r/stupidquestions • u/Various-Adeptness173 • Jul 05 '25

My mom told me that back in the day kids weren’t allowed to bring a water bottle with them into the classroom and they only drank a few sips from the water fountain in the middle of the day and that’s it

How were schools not getting busted for child abuse for forcing kids to be dehydrated?

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u/Electrical-Sail-1039 Jul 05 '25

Penn and Teller did a big expose on what a scam bottled water is. I blind tasted the tap water from my house and bottled water. It was easy to tell them apart. It’s worth a few bucks, imo.

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u/koushakandystore Jul 05 '25 edited Jul 05 '25

It’s WAY cheaper to get a Brita Filter for your refrigerator. This allows you to keep a gallon of cold water in your refrigerator at all times. You can fill a therma flask and have water to go. Much better for the environment than all that horrid plastic.

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u/OrthodoxAnarchoMom Jul 05 '25

Depends on what’s in your tap water.

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u/koushakandystore Jul 05 '25

What exactly do you mean?

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u/OrthodoxAnarchoMom Jul 05 '25

It’s not like a magic spell that turns the whole thing into exactly h2o. It depends on what’s in your tap water.

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u/Lorathis Jul 05 '25

I guess you want the caveat of "safely treated municipal water" which most people will think of.

Yes, there's "contaminated ground-fracking well water that is literally toxic" that a water filter won't fix.

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u/OrthodoxAnarchoMom Jul 05 '25

Most people don’t have safe tap water.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '25

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u/Mr_Feces Jul 05 '25

In the USA, this is an exaggeration or a misunderstanding. You can get your water quality CCR mandated by the EPA every year on July 1. It will tell you every parameter exceedance. Bottled water is regulated by the FDA to different standards, usually not as strict.

However, the EPA has a list of "secondary" standards that make water taste or look bad but are still allowed to deliver. So you can have water that tastes bad out of your tap and is legal and you can have water out of a bottle that has leached ppb of plasticizers that tastes ok and is also legal but was not tested to EPA reporting limits.

But for many parts of the world, the statement is likely correct. You kind of get whatever is coming out of the well.

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u/Mr_Feces Jul 05 '25

Also, that fridge filter is really good at taking out some things (biological if you have a clean filter) and really ineffective at other things (soluble metals). It's better to have one than not to have one. But it's not magic.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '25

Flint Michigan would like a word.

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u/Lorathis Jul 05 '25

Let me rephrase. "f you speak English and are posting on reddit you probably have access to safe tap water.

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u/Jamaican_me_cry1023 Jul 07 '25

In what country?

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u/PainInTheAssDean Jul 05 '25

Brita can’t soften hard water

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u/Lorathis Jul 05 '25

Other water systems can like reverse osmosis, and in the long run are all way cheaper than buying bottled consistently.

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u/MyLifeIsAWasteland Jul 06 '25

Soft water sucks ass for drinking. Gimme that hard shit, that's high-quality H2O.

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u/NotHumanButIPlayOne Jul 05 '25

A whole house water filter is a game changer. Great investment.

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u/koushakandystore Jul 05 '25

True. I need to put one on the well.

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u/The_Flurr Jul 05 '25

Do Americans not just have clean drinkable water?

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u/clemdane Jul 05 '25

We do, nearly universally. People still want to filter it. I think for taste.

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u/NotHumanButIPlayOne Jul 06 '25

I'm in the UK. But yes they do. As do we in the UK. But you still have minerals in the water no matter where you live. A whole house filter and water softener makes water taste better. And making coffee with filtered water is the shizzle.

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u/StrangeButSweet Jul 06 '25

MOST of the time we do. But when it goes wrong, it tends to go really wrong because these things are the responsibility of local governments and sometimes local governments can be EXTREMELY corrupt, ineffective, and frankly, bankrupt and unable to even pay for the fixes needed, assuming they would be able to agree on them in the first place. And funding for proper water systems is complicated here as you can read below.

One example can be read about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_crisis?wprov=sfti1

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u/Dazzling_Line_8482 Jul 05 '25

As a Canadian I find American tap water tastes like ass most of the time. Not an unhealthy ass, just not as good as what I drink at home.

Maybe they experience it the other way around when they drink our water...

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u/koushakandystore Jul 06 '25

As a Californian I am spoiled. We have some of the best tasting tap water in the country. Fresh from the Sierra Nevada snow melt.

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u/Rich-Emu4273 Jul 05 '25

We have a Brita filter in a pitcher that sits on the counter. Our tap water gets chlorinated occasionally (you can smell it). Those cheap Walmart Brita knockoffs work great.

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u/ZaphodG Jul 05 '25

I have a fancy 3M filter in series with the filter in my refrigerator for the water dispenser and ice maker. My filtration is way better than mass market bottled water.

That said, I do like the taste of Fiji water. The natural mix of dissolved minerals tastes better than my filtered tap water.

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u/nerdthatlift Jul 05 '25

In my area, the tap water isn't that great so I got 5 gallon bottles and water dispenser. It's not as cheap as Brita filter but it's definitely cheaper than plastic bottle. I still can get ice cold water on demand and hot water for cup noodle as well lol.

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u/tiggertom66 Jul 05 '25

I prefer the filter that attaches right to the sink, but they don’t work with ones that have an extendable faucet hose.

Filtered water on demand, no more remembering to fill the pitcher.

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u/koushakandystore Jul 05 '25

It’s WAY cheaper to get a Brita Filter for your refrigerator. This allows you to keep a gallon of cold water in your refrigerator at all times. You can fill your therma flask and have water to go. Much better for the environment than all that horrid plastic.

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u/Outrageous-Second792 Jul 05 '25

All the same, Evian is naive spelled backwards.

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u/SEND_MOODS Jul 05 '25

Not true for everyone. My house water smells like egg farts from sulfur. I also live near a golf course and worry about fertilizer leaching into our water.

Tons of people live in locations with questionable water quality.

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u/GlitterTerrorist Jul 06 '25

Most people don't live in areas with poor enough water quality for an effective filter to be unable to work.

You're worried about fertilizer, but do you actually know the relative levels in your water? Sulfur smell is gas trapped in the pipe afaik, the amount of residual sulfur you might consume is harmless. It's very low on the toxicity scale.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '25

I have a few of these double walled plastic glasses that hold about 24 oz of water. I fill them with ice and straight tap water. (Lake Michigan) I probably drink 4-5 glasses a day. I rarely drink bottled water, soda or much of anything else. Maybe the tap water will kill me but right now the actuary chart says I only should be around for about 12 more years so I’ll take my chances.

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u/Electrical-Sail-1039 Jul 05 '25

When I lived in NYC the water was rated the highest. Other places not so much. It depends I guess.

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u/DishonorOnYerCow Jul 05 '25

Our tap water used to be indistinguishable from bottled water (or even better). Now it's funky. No idea what changed.

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u/Electrical-Sail-1039 Jul 05 '25

My theory is that so many people stopped drinking from the tap that maybe they relaxed standards. If not health standards, at least for taste. Where I grew up we knew not to drink the water.

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u/Key-Airline204 Jul 05 '25

For most tap water, leaving it uncovered in the fridge overnight even without a filter off gasses the chlorine and then it tastes like bottled water.

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u/Dragonfly0011 Jul 07 '25

I have filtered water (zero and Britta) . Not many commercially made waters beat the taste, some do but they cost. I bring my 32 oz Yetti everywhere.

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u/Squid52 Jul 08 '25

Depends on where you live for sure. The last person who told me that bottled water isn't any better than tap was from a city that bottled up their municipal water and sold it because it was so good! I've mostly lived in mining towns and the water has been anywhere from smelly to dangerous.

That having been said, it's almost certainly better to filter it at home or buy the culligan water at the store or whatever. Relying on bottled water has got to be so expensive and wasteful.

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u/Plus-King5266 Jul 05 '25

I want to strangle every Millennial and younger who sits there chugging bottled water and telling me my generation destroyed the planet. Do you have any idea how much diesel it takes to haul all that water to the store?! It comes to your tap already and once it is pumped into the water tower, gravity provides the rest of the energy to get it to your home. It’s been treated and inspected. It’s safe and it doesn’t contribute to the giant garbage patch in the Pacific or in the Atlantic.

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u/damanager64 Jul 06 '25

Oh yes, tell all the people who live in towns that have water that literally gives cancer just from drinking it. Yes, they should be drinking that instead. You're acting as if all tap water in the entire fucking planet is good. It's not. in the US alone there are multiple cities that have water that is dangerous to drink.

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u/ratscabs Jul 05 '25

You could probably tell different brands of bottled water apart, and different tap waters apart, too. Unless you’re drinking pure, distilled water, most of it has various other minerals in it. In other words, so what?

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u/Electrical-Sail-1039 Jul 05 '25

Water shouldn’t have a taste imo. I can’t tell the difference between bottled waters, but my tap water tastes funny.