Is anyone using an under-sink water filtration system? If not, why?
EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes
161–170 of 198 posts
Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're asking the wrong question. It isn't a question of whether the people of Flint should have clean water. The question is whether people should continue to live in Flint. And if the answer is no, spending a hundred million dollars to install pipes there makes no sense.
A related question is: should every single place to live be subject to the same conditions that produced Flint? I see a fundamental viewpoint conflict between the concept 'what created Flint was a persistent course of governance action stretching way back to the 60s and only exacerbated by municipal choices to destroy the infrastructure, and this is basically criminal behavior' and 'Flint is what it is because when s…
Places don't have to compete other places to be worth living in. Places where water extraction and delivery is relatively cheap, for example, need not produce very much in the way of value to be justified.
Moreover, economic value can be created, and is not zero sum, meaning that two people, or two places may create value without being parasites on each other. The important thing though is just that somebody has to create some form of value -- value can be minimal, and value can be isolated, but there must be someone doing something of value for the math to work out, and for a variety of reasons, a tax-funded commune is very unlikely to work except in areas that are rich in resources, which Michigan is not known to be. (Though I could be very wrong on that)
Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this country we've lost the ability to build things at a reasonable cost (or at all). A single mile of track in NYC costs about half as much as the entire Delhi metro system, or a typical Spanish rail line (not just a small track extension), etc. The problem is costs, not revenue. Charging more money will merely divert funds from productive and valuable investments (e.g. self driving cars) into less valuables ones…
You've misdiagnosed the cost problem. We have suburbs who have never, and continue not to be, amortizing -- they don't pay their costs in taxes. That can be papered over by fees from growth when they are growing, but when they stop expanding, wait 50 years for infrastructure to wear out, and you have a disaster. Lots of suburbs and rural America are built far too sparsely to be affordable (to the denizens; Woodside w…
If infrastructure cost the same as it costs in Spain, Korea, China or India, thos suburbs would be paying their costs.
Delhi built a metro system for the cost of 2 miles of 2nd Ave Subway track in NYC.
We spend too much. That's the problem.
Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the adversarial system - people vs Government. In pretty much every country that's doing well, the Government is considered a representative of the people, and is expected to act as one or suffer political consequences - but in the case of the US, it's expected that the Government as a whole is not a functional part of society, so it has no reason to behave as one.
Can you give some examples of those countries? Which countries are doing well and have governments that their people are generally happy with and consider representative of the people?
Most of Europe to at least some extent, with variations on different subjects.
For example, in some countries people are dissatisfied with immigration policy, but they're probably happy with the roads and water supply.
Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe just privatize it? In France (one of the most socialist country on Earth) we've been privatizing more and more of our water infrastructure (we're around 30% private by now and it increases each year) and the quality of water is still one of the best.
And how much do you pay for it?
England's water system was privatized in the 1980s, and prices went up significantly. But that's also kind of the point. One of the reasons U.S. water infrastructure is so bad is that bureaucrats set the water/sewer rates too low to appropriately fund upgrades.[1] Regulators set rates way too low, because they'd rather poison children (who don't vote) with lead than raise water rates on grandmas (who do vote).
[1] https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-water-infrastructure/pricing...
Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. I don't understand the first point. Do water systems have some great economies of scale beyond the municipal level? The cost of the water system and the ability to take on debt are both directly proportional to the pop…
> If you have twice as many people in a unit then you can borrow twice as much money but have to pay twice as much to cover them. Right, but you can spread out the repayment risk. Michigan as a whole is struggling, but as recently as 2000 it's per-capita GSP was at the national average, compared to places like Detroit and Flint where the bottom dropped out decades ago.
> Right, but you can spread out the repayment risk.
The lenders can already do that. Instead of buying $1000 in Michigan State bonds they can buy $100 in bonds from each city, limiting the exposure to any one.
The effect you're really after is that at the state level the interest rates are lower because one city failing doesn't cause any of the state-level bonds to default. But that's just the second point again -- sustainable cities bail out the unsustainable ones. Instead of cities paying more interest they have to pay the same money to cover the bondholders against another city's default. If the bond market is efficient in evaluating risk and pricing it into interest rates then it's exactly the same average amount. But more of the money comes from the cities that already would have paid lower interest rates, to prop up the failing ones.
It's basically the state acting as an insurance company for the bondholders against the risk of default, without reinsurance. So the government suffers unexpected large one-time expenses rather than predictable small expenses over time, and if too many municipalities get into trouble at once it could take down the whole state. Look at what Greece nearly did to the EU at an even higher level.
Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. I don't understand the first point. Do water systems have some great economies of scale beyond the municipal level? The cost of the water system and the ability to take on debt are both directly proportional to the pop…
> The cost of the water system ... [is] proportional to the population size... Absolutely not - unless you assume every municipal area has equal population density. You figure water pipe installation costs per mile. There are a lot more miles to get to people's houses in Podunk Nebraska. Overall - trivially disprovable. > The ... ability to take on debt [is] directly proportional to the population size. Absolutely no…
Podunk, Nebraska isn't supposed to have city water and sewer. It isn't a city. You only need those things in areas where there is too much population density for wells and septic fields.
And then you're just arguing that sustainable cities should pay for unsustainable ones again.
Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clean water is only valuable if someone can get for it greater than what it costs to extract. The aspect you're missing isn't a definition of value, but a model of sustainability. If there's industry enough in an area that there is some other way to pay for water extraction, production, cleaning (see Nevada) -- then water can be sold at a loss because it supports something else, and is sustainable so long as there a…
> Economics are true whether or not your ideology agrees This is not true. Hence the old name Political economy. There's no such thing as objective economics - much to the annoyance of usually libertarians. And to add to this discussion there's no way that this would happen and not be fixed where I live no matter the profitability of the municipality itself. If the municipality couldn't pay for it, the state would. A…
people are just arguing over each other because the other's point of view is unimaginable.
on the one hand, providing basic necessities which is deemed a basic human right, like clean water, is a no brainer. it should be done regardless, and if the city cannot afford it, it ought to be subsidized by an out of city entity like the state.
on the other hand, what's the worth of these human lives? if it cost more money to keep a city running than the productivity it produces, it makes sense to cut it out. it leaves the resources that would've been allocated to be used elsewhere.
Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
One could argue the Coca Cola company pushed bottled water on US residents in the 1990's. Alternatively, one could argue government standards did not keep up with filtration technology. Unfortunately, US government innovation since the 1960's has failed the test of time. Statistically speaking, the majority of quality of life improvements in the last half century, was seeded by American startups and small business.
Do you have sources/data for any of those claims?
Agreed. This is some tin foil hat stuff.
Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many well functioning local governments in the United States. The US is a big country both in terms of habitable land and population, with almost 325 million people (Canada technically has more land, but since most of it is uninhabitable, they don't have to worry about plumbing it). You've read about ONE city where the mismanagement was so severe that the water became poisonous. I'm sure it's not the only o…
isn't the problem in Flint that a set of politicians decided to switch the water source to a heavily polluted one in exchange for some financial compensation now that the lead particulate has gotten into all the existing pipes, it's an insurmountable problem, but still entirely a result of American corruption, rather than an engineering issue.
They switched the water to the Flint River to try to save money (the city had been maintaining infrastructure and a treatment plant to pull water from the Flint river for many years previously but it was unused).
My understanding is the largest problem was not pulling water from the river - it was the decision of evironmental department officials and treatment plant managers to not add anti-corrosion chemicals to pH balance the acidic water. (They claimed to misinterpret federal regulations and believed 1 year of monitoring was necessary before adding the chemicals). The chemicals themselves were quite cheap and there hasn't been any "corruption" related reason for them not to have been added. Unless new evidence has come out since then, this was a case of incompetence.