Scrymarch . # .

Leviathan knows best: Interesting post.  Google turned up a disturbingly similar Age article from two years ago .  It looks as though this has been a long slump towards failure.

Sydney Water told people to get rid of their water-tanks as they were now on the Sydney mains and the inexhaustible water supply from the Warragamba

This happened all over Australia, citizens were told to sit back and let nanny provide.  I know why it happened but it now seems an infantile model of government.

The governments of democracies and republics exist at the behest of their citizens, and this is always reinforced by economics.  Not only is it less efficient and more failure prone to have a centralised water supply, it ties citizens to the whim and competence of the government.

As these clumsy centralised systems fail, but also as people start to think about these problems a different way, distributed models become viable.  A house that sells energy back to the grid, making a little money for itself, and making the power supplies of all more stable and reliable, is rather a good metaphor for democratic citizenship.  But to underline how outdated our political terminology is, it\'s also a case of the workers owning the means of production.