Shot in the Dark

Watching…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

1984 is a little late, but it’s arrived in St. Paul.

 Those new blue recycling carts in St. Paul, you know the ones, you got one.  The City forgot to mention that each has an embedded microchip.

 St. Paul has mandatory recycling and the chips allow the trucks to see if you’re recycling enough.  The City claims they have no plans to enforce the recycling ordinance that way . . . but that’s what the State said about seatbelts, too.  Has nobody heard of the camel’s nose?

 When they quietly implement the next phase, the justification will be to save the planet ‘for the children.’ But that means the recycling company (hence the government) will be able to track not just how many pounds of recycling you submit, but also which brand of booze you drink, which magazines you read (Playboy ‘for the articles’, NRA kook stuff, survivor militia newsletters, right-wingnut National Review), what foods you eat (so they can assist you in healthier life choices no doubt), and so on.

 I suppose next, I’ll have to go sneaking around putting my recycling in neighbors bins so I don’t get targeted by the gun control squads coming to take my weapons and ammo ‘for my own safety.’  I tell ya, it gets harder every year to justify living in this burg.  

 Joe Doakes

Never put anything past Saint Paul.

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27 responses to “Watching…”

  1. Emery Avatar
    Emery

    Great investigative piece. I’ve read that Milo Yiannopoulos has some time on his hands. Perhaps he could look into this little crisis and report back.

  2. TheFedSucks Avatar
    TheFedSucks

    How will they monitor compliance in apartment buildings? Doesn’t that make it unconstitutional?

  3. Joe Doakes Avatar
    Joe Doakes

    The usual response you get from building inspectors to such concerns is “St. Paul has a charter.” I suspect they honestly believe that being a charter city instead of a statutory city makes them a super-city, having super-powers that mere mortals cannot comprehend, which are above, beyond and in every other way unlimited by mundane concerns such as the laws of economics or the Constitution.

  4. mjb003 Avatar
    mjb003

    “When they quietly implement the next phase, the justification will be to save the planet ‘for the children.’ ”

    I often ask recycling advocates if they care that our trash that we call recycling is transported half way around the world, dumped in an underdeveloped country where people are paid just a couple dollars a day to sort. Wages advocates often call slave labor wages when we’re talking about manufacturing jobs. I never get a response.

    I am OK with paying a fee to dispose of my trash that might have a higher environmental impact. I am OK with reduction of waste. I recently paid Tech Dump to take my non-working microwave. But, I refuse to call it recycling if it is really trash. And if this recycling really had any value, A- it wouldn’t have to be mandatory because B- people would pay us to haul the recycling away.

    But, with years of marketing, recycling is now a feel good action, and an action where if you question it, you’re shamed. Some advocates believe in high penalties for non-compliance. I’ve heard San Francisco actually snoops through trash to check compliance with recycling. So of course St Paul will implement some sort of tracking on the bins. The question is only how far they will go.

  5. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    Recycling consumes energy. It only makes sense in densely occupied urban areas (political sense, not economic sense). Something like 80% of the recyclables on Oahu are put on big, diesel burning ships and sent to Asia or the US mainland.
    Recycling proponents use a lot verbal sleight-of-hand when talking about the economics of recycling. They will tell you that recyclables are a scarce resource, while they hide the fact that all recycling is heavily subsidized by the state or city. They will talk about ‘jobs created’ by recycling, when these jobs produce negative value. They will also use odd figures to make it appear that recycling has a net positive effect on the economy.

  6. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    My dad lives in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma. He’s so far out from civilization, that he doesn’t have garbage service, let alone recycling. All his stuff goes in one bag, then every week he takes a trip out to the community dumpster and dumps it all in: Recycling, garbage, misc crap from around the house, carpet, old electronics, old car parts, everything. I highly doubt his county, or township, or whoever empties the bins, is taking the time to sort it out. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

  7. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    So in the liberal world, you are a bad person if you fail to use enough “recyclable” bottles, newspapers, and such to fill a 64 gallon container every week or so? Given that recycling consumes more energy and produces more pollution than it saves, we would infer that once again, the left LOVES pollution.

    Just like we’d infer from transit (25 passenger-miles per gallon of diesel on average), solar panels (which used more power to produce than they could hope to produce until 2010), electric cars, and the like.

  8. Emery Avatar
    Emery

    Old habits are hard to break. Americans have grown up on excessive consumption. Time to move to the plastic island that grows daily out in the oceans.

  9. Alt-Good Swiftee Avatar
    Alt-Good Swiftee

    I bet Milo’s confession brings up fond memories for you SSOLSEmery, amiright?

    How many young boys have you mentored? Do you keep trophies?

  10. Alt-Good Swiftee Avatar
    Alt-Good Swiftee

    Facebook showed the leftist shitlords the power of data mining and relational databases. You can be sure that anything you do is being collated, cross referenced and stored.

    It won’t be long before all those cameras out there are collating and updating your file. Hell, it’s probably happening now.

    That’s why it’s important your face registers the proper emotion. When Trump issues his follow up EO on Friday, make sure your jaw is set, and your brow is furrowed.

    Unless you want some special attention.

  11. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Not that I’d endorse making life difficult for the recycling bin Nazis, or subverting a duly passed ordinance, but I just wanted to note that if somebody put copper tape (available at Uline) around the RFID chip, it will not transmit and therefore will not be readable. That person might even cover the copper tape with duct tape as if they had simply repaired the bin, and then the city recycling authority would find itself in an endless cycle of replacing recycling bins, since most people don’t understand RFIDs well enough to realize what’s going on.

    Just hypothetically, of course. In other hypothetical action, a person might subvert the “low flow shower head” ordinance by removing the rubber washer from the inlet to the shower head with the corkscrew from a Swiss Army knife. Not that I would endorse doing this, of course.

  12. Emery Avatar
    Emery

    A foreign national advocating the homosexual exploitation of minors sounds dangerous. Shouldn’t he be deported and banned from the US ?

  13. Alt-Good Swiftee Avatar
    Alt-Good Swiftee

    Thining out the competition, eh SSOLSEmery?

  14. Prince of Darkness_666 Avatar
    Prince of Darkness_666

    Silly Joe, you have to know this is completely voluntary. St. Paul knows whats best for you, if you don’t believe me just ask them. Giving the state more intrusion in your life has never backfired in history, it’s only led to glorious utopias not soulless killing fields…

  15. Emery Avatar
    Emery

    Swiftee, spend the ten bucks and buy a copy of Strunk and White.

  16. Joe Doakes Avatar
    Joe Doakes

    Swiftee – save the ten bucks. Learning fancy writing for Emery would be casting pearls . . . .

  17. Emery Avatar
    Emery

    I still think we should do a SiTD In-Real-Life get-together in Vegas. Of course, with all of the sock puppets, there might only be like three actual people there.

  18. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    I am lost, what does Milo have to do with St. Paul privacy intrusion via mandated recycling program? Better a sock puppet than an ignorant threadjacker. But hey eTASS, you want to follow up on your crush, go right ahead, not that there is anything wrong with that.

  19. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    What is the opposite of sock puppet?
    I think that the “Emery” posts are made by more than one person.
    How else to explain the schizophrenia?

  20. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    BB, there are better ways to disable the chip. Yea constructive use of EMP! And certainly much more fun were you to walk down the alleyways doing mass civil disobedience.

    Not that I am too concerned about how you want to live your life if you choose to submit yourself to totalitarian leftists who run your burg. Just don’t export it to mine!

  21. Troy Avatar
    Troy

    I guess you can always supplement your recyclables with real garbage if you run low.
    😉

  22. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    Follow the money.
    Who makes more dollars when more junk is recycled?
    Not the citizen-recycler. It’s just a pain in the ass for him or her to do. The more recycling, the more uncompensated work they are doing for the city.
    Not the city. They have to pay to recycle the collected crap. The more that is recycled, the more they pay.
    The companies that contract out to pick up recyclables, on the other hand, make more money when more junk is recycled.

  23. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    Could a common magnet disrupt those chips?

  24. Night Writer Avatar
    Night Writer

    What is the opposite of sock puppet?

    I’m not sure, but judging from the content, I think it involves Pinocchio.

  25. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    Could a common magnet disrupt those chips?

    Nope. What you need is something that can put a big enough EM pulse into the antenna to develop sufficient voltage to fry the chip on the other end. What the chips do is get just enough energy from their radio antenna to power up the CMOS chip on the other end to send back its ID code. What you can do is abuse that.

    All CMOS chips are sensitive to electrostatic discharge (ESD). Normally you have to worry about that when you make the circuit, since even a very slight amount of static electricity discharging can produce 1000 V even if the charge involved is small and that can fry the gate of the CMOS chip. The chips in these applications are made to be dirt cheap, so they’re in relatively old and less sensitive technologies so you’ve got to give them a much bigger pulse than your CPU can take, for example.

    So the idea is to produce a quick, short discharge of electricity near the antenna. The antenna will pick up the EM and generate a voltage at its terminals, and if you can get the voltage large enough, bye-bye (functional) chip. What the paper I linked to did was to take a common disposable camera board and use the flash’s capacitor and make it discharge near, but not on, the RF chip, which caused the antenna to blow the associated RF chip. And it does it all completely without touching anything and without any trace.

    How easy is it to do? Trivial. You can find any number of YouTube videos that show how easy and low tech it is even without any circuit boards to make your life easier. Or go look on Alibaba and you’ll find a ton of suppliers at dirt cheap prices.

  26. Scott Hughes Avatar
    Scott Hughes

    nerbert: fun conversation! I’m curious what a taser would do to the circuitry?

  27. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    I’m not sure. Hitting an exposed chip with a taser is easy enough to see that the chip would lose (50 KV [raw; people generally only get 100 – 6KV] will do that to just about any chip I know of). A taser near the chip might well be able to do it in, but probably not. A taser cycles at around 19 Hz, with bursts of 150 usec in length, delivering only ~100 microcoulombs, typically, and most RFID chips run about 133 MHz so the antenna isn’t well matched. They might generate enough harmonics, but I honestly doubt it would work. The paper and most folks seem to using millicoulomb or better charges delivered into crudely tuned antennae, so I suspect that there’s not enough energy delivered for it to work. It would be an interesting experiment, though.

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