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The drinking fountain button

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Re: The drinking fountain button

#31

Post by piskov »

lambdaxyzw wrote: post #23
piskov wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not fountains but glorified watercoolers with sparkling water and, sometimes, lemonade. Most of the time they were not free although very cheap: 1 copeck. These survived up to the 1995, several years after the fall. And yes, most glasses have never been stolen. Shared glasses were quite safe because every machine had special button to clean the glass with pressurized technical water (several calibrated jets…

>It’s only after the fall of the Soviet Union that shit with plastic poured into. As well with the fall of recycling, morals, etc. Soviet Union was green not because of morals, but because it was poor and couldn't afford single use packages. I remember when Nutella entered my country, the empty Nutella jars were washed, kept and used as glasses for drinking - because buying new glasses was hard or expensive. >And yes…

Single-use packaging is just waste. Poor or not is irrelevant.

That’s why it so ironic sometimes to see west slowly turning into soviet union :-)

From recycling to cancel culture, just with 100 years of delay

Re: The drinking fountain button

#32

Post by weinzierl »

"Who among us hasn’t walked up to a drinking fountain, expecting a bubbling stream of life-giving water, only to experience the crushing disappointment of a measly trickle after smashing in that button?"

That'd be me. I traveled quite a bit all over the world and these seem to be a pretty American thing.

It's also a bit strange because for the countries that have them it is generally not recommended to drink tap water and for the few countries where tap water is considered safe to drink they are virtually non-existent.

Re: The drinking fountain button

#33

Post by piskov »

Rychard wrote: post #30
piskov wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t talking about industrial but your usual Ivan. Just think about how many garbage is produced by a family every day. As for your article, I don’t have access to the PDF, so I cannot verify it. The place I grew up sometimes I could see Elbrus even though it is almost 300 km away. That’s for air pollution. > in the early 1990s the air pollution became an issue of great public attention This as well may be the co…

Due to the curvature of the earth, it's unlikely you were able to see anything 300km away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_distance_observations#Gro...

You do understand that Elbrus is almost 6 km high? :-)

Re: The drinking fountain button

#34

Post by lupire »

Rychard wrote: post #30
piskov wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t talking about industrial but your usual Ivan. Just think about how many garbage is produced by a family every day. As for your article, I don’t have access to the PDF, so I cannot verify it. The place I grew up sometimes I could see Elbrus even though it is almost 300 km away. That’s for air pollution. > in the early 1990s the air pollution became an issue of great public attention This as well may be the co…

Due to the curvature of the earth, it's unlikely you were able to see anything 300km away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_distance_observations#Gro...

The article reports several photographs of over 400km distance

Re: The drinking fountain button

#35

Post by lupire »

sgarland wrote: post #27
2024throwaway wrote: post #3

The headline is click bait, nothing about it is misunderstood. I generally enjoy esoterica, but can’t believe I just read a whole article that amounts to “those buttons are buttons”.

They’re not, though. They’re button-activated valves with a fairly complicated flow path, integrated screen, extremely high lifecycle, and pressure regulation to deal with a wide range (one spec I saw said 30-90 psig) of water pressure, all while being contained in a single cartridge for easy replacement. The details of everyday items are fascinating.

The title is garbage, but the article is good and the mechanism of the water fountain is amazing.

Re: The drinking fountain button

#36

Post by tokai »

piskov wrote: post #28
tokai wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The former Soviet Union was the world's second largest producer of harmful emissions." Some paradise. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0959378094...

Second account to post this link: say what you will about the bots and — god forbid — someone saying something good about soviet union :-)

>someone saying something good about soviet union

Has nothing to do with it. You simply lied. Would have called you out no matter the subject.

Re: The drinking fountain button

#38

Post by sdwr »

2024throwaway wrote: post #3

The headline is click bait, nothing about it is misunderstood. I generally enjoy esoterica, but can’t believe I just read a whole article that amounts to “those buttons are buttons”.

While we're complaining, does anyone else think the button mechanism is too complicated? That diagram has 50 annotations, which seems like too many for a button.

I know nothing about fabrication or physical engineering, but surely it can't be that hard to make it simpler, like a safety pin or a .

Not a joke. Thanks.

Re: The drinking fountain button

#39

Post by ajuc »

piskov wrote: post #11
082349872349872 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It amazes me that 1960s Moscow had drinking fountains with shared glasses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F68bbzOOOdY&t=1850s What were they thinking?

These are not fountains but glorified watercoolers with sparkling water and, sometimes, lemonade. Most of the time they were not free although very cheap: 1 copeck. These survived up to the 1995, several years after the fall. And yes, most glasses have never been stolen. Shared glasses were quite safe because every machine had special button to clean the glass with pressurized technical water (several calibrated jets…

> USSR has been eco/green paradise

USSR was poor as fuck therefore is saved money on packaging whenever it could. It was occasionally ecologically benefitial as well, but to go from that to "eco/green paradise" is absurd.

USSR was polluting like crazy, significanly more than more developed economies. It treated its citizens as replacable cogs, to the point that after Chernobyl catastrophe it was Sweden not USSR that informed people there was, in fact, a catastrophe.

USSR was denying any problems with asbestos, calling it "asbestos hysteria" of the west. Russia is still doing it to some degree, and russian asbestos mines are causing significant health problems to the people living there. About 60 000 of them.

Soviet heavy industry was ignoring any health, safety and ecology concerns in the name of cost-saving. The reason most "commieblocks" are gray is the air pollution from all that industry and 19th century tech heating with unfiltered coal-fired powerplants.

USSR accidently destroyed Aral Sea. As in - it's no longer there. That's some amazing ecologic paradise.

The only reason Russia isn't the most polluted country in the world is that it's the biggest country in the world by area and very sparsely populated. There's a lot of it to devastate.

Re: The drinking fountain button

#40

Post by piskov »

lambdaxyzw wrote: post #23
piskov wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not fountains but glorified watercoolers with sparkling water and, sometimes, lemonade. Most of the time they were not free although very cheap: 1 copeck. These survived up to the 1995, several years after the fall. And yes, most glasses have never been stolen. Shared glasses were quite safe because every machine had special button to clean the glass with pressurized technical water (several calibrated jets…

>It’s only after the fall of the Soviet Union that shit with plastic poured into. As well with the fall of recycling, morals, etc. Soviet Union was green not because of morals, but because it was poor and couldn't afford single use packages. I remember when Nutella entered my country, the empty Nutella jars were washed, kept and used as glasses for drinking - because buying new glasses was hard or expensive. >And yes…

> the empty Nutella jars were washed, kept and used as glasses for drinking - because buying new glasses was hard or expensive.

You do understand that sand is one of the most common things on earth (hence the glass is dirt-cheap).

Just as an example of those mentioned faceted glasses: their price was 7 or 14 copecks (good thing every one of them had the price stamped on the bottom). It’s less than the price of bread.

The only thing I could imagine about those Nutella being used as glasses is common “this is a thing from the coveted west”.

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