1. Search zipcode in UCMR3_ZipCodes.txt, obtain PWSID.
2. Filter by PWSID in UCMR3_All.txt.
3. Filter that result by rows containing "=" (which means at or above minimum reporting level)
4. Don't panic.
5. Compare AnalyticalResultsValue column to the Reference Concentration in ucmr3-data-summary-april-2016.pdf. If its under the Reference Concentration then you're safe, within the limits of how incomplete their reference concentations are. The document specifically states:
> The intent of the following table is to identify draft UCMR reference concentrations, where possible, to provide context around the detection of a particular UCMR contaminant above the MRL. The draft reference concentration does not represent an “action level” (EPA requires no particular action1,2 based simply on the fact that UCMR monitoring results exceed draft reference concentrations), nor should the draft reference concentration be interpreted as any indication of an Agency intent to establish a future drinking water regulation for the contaminant at this or any other level.
The minimal reporting level seems to be based on how small an amount is detectable, not harmful. The reference concentration appears to be a best guess at the moment for what a maximum safe amount is.
My zipcode for example came up with several of these above the MRL but below the reference concentration. Enjoy.
... "Brita" filters were found to remove around 55% of PFOA, whereas "ZeroWater" filters remove more than 95%. I.e. "Brita" filters leave 9x more stuff in the water. The performance difference is similar for other unwanted stuff, like lead.
ZeroWater changed their filters and now have a time release of a metallic element into the water after about 20-30 refills. Meaning, they make you change the filter unless you can stand the terrible taste. Super scammy. Their water tastes really good... until it doesn't. Then it's horrible.
Sounds like they care about their customers enough to add a mechanism like that. I think a transparent filter with a sensing colored indicator would be a much better and more customer friendly solution though.
Other filters have a shitty digital timer on the pitcher lid last time I checked. It never worked well so I resorted to changing the Brita whenever it started tasting funny. Now I just buy artesian alkaline water. I feel much better.
Most of these filters suck. Better off making your own. Buy silver coil and NSF coconut carbon. Use a french press type device to push water through your silver assorted carbon. Easy! And you save plastic since you made the filter yourself :-)
Does anyone have a better suggestion? I am all for changing the filter on time but if they are putting something in the water at their choosing, that seems wrong.
ConsumerReports rated the Clear2O filter one of the best [0]. I've been using it for over 24 months in Pittsburgh, PA and I can definitely taste the difference. I haven't done the math, but I feel like their filters are cheaper than Brita filters. They have published a fact sheet on their website [1] showing what their filters remove.
Is it not more likely that the filter broke and that's just a natural effect of what happens? I have seen bad filters before and they make the water taste like acid — worse than if the filter was removed entirely.
I think this depends on your water. I use my filters for 6 months at a time, every single day, and haven't noticed any effect like that. They do acknowledge some people get a fishy smell on their troubleshooting page:
The first thing I thought of when I read this was that it reminded me of the smell added to propane, to help people detect leaks. Perhaps the company simply determined that their filters stopped working at that point, and give a perceptible indication of it.
Also, FYI, many treatment centers in the US and abroad changed from chlorine to chloramine without informing the public. It has less of an oder and taste, but basically no carbon filters on the market can remove it. This obsoleted one of the primary utilities of each household filter, so if you want it, then lookup which treatment method is used in your locale and how to remove it (if you care).
Why? They could recommend any product via Amazon. Not a huge incentive to lie. Though a healthy skepticism is always good. For what it's worth these are the folks behind the Wirecutter.com. They are legit.
There isn't much (or any) research on the effects of PFAs on humans, only on lab animals, so we really don't know anything about its toxicity to us. What we do know, however, is that these organic molecules have an extremely rare combination of characteristics: they are unbelievably stable (they seem to be both both hydrophobic and hydrophillic), they can bind to a significant fraction of common proteins indiscriminately, and there exists no biological mechanism that can effectively filter them out. Even though we don't yet know how toxic the compounds are, we do know that this behavior creates a perfect shit storm because not only do these molecules interfere with basic biochemistry but also bioaccumulate though environmental exposure (drinking contaminated water) and the food chain.
The closest analogy would be prions which are also very stable, interfere with the basic function of proteins, and can accumulate through a variety of exposure vectors. The difference is that prions coevolved with the rest of our ecosystem whereas PFAs are entirely synthetic and do not exist in nature. It's unlikely that these molecules are as toxic as arsenic (which wrecks havoc by replacing phosphorus in DNA and the Krebs cycle) but this rather unique combination of circumstances requires an extreme level of caution.
This is what makes PFA molecules so potentially dangerous: they don't behave like anything we've seen in natural biochemistry. Since they have both a hydrophobic carbon chain and a hydrophilic functional group containing fluorine, no known protein can break them down and no known biomechanical mechanism can filter them out so they remain in the blood indefinitely. At the same time, however, the carbon chain and functional group are free to bind onto other proteins as long as the molecules are oriented in the right way, which invariably prevents the other protein from functioning correctly.
Maybe, but not for a very long time. You'd have to develop an otherwise inert enzyme that can go through cell membranes and spread to every cell in the body. Theoretically this would be feasible using a retro virus that can infect every cell and instruct it to produce the enzyme but we're basically just getting our feet wet with genetic engineering research that is bound to take decades or centuries to get to that point.
Dialysis wouldn't do a thing since most of the toxic molecules arent going to be in the blood plasma.
No, activated carbon filters are actually very effective at removing PFAs. The filters work mechanically by trapping the molecules which works well because of the long carbon chain in PFAs. This mechanism is far simpler than reactions in protein chemistry because it doesn't require complex interactions with a solvent (which is where being both hydrophobic and hydrophillic becomes a problem).
Fluorochemicals break down very slowly in the body, if at all. So while a small amount might not do much immediate damage there is a serious risk of bioaccumulation.
I did it recently. I'm using the results to put some water filters into the house that are actually NSF (1) certified to remove the contaminants the test found.
To see specific zip codes, download zip[0]. UCMR3_ZipCodes.txt has all the zip codes and you can cross reference UCMR3_All.txt using PWSID to get facility ID; then cross reference UCMR3_DRT.txt using the facility ID to get the disinfection type. Details about the disinfection type can be found in a pdf within the zip file.
I'll paypal $50 to the first person who can write a script or web interface which just takes a zip-code and returns a list of infections based on this data.
I updated the bash line to include filtering on "=". From reading other comments, "which means at or above minimum reporting level". But more importantly, the line I had was reporting the "Disinfectant Type" not the "Contaminant"!
If you're feeling really charitable, I'll pay it forward and second another comment: send the donation to EFF.
Update: with "=" filtering ("at or above minimum reporting level"), AND... using "Contaminant" instead of "Disinfectant Type" (I followed a comment that seems to be off...always worth checking for yourself!).
When you get deep into these widespread public health issues you start to realize that there's always going to be at least one that you or your locale is at risk for. If it's not the water, it's the food. If it's not the food, it's the air. If it's not the air, it's the soil. If it's not the soil, it's your building. And so on...
The best you can do, in the end, is to avoid paranoia or panic and just aim for some systematic detection, mitigation and prevention processes in your household. With a little luck and a good system, you cheat death or disability, temporarily. You cannot create an ironclad guarantee of safety, but there are many things that you can do something about.
I figure tallying the top ones based on impact on life expectancy makes some sense. The list is probably going to be dominated by the top two or three items. Probably obesity (4 years?) followed by air pollution (1 year maybe) in my case. Not much point worrying about the barely detectable stuff.
You might be interested in the Disinfectant Type used by your water district, but I think most people are interested in knowing the "Contaminant" detected in their water.
For example it colors my county, Alameda County, CA in red because there is some system, somewhere in the county where one of these compounds was detected. But the populous areas of the county are served by East Bay MUD, where the data indicates no detection. The actual data lies in a gigantic text file in a zip archive at https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-09/ucmr-3-oc...
This illustrates the future unknown issues with respect to chemicals and health/environment. At the moment, we have two schools to handle this:
1. not proved bad, we allow.
2. not proved good, we disallow.
The US is more on the first side and the EU on the second, of course, like for any complex issues, the right decision is context dependent and in the middle.
I am working in the area of chemical properties, this is a hard problem and I am sure that when this class of compounds arrived on the market, smart people tried their best to figure out the health implications. We have more tools and experience 50 years later, but we are not smarter. We need to move with caution while handling an increasing market pressure... this is challenging!
"The lowest amount of an analyte in a sample that can be quantitatively determined with stated, acceptable precision and accuracy under stated analytical conditions (i.e. the lower limit of quantitation). Therefore, analyses are calibrated to the MRL, or lower. To take into account day-to-day fluctuations in instrument sensitivity, analyst performance, and other factors, the MRL is established at three times the MDL (or greater)."
[Edit 2] In my town's overall distribution system there are multiple samples above the allowable Reference Concentration. The highest were:
Are you in Wisconsin, a region with large amounts of fracking, or near a nuclear disposal site, by any chance? Such a large molybdenum concentration is exceptionally rare as far as I know.
Chromium, strontium, and vanadium can enter groundwater from many different sources including water seeping through concentrated deposits and industrial pollution. It's the molybdenum concentration that caught my eye because it is unusually rare due to mineral insolubility. It's only when high pressure fracing chemicals oxidize molybdenum does it become readily soluble in untapped deposits, causing it to seep down.
I continue to be shocked that consumer beauty products containing polyfluorinated alkyl compounds are being sold without any significant attention or regulatory oversight [1].
Good grief. There is very little data this stuff is harmful. Certainly not going to wipe out a town in a weekend. Can't wait for millennials to age a few more years and hopefully get a little context. Being wedged between baby boomers and millennials gets more uncomfortable by the day.
> Certainly not going to wipe out a town in a weekend.
Well neither did lead, in the olden days. Not in a weekend, that is.
Of course any fear such as it exists (and regardless of how ill-founded or well-founded it may be!) is not about weekend wipe-outs but rather slowly creeping seeping insidious very-long-term poisoning accumulating and unnoticable from day-to-day, until who knows "suddenly" at some point the entire population has at least half a dozen ailments of civilization, new-fangled "syndromes", mitochondrial or neurodegeneration, and depends on dozen of pills..
I would suggest that's not the point, old man. The point is that the limits exist, and people have to trust that the rules are being followed because they can't go around testing every drop of water that comes out of their tap, yet the rules are being broken invisibly. If the limits are wrong, sure, lets get them changed. Breaking the law because it's probably harmless doesn't make it acceptable.
I'm not sure how it's in the US but my biggest fear with water quality is never the water from the source but what happens on the way to your tap. In Vienna Austria for instance they are super concerned about PH levels because some old houses still have lead piping and if it gets out too far, then the pipes can corrode and lead makes it into the water.
As another example the difference in water quality in the same district in Moscow and SPB from different taps is crazy.
Now that smart meters are a thing for electricity I really wonder if it would not start to make sense to work on basic water quality measurements in houses.
IIRC that was exactly the scenario that happened in Flint, MI in the US.
I don't know enough to comment on how it happened, but the end result was that the PH was too far off and it destroyed something that caused them to leech lead into the water until replaced.
Large parts of the city are still unable to use the pipes in their house.
Anyone have personal experience or research from reverse osmosis filters? I keep hearing it makes the water "better" but never any hard facts on how it performs statistically.
Why is that? My understanding is that fracking "recipes" are secret only because they're so boring. If it's just soap and sand and whatnot and you're making $50mm a year on it, you gotta keep the recipe a secret or else everyone will copy it and you're out of business.
i rent a room in a very old house and i wouldnt be surprised if there were higher than acceptable lead levels in the tap water here. so it got me thinking about water filtering. a reverse osmosis filter and charcoal filter working in series seems to be the most thorough method. does anyone have experience with filtering their water?
You can get the water lead levels tested for relatively little money. I would. And if it turns out the house has lead pipes, you should get them changed
Ive never done reverse osmosis but Ive built water filtering fountains for my cats.
You'll want NSF grade (food grade) carbon from either bone or coconut shells with a fine enough mesh to provide resistance. I bought 10 pounds of this one and its still lasting over a year:
Next you'll want to get silver tubing and adapters to kill all bacteria. You'll also be able to connect your carbon filter inline with the tubing and use a pump to push your water through the filter.
This is the best NSF antibacterial silver infused tubing money can buy:
You can also find the clearflo tubing on usplastics but only in 100 feet rolls. I can ship some if you need only a few feet, my email is in my profile.
Next youll want a transparent/translucent inline refillable filter. I recommend a 1/2" FPT but you can get larger/smaller depending on how much water you want to filter and what your tubing, adapters, and pump size is, everything needs to match. 1/2" ID for tubing and 1/2" NPT / barbs is very compatible and provides enough flow for most purposes. Theres a lot of these on the market, here's a good google search that sources images from amazon, ebay, and some smaller vendors:
Unless you hook this contraption up to an actual water line( your sink), you'll need a pump to push the water through the carbon. No, gravity is not good enough - if the filter is worth its salt it will provide a resistance much greater than what gravity can provide.
I recommend Danner steel pumps. Their plastic ones suck, trust me, I've burned through a few. This pump has really shined:
Now if you choose to use this pump, go with 1/2" on everything. Here is a barbed adapter that will screw perfectly into the top of the pump and seal perfectly with 1/2" ID tubing:
I dont know much about Berkey filters. It looks like they are gravity powered. They might be weaker than the filtration you could accomplish with line or pump pressure.
Only an absolute fool says, "its fine to saturate the environment with synthesized chemicals with unknown effects until they are proven to be harmful."
Unfortunately this is the law of the land and the opinion of many.
What does that have to do with fear? How on earth can you say its fine for me to go into my basement and mix up any chemical compound I want and saturate you with it? How on earth can you say I should have the right to adulterate the environment and subject you to any chemical I mix up in my basement until you prove that its harming you?
The truly frightening part isn't that people like you, completely devoid of logic and common sense, exist. Its that people like you are many, and that your ignorance is exploited by those who run the show and profit off of this poisoning.
Nothing measured in parts per trillion is "saturating the environment," and everything including plain water has "unknown effects" in one context or another. The precautionary principle is epistemologically bankrupt.
But then this sort of thread always generates more hype than light, I suppose.
"These experiments yield bodily concentrations of BPA in ranges of parts per million, but some recent studies have even found that when BPA interacts with hormone receptors on cell membranes, concentrations of one part per trillion can stimulate physiological responses."
Just an example, tho.
Also, to borrow from history, cigarettes once upon a time were not considered harmful mainly because there was just no data suggesting that they were. Smokers regularly "saturated" their environments with smoke. Smoking is banned in a lot of placed now that we have data. Does this help people who got lung cancer or other diseases, who might not even smoked themselves but only second hand? It does not.
The compounds in question here are known to bioaccumulate, meaning once you got them in your system, they will (mostly) stay in and not break down. If I came to your house every day, placing a rock in it and telling you that you cannot remove it, you'd probably object and also don't think that me saying "But it's only one(1) rock and does not matter!" especially after I added new rocks for years.
The default should be to ban use of any compound until you can reasonably prove it is safe according to the current state of science, not allowing everything until somebody proves it is unsafe.
Now, if people want to ingest potentially harmful stuff by choice (e.g. smoking)... that's another matter and they should be free to do so. But they should not be free to make other people ingest potentially harmful stuff against their consent or knowledge (e.g. pollution)
The default should be to ban use of any compound until you can reasonably prove it is safe according to the current state of science, not allowing everything until somebody proves it is unsafe.
This guarantees an exponential slowdown in human progress, while not demonstrably leaving us any safer.
Thank you for being an example of the ignorant mentality that allows poisons to flood our environment.
Who the hell are you to say that the adulterant you introduce into my bloodstream is safe because its such a low level? Should you have to wait until I stick my thumb in your eye to attain proof that its harmful before I'm prevented from doing so?
Anything that is public health related is bound to be full of tradeoffs and "good enoughs". The water in Flint, MI was considered good enough by Flint's officials, as is the water in many other municipalities.
Just as a private monopoly would start to reduce quality once it cornered the market, public, regulated monopolies behave similarly. Why care about quality if there is no competition and it's just another year earning a pension for the bureaucrats involved?
Consider how the bidding process for building roads results in poorly built roads and no incentive to the winner of the contract to build something that will last. Nearly every piece of American infrastructure is riddled with corruption or incompetence (or both). Even basic construction is full of various rules intended to bolster union workers, etc. and adding enormous cost.
I really want to be respectful here but your comment shows a large level of ignorance around the difference between public monopolies, public UTILITIES, public (regulated) goods, and the economics thereof. A lot of public utilities were created specifically to enforce a level of quality and compliance and protect the citizen. In situations where the quality of goods is reduced below a safe level, you should not blame lack of competition, but call it what it is: incompetence at best, corruption at worst.
I this is a little blinkered. You are making too much of merely verbal differences.
Government organisations do don't magically do what they were nominally made for. Like all providers, their work is the product of various human motitivations operating under under various kinds of control.
Approximately speaking: private providers are controlled by competition and regulation. Government organisations are controlled by politics and a command structure. Much of that is also regulation -- though sometimes under a different name.
What you call incompetence and corruption happens when those controls fail. The resulting organisation is very much like a private monpoly: it has no competitors, and the chain of bureaucratic control stops short of making anyone accountable to the public.
I typed the comment in haste and so did not emphasize any of the differences. I think the main difference has to do with which of the entity's behaviors are regulated internally vs externally. This influences whether we consider failings to be incompetence or corruption, but it scarcely matters, since there is no chance for consumers/citizens to simply choose another option.
What sorts of contaminants in drinking water are harmful? How much contamination is too much? What tradeoffs are important when determining that?
Chlorine causes cancer, but it is added to the water supply to prevent bacteria growth while the water is in transit to buildings and residences. Those closest to the treatment facility get over-chlorinated water, and (assuming enough has been added) those furthest away get bacteria-free water.
Fluoride is also sometimes added to water, but it too can cause health problems. How much is reasonable, what is the right tradeoff between the dental health benefits of fluoride and the harms? Who is to decide this?
In Flint, the pipes began leaching harmful chemicals into the water supply, but the officials ignored reports of the problem. Why weren't citizens quickly aware that the water entering their homes (and bodies) was poisonous? Because the public trusts government to do a good job and not to be corrupt.
Public health standards dictate whether an old person gets stents or a coronary bypass operation or neither. There are age limits that apply regardless of health, because of the average health of people of certain ages.
In all cases, public health guidelines are fraught with tradeoffs that inflict intentional harm, usually to conserve resources, etc.
The problem is that the public believes these guidelines to be in their individual best interest. Th public also believes that water deemed safe by regulators is actually safe to consume over the long term, when it may not actually be.
Is it safe to ride in a car with seatbelts and no airbags? Is it safe to drink city water for municipality X for 20 years? How many people will die due to not having an airbag? How many due to low level contamination in the water? Someone is making this judgment call on behalf of everyone, but due to the need to preserve their political authority, the tradeoffs and weaknesses of the approach are not surfaced. They can't say "buy a home water filter" because then they are discriminating against people too poor to do so.
How many poor people live in buildings with water pipes that were grandfathered into code compliance but still create health risks? How much health risk is "reasonable" to prevent the landlord from having to replace pipes?
Similarly, regarding net neutrality, how many startups can never succeed because the "net neutral" latency is too high for the service they wanted to build?
Many of these things are minor, but across the whole spectrum of imperfectly regulated things, are all exposed to significant risk and harm. It's the things we don't tend to focus on (like what constitutes safe water) that are the most likely to harm us, and when we're grieving because a grandparent is sick we are not likely to be thinking about the standard of care that made him/her ineligible for a therapy that had a 1 in 5 chance of extending his/her life by a few years.
Institutions desire power and authority, and they often start out by doing some sort of useful service. But they are easily corrupted. One hallmark of tyranny is the creation of a top down idea of the "greater good". We must be vigilant to prevent our trusted institutions from embodying this sort of tyranny, even on issues that seem inconsequential or minor.
> A lot of public utilities were created specifically to enforce a level of quality and compliance and protect the citizen
Calling others ignorant does not help an argument. I think he had a point that when you let government control something it is the worst kind of monopoly and the quality is bound go down the drain. Whether it VA affairs, public education or IRS.
> I think he had a point that when you let government control something it is the worst kind of monopoly and the quality is bound go down the drain. Whether it VA affairs, public education or IRS.
Thats not necessarily true. Certainly outside the US there are many, many public institutions which do fantastic work. The ABC here in Australia and the BBC in the UK produce great television. The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) are highly regarded here, as was CSIRO before the government gutted their funding (CSIRO is an Australian government research group which invented parts of wifi).
I don't know if the reputation US government agencies have for incompetence is real or due to media spin, but the problem is obviously not inevitable. To quote Bill Clinton: "The problem with ideology is that it gives you the answer before you've asked the question".
As an Australian, aside from their news which last I checked doesn't get the same kind of views as the private companies I would disagree.
Maybe the parents enjoy ABC1 or whatever plays kids shows all day but I find the quality of their original shows to be quite poor and their flagships like QANDA have really gone off the rails in the last few years.
in Canada, the CBC was pretty great until the conservatives annihilated their budget. In that time, they lost the license to the theme of their flagship show, Hockey Nightnin Canada, and after that, the show itself. Also, they lost the rights to report the olympics, and the news is much lower quality.
its almost like public services dont work well when you defund them.
Do you have any data points of the private sector managing those things?
I only ask because I moved from government to private sector. In government we were all so frustrated that we were so inefficient and had to work with such backward technology and systems. So I left to get paid more and do things better for private industry...
I get paid more, but by god, we're about 10 years behind some of the practices we were bitching about in government, but we call everything a grand success and put out so much advertising and never admit failure and we don't really care about measuring or performance objectively.
I think there's so little cross over most people don't really know whether what they're doing it's objectively efficient...most of us in government had swallowed the line we were behind because that's what we were always told and things were objectively frustrating: so we bought that private is better. And this was despite the general observation that our private competitors generally put things out of lower quality and then arguing that we should be abolished because of our inefficiency/lack of need for us any more.
I'm not saying government is inherently more efficient than private sector, just that government involvement isn't necessarily more inefficient/desirable than private sector or deregulation.
Also, I think a part of this also has to do with the general cultural values systems a society has. Have government or private industry set up to deal with things the society genuinely doesn't value that much, and you're going to find its generally poorly done no matter who it's running the show...
> when you let government control something it is the worst kind of monopoly and the quality is bound go down the drain
[citation needed]
I think the US political climate seems uniquely poorly suited to having well-functioning government because it seems half the country is hell-bent on proving that government doesn't work.
I don't live in the US and I've only had great experiences at the driver licensing center and tax authority. My garbage gets picked up on time, the water is clean and safe to drink. Meanwhile at private services I've waited in massive lines at banks, and had poor service from telecom companies.
Water pipes are a natural monopoly anyway. It doesn't make any sense for FooWater and BarWater to build out two completely separate sets of water mains which all have to be maintained.
Whichever entity is running the water for a particular area, it's either going to be run by the state or contracted out by it. I don't know anywhere that isn't true, other than places where the water supply is so abysmal that people pay private firms to truck water around.
I dunno, maybe because you'll rot in a prison cell? I'm going to need something better than this for the 'competition fixes everything' argument. Yes, corruption in public utilities/institution is a serious problem. However I think you need to quantify that before breezily saying there is no difference between public and private monopolies. Private firms generally have far less internal accountability as far as I can see, and make the argument that loyalty to shareholders trumps obligations to customers.
Not making this argument, just pointing out that it helps to surface information.
> Private firms generally have far less internal accountability as far as I can see
- Fannie and Freddie had been exempted from releasing public financial records for several years prior to the financial crisis of 2008.
- Wikileaks revealed that information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was classified solely to help support the government's narrative about the success of the war effort and the lack of Iranian involvement, etc.
With those two examples alone, we see that significant corruption exists on a massive, world altering scale.
In terms of accountability, private firms have an obligation to shareholders to behave ethically and legally, and to behave in a responsible way with the capital provided by shareholders. Specific behavior (such as dumping pollution into public waterways) is dependent on laws and on the enforcement of those laws.
Why do we still see smoke stacks leaking disgusting filth into the environment? Why do we still see pipes carrying all sorts of waste into the oceans? Because the firms doing the polluting are friends of the lawmakers and help keep them in power. The lawmakers are certainly not the "good guys".
Also, notice that in US newspapers there is a steady stream of stories talking about how bad it is to live in other countries. People would leave to find better regulated, less corrupt places, so there is a pretty significant theme of "America is the best country on Earth", and for some reason Americans like reading about problems in other countries and ignoring our own problems.
Walk into ATT showroom, BMW showroom or Wallmart or a Lasik clinic or other zillion private business and then walk into DMV, VA or IRS office. Even blind people would be able to tell the different.
Loyalty shareholders is any day better than total lack of accountability which is the case with public utility companies.
what into the irs then walk into an h&r block. i've done this one year when my taxes were particularly complicated and someone i had worked for was trying to screw me over on taxes. after a long wait, the guy at h&r block said there was nothing to be done. on the other hand i walked right into the irs, was given the form and assisted in filling it out. in the end i saved a couple thousand dollars.
i never was that excited to go to h&r block, but figured they'd be an extra pair of eyes to catch anything stupid. now i don't bother. i've been to the irs a couple times since with my tax questions and get good answers from them. also haven't ever had a problem with the DMV. the VA, i've no experience with.
What's the throughput of both, the outcome, and the per user cost?
Those are the metrics that should matter to the society as a whole.
The BMW showroom looks shiny, and they explicitly kick out and don't include in their metrics the customers they fail to serve. Great if you've got the money to pay for that. Bad if you want a measure of social utility or overall efficiency, or if you don't have the money...
Monopolies and businesses if great size have general issues also, regardless of being government or private...
You obviously have some kind of political axe to grind, but factually I believe you are not correct about "Flint officials". The officials in question were installed by the state government using "emergency" powers.
"Why care about quality if there is no competition"
the implication in this statement is that any organization whose purpose is other than maximizing income streams will be dysfunctional and ineffective. i don't think that's the case.
If you are offered two choices, A and B, and have to make a decision, how do you decide which to choose? By comparing characteristics of each.
When there is only one choice, it doesn't really matter what the characteristics of it are, and any information that might reflect negatively on it can be kept hidden from view.
This is not just for the purpose of maximizing income streams. Two competing charities might attempt to raise money to accomplish the same goal, but one may have a far better approach and get far better results.
Imagine if you were given a large scoop of a mushy substance labeled "FOOD". There were multiple vats of it behind a counter, but they all contained the same thing.
This is where ideology has a role: in absence of immediate threats (which cannot be introduced everywhere), you do your job well not because you benefit directly, but because it benefits $cause. Public services without a public-service ethic don't work well, and public-service ethic needs some sort of ideological system to build on -- be that a religion or something else.
1. Search zipcode in UCMR3_ZipCodes.txt, obtain PWSID.
2. Filter by PWSID in UCMR3_All.txt.
3. Filter that result by rows containing "=" (which means at or above minimum reporting level)
4. Don't panic.
5. Compare AnalyticalResultsValue column to the Reference Concentration in ucmr3-data-summary-april-2016.pdf. If its under the Reference Concentration then you're safe, within the limits of how incomplete their reference concentations are. The document specifically states:
> The intent of the following table is to identify draft UCMR reference concentrations, where possible, to provide context around the detection of a particular UCMR contaminant above the MRL. The draft reference concentration does not represent an “action level” (EPA requires no particular action1,2 based simply on the fact that UCMR monitoring results exceed draft reference concentrations), nor should the draft reference concentration be interpreted as any indication of an Agency intent to establish a future drinking water regulation for the contaminant at this or any other level.
The minimal reporting level seems to be based on how small an amount is detectable, not harmful. The reference concentration appears to be a best guess at the moment for what a maximum safe amount is.
My zipcode for example came up with several of these above the MRL but below the reference concentration. Enjoy.
Edit: added link.