But the thing is, I basically hate the way everybody else hates waste, because I get the impression that they don’t actually hate waste, they hate something else.
People who talk about limited resources don’t actually hate waste—they hate the expenditure of limited resources.
People who talk about waste disposal don’t actually hate waste—they hate landfills, or trash on the side of the road, or any number of other things that aren’t actually waste.
People who talk about opportunity costs (‘wasteful spending’) don’t hate the waste, they hate how choices were made, or who made the choices.
Mind, wasting limited resources is bad. Waste disposal is itself devoting additional resources—say, the land for the landfill—to waste. And opportunity costs are indeed the heart of the issue with waste.
At this point, the whole concept of finishing the food on your plate because kids in Africa don’t have enough to eat is the kind of old-fashioned where jokes about it being old fashioned are becoming old fashioned, but the basic sentiment there really cuts to the heart of what I mean by “waste”, and what makes it a problem.
Waste is something that isn’t used. It is value that is destroyed.
The plastic wrapping your meat that you throw away isn’t waste. It had a purpose to serve, and it fulfilled it. Calling that waste is just a value judgment on the purpose it was put to. The plastic is garbage, and the conflation of waste and garbage has diminished an important concept.
Food you purchase, that is never eaten and thrown away? That is waste. Waste, in this sense, is the opposite of exploitation. To waste is to fail to exploit. However, we use the word waste now to just mean that we don’t approve of the way something is used, and the use of the word to express disapproval of a use has basically destroyed—not the original use of the word, but the root meaning which gives the very use of the word to express disapproval weight. Think of the term “wasteful spending”—you already know the phrase just means spending that the speaker disapproves of, the word “wasteful” has lost all other significance.
Mind, I’m not arguing that “waste” literally only means a specific thing. I’m arguing that an important concept has been eroded by use by people who were deliberately trying to establish a link with that concept.
Which is frustrating, because it has eroded a class of criticisms that I think society desperately needs, which have been supplanted by criticisms rooted in things like environmentalism, even when environmentalism isn’t actually a great fit for the criticisms—it’s just the framing for this class of criticism where there is a common conceptual referent, a common symbolic language.
And this actually undermines environmentalism; think about corporate “green” policies, and how often they’re actually cost-cutting measures. Cutting waste, once upon a time, had the same kind of public appeal; now if somebody talks about cutting waste, I’m wondering what they’re trying to take away from me. We’ve lost a symbol in our language, and the replacement isn’t actually a very good fit.
now if somebody talks about cutting waste, I’m wondering what they’re trying to take away from me.
This probably applies to applause lights in general. Individuals sometimes do things for idealists reasons, but corporations are led by people selected for their ability to grab power and resources. Therefore all their actions should be suspected as an attempt to gain more power and/or resources. A “green policy” might mean less toilet paper in the company bathrooms, but it never means fewer business trips for the management.
I really, really dislike waste.
But the thing is, I basically hate the way everybody else hates waste, because I get the impression that they don’t actually hate waste, they hate something else.
People who talk about limited resources don’t actually hate waste—they hate the expenditure of limited resources.
People who talk about waste disposal don’t actually hate waste—they hate landfills, or trash on the side of the road, or any number of other things that aren’t actually waste.
People who talk about opportunity costs (‘wasteful spending’) don’t hate the waste, they hate how choices were made, or who made the choices.
Mind, wasting limited resources is bad. Waste disposal is itself devoting additional resources—say, the land for the landfill—to waste. And opportunity costs are indeed the heart of the issue with waste.
At this point, the whole concept of finishing the food on your plate because kids in Africa don’t have enough to eat is the kind of old-fashioned where jokes about it being old fashioned are becoming old fashioned, but the basic sentiment there really cuts to the heart of what I mean by “waste”, and what makes it a problem.
Waste is something that isn’t used. It is value that is destroyed.
The plastic wrapping your meat that you throw away isn’t waste. It had a purpose to serve, and it fulfilled it. Calling that waste is just a value judgment on the purpose it was put to. The plastic is garbage, and the conflation of waste and garbage has diminished an important concept.
Food you purchase, that is never eaten and thrown away? That is waste. Waste, in this sense, is the opposite of exploitation. To waste is to fail to exploit. However, we use the word waste now to just mean that we don’t approve of the way something is used, and the use of the word to express disapproval of a use has basically destroyed—not the original use of the word, but the root meaning which gives the very use of the word to express disapproval weight. Think of the term “wasteful spending”—you already know the phrase just means spending that the speaker disapproves of, the word “wasteful” has lost all other significance.
Mind, I’m not arguing that “waste” literally only means a specific thing. I’m arguing that an important concept has been eroded by use by people who were deliberately trying to establish a link with that concept.
Which is frustrating, because it has eroded a class of criticisms that I think society desperately needs, which have been supplanted by criticisms rooted in things like environmentalism, even when environmentalism isn’t actually a great fit for the criticisms—it’s just the framing for this class of criticism where there is a common conceptual referent, a common symbolic language.
And this actually undermines environmentalism; think about corporate “green” policies, and how often they’re actually cost-cutting measures. Cutting waste, once upon a time, had the same kind of public appeal; now if somebody talks about cutting waste, I’m wondering what they’re trying to take away from me. We’ve lost a symbol in our language, and the replacement isn’t actually a very good fit.
This probably applies to applause lights in general. Individuals sometimes do things for idealists reasons, but corporations are led by people selected for their ability to grab power and resources. Therefore all their actions should be suspected as an attempt to gain more power and/or resources. A “green policy” might mean less toilet paper in the company bathrooms, but it never means fewer business trips for the management.