Oh I don’t disagree, it can be done and is clearly an issue, I just think we have to be careful on how. The EU probably has good framework given how different it’s members are

There’s definitely issues with the EC, but you’re bringing up a feature not a bug.

The executive branch wasn’t supposed to be an extension of the legislative. The office of the president wasn’t supposed to be a “super duper senator”. The blame for where we’re at is entirely in a defunct congress. With a presidential office that is genuinely executing, not the forefront of, legislation, the checks and balances in congress start to make a lot more sense.

And regardless of the way it’s supposed to be, we’ve got to work with what we’ve got, I get that. But the US is huge and wildly different. I’m not particularly rural, but took a friend of mine born and raised in NYC out to a friends cabin once. Offered to give em a ride on the ATV. They were excited, I grabbed my jacket, and came out to them sitting on the ride-on lawnmower, all ready to go. To flip it around, I have very little business giving an opinion on what minimum wage in a major metro should be (although after a recent visit to sanfran my guess is about $1,000/hr…).

My point being, an over correction the EC will 1) see a ton of opposition that makes it unfeasible, and 2) ultimately be fairly destructive. The challenges in different parts of this country are worlds apart, and we do a TERRIBLE job understanding one another, mostly by design because it helps reelection. Threatening the EC without a replacement that takes the concerns of otherwise under-represented folks into consideration will feed into this partisan crap more that it has already, entrench identity politics further, and just accelerate things.

I have no solution for this.

I wanted to add an addendum here: We are also increasingly dealing with the fact we made tons of chemicals that the medical science and stats are now catching up on. I was at a town hall meeting of a tiny tiny town that had big issues with PFOAS before it “popped”. At that point it time, it was something the EPA was researching, but hadn’t officially come out against. I have some biochemistry background, and while that kind of thing is outside my field, I could read that the EPA positions was “look… we don’t have the data to say this definitively, but for the love of god don’t put this in your body”.

So this town, with a mayor that isn’t even a full time appointment is being asked to read into data that has a TON of nuance and subtext to take actions that will absolutely destroy their budget for decades… or if they don’t, destroy their citizens instead… and oh yeah, all of this involves shutting down the reason you can afford to fix the school roof…

I don’t have a solution to any of this, but it’s going to be an increasing problem. There are some cases where it’s cut and dry, you could arm the city of East Palestine Ohio to disallow rail traffic based on inspection failures, for instance. However, PFOAS will not be the last compound we get new data in for that makes us go “ohhhhhh thats not good”. I don’t know what you do to help a town handle that proactively where the town is usually focused on paving contracts and new park benches.

While the jailtime for C-level would be cathartic, it’s really just upping the fines and/or something that goes well beyond a defined amount of money. For instance: If you’re under investigation, there is an immediate stoppage on any stock transfer. Whoever holds the shares holds the shares, and they may be about to drop considerably. Traders would evaluate a purchase based on the risk they get stuck with an asset they can’t unload. Board members/large shareholders would be unable to unload either. Stock trading is the lifeblood of large corporations, a board would not allow a CEO that put that at risk.

I just don’t think there’s a fine big enough, and I don’t think jailing the c-suite would get it done (although I’d certainly give it a shot!). Part of what keeps people in compliance with water regs is if you violate permit, the state agency can and will pull your permit. If you proceed anyway, armed enforcement officers get involved and start seizing the property. Now thats not perfect, and through a lack of staffing and/or political favors, stuff slips through depending on the state, but my broader point stands. Crappy c-suites are the symptom not the disease. I find it awful, but they’re “just doing their job” in these situations. You have to threaten the business itself to make compliance a paramount “part of their job”. So yeah, I mean we can jail them, but the worlds got no shortage of people willing to take a fall for the right price.

This does happen in some cases. A water operator in my state just went to jail for fabricating report numbers.

Here’s an idea: Let’s keep the for-profit prison lobby happy by having them push jail time for white collar crime?

Broader point stands, but I want to split some hairs around love canal because there’s an important part of that story that’s normally swept under the rug.

The offending company tried to keep the land from development. They knew the land wasn’t safe, said as much, and when eminent domain was threatened sold it for $1, discharging their responsibility. But again they tried not to sell it all.

Now, the dumping was pretty crappy, but that was also the practice at the time. I’m not saying companies shouldn’t carry liabilities to clean up their messes, intended and/or following best practices or not, they absolutely should. It’s important, though, I think, to remember the company knew and communicated the risks, and tried to keep the land from being transferred. Ironically, part of what moved the domain threat along was that they intentionally stopped using the dump as housing developments expanded out closer to it.

When it became clear it was leaving their hands one way or the other, they sought to limit their liability, and to a certain extent that has to be understood: We said you don’t want this land, you’re taking it anyway, it’s not on us.

My point in all this isn’t to stump for Hooker Chemical, it’s to point out most of these disasters have layers of problems to them. I’m all for strong regulation, there are things which just cannot be fixed after the damage has occurred, so it has to be avoided. But it’s important to remember the regulations are only as good as we make them and their enforcement.

Ironically, there are very cherrypicked examples of voluntary regulation working well. A good example of that is Underwriters Lab certification for electronics. It’s not required by law, but is required by a lot of insurance companies. I not using that as an example against governmental regulation, I just think it’s an example where interests align pro-, rather than retro-actively: If you don’t abide by the regulations, you are not selling any product. Same with how a bank won’t issue a mortgage unless the home passes inspection: they’re protecting themselves, you’re just a happy side benefit.

Bit of a first coffee rant, but especially as all this stuff is getting gutted, the nuance needs to be appreciated. Trump would be a disaster for the little mechanisms we’ve managed to get put in place over the years to protect ourselves, but a Biden administration is going to have a tough road. I’m optimistic they’ll have some wins, but they’re going to lose ground in some areas as well as they’re forced to make compromises and allocate focus and political capital. The net result is we’re all going to need to become a lot smarter and more active.

The local government at love canal had all of the information they needed, and proceeded anyway. They were decided by local elections. It could have been stopped.

Yeah you say that and should be right but I’m more worried about January than I am November…

If only. That would be amazing and thank you for the dream, but they’ve all got private security, I don’t see how this could be done without someone being shot, which changes the whole context and would make it something that could be spun to easily.

But it brings up the whole issue doesn’t it? The court feels they will never have to deal with the consequences of any of this. Surely a trump-style president would never come after them.

Damnit, we’ve been to this movie.

1. Yes: you absolutely want the outdoor rated PVC if you’re getting sun exposure. You can cheat, it’s not like the white stuff will be immediately destroyed, but if you want something that will last a bunch of seasons, the “grey” stuff is the way to go. Double check that it’s UV rated though, and doesn’t just happen to be grey.

2. To get around all of that, you can bury it. Because you’re just doing it for the garden, you don’t need to dig down to the frost line. Just make sure you clear the line at the end of the season. Another advantage is that you’ll minimize the amount of water that’s been baking in the sun idle in the pipes. If it’s a heatwave and they’re in direct sun, that water can get downright hot to the touch. I’ve never lost a plant because of it but frankly I’m kind of surprised by that. If you do bury, you might consider running some electrical conduit at the same time, even if you don’t put wires in it (DO however include a pull cable for later use). What you do at either end of that is a whole other project, but you can always just cap it and get it to it when you get to it. Solar + Battery usual works great for garden automation stuff, but being able to run an ethernet cable can simplify a lot.

3. Plastic will hold up fine, but as others have mentioned you might want one of these.. The union allows to remove it. You could do a more simple threaded system IF you are able to completely and freely rotate everything “down stream” of the valve. I’m just going to say the stupid part out loud because I learned pipe stuff the hard way: A ball valve threaded on both sides cannot be loosened from one side without tightening the other (again, unless that other side can freely rotate). Edit: alternatively unions are sold separately, and sometimes you can eek out some flow advantages that way but it’s in no way worth thinking about at garden water flow rates.

4. Finally, a last alternative I’ve seen done well for gardens that sort of “wrong done right” is putting posts up and stringing a hose over head. It kind of seemed like as much work/expense as burying it, but I guess they had the posts, it came out really sharp in the end. You need a pretty high quality hose though. Baking in the sun and sagging under the water weight can end badly.

Climate change and the housing crisis means both the cost of replacing a home AND the likelihood of needing to is going up. They may not be on the brink of going under, but may be trying to avoid getting into that position.

It is an enormous problem. When a property becomes un-insurable it loses value. When that happens to a TON of property it’ll have massive knock ons. Something like 1/3rd of all assets in the US are commercial realestate. This next adjustment will not be pretty, and the real irony is a ton of people who got priced out of home ownership in the first place are going to suffer no matter what.

That’s the part that people don’t get and is intentionally hard to find numbers on. The entire appeal was on it not being an influencer centric space. The entire value was always at odds with monetizing that value beyond it’s upkeep and paying the people (who apparently aren’t that many) a reasonable salary. It is the worst growth case you could have ever had.

My dad was a farmer. I AM AN ORPHAN.

Edit: Ok, I feel bad. But like… I know one dumbass with a cough that won’t go away (7 years and counting) because they wouldn’t effing listen to me about DE, another who rolled his tractor on to himself and died. Don’t take it lightly man. The bill always comes due. We all do what we have to, lord knows I’ve done some dumb shit, but it ain’t cute to dismiss it.

That and post-scarcity doesn’t mean “zero scarcity”. Like if someone wanted to create a picard funkpop the size of a planet, I don’t think they’d be allowed the resource budget.

It’s like how it doesn’t matter where you live, if you want to buy on the silk road, you need bitcoin. Presumably even the federation can’t just make latinum whenever they please, or we wouldn’t see them haggle with it. Although, it would be fun to see that they could and just take the responsibility of not crashing non-federation cultures entire economies very seriously, either out of respect or treaty.

Damnit, I want a LD episode where the crew is frustrated and desperately wants to just “buy” their problem away but can’t because an economist at command says it’ll mean they have to rescue all these non-federation colonies that are currently self sufficient. Come to think of it it’s right there with the “you break it you own it” concept of the prime directive.

Literally means “have you eaten”, except it doesn’t really require an answer.

Grandmothers in every culture

Don’t take it personally. The world is crazy right now and people (including me) get a little… defensive… from having to have more “I can’t believe this is something I need to talk about” conversations than I think any of us ever anticipated. Looking at it again your word choice wasn’t even off. Hope you’re having a good day.

It might be how it’s written, but the way it works is people get shot for a bag of skittles.

Yeah like… Netflix has peering agreements and whatnot but… It’s not 2005.