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.
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?
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.
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.