5 ms·

Remember Arab Spring? People in the West believe that it was about "freedom", but it was about food and life getting so expensive normal people needed to spend

by pipio21 10y ago

Remember Arab Spring? People in the West believe that it was about "freedom", but it was about food and life getting so expensive normal people needed to spend most of their salary just on it. Poor people not being able to eat well or not eat at all as there were no jobs. People will revolt if they can't buy food because it is very expensive. That is the civilization ending treat: war. War is really the worst experience you could experience. I will remember things I have seen in Congo all my life. For example WWII was created because Germans lived a miserable life paying for WW1 and Great depression. Just interest in the WW1 debt grew faster than their productivity meaning they were slaves forever, just like Greece is today. Americans were very careful not making the compensation for war for Germany excessive in order not to repeat History. People will choose whoever person that promises an easy exit for their problems, and the easiest thing is to steal from others. You don't have water, you take the places that have water, like the Golan heights. And that is war. For market forces to work you need a long time. Inventors will only discover innovative methods after working for decades in a problem. Letting your lawn die? This is a really stupid idea. I have worked in Sahara desert precisely helping people stop the desert just putting vegetation in place(that holds sand and makes soil so wind does not move it).

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CydeWeys 10y ago
The Arab Spring happened precisely in those countries that were already totalitarian and dysfunctional anyway. If not this crisis it could've just as easily been something else, like what's going on in Turkey right now. A lot of the Middle East petro-states are only propped up by their oil wealth, the profits on which go mostly to the elites, with token handouts and subsidies for everyone else. They've already had to subsidize food and water for a long time in order to prevent their societies from revolting, and increased costs due to desalination is thus only a difference in degree, not kind. As for the World War II comparison, well, the world is simply different now in a huge number of ways. So while I don't disagree with the examples you bring up, I just don't see them being relevant to developed democratic societies, which I believe can solve these problems. A lot of the remainder already has problems anyway, and water scarcity is one of a laundry list of problems on their plate, which also includes displacement due to rising sea levels, climate change, you name it. As for letting your lawn die, what I really meant but didn't say because it doesn't sound as pithy is to replace your lawn with landscaping or native flora that require much less water to maintain. There are many parts of California, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and other places that are all essentially desert, and rapidly tend back towards desert in the absence of voluminous irrigation. It makes no sense to waste thousands of liters of water per lawn per day keeping non-native grasses alive in the middle of a desert. For the cost of only several months' water you can replace your yard with something that doesn't need watering and won't blow away in a storm, the simplest and cheapest replacement being gravel.
- valarauca1 10y ago
  >The Arab Spring happened precisely in those countries that were already totalitarian and dysfunctional anyway. But they were nonetheless capitalist. There were market forces at work to fix the problem, but it failed . Which still is a powerful argument against your thesis. Sometimes the hand of the market isn't sufficiently incentivized by starving broke people. Sure they would pay, but can they?
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    Were the actually capitalist? When I think of the Middle East monarchies dominated by an inherited nobility that controls all of the wealth and gives handouts to keep the lower class from revolting, "capitalism" is not what comes to mind. I feel like I'm being mistaken for a staunch libertarian here, so I want to point out that I'm not that at all. I do think there is a big role for government investment to play in society, including in providing drinkable freshwater. This was the Israeli solution, and it's increasingly going that way in California as well. I'm not advocating for strict market-force-only supply-and-demand, but rather just pointing out that wasteful uses of water will go down as the price of water goes up, which it should be allowed to do rather than being subsidized in order to control wasteful uses. The cost of having enough water to drink and to cook with is measured in the low cents per day per person in the US. A single penny gets you over two gallons from the faucet where I live. And I'm in favor of safety net programs to prevent people from dying from illness, hunger, or thirst.
    - noobermin 10y ago
      I think the point here is as in Israel, there needs to be a system, government, and culture that makes a free market possible. In the case where such a system is corrupt or instead offloads the costs onto another group of people, such a system falls apart and you have revolution as a result.
      - pm90 10y ago
        Exactly. While the parent comments correctly claim that many Middle-Eastern countries are technically capitalist, they do not provide a fair system where anyone with the capital can set up shop and start offering products/services. There is a large amount of bureaucratic red tape and often lack of property protections that scare away genuine capital.

by pipio21 10y ago

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CydeWeys 10y ago

The Arab Spring happened precisely in those countries that were already totalitarian and dysfunctional anyway. If not this crisis it could've just as easily been something else, like what's going on in Turkey right now. A lot of the Middle East petro-states are only propped up by their oil wealth, the profits on which go mostly to the elites, with token handouts and subsidies for everyone else. They've already had to subsidize food and water for a long time in order to prevent their societies from revolting, and increased costs due to desalination is thus only a difference in degree, not kind. As for the World War II comparison, well, the world is simply different now in a huge number of ways. So while I don't disagree with the examples you bring up, I just don't see them being relevant to developed democratic societies, which I believe can solve these problems. A lot of the remainder already has problems anyway, and water scarcity is one of a laundry list of problems on their plate, which also includes displacement due to rising sea levels, climate change, you name it. As for letting your lawn die, what I really meant but didn't say because it doesn't sound as pithy is to replace your lawn with landscaping or native flora that require much less water to maintain. There are many parts of California, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and other places that are all essentially desert, and rapidly tend back towards desert in the absence of voluminous irrigation. It makes no sense to waste thousands of liters of water per lawn per day keeping non-native grasses alive in the middle of a desert. For the cost of only several months' water you can replace your yard with something that doesn't need watering and won't blow away in a storm, the simplest and cheapest replacement being gravel.

valarauca1 10y ago
>The Arab Spring happened precisely in those countries that were already totalitarian and dysfunctional anyway. But they were nonetheless capitalist. There were market forces at work to fix the problem, but it failed . Which still is a powerful argument against your thesis. Sometimes the hand of the market isn't sufficiently incentivized by starving broke people. Sure they would pay, but can they?
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  Were the actually capitalist? When I think of the Middle East monarchies dominated by an inherited nobility that controls all of the wealth and gives handouts to keep the lower class from revolting, "capitalism" is not what comes to mind. I feel like I'm being mistaken for a staunch libertarian here, so I want to point out that I'm not that at all. I do think there is a big role for government investment to play in society, including in providing drinkable freshwater. This was the Israeli solution, and it's increasingly going that way in California as well. I'm not advocating for strict market-force-only supply-and-demand, but rather just pointing out that wasteful uses of water will go down as the price of water goes up, which it should be allowed to do rather than being subsidized in order to control wasteful uses. The cost of having enough water to drink and to cook with is measured in the low cents per day per person in the US. A single penny gets you over two gallons from the faucet where I live. And I'm in favor of safety net programs to prevent people from dying from illness, hunger, or thirst.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    I think the point here is as in Israel, there needs to be a system, government, and culture that makes a free market possible. In the case where such a system is corrupt or instead offloads the costs onto another group of people, such a system falls apart and you have revolution as a result.
    - pm90 10y ago
      Exactly. While the parent comments correctly claim that many Middle-Eastern countries are technically capitalist, they do not provide a fair system where anyone with the capital can set up shop and start offering products/services. There is a large amount of bureaucratic red tape and often lack of property protections that scare away genuine capital.