The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by hp:

We're going to face sacrifices regardless, but a lot of us prefer not to believe it.

You're starting to see this belief in odd places. The places that "look forward" and see a pretty messy future no matter who's in charge.

Example: the financial analysts who have started campaigning retirement investment accounts that are POST-TAX. The Roth 401(k)s and the like. There's a growing knowledge that we're probably at the lowest tax brackets we're going to see for the next century, and thus people may actually be harming their retirement investments through traditional 401(k)s. It's better to pay tax now than a couple of decades from now. That's a total reversal from advice in the past.

I'd be far more concerned with our tendency to leave lights on when not needed (or, the heaters that heat our 18 aquariums).

Or, thinking about it again, the 4-5 computers that run 24/7 in our household. Turning off one of those for a month actually does have a noticeable impact on our electricity bill.

It's curious to see what can affect the electricity bill: for a while, we were keeping a friend's 75 gallon saltwater aquarium with full spectrum lighting that needed to be on for 12 hours a day. We didn't notice the bill went up when the aquarium was installed, but we certainly were surprised by the amount the bill went down when the aquarium was returned to her. The tank didn't have a heater (??) and the pump system wasn't much different than anything we use. So, all we could figure was that the lighting for the tank was sucking down all that electricity. (Many of our fish live with room lighting. The things you can get away with when you have freshwater fish . . . )

Further to sump pumps: does this mean people are building in places where it wasn't realistic before such luxuries?

Or are they just expecting dry basements where earlier centuries used them as a sump to stop water flooding into inhabited areas, or priming rising damp? I've heard this was one of the original functions of castle dungeons.

I wonder what will happen if/when fuel gets to luxury prices? Perhaps they'll get linked to 'alternative energy' supplies.

I vote for a newer "expecation of dry basement": the Victorian-period houses that my parents have otherwise owned (otherwise from the one with the flooded crawl when I was a tween) had basements that were intended to be damp and intended to drain freely if wet. We never thought about finishing any of those--those basements are going to be wet without major $$$ being spent on a tile+pump system. (I and the husband had a partial new system installed at our former house as the old system was failing--it was only new drainage tile around 1/3 of the basement exterior. That cost us almost $4000.)

Sump pumps are cheap to run: they're just tiny pumps (in a pit about 18-24 inches across) that run off electricity. As energy becomes more expensive, I'd be far more concerned with our tendency to leave lights on when not needed (or, the heaters that heat our 18 aquariums).

Our old house also had a battery-operated backup system (a second pump) in case of power outage during storms--it was rated to run frequently over many days if need be. The battery wasn't that large.

You could probably hook a sump pump + battery combo up to a smallish solar panel and have it recharge/store enough to run through multiple stormy days.

Some Public Domain characters which the Disney Corporation has appropriated and made lotsa moolah from -- to the point where kids might think Disney *created* them:

I'm googling for references right now, but I recall from a couple of years back, that Disney actually started sending cease & desist letters to authors using the traditional Beauty & The Beast fairy tale as the basis for story, play, or elsewise. They weren't just protecting their retold version and identifiable elements from that version, but claiming that ANY version based on the original fell under their copyright and trademark.

(Blinks).

HP, if I understand you right, you lived in a house that would flood if a pump failed?

I mean, it actually needed a pump running all the time to keep from flooding?

Is this practice common where you come from? Because from where I'm standing it sounds just totally bizarre. I mean, I don't understand why anyone would build a house like that.

The basement would flood if the sump pump wasn't running during heavy storms. This is pretty common throughout the upper midwest in the United States (Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan).

How it's set up is that the foundation of the house has drainage tiles which collect the rainwater that gathers around the foundation. The drainage tiles direct the rainwater into the sump pit, which is then drained by the sump pump, either into the far reaches of the yard--or, if you live in a nice town that allows you to do it, directly into the municipal storm drain system. If the pump fails, the pit can overflow.

At our former house, the sump pump running was pretty much a every half hour occurrence during light rain; a every five minute occurrence during heavy storms. The current house does have a pit and a pump. We make sure that the pump continues working, just in case, by draining the basement aquariums into it. We've never had it run during a storm, but we got really lucky with the foundation on this house.

Throughout much of the midwest, a basement is basically a concrete bowl set in clay. (Or, a concrete bowl set in swampy areas.) You have to be able to move the water away from the foundation, or the foundation is eventually going to become the place of least resistance. Houses up here are expected to have basements--we're within 50 miles of a pretty major tornado alley.

(In fact, there's a new subdivision going up a few miles from us, and we were interested because they were selling "estate-sized" lots--lots of 1/2 to 1 acre. But it's right on top of a damn swamp--not just swampy ground but a REAL swamp at the headwaters of a creek, and the town is requiring *all* the homes to be built with full basements. Knowing the massive problems homes already in that area are having with basement water, that's where I'd build on a slab, but they're not being allowed to.)

than the basement's flood

Ah, instead: than the basement's floor.

Re: Basement flooding

Oh, how awful. Back when I was a tween, my parents had a house that was half full-height basement, half crawl. The house itself was a split level (tri-level) with the middle level above the full-height basement, and the crawl beneath the lower living level. The crawl's floor was about three feet lower than the basement's flood. The house was older (~30 years) and the crawl had--as far as we knew--always been dry, and had been set up as storage (lots of built-in shelves) by a previous owner.

What we didn't know was that the crawl was ALSO intended for water overflow if the sump pump failed (it was actually quite a intelligent design: it kept the finished, full-height section of the basement from flooding for hours after pump failure; it could hold A LOT of water.)

While the library was under construction, the boxes of paperback books were stored on one of the shelves in the crawl (about 2 feet off the floor). The sump pump failed during one horrid thunderstorm.

Re: Slash

Fandom and fan fiction, almost exclusively, tend to use "slash" as a label for fiction about homosexual relationships--whether explicit or implicit in description. Yes, there is such a thing as "G-rated" slash nowadays. Once in a while, you'll come across someone in fandom using "slash" as label for explicit sexual relationships: generally, those people are new to fandom OR very against adult (explicitly sexual) fiction of all forms and the usage is a mistake based on limited exposure. (In most cases I've seen, they're looking for a simple, singular term to define everything they don't like, which is both het and homosexual explicit fiction, and decide that the definition of slash == everything I don't like; they run with it for a while, until they throw a fit at someone for presuming that some explicit het fiction is "acceptable" and then it becomes even more amusing.)

In academia, the currently accepted fannish definition of "slash" has been used since at least the late 1980s.

From what I've seen and heard from others, in the early 1970s "slash" could be used for ANY non-canon romantic relationship. But the overwhelming amount of same-sex non-canon relationship fiction (partly due to the lack of good female characters in the TV shows whose fandoms popularized fan fiction) narrowed the definition and it was generally accepted to apply only to same-sex, non-canon relationships by the end of the 1970s/beginning of the 1980s.

I'd say that Internet fandom has widened the definition slightly again: making non-explicit fiction with same-sex relationships more firmly part of the "slash" label, and making CANON same-sex relationships part of the "slash" label.

In general, few women want to go up to a sales person and say, "My size is 52" waist and 28" leg." It's part of the culture to fudge our size, and the wide-ranging American dress sizes allow us to do this.

I'm a woman, and I would LOVE to do this.

Of course, that's mainly because I fall off multiple sides of the range (I have a 33 inch inseam--which NOBODY makes for a female--a very short torso and no breasts). I don't own anything that fits me properly. I can't find anything that fits me properly. If it's correct in length, it's hanging off me in all directions like a sack. If it's not hanging off me like a sack, the ankle hits two inches above mine.

I want to be rich and have someone make clothing for me.

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