Exactly, I would prefer it if we decommodified water use with and regulate use base on sustainability needs. It would have prevented all these water companies like Nestle from stealing the water from various regions.
- https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-01-20/environ... and https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/the-figh...
- https://www.mashed.com/717227/nestles-water-controversy-expl...
- https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-environment-watch/michigan...
Here's an example from Canada - https://esemag.com/water/nestle-sells-canadian-bottled-water...
We can assume that Nestlé executives are sitting in Switzerland dreaming up where in the world they extract the most water from, put in a bottle, and reselling to the communities (and further afield) that they took the water from.
Isn't is the actual business they do? What's wrong with it?
nothing in an of itself, but if you look at the strategies that Nestlé employ around the world to gain access to water while cynically damaging communities, it is hard to be on their side.
Like corporations have never ever murdered people for resources. Google United Fruit and find out where the term "banana republic" came from.
Once they had been on the bottled milk they can't go back to breast milk so when they leave the hospital the mothers are forced to buy the artificial milk.
Many of them can't afford it so the babies starve to death.
This is what the corporation you trust has done. Literally killing babies for profit.
Bottled water should be a niche business. In the same category as surplus MREs or heavy-duty construction radios.
That's for paying consumers to decide.
What's the problem with that? It sounds exactly like what the water utility does, except with plastic bottles rather than pipes.
utilities prioritize the welfare of the citizens who reside in an vote for the (local/regional/national) political apparatus VS exploiting resources with the aim of maximizing profit for shareholders
one benefit that private water companies like Perrier / Fiji Water / Nestlé et al provide to society is that they "distribute" water to locations where there's less. Or at least that what it seems like.
However, on the one hand very little of the water consumed this way is by people who do not have access to local water. Two; they try as much as possible to underpay the "community" from whence they extract the water, so that should be made more fair.
How is this any different than any other industries that consume water (eg. farms or factories) and use that to make money? At least with nestle water, it's not a premium product so in all likelihood it isn't getting shipped across the world like Perrier is.
Even without being shipped across the world, in most places, bottled water is still hugely wasteful. Multiple facilities, haulage, plastic, stores, and refrigeration to deliver something that is directly piped into almost every building.
Not according to the rate increases in my bills. More like padding their pensions and political apparatus.
How much is your water bill per gallon of water? Now how much would that amount of water cost you purchased from an organization like Nestle?
For all the people here who like to trumpet their advanced intelligence, there are certainly a lot of triple-o stooopid statements made.
That alone is a big problem. And water utilities aren't run for profit. Or if they are, they're heavily regulated.
Government agencies often don't have a profit motive, but some pricks are still getting rich from the corruption.
Hence it is important to economies on their use.
Eg instead of having court appointed bankruptcy proceedings that tie up the time of a judge, just liquidate.
In general, you want to arrange government procedures to be simple and quick to carry out, and with not much subjective judgement requirement, because that requires competence and provides nooks and crannies to hide corruption in.
Pulling back the responsibilities of government and lettings markets handle more, is a good way to assist with this effort.
(Another example: when you privatise a government owned company or department, you should pay off its debts and auction it off to the highest bidder. Government officials should not be used to judge a beauty contest of business plans for the new entity. Those plans never work out as advertised anyway.
In an account sense, paying off the debts first doesn't make a difference: a company with 1 dollar more debt on the balance sheet should just sell for an additional dollar more.
But in practice, asset stripping is much easier done with highly leveraged companies, and politically it's hard to keep the government from (implicitly) backing the debt.)
That doesn't seem to be what everyone is mad about though, judging by the comment chain.
>And water utilities aren't run for profit. Or if they are, they're heavily regulated.
I'd be sympathetic to this argument if nestle was the sole provider of water in an area, but they're not. In a hypothetical universe where nestle has a monopoly on bottled water distribution and is abusing it by charging $2/bottle or whatever, the damage would be limited because people could just... use their own bottles. Also, given that bottled water "is a big problem", should we really care that consumers can't get them for cheap?
There is no being objective when the conversation starts in such an intentionally spread artificial obligation to consider. Their claims of ownership are not backed by immutable physical evidence but mutable spoken social norms.
Your skepticism alone is insufficient objection to curtail conversation that may rustle Jimmie’s but otherwise does no quantitative damage; it’s not as if mere conversation magically alters the status quo. Rest assured Nestle will be ok tomorrow.
In any case, that doesn't mean that the liberal notion of private property escapes criticism. Indeed, that is very much the problem. According to the liberal view, radically individualist and absolutist as it is, property is first and foremost private; the common good is conceived of as something resulting from the voluntary cession of private property.
But this is backwards and this notion is not at all the traditional view of property. According to the traditional view, human beings are social animals, not atomized individuals, and this means there there exists a common good. Furthermore, private property exists for the sake of the common good. That private property exist at all is because it enables the common good. It enables human beings to pursue the good; its absence would frustrate it by introducing conflict, an unjust distribution of goods, and so on.
This imposes a limit on private ownership because if private ownership exists for the sake of the common good, then it cannot be the case that the private ownership of something is harmful to the common good. If I bought up all the arable land in the world and in this way prevented the possibility of farming and food production, I would indeed be harming the common good. Water is similar.
But nobody is actually buying up land so nobody can grow food, nor is nestle buying up water so nobody can drink it. In fact they're doing the opposite. They're taking water from the ground and selling it so people can access it. I don't see how this is any different than a farmer growing food from the ground and selling it to people.
Same goes for land use. Agriculture is a main driving factor of mass extinction (yes, we are in the midst of a biosphere mass extinction event) because they ignore the common good, and other land uses bring their share of problems with it.
Mexico city and probably a hundred others are looking at the effects of that.