I am just wondering that you drink Perrier and San Pelegrino in the US, don't you have your own water?
I am just wondering that you drink Perrier and San Pelegrino in the US, don't you have your own water?
"Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen." - Helmut Schmidt
we do, in fact I believe the bottles in the 2nd picture are bottled somewhere in my state.Originally Posted by earthJoker
yipee for massive amounts of marketing and advertising. Sometimes with a helping of bullshit
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
Swiss and Swedes just don't get it, having ready and free access to the world's most delicious and cold tap-water.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
I think I never saw water in any store here from overseas, of course I can't be sure because I don't know the origin of each and every brand. To transport water so far is probably the much bigger problem than some small bottles to recycle.
"Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen." - Helmut Schmidt
Two points.
First of all, Poland Spring's ridiculous cap gimmick (tiny cap "to save the planet") is impossible for me to open.
Second of all, neither morality not culture is possible to legislate. All they are doing is being asses.
If someone is going to be throwing bottled water randomly on the ground, they are going to do it regardless if hell freezes over. Same thing goes for if someone is going to throw bottled water into the trash when there's a recycle bin 2 feet away.
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I remember those at school. Nasty, unmaintained, and unsanitary imo. The faucet is/was too close to the basin to be able to drink without touching either, and no doubt that button is very dirty as well.It's pretty hard to find public drinking water fountains these days. Almost as hard as finding a public phone.
I disagree. Seatbelts, just for one example.
They can't throw bottled water randomly onto the ground if there is no bottled water. Kinda the point of the ban.If someone is going to be throwing bottled water randomly on the ground, they are going to do it regardless if hell freezes over. Same thing goes for if someone is going to throw bottled water into the trash when there's a recycle bin 2 feet away.
Seat belts are safety not morality/culture.
They can throw bottled sodas away.
As an example of changing the culture of not wearing seatbelts, as was the culture pre-1980s, through legislation.
Though that could be down to the semantics of the word culture. It can mean more than one thing.
As a better example, when the British government outlawed capital punishment in the late 1960s, the populace as a majority was in favour of capital punishment. In the decades since, the majority moved to being against. Arguments as to whether the morality of the population changed as a result of the change to the law are open.
Again, perhaps there are better examples.
~
Soda is not available in forms other than in manageable cartons; water is, both refrigerated and tepid.
There's a small faction on this forum that believes that requiring people to wear seatbelts and punishing them for not doing so is immoral.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
But for those who want a bottle the choice is water or soda; the choice is not merely tap or bottled.
Quite, but I think that small faction was down to the singular member from Hicksville, Wyoming. Christ, I've entirely forgotten her name.
Edit: Munchkin!
I thought it was every single libertarian and quasi-libertarian on this forumQuite, but I think that small faction was down to the singular member from Hicksville, Wyoming. Christ, I've entirely forgotten her name.
Edit: Munchkin!
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
I'm a libertarian but I see a libertarian reason for those laws.
Munch stands out as being quite vehement, I recall, in railing against being told what to do vis a vis seatbelts by teh gummint.
I can't recall anyone else taking the same line, but my memory ain't what it use ta be.
Munch also thought she could drink drive and getting arrested for doing so was Police harassment.
Lewk IIRC is anti-seatbelts.
Aye she was a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
It'd be fun to see you, Lewk, Veldan and Enoch duke it out
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
I don't see any trampling of rights with seatbelt laws.
Public road, the public can make the rules to use the road.
If I want to yippie ki yea my self without a seatbelt on my private property...I can.
No conflict here.
Brevior saltare cum deformibus viris est vita
100% agreed it is exactly my opinion too.
I'm generally of the mind that the law shouldn't be used to enforce seat belt use, but that if you decided you didn't want to wear seat belts your insurance premiums should be adjusted accordingly. If, because of your failure to wear a seat belt, it can be proven you injured or killed someone else, you can and should be held liable for their death/injury.It'd be fun to see you, Lewk, Veldan and Enoch duke it out
pppfttt..in today's society of never placing blame?
Brevior saltare cum deformibus viris est vita
Yeah because your 1st amendment rights only go as far as your own property right?
To be fair, I don't believe there's a constitutionally protected freedom to not wear a seat belt.
There isn't. But I'm poking holes in the ridiculous argument that because its a public place its OK to lose your freedoms.
Define public. You seem to think that students should lose their freedoms by virtue of being in a school.
Are your referring to the monitoring? Because if so... that's not searching or seizing anything and ultimately the same result could be done with cameras but far less effectively. There are no rights being violated and the parents WANT their kids to be safe and on school property for the entire school day. Truancy is an issue in schools - and this fixes the problem pretty nicely.
Ultimately the discussion about seat-belts is really a discussion about do you think the government should save people from themselves? If the answer is yes then you also support drug laws, gambling laws and the like. If the answer is no then there is no rational for mandating an adult to use a seat-belt.
The sheer amount ofin this thread is amazing. I've avoided it as long as I could, but the inner policymaker in me can't stand it any longer.
There are three intersecting issues related to the use of bottled drinks (water or not):
1. Bottled drinks are fundamentally more expensive than drinks delivered through pipelines. It's a waste of energy, and a polluter (through carbon emissions) to boot. This applies more to water than other drinks because so far we don't yet have piped Coke delivery to our homes - yet. There are some ways around this, but they certainly aren't the identical product to a bottle of Coke.
2. Bottles are made of plastic and disposable, which is a waste of precious oil. (I, along with many chemical engineers, feel that using oil/plastic for something disposable is a crime.)
3. Bottles are often not recycled, leading to unnecessary waste. Even if they are recycled, it's a waste of energy for a one time (or few time) use container, when a non-disposable plastic/metal bottle will last for hundreds of uses.
There are three simple policy solutions for this, none of which include something as heavy-handed as a ban.
To address point #1 (transportation waste), this is not an issue specific to bottles but to all transportation. We use gasoline too much because it's too cheap. Therefore, we should tax gas (or, better yet, carbon emissions) to drive down consumption. Particularly wasteful activities - like lugging a truck of water halfway across the country - will decrease through a number of ways. Prices will go up causing demand to drop, bottlers will move to more local distribution to drive down operating costs, etc. Straightforward.
To address point #2 (waste of perfectly good plastic), we have to be a bit more focused - merely taxing the use of all plastic would be silly, since sometimes plastic is critical for the product in question (just not for the disposable consumption of beverages). It's easy, though, to slap a tax on the sale of all disposable bottled drinks. Many states in the US already do this with 'deposit' schemes, that you can get back if you return it. I know of no one who actually does this, but I have seen the local hobos hunting through my apartment building's recycling bins to take the bottles in for a deposit. So in principle this at least means things are recycled. The big downside here is that the tax is too low, so even if there's an incentive for the poor to recycle, there's no incentive for the front-end consumer to reduce their usage (a nickel is not a lot of money). You'd have the dramatically increase the tax on disposable bottles to make it affect behavior. Certainly there's an equilibrium value that will work, though - in DC the equilibrium value to nearly eliminate the use of disposable plastic shopping bags was $0.05. I imagine it's higher for disposable plastic bottles since there are no ready alternatives for some things, but I imagine a 50 cent tax would be more than enough. Presumably you could scale the tax based on the weight of plastic used - the bigger the container, the better the ratio between base price and tax.
To address point #3 (landfill usage/energy for recycling), it's again a simple matter of incentives. To discourage landfill usage in general - not just for plastic bottles - it's simple enough to charge per unit for garbage collection - something not done very much in the US, I'm afraid. It's also important to have more publicly available recycling bins next to trash cans, because I imagine a not-insignificant portion of public trash can volume is taken up with discarded food containers, including plastic bottles (those in the UK or other countries with a distressing lack of public trash cans need not worry about this). To address recycling energy costs, this is tougher. To encourage recyclilng, most governments make it free, with good reason. So a high energy price would only affect profit margins for recycling companies (potentially requiring government subsidies to continue operations), rather than changing consumer behavior. In this case, perhaps an indirect approach would be needed - something akin to the disposable plastic tax mooted in point 2.
See? Simple. You can solve problems using clever policy, not ham-handed bans of products. This is the same reason why NYC's ban on sodas of a certain size is absurd. Tax sugar or HFCS (better yet, get rid of our absurd sugar and corn subsidies) rather than ban things. People respond very well to price signals, and not very kindly to having arbitrary bans shoved down their throats.
Yay government gets to decide what type of commerce is "good" and what type of commerce is "bad." Just hope your never on the wrong side...The sheer amount of
There are three intersecting issues related to the use of bottled drinks (water or not):
1. Bottled drinks are fundamentally more expensive than drinks delivered through pipelines. It's a waste of energy, and a polluter (through carbon emissions) to boot. This applies more to water than other drinks because so far we don't yet have piped Coke delivery to our homes - yet. There are some ways around this, but they certainly aren't the identical product to a bottle of Coke.
2. Bottles are made of plastic and disposable, which is a waste of precious oil. (I, along with many chemical engineers, feel that using oil/plastic for something disposable is a crime.)
3. Bottles are often not recycled, leading to unnecessary waste. Even if they are recycled, it's a waste of energy for a one time (or few time) use container, when a non-disposable plastic/metal bottle will last for hundreds of uses.
There are three simple policy solutions for this, none of which include something as heavy-handed as a ban.
To address point #1 (transportation waste), this is not an issue specific to bottles but to all transportation. We use gasoline too much because it's too cheap. Therefore, we should tax gas (or, better yet, carbon emissions) to drive down consumption. Particularly wasteful activities - like lugging a truck of water halfway across the country - will decrease through a number of ways. Prices will go up causing demand to drop, bottlers will move to more local distribution to drive down operating costs, etc. Straightforward.
To address point #2 (waste of perfectly good plastic), we have to be a bit more focused - merely taxing the use of all plastic would be silly, since sometimes plastic is critical for the product in question (just not for the disposable consumption of beverages). It's easy, though, to slap a tax on the sale of all disposable bottled drinks. Many states in the US already do this with 'deposit' schemes, that you can get back if you return it. I know of no one who actually does this, but I have seen the local hobos hunting through my apartment building's recycling bins to take the bottles in for a deposit. So in principle this at least means things are recycled. The big downside here is that the tax is too low, so even if there's an incentive for the poor to recycle, there's no incentive for the front-end consumer to reduce their usage (a nickel is not a lot of money). You'd have the dramatically increase the tax on disposable bottles to make it affect behavior. Certainly there's an equilibrium value that will work, though - in DC the equilibrium value to nearly eliminate the use of disposable plastic shopping bags was $0.05. I imagine it's higher for disposable plastic bottles since there are no ready alternatives for some things, but I imagine a 50 cent tax would be more than enough. Presumably you could scale the tax based on the weight of plastic used - the bigger the container, the better the ratio between base price and tax.
To address point #3 (landfill usage/energy for recycling), it's again a simple matter of incentives. To discourage landfill usage in general - not just for plastic bottles - it's simple enough to charge per unit for garbage collection - something not done very much in the US, I'm afraid. It's also important to have more publicly available recycling bins next to trash cans, because I imagine a not-insignificant portion of public trash can volume is taken up with discarded food containers, including plastic bottles (those in the UK or other countries with a distressing lack of public trash cans need not worry about this). To address recycling energy costs, this is tougher. To encourage recyclilng, most governments make it free, with good reason. So a high energy price would only affect profit margins for recycling companies (potentially requiring government subsidies to continue operations), rather than changing consumer behavior. In this case, perhaps an indirect approach would be needed - something akin to the disposable plastic tax mooted in point 2.
See? Simple.
Not at all. The government isn't deciding anything about commerce - that would be the case of banning certain bits arbitrarily. Instead, it is identifying externalities associated with the market and trying to price them into transactions. This, in my mind, is one of the core responsibilities of government - guarding the commons.
To address your point #2 - Using plastic to make something that the market wants is not a negative externality. It is the BEST use of the resource. If it wasn't the best use of the resource then something else would have been created with the material. This is how the free market works. I want X more then it costs me in Y. And vice-versa. There is no such thing as a "wasting" a resource on the free market - its being used typically at peak efficiency based on what people want.
As far as point #3 I don't see a problem with charging people the cost of storing something as long as there is not a government monopoly on it. IE if a private individual wants to buy a crap ton of land to store waste then they can also run the garbage collection business.
Point #1 is eco clap trap. Oh noooo carbon emissions.... blah blah blah. You do realize even if we completely stopped using oil as a nation the level of CO2 would rise in the atmosphere. There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent it to so you better hope the climate models turn out to be wrong (quite probable) because if not we are already screwed anyway.
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