111–120 of 413 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Large country, so probably true for the most remote locations.
Remote locations are where companies frack and spill oil and coal waste with impunity. People are also more likely to drink well water there (apparently 15% of Americans rely on it). Coming from a rural place where water smelled like rotten eggs on a good day, I doubt the veracity of the claim.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would a reverse osmosis filter hooked up in the basement / under the sink compare to distillation? The good ones spit out water that is close to 0 PPM (in most municipal water systems tap water is closer to 60-200). Is PPM a good way of measuring the types of chemicals you mentioned?
Doesn't RO needs 3+ liters to get you 1L of purified water ? It doesn't look like this would be viable long term + it doesn't solve the root cause, just the symptoms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is pretty much the end state for Neoliberalism (which has been the prevailing mode for both parties). There's such an emphasis on protecting business and capital, and almost none on protecting the people.
In your view, what happens to the people when business and capital fail?
Business are allowed to fail, that's healthy for the overall system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Democracy is mostly a facade anymore, unfortunately. Don't get me wrong, we haven't gone completely south to a dictatorship--there are many protections in place to keep things from falling apart but nonetheless I feel as though we're in the decline in the respect of being democratic. The underlying failed assumption in our representative democracy was that representatives would represent their constituents' interests…
>Democracy is mostly a facade in the US anyway. But I agree, the US government isn't functioning 1) as originally intended or 2) for the benefit of the majority of the people it 'represents.' Although it's worth noting that 'as the forefathers intended' carries more weight than it typically should. Their intentions were mostly based on philosophical guess work, as they didn't have a whole lot of empirical data or exi…
> Although it's worth noting that 'as the forefathers intended' carries more weight than it typically should. Their intentions were mostly based on philosophical guess work
Until the letter and spirit of the law are ironed out, it's hard to interpret what laws mean, specifically. A lot of rules, like how shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater is not free speech, are essentially interpretations of what the people who wrote the laws intended when they wrote it.
> It honestly seems like like they intended the US government to function a lot more similarly to the EU than what we currently have
That was, and is, the intent of having states be their own, you know, sovereign states, with their own constitutions, laws, and courts. Unlike the EU, the US has a common language, history, and currency, so centralizing and strengthening a federal government is easier, and has some advantages.
It is constantly amazing to me that "cover up the existence of poisonous chemicals in your drinking water" is a viable position for a democratically-elected officeholder to have. What a world we live in.
The elected officials are also responsible for the functioning of the society in general. Sometimes you need quite the acrobatics to achieve that, I suppose. In this very case, what would happen if this report would circulate widely and become common knowledge among the population in a short time?
One outcome would be that safety measures and/or alternative water sources would be sought after. One other possibility is that no such short-term solutions are in sight, meaning, you, as the "democratically-elected officeholder" have no way of realistically supply clean water to tens of millions of people. I would bet chaos and panic would ensure. We're talking about health-related problems, and not only about the water having a bad taste.
So, in that view, I suppose that not every truth can come out to light. Some truths can simply be unbearable or have no immediate solution even though the people demand a solution to it. One other alternative might be to promise, publicly, that it will be solved. The years will pass, another promise, another elected official, and on and on.
It is constantly amazing to me that "cover up the existence of poisonous chemicals in your drinking water" is a viable position for a democratically-elected officeholder to have. What a world we live in.
Direct democracy has downright massive logistical issues for everyone to learn sufficiently capable of being informed on the issues while adding more may diffuse power it also diffuses responsibility. Simply subdividing more doesn't solve problems as not only would it result in squabbling fiefdoms instead of concern for the whole and lose the advantages of large scale.
Even if we had a known and proven better solution getting it implemented over the status quo would be fiendishly difficult to bootstrap or carry /massive/ side effects like say literal Civil War or Coups and the latter usually make things worse since the winners are based upon their ability to do violence instead of their ability towards any constructive pursuit let alone to govern.
Compound that with the evolution of emotional manipulators - the demagogs and propagandists as an electorally dominant force and every special interest after their own piece of the pie. An educated populace helps as always of course but that is a very long term project. It is a "plant trees and decarbonize 70 years ago" sort of solution.
The kicker is that despite the paragraphs of advantages it is still better than dictatorships and oligarchies. Their bread ans butter are lies, cohesion and the ability to rationalize absurdities to make travesties.
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/list-of-household-filters-appr...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Democracy is mostly a facade in the US anyway. But I agree, the US government isn't functioning 1) as originally intended or 2) for the benefit of the majority of the people it 'represents.' Although it's worth noting that 'as the forefathers intended' carries more weight than it typically should. Their intentions were mostly based on philosophical guess work, as they didn't have a whole lot of empirical data or exi…
>Their intentions were mostly based on philosophical guess work, as they didn't have a whole lot of empirical data or existing republics/democracies to base their new government on. They had plenty of examples to base their design on; democracy had been invented more than a thousand years before the US was formed. Like the vast majority of social institutions though, it was in the end based on fallible guesswork -- p…
Right, that was my point. I wasn't suggesting they invented democracy.
It is constantly amazing to me that "cover up the existence of poisonous chemicals in your drinking water" is a viable position for a democratically-elected officeholder to have. What a world we live in.
Democracy is mostly a facade anymore, unfortunately. Don't get me wrong, we haven't gone completely south to a dictatorship--there are many protections in place to keep things from falling apart but nonetheless I feel as though we're in the decline in the respect of being democratic. The underlying failed assumption in our representative democracy was that representatives would represent their constituents' interests…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is pretty much the end state for Neoliberalism (which has been the prevailing mode for both parties). There's such an emphasis on protecting business and capital, and almost none on protecting the people.
In your view, what happens to the people when business and capital fail?