I’ve always been curious about things like this (seen on Facebook yesterday):
Foreigners are “baffled by how much water is wasted…while other places in the world are in desperate need of water?”
When foreigners flush a toilet, where do they think the water goes? Do they think it gets destroyed? Sent into an alternate universe via a wormhole in time?
That water goes to a treatment plant of some kind or another; usually the icky stuff gets separated out, and the water goes into a holding lake, where it filters down back into the groundwater, or evaporates back into the atmosphere, to fall somewhere in the world as rain, or to float around as humidity, or (mostly) sit in the ocean.
And it’s water that’s here. Does an American have the option of sending water from his toilet – or from the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River, for that matter – to Ethiopia or the Gobi Desert? Is there an alternate flush button we could push to send the water (waste-free, natch) to the horn of Africa?
Who are these “foreigners” with no knowledge of the evaporation cycle, anyway?
some pissant progressive environmentalist wants you to feel shame for your white privilege and especially because that white privilege built a civilization that spawned the USA, a democratic republic that continually thwarts their best efforts to return humanity to feudal serfdom.
This is odd because one of my Lefty FB friends posted earlier this week that ‘foreigners’ think Americans are ‘funny’ because we use gobs of toilet paper while the more civilized (ie: Euros) of the world rinse their backsides with a bidet. I commented that this was due to Socialist societies with centrally planned economies constantly running short on basic goods – like toilet paper and soap. And that all real ‘Muricans think ‘foreigners’ smell funny because they need to rinse more than just their backsides. His Lefty friends went all ‘Faux News!11!ty’ on me afterwards so – let’s just say they will never understand where the toilet/bidet water goes.
It reminds me of the old college/high school joke, “Flush twice, it’s a long way to the cafeteria.”
An earthquake damaged sewage treatment facilities in Haiti in 2012, after which Haitians wasted no water on flush toilets.
In completely unrelated news, the cholera outbreak continues.
.
Be patient. Al Gore says we’re all gonna be 10′ deep in a couple of years.
I thought the people on the left were all science-y? Do you know that virtually all the water that was on the planet a thousand years ago is STILL HERE in one form or another. Even with billions of people drinking, and then urinating it. People washing with it. People watering their lawns and crops. Only an infinitesimally small amount has escaped the bounds of the planet, or been converted to energy.
The fact that the majority of toilets are white is proof of systematic racism and white privilege. In this case, that privilege is to crap into a toilet that looks like you.
Kel with the comment of the week.
If you take a college-level geography class, one of the things they teach you is that a lot of the misery of existence in the third world is caused by the difficulty of gathering fresh water. In some parts of the world women and children walk miles to fill the five gallon bucket that is their daily supply of water.
In the liberal mind, they can only have less because we have so much. Americans who are not liberals are using too much water.
America went through a period of high housing stock growth after the wonders of modern, distributed water supply systems were developed. We aren’t using too much, they are using too little.
The really sad part, PM, is the technology to move water long distances has been known since the Romans built the aquaducts, but modern desert kleptocrats aren’t willing to invest in it, thinking “So my subjects get clean drinking water, what’s in it for me?”
Not my problem those governments are worthless – I have enough problems with my own – so I’m not feeling guilty about flushing while Africans go thirsty.
Joe Doakes-
This caused quite a bit of controversy in the African Studies world when it was published in 2001:
http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/MP1600gk.html
The author, a self-proclaimed Marxist, despairs of the fact that everything he was taught about the plight of Africa being a legacy of colonialism cannot explain Africa’s problems today. By every measure it got worse after the colonialists left. With no ideas left to explain how to fix Africa, he is leaving the field of African Studies.
Holy crap (pun intended), Merg, maybe you might want to think about this a few more minutes.. The point here is that many US toilets, unlike their foreign counterparts, are high gallon per flush (gpf) at 6 gallons on average, while most other toilets are 1.5 gpf. Now, I know that little factoid seems hard to follow, but go along with me for a teense, mkay? The thing is, we Americans, (or MMMerkins in your language), we have a reputation for being, friendly, well-meaning, fat, loud, wasteful, and ignorant. Now I’m not one to point fingers (or in this case toilet paper), but you might understand why they feel that way when you put up drivel like this. That you aren’t aware of the wastage of water in high gallon per flush toilets I suppose isn’t proving them right exactly, I mean one should not assume you don’t know since this is something anyone who has remodeled a bathroom in the past 10 years hears about, along with various little stories you hear about wasting water with an inefficient toilet, but honestly, given that it’s so blatantly obvious that was the point, one has to wonder how you missed it so badly. Perhaps it was because you forgot your shovel? Well, on the plus side, given the BS nature of this article, clearly you didn’t waste any water by failing to do what you should have done when the idea for this post came to mind, namely flush it
As far as shipping water overseas goes, what a stupid question. No one suggested it Merg-bo, but build your straw man all you like, it’s as stupid as your first omission was glaring. On the other hand, and try to keep up, by not wastefully using more fresh water from the Great Lakes or other bodies of available water here in the US, that water then is available to irrigate crops, so we grow a bit more food. Maybe some of that food goes overseas and when some farmer in Kenya has to make the choice between pouring water on his scant few plants or giving his family just a bit more to drink, well, maybe he doesn’t face that choice. Now, I realize you don’t give a carp about someone in Kenya, and in fact that scenario is unlikely, but I tried real hard to keep it simple because high fallutin’ concepts like global responsibility, population planning, ecological management and the like clearly are beyond your sphere of concern. Concepts like not wasting water because it sends the right message, because it may have a net positive impact on water supply not to Kenya, but to Mexico, all because it goes along with trying to solve big problems like how do you deal with the self-perpetuating problem of growing more food only allows for more population and more population then demands more food. Such a realization might cause someone (not you, but someone) to think about what the proper population balance is relative to world resources and from that, gee, well, including for water. I realize that’s far to big a tent for conservatives to want to care about but it is what actual sociologists and physicians and a whole host of very dedicated and concerned scientists care about. So do them a favor, stop being quite so myopic and go get a new toilet. You clearly can fill it up.
Frugally yours,
The Prince
By the way, is it true James O’Keefe acted in a way that very well might have incited people to kill cops and fired staff when they wouldn’t go along with his plan? Nice hero, your should be so proud.
“Head”, maybe….decaf would be a good idea for you? Just sayin’.
Seriously, your gracious host found a source which made exactly the argument you claim does not exist. Again, DECAF for you.
Okay, Penigma, you’ve convinced me. I’m willing to do my part to share my water with thirsty Africans and Mexicans. I’ll convert to a low-flow toilet out of my pocket, you pay the shipping to get it there out of your pocket. If you won’t, it makes no difference whether I use 6 gallons or 1.5 since the thirsty people won’t get any of it either way. In that case, your moral preening is wasted.
” . . . we Americans, (or MMMerkins in your language), we have a reputation for being, friendly, well-meaning, fat, loud, wasteful, and ignorant.”
This is a disgusting way to view your countrymen, Pen.
I mean that, disgusting. I don’t think of Americans being this way. Who thinks of Americans as being “friendly, well-meaning, fat, loud, wasteful, and ignorant.”? And in comparison to which other people? The Chinese have reputation for being dirty, and of having little respect for modern ideas of hygeine, but it doesn’t bother me.
I’ll be very clear, Penigma. If you have whipped up an idea out of your imagination that Americans have a reputation of being “friendly, well-meaning, fat, loud, wasteful, and ignorant.” that is your problem, not mine. You don’t have a right to inflict your psychological issues on your fellow Americans. Get some help, for God’s sake.
I get catchwater for all my needs. I have no choice. I am not hooked up any central supply. Gosh! Am I allowed to own a hi flow toilet? Or take a shower for longer than the government-approved maximum, comrade Penigma?
How do we know it’s Penigma? It’s verbose, yes, but usually her (?) writing is better and more coherent than that. Biased, insulting, foolish, yes, but it’s usually more coherent, isn’t it? Somebody putting Irish Cream in her Starbucks, purchased anywhere but where minorities live?
It’s Penigma real initials AB, I think.
The density is hard to duplicate. The tweet Mitch mocks implies that our flushing is the cause of water shortages in other parts of the world. Jesus that’s dumb.
Yea Head, and I’ll just bet that all of you elitist libidiots in your circle of jerks has a low flow or toilets in their mansions. Why not make it mandatory for the peasants to install those in their houses? Hell, for as much as your Democrats whiz on the feet of the poor and middle class and tell them it’s raining, what’s another attack on their income?
Once we get desalination figured out we will have an unlimited supply of water. Too bad it might be too late for California by then
Too bad it might be too late for California by then
I lived in Kali, so my answer is, no, it’s not too bad. The only real worry is that the drought might force the residents of that asylum to escape.
Geographers point out, correctly, that a very small amount of the world’s water is accessible frsh water. True. But what they fail to point out is that the lack of fresh water is usually a result of political decisions made by national governments. Israelis are reluctant to give water to the Plastinians because A) the Palestinians have not shown that they have the ability to use the water as efficiently as the Israelis B) The Palestinians want to kill them. Money spent to develop infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa is routinely embezzled. Aid agencies want a strong, central government to disburse aid to, but often poor nations, especially ex-colonies, have a central government that is weak because the people living there do not trust a central government, and they value family and tribe more. How can you help people that would rather dump water on the ground than give it to their fellow citizens because of some old grudge?
Western aid to third world countries does not have a proud history. Back in the 1950s, Western countries looked at their own nations and decided what more backward nations needed was giant hydroelectric dams. They paid for dams that were never built, or never worked, or if they did work, the people had a limited ability to make use of the power they generated.
A lot of small islands in the South Pacific have water problems. An island may not be big enough to produce its own rain, and well water is brackish, so the island’s inhabitants collect rain water. But in dry periods they may run out. Disease and death follow. So aid agencies build them a cistern system to collect more water, but unless it’s empty the people still don’t ration it. They like to be clean, so it’s a bath every day for all of them until the water’s gone. So the aid agencies came up with a system: two spigots on the cistern, one high, one low. The lower spigot was locked and the village headman got the only key. When the water got low, people had to ask the headman to let them get some water, and the headman was headman for a reason — he knew who really wanted water for cooking and who wanted water for a bath.
But the system failed when they tried the same thing with boats. Give the headman a motor boat, and he would only let his relatives use it to steal other peoples’ catch, it would never be maintained, and eventually it would break or they would wreck it. Trying to give people the undeniable benefits of modern life can be a maddening pastime.
this: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1950/jun/20.htm
published in 1950, authored by Ioseb Besarionis dze Jugashvili answers questions such as: Is it true that language is a superstructure on the base? and Is it true that language always was and is class language, that there is no such thing as language which is the single and common language of a society, a non-class language common to the whole people.
These questions and especially the answers provided the grist for the mills of LA uni professors well into the ’70s.
Penigma, you blithering dolt. Why do you hate science; didn’t you used to live next door to Edward Teller?
Every drop of water that was ever on Earth is still here, you idiot. There is no net loss when water is used for any particular purpose, you moron; the only variable is how long it takes to recycle, you fool. If it takes 50 gallons to flush down 10 liberals, that 50 will be unavailable for re-use no longer than 4 days; but use that 50 to water a tree, and it’ll take a month, or more depending on how many leaves it has, to complete the cycle through transpiration.
So there you have it, dimwit. Bare trees are evil, flushing is good.
Not Edward Teller, Swiftee, it was Raymond Teller, the silent half of Penn & Teller, the magicians.
Which explains why Penigma thinks toilet water disappears forever. He’s been watching too many magic acts.