The solution to people not wanting to haul garbage was to pay them enough that it’s worth doing anyway, same as with all the rest of the jobs people really don’t WANT to do. Garbage haulers sure as shit aren’t paid minimum wage, I’ll tell you that right now.
Nobody WANTS to crawl into a sewer and use a pressure washer to break up a massive chunk of congealed fat, human excrement and “flushable” wipes as human waste splatters all over them, but as with most things if you offer an enticing enough reward someone will eventually do it for the paycheck. And there are lots of jobs like this, miserable things that need to get done and nobody wants to do, but they’re important for a functioning society. You might find some people who would do it just out of passion for mopping sick off yet another floor, but you’ll never find enough people who want to do that more than they want to do anything else. You also won’t find people widely enough distributed to cover all the needs, you just can’t assume every single town has a core of people so dedicated to the idea of handling hazardous biowaste regularly to staff all the required positions purely for the love of it.
There are already incentives to “optimize” these awful tasks away, the very means of their completion is and has been to just throw heaps of money at the problem. Being the one to fix it forever for everyone would come with heaps of money getting thrown at you, and yet it still isn’t done. You’re certainly not going to encourage even more problem solving to problems that already exist by eliminating any existing reward system. If they didn’t fix it for the reward of being set for life, they’re not about to fix it just because they had nothing better to do.
jj4211@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
This is unfortunately a bit naive, that for every problem no one wants to do there’s a solution that people both want and can create.
If you want to dismiss excessive waste as a failing of society, we can speak of work like line men who repair power infrastructure. It’s not super engaging work.
thetentacle@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I don’t know how you solve excessive waste, it’s maybe a problem of population density more than failing society. If you live on a plot of land in your own home you can exist without producing more garbage than you can process away on your own. So while yes you can’t realistically just tune down society, it’s naive. It’s not true that people can’t exist in a self sustained way as the basis for a thought experiment.
It’s not that garbage or infrastructure repair aren’t problems that need to be dealt with, they now are. Or that you never have to do anything you don’t want to do, even self sustained you have to. I’m saying that you would need to solve them upstream at the source where they are not menial but interesting like the pictures in the meme.