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The Nagging Never Ends
We’ve been told that we shouldn’t use plastic bags or plastic straws. Some people say that we should wear masks everywhere. Politicians who own three mansions preach that we use too much energy. Today, alas, I came across this on the ground outside of a bank two blocks from my apartment in Dallas.
The nagging never ends.
What is the water situation in Dallas? I recall living in California in a previous lifetime, and water shortages in the West were serious issues. I was born on the shores of Lake Erie, and now live in Pittsburgh where the 3 rivers provide more water than our commerce and residence could ever imagine needing. I understand in theory the nag if Dallas might be threatened with water shortages. If you are like us here, on the edges of the world’s largest fresh water systems, if they nag us to preserve water, it is akin to my Mom, who on frequent occasion would implore us to eat our vegetables because “there were starving kids in Africa” It doesn’t help anyone in Nevada or California to turn the water off while brushing your teeth in Buffalo, nor does eating all your peas help or further exacerbate potential starving conditions around the world. On the other hand, if you have a water shortage, then maybe the nag is a decent ploy for you to be more mindful about that resource. I still have no solution to my eating the last pea and the starving children of the world.
The Water Data for Texas website, which charts the water for all the lakes and river basins in the state, shows drought conditions in West Texas, but no drought as of yet in the Dallas area, and the lakes and river basins the city gets its water from.
This is an ongoing dispute in our household. My 13-year-old is disgusted that I leave the water running. (Our water comes from a very deep well that has never shown any sign of drying up, even during pretty bad droughts.) I like to leave the water on to taunt her a little, good-naturedly.
I would take California’s water shortages a whole lot more seriously if they hadn’t dumped literally trillions of gallons of water into the ocean, to “save” some fish. Ask VDH for details. Not only is CA threatening it’s own residents with this stupidity, they’re also threatening a large portion of America’s food supply.
Only flush after #2.
#waterislife
Speaking of water, if that paint doesn’t wash off I suggest the city bill Edens.com.
Since I grew up with parents who paid for water and would nag us to conserve, and since I now have a well which sometimes bottoms out, I don’t need painted messages on the sidewalk to “change” me. It’s kind of an arrogant assumption, that I need to be “changed.”
It looks as though “Edens” is a real estate development company, whose “purpose is to enrich community through human engagement.”
Nagging is not human engagement.
Painting a message on a city sidewalk? Alinsky would want to know if they got a permit to do that. If they did, he’d want a permit to paint his own messages on city sidewalks. If not, he’d file a complaint of vandalism. Just saying.
I thought a real estate development company’s purpose was to develop real estate?
Silly me…
Does anybody here know what the bolded phrase means? I’m thinking a week-long old time church revival in tent on the town square.
Maybe a monthly town barbeque on the football field with a bonfire and fireworks?
Maybe family night at the local dirt track, with $1 beers and 50 cent hot dogs?
But for some reason, I think they mean something else.
Definitely “EDENS” is not like the firm that developed P.G. Wodehouse’s Wood Hills (from The Clicking of Cuthbert).
No. The inhabitants of EDENS know their place. They are there to serve the earth, meekly dribbling water from their lo-flo faucets and toilets, dutifully sorting their recyclables, wistfully squinting in the dark…
I understand water conservation in a drought area. But otherwise, isn’t water an entirely renewable resource? Of all the things to worry about, I just never got this obsession with conserving water when it falls out of the sky on a regular basis. . .
Moral real estate.
I did this too.
Not good-naturedly. I told my daughter that there was plenty of water, I PAID for it, it was my house, and I would run water if I wanted too and there was nothing she could do about it.
In fact, due to this, I just turned my water on.
And water running in the faucet and down the drain, isn’t obliterated. For people with city water and sewer systems, it goes back to the city to be re-filtered and sent out again. Indeed, cities could run into problems if NOT ENOUGH water comes back for the filtration plants to operate properly.
Our water department recently started buying water to keep the system fully charged. Naturally, they paased the cost on to the consumers that they’d spent two decades, lecturing, hectoring, and fining to *decrease* water use.
Our electric company did the same thing right afterwards, buying electricity to keep the grid charged after lecturing us to use less electricity.
I hate these people.
Her Pavel Mazarov act has paid off a little already – you’ve already added a little parentheses about how deep the well is! I go grocery shopping during my lunch breaks and all the plastic rustles around in my bags taunting my woke 20 something colleague.
On a related note, I see where the multiverse’s worst governor and his minions plan to restore their ban on single-use plastic bags a month from now.
Followed by the predictable spike in covid cases, along with other types of illness and food poisoning that can result from re-using grocery bags.
I brush my teeth with the hot water tap on. After 2 minutes the water is hot enough for shaving. Then it’s into the shower, where the water is already hot. I consider this responsible stewardship of natural resources.
And that reminds me of a fun fact from high school biology that, because matter is never created nor destroyed, we have exactly the same amount of water as 2 billion years ago.
Possibly more, since catalytic converters actually make water from unburned fuel.* But using water certainly doesn’t destroy it.
*This would be an interesting science fair project, to calculate how much water the world’s automobiles produce each day.
I use to live in Pittsburgh. I had a friend in Cincinnati. I use to kid him he drank our used water from Pittsburgh.
I went to college in Pgh. We joked that Iron City was the water pulled up from the bottom of the Mon, while IC Light was skimmed from the top.
(The Homestead Works closed two years before I got to CMU, so the river was already much cleaner when I was there.)
“The breakfast garbage that you throw in the bay
They drink for lunch in San Jose.” Tom Lehrer
Tusk, the Cocoa Krispies Elephant, was nagging us way back in the 70s. I had a sticker of Tusk, similar to this one, stuck to the inside of my desk drawer, reminding me to turn the water off!
Tusk, and those other characters, were constantly telling us to conserve energy.
Actually, matter is not created or destroyed (at least until we start using warp drive), but it can change form.
Yeah, I remember those days. Then Reagan was elected and they all disappeared for a while.