Tokyo drip

In an earlier blog I described the United States as a Third World country with a tech veneer.

A simple story will illustrate what I mean.

These two events happened at the same time.

I was in Tokyo at a house of my friend. The toilet required a screwdriver to turn on the water flow because the expensive automatic toilet seat had not been repaired.  My friend was too busy.  I turned on the screw and accepted a very small drip, roughly a quart a day.

Three days later a man from the city water department knocked on the door to say that we had a leak and needed to fix it.

The same year, when I returned home to San Francisco, we found a small river gushing out of a hole in the adjacent neighbors backyard. I filtered the water and tasted it. It was good and I assumed it was an artesian well, which was possible in our neighborhood. The water had been flowing for the two months I was gone.

I got all excited and thought about selling bottled water from our artesian well. But being cautious I phoned the water department about the flow of water. A week later the water department came and took a sample of the water. If it had chloramine in it it was city water. Chloramine is not taste-able.  After another week the water department came and dug up some pipes in the main street and found the leak in a water main.

So one country can detect a few quarts of water leaking in hours. In the United States, a Third World country, months pass as gallons pour out.