There's not really a more efficient system than gravity. In this case, that 'efficiency' is in costs and materials. Most systems of moving water require pumps, and pumping water can be very costly. However with gravity, the water will carry itself, so the only maintaining you need to do is of the pipes themselves. This is an instance where the resource wasteful system is the only one that makes sense for city governments to fund, and if we want to change that, we'll have to make an argument for cities to completely gut their existing systems to fully replace them with something else. Or, or simplify that, we have to convince people who're bound to their budgets to spend money on something that either they or their voters don't see as necessary. The waste management system my town uses was installed in the early 1900s, and hasn't been changed much since. A few years ago the city renovated nearly all of the pipes, but it was only a modernization of the existing system, and it would be nearly impossible to convince the city that a different system would be more efficient for them.

As well systems that use drinkable water is only 'wasteful' in places with a lack of drinkable water, so solutions to this issue will have to be case-by-case. The only method of dealing with human waste that I'm aware of, other than conventional sewers, is 'night soil' - or the storing of human waste in the ground, where it can be converted into dirt. But this isn't a solution in cities, and cities are the bigger concern. Perhaps there's something I'm not aware of, I'm only a mechanical engineer (or, more accurately a firearms engineer, but the two are very similar) and am only into civil engineering because it's interesting. A civil engineer would be far far more knowledgeable on this than I.

I tried ProtonVPN a few months ago, it worked great for a while then suddenly stopped working entirely for me. I was using it to watch geo-restricted youtube content, so I assume either my browser wasn't allowing it to change my location, or it just stopped working.

This is one of few answers that's actually helpful, thank you.

I couldn't quite understand the site you provided though, I couldn't find a download link. That could just be me being blind, I've decided to go with Windscribe because I've used it before, but I'd much rather use something else.

I'm from the US, but I've worked in freelance for most of my adult career - and have been out of work since shortly before the pandemic hit, my income is pitiful and far below minimum wage. I simply can't afford $5 a month, unless I start surviving on bread and water alone.

I dunno the proper terms, like I said I'm a bit of a noob about VPNs, but my speeds are definitely lower than they used to be, and they definitely have been getting slower. I've been told a VPN could help with that, but idk which one does that the best at my price point. (and yes, I understood before making the post that free VPNs aren't great nor private)

this trips me up all the time. I use Gdocs because it's a super useful online program for working on writing projects with other contributors and not being able to copypaste in an intuitive way makes it really frustrating sometimes.