PSA: Fill your own damn water bottle.

This afternoon I watched as a vendor came through our office and restocked our company coolers with a variety of sugared waters-- as well as ordinary bottles of water. It surprises me that we buy bottled water when we also have a filtered tap in the kitchen, and it surprises me even more when I realized that each liter bottle costs upwards of a dollar each to purchase, and that's before calculating in the delivery costs that come after production.

Compare that $1 a liter to the $0.0011 per liter for water from the tap. For those of us living in Seattle, there's absolutely no excuse for bottled water: the water from the tap is likely to be cleaner.

Of every penny above that 0.1¢ perhaps a quarter of it goes to the profit of the bottler. The rest is consumed in two ways: the menial efforts of others, and in oil. The bottle is made of petrochemicals, and it costs truck time to transport the bottles from the bottler to the point of purchase. Given that most Western countries have evolved this incredibly energy-efficient mechanism for delivering water to every non-rural home and office, there is almost no excuse for buying bottled water. If you want to save gas and oil, reduce pollution, and save the planet, here's a cheap, easy and probably better-for-you step: fill your own water bottle from the tap.

The Mayor Makes a Funny...

This morning on the radio Seattle's mayor, Greg Nickels, said one of the funniest things I've ever heard. He said, "A strip club is never a desireable thing."

Since it's never a desireable thing-- since nobody would ever want to open or visit a strip club-- the mayor and his cronies are now working feverishly to make sure that the owners of the cities clubs-- which nobody wants and nobody visits, and so which have no revenue and no clout-- don't get a chance to open any more of those unwanted clubs.