I'm not saying it's a character flaw. I'm saying they held onto a job that wasn't optimal based on their other available options. They could have been middle class had they chosen another job. Down right negligent honestly since they clearly had no healthcare that entire time. One illness could have thrown them on the street.
> They could have been middle class had they chosen another job. What the effing f? So they "chose" to be poor?
Actually.... Yea. In this case that's exactly what's happening. It's like if you got a job at McDonald's working minimum wage when you were 16 but then you never moved on.
From the article "Jessica is a proud first-generation Ecuadorian-American and a second-year Percy Ellis Sutton Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) student at Baruch College majoring in business management with a minor in law and policy." Jessia is the American dream. First generation, got to college and writing like that. Lots of Americans concentrate on what is wrong with America. There is value in…
> Jessia is the American dream. She's the one who made it, unlike thousands of others, who worked equally hard, and didn't. No family should have both parents working 12 hours a day just to survive, period.
> She's the one who made it, unlike thousands of others, who worked equally hard, and didn't.
Data?
Immigrants continue to do very well in the U.S., often succeeding to a greater extent than people born here.
Saw that at your neighboor's in Copenhagen, and after the first outrage of paying +50cts per drink, I understood that I was seeing a glimpse the future… If littering is equivalent to throwing money, you simply won't do it. Weird side-effect: homeless people might ask for your empty bottle and do the collection. Not sure how I feel about that though…
Some years ago, New York passed a law on recycling. For some reason, people seemed to be surprised when it turned out that those showing up at the grocery store with carts full of recyclables were neither lawyers nor stock traders, but rather the homeless.
in California there are fewer dropoffs in stores but the bottles tend to come from residential recycling bins, which were raided while they were waiting for a truck to pick them up.
Same in Germany, there is also the "Pfand gehört daneben" (Deposit [bottles] belong next [to the trashcan]) campaign, often with bottle holder on the trash can. The whole deposit system is extremely convenient when you are drinking in the park or beach, where you usually don't want to bring all the bottles back again, but you'll get people coming by and ask if you have any deposit bottles to give to them.
Isn’t there a decline in deposit bottle usage in Germany? When I was a kid beer was delivered to your house by the crate and empties picked up. I was led to believe this has become less common, which would be regrettable bc it was elegantly efficient.
Edit: it's reusable/refillable bottles that I am remembering and referring to, and I'm happy to say the system in Germany seems to be strong, per Google.
From the article "Jessica is a proud first-generation Ecuadorian-American and a second-year Percy Ellis Sutton Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) student at Baruch College majoring in business management with a minor in law and policy." Jessia is the American dream. First generation, got to college and writing like that. Lots of Americans concentrate on what is wrong with America. There is value in…
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> I would not call that "make it". Maybe once they own couple of houses or business.
You sound exactly like the snobby kids in the story, judging who can be proud of "making it" and who can't.
Anyone who doesn't own a couple houses or business should feel ashamed for not "making it".
My father was illiterate, which left him very few options in life after spending his early 20s in prison for check fraud. During the 70s, he discovered he could pick up cardboard and recyclables from local shops and grocery stores and take them to the nearby recycling plant for decent money. By the early 90s, when I was a young teenager, he would use me as free labor and I'd spend my weekends crushing cans piled as m…
> It's so easy to look at someone else and judge them, and assume they're the victim of their own laziness rather than complicated people with complicated histories and complicated situations.
I understand what you mean from an emotional stand point, but isn't it odd we can think of someone crushing pick up size mountains of cans to make a buck as "lazy"?
In retrospect, your dad was obviously busting his butt and hustling to make some honest money as best he could, and that deserves our admiration.
This is why I have always thought that can and bottle deposit prices should keep up with inflation: to give the collectors a living wage.
I think Oregon has the right idea. We did invent the bottle bill, so I guess that isn't a complete surprise. The redemption value is tied not to inflation, but to redemption rate. If it drops low enough, the deposit is increased. We started at 5 cents, and in 2015 the redemption rate had slipped down to 65%, so the deposit was doubled to 10 cents.
I like these types of stories that show the harsh economic realities of many in America. It was not the case many years ago, when they could become an American citizen by working hard enough. Now they are servants, beholden to the corrupted members of our government.
> It was not the case many years ago, when they could become an American citizen by working hard enough.
I suspect you have an overly rose-tinted view of the past.
Some years ago, New York passed a law on recycling. For some reason, people seemed to be surprised when it turned out that those showing up at the grocery store with carts full of recyclables were neither lawyers nor stock traders, but rather the homeless.
in California there are fewer dropoffs in stores but the bottles tend to come from residential recycling bins, which were raided while they were waiting for a truck to pick them up.
In my experience, that's common, but so is people jumping your fence to raid your cans before you've put them out. And, should you ever try to recoup the 'deposit' by going to the recycling center, you'll spend 1+ hour in line being hounded by homeless people to give them your cans.
All of it creates way more incentive to just throw your cans in the trash so you don't have to deal with any of that.
I have not thought about collecting cans in a very long time. Decades ago you could make a decent bit of cash collecting aluminum cans. It was a common past time for poor people and undoubtedly contributed to the very high recycle rate for aluminum since it was a source of income for many people. This was widely known, so people would often go out of their way to make their aluminum trash easily available to be colle…
In the San Francisco Bay area, collecting cans is still very common among the homeless. In some parts of SF people will dig through your recycling (and garbage) every garbage day for recycling. Additionally, many public garbage cans have a semi-open section at the top which I have seen used for disposing of cans. I don't know if it's intentionally designed that way, but it's much easier for anyone to get the cans fro…
Most garbage cans (at least those in dense areas) in my town of Calgary have a little shelf along the top that can hold cans/bottles. I can't see them being used for anything other than holding cans for collection. In Alberta, there is a deposit for all beverage containers (milk, juice, beer, wine, pop/cola etc) so there are a lot of people that collect for a living. Where I grew up (Ontario), there is only a deposit on beer and wine, not juice/milk/pop etc.