Posts Tagged ‘water’

A Small Flood Avoided (or Why You Should Have Water Leak Detectors)

Thursday, October 30th, 2025

I got to experience one of those joys of home ownership yesterday. I peed, flushed the toilet, washed my hands and started walking away when the water leak detector next to the toilet started going off.

Turns out I had been hit by one of those one-in-ten-thousand chances of bad luck, as the toilet had clogged (how, I don’t know) and the flush flapper had stuck open at the same time, with the result that water was now brimming over the top of my second floor guest toilet.

My first response should have been to cut off the water valve, but in that moment of panic I ran to my master bathroom and grabbed a large towel and plunger, and only once back at the overflowing toilet did I think to close the valve, so I probably ended up cleaning up a couple more gallons of water than needed. It took several towels and plunging to mop up the water, but none seems to have made it to the first floor ceiling. (The fake wood cabinet trim near the toilet was already a touched water-logged when I moved in, so no harm, no foul.)

This isn’t the first time I’ve had one go off. A week before the ice storm hit, a shutoff valve I had closed to plunge an overflowing toilet started leaking.

My water leak detectors are nothing special, just cheap Chinese crap. Usual made in China caveats apply, but it’s very simple tech (two parallel wires on the exterior that water closes the circuit and sets off when wet). A lot of people don’t have these, but yesterday showed why I consider them essential. What could have been thousands of dollars in drywall and ceiling replacement turned into merely having to run another washing load for all the towels I used to mop up.

The above link goes to a 5-pack of the brand I have, because I recommend putting one behind every toilet, under every sink you use, under your water heater, and next to your washing machine (I’ve had mine start rocking for an unbalanced load that pulled the drain hose loose). However, that 5-pack has gotten pricey, so here’s an even cheaper five pack from another manufacturer (also made in China) that I have no experience with, but it currently has a 4.6 rating on Amazon.

You’ll also want to own a water shutoff tool to be able to cut off water to your entire house. The Orbit 26097 provides a water shutoff valve, a gas shutoff valve, manhole cover lift tool, and a rubberized grip. You need one of these for the same reason you need a water leak detector, i.e. it will greatly limit damage before the plumber gets there.

I have a fire extinguisher and several guns, just in case I need them. I haven’t, yet, but I’ve needed my water leak detector twice. Buying enough to put one behind every toilet, under every sink, under your water heater, and next to your washing machine is going to cost you considerably less than buying one decent gun.

Consider picking some up if you haven’t already.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Oregon Declares War On Family Farms

Saturday, March 30th, 2024

The radical left-wing anti-farm green agenda isn’t just trying to destroy agriculture in foreign locales like The Netherlands, it’s also happening in Oregon.

  • “The state of Oregon has effectively shut down small farms and market gardens on a large scale, and they’re actually sending out cease and desist letters to farms.” (By “market gardens” he means small farms that only supply produce locally.)
  • “They’re using satellite technology to find their victims and then send them these letters, and say you can’t operate, and they’re doing it in the name of water conservation.”
  • “Oregon’s government and dairy industry [have joined] forces against small farmers.”
  • “There are two different laws that they’re using.”
  • “They’ve redefined what a CAFO is.” CAFO stands for “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.” According to Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, a CAFO is where “over 1,000 animal units are confined for over 45 days a year. An animal unit is the equivalent of 1,000 pounds of “live” animal weight.[1] A thousand animal units equates to 700 dairy cows, 1,000 meat cows, 2,500 pigs weighing more than 55 pounds (25 kg), 10,000 pigs weighing under 55 pounds, 10,000 sheep, 55,000 turkeys, 125,000 chickens, or 82,000 egg laying hens or pullets.”
  • Oregon seems to have redefined that. “This applies to people who have chicken houses, who have goat farms, basically anybody who has a barn or a facility that has a gravel or concrete floor.”
  • “What’s happening in Oregon, and why the small dairies have filed a lawsuit against the state…it doesn’t matter the size of the operation, you could have two milking cows.”
  • “Sarah King, who owns Godspeed Hollow Farm in Newberg, Oregon, has a pickup station that’s just 100 ft in length. She has an 11 acre property, and keeps things pretty simple. She has three milking cows. [Because] she has that milking stand, the state of Oregon said you are a CAFO, and because you are considered a CAFO, they require you to put in this infrastructure improvement which would cost her $100,000,”
  • “We’re requiring this massive infrastructure upgrade for you to continue to operate your facilities to protect our ground water from your two cows standing on a milking stand.”
  • Even if you have a gravel floor in a chicken coop, Oregon wants to come after you. “They have redefined CAFOs. This is going to impact nearly everybody.”
  • “This law is being enforced in the state of Oregon. It has already shut down some farms.”
  • There is an injunction on the definition of the law until it can be heard in court.
  • “You would think that they were going after raw milk, that always seems to be the case with a lot of these things, but this is actually going after anybody. Egg producers, anybody who has chickens that go up in a chicken house at night that may have a concrete floor.”
  • You have to go through a permitting process, and a lot of what they’re requiring is just simply too much for the small farmer. So that’s rule number one.”
  • “The second rule: In the state of Oregon, if you are using water, even groundwater, the only water that you can legally harvest and use without a permit is actually rainwater. They consider all water in the ground a resource of the public. Even if you have a private well on your property, that belongs to the people of Oregon.”

  • “This is a rule that went into place back in 2021, and then it has slowly rolled out to the point where market gardeners with a half acre of land are now receiving cease and desist orders saying you can’t water your gardens. Figure out another way to do it.”
  • The law says you can use up to 5,000 gallons a day, but market gardeners are proably only using 1,000 gallons a day. “You would think that they’re saying you’re a commercial business, because if you are growing food for yourself [But] There’s a lady has been growing food and selling it to neighbors. It’s been her primary income source and they shut her down.”
  • “Christina Del Campo um has just over a half acre. She grows blueberries, local vegetables, things like that. Her farm is called Oak Song Farm near Eugene. She’s operated there for 7 years and she recently received received a letter from the regional office of the Oregon Water Resources Department. It was a notification that the farm couldn’t irrigate its commercial crops without a water right.”
  • “They shut her down because, according to the Oregon Water Resources Department, the exemption for commercial use does not include irrigation of land.”
  • “Basically, the state of Oregon is coming in now and they’re they’re putting things on people’s wells to measure the amount of water. It’s very invasive.”
  • “Supposedly Oregon had these rules in place since 1909. They just keep changing them.”
  • “They’ve sent out letters not just to this one farmer, but multiple small farms, market garden farms, saying you can’t water your crops anymore.”
  • “This is actually a war on small farms.”
  • “We’ve seen this happening over and over and over again, where we’re seeing them utilize water rights [protection] to shut down farms across our country.”
  • “If you look at the number of farms that we’ve lost since 2000, it’s staggering. We’ve gone from 2,100,000 farms in 2000 down to 1,850,000 farms at the end of last year.”
  • “You’ve seen a lot of these cases where they’ve gone in and they’ve just shut off farms to water rights to an entire valley at a time.”
  • “We’re seeing them take control over people’s wells putting meters on people’s wells, shutting down small farms.”
  • “Everybody should have the right to farm fresh food. Oregon is basically taking that right away from every Oregon citizen by taking away the rights of the small farmers to operate their businesses in the name of some laws that were originally put in place to protect groundwater from much larger scale operations.”

    • If there isn’t some sort of sinister agenda behind these new regulatory pushes, destroying small farms certainly gives a pretty good impression of a sinister agenda. And no points for guessing which political party enjoys uncontested control of Oregon. Remember when Democrats claimed to be looking out for family farms? Doesn’t seem to be the case any more. Someone should ask Willie Nelson about all this…

    Texas has a Right to Farm statute that should (theoretically) prevent such abuses here.

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    Posted in Democrats, Regulation, Texas, video | 7 Comments »

    Texas vs. California Update for February 25, 2016

    Thursday, February 25th, 2016

    Been too long since I did a Texas vs. California roundup, so here it is:

  • Dark Age California:

    There are large areas of Central California that resemble life in rural Mexico. Within a radius of five miles I can go to stores and restaurants where English is rarely spoken and there is no racial or cultural diversity—a far cry from Jeb Bush’s notion of an “act of love” landscape.

    With unemployment at 10% or more in the interior of the state, with the public schools near the bottom in the nation, and with generous entitlements, it is no accident that one in six in the nation who receive public assistance now live in California, where about a fifth of the population lives below the poverty line.

    One in four Californians also were not born in the United States; more than one in four who enter the hospital for any cause are found upon admittance to suffer from Type II diabetes. The unspoken responsibility of California state government is to bring state-sponsored parity to new arrivals from Oaxaca, and to do so in ideological fashion that ensures open borders and more government. It is the work of a sort of secular church, and questioning its premises is career-ending blasphemy.

  • “California has come a long way to dig itself out of budget deficits, but the state remains on shaky ground due to nearly $400 billion in unfunded liabilities and debt from public pensions, retiree health care and bonds.” More: “It’s California’s debt and liabilities that are concerning financial analysts, particularly the state’s rapidly growing unfunded retiree health care costs, which grew more than 80 percent over the past decade. California has promised $74 billion more in health and dental benefits to current and retired state workers than the state has put aside.” (Hat tip: CalWatchdog.)
  • And new accounting rules make those unfunded liabilities harder to ignore.
  • The problem might not be quite as bad as it is did not CalPERS and CalSTARS insist on politically correct investments. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • San Francisco political officials indicted:

    A retired city employee and a former city commissioner who are at the center of bribery allegations involving Mayor Ed Lee were charged with multiple felonies including bribery and money laundering, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon announced at a news conference Friday afternoon.

    Also charged Friday was political consultant and former San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education President Keith Jackson, who pleaded guilty last year to racketeering charges.

    The district attorney’s office charged recently retired Human Rights Commission employee Zula Jones, ex-HRC commissioner Nazly Mohajer and former political consultant Keith Jackson.

    Remember that Zula Jones and Nazly Mohajer were fingered by Leeland Yee’s attorneys as being the go-betweens for bribing Lee. This brings up the question (yet again): Why hasn’t Lee himself been indicted?

  • And speaking of California government officials being indicted: “Retired Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca pleaded guilty Wednesday to lying to federal investigators, a stunning reversal for the longtime law enforcement leader who for years insisted he played no role in the misconduct that tarnished his agency.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Jerry Brown vetoes kangaroo court minimums for college sexual assault cases.
  • “Brown pushed for the giant pension fund CalPERS to lower its assumed investment return from 7.5% to 6.5%. Given that the world is headed towards deflation and that CalPERS earned only 2.4% for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2015, Brown’s request seemed entirely reasonable. Instead, the board approved a staff proposal to move to the 6.5% target over 10 years.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • CalPERS board President Rob Feckner, serving his twelfth term, casts deciding vote against proposal for term limits for board members. “Feckner was president of the California School Employees Association for four years and executive vice president of the California Labor Federation for five. Such a conflict of interest wouldn’t be tolerated with the president of other boards of directors. But with CalPERS, it’s par for the course.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • San Diego voters: We want pension reform! Union-stacked Public Employment Relations Board (PERB): Get stuffed, peasants! Result: Lawsuit. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • The middle class is fleeing California. “In 2006, 38 percent of middle-class households in California used more than 30 percent of their income to cover rent. Today, that figure is over 53 percent.”
  • California tech industries continue their exodus to Texas:

    The tech industry in the Bay Area has become a victim of its own success – and state policies. Like many other California businesses, tech firms are relocating or expanding operations in others states – particularly Texas – at an alarming rate.

    Some companies spend significant amounts of time and money finding and training the right workers, only to see them poached by a flashy startup within a number of months. The need for a more stable workforce was one of the main reasons cloud-computing company LiveOps Cloud moved from Silicon Valley to a suburb of Austin, Texas, CEO Vasili Triant told the San Francisco Chronicle.

    Other reasons to move or expand out-of-state are government-created: high taxes, burdensome regulations, unaffordable housing due to excessive development fees and restrictive land-use policies. California’s highly-educated workforce is not so unique anymore, and its quality of life has been tarnished by regulatory and affordability issues. Texas, by contrast, has no personal income tax and no corporate income tax (though it does have a less-onerous gross margins tax), and is universally hailed for having one of the friendliest business climates in the nation.

    Google, Facebook, Apple, Dropbox, Oracle and nearly two dozen other Bay Area tech companies have all built or expanded facilities in Texas just since 2014, the Chronicle reported. There have been more than 1,500 publicly reported California “disinvestment events” across all industries over the past seven years, according to a November report from Spectrum Location Solutions, an Irvine-based business relocation consulting firm, although it estimated the actual tally at as high as 9,000. A California business “can save 20 percent to 32 percent of labor costs by relocating a facility out of state,” Spectrum president Joe Vranich told us last year.

  • More on the theme:

    Between 1997 and 2000, during the peak of the dot-com boom, the Bay Area was a net importer of Texans: About 1,500 more households moved into the region from Texas than vice versa, bringing an additional $191 million (2015 dollars) in taxable income into the region, according to IRS data, which tracks the movement of taxpaying residents.

    The trend changed in the early 2000s, and Texas has been a net importer of Bay Area households ever since. Between 2009 and 2012, as the recession was winding down and the second tech boom was revving up, the region lost about 1,430 households to Texas, and nearly $390 million in taxable income.

    Snip.

    I had a guy working for me (in the Bay Area) making $200,000 a year, struggling to pay his bills,” company CEO Triant said. “In lots of places in the country you’re living high on the hog on $200,000. … As far as work life balance and employee morale, we have absolutely seen a remarkable increase since moving here; it’s night and day.”

    The firm still keeps a small Bay Area office, and Triant speaks fondly of his hometown of San Diego and California in general.

    But when it comes to building a company and running a business, he has found a new home in Texas. “I want my employees to be able to have a good quality of life, live in a city with low crime rates, good schools,” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing here.”

  • “It’s no coincidence that Texas and Florida have thrived while New York and California have not. High levels of taxes, spending, and regulations make it more difficult for entrepreneurs to be successful. When entrepreneurs cannot expand their businesses and hire new workers, everyone is hurt, not just the rich.”
  • In the course of verifying a Rep. Joe Straus campaign ad, Polifact confirms that Texas has grown twice as fast as the rest of the country.
  • The University of California, Berkeley, is running a $150 million deficit this year. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • UC Academic Senate rejects task force’s proposed retirement benefits plan that, keeping with Jerry Brown’s modest pension reforms, would pay them a measly $117,020 pension benefit. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • “What’s more important: High-speed rail or water? Proponents of a proposed ballot measure would force voters to choose just that. The measure would redirect $8 billion in unsold high-speed rail bonds and $2.7 billion from the 2014 water bond to fund new water storage projects.”
  • Speaking of water restrictions, looks like Californians will get to enjoy them for another year.
  • Sure, Covered California (California’s ObamaCare) may be incompetent. But it’s also corrupt. The state auditor “criticized the exchange for not sufficiently justifying its decision to award a number of large contracts without subjecting the contractors to competitive bidding.”
  • California is releasing many felons as part of a “mass forgiveness” program. Including a murderer who tied up a husband and wife and beat them to death with a pipe.
  • California adds Aloe Vera to list of cancer-causing substances. “The problem is that the 800+ chemicals listed in Proposition 65 are not devised to protect consumers, but rather serve as a cash cow for private trial lawyers to sue small business and reap the hefty settlement payout. Since 1986, nearly 20,000 lawsuits have been filed, adding up to over half a billion dollars in settlement payments by business owners.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • San Francisco’s planning process is designed for gridlock.
  • Bankrupt San Bernardino has reached a settlement with its firefighters union.
  • Heh. “The movement to emblazon state legislators with the logos of their donors has collected tens of thousands of signatures for its would-be ballot initiative.The measure, formally called the ‘Name All Sponsors California Accountability Reform (or NASCAR. Get it?) Initiative,’ would require all state legislators to wear the emblems or names of their 10 top donors every time they attend an official function.” The ballot initiative has already collected 40,000 signatures…
  • Huge soda pop collection is coming to the Dr Pepper museum in Waco.

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    Posted in Austin, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 6 Comments »

    Texas vs. California Update for April 15, 2015

    Wednesday, April 15th, 2015

    Hope you’ve finished your taxes already! Time for another Texas vs. California update:

  • Detroit and Stockton’s bankruptcies may signal further problems nationwide, says New York Fed President William Dudley. “While these particular bankruptcy filings have captured a considerable amount of attention, and rightly so, they may foreshadow more widespread problems than what might be implied by current bond ratings.”
  • The Texas senate approves a $211.4 billion biannual budget, which will need to be reconciled with the $209.8 billion House budget. Both budgets offer tax relief, but of different kinds.
  • The senate also zero funds two rogue agencies the Texas Racing Commission and the Travis County Public Integrity Unit. Expect Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, with deep ties to the gambling industry, to go to the mat to save the Racing Commission.
  • The Texas senate has also passed signifcant spending limit reform in Senate Bill 9.
  • CalPERS raises contribution rates by 6%.
  • California senate OKs yet another restrictive energy policy bill. Yet another in their continuing “Let’s send as much business to Texas as possible” acts…
  • Los Angeles Unified School District extends lavish employee benefits package another three years, despite existing underfunded liabilities. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • California sets aside $261 million for cost overruns on its already pricey high speed rail boondoggle.
  • California’s drought is something environmentalist liberal elites have brought on themselves: “Those who did the most to cancel water projects and divert reservoir water to pursue their reactionary nineteenth-century dreams of a scenic, depopulated, and fish-friendly environment enjoy lifestyles predicated entirely on the fragile early twentieth-century water projects of the sort they now condemn.”
  • More on the same theme.
  • San Diego builds a desalinization plant (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
  • Central California is already starting to suffer water-related thefts.
  • In the wake of the Vergara ruling, California Republicans want to overhaul how teachers are hired and fired. Naturally teacher’s unions are opposed…
  • Judge rules that California must pay for sex change operations for prisoners on Eight Amendment grounds. “To contend that ‘forcing’ a prisoner to continue as a man violates the Constitution is absurd…It is nonsensical to grant imprisoned convicted felons health-care ‘entitlements’ that many law-abiding, hardworking taxpayers don’t enjoy.”
  • California prostitutes demand prostitution be legalized. You’d think they’d get a sympathetic hearing from California’s Democrat-controlled legislation, what with all they have in common… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Stanford student council candidate grilled over Colleging While Jewish. This could go in the regular LinkSwarm, but I noticed that both of these recent incidents took place in California.

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    Posted in Budget, Democrats, Regulation, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »