231–240 of 269 posts
This is great news! I have a question maybe someone from Delhi could answer, the article states: "The ban took effect on the first day of 2017." What are the vendors doing? Is water being sold in glass bottles with a deposit scheme for redemption now?
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It is utterly bizarre. This stuff angers and confuses me in equal measure. It's like a complete refusal to participate in society, just the expectation that someone else will come and tidy up after you. How do these people behave elsewhere in their lives? One example I keep seeing is people who buy a pack of cigarettes, rip off the plastic film covering and just drop it on the floor. It sends me into a silent rage ev…
I don't think you can neatly separate people by their behavior in this manner, in general, but also in particular when it comes to 'automatic', frequent behavior like disposing of trash. People are irrational. Most smokers I know will carefully separate their trash and walk hundreds of meters to put everything in the right bin... and yet dispose of their cigarettes all over the place. To my shame I have to admit I wa…
This is India. Starving, thirsty, injured (hit by cars and trucks) cows and dogs roam the streets, hobbling along, limping along. There are people starving on the street-side. The poorest children are openly prostituted on the streets. How are they going to enforce a rule regarding plastic bags? The rich will continue to do whatever they want. The middle-classes will continue to do whatever they can get away with. Th…
Public Smoking ban has been largely effective in India. You rarely see people smoking in public areas. The effectiveness of these laws are that it allows concerned citizens to raise their voice when they see law is being broken.
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To be honest I hate this economic idea of enforcing a ban via adding tax to it. This ideology shows the lack of understanding of the disparity in income in India. The middle class and below are the most affected and they face the most brunt of all this. The same goes with how the govt. keeps adding tax on tobacco and its products every year. Forcing people to stop smoking by not allowing them to buy despite allowing…
Dunno I am all for tobacco being expensive. Soon most poor people will no longer be able to afford them. Which is a good thing to me.
I think I agree with vidyesh, taxes are for money not for changing social behavior.
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There was this scene in Mad Men where Don Draper, Betty Draper and the kids go out for a picnic in the new family car. They eat lunch in a grassy field, then when they're done, they pack up their basket and blanket, leaving the beer cans, food wrappers, empty bottles, plastic cutlery, and chicken bones scattered on the grass. That scene shocked and horrified me more than all the sexism, racism, and homophobia combine…
That still happens in America. See pictures of Washington DC the day after 4th of July. Or Golden Gate Park in SF after a big festival. So many people leave their trash looks it like a dump. Compare to say Cherry Blossom watching in Japan where a large park will be entirely covered in people but when it's over they will have all cleaned it up. It's a cultural issue. I have no idea how to influence western cultures to…
Was perplexed more than anything.
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The prejudice seems to be "ah India, nice try but you still fail badly in an unrelated area" while in fact in this regard Delhi is more progressive than much of Europe and the US. Reducing plastic waste is a step in the right direction and should not be dismissed just because there are other problems that may be harder to fix right now.
>"ah India, nice try but you still fail badly in an unrelated area" That's not what a prejudice is. It's also not what he said. Maybe if people wouldn't be so hypersensitive we could address the problems a country might be facing. India has many issues. So what if he points that out, while we're discussing a different issue? It's part of having a conversation.
Why only Delhi?! That country is drowning in filth not just Delhi.
[1] http://m.timesofindia.com/city/bengaluru/Total-plastic-ban-i...
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Dunno I am all for tobacco being expensive. Soon most poor people will no longer be able to afford them. Which is a good thing to me.
I am pretty sure a lot of people will just reduce other expenses to compensate. At least for as long as they can. That just means most of the money goes to tobacco companies instead of anything else they would have spent it on. I think I agree with vidyesh, taxes are for money not for changing social behavior.
We don't have to idly speculate this, the phenomenon is called elasticity of demand in economics, and not only are there good estimates of elasticity for various products, there's a rich set of ideas that have been developed around elasticity, including what happens when you tax goods of various elasticities.
I highly recommend looking into the details yourself (any intro micro economics textbook will cover it), but the upshot is that cigarettes judged to have relatively inelastic demand, which is basically what you had said. This means that a tax on the product will not reduce the equilibrium quantity consumed by very much. A corollary is that the majority of the tax burden will fall on the consumers of cigarettes. I'm not sure why you said "most of the money goes to the tobacco companies"-- with all tax levels the revenue goes to the government.
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I'm curious to know this as well. It would be cool if they implemented this in the U.S., even if only for the return to dominance of the glass bottle soda.
It interesting in many places in South America glass bottles are the norm, they get sterilized and reused. You see crates of them stacked up outside the kioskos waiting to be picked up. You pay a deposit on the bottle and get a redemption when you return it. This isn't a new development either, its just kind of the way its always been. I am not sure why plastic didn't become as dominant in many of those countries.