NYC Swimming in Delicious Decay

New York City’s curbside composting program appears to be taking off, with a record 3.8 million pounds of organic waste collected in the second week after the city started enforcing fines for not separating compostables from other trash. Naturally, under pressure from landlords and residents who hate touching filth, the city has declared an eight-month pause in actually collecting those fines. In theory this will help slowly boil the unsuspecting lobster of noncompliant citizenry until everyone’s on board, not to mention conveniently kicking enforcement out past the next mayoral election.

I still haven’t gotten any answers about the microplastic content of official NYC compost though. The Staten Island composting facility can “process more than 200 million pounds of material,” presumably annually. Which means it should be able to swallow up the city’s output as long as that record-breaking weekly total doesn’t get too much higher.

I wasn’t going to mention the usual reactionary whining from the Manhattan Institute, a sort of cossetted enclosure for plutocratic conservative primates. But of course the New York Post has no problem laundering a screed that’s not only anti-compost, but also anti-recycling, anti-mask, or really anti- having the government asking you to do anything that might make your life or the lives of future generations marginally better, if doing so rerpresents even a nanosecond of inconvenience or expense. Not my precious taxpayer dollars!!!! And yet the Post also published the celebratory pro-compost story at the first link above! Make up your mind, but you’ll all rot eventually, somehow.

Recently spotted the above extremely tiny Elon Musk apology decal on a Tesla. Setting aside the superfluous comma, I should reiterate that this sticker was so small you couldn’t possibly read it until getting right up next to the Tesla, like, say, if you were creeping up to vandalize it I suppose?

Most of these stickers declaim Musk while praising the Tesla as a car, which unfortunately for Tesla owners is a distinction without a difference. “I bought this before Elon went crazy” is the worst of these equivocations, but variations like “Anti Elon Tesla Fan Club” are almost as bad, or as sad.

But the guy best known for selling these stickers claims to be pulling in $4,500 a day, so good for him, I guess? The defensive message from all these stickers is an excuse for owning the car, and an implicit plea not to hurt the car. I’m surprised no one is selling a much more direct “Please do not hurt my car” sticker, maybe with “I’m trying to sell it” below that, perhaps even with contact information for interested buyers. But I guess that might actually inspire rather than dissuade potential vandals. Not to mention you’re just kicking your Tesla-owning problem to the next owner, like the It Follows of brand shame.

Still … $4,500 a day? I should probably stand up a quick Etsy based around my Sam Sellit character before the grift cools off.