How the Water System Works | Hacker News Reader

How the Water System Works

thenewatlantis.com

67 pointsSCEtoAux25 comments

This article reminds me about how much I hate bottled water, in places where potable water is cheap and plentiful. It’s such an incredibly cynical thing that many American families, again those who have cheap potable water, go through cases of water a week. “A spring in every home” like the article says is a modern miracle. It’s one of the things that if someone was brought here from even just the 1800s they’d be focused on. And yet we’ve managed to build a market primarily focused on recreating scarcity of fresh water.

I don’t know what that says about us. It doesn’t make me feel good though.

If decent water testing kits were widely available...or even water analyzers on the outlets, more people might be more confident drinking tap water. But I suppose there isn't much incentive to push people in that direction.

Bottled water, when tested, does not out perform and has more plastic. It's a placebo basically

If you are India, bottled water is the safe alternative.

I doubt the reasons are that rational. It also correlates with greater consumer spending.

I suspect the opposite. Especially if those testing kits checked for lead, PFAS, and pesticides. Millions of people are blissfully unaware of what's in their water. Many people are selecting bottled water on taste though, not health concerns. I've been to places in the US where the water not only tasted terrible, it smelled terrible.

It’s such a (relatively, I guess) recent phenomenon too. Bottled water really wasn’t even a thing when I was a kid. I think it was around the turn of the millennium when it really was novel and then on its way to ubiquity

> There is so little fresh surface water on Earth that if you collected it all into a ball, it would barely reach across New York City.

I'm not sure what this means. I think we could drop New York City in one of the Great Lakes with little problem... or drop Moscow in Lake Baikal if you prefer.

I think the interpretation is "take the volume of fresh surface water on Earth", then "make that volume into a perfect sphere", and the diameter of that sphere is smaller than NYC.

I don't think that is even true. This may refer to the total volume of potable water. between the great lakes and Antarctica, there is lots of non-salt water out there. Easy google results show 35 million cubic kilometers, which is a rather large sphere.

https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/volume-of-sphere-...

A 35 million cubic kilometer sphere would be roughly 400km across. NYC is big, but not that big.

The volume of the Great Lakes, per Wolfram Alpha [1], makes a sphere ~22 miles in diameter. The Great Lakes is ~20% of the world's surface fresh water.

Your number of 35 million cubic kilometers includes the Antarctic ice sheet, but the definition of "fresh surface water" sounds to me like it intends to exclude the ice sheets from the list.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28volume+of+great+lake...

Water is why life never left Earth. We would already be living on Mars or the moon if there was just a lake or two of water. Water got what plants crave.

https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/scientists-grow-plants-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAqIJZeeXEc

plants also like sun and gravity, and wind

And CO2. They need at least 120ppm. The moon has none. Mars has plenty, but very low atmospheric pressure, and too much wind.

>Although a dozen or so Johnny Appleseed festivals are still celebrated, he is less likely to be found in children’s books today.

Is this true? Grade school was full of Johnny Appleseed facts when I was a kid.

Bottled water tastes fairly crap. But potable/tap water ...even in a part of Australia with good infra (i tested my tap water to have 17tds) tastes like a combination of metal/bleach. It is "hard" in the chemistry sense...and difficult to chug (the body doesnt like large amounts of it too quickly)

Once youve drunk ph adjusted (higher alkalinity) from a 4 cartridge RO water filter...everything tastes like shit.

Funny, I've been to the hotspring in the photo.

Crab Cooker, yeah?

If irrigation consumes 75%, and industry consumes another 20 - how can household usage be at 10%? I feel like these numbers are a little misleading.

Without digging into the validity of the numbers, it doesn't seem so odd to me. Agricultural and industrial uses of anything are on a huge, well, industrial scale, and domestic uses are numerous but relatively small in comparison and people tend to overestimate them because these uses are what most of us more directly and frequently observe.

It's sort of like CO2 production. Many people get encouraged to do their nearly symbolic reduction "contribution", while real CO2 production remains the same or rises since something like 80% of all emissions are generated by just a few dozen corporations globally.

Their point is the numbers don't add up to 100%. And it's 5% over so can't just be a rounding issue.

> 80% of all emissions are generated by just a few dozen corporations globally.

Which ones?

> Many people get encouraged to do their nearly symbolic reduction "contribution"

I think that's a fallacy of the climate change denier crowd, who go from 'it's not happening' to 'humans aren't causing it' to 'there's nothing we can do about it' or 'there is nothing you can do about it'. It's also a fallacy of the right that collective action by the left is powerless - it's an effective fallacy, because many on the left believe it!

What amount of GHG emissions is from consumers?

>What amount of GHG emissions is from consumers?

Why not try some of your own googling too?

As for the companies in question. I was off on the percentage but here:

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

Also, i'm not a "climate change denier" (a loaded, idiotic and ideological phrase to begin with, especially because it often gets used when someone even debates elements of something so complex as climate change) But I do think that one of the petro/gas/plastics corporate world's great PR tricks was to throw the mass media onus on consumer CO2 emissions and help create a massive consumer guilt campaign about individual activity while happily continuing to pollute on a literally industrial scale.

This is not to say that individuals should be wasteful and reckless in their personal environmental habits, but idiocies like mass anti-straw campaigns are partly absurd in comparison to industrial atmospheric contamination and etc.

Yes, much of it ultimately ties into consumer consumption, but much more of the blame should also tie into corporate emissions creation.

I wanted to add that the CO2 footprint was a marketing campaign designed to change the narrative away from the companies that caused the majority of CO2 production, towards the private household.

It was the advertisement agency Ogilvy and Mather who invented the carbon footprint for BP.

Sometimes it's frightening how easily gullible people are.

Great article.

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