In my bit of the UK there is a fairly common bit of geography, which is hilly peat bog ground. This is natures sponge, it absorbed rain to reduce flooding, and then kept the rivers higher in times of drought.
In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed
There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again.
But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse.
Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up.
In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it!
I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.
I think societies should and will need to get used to either forcibly doing these environmental restoration projects despite other objections and/or paying people out to remove land owner interests.
Climate change doesn’t care about whether you own the land or not, it will inevitably lead to more problems for everyone. Anything that helps mitigate this needs to be actively considered
Totally agree. But if we believe in property protection, we shouldn't steal those rights though.
Any temporary payment will not be trusted, since future governments can undo it.
The government should buy the land, and the rights, at full market value, discounted by the value of a new perpetual right to graze what is left after the flooding. Peat bogs are also the best carbon sinks we have, aren't they?
One interesting part of this, is that there are plans to reforest some of these areas (which were deforested perhaps 1000 years ago), and the main opposition to that is from the general public, who like to look at the hills as they are! People are complex...
The government doesn't even have to buy the land outright, just give them a one time payment to turn part of their land into a bog. Now they own bogland which is less useful, but the reduced value of the property was paid for.
How much has the infrastructure improved since then? I see on TV that some of California has snow and flash flooding. Are there attempts being made to capture that, or soak it into the ground? Or is it cheaper to keep using the old projects?
I see on YouTube that there are parts of Texas you can buy for peanuts because ranching doesn't work there any more. I gather that the cows eat so much of the ancient grassland away that the soil washed away and now we have flash flooding? Then I see terrible flooding in the main rivers. I wonder if it is because governments are (or were) good at big centralised water projects, but spending for thousands upon thousands of swales and check dams to be built is harder, and less sexy?
> Chronic overuse of groundwater, forest destruction, land degradation, and pollution have caused irreversible freshwater loss in many parts of the world
I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.
Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.
I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
The PFAS are underground and will likely be down there indefinitely. I assume that their "racing to fix" bit has more to do with filtration and reducing the PFAS levels to something deemed acceptable.
Given the changes at the EPA recently it would not surprise me if they simply change what is deemed acceptable and claim that the problem has been solved.
The challenges will be great and felt by all in some way.
I live downstream from W.L.Gore in Maryland, the creator of this miracle substance, and a few years ago I myself began asking questions. I came to learn that they just dumped the stuff in the stream for decades and that stream is the source of my family's water via the town system. I had my water tested and came back at 70 ppt of which I then spoke to some doctors. This inspired me to write up and speak before the political board of my town and they did not believe me. Hilariously however someone knew because they stopped publishing PFA numbers in our water reports in 2022 but as a result of my speaking a few months later they brought in Inframark Corp who runs our town water and sewer. After they spoke to the town board at the meeting the town board was no longer smiling nor doubting my words. They were told that they must filter the drinking water and the operation will capex at about 4 MM USD with an opex for filters of around 2 MM USD annually. The town board was floored, but wait there's more, Inframark then told the board that they also must filter the sewer too since it must be removed as liquid products we use have pfas as well as RO systems which just re-concentrate it back into waste water. This sewer system capex was quoted at 10MM USD minimum and no opex stated since the plant already runs and filters costs were not known at the moment.
My story is real world for nearly the entire East Coast of the USA but since the problem cannot be seen few know about it or even concern about it. A town close to me, Newark DE, just announced a few months back going to spend tens of millions to filter their water with taxes ballooning from that and more. While a town to my West stated needing to spend about 20 MM USD to filter theirs. This is an absolute issue and I'd wager, polymarket conveniently makes it easy now, that this post ages well with time, or maybe I should say unwell. I have also been speaking with a lawyer in a big state that is running a class action and his information of course should be blasted on the news as more and more folks continue to consume liquids from plastic containers. Veritasium did a great piece on it a while back too but I have yet to have my own blood tested. For perspective I immediately bought a PFA specific filter and I installed it by extending our existing 3 stage to a 4 stage kitchen water tap at a cost of 600 USD for supplies. I then bought a whole house PFA filter a few months later and installed it too, costing me about 2000 USD in supplies, it is the size of a large compressed air canister so room is needed. I have so much more on this PFA topic but I am already going on too long. Your health doesn't matter until it does and no pill is going to filter this stuff from your organs.
So the problem from the post then becomes: the water that we do have to drink probably isn't safe either.
This leads me to question how many other chemicals we continue to "create" that in time will too show health impacts to many. We are certainly leaving our mark in this layer of soil for some future species to find and ask their own questions about us, such as how smart we really could have been given what they dig up.
I'm curious. You complain about "profits," but do you know how much money private investors put into the water companies to begin with? Because the alternative to privatization was the government issuing bonds to get that money. Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?
Here in the U.S., almost all water utilities are operated by the government. We have a more than trillion dollar investment shortfall that taxpayers will have to cover: https://nawc.org/water-industry/infrastructure-investment/. It's not a problem with our government either. Both countries just have a lot of infrastructure built in the post-war era that is nearing end-of-life. And it just costs a lot more to replace that infrastructure than people think it should cost.
Our subdivision had a community-owned water/sewer system built in the early 20th century that was failing. The county government came in and tore it all out and connected everyone to the public system back in 2014. The county imposed a charge of $32,000 per house, which was added to everyone's county tax bill to be paid over 20 years (with interest). That was just the cost of hooking one subdivision up to the existing water/sewer plants. The existing public system ended less than half a mile away.
The BBC said (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw4478wnjdpo) that in 30 years, private water and sewerage companies in England and Wales have extracted over 86 billion pounds (~USD $115 billion), while investing very little.
Meanwhile, consumer water rates in those areas increased by as much as 50% in the past year alone.
What is the number? It is a huge red flag if you see an article that cites a profits number without citing a number for capital invested. You literally cannot reach a conclusion either way without comparing the two numbers.
You cannot reach a conclusion. A conclusion is a rational thing based on comparing realistic alternatives.
As the user of the water system you do have to care about the return on investment. Because the alternative is to have the government take out bonds to pay for that work, and you’d have to pay the interest on those bonds with your tax dollars.
The conclusion in this case is very simple: 86 billion has been taken in profits, with very limited capital investment.
Now .. what to do about that? That's a bit more complicated, but we could at least start from the premise that had the water systems been public, that 86 billion could have been spent on capital investment without a single bond being issued.
> The conclusion in this case is very simple: 86 billion has been taken in profits, with very limited capital investment.
What is the number for the capital investment? You’re comparing a number to words. That’s a type error.
> That's a bit more complicated, but we could at least start from the premise that had the water systems been public, that 86 billion could have been spent on capital investment without a single bond being issued
Not without knowing how much capital has actually been invested to date. Because you’d be have paid out interest and principal on that over 30 years out of that 86 billion.
I'm the board of my local (rather small) water system. Most of our capital investment is done by spending what we raise from our members/customers, and we try hard not to require loans unless absolutely necessary.
A larger water system has bigger capital projects, but also a larger customer base (and they also likely charge more per liter of water than we do). So it is absolutely not a given that capital investment in water infrastructure requires bonds or loans (though I acknowledge that these likely cannot be avoided).
Issuing bonds is how virtually every large water system pays for capital projects. My county is very financially responsible (triple AAA bond rating), but it has hundreds of millions in debt outstanding for water/sewer: https://www.fitchratings.com/research/us-public-finance/fitc.... This is a small county with just half a million people.
Again, how much money did these UK water companies invest? What's the number? Without knowing that, you're in no position to say it's in the range of what a government utility would be able to pay out of operating surplus, without issuing bonds.
> Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?
Apparently rather more
"Earlier this year, Corporate Watch calculated that £2 billion a year could be saved – or £80 per household – if the water supply was in public ownership. The government can borrow much cheaper than the companies and there would be no private shareholders demanding their dividends"
The research is cited in the document if you would like to critique
The frustration I have with this is that the money is there, today but our culture in the US does not understand the value of proper taxation to fund infrastructure and social services in the US.
We waste billions of tax dollars on frivolous pursuits, misaligned incentives and defense contractors rather than investing in communities and infrastructure, and that’s just at the federal level. Plenty of states and localities follow these same patterns then turn around and say they have no money for proper maintenance of civic infrastructure while being bilked by private companies
At least as of the last time I did the math (pre Trudeau), the U.S. had higher non-defense expenditures per person than Canada. We have low taxes, but that’s not because we don’t spend money. It’s because we pay for government expenditures with debt instead of tax dollars.
Are you sure that's the big lesson? That wolves don't exist?
To me the big lesson was that wolves do actually exist, and if you repeatedly claim that they are here when they are not, then nobody will believe you when they actually are here.
> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
there was a time where we weren't guaranteed to be screwed. environmental stewardship was deemed unimportant in the face of profit. here we are.
I sometimes write directly in VSCode and use the preview mode there. I've also used Obsidian but it always felt kinda heavy and distracting for pure writing, though great for managing a large group of .mds in folders.
Just for clarification. House of Lords amendments do not have to be accepted by the House of Commons and may not make it into law. If you do not agree with an amendment then write to your MP, write to the ministers concerned. If you do not tell them your concerns they will not know. You can ask for an appointment with your MP. You can ask for an appointment with ministers. Better still you can form an advocacy group and lobby.
I've written to my MP several times about this. Each response just repeats the same talking points about safety whilst completely missing the underlying technical issues and consequences.
I've been met with that kind of stone walling before too, you know what eventually worked to actually turn the position of a local councilwoman? Going to her office and demand to speak with her, then sitting down, listening and having a conversation with her. Turns out that most of the emails "she" wrote to me was written by an assistant "to save her time" and she weren't aware of the points I was trying to bring up. Granted, this was like one and half decade ago, but if I was met with something similar today I'd try the same thing.
People tend to be a lot more reasonable in person, and also if you listen to them first.
Yeah, also they could be male. Don't take it so literal, the point I'm making is about going and physically meeting people, not about what title/label those people have.
There are lots of replies stating that their MP gave them a cookie cutter response, so it is a waste of time.
I can tell you that isn't entirely true. When they get a lot of messages about the same thing, or better still you meet them in person, they may keep giving you the 'party line response', but they will also be feeding back that there is discontent to the whips.
This. It's not a waste of time. I know it's frustrating. You have to set your expectations. The best you can do is write as eloquently and succinctly as possible to get your point across and make it clear what you're advocating for. Better still, encourage others to write / email / call with that same clarity.
What you are telling me in effect is that all the exchanges I have are ultimately disingenuous with the MP. It also tells me that the MP represents the party and not me (as they are acting as nothing more than a glorified public relations officer).
This undermines the entire point of the process and only further degrades public trust.
Here on the other side of the pond, writing our so-called Representatives to complain, produces the same kind of result. If your rep has a (D) by his or her name, you'll get back one form-letter, and if your rep has a (R) by his or her name, you'll get back the other form-letter. There's no attempt to address the points you might bring up. You write--and they respond back with their pre-baked talking points.
A politician is like ROM: Once it's written, that's it, you have to swap it out with a different ROM if you want even one of its lines of programming changed.
What you describe is the representative democratic system. Misunderstanding is the source of any distrust. It is frustrating to write to an MP only to be given boilerplate in return. But setting your expectations and continuing to advocate for your point of views is the only way to participate. One letter won't change anything, and how could it? There are other people writing opposing points of view. It's taken in the aggregate.
Same. I have protested over email about the Online Safety Act (amongst other things). I get a generic reply after 6-8 weeks with the same talking points.
Legislation like this does not make children safer, it makes everyone else less safe.
Same, my MP is clueless. They won’t listen to the experts. This is what he said:
The UK has a strong tradition of safeguarding privacy while ensuring that appropriate action can be taken against criminals, such as child sexual abusers and terrorists. I firmly believe that privacy and security are not mutually exclusive—we can and must have both.
The Investigatory Powers Act governs how and when data can be requested by law enforcement and other relevant agencies. It includes robust safeguards and independent oversight to protect privacy, ensuring that data is accessed only in exceptional cases and only when necessary and proportionate.
The suggestion that cybersecurity and access to data by law enforcement are at odds is false. It is possible for online platforms to have strong cybersecurity measures whilst also ensuring that criminal activities can be detected.
The response is the same boilerplate responses I used to get when I used to write to my MP. This is why I just gave up emailing my MP. You are essentially pleading with someone to reverse their previous position when they have no incentive do to so.
All of which is arguably true, but misses the point that uploading your age verification documents to every social media site you might want to look at is very likely to result in them getting hacked and leaked.
Working with startups, I've signed up for 100s of sites. My password manager lists 550. Those signups are currently low-risk: just my email (already widely public) and a random password. But it would put a big chill on my work if I had to upload government age verification docs to each one.
No, but it does mean that MP's have to make a positive decision to reject it, the proponents of the amendments (who are well financed) will claim anyone who opposes the amendment is pro-pedophile (as happened with the online safety act) which makes it hard to reject.
To stop it now we need a majority of MPs who are willing to take a political risk to reject it.
> If you do not agree with an amendment then write to your MP, write to the ministers concerned. If you do not tell them your concerns they will not know.
It is an utter waste of time. MPs already know about the concerns. They don't care. I wrote to my MP about many of these concerns in the past. You either get ignored, told you are enabling pedos, told there will be protections put in place (ignoring the whole point is that I don't trust the government), or you get a boilerplate reply.
Moreover The vast majority of people (unfortunately this includes people in my own family) have been propagandised to agree with all iffy censorship, monitoring and other spooky nonsense the UK state engages with.
> House of Lords amendments do not have to be accepted by the House of Commons and may not make it into law
Except the Lords can send back a law indefinitely until the Commons accepts it. There have been cases in which laws were sent back 60 times until what the Lords wanted was added. A house with hereditary posts with infinite veto power.
In the UK, pull the socket front off and look what the wires actually are.
I have seen electricians use cat 5 to carry phone lines several times. It is a mixture between having cat5 already in stock, and future proofing I think.
If it is cat 5 then just put an RJ45 socket on it.
As others have said, you can also try running ethernet on a phone line, you might not get gigabit, but you might get more than what is coming into your house!
The third point is you may be able to use the phone cable to fish a cat 5 through (depending on where it is). Electricians tend to be very good at this!
That's also a good point that the Network hardware does not care about cable categories.
If it plugs into your card the card goes "OK, lets see if 1000baseT fits on this?" the cables don't have a little chip or anything saying "I'm not suitable for high speed" the card will figure out whether this looks plausible and just do it.
At the turn of the century I was putting new Cisco gear into a building (which has since burned down, not related) that had been built a long time ago and so it didn't have Cat 5e cables. I was fitting switches which were state of the art at the time (IPv6 experiments), and they didn't have a 100Mbit option because that was legacy, so you'd plug this ancient looking 1980s cable designed for 10baseT into a switch, and in most cases once it's connected the switch and the network card at the far end both go "Aha link, can I do 1000baseT over this?" and conclude yeah, Gigabit just works. There is a setting to say "No, only do 10baseT" but why set it? Users don't want slow Internet.
Unless somebody went very cheap and strung literal bellwire (which was never rated for a telephone but would probably work) or your distances are very long, you will almost certainly get 100Mb and if there actually are four pairs you will most likely get Gigabit.
> the cables don't have a little chip or anything saying "I'm not suitable for high speed" the card will figure out whether this looks plausible and just do it.
You're actually wrong on all of that ^^
The cables actually have a rating to say what they are suitable to. See the markings on the cable: category Cat5/Cat5e/Cat6 + frequency range 100/250 Mhz + insulation UTP/FTP/STP/mix.
Ethernet cards don't negotiate, they typically only check whether the pairs can transmit any signal. You could end up in a situation where they go for gigabit and it doesn't work well.
Fortunately, the main issue for signal transmission is loss over distance. Ethernet is designed to work over 100m every time in a noisy industrial environment. You've got a pretty good chance for it to work on a short run, even with poor cables.
The alternatives being discussed ADSL/VDSL/G.hn actually detect the capability of the medium and adjust the transmission rates and frequency to give the maximum possible speed. IMO they are much more advanced technologically and much more interesting. (Ethernet is doing exactly 250 Mbps on one pair, G.hn can do up to 1700 Mbps on the same pair, automatically adjusted, the article is getting 1300 Mbps which is insane!)
Worthwhile to point out: The Cat5 cable required for gigabit Ethernet is merely twisted pairs with no insulation, which is pretty much a dumb basic cable (with 8 wires). That's why any cable can work in practice.
I don't know how possible it is to find a really bad cable (untwisted) and it might work on a short length anyway. (Your 1980s office cabling must have been 8 wires if you were able to get gigabit later, so it was far beyond basic phone wires or Cat1 from the time).
Sure, they will have been bundles of 4 pairs and I suppose we could say that is a matter of luck, it will have been installed from the outset in anticipation of networking - there's a period in the late 1980s when everybody is iterating on what will soon become 10baseT and the people in that building would have known all about it - but there's no reason back then to know 4 pairs will be an auspicious choice rather than 3 or 6.
So yes, those cables though they weren't Cat 5e because it didn't exist when they were manufactured, also were not basic phone cables, and I believe when the building was formally opened it had "ground breaking" 10Mbit Ethernet to every laboratory.
Even if the cable is cat 5, telephone sockets are often daisy-chained from room to room. So it can still be a pain to get a point to point connection if it goes through several sockets.
Short two wires on one end, go to the other end with a multimeter and test for continuity between those two wires on your lowest resistance range. If it is infinity then no connection. If it is some low number then there is a connection
I like a light editor with syntax highlighting and basic linting. Last time I was coding regularly I used VS code, but had only the default plugins. I only used it for basic text input. I always ran git and my code from the terminal. Does that help?
Try claude. It's basically the cli agent everyone is catching up to.
Start prompting it for annoying shit "Set up a project layout for X", then write things yourself inside that - the fun stuff or stuff you care about.
Then use it for refactors or extrapolation "I wrote this thing that works, but this old file is still in old format, do what I did there"
It's very good for helping with design of just above layperson knowledge. "I have this problem organizing xyz, what's a good pattern for this?"
or just "I want to do a project that does xyz, but dont know where to start, let's chat about it"
Some of these 'chatty' queries can be done in web, but having it on CLI is great b/c it'll just say "Can I do this for you" and you can easily delegate parts of the plan.
Give it a shot. That's pretty low level agentic use, and yes, it will demolish procrastination and startup inertia.
Create a user, apportion a 365 licence and boom, they have email, Teams, OneDrive etc. Add them to some groups and they have all the files they need.
Excel is better than Sheets in ways which are important for 0.01% of users, but that is all.
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