When I was a bartender if we had a wine that wasn't selling we'd do two things: raise the price and improve the story around it. The story involved researching the vineyard, the wine maker, and the grapes involved in the wine. Once the staff has the story then it's easy to sell it.
People are very gullible. About a lot of things. It's especially comical with wine because a lot of people are convinced they're super tasters.
Raising the price is an easy win. There's always some guy saying, "you get what you pay for!" as if wine were priced on it's taste or quality.
My experience as a bartender and a bachelors in philosophy have given me great appreciation for cognitive biases.
We pay for stories all the time. It's entertainment. Your beverages are also a form of entertainment.
I'm OK with paying more for a wine that comes with a good story. It does have a different effect on me than one without, even if the chemical makeup is identical. I probably won't buy it more than once -- but I might, if the story resonates especially well.
Really Id just feel annoyed that the bartender was wasting my time and feel socially obligated to buy the wine after he just spent so much time bloviating about it.
The price thing is probably a cognitive bias but not really the story thing.
People go to a bar for a good time. If you took the time to tell them a story about a wine, they probably had a good time hearing about that and were willing to pay to continue participating in that story.
I'm laughing that you're citing your philosophy degree and seem to have missed the boat about people searching for meaning in their life, jumping straight to cognitive biases (which aren't even a philosophical subject).
> It concluded that one could send the lake ice 286 miles by truck, 1,438 miles by rail, or 4,284 miles by container ship until it broke even with the energy required to produce a Clinebell block.
This report was of course commissioned by the business in question so it is likely biased, but generally speaking it seems clear that shipping natural ice and freezing your own ice are roughly comparable in terms of environmental impact.
You may think that ice is ice. I'm not going to disagree that Norwegian lake ice is likely the same as locally produced freezer ice. However, there are interesting properties to kinds of ice with unexplored culinary properties.
If cooled very rapidly, liquid water forms a glass e rather than crystallizing to hexagonal ice, for example, hyperquenched glassy water. [0]
If you add up the cost of shipping the water, either in bottles or in pipes, and the electricity, including line losses, it starts to be more even I expect.
We often think, in our modern world, that water and power are free at our homes.
Often it's the other way around, the ice is and can be used to cool other cargo. Ship fruit or fish with it.
This is how the meatpacking plants in Chicago used to work, entire train loads of ice was shipped down, then we add beef in Chicago, then you ship refrigerated beef and ice together to the rest of the country.
Not disagreeing about the point of lake ice, but about apetizing -- as a Norwegian, I would much rather drink directly from a Norwegian lake in the mountains than tap water from any city, Norwegian or European. Much tastier.
Drilling through the ice for drinking water is common (well, if you have a cabin near a mountain lake). Closest you would get in many cities is purchasing highest quality bottled water, except that has been stored in plastic.
Not entirely comparable, but I'm someone who frequently backpacks in the mountain regions of the Pacific Northwest, and I wholeheartedly agree with this general sentiment. Mountain lakes and streams have the most delicious water, and much of it is surprisingly clean thanks to wilderness regulations. I still filter out of an abundance of caution, but often times the water is so clean that there's no actual need.
It's absolutely tastier and purer than any water elsewhere, and I've even got a few "favorite" streams I prefer hahaha. I actively look forward to drinking from them and, even as I write this, crave water from them. Glacial runoff streams (at least the siltless ones) are the absolute best - so frosty and delicious.
Fair enough. This is not a lake in the mountains though, it's right outside Oslo next to a bunch of farmland.
Maybe things are different in Europe, in most of the US the highest quality water is from the tap. Bottled water is at best just repackaged tap water, and the expensive brands are usually just shipped from somewhere far away with worse standards than your local municipality.
With "high quality" do you refer to taste or safety?
In Norway, tap water countryside can be quite tasty but in cities there has often been chlorine added and it just taste worse.
And bottled water is bottled mountain water with good taste (in Norway), not as good as tap water countryside but better than tap water in cities.
Most other places I have been in the world tap water tastes...not good. UK, France, Spain, California... I mean I can adapt, good water is not essential to life, but.. it is just something else.
I am sure mountain regions in US would have excellent tap water though, no reason they should not have.
NYC has very high-quality water. It's all from the mountains north of the city. It does have a somewhat unusual taste, but it's better than what I get at home (which comes from a river and smells a bit swampy).
It really is. The basic hipsterization cycle goes like this:
1. Humans suffer with crappy situation due to lack of technology for years. (In this case, water-borne illnesses that killed most humans for our first X years as a species, where X is like 1925 - whenever humans first came on the scene).
2. Humans invent technology that makes life better and stop suffering from crappy situation entirely.
3. Hipsters think crappy situation was probably kinda awesome and elect to go back to it. Before 2020, anti-vaxxers were largely hipsters. Unpasteurized milk is a good current example too.
They mention visual checks for dead animals, and bacterial tests. But what about checks for heavy metals? Viruses? Radioactivity? (My understanding is that viruses are frequently durable to temperature changes because, unlike bacteria, they don't have a cell wall that will get damaged when frozen)
This seems like a naturalistic fallacy to assume random ice you find is safe to drink...
Here[1] is what the gov't says on the topic. Mostly stay way from water that's near farmland and after heavy rainfall. Apart from that it's quite safe here.
As for radioactivity, AFAIK the primary source would be radon from granite and similar rocks. It shouldn't be a problem for a lake, though can be a concern if you have a well[2].
True, however the farmland-proximity advice is primarily due to bacteria from natural fertilizers (ie cow dung etc), and those bacteria wouldn't survive freezing.
That said, the virus concern is probably not invalid, so I'd get my ice cubes from somewhere with a less exciting story.
Legend has it that my great great (great?) grandfather was heavily invested in lake ice exports from Norway to warmer places. Then the refrigerator was invented, he went under on his boat, and made the controversial decision to move to America in hopes of finding prosperity not long before the great depression. It's reassuring to see this ancient industry is coming back via automation.
You need to watch put in SF for this kind of thing too.
If you have a water delivery service and they deliver "live water" it's this. Just pond or spring water, un filtered. Thats why they have to refrigerate it.
Hopefully it's spring water, not pond water. Many springs are effectively filtered by the soil and are perfectly safe to drink from, but I wouldn't want to risk pond water. Lake water is better, ponds are just nasty though.
Kinda cool how modern refrigeration is so good and cheap people can larp the old expensive in their time ways of refrigeration (having your drink cooled by lake ice that was cut and stored) as a novelty.
I mean.. what about algae and amoebas and such? I don't seen the appeal of naturally harvested ice. I guess if it's harvested from close by then the carbon footprint could be much lower than artificially frozen water... but the carbon footprint of ice making in general is probably low relative to other things, like driving, or air travel.
Most cocktails bar already have good quality ice, I do wonder How a good story taste?
The environmental waste of shipping ice just seems silly.