Posted by xrayarx 7 days ago
:D
Thames Water: pooposterous! we must pay bonuses, or it'll affect investor morale! Haven't you heard, your water is the best in the world, be happy :)
Consumer: grumble okay, here's our money
Thames Water: gives money to execs
Consumer: the infrastructure needs repair
Thames Water: we need to raise bills to fund the infrastructure repair/upgrade
But we need to lower the taxes on the wealthy and corporations (and reduce or eliminate regulations) so they can distribute their capital to make new water!
Don't you know anything about modern economics?
:D
HN is largely user-moderated and we'll continue to see more drivel like this if people aren't diligent about downvoting, flagging, and reporting especially egregious comments to the mods.
https://fullfact.org/economy/do-top-1-earners-pay-28-tax-bur...
The good news is that not all that '1% of the rich' are leaving. However unless this 28% of all tax figure is wrong, inevitably there will be an increase to counter the loss.
Of course, the narrative suits the wealthy owners of the media, so the story gets repeated anyway.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/07/the-british-we...
Though as we are aprox half the size of England, with 1/56th the population the the urgency in a drout will be less acute. 4 years ago we had unpresedented rain and floods with people getting washed away and killed, roads and bridges destroyed and comunities cut off with damage from that still evident, which would be truely devastating if it were to happen now.
Civil engineering calculations were based on max rain bieng 1”/hr, and now there are regular reports of twise and three times that, and I am sure that drout planning was based on now irrelivant tables of average rainfalls and resevoirs sized acordingly. The issue for England is if the will and capacity to build better infrastructure is there, as hydrology is governed by geography and cant be put just anywhere, ie:we are talking water frontage here, dams to raise lakes, and other popular types of projects.Given that it's England, some of the water rights will be written into ancient law, and will be essentialy impossible to override, and then require buy outs of breathtaking proportions. Which leaves tunnel boring machines, sand hawgs, epic infrastructure that has to be built to last forever, and not one but of it suitable to pose in front of.
I think the question should really be, how can it not be out of water? There's literally only 48x48 metres per person.
I would prefer it was metered so companies that use a lot of water are charged commensurately. Council tax in itself is a regressive tax, so adding water charges to that makes things worse.
It's not like they're bringing water from Scotland to England by pipeline.
But I was in Scotland a few years back (from Colorado) and I was constantly surprised by the incredible amount of water that came out of each faucet whenever I turned it on. Like, I get that nobody wants to wash their hands in a fine mist, but there's a point beyond which more means nothing.
In many places in Europe it is ironically the sewage system that actually depends on high rates of flow to function properly and retrofitting them is effectively not plausible, while also causing sewage issues because water has been made expensive, which then causes lower usage. In other places in Europe you aren’t even able to flush toilet paper because the system cannot handle it. In America, because of the nature of our development we don’t really have the antiquated sewage problem as much, but we have things like septic systems and private wells that are still widely used in places because they are so sparsely populated or even just because connecting into the public sewage system is getting increasingly financially infeasible as the financial chickens come home to roost after squandering ~$100 trillion dollars over 25 years.
This is something that was intentionally done and the argument was had and, agree or not, people didn't want it to happen. It happened anyways. Of course, the policy can be reversed.
Rainfall over all of the UK has been increasing since 1840 accord to the Met Office [1]. How is a drought a clear signal of collapse if they've been happening since before the industrial revolution? [2]
[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/...
[2] https://iahs.info/uploads/dms/13708.88-483-489-81-308-Cole-F...
Previous government sold off the land on which gas storage once sat to private developers to build houses and business parks.
Roll forward 25–30 years later, UK is something like 65% dependent on gas imports from the EU who kept the majority of their gas storage ... quite an ironic position in the post-Brexit era.