Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 60 posts

Re: A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt

#51

Post by JetSpiegel »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #50
JetSpiegel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evernote has acquired Readable! Hmmm, let's check Firebug's Net tab http://readable.tastefulwords.com/log.js?rand=0.8736547357568928&url=http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Finformation-technology%2F2014%2F10%2Fborked-belkin-routers-leave-many-unable-to-get-online%2F&options=%5B%5B%3Dtf%3A%20quote(Palatino%20Linotype)%2C%20Palatino%2C%20quote(Book%20Antigua)%2C%20Georgia%2C%20serif%5D%5D%5B%5B%3Dtfm%3A%20quote(Courier%20Ne…

Good stuff on firebug research. I am however, not sure how switching between color modes helps with messy layout.

It doesn't, but if you uncheck "Let pages override this settings", all the backgrounds will be the same and the effect is quite similar.

Re: A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt

#52

Post by belorn »

cdr wrote: post #14
teddyh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, in the actual developed world, nobody buys bottled water because the tap water is perfectly indistinguishable from the bottled stuff, which the stores only keep for tourists.

My tap water (from a well) is highly sulfuric. The quality and taste of tap water varies greatly from location to location, "developed world" or not. There are all sorts of good reasons to buy bottled water.

For all the following discussion here, I find it surprising that no one is asking why the water is tasting of sulfuric or chlorine.

Some places has higher chlorine that others. In cities with old water pipes, they sometimes choose to increase the amount of chlorine in the water in order to keep the amount of bacteria down. They sometimes also do this in a temporarily basis, when test shows increase amounts of some harmful bacteria.

Water that taste chlorine is not however a fact of nature. Its fixable, given cities are willing to replace old pipes with modern ones.

Re: A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt

#54

Post by A_COMPUTER »

whyenot wrote: post #32
teddyh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, in the actual developed world, nobody buys bottled water because the tap water is perfectly indistinguishable from the bottled stuff, which the stores only keep for tourists.

Ok, I'm curious. What geographic locations do you consider the "developed world"? People in Europe, Canada and the US all tend to drink large amounts of bottled water.

That has almost nothing to do with the quality of the tap water. At least in the USA, I don't remember exactly when it happened, but there was a time when individual bottled waters basically didn't exist. Well, it existed, but there wasn't walls of the stuff at every grocery and convenience store.

Re: A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt

#55

Post by teddyh »

A_COMPUTER wrote: post #54
whyenot wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'm curious. What geographic locations do you consider the "developed world"? People in Europe, Canada and the US all tend to drink large amounts of bottled water.

That has almost nothing to do with the quality of the tap water. At least in the USA, I don't remember exactly when it happened, but there was a time when individual bottled waters basically didn't exist. Well, it existed, but there wasn't walls of the stuff at every grocery and convenience store.

Before that, people probably drank beer, spirits, or soda. But when it became more well known that these things are not healthy, people began to desire plain water instead, and everybody were used to the idea of buying drinks at the store, so bottled plain water appeared.

Re: A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt

#56

Post by teddyh »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #33
teddyh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your tap water is unusable, you do not live in a civilized society with modern infrastructure.

That infrastructure is called bottled water delivery.

If it can be shown that it makes more economic sense for a society as a whole to ship bottled water to its citizens instead of having a water supply network for potable, drinkable water, then sure, why not.

Re: A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt

#57

Post by teddyh »

whyenot wrote: post #32
teddyh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, in the actual developed world, nobody buys bottled water because the tap water is perfectly indistinguishable from the bottled stuff, which the stores only keep for tourists.

Ok, I'm curious. What geographic locations do you consider the "developed world"? People in Europe, Canada and the US all tend to drink large amounts of bottled water.

My original comment suffered from an excess of snark and exaggeration.

My point was more this: If your tap water is not as clean as the bottled stuff, this is not a fact of life and you don’t just have to live with it. Many people do have it better than that, and you could, too, if your infrastructure (water supply network) was up to it. This should maybe be on your mind the next time you consider how your society should spend its resources.

Re: A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt

#58

Post by teddyh »

cowpewter wrote: post #47
teddyh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who can taste a difference in tap versus bottled water perhaps do not live in as developed a society as they would like to believe. I certainly have never prefered bottled water over tap. There might be a difference if you made a blind study, but I have never needed to care that much, and I probably couldn’t tell the difference if you gave me a blind test. People around me also seem not to use bottled water in…

My parents have a well, I live 2 hours away in a city with municipal water. My parents' tap water contains enough iron and sulfur to taste like diluted blood, while my tap water tastes like drinking from a swimming pool. But I do not consider either myself or my parents to be living in an undeveloped society (Florida has its issues but it's not THAT bad). A tap filter (of the Brita/Pur/whatever variety) makes both wa…

> I do not consider either myself or my parents to be living in an undeveloped society

I did not say you were undeveloped. I said that your society was perhaps not as developed as you would like to believe. People have a tendency to believe (unless presented with daily reminders) that they are the apex of their development, the best their society can produce. I wanted to remind you that, at least in terms of your water supply network, you can certainly do better.

Re: A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt

#59

Post by jessaustin »

ramgorur wrote: post #53
jessaustin wrote: post #4

One year, we couldn’t buy bottled water for months, because the plant that produced the water somehow caught fire. Ouch. A way to know one lives in the developing world.

please come and visit michigan.

Please confirm, is bottled water unavailable for months at a time in this benighted place? What do they do about Wal-Mart, which claims to be able to supply bottled water at all times in 118 different locations in a place they're calling "michigan"?

Re: A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt

#60

Post by akx »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #31
DanBC wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Readability? https://www.readability.com/

I would rather have something local, not send a list of everything I read to some server somewhere.

Readability Redux (https://github.com/MHordecki/readability-redux) is local. It uses the old Readability library that Readability used before it turend into an online service.
Post reply on HN