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Comment by wahnfrieden | Hacker News Reader

This isn't a sign of that, this is a sign that it's working as intended.

The Michigan lead pipes or whatever might be a better story to point to if you want to show a failure like the one you suggest.

Depends. This sounds like an incident. If this is a regular occurrence then there's something that needs to be fixed, that is, funds need to be reallocated to redevelop core infrastructure.

When you already believe something, you can start seeing proofs everywhere.

Water grids malfunction. Some water management departments suck. Some are good. Some cities have better infrastructure than others.

Inevitably though, these are taken as "see! I'm right." Tories are evil. Democrats are useless. Communism doesn't work. Capitalism hates humans. Bureaucrats suck. Privatisation is a failure. Regulators are ne'erdowells. Etc. Etc.

One of the first principles of formal logic deals with this sort of thing. Reductio and absurdum. When a statement or logical method can yield every conclusion and it's opposite, it's the logic or assumptions that are false.

I don't actually believe it from this example alone but wanted to say it. Your reading is a little simplistic and condescending

Fair enough. I can see why you say this, and I would probably feel the same way if our positions were reversed. Perhaps there is a better way that I should have phrased this.

OTOH, I'm somewhat stumped. Some forms tend to be condescending or dismissive. Assigning motives, for example. Meta, like my response to your comment. Yet, motivated reasoning exists. Cognitive fallacies recur. Etc.

I don't want to be condescending or bad faith. But in these cases, I don't see much daylight between condescending and just not commenting. There is such a thing as adopting a worldview, and then suddenly seeing everything through that lens. As you say, you already hold the position that "the American project is failing its residents." When the water grid has a fault, it's proof of this. My contention is that if you had previously adopted an alternative worldview, you'd hold the recurring culprit (capitalism, bureaucracy, republicans, environmentalism, etc.) responsible by the same logic.

I get what you're saying but you should recognize a level of "meta" in peoples behavior as well rather than take for granted a kind of intellectual immediacy to what people say. I'm aware of the audience here and have intention to agitate. To be open with you. Also your line of thought can apply to really anything, not just the problem of crediting

If the same happened in a city in another country you just wouldn’t hear about it on international news.

Case in point, Sydney Au is starting water restrictions despite record rainfall due to quality of water in catchments.. Not that far from boiling water.

https://www.nsw.gov.au/environment-land-and-water/water-rest...

> starting water restrictions

Not starting.

"The NSW Government has announced that Water Wise Guidelines have replaced Level 1 water restrictions [...] The restrictions have eased, but let’s stay water wise."

Yeah, nah, it is rather far from boil water notices tbh. Rather heavier rainfalls into mountainous bushclad terrain can significantly increase turbidity and faecal coeliforms in a reservoir.

So treating each cumec takes longer - filters clog faster, UV needs to be applied for longer...

Hence the water restrictions - throughput has to decrease to maintain quality.

Boil water notices occur when your water treatment has entirely failed.

> Boil water notices occur when your water treatment has entirely failed.

I don't know how it is where you live, but here, boil water notices generally happen because of mundane things well downstream of water treatment. Water demand too high, dropping pressure? Boil water notice. Water main breaks? Boil water notice. In this case, although I wouldn't describe it as mundane, the boil water notice occurred because of a temporary power loss resulting in a pressure drop, not because the water was actually known to be contaminated.

It's also hard to compare across water treatment standards. Are the allowed contaminants the same? For example here, no amount of PFAS contamination results in an advisory, even though it's well over the limits.

I think a better point would be a) there's no such thing as the "American" water system; water systems are virtually all designed, implemented, run, and administered by municipal and county governments, with anyone remotely rural on a well; and b) any minor water failures in the US are going to garner extra attention for the next couple years because of the Jackson debacle.

OTOH, I have well water for myself. ;)

EDIT: Also here's a boil water notice in New South Wales from flooding events, 22 days ago.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/residents-boil-drin...

Not sure it's a story at all outside of Houston. When I lived in Atlanta, boil water advisories were pretty common because pumping stations losing pressure and a random assortment of other issues that plagued the neglected, but being rebuilt by court order, water system. Though stories about Atlanta's sewage overflows into the river sometimes made news outside of the local area, simple boil water advisories didn't.

I'm failing to find any reference to this incident on any non US website. BBC, Deutsche Welle and the Guardian... All no.

Is it a headline in international news? I don’t think anyone elsewhere cares to be honest.

It is not just America. The whole west is failing in differing ways, to differing degrees, and at different states; but the heading is generally the same. This is also just the start of a lagging problem. It’s civilizational cancer or HIV, not a laceration or broken bone. The whole immune system is unable to detect what is killing the body, let alone act against the threat to its existence. By the time it is obvious to the naive and short sighted that there is a problem, things will long have been terminal.

It sounds like they had a brief service disruption and the underlying issue is already fixed. They just need to give the system time to flush out any questionable water. It's by no means ideal and seems like they should have had better backups (gravity, generator power) but doesn't seem to be a massive indictment of the system.

Hopefully, but let's not forget about the power crisis that Texas had semi recently which may continue to give Texas a bad name in regards to infrastructure for a long time to come. I doubt that the residents affected forget that quickly.

That because media coverage is generally anti-bitcoin mining. What many don't understand is that bitcoin mining at industrial scale incentivizes energy production, because the miners seek out cheap, otherwise underutilized energy (otherwise they aren't profitable).

During last July's heatwave, Texas's industrial bitcoin mining base "allow[ed] for over 1% of total grid capacity to be pushed back onto the grid for retail and commercial use.” [1] No other industrial-scale use of electricity can be turned off and back on when the grid needs excess capacity without harming that industrial production---you can't shut off a steel mill without enormous damage to production, or turn off a hospital without loss of life; but energy grid operators can sign contacts with bitcoin miners to have the right to dial them down to meet peak grid demand.

And yet, the NY Post article I sighted here spins the story anti-miners, missing the point: had the miner not been consuming power, the grid would have had 1% less to meet the peak heatwave demand. “There are over 1,000 megawatts worth of Bitcoin mining load that responded to ERCOTs conservation request by turning off their machines to conserve energy for the grid.”

Imagine if there were ten times as many miners there---they would have been able to provide 10% additional power to the grid during peak demand.

[1] https://nypost.com/2022/07/13/texas-bitcoin-miners-halt-oper...).

You really drank that koolaid.

Connect the public water utility to a bitcoin mining operation, with contractual rights to dial down/turn off the bitcoin mining and use that electricity as backup should the water treatment plant's other source of electricity fails. When they don't need the backup power it provides security to the bitcoin network, and when they do need it, its there.

I mean Canada had a bunch of people die from unsafe drinking water not that long ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak

The article is very in-depth and shows a long list of failures, well into the disaster response. But it was also 22 years ago.

Here are all the current water quality notices in Canada right now.

There are dozens of them.

http://www.watertoday.ca/textm.asp

This only suggests that quality control and warning system are working. The 2000 case is infamous because both didn't work and caused deaths and permanent injury.

Or the Texas project anyway.

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