Welcome to HELL
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We’ll, if you look at it closely you’ll see that those are strandkorbs, beach chairs people rent because of the wind. Those are professional models, so they’ll probably weigh around 70 or 80 kg and can’t be shifted easily once they have been deployed by truck at the beginning of the season.
Note that visitors nearer the tide line use simply towels and break into more organic patterns like all over way. Just with a bit more of personal space, as it’s usual in Northern Europe.
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When I think about all the released urine and dislodged feces from improperly wiped butts in that water…
Bah… By volume, it’s not really that much. You probably get exposed to more urine/feces by touching a public washroom’s doorknob.
Take another look at that picture then take a look at this:
Ahh, see, I missed that it was in China from the OP, so yeah, ick. But I wonder about some of the numbers in that article:
Is that actually saying that the swimming pool was 90% urine and fecal matter? Did they just start with a 10% empty pool, and ask people to piss until it was filled?
I dunno, that was just one link I found off-hand. I had read about the issue previously I guess years ago that discussed the issues with illnesses at those pools there and overcrowded ones elsewhere in the world as well. There out there in the search engines somewhere.
I don’t question that the pools might actually be filthy… It is China, after all. Though looking a little deeper, it would appear that the story you linked is using a Daily Squib story as a source regarding a man dying in one of the pools, and that site appears to be another one of those Onion ripoff sites that are so poorly written, you can’t tell that they’re actually meant to be satire sometimes. And likewise, the source for the “China’s health ministry reports that 10% of pools exceed safe urea levels” link seems to be the only site reporting that news, as well.
Soooo… I’m going to take a “Yes, they’re probably pretty filthy, by North American swimming pool standards” but “no, they’re not deadly cesspools primarily consisting of urine, feces and bacteria” take on this one. 
Ha, either way I completely stand by my puking guy picture next to the picture of the overcrowded pool. And, once again, there’s other sources for info out there on related illnesses to these overcrowded pools out there if you look. Like I said, I just quickly grabbed that link, I have no idea what the specific veracity is of all its content and I’m not terribly interested in hashing it out since as I’ve told you there’s other sources out there available.
It’s not just filthy and gross (hurl!), it’s unhealthy. If you can’t find the other sources (after making a sincere effort) lemme know and I’ll try to dig em up later.
The urine+chlorine study is an interesting one… Though I can’t get access to the original journal article to see exactly what concentration of urine + chlorine they used to actually create the disinfection byproducts. If they just dumped some chlorine in straight up uric acid, that’s different from comparing the average concentration of urine in a swimming pool. Still interesting, though not enough to concern me about a properly chlorinated pool that’s not seeing 10,000 swimmers a day.
I should add that I’m not disputing that overcrowded swimming pools can cause health hazards (though most of the articles I’m seeing about it regard unchlorinated swimming pools or poorly maintained pools). I certainly would stay well away from the pictured pool in China, and really from ANY pool that was that crowded, because personal space, I really only had issue with the one article that you linked that was spouting a bunch of crazy nonsense about the pools being 90% urine and fecal matter
In general, I’m not too concerned about urine/fecal matter in your average pool though. Unless I’m putting water in my mouth directly next to somebody who is in the process of peeing, that I would definitely have a problem with.
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Booo, not hotlinky! 
In general, I’m not too concerned about urine/fecal matter in your average pool though
Nah, me neither. I’ve never gotten sick from normal pools even if they are crowded. But, yeah, that one in the photo is just crowded on another level entirely as we agree.
This should keep you distracted a while.
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“The world is not over-crowded.” If you had said that in the 70’s you might have been branded a “denier” (or whatever the equivalent term was at the time).
What happened to my MBW??!?
The site that it is originally hosted on does not allow hotlinks to images (it may allow hotlinking via google). So you need to download it, host it somewhere else, and then post the link to it here. If you’ve already viewed the page in context on the original site, your browser will have it cached, so it LOOKS like it worked, but nobody else can see it.
That’s what my “Boo, no hotlinky” comment was referring to, incidentally
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Thank you for validating my exact theory as to what happened. I think I will do that with the re-uploading.
For what it’s worth, that person’s site has an awesome “not hotlinking” image.
What time I’ve spent in developing countries (which isn’t a whole lot, so I don’t claim to be an expert) leads me to believe that most folks in such countries have every intention of letting go of more sustainable, indigenous practices. They seem to want what the developed world has. And even though they don’t use a lot of energy (by developed standards), there is some pretty extreme environmental degradation in these areas.
In short, it seems like in the developed world the population growth has topped out, but the current population is in a wholly unsustainable lifestyle. On the other hand, in poorer counties the population is still increasing and wreaking havoc on the environment in other ways.
So yea, I’d say we have a problem, and I’d cast my vote for “yes, there are too many people in the world.”
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