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Water. Fresh drinking water straight from the tap.
And yet I'm seeing lots of people in the UK start to buy bottled water. Worse: canned water.
The shittification of public services in favour of private products is a creep I'm not paying enough attention to
I agree with the overall sentiment; but there is no way in hell that canned water is worse than plastic bottles.
Aluminium is infinitely more/easily recyclable than plastic, and has a much lower negative impact on the environment.
But to reiterate, filling up your own bottle from the tap is preferred - but if you have to buy water in a container: can > bottle
It's not really the metal that's bad, but the coating on the inside of the metal (in contact with your food/water), that raises concerns.
Glass is best, but food/water in glass containers are often considerably more expensive.
I am aware; but when the options are an entirely plastic container (clear, and readily able to oxidise and leech microplastics when exposed to light over long periods of time) versus a lined metal can (which is at least opaque) - cans are remain the lesser of two evils.
I don't disagree at all. I wish we had more options.
More glass with compatibility with mason jar lids would be a win for everyone. You can recycle 5them if you want, reuse them easily, and they can remain in circulation for a very long time.
The only caveat with glass is that you have too many idiots breaking them on sidewalks, bike lanes, and parks.
Glass is also quite heavy, increasing logistics costs for transport - but in an ideal world where everything runs off renewable energy sources and stupid people didnβt ruin things for the rest of us - glass would indeed be the ideal medium.
But glass is easy to sterilize at the point of purchase and refilled. There are "zero waste" stores that do something like this already, so there's nothing to bring in other than bulk product (instead of 100 cans or bottles).
Doesn't work everywhere in our current, high-profit, low-care business models.
I agree that metal is better than plastic, but it feels like they're trying to categorise water with soda as a commodity
The thing about it is aluminum cans leach into their contents, especially if left open. Aluminum isn't particularly harmful in that amount but it's something you can taste, particularly with acidic contents. Not sure how much water suffers from this, but if it comes through in things with flavour, I'm sure it would come through in water, which is supposed to be flavourless, even if it's not usually very acidic.
I have a thick rope of muscle in my mouth that I can control accurately enough to speak with, swallow with, and dig popcorn fragments out from between my teeth with.
Just one of nature's wacky solutions that applies to more than one problem. I should be grateful it doesn't have thorns on it.
Printed currency.
Homelessness.
nature
Health
life and death
4,000 years ago, we were doing trigonometry, but just 200 years ago we were still putting leeches on people and not washing our hands before doing surgery.
Also, we sent people to the moon and got them back using less computing power than a smart watch.
putting leeches on people
We still do that. Leeches are surprisingly useful when treating certain blood clots. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The difference is putting them on because you actually understand the problem you're trying to treat lol.
Those computers has less memory than a dollar store calculator. The bits in memory were physical magnets woven by hand into a mesh. Itβs insane that it left our planet and came back with people alive.
Our car centric world. We have somehow intersected everything and everywhere with death zone strips where people can't go. And that's entirely normal and accepted.
Humans be allowed in, on and across roads in many countries. Jay walking is the most insane non-crime Iβve ever heard of. I still donβt really believe it existsβ¦
So, yeah, car centric cities are both terrible and insane - but not every city in the world is that way; thankfully.
Driving.
Somehow millions of us go hurtling by each other mere inches away in multiple tons of steel, often in conditions less than ideal yet for the most part, it's a safe way to travel.
We can't even collectively agree on most topics, yet we put our lives in each others' hands every day.
Even disregarding all the other drivers, we put ourselves in a metal can, hurtle towards solid objects, and simply count on the idea that on average, nothing catastrophic will happen.
Pure, random chance is enough to end us - animal pops into the road, a tree randomly falling, etc. - yet there we go, on yet another daily commute.
I have a long commute through the "middle of nowhere" so lots of time to think about things that ought to be downright terrifying. The thought of hitting one moose is bad. Never occurred to me until just the other day that two moose was not out of the realm of possibility.
Supply chains. Itβs mindblowing how that patch of cabbage got to the produce section at your grocery store. Or how the parts of that gadget you bought at best buy were sourced, assembled, and shipped to the store. Some products that have multiple parts are shipped multiple times across countries, sometimes back and forth, as they get built and assembled by different factories.
The USA drops approximately 15-20 million sterilized worms on Panama every day. Yes you read that right, itβs The Great American Worm Wall.