Hacker News Reader

Comment by killingtime74 | Hacker News Reader

This ignores the most difficult part...getting a permit

I think the idea behind doing it yourself is that you don’t need a permit. In the USA, while permits are technically required for a lot of things, the law is widely ignored, and enforcement is lax to nonexistent. Hell most of the licensed contractors I hire (electric, plumbing, etc) don’t bother to pull permits, even for new work.

You will likely have issues if you ever try to sell property with an unpermitted well. FHA loans have restrictions on the well as do many local jurisdictions that may refuse to convey the property if the well isn’t up to code. My local jurisdiction won’t block the sale but will write an alarming letter to the seller. In the case of a new build or major remodel, you will not be able to get a certificate of occupancy without a state and county verified well here.

> Hell most of the licensed contractors I hire (electric, plumbing, etc) don’t bother to pull permits, even for new work.

Yeah, it’s your responsibility as a homeowner to get the permit (either get it yourself or see that the contractor does). Even if you don’t think the permit inspectors are doing anything in terms of quality control, the permit helps you to pass inspections as part of the sale process and will limit your insurance exposure if there’s ever an issue. There’s probably fine print in your insurance contract saying that all work shall be permitted as required.

Yeah, it doesn't take a genius inspector to take the as built plans, the list of work permits, and see if that explains current state of the house. And then there's the whole issue of mandatory disclosure forms and how forthcoming you are on those and if whatever you put down aligns with the inspectors find.

That assumes there are as built plans. I live in an area of the US with a lot of old houses and there certainly aren't as built plans for 100-200+ year old houses or a string of permits for any substantial work.

(Well/septic tend to get more scrutiny at a sale but the status of old renovations/remodels in general are often pretty opaque.)

The permits exist for a reason.

If too many people start doing it, it becomes an issue of overdrawing groundwater. This leads to an arms race of digging ever deeper wells to reach the remaining groundwater, and on top of that starts leading to ground subsidence as ground formerly full of water dries out and compacts.

Off the top of my head, there is massive groundwater subsidence in the Central Valley of California, Mexico City, and Jakarta due to this issue, at rates measured in feet per year. This makes the land prone to flooding, and also damages buildings and infrastructure since the subsidence is generally not evenly spread out.

Importantly, in case it wasn't obvious to readers, hydrocompaction cannot be undone in any meaningful way. Once the compaction happens, water will no longer, and will never again, flow in the compacted area.

I was looking into this DIY approach and it is not allowed in my county. Some of the justification is that improperly cased wells can allow backflow contamination of the larger water supply, affecting other nearby water sources. I'm not sure how likely this is as I have limited knowledge of the subject.

At least in my state (Washington), electricians and plumbers licenses include an annual permit which covers all the work they do during that year. It's only the trades that don't have a licensing program (or are only licensed as "general contractor") that need a separate permit for each job instead of one big one that covers all their work for the year.

Each individual job also needs a permit

And today I am reminded that people in many places must get the state’s permission to build, repair, or improve their shelter, to grow food, to collect rainwater, to dig a well.

On property they “own”.

You’re literally asking the states permission to have the basic things needed for human survival- shelter, food, and water.

While this makes sense to me for a business or an organisation, it strikes me as unconscionable for a private individual to have to get permission from the state to survive.

I understand the sentiment but when you have this many people living close together, somebody has to be the adult to make sure things continue to work for everybody.

On property they own

Ownership that is regulate and enforced by the state; if you own it according to the rules, you use it according to the rules. If you want to do something else, you can step outside the rules and best of luck to you.

> you can step outside the rules and best of luck to you.

This is why I cannot understand how the 'sovereign citizen' nonsense is at all appealing to anybody. If I'm my own boss and not morally subject to society's rules, how is it not fair game then for society to completely ignore my desires and needs? Like, ok, lets say our courts have no jurisdiction over you, but then it also follows that we can just shoot you dead where you stand and move on with our society. I get that it feels unfair to be born into rules you didn't agree to, but a second's reflection makes it obvious the other alternative is not at all a good one.

> how is it not fair game then for society to completely ignore my desires and needs?

Best I can tell, it already does this. Not saying I believe the lunatic sovereign citizen horseshit, about how if they spell my name in all uppercase letters on the paperwork, I'm not subject to courts of law...

But yeh, they're definitely completely ignoring my desires and needs. Yours too. Some people are just slow to catch on.

I'm unconvinced. I like electricity and water I can drink and all that sort of thing, and society seems to be doing a pretty good job of providing that. Certainly enough of it for my own needs right here in my house.

Isn’t ownership of land regulated by the state pretty much everywhere?

Depends on what you mean by pretty much anywhere. Outside of the actual cities in Alaska for example you won’t find many restrictions. Many countries in the developing world also are essentially unregulated.

Because you alter things outside of your perimeter. If you extract a lot of water you might cause issues at your neighbour.

>Because you alter things outside of your perimeter.

Indeed, but you need a permit for a lot of things contained within your property too. Technically, I need a permit to change my front door. Kinda silly, mostly ignored by people, which is probably a worse outcome.

Homes can have neighboring properties and non-owner occupants and there are third-party fire risk concerns with both. It is not good if people build homes which are at risk of spreading fire to neighboring properties, or at risk of harming occupants in case of a fire.

Building codes are a big reason we don't have nearly as many events called "the great fire of [city]" in the 21st century.

Yet e.g. fracking or animal agriculture gets subsidized, no reasonable limits are being enforced, while doing most of the damage.

Groups that do those things have political clout. The average homeowner does not.

It turns out that we live in a society. And these days the main risk to human survival before middle age is other humans.

Or, you know, people understand that their actions have consequences on others and living in an organized society is far better than the alternative. We're not endlessly settling an untapped frontier that exists solely in our heads.

> it strikes me as unconscionable for a private individual to have to get permission from the state to survive.

It would be nice to be free of the state. But how do we deal with the Tragedy of the Commons? How do we make hidden externalities visible & accurately priced?

It seems like the population is too high in most places to be able to tolerate people doing their own thing, with their own property. Not sustainable unfortunately.

At this point, "private ownership" is fading away. Eventually, maybe a hundred of years from now, we'll all be leasing our land from the government, and perhaps even leasing our privileges.

> how do we deal with the Tragedy of the Commons? How do we make hidden externalities visible & accurately priced

We do (pretend to do) when it's easy enough. But mostly we don't. Some examples:

- (micro)plastic pollution

- climate change (greenhouse gases)

- deforestation

- biodiversity loss

- overfishing, bycatch

We even subsidize the sectors causing most of the damage. But for for a regular joe wanting to have water ... sure, that's easy enough.

yep, we're failing to price those hidden externalities big time.

There's a philosophical question here, which is that as science and technology get better and our ability to measure things improve, the hidden externalities become less and less hidden. Nobody told Grok the caveman not to burn sticks in his cave for warmth, out of concern for releasing CO2 and particulate matter; but nowadays it's frowned upon to use a wood pellet furnace instead of electric heat, for example.

Existence itself is an externality, since everything any living organism does affects every other living organism, however minutely. There probably exists some amount of externalities that we have to choose to ignore.

We can stop destroying the entire biosphere first and then get philosophical with the remaining details.

tragedy of the commons is a myth https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...

Not sure why you got downvoted.. thanks for the link

That was the attitude of the dude down the road from me who started his own impromptu pig farm. The folks who are outraged by what they can't do on their own land often also are the folks who don't think beyond step 1 and don't care if their pig shit stinks and runs off everywhere.

It does depend on location. My town, for example, is a "right to farm" community which--while it doesn't give you carte blanche to do anything you want that's agriculture-related on your property--does give fairly broad latitude.

It really depends on the setting.

Local city allows chickens (just a few) and out by me some towns allow a lot more, but there's also proper space to do those things.

Pig farm guy was right on the border and he did NOT have enough space for a bunch of pigs. Thankfully the town already had rules about pigs. Pig farms STINK.

The issue is "water rights". In Western states, somebody owns that water already. The rain might fall on your house, but it normally flows into some creek/stream/river where the legal and moral rights to that water belong to someone else. Capturing that water is legally considered theft. In Colorado, for example, every bit of river water was allocated to someone before Colorado became a state.

One book that covers the history of water projects in the US is Cadillac Desert [0]. We have this cultural myth that all we need is a little more water to make the desert bloom. And as a country, we've wasted trillions of dollars diverting rivers for agricultural use. Agricultural users of water pay almost nothing for their water while using enormous amounts of taxpayer funding to do so. Utah and Arizona have recently had droughts where water consumption by private citizens was limited.

There are several crops that use enormous amounts of water, the one receiving attention is alfalfa. 82% of Utah's water is consumed by agriculture. The UT governor owns a farm that grows alfalfa for export. Instead of cutting back on his own farm's water consumption, he's been on radio & TV telling Utahns to pray for rain. Arizona has had some recent news stories about Saudi companies growing alfalfa in AZ and exporting the hay to Saudi Arabia. Alfalfa consumes so much water that growing it in Saudi Arabia is illegal. Amusingly, `alfalfa` is an Arabic word. The issue with AZ & UT is that there is plenty of taxpayer subsidized water to grow alfalfa for export while simultaneously rationing residential water consumption.

0 - https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing...

We had the idea to drill one to here in Germany, but having drilled it doesn‘t mean you can use it as long as you please. Ground water levels are falling and eventually it will be forbidden.

But we also have a 13k liter cistern and with drip irrigation it holds reasonably long.

Well permit requirements are highly variable. As I understand it, in surprisingly large parts of California, the permit is almost automatic. In other parts of California, there are more complex regulations and sometimes even requirements to meter and pay for (!) well water usage. Cough, Santa Clara, cough.

I’d actually be all in favor, except that the rate for non-agricultural users seems to be over 10x the rate for agricultural users.

permits don't exist in the county where i want to do this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com