#also diversity in CO overall is p garbage

[anjumbai]

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis – Thoughts

“… and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”

First of all, this is one huge book. I was skeptical of whether I should really even pick this up, will this put me in another reading slump and yada yada. Surprisingly, I managed to finish it in a very short time. The narration style and dialogues are something I found to be absolutely hilarious. Bret Easton is very crafty with the dialogues he constructs and I don’t understand how he comes up with such elaborate and funny conversations. Honestly, I’d research a little bit more about the book and the writer but there is no network in my country as I’m writing this. So yeah, giving it to you raw.

Can I talk about the movie first? I’ll talk about the movie first. I love Christian Bale. He’s one of my favorite actors, a master at his craft and worthy of respect for his diverse set of roles. His dedication to play a role is unmatched. He starred as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and I’m glad I watched the movie first. The book is written in first person narrated by our P&P executive, working in murders and executions, Patrick Bateman. And every time I imagine a scenery with this guy, pop, it’s Christian Bale’s goofy ass acting popping up in my head and I absolutely love it. Somebody said while working with Bale that during the shoot of the film, he thought that Bale was deliberately acting horrible. He couldn’t understand why and when the movie came out, his doubts were gone. He seemed like the perfect sociopath, trying his best to fit in while being absolutely horrible at it. His deliberate bad acting just made the character Bateman come to life. It was bad acting to the point it was amazing acting. I don’t know, 10/10 for Christian Bale.

Let’s start off with the contents of the book. The book is a series of narration of the events happening in Bateman’s life and his mind by Bateman himself. There are often whole chapters dedicated to Bateman naming designer and luxury brands, describing popular music bands and their history and what their songs mean, there was even a whole chapter dedicated to his panic attacks; considering he is always high on Xanax, Velium or some other drug. Pages and pages worth of creative and witty dialogue, callbacks or just the total unhinged way of how Patrick treats everyone else when he is on bloodthirst mode. So much to highlight. So much to highlight, cause all of it is just so funny. Something like- “What is this continuing inability you have to evaluate this situation rationally?” when Patrick is being harassed by his fellow gay co-worker(who thinks Patrick loves him cause that one time he was trying to strangle him but dude thought wow Patricks in love with me) is just comedic. Or something like – “Patrick, why aren’t you looking at me?” “I’m ignoring you, Luis.” Just makes me laugh out loud. And of course, the movie. Lines from the movie written out in the book and you’re just sitting there Leonardo DiCaprio-ing all over. “He said the thing.”

All jokes aside, it was also a very clever critique of the free market. All the characters are extremely self-centered to the point of obsessive narcissism, where Pat just takes it up a notch. I don’t need to describe some of the scenes from the movie or the book because I can’t. It’s just not possible, the things Bret writes in the book, to put in a review. If you do wanna see an uncensored review, do pull up your Platinum AmEx card and sign up for my patron, where you’ll find exclusive content. Seriously, if you don’t have a Platinum AmEx card you might as well just be gutter garbage. Did I tell you that Patrick just gave me a face care routine that’ll set me back thousands of dollars but it’ll make me feel, quote, “I feel like shit but look great”?

Overall, my thoughts are all over the place and there’s nothing in particular I want to say about this book. It’s just the day to day life of a psychopath who commits heinous and gorey acts of crime, murder and what not. The book is basically him trying to fit in society while also maintaining his bloodlust. The lines “My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage” sums up the book pretty well. He doesn’t necessarily leave the city all the time but rather he leaves his “I work in finance” façade behind and goes full on Ted Bundy all over the city. Graphic and gorey descriptions of his murder, torture, assault is just horrifying to even imagine. The very fact that someone thought all of this and put it in a book is gut-wrenching alone but let’s just say that the book tries to put some heartfelt moments too. Sentences like “I just want to be loved” are spoken out loud by Patrick after he, pretty graphically, cooks a part of a human body for his dinner. Words are written but not said out loud when Patrick feels love from someone. Genuine, heartfelt love that doesn’t want fame or money or anything else from Patrick, unlike every other girl he has slept with. “yet she weakens me, it’s almost as if she’s making the decision about who I am, and in my own stubborn, willful way I can admit to feeling a pang, something tightening inside, and before I can stop it I find myself almost dazzled and moved that I might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love.” A slight attempt at humanizing a monster, I’d say. Not very successful. And I found it funny that even until the end of the book, I couldn’t tell most characters apart from one another. Just like in the movie, and I think the movie captured that essence pretty well.

Most of what you can know about the story is summed up pretty well in the movie, except that the book delves into much more comedy and, of course, gore. The movie ends at a better note in my opinion, simply because the part where the movie ends is just one of the few final chapters of the book. The movie couldn’t have done well with what the book offered as its ending and well done to the script writers for that. The book is hilarious, graphic and just a really funny mockery of materialism. It’s definitely worth a read but it does drag on without a proper goal or anything. But did I still enjoy it a lot? Yes, I did. 8/10. Hilarious and witty.

Now you know what to do when life is getting you down. Just tell yourself “You’ve got a negative attitude. That’s what’s stopping you. You need to get your act together.” Wise words, honestly.

Big ideas, guy stuff, boy meets the world, boy gets it.

[envir480]

Waste Management Infrastructure

Hi everyone. This is Ziyi and Daniel here. For our blog we just wanted to let you know what waste management infrastructure is and then make a comparison between two cities. We hope you enjoy!

Waste management is all the activities and actions required to manage waste from its inception to its final disposal. Contemporary waste management practices emerge from a historical and institutional context. The solid waste generated by residents and business will present new challenges for people to deal with due to increased population and resource consumption. There are two categories of waste management: waste prevention and waste recovery: Waste prevention is any action that results in a net decrease in the generation of waste, such as using products more intensively, or delaying the end of life of a product. Waste recovery refers to the utilization of waste as either a substitute for virgin resources in goods production or for energy recovery. From the diagram of the waste hierarchy, the most favored option is prevention while the least favored option is disposal. Waste prevention is generally environmentally superior to waste recovery because there is a net decrease in the generation of waste, but in reality it depends on the numerous factors such as materials and technologies. Recycling belongs to waste diversion as it diverts materials from landfill.

Solid waste can have a complex set of local impacts including limited landfill capacity, worker health and safety, environmental justice, and costs. In the United States, there has been a lack of federal leadership in regards to expanding polities related to recycling targets, disposal bans, and extending producer responsibilities polices. The limitations of federal policy for addressing issues beyond solid waste disposal have encouraged state and local governments to develop and improve waste management infrastructure. Solid Waste Disposal Act (SWDA) provided technical and financial assistance to state and local governments for creation and implementation of solid waste management programs ad for demonstration projects to develop improved management method. For example, the Los Angeles Department of Public Works’ Bureau of Station has provided solid waste collection service to the residential sector since 1943. The Bureau separately collects trash, co-mingled recyclables, and green waste from the city’s 540,000 single-family homes and 220,000 small multi-family complex.

Municipalities are leading the push for better waste management. For instance, the Northwest Product Stewardship Council is a regional council of local governments in Washington State that in 2006 succeeded in requiring producers to create recycling programs for electronic products. (Sheehan and Spiegelman, 2010, p.11) Rapid technology advances lead to shorter useful life of electronic devices, for the past few years there are countless innovative phones and computers coming into the market, which also leads to a great deal of wastes. According to the EPA, Americans generated about 3,190,000 tons of consumer electronics in the U.S. in 2009. Of that, only 600,000 tons were recovered while 2,590,000 were discarded. Electronic wastes, not like other wastes, contain hazardous materials that will release into the environment, affecting the soil and people’s health. Besides, electronic devices were designed with little or no thought to recycling and are difficult to disassemble. Product stewardship solutions can take to minimize the environmental impact of the product throughout all stages of the products’ life cycle, including end of life management. Manufacturers, retailers and other organizations can provide and finance take back programs to collect unwanted electronic products from consumers. Manufacturers can also redesign products to use fewer harmful substances or use materials made from recycling.

Of all the wastes we generated, product wastes have the highest proportion. What causes our society to generate so many product wastes is the continuous desire for more. The majority of people who purchase the newest product not because their previous device was out of job but they want the newest and coolest electronic device on the market, which could lead to a huge amount of wastes. In addition, to produce these products it requires a great amount of energy.

This is Daniel here! The Atlanta Falcons are about to battle the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LI (51) and it should be a fantastic game. However, I thought it would be fun to match up the two teams and their cities in a battle of waste management. I will be matching up their waste management systems against each other and seeing which city has the superior waste management system/website. There will be four different categories compared, each representing the four quarters of a football game. Although there will be no Julio Jones or Malcolm Butler in this battle, it should still be fun! Let us get started!

I want to start with a quick disclaimer. I will be using Boston instead of Foxborough since there was so little information on the waste management system of Foxborough I could find online.

For the first quarter we will be comparing the recycling programs of the two cities. The first thing I liked about the Atlanta recycling page is that it gives information about the benefits of its Cartlanta Recycling Program and how it gives back to the city in ways such as saving money. This makes sure people understand that they are helping the city when they recycle giving them additional motivation. On the Boston website, I could not find information about the benefits of recycling. This is not a huge deal, but I like that Atlanta put in the time and effort to list the benefits of recycling. Because of this Atlanta starts the first quarter off with a 3-0 lead.

Both websites contain information about what to recycle and what not to recycle as well as how to recycle. However, Atlanta says that recycling should be placed in the blue recycling bin while Boston gives other options to use if a household does not own a blue recycling bin. These include things such as using an extra garbage bin as a recycling bin. Here Boston answers back and ties it 3-3 in the first quarter.

Both cities have special events and places for recycling if a person cannot normally recycle. In addition, both websites have the city’s recycling schedule on their website. However, Boston on its website says that it offers free recycling to residents of buildings with 7 or more units as well as giving out a free recycling bin to buildings with 6 or less units. This is a great program to help encourage people to recycle and for this Boston ends the first quarter with a 10-3 lead.

For the second quarter, we will be looking waste management citizen involvement. On the City of Atlanta website, I could only find how to report a pothole. Boston had information on not only how to report potholes, but missed trash collection and street light outages as well. I don’t see how street light outages and potholes relate to waste management, but missed trash collection does. The Boston website also had information on how to request a special item pick up and ways to request recycling and yard waste stickers. Boston dominates this category and goes up to a 17-3 lead.

The third quarter will be a battle of community programs. I could not find any community programs or events on the Boston page except for drop off days. However, Atlanta has a whole “Keep Atlanta Beautiful” commission. This commission aims to educate the public on clean lifestyles, lead programs for cleaning up bodies of water, and give people ways to report illegal dumping. I like the fact that Atlanta on its website has a program like this. Atlanta lessens the gap and is now down only 10-17.

The last category we will look at is how the cities handle hazardous waste. The Atlanta page states that Atlanta has no program for Hazardous waste, but that Keep Atlanta Beautiful has options. However, upon further investigation I could not find more information on hazardous waste on the Make Atlanta Beautiful website. The Atlanta page gave tips to handling hazardous waste like how to turn paint into a solid using cat litter before putting it in the garbage or to triple wrap pesticides. I question how effective these tactics are. The city of Boston has drop-off days for hazardous waste as well as a much more comprehensive list of hazardous waste items then Atlanta does. Unlike Atlanta, Boston has special drop off places for medications as well as the option to request TV or PC Monitor pickups. Boston finishes off the game with a 24-10 victory.

Well there we have it. It appears from the information on the websites, that Boston has an overall better waste management system/website then Atlanta. Both cities clearly have improvements to make such as Atlanta should have its own hazardous waste system. One complaint I have about the Boston website is it was hard to find the information I was looking for and that it could be more user friendly. Having a more user-friendly website would allow residents to find the important information on the website easier.

 It is possible that I missed some things on the website and I am sorry if I did. Also it’s important to realize that there is certainly information on the waste management systems of both cities not on their website so this is not the whole story. Also I did not cover all the information on their websites because there was a lot of it. I hope you enjoyed this and learned a little about the waste management of Boston and Atlanta. I hope that the Falcons do a little better in the upcoming Super Bowl.

 Source:

City of Boston. Boston Gov. https://www.boston.gov/

City of Atlanta. Atlanta Gov. 2017. http://www.atlantaga.gov/index.aspx?page=491

Murphy S, Pincetl S. “Zero waste in Los Angele: Is the emperor wearing any clothes?” Resources, Conservation and Recycling. University of California, Los Angeles, 2013.

Northwest Product Stewardship Council: The Problem: Volume, Cost, Waste, Toxicity. http://productstewardship.net/products/paint