My city got rid of lead pipes decades ago, and now I'm mad other cities are getting free money to replace them.
(This post is about student loans)
this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
633 points (98.9% liked)
politics
19170 readers
4720 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! 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.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I hate scientists because they figured out the cure for cancer before my meemaw died. All my homies hate scientists. It probably makes you gay anyway.
load more comments
(1 replies)
This is huge...
I don't get a chance to be happy with Biden often, but this is one of the rare times.
Lead poisoning doesn't just hurt people's health, it makes the stupid and belligerent. Like, those are the actual effects of it.
There's a reason the benefits of banning leaded gas takes decades, it's not helping those who already have lead poisoning, it's just waiting for a new generation to grow up without it.
This is like one of those "best time to plant a tree" things.
The benefits are really far away, but doing it is a huge investment in our future as a society.
It's reassuring to know society overall will be more sane when I'm old.
Sadly, this is barely enough to scratch the surface. We need a lot more money put into this, and it’s not like the presidents before Biden didn’t know about it. They just didn’t even do this much. It’s disgraceful.
Kind of true, but some lead pipes just aren't an immediate issue. Like asbestos in a building that isn't disturbed, it doesn't hurt anyone until it starts to come loose.
Getting the worst of it solved is a good step.
The issue with not dealing with problems immediately, is that people have a tendency to push them down the line over and over until it’s not just immediate, it’s an emergency over a decade ago. Flint still doesn’t have clean water. This should have been a good first step Obama did, like he promised he was going to.
Flint actually does have clean water by most metrics and independent measurements, but public trust is reasonably deeply, deeply shaken.
This, and I don't mean this as a bad thing, isn't actually a thing Biden started. It's a massive disbursal of funds allocated by the infrastructure bill to a program started in 1996 for upgrading water infrastructure and specifically removing lead pipes.
So this is something great to do, and we should keep doing more of it (there's $12 billion more waiting for future rounds), and we can be slightly happy that we're not complete fuck ups since we actually started nearly 30 years ago.
We shouldn't have to live in a world where we need to advertise that the people entrusted to be basically competent at managing our public works are doing their jobs, but here we are, and we should probably advertise this stuff better.
load more comments
(8 replies)
load more comments
(14 replies)
republicans now replacing their nonlead pipes with lead pipes
"Tonight on Hannity: Liberals want to take your Lead away!! The Romans used lead everywhere and they were a gigantic empire! Leave it to stupid liberals to think they know better than our ancestors! Take Back Our Lead!"
Feels like they did that years ago.
Um... You guys are replacing them.... Now?
That actually explains quite a lot.
It’ll be interesting to see all these lead pipes replaced, and watch the amount of religious people take a nosedive afterwards.
It will have an effect in decades. The people that got affected are unlikely to get better. The biggest damage is being exposed to lead during childhood.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(8 replies)
The US still has lead pipes for drinking water??? Wtf.
Yes. 😕 They were originally coated on the interior so there wasn't direct exposure of the lead to the water. But lack of funding (in some cases deliberate, see Flint, MI) for maintenance leads to the coating wearing away, resulting in contamination of the water. There's plenty of Starving The Beast going on with things like this (also see bridges collapsing and public schools failing) by conservatives to try and grift on replacing public infrastructure with private ownership. Pretty disgusting.
Purely pedantically: the coating isn't applied to the pipes, it forms there from a reaction between the water and the pipe material.
It's not something that maintained by directly putting it on the pipes, but by managing the composition of the water supply, which they can't not do.
http://www.sedimentaryores.net/Pipe%20Scales/Lead%20Solubility.html
The issue in Flint wasn't that they cut maintenance funding, but that they cut water supply funding and so the utility switched from Detroit water (fine, stable and nice to pipes) to local river water which had a different acidity which destroyed the coating.
I agree with all your conclusions, just wanted to let you know why we're not constantly digging up pipes to fix the coating. 😊
Appreciate the clarification/correction.
How else do you explain there are still people voting for trump?
load more comments
(2 replies)
“Buh muh lead!1 gubment ruinin muh watuh!”
Waiting for the conspiracy videos where people are claiming they’are adding 4G modules to your pipes.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Damn Libruls trying to take away our poisonous lead pipes
Holy shit, we still have lead pipes in places!? I thought those were replaced in the 80's.
It's worse than you think.
You know those old ill maintained public schools?
The combination of not just old lead pipes, but being shut down for extended periods mean lots of children are getting lead poisoning at school.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/protecting-children-lead-exposure-schools-and-child-care-facilities
So even if your house and local water is fine, your kids might be getting dosed up with lead at a young age, which is when it's most impactful.
Lead is a serious problem that lots of people assume was fixed when we took it out of gas. It helped, but there's still lots of lead around.
It's going to be one of those things future generations look back on and go "no wonder they were so fucking crazy".
Nope, they're actually still pretty common across the industrialized world. It's not just a US thing.
We recognized the potential for harm decades ago, but for the most part it's not a critical issue due to some minutiae of how lead pipes work in practice.
Incidents like Flint made it clear that the consequences of messing up that minutiae are big enough that we really, really shouldn't be relying on them.
So this isn't billions of dollars in emergency response, it's billions of dollars in preventative maintenance, which is even better. 😊
load more comments
(5 replies)
Infrastructure updates? Fuck yeah!
Strategic lead reserve is being tapped.... munitions.
Looking at historical data on lead prices, you might be on to something
Like, to actually do it? Or for companies to pocket the money and give up on it soon after, like with the infrastructure upgrade we should already have?
Welcome to the 1800s.
view more: next ›