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The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

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Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#151

Post by legitster »

phpisthebest wrote: post #145
legitster wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? Most places I have lived, the wording of the local ordinance says " IF you have a grass lawn, it must be maintained". I don't think many places would have issue with a nice xeriscaped native garden or even a cinder lawn.

Even in cities that do not call out grass, combination of ordinances make grass the easiest and most economical, one could not replace it with say concrete. These are set in a variety of zoning, building, and maintenance ordinances For your "native garden" depending on your meaning could be banned because the city classifies all "unmaintained plants" to be weeds in violation of the ordinance. Various zoning and build…

Okay, but there's a difference in saying something is banned vs saying it is expensive/too much work.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#152

Post by azinman2 »

lbrito wrote: post #86
joshuaheard wrote: post #14

On a planet that is 2/3 water, I think we can find a solution. Desalination comes to mind. We built an interstate highway system. We can build an interstate water distribution system for desalinated Pacific Ocean water.

>We can build an interstate water distribution system Canals are a well-known technology. Humanity has several thousand years of experience with them. Desalination is the real problem.

It isn’t magically flat between ocean across the US. You’d need extreme amounts of energy to get it over the mountains.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#153

Post by etc-hosts »

anigbrowl wrote: post #116
throw8383833jj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the real estate agent's duty to inform house buyers that they property they're buying may not have water in the future and what a huge pain point that would be. The only logical conclusion i can come to is that the buyers real estate agents have not been honest in this regard.

Other people just don't care. I know a Mojave desert community far to the east of LA where water delivery happens by truck. It's a very harsh and unforgiving environment, but I really liked it when I worked out there some years ago and have considered moving there because I like solitude and am comfortable with a very frugal/minimal lifestyle. Last year I ran across an LA Times article about how people were making di…

Would a white house reflect more height and be cooler inside ?

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#154

Post by shakezula »

ch4s3 wrote: post #17
shakezula wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Government for thee, not for me" is the prevailing sentiment for these types. The article even mentions it - the "fuck you, I got mine" attitude is a core cultural identity to Americans and this is exactly how it manifests.

That is absolutely NOT a core cultural identity to Americans. There is a tendency to want to solve things at a local or regional level that frustrates larger issues like water management. There is also a western do it yourself individualism that puts common resources in contention, but Americans aren't all some John Galt/John Wayne hybrid.

> There is also a western do it yourself individualism that puts common resources in contention

This is exactly the John Galt/John Wayne hybrid cultural identity that you're saying doesn't exist manifesting itself. That same "individualism" is why we can't come together long enough to build water infrastructure for people who belong to that same community. It's genuine insanity. Americans deserve every bit of pain we're about to experience over water rights in the coming decades because we won't acknowledge that mentality is the problem.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#155

Post by rightbyte »

bradfa wrote: post #117
rightbyte wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't US fire trucks carry water?

Only enough for a very short amount of time, basically the water in the truck or fire engine lasts long enough for the firefighters to get connected to a hydrant and not much more.

Ah ok. I think I greatly overestimated how long those tanks last for.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#156

Post by crikeyjoe »

mechagodzilla wrote: post #113
crikeyjoe wrote: post #83

California refuses to desalinate, which would solve all the problems. I thought they were smart, instead they're political. They'd rather kill off the southwest. Assholes.

Desalinated water is $1000+ per acre-foot, while water from existing water infrastructure is heavily subsidized and sold for a few dollars per acre-foot to farmers. There are many reasonable arguments as to why we should not be building new infrastructure that produces water at 100x the cost it is currently sold at. Nearly all water projects in the west in the last hundred years are “political”, not economic.

You'd think someone would solve that problem, I guess all those techies in California really are stupid.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#157

Post by wizofaus »

RC_ITR wrote: post #109
throw8383833jj wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what ever money save from garbage pickup will be vastly outdone by the enormous waste an HOA brings. Our HOA costs me 2K per year (that's a whole tesla every 20 years = 40K). And the only thing they do is take care of a couple of benches, blow some leaves off a few bushes, maybe a few sprinklers in a green area and 2 big white fences. Other than that, all the money goes to administration and inspectors that go around…

Two unrelated comments: 1) The conspiracy theory is that intentionally pointless HOAs were pushed by small government folks as a way to make people skeptical of tax-for-service organizations. 2) The HOAs point isn’t to regulate the 99% of people who would otherwise maintain their house. It’s for the 1% of people that wouldn’t and in order to avoid housing discrimination charges, you have to regulate everyone equally.

Do HOAs even exist outside the US? I don't know of anything similar in Australia other than body corporate organizations for blocks of units but their scope (and cost) is far more limited. All the other services seemingly provided by HOAs in the US would all be local government provided here. I assumed it was much the same elsewhere in the (developed) world...

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#158

Post by eesmith »

D13Fd wrote: post #139
eesmith wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under the section "Tropical climate needs" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house#Tropical_climate... > Passive cooling, solar air conditioning, and other solutions in passive solar building design need to be studied to adapt the Passive house concept for use in more regions of the world. > There is a certified Passive House in the hot and humid climate of Lafayette, Louisiana, USA, which uses energy recovery…

I saw that, nothing there says that cold climates are easier.

I see "easier" as meaning different things.

1) it's easier in the Scandinavian and German-speaking countries because passive house building materials are easier and cheaper to acquire ("other countries may spend 8% more on constructing Passive Houses than conventional buildings because the Passive House components may not be readily available" - "Examing the Prospective of Implementing Passive House Standards in Providing Sustainable Schools", https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5031991?casa_tok...)

2) it's easier in cooler areas because there's more experience in how to build for those climates (as Wikipedia points out).

3) it's easier in cooler areas because the energy saved is higher, and so easier to justify economically. "Passive Houses for different climate zones" at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037877881... shows "Energy demands of the Reference Passive Houses in the different locations" in Table 3, with:

            Yekaterinburg  Tokyo   Shanghai   Las Vegas   Singapore  Abu Dhabi
   Total saving  96%        90%       87%       86%         79%        77%
Those are all good savings in power use, but clearly better in colder climates.

(Sorry, I can't find TCO.)

4) From my understanding, it's easier to well-insulate and let body heat and appliances provide the heat, using the cool exterior to regulate temperature, than it is to deal with cooling and humidity issues in warmer climates to bring the internal temperature to the "inner comfort range" specified by the Passivhaus Institute, Fig. 8 of the link in 3).

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#159

Post by galdosdi »

legitster wrote: post #44

I'll be a resident contrarian and argue that building more houses in the SW is a good thing. - The desert is probably the best place to build sprawling metropolises with the lowest ecological impact (overall) - Cooling is more energy efficient than heating. - Houses in places like AZ are implicitly less wasteful (no lawns, better insulated, etc). - People like it But the question is how to get water to these places?…

> - The desert is probably the best place to build sprawling metropolises with the lowest ecological impact (overall)

The only problem is then these metropolises are in the desert, and you have to ship all agricultural products to them. That's fine most of the time when times are good and supply chains work, but it's fragile, if anything goes wrong enough in the worldwide food markets. A desert metropolis is like an island nation that must import all its food.

A precarious position if times ever get tough. I believe currently the USA is a net exporter of food products, but if you started building and growing enough desert cities that might stop being the case

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#160

Post by Gibbon1 »

wizofaus wrote: post #157
RC_ITR wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two unrelated comments: 1) The conspiracy theory is that intentionally pointless HOAs were pushed by small government folks as a way to make people skeptical of tax-for-service organizations. 2) The HOAs point isn’t to regulate the 99% of people who would otherwise maintain their house. It’s for the 1% of people that wouldn’t and in order to avoid housing discrimination charges, you have to regulate everyone equally.

Do HOAs even exist outside the US? I don't know of anything similar in Australia other than body corporate organizations for blocks of units but their scope (and cost) is far more limited. All the other services seemingly provided by HOAs in the US would all be local government provided here. I assumed it was much the same elsewhere in the (developed) world...

I'm dubious. HOAs were created to do an end run around Shelley vs Kraemer.
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