halp

Wow, great to see a government encouraging it instead of saying you can’t do it! I’m also right next to the Rockies just far south of you in Colorado, and we get very different messages.

It is weird. Like if every house had 200 gallons of storage, that could add up to a small dam’s worth of storage at almost no cost to the government. It makes more sense to me to encourage houses to store it.

It really might come back around to blame capitalism - since like 90% of water is used for agriculture here maybe the downstream money makers are the ones yelling the loudest.

Water rights in the Western US are wild. I wrote a small rant above if you’re interested. There is very legitimately not enough fresh water to go around from rivers like the Colorado to support continued agriculture and population expansion. (I blame agriculture 10x more than population, but that’s my hot take)

Oh boy - it’s a rabbit hole. As much as I like to blame capitalism for things, this one kind of stems earlier than that. Water rights and usage in the Western US is pretty fucked, and it’s only going to get worse with climate change.

I have some hot takes after reading Cadillac Desert and some other books on water rights. I’m going to lazily link to another comment where I wrote a tiny bit about this book. What’s fun is lots of river water allocations in the Western US were written in times of excess and aren’t even remotely accurate for normal times let alone times of drought. The Colorado River has only flowed through to the Pacific Ocean like once in decades (citation needed) and Mexico doesn’t even get their allotted share. It’s mouth to the Pacific is mostly a dry bed of dirt 🫠.

My house is in the watershed of the South Platte River, so Nebraska is the one who’d get mad if I put out a 3rd 55gal drum rain barrel. There’s a fun 100 year old compact that says Nebraska is allowed to seize land to build a canal to take their full allocation - a couple years ago Nebraska started to threaten to inact on their rights and Colorado’s just like ‘good fuckin luck’

We’re closer to playing out Mad Max in my lifetime than I’d like. Sorry to bring down the vibe in Gardening 😂

store the rainwater for use later.

And then there are even further rules on storing water in some places - in Colorado I’m only allowed ~100 gallons of rainwater collection storage because someone else owns the water rights to the land my house is on.

lol unprecedented? The entire country of LA would not exist without the early-LA government buying up water rights in the eastern sierras to pipe to LA, and then telling the local farmers there they were shit outta luck the first time drought hit.

If anyone is interested in Western US water rights - Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is a great book. I usually recommend at least the first quarter of it, as it gets pretty dry and repetitive in the second half. But the first couple chapters talk about the first expedition down the Colorado River and early water rights, which was super interesting. Second half of the book mostly goes over large water projects like dams and aquaducts.

I’m guessing you’re getting down voted by all of us that want light to be reflected/diffused off the ceiling, and actively own LED versions of this lamp.

These exist, they make LED versions of this. I have 3 of them because I’m too lazy to crawl into the attic and install better lighting in the ceiling itself.

I absolutely loved mythbusters, but honestly I think it ran it’s course. They were kind of running out of things to test towards the end.

Also search for Streamlined Mythbusters - they’re fan-edits that remove fluff (lots of fluff in the later seasons) and rearranges the shows so each myth is played straight through before going to the next myth in the episode; instead of showing pieces of 3 different myths at a time bouncing between them.