More Bans! San Francisco Bans Plastic Water Bottles

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 11-0 to ban the sale of plastic water bottles on public property. Supervisor President David Chiu declared:

"It was not long ago that our world wasn't addicted to plastic water bottles… It wasn't until the 1990s that the now $60 billion plastic bottle water industry experienced an enormous growth based on massive marketing and distribution campaigns."

Yea, and it also wasn't long ago before people were addicted to dishwashers, microwave ovens, mobile phones, the Internet, Facebook, Amazon 2-day delivery, and other technological advances and modern conveniences that make our lives more productive.

There are concerns that the ban on plastic water bottles could harm public and non-profit events that sell water bottles to raise revenue. Banning water alternatives in public places will also direct attention toward the quality of the city's drinking water infrastructure.

Apparently this is part of a "zero-waste goal." The city has decided to aspire "to have zero waste going to its landfill by 2020." What other waste-generating products will the city ban next?

Comments

[Aloysious]

"zero-waste goal."

Ban everything.

[AlexInCT]

And then ban banning?

[anon]

0 / 0

[Rasilio]

Can we ban San Francisco while we are at it?

[fish_remote]

Hold off....I think the Giants could have a pretty decent season.....move to table this suggestion until after the All Star break!

[Paul.]

Can we ban San Francisco while we are at it?

How would we know what retard looked like?

[fish_remote]

We still have shreek....there's that!

http://tinyurl.com/shreeky

[Tim]

Utopianism.

[Hugh Akston]

They're only a few bans away from perfection.

[albo]

Yep. If only those pesky people whose brains aren't on board with the right way of living would go away.

[anon]

To be fair, I've banned myself from ever going to California again.

[AlexInCT]

Maybe they need to cull them?

[Brett L]

Just like useful fusion.

[anon]

" The city has decided to aspire "to have zero waste going to its landfill by 2020."

Oh jesus fucking christ.

[Zeb]

And I've decided to aspire to be 10' tall and have the power to shoot lasers out of my eyes by 2020.
The landfill thing is easy, though. Just chuck it all in the Bay.

[anon]

The landfill thing is easy, though. Just chuck it all in the Bay.

But then you won't have room for the other trash: Californians.

[Zeb]

Oh, the bay is pretty big. You could fit a lot of Californians in there.

[anon]

You could fit a lot of Californians in there.

I can only hope I live to find out exactly how many.

[Ted S.]

Aren't Californians biodegradable?

[Paul.]

Meh, they're very dense. Like lead.

[Kaptious Kristen]

Politicians. Ban.

[entropy]

It's like zero tolerance except instead of school administrators now it will be garbage men yelling at your kids for chewing a poptart into the shape of a plastic bag.

[Paul.]

This is what fun is for progressives.

Most people don't want to spend their mornings sorting through a mountain of grease-stained pizza boxes, soggy cardboard and soiled newspaper.

But for 10 minutes Tuesday, nine Kent residents were willing to go deep into their own and other people's garbage and sort out recyclables in hopes of being crowned the city's new "green team."

http://seattletimes.com/html/l.....le15m.html

[Terr]

i'd probably dump a few into my trash can for them.

[kinnath]

We'll have to put our plastic water bottles in little brown bags so that the police can ignore our flagrant violation of the statutes.

[Pro Libertate]

Really, why not skip ahead and ban people?

[anon]

White Indian runs San Francisco now?

[Warty]

Water

[anon]

I approve this message.

[Episiarch]

Much, much better.

[waffles]

Take that capitalist litterbugs!

[Rich]

What other waste-generating products will the city ban next?

I propose they ban the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

/Captain Obvious

[a better weapon]

It wasn't until the 1990s that the now $60 billion plastic bottle water industry experienced an enormous growth based on massive marketing and distribution campaigns.

The blame rests entirely on the "industry" and marketing. You know what other things were heavily marketed? The shake weight, LifeSaver's soda, and the XFL.

Shit, even McDonald's, who is constantly bashed by progressives for sinisterly tricking otherwise well intentioned people into throwing their lives away on shit tasting, fatty, doomsday burgers, couldn't get us to buy the Arch Deluxe.

You want to ban plastic bottles? Fine, but don't act like this is some fight that your city is taking to a faceless company's crooked doorstep. Have the balls to admit that its the people who you think are idiots.

[sarcasmic]

The blame rests entirely on the "industry" and marketing.

Well, duh. People are mindless sheep at the mercy of their corporate overlords. Everyone knows that.
It's not like peoples' preferences change on their own or anything.

[a better weapon]

I refuse to think these people don't know how consumer demand works. They do. It's just admitting it and talking about it correctly would amount to a direct admission of just how little they think about the average person.

[GILMORE]

". You know what other things were heavily marketed?"

Progressives?

[Swiss Servator, alles klar?]

"couldn't get us to buy the Arch Deluxe"

SPEAK FOR YOURSELF!

*salaams to a set of Golden Arches*

[Kaptious Kristen]

MMmm....Shamrock Shake. I had my annual shake yesterday, but al this McD's talk is making me consider a 2nd.

No wonder I'm so goddamn fat. Because of McD's marketing, I mean. Not the shakes themselves.

[Paul.]

You know what other things were heavily marketed?"

Followup question: That resulted in bans?

[Ivan Pike Trolle]

Would you rather live in San Francisco or Houston?

[Zeb]

I'd rather eat broken glass than live in either place, really.

[Cloudbuster]

"What other waste-generating products will the city ban next?"

From the looks of it, the next thing they should ban is the Board of Supervisors.

[F. Stupidity, Jr.]

It was not long ago that our world wasn't addicted to plastic water bottles? It wasn't until the 1990s that the now $60 billion plastic bottle water industry

OMG BIG WATER!!!

[F. Stupidity, Jr.]

It was not long ago that our world wasn't addicted to plastic water bottles? It wasn't until the 1990s that the now $60 billion plastic bottle water industry

OMG BIG WATER!!!

[F. Stupidity, Jr.]

OMG SQUIRRELS!!

[Swiss Servator, alles klar?]

The 3 O'Clock squirrel attack.

[Zeb]

God, "addicted to oil" was bad enough. Now we're "addicted" to plastic bottles of water?

[GILMORE]

"The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 11-0 to ban the sale of plastic water bottles on public property. "

"Refresh" my memory...

(ZING!)

...isn't this the same public property that Banned Soda, not so long ago?

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n.....38713.html

Hopefully they will soon Ban Dehydration, or low blood sugar, to offset any 'unintended consequences'

[The Late P Brooks]

Safe water in a clean drinking vessel is bad. Bring back hand pumped wells with common drinking cups.

[Winston]

Bring back hand pumped wells with common drinking cups.

Considering how increasingly collectivist and reactionary the lefties are getting I can see this happening. And the enviros would love the return of cholera to end overpopulation.

[Banjos]

The cholera will only wipe out all the unvaccinated hippie spawn. Reminds me of a documentary I saw ahile back on some 60s hippie commune. At one point a huge group of them left the commune to go live in India, all their children died of easily preventable diseases.

[John]

As antibiotics get less and less effective, I am thinking that the fun of living in your own filth and composting your own shit will start to end real quickly.

I am constantly amazed at how stupid these people actually are. They are so ignorant they would literally put us into the dark ages.

[Swiss Servator, alles klar?]

"put" - their problem is I have modern firearms.

[Zeb]

There are probably lots of other reasons why communalists are silly, but I feel I should point out that it is possible to compost your shit, grow your own food and generally hippie out without being completely unsanitary.

[John]

Sure Zeb, if you live in the country. These clowns are doing it in Brooklyn.

[Zeb]

Yeah, that's dumb. You want to farm, move to the fucking country.

[mad.casual]

As antibiotics get less and less effective, I am thinking that the fun of living in your own filth and composting your own shit will start to end real quickly.

IDK, I've seen this as distinctly self-limiting behavior.

Eating locally grown, organic, carbon-neutral foods is great until you realize that you have buy citrus in the winter and shoveling shit should be done by a machine.

[Invisible Finger]

Cups?

Put your hands together and the state will pour some drinking water into them. To be on the safe side, be sure your hands are encased in plastic or rubber gloves.

[Winston]

Is this part of the increasing social tolerance that is happening?

And why haven't libertarians won election to the Board of Supervisors? The Republicans are dead in that city and I thought libertarianism can better appeal to TEAM BLUE hives than TEAM RED can?

[Zeb]

"libertarianism can better appeal to "...

"Better" being the key word there. Libertarians can do a whole lot of better before they start getting elected in significant numbers.

Though I think that most statists would switch to the other team before contemplating the horrifying possibility that maybe the state can't solve all problems.

[Winston]

Also I thought the progs loved plastic water bottles since drinking water is healthier? Next you're going to tell me the progs have turned against plastic bags...oh wait.

[John]

The political cliche that most needs to die is the idea that Democrats are "socially liberal". I am sorry but if you think the government should be controlling what kind of bottles people drink water from, you are not "socially liberal". You are a social conservative.

[Invisible Finger]

Exactly. Proggies hate change.

[Zeb]

Yup. And an awful lot of environmentalists could accurately be described as reactionary conservatives as well. The division of politics into two sides really makes people say a lot of stupid things.

[Winston]

In the olden days the proto-environmentalism of the Romantics and the "blood and soil" types was considered to be reactionary and in the latter case fascist.

It doesn't help that in an American context right/conservative was coined to refer to opponents of the New Deal and the Great Society and left/liberal to the supporters of those programs. This leads to "conservatives" attacking the status quo and "liberals" defending the status quo.

[Zeb]

The other thing, and I think this applies to conservatives especially (and probably progressive too), is that conservative only means anything in context. Where European conservatives might be monarchists, American conservatives will tend to be more laissez-faire republicans. But people seem to have decided that those things will always mean what they meant in 1950, so the terms lose real meaning.

[John]

And of course, this accomplishes nothing except to cause people to drive to San Mateo or Oakland to get their bottled water. Doesn't anyone care about the carbon footprint?

[anon]

Don't you know by now John that it's not about consequences, just intentions?

[Rich]

Nope. Doesn't affect the landfill (directly).

[mad.casual]

Maybe it was your point, but let's not forget that no other man-made process locks carbon away as abundantly, stably, and otherwise usably than plastic.

[Zeb]

Ha, that's a clever point. How can we convince the enviro-mentals that landfilling plastic bottles is a good method of carbon sequestration?

[mad.casual]

Environmentalists? Never, it's a religion. Hipsters? Just do something "hip" with it:

http://www.redorbit.com/news/s.....ng-030513/

[mad.casual]

EDIT: Sorry, I guess this didn't directly address the 'landfilling' question. IMO, landfilling is predominantly a public-land sort of idea which, IMO, runs counter to libertarianism. You can monitor a 2 yr. old and make sure he doesn't do something stupid with a plastic bag, not so with the gov't.

[wareagle]

so a 60 billion dollar industry is a bad thing?

[Brandon]

It is if they can't control it.

[mad.casual]

Under this ban, does a plastic bottle full of urine count as a 'water bottle'?

Just asking.

[Zeb]

You starting a business selling plastic bottles of urine?

[mad.casual]

Lord knows they ship enough piss in glass bottles with red bowties out of St. Louis.

I was more curious about the fact that everyone keeps calling them 'plastic water bottles' like the fluid contained in them is somehow relevant and any, possibly exploitable, implications that may have on the law.

[PapayaSF]

"The city has decided to aspire "to have zero waste going to its landfill by 2020."

This is going to conflict with the city safe sex policy, because condoms and dental dams are not recyclable.

[John]

Given them credit, they have set a goal that is easy to meet. If you just stop picking up the trash, you won't have any waste going to the landfill.

These idiots will do that eventually. You watch. They will turn that city into a garbage and rat invested shit hole that will make Detroit seem pleasant by comparison.

[Mainer2]

John, I was too late to reply to you on the earlier thread where you were talking about the movie LeMans.

More incentive to put Pebble Beach on your bucket list:

The 911 that McQueen drives during the opening sequence of LeMans is the one I saw auctioned at RM Auctions during car week in Monterery. You really do see some amazing things that week.

Also the historic racing at Laguna Seca. A few years ago that had Schumacher's F1 car from the prior season do some demo laps.I'd never heard an F1 car, and suddenly it became clear why people love it.

[John]

So my Turbo fell though. I am now hopefully going to get an 02 C4S. Going to look at it tomorrow. Dealer looked at it today and all they could find wrong with it was dry rot on the tires, which only matters if you can see the cords and you can't. Also, I plan to replace the tires with some all weather ones this fall anyway.

I think I may have a winner. It has a new clutch, an upgraded L&N IMS bearing and had its major service. I am still terrified to buy it since anything going wrong will be thousands. But I think this one is about as safe as I can get.

[Mainer2]

Sounds like you're doing your homework. Standard advice it to buy the newest 911 you can afford and have a PPI done, because you are correct, if something goes wrong it won't be cheap.
If the IMS bearing has been taken care of you could have bullet proof driver for a long time....or not.

[John]

I had a PPI and their only complaints were that they said the coils looked old, the tires had some dry rot and were too old and the brake fluid looked dirty. That is it.

I am going to check the tires out myself. And I am always skeptical about dealers and things like brake fluid and transmission oil. They always tell you they need changed, when in reality they are closed systems and rarely should need changed absent a leak. I am going to drive it tomorrow. The tech told me the cylinders, rotors and pads all looked good. If the brakes feel good, I am not going to worry about the fluid. And the coil is nothing. Hell, the coils on the car I have right now probably look a bit tired. Does the car run? If so, the coils are fine and if they go, it is a $50 part.

[Mainer2]

You need a mechanic you can trust, Porsche or not. They may be trying to pad the bill with un-needed fluid changes, OTOH it sounds like the car may have been sitting a while and clean fresh oil, brake and transmission fluid is cheap insurance.

Coils, you mean for the spark plugs, right ? I would agree, if the car is running ok, a pre-emptive replacement is not needed.

[John]

The ignition pick up coil that is part of the distributor. I am not a Porsche guy. But my experience is those things either work or they don't. There is no "almost had it". If they stop working, the engine either doesn't start or runs like shit. So if the engine runs smooth, I am not going to worry about it.

I might get the fluid flushed if I buy the car just to be on the safe side. But my experience has always been when your fluid gets old your brakes get soft. So if the brakes are nice and tight, the fluid is fine.

[Zeb]

Unless it gets water in it, brake fluid should be good forever, pretty much.

[Mainer2]

Depends. Brake fluid is hygroscopic, which means it attracts water. So it's kind of inevitable you will get some moisture in the fluid. And a high performance car driven hard, you can boil the fluid. So a fluid change every few years is not a BAD idea.

[John]

Speaking of cars and McQueen movies, the original Thomas Crown Affair was on last week on AMC. That movie featured his Ferrari 275 NART spyder. My God that car was gorgeous.

[Winston]

This is going to conflict with the city safe sex policy, because condoms and dental dams are not recyclable.

If we pointed out every prog cognitive dissonance then we'll be here a long time.

Given them credit, they have set a goal that is easy to meet. If you just stop picking up the trash, you won't have any waste going to the landfill.

And then there's that...

[Invisible Finger]

If they ban taxes, they can't waste taxpayer money.

Anyway, nice to have Emily posting (heh) something other than polls. Although a board of supervisors vote is still a poll, I guess.

[Sevo]

Plastic is ICKY!

[The Late P Brooks]

If they are going to stop putting trash in the landfill, that must meant they are building an incinerator. Right?

I thought so.

[Number 7]

Just a thought, when I was a kid we didn't have water bottles, we didn't have Britas, we didn't have filtered water. We drank out of the tap. And it wasn't that bad.

So now that tap water tastes like it was steeped in a homeless guy's underwear, maybe instead of banning water bottles they could figure out how to make the water that I pay for that comes to my house to not taste like aforementioned scrotum tea.

[Leigh]

The awesome thing about bottle water is that you now have a real choice over other sugar based drinks - which personally I don't really enjoy and could do without the empty calories. So ban they bottle water, more will drink the carbonated stuff (which I surprised they didn't do that first with that whole obesity thing) - until they ban that and then what? - beer?
Fuck SF and their citizens who elected those assholes.

[The Late P Brooks]

If the IMS bearing has been taken care of you could have bullet proof driver for a long time....or not.

I did an intermediate shaft bearing on a friend's Boxster. I had never even sat in one before that, and after test driving it I have to say those cars are actually kind of cool. The motor is in the right place. Too many bells and whistles for my taste. You could probably shave more than a hundred pounds off the damn thing by throwing the top and frame and motors in the trash.

[Mainer2]

It's a funny thing, some folks would love Porsche to sell a "base" Boxster with wind up windows, and a manual top and so forth. But like all modern cars it's designed from the ground up to have electric windows and a power top and all the bells and whistles. It would actually cost more in design and construction to try to make a simpler entry level Boxster.

[John]

They are real cool. If I had any sense, I would be buying one of those. But I have this weird 911 thing.

[Mainer2]

weird 911 thing is kind of redundant, but yeah I know what you mean. There are tons of cars that are more conventional, and it's not like anyone "followed" Porsche. Who else is making rear engined cars ? They were air cooled way past the expiration date for that design, torsion bar suspensions...it's an automotive evolutionary dead end that somehow survives, like some creature living by a heat vent on the ocean floor, or some australian creature that's it's own genus.

[John]

I always laugh when I hear corvette or BMW people call Porsche drivers posers. No, posers buy M5s and Datsun GTRs. Geeks buy Porsches. Porsche drivers make the goofiest corvette obsessive seem sane by comparison.

[Mainer2]

The mechanic from whom I bought my 911 way back in 1992 said that lots of his customers were either doctors, engineers or accountants. One fellow flat bedded his 911 to shop so that he wouldn't go over 3000 miles between oil changes, which is obsessive to insanity

[John]

Any group that will wax nostalgic about how the older versions were so much more unstable and likely to kill you as opposed to the newer safe ones, has some underlying issues.

[Mainer2]

Analagous to this...I drive my Mustang Cobra all winter, with Blizzaks and some weight in the trunk. Anybody can drive a four wheeler in the snow, it takes a special kind of fool to drive a nose heavy, rear wheel drive pony car in new hampshire in winter.

Or maybe all the Porsche drivers think they are Steve McQueen

[The Late P Brooks]

It would actually cost more in design and construction to try to make a simpler entry level Boxster.

I could almost be tempted to buy one and just strip a bunch of shit off it. To be honest, it would make more sense(!) to rob a motor/gearbox out of one and stick it in the 914.

[Mainer2]

http://flatsixes.com/cars/pors.....y-boxster/

Karman Ghia body on a Boxster

[PapayaSF]

Nice! I miss my Ghias.

[John]

A lot of people do spec boxster racing. Go find yourself a trashed out boxster, rebuild the engine, strip out the interior and put a roll cage on and you are off to the races in a wildly fun and pretty fast car. All for under 30K total.

[The Late P Brooks]

I am at the point where I have zero confidence in the type 4 motor, low compression air cooled lump of shit that it is.

[John]

I have done more research into this purchase than I should have. But really the air cooled Porsche engines are a bit romanticized. They were not a bullet proof as is claimed. They were very Teutonic and high maintenance beasts.

The water cooled engines, IMS issues aside, get a very bad and unfair rap because Porsche heads are total Luddites and will always be angry the car didn't stay stuck in 1965.

[The Late P Brooks]

Karman Ghia body on a Boxster

NICE

[The Late P Brooks]

it's an automotive evolutionary dead end that somehow survives, like some creature living by a heat vent on the ocean floor, or some australian creature that's it's own genus.

Porsche 911: The Triumph of Development Over Design.