261–270 of 283 posts
This is great but what if, hold on, we paid taxes.
Many towns in New Hampshire with spread out population do not want to pay for garbage pickup. Everyone brings everything to the dump themselves. These people "self-uber for garbage" as they say. Some rich folks pay companies like Waste Management to do it for them. What's wrong with that model?
Hmmm. I wonder how trash haulers are going to take to having a big chunk of their profit margin extracted by Sili Valley style investors? Uber drivers seem to go for it, but not without grumbling.
Also, it's important to view this initiative as a rebirth of the waste broker. They're already super common in the industry handling the waste collection services for all the locations of large corporations, they negotiate with haulers to service each site then make sure services are performed. They tack on a fee for streamlining/managing this service for each company.
One of the larger brokers was purchased by Waste Management a few years ago. Since WM is a hauler too, they're now gathering tons of data about each market that can be used when bidding against smaller/independent haulers. Lot's of haulers would be happy to help another broker succeed to get WM out of their affairs.
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Wouldn't it be better if we were allowed to interact voluntarily? Pay for what we wanted and used, and support people and causes through charity instead of under duress?
Do you want to live next to the guy who either cannot or is unwilling to pay? Nobody else does either.
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Wouldn't it be better if we were allowed to interact voluntarily? Pay for what we wanted and used, and support people and causes through charity instead of under duress?
Governments are a default state produced by groups of humans. They are inevitable. Making them better is incredibly hard work, but that is the only option. Often times, they are improved by working outside the system itself, it seems. So there are some interesting options for tackling this hard problem. The company mentioned in the article may turn out to be a great example of this. Governments do come in many forms,…
What about tribal societies?
What would stop an evil entity from picking up your garbage and dumping it in the nearby park / side of the road?
It's a double edged sword for sure. I'd love to see more open and creative competition in the industry, but since disposal and transportation costs make up such a huge % of a hauler's expenses there will certainly be corrupt entities dumping waste in a canyon somewhere just outside of your community.
Tracking the waste from source to destination accurately and in a way that people can truly trust will certainly be a key to success here. It's worth noting that it is still very likely that some contracted and "compliant" haulers are doing things with your waste that they shouldn't. So that's another place that a start up could potentially differentiate themselves.
I'm rooting for these guys - it looks like their COO has been in waste management since 1999 (and, from the article, his family's been in it for decades). As a casual observer of "non-sexy" startups, I've noticed that these kinds of founding teams do well.
Either way I predict success. Down the line they'll be acquired by Waste Management, Republic, or Waste Connections to become another Oak Leaf.
Then this driver drove the wrong way down the road in order to a get a bit closer to a load of garbage without having to go around the block.
It's a business that externalizes its costs by driving dangerously and killing people: http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2010/07/13/see-a-pattern-of-deadl...
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Even so, they have to pay their own fuel costs...
I meant number of vehicles per physical location. Delivering to a bunch of vehicles on one street or hitting a bunch of vehicles in one lot/garage is better than one fill per location. It seems like they shouldn't be targeting consumers except as a means to target small businesses and municipal fleets. Modern fuel pumps are slow compared to the old ones. (Seriously, if you stop at a gas station with the old style pum…
They say that they will deliver to a single area for a single fee. http://www.filld.com/groups/
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Filld customers pay the lowest price of the three gas stations closest to their location plus a small delivery fee. For example, if the three gas stations closest to you charge $2.62, $2.55 and $2.67 per gallon, you will pay $2.55. We purchase this pricing data from the Oil Price Indexing Service (OPIS), and we update it regularly. How do they make money? I wonder how high the delivery fee is.
Manhattan no longer has gas stations south of 12th street, and yet people pay > $400 for a parking space. This sounds like an ideal starting point for a burgeoning delivery service.
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As an anarcho-capitalist, I'd be really keen on a "HumbleBundle" type government funding model. E.g. you don't get to pick if you pay taxes, but you do get to pick which parts of the state get what proportion of your taxes. E.g. 30% welfare, 0% military, 70% infrastructure development. You could even argue that such an arrangement is voluntary in a narrow definition of a term. Definitely not one to satisfy most liber…
How does that resolve? If I pay 0% to the military, but the US gets a favorable trade deal b/c theyre worried for invasion, do I get the reward without any skin in the game? Wouldn't a savvy gamesman just vote for their own self-interest?
The idea is that it's more "expressive" than one person = one vote. And it's more manageable than pure direct-democracy. Look, you could fiddle with things and have "minimum" amounts so that people can't completely break a government feature if they don't like it. E.g. 100% of people voting to have 0 military spending. But, if that were to happen, is that not a hint to politicians that none of the voting populace wants military spending?
To me it's another way to give more power to the individuals, rather than leaving it solely in the grasp of politicians.