I'm sympathetic to the goal of trying to recycle more bottles but here's my problem: Like more than 10% of the population of the state, I live in Seattle. I have a giant blue recycle bin that's included for free with garbage service. The cheapest, laziest thing I can do with a plastic bottle is throw it in my recycling bin for efficient, high-volume pickup and recycling. The proposed deposit system adds a lot of administrative hassle, inconvenience, and waste (in the form of recycling return bags). Or I do what's easiest and the most environmentally friendly but accept an extra expense. Would our resources not be better spent encouraging or subsidizing recycling programs in communities with difficult, expensive, or non-existent recycling programs? We don't even have to hit every tiny town in the middle of nowhere to make a big difference. There has to be a good amount of low-hanging fruit out there where we could get a lot more recycling done, without making recycling worse in the places where it already has high participation.
You nailed it. Recycling is already flawed as hell and doesn’t do what we think it even does. I feel like this proposal is being introduced to fix some sort of gap in funding the existing program but is being sold to the public as a way to get back a hidden fee, knowing full well most people won’t take advantage of it, due to the hassle.
It's bad in principle because he obviously engaged in insurrection and is ineligible but from a practical standpoint it's great news for democracy. A toxic Republican candidate who by the election will most likely be a convicted felon and quite possibly already in prison is pretty much a best-case scenario for the country. Turnout matters and nothing is going to dampen Republican turnout like the top of their ticket being a convicted loser. We could very well be looking at a historic blue wave this year.
I'm not sure I can agree that ignoring the Constitution is good for democracy. Especially when it comes to disqualifying insurrectionists. But hopefully you're right about the outcome.
Everything Cliff Mass claims is immediately invalidated by his climate change denial. Imagine thinking you were an expert in meteorology and denying that climate change is happening. Expert my ass.
Never understood how he can be a well respected scientist and also a climate change denialist in the same breath. I’m not debating that he is. I’m just saying it’s so absurd.
Washington is an epicenter because we don’t have enough economic opportunities in our rural locations, plus people are criminalized and shamed for even admitting they are addicted, they need harm reduction and no strings attached housing and jobs.
“The commission’s study found that 54%, roughly half of respondents had security concerns. Roughly 88% of participating drivers opted to self-report mileage instead of using a GPS monitoring system.”
I feel like this part of the article needed some serious exploration that isn’t there. Is there a chance in this proposition that they would track mileage with a GPS system? Because that is a much bigger deal if so.
I'd find it to be an invasion of privacy to have my mileage tracked, but on the other hand, people will underreport their miles if it's up to self-reporting. The only way to do this properly is to not have self-reporting.
You could have the odometer read yearly by a certified person. In UT they do this for registration renewals and you can have it done at pretty much any gas station or dealership.
I think that would be infinitely better than affixing an electronic tracking device from the government to all private vehicles.
First everyone bitches about how EVs don’t pay gas taxes to help cover road costs (which are mostly covered by other taxes anyway). Then they bitch when a more equitable tax option is suggested.
That makes sense to some degree, given that the taxes were meant for maintenance of roads. However the per mile tax should also be a sliding value based on vehicle weight as that increases damage to the road. So a light car going a few miles wouldn’t be taxed as heavily as a truck going a long distance since it wouldn’t damage the roads the same way. Though at the point you’ve thrown out any incentive for more fuel efficient ICE powerplants.
farmers and others also may drive quite a lot in vehicles on their own properties without ever touching a road. If it's purely for roads and not, say, including a carbon tax or something, that seems rather unfair.
Existing gas taxes also affect them in this way then. They pay for the gas tax used and they’re not driving on public roads, so that seems to be a wash.
We actually have off-road diesel for this. Alberta also used to have "purple gas" but it was halted in 1999 due to rampant abuse. We could do something like that, but it hasn't worked historically.
The State of Washington — The Evergreen State
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