Romania was heavily cooperativised. Not all the villages tho, some of those in the mountains were left out. The plains, where I live, was the main stage for the communist agricultural policy. There were those outside the system in the plains as well, due to glitches, not due to law regulating it. In some areas those were sheep breeders. But the "big agriculture" was state owned. Indeed the country suffers now. I see peasants managing well their small garden, having knowledge about large scale technology, because they worked in the field, but knowing nothing about smaller scale commercial exploitation. These people had land before the commies, which was confiscated, and they got it back after 40 years. And that's huge gap, there's another generation owning the land and not really knowing how to make it profitable. And that's a pity, there are a lot of lost opportunities. These people may own 1 to 5 ha (which they got back after the communism fell) and rent it to the big farmers. In the plains there are now big land owners who work thousands of ha and are seem to be millionaires, but they own their life to the banks, while giving blow jobs to the international trading corporations who buy their crop. It's fucking sick, everything. It's like in those american stories about tricked farmers. It's really the same pest. Fortunately nowadays there's a huge demand for workforce in other fields and the rural areas are economically better than 15 years ago. And there are the millions who go to the western EU countries for work. So the reliance on agriculture for income is a lot lower.
I have a septic tank that really doesn't require any emptying. It's huge, 20 m3, cylindrical hole with stone masonry on the inside. Having a round section, it didn't need any armature, because there are only compression forces in the wall. It costed me a lot less than the commercial ones in PPR, which are a lot smaller. Of course there was some bone-breaking work involved, but I always consider it as the premium alternative of going to the gym.
You wouldn't get permission to keep such a huge septic tank here. 9 cubic metres is the maximum permissible value. Impermeable materials only (no masonry allowed - either certified, leak-proof reinforced concrete or high density plastics). What you are writing about goes by the name of "home wastewater treatment installations" here... but they're already in decline, due to several issues. I moved to a large town from a rather small city, and the basic pre-requirement were "all conveniences included". I simply can't live without AC, sewage connection, and fibre optic connection. Signed an agreement to install PV panels, to help me with the AC bills yesterday
I thought so too The science behind wastewater shouldn't be so constraining. Part of the of the residue processing is done inside the tank, part inside the soil. The large stations "purify" the water then dump it, much like a septic tank. The main downside is the alienation from not pooling one's excrements with the community. Of course, i guess the reasons are good where there's a high population density.
Yes, I do not plan a storage device, at least not yet. The inverter I envisage for the entire installation is the new generation Huawei one, so I can easily expand the installation with a storage module later on.
The subsidies are relatively low here. The whole is 5.04 kW rated power (14 0.35 kW panels), so given the beneficial location (210 m above sea level, southern part of roof, 29 degree slope) it should give me 94-95% of rated power on a cold, sunny day. The total cost (all things included) will be PLN 22.5 k (roughly EUR 5k). I can get up to PLN 4-5 k subsidies from the "Your Power" government program, but they have not announced this year's edition yet, so I don't know "if" and "subject to what conditions" I will qualify (the program is to be announced on July, 1st, and subsidies will be available for all qualifying installations connected after February 28th). If I manage to get a grid connection (will get the panels in 10 days time, but the lecky supplier is the "bottleneck" here) by July, 1st I'm "in the green", as my application will be considered as one of the first ones. If I don't manage to get connected by July, 1st - it's all about "how many will apply, and how many will qualify before I'm eligible to apply?". I could get 5k, but I also might end up with nothing. Then comes the tax deduction. I can deduct all unfunded parts of the installation from my income tax (currently @19% rate). So the worst case scenario is that I get financing for 19% of the entire installation - this setting the price for entire installation @ PLN 18.2k (and a ROI after almost 8 years) The best case scenario is that of 5k subsidy + 19% off the rest, which makes it = 22.5-5=17.5 and then 17.5x0.81= PLN 14.2k (and ROI in just 6 years). Poland's got the most expensive electricity in EU. And the other thing - I live in the south-eastern, sunniest part of Poland
Here too they have financing programs, from time to time, for green energy. "Casa verde" they call it, "green home". Fucking wankers, the funds are very few and it's completely unpredictable, you don't know when they'll start it and there were years without financing programs. I don't bother about it. I'm to buy the heat pump this year, geothermal. 180 metres of shaft are needed for this one (there may be more boreholes for the tubing) or a surface area of about 600 m2 for horizontal tubing at 1,5 metres of depth. Drilling is too expensive here, I would have to pay about 8-9k euro for it. While the close to the surface horizontal system is less efficient. But, in my yard, I can dig to 15 metres through soil, without the need for special equipment, just a simple earth drill and muscle. And below 5 metres the variation in temperature is veeery small as you go lower. So I'm to make more boreholes instead of two or three as customary, and I'll connect them through thermally isolated pipes. This should 500 euro tops (more like 300), as I'll need someone to help me. So my tubing will look like this: | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | instead of this: | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
California cafe owner charges customers $5 fee for wearing masks (nbcnews.com) "Diners are mostly free to speak their mind at a Northern California cafe, but doing so through the protective confines of a mask will cost a cover charge of $5. Fiddlehead's Cafe in Mendocino on Sunday put up a sign announcing the fee for customers who wear masks while ordering. In March, the cafe announced an ongoing 50 percent discount for those who throw their face coverings in the trash, said owner Chris Castleman, 34.
Sometimes, when trying to empathise with this sort of mindset, I get a strange feeling of exotic entertainment.
Yes, septic tanks are no fun to maintain at all. My childhood home in the US had one such, and I really do have nightmares about them "having problems." As my long-gone, wonderful grandmother once yelled, "It stinks like a shithouse!" She was born and raised on a farm not so far from the Baltic Sea, to the east of you. To be honest, a simple hole dug into the ground causes fewer problems. Of course, that's not a proper solution for a family, but it gets the job done in extremis I could write a good short story about places I've had to sh*t. But that wouldn't make the New York Times best-seller list. Perhaps a new thread for that subject...
When I was a kid I went to this summer camp in the mountains. I met many kids there, from other cities and hung out with them in the woods. We were all about 12 or 13 years old. And there was this kid that was a total show-off, told all the jokes, all the stories, I guess if one counted the time each of us was speaking, he would take like 90% of the time while the other 5 or 6 of us would take the remaining 10%. I remember I didn't really like him, probably none of the others liked him much, I don't think he was even that friendly. And one day while we were on our own in the woods, on a mountain, this guy needs to shit. And he climbs up a small tree up to a point where a nearly horizontal branch forks, at about the height of our heads. And he pulls down his pants, sits on the fork of the branch and extrudes a shit, for all of us to see, while continuously speaking. He probably briefly, not interrupting his phrase, made that sound when someone pushes hard. I don't know the english word for it, in my language is "screme", which comes from "exprimere". I think this term fits very well.
Yes, this is a universal experience (Well, perhaps for those of us who are a bit older.) We did similar things. Go into the forest for a few weeks with your group and goodbye -- if you return, that's fine If a guy did that in our camp, we would have expelled him and sent him back home. Really we would have -- possibly -- beaten him up a little. Maybe he would cry a little, but he would go home. We had some brutal initiations. No way would they allow that sort of thing these days. But if you survived, you became stronger. One terrible thing they/we did was to tie a guy to a tree and throw mustard into his eyes.
I don't remember all the occasions when I've been intentionally mean to others, but i remember this one. When I entered high school, it was this hugely elitist school. And me and a buddy of mine, who entered at the same school, knew there was this ritual: on the first day of school, the older guys picked on the newbies and demanded them to sing the national anthem. This national anthem thing was not out of patriotism - it was the early 90's, we were just out of communism, we were sick of propaganda, sick of the state and this anthem singing was a tongue in cheek ritual, which was more of a reference to the absurdity of the life in school. Our high school building was an old late 19th century one and we later learned that the students called it Bastille. So me and my buddy were so thrilled about the older guys demanding us to sing the anthem, so when they showed up we sang it like nobody had done it before, with such a pathos that from that moment we became friends with the older guys and all the doors of our high school community opened for us. Then, in our last year of high school, we felt it was our duty to pass this tradition to the younger generation. So in the first day of school me and my buddies approached these kids with the clear demand that they sing the anthem. Two of the kids quickly ran through the crowd and the remaining one, which we somehow cornered, got so scared that I felt sick about what he must have thought we were doing. I think that was the last time I pretended to be scary.
This demonstrates that you are a good soul and are not a sociopath. It's a good thing if we can feel guilty about things we did in our pasts. Crazy people don't ever consider the things they did in their past; they don't care and they are often psychotic. Two of the kids quickly ran through the crowd and the remaining one, which we somehow cornered, got so scared that I felt sick about what he must have thought we were doing. I think that was the last time I pretended to be scary. You have a good soul, as I observed above. Yes, only bad persons enjoy seeing another's suffering. There are universal truths.