Massaschusetts Town Bans Sale of Small Bottles of Water

[wiggin]

You're misunderstanding the concept of externalities, Lewk. All products are provided because of the market. However, sometimes the product is provided by using something in the commons and that cost is not borne by the producer. Then you get an imbalance, when the public as a whole is paying for the overutilization of the commons, but the producer is making an outsized profit. Thus, the optimum use of the commons has not been achieved until the producer has to factor that cost into their pricing.

As far as I know, Lewk, many landfills are indeed privately owned. Taking into account reasonable environmental and zoning issues, I don't see a problem with private competition for landfills.

As for carbon emissions, I'm well aware of your feelings on this issue, but you're wrong.

[Lewkowski]

You're misunderstanding the concept of externalities, Lewk. All products are provided because of the market. However, sometimes the product is provided by using something in the commons and that cost is not borne by the producer. Then you get an imbalance, when the public as a whole is paying for the overutilization of the commons, but the producer is making an outsized profit. Thus, the optimum use of the commons has not been achieved until the producer has to factor that cost into their pricing.

As far as I know, Lewk, many landfills are indeed privately owned. Taking into account reasonable environmental and zoning issues, I don't see a problem with private competition for landfills.

As for carbon emissions, I'm well aware of your feelings on this issue, but you're wrong.

Assume the climate alarmists are correct. If the United States carbon output somehow magically went to 0 - is the problem anywhere close to being solved?

And you are missing the point. Use of scarce resources is NOT wasteful when put on the market. Its doing exactly what its supposed to be doing. Your argument on #2 was that its a horrible waste to use plastic that way. My point is that its not wasteful because that is an efficient use of that product - while tautological its also true - if the market is using it its being used efficiently absent government manipulation.

[wiggin]

Assume the climate alarmists are correct. If the United States carbon output somehow magically went to 0 - is the problem anywhere close to being solved?

Yes, global emissions will have dropped by a fifth. That would be remarkable progress.

Obviously an international solution is necessary, but the basic idea is the carbon taxes - especially on the largest polluters - is an efficient way to reduce carbon emissions. There are other potential mitigations as well, but a carbon tax is a good start.

And you are missing the point. Use of scarce resources is NOT wasteful when put on the market. Its doing exactly what its supposed to be doing. Your argument on #2 was that its a horrible waste to use plastic that way. My point is that its not wasteful because that is an efficient use of that product - while tautological its also true - if the market is using it its being used efficiently absent government manipulation.

This isn't a matter of scarce resources. This is a matter of common resources. The reason it isn't necessarily efficient is that the producers may be getting profits from their goods without paying all of the costs. This results in market inefficiencies, as any economist worth his salt would tell you.

Anyway, I have no interest in continuing this.

[Lewkowski]

Wiggin - what is the Carbon parts per million threshold you think we need to prevent in order to avoid catastrophic global warming. Lets put some numbers to this as opposed to talking generalities.

Plastic/Oil is not a common resource. Like lumber, gold and rare earth metals, they and oil are all commodities to be bought and sold by individuals. None of them are common resources like air or a river.

[Timbuk2]

Thanks for the insight wiggin.

Disposable bottles are indeed as harmful in their production, distribution and disposal as I'd been led to believe then, particularly so for water which is readily available for consumption by other means .

[Lebanese Dragon]

The commonality of the resource isn't going to drive inefficiencies, still going to be more profitable to be more efficient (so they will be); however, if there are negative externalities like the very real global warming or the death of fish when we dispose of plastic in water, these are things that cost society something but companies' profit don't get affected by.

[Lewkowski]

The commonality of the resource isn't going to drive inefficiencies, still going to be more profitable to be more efficient (so they will be); however, if there are negative externalities like the very real global warming or the death of fish when we dispose of plastic in water, these are things that cost society something but companies' profit don't get affected by.

I was directly refuting point #2. Wiggin seems to think that "wasting" plastic is a negative externality.

[Enoch the Red]

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.

I think I may be cross contaminating threads, but I'm just not understanding your logic here. It's bad for governments to enforce seat belt laws, (which isn't directly unconstitutional) but it's good for them to be able to treat your children like they are prisoners or cattle? Better yet, do you really think this will affect truancy? Kid's aren't going to prop a door open, or have one of their friends open it for them? That if they were looking to play hooky they would just, you know, not drive themselves to school?

I'm also curious as to how you think an RFID chip is going to keep your kid safe on school property? Will it stop them from being bullied? Is it bullet proof? Does it alert teachers when there's a fight?

I guess I just don't understand how you think we can create a free and freedom loving society when you raise and treat children like prisoners.

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.

I don't support any of these things, and I likewise don't believe that the government needs to be petty tyrants to our children.

[Lewkowski]

Enoch - So are you in favor of seat belt laws or not?

When you are at school you need to be in X location. If the school cannot determine the location of a CHILD that is put in their care that is a HUGE issue. And as far as truancy - yes it will make it easier to track - is it full proof? Of course not. And as far as safety like "bullet proof" that's asinine liberal logic that teaches kids are not safe in schools anymore because of school shootings. Children are more likely to die in car accidents, disease or POOLS. http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2001...ttpoolsvsguns/ As far as bullying, meh part of growing up, kids will be kids. As far as a fight... no one needs to alert anyone everyone will be chanting fight fight. RFID helps deal with truancy and there are no down sides.

[GGT]

Are you going to implant an RFID chip in your child, like you would your pet?

[Lewkowski]

Are you going to implant an RFID chip in your child, like you would your pet?

The article was about a RFID chip on a school ID...

[Enoch the Red]

Enoch - So are you in favor of seat belt laws or not?

I thought I've been pretty clear about this, but maybe you missed it.

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.

And in response to you about whether or not the government should be in the habit of protecting us from ourselves.

I don't support any of these things, and I likewise don't believe that the government needs to be petty tyrants to our children.

When you are at school you need to be in X location. If the school cannot determine the location of a CHILD that is put in their care that is a HUGE issue.

I don't disagree. Luckily for us the only options schools have aren't: track a students every move, and throw children to the wolves.

And as far as truancy - yes it will make it easier to track - is it full proof? Of course not. And as far as safety like "bullet proof" that's asinine liberal logic that teaches kids are not safe in schools anymore because of school shootings. Children are more likely to die in car accidents, disease or POOLS. http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2001...ttpoolsvsguns/ As far as bullying, meh part of growing up, kids will be kids. As far as a fight... no one needs to alert anyone everyone will be chanting fight fight. RFID helps deal with truancy and there are no down sides.

Liberal logic? You're the one pushing for tracking children and employees at all times, and you are doing so out of what I'm going to guess is an asinine liberal fear that the world is a more dangerous place now than when you were growing up.

You also seem to be backing away from your claim that it would make kids safer, which is good because I don't think an RFID tag has any bearing on how safe a child is.

Better question. What if the parents of the child don't want them carrying around an RFID tag?

[Lewkowski]

I thought I've been pretty clear about this, but maybe you missed it.



And in response to you about whether or not the government should be in the habit of protecting us from ourselves.





I don't disagree. Luckily for us the only options schools have aren't: track a students every move, and throw children to the wolves.



Liberal logic? You're the one pushing for tracking children and employees at all times, and you are doing so out of what I'm going to guess is an asinine liberal fear that the world is a more dangerous place now than when you were growing up.

You also seem to be backing away from your claim that it would make kids safer, which is good because I don't think an RFID tag has any bearing on how safe a child is.

Better question. What if the parents of the child don't want them carrying around an RFID tag?

My bad for missing your original response on seat-belts.

There are two issues with the RFID tags - safety and preventing truancy. Not knowing where an 8 year old is a safety issue, weather or not we are safer now or in the past shouldn't matter. It provides an increase to safety, it makes truancy easier to detect and deal with and there are no down sides. I still have yet to understand your rational, it seems honestly like a knee jerk reflex against any form of "tracking" rather then a well thought out argument. Oh no they know where I am when I'm at school. This can be duplicated easily with cameras but it would be costlier and less efficient. Keeping track of students and ensuring they are where they are supposed to be isn't an invasion of their privacy, its doing their mandated job.

Parents don't get to make the school rules. If the parent doesn't want their kid to have to take Math they don't get a choice in that matter. If a parent wants to have the teacher privately tutor their kid for 3 hours a day - they don't get to make that choice. Of course if we had school choice they could just easily take their kid out and that would be the best possible solution. This doesn't cause any harm to parent or child. The only parents who would have an issue are those who just have a irrational reaction to new technology.

[Timbuk2]

[earthJoker]

So I finally have some time to address this post:

The sheer amount of in 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.

I totally agree with this, unless you don't have a tap available (hiking, traveling ect.)

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.)

You can use PET and glass. Glass is perfectly recyclable, but it is quite heavy, so you need more transport energy. PET light, but not perfectily recyclable. But you can still avoid most of the problems using PET.

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.

Over here almost all bottles are recycled. So there is room of improvement there.

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.

100% agreement on this

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.

I don't like it when you pay the garbage tax with the product. People wont care for what they pay, they just look at the whole price. Tax the garbage collection per liter, it works easy (you just pay for each liter you want to have collected). People will reduce the ammount of waste as they feel the costs directly.

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.

General purpose landfills for unprocessed waste are forbidden in Switzerland since 2000, waste is usually incinerated and than the leftover is further processed. The heat is also used for energy production.

There are much better things you can do with waste than put it in a landfill.

[Aimless]

*lewkowski "mind" trick* These are not the externalities you're looking for *Lewkowski "mind" trick*

[agamemnus]

Come on now, that's just absurd. The value of that garbage is immense! Surely it would have been mined by now.

Oh and wiggin, I have long since realized that pin-point effective taxes almost never happen even when you show the suggestion in the face of your elected "representatives". Taxes almost always result from politics, not borne of serious research and debate.

Oh and Timbuk2, regarding seatbelts... I think you are right in the sense that harsher seatbelt laws has caused people to wear seatbelts at a much higher rate, perhaps 95%. It seems more along the lines of a Pavlovian response that is now being generationally maintained (from parents to children)... but there is also a huge media element to this. Think of how many government campaigns and "public outreach" private campaigns (for brownie points) were launched in the media. The seatbelt thing isn't just a taxes and laws phenomenon.

Anyway, though, it's going to be difficult to police people picking up their trash.. although in the UK, it might be feasible, once there is a camera around every tree and automated facial recognition/movement systems in place to track it all.

Oh and Lewkowski - wow!

Keeping track of students and ensuring they are where they are supposed to be isn't an invasion of their privacy, its doing their mandated job.

If I was a student being tracked in this way (or worse, the child of a parent being tracked 24/7), I would have to abrogate my morality. You're going to watch people 99% the time to make sure they are doing what they should be doing, and 1% of the time they are not going to be watched.. that is when their morality is going to go downhill because they will have learned that morality only applies when you are being watched. All in all, absolutely horrific societal consequences.

[Lewkowski]

If I was a student being tracked in this way (or worse, the child of a parent being tracked 24/7), I would have to abrogate my morality. You're going to watch people 99% the time to make sure they are doing what they should be doing, and 1% of the time they are not going to be watched.. that is when their morality is going to go downhill because they will have learned that morality only applies when you are being watched. All in all, absolutely horrific societal consequences.

People don't think like that.

[agamemnus]

People don't think like that.

I've experienced it differently. . .

[Veldan Rath]

How about innocent until proven guilty? Once they demonstrate that they can't be trusted, then they get the card?

[Lewkowski]

How about innocent until proven guilty? Once they demonstrate that they can't be trusted, then they get the card?

Having an ID isn't punishment. It does not restrict you in anyway. It merely allows the school to know where you are - something they already have to do.

[GGT]

Yeah, and who wants to claim that water is safer now than ever before?

Apologies for the cross-thread posting, but I wanted to make a distinction between surface water, wells, deep aquifers, de-salinization, and contaminants. Also to remind everyone that water is now a global commodity....and not just a local one.

[Lewkowski]

Yeah, and who wants to claim that water is safer now than ever before?

Apologies for the cross-thread posting, but I wanted to make a distinction between surface water, wells, deep aquifers, de-salinization, and contaminants. Also to remind everyone that water is now a global commodity....and not just a local one.

I'm curious what you mean by global commodity.

[GGT]

Water is used in all fossil-fuel energy extraction processes.

[Lewkowski]

I want you to define "global commodity." I'm trying to figure out exactly what you are trying to say, the way you use certain terms doesn't always make sense to me.

[RandBlade]

<Pictures of landfill>

Thank you for proving my point. Loads of those bottles are Pepsi or Coke etc

Banning the healthiest bottled drink from sales as a solution to landfill is like putting a small plaster/bandage on an arm as a solution to frostbite.

[Timbuk2]

Plastic bottles are plastic bottles.

[RandBlade]

Plastic bottles are plastic bottles.

Exactly, so either ban plastic bottles or don't. If you decide don't, then banning the healthiest contents of those bottles achieves worse than nothing.

[Enoch the Red]

There are two issues with the RFID tags - safety and preventing truancy. Not knowing where an 8 year old is a safety issue, weather or not we are safer now or in the past shouldn't matter. It provides an increase to safety, it makes truancy easier to detect and deal with and there are no down sides. I still have yet to understand your rational, it seems honestly like a knee jerk reflex against any form of "tracking" rather then a well thought out argument. Oh no they know where I am when I'm at school. This can be duplicated easily with cameras but it would be costlier and less efficient. Keeping track of students and ensuring they are where they are supposed to be isn't an invasion of their privacy, its doing their mandated job.

How many eight year children go missing while at school? Or is this more of your asinine liberal logic? Is there something fundamentally broken in our system where we haven't been keeping track of where our eight year children are? Are teachers no longer taking roll, which seemed to do as good of a job keeping track of whether or not a student was present?

Do you not see a problem with a generation if children being raised accustomed to being tallied, tagged, and tracked by the government? How can you expect children to appreciate freedom if they are constantly being treated as criminals?

[RandBlade]

Many classes either don't take roll call or pupils/teachers can fix it even if the pupils not present - especially if they're incentivised to improve attendance it can be easier to take a fake roll call than fix the underlying problem.