Tangentially related to this thread sorta, lived in San Antonio. There's a major bus station by one of the largest malls. Right next to it. But there's two sets of fences between the station and the mall and nothing between, DMZ style.
I got in trouble at a job once for giving someone a cup of water when they asked. Boss told me I should charge a whole dollar for it, because of the cup (I said "sure" and kept giving it away anyway). Policy in most places seems to be to not engage with someone unless they intend to spend money.
Actually most of the US has unsafe drinking water, and there are over a million kids in the US at any given time currently suffering from acute lead poisoning. The EPA's 15ppb action level is much higher than it should be, and even in spite of that nearly half of Americans are getting water above the action level limit thanks to cheating on water testing, deferring action, and local governments outright lying to people.
Reminder that Flint got huge amounts of press coverage and international outrage because it was white [Edit: completely incorrect - see comment below] America so it's etched into our brains while the general awareness of the lack of safe drinking water and running water in reservations which has been an ongoing problem for decades upon decades is barely known to people outside of the reservations themselves.
Lead in the drinking water is terrible, don't get me wrong, but how about uranium and arsenic poisoning your water supply as well as lead?
watching Britain's Americanization has been horrifying
and funny, because you get a lot of American-isms introduced into the language because of TV/internet. It's also occurring all over the Angloid countries, especially countries like Australia and NZ. I guess the main downside is the awful politics has become more awful because they've imported the "culture war" nonsense.
Privatisation of water treatment has done wonders to help England on the way to not having clean drinking water. The old infrastructure they’ve been coasting on is starting to fall apart now. Love all that raw sewage straight into water systems.
But at least some people made money, and isn’t that what it is all about after all?
"Stop banging on the door; I'm having a shower! Water is free in this country! And get hoses so I don't have to bring my own! When I come back to wash my kid there better be proper facilities!"
I'm 99% sure that account is a troll. They previously argued with me that an Asus router can do everything a business grade firewall like opnsense could do, then proceeded to stick their head in the sand and provide no counter when I pointed out several limitations of consumer router hardware and features that even replacing stock firmware won't get you. Their trolling becomes super obvious really quickly.
Yes water is a basic human need. So it's most important.
However, real free cannot exist. In the Netherlands, a country that is quite social, water is not free. We have some of the purest tapwater the world knows. People work for that, big systems have to purify that water and in turn need to be maintained. It's expensive. I don't mind paying for water if it gets me the best quality water in the world, from my tap. It's not expensive, in fact it's cheap. If this becomes free to me, I think that quality wil suffer.
Then again. I live in a country that values human life and doesn't slave away for capitalism completely.
Except everything you've said is true of public roads and those are somehow free. Literally nobody is talking about this straw man of "true free". Nobody thinks that potable water can be created, regulated, and distributed without the labor of many people. However the example of public roads, public schools, etc, show us that it is actually very much possible for essential services to be funded out of general taxes and be free and openly accessible.
Moreover, water access activism isn't necessarily even about drinking water in many places because agricultural water sources are being tapped unsustainably and distributed unfairly. Especially for indigenous peoples who rely on already precarious water sources to make their remaining land habitable, this has never been an issue that can be solved by going to the mall to fill up your drink bottle.
It’s not “waaah why is it not literally free” and it’s weird that chuds on the internet interpret it that way.
The complaint is not that it isn’t literally free. The complaint is that their water system was destroyed.
“Water is a human right” isn’t about a few cents for tap water. It’s a demand for water systems to be protected and not exploited with disregard for the impact of that exploitation.