No science, but algae is extremely common and easily spreads. Yes, there is some that could be harmful, but it isn’t something I am going to stress about.
Leave any body of water open for awhile, and eventually algae will show up. That’s why you need to keep adding chemicals to your pool even if it is filled with water that has been cleaned. It can be carried on the wind or other animals.
I might be willing to believe some of the commentary about Juicero having merit in terms of a distribution method for fresh produce. But this is just wrong.
So if anyone is a Rick & Morty fan, this ad copy I can’t help but hear in my head with the voice of the narrator from the Interdimensional Cable TV episodes.
Yep. If I stopped putting stuff in my pool for less than a month in summer, BOOM! Algae bloom, and it won’t go away until I drain the pool and have a chlorine wash done.
There’s something else that pops up in stale water, too: Legionnaire’s disease
Like, from the toilet?
I, too, have had Giardiasis (from drinking tap water in northwestern PA) and it is very much not fun. If you get it, here’s a tip: when you’ve doubled over from the feeling of a jagged knife being plunged through your belly, don’t wait to straighten up before running to the bathroom. You don’t have time for that.
I drink from the stream by my house from time to time. I wish I lived in a country where people had no need to fear “raw water” and no urge to fetishize it.
Is this the first step towards his live-action adventure game business, “Oregon Trail Offline”?
We provide everything you need! It’s so authentic, now you too have the chance to die of dysentery!
eat. the. rich.
My grandparents’ house had a spring about 1/4 mile upslope from them that provided all the house water, but I never saw them drinking directly from the tap, it always was boiled or turned into tea or coffee, so any harmful things in it probably got boiled to death. We had a spring down the hill from us, but never relied on it for drinking water; OTOH, although I occasionally drank from it, I never got sick from drinking it.
Here’s your homage to modern water processing plants: John Snow and the Broad Street Pump
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/snowcricketarticle.html
tl;dr John Snow was an amateur epidemiologist who correctly identified the cause of a cholera outbreak in Victorian London as water from a popular public pump, contaminated by nearby outhouses. He stopped the plague by taking the handle off the pump.
Fair enough.
You describe the giardia experience well. I got it when I let someone else pump the water to disinfect it on a hiking trip.
I’ve always said that if I were to give up on the world entirely and go evil, I’d easily make a ton of money by selling people homeopathic medicine with insane ad copy like this. Now I’m torn between being more evil by making them suffer or die for their gullibility, or making more money by not offing my customer base.
Maybe I’ll just stick to helping people after all.
Hard pass on the corpses contaminated with cholera, giardia, cryptosporidium, e. coli, arsenic, various radioactive isotopes, lead, etc. The rich people who die drinking “raw water” are going to have any number of the above value-added ingredients.
Maybe they’ll open a bottling plant in Flint.
Gods, if ever a website seemed like a parody… Although with a few fixes, it begins to make sense:
“…thats why the porn industry depends on it, hence the name silicone valley.”
Yeah, this is a dumb rich people trend I can get behind.
Hopefully that happens before they start deregulating water, though…
Is this really just a stealth attempt by the rich to forestall the wealthy-ingesting future that we read so much about as it becomes ever-more relevant? Are they trying to force an evolutionary response by becoming poisonous?
Annnnnddd that’s goin’ right in the bank, gracías!
Seems like it could be any number of algae/cyanobacteria, most of which are harmless/edible. (And the toxic varieties need high concentrations to be dangerous - fertilizer-heavy water with thick blooms of algae, for instance.) Although wind-borne dust will contain cells, it’s also already present in (even treated) water, multiplying on surfaces on which it can get light. So you’re already drinking it in “clear” water, and it’s fine. I mean, if it builds up enough, the cells will die and then rot, which isn’t great, but otherwise…
Morty: “Wow Rick, this Venture Capital adcopy has a much more freeform feel, doesn’t it?”
Rick: “Y-yea[belch]h, Morty, I guess they’re pretty into, you know, making it up as they go along. Really freeing, being detached from the ethical obligations a company has to its customer base.”
Morty: “That doesn’t sound… Hmmm”
Have you read Martha Wells? I think toxicated industrialists is in one of hers.
(Even if I’m wrong, she’s worth reading. Wheel of the Infinite may well be the best thing I’ve read since Zelazny was a pup.)
