Wasting Water

Can someone please explain something to me? Why do people always tell you not to waste water? When you pour water down the sink, it goes through the sewage system, gets filtered a little bit, and then either sucked back into the water system or dumped into a lake or stream. That water can then be filtered and used as potable water, or it will evaporate and become rain. Either way, the water does not escape the system. The water is not destroyed so that we need to find new sources of fresh water. Am I missing something? It seems we're wasting the electricity of the processing plant, not the water itself.

Also, potable is a stupid word. It just means drinkable. Why don't people just say drinkable! (I see the irony in using potable above and then bitching about it here. I was using it above to prove this point!)

Gas Prices

I drive a Toyota Prius. I am not a hippie, though. I care about the environment, but not to any extreme. My purpose for having a Prius is not to save money, either. Even at current high gas prices, it would take me years before I made up the additional price for the hybrid system on gas savings. Perhaps I will delve into my reasons for purchasing my Prius in a later post. For now, I'd like to discuss gas prices.

Paying for gas sucks. There no way around that. And paying more for gas sucks more. We do, however, need to spend some time looking at how much other Western countries are paying for gas and why. In Europe, the average cost per gallon of gas is more than double what we pay here. Why is that, you might ask? A lot has to do with taxes. In Europe, the cost of gas is made up of as much as 60% - 75% taxes. For this 60%+ tax, the Europeans enjoy one of the best transportations systems in the world. Good quality road, trains, busses, trolleys, funiculars, etc.

Now, why should we, as Americans, pay more for gas? The answer to this has two important components:

1) Using too much gas is wasteful. No matter what some people may say, we have a limited supply of oil. How much is that? No one really knows. We live in a society that requires the use of gas. I'm not saying that everyone should drive a hybrid, or everyone should walk to work (I surely don't), but I'm saying that people should start to make an effort. If you are a single, twenty-something business-person, you DO NOT need a Hummer or Denali or Escalade. That's just BEING WASTEFUL. I know you think it makes you look cool, but would you throw all your garbage out the window and shit in the street if that was cool? If everyone made the slightest effort, we could significantly reduce our dependence on oil (be it either foreign or domestic). Money is a huge motivator of people and if gas prices increase, hopefully the waste associated with the use of these vehicles will decrease. In Europe, with their $7+/gallon price, people walk more, use more public transportation, and drive smaller cars.

2) Taxes. Most state, including my home State of Texas, charge tax on gas on a cents per gallon basis. This could very well be the worst idea. Allow me to explain. By setting a price per gallon, instead of a percentage of gas price, we are reducing the value of the tax that is collected every year. Because of the system in place now, congress would have to pass a tax increase every year to keep up with inflation. That is clearly not going to happen. The effect of this system is to cause the government to use other taxes (sales/property/income/etc) to subsidies what gas tax should be paying for (road improvements, road construction, public transportation). So, in effect, to get the same bang for each tax buck, the government is needing to either raise taxes in another area or raise the national debt.
For more information on gas taxes per state, check THIS out.

Human Weakness

I've been reading a little bit lately on studies that have been done to show how weak we all are as humans. It's something I've been interested in since I went on the March of the Living in 1998. Over the last few days, I've stumbled upon some websites which have made me revisit this belief. First, some background....

Anyone who has ever studied about Nazi Germany inevitably comes to the question: "How could so many people let something like the Holocaust happen?" It is a very interesting and powerful question. Millions of people lived in Germany during and before the war. It is impossible to believe that regular people did not know what was going on in the camps. It has been reported that the smell coming from the camps could be detected for miles. So, assuming that people knew (because they must have), why did so many people go along with Hitler? There are definitely cases of Germans helping Jews escape or hide from the Nazis (Schindler's List, Anne Frank, etc.), but most of the German population went along or allowed these acts to occur. There are also acts that are less horrific but also very disturbing, like book burning, which the Nazi got people to do.

This brings me to two articles that I've recently read. One concerns a high school teacher who was asked the very question I posed above. To answer the question, he started an experiment with the class to demonstrate how easy is can be to become brainwashed. The experiment was called the Third Wave. The other article is about the Stanford Prison Project. This was an experiment in the 1970's to understand the dynamics of prisoners and guards. The website also tries to explain the correlation between those experiments and the Iraqi prison abuse scandal.

These two studies illustrate a very strong and scary point about the human mind. Most people... Almost all people... Would say that they would never go along with a group or be led like that, but it's easy to see from history how easily a person can be swayed. It is probably too harsh to say that people are inherently evil, but it does seem that we are all weaker than we think we are.

I'll probably add to this point later, but this is a good start...