First of all, kudos for not taking it personally. I don't know how any of this is scored but I think you may have won.
> [...] Americans are much more oriented to the rights of the individual [...]
It definitely feels like it. When it comes to things like abortions you can't live up to your own expectations though. Not quite sure why that is.
I love the water tap story. Sounds about right :D
Let me get the recycling thing out of the way and then I'll cover the rest in one go. We have three bins: 1. Organic stuff, 2. paper and 3. everything else. (We have a bag for plastics, not a bin. That's important.) They get picket up by different people and are brought to different places (at least in theory). Kind of makes sense I guess. The reason we do that directly at home is probably because it's the most efficient solution. Our friends in Sweden have way cooler bins. They use one with four compartments instead of four separate bins. Same thing though.
What you said about the "vanishingly inconsequential" effects got me thinking. Maybe that's the real problem. Imagining things on such a large scale is very difficult (e.g., people can't image how small changes caused by evolution lead to a new species). Small streams make large rivers.
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> [...] if you are not (directly) harming someone else, it's nobody else's business what you do.
That's the other thing, right? They're almost always indirectly harming other people. Indirectly is a nonsense term in that context. They're directly harming other people.
I enjoy discussing sociological themes and I never take it personally. If you're ever in San Francisco, I'll buy you a beer and we can continue!
Abortion is legal in the US, though some conservative areas attempt to make it impractical, with varying degrees of success. This derives from controversy over whether and when a pregnancy should be considered a human baby deserving of legal protection. Many religious groups believe that this happens at conception, and thus view the situation in terms of the necessity of preventing one person (the mother) from directly harming another (the baby).
As for recycling.. when I lived in Berlin, we definitely had 9 bins, with seperate bins for green glass, clear glass, brown glass, paper, compost, this or that type of plastic, and so on. I've got pictures -- it was very weird for me. This was a while ago. Maybe they've changed things since then.
As for direct and indirect harm, direct harm is (usually) pretty easy and non-controversial to discern. If you punch someone in the face, you've harmed them directly, so our mythical average American would think it's fine that there is a law against this whereby society tries to prevent such things from happening. Indirect harm is much harder to discern and much more debatable, so the mythical average American will err on the side of leaving it as a private matter when in doubt.
> [...] Americans are much more oriented to the rights of the individual [...]
It definitely feels like it. When it comes to things like abortions you can't live up to your own expectations though. Not quite sure why that is.
I love the water tap story. Sounds about right :D
Let me get the recycling thing out of the way and then I'll cover the rest in one go. We have three bins: 1. Organic stuff, 2. paper and 3. everything else. (We have a bag for plastics, not a bin. That's important.) They get picket up by different people and are brought to different places (at least in theory). Kind of makes sense I guess. The reason we do that directly at home is probably because it's the most efficient solution. Our friends in Sweden have way cooler bins. They use one with four compartments instead of four separate bins. Same thing though.
What you said about the "vanishingly inconsequential" effects got me thinking. Maybe that's the real problem. Imagining things on such a large scale is very difficult (e.g., people can't image how small changes caused by evolution lead to a new species). Small streams make large rivers.
---
> [...] if you are not (directly) harming someone else, it's nobody else's business what you do.
That's the other thing, right? They're almost always indirectly harming other people. Indirectly is a nonsense term in that context. They're directly harming other people.