Safe Water

Story time:
I live in philly (as in Philadelphia, PA, USA) and there was some chemical spill last year, they gave out an alert like
"Water is safe until 2PM" then minutes before 2PM, they issued another emergency alert saying "Water is safe until 11:59PM"
🤨 (kinda sus how they change words so quickly)
And on top of that, they said "There's no need to buy bottled water".... sound familiar?
Remember covid and there was a whole "There's no need to wear a mask" debacle in the US?
🤨 (yea nobody is gonna trust the government)
So... Everyone is just afraid, and brought every case of water they could find. Like the whole "Tri-State Area" just completetely empty of water. We got like 10 cases of water from a friend in NYC who bought it on our behalf, because my family is just extra paranoid.
Felt like Flint Michigan.
- Nothing says thriving country like a major metropolitan city not having reliable, clean water.
  Sad US Empire noises

I thought this comic was super racist and got confused about the upvotes. Then I read the comments.
I'm way too European for this shit.
- I thought this comic was super racist
  The comic is super racist.
  
  Or more specifically, it’s pointing out the systemic racism in the United States.
- Just replace white with non-Romani and there you go
  
  Is this a problem in some EU countries? I never heard of it before.
- Nah, I just thought it was sarcastic. Like the Segregation-Era average racist attitute of: "Oh, there's not too many black people to taint the water supply" type of thing, and this comic is pointing out the racism, not being racist it self.
  Then I read the comments and apparantly, it had something to do with funding.

When we were picking a school district, we looked at school rating sites. But then we found out that those ratings are mostly a proxy for how white the school is.
So we switched to looking at school funding instead.
And uhhh... you're not gonna believe this...
- You're not going to believe this
  says most believable thing ever
- The school district where I live straddles a wealthier, predominantly white area and a poor, predominantly black area. The idea when it was formed was because rich parents want good education for their kids, and contribute more taxes via bigger homes, the schools could provide better education to the poorer areas and over time help to improve the socioeconomic balance.
  In reality, all the rich parents around us just send their kids to Catholic or charter schools, which fungus money from the school district which makes it unable to provide a decent education at all, screwing over the poorer area wise than if they had two different school districts (since the public schools need to have the capacity to in theory at year accept all the kids in the case none went to charter schools). Just more proof voucher programs are racism by another name.
  
  See, I grew up in the era of the Gifted And Talented Program. You'd be in a neighborhood with a mix of kids and each kid would be evaluated to determine if they were a "GT" student. Then the GT students would be funneled into one set of classes and the Non-GT students would be funneled into another set of classes.
  Take a wild guess what the economic and ethnic makeups of the GT v Non-GT classes were.

I like this joke format of answering a question with seemingly irrelevant facts that still answer the question. Hit me with some more.
- Here: https://youtube.com/shorts/KBOa3bFqlco

If you're on Mastodon I highly recommend giving Mekka Okereke a follow. His longer posts on racism in the USA were very eye opening. I've lived through most of what he discusses and some of it even surprised me.
If you have any issue or complaint about the USA, racism is almost certainly at the root of it. No public transit? Because it disproportionately hurts Black people. Bad public schools? Hurting Black people. No social safety nets, rampant health industry abuse, pollution, crumbling infrastructure, and on and on it will astound you how many bad things in America are bad just to spite Black people and regardless of the universal harm they do.
- Is all of this really caused by racism? Or is it designed to hurt poor people, which are predominantely black due to racism?
  
  I think therea a lot of little racism along the way that inadvertently affected whites as the middle class dwindled and the number of poor whites increased.
  So, all rooted in racism, maintained by classism, I'd say.
- These are also all things that disproportionally affect the working class
- Some of those things I could see a pattern as described. The exception for me is public transportation. It exists in urban areas with high diversity. But it doesn't exist in the suburbs which are much more white. The rich suburbs, it doesn't matter as everyone is driving a new Audi or whatever. But the poorer white suburbs are really a terrible place to live, you can't go anywhere without a car, and most jobs don't pay wages that accommodate housing, food and car expenses anymore. The cost increases have way outpaced wages. I know that affects urban life too, but at least they have access to buses etc.
  
  Car centrism lobbied by oil and auto industries is very responsible for the laws and policies that forged this situation. But to assume it isn't sieved through a racists filter as well is naive. The most popular public transport in America, New York, is a perfect example. There's a subway, fast and frequent, highly convenient in a high density city. They have buses, awful and inefficient when deployed in a traffic adled city without priority lanes. There are black and Hispanic, and white neighborhoods. Guess who got what when the system was designed?
  Rural America is a bit different, of course, but guess which communities get all the high capacity high speed highway projects and high frequency maintenance, and who gets stuck with small rural roads and zero maintenance or investment?
- No public transit? Because it disproportionately hurts Black people
  Why is that? Due to getting harassed by controllers?
  Or are you just being sarcastic?
  
  Because access to public transport helps poorer communities.
  And then as the other reply said, when transit networks were planned they would give black neighbourhoods less, if any, connectivity into the metro networks.
  
  There are cities that have poor transit connectivity to certain areas because when the systems were designed those were black areas. Some places even ran highways through black neighborhoods to further segregate them from other areas.
- Excellent recommendation. Instant follow. Currently listening (Read Aloud for Firefox on Android) to one of his threads and it's so good.
- Mekka Okereke
  posts on racism in the USA
  Works at Google 😬
  That's gotta suck for him.
  
  ~~Targeting the messenger of truths is right outta fascist playbooks.~~

My mostly Hispanic hometown's water was mixed with recycled poo water. It was heavily filtered and processed and was probably safe... But still.
It also had a chemical taste to it.
Edit: In the US
- Purifying water is quite standard. Furthermore, almost all purified water is purified poo water.
  
  I'm learning from the comments. I'm thinking poo water is recycled more often where there is water scarcity. My current town detoxifies the poo water and releases it back into a nearby river instead of reusing it as drinking water. It's not pure water, but some regulated blend that won't upset the river ecosystem. Lots of bacteria and other processes involved.
- Pretty much the standard in all of Germany except the water is usually better than any you can buy
- If you think about it, all water is poo water.
- I think it's important to visit the water treatment plant to see how the thing's done. They normally should be doing group visits for residents, but if they aren't allowing it, then that'd be an even bigger reason not to drink it.
  
  In elementary, we had a field trip to the water treatment plant. It stunk... badly 🤢, but it was cool learning how it worked.
  
  It's also genuinely interesting!

...what? Am I just not racist enough to understand this?
- No. The cartoon only makes sense if you live in the US… which not everyone does.
  Basically “black” neighbourhoods would - in all likelihood - have a lower standard of public utilities than the equivalent services in a “white” neighbourhood.
  It’s like racism hard-baked into the city. Whack.
  
  No. The cartoon only makes sense if you live in the US… which not everyone does.
  Canada too, embarrassingly.
  While there has been progress in recent years, there are still 31 long term drinking water advisories on 29 reserves including some that have been in place for more than 25 years
  
  Aren't the budgets based on the tax income for the districts? Wealthier people tend to be white, and wealthier people have more alternatives on where to live... so why would they choose to live somewhere without clean water, just to save a bit of money?
  It's still the same answer in the end... but it's not like some councilman is saying "those blacks won't be getting clean water as long as I'm in charge", no? I'd imagine that neighborhoods filled with poverty-whites would also have bad water quality.
  
  I can't even begin to understand how one could segregate water... But then, I don't doubt it, I just don't know how it's possible.
- Minority population centers tend not to get a lot of infrastructure funding compared their paler counterparts.
  
  Ah, so the issue isn't the in-house plumbing, but the plumbing leading to the house. Hence the "neighborhood" part.
  
  Tap water is perfectly safe to drink everywhere in the UK (except when there's some temporary incident that gets fixed) regardless of who the consumers are, there are very strict regulations to follow regardless.
  Surely it's the same in any developed country, clean, safe water is a very important basic right that the populace would quickly riot over if it weren't available. It's water, after all.
- I'm confident that isn't the issue.
  
  On no... I am too racist to understand?

Which reminds me, did Flint, Michigan ever get their water fixed?
- Yes, at least the known pipes with lead have all been replaced and it is reportedly passing safety standards.
  Took five years to fix an obviously poor decision to switch water supplies that had both an instantaneous outbreak of Legionnaire's deisease and unsafe levels of lead detected within a single year because some corrupt officials didn't want to pay for safe water.
- Officially, yes. Unofficially hell to the fuck no.
  Per the NRDC: "Flint's program to replace the thousands of lead and galvanized-steel service lines that connect city water mains to local homes began in March 2016. The program was initially scheduled to be completed within three years but as of April 2024, 10 years since the city of Flint set off the water crisis, the work of identifying and replacing lead service lines remains unfinished. Nearly 2,000 homes also still require repairs tor property damage caused by the lead pipe replacement program. Meanwhile, the city's population has declined by nearly 20,000 people since the crisis began."
  Also in 2024, the EPA proposed reducing the federal action level for lead from 15 ppb to 10 ppb and mandating the replacement of all lead service lines in the United States within 10 years.
  Fat chance that will be happening under our new oligarchy. And to be clear, there is no amount of lead that is safe to consume. Even 10 ppb is considered unsafe, but lowering the minimum would have allowed for pipe replacement and legal action against the city and those responsible.

Welcome to this new episode of “What happened in the USA this time ?”
- Same thing that's always been happening.
  
  Trying to take over the world? Zoinks, Psythik!

'Yeah all kinds of folks live here, take a look for yourself'

Damn, my neighbor is black. Am I fucked?

Is wondering if municipal tap water is safe to drink whenever you go to a different area a reality in the US?
- It's a major, multi-year news event when it's found a municipal's drinking water isn't safe to drink in the US.
  The most common complaint is that a city's water may not taste as good as another city's. A problem which is commonly remedied by adding a filter.
- Most of the USA has safe drinking water
  
  Eh... Most large urban areas have invested heavily in water treatment and sanitation, promising potable water to around 80% of the population at large.
  Once you get into the more rural neighborhoods, you'll find people relying on less developed municipal water systems. The real outlaying areas are reliant entirely on well water and self-treatment. Especially in areas that have undergone extensive fracking, well water is subject to contamination.
  So most of the US plumbing system has minimal health risks. But if you're driving through Idaho or upstate Alabama or rural Pennsylvania or the more radioactive corners of Nevada, YMMV. That's before you get into the areas of the country that still rely on lead pipes, which tend to be older, poorer, and more industrial but also tend not to have large populations.

I live in a golf course neighborhood that's easily 99% white, and the EPA just released a report saying that arsenic has infiltrated the aquifer. They plan on building close to 6000 homes here soon.
The land is polluted to fuck, and there was worry about ~~DEET~~ DDT in the soil because they used to spray it here; so what they did was haul in a bunch of outside soil, and mix up the topsoil layer so that the levels were 'lower' and then continued to build houses on it all.
Even at the county level, the commissioner here is corrupt as fuck, and is working with multiple builders from Saudi Arabia in order to bring in housing to sell at as high of a price as they can get away with.
And since we don't have the money to hire competent lawyers (half of them all are grifters), and we'd be painting a HUGE target on our backs with interests that have never given a shit about simply murdering people to further their own goals - We just stir the pot and keep letting everyone know these things so that more people start to get angry.
- I don't know where "here" is, but do you mean DDT? DEET is used in insect repellents but it's rare to find contaminated soil with it.
  Additionally, dilution is the solution to pollution. It's really common to mix uncontaminated media into a contaminated area to make levels safer. Especially when you can't truly clear away contamination for whatever reason, lower the relative amounts in the environment at that location is an accepted way to make it less impactful (and depending on the contaminate can made it truly safe).
  
  Ah yeah - I was mixing up DDT/DEET. DEET is still used today, and DDT was its predecessor. I meant DDT, thanks for the correction.

Sorry, is this kitchen outside?
- isn't everyone's?

PSA: Countertop reverse osmosis systems are not too expensive.