Here’s an affordable solution for sleeping air controllers

To the editor:

The Federal Aviation Administration reports that an average air traffic controller is paid about $160,000 per year in salary and benefits. Because controllers tend to fall asleep when working alone at night, our government will place two controllers each night at 27 airports that currently only have one (“Air traffic controller takes nap,” Thursday Review-Journal). This redundancy will hopefully ensure that at least one of them will remain awake.

I propose that we not provide the second controller, but instead provide $30,000-per-year baby sitters to keep the under-worked controllers awake. Skype and electronics — with mandated feedback loops — would be even cheaper.

And instead of suspending these sleeping controllers, let’s fire them.

Henry Soloway

Las Vegas

Right to choose?

To the editor:

The Senate Transportation Committee voted Thursday to allow motorcycle riders 21 and older to ride without a helmet (“Panel advances helmet repeal effort,” Friday Review-Journal). The vote was mostly along party lines, with only Democrats voting against free choice.

Why is it that Democrats support the free choice of half of our population to destroy a human fetus, but not the free choice of 100 percent of us who made it out of the womb to live our lives as we see fit? Hypocrisy?

Victor Moss

Las Vegas

Bottle deposits

To the editor:

In response to your April 9 editorial on Assembly Bill 427, “Pass the bottle — and pay up”:

For me, one of the guilty pleasures of moving from Oregon to Nevada was freedom from the so-called “Bottle Bill,” a nickel deposit on most pop and beer containers. When Oregon passed the law, widespread home recycling had yet to be begin. The idea was that the irresponsible would toss cans and bottles out on the roadside and someone, perhaps the homeless, would collect, turn them in, and reap the deposit.

In practice, you pay the deposit, save the containers in a 30-gallon garbage bag until you have about a hundred, and then you take them back to the store. In the old days, you presented them to the checkout and a box boy was delegated to count and store them while you shopped. The merchant had to store the bottles and cans in undamaged condition to await collection by the recycler.

Later, the stores installed collection machines that crushed the cans. You would take your bag in and then spend 15 minutes pushing the cans and bottles into separate machines while the machines read the bar code on the container and accepted or rejected the containers. Retailers had only to accept bottles and cans they sold, so other store brands were rejected.

Multifamily unit managers suffered from homeless people rooting through their trash and scattering it about. That often required locked garbage storage areas that residents, managers and garbage disposal companies had to deal with constantly.

The law punished the many to target the few. I say that in this time of curbside recycling, the drawbacks far outnumber the benefits, and Nevada can do without the nuisance.

Ed Dornlas

Las Vegas