The scenario is this: you show up to the grocery store and you don’t have a reusable bag today. Maybe you forgot to re-stash it in your car after bringing in groceries last time, maybe you walked there and don’t carry a bag on you.
If you live in a state with a single-use bag ban, your options are: buy a reusable bag for 50 cents, or travel 15 mins round trip to grab one of your bags.
Once you get home, you note that you already have a dozen reusable bags so you throw it away and stash one of your existing ones for next time.
I use reusable bags a lot, and did even before single-use ones were taxed, but maybe 5% of the time, I show up to the grocery store having forgotten one. I’m almost certain if I were in a state with a single-use ban my footprint would be higher (especially because I normally use paper bags when I forget, which have a negligible environmental impact).
IMO, the entire ban was a gift to the plastics industry. I’m sure the margins on these reusable bags are much higher.
I live in CA where we have a ban on single-use plastic bags. We still have single-use paper bags. So your footprint would be the same here, not higher.
That makes sense and I’d support that. In New York and New Jersey all single-use bags are banned and I’m almost positive it’s counterproductive. Especially in NYC where many people aren’t using cars to grocery shop and can’t keep a bag stashed
Yikes. I occasionally forget bags, and appreciate that we can get paper bags here for 20-25 cents. I also reuse those paper bags once or twice, and then use them for collecting compost on my countertop, and then throw the whole bag in the big city compost bin. This system means I don't need to clean or line a proper countertop compost container.
We absolutely should price reusable bags higher then.
If I forget my bags and I don't have many groceries I'll just not use bags at all. Otherwise I'll use paper, which isn't great but it's not adding to plastic trash.
Also plastic bags are generally around a $1. I'm not throwing those away, economic reasons and on principle.
The plastic bags in places like NYC are usually 25-50 cents. It’s stupid to force those on people when paper bags exist and barely have an effect on the environment. Also, half the grocery stores in the US only stock things like spinach in plastic containers or bags. There’s much lower hanging fruit than banning single-use paper bags.
My guess is it's something like that famous "daycare late fee" study that was widely discussed after Freakonomics reported on it, https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/what-makes-people-do-what-t.... Essentially, the fee wasn't high enough to cause parents to need to be on time, instead the fee was more like something to pay off their guilt, so adding the fee caused more lateness in parental pickups. I.e. before there was a late fee, parents would feel somewhat guilty if they were late. After the late fee, they didn't feel bad - after all, they were basically paying to be late.
My suspicion with these kinds of bags, which are very cheap and honestly feel just a bit sturdier than disposable baggs, is that the same dynamic is at play. People feel like "I'm a good environmentalist for reusing this bag once or twice" and then toss them.
I think one thing that may be misunderstood is that many of these chains have "reusable" bags that are very hefty plastic bags but are not the very durable reusable bags made of cloth/canvas or materials, the ones which are basically tote bags. I think the people who buy these more expensive bags tend to use them more than 3 times. But the ones that cost 99 cents at the register end up getting repurchased everytime someone forgets their bags. It took me a while to get into the habit and I know I have about 60 of those accumulated from the last 10 years of occasionally forgetting them. The bags I do reuse tend to get used many many times, but the rest might get used just once, because I already have a pile of them. If i remember my bags, I take the nice ones. If I forget, I have to buy new hefty "reusable" bags.
Me. I've tried again and again, but they all wind up in a pile at home. I forget to empty them and take them. They're never in the car when I need them.
I probably have had twenty to thirty reusable bags. Most of them get thrown away.
Not everyone is built the same way. I think this is hard/impossible for people with ADHD to manage.
FWIW, I have ADHD, and once I amassed like 30 of these things, I kept as many as possible stuffed inside one of them in my car. Then, I had like 30 opportunities between then and when I ran out to remember to bring all my bags to the car again. It worked out well. Now my grocery store has a give-a-bag, take-a-bag stand which is even better.
> In the past, Tan has not been receptive to jokes about him: When commenting on San Francisco community organizer Julian La Rosa, who had said that “millionaires and landlords should be guillotined,” Tan seemed to take the jest deadly seriously.
> “This is not a joke,” he posted. “This guy wants to guillotine people.”
The reputational harm clause that is surely in his employment contact was just beached. The board should fire him within days.
The culture of a company is the behavior you tolerate. If the board doesn't act, they're condoning toxic culture, which is ultimately a threat to their institution.
We should be making much more low end housing, absolutely. That said, even the cheapest housing costs the time of tradesmen and substantial materials costs, not to mention land. It will always be a substantial chunk of minimum wage earners' income because minimum wage is too low and/or out of whack with real costs.
it was not even a "leak". they just set up a search, like most major newspapers.
from wikipedia:
> A March 2, 2015 New York Times article broke the story that the Benghazi panel had discovered that Clinton exclusively used her own private email server rather than a government-issued one throughout her time as Secretary of State, and that her aides took no action to preserve emails sent or received from her personal accounts as required by law.[42][43][44] At that point, Clinton announced that she had asked the State Department to release her emails.[45] Some in the media labeled the controversy "emailgate."[46][47][48]
It seems to me the idea is sound but the specific implementation very difficult to get exactly right. Tax it too much and no one will want the land. But unless you tax it enough to really spur development it won't have an effect. Finding that sweet spot is the key, but is also going to be a moving target.
I think the specific implementation isn't that hard. The main idea is to provide an incentive to build by not taxing structure value. If you're taxing a territory that is currently half structure value and half land value you can set the land tax that replaces the property tax to double the current rates. Then your city revenue is unchanged. If plenty of land is blighted or empty then the average increased tax on land should be less than the tax of a reasonable structure (SFH for example). Townhouses and condos save by having less land per unit.
While I cede your point to an extent, small time landlords are generally (1) small, local businesses, giving back to the local economy, and (2) very motivated to keep the places rented rather than sit idle. Which is to say at least somewhat invested in the community.
I 100% agree, but the difference you are pointing out relates to how a landlord acts and works with the community, not how they became a landlord in the first place. There are plenty of "small time landlords" who simply inherited a house when their parents passed away and chose to keep it to rent out. The author of the article is implying we should demonize these small time landlords because they didn't "scrimp and save their earned income over decades" (even though their parents did).
I agree with this. Emotional investment is entangled with a generational home. You don’t want an inherited home with positive memories to turn into a drug den, so you’re incentivized to screen out unfavorable tenants.
If you’re a large-scale real estate corp, the houses are just income earners and as long as the income is greater than the n expenses, you don’t give a rats ass who lives there.
