News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Water and sewer are overwhelmingly public utilities in the US. This is more a case of small-time bureaucratic incompetence than corporate avarice -- think along the lines of your grandpa writing the default Wifi password on the front of the router because he can't remember it and doesn't know how to change it, except Grandpa is in charge of a rural water district, and the router is the control system for the chlorine treatment.
Where water service is expensive in the US it's usually because decades-old infrastructure built to support far-flung suburban development are starting to fall apart, and there was never a plan to pay for replacement. Some places are also being required by the EPA to separate ancient combined storm and sanitary sewers, which basically entails a complete replacement of the sewers at a cost of billions. Infrastructure is expensive to maintain, especially if you spend a few decades ignoring it first.
And when the rural communities can't afford to do the EPA mandated updates, they sell out to a publicly traded, for profit corporation...who raises basic utility fees multiple times over the short span they've owned and operated the infrastructure of the rural communities.
I'm not saying you're wrong in every instance, as what you've said holds true a lot of the time. Just not in this very specific, albeit anecdotal, instance.
So there is also the classic issue of underfunding of municipal services. Good luck getting qualified security people for what local government pays.