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In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

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Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#31

Post by Jeff_Brown »

egypturnash wrote: post #26
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #18

tl;dr, anybody? I came to this article hoping to learn something about public policy, esp. regarding privacy. Whatever insights into those topics there might be are too buried in story for me to find them easily so I stopped reading.

When you do not have a publicly-funded garbage collection infrastructure, then the private enterprises that fill in those gaps can, and will, make use of any physical or informational resources they find in the trash they pick up in an effort to make a decent living. Examples given include "a nice camera", "drugs", "porn", and "knowing exactly how much money an ambassador is making". There are no examples given invol…

Scary.

It's not obvious to me that I should trust the government more than a big corporation with a reputation to defend. If Google was found to be leaking credit card details, for example, it would at least cost them a ton of business (and maybe do much more harm than that). They have the wherewithal to avoid it. The incentives for long-term investment in security infrastructure are weaker in government.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#33

Post by kwindla »

Peter Hessler's books about contemporary China are super-interesting reading. He's a very low-key, but deeply informed cultural translator. In all his books, he focuses on the stories and lives of the people he meets and gets to know, first as a young Peace Corps volunteer, and then as a journalist living in the country for many years. If you're interested, maybe start with _Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory_.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#34

Post by nixpulvis »

woliveirajr wrote: post #4

I love how HN is so diverse and how many submissions' titles can be read in many ways. Tip: this article is about a human, real-person garbage collector, and garbage is the real, physical waste that people put inside bins.

Yea I was trying to imagine how https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_%28graphics%29 uses its GC.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#36

Post by jbuzbee »

My brother and sister-in-law (Westerners) lived in Cairo for a few years and tell a similar humorous story. They too would just set their trash and unwanted items out in the hall where it would quickly disappear.

Once my sister-in-law put out some clothes that included an old T-Shirt that had been printed for a family get-together celebrating her parents 50th anniversary. It had a large photo of her parents on it along with wording like "John and Mary's 50th anniversary" etc. etc. She thought nothing of it. But several days later while walking near their apartment, she was taken aback to see an Egyptian man coming toward them proudly wearing the T-shirt with her parents smiling photo on it.

And it seemed this was his favorite or only shirt. For months afterword, she'd see her parent's photo as the man went about his business in the neighborhood. She took it all in stride!

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#39

Post by to11mtm »

endymi0n wrote: post #28
dang wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The domain name is the tipoff.

Well - I read the domain name as a pun on Github of a new open source community featuring literate programming languages, of which a particularly new one named Cairo had a fully correct GC. It took me almost a minute to adjust all my assumptions. Well executed nerd snipe.

I assumed it was some 10xer/brogrammer hosting for projects that were 'lit'.

Slightly disappointed.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#40

Post by chc »

mc32 wrote: post #21
vilhelm_s wrote: post #8

When I read this, my first thought was "wow, this must have been really hard to anonymize, if he wasn't careful to remove/change enough details people could figure out who the garbage man is". Well, not so much... > So of course Sayyid was aware that I was researching and writing about him. At the same time, he is not literate, so there are serious limitations on his understanding of something like a New Yorker story…

Yeah, it’s a stretch to say using an alias makes it less real or using a ruckenfigur picture takes away from the story. If the law allows for witness protection via alias, I can’t see something less real or genuine. As someone else had pointed out this man may not realize or care about the consequences of the publicity but the author does have a duty to care and I think he betrayed that duty here.

I'm trying to figure this out: What, specifically, is the duty you think he betrayed?

It's pretty obviously not the case that authors have a duty to anonymize everybody they write about — I've never even heard a serious argument to that effect.

Hessler said he considered whether there was likely to be negative consequences for Sayyid if he was identified in the story, and he didn't see any likelihood of that. There don't appear to have actually been negative consequences (at least, nobody has mentioned any), so it's hard make a strong case for negligence on that front.

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