
When Accessibility Gets Labeled Wasteful - luu
https://crippledscholar.wordpress.com/2016/03/04/when-accessibility-gets-labeled-wasteful/
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spinlock
I bet the guys/gals at the deli counter would peal an orange for you if you
asked nice.

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pigpaws
this is horrible. Why isn't that label done in braille?!

when does this end?

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danharaj
This is a solid argument from the premises, but one of the unspoken premises
is that people should live independently or in small nuclear families.
Disabled people have fewer accessibility issues when they are integrated into
larger social units. Most ableist discrimination is ultimately exclusion from
the social participation that is the mechanism of human mutuality. Handicapped
people are excluded from reaping the benefits of human cooperation at the
local level: trying to fix that with commodities and government stipends
soothes some symptoms without solving the root problem: our society implicitly
excludes people who need it most.

My opinion is that everyone would be better off in larger living groups where
everyone contributes labor for others. To each according to their need, from
each according to their ability' and all that nonsense. I understand that this
idea is considered ridiculous and naive by prevailing wisdom, but whatever
/shrug

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Houshalter
Who even cares if it's wasteful or not? Let people buy what they want. If I
want to pay 10 extra cents for a peeled orange, then let me. It's none of your
damn business.

Is it really lazy? How much time does it take to peel an orange? How much is
your time worth? There you go.

And that's not even getting to the health issues of it. If you buy a peeled
orange, you are more likely to eat it than an unpeeled one. Just like placing
a candy jar on the other side of the room makes people eat 10x less candy,
than when it's conveniently placed next to them. We should put orange peels on
unhealthy food.

I know this is true, because I have a bunch of unpeeled oranges going bad, but
the other fruit is all eaten. Everytime I think I might like an orange, my
brain tells me "eh, maybe later". And they never get eaten.

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julie1
Ok, when it comes to hygienism, healthy food, the cult of Nature and of the
perfect body, where bullying/shaming publicly the weaker was the right way to
discuss a problem there is an historical precedent.

A regim loving all of this, and nice desgin/architecture and also going to the
conclusion disabled people are a waste ... I don't say it to not win a Godwin
point.

But really social networks don't bring the best out of Humanity.

The internet era of NNTP newsgroups, early web had some dark parts but it was
more looking like an agora than the arena it has became.

Modern internet is becoming scary.

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Sanddancer
I think the crux of this particular problem is that there was no thought to
how to possibly redesign the product to be less wasteful. The argument had
been played, "these are bad, and can't be fixed." So, instead of looking at
the usage scenarios -- disabled people, parents with young kids who want them
to have easier access to a healthier snack, etc -- they went straight to, "oh,
they must be lazy."

Here, I can see an easier solution than mason jars being two hemispherical
plastic halves shrink wrapped together with a perforated area that's easy to
tear, like is found on drink containers. Make it out of a bioplastic and you
have something that's accessible and environmentally friendly.

To pre-answer, no, getting the produce person to help you isn't a real good
option. It's doubtful that you're going to want the orange right then, and
having a peeled orange in even a produce bag is going to be more problematic
than a harder container. So, a harder container that's relatively sealed will
help keep it a few days until the person's ready to eat it.

~~~
mcguire
I rather suspect that Whole Foods used the rectangular plastic boxes because
they have a billion of them on hand for their other packaged products. They
may even be bioplastic, knowing them. Which means that these were pretty much
optimal to start with.

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746F7475
Is this a common issue? Do these pre-peeled oranges last keep as long as un-
peeled ones? Are they as good, say, a week after they have been peeled?

If this is really a common issue (I have no idea I haven't thought about
peeling oranges before in this way) and these sell at fast pace, I see no
problem. But if store only sells a couple each week and rest are just left to
rot then I feel like these probably shouldn't be sold. Or maybe author could
ask their local store to implement some sort of "pay extra and we'll peel 'em"
deal.

~~~
cbhl
The irony is that pre-prepped fruit is used to _reduce_ environmental waste.
The store takes fruit that is at the end of it's "on the shelf in its natural
skin" life, and processes it to make it appealing to eat for a few days
longer. For oranges that might have blemished skin; remove the skin and put it
in a plastic tin and you can keep it on shelves for a bit longer. For mangoes
and melons and berries you can cut out or toss the bits that are starting to
rot, and make fruit salad with the good half of the fruit. And so on.

~~~
shawn-furyan
Excellent point.

This is the fundamental issue with meme outrage. It almost always relies on
assuming the complex incentive structure that leads to something existing in
the world reduces to 'lazy idiots made it happen'. Looking for nuance in the
subject of the meme almost always works against this assumption.

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mwcampbell
What I find most striking about the tweet quoted at the beginning of the
article is the assumption that just because something is natural (e.g. the
peel on an orange), it's better than the manufactured alternative (e.g.
plastic packaging). That assumption can probably be traced back to the belief
that the natural world was created by a God who designed it to be good, for
our benefit (well, before it was supposedly cursed because of sin). The truth,
of course, is that the peel on an orange is merely the product of evolution;
it wasn't designed for our benefit. We can do better than nature. So the real
solution is to package products in a way that's both convenient for us and not
harmful to the environment.

~~~
forgottenpass
I think you're reading too much in to "natural". I just see someone trying to
say peels are a preexisting attribute of oranges without using the word
"preexisting" because that would ruin the joke structure they're using to make
their point. "If only there were [roundabout way of describing something that
seems obvious to speaker but are feigning ignorance to]..." is a well worn
construction.

~~~
paulddraper
Exactly. It's like someone made [https://github.com/baphomet-berlin/jQuery-
basic-arithmetic-p...](https://github.com/baphomet-berlin/jQuery-basic-
arithmetic-plugin) but for oranges. (Ignoring of course the advantages name by
the OP.)

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slavik81
I really wish we just tried to properly price externalities. Then we could end
these moralizing crusades and it would no longer be a question of whether
peeled oranges could be sold, but a question of how much they cost.

Sure, I might buy a peeled orange. Maybe that's wasteful, but maybe I make up
for it by being less wasteful elsewhere. That should be a possibility, because
it would be a big help for people like the OP for whom the product is much
more valuable than normal.

You get much better results when everyone's incentives are set up to be
directly aligned with doing the right thing.

~~~
sago
Where 'doing the right thing' is synonymous with 'being abled bodied' in this
case.

Being disabled is expensive. Adding to that cost, because being disabled also
has more 'externalities' is a pretty vindictive move.

Not to mention the fact that it means rich folks get to do the 'wrong thing'
more, and with less significant personal consequences.

Sounds like a terrible system.

~~~
slavik81
If the disabled suffer extra costs, I'd rather give them extra money and
retain the right incentives.

It's true the rich do get to waste more, but that's already the case. At least
then they would pay for it. That's extra money that could go to help the poor.

~~~
sago
Lovely: make it clear that we're inherently immoral (not doing the 'right
thing'), and increase our dependency on charity.

~~~
slavik81
It's not a matter of morality. It's a matter of environmental cost. All people
put a burden on the environment. If disabled persons need more resources and
therefore put a greater burden on the environment than others, that's simply
how the world is. It doesn't make them bad people.

I'm not talking about charity, either. I'd want the government to make up the
difference.

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mxfh
There is a growing cargo cult between what people belief is ecologically
responsible behavior and what keeps waste low in a society.

In my opinion this complex consist part out of learned behavior decades ago,
remainders of slightly masochist protestant life style ethics and prolonged
exposure to green-washing.

Plastics are not bad by default compared to all other alternatives¹. Bad is a
waste of energy and resources as is littering instead of a closed product life
chain.

[http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2012/expert/expert-
article/](http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2012/expert/expert-article/)

¹How many paper tissues and water+detergent is used at home for preparing a
single orange compared to an efficient peeling processing line, that also
hopefully doesn't discard the peels in a mixed waste disposal.

I would even guess a random pre-peeled orange might even have a higher chance
of a smaller footprint in an life-cycle assessment, than a regular orange that
has a higher chance of never never being sold or eaten after purchase.

~~~
leereeves
The downside of disposable plastics is that people often don't dispose of them
carefully and they decompose very slowly. They're accumulating in the
environment.

~~~
Grishnakh
I sometimes wonder how feasible or expensive it'd be to: 1) institute trash
separation for all waste before it enters landfills, so that recyclables are
separated out and processed, since obviously people are not very good at
disposing of recyclables separately themselves, and 2) dig up old landfills
and process the trash as in #1.

Of course, there's also the problem of things like the garbage gyres in the
oceans, and of course litter on the land. The latter is solvable I think
through cultural changes. In first-world countries litter isn't that much of a
problem any more; it became socially unacceptable to litter, just like it
became socially unacceptable to smoke indoors.

~~~
athenot
Reprocessing trash for recyclables is not always possible due to
contamination. For example, my trash company won't take pizza boxes in the
recycling stream because they are often greazy. The grease in the cardboard
not only affects the cardboard it's on, it affects the surrounding cardboard
that might be in that recycling stream.

I would imagine that mining trash for aluminium might be more feasible but the
quantities would have to justify the operation.

~~~
Grishnakh
I imagine there's a lot of somewhat valuable metals in trash: steel and copper
come to mind immediately. Electronics are full of copper (though usually not
in huge quantities, but if anyone throws away wire that's actually fairly
valuable on the scrap market; PCBs can be processed to reclaim the copper and
tin and lead), and there's all kinds of other stuff people throw away that's
made of steel (including cans).

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AlgorithmicTime
This is silly. Disabled people don't have any special rights, and should not
expect any special accommodations, especially when those accommodations would
cause excess environmental damage. You may as well complain that Mount
McKinley isn't handicapped accessible.

~~~
noir_lord
What a horrible worldview you have.

Yes disabled people shouldn't have any special rights but they should have the
same rights as everyone else, the right to live as functional life as
possible, if that requires that the rest of society make some accommodations
then that's fine by me.

Any society is the sum of its parts, all its parts and should be judged on how
it treats everyone able bodied and not.

~~~
Chris2048
Where is "the right to live as functional life as possible" an established
right?

~~~
tremon
[http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/UDHRIndex.aspx](http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/UDHRIndex.aspx)

~~~
AlgorithmicTime
Oh, a non-binding, toothless, meaningless document issued by the UN. Seems
legit.

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whack
I generally agree that shaming people for choosing lazy/convenient options is
bad. Quality of life and convenience should be a primary design factor, unless
it's shown to be disastrously bad in some other respect.

Honest question for disability supporters though: Would you support a 1% tax
on every able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to help disabled people
better live their lives?

Because that's essentially the argument that the article is making in a lot of
ways. Every time you make accessibility a design goal in a
technology/product/building/service, it makes the design/production more
complicated than it otherwise would be. It bloats the product spec. Makes the
implementation more complex, which in turn makes it harder to understand and
maintain in the future. It makes the manufacturing more onerous. In all these
ways, when going out of your way to make something more accessible-friendly,
it ends up taxing every single person who doesn't use or need those features.

Hence my question above. Similar to forcing/shaming companies into making
their products disabled-friendly, would you support a X% tax on every single
able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to better help all disabled people?
And if yes, what do you think is a reasonable limit on X?

~~~
edent
> Would you support a 1% tax on every able-bodied person, with the proceeds
> used to help disabled people better live their lives?

Yes. That was an easy question.

Do you know what The Disabled community call the rest of us? The Not _Yet_
Disabled.

At some point, you're going to get old. You'll need glasses and all of a
sudden that ultra-thin grey font on a stylish grey background will be a pain
to read.

Or you'll be in an accident and have to spend a week living with your arm in a
sling, unable to use a mouse and keyboard simultaneously.

Or you'll get drunk, or try to operate your TV while half asleep. Your
cognitive impairment will be an impediment to interacting with the world.

Even if you're the most selfish person in the world, and don't care about
accessibility for people who live with an impairment _now_ \- you ought to
care about how you'll cope once you become disabled.

> And if yes, what do you think is a reasonable limit on X?

That's like saying "what's a reasonable limit to spend on security?" You spend
what's necessary.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> That's like saying "what's a reasonable limit to spend on security?" You
> spend what's necessary.

That doesn't actually tell you anything. Things would be "more secure" if
houses were armored like tanks and everyone was prohibited from leaving their
homes without a police escort. The question is not necessity, it's
cost/benefit.

The whole problem with accessibility is that there are contexts when the
required effort is disproportional. When it takes as much or more effort to do
the accessibility as to create the product in the first place, or requires a
skill set the maker doesn't normally possess.

And that's pretty much always when people want to impose it. Because if you
can buy a machine for $50 that will peel your oranges, that's what people who
need one will do and then nobody else has to do anything. It's when such a
machine is too expensive or doesn't work well enough that people want to
impose the cost on someone else.

That's what we're talking about here. Because there is nothing wrong with a
disabled person needing to buy a peeled orange, but there is something wrong
with everyone else doing the same thing. The vast majority of customers don't
need it, and in _that_ case it's wasteful and environmentally unsound and
should be discouraged.

The argument seems to be that disabled people shouldn't have to do something
different, like asking the produce clerk to peel their oranges. But that
argument burns itself to the ground. Then everyone needs to use the more
expensive accessible version to avoid special-casing the people who
specifically need it. Which moves the cost/benefit analysis away from
accessibility, because you have to justify the added cost across the whole
population rather than only where it is needed. The result would be fewer
accessible products that are more expensive for everyone.

~~~
mcguire
" _Because there is nothing wrong with a disabled person needing to buy a
peeled orange, but there is something wrong with everyone else doing the same
thing._ "

Are you really arguing that I should not be able to buy a bagged salad because
I can chop my own damn veggies? And I thought I was a moralist.

You do realize most of the people reading this work in an industry that spends
billions on giant space heaters to provide snapchat and online poker and
bitcoin and HFT and...

How about this: put the the convenience products next to their traditional
brethren, charge not-outrageously more for them (to pay the extra costs and
because they are more convenient) and stop trying to feel morally superior to
random other people because you aren't interested in the product?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Are you really arguing that I should not be able to buy a bagged salad
> because I can chop my own damn veggies?

Not "shouldn't be able to," just "shouldn't."

The underlying problem is that we're not pricing externalities correctly. If
the environmental and energy impact of plastic containers was required to be
paid up front then the price would increase significantly and companies would
stop using them in many cases. But until that happens, if you want to be
environmentally conscious, you avoid such products where practical. And if
you're an environmentally conscious company, you avoid selling them.

> You do realize most of the people reading this work in an industry that
> spends billions on giant space heaters to provide snapchat and online poker
> and bitcoin and HFT and...

...and people are spending billions of dollars to make those space heaters as
energy efficient as possible going forward. And some of those practices (like
HFT) _are_ criticized for being incredibly wasteful and people have suggested
curbing them.

And hypocrisy is not, in any event, a logical fallacy. Two wrongs don't make a
right.

