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this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Huh? I don't see how that follows.
Freedom of speech is widely regarded as a human right. But you still have the right not to express yourself.
Shelter is literally a human need. It's like, number 4 on the list after air, water, and food. Maybe before food, even. Being necessary for life should be a sufficient condition to qualify as a human right.
Speech doesn't require anything tangible though. Big difference. Same with the right to water -- it has more to do with not infringing the rights of others (by dumping waste into the water, etc) than it does actually attaining something tangible; mostly due to how widely available it is, causing it to be essentially free as well. That's why those are already codified rights basically -- because they're easy to attain and ensure.
Water is tangible though. Clean, safe drinking water isn't cheaply and widely available (in the USA, anyway) by accident: it's a huge endeavor that requires tax money to maintain public infrastructure. See the ongoing crises in places with tainted water to see how challenging it is to maintain.
Housing is harder than water, but public water and sanitation systems are incredibly expensive, so I wonder what the comparison would be like against more public housing.
Literally rain. It's literally free, and literally "widely" available. As I said, water rights have more to do with not polluting fresh water sources than actually attaining physical water.
Hahaha awesome, do you get the majority of your clean water via collecting rain? Do you think it's a viable source for folks living in dense metropolitan areas?
Yes, I do. It's called a well. Millions of people do the same. You can drill a well almost anywhere, and drink clean rain water. There are some exceptions of course, but as I stated before -- "the right to clean water" -- has more to do with keeping large corporations, etc from polluting those water sources than it does physically attaining water.
No, but that's their choice to live there. That's the same reason why it's illegal to fish in dense populated areas.
My apologies, since wells are hardly "free" to build and maintain I had assumed you were talking about collecting it directly via a harvesting system. I've used wells the majority of my life.
My general point is that wells or direct capture is not viable for dense urban areas, and while you're saying it's a choice, the majority of folks in the USA live in urban areas. Big urban centers aren't going away any time soon, so we should consider how to meet people where they are, when possible. The larger point I wanted to make though is that we (at least in the USA, and all the Latin American nations I've lived in) have good public sanitation and water systems precisely because it's seen as a right. And those systems aren't cheap, but we do it. As I argue we should do more for re: housing.
That's the crux of the biscuit: I just think more should be done to help people afford these basic necessities. I think we should (as a nation/planet) fundamentally rethink the way we approach housing, for the same reasons water and food are subsidized (and they should be further subsidized IMHO, but that's another point entirely). I'm not going to claim I know the answers, or that it would be easy or cheap, but I think it's something we should all try seriously to solve.
Wells are essentially free. They used to dig them by hand...you still can, in fact. They're one of the most commonly used pre-technological age way of getting water with the exception of simply living next to a freshwater source.
You don't need metal, you don't need electrical, you don't need pumps, you don't need anything except some rocks, clay, and something to dredge water up with.
It's wonderful how in most places on this earth you can simply...dig...and get water.
I'd call that about as free as something could ever be achieved, gets.