481–490 of 524 posts
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Flushing a toilet will always be cheap. Desalination costs somewhere around $1 per tonne of water.
You could flush a toilet with salt water, the problem is you’d have to pump it all the way from the sea. That’s the expensive part.
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When it comes to things like utilities every penny of profit comes at the expense of the public. Either prices are raised so that a small number of people can stuff their pockets with extra cash above what it costs to deliver the service and maintain the system or they get that extra money by failing to deliver the service or they do it by failing to maintain the system itself. I think the neglect and failure to inve…
> I think the neglect and failure to invest in infrastructure is the worst Cumulative capital investment by water companies in England and Wales since privatisation: £250bn. The infrastructure they inherited was never designed for the things it's being asked to do today, and it has a life expectancy. It would literally cost trillions to upgrade the entire sewerage system. This isn't apologia, it's just reality. The r…
Very little in our world was designed to do what we need it do 50 years later. It's unlikely that anyone will even know what our needs 50 years from today will be. This is why the expectation is that systems we build will be constantly maintained, upgraded, modified, expanded, and redesigned as needed and with the next several decades in mind (to the best of our ability).
It's what we've always done with all infrastructure and even our cities themselves. Neglecting things like sewer systems until they are overwhelmed, failing, and prohibitively expensive to fix isn't inevitable. It's just bad governance. It doesn't matter if it's private companies or governments, neglecting infrastructure so that a few people can line their own pockets until the situation becomes critical should be criminal, but at the very least nobody should accept them throwing their hands up and saying it's just too expensive to fix now.
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You really twist yourself around here. But this? > Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt. Bloody Tories, the whole problem isn't that they were in charge for 32 years from 1979-2024, it's the 13 years of Blair. They have been powerless to stop the spooky Left and fix the pipes before the water was…
The Tories are a centre-left party. That's why they lost the support of conservative voters at the last election and are now in the doldrums, with much of their base having defected to Reform.
Oh boy. That's funny.
> much of their base having defected to Reform.
Yes, they found a party they will say the quiet bits out loud, so they don't feel as uncomfortable being bigots and racists.
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> on the basis that the AfD is right wing and thus inherently evil I thought it was on the basis of the whole Nazi thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany#Neo-Na... Everyone except Nazis agrees that Nazis are inherently evil.
The AfD has nothing in common with the Nazis.
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> on the basis that the AfD is right wing and thus inherently evil I thought it was on the basis of the whole Nazi thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany#Neo-Na... Everyone except Nazis agrees that Nazis are inherently evil.
The AfD has nothing in common with the Nazis.
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> The US is a very right wing country. It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls. Maybe with Mamdani that's now changing. Rather than placing price controls on private companies the US slashes taxes to the point where public services then cannot invest in infrastructure and maintenance - and then use that as an argument why public services should be privatized. If tax cuts aren't populist poli…
The difficulty of getting people to vote for tax rises is a good justification for privatization. This difficulty isn't some uniquely right wing thing. The Democrats and Labour don't campaign on general tax rises either. At most, the left are willing to campaign on "tax rises for people who aren't you". That's because any party that wants to raise taxes on the majority loses. So, governments of any color have to work…
They should try it. We desp3rately need to move the Overton window on this.
Tax is good. We need more of it. A screamingly obvious fact. Give us a chance, please, to vote for it.
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The thing is, if a water company is in good financial health, with low debt and lots of money to invest in infrastructure, it’s completely legal for private equity to buy the company, stop investing in infrastructure, take out loans until a third of customer bills go on interest payments, and take the loaned money as ‘management fees’. Then dump untreated sewerage in rivers and demand more money from bill payers, bec…
Governments don't pay for infrastructure by saving up surplus tax revenue in a piggy bank. They take out loans to pay for it, same as the water companies do. The UK pays around 8% of its spending on interest payments and that's rising rapidly, despite the fact it can print money. British water companies are in lots of debt because they aren't really private. They're forced to spend huge sums to repair Victorian-era i…
This clearly isn't always true and when it does happen the public has the ability to require the transparency from their government to catch it happening quickly and the ability to hold the elected officials responsible for it accountable by voting them out and replacing them. Private corporations don't allow the level of transparency the public needs and aren't accountable to the public either.
Maybe the government could work out some deal that gives the public the right to put webcams in every meeting/board room of the private company, force their bookkeeping to be published to the internet, allow the public to request internal email and other communications, require independent audits/reports, and grant the public the ability to fire and replace any and all employees or executives at the private company who fail to do their jobs, but even then you'd still have the problem that private companies demand extra money on top of what is required to do the job just to line their own pockets. Why should we accept that?
As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources. What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992. So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of i…
When it comes to things like utilities every penny of profit comes at the expense of the public. Either prices are raised so that a small number of people can stuff their pockets with extra cash above what it costs to deliver the service and maintain the system or they get that extra money by failing to deliver the service or they do it by failing to maintain the system itself. I think the neglect and failure to inve…
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Giving how much subsidies farmers get, and they still whine all the fucking time, I would gladly nationalize them all. Corn ethanal? Gone. Crazy EU stuff? Gone.
Collectivised agriculture has gone badly enough often enough that I'm wouldn't risk trying it.
Because the massive subsidies we already have the incentive problems too, so it's not like that would be a new can of worms either.