131–140 of 303 posts
Only 1.7 million people die from unsafe water? That's a lot less than I thought. It's still a awful and fixable issue but not as bad as I thought.
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The first or second chapter of Diffusion of Innovation covers a case where a health organization official tried to convince people to boil their water. No one did it. The concept of "germs" was so foreign to them, and their beliefs about water were already so ingrained. It was a complete failure. It seems obvious to say "if you drink dirty water you will get sick" but you're assuming that people can make so many conn…
People understand just fine what "illness" is. Every culture has a long tradition of medical practice since long before anyone knew what a germ was, and people in many civilizations (this isn't some eurocentric western-world thing) have known for hundreds or thousands of years to keep feces away from their food and water. It seems obvious because it is obvious and has been, in India and practically everywhere else, f…
It's also a cultural thing. Just the other day I was minding my own business on a relatively central street in the European Eastern capital where I live and all of a sudden I see a Roma lady, in her early 50s, reasonably well dressed, coming towards the lightning pole that was on my left side, taking her underwear down and urinating, literally in the middle of the sidewalk, in plain daylight. Before that she had been talking with some acquaintances of her just outside a court-yard, I presume that if she really wanted to she could have asked those people if she could use their toilet.
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This is an area for innovation. Managing change/altering beliefs are extremely difficult. To help iron deficiency in Cambodians, they were encouraged to cook with iron ingots. No one used them. So they shaped the ingot into a lotus flower. Dice. Cultural investigation showed that fish were symbols of luck, health, and happiness. Fish-shaped ingots worked out! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_iron_fish
The Wikipedia article you linked says that the lotus flower shape was rejected as well.
Does dice tend to mean success in this scenario?
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Or you could be intentionally exaggerating the problem by about 100 fold. Perhaps you'd like to show me the stats that indicate a million people (or even how about 2.5% - ~100k people) in the San Francisco metro area have begun shitting in the streets, in their drinking water, etc.
Or we could explore the possibility that the acceptable amount of human feces on the streets of a major city in a first world country is none.
Gotta accept a bit of poop in your life.
The reason toilets don't get used even when available in India is that Indian version of toilets are not very maintainable. First every one needs to get water from somewhere and carry it all the way with them to toilet. If water turns out not to be enough then toilet retains the waste, start becoming smelly and unhygienic. Also because of extensive water use, its unpleasant place to walk around. Toilets with flushing…
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The Wikipedia article you linked says that the lotus flower shape was rejected as well.
I don't know what he meant with "Dice.", but after that he did say that it was fish-shaped ingots that worked out. Does dice tend to mean success in this scenario?
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Better than shitting in people's pots and then loading them up with food and soup.
Did anyone ever do that?
https://www.google.com/amp/pictorial.jezebel.com/some-fun-na...
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From the GDP lift caused by lifting large populations out of disease and poverty. Thought experiment: how fast do you think our scientific knowledge would advance if 90% of the US were living in poverty and spent most of their day simply figuring out how to survive?
Sure, but the only way to lift large numbers of people out of poverty is growth. That's not something you can do by fiat.
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The Wikipedia article you linked says that the lotus flower shape was rejected as well.
I don't know what he meant with "Dice.", but after that he did say that it was fish-shaped ingots that worked out. Does dice tend to mean success in this scenario?
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I wonder how long it took for westerners to stop throwing their "night soil" out the window and start installing and using toilets. What always struck me as strange is that the Romans had and used public toilets, but afterwards Europe went back to shitting in a bucket and throwing it out the window. Puzzling.
Don't mix up "Romans" and "Europeans." A better question is if the residents of Rome and other cities that had public facilities went back to the bucket or if they continued to use and maintain the public toilets. The rest of Europe likely never had public facilities to begin with, and the fall of the Empire might have delayed that technology transfer I suspect.