Ships carried literal tons of fresh water. I'm not sure the details of treatment or how it was provisioned—provisioning beer was such a massive logistical task we have mountains of records, but we have a paucity of corresponding records for water—but we have sufficient records of what happens when that fresh water disappears or becomes tainted to know it was of paramount importance.
Keeping water fresh is not quite as difficult as you might think. For one thing, wood has naturally antibacterial properties; it can be trivially sealed with pitch and tar (which also has antibacterial properties), and it just takes one quartermaster to babysit it.
If anything, beer is a way of preserving calories and boosting morale. The fact that drinking a gallon of it translates roughly to drinking 97% of a gallon of water and does end up being quite hydrating just doesn't imply that people didn't also drink water sans beer.
Again, the claim is not against people drinking beer or water, it is against doing so out of some general fear of drinking water.
Perhaps I was too strident in my criticism of your substantial comments; I apologize.
However, I am still unconvinced that people in the past viewed beer as a replacement for potable water rather than a food-like complement to it. If water was generally regarded as less safe than beer, why were so many people brutally executed for messing with it? Why do we have so many sources noting with far more sensitivity than most have today to where you can find and drink water without boiling? Surely it is not a coincidence that springs whose water you didn't need to boil later grew towns and cities? Why do we have so much evidence of what amounts to seasonal boil advisories? Why was disease so strongly associated with the presence of armies if people weren't consuming the water that forms the natural vector for transmission?
I have no doubt the confidence to which we can say water was safe could be exaggerate in order to dispel the myth that people didn't generally drink water at all, but even today people drink from water sources that would make you or I sick without becoming ill themselves. Perhaps there is room for degree of safety that might explain how water can both be safe and unsafe.
My concern is not with doubt in the consumption of beer (or wine, or later liquor) but with the widespread impression that people in the past simply didn't drink water. Such a poor understanding of what you clearly understand is a complicated topic harms our ability to empathize with our ancestors.
Point of order, beer was stored in a higher alcohol percentage (which is where we get IPAs from) which does extend its shelf life significantly. The gallon was heavily watered down to serve.
Which is basically identical to lite beer we drink today. Hopefully with more flavor, but I don't actually know.
I don't really care about knockoffs (hell, I would happily shop on a site that ONLY sold knockoffs for basically everything but electronics), I just want to spend as little time actually looking through products as possible. Google is good for a lot of things but finding good places to buy stuff is not one of them. The entire process of making a profile and entering payment information is sufficient to ensure I don't buy from your site at all.
Tbh, amazon should probably be run as a public service. We've long since passed the point where their profit incentives benefit anyone but shareholders. By about fifteen-twenty years by my estimate.
> I have no conceptual issue with Amazon serving ads against search terms.
I do. Ads have zero positive. They lower everyone's quality of life and stuff our heads full of useless crap like brand awareness. Truly a cancer on society in every conceivable way.
You might enjoy a fella named marx. Labor is labor, my friend. It should be mostly devoted to things that enrich the lives of us and those around us. It is normal to want to work. It is the alienating nature of selling our labor for a pittance that ruins our lives.
> As far as I can tell, water-drinking was not particularly common
Based on what? You certainly haven't given any indication of having read what historians have to say.
Granted, that subreddit could be a cabal of people colluding to make us think humans didn't go through a phase of drinking beer rather than water. It seems easier to believe you're trying to justify your own talking out of your ass if you can't respond to specific claims.
> In the old days, clean water was rare
What does this mean? Clean water was arguably much more common than it is today because of industrial contamination.
> What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long).
Nobody contests this. What is contested is fear of drinking water.
> I've worked on this for a decade, collecting archive accounts from around Europe. I can quote you pages and pages and pages and pages of people writing about how they used to drink beer against thirst every day.
Great! Pay up! I ain't reading your book.
Btw, you don't need metal to boil water. And beer is healthy if you're faced with a calorie deficit; it's loaded with nutrients. Perhaps you should use this as an argument for why people drank beer (allegedly and confusingly instead of water)
> I don't claim that people explicitly avoided water
Yes you did:
> And was this why people drank beer instead?
If you did not mean to imply that beer drinking came at the deficit of water drinking, you should consider rephrasing.
> What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long).
I have no doubt that someone in history said this, just as they did now; what I find hard to believe is that this was in any way normal or typical. One citation might be more meaningful than this entire thread. If you can provide a source, please do so.
Hell, I drink beer for thirst myself; against all rational judgement. This doesn't imply my tap water is unclean.
> So right now we have basically ideal headsets Meta Quest 3/3S
Cmon, it has shitty hardware and shittier software. The only thing going for it is price and a game catalogue they've basically purchased. Which is admittedly a formidable combo, but it's clear nobody wants it. There's no leverage to make them actually cater to the consumer.
Applying this to apple is beyond comprehension... What do you mean by using such a term? Apple is likely the richest single entity to have every existed, outside of perhaps the US economy as a whole. This single vr product line made apple more money than either of us will make in a lifetime. So hopefully i'm mistaken and you can educate me as to what the word means.
But hopefully you meant "objective". Which is still stupid, but is at least a familiar and manageable form of stupidity.
I appreciate the insight. I definitely understand why you might prefer this, especially with the in flight example and the photo editing. The one example I came up with internally was video editing/viewing, which seems to align quite well.
Would technology that allows sealing of beer not apply even better to relatively nutrition-less water? Especially boiled water. Anything that can feed off of pottery + water or metal + water or glass + water is gonna take a lot longer to grow than basically any kind of familiar bacteria feeding off beer + any of the above.
> There may be other reasons to prefer beer where the alcohol is relevant of course
I imagine these are largely the same reasons people drink beer today. Spoiler: it generally ain't hydration or avoidance of disease.
Googling "belttop" just shows belts. To what are you referring? Are you suggesting wiring the glasses to some battery stored elsewhere? Sure you can do that, but I thought people these days hated wires (in spite of an objectively superior interface to wireless). But you certainly can't power streaming for it (for more than say an hour) with the battery you can actually store in glasses.
I've never even heard of an iVert.
> Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses
I want to sell these people a bridge. Pray tell me where I can find them because their money is absolutely begging to be taken for a pittance. Who the fuck is paying $600 for $5 of plastic?
Edit: i realize i only addressed part of your comment. I think I get that you're trying to convey an iVert as an apple product, right?
> Now you can charge $3000 for you VR kit, but claim it only costs $2400. Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses even though they don't have the CPU. They just want to look like they do. Or they buy multiple pairs for different locations or as backups or whatever. The profit on the glasses could be huge. Especially if they could replace the Apple Watch for some people.
Do we have evidence they aren't subsidizing this? If you can't look at production cost this speculation seems useless. And to claim that $2400 is any more within the realm of affordability is insane. If they actually wanted normal people to bite they'd have priced it at ~$700. This is for rich people and reviewers only.
I've yet to meet someone with strong preference for screen real estate that could back it up with productivity. Sometimes people just want stimulation.
Edit: i have no gripe with these people, I just simply don't buy that they're more productive. We all need our comforts. Mine is music.