depending on how much clean water you get out of it in a single week it might still be worth it at $4 a pop even if it doesn't last much longer.
Your point still stands, but the $4 wouldn’t be paid by end users: it would likely be covered by these organisations, which would then be able to provide aid for a much larger population.
I meant, how sustainable is it to keep depending on foreign aid? Obviously dirty surface water that does not suffice for the whole population is not sustainable. But in the long run, creating new dependencies on aid can't be the solution. Any long-term plan that involves foreign aid is a bad plan.
Not having the knowledge or equipment for drilling water wells is a problem. Getting the knowledge and the equipment there is another. The result is not a dependency—rather, the alleviation of a dependency.
Money is ultimately numbers on a piece of paper. It's inherent worth is equal to that of monopoly money. It takes a lot of effort to keep that from happening.
I like how in this worldview giving money to the capital class of society is fine and dandy, but giving money to labour class is disasterous. Seems suspiciously convenient.
Giving money to the working class means that such luxuries as lettuce double in price.
The rich have been dealing with ridiculous cost of living inflation since 2000. No one particularly cares because fuck em. But if you think that the middle class can survive the same inflation you're in for a rude shock.
20% interest rates are the best thing that can happen to the economy now.
Only if the supply of lettuce doesn't keep up with the increase in the supply of money.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/16/18251646/modern...
But it's heresy to blame the market for being shortsighted, and to suggest any kind of long-term planning is needed.
https://www.businessinsider.com/food-destroyed-farms-amid-co...
This was 2 years and a few months ago, at least the article is.
> wouldn't pay them and store this food
In the article the plant pictured being plowed over is an eggplant, which has a storage life of about a week if stored properly. How exactly can we store this food for a rainy day when it spoils so quickly? Grains can be stored for long durations, but fresh fruit and vegetables cannot be stored to save for much longer than a few weeks.
Then you’re also ignoring the costs. If they won’t be able to sell some crop, why keep dumping time and materials into it? You’re just exacerbating your losses.
Thats exactly the point of my critique that for the individual farmer it doesn't make sence to invest so much effort, but as a society wouldn't it be nice of we didn't waste what we had, we'd have something to fall back on.
Farmers grow food, they don’t process it outside what a combine does. This further increases costs as now you need mass grinders, canners, and pickling machines.
> Thats exactly the point of my critique that for the individual farmer it doesn't make sence to invest so much effort, but as a society wouldn't it be nice of we didn't waste what we had, we'd have something to fall back on.
Yes I get your point, but I’m a realist. Things expire, things can’t store as long. It’s not feasible to have a farmer be the entire, or even a majority of, the food supply chain. You’ve clearly never grown anything at scale.
I hate the constant conflation of rich and wealthy. People who earn a lot of money vs people who own a lot of money. A lot of criticism about inequality, by politicians and economists alike, is about rising wealth inequality, but they only advocate and undertake policies to hurt the higher income class. Why is there no wealth tax, but the govt is funded primarily by income and payroll tax. Why is the federal reserve always worried about falling asset prices. And again here, rising house prices benefited the wealthy, and hurt the high income class, but you didn't differentiate between them either.
Does income tax become negative when I loose money?
Wealth is not income until you realize the gains.
If your car goes up in value you can't sell 1/100th of it to cover the your tax obligations.
Maybe we can tax only productive assets. And you don't need to sell a small proportion, just let the government own that tiny bit
"I didn't think they were gonna tax me" says the guy who <checks HN demographics> is in the top 10% of income by almost any measure and who's FAANG monopoly bucks are exactly why the plumber gets priced out of the Boulder/Austin/Seattle housing market.
I'm perfectly happy for a government food program to give people food. Much less so for giving people money during an incredibly inflationary period. You still end up with people not having food, but also not having gas, rent or health money either.
A- Can I pay my landlord with a box of apples?
B - How does your second point about 'people end up without food if you give them money' work?
Either government or people buy the same food, either there is enough food or isn't.
C - If the government has made it illegal for me to work, why should I eat the loss but banks and landlords shoups never loose money? We are told they are earning their interest and rent because they are taking the risk, but when the time comes, the risk is always passed on to someone else.
That you can't even imagine a government owned integrated vertical food system not run for profit is extremely sad, but completely expected given that you speak English.
However in this case I was making a point about the stuation we were already in when covid hit.
Pretty bold of you to derive his world view from such a short statement of opinion. Just because he didn't like the 'rona stimmy payments doesn't mean he's fine with with pumping asset prices by buying assets.
I and many other people dislike both those things but for me personally they're a drop in the bucket compared to my hatred for the kind of unsound logic that underpins the strawman you built.
They didn't. The inflation we see is from money printed and given mostly to corporations.
Seems like the plan mostly worked to me.
Do you really think giving people more money would make developing countries develop faster? It would just create incentive for companies to keep things as they are, so they can extract that money in exchange for things like bottled water. Those companies would seek to corrupt local governments to do so. That leads to widespread aid redirection and skimming.
However, this does not mean that giving money to people is going to make those people want to develop themselves and their surroundings, unless they are already in the process of doing so.
And what stops the local government from trying to take a big cut?
It's not a perfect solution because it needs a certain level of stability and existing things to boost but it's a fairly robust way of helping people become less reliant on outside aid in the long run.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/we...
Here is a more readable reference "Does it Work?": https://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly#Does_it_wor...
Poverty is hard.
Boiling water for a few minutes is a common way to get rid of biological contamination.
No, it’s not. I’ve been drinking it exclusively for the last ~20 years and have no health issues.
So you're substituting in the lost minerals from other sources. I don't see how that detracts from my (rather weak) argument
Why do you seem to feel so strongly about distilled water?
If you have to compensate from other sources than I don't understand how something is necessarily harmless, without the qualifier that it should only be used in the context of a proper diet (which many/most don't have, particularly the types that might be susceptible to quack wellness claims)
Besides, one anecdote does not a disproven theory make
But it should be obvious that your mineralisation is not on a knife-edge. The tiny amount of minerals lost by drinking distilled water is massively made up in the other stuff you eat and drink.
No, this is not proven. To prove this, we must demonstrate that a person who only drinks distilled water would get sick sooner than the same person who only drinks tap water - in exactly the same conditions.
Clearly this experiment would be very hard to perform. But if someone did perform it, I'd love to hear about it.
This just seems like such a bizarre and indefensible hill to die on.
http://ecoewp.com/images/nutrientschap12.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4223198/
And FFS people, lighten up. The preferred way to correct someone wrong on the internet is gently.
Many of us have had the “citation needed” demand thrown in our face in very rude ways during the COVID vaccine debacle. It’s gonna take some years for it to settle down and be forgotten again.
It isn't and doesn't. Please stop pushing this annoying myth.
Please provide quality references, or even some argument, to support your statement, beyond 'you said so'. 'You said so' is always a useless information-less way to communicate that I would push back on, but this is a health relevant issue, and you are spreading misinformation that is dangerous. Provide some quality references if you're right, but you're not.
>if you're right, but you're not
where is your evidence?
This is a particularly annoying myth. When the water passes through the gut it picks up plenty of mineralisation, as well as other gunge.
On ships, vacuum vapor distillation is quite common for drinking water production. This is because the equipment is used to generate boiler feed water, which must be high quality distillate. Acquiring additional water-making equipment is redundant.
Nutritional content can be limited and lacking diversity. Many minerals in the body are of very low concentration, they are nevertheless, necessary. Osmosis will delpete the body of these over time. The health effects of this would require a longterm study for chronic symptoms to appear. I have never seen any study of this nature. I have seen mariners after several months at sea with no other water source and, yes anecdotally, they look like hell. I will not drink distilled water for any length of time, but a few weeks would never amount to anything.
So in your day to day life, sure, you have a healthy, diverse, first-world diet and have no ill-effect from drinking distilled water. You can 'live' drinking only Coke. Appalling, certainly, but doable. In terms of cost and energy expense, distilled water is likely higher than Coke to produce, though that is an aside.
You don't want water picking up minerals from your body .. you want it DEPOSITING minerals into your body. That's the way we evolved obtaining minerals from water from streams where the water runs over rocks to mineralise.
Aside from the ones that will boil together with water are those that will boil off before the water (methanol is the other common example that comes in practice). If you have any that boil off before water you have to know at what point it's safe to start condensing the vapour and storing it.
My dude, it's the first words in the article.
“If it does prove durable, it could be a relatively cheap way to get freshwater to people in need of it.”
The engineers are unsure of how long it will last and if it’s actually cost effective, yet there’s many HN comments here that seem to suggest they know better. Where are you getting your information that the rest of us are not privy to?
I'd also think that the GDP doesn't factor in international aid, so 25$ per year for the poorest could be still better than the current alternative (no idea on what that is, though).
Can't salt accomulation be flushed away?
I think for example reverse osmosis machine also have to constantly flush filtration debris away from the main membrane to maintain efficiency.
In indistrial usage, a lot of the salt is removed before hitting RO filter.
That said, it exists right now and is well tested.