Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by seer | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

seer

Hmm just shared this with someone who works in this space in India, they got angry.

> It doesn’t work for 3rd world contaminants.

> White people have been making these for years. Doesn’t work

> We need hard TDS removal also

And the ceramic ones apparently are also bad:

> we had one of these for many years while growing up. the ceramic candles got fungus on them

Viruses are the bigger threat I think and just a filter like this will not stop them HepC and the like would be easily transmittable. Not really “safe”, maybe at best “better than nothing”

View on HN

Would would want to chlorinate the resulting water, these filters are only going to remove large particulates.

Clay/sand water filters have been in use for a long time, some from the roman period are still in use.

I do not know whether this is what they meant, but in many places the biggest threat is now industrial pollutants not infectious diseases.

seems like he or she might have an anger and racism problem? "white people have been making these for years?"

PERHAPS instead of being angry at white people, they should look a bit into what they do in their own backyard.

yeah, downvote away :) but it doesnt make it not true, and thats why the downvotes will sting the downvoters so hard

She is leading some orgs in rural India, targeting empowering and helping women and has seen countless examples of Europeans / Americans coming over with noble ideas, making a mess, leaving, and sometimes things getting worse not better in response.

Took her a lot of empathy and understanding on what the situation is like on the ground really, second / third order effects, etc - to get to solutions that _actually_ help people there.

For example how do you do fair lending to people (rural Indian women) who have no bank account, no credit history, almost no financial history at all, and they want to star an enterprise? How do you “bootstrap financial trust?” And with proper and inventive organising she managed to lend to women and proved with data that they are 5x better borrowers than the equivalent male population, but were starved of accessible credit cause banks would not lend to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com