4w ago

What are some illegal things that should be legal?

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Dumpster diving. Doesn’t matter if it’s food or merchandise. It should be illegal to lock a dumpster or willfully destroy usable goods.
- Locking dumpsters is important in some areas so wild life dosen't get into them. To quote the National Parks service,
  "There is a significant overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest humans".
  
  Most businesses lock the dumpsters because trash service is expensive, and if you don't lock them people will pull up with a pickup bed full of trash and fill them up.
- You've never had to repeatedly clean trash slurry off of a concrete slab because junkies are terrible people who have no manners. If people could be trusted to not redistribute the trash across the land I wouldn't mind so much
  
  Ah, so getting things out of the trash could be legal, but making a mess from a dumpster should have consequences
  
  Enforcing that would take a lot more money than a padlock.
  A better idea would be to charge businesses for the downstream costs of externalities like waste. Make them self-enforce by making it more expensive to dump recyclable or reusable materials.
  
  If capitalism could be trusted not to put valuable items in the trash, it wouldn’t be a problem.
  
  If it's in the dumpster, it's garbage.
  What you really want is the usable food to not end up in the dumpster in the first place.
  If you don't want Amazon trashing all their returns, don't buy from them in the first place.
  
  Some stuff is in the garbage because a corporation doesn’t want to devalue the item they’re selling by giving away the same thing for free. Waste is waste. There’s not much difference between cotton garments, and a box of pop tarts, from a resources standpoint.
- Dumpster diving laws are more about trespassing and removing liability anyway.

195 comments