Q: But it requires more energy and creates more pollution! A: Well, less than soft drinks, beer, or milk.
Are you falling into the trap of defending silliness for the sake of it? To prove your un-PC credentials?
I'm defending this because I think it's just a typical idiotic upper middle class identity politics lifestyle leftist critique, where brand and posturing about "cool" things is seen as much more important than boring unsexy things that actually matter. Like water treatment plants. But hey, they're made of old fashioned things like steel and concrete, and they're smelly too! They've got lots os technology in them and they hence oppress lesbian miniority unemployed sculpters and further male patriarchic thinking, while destroying the third world, and whales!
Grrr. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Tell me how it's "upper middle class...posturing on identity issues" to point this out and encourage people to use plain tap water that comes from old-fashioned steel and concrete water treatment plants?
The same people who want to ban these things (around here anyway, where there is no uncarbonated mineral water) are the people I mentioned, and who'd become outraged if anyone wanted to ban their "organic" orange juice or wine. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
But nowadays, with steel and concrete water treatment plants, drinking carbonated water, soft drinks, beer, wine or tea are a lifestyle choice as far as hydration is concerned. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
Unless the externalities are properly priced. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
Your implication that I'm marketing an ET iconoclast brand is, well, let's just say I disagree with that. I rather think it's the natural result from being the most rightwing person on a solidly leftwing site. I just really deeply disagree with the people who hawk these kind of politics, both because their ideas are wrong and because they are so ineffectual that you might actually believe they were a diversionary tactic used by, say, wineries and breweries. (No, I'm not saying they are, but that would make them seem more serious, like the theory that the "peace" movement was supported by the Soviets.)
Ironically, I do the same thing at other discussion sites I frequent, except as they are more to the right I'm the guy on the left muttering about wage equality and the states role in the economy... Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Your implication that I'm marketing an ET iconoclast brand
Not really what I meant. I just thought you were laying it on a bit thick about "these people" and the motives you ascribe to them.
They really do get my blood boiling, and in real life this often leads to a 45-120 minute non-stop rant until I tun out of steam, to the mild amusement of my friends, as in "here we go again". I'm sure you know the feeling. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Hey, I have influenced my own consumer behaviour to minimize flying. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
I don't think I've ever seen a water ad in this country
That might explain your position. What the people in this diary are pointing at is advertising portraying bottled water as "natural" and superior to tap water, when it is not necessarily, and when in some cases it simply is tap water in a bottle.
The whole discussion doesn't strike me as coming from the right angle.
What I don't get about bottled water is how, knowing that tap water is better for you than bottled water (at least according to every study I've ever seen), why would you fork over the equivalent of $10/gallon for the privilege of drinking an inferior resource in a disposable bottle? You could buy a Brita or Pur filter and a reusable bottle for the cost of the daily intake buying them.
Paying $3/gallon for the magic goop that gets you places in ten minutes that a hundred years ago would've required a month of planning is an outrage, apparently, protested by people choking on their $6 lattes from Starbucks or their $1.50 bottles of water. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
So, er... What angle are you coming at it from?
The more precise angle the Tappening people up there are attacking from is that this mostly mediocre product is sold at a high price thanks to mendacious advertising that uses images of natural purity and greenness.
Me, I drink bottled water too: I take a cola bottle and put tap water in it. That's good for something like three or four uses until it becomes too iffy for my liking.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
You must not watch television then. Or you just watch public service to get your blood pressure up. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
Still, taxing flying and supporting HSR are more effective ways to deal with that than trying to create consumer guilt.
trying to create consumer guilt
is not the only communications option. Consumers are massively exposed to image advertising on bottled water or air travel. Why is it wrong to fight on the same ground?
The situation is complicated elsewhere because we live in a media environment and have a general discourse where bans on ads in which cars make trees grow and flowers bloom would be considered government intrusion on freedom of speech.
So there is a point - still, as regulation is better it should remain the ultimate goal.
If we just wave the "this-should-be-regulated" flag while sniffing at attempts to score points within the media environment (judgement of their quality and likely effectiveness set aside for the sake of argument), I suggest we are comfortably ignoring the way the world works. The image-makers, meanwhile, go on creating their "reality".
