Precious water: As more of the world thirsts, luxury water becoming fashionable among the elite

[Nevilledog]

https://apnews.com/article/water-luxury-india-bhutan-greece-aaa020587961c992352c19116660cbbc

SAMTSE, Bhutan (AP) — Monsoon rains have finally passed and floods blocking the lone dirt road have retreated enough for a small truck to climb these Himalayan foothills to a gurgling spring. It spews water so fresh that people here call it nectar.

Workers inside a small plant ferry sleek glass bottles along a conveyer. The bottles, filled with a whoosh of this natural mineral water, are labeled, packed into cases and placed inside a truck for a long ride.

Ganesh Iyer, who heads the operation, watches like a nervous dad, later pulling out his phone, as any proud parent might, to show the underground cavern the waters have formed in this pristine kingdom, the world’s last Shangri-La.

This is no ordinary water. It will travel hundreds of miles to some of India’s luxury hotels, restaurants and richest families, who pay about $6 per bottle, roughly a day’s wage for an Indian laborer. Millions of people worldwide don’t have clean water to drink, even though the United Nations deemed water a basic human right more than a decade ago.

*snip*

[Igel]

1. "A fool and his money" comes to mind.

Think of it as wealth redistribution. You can pay pennies or you can pay $6, and they choose to subsidize the bottler, the transportation workers, those who mine the sand, make the glass, and cast it.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. Seems awfully close to the broken window fallacy, though ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

[Maru Kitteh]

6. I'm missing the pass-thru here between "a fool and his money" to

"broken windows" but now you've got me genuinely curious so I guess I'll have to ask you to draw me a couple pictures Hermit.

I'm familiar with broken windows, I just don't get the connection

[Hermit-The-Prog]

7. The production of that luxury bottled water consumes a lot of resources

The per capita cost of those little $6 bottles of water is far greater than, for example, a good system of pipes and a water treatment facility. That's without even considering the ecological / environmental costs. (Every resource extraction operation does damage).

Just because it creates jobs, doesn't mean it's a good deal.

[Maru Kitteh]

8. Okay I guess if somebody was arguing lower crime because jobs, yeah

I can see that. Totally agree that not everything that creates jobs is a good deal, I just wondered how we got from a to b. Thanks

[milestogo]

3. Why did a picture of Clarence Thomas just flash through my mind?

[dalton99a]

4. They should age it for taste

Maybe 10-100 years in a cellar

[WarGamer]

5. There was a TV show a while back...

A big boat would go out in the Northern Seas and break off big chunks from icebergs and bring the chunks back for melting and bottling...

Yeah pretty silly.