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2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

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Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#81

Post by 0xffff2 »

londons_explore wrote: post #62
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is that more efficient than having one set of plumbing with safe drinking water? I doubt it. Over here the price difference between drinking water from the tap and the cheapest bottled water is a factor ~200.

refillable water bottles are how it's done in most of the world. You go to a water shop, hand over a bottle, and they give you a one filled with a 15 liters of water, and you'll probably pay around 5 USD cents for that. The water will be filtered (but probably not with reverse osmosis, so there might still be a few viruses and a little lead contamination in it). The bottles will be filled thousands of times in their…

Hell, I do this for my drinking water in the United States. My tap water is perfectly safe to drink, but even after running through a brita filter it tastes aweful, so it's worth the 30 minutes a month it takes to got get RO filtered water from the water store.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#82

Post by atomicnumber3 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #60
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see some amount of counter-argument though. If 95% of your drinking water is clean, but then you were thirsty at 2am and you wouldn't have more clean water until someone went 5 miles up the road to the "improved source" to refill buckets, and so you drank some unclean water that was convenient and you got sick... that's still a big problem. Convenience is a safety feature. The safe option has to also be the con…

Usually you notice a few days before when your stock is starting to run out. If you make coffee every day, would you be surprised that you're out of coffee one morning, or would you notice the day before that you need to buy some coffee?

My understanding is that these areas are services by a single well or spigot that serves an entire small community. Like in rural (poor) India. So you don't stockpile water for days, you're fetching it daily. But then meanwhile there's also "traditional" (unclean/less clean) water sources available much closer to or in the homes.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#83

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Exoristos wrote: post #50
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, heating water to the boiling point is hugely fuel intensive and making charcoal is also hugely fuel intensive plus time consuming.

I'd be interested in learning more about places where people can't afford a fire.

The article says "D and her kids spend another 21 hours a week collecting firewood.", effectively half of a full-time job, on top of another 14 hours per week collecting water. Where do they have the time to gather excess fuel to boil water, let alone make charcoal?

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#84

Post by makeitdouble »

colechristensen wrote: post #35
makeitdouble wrote: post #8

This a truly big problem that has been going surfaced for decades, and I honestly have become split... On one side, France in particular, but many other "developed" nations as well have stepped in to build the infrastructure and provide clean water to places where it was problematic. Only to monopolize water distribution one way or the other, resulting in people not able to afford the water at the end, while losing t…

>Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ? Yes, things are improving all the time. There are all sorts of organizations recording various metrics of quality of life kinds of things and the trends across the board are upwards, it's just very easy to live in a bubble and have no idea how things actual…

Thank you, that's a really good point: we hear about the dire stuff but seldom about the steady improvements.

These numbers are to be taken with a spoon of salt though.

Randomly taking the Republic of Congo as an example, it's currently in an acute crisis as a result of heavy conflicts, and water is trucked by health international organizations as part of the relief effort [0].

So thar 8.6 point improvement on sanitization and clean water access on the EPI scale is a bit head scratcher [1]

[0] https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/03/1160706

[1] https://epi.yale.edu/country/2024/COD

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#85

Post by carlosjobim »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #56
carlosjobim wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need any plumbing for safe drinking water. It can be delivered to the customer in gallons and bottles. That's how it's done in large parts of the world.

But is that more efficient than having one set of plumbing with safe drinking water? I doubt it. Over here the price difference between drinking water from the tap and the cheapest bottled water is a factor ~200.

What does it matter if it's more efficient or not? I want to drink clean water today, I get a gallon delivered to my home.

Also, when comparing prices for necessities, the only thing that matters to an individual is the actual amount, not any percentage comparison. You've fallen into a mental trap that I've seen a lot of people fall into, by comparing prices by percentages. If most people in a developing country can easily afford clean water delivered to their homes, then it doesn't matter if it's percentage wise more expensive. Same thing if you buy some ramen noodles. It doesn't matter in the slightest if they cost 50c or $1.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#86

Post by carlosjobim »

londons_explore wrote: post #68
carlosjobim wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to understand your examples. Those are absolutely massive quantities of water you're mentioning for cooking, washing and farming. I assume that you cook and wash yourself like everybody else, and have a basic understanding on how much for example a head of cabbage should be watered each day. So what do you mean with these numbers?

cooking includes the running tap under which you peel the potatoes, the water you boil the eggs in, etc. washing includes the 150 liters a washing machine uses or the 100 liters in a bath or shower.[3] Spraying things down with a hose really uses a lot too. farming is the one with most variance - but some crops have a super high number of liters of water used per kg of crop harvested. 1kg of rice = 5000 liters of wat…

I cook everyday and there is absolutely no way that a normal family yet a single person would be using 20l of water per day to cook, unless they were deliberately aiming to use as much water as possible. Including washing dishes etc.

The example stated for farming is 2000 liters per person per day for food. I'd like you to pause for a moment and think about that statement. A person can't eat a whole head of cabbage in a day, and you're saying that this head of cabbage would need more than two tons of water per day before it's harvested.

Likewise with the washing machine, you're talking about washing a full load per person every day. Who do you know that soils so much his clothes that he needs to wash a full load only for him every day?

Water to grow the grass for beef cattle is rain, as I assume at least a small minority of people reading here will know.

Your original comment is greatly upvoted and the people here actually believe that two tons of water per day per person is needed to grow their food. Per day. Per Person. I can't fathom what is going on in this forum.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#87

Post by carlosjobim »

vkou wrote: post #63
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is that more efficient than having one set of plumbing with safe drinking water? I doubt it. Over here the price difference between drinking water from the tap and the cheapest bottled water is a factor ~200.

What's actually cheaper is not bottled water, it's a village well.

And what water do you think a poor person will prefer to drink:

a) Some of the highest quality drinking water in the world, taken from a regional or national spring and delivered to their home for a very accessible price?

or

b) Slightly muddy well water that they have to go and fetch in a village well? Assuming they live in a village and assuming that there's ground water available.

Which water would you prefer to drink?

The comment I was replying to was talking about plumbing, so my response regarded settlements larger than villages. Any village where the ground water is good to drink have already dug a well, so no use in telling them to dig a well.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#88

Post by vkou »

carlosjobim wrote: post #87
vkou wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's actually cheaper is not bottled water, it's a village well.

And what water do you think a poor person will prefer to drink: a) Some of the highest quality drinking water in the world, taken from a regional or national spring and delivered to their home for a very accessible price? or b) Slightly muddy well water that they have to go and fetch in a village well? Assuming they live in a village and assuming that there's ground water available. Which water would you prefer to dr…

I'd prefer to drink Dom Pérignon and eat off golden plates, but I don't always get what I want.

There are vast degrees of poverty of availability or unavailability of infrastructure, across both the developed and developing world.

Shipping in bottled water, for instance, isn't a solution when the cost of shipping into the area (due to poor road infrastructure, or poor weather, or conflict zones) has prohibitive - or even intermittent - problems.

People already live around sources of water. At the scale of a township, it's generally long-term cheaper to figure out how to make your sources of water potable than to introduce a permanent dependency on a distant third party supplier, and a complex logistic network for something as fundamental as drinking water.

> ...delivered to their home for a very accessible price?

> ...have to go and fetch from a village well.

If someone can figure out to 'very accessibly' deliver bottled water from hundreds of miles away to your home, why wouldn't they be able to 'very accessibly' deliver locally sourced water to your home?

And if you have to go from your home to a distribution center for those bottles, how is that better than the proverbial village well?

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#89

Post by carlosjobim »

vkou wrote: post #88
carlosjobim wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what water do you think a poor person will prefer to drink: a) Some of the highest quality drinking water in the world, taken from a regional or national spring and delivered to their home for a very accessible price? or b) Slightly muddy well water that they have to go and fetch in a village well? Assuming they live in a village and assuming that there's ground water available. Which water would you prefer to dr…

I'd prefer to drink Dom Pérignon and eat off golden plates, but I don't always get what I want. There are vast degrees of poverty of availability or unavailability of infrastructure, across both the developed and developing world. Shipping in bottled water, for instance, isn't a solution when the cost of shipping into the area (due to poor road infrastructure, or poor weather, or conflict zones) has prohibitive - or…

Here is the reality: In large parts of the world, very high quality drinking water is available in large, reusable jars and bottles, for a cheap price which poor people can afford. While the tap water ranges from undrinkable to bad tasting.

Now you might think that it is outrageous that they buy and drink this water, that they don't deserve it and should wait for plumbing or better government water treatment. That they should be denied one of the basics of life in the holy name of hacker efficiency. Do you think they give a fuck about what you think? You are literally arguing to take away people's good drinking water because they live somewhere with lacking infrastructure.

> If someone can figure out to 'very accessibly' deliver bottled water from hundreds of miles away to your home, why wouldn't they be able to 'very accessibly' deliver locally sourced water to your home?

Because locally sourced water is not of the same quality or even drinkable many times. A river or a spring is in a fixed place geographically and not everybody can live on top of it. If you lived an hour or two from a large spring with high quality water, you wouldn't want to drink foul-tasting water from the tap or try to dig a well for some brackish water.

> And if you have to go from your home to a distribution center for those bottles, how is that better than the proverbial village well?

They deliver it to your door and with your permission they will cary the jars into your home and put them wherever you tell them to.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#90

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

carlosjobim wrote: post #85
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is that more efficient than having one set of plumbing with safe drinking water? I doubt it. Over here the price difference between drinking water from the tap and the cheapest bottled water is a factor ~200.

What does it matter if it's more efficient or not? I want to drink clean water today, I get a gallon delivered to my home. Also, when comparing prices for necessities, the only thing that matters to an individual is the actual amount, not any percentage comparison. You've fallen into a mental trap that I've seen a lot of people fall into, by comparing prices by percentages. If most people in a developing country can…

Because we're not talking about what it costs for an individual, we're talking about how to get clean water to everyone in the world.
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