{"id":711,"date":"2004-08-04T19:10:23","date_gmt":"2004-08-04T19:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/bologs\/vng\/sewage\/"},"modified":"2004-08-04T19:10:23","modified_gmt":"2004-08-04T19:10:23","slug":"sewage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/sewage\/","title":{"rendered":"Sewage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a result of last night&#8217;s storms, 900,000 tons of raw sewage&#8230;I&#8217;ll say that again: 900,000 tons of raw sewage&#8230;poured into the Thames and the London streets, killing massive numbers of fish and generally filling the place up with, well, shit.<br \/>\nThe last time this was a news headline was in the middle ages. So why&#8217;s it happening now ?<br \/>\nAnother question: why is our postal system no longer the envy of the world (as it was 10 years ago when Michele first arrived), and instead the laughing-stock of the world ?<br \/>\nHere&#8217;s another one: why is British public transport worse now than it has ever been&#8230;well at least since the invention of the train ?<br \/>\nWhat about the health service &#8211; why is it so crap these days (a value judgement that I can back up wih some pretty bloody convincing stats ) ?<br \/>\nWell, I don&#8217;t know. But one piece of evidence that is common to all of the problems is&#8230;privatisation.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s just take the floods\/sewage.<br \/>\nNever in my life have I heard anything like this. The reason is that, until privatisation, the job of the water board (as was), was to make the water system work properly. Now, it&#8217;s to ensure that the share-holders make an ever increasing profit. How do you keep increasing your profits ?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Pay your workers less<\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t be so meticulous with the &#8220;day to day&#8221; jobs (like cleaning storm drains, fixing rail tracks etc etc<\/li>\n<li>Make your business more efficient &#8211; (by sacking the overly heavy management layers&#8230;oops no, sorry, even though they are paid an order of magiture higher than the skilled people on the front-line, they are worth far more&#8230;probly)<\/li>\n<li>Ditching all of these luxurious things like holidays with pay for workers and contracts<\/li>\n<li>Not making &#8220;environmental&#8221; concessions to sate the liberal lefties (tree hugging tossers). You can&#8217;t stop progress. The needs of the planet (and its inhabitants) should be secondary to thos of a healthy free market. Oh wait, <i>we<\/i> are inhabitants of the planet&#8230;fuck us, we are expendable in the name of business&#8230;but not the liberal, commie, &#8220;planet&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a result of last night&#8217;s storms, 900,000 tons of raw sewage&#8230;I&#8217;ll say that again: 900,000 tons of raw sewage&#8230;poured into the Thames and the London streets, killing massive numbers of fish and generally filling the place up with, well, shit. The last time this was a news headline was in the middle ages. So [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}