Water company can measure the water that leaves their pumping station(s) - just put a flow meter on the one big pipe. If that doesn't match the sum of all their customer meters, then water is going somewhere else - broken pipe, illegal connection, meter fraud, whatever.
I would guess that most jurisdictions already have that one big flow meter, because they have to comply with water rights agreements, have to know how much chlorine & fluoride to inject, etc.
Kind of fascinating that they don't do any kind of reconciliation of water delivered against water billed. You'd think that would be an easy thing to do and a good way to discover leaks (or theft). I mean, there would definitely be 'missing' water due to leaks, fire department, etc, but one imagines that would have some kind of normal/tolerable range, and that 30 million missing gallons would trigger some kind of investigation prior to customer complaints.
Right: SSA buys a treasury bill, and congress gets to treat that as income for the general budget. For a long time, SSA was the largest holder of US debt. Their surplus has been falling, while the Federal Reserve has bought up tons of Treasuries every time there's an economic crisis and have now eclipsed SSA. Fed holds about $4.5T, while Japan holds barely $1.2T
Whether you think of these inter-governmental loans as "investments," is probably a matter of where you fall on pedantry. If I take a loan from my 401k for down payment on a house, I don't think of that as "investing" my 401k in the house.
This is the Lincoln Reflecting Pool in Washington DC, a treasured landmark seen in many iconic images and films. The mad king had it drained so that the bottom could be painted blue, adding an over-saturated "ocean" color.
Social security is not an investment at all. It's young people giving money to old people.
For a while, the country didn't have very many old people, so some of the young-people tax went into the general budget (through purchase of US Treasury bills). Now there's too many old people, and you can bet that the general budget won't be giving them anything.
You had to have multiple jacks, because the phone cord was only so long. No one wants to go running through the house to get to the phone before it stops ringing.
Are they not building houses with phone jacks anymore? I mean, I know "no one" has a landline, but not even the wiring?
Wonder if they'll unblock Infowars, now that it's The Onion.
News loves to talk about Trump's 33% approval rating, but that is 66% of the GOP. Add on some people leaving the GOP over the pedo-issue, the war-issue, or the grift-issue, and Trump should do well in primaries. Terrible in the general, but good in primary.
Just gotta watch out for 2020 republicans running as 2026 democrats.
used to commute 130km a day for university. No one would consider that in Germany, but I knew several people from high school making the same commute as me
Did you even suggest carpooling with any of those people?
Part of the reason people outside the US would not spend what, 3 hours and 5?, 6? gallons of gas per day is that US petrol is stupid cheap. If it weren't, you and your high school buddies would have rented a place closer to your school. Seriously: 3 guys each paying $8/gallon for 5 gallons/day 4 days/week? $2000/month is rent. At $3/gallon, $250/month to live with your parents makes sense.
I use encryption whenever I can not so They can't see my ops, but so that the encrypted comms of people who actually do need opsec are less suspicious.
I've used my 3d printer more for hydroponics than anything else. It's great for making baskets/adapters to hold sprouts in whatever container you want. I settled on 2" PVC with ebb-and-flow irrigation, but Kratky fascinates me.
Do you have trouble with algae in the glass containers?
Maybe they do commercial customers different, but I'm about 30 miles north of the site in question, and my water use is reported in real time. I can even get a daily report from their web site. It's hard to believe they'd be less interested in the usage of their 1e6-gallon-per-year commercial customers than their 1e4-gallon-per-year residential customers.