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"RL 77-19." ; "June 20, 1977." ; Cover title. ; Includes bibliographical references (leaf 5). ; Mode of access: Internet.

Paul Matzko









This global public opinion poll asking respondents whether they have a favorable view of the USA has been bouncing around the interwebs. The topline finding — the US is pretty popular! — surprised many American cultural critics who remember the bad old days of the Iraq War when global criticism of US imperialism surged.
I find the handful of countries where the opinion of the US remains more negative just as interesting. Hungary's worst‐​in‐​Europe result is amusing given how the far Right in the US fetishizes Viktor Orban's reactionary politics. American Hungary stans suffer from sublimated self‐​hatred, wishing they could be as xenophobic and culturally chauvinist as team "Make Hungary Magyar Again."
But the other outlier country on this list with a marked dislike of the US might be more of a surprise to Americans: Australia. We're almost underwater Down Under. This is in sharp contrast with how highly Americans think of Australia; if you combine all positive responses from this survey, Americans consider Australia their warmest ally. Which means the gulf between how Americans and Australians view each other would be one of the widest in the world!
As it so happens, I spent eight summers as a teenager living in Australia. That certainly doesn't make me a country expert — and it's been two decades since I was last there — but it does mean that Australian antipathy towards the US doesn't take me by surprise.
That dislike was very much on the surface when I was a 10 or 11 year old trying to make Aussie friends. The most popular country singer in Australia at the time was the man, the legend, John Williamson. I've written about Australian country music elsewhere, but I can still sing many of Williamson's top hits from memory, including his rip‐​roaring nationalist anthem "A Flag of Our Own" (1991). Williamson was a republican, which meant that he believed Australia should leave the British Commonwealth, reject the monarchy, and take the British stripes off the Australian flag. Here's the song's chorus:
'Cause this is Australia and that's where we're from We're not Yankee side‐​kicks or second class P.O.M.s And tell the Frogs what they can do with their bomb Oh we must have a flag of our own

Let me decipher that for you. P.O.M.s stands for "Prisoners of Her Majesty," or Brits, which is often amended with an adjective such as "whingeing POMs" to describe those who yearn for ye olde country and constantly complain about Australia's supposedly backward ways. This was a particularly popular complaint in Australia in the aftermath of Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis. The Australian Governor‐​General — a crown appointee in a mostly symbolic role — had invoked a long neglected royal power and replaced the elected left‐​wing prime minister with a conservative. (For comparison, imagine the hoopla if King Charles III were to kick British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak out of office and install a Labour prime minister!)
"Frogs," of course, are the French, who were on the radar of Aussie nationalists in the 90s for conducting nuclear testing in their Polynesian colonies — which Australia considered its own backyard — and doing so without regard for the effects of nuclear fallout on surrounding islands and Australia itself.
That leaves us with Yankees, commonly shorted to "Yanks," which quickly becomes, via Australia's penchant for rhyming puns, "Septic Tanks," or then shortened further to "seppos." (Aussies are world leaders in slang. It's like if Cockney wasn't just the lingo of one neighborhood in London but had been exported en masse via prison ships, transported to the other side of the globe, and then had taken over an entire continent. Oh wait…)
Maybe you're wondering why America made that opprobrious list alongside the POMs and Frogs. We weren't testing any nukes in the Pacific (at least, we hadn't for a while) and we weren't meddling in their domestic politics (though blaming the CIA for the 1975 constitutional crisis remains popular among Aussie conspiracists).
But when this song was released in 1991, the Australian military had just participated in the US‐​led Gulf War. Although suffering no combat casualties, Australian nationalists saw this as yet another example of Australia blindly serving the interests of foreign superpowers, from dying at the command of callous British generals in the trenches at Gallipoli — the subject of a 1981 blockbuster starring a young Mel Gibson — to the failed fight alongside the Yanks in the jungles of Vietnam.
Bear in mind that Australia's anti‐​Vietnam War protests in 1970 were the *largest* protests in their history; by contrast, the much feted anti‐​Vietnam war protests in the US don't even crack our top 27! Australia's involvement in the Iraq War did little to assuage critics who believed Australia should stop playing second fiddle to the US, especially after leaked documents showed that the Aussie government's primary purpose for sending troops was to cozy up to the US. All the talk about eradicating weapons of mass destruction and promoting democracy was merely "mandatory rhetoric."
However, when I was a teenager in Australia in the late‐​90s, especially while visiting rural communities in Northern Queensland, the complaint I heard the most often revolved around US trade policy, specifically US tariffs on the import of Australian lamb meat. I remember riding around the bush in a ute (flatbed pickup truck) with a local farmer who was spitting mad about US tariffs and who said that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was Bill Clinton getting his just desserts for harming Aussie sheep farmers. What a thought! Australian headlines from the time were simply scathing in their critique of Clinton's hypocrisy in signing a free trade deal with Canada and Mexico while slapping new tariffs on Australia.
Yet other than the mad cow panic, meat import policies — let alone veal tariffs, lol — have never been a major political issue in recent US national politics. But they sure mattered a great deal to Australia, which is the second largest sheep exporting country in the world (Australia and New Zealand combine for an incredible 93% of the global market). In any case, US trade policy in the 1990s fit with Australian nationalists' broader critique of the US as a bully who simply expected Australia to meekly comply with its broader geopolitical agenda regardless of whether it was in Australia's own national interest.
So Australians' mixed opinions regarding the US are grounded in real, pragmatic considerations. It's yet another situation in which our imperial entanglements and trade protectionism have provoked blowback.
It's possible that in the future those feelings might revert towards the more US‐​positive, Australasian mean given Chinese economic and military expansionism in the region. Up until now, Australia has been insulated from the downside risks of Chinese expansion — funnily enough, the intervening Indonesians have been a more significant target for Australian jingoism — while benefitting greatly as a supplier of raw materials for the post‐​Mao Chinese economic miracle. Until the pandemic, Australia hadn't experienced a recession in nearly thirty years (!).
On a more speculative note, if Noah Smith and other India boosters are correct, Australia's role as a potential trading partner with India could matter as much for that country's success as its trade with China has for the past three decades. Last year, Australia signed a new free trade deal with India and expects its exports to triple by 2035. And given the ongoing decoupling of global investment from the Chinese market, Australia could benefit from a major boost of foreign investment given its proximity and ties with India, Vietnam, and other high growth South and Southeast Asian markets (nicknamed "Altasia"). There's little in the way of Australia enjoying another thirty years of torrid economic growth.
The US should forge a new, peer relationship with Australia, signaling that it takes Australia seriously as a vital regional ally rather than treating it as a junior partner in our foreign misadventures. We have a golden opportunity to do so right now. As Doug Bandow has noted, China has foolishly kicked off a trade war with Australia, and while Trump considered following suit with new tariffs on Australian exports, he was finally persuaded not to. We should take advantage of China's mistake by expanding our 2005 free trade agreement with Australia and lower rates on agricultural products that are feeling the pinch from Chinese tariffs.
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AbstractSeptic tanks are widely used in on‐site wastewater treatment systems. In addition to anaerobic pretreatment, hydraulic buffering is one of the roles attributed to septic tanks. However, there is still no tool for assessing it, especially in dynamic conditions. For gravity fed‐system, it could help both researchers and system designers. This technical note reports a simple mechanistic model based on the assumption of flow transition between the septic tank and the outflow pipe. The only parameter of this model was calibrated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling for a wide range of discharge rates. The resulting model highlights that a septic tank plays a hydraulic buffer role when faced with sudden and large discharge flow, but this role tends to disappear when input hydrographs are smoother. In those cases, there is an observable lag between the input hydrograph and outflow hydrograph.

The coverage of improved sanitation in Vietnam is still low, especially in rural areas. As a result, water-borne diseases remain key threats to public health. While the government has committed itself to increasing the proportion of people with access to improved sanitation, it cannot afford to subsidise sanitation for the entire population. Thus, improving rural sanitation continues to rely heavily on financial contributions from household-level private users, which depend on their willingness to pay (WTP) for such services. Knowing people's WTP is crucial when assessing the economic viability of projects, setting fees, evaluating policy alternatives, gauging financial sustainability, and designing socially equitable subsidies. However, such information on household-level demand is scarce to non-existent in Vietnam. We assessed the WTP for septic tanks among the rural population in Vietnam and identified the some factors that influence the level of WTP. The study was conducted in Hanam province, in northern Vietnam. Researchers randomly selected and surveyed 600 households, conducting personal interviews with the main breadwinners or decision-makers in each. Contingent valuation was used to obtain relevant economic data. This method consists in asking individuals how much they would be willing to pay for a change to the quantity or quality (or both) of a particular commodity. We found that 63% of the studied households were willing to pay for construction of a septic tank. The average WTP level was VND 16 million (US$ 800), which amounts to about 15% of the households' annual disposable income. Economic hardship was found to be the major reason for not installing a sanitary latrine. Health, cleanliness, and prestige were found to be three major motivating factors for constructing septic tanks. Regression analysis showed that the odds for spending money on improved sanitation services were higher in households with better income, as well as in households whose head had better knowledge of sanitation.

ABSTRACTBucket‐type samplers were installed in the unsaturated zone to intercept septic tank effluent descending through the Chalf at Snowdown, Kent. Better than 90 per cent removal of BOD and COD, and of the order of 99 per cent removal of coiform bacteria, were observed after downward percolation through 2.1 m of Chalk. Nitrification of ammonia had begun at that depth, but not at intermediate depth. The results, though limited, suggest that septic tank effluent is purified in the Chalk in a similar way to settled sewage.

This is a conference paper. ; Excreta related waste is a major cause of surface and groundwater pollution in Sri Lanka. The fact that decentralized onsite disposal is the dominant form of disposal for human excreta related waste makes it an even difficult problem to handle. Therefore well laid out national standards and guidelines on the construction and design of onsite disposal systems are essentially required to ensure safety of water resources in Sri Lanka with the growing population and urbanization. Many attempts have been made by different government authorities to fulfill this requirement at different times. The objective of this paper is to critically and comparatively analyze the contents and level of information given in different key guidelines, codes of practice and regulations related to onsite disposal of human excreta related wastes and suggest methods to integrate and effectively disseminate this information.

AbstractA 250 L and a 550 L pilot scale Up‐Flow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (UASB) reactors having different reactor height were fed septic tank effluents and operated at ambient temperatures of 0°C to 30°C. Both UASB reactors were fed intermittently at least 8 times per Hydraulic Retention Time (HRT) and the performance was monitored at 4d and 1d HRT. The removal efficiencies of Total Suspended Solid (TSS) and Total Chemical Oxygen Demand (CODt) were about 59–68% and 54–59%, respectively, for both reactors at both HRT. The TSS and CODt removal efficiencies of Septic tank – UASB combined system were above 80% for both HRTs tested. The average biogas yields were almost same at 4d and 1d HRT, representing 31(±3)% of influent CODt. The nitrogen and phosphorous removal efficiency was an average 20–30%. The tested system can become a suitable low cost yet effective option.

AbstractReporting sludge accumulation in septic tanks as a constant rate is no longer accepted, and there is a need for a model that predicts sludge accumulation in septic tanks taking into consideration the continuous consumption of sewage solids by microorganisms. This study presents the development of mathematical model that predicts sludge accumulation in septic tanks and to investigate the effect of mixing on solids digestion. The mathematical model takes into consideration the effect of different operational parameters (influent and effluent) as well as the bacterial kinetics in predicting the sludge accumulation in septic tanks. The model predicts with R2 > 0.88 the sludge accumulation rate in standard septic tank calculated by empirical models developed by Weibel in 1955, and by Bounds in 1995. The model was also used to estimate the typical pump‐out interval for different tank volumes and the sludge accumulation inside septic tanks at different operational parameters.

AbstractThis work analysed the hydraulic behaviour and treatment efficiency of an upflow baffled septic tank (UBST) through tracer tests and mathematical modelling using the axial dispersion and the tank‐in‐series (TIS) models. The tracer tests were performed under different HRTs (12, 18 and 24 h) and configurations (UBST, UBST with sludge and UBST with sludge and zeolite filter). UBST followed a non‐ideal flow, and configuration modifications, rather than HRT, altered its hydraulic behaviour. Mathematical modelling indicated that the TIS model calculated with mean squared error (φ) described adequately UBST hydraulic behaviour (R2 = 0.9833). Additionally, UBST is recommended to operate under 24 h HRT to reach satisfactory hydraulic and pollutant removal efficiencies. At this HRT, total COD and ammonium removals were 75.1% and 49.3%, respectively, which were better than those obtained without the zeolite (71.2% and 1.8%, respectively). However, it quickly saturated, so it is necessary to deepen the research on this topic.