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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • People like that, who almost universally profess Christian faith, should be attentive to the words of the early Church fathers on the intrinsically corrupting nature of wealth:

    “The rich are in possession of the goods of the poor, even if they have acquired them honestly or inherited them legally.”
    — John Chrysostom

    “You are not making a gift of your possession to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his.”
    — Ambrose of Milan

    “The property of the wealthy holds them in chains […] which shackle their courage and choke their faith and hamper their judgment and throttle their souls. They think of themselves as owners, whereas it is they rather who are owned: enslaved as they are to their own property, they are not the masters of their money but its slaves.”
    —Cyprian

    And for a direct Bible passage, it’s hard to be more succinct than James.


  • My joke was that people still use Flachspüler for their originally-intended purpose in the late 19th Century, which was to check their stool for pork-borne parasites.
    American toilets aren’t filled to the top, only about ⅓ of the total volume is water. The idea is to have enough water to keep fecal matter completely submerged, to cut down on odor and to prevent skidmarks. However, older toilets are indeed wasteful, using about 14.25L of water per flush. The law was changed in 1994 to limit newly-manufactured toilets to 6L per flush, but the first generation of “low-flow” toilets were so ineffective that consumers simply refused to buy them, and most homes have a toilet made in 1993 or before. Only in the last ~10 years have modern “high efficiency” toilets taken root, which let you choose either a 3L or 4L flush. Those, too, are still designed so there’s plenty of water to cover stool.

    Ultimately, the most pressing issue with toilets is not the water height, it’s that each one should also have a bidet, but too few actually do. Personally, I’d like one of those Japanese toilets that has an integrated heated bidet and plays music.