Links - 12th June 2019 (3) (Recycling, Women at work, Indoctrinating kids)

State Has Made a Religion out of Recycling - "Any ABC license-holder (e.g. a restaurant or bar owner) who fails to implement a glass and aluminum recycling program will be charged with a class-one misdemeanor alongside those accused of assaulting a handicapped person or burning a cross on someone’s property.So how did we get to this point? If we’re prepared to jail people for failing to recycle, shouldn’t we at least ask “to what end?” Why has recycling become so serious and, most importantly, why are our elected officials so determined to force compliance with such drastic penalties?“Applying resource economics to recycling is like applying nutrition research to the Holy Communion,” said environmental policy analyst John Baden. That’s a colorful way of suggesting that people don’t recycle because beer bottles are valuable. If bottles weren’t trash, people would pay us to collect them. There would be strip-mining operations at landfills. Recycling bottles and cans doesn’t make a significant impact on conserving landfill space, either. If it did, we’d already do it without fines – as landfill scarcity would make recycling the more cost-effective option (i.e. the price of waste disposal would become too costly)... Recycling programs are a manufacturing process like anything else, except municipalities have fewer incentives to conserve resources associated with the process than a for-profit company. But that’s not the worst of it. Many cities require twice the number of diesel-and-carbon-spewing trucks to collect recyclable materials separately. Twice the oil and gas. So, it’s not so much that you’re conserving energy or resources. You’re simply displacing the kind of resources being consumed and the type of pollution being emitted. "The net cost for recycling is more than double the cost for regular garbage collection that will go to the transfer station” said Greensboro Councilman Tom Phillips in a public hearing. “A lot of what we recycle winds up at the landfill anyway because of contamination or lack of markets for the recycled material."... “Ted Turner’s flying D ranch outside Bozeman, Montana, could handle all of America’s trash for the next century—with 50,000 acres left over for his bison.”... you have a greater chance of being hit by a recycling truck than being harmed by a landfill."

Going Paperless Does Not Save Trees - "loss of markets for paper and other wood products, a large portion of which are produced from wood harvested on privately-owned land, increases the risk of forest loss... "This study is another example of why slogans such as 'go paperless – save trees' or 'go green – go paperless' are not only misleading, but false. Over the past 60 years, the number of trees on managed U.S. forest lands has been increasing considerably due to responsible forestry practices. Wood is a valuable renewable resource that we are taking care of... Private forest ownership and stable paper markets create a synergy that has long yielded tens of thousands of jobs, rural income, and strong incentives for continued investment in forests for the near and long term. However, if efforts to reduce wood markets succeed over an extended period, the result would likely be loss of forest lands rather than the reverse."
i.e. Going paperless/recycling paper results in fewer trees

Recycling: Can It Be Wrong, When It Feels So Right? - "I focused on glass, especially the kind of green glass used for wine bottles. Glass is heavy and inert. That means it’s expensive to cart around and handle, in addition to the problems of breaking and cutting workers. Glass is harmless in a landfill and breaks down into something very like the sand it came from.The commodity that glass can be ground into, called “cullet,” just isn’t very valuable. Mixed cullet, even from glass that looks similar, turns a dull black; sorting to avoid mixing takes time. Recyclists seem to believe that everything should be conserved, except time, the one resource we can’t make more of.The alternative to recycling green glass is to use virgin materials—sand—and add the chemical compounds and color required. A cubic yard of mixed cullet can actually be much more expensive to convert into usable glass than a cubic yard of sand, depending on conditions. That means that “recycling,” when you add on the fuel costs and pollution impact of collecting small quantities of the stuff from neighborhoods, actually uses more energy, and wastes more resources, than using virgin materials... given the costs and lack of demand in most areas, opportunities for environmentally responsible recycling of green glass are rare. As a result, hundreds of municipalities across the United States have tried to suspend their glass recycling programs. Interestingly, in some of these (including my home town of Raleigh, North Carolina) there were legal or political barriers that forced the resumption of curbside glass collection. Citizens voted to force the city to pick up the glass in those plastic bins, because they don’t like to throw the glass away. The glass is picked up, trucked to the recycling facility, and either bagged or boxed and then shipped, in a different truck, to the landfill. In effect, citizens are paying the city extra to throw away the glass, so that they can pretend it’s being recycled... Recycling gives people a chance to express their concern about the environment, and concern about the environment is good. Sure, sometimes the actual effect on the environment is harmful, as in the case of green glass, but that’s a small price to pay for developing the right habits of mind. I wasn’t wrong, I just didn’t understand their objectives... Recycling, including the costs of collecting the waste in tiny, mixed amounts, transporting the waste to a handling facility, sorting it, cleaning it, repackaging it, and then transporting it again, often for great distances, to a market that will buy the commodity for some actual use, is almost always more expensive than landfilling that same waste in a local facility... In 2007 and 2008 North Carolina suffered a significant drought. Durham County, home of Duke University, was at one point at least 10” below normal rainfall levels. The reservoirs and aquifers were extremely low and falling fast. Water had become a very scarce commodity. For years, Duke (like most universities) had made a concerted effort to reduce its waste stream, and to divert waste that was created away from landfills. This effort had focused particularly on “saving trees,” or reducing the use of paper. And paper that was used was to be recycled, with containers placed on most floors in most buildings. But during the drought, the scarcity of water led the university to try to make changes. This was perfectly sensible, given that water (used for washing china dishes, cloth napkins, and metal flatware) had become more expensive than landfill space (used for disposing paper dishes, napkins, and plastic utensils)... At first there were grumbles. Then there were outright protests. Students and faculty complained that “we all know it is wrong” to dispose of waste in the landfill. (I asked at least twenty people, and I never got an answer for why “it is wrong,” they just knew that it was.)"

Think Globally, Act Irrationally: Recycling - "Some policy analysts justify government intervention in refuse collection by invoking market-failure arguments in the collection of recyclables. Why don’t free markets for recycling work? Well, in some circumstances they do. Scrap yards, for example, recycle iron and steel. The growth segment in the U.S. steel industry is the so-called “minimill” whose raw material is recycled. Recycling markets work fine in this sector of the economy because making steel from virgin iron and coal is more expensive than making it from recycled raw materials. In other areas of the economy involving glass, paper, and plastic, for example, the discrepancy between recycled and virgin prices often does not justify the development of markets for recycling…. [S]upport for recycling is more religious than economic in nature."

Lower voting age to six to tackle bias against young, says academic - "The head of politics at Cambridge University has called for children as young as six to be given the vote in an attempt to tackle the age bias in modern democracy.Prof David Runciman said the ageing population meant young people were now “massively outnumbered”, creating a democratic crisis and an inbuilt bias against governments that plan for the future... “I would lower the voting age to six, not 16. And I’m serious about that. I would want people who vote to be able to read, so I would exclude reception [age-children]."
(Again,) Shamima Begum was too young at 15 to be responsible for joining ISIS. Kids are old enough at 8 to take hormone blockers and start gender transition
Given that they indoctrinate children in schools this is a convenient way to tip the vote

Four-year-olds play pre-school politics on refugees - "A Melbourne preschool has ­decided that children are never too young to embrace political ­advocacy, incorporating a recent Kids Off Nauru campaign into a lesson on refugee rights. Brunswick Kindergarten, in the city’s inner north, broached the contentious topic by hosting a #BlueForNauru Day in which its children, aged four and five, were encouraged to dress in blue — ­signifying sadness, according to the campaign — to learn about the plight of children in offshore detention.Teacher Catherine Sundbye wrote about the session in the preschool’s parent newsletter, ­detailing some of the student’s ­responses to the question: “What would you say to the politicians who won’t let the refugees in?”... childhood experts warned about politicising early childhood, questioning whether children as young as four had the ­maturity to grasp the concept of asylum detention.Political activism in schools is considered a fraught issue. Yesterday, thousands of students defied calls by Scott Morrison to remain in school and instead joined protests calling for climate change ­action."
Presumably four year old girls can also protest for their right to wear the hijab, or wear MAGA hats
Are accusations that schools are indoctrinating/brainwashing children still a paranoid right wing conservative fantasy?
Keywords: indoctrination

LGBTyranny: School Has 6-year-olds Write Same-sex “Love Letters” - "“You’re Prince Henry,” said the teacher. “You’re going to tell Thomas why it’s a brilliant idea for him to marry you.”This instruction was given to a class of six-year-olds, as they were told to write same-sex love letters, according to a BBC video... The video is found at BBC Radio Manchester’s Facebook page and bears the title “Primary School Teaches Pupils About LGBT Relationships.” The institution is Warrington’s Bewsey Lodge Primary School, according to headteacher Emma Wright, posting at the BBC Facebook page. It’s in the region of Cheshire, England... Don’t expect anything to change at Bewsey, however, if the BBC Facebook comments are any indication. Virtually all of the hundreds posted are supportive of the school, and many display toward the few dissenters the “tolerance” you’d expect (to paraphrase, “Those disagreeing are over 50 and will be dead soon, so don’t worry”)... the headteacher tells us in a long Facebook response that what they “are trying to achieve is a culture of acceptance and respect.” This is self-delusion. Acceptance of and respect for what? Certainly not anything opposing leftism.Wright also says she wants children to leave her indoctrination center with “enough information to make their own informed choices,” but it’s clear what she wants those choices to be... If they realized they had dogmas and drew lines as does everyone else, we could perhaps have an intelligent discussion about what our dogmas should be. But this can’t happen when people, living unexamined lives, delude themselves and fancy they’re unquestionably right because they’re “inclusive,” “respectful,” “nonjudgmental,” and “tolerant.”"

Part-time jobs: what women want? - "Part-time jobs are common among partnered women in many countries. There are two opposing views on the efficiency implications of so many women working part-time. The negative view is that part-time jobs imply wastage of resources and underutilization of investments in human capital since many part-time working women are highly educated. The positive view is that, without the existence of part-time jobs, female labor force participation would be substantially lower since women confronted with the choice between a full-time job and zero working hours would opt for the latter. In the Netherlands, the majority of partnered working women have a part-time job. Our paper investigates, from a supply-side perspective, if the current situation of abundant part-time work in the Netherlands is likely to be a transitional phase that will culminate in many women working full-time. Our main results indicate that partnered women in part-time work have high levels of job satisfaction, a low desire to change their working hours, and live in partnerships in which household production is highly gendered. Taken together, our results suggest that part-time jobs are what most Dutch women want."
Patriarchy strikes again!

More than two-thirds of women doing 'home duties' do not want to return to a paid job - "More than two-thirds of women who work in the home and have a third-level education do not want to return to a paid job, according to a survey.Solas, the further education and training authority, surveyed 218,000 women, aged between 20 and 64, who were described as being on 'home duties', meaning they did not participate in the labour force.It found that, regardless of their education level, the majority of women did not want to return to the labour force.However, some 16,000 women said they could be encouraged to do so if they had the right supports - such as flexible working hours, childcare, apprenticeships and further education. Launching the report, Solas director of communications Nikki Gallagher said childcare was not the sole reason why some women opted not to work."There's a common perception that women opt out of the workforce primarily because of childcare duties while their children are young," she said."However, the research we're publishing today shows only one-third of those not currently working have children under the age of five."... Some 38pc reported that they were either lone parents or had a partner who was not working"
From Ireland
Yet more reasons for the gender pay gap
This suggests that being a homemaker/housewife/stay at home mother is not that hard, since most of them see it as better than working
Given that some of them were lone parents we can't say the reason they didn't want to work was because they thought they'd have a second shift (i.e. that they would be working and doing housework at the same time)