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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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 😂



  • 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.



  • Earth’s natural satellite can serve as a valuable research partner in measuring the sun’s oblateness. This is due to a phenomenon known as “Baily’s beads,” which are the tiny flashes of light during an eclipse that occur as solar light passes over the moon’s rugged terrain of craters, hills, and valleys. Since satellite imagery has helped produce extremely detailed mappings of lunar topography, experts can match Baily’s beads to the moon’s features as it passes in front of the sun.

    The way I’m guessing this works is: Baily’s beads will be detectable on shitty cameras since they will be distinct flashes of light, and since we have very detailed information of the moon’s topography they can determine information on the sun based on your phone’s location and the timing of the flashes of light.

    And if that is how it works, that is fuckin rad. A+ science.


  • They really don’t have to be bigger and heavier. I have a Pantum P2502w laser printer and it is seriously one of the smallest printers I’ve ever owned including inkjets. I feel like laser printers always default to paper storage being underneath them instead of having a feeder tray that sticks out further from the body? And that puts them into a larger form factor.

    That being said, I’m fairly sure this is a much lighter duty laser printer than other heavier ones.

    Also this is not really an endorsement for Pantum, the software and firmware are buggy as hell, but the software isn’t bad enough for me to throw it out and the hardware will probably last a decade so good luck to me.