Silicon Valley elites spending $60 for less than 3 gallons of unfiltered water | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley elites spending $60 for less than 3 gallons of unfiltered water

businessinsider.de

56 pointsthg57 comments

In case you missed the discussion of the source NYT article 3 days ago:

Unfiltered Fervor: The Rush to Get Off the Water Grid | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16040540

>dankohn1: Yes, the founder of Juicero has re-emerged: After his juicing company, Juicero, collapsed in September, he went on a 10-day cleanse, drinking nothing but Live Water. “I haven’t tasted tap water in a long time,” he said.... “You have to be agile and tactile, and be available to experiment,” he said. “Literally, you have to carry bottles of water through the dark.”

You have to admit, it’s a brilliant business strategy. First you rip them off with all natural raw water, then you rip them off with all natural dysentery treatments, then the few who are really fools can probably be ripped off again for an all natural raw wood pine box (coffin).

I know it sounds ridiculous, but let's play devil's advocate for a moment: We've evolved drinking "dirty" water until very recent history. It might be that there are some unknown negative effects that come from drinking filtered/purified water. Or some unknown positive health effects of drinking unfiltered water.

It's slowly coming out that modern medicine occasionally gets things wrong and we have to correct our intuitions (sugars, fats, sun exposure), but if you think from a simple evolutionary perspective, these things often make a lot of sense.

I'm not drinking unfiltered water, but there's some potential rationale behind it.

We evolved dying of dystentery in our very recent history too.

You have to account for the fact that before modern filtration civilizations developed other ways to make water safe to drink, like brewing beer and boiling water for tea.

unfiltered water => worms, bacteria, death especially if you're in the warmer zone of the Earth.

> I'm not drinking unfiltered water, but there's some potential rationale behind it.

There's also a potential basis for that increasing trend-line for life expectancy... well, up until the last two years, anyway. :o)

The most hilarious part about the "unfiltered water" fad, to me, is that it probably has a bunch of hipsters drinking industrial run-off and many of the same chemicals they rally against.

That's not to say I disagree with them about industry destroying water supplies or poisoning us with various poorly-understood chemicals. It's just the lack of self awareness that I find amusing.

> industry destroying water supplies or poisoning us with various poorly-understood chemicals

iodine? chloride? Which one of those is not well understood? :)

I thought it would be pretty obvious that I wasn't talking about either of those. The dead give-away should have been the "poorly-understood" part.

Yup. And I don't for a second buy that this "raw water" isn't in reality some industrial-grade tap water or sourced from whatever lake they could get access to cheaply.

Once there's a number of reproducible, peer reviewed, studies then maybe it's time to have this discussion.

Until then, we have pretty good real-time evidence that drinking dirty water is one of the highest causes of mortality in the world.

> Once there's a number of reproducible, peer reviewed, studies then maybe it's time to have this discussion.

That's a chicken-and-egg problem. Who is going to start doing peer-reviewed studies until someone doubts the status quo?

This is the same argument against vaccines.

And you can't win that argument in the face of hard facts.

Poorer countries don't have the luxury to drink filtered water. And you know how many of those populations die of diseases from such 'holy spring water'.

To reinforce the point made by 'katrielalex - we drink purified water not because it's a fad, but because we know - and this is where medicine is not wrong - that things in dirty water cause illness and death. To outweigh that, our medicine would have to miss some serious health risks of filtered water - big enough that we would surely notice them by now.

In general, I feel that a lot of sympathy for those "natural" things stem from not bothering to put a numeric value on actual risks and benefits involved. Getting a 0.01% risk of cancer from an "unnatural" habit beats the hell out of getting 10% risk of death from a disease that this habit prevents.

Another point is that these days, we pollute the environment much more than in the past; "raw water" of today is often full of industrial waste products, so in a way our own civilization forces us to filter it.

So the headline here had me focus on something that annoyed me. Oh and I should say, I'm neither Silicon Valley based or elite or interested in water beyond the normal scope of human survival :P

The implication "Silicon Valley elites" and that wonderful play in to confirmation bias that they're all out of touch, cash flushed weirdos, like that's just something people kind of want to believe especially in comment sections with article like these. And ok so I'm not setting out to disprove this, but this article and the one it links doesn't do the opposite either.

It makes some really spurious claims.

1. I'm going to ignore the price thing here, because it seems to be heavily reliant on one store just arbitrarily jacking up the price.

2. Silicon valley elites = The Juicero guy. And pretty much only the Juicero guy. He's the only one named and the only one that talks about it to anyone. There is a landscaper from Emeryville, but I'm going to claim that "elite" is probably not something they're going for.

3. "Flying off the shelves" The atribution for this is one store in San Deigo that opened three years ago. It's heavily dependent on these two paragraphs

"And Liquid Eden, a water store that opened in San Diego three years ago, offers a variety of options, including fluoride-free, chlorine-free and a “mineral electrolyte alkaline” drinking water that goes for $2.50 a gallon.

Trisha Kuhlmey, the owner, said the shop sells about 900 gallons of water a day, and sales have doubled every year as the “water consciousness movement” grows."

4. You can find "movements" for anything. Both articles talk about "raw" water movement like its this huge thing that is sweeping the bay area and will consume you all.

So I'm not saying this is definitely wrong, but it just looks like that business insider took one article of little value and several barely linked claims to come up with the title of

"Silicon Valley elites are spending $60 for less than 3 gallons of dangerous, unfiltered water — and it's flying off the shelves"

I mean the concept is stupid, but the articles talking about it doesn't feel like its doing much better.

>"It stays most fresh within one lunar cycle of delivery," Singh said.

haha wow. That sentence says it all.

I have to agree that it's some sort of good (alternative) marketing

Because the pure, natural minerals i want in my water include arsenic, and the pure natural "living" water i want includes Giardia lamblia...

Some people will always find something to be fussy about.

Especially so in SV where you have neurotic programmers that can't find any more problems to solve.

The article is summarized by the its title and the concluding sentence:

"Silicon Valley elites are spending $60 for less than 3 gallons of dangerous, unfiltered water — and it's flying off the shelves"

...

"You can't stop consenting adults from being stupid," Marler said. "But we should at least try."

How did this diet trend start?

The full glass jug is $60; refills are $15. That's expensive, but probably in line with what people are willing to pay for smaller plastic bottles of water.

"You can't stop consenting adults from being stupid," Marler said. "But we should at least try."

I spent nearly all my life drinking raw water, and my parents before me, also the entire population of the village I'm born, and no one ever got any disaese like collera or epatite, we use to drink tap water from the village fountain, or go to the mountain to take the tap water from there (because it taste better). I'm. Not saying raw water is safe, but some sources of raw water are proved safe. And pay for raw water is definitely stupid, we drink it because is free

Water from a mountain spring or creek tends to be clean enough to drink. I personally never treat the water if I am in the mountains and far from civilization (live in Colorado) even though there is still a chance I could get sick. However I will always treat that same water with iodine if it is sitting in a lake/pond or close to civilization because the likelihood of disease goes up significantly.

So, we already have organic soap, probably also toothpaste, raw milk is a thing, as is bottled mountain air.

What about raw clothes? Growing 3-4 sheeps, getting the fur, and making some clothes with medieval technology. But because we're not savages, let's leave the leather products out.

Throw in some natural colorants and "no chemicals" anywhere.

I bet you could sell this stuff for some real money.

> bottled mountain air

I had to look that one up, but yes, it is real. This is also artisanal air, made with love: "It's a long and tedious process, you know. We sit in Banff for about 10 hours capturing the air and then after that we bring it back and we have to fill it into these bottles individually."

-- http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-company-bottli...

Also seen on Most Expensivest Shit with 2 chainz

Who could have known that Spaceballs would predict the future so accurately?

If they are drinking pure water from the well or spring, provided it was taken in pristine environment, it should be better then regular "clean" water. That is what concept of "mineral water" is, you get water directly from the ground, usually with some health benefits.

Sometimes you get 'mineral water' packaged from retailer, but if you go to place where it originates, you can get it from the well. Microelements you get in that water is something you will not ever get in regular water and it is good for your body and brains, within reason. Drinking it exclusively will not be good for your kidneys I guess, but it is not intended for that.

I wish reportes would not hype this as much and explain if there is genuine issue in how this water is getting collected, there might be genuine issues, but it is hard to understand where the problem is and this is not the first article I read.

The only water available to me is well water and I do prefer to fill up several Aquatainers at a local spring, but it's just water to me.

There are seasons where the springs around me appear to "flunk" the drinking standards compared to treated, but not to a level where there's levels of ecoli, giardia, etc. Check for standing water around the site, research tests or get it tested yourself, spring water is fine, but obviously I wouldn't recommend anyone who's elderly or vulnerable to disease to drink from any random "spring."

It's quite puzzling to see the rich paying out the ass for something those without municipal water, and the poor, have ritualized and get for free. I'm sure there's public access and tested springs only a quick drive from San Jose, so it is amusing.

> Rainbow Grocery was sold out of its Fountain of Truth spring water

Although it's currently the zeitgeist to mock "Silicon Valley elites" at every opportunity, Rainbow Grocery in SF is cut from the same cloth as Berkeley Bowl in the East Bay, i.e. serving the wealthy hippies that have lived in Berkeley (and to a lesser extent the rest of the Bay) for many decades. Some of those made their money from tech in SV, many did not.

While I'm sure the author had a fit of ecstasy when they found that the Jucero CEO was a fan of this product, this really has little to do with "Silicon Valley elites"; this is the same extreme hippie contingent that oppose vaccination (the hint is in the product name: "Fountain of Truth" is clearly marketed at spritualists not technologists).

"Silicon Valley idiots spending $60 for less than 3 gallons of unfiltered water" - fixed

Is the 60$ for a single guy trekking to a spring and filling these manually, and carrying them back? Seems outrageous.

Nestle pays 2$ per million litres of water to extract.

I might aswell get a friend in the interior to goto a stream and start shipping mason jars of water lol.

I am in BC, we drink tap. We bottle our tap water for on the go. Alot of people prefer bottled water.

Surprisingly alot of people prefer Costco Kirkland bottled water over other name brand crap like Fasano, nestle etc.

I wonder if there's a market for a company that analyzes the mineral makeup of different cities'/regions' tap water, and sells an on-faucet water softener/filter that can be configured with different "mineral pods" to match the water taste of your preferred region.

New Yorker living in Texas? Don't worry, you can still get that great NY Watershed taste coming right from your tap!

> People — including failed startup Juicero's cofounder Doug Evans — are gathering gallons of untreated water from natural springs, venturing out onto private property by night to get the water.

I am wondering, are there any rules/regulations for drawing water from a natural resource and selling it commercially? Because if there aren't any, wont that that lead to exploitation.

Ask Nestlé.

Water rights are a pretty settled and old bit of law in the western US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_law_in_the_United_States

I agree that this new "product" is complete BS - but I don't and will not hesitate to drink from naturally occurring springs.

It's Spring Water! believe it or not people around the world with access to Spring Water have been drinking for years.

Canada has an incredible density of springs. What's stupid is how it's turning into a fad. haha My dad get a kick out of this.

Natural selection at work? ;)

Wow. I predict a coming rash of beaver fever. I've drunk out of a few mountain streams from time to time, but I wouldn't make a habit of it.

Wait...does this mean people would pay a lot for the unfiltered, untreated water that comes out of my well?

I am not a doctor, but wouldn't drinking unfiltered water stress your kidneys?

New York City tap water was unfiltered until recently, so I'd guess if it was a problem for kidneys we'd have heard about it.

Note that I said unfiltered, not untreated. It was treated with ultraviolet, chlorine, fluoride, orthophosphate (inhibits lead contamination from pipes) and sodium hydroxide (reduces acidity).

Isn’t raw water basically rainwater?

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