Morning Brew: August 21th, 2007

How many years have smoke detectors been mandatory?
About thirty by my reckoning. How could a home go
un-alarmed for so long?

Tragic.

Here's the NYT on Velib. 3,000 bikes stolen to date!

It will be interesting to see how it's funded. In Paris it's an ad company but that would be ruled out in Toronto by the street "furniture" contract given to Astral. In Dublin the same ad company is running their program - ad boards have been erected on roadsides in unsafe locations and there's uproar about it.

How will a bottled water ban work when it comes to large events at Downsview Park? Usually you're allowed one *sealed* bottle of water. I doubt I'd be allowed to bring my water bottle from the gym in since they'd assume I'd fill it with vodka.

The danger with banning bottled water outright is in the case of emergencies when safe drinking water isn't available.

The companies of course will compensate by adding additives to their water to make it -more- than just regular water and likely bypassing the ban.

"A law that would allow customers to unwrap items in a store, leaving the packaging behind for the store to dispose of. That would presumably encourage retailers to put pressure on manufacturers to reduce packaging."

This could cause some -serious- security issues with stores and their internal security. This would make internal theft much, much easier to get away with. It's easy for a dishonest employee to remove an item from a package and stick in their pocket or purse. The tough part is disposing of the packaging as even most places check their garbage before it goes out the back door.

In my retail experience, every single person who has been caught stealing from the store has been caught because management was tipped off by finding open packaging.

Reminds me of that Dave Chappelle stand up routine... "I had to say something, and it's not even like I was brave... I was sitting next to the guy...... come on dog, your hitting my elbows"

I've been to a few large festivals, and portable "water stations" are becoming more common, which is a great thing. People can refill their own cups or bottles with purified tap water, or take a sip from the fountains. (All for free, as it should be.)

I'm all for the ban on plastic water bottles. People tend to forget that a lot of water companies use tap water as their source - so you're basically paying for something that's already free, and your tax dollars are being poured into cleaning up and disposing of the garbage generated by these companies.

There's also other alternatives to using plastic: glass, lightweight aluminum (like SIGGS) or stainless steel.

People survived just fine 20 years ago when plastic bottled water wasn't commonplace. I think we'll be just the same.

From what I heard a theft of one of the Velib bikes is pretty much a non-issue because it's so subsidized by ads.

Then again, a similar bike renting system in Washington that I once wrote about on blogTO has electronic measures to prevent theft.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a mayor who was worried about roads, garbage pick up, snow removal, etc. instead of constantly trying to socially engineer their citizens? Is bottled water truly something that the mayor should be focused on?

Plastic water bottles are a health and HUGE garbage issue. I think that merits some attention from the Mayor.

@Davedavedave

I agree with you that there are a lot more pressing issues in the city that the mayor should be more concerned with (most importantly, getting the province to upload their responsibilities off the municipalities) - this is something that really doesn't cost much and is actually an important issue.

Governments are always involved with social engineering in some way or other. Municipalities play a huge role in this job - look at the rise of suburbia and how Toronto and the GTA have developed a car culture instead of developing public transit. Banning bottled water from city facilities to help reduce the unrealized cost on the environment is hardly a difficult or resource consuming task and is therefore a step in the right direction.

I also now hate David Miller for finding something that I can agree with him on... iwanttogotakeashower...

Is it really August 21th, 2007 already? ;)

It's my way of wishing we had a less rainy summer. =) I'll fix that now, thanks.