#trash cans

i am trying to find out trash cans.... like I was outside walking downtown yesterday in my city, right like people usually do (i usually do not but i have been trying to walk around more??? i guess)

anyway uh, I was irritated bc of all the littering and then I wondered why the fuck there aren't a lot of public trash cans in spaces where they should be like obviously if I have to I will carry my trash on my person but the fact there are no trash cans makes me feel like some people just throw shit around because there's nowhere else to put in and I have no idea if this is true, like does the placement of more trash cans make people MORE likely to actually throw it away and do the right thing or do they still throw shit everywhere?

Regardless, this morning i'm like... thinking about maybe writing some kind of article or something about trash cans or maybe trying to find a way to encourage my city to think about more trash cans in public areas that NEED trash cans. And so I am on a google rabbit hole...

now, i used to use AI for research on shit like this because I got caught up in the hype and "it's so useful and it's so time saving" but like, if i am interested in something and passionate about it, part of the exciting this is the journey of finding out new information on a subject and people will say "oh but googling to find the answer is the same thing as asking an AI" no it's not. Google sucks now, but even when it didn't suck it still took a little bit of like, digging to find the specific answers to the questions you had about like.. random things.

And you can find forums and reddit posts about these things and hear HUMAN experiences, instead of just having an AI spit back at you what you think is correct but might also be absolute nonsense.

Anyway, I've been on a mission to cut myself off from being that person who became so disinterested in the journey of finding out information and learning, so I stopped using AI for questions like this, which I would have done before. The more and more aware I become about the fact that AI is making us dumber, creatively bankrupt, and less able to think critically, not to mention the INSANE AMOUNT OF DAMAGE it's doing to the earth...

So this morning I went on this google rabbit hole to find the answers to the questions that I seek, trash cans...

It started with me searching "How to get my city to place more trash cans" and then when I couldn't find anything because google thought I meant like.. the trash cans that are on your personal property and how to get a replacement, like i said, it takes like actual time and patience to research, but that's half the point. Learning. Using AI for stuff like this isn't learning, you're literally just repeating what the AI told you was true.

Anyway, back onto the subject lol

I found reddit discussions of people talking about their own cities and how trash can's seem to disappear from public places, and through this I found out that a lot of the large trash bins and recycle bins are removed from near stores like Walmart and target because people were throwing away their own shit from home in the bins, the large ones. There is actually NO answer or explanation to why there are no trash CANS outside of walmarts and targets all across the united states. I know this isn't true for everywhere but I have been reading reddit and I will continue to read reddit posts about this and find out more information, but it's a problem in more than one state and in more than one city.

So anyway I don't wanna bore you with all the details but I ended up searching google maps to look at my city and see what buildings have trash cans outside of them for public use, only one building so… not good so far lol

Anyway, I was like "oh i take a lot of photos of my city so let me look at my photos" and then I got distracted by a bollard outside of a building and I was like what is that, so i googled to find out what it was, and i did find out what it was… but then I also wondered like, were those bollards always there are are they placed there to replace something else, possibly trash cans? Because when I was a kid, I remember a trash can being in that area, where is this fucking elusive trash can?

So in an attempt to find out if those bollards have always been outside this building and no public trashcans have ever been there, I am trying to find a way to view historical photos of my city (and other cities if I wanna like deep dive on the lack of trash cans in other places) and so far I found an thing that showed historic aerial viewing but it;'s really shitty and it's confusing for me to use so I'm going to look for something else.

Also the thing that viewed aerials historically made me think of a few months ago because like, I notice the lack of benches in my and other cities across the united states constantly (which even caused me to make an old twitter account where i was going to talk about benches in video games but twitter sucks and I have ADHD so not a lot became of that (or the other "in video games" twitters I started, but i did remake them on bsky so it's fine whatever im busy rn) and I had wanted to track all of the benches in my city but I … again I have ADHD and I think I forgot about doing it.