Water is water

Oh, how I love this.

(H/t CJR) The Washington Post cuts through the bottled water hype:

The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon: The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince Americans that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap.

But empirical tests have repeatedly shown that they are generally the same. In blind taste tests, many people who swear they can differentiate between bottled-water brands and tap water fail to spot the differences, and studies have shown that both are fine to drink, and both occasionally can have quality problems.

A classic example of how the marketing firehose can drown out the truth. Read the whole article. It rocks.

Only in America could government spend trillions providing cheap water to citizens who'd spurn it in favor of overpriced, unregulated hype.