[Saber Cherry]

Jurri said:
What's wrong with tapwater? Bottled water is a strain to the nature, requiring transportation over long distances via ecologically inefficient means and producing plastic waste in the form of discarded bottles. Additionally, I understand a large minority of bottled water is actually tapwater in bottles (something like 40% if memory serves).

In many places the quality of tapwater is more regulated than is the quality of bottled water, if you're worried about contaminants. Of course there are also areas that lack regulations or follow them laxly, so I don't think generalizations apply to either side of the argument: for some the use of bottled water is the only viable choice, whereas for others it's only rational to use tapwater. Easy for me to say, seeing how great the quality of tapwater is in most of Finland. It could be that I've been told to 'like the crap' but then again your preference of alternatives over tapwater might quite as well spring from someone telling you that it's better. Not knowing what the tapwater is like in Crystal Tokyo, I'd better not hazard a guess.

Heh - Crystal Tokyo is on the moon, and we have no water

Tapwater is well-regulated in some places, and poorly in others - same with produce and bread. I understand that in France you can walk into any bakery and buy good bread. I know that in Mexico, you can walk into any supermarket and buy good milk - and it does not require refrigeration before opening, because they abandoned pasteurization along with blood-letting and other primitive rituals long ago. Their milk is irradiated, and tastes wonderful compared to milk in unfortunate countries that fear modern technology.

So, some people are lucky. But in most of the world, tapwater is contaminated with one or more of lead, copper, fluorine (natural or added), chlorine, chloramines, human or agricultural hormones, MTBE (a gasoline additive), E. Coli, and other unpleasant compounds. They may or may not change the taste of the water, but no matter where you live, it is impossible to filter these out to high standards on the massive scale of tapwater distro systems, which must be used to water lawns, run showers, fill swimming pools, wash clothes, wash cars, run swamp coolers, and other things that use 1000X more water than drinking, and have no need for high purity.

People can install reverse-osmosis or charcoal filters on their tap to reduce these contaminants, or like me, fill jugs from a commercial reverse-osmosis / dionization water purifier at a store. Mmmm, it's sweet and delicious... and more importantly, I won't get cancer / dumbness / unwanted sex characteristics / etc from drinking it in massive quantities.

Of course, if the alternative isn't bottled water but a natural spring nearby (like I have where I go for Summer) it's all cool.

Stop bragging

many higher-quality alternatives for common things aren't ecologically as effective as the lesser-quality alternative.

That's kind of universally true. The more expensive something is, the greater its ecological impact, in general. It is not strictly true because e.g. coal power plants don't pay for their pollution, while nuclear plants do; environmental destruction is cheaper in more primitive countries; and so forth. Despite this, there's a good correlation between cost and impact - cheaper Chinese imports have a lower environmental impact than natively produced quality googs, because the Chinese laborers that produced them live very poorly, eat little, ride bikes, live in tiny houses or apartments (or jail cells), use little energy, and generate trivial amounts of garbage. But that doesn't make we want to buy lower-quality, cheaper items

Like LCD-monitors: they use less energy compared to a CRT of same screen-size (1/2 to 1/3 unless I'm mistaken) and when discarded are far easier to dispose of since they contain less ecologically harmful materials. Of course, LCD-monitors are also more expensive than CRTs (which might indicate a larger ecological strain in the production process: I don't really know), so maybe you've got some other alternative that you prefer over either?

There is no current alternative superior to either. I like CRTs purely because they have a better image and better responsiveness (comparing a top-end CRT from 2002 to a top-end LCD today). Unfortunately, the industry has decided on LCDs, and no innovation has occured in the CRT area for the last 5 years... instead, they're constantly getting worse, as far as I can tell, since most people will not spend more on a CRT than an LCD. $200 CRTs are the same as $200 CRTs 5 years ago but the $500 CRTs of 5 years ago have disappeared.

Pretty soon, flat-panel CRTs (the ones with millions of emitters, rather than a single cathode) will come out, and destroy everything else... but they're not here yet.


P.S. I don't mean to imply that anyone who likes LCDs or tapwater "likes crap". That was bad wording on my part. What I meant to say was, "Most people like what they're given, even if it is crap.", with the specific examples being cases in which people whose interests run counter to the majority have to pay a price for it - without implying that one choice is right or wrong. As you noted, LCDs have many advantages over CRTs, but I evaluate them using different metrics than other people - I don't care about portability, power consumption, or soft X-rays zapping my brain nearly as much as "ability to perform well in computer games". Wonderbread really is crap, but I might buy it to feed to ducks, for example - they prefer it to the real thing.