Bill Gates Looks to Reinvent the Toilet 471
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the German government are working on a $10 million project to provide innovative sanitation facilities to 800,000 Kenyans over the next five years. From the article: "The goal is to find 'innovative solutions' for sanitation in poor urban areas. Gates says it's time to move on from the era of the classic toilet. He points out that, despite all the recent achievements, 40% of the world's population, or some 2.5 billion people, still lives without proper means of flushing away excrement. But just giving them Western-style toilets isn't possible because of the world's limited water resources." I wonder what the toilet version of The Blue Screen of Death is.
Reflexive /. Gates bashing in 3...2... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm just curious how someone will find a way to spin this as a bad thing. Will it be "Gates will probably insist they use only Windows toilets!"? Or maybe it will be "This is just a ploy for him to sell more Windows copies to the poor people after they take a shit!" Or perhaps "I'll be he'll ban Linux and Apple from these shithouses!"
Come on, I know there are plenty of Slashdotters just ACHING to find SOME way, ANY way to bash him some more. Forget that Steve Jobs does NO charitable activities (Steve don't do charity) or that this has nothing to do with Linux. Someone will find a way. He's the guy with the Borg picture, after all.
Re:Reflexive /. Gates bashing in 3...2... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Reflexive /. Gates bashing in 3...2... (Score:4, Funny)
No, the real question is...how the hell will the three sea shells work?
yes it will run crysis (Score:3)
does no one recall the Microsoft iLoo disaster in the UK? [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo [wikipedia.org]
Re:Reflexive /. Gates bashing in 3...2... (Score:5, Interesting)
The bashing began before you started typing. Did you read the summary?
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I'm just trying to figure out why he wants to violate the KISS methodology. You have few options for feces. Put it it into a treatment facility (flush, carry...) to be treated with bacteria that live on that sort of thing, use it for fertilizer or burn it.
The use of toilets in "western society" simply facilitates the first step in those methods be it an out house, a ceramic bowl, or fancy plastic. I don't understand what he wants them to do. Maybe learn how to use sea shells for less paper usage? There
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Re:Reflexive /. Gates bashing in 3...2... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not like there haven't been all kinds of methods devised for getting rid of waste. Hell, NASA probably researched a million different chemicals and methods for getting rid of such waste. I'm sure they didn't just blow all that money on a single toilet.
Also, there no need for name calling. So I went a little wordy with my sentence... big deal.
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NASA had the advantage in that their methods had to be efficient when used, but still very expensive to manufacture and maintain. What he needs in this case is something that can be cheaply implemented and not wasting any more resources than needed when used.
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They stopped producing music that appealed to the current youth.
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Sterilize it with heat(but without burning it it) and then use it for fertilizer.
However, that is kind of energy intensive. Giant fresnel furance?
Re:Reflexive /. Gates bashing in 3...2... (Score:4, Insightful)
Heh... No...don't need to do that... A composting toilet breaks it down and renders the hazardous bacterial aspects of it largely harmless over time- typically a shorter period than the bulk wastewater treatment systems take to do it.
Re:Reflexive /. Gates bashing in 3...2... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Reflexive /. Gates bashing in 3...2... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not have a dual system?
Liquid waste goes into a liquid recyc system, to be chemically cleansed and reused in future flushes. Doesn't need to be electric powered; you should be able to pump up a couple gallons into a reserve flush bin by a hand-crank pump fairly easily. Solid waste filters out into a bin to be taken away for treatment later (carried or otherwise). That way, you don't have to worry about wasting good, potable water on your flushes.
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You're going to have to extract the liquid from the waste to do that- and unless he's focusing on efficient water purification systems that don't require much or any power, that's not going to be happening.
Like I said. Let gravity filter the waste - liquid goes through, solid catches in a trap of some kind (removable bucket? Flip-to-clear lid?). Put a crank in the right spot, hand-pump enough liquid into a reservoir for a flush, and the system can be more or less closed until it's time to refresh the water
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I'm just trying to figure out why he wants to violate the KISS methodology. You have few options for feces. Put it it into a treatment facility (flush, carry...) to be treated with bacteria that live on that sort of thing, use it for fertilizer or burn it.
That's only simple for you, the homeowner, because somebody has invested HUGE amounts of money and engineering into infrastructure that makes it possible. Think about it. You take water that has been purified to drinking water standards and moved tthrough a water distribution system, often hundreds of miles. You shit in that drinking water and send it through a separate water collection system, where the shit you put into it is removed and processed and the water treated AGAIN before being dumped in the
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No, I consider simple being a hole in the ground with a place to sit above it. I grew up on a Midwestern farm and we had an outhouse that was no longer used by us... but I understood it's purpose. I even went camping, a lot, as a kid and had to dig holes where I would bury my waste. It's not something I needed a degree in biology or waste management to understand.
No nice way to say this (Score:5, Insightful)
But there is a difference between not having a degree in biology or waste management and living under the control of people that tell you to pray for rain in a massive drought. Or who believe raping a baby (or any virgin but easiest with a baby) cures aids. Or eat albino people to gain their powers. And don't act so high and mighty, it wasn't so long ago in the west we burned people alive for voodoo, oops witchcraft or killed people for their faith and made lampshades out of them.
Civilization, you never truly appreciate it until every last bit of it has been stripped away from you. There are still houses in western Europe where you can see the design for crapping out on to the street. The London sewer system isn't all that old (compared to civilized man capable of building a toilet) but us modern humans still rely on it because we are no longer capable of the massive engineering it took to build it to upgrade it to modern needs.
A hole in the ground that is all? What about leach area, the radius around the hole in which you shouldn't dig or grow crops etc? How do you know? For thousands of year NO human knew. We thought smell kept evil spirits away. You and I can drink purest water from the tap for less then the cost of a peanut but drink instead poisoned water from plastic bottles at outrages prices and waste most of it for flushing the toilet.
I sit here within easy reach of enough food to last me a week, pure water how ever much I want, power for a dozen gadgets, in building that doesn't even budge in the worsed storms. Maybe you are too, but I don't pretend that my state in the norm in the rest of the world. Am I grateful for it? Hell no, I am a spoiled westerner but at least sometimes a story like this reminds me there are other places in the world. Maybe you should too. Even knowledge we consider basic is not universal. Just because you had over a decade maybe even two of education doesn't mean everyone has.
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OK, let's take your dig a hole in the ground routine and apply to a city like Dhaka, Bangladesh, with a population density of 118,000 per square mile. Let's stipulate that part of the job is keeping diseases like cholera from spreading. "Simple" only counts as a virtue if it gets the job done.
Re:Reflexive /. Gates bashing in 3...2... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the small villages in Pakistan can figure out that they need to go to "x" location on the other side of the hill when they need to dump their waste, why can't someone in Africa designate an area that people will go to do that?
Why do they need someone else to come in and dig a latrine for them? Do they lack the knowledge on digging a hole? ... building a stick/rope structure to hold up a person? Why is there really an issue with people squatting anywhere they damn well please in Africa if all the other places all over the world figured this out already? There are remote places all over the world that have figured out that this waste is bad and they work with it just fine. How is it any different in Africa? They don't know how to mix the feces with dirt and/or bury it?
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Why is there really an issue with people squatting anywhere they damn well please in Africa if all the other places all over the world figured this out already? There are remote places all over the world that have figured out that this waste is bad and they work with it just fine. How is it any different in Africa? They don't know how to mix the feces with dirt and/or bury it?
This was my first reaction too---
Step #1 - Dig a hole
Step #2 - Place outhouse over hole
Every month or two...
Step #1 - Temp. move outhouse
Step #2 - Dig new hole, placing dirt in old hole
Step #3 - Please outhouse over new hole, mark old hole so as not to dig there for a while
Then just make sure you aren't placing your outhouse holes somewhere that they contaminate your water supply (well), garden, etc...
But, I'm guessing there must be some reasons they don't do this... maybe--
- Population density? Too many p
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So do what westerners did when they were poor and had no water and power. Outhouses with properly sized leach fields. I would imagine the folks who need these facilities don't own the land and so can't build such things. The people who do own the land have another place to potty.
Re:Reflexive /. Gates bashing in 3...2... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure where my joking starts or ends. Could you clarify where you think I'm joking?
You've listed a solution that may work for them. Why hasn't this billion dollar fund heard of these toilets then? What sort of solution is Mr. Gates looking for if these compost solutions were not sufficient enough for his solution?
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>Forget that Steve Jobs does NO charitable activities
Steve Jobs isn't public about whether or not he does charities. He thinks it's none of your business.
And I tend to agree with him on that point.
Some people use charity as a means of self-promotion.
Who is better, the Christian that goes to church every Sunday and makes sure everyone knows he goes to church, or the Christian that doesn't always go to church, but volunteers at the soup kitchen downtown and tells nobody?
Disclaimer, I am a lapsed Episcopal
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Or would it be better to suffer in silence feeling like no one cares, because they dont ask and you dont tell?
The Spotlight is a harsh mistress, and to put ones self on the line for a cause they believe in is more gutsy than not.
It is still up to the individual, and I respect either way. But the way you write it, you would think the world should keep its mouth shut.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who is better, the Christian that goes to church every Sunday and makes sure everyone knows he goes to church, or the Christian that doesn't always go to church, but volunteers at the soup kitchen downtown and tells nobody?
I don't see how this comparison works. The fact that they they do/don't go to church has no bearing on the charitable service/money they provide, and you've not indicated whether the first guy does anything for charity. So in the context of a debate about charity, I don't have enough facts to determine which one is "better".
What I can tell you is that the soup-kitchen guy is probably a criminal who is sentenced to a number of hours of community service... which is why he doesn't brag about it.
Ok. Kidding as
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The non-vocal person helping society does nothing for the hegemony of the church.
Sure he does, if the people he is helping know he is with the church.
But remember, it's not about the church, it's about taking care of other people because it's the right thing to do.
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"Creating schools is a bad thing?"
No, OTOH, creating schools that teach about talking snakes, is.
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Is that the best you can do? Making lame assumptions about Steve Jobs and getting mad because he parks where he feels like it? Why the hatred, anyway? It's just a technology company that sells its products to people who want them. Why not reserve your bile and revulsion for things that deserve it - dictators, mass murderers and desktop Linux?
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I'm an atheist, but: it's simply not true.
Wars are generally fought for resources, especially land. "Religion" is just one of the features by which different ethnos and cultures differentiate themselves from each other. When there is no conflict over resources, religions seldom fight. When two different power-groups/ethnicities/polities are struggling over a resource, religion seldom matters.
The Nazis were generally Christian (both Protestant and Catholic) and invaded Christian countries. Some of the most v
Similar to Maimonides (Score:3)
Very similar to Maimonides Eight levels of Charity [chabad.org]. From highest to lowest:
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No need to spin it.
Odds are high they will do what they did with the medicine. To get the free stuff you have to agree not to infringe on patents on drugs they invest in. This means the third world nations get the choice of free drugs now and high prices later or making their own generics and growing the local economy.
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My only complaint is with the headline. It should read "Bill Gates looks to give money to people to invent a new toilet". I am pretty sure that he will not be involved in the actual development. I think that his foundation does a lot of good work, and respect the fact that he isn't just hording his money, but it should also be recognized that the actual work is done by people in the field, and not by him personally.
Actually, it kind of reminds me of a recent, very bad decision, at work. We hired a firm
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I don't need to bash him, but your need to whitewash him is curious. He did both bad and good things.
Steve Jobs may or may not do charity. It's really his business, isn't it?
It's curious to me that people who do far less with their lives feel the need to either bring down either man or erect a podium for them. It doesn't make you a better person to be a slobbering idol worshipper nor a spiteful harpy about it.
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Me thinks it is like a weasel... (Score:3)
You're over thinking the problem. The bashing will be real toilet humor, heh. Something about them being full of shit, or about what floats, or you can't keep a good gates flushed down.
That's far easier than sinking a joke about windows or getting potty mouthed. But, fighting the urge is just pissing in the wind. When mother nature calls with a joke, Just go with it and let it flow.
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week folks!
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Steve's only charity is Steve. And to that he gives generously.
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This won't be his first shitty idea.. (Score:5, Funny)
but I think we can all agree it's a damn good one.
Re:This won't be his first shitty idea.. (Score:5, Funny)
find a way to weaponize the toilets
It's called a bidet
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Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation != Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
The last comment in the story about BSoDs is disappointing. I like to poke fun at Windows and Microsoft software in general as much as the next person over but I have genuine respect for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They're doing more to solve world problems than most countries are. I can recognize a good thing when I see it and making BSoD jokes when it comes to the foundation just belittles the work they do.
Get a sense of humor (Score:5, Funny)
It still will be a BSOD, the Brown Screen Of Death.
It is called humor dammit, even though it may be shitty humor.
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I can recognize a good thing when I see it and making BSoD jokes when it comes to the foundation just belittles the work they do.
Besides that, the BSOD died in 2000. Few people under 25 will even get the reference.
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That's just not true.
You can still get a BSOD it's just that these days they are rarer than they were in the win9x days and when they do appear the default behavior is to flash the BSOD and then reboot, my current work laptop did this a few times before the manufacturer (Dell) released a few new drivers that I installed...
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You can still get a BSOD it's just that these days they are rarer...
Exactly my point, thank you.
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I didn't own a Windows Machine until 2001. I definitely got the BSOD with XP.
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But, you are right, it doesn't happen that much anymore...and it almost never hangs on it when it does.
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I think people have held on to this joke so long that they forget just how often Win9X BSOD'd. People measure WinXP BSOD's by how many they've had in a decade. The Win9X BSOD's were daily.
The last time any of you were dealing with daily BSODs you were watching the finale of 3rd Rock from the Sun, W. Bush was entering office, and you could still fly on a plane without getting your balls squeezed.
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Making fun of gates (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Making fun of gates (Score:5, Interesting)
What about Composting sawdust toilet [humanurehandbook.com] I'm sure the locals have something they can use in lieu of sawdust.
You could even create a dehydration toilet [finishsociety.com] Urine is collected separate (where it could easily be evaporated off and the urea used as fertilizer). After dehydrated the human waste could take place of animal dung used for heat.
I think a bigger and better use of this money would be something to sanitize. Something as simple as soap or the 'waterless' alcohol based sanitizers.
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Grinding any local vegetable matter just to defecate is hardly a sustainable idea... they'd still be better off just digging a hole.
Seems better to be able to use human excrement in one of those natural gas generation facilities, like some way to direct the waste there without loss of gasses.
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Re:Making fun of gates (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong.
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again. "
- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates [wikiquote.org]
Didn't he already do that (Score:2)
Nice Editorial (Score:2)
I wonder what the toilet version of The Blue Screen of Death is.
I wonder what the Slashdot version of "Why did the Chicken cross the road?" is.
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I wonder what the Slashdot version of "Why did the Chicken cross the road?" is.
Why did the [ getRandomEthnicNational() ] cross the road?
Because the chickens job had been outsourced.
The toilet version of The Blue Screen of Death (Score:2)
http://lavatoryreader.typepad.com/the-lavatory-reader/page/3/ [typepad.com]
BSoD will be replaced (Score:4, Funny)
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Cholera [wikipedia.org]
BSoD? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what you want about Microsoft, but that's no longer the same thing as Bill Gates. I've been a /. user for around a decade and have certainly made my share of bad Bill Gates jokes, but the guy is literally trying to save the world now. He has the money and the connections to do it, and the projects he's working on are incredibly selfless. Let's give him a break. OP was being very immature IMHO.
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Heh... One doesn't make up for decades of bad actions that quickly. Moreover...he might have "turned over a new leaf", but from decades of personal experience, that's not so easily done by ANYONE. It's possible- but it's a herculean feat in and of itself. In short, until he's proven himself having changed his tune...he's still got the same inclinations he had when he was at Microsoft's helm. Do keep in mind...he's still Chairman of the BoD.
Limited water resources? (Score:2, Informative)
Last I checked most of the surface area of Earth is water. Why not flush toilets with saltwater when 38% of the population [tamu.edu] lives within 100km of an ocean? Tidal driven pumps could be used for energy efficiency and in desert areas, solar desalinization is a possible source of drinking and irrigation water.
Toilet Usage (Score:2)
64.0 oz of water should be enough for anyone!
Simple composting toilets (Score:3)
Why re-invent the wheel, just make it low cost and difficult to block up..
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Relevant?
http://www.gocomics.com/2cowsandachicken/2011/06/24 [gocomics.com]
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The rub's in the "low-cost" territory. They've got systems that'll do this sort of thing- but you're talking about a $2-4k investment per system install.
TeePee (Score:5, Funny)
Toilets not the issue (Score:4, Informative)
While many of the comments so far are focussing on the issue of toilets, as does the summary, it's the whole sewage infrastructure that's the issue. In the African cities I've been to, large areas don't have proper underground sewers, and sewage is carried in stinking open gutters at the side of the road; having any kind of toilet doesn't help if it's flushing into those open sewers. TFA talks about supporting construction of pit latrines in slums that lack any form of sanitation, so it seems they are being quite practical about working with the existing infrastructure.
Toilets are not sanitary (Score:2)
I wonder ... toilet version... Blue Screen (Score:2)
The brown cheeks of ass.
Outhouse? (Score:3)
Solved Problem (Score:2)
This is a solved problem. Composting toilets have been around for decades, and are not uncommon in highway rest areas. They're low/no water use toilets. Liquids are either evaporated with help from a solar-powered exhaust stack or separated and run through underground perf pipe to water flower beds. The solids break down into a sterile compost, and can be used for fertilizing flower beds. They could, in theory, be used safely for fertilizing vegetables, but the yuck factor is more than most people can
Humanure composting (Score:2)
How about teaching people how to use a 5 gallon plastic bucket, some sawdust and their kitchen scraps to compost their poop.
Link: http://humanurehandbook.com/ [humanurehandbook.com]
No water needed. Your poop and kitchen scraps already contain all the water needed for a thermophilic reaction. Furthermore, you get nice compost that these people can use to fertilize their land. If not for growing things they can keep their land from turning into desert.
Also, *everything* organic goes into the compost pile: fats, oils, bone, meats, f
First Maleria now this! (Score:3)
But I suggest he look at what Nepal did:
He could fix the sanitation issue and solve a large part of their energy issues very cheaply. He just needs to push some startup money to modify the designs for the different areas and some startup money for a micro-finance so people will be able to buy them.
Here is an article on how nepal did it:
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/gobar-gas.htm [michaelyon-online.com]
well.. (Score:5, Informative)
On top of every building thats owned by anyone with money is a water tank. They pay other companies to come and fill that tank dailly or weekly. Showering with this water would be too expensive so this is your drinking water and you shower in the tainted water and keep your mouth closed. Another problem is the way bathrooms are designed in Africa and the middle east. In every place I stayed there was a bathtub with no shower head. Instead they had a sprayer on a hose that was part of the tubs faucet that could hang up high if you wanted it. I was told this has something to do with the muslim religion or something, I dont really know. But this sort of setup is against code in the US. Why? Because you can lay the hose down into the tub. If you have the tube full of water, and wash yourself in it... now the water is dirty. If the hose is laying in the water it can now siphon the dirty water back into the water supply. Every single tub is like this.
The only thing that I saw that was really working there was bottled water. It was plentiful and it was cheap. I could get a liter of good bottled water for about 10 cents. That's still a lot for the poor there, but, with a little more effort it could be made even cheaper.
Despite all this, the fact of the mater was water born illness was so common they didn't even bother to treat it in most cases. They wait until it becomes a real health problem. We adopted our son there and when we got back our entire family were basically on antibiotics for a full year afterwards. The stuff is so easy to spread, especially when you have a child in diapers that you cure one familly member and a week later another gets sick... in the end the doctor got fed up and just put everyone, even our dog on antibiotics at the same time for 6 weeks strait and finally we were rid of it.
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I was told this has something to do with the muslim religion or something, I dont really know.
FWIW, vast majority of Ethiopians are Orthodox Christians, not Muslims.
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Funny as fuck and I'm out of Mod points!
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Another tough nut to crack "Show me the science"-type.
Yeah, stupid science. What we need is more people like Bob here who know more about magic beans than those ignorant science type people.
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Also, this project is a much more noble cause than Gates' misguided drive to immunize the world's population. The world's health care systems would collapse unded the weight of all the new cases of Autism if successful.
I may be dense, but I sure hope that's sarcasm. Autism has no relation to vaccination.
The article spurring that whole belief has been outed as a fabrication. Andrew Wakefield was attempting to push single-disease vaccination shots as a means of boosting pharmaceutical profits, so his "study" showed that only multi-disease vaccinations caused autism. I know it's Wikipedia, but check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy [wikipedia.org] for a brief overview. Note the many citations to non-Wikipedia sources
Re:Silly Gates.... (Score:5, Informative)
I think he has finally went over to the nutter side. a flush toilet that wastes precious water is NOT the answer.
Did you even read the summary? He's not trying to give them flush toilets. He's aware that it wastes water. From the SECOND LINE of the summary: "The goal is to find 'innovative solutions' for sanitation in poor urban areas..." What do you think "innovative solutions" might mean? Could it possibly be something along the lines of "a way to deal with waste in a sanitary way that doesn't involve water"?
Yeah. Try reading at least the summary before you post.
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Not only did i read the summary but I read the FA as well. they are trying to apply technology that will not be fricking used for a problem that a solution was discovered several thousand years ago.
You dont crap where you drink and eat. A proper outhouse is the solution. they talk about children playing in sewage, that is because these people are just crapping randomly or in open pits. where a proper outhouse IS the answer.
Blowing money to find a solution that has existed forever is dumb.
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By not crapping in their drinking water they might actually have a source of clean water. A proper outhouse might go quite far in accomplishing this.
I do wonder why something like the basic outhouse won't work. You dig a hole, put a tank* in, built the structure around it. When it gets full either have a truck come and empty it or build a new one. Also when planning an outhouse the best place for it is down stream from your water supply and usually 100' (30 meters) from the well. This way even if the tank
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In some locations, it's not QUITE that simple. As for contaminating the drinking water...heh...a composting system can actually fill the bill without needing a classic outhouse, fill the same role, and do it for decades while being able to be placed in locations that would be otherwise impossible for an outhouse.
Re:Silly Gates.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not quite sure what this problem looks like in your imagination, but the fact is, we're approaching the stage where most of the world's population live in cities.
Population density without the infrastructure to remove the waste is the problem. It's a very hard logistics problem.
You can't just dig a hole 30m down the road in an urban environment.
Also, "planning an outhouse", yes that's another problem since lack of infrastructure, poverty, filth and improvised shelter, ie slums, are all part of the mix.
Lots of perfectly functional, albeit hippyish solutions like composting toilets do not scale to urban environments.
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The summary specifically mentions urban areas. Downstream of your water supply probably isn't downstream of your neighbour's in a city. So you need some innovation to make sure it doesn't leak. Just digging a hole and covering it up when it's full isn't sustainable in a city. You need some way of getting the waste outside city limits where there's more space for storage or to a central location for treatment. Either of those solutions could use some development to make a system that's efficient and rea
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Doesn't have to waste water...
Sancor [envirolet.com] has one of the very answers that Bill and Melinda envision. No, it can't scale to large communities- but the thing is...they're not trying to do large communities.
You can do waterless self-contained, remote, very low flush (~0.5l), and if there's enough power via solar/wind/etc. you can do vacuum flush (~0.2l) systems that can run without much in the way of maintenance for years and years. In the case of the low-flush and waterless systems, the system's capable of hand
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A proper privy is sanitary, stinky, but still sanitary. I think he has finally went over to the nutter side. a flush toilet that wastes precious water is NOT the answer.
I think maybe you've misunderstood something.
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The funny part is that history already has those answers to draw upon. with minor changes that can easily be done you can upgrade what we used to do in cities before the flush toilet existed.
Look at london, NYC, etc... a lot of the world had large cities without plumbing and sewage answers for a very long time.
But there are no answers for dense populations without having a way of sewage removal, unless they invent the portable black hole and give them away for free to everyone.
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What do they do with the waste, as far as I can tell they use it for compost, but using human waste as compost for edible products, or even being in contact with it can lead to several diseases
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Incorrect handling of human waste can indeed spread disease. But with proper composting, you can kill 100% of the pathogens and have no risk of spreading disease at all: http://weblife.org/humanure/
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I'd recommend you read up on his foundation. One of their largest focuses is education. He's given to plenty of other state-side causes, such as the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (largest gift the CFF has ever received, no less).
Reality: money is good at quickly fixing infrastructure issues. It's far less efficient at fixing behavioral issues. I think it's a given that much of the US's problem are behavior based: racial bias, drug dependency, broken homes, and more (and often many of these causes).
It's a matte