Snoitulos Drawkcab (Backward Solutions)

I have a HUGE disdain for street-sweepers. At least in urban, densely populated areas. Seriously, what were the inventors thinking? "I know, we can make this cross between a vacuum cleaner, a fan, and a riding lawn mower and say that it cleans the streets!"

I have serious doubts about the efficiency of these machines ability to pick up dirt and trash from the road. From my experience, they mostly kick up massive amounts of filth from the ground (where gross and dirty things should be) and transfer it to the air (where nothing dirty or filthy should ever be). In addition, they run on internal combustion engines, which pollute the air.

Side note:

The boogie man isn't real, the sky isn't falling, and global warming is a bigger load of crap than anything else in this sentence. CO2 is considered the worst green house gas, but only a fraction of one percent of the CO2 released annually is realised by human actions. The relationship between global warming and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has a margin of error of close to two percent. All of that means that there is no way to tell if any of our efforts has affected the rate at which the earth's temperature is rising. None the less, we do have pollution problems, they're just localized. Around cities across the globe, the air quality is considerably lower in urban areas. (READ: driving two miles to work every morning instead of walking or riding a bike is only doing a few things: 1. Making you fat, 2. saving you a few minutes (which you get to spend in utter joy as you arrive earlier at work), 3. making the air you breathe taste like a tater-tot that got dropped into the fire on the grill.

Resume:

Really, wouldn't it be great if they got rid of all of the street sweepers and gave homeless people brooms and dustbins and some projects to live in and hired some people to cook for them and paid all of them enough to get on their feet? I know that most people don't trust the homeless with money, but if we would hire more social workers (creating more jobs...) the homeless people could be brought to a place where they would be able to manage their money successfully. Unemployment would go down, your air would be easier to breathe, people would stop asking you for your change when you come out of Starbucks, and your walk to work would be much quieter. What's the downside, we all loose some unsightly belly-fat? Crap, I know, you really like your "love handles" but come on, take one for the team.

End note:

I'm not a greenie or anything, I just think that the world God gave us to live in rocks, and I want my children to get to enjoy it at it's best, not some cheap broken down version. If we would just come to grips with the fact that a better standard of living is going to cost us a little bit of comfort and make the sacrifice, life would taste just that much sweeter.