Recycling stories!

The telecommunications people R must be branching out into other fields, diversifying. We found a letter in our letter box all about R Optica (mobile phones to glasses!!), with a clever little pair of cardboard glasses inside, intended to be a copy of the kind of thing the optician uses to measure your eyes and the kind of lenses you need. People get paid good money to come up with advertising ploys like that! Anyway, we didn't want it so we put it in the box outside the door, the one labelled "publicidad".

I think that box was intended for advertisers to put their fliers in back in the day when the outer door to the entrance to our block still had a working lock. Nowadays the advertisers can get into the outer vestibule where the letter boxes are and pop a flier in each letter box. When we empty all the tat out of our letter box and can't be bothered to go out to the big waste paper collecting bin in the street, then we pop it into the box labelled publicidad. It disappears as if by magic!

 Whoever does the disappearing trick clearly took one look at the envelope from R, saw that it was addressed to "El señor residente", ie the occupier, at our specific address and took umbrage. For the opened envelope appeared back in our letter box with a message: "Hay una papelera en la calle"; in English "There is a waste paper bin in the street". Oops! We shall consider ourselves told. It will not, however, prevent us from putting anonymous, untraceable advertising propaganda into the "publicidad" container!

We do believe in recycling though. It's just that such a lot of tat gets stuffed into our letter box.

Someone else who believes in recycling is a chap described as the "crazy bottle guy". He has been filling empty plastic water bottles with sand and using them as building materials to make a house in a refugee camp in the Western Sahara. Here is a link to details of what he has been doing.

"I was born in a sun-dried brick house,” he says. “The roof was made of sheets of zinc – one of the best heat conductors. Me and my family had to endure high temperatures, rain and sandstorms that would sometimes take the roof off.
When I came back to the camps, I decided to build a place for my grandmother to live that was more comfortable and more worthy of her.”

Apparently the sand-filled bottles work a treat, insulating just as well as traditional sun-dried bricks, and have the advantage of not crumbling away. Well done, "crazy bottle guy".

And here's something from the Huffington Post that I found myself in agreement with, and which I think applies to the countries of Europe as well as the USA:-

"Like many Americans, I’m having politics fatigue. Or, to be more specific, arguing-about-politics fatigue. I haven’t run out of salient points or evidence for my political perspective, but there is a particular stumbling block I keep running into when trying to reach across the proverbial aisle and have those “difficult conversations” so smugly suggested by think piece after think piece: I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.

Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 % for my fast food burger if it means the person making it can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.

I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I’m childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye.

If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP.

Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world. If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.

I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. I cannot have one more conversation with someone who is content to see millions of people suffer needlessly in exchange for a tax cut that statistically they’ll never see.

I cannot have political debates with these people. Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters. There are all kinds of practical, self-serving reasons to raise the minimum wage, fund public schools (everyone’s safer when the general public can read and use critical thinking), and make sure every American can access health care (outbreaks of preventable diseases being generally undesirable).

But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you. I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to their fellow human beings. The fact that such detached cruelty is so normalized in a certain party’s political discourse is at once infuriating and terrifying.

The “I’ve got mine, so screw you,” attitude has been oozing from the American right wing for decades, but this gleeful exuberance in pushing legislation that will immediately hurt the most vulnerable among us is chilling."

It's all about making the world work for all of us!