Don? <Grin City> Of course, one would simply deposit the aforementioned dirt in the airspace above one's hole......
CartooniverseWho cares where the 'dig thru to China started? We all know it’s a euphemism.
Kind of like ‘kicking someone’s butt up around their shoulders’ is just a bit impossible.
If you own a 10,000 square foot lot, that corresponds to a volume of roughly 2 cubic kilometers. Have you thought about how much the metals in that much volume of the Earth is worth? Not to mention any gems that may be there. Many times the price you paid for your house, I’ll bet. Talk about a windfall profit. Imagine the taxes you owe! Why don’t you just hang a big “Come take my house and land, IRS” sign in your front window?
Ah, but the IRS can’t take your land if you’ve dug it all up and hidden it somewhere.
If I go around and take a thousand dollars from a hundred people and give it to someone else, it doesn’t increase spending and wealth because, of course, the people from whom I take the cash would have spent it on other things. So the net effect is nil. And, of course, a rule of economics is, the more you subsidize something (in this case, poverty) the more of it you’ll have. You might make penury so attractive that people will quit their jobs, hoping to get the free cash instead of working for it like a chump, and then our economy will suffer more.
If you happen to live in Texas, you are allowed to use lethal force to protect life and property.
And it wouldn’t hurt either to say “I was fearing for my life! I thought I was gonna die!” to the authorities and all the other witnesses.
IIRC, this was one justification Saddam Hussein used for invading Kuwait (and is still using to justify his periodic escalations of tensions). He says that Kuwait doesn’t really have any oil, and that the rich Kuwaiti oil wells actually sit in Kuwait, but are drilled diagonally so that they pull their oil from underneath Iraq. He doesn’t seem to realize that this makes him sound even more whacked out of his gourd. . .
I wouldn’t say that. I’ve heard of the concept of slant drilling before, and yeah, it’s dishonest as hell. I don’t think Iraq’s claims are true, but if they were, I’d go so far as to say that Iraq had a legitimate reason to invade Kuwait. Of course, the rest of the world wouldn’t have helped Kuwait if Iraq’s claims were ture, we’d have just made a few token speeches about human rights and then proptly forgot that Kuwait ever existed.
It’s really not a matter of “snakes” ripping off the sheep; if you buy land and want to include the mineral rights, you buy the mineral rights as well. It’ll cost more, or, alternatively, if you don’t foresee yourself pursuing exploitation of mineral resources, you can get the land at less cost without the mineral rights.
I know Diceman meant it’s dishonest if you don’t have the mineral rights. Slant, or directional, drilling is quite common - we’re drilling such a well now that would have required a location in a wetlands area to drill vertically. Offshore wells nowadays are probably more often directionally drilled than not. Part of Saddam’s noise about Kuwait included claims (hardly justifying his actions) that the Rumaylah oil field on the Iraq-Kuwait border was being unfairly exploited by Kuwait. Note that it doesn’t require any directional drilling for disputes to arise over stewardship of a reservoir where there’s more than one operator involved. Think about poppin’ a couple of straws in a milkshake and sharing it with your big sister - whoever sucks the hardest and fastest gets the most (and there I was, blowin’ bubbles).