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In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

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61–70 of 76 posts

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#61

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.

and it's on lithub.com, not github.com

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#62
post #54
post #50

I guess I'll get in trouble for saying this again. He is compelling and be speaks Arabic blah blah blah, but I feel these articles are more about him than Sayyid, over which we haggle with him vicariously over Egyptians pounds, approximately seventeen to one US dollar now. I know that feeling, but I wouldn't even ironically brag about paying fifty cents over the other wealthy foreigner a month. I would saying somethi…

I feel you read a bit too much into all this. The guy is a journalist and his wife as well. I suspect they don't make much money from their job so they have to be a bit careful on how they spend it. And knowing they pay a bit more compared to some other Western guy in their apartment complex ... well, I feel most people would feel better about themselves as well given the circumstance. I feel it's just human nature.…

I visit 3 to 5 times a year. It's not that unsafe, in Cairo at least, as police reaction forces roll around in Jeeps and I have never seen people want to make such a fuss to get their attention; foreigners used to be interesting but stuff is so bad I feel tourism took a nosedive and over the years people don't bother foreigners has less of a payout and nothing really matters anymore. I feel the big cities must have more risk, unless we are talking Sinai where people are actively fighting the military and Egyptians not directly in that zone avoid.

Westerners continue to make vastly more than local counterparts, and those 40 pounds buy less in 2007 than they did in 2019 (6LE:1USD,17.8LE:1USD, it was even crazier for foreigners when black market currency flowed freely and was stopped violently, including dragging exchange owners and seizures by police in ... 2018). Letting foreigners say stuff like this and rationalize it is part of how we helped passively ruin it.

You are right. I do read a lot into it, but stuff like this has been bothersome to me for what you can guess is 10+ years now. That we all go wow, look at this foreigner's insight into Cairene culture in 2019 with pieces like this just makes me sad.

Those organized trips are fun, but it limits the people and experiences you have. I understand we gave limited time on this planet and vacations in foreign countries are scary and uncomfortable so the effort and risk/reward is high unless you're a crazy person like yours truly.

I said elsewhere I will read his Chinese stuff and have my sinologist friends read it with me too see if it similar and I overreact.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#63

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.

and it's on lithub.com, not github.com

this joke, much like ogres (and onions), certainly has layers

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#64

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.

and it's on lithub.com, not github.com

Hilarious. This submission wins the "Most easily misread by a programmer" award.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#65
post #48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, to me a lot of what he (the sanitation worker) did wasn’t “official”. Also, he scavenged (and maybe it’s lucrative to him, if so it might interest others). It also mentions he does not observe religious orthodoxy. Someone could come along and try and argue he’s not fit for the job or worse. It’s like when writing s story about people on the periphery of society and most writers use pseudonyms for their subjects.…

I think you have a good thinking about journalistic practice here. It might mitigate hypothetical undesirable effects, in this case, to articulate some of the effect of the article on readers for whom the article was intended. For one example, for me, as a citizen of the US, where this article was published, I enjoyed this article, and it fostered a favorable impression of Cairo, by humanizing one of its people. In a…

oh wow that's an astonishingly wholesome take on it. and now that i think about it, one that is quite resonant with my own experience of it in retrospect. it was certainly an extremely humanizing piece and i think in that regard, it's doing one of the most noble honors (at least in my moral framework): striving to eliminate xenophobia. so much in this world tries to divide us by our national identity and our ethnicities, etc, but at the end of the day, we are all just one species, and any difference that we perceive physically is just a side effect of phenotype expression, and any other more abstract difference such as belief, etc, is a side effect of the culture and society surrounding that phenotypical substrate. we work so hard to divide ourselves from our core nature, which is to cooperate and seek novelty, so it's quite cathartic to see a piece that tries to eliminate a substantial contributor to that division.

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and it's on lithub.com, not github.com

Hilarious. This submission wins the "Most easily misread by a programmer" award.

Glad to know I’m not the only one surprised by the content of this story...

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#69
post #36

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 alo…

That is so sad she threw the shirt out, were they on bad terms with the parents?

Re: In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything

#70

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.

And "Cairo" refers to the physical city, not the graphics library ;-)

That was my first thought "What? Cairo has GC?".
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