If I was a rich person, I would take all of the money I had, buy a bungalow on a beach somewhere in Thailand, and live out the rest of my life napping, swimming, eating pad see ew, and drinking beers in the sun. But instead of giving themselves the perfect life, rich people just do stupid shit with their money. They do things like spending $500 on single t-shirts and forking out huge amounts of money for water that might make you shit yourself to death. Assholes.
For reasons that are absolutely beyond my ken, cashed-up yahoos in Silicon Valley are dropping their filthy app money on unfiltered, untreated water – seemingly convinced that all the reasons we treat and filter water were made up for yuks.
In a recently released report, the New York Times catalogued the rich weirdos who are buying into this nonsense, and the even weirder, even richer rich weirdos who are making the product available to them, focusing largely on Live Water.
In the article, Live Water is described by an employee of one of the stores that sells it as having a “vaguely mild sweetness, a nice smooth mouth feel, nothing that overwhelms the flavor profile.” Just a reminder: we are talking about water. The clear, 99.9% flavourless liquid that comes out of your tap.
The Live Water website seems to claim that drinking Live Water is like adding more RAM to your brain (your brain is a computer in this analogy):
The Extensive Water Analysis shows super high levels of natural silica. Silica is essentially pure liquid crystals. Silicone holds information and energy in a unique way, that’s why all our devices run off of them, hence the name silicone valley. Imagine how it would feel to upgrade your brain’s entire operating system to the best computer chips available.
I’m trying to imagine it and I just can’t, possibly because my brain has too much shitty silica in it from drinking water that doesn’t have E. coli in it.
Live Water’s founder, Mukhande Singh (previously named Christopher Sanborn, and definitely much whiter than you might be picturing), concedes that, yes, you can get pure water from reverse osmosis, but that misses the point: “You’re going to get 99 percent of the bad stuff out, but now you have dead water.”
‘Dead water’, in case you were wondering, is the bad kind of water. What you want is water that will eventually turn into filth, like Live Water:
It stays most fresh within one lunar cycle of delivery. If it sits around too long, it’ll turn green. People don’t even realize that because all their water’s dead, so they never see it turn green.
There’s a shock twist, though. It turns out there’s a reason we filter and treat our water – just ask Dr Donald Hensrud, director of the Healthy Living Program at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota:
“Without water treatment, there’s acute and then chronic risks,” Dr. Hensrud said, including E. coli bacteria, viruses, parasites and carcinogenic compounds that can be present in untreated water. “There’s evidence all over the world of this, and the reason we don’t have those conditions is because of our very efficient water treatment.”
You might know E. Coli as the one that gives you food poisoning, but, rest assured, it can give you so much more.
The kicker in all this? It costs about $47 AUD for just shy of ten litres of the stuff (less if you bring your own container). What is wrong with these people.
Bonus tidbit: one of the proponents of ‘raw water’ profiled in the NYT article is Doug Evans, one of the co-founders of the catastrophic Silicon Valley startup failure Juicero – the $400 ‘juicing’ machine that did literally nothing else other than squeeze open the juice packets you had to buy, a task you could easily accomplish with your hands.
As always: eat the rich.
