Lol true. Compare sewage to electricity.

Imagine having to pay your monthly Shit bill.

Yeah so that exists and it's not going so well for the UK. I will edit with some links.

Edit:

Very broadly water utilities in the UK and north America largely started off private but public ownership is still the norm for centralized system of idk > 100 people?

Tbh I'm high and not bothering to look stuff but but I'm guessing that it was sewage treatment which lead water utilities (handling both potable and sewage) being public. You can charge people for water, but unless the government is forcing people to connect to a sewer and get rid of pit latrines etc there is no market for it. (Fun fact domestic connections to sewers predate the widespread use of septic tanks)

Migration to urban centres due to industrialization and the industrial processes themselves were the main loading of sewage, which overwhelmed natural systems that had previously been able to support the community.

Someone had to treat the sewage because it was fucking up the drinking water. Who has to deal with stuff like that? The government! So they run the sewage plants. And because the private drinking water plants were run for profit and not for health, a lot of them were extremely bad they got shut down. Once again, the government had to step in because they needed to enforce standards.

Toronto and Ottawa have very interesting and very divergent experiences with that relationship. If someone is interested I can see if I can dig up an article someone wrote about it.

Anyways, sometimes the government made developers pay directly for the construction, operations and maintenance of a plant, but now in Ontario for the most part they just charge development fees. Small communities like trailer parks or ski villages typically have their own little plant or over glorified septic tank.

I came here to argue that there are in fact private sewage companies and they are often disasters, but I think the above kind of proved that the origin of public water utilities was the failure of the private sector to get their shit together.

Well that's awkward.

Anyways, fuck Thames Water : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Water

At least where I live (US), sewage is included in the water bill, and the cost of sewage is 4x the cost of the water it came from. Partly because the public service commission neglected sewer maintenance for 100 years to the point that the EPA stepped in and told them to fix it. Now they're doing a billion dollars of pipe replacement.

Yeah same in the UK. The sewage costs are in your water bill.

Not by choice.

I have a septic tank, so I don’t have to imagine too hard.

I do have to pay for sewage service.

We 100% do. Either by taxes to a county, a private sewage company, or by having someone come to empty your local sewage tank.

Unless you're putting your shit through a sandbed/rock chest.

God, this comic fits sooo often. It's sad.

"Midwest State Of Mind" is so in the nose that I'm not 100% sure it isn't sature

The interesting thing is now that the Internet is completely corporate free market driven it resembles a sewer much more than it used to.

Sounds like a real shitty situation

🥁

I am sure some of them are privatized. They want to privatize everything, they think the only legitimate function of government is protecting property. If they got what they wanted all industries would consolidate into one company and those would consolidate then we'd just have the disney/amazon/exon/whatever mega corporation left. Like in idiocracy but with meaner spirited leaders.

I would be pissed off.

Better to be pissed off than pissed on, at least

Toronto and Ottawa have very interesting and very divergent experiences with that relationship. If someone is interested I can see if I can dig up an article someone wrote about it

I would love to read about that, sounds very interesting.

"Then I shall leave the society!"

"You can't, we'll arrest you!"

Yeah in parts of the UK (largely England) water is privatised, and that includes sewage. You can imagine that goes swimmingly for everyone involved, especially if you like swimming in untreated human shit when you visit a river, or the regulator doing nothing about these people hiking your bills to pay their senior management higher.

Private water monopolies all belong in hell, largely because there's no aquatic environments there for them to poison.

fuck Thames Water

Having lived in their catchment, I cannot echo this sentiment more strongly. In a sane country their entire senior management cohort would be hauled before Parliament to explain the amount of human shit in the Thames, and why their bosses keep getting paid enormous bonuses despite this. Absolutely crooked industry, I'm fairly sure Thames Water could redirect the sewage they're currently pumping into the river into Ofwat's boardroom and they'd at worst get away with a slap on the wrist and 'boys will be boys'. Absolutely pathetic, and the whole thing stinks of corruption as well as sewage.

In the UK it is. Sewage is routinely dumped on beaches and in rivers as a result to boost shareholder profits.

In response to this I support jury nullification to anyone who causes any harm to CEOs or execs of sewage companies.

Yeah, having lived in a Thames Water area, and with the absolutely garbage water quality, and pretty consistent 2-6×/yr loss of service because of shit infrastructure, and constantly insane price increases. Now live in Scotland, quality is peak, haven't had a single loss of service in 4 years. Idk.... almost feels like maybe something like water and sewage shouldn't be privatised.....🤷🏾‍♂️

💚💚💚

I looked them up and yeah it seems to be a satire account.

Oh it wouldn't be Idiocracy, we would definitely be headed down the Cyberpunk route at this point, but without the cool augmentation stuff. Just the Megacorp bullshit.

Shhh!

Yeah, well, around my parts it was in time to be a Jewish conspiracy...

"The Warsaw Sewer System as a Tool of Judaism and Quackery aimed at destroying Polish agriculture and exterminating the Slavic population along the Vistula River"

Actually, US Military Technology is almost exclusively private contractors. US Universities, like Stanford Research Institute and other ones to first build such a network, are the same way. So Internet and especially modern Telecoms version of it are the result of free market. There is a reason it wasnt invented in the USSR.

Shout out too for tim berners-lee. I was going to say CERN but it looks like he left there to found W3C

edit: too many too's

Self hosting is always the best way to go.

This post made by the "Never had to deal with rural septic service" gang

So... Planned economies at a small scale created the Ethernet. There's a reason we didn't invent the WWW. Thatcher must have missed some shit for that to have happened.

How the heck did y'all take the Ethernet, and create WWW protocols under Thatcher?‽?‽

I'm thankful for libraries and fire departments.

Would be? We're there, boss.

Posting this on an app that emerged from a 'free' market does not invalidate the point about critical civil infrastructure.

Sewage systemc are highly important. Brainfart apps are not. Both can coexist.

Assholes pointing out someone participates on what's being criticized are no fun anymore. They've never been.

they did it in switzerland

I was looking for this comment. Obviously OOP doesn't keep up with UK news.

Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN in Switzerland when he invented WWW.

That would stink

I'm having trouble finding the one I'm thinking about (it was written for some industry org, maybe OWWA or OPWA?

Anyways, here is a comprehensive history, but it's 181 pages: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2273818

I'll comment again if I find the other one. I'm sure I have it saved somewhere 😅

TL;DR: Ottawa would have sooner built an aqueduct from 31-Mile Lake than build a sewage plant. They didn't get one until the 1960s. Toronto built it's first (and poorly working) municipal plant in 1912 (I think?). The chief bacteriologist in Ottawa was just like, throw some chlorine at the water, you will be fine. 😬

For real? Conspiracies in 1800 were wild

I so often see absolutely misinformed takes like this post, for which this comic is always so relevant. I hope in my heart of hearts that this is just children who don't yet know better yet.