I saw a thing on the news this morning about Bill Gates running around spruiking the replacement of sewage systems with chemical toilets. Apparently, he thinks that instead of each house having a simple mechanism for carrying waste water away to a central plant where it can be processed, it would be better for every house to have a complex mechanism that will no doubt require constant maintenance, and replacement materials, and will produce "fertiliser" that everybody will have to dispose of themselves … somehow?
If you hunt around on YouTube, you can find a number of channels which are almost exclusively devoted to stupid ideas that have raised millions of dollars in funding, and then failed to deliver anything … because they were obviously stupid ideas. And yes, in case you were wondering, many of the videos on these channels do talk specifically about Elon Musk.
And in case you don't know what I mean by that, one of Elon Musk's pet projects is a train in a vacuum tube, which he calls "The Hyperloop". Which is a fine idea on paper … until you realise that you're talking about building a giant vacuum tube that stretches for miles and miles, and any damage whatsoever, anywhere in the tube, from weather, corrosion, accident, or simply heat-expansion, is not only going to stop the thing from working, but could cause explosive decompression, thereby killing everyone riding on the thing.
And this, I think, is a fine example of the massive problem that we as a society have facing us today. Too many of the dickheads running this show spend too much time sitting behind a computer—surrounded by other dickheads who spend too much time sitting behind a computer—with any understanding (if indeed they had any to begin with) of how real materials, and real people behave under real conditions out in the real world, gradually falling away. So, rather than trying to design things that are simple, robust, and easily maintained, they push towards creating things that are complicated, fragile, and in more and more cases, utterly unworkable.
And this doesn't just apply to technology either. Anyone who's worked under any sort of bureaucracy knows how things are going there too.
I'm fucked if I know what to do about it though. Apart from come here and complain. Any thoughts?
11 comments :
I though the 'fertiliser' was then going to be converted into energy? Sounds good, if it can be done
Yeah nah. I want the sewerage to go off to Werribee where it belongs to be processed. Not somewhere in my backyard, where it might explode and I might be stuck with it.
I though the 'fertiliser' was then going to be converted into energy?
That part wasn't covered in what I saw, but it does beg the question of … how?
It's probably a decent enough idea if you live somewhere where there's no sewage system, but for everyone else … no.
Escalators are a brilliant invention, because when they stop working, you still have a perfectly good set of stairs.
Flush toilets are similarly great. Even if the flush mechanism fully breaks down, all you need to make them carry the waste away is a bucket of water. The only way they can become unusable is if the waste outlet gets clogged or you smash the bowl.
how?
I don't know, the article I read said it converts sewerage into power and clean water. I think it's mainly meant for developing countries at this stage
I'm not interested in nit-picking other people's spelling, but I am curious:
Sewerage = The pipes and stuff
Sewage = The shit that flows through the pipes
Is that correct?
I don't know. I always thought it was a Aus/US spelling thing.
That's correct, of course
Oh cool, I was right for once.
Also, on the subject of getting modern sanitation to the 3rd world—and specifically that international toilet day, or whatever it's called. Both my parents grew up in rural communities where there was no sewerage and no septic, and yet they didn't have continuous outbreaks of fecal-borne diseases. Why? Well, people buried their shit. They dug "shit pits", and built thunder-boxes on top of them. When the pits started to fill up, they covered them over with soil, dug a fresh pit, and moved the thunder-box. People in developing countries don't need flush toilets to stop cholera, they need shovels, toilet-paper, and soap.
I agree about the pit toilet. And you had to close the lid on it to prevent the flies, though they got in anyway. Mind you, cholera vaccine would also help with this.
My mother travelled to Nepal twenty years back and she said that the worst toilet they encountered was a latrine which was situated over a waterfall. You had to edge your way out on planks and shat into the waterfall. No thought about the people downstream from this, clearly.
I got sick in Turkey because I forgot basic precautions and rinsed my mouth with the tap water while brushing my teeth. I was staying in a valley and the water was clearly going to have upstream contaminants in it. I got giardia, and I am thankful it wasn't worse.
In towns that had a sawmill, dunnies would often have a box of sawdust in them. Throwing it into the pit helped with both the smell and the flies.
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