I scroll down past the opening photo so the 1st line of text is at the top of my browser window and settle in to begin reading and then the header scrolls down to cover the top 3 lines of text.
Side project idea, chrome or firefox extension that takes text and pictures from popular news sites and removes all the distracting bells and whistles. Now that I think about it, something like that probably already exists.
I do this manually sometimes, with chrome dev tools. The whole issue actually has a pretty profound effect on which sites I read. For example, I won't follow a link to usa today unless it's something really interesting, whereas I'll read almost anything from the la times, just because I enjoy their bullshit free layout.
It's really poor design. Widescreen displays are in the overwhelming majority at present, but few people prefer columns of text that fill the screen horizontally. Vertical screen real estate therefore commands a premium price. Users probably wouldn't mind a vertical bar off to the side nearly as much.
> The government played no role in establishing this system, which worked remarkably well. Social scientists often cite it as a success story among developing-world megacities... Brilliant!
Meanwhile, in the actual developed world, nobody buys bottled water because the tap water is perfectly indistinguishable from the bottled stuff, which the stores only keep for tourists.
I completely fail to see why tap water would not serve just as well for these occasions. Or is your tap water actually, noticably, different than bottled?
Since we are nitpicking, I would say that water bottles are good for hiking camping and working outdoors, I would not recommend buying bottled water to carry on a walk.
I know plenty of people in the developed world that drink bottled water. Its not that hard to taste the difference between 2 sources of water (filtered vs spring), and not everyone wants to drink fluoridated tap or rusty well water.
People who can taste a difference in tap versus bottled water perhaps do not live in as developed a society as they would like to believe.
I certainly have never prefered bottled water over tap. There might be a difference if you made a blind study, but I have never needed to care that much, and I probably couldn’t tell the difference if you gave me a blind test. People around me also seem not to use bottled water in any great amounts; certainly not nearly as much as people in American media apparently do.
(The only place I encounter actual bottled water is in restaurants, and then only the sparkly variety, which I feel is not the same thing.)
My parents have a well, I live 2 hours away in a city with municipal water. My parents' tap water contains enough iron and sulfur to taste like diluted blood, while my tap water tastes like drinking from a swimming pool. But I do not consider either myself or my parents to be living in an undeveloped society (Florida has its issues but it's not THAT bad). A tap filter (of the Brita/Pur/whatever variety) makes both waters far more drinkable.
In terms of taste, filtered well > filtered municipal > unfiltered well > unfiltered municipal. But that's just me. I prefer the taste of too much iron and sulfur to the taste of chlorination.
> I do not consider either myself or my parents to be living in an undeveloped society
I did not say you were undeveloped. I said that your society was perhaps not as developed as you would like to believe. People have a tendency to believe (unless presented with daily reminders) that they are the apex of their development, the best their society can produce. I wanted to remind you that, at least in terms of your water supply network, you can certainly do better.
My tap water (from a well) is highly sulfuric. The quality and taste of tap water varies greatly from location to location, "developed world" or not. There are all sorts of good reasons to buy bottled water.
A civilization needs modern infrastructure. One of these is certainly tap water. If the tap water is not usable for one of its primary purpose – drinking – then I would say that the infrastructure is lacking, and, by inference, the civilization.
The same with road systems. If I can confidently know that I can drive safely on the roads, I live in a civilization with a modern, maintained, infrastructure. If, on the other hand, I must constantly look out for potholes, missing roads, etc. then I don’t.
Oh well, the place where I live has tap water with better health standards than bottled one, but when driving, one still has to look for potholes. So much for civilization :(.
Why can't a civilization have tap water that's suitable for everything except drinking, and let bottled water be delivered on the free market? If that's the most economically optimal way to handle things, that's a more advanced society.
Is your argument that Americans are by definition civilized, and that wells (however they taste, as long as they are not poisonous) are therefore somehow acceptable?
If it can be shown that it makes more economic sense for a society as a whole to ship bottled water to its citizens instead of having a water supply network for potable, drinkable water, then sure, why not.
Shoot...try the municipal tap water in Tampa, FL. Nasty, sulfurous stuff. You get used to it after living there for a while, but whenever I go back, it's bottled all the way.
For all the following discussion here, I find it surprising that no one is asking why the water is tasting of sulfuric or chlorine.
Some places has higher chlorine that others. In cities with old water pipes, they sometimes choose to increase the amount of chlorine in the water in order to keep the amount of bacteria down. They sometimes also do this in a temporarily basis, when test shows increase amounts of some harmful bacteria.
Water that taste chlorine is not however a fact of nature. Its fixable, given cities are willing to replace old pipes with modern ones.
This American cannot recall the last time he purchased or consumed bottled water. I do purchase and consume Diet Mountain Dew, which may amount to the same thing.
Ok, I'm curious. What geographic locations do you consider the "developed world"? People in Europe, Canada and the US all tend to drink large amounts of bottled water.
That has almost nothing to do with the quality of the tap water. At least in the USA, I don't remember exactly when it happened, but there was a time when individual bottled waters basically didn't exist. Well, it existed, but there wasn't walls of the stuff at every grocery and convenience store.
Before that, people probably drank beer, spirits, or soda. But when it became more well known that these things are not healthy, people began to desire plain water instead, and everybody were used to the idea of buying drinks at the store, so bottled plain water appeared.
My original comment suffered from an excess of snark and exaggeration.
My point was more this: If your tap water is not as clean as the bottled stuff, this is not a fact of life and you don’t just have to live with it. Many people do have it better than that, and you could, too, if your infrastructure (water supply network) was up to it. This should maybe be on your mind the next time you consider how your society should spend its resources.
Please confirm, is bottled water unavailable for months at a time in this benighted place? What do they do about Wal-Mart, which claims to be able to supply bottled water at all times in 118 different locations in a place they're calling "michigan"?
I read it in its entirety. It's quite long, but it has some fascinating vignettes into life in Egypt. Topics covered include garbage collection and recycling, politics, marriage and divorce, and the roles of males and females in Egypt.
Very interesting read indeed, a very thorough insight into life in Egypt. I especially liked the relationship part, the female oppression and dominance at the same type. Seems almost like a paradox through the eyes of a westerner.
"In 2009, during the worldwide epidemic of H1N1 swine flu, the Ministry of Agriculture decreed that all Egyptian pigs had to be killed. There was no evidence that pigs were spreading the disease, but the government went ahead and slaughtered as many as three hundred thousand animals. Some Egyptians believe that the decision was driven by a desire to appease Islamists, who had become outspoken critics of the regime, and supposedly hated pigs even more than they hated Mubarak."
It was also speculated that they were killed to oppress the Christian minority in Egypt, who derived a significant part of their income from raising swine, due to Islam's restriction on interaction with pigs.
What a great little vignette on a part of our modern world. The clash of tradition, politics, love, and garbage. My family owns an auto repair shop and I could just feel the clothes that Sayyid wears on my skin again (grease and salt, similar, but not the same as his). My father also deals with most strata of society and Sayyid's observations ring true to me as my father's words: 'Assholes have all manner of 0's on their bank slips'.
59 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 419 ms ] threadHate.
https://www.readability.com/
http://readable.tastefulwords.com/
1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/color-toggle/...
Ouch. A way to know one lives in the developing world.
I certainly have never prefered bottled water over tap. There might be a difference if you made a blind study, but I have never needed to care that much, and I probably couldn’t tell the difference if you gave me a blind test. People around me also seem not to use bottled water in any great amounts; certainly not nearly as much as people in American media apparently do.
(The only place I encounter actual bottled water is in restaurants, and then only the sparkly variety, which I feel is not the same thing.)
In terms of taste, filtered well > filtered municipal > unfiltered well > unfiltered municipal. But that's just me. I prefer the taste of too much iron and sulfur to the taste of chlorination.
I did not say you were undeveloped. I said that your society was perhaps not as developed as you would like to believe. People have a tendency to believe (unless presented with daily reminders) that they are the apex of their development, the best their society can produce. I wanted to remind you that, at least in terms of your water supply network, you can certainly do better.
A civilization needs modern infrastructure. One of these is certainly tap water. If the tap water is not usable for one of its primary purpose – drinking – then I would say that the infrastructure is lacking, and, by inference, the civilization.
The same with road systems. If I can confidently know that I can drive safely on the roads, I live in a civilization with a modern, maintained, infrastructure. If, on the other hand, I must constantly look out for potholes, missing roads, etc. then I don’t.
I guess civilization isn't possible in North America above 45°N then.
The other poster is right, your comments are better suited for Reddit.
Heavily mineralized water is not "unusable", the taste is just rather unpleasant.
Some places has higher chlorine that others. In cities with old water pipes, they sometimes choose to increase the amount of chlorine in the water in order to keep the amount of bacteria down. They sometimes also do this in a temporarily basis, when test shows increase amounts of some harmful bacteria.
Water that taste chlorine is not however a fact of nature. Its fixable, given cities are willing to replace old pipes with modern ones.
My point was more this: If your tap water is not as clean as the bottled stuff, this is not a fact of life and you don’t just have to live with it. Many people do have it better than that, and you could, too, if your infrastructure (water supply network) was up to it. This should maybe be on your mind the next time you consider how your society should spend its resources.
I read it in its entirety. It's quite long, but it has some fascinating vignettes into life in Egypt. Topics covered include garbage collection and recycling, politics, marriage and divorce, and the roles of males and females in Egypt.
wow.
http://dilbert.wikia.com/wiki/The_Garbageman