DailyDirt: Don't Drink The Water

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Water is abundant in most places, and it's generally free -- except for folks who only drink bottled water. So people tend to take water for granted, but there are plenty of reasons to conserve water. Here are just a few reminders.

• About 60% of people (surveyed by the WateReuse Research Foundation) don't want to drink water that has ever had direct contact with sewage. The other 40% are wastewater engineers. [url]
• Manufacturing plants are apparently releasing lots of pharmaceuticals into wastewater streams. And wastewater processing facilities aren't catching the drugs before releasing them into rivers... [url]
• Oklahoma is responding to its ongoing drought after seeing more than its fair share of triple digit temperatures. Unfortunately, some predictions say this "exceptional drought" could last a bit longer, maybe until autumn. [url]
• To discover more related links on stuff we eat or drink, check out what's brewing on StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: dirty, drought, pharmaceuticals, wastewater, water

'Dirty' City Decides It's Cheaper To Clean Up Google Rankings Than Clean Up

from the taxpayer-seo dept

Bas points us to the news that a city in Russia, Chelyabinsk, which is ranked in the "top 10" list of "dirtiest cities" by the government, has apparently decided that the best way to spend taxpayer money isn't necessarily to make the city any cleaner, but to clean up their Google and Yandex rankings. They've put out for bid a search engine optimization contract, in which they want the top 150 results on the city's name to show "positive or neutral opinions of the ecology of Chelyabinsk and the Chelyabinsk region." At most only 20% should show "negative reports about the region's environment." Chelyabinsk was apparently near a nuclear waste facility explosion in 1957, which the Soviet government covered up for over 30 years. The city is also hoping that "search queries related to that incident," will have much cleaner results. I'm sure plenty of cities do some SEO activities these days, but there does still seem to be something quite questionable about focusing on cleaning up your search rankings, rather than cleaning up the actual city.

Filed Under: chelyabinsk, cities, dirty, russia, seo