this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Lack of clean water, not literally dehydration.
Either you drink the dirty water and die from that or you don't and die from dehydration. What's the point of the distinction of lack of water and lack of clean water?
The solutions are different.
?? The solution is to provide clean water. Also we were discussing about the grouping of death causes in the poster. How does the solution affect how you group that? Where is the group for literal dehydration anyway if they're are different group of death causes as you suggested?
In a place where the local river is too polluted to drink, the solution is to either purify the water or solve the pollution at its source.
In a place where there's literally no water, the solution is to truck or pipe water in from far away. That's drastically different?
I think "lack of clean water" combines both causes of death, for simplicity? I'm not really sure why you have such a problem with it.
Yes, I agree. Which is why I said it's impressive that there are no one dying from both lack of food & water in my first comment. It was your reply that says it's "lack of clean water" (instead of lack of clean water + lack of water). Which is a meaningless distinction that we seems to both agree now? Have you changed your mind on that one?
People dying of dehydration probably also die of malnutrition, like you said, but people dying from drinking unclean water are a distinct group that can't just be lumped together with starvation because that's a public sanitation and pollution problem rather than a resource problem. This statistic groups dehydration and waterborne illness and pollution and industrial poisoning together as one group, and then separates that with malnutrition as a completely separate group. You, for some reason, have a problem with that?
Is that how the statistics in this poster work? Firstly, they used different source for lack of water and hunger. Which is already kind of asking for overlapping errors. Secondly, I check the "http://poverty.com" as it mentioned in the poster and the site doesn't even mention how it get the numbers. Actually it doesn't even mention that 8000000 number on that site. Are we supposed to take this seriously?
I don't know what you want to combine lack of water and food so much - general rule of thumb, you can survive 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food. They're just different problems.
Also, I think this is a pretty old image. I seem to remember it back during Occupy? So who even knows where the sources are or how to find them.
Well I don't. I just think the numbers in this image is way too fuzzy to be taken serious from the get-go. And that's why I commented on it like it's a bad joke, which it is.
It references The Black Book of Communism, which is similarly unserious. Makes sense.
The distinction is, to oversimplify it, between living in a parched desert or living next to a toxic river or a contaminated well. In the case of contaminated water, you may not even really know that your water is contaminated with, say, cholera or dysentery on a given day, you just drink it because you must.
I would also venture to guess that most people, even in overexploited nations, have access to water of some sort. So wording it as lack of clean water is probably more accurate than lack of water.