No one in any city trusts their water supply. Ask any local town residents in America how their water is, and they'll probably complain about it. Even if they say it's good, they'll add nervously, "... at least that's what they say..."
Apparently, the water phenomenon has the inverse quality of the "good driver" phenomenon. Just as most Americans think they are better than average drivers, most Americans also seem to think they have worse than average water.
The solution is simple. Simply build new pipelines which import every city's water supply from another city. Residents will have the choice of using their town's standard water, or paying an additional fee to gain access to the imported "premium" water.
As long as the aggregate fee income exceeds the implementation and maintenance costs of the water exchange pipelines, then this program will generate revenue, which can be used for training kangaroos to go "Boing!" and other public services.-- phundug, Nov 10 2003 Lake Wobegon Effect http://www.wordspy....keWobegoneffect.asp [hippo, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004] This is similar to the "Lake Wobegon" effect (which I read about, yes, in the Economist). In Lake Wobegon all the children are above average. When a big company chooses a new CEO they set up a commitee to choose the new CEO and set a salary. The commitee dos research and looks at what the avarage CEO salary is and then, because they want a better than avarage CEO, set an above-avarage salary. A few cycles of this causes CEO salaries to rise rapidly and keep on rising.See link for a clearer explanation.-- hippo, Nov 10 2003 I think it might be interesting to just import samples upon request to really see which town's water tastes better. I know where I live now has substantially better water than where I lived previously ... but I often wonder what water from London, Melbourne or from the Isle of Man tastes like ...-- Letsbuildafort, Nov 10 2003 Is this not what we are doing already with Perrier and other bottled waters? Depending on the time of year, even Poland Spring can be more expensive than gasoline.-- DrCurry, Nov 10 2003 Well, yeah, but the beauty of *this* idea is that it is self-sufficient. That is, we don't have to worry about the Perrier spring drying up. By exchanging different cities' waters, we actually convert the endothermic energy of pessimism into national profit.-- phundug, Nov 10 2003 random, halfbakery