As more of the world thirsts, luxury water becoming fashionable among the elite | Hacker News Reader

As more of the world thirsts, luxury water becoming fashionable among the elite

apnews.com

Coca-cola has the contract for the United terminal at LAX (and maybe the rest?), so all water sold at all retailers in the terminal need to be Dasani, Smart Water, or Evian.

But as part of a good works initiative, they also successfully lobbied to ban selling plastic water bottles at LAX to (ostensibly) reduce plastic waste. So while soda bottles are excluded from the ban and are still sold in plastic, you can only buy water there in glass bottles that raise the perceived value of the water and are less offensive when overpriced.

As a result of their efforts:

1. It's cheaper to buy coffee, tea, or soda at LAX than it is to buy water itself.

2. Customers have the luxury of choosing the brand of water that best represents their class image: $5 Dasani, $7 Smart Water, or $9 Evian

You can buy glass bottles after security? I got a screw driver taken from me by tsa... You can't even get a glass bottle at a stadium lol

Some domestic 'first class', actually business class, provides glass. It breaks when dropped.

> 1. It's cheaper to buy coffee, tea, or soda at LAX than it is to buy water itself.

It's funny how the world evolves: i always thougt at "Idiocracy" [1] as a work of fiction.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

Even worse than Idiocracy, instead of handjob you get a pat down. The future is now.

To make a serious comment, not to be snarky, I don't think people realize that as climate change constrains resources economics has replaced war. Specifically the technology and organizational reach of private corporations and their capability to change/cripple/impede/boost actors was previously only available to governments.

In most sectors there is no "market" just vaguely aligned or unaligned corporations, and a huge number of people like on this site are tied up in a worldview that no longer reflects reality. In markets where there is still competition, you're looking at an endangered species.

I don't know how this gets fixed, as I don't think we ready to even accept that we will be in a hundred little wars all our lives, and definitely not ready to fight them.

Well, it replaces it for now, at this scale.

When there's a billion displaced humans level, well, there will be blood.

The two big dangers of global warming aren't direct weather effects like fire, hurricane, or even heat waves.

It will be starvation from disrupted food supply chains, and war.

The corporate/government divide is not very useful analytically. Elites use wealth through large scale organizations to hide actors and intent. Government institutions and privately incorporated corporations are just two sets of kit with different uses.

The ebbs and flows of power in society operate on scales of decades and centuries. Individual decisions can't change that, and there's nothing special about our time. It's just some phase we have been through before.

I remember while I was in Nepal, reading a story in the newspaper about how the Prime Minister was caught sneaking off to China for $100 bottles of spring water that was supposed to cure his cancer. This in a country where there is no safe drinking water from taps, even in the capital! And the kicker? The PM was from the communist party!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com