the highrise produces 50x as much trash. So instead of 10 trashcans once a week they need to haul away 5 dumpsters worth every day.

Let's say a single dumpster handles the trash of 25 apartment units. So you'll need 20 dumpsters for the 500-unit apartment block. For 500 single-family homes, you'll need 500 trash barrels. Which do you think is easier to service, 20 dumpsters or 500 barrels?

In the suburbs you can put up a couple pylons and just dig a hole to do what needs doing. Downtown you'll need flag people to help redirect traffic, you may need coordinate access to buildings, or involve other utilities etc.

Despite all that, dense development is much more cost-effective in city services than single-family homes. For example, per unit, a mixed-use development produced a total of $3,370 in public revenue annually, while costing the local government about $1,400 per year in infrastructure maintenance, policing, fire response, and other general fund obligations. In comparison, the traditional suburban development...generated only half the revenue â" $1,620 per year â" and cost more to service â" $1,600.

So my question is, why should poor renters subsidize middle- and upper-class homeowners? By defending this kind of reverse welfare, you come off as being in favor of it.

The 10 families in the 10 homes should each pay 50x the property taxes as the high rise tenants?

The assessment for street maintenance on the property taxes for the 10 homes should each be 50 times that of an apartment unit.

But water?

Yes, water infrastructure costs less per unit in an apartment building than a single-family home. But this should be on everyone's water bills, not their taxes.

Garbage removal?

Yes, it's easier to haul away trash from a single dumpster than from trash barrels serving the same number of homes. But this should be on everyone's trash collection fees, not their taxes.

schools? Libraries? Recreation centers? Parks?

These things are probably about the same cost for condos as for single-family homes.

Sewers?

Yes, like water. Remember, the cost of sewers also depends on the amount of impermeable surface on each property.

Cities tend to divide costs by an assessment of value. Within a strata that works out pretty close to being the same thing

That's a pretty clumsy and inexact way to assess property taxes, and it encourages urban sprawl when the property's burden on infrastructure isn't properly reflected in property taxes.

The value of education isn't proportional to the property's value. Law enforcement probably is.

Fire protection should be billed to the property owner's insurance in order to provide the proper incentive to use fireproof building materials, and to clear away brush in areas prone to wildfires.

In California, we make a distinction between taxes and fees. For example, a fee is:

A charge imposed for a specific benefit conferred or privilege granted directly to the payor that is not provided to those not charged, and which does not exceed the reasonable costs to the local government of conferring the benefit or granting the privilege

I would rather pay such fees than taxes, wouldn't you?

The township has a certain set of fixed costs which it has to meet every year.

Stuff like street maintenance, right? Is a property's burden on the streets proportional to the property's value or the property's street frontage?

Cities and towns usually get this answer wrong, and that causes a lot of problems such as those we saw in the real estate crash.

The alternative is to have even more and longer trains and higher rates for garbage for everyone.

Or switch from flat rates to proportional. Why should poor people who generate little waste subsidize waste disposal for wealthy people?

Seattle has not made it a fine-worthy offense to discard uneaten eat food, which is what the headline implies.

What definition of "waste" are you using that's synonymous with "discard"?

What is your rating worth if you have nothing to compare it to? See, your argument also works against the star rating system.

I fully expect this to prove only that the NASA guys were wily bastards.

Yes, NASA put a lot of effort into making the details perfect enough to remain convincing over four decades later. Maybe it would have been easier to put a man on the moon!

Better yet, instead of using the star rating system, rate everything relative to a competing product or service. For example, if you're rating a restaurant, you would need to decide whether it's better or worse than another restaurant you've visited.

Then the rating system would use something like Instant Runoff Voting or Condorcet to sort everything in order from lowest to highest rated. It would then score each item as a percentile according to its position on the scale. A score of 95 means that the restaurant is better than 95% of all restaurants.

It would be much easier to use NoScript if web sites stopped requiring JavaScript or at least stopped using scripts hosted on other web sites.

Instead, tax-per-use: road tax...

You'd end up in a shit hole of a society in which things like roads and schools don't work and don't get funded.

So if we had a road tax, roads wouldn't work and wouldn't get funded? That's like saying if a restaurant charged for cheeseburgers, they would taste awful and nobody would buy any.

Backing up the "master archive" is critical! The "derivative" files shared out aren't so critical, as they can be reconstructed from the "master archive". An example is MPEG-2 will preserve videos at high quality, but with large file sizes.

I agree that backing up the master archive is critical, but for video that archive should be the original file created by the video capture system, preferably a non-lossy archival format such as FFV1 or HuffYUV in order to reduce or eliminate generation loss and retain all the original data and metadata for future reprocessing. MPEG-2 tosses away potentially valuable information in order to reduce file sizes and is therefore better as a publishing format than as an archival format.