Oh yeah, Steve called the manufacturer about that, and they're supposed to be sending someone out this month. Maybe next. Our deepest apologies for the inconvenience.
No, the system won't allow us to discount or refund.
That's my favourite line, "I'm sorry we can't do that because of how our system works."
"But you're ripping me off and that's illegal."
"I'm sorry, the system won't allow me to refund you."
"So you're admitting that your company built a system that rips people off and breaks the law as a matter of policy? You realise that's worse, right?"
It's just finger pointing to avoid liability.
"Oh no, that's not our fault! It's these guys who did it, so talk to them!"
For the individual phone line worker yes, but as a system it's an intentional layered diffusion of responsibility. The decision makers employ goons to tell you about their decisions and blame it on the "system" which is actually just a decision made higher up. You can get as angry as you want at the goons, they have no decision making power so the anger is likely to get nowhere. Even if you ask to talk to a manager, in most situations they're only a middle manager and yet another layer of security for the person who's actually screwing you.
Exactly. It is very rare that I find someone willing to claim responsibility for an issue nowadays, but when I do I feel it reflects very positively on them.
If the water is cooled with a low-energy method like a Peltier cooler, the heat has to go somewhere.
Even if it was free, opening an app to get water is bullshit.
Edit: Let the record show, I was referring to the chilled water.
It "clearly" says, "USE APP TO ACCESS", so no, you can't just push the button. It has to verify your subscription first.
It only requires the app for chilled and filtered. The regular tap water is still available.
@ch00f@lemmy.world said, "Even if it was free..." which implies he's talking specifically about the paid button on the right and not the free button on the left.
The implication being even if the chilled and filtered water was also free, having to open an app for the button to work would be bullshit.
Put me down on team "even if it was free..."
Keep fighting the good fight, it turns out words mean things.
Meh, he says, "opening an app to get water." I think there's some fudging going on here.
Water is available with no app.
Certain processed water is offered with an app.
If this was downtown or at parks I can kinda see them providing something. Knowing this is likely at a university library or building its just removing access that was already there.
Fuck that. If it's downtown or at a park the fucking municipality can afford $1.99/mo
We need more public facilities. This privatization bullshit can kick rocks
The heart of what you're saying is right, but it isn't 1.99, it's 1.99x whatever their expected ussage/power/maintenance metrics are.
No, it's just what the usage/power/maintenance is. It's not $1.99 times anything. $1.99 doesn't enter into it anywhere. $1.99 was made up out of the whole cloth.
Right this is what I really mean. It's a trivial cost in the grand scheme of things for a municipality to provide public drinking fountains. This shouldn't be outsourced to a for profit private enterprise.
It's going to sound like I'm defending them in some way, which I'm really not because the whole thing is stupid, but they're not charging for the drinking fountain they're charging for the cold filtered water, which is going to incur some kind of power and maintenance cost that's while negligible at scale is beyond the norm. Room temperature tap water is still free here.
Sorry I really hate this line of thinking.
I also hate privatising costs for social services so we're in agreement on that....
... but no cost faced by the municipality is trivial. They correct taxes to pay for it. You can go to the meetings and have your say in how it's spent. More water fountains means more money.
If it were up to me we would increase taxes so we could have all the fountains.
I don’t think the thing costs only $2 to install? $2 price per liter of refrigeration on your water does not imply the the system costs $2
Refrigerant and filter systems need to be powered, replaced and maintained, that DOES cost money. What math, if any of substance, was applied on top of that cost to reach the subscription price is debatable. Though perhaps ironically, if they didn't expect many people to actually bite, then the cost per user would end up being abnormally high.
Refrigerated water fountains have been existing in parks, schools, libraries, and public buildings for decades with no on-demand cost to their end users. Our tax dollars paid for them easily and the cost is obviously trivial compared to everything else your local or state government spends money on.
There is no valid justification for this. It's just greed.
Thank you for stating the obvious. I fucking hate this future where even the basics of the past are starting to seem unreal. Little gray cubes with a wide bar you push and out comes cold water from a spout at the top; used to be everywhere outdoors growing up.
Realistically the cost of filtration is already covered by the municipal water system's budget, and the power and maintenance is already covered by the cities parks/public infrastructure budgets. So there is a small cost, but it's at a scale where it's negligible
Obviously it isn't, if it was there wouldn't be a user facing cost. The fact this is a private venture basically proves that wherever this is, the municipality or building owner is only committed to providing tap water (which we see here is "free") the cost is for the extra, private, infrastructure that has been added in order to provide cold filtered water. If you aren't US, I'll note that municipal water treatment and filtering vs the more "Britta" level implied here are entirely different and very much a thing for some people.
200kjoules of heat must be removed from a gallon of water to cool from 55F to 32F (out of the ground down to pleasant drinking temperature).
Assuming a COP of 2 for your compressor (conservative), that's 100kjoules or 1/36 of a kWh.
High price for a kWh of electricity is $0.25 in the US. So for your $2 subscription, you can pay for 8kWh per month or enough to cool 288 gallons of water or roughly 9 gallons per day. More than anybody would rightly use.
What a fucking ripoff.
Not to mention that, in a place like a public park, 55F water is totally fine. It isn't the coolest most refreshing drink of all time but it's damn good from a public fountain on a 90F day.
I drink to hydrate anyway. The thing that’s satisfying to me is liquid going in. The temperature’s nice if it’s cool but if it’s cold I can’t drink the water fast.
You’re also paying for the installation of a refrigeration system right at the point where you want water.
Sure, but if everyone drinks a half gallon a day (still a lot for a normal person), that’s still 95% revenue which will absorb the installation cost quickly, and maintenance is minuscule on something like this.
Not to mention that since its subscription based, a broken dispenser is actually more profitable in the short term.
No it’s providing new access. Used to be, you had to take refrigerated water. Now you can have room temperature water which is superior because you can actually just drink it instead of having to sip it ultra slow.
The fact that it adds access to room temperature water doesn't change the fact that it removes access to cold water
I feel that the majority of innovation occuring in modern capitalism is confined to two key areas:
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Regulatory capture and market control.
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New ways to mindfuck people into overpaying for goods and services.
Productive innovation ceases the moment growth has reached its peak. It is then replaced by counterproductive "innovation", such as finding new ways to nickel and dime your customers, reduction in quality or dismissal of employees. All in the name of simulating "growth" to please the shareholders.
The entire country has incentivized its top minds to developing ad tech bullshit. Like literally our astrophysicists are working at Stitch Fix instead of doing astrophysics.
I help setup ad placement TVs for resort style businesses.
Studied theoretical astrophysics and astro xenobiology as a double advanced major...
My boss used to brag he managed to get the astronaut in his team so, I am useful for facts and puzzles.
God I hate my existence.
Sorry chief I hate those TVs.
I'm sure you're great and everyone needs a little sugar in their bowl or whatever but... IDK. I hope you find a more fulfilling job soon.
LOL I hate those TVs too but don't mind when I get to install like just a good menu or informational directory. Key word good. But I'm just supposed to make a thing that works and looks good for the 11 seconds of your attention we expect to have of you.
The worst part is that I don't even make good money really. Just slightly more than a regular office job and I got here from doing my passion at the time of advanced robotic screens. But they are all hyper niches that are like impossible to move around or within.
But yeah gotta figure out what fulfilling means these days.
Like literally our astrophysicists are working at Stitch Fix instead of doing astrophysics.
I'm honestly here wondering if this is some guerilla marketing for Stitch Fix or if there's some more story to this.
Oh, no. They're fast fashion, right? That can't be great for the environment.
Article is here, kinda interesting in a depressing sort of way: https://archive.is/E0NWk
Thanks for sharing.
Four years later, Moody works for Stitch Fix too. He belongs to a growing group of astrophysicist deserters, who have stopped researching the cosmos to start building recommendation algorithms and data models for the tech industry. They make up the data science teams at companies like Netflix and Spotify and Google.
[...] The decision to leave academia came down to a few factors: The pay was certainly better, and the jobs were more plentiful. “There’s a bottleneck of getting into tenure-track positions,” he says. And being in the Bay Area meant he and his wife—who is also an astrophysicist—would never have to worry about both finding jobs. But the real surprise, he says, was that the work in tech companies was actually interesting. At Beats, he says, he found “like-minded people who were working on problems that didn’t take away the intellectual high.” Same math, different application.
If that's not an alarm that screams for science funding, I don't know what is.
Don't forget the super fun B2B market where one business overcharges another business to outsource functions that really should be done in-house so then businesses can talk about "the cost of doing business increasing" when really it's that they have purchased too many services and those services are all at various states of enshitification
So like video games, cars, slap bracelets, chicken fries, winnebegos, movies, music, none of that’s “innovation” under capitalism? Just the antisocial types? Nobody’s come up with anything interesting under capitalism?
Most of those things were products of earlier times, when our economic system and industries were more regulated and had a larger number of competitive entities. "Innovation" now is just more cupholders in the RV to put your chicken fries in. All flash, no substance. Everything is an AI wearable tacked on to something else we've already had for years.
EV battery tech, there's some decent work being done there. A few other niche cases like that. But the rest is one big fucking con game. It's all a race to find out how much money you can gouge out of people before the system just breaks.
You are right, it is not a current valid domain. It was an Indiegogo crowdfunded project though, and I am guessing it failed.
https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/178262-56#overview
Went under about two years after the crowdfunding. Guess people didn't want to pay $2 a pop for chilled and filtered tap water.
It was.
I'm paying about C$50/ year for an under-the-sink cold water inlet filter. It's not a subscription, but that's roughly how often I need to replace the filter. So $2/mo isn't that bad.
Surely their price is considerably low, but given the limited locations where people can actually get access to the water, it is not that cheap. Imagine waiting in line with your mobile phone and your cup to get a little sap. You would want a huge water tank to cut down the frequency of fetching water. Good for motorhome users though.
I believe it lacked alliteration. Should've called it Weefill. Do the Water Way with Weefill Water Waypoints, where you're in for the wettest of whistles.
Also, if a lot of people happened to use the cold water, it probably wouldn't be cold anymore by the time you got to it.
Jesus, how much water do you drink?
I hope you're aware that it's possible to drink too much water and die from it....
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/reefill-ditch-bottled-water-for-good#/
There are several articles about it and an indiegogo, if fabricated a lot of people bought it few years ago.
That's how corporations nickel and dime you. I resist subscription services almost completely (I pay for cloud backup storage for my phone in case of breakage/theft and that's it) because as well as being a constant financial drain they inevitably degrade and enshittify, often even removing things you paid for
"Your water subscription has increased by $1, thanks for being our customer. Reminder, creation of public fountains and bottle sharing activities are punishable by law!"
You sigh and delete the email. They send out the same message every month.
I would rather take the tap water than trust the maintenance of whatever filter they put in there.
i find it weird people don't drink tap water, but i live in toronto so our tapwater is safe.
In America, tap water is either "Fine, maybe a little odd if you're used to bottle water, but probably fine." to "It's not safe to drink this shit."
Drinks water from gallon jugs because the faucet spews well water from limestone near an oil refinery
I know people who can't tell the difference between the well and spring water, they are not my homies.
I can tell the difference between my cities perfectly adequate and safe tap water, and water that's from a Brita.
There's literally nothing wrong with my tap water at all. I use a Brita because I don't like the taste of my tap water.
I know exactly zero other people who can tell the difference.
I started using a water filter because my cities water reeked of chlorine. Funnily enough a few months later a job listing appeared for a new water facility person and the water has not since smelled nor tasted bad, and that was about 5 years ago now
There's some natural springs here in Ontario, and people claim nothing beats it taste wise.
Yeah I grew up trusting my local tap water which I drank regularly, and then I saw what happened in Flint and I became a little more wary. I always filter my water at home now.
You can typically look up your city's water test results and see what's in there or do your own testing. The vast majority of municipal water is plenty safe, and most issues with stuff like elevated lead come from the home/building itself, not the municipality.
This. Unless there is fracking happening near your water supply, check your city/county water reports.
I live in the Phoenix area. Our tap water won't kill you, but it tastes nasty. That's because aside from the hardness, it's so full of chlorine to kill the bacteria, amoebas, and fungus that might kill you otherwise, it's like drinking swimming pool water. Anyone who can afford it has a reverse osmosis filter for drinking water. Anyone who can't afford it buys bottled water, which is probably why they can't afford the filter...
Protip: if it's only chlorine and not chloramine you can gas it off. Fill a jug in the fridge and let it sit. Chloramine won't allow this to happen because ammonia has been bonded to the chloride to make it stable i.e last longer in transport to customers. If that still makes it taste bad, I guess a filter or Brita type device is all I can say. Bottled water is horrible for you.
Yeah, letting it gas out works for the chlorine taste, but it still tastes funky, likely due to minerals so I'm fine with my RO.
You actually can use a Brita and similar filter system for that. Here's a pretty comprehensive video review of retail filters that one can buy. Had some fairly surprising results. And this guy is coming from your area as well.
Oh I have RO, one of the first things I put in when I bought the house, and already had to replace it once, the last one took really obscure filters that were hard to find, it ended up being simpler to replace the thing with one that took more common replacement filters. And I've tried more ordinary filters, it makes it better, but it still tastes funky, I prefer RO.
Maybe that's why my balls are the size of tennis balls (no they are not inflamed I've had them checked)
Is it still a thing? The website doesn't go anywhere and I can't find the app. All I can actually find are a few articles talking about how ridiculous it is to have a $2 subscription service on water fountains.
All I could find were articles from 2017 and I haven't heard of it before, so I'm gonna say it's not a thing any more.
Oh that's funny. I still see these things installed in some buildings but it's not like I ever saw anyone bother with the "premium water" but also now sodastream is getting in on it for I think a higher cost actually....
Ugh. Please let this whole concept of selling tap water die.
I found this indiegogo link from 7 years ago which gives a little more background. Its not quite as horrible as the picture suggests, I think.
There's some FAQ and Comments that give some background, like this one:
Rier Esor 7 years ago I’ve been asked by a few people: why do we need reefill water stations when there are water fountains around NYC (if you look hard enough!) and we >all have tap water at home? What’s my best answer?
Patrick Connorton 7 years ago PROJECT OWNER We're also working with New York City and the Port Authority to map free public bottle filling stations around town -- these are usually in or near >parks but, unfortunately, need to be off six months a year to avoid freezing and can be challenging to maintain. Reefill is a natural complement to >these fountains, filling in the gaps in parts of town where it is impractical or cost-prohibitive to install a water fountain.
So it doesn't sound like these were replacing existing free water fountains, but instead offering free (and paid) water in places never offered before by generating revenue from the paid water to support the installation of any water (including new free water) in places that had none before.
It also looks like the project died in 2019.
filling in the gaps in parts of town where it is impractical or cost-prohibitive to install a water fountain.
As usual, if it's a gap in our public services, the answer is not "let a private company do it" it's "tax the fucking rich and use that money to improve our public services".
Those water fountains didn't even need to be water fountains. This was basically just a bastardized version of what they do in the UK. There's a program over there called Refill, that businesses and public places participate in. You use a free app that shows you the locations of participating places, and those places have refill points, all for free.
This person probably saw that and thought "let's ditch the free and the volunteer participation part, build unnecessary fountains in unsustainable areas, and try and make some money off that sweet public utility"
I'm not going to hate the company for trying, but if you're a building admin using these instead of Oasis or Elkay fill stations you're a huge fucking asshole.
But with all the money they're saving, they'll be able to renovate the admin building for the first time in two years, or have a nice dinner for the big donors, or give even more money to the football team.
Edit: assuming this is a uni. If not: won't someone please think of the investors?
I don't see why this kind of behavior should be excused if exhibited by a company vs. an individual. Would you also not fault your friends "for trying" to be an asshole to you in day to day life? Are humans not making the strategic decisions for that company?
I mean people can develop and sell whatever product they want at the price they want. Usually I'd recommend voting with your wallet, but presumably this would be up to facility management to install these for a captive audience, who wouldn't have much choice in the matter.
Product designers are supposed to understand pareidolia and will often intentionally put faces into their designs. Some designs look happy, others like sports cars can be made to look aggressive.
The top of this design looks like some combination of angry, sad and disappointed, which I like to think is intentional.
The fact that modern cars are intentionally designed to look like their headlights have angry eyebrows is honestly one of the funniest things I've ever learned.
Drill a fucking hole in that motherfucker and siphon it off. Or just drink tap water. It's fine. At least where I live. But still drill a hole in there to fuck with them.
I am not often in favour of shooting people.
For legal reasons this concludes my statement.
Property damage of this is valid. especially if you can give people water for free next to it.
Yeah when someone offers you free drinking water, they deserve to be punished for it.
Not nesssicarily, but the "filtered" part of the premium water seems to imply that you have to pay to get cleaner water.
Why are people trying to justify this, the city can put in chilled water taps like those Elkay ones for super cheap. Then when shitty businesses like these go under, you aren't left with a useless machine with no other water source nearby. Relying on private entities for basic things like this is just objectively a bad idea if it can be at all avoided.
I am astounded by the amount of irrational hatred in here towards what is essentially a T-junction pipe...
It's the fact that they're charging for something that should be available at no cost.
"Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it's better to give a foodstuff a value so that we're all aware it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there."
Peter Brabeck-Letmathe served as Nestlé's CEO from 1997 to 2008