It’s not just the convenience of running water, it’s all of the infrastructure around making sure that water is clean and safe, which involves government regulation and audits, massive engineering projects, a lot of maintenance effort and a considerable amount of tax dollars.
Just as an example, leptospirosis is a common bacterial contaminant in untreated water:
Signs and symptoms can range from none to mild (headaches, muscle pains, and fevers) to severe (bleeding in the lungs or meningitis). Weil’s disease (/ˈvaɪlz/ VILES), the acute, severe form of leptospirosis, causes the infected individual to become jaundiced (skin and eyes become yellow), develop kidney failure, and bleed. Bleeding from the lungs associated with leptospirosis is known as severe pulmonary haemorrhage syndrome.
If you go to places like Hawaii you’ll see warning signs about lepto around pools and streams because people have this delusional fantasy about tropical paradises with clean flowing streams. Untreated, uncontrolled water is a hazard.
Everyone can’t be an expert on water sanitation. Employing some experts to provide that service for thousands or millions of people is a fantastic solution. It’s probably impossible to overstate how much benefit water infrastructure provides for society.
So I disagree with you. “Running water” (centrally managed water sanitation and delivery) is one of the best things human society has ever done. The benefit to public health is incalculable.
The only reason you might discount how much benefit you gain from this system is that you’ve grown up with it as normal. You’ve never had to worry about groundwater contamination, about boiling every cup of water before you drink it, about filtration or desalinization or testing for lead.
dbtng@eviltoast.org 3 weeks ago
How much experience do you have with third world conditions? I would tend to assume from what you are saying that you’ve never seen what a lack of sanitation does to a society.
But you might be well familiar with all of this … and just like it?
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Not the person who you replied to, but if you could trade all the cars in the world to go back to using rainwater to shower/flush toilets and buy drink water I think we should take that deal.
It has already been proven countless times that having walkable/bikeable cities with the adition of public transport is better for our health and the environment. Most countries don’t even have drinkable water out of the tap anyway.
The only issue is that it doesn’t rain enough in a lot of countries to keep up with our water usage for showering/flushing toilets, but infrastructure to move water is as old as the Roman’s, so we would find a way again.
dbtng@eviltoast.org 3 weeks ago
My friend, we have a way. Many ways. We don’t need to find one. But we keep doing that too.
You are proposing civil engineering projects to deliver water to the people. Yes, that is how we do it.
The other fine contributor to this discussion posited dragging barrels of water from the river as if that would be a good thing. This is a perspective that I cannot support.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Yes I know we have plenty of ways to get water from A to B, but that isn’t my point.
I am just saying that this hypothetical depends on what we would be giving up. If we can still live our lives, but we have to get water from the store instead of from the tap, I would be fine with it.
Car’s are a necessary evil at the moment, and we need to change that, sadly there are a lot of people in countries like the US or Canada who actively work against biking, walking and public infrastructure.
“We need to remove the bike lanes because the fire engine can’t get to point C quickly enough” meanwhile in NL they just drive over the bike lanes to get to D even quicker …