I just find it annoying when people look at people drinking bottled water and going “haha look at the idiotic millennials haha they probably think they’re drinking magical space water or something haha idiots it’s the same as tall water haha.” and the rest of that. Haha no, maybe some people just prefer being able to store the many bottles of water easily. Or maybe they want secure water. Most bottles of bought water are clear and when you open them they have a lock that breaks letting you know the product has been opened.
Now reusable bottles are mostly opaque steel or darkened plastic. What happens if someone decides to take a leak inside your opaque water bottle, or worse they put either a deadly poison or incapacitating poison in it? You will never notice, because the bottle will not show signs of being tampered with.
Once you open your bottle of water, you’d be subject to exactly the same tampering you’re worried about. Do you carry it with you everywhere? For that matter do you inspect it to make sure no one has injected a poison through the plastic. You likely wouldn’t notice a hole left by a syringe. And you almost certainly wouldn’t detect one that had been made under the label with the label glued back in place.
If you do carry it with you all the time is that any safer than filling a reusable water bottle yourself and carrying that with you all the time. In fact as the reusable bottle is likely metal, it would be safer from a syringe “attack.”
I see people complaint and mocking “clueless sheep” on the internet all the time because they are drinking bottled water. Then you have the smart internet people who pride themselves on knowing that bottled water is actually just plain water and not magic space water and therefore they don’t drink it and everyone who does drink bottles water is an idiot.
And of course prevention is better than the cow!
No, because most of the time I drink the entire bottle after I open one, this making them very convenient. If someone tries to inject the bottle below the waterline, then it would probably look strange and leak. If it was above the waterline, which is at the neck, which is where I usually grab the bottle, it would probably collapse or weaken noticeably when I pick the bottle up.
Plus, using a syringe is a pretty high level attack, so if that failed, they’d probably just try something else. Simply opening a loud and dropping something inside and closing the lid is much easier and more subtle.
Are you aware of the concept of risk assessment? You evaluate the parameters of Consequence, Probability and Cost to prevent. Now being poisoned to death is of course a very bad consequence, and you may think paying for bottled water a small cost to prevent it, but to justify that evaluation you are juggling the probabilities of being poisoned through tap water or bottled water.
Why are someone trying to poison you? Is it just a random attack? Then the chance they’ll poison reusable water bottles is remote, and no more likely than lacing a bunch of bottles in a store with contact poison.
Are they specifically trying to kill you? Then you’ve only removed one of an infinity of angles of attack, and replaced it with new ones.
Unless you have real evidence of more people poisoning reusable water bottles than poisoning store bought water (which is a lot easier than you believe) you are only making up excuses to cling to a weird evaluation of safety.
Being this obsessed about extremely unlikely events like someone poisoning your water or the risk of being hit by a fire hose while not wearing a sufficiently sturdy jacket will severely hamper your freedom to live in happiness. You might want to look into ways of dealing with this other than seeking validation and advice on an internet forum.
I truly have no idea what either of these means.
What’s to stop someone at the bottling plant from peeing in or poisoning your bottled water before it’s capped? If the poisoning is randomly aimed, this is more likely than a reusable bottle being poisoned in your home.
If the crime is specifically aimed at you, home poisoning is more likely. But water coming out of the tap is probably less likely to be tampered with than a purchased bottle, especially if you let the tap run awhile, rinse out the container, and then don’t let the filled bottle out of your hand, as you claim to do with the purchased water.
The water bottling industry loves you and will be happy, in many cases, to sell you their tap water in bottles. This also offers an additional marketing scheme to include in their labeling and advertising:
“Our water is poison free!”*
*At least we think so when it left our facility. Beyond that, anything could happen.
D the stupidity of this topic I wanted to point out that Chinese children in San Francisco have higher frequency of cavities because of the cultural fear of drinking tap water. They drink a lot of bottled water and it doesn’t have the fluoride that you need to make your teeth strong.
I agree that there is an unreasonable amount of smugness from people who like to point out that bottled water isn’t somehow special and consider anyone who drinks it to be foolish. Personally I often prefer the taste to tap water.
Okay. But have you checked the source of your bottled water? More than likely it’s just filtered municipal water, that you paid a 30,000% premium for. But hey, it’s your money, do what you want.
The last thing in the world I have to worry about is that somebody has tampered with something that I will later consume. This is a risk that I consider to be absolute zero. I am more likely to be hit by falling aircraft parts.
Completely aside from the other moronic proposition, that bottled water is somehow safer to drink than tapwater. And I have drunk tapwater in more than 100 countries. Most recently Somalia, where tapwater is saline, but it’s still OK.
If you are worried enough about being deliberately poisoned and there are times when a perpetrator might be close enough to your bottle to open it and drop something into it, then you have other issues that you need to be worried about.
I tend to stay up on most news, but somehow I’ve been missing the news releases about people getting murdered and incapacitated via poison slipped into their Nalgene reusable bottle. I’m guessing there must be lots of news reports of others getting poisoned via other non one-use bottles like 2-liter soda, gallon milk jugs, half gallon OJ, etc. Or, is it just easiest to hide poison in a non-flavored liquid like water? You could obviously taste the poison if it were slipped into Pepsi. :rolleyes:
When did people have to start carrying water with them wherever they went? When I was young, [fuzzy memory]there were public drinking fountains everywhere, so the only people who needed to carry water with them were hikers, who had canteens[/fm].
I don’t know, but it strikes me as weird that so many people suddenly can’t go without their [del]security blanket[/del] water bottle more than 15 minutes. I mean, yeah, I know of diabetics who are constantly thirsty but that’s still a minority of the population.
I don’t normally carry water with me when I go about my day, and generally only drink fluids during meals. Exceptions are at work, where I’m talking almost non-stop for 8 hours, I have a small bottle of water there to keep my throat from drying out but I almost never finish it by the end of my shift, and if I’m going for a walk on a hot day.
As for bottle vs. tap… well, there’s a certain convenience to bottled, there’s no denying that, if you’re going to be carrying it around. Or if you need to store some water as your emergency supplies. But I don’t get people who won’t drink out of their own taps at home. Is your well contaminated? No? Municipal supply compromised? No? Then drink your tap water, it’s cheaper and it’s wholesome.
Now, if your well or your municipal supply has a problem (Flint, MI) that’s a different matter entirely.
