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How does the US use water?

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Re: How does the US use water?

#191

Post by aidenn0 »

morleytj wrote: post #181
rconti wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. I grew up in Seattle and it never occurred to me that there were places where you didn't need to water a lawn.

I guess my general question in those scenarios is why spend time and water maintaining a lawn of plants that can't grow normally in the local climate? There are definitely plants which survive in the area year round in many places in the US.

It's an expectation. Sometimes just peer-pressure, sometimes with legal backing (there are many HOAs that require lawns, sometimes with a specific list of allowed grasses).

Re: How does the US use water?

#192

Post by ajmurmann »

arp242 wrote: post #57

> We can also think about it in economic terms. The 2.5 billion gallons per day required to grow cotton in the US created about six billion pounds of cotton in 2023, worth around $4.5 billion. Data centers, by contrast, are critical infrastructure for technology companies worth many trillions of dollars. Anthropic alone, just one of many AI companies, is already making $5 billion dollars every year selling access to…

"Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not."

If this was an actual problem, clothing prices would go up and clothing and cotton producers would outspend the AI companies if that's where the demand was. You are anticipating a problem that doesn't exist that the market is the best tool to solve once it were to arise. Prices are a fabulous feedback mechanism. The absence of prices as signals is what made planned economies fail and this was one of the main issues in the Socialist Calculation Debate. Don't try to guess what people want or need! As long as there is no market failure (no competition, natural monopoly, etc), price signals will lead to proper resource allocation.

Re: How does the US use water?

#193

Post by ajmurmann »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #161
ryandrake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family h…

Dense infra is easier and cheaper to build and maintain than inherently sprawling single family infra where you lay down a lot of material and fixed costs just to service each single home and the infra between them. The tax base you have per meter of sprawling single family infra doesn't even necessarily cover the maintenance. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-the-real-... And "build moar housing" tr…

You might enjoy the book Scale by Geoffrey West. One of the cool things he shows is that infrastructure needs of cities scale with an exponent of 0.85 while social things like incomes, patents but also crime scale with an exponent of 1.15. So as cities grow they get more efficient and it seems to be somewhat of a natural law that crosses countries and cultures.

Re: How does the US use water?

#194

Post by ajmurmann »

Maxion wrote: post #135
hammock wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they are calling “per capita domestic water use” is the per capita public+self supplied, which is not the same as home use. They sort of hand-wave over “most of this is used at home” but really it is inclusive of not only lawns (which are bigger in the US) but commercial use of water as well- commercial landscaping (far more in the US than in Europe) and other business use Plumbing fixtures are also more regulat…

As with most things, I think there's multiple things. US home also tend to be larger, meaning the hot water line is longer from the tank to the shower. Most americans I know tend to leve the shower running before they get in so it "warms up". I've never been in a European shower that's required that.

"I've never been in a European shower that's required that." Unfortunately, my parents' home in Germany does require this.

Re: How does the US use water?

#195

Post by sellmesoap »

pfdietz wrote: post #149
sellmesoap wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of historical reasons for people to be angry at Nestle, aside from their impact on water.

It's become a meme, or a badge to display your tribal affiliation, to be mad at Nestle. Monsanto is another example of this phenomenon.

Do you think that leading mothers away from natural breast feeding into buying nestle formula is good for babies? Terminator crops that won't propagate from seed also have the same SaaS feel, making two natural solutions for human sustinanace up for rent, directing science research away from negative conclusions about both these scenarios, creating dependency on both these industries sounds like a win for money but not human wellbeing. Sign me up for the tribe that says no to that!

Edit: adding a reference for nestle on the topic. https://voxdev.org/topic/health/deadly-toll-marketing-infant...

Re: How does the US use water?

#196

Post by pfdietz »

sellmesoap wrote: post #195
pfdietz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's become a meme, or a badge to display your tribal affiliation, to be mad at Nestle. Monsanto is another example of this phenomenon.

Do you think that leading mothers away from natural breast feeding into buying nestle formula is good for babies? Terminator crops that won't propagate from seed also have the same SaaS feel, making two natural solutions for human sustinanace up for rent, directing science research away from negative conclusions about both these scenarios, creating dependency on both these industries sounds like a win for money but n…

Great examples of the sort of nonsense I was talking about.

Formula is fine. How do I know that? If it weren't, if there were any evidence it was bad, the FDA would not allow it to be sold in the US. But there's a wide variety of such formulas here.

Perhaps you think formula is fine for we smart first worlders, but poor dumb third world mothers have to have their agency removed and us determine what they can choose? Strong pass on that; this is no longer the age of European colonialism.

Terminator crops... oh boy. This one is hilariously ridiculous. Their sin is that they don't allow the farmer to retain seeds and plant them again. You know what else has that property? All hybrid seeds! These have been around for nearly a century. No hybrids breed true if you try to replant them; the uniform combinations of genes in the first generation hybrid becomes randomized in the second generation.

You aren't complaining about terminator seeds, you are complaining about modern agriculture.

Re: How does the US use water?

#197

Post by sellmesoap »

pfdietz wrote: post #196
sellmesoap wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that leading mothers away from natural breast feeding into buying nestle formula is good for babies? Terminator crops that won't propagate from seed also have the same SaaS feel, making two natural solutions for human sustinanace up for rent, directing science research away from negative conclusions about both these scenarios, creating dependency on both these industries sounds like a win for money but n…

Great examples of the sort of nonsense I was talking about. Formula is fine. How do I know that? If it weren't, if there were any evidence it was bad, the FDA would not allow it to be sold in the US. But there's a wide variety of such formulas here. Perhaps you think formula is fine for we smart first worlders, but poor dumb third world mothers have to have their agency removed and us determine what they can choose?…

What I'm complaining about is everything being for rent. And how we get there in mamy cases is by turning a blind eye to knock on effects of these technologies. There's a reciprocal immune response between mother and baby through nursing. I haven't heard of a formula that has this feature. That link I posted claimed that approximately 212,000 babies died a year in areas without clean water when supplied with formula. That's a bleak outcome, is that just the cost of progress for you?

Re: How does the US use water?

#198

Post by lxe »

saagarjha wrote: post #187
lxe wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a modest front and back yard in the "hot" part of the Bay Area. Summer months I'm pouring 5000 gallons a week to keep it moderately brown. It's insane.

Why keep it, then?

Nice for kids to play. Easy to take care of. Water is relatively inexpensive.

Re: How does the US use water?

#199

Post by pfdietz »

sellmesoap wrote: post #197
pfdietz wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great examples of the sort of nonsense I was talking about. Formula is fine. How do I know that? If it weren't, if there were any evidence it was bad, the FDA would not allow it to be sold in the US. But there's a wide variety of such formulas here. Perhaps you think formula is fine for we smart first worlders, but poor dumb third world mothers have to have their agency removed and us determine what they can choose?…

What I'm complaining about is everything being for rent. And how we get there in mamy cases is by turning a blind eye to knock on effects of these technologies. There's a reciprocal immune response between mother and baby through nursing. I haven't heard of a formula that has this feature. That link I posted claimed that approximately 212,000 babies died a year in areas without clean water when supplied with formula.…

You're again engaging in the patronizing approach of removing any agency from those involved in these countries. Some mothers there would certainly benefit from access to formula, just as they do in your country. You remove this because you don't consider them able to make choices for themselves. It's the same horrid mindset of the colonialists, seeing the third worlders as primitives "just down from the trees".

Re: How does the US use water?

#200

Post by sellmesoap »

pfdietz wrote: post #199
sellmesoap wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm complaining about is everything being for rent. And how we get there in mamy cases is by turning a blind eye to knock on effects of these technologies. There's a reciprocal immune response between mother and baby through nursing. I haven't heard of a formula that has this feature. That link I posted claimed that approximately 212,000 babies died a year in areas without clean water when supplied with formula.…

You're again engaging in the patronizing approach of removing any agency from those involved in these countries. Some mothers there would certainly benefit from access to formula, just as they do in your country. You remove this because you don't consider them able to make choices for themselves. It's the same horrid mindset of the colonialists, seeing the third worlders as primitives "just down from the trees".

I agree about the agency, except the game is rigged, once you stop breast feeding it's hard to start again. So a mother is sold on a way to feed a baby that can free her up to work and anyone can toss a bottle to the kid, but then water quality becomes problematic, and the baby is the most vulnerable. You can't fall back to breast feeding. And the formula is no doubt funded by third world debt arrangements. Nestle didn't have the foresight to think about water quality, and it resulted in a tragic outcome. Even though they also sell water, they could have been the hero and made twice as much money if they were in the loop (not sure if they were in the water business back then).
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