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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

This is an absurd strawman. Effectively all of modern history had no modern medicine, though that doesn't mean there weren't treatments and remedies for ailments. Drinking rain water is a pretty damn good alternative to drinking city water if you have the option, remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it. Welfare should never be a goal, its a sign that something is wrong when a subset of the population is completely unable to make ends meet for the basics of life. And though the black plague was particularly bad, humans survived it and we weren't being decimated by fever every year.

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> remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it

Is there any place in the developed world that treats mixing sewage into your water source as a viable strategy of providing municipal water?

Yes, there have been standards for years already. It was proven in s US city some time ago when it faced a bad drought.

Las Vegas is a 100% closed loop system. All grey water is recycled back into Lake Mead fur reuse.

Modern sewage treatment is a modern miracle.

It is a modern miracle, though the miracle is in part that we can now drink poop water.

That’s not how city water works.

Correct me where I was wrong then My understanding is that sewage, including toilet waste, goes through the sewer system to a treatment facility, and is cleaned as best they can including using amounts to bleach as part of the process.

That obviously isn't a complete detail of how it works, but what is inaccurate?

In the vast majority of developed nation cities, drinking water comes from reservoirs and goes through whatever treatment is required to make it potable.

Anything that goes down the drain is then treated at a sewage treatment facility and is then dumped into a river/ocean/whatever. Sometimes it’s used for toilet water in large facilities like airports and they put warnings all over everything that it’s not potable because it came from sewage.

There are a few cities with cutting edge “piss to table” technology, but it’s not the norm. The closest you get normally is when an upriver city discharges into a river used downstream.

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