Exactly, I would prefer it if we decommodified water use with and regulate use base on sustainability needs. It would have prevented all these water companies like Nestle from stealing the water from various regions.
Where is nestle "stealing the water from various regions"? I'm sure they've been involved in water rights disputes, as has any large water consumer, but I'm skeptical that "stealing" is the most objective description or that they're even a large consumer compared to ag.
We can assume that Nestlé executives are sitting in Switzerland dreaming up where in the world they extract the most water from, put in a bottle, and reselling to the communities (and further afield) that they took the water from.
>We can assume that Nestlé executives are sitting in Switzerland dreaming up where in the world they extract the most water from, put in a bottle, and reselling to the communities (and further afield) that they took the water from.
What's the problem with that? It sounds exactly like what the water utility does, except with plastic bottles rather than pipes.
perhaps not a problem one some people's mind, but certainly a material difference:
utilities prioritize the welfare of the citizens who reside in an vote for the (local/regional/national) political apparatus VS exploiting resources with the aim of maximizing profit for shareholders
one benefit that private water companies like Perrier / Fiji Water / Nestlé et al provide to society is that they "distribute" water to locations where there's less. Or at least that what it seems like.
However, on the one hand very little of the water consumed this way is by people who do not have access to local water. Two; they try as much as possible to underpay the "community" from whence they extract the water, so that should be made more fair.
>utilities prioritize the welfare of the citizens who reside in an vote for the (local/regional/national) political apparatus VS exploiting resources with the aim of maximizing profit for shareholders
How is this any different than any other industries that consume water (eg. farms or factories) and use that to make money? At least with nestle water, it's not a premium product so in all likelihood it isn't getting shipped across the world like Perrier is.
Incentive. Farms and factories require water as an input to fulfil some other purpose. They have no incentive to extract more water than they need for their processes, increasing the price incentivises them to reduce their consumption. In contrast, a bottled water company's revenue directly correlates with how much water they can extract. Increasing the price does not encourage a reduction in consumption since consumption is tied to revenue. In fact, if margins tighten due to price increases we might expect to see production increase, with the aim of maintaining the rate of profit.
Even without being shipped across the world, in most places, bottled water is still hugely wasteful. Multiple facilities, haulage, plastic, stores, and refrigeration to deliver something that is directly piped into almost every building.
That doesn't seem to be what everyone is mad about though, judging by the comment chain.
>And water utilities aren't run for profit. Or if they are, they're heavily regulated.
I'd be sympathetic to this argument if nestle was the sole provider of water in an area, but they're not. In a hypothetical universe where nestle has a monopoly on bottled water distribution and is abusing it by charging $2/bottle or whatever, the damage would be limited because people could just... use their own bottles. Also, given that bottled water "is a big problem", should we really care that consumers can't get them for cheap?
I too take a long drink of my tap water and think to myself "It's a shame some prick isn't getting rich because I'm thirsty and his great-grandfather built a pipe".
Honest and competent civil servants are one of the most precious resource in any government, and even more in poor countries.
Hence it is important to economies on their use.
Eg instead of having court appointed bankruptcy proceedings that tie up the time of a judge, just liquidate.
In general, you want to arrange government procedures to be simple and quick to carry out, and with not much subjective judgement requirement, because that requires competence and provides nooks and crannies to hide corruption in.
Pulling back the responsibilities of government and lettings markets handle more, is a good way to assist with this effort.
(Another example: when you privatise a government owned company or department, you should pay off its debts and auction it off to the highest bidder. Government officials should not be used to judge a beauty contest of business plans for the new entity. Those plans never work out as advertised anyway.
In an account sense, paying off the debts first doesn't make a difference: a company with 1 dollar more debt on the balance sheet should just sell for an additional dollar more.
But in practice, asset stripping is much easier done with highly leveraged companies, and politically it's hard to keep the government from (implicitly) backing the debt.)
In places with reliable supply of potable water - most of the developed world - the business provides no real value. And plenty of harm in the form of plastic pollution.
Bottled water should be a niche business. In the same category as surplus MREs or heavy-duty construction radios.
nothing in an of itself, but if you look at the strategies that Nestlé employ around the world to gain access to water while cynically damaging communities, it is hard to be on their side.
Nestlé is the company that bribed hospitals in poor countries to tell new mothers that their artificial milk was better than breast milk.
Once they had been on the bottled milk they can't go back to breast milk so when they leave the hospital the mothers are forced to buy the artificial milk.
Many of them can't afford it so the babies starve to death.
This is what the corporation you trust has done. Literally killing babies for profit.
None of those seem to be what a normal person would consider "scandals". Those are either environmentalists objecting to bottled water in a general sense, or the last one which is Michigan's government considering limiting water being used for bottled water.
Where’s the objectivity in letting well financed private power “own” natural resources.
There is no being objective when the conversation starts in such an intentionally spread artificial obligation to consider. Their claims of ownership are not backed by immutable physical evidence but mutable spoken social norms.
Your skepticism alone is insufficient objection to curtail conversation that may rustle Jimmie’s but otherwise does no quantitative damage; it’s not as if mere conversation magically alters the status quo. Rest assured Nestle will be ok tomorrow.
That something isn't accessible to the methods of physical science doesn't mean it has no objective reality. (The methods of physical science themselves are not objects of physical science.)
In any case, that doesn't mean that the liberal notion of private property escapes criticism. Indeed, that is very much the problem. According to the liberal view, radically individualist and absolutist as it is, property is first and foremost private; the common good is conceived of as something resulting from the voluntary cession of private property.
But this is backwards and this notion is not at all the traditional view of property. According to the traditional view, human beings are social animals, not atomized individuals, and this means there there exists a common good. Furthermore, private property exists for the sake of the common good. That private property exist at all is because it enables the common good. It enables human beings to pursue the good; its absence would frustrate it by introducing conflict, an unjust distribution of goods, and so on.
This imposes a limit on private ownership because if private ownership exists for the sake of the common good, then it cannot be the case that the private ownership of something is harmful to the common good. If I bought up all the arable land in the world and in this way prevented the possibility of farming and food production, I would indeed be harming the common good. Water is similar.
>This imposes a limit on private ownership because if private ownership exists for the sake of the common good, then it cannot be the case that the private ownership of something is harmful to the common good. If I bought up all the arable land in the world and in this way prevented the possibility of farming and food production, I would indeed be harming the common good. Water is similar.
But nobody is actually buying up land so nobody can grow food, nor is nestle buying up water so nobody can drink it. In fact they're doing the opposite. They're taking water from the ground and selling it so people can access it. I don't see how this is any different than a farmer growing food from the ground and selling it to people.
Simple: The real world is not made up out of things which are independent, but everything is connected one way or another. If a private company has control over water they want to grow and maximize profits. First consequence is clearly that prices will go up, even more so if there is clear demand for that, and secondly they will slurp as much as they can out of the ground. Unfortunately, the water in the ground is not infinite, it is a shared resource and needs time to get replenished. It is part of this "common good". So you have to start regulating, and also controlling the regulation of how much at most a company can draw water out of the ground. Same goes for polluting water (not just by dumping dirty water, but think fracking and other such things) etc.
Same goes for land use. Agriculture is a main driving factor of mass extinction (yes, we are in the midst of a biosphere mass extinction event) because they ignore the common good, and other land uses bring their share of problems with it.
In that case you're using it wrong, since it seems to be primarily about withdrawing ones economic activity from the market, rather than removing a particular good from the market [0]. I'm asking you because you seem to think you've read people who use the term rigorously, and I'm asking you to give a reference in some way shape or form.
I think defining womanhood is actually quite difficult. We can’t really use the ability to nurse, because everyone has the ability to produce breast milk. We can’t really use the ability to bear children, because infertility happens and people already suffer insane emotional trauma about feeling like they’re not really a woman because of difficulty conceiving. (Also this means people stop being women during menopause or when pregnant??) We can’t even really use chromosomes, things like androgen insensitivity exists.
Biology is just really really complicated, and trying to simplify it is unscientific imo. We don’t use women as a category in studies for good reason, and when we do describe the sexes of the participants we have to also include contextual information like age, health status, and ruling out conditions like pregnancy or hormonal disorders.
(I don’t really want to comment on the rest of that spiel. I just wanted to point out, as a biologist, that biology is really hard and the narrative that it is simple downplays my field.)
Air isn't free as such, either, because of pollution. The moment you pollute air you are degrading its quality, up to the point that certain equipment has to actively filter the air before using it. Also keep in mind that "pollute" for example in denser settlements can also mean smells, e.g. someone is constantly cooking stuff that strongly smells and you live "downwind" of that, would you consider air as "free" or should there maybe some limit to what can be done with it?
