There is at least one used condom too (sorry)

Thank u 4 ur service 🫡

Hello. Please be introduced to the concept of poop tomatoes, something that pops up in wastewater plants. In warmer climates we see more poop watermelons.

It’s not just tomatoes or watermelons but those are the ones that seem to “make it” to being full plants so that’s what people remember. I’d bet on chia for this bad boy.

Putting some photos behind a spoiler tag because I have no idea what is considered decent vs gross anymore

My pessimistic self wonders if the owners/users of these freezers even know they are in the internet 😭

Yeah so that exists and it’s not going so well for the UK. I will edit with some links.

Edit:

Very broadly water utilities in the UK and north America largely started off private but public ownership is still the norm for centralized system of idk > 100 people?

Tbh I’m high and not bothering to look stuff but but I’m guessing that it was sewage treatment which lead water utilities (handling both potable and sewage) being public. You can charge people for water, but unless the government is forcing people to connect to a sewer and get rid of pit latrines etc there is no market for it. (Fun fact domestic connections to sewers predate the widespread use of septic tanks)

Migration to urban centres due to industrialization and the industrial processes themselves were the main loading of sewage, which overwhelmed natural systems that had previously been able to support the community.

Someone had to treat the sewage because it was fucking up the drinking water. Who has to deal with stuff like that? The government! So they run the sewage plants. And because the private drinking water plants were run for profit and not for health, a lot of them were extremely bad they got shut down. Once again, the government had to step in because they needed to enforce standards.

Toronto and Ottawa have very interesting and very divergent experiences with that relationship. If someone is interested I can see if I can dig up an article someone wrote about it.

Anyways, sometimes the government made developers pay directly for the construction, operations and maintenance of a plant, but now in Ontario for the most part they just charge development fees. Small communities like trailer parks or ski villages typically have their own little plant or over glorified septic tank.

I came here to argue that there are in fact private sewage companies and they are often disasters, but I think the above kind of proved that the origin of public water utilities was the failure of the private sector to get their shit together.

Well that’s awkward.

Anyways, fuck Thames Water : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Water

Apprenticeship is the only way, but you need books to help pass the exams.

Sacramento State courses were at one time considered the best: https://owp.csus.edu/operator-training/courses/correspondence-courses/wastewater-courses/course.php?sectionId=1947&has_child_courses=1

I’m even if they aren’t considered great anymore, doing the correspondence course which costs $50 and is a series of online multiple choice questions gives you 90 training hours towards your renewal requirements which is more than two years worth here.

I understand operators these days prefer the WEF manuals: https://www.wef.org/publications/operator-training-manuals/ Perhaps they kept up with the standard exams better.

On the engineering side I love the WEF MOP, especially MOP 8: https://connect.wef.org/s/store#/store/browse/detail/a2nRP000000oa6jYAA

We joke that Metcalf and Eddy is our bible but it’s the most basic starting point in research. I think people take the joke too literally sometimes:

https://www.mheducation.com/highered/product/wastewater-engineering-treatment-and-resource-recovery-metcalf-and-eddy.html?viewOption=student

The new order comes amid several reported cyberattacks on U.S. water systems, which officials suspect have links to Iran, according to The New York Times.

I know the article isn’t saying it’s the same, but I wanted to add a clarification that the FBI had said the attacks were only noted in Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), specifically MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 series.

After remotely accessing internet-facing devices, the actors changed the IP addresses and passwords, resulting in a loss of monitoring and control functionality.

There have been PLC attacks that resulted from a compromised device being installed but these appear to be about poor security practices.

Someone is in TROUBLE:

At least one organization reported modified PLC project files after noticing ladder logic discrepancies across several sites.

There is literally a physical key you have to turn to change the program. For example:

Sure you could take a sentence in a reply explaining a very specific scenario and apply it to every situation, but that would be foolish and a waste of time.

Oh no I’m serious replying to a meme

Obviously this happens a lot but people get big mad at unions because they think this is happening and it isn’t necessarily.

The job may be posted internally and externally at the same time. All internal candidates who apply must be assessed first and replied to in order of what union they belong to depending on the job. If can take a long time because people kind of just apply to everything the same way you do as an external candidate.

Once they are all excluded then HR releases the external applicants for review. At no point are they compared with each other. Not all qualified candidates are contacted because there are probably dozens of them, so maybe the top 5 or so will be invited for the evaluation.

It’s shitty that there are people who don’t have work, but I get grumpy when people yell NEPOTISM and other things. If we wanted to hire an internal candidate unethically we could and it wouldn’t get posted externally. If we knew there were wrong internal candidates and we were doing things by the book we would post internal only. No one wants to deal with HR to get things posted externally, I promise.