TheOubliette

@TheOubliette@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not a whataboutism to ask you to acknowledge the principals behind how GHG targets are set via an example when you’re using a simplistic bar to attack another one.

  Guess your answer is no, you aren’t going to engage in good faith. Bye.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  First off, I’m not talking about India. I’m not a fan of their emissions either, but this discussion is about China.

  So you simply can’t engage with this discussion in good faith and are throwing up arbitrary roadblocks so you don’t have to think about things like why climate targets differ relative to development and historical emissions.

  I refuse your excuses. India is relevant. Either engage in good faith or I will ignore you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The narrative you’re promoting right now that individuals are blameless

  I’m gonna write this out a third time and bold something. Let’s see if you can pick up on it this time.

  1. Industry that produces commodities for sale in rich Western countries.
  2. Industry, military, and direct individual consumption in rich Western countries.

  This was literally the first thing I wrote to you by the way.

  because it’s all the government/industry/capitalism’s fault

  Actually capitalism is the social system that ties it all together and is inherently part of industrialization, i.e. the production of virtually all excess GHGs we are talking about, and I’ve explained all of this to a decent degree but you have refused to engage with it even once. Pretending like it isn’t the elephant in the room is foolish.

  is not helpful

  Correctly identifying primary root causes is actually the most helpful thing to start with. Then we can talk action.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re concerned that I’m focusing too much on capitalism in the global GHG discussion where you asked lazy questions to point fingers at consumers? lmao.

  I’m not the reason you’re not engaging in good faith in this conversation. Gotta get over this habit of blaming others for your personal disinterest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Shell manufactures to produce a profit it doesn’t care who buys unless it is perceived as maximizing profit. Downstream costumers are companies, militaries, and individuals.

  Shell doesn’t care whether fuel is considered excess by a military. If excess fuel is used by the military to destroy something Shell manufactured it to do that. I think you’re missing the point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Shell does manufacture excess fuel and oil. Where else does it come from?

  Shell does store fuel and oil including for the US military.

  Shell isn’t blowing up the “leftover” US military materials sure. Why does that matter here?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Industry makes it under the expectation to turn a profit. Overproduction is common and so is wasteful or pointless production. It doesn’t even need to be “consumed” so long as they get paid. The US military constantly blows up “leftover” materials to ensure they get the same budget next year, for example. And most sales are between industries. How efficiently are those industries using all their purchases? Have you ever worked in a restaurant?

  If consumer choice doesn’t enter the equation then you’ve proved my point. Focus should be on the system itself that forces emissions as part of core economic activity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Your question was, “Who buys and burns most of the fuel they create and why?” and I answered it and explained how it works. It’s mostly industry The answer is absolutely not simply “consumer choice”, which is quite clear if you review my simple 2-point list.

  Here I’ll write it again:

  1. Industry that produces commodities for sale in rich Western countries.
  2. Industry, military, and direct individual consumption in rich Western countries.

  The cause of this is not individual consumer choices, it is capitalism - it seeks to increase capital and nothing else. Capital does not care about the emissions of growing fruit in Central America, packaging in Thailand, and selling in Germany. It cares that you buy the fruit cup for more than they spent on it. And to make that happen, capital had to force wages and production to be depressed and scattered across the globe. And it’s not going to waste money on making the processes themselves independent of fossil fuels so long as fossil fuel prices are low enough - and it keeps them low by constantly seeking more extraction for profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The reason I’m not debating China’s flavor of capitalism is because it’s irrelevant.

  You brought it up (and are reasserting it in this quote), same as how you bring up China unasked. Clearly you thought it was relevant, you are just trying to avoid responsibility for your claims.

  They don’t get a free pass on carbon emissions no matter what economy they have.

  Which part of “meeting or exceeding their Paris targets” reads as “get a free pass” to you?

  And yes there’s a trade-off, regulating fossil fuels increases production costs. That’s the trade-off everybody makes.

  Oh so the decision of what to target isn’t just “no increases immediately”? Glad we agree and can stop pretending it’s so simplistic. Though I see you neglected to acknowledge India’s targets.

  Bottom line is that China’s emissions are huge and still growing. They are meeting commitments because those commitments were low in the first place.

  The commitments of China were nearly an order of magnitude higher than the EU and US actually. By the way the US withdrew and is going hog wild.

  For example China only commited to peak emissions by 2030.

  And they are meeting their commitments, even exceeding them, despite being the primary seat of global production while the EU continues to deindustrialize.

  The US and EU never needed to make such a commitment because they had already reached their peak in 2005.

  In production, yes. They are deindustrializing. Their targets are much easier to hit, they follow the global capitalist economic trend re: imperialism, offshoring. It is actually much harder to reduce emissions while taking on the industry that’s being outsourced.

  And yes they perform a large portion of the world’s manufacturing, this “shuffling” of industries that you mentioned. But their lower regulations on emissions is precisely one of the reasons why manufacturing moves there. If they regulated more heavily, then some manufacturing would move out, but at least total global emissions would go down.

  It’s really not. You move production to China because overall it is vastly cheaper, primarily due to the much lower costs of labor reproduction and how tightly integrated industries are and can be due to infrastructure and colocation of technical ability. If you want to make something in the US something like half your cost goes to maintaining the humans doing it, and they’re expensive due to massive economic leeches: real estate, finance, insurance. When 80% of a paycheck goes to having a place to live (just renting), going to the doctor, and eating, your labor costs are just subsidizing rent seeking and finance.

  Every country needs to participate in raising the cost of fossil fuels, in order for it to work.

  Every country needs to meet their climate commitments. Is yours?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My comment directly replied to what you said. I numbered the bullet points, literally the first thing I wrote.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Various global poverty stats produced by major entities, e.g. below $x per day by the World Bank (which keeps changing its metrics but that’s a different discussion). Capital apologists like (incidentally Epstein-tied) Pinker attempt to claim improvements to human development and well-being for capitalism, but these statistics are highly sensitive to exactly which countries you include as well as what metrics you use. But a trend re: global poverty alleviation is that China is responsible for most of it, sometimes the vast majority for certain statistics, and trends can reverse when you remove it from the equation.

  India is a good metric for comparison. Similar population size, similar location, formerly colonized and formally liberated around the same time, but two very different paths. Capitalist economist Amartya Sen estimated tens of millions of deaths in India alone every decade in comparison to China.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If you want to have a conversation you’ll need to reply to what I actually said.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, walkable cities and trains but also planning out where people live and work. Where people live is currently left up to the anarchy of the market, real estate speculation, where employment is located, etc. Then they have to get from where they live to other places they want or need to be, usually work. With some planning these things can be made intentionally dense, closer together, cheaper, and on transit lines.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
  1. Industry that produces commodities for sale in rich Western countries.
  2. Industry, military, and direct individual consumption in rich Western countries.

  The cause of this is not individual consumer choices, it is capitalism - it seeks to increase capital and nothing else. Capital does not care about the emissions of growing fruit in Central America, packaging in Thailand, and selling in Germany. It cares that you buy the fruit cup for more than they spent on it. And to make that happen, capital had to force wages and production to be depressed and scattered across the globe. And it’s not going to waste money on making the processes themselves independent of fossil fuels so long as fossil fuel prices are low enough - and it keeps them low by constantly seeking more extraction for profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  These companies are monopolies, they can’t be significantly materially affected by a consumer boycott. Most of their customers are in industry anyways. Any boycott against them is more about raising awareness than achieving something, it’s a diffuse form of political education.

  To take on the fossil fuel industry requires having control over big levers at the top of the economy. Those levers are currently pulled, anarchically, by capital, not actual humans. Capital pulls those levers and spurns its highest level servants to get out of the way or feed it more bodies. To end this society-wide violence we must displace capital, it must not be in charge. We must be in charge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Basically all of the political class supports the fossil fuel industry, “voters” do not have a ballot option for dismantling it. Some Green parties promise it, perhaps, but they will immediately run into larger economic challenges that require them to take a socialist analysis and approach and this results in them being sidelined by the actual master in these countries: capital.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Individual consumer shaming for society-level problems is usually corporate PR to defend from interventions. The classic example is the invention of the “litterbug” when companies introduced disposable but not easily reusable or compostable packaging and trash was piling up in much larger quantities. There were movements against using the packaging itself. The “litterbug” PR campaign successfully changed the narrative to make this litter an individual problem to shame people for rather than a problem with capital. Similarly, there were many movements against cars in the beginning. It was considered outrageous when “chauffeur’s” would hit pedestrians, there were calls for entire bans. There were multifaceted PR pushes to instead shift blame to pedestrians while giving cars exclusive use of the streets, pushing pedestrians to the side and calling them “jaywalkers” if a car hit them. Both of these cases also involved heavy lobbying/bribery of the political class, same as today.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And regarding your other points, don’t forget urban planning. Trains and urban planning go hand in hand. You can’t transform transportation by trains alone if everything is suburbs and city jobs, for example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Goddamn you really are just sinophobic for capital.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Everybody’s economy is different, China is no snowflake.

  Actually it is. The trajectory of other peripheral countries is quite different. Compare to India, look at poverty stats when China is removed.

  But I am not going to debate whether China’s capitalism is “good capitalism” or not, that feels like pulling hairs and is a digression as you yourself said.

  You can’t debate the topic at all, clearly, but sure want to continue making the claim that it simply switched to capitalism. Maybe don’t say things your can’t bc defend?

  How much should China regulate? At the very least enough to stop the growth. I think that’s a simple enough answer.

  It doesn’t address the obvious trade-off I laid out. Why are India’s Paris commitments currently greater than zero?

  So, what was China’s target for peak emissions? What does peak emissions mean? How are they doing regarding that target?

  Not true. The US and EU have been lowering emissions for the past 20 years.

  If you focus solely on production you can eke out such numbers, but it ignores the basics of imperialism and the aforementioned offshoring where industry doesn’t just magically become green. Shuffling around where industry is located didn’t decrease emissions by itself. Emissions targets do not stick exclusively to production and, I have to repeat again because you keep ignoring it, the US and EU are failing to meet their commitments. Yet you focus on one of the few countries that is. I wonder why. I wonder why you ignore 80% of what I say. Perhaps you should take a little break.

  If you include consumption the plots look very different. And I’m not aware of easily available stats that track based on industry ownership.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Why are you acting like China is a poor helpless victim to capitalism here.

  I didn’t. I gave a pretty dry analysis. Maybe ask yourself why that feels overly sympathetic to you.

  China chose to shift to capitalism at the end of the 1900s.

  That’s not a particularly accurate or useful description of China’s gambit to allow (mostly foreign) capital to exploit its people to build productive forces while maintaining overall control over sweeping aspects of their economy. If China simply switched to capitalism one then has to explain why it is so different from every other capitalist country. China’s trajectory is responsible for the vast majority of global poverty index improvements and this runs in dramatic contrast to the rest of the periphery that was already fully capitalist and continues to be. The redirection of funds and productive capacity to infrastructure, education, housing, direct poverty alleviation. The limits/outright bans on the financialization and speculation that characterize imperial core economies. The policy of embedding the party in large firms and turning developed industries into state-meditated co-ops. The lack of imperialist expansion required by monopolized, financialized capital. But I digress.

  And they can choose to impose stricter regulation on fossil fuel emissions.

  Sure. They could set them to any arbitrary level. What is the correct rate for it to be sustained? Remember, they’re almost alone in meeting targets among countries as advanced as they are. What level of production flight should they unilaterally sacrifice, if any, and who picks up the slack? At which limits do they begin sacrificing that production? Are their regulations too loose or strict for the optimal trajectory? Why are we focusing on one of the only countries meeting their targets and making progress on renewables?

  They choose not to because it hurts their bottom line. Simple as that.

  It is, in fact, not as simple as that and this ignores the active work and debate within China that produces the results we are discussing. They aren’t making their targets because that’s just what capitalism does. It’s deliberate, literally a result of deliberation, research, modeling, and pulling levers at the commanding heights.

  The US and EU have controlled their emissions

  lmfao you can’t be serious they can’t even meet their own targets. France is the only one that ever does and it’s because they became a primary source of nuclear weapons materials (producing low emission energy as a nice side effect).

  while China’s continues to gro

  Everyone’s continue to grow. The targets are set, at the moment, for when they will hit peak and then begin dropping. China’s peak target is set to 2030 and they are slated to beat that.

  China has the highest GDP in the world, and 7th highest GDP per capita, it has no excuse anymore.

  Which part of “the only ones taking this seriously” is not registering?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Most greenhouse gas emissions occurred when colonizer Western countries were industrialized. They were not “properly regulated”, instead they were offshored in order to discipline labor and extract even greater profits. The offshoring was not exclusive to China, GHGs accordingly increased everywhere that further industrialized as a result of this. This effect is about as capitalist as it gets, trying to maximize profits via labor discipline and opening new fronts for increased exploitation (more profit per worker).

  China’s approach to this shift was to realize it was an opportunity to build their own productive forces, that capitalists would give up productive centers and move them to other countries, and those countries should be able to domestically gain and upper hand so long as they ensured that production could broadly increased with every investment. For example, China requires technology transfer as part of direct foreign investment. China was correct in this and it is why it is an exception to the rule for national development as a former peripheral country. Compare ita development to India, which did not require such transfers or focus on building production.

  Now, again, this means that industrial production moved outside the imperial core and into other countries, including but not limited to China. That industry did not suddenly become green nor did it become immune to the global economic system. It meant being wed to it. As we all know China’s strategy is one of interdependency with global capitalism even as they try to steer an otherwise anarchic process in a coherent direction via the commanding heights of the economy.

  And yet we can see the difference those commanding heights make even on this specific issue. China is the global exporter and consumer of green energy, leading the charge on solar panels that countries like the US sanction and tariff, instead promoting fossil fuels. China is taking the actual steps you’d imagine Western nations doing (even though they never have), like setting public targets and meeting or exceeding them, and sticking to their obligations.

  Imagine what could be done if every country could work in concert for those developments. Specifically, against the anarchic tendencies of the market and capitalist profit seeking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨take their money and arrest those responsible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s actually the capitalist system as a whole. The large fossil fuel companies of course push for extraction and maximizing their customer base, but it is the entire underlying economic system that ensues it is wasteful and that alternatives for energy production are avoided or limited.

  Let’s go through some examples.

  Just think about all the jobs on the planet. How many of them are actually necessary and doing work that prioritizes sustainability or limits environmental impact? How much is producing pointless goods or forcing them to be grown in wasteful ways in order to maximize profit? Is the fruit in your fruit cup grown in Latin America, packaged in Thailand, and sold in Germany? Is your job in or related to finance, real estate, or insurance (all useless or leech industries)? Are there 30 people doing a job when only 3 are needed because 5 companies are doing redundant hiring between each other?

  Look at one of the largest single-entity consumer of fossil fuels on the planet: the US military. More than the vast majority of countries. Now you might say, “hey wasn’t this about the economic system?”, and yes it is. The purpose of the US military is not “defense” of the United States itself, its lands. The purpose of the US military is to enforce its unipolar status as the primary seat of global capital. Bases all around the world, surrounding shipping lanes and energy. Their most conspicuous targets revolving around either energy (Venezuela, Iraq, Iran) or opponents of the capitalist system or peripheral countries trying to assert a slightly higher level of economic autonomy.

  The reason for this is that the economic system is driven entirely by profit-seeking, namely accumulating more and more capital via injecting capital into activities. Productive, redundant, destructive, capital doesn’t care so long as more comes back through the activity. Environmental sustainability is not something capital considers except as a new way to market selling more products and therefore increasing itself. Capital industrialized entire nations while dooming generations to lung problems from soot and famine conditions and dust bowls from over extraction and the elimination of the commons. It simply does not care, at all, and it is in control of nearly every human on the planet, including those who own businesses, pressing them into the capital-increasing social activities it spurns.

  You could end every energy monopoly tomorrow, even nationalize them, and the vast majority of emissions would still remain, as the actual primary engine would be left intact.

  The only way to secure an environmental future is to overthrow capitalism and put people, not capital, in charge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is it called when you believe the U.S. political parties shouldn’t exist?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nonpartisan. Though there are not really movements against this, just small nations that ban parties.

  I will push back on your opinions, though. “Division” is not a moral or political quantity. It is not itself good nor bad. Trans people were universally oppressed for centuries. Now they have some protections. This is a consequence of struggle against transphobia, that struggle is inherently a division. There are transphobes and pro-trans people. The pro-trans group should win. For them to win we need to support them materially and in as effectively as possible, which means through organized work. Progress against oppression only occurs through division and struggle. And the best vehicles for this are organizations - basically parties or very similar apparatuses.

  The two-party system is a symptom of deeper problems and they shouldn’t be summarized as division. The two-party system is really just a very effective way for the ruling class (business owners) to achieve their ends while still providing a venue for “the political”, often struggles and oppressions that they personally exacerbated. For example, some of the earliest institutional racism in what would become the US emerged due to worker solidarity and struggle. The ruling class decided to divide and conquer: they created a race-based system, defining a new class corresponding to “black”, who would be the most exploited, and exploiting everyone ekse skightly left. This is not theater, as the oppressed are facing actual oppression, but it is cynical: it’s really about profit maximization and controlling workers. The two-party system makes this kind of thing a constant endeavor, you can spend all of your time invested in struggles imposed by the ruling class and exemplified in the parties, and in doing so never focus on the underlying system that creates it. But of course not every oppression makes its way into this attempt at distraction, as when the oppression is bipartisan (no division in that case but still bad!). For example, both parties are in favor of the genocide of Palestinians and both actively ensure that it happens. A few decades ago both were purely transphobic and did nit evdn exhibit today’s liberal cooption of the struggle (notice that it has slowed down).

  Most importantly, the two-party system prevents popular politics that runs counter to ruling class interests. Their greatest opponents are the left, so the US political system prevents left parties from functioning abd becoming popular. Want to run as a third party? Well the Dems will gladly do a last-minute change to how many signatures you need to gather to get on the ballot. They can meet the number because they will pay people to collect them, but you have to have already prepared a horde of volunteers. Organize a socialist party? They might just plain kill you.

  It is not the existence of parties that is the problem, but the stifling of left parties, of those that can challenge the systemic causes of oppression.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ignore trying to identify and fit into some niche subculture. Instead, just make friends based on your interests. Let any subculture participation emerge naturally. There is no need to granularly define and name and restrict yourself to one thing or social group and this can actually be arbitrarily limiting and divisive.

  For example, find some friends to safely go to music events with. Sounds like that’s something you’d like to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Water Boil Advisory⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah by replying I think I’m giving the false impression of taking you seriously, person whi thinks things that happen are impossible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Water Boil Advisory⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm I never said that.

  This you?

  You drive door to door leaving flyers. […] Why do you think municipal or county staff can’t drive

  Anyway…

  Hey there champ, those are different words meaning different things. Love this strategy of yours known as, “pretend to be less literate than a gradeschooler”, though.

  You’re talking about what Amazon and USPS can do. They can do it (Amazon not every home in a given area) because they’re equipped to. Saying that the water company should be able to cover a town with flyers because USPS goes door to door is about as logical as saying USPS should fix a water main because the water company does it.

  Okay so there’s this thing called paying for goods and services. I know, difficult concept, but stick with me. Companies and agencies with liabolities write things called “contracts” or “budgets” where they pay others to handle needs for goods and services. Such as paying USPS to knock on doors like they often will for packages, leaving behind a flyer. Crazy, I know. There are already municipalities that use Amazon delivery drivers for services due to neoliberal austerity, but that is an actual thing that happens.

  These are just some competent, simple options. They could also use a slew of government workers, contractors, hell they could be lazy asses and supplement with day laborers. The sky’s the limit.

  Now, if the law requires something that will always change the calculus but that doesn’t seem to be the case here

  Oh? How does it change the calculus?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Water Boil Advisory⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok, where do you get those 50 people?

  There are places that regularly do this. Where do you think they get enough people to visit and/or mail every address? Who works at the post office? Cops? First responders? Utility workers? Social workers? Delivery drivers?

  This is not just a failure of imagination, it is trying to pretend this kind of operation doesn’t already happen every day right where you live.

  Do you have 50 people sitting around on-call 24/7/365 just in case they need to go knock on everyone’s door?

  Why would they need to?

  Are you taking them off of other jobs to go do this? If this happens at 3AM on a holiday weekend, there’s probably a pretty good reason those other people are already on the clock, like maybe fixing whatever issue is causing the advisory.

  Yes you are taking people off of other jobs to do this. Why would they all be working on the problem that caused the boil notice? Do you think your mailman is cranking on water mains?

  Are we relying on volunteers? How are we going to get ahold of them to let them know, let alone guarantee that they’re actually going to show up.

  If you wanted to use volunteers you would do it by having a group ready to meet up, get trained, and then do these kinds of tasks when needed. You would get their phone numbers in advance and then call around to get together a group. This is how all civil volunteer groups work. Search and rescue. Emergency volunteer firefighters. This is an everyday thing and very basic. Why imply it’s impractical?

  We gonna mobilize the national guard to do it? How long is that gonna take to get going?

  The governor could do that, yes. They mobilize very quickly, they do evacuations for natural disasters. They train for this kind of logistics thing. But sending notice in the mail would be much cheaper.

  Maybe we’ll just press-gang the first 50 people we can get our hands on to do it. What could possibly go wrong?

  “What about [stupid thing]? You’re so dumb for thinking the thing I just made up.”

  But let’s say getting the people is a solved problem. How are they getting around? Not every area is easily walkable.

  The US is car-dependent. You would use cars. Those owned by the authority, municipalities, owned by USPS, cop cars, etc. How do you think your mail works? Purely pedestrian?

  Do we have 50 municipal cars on standby for them to use?

  For an area with 55,000 people? Yes you have 50 vehicles that could be used, though you don’t need 50 because you can do 2-3 per car if you’re doing the door knocking strategy.

  And yes most municipal vehicles are “on standby”. Tons sit in parking lots all day. Ask your county about their staff vehicles and the reservation process.

  Are we going to have additional people driving them around to the needed areas in vans?

  Why would they need to?

  Are they using their personal vehicles and will need to be compensated for gas and mileage (not to mention probably an insurance nightmare for those people using personal vehicles for non-personal use)

  Could be. Depends on exactly how incompetent the water authority is. As we can see, publishing info in the internet equivalent of a dark corner in a broom closet is a strategy they actually went with.

  They are liable for this and can opt for as expensive snd dumb or cheap and efficient of a method they’d like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Water Boil Advisory⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Naw, I think “but we have cars” was silly, not clever (funny how you dropped that pretty quickly).

  Hmm I never said that. You’d rather make stuff up than acknowledge an everyday thing is actually entirely feasible?

  I think “but you can get people and a plan immediately while also fixing the problem” is silly, not clevet (admittedly places that require certain notices will also have a plan to implement it as required by law, not I’m thinking about wherever OP is which I’m assuming doesn’t have that).

  Thanks for explaining how your idea that this can only be done ad hoc is actually dumb, refuting your own point!

  I think comparing with organizations that need large coverage for their daily operations (not necessarily 100% of homes in a day, mind you) is silly, not clever.

  What are you even talking about? Use your words.

  Feel free to move on.

  But your bad faith obstinance is funny. You can go ahead and ignore my advice and embarrass yourself as much as you’d like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Water Boil Advisory⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is literally something that already happens every day for junk mailers and junk from Amazon and you’re trying to die on the hill of saying it’s basically impossible. There are regions where direct verbal or written notice is required by law. These are things that happen and happen efficiently and in very boring ways, despite your continued attempts to argue about this from the position of, “nuh-uh it’s too hard” ad nauseum.

  And this is in defense of instead publishing this information in a dark corner as if it’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’."

  And no, I don’t think the water company would have an army of 50 people ready to do an organized canvas of the town (unlike the Postal Service, which has a roster of dedicated mail carriers)

  Paying 50 people for one day of flyering is an army? How much do you think it costs to send a letter? A water boil notice already means they have failed their own liability and could cause very serious and expensive harms. Yes they have to pay for that (possibly literal) shit.

  Just admit you were being silly, not clever, and move on.