"The confetti drop started in 1992, when it was intended to lighten up the tone of the event. “Up until that point, it had just been a drunken brawl,” said Treb Heining, who managed the confetti that first year and has been doing it ever since. “It was so seedy.”"
I think they are attributing too much to confetti -- how does one minute of dropping paper at the end of the event transform an hours long event to something less seedy? I think the big push to clean up the Times Square area that started around then is the real reason the event became less seedy.
If you have ever thought about waiting in Times Square for midnight I highly recommend against it. It is hard to see from the TV PoV but you are all in small, square roped off areas in the middle of the street. You can't leave for the entire night and you need to get there by around 5pm to even be close to the festivities. We left at around 7pm and got our hotel concierge to find us a nice place to eat. Far preferable. You can kind of see how controlled it is in this photo:
I've gone (as a college student in the 00s) and had a blast. I wouldn't do it now because I'm lazy, but back when I had a lot of energy it was fun. I went with a good group of people, made friends with the revelers, shop keepers (and police!) around us.
I had this experience as well about ten years ago, arriving in NYC on my own a few days before new year for an internship— the idea of being sealed in there for such a long period was kind of terrifying so I ended up going elsewhere.
I kind of wished it was more crowded. Instead people were in what were basically cages and the police / organizers were walking around in the empty space between them. Makes sense from a safety perspective but isn't like typical crowded places. The pens weren't even completely filled...
opened the article expecting to read a wide array of tech and coordinated pyrotechnic systems used to disperse the confetti, but at the end of the day, good old human power and simple coordination does the trick. always amazed at how simple systems & processes can be magical.
Right, but at the cost of throwing waste on the ground. I’m not arguing that it is harmful (i’d imagine it biodegrades pretty easily) but it seems flippant to me to assume zero impact.
This would come off as meaningful if you didn’t dismiss the environmental impact without even acknowledging its existence. I am not against celebrations like these so long as you can acknowledge their impact.... sanitation workers are not responsible for our actions, regardless of how content they are to clean the visible impacts from the streets.
The explained the reason in the article. In order to transform the Time Square NYE celebration from a violent dangerous drunken brawl complete with hookers and cocaine from the dealers on 'eighth and forty - deuce' they started dropping the confetti to make the experience a lot more fun.
Maybe the police should consider dropping confetti on rioters? Maybe implement in clubs and bars? The solution to world peace: confetti. Who knew. :P
> More than 100 sanitation workers begin their eight-hour shifts. Using street sweepers, backpack blowers, and push brooms, they will remove the 57 tons of material that’s left behind
This is actually disgusting. I think the idea that dropping confetti prevents violence, or that it was responsible for the drop in violence the article attributes to it, seems silly. It sounds like they are just trying to justify the massive expense and waste associated with this reckless behavior.
Of course the owner of the company who gets paid mad money to dump trash on the public is going to tout his works as transformative and important. Does his company also pay for the 100 sanitation workers to clean up his mess? Or do the people foot the bill for both the dumping of the trash and the cleanup?
The targeted tax revenue per square foot of the businesses in that zone that profit from the massive foot traffic of Times Square and a hotel tax per night is used to create a safer experience that is the attraction people come to see pays for that. Hotels can say not to tax the room and stop the Times Square event but they will lose far more revenue, a little extra tax for far more revenue makes a ton of sense. In other words, the people who visit for the experience pay for it by the hotel room and sales tax when they eat at Planet Hollywood.
As long as there are no direct personal consequences from type of needless waste, a large segment of the population will just keep on doing it. They'll be dead long before the consequences hit, after all.
Edit: However, it should be noted that the confetti is made from waste paper and is biodegradable. I still think it could be put to a better use, but it's not like they're dumping a load of plastic on the streets.
That still leaves 57 tons of trash that isn't recycled, though. What a waste.
2. Argue the second law of thermodynamics until the ball drops.
3. Watch as the American Journal of Physics grudgingly publishes your paper with a long-winded preface on just how aggravating your approach made parking that year.
4. Win a sanitation award.
5. Spend the rest of your days running from the reanimated corpse of Max Planck.
Off topic: Can't we all, just get along and adopt the metric system? It's so weird, a bushel, used for grains etc., doesn't weigh the same https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel#Weight . Use the metric system and be done with it. Or even the pound /lbs but get rid of cups, pints, teaspoons etc
Dont worry, we already do. Almost everything is manufactured in metric and later converted to other systems. The tools are calibrated in metric per international standards. The only solid, scuentific, definitions of the pound or mile are metric.
Almost like asking: Can't we all, just get along and adopt the same language? Cause that goes over well here in America where we don't have an official language. :)
Biodegradable on what time frame? Isn't everything biodegradable given enough time? Is there an official definition on what time frame of biodegradability allows something to be legally declared 'biodegradable'? (Looking into this now, fascinating!)
If there's no reasonable legal definition of biodegradable, then isn't that label useless?
> The article makes no mention of the other garbage the accumulates as a bypoduct of this event
In fact, it makes a point of it.
> More than 100 sanitation workers begin their eight-hour shifts. Using street sweepers, backpack blowers, and push brooms, they will remove the 57 tons of material that’s left behind, none of which is recycled.
> What is the point of dumping this garbage in the street?
It’s NYC. There are no alleyways so the garbage usually ends up on the sidewalk. Smells just wonderful in the summertime. A few tons of confetti on the street is a drop in the bucket.
Better idea: pay the cleaners anyway and let them stay home without littering in public.
Alternative: do not pay the cleaners if they can't do enough useful work (without artificially increasing it for no gain) - their wage comes from the taxpayers after all (I presume) who pay them in order to get a specific work done, not for charity.
An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.
The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”
Wow, a thousand a day? Is that full wages, or does it include benefits? Even if it did include benefits, $1,000/day all-in is not exactly chump change. Universal income would not pay them $1,000/day.
I'm implying that workers are often employed temporarily though a subcontracting agency, rather than being in a permanent role. The daily costs is fully inclusive.
Both companies should keep track of what resources are assigned where and paid for.
Most of the garabge they are cleaning up isn't confetti. It's people throwing their wrappers/bottles on the ground because they can't/won't get to a garbage can.
> January 1: Applications go out for next year’s Confetti Crew. (Mr. Heining calls the volunteers “dispersal engineers.”) Though he says that 50 people would be enough, he enlists twice that number in order to give more people the opportunity.
Wow, that guy is really something. Turn dumping trash in public into profit, get others to volunteer to do the work, charging the people the entire time, for both the dispersal and the cleanup, all the while claiming his trash dumping is a powerful deterrent to crime. Master scammer.
I think they are attributing too much to confetti -- how does one minute of dropping paper at the end of the event transform an hours long event to something less seedy? I think the big push to clean up the Times Square area that started around then is the real reason the event became less seedy.