14 ms·

> especially if we ever get to a point where some people can 'afford' water while others can't. We are almost there. In Bangalore, India due to hockey-stick li

> especially if we ever get to a point where some people can 'afford' water while others can't. We are almost there. In Bangalore, India due to hockey-stick like expansion of houses, mainly high rise gated communities, the municipality is just not able to supply tap water. They all rely on daily supply of water tankers. However, even that water isn't potable. So house holds buy bottled water or have RO machines. Bear in mind, this is the situation for middle/upper-middle-income group. Lower income groups just drink any water they can, waterborne disease is rampant. This[1] talk from P Sainath about the water crisis in India is revealing. I would the situation would be similar in other emerging countries. I remember that a few months ago Cape Town, SA ran out of water[2]. Water was strictly rationed. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-l2LvA2dSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-l2LvA2dSI [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/cape-town-was-90-days-away-from-running-out-of-water-heres-how-it-averted-the-crisis/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/cape-town-was-90-days...

IronRanger 6y ago
With the core factor being that there are more people than the water supplies can support. The solution here is a one-child or no-child policy, just as in China.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Desalination at scale is the solution.
  - cdmckay 6y ago
    This has environmental consequences.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      We've opened pandora's box. I'm not saying a one child policy isn't a solution but it's not the solution.
  - p1mrx 6y ago
    Seawater is the solution; desalination is isolating the solvent.
    - heyoni 6y ago
      Technically, it’s GNU/desalination.
  - siruva07 6y ago
    I think atmospheric water generation at scale is the solution
- cdmckay 6y ago
  How do you know there's not enough water supplies? In this case, it sounds like what's needed is better city planning and more equitable distribution of water. I don't know the specifics here, but I suspect there's plenty of water but it's probably being tied up in industrial applications. Also, instead of letting the market decide where to build houses, why not build them where there's infrastructure to support them, instead of building them where the profit is highest? Also, have you even considered what a one-child policy entails? It's forcibly sterilizing or aborting pregnancies.
  - eurasiantiger 6y ago
    The problem isn’t that there is no water supply, the problem is that Indian water supplies are incredibly low quality. Over 70% of surface water in India is unpotable. The main problem is inadequate or non-existent waste water treatment, but agricultural and industrial runoffs also play a large part.
  - Razengan 6y ago
    How do you know there will ALWAYS be enough water supplies? There must be a real limit to how many humans this planet can support.
    - jjk166 6y ago
      An area might run out of water, but the planet won't. The planet would run out of literally everything else before we run out of water. It takes water to make a human. You will pass the point where you can't expand the population before you get to the point where you can't maintain the population that already exists. If something does decrease the water supply, you will in a short period of time have a smaller population to support. Such is the nature of carrying capacity.
      - bobthepanda 6y ago
        Sure, but practically speaking there is a lack of potable freshwater in certain places. You can’t just stick a straw into the Indian Ocean and glug away.
- berkes 6y ago
  No. The solution is to fix the water supply infrastructure so it can handle the current population. Don't push politics and ideologies into things that have little to do with it. What you describe is the underlying problem, one that needs to be solved as well (though how, is another thing). But solving that, even today, won't bring water to the people who need it today.
  - IronRanger 6y ago
    And who is going to come in and fix this water infrastructure, the British? The fact is that environmental conditions worsen each decade in India and quality of life is lower than in the 70s when the population was 555million (currently 1.3b). Meanwhile the upper castes flee the country en-masse to the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe. The Indian population will rise to 1.6b by 2050. It will be substantially easier to fix water infrastructure if this number was hundreds of millions lower. Population management is a bigger part of the solution than pipes and dams.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      > Population management is a bigger part of the solution than pipes and dams. "Population management" is a road leading straight to ethical catastrophes, to murder and other horrible forms of suffering. There have been many of these - genocides, "Lebensraum im Osten" aka Nazi Germany invading Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, China's "1 child policy". The best way a society can handle population management is fact-based sex education and safe, cheap access to contraceptives and medical abortion, and general access to healthcare and a social security network so that people don't have to have half a dozen children if they want one or two to survive to adulthood and care for them at old age.
      - matthewdgreen 6y ago
        Are you sure you’re disagreeing with the parent poster? It sounds to me like you’ve just outlined a plan to achieve the same goal.
- celticninja 6y ago
  It's the distribution of the water that is the problem, not the amount.
- betwixthewires 6y ago
  The fact that you're recommending a one child or no child policy with a one sentence statement tells me you've never even done even high level research on the topic of population dynamic or resource allocation. The one child policy has been disastrous for China. Imagine a whole generation of people that have no siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles (after 2 generations of one child policy). The social fabric in China has been gutted by this policy. Also it means that after 1 generation of this policy the number of working people is significantly less than the number of retired people. It destroys economic output and ability to care for a population, the oldest people suffer in a system like this, and younger people spend more of their earnings taking care of older people than improving their lives, so living standards stagnate or go down, you wind up with less resource availability. A no child policy leads to extinction after one generation. You don't even need to do research on anything to know this, just simply thinking about what you're saying for a moment works. A reduction in population does not increase resources available to people. Resources must be produced by people, a reduction in population also reduces that output. For historical proof, look at the numerous examples of famines that occurred in previous centuries, when there were less than a billion people on earth, by your logic life should've been more plentiful throughout history until recently but the opposite is actually the case, because resource availability scales with production capacity, it does not simply decrease with demand pressure.
  - dirtyid 6y ago
    GDP/productivity scaled with population PRE-INDUSTRIALIZATION. It's why China historically occupied greatest share of global GDP, it simply had greater proportion of global population. GDP then was also proportionally accounted by subsistent farming. Civilization was built on the little bits of surplus left over. Post-industrialization, capital has been gradually accumulating line share of productivity. It's how US accounted for 40% of global GDP with 6% of world population post-war. Post-automation, you simply do not need that much labour for large scale widget factories. Nor do you need that many farmers. There is now a curve where excess people becomes a drain. In China's case, even at the height of pre-automation manufacturing economy, the manufacturing sector accounted for 400M jobs. 300M work in agriculture, kept deliberately deindustrialized (until recently) specifically as a jobs program. Today, 600M subsist on less than 2000 USD per year. These are excess people. What do these numbers mean? World demand was/is literally not enough of uplift 1.4B Chinese out of poverty. That's simply too many people. The sooner China can settle at 800M (2100 estimate) the better. There's literally not enough resources in the world for China to consume much above middle income, let alone high income like the west. If everyone consumed like US we would need 5 earths. China is 1/5 of global population. Long term, One Child Policy was the better moral calculus despite social ramifications, i.e. demographic bomb, which TBF is blown out of proportion. It's better to be less populous and rich than the alternative. At minimum wealth allows you to import cheap surplus labour to take care of aging populations, which China should be able to arbitrage internally due to income disparity. Family Planning and crudely, millions dead under Mao worked in China's favour (well minus purging experts). The alternative is geometric population explosion to support successive generations. We know from overpopulation studies that this is fundamentally a self terminating system that will exceed carrying capacity of Earth.
- paublyrne 6y ago
  The birth rate in India is not particularly high, at 2.x, and my anecdotal experiences of travelling and working there is that younger couples prefer to have fewer children, only 1 or 2. Of course the population is already large, but that's unlikley to get much smaller in the short to medium term, so is hardly a useful suggestion.
- imtringued 6y ago
  The consensus is that giving women roles other than child rearing reduces the birth rat far more effectively than an outright ban. The other factor would be to pave all the damn dirt roads. Teenagers in Cameroon do dirt road maintenance as their summer job. It's a complete waste of effort but it encourages parents to have children.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    > It's a complete waste of effort Why is that a waste of effort?
thisistheend123 6y ago
If the water tanker guys are able fulfill the deficiency, then you know that there is enough water. It's only that the waterworks aren't supplying enough so that people have no choice left but to pay the water tanker guys. Municipalities in most of Urban India are hand in glove with these water tanker mafias. Good governance is the answer.
- sumedh 6y ago
  The water tanker guys also steal the municipal water supply by giving bribes to some of the officials.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    Happens in the west too. No bribes required. There’s already non-secured water everywhere by law: fire hydrants.
    - gmadsen 6y ago
      you think there is rampant theft of water in the US due to fire hydrants? I have never heard of that, do you have a source?
      - riversflow 6y ago
        Yeah I doubt that much water is stolen from hydrants in the US. I have heard of business using it, but as I understood it they are required to get permitting and pay for usage by monitoring their flow, at least in California.
      - Scoundreller 6y ago
        Usually it happens at the geographic fringes of civilization where cisterns/tanks get filled from municipal water supplies. Not people running a hose to their house. But there’s also a lot of truck-delivered water used in construction/dust control. No shortage of reports/charges: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fire+hydrant+water+theft https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fire+hydrant+water+theft
huhtenberg 6y ago
> just drink any water they can, waterborne disease is rampant Is boiling water not option or am I missing something? On a world scale having a potable tap water is more of an exception than a norm.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Purification tablets are also not that expensive compared to the effects of crippling diseases.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    Crippling disease is free if you don’t get any medical care.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Ah yes, the American way.
    - coddle-hark 6y ago
      You’re forgetting the opportunity cost.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        You have to have opportunities to have opportunity cost.
- MisterTea 6y ago
  This assumes that people have adequate access to the energy required for boiling and have the necessary equipment to do so.
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    Not at all an insignificant amount of energy btw.
runawaybottle 6y ago
This is kind of one of those shocks most people will get when they goto those countries. Just as you said, even the well off have to fill up their water tanks daily and hope they don’t use it all up. I have no idea how everyone else gets by, but certainly in the west we simply take water for granted.
- Balgair 6y ago
  Speak for yourself there. I know that CO has been in a drought more often than not this century: https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/colorado https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/colorado
  - meesles 6y ago
    Having lived in CO + TX (both states that get 'water restrictions'), never once did I worry about not having water to drink or bathe. They usually just ask us to conserve water and not water lawns so heavily in the summer. Not really comparable to countries where you need to plan to acquire and stock water for your family for daily use.
    - Balgair 6y ago
      True, but it seems like it's only a matter of time then. What can you call a chronic 20 year drought when it stretches to 40 years?
      - seattletech 6y ago
        A liberal conspiracy /s
      - DubiousPusher 6y ago
        Agreed. We don't know the consequences of pushing Mountain West aquifers the way we have. There is good evidence we are pulling out more than is replenished and therefore are incurring a deficit. What's more, we tend to think of the "West" as "won" but these states are mostly still growing as part of the American Westward expansion. A lot of Western State land only became easily accessible with the completion of the interstates in the 1960s 1970s and even 1980s. Therefore, the material abundance necessary for truly large scale populations to live in comfort has only come to these places in the last 40 years. This has caused a consistent population boom in some places which is not yet tapering and will lead to increased stress on these resources.

IronRanger 6y ago

With the core factor being that there are more people than the water supplies can support. The solution here is a one-child or no-child policy, just as in China.

rorykoehler 6y ago
Desalination at scale is the solution.
- cdmckay 6y ago
  This has environmental consequences.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    We've opened pandora's box. I'm not saying a one child policy isn't a solution but it's not the solution.
- p1mrx 6y ago
  Seawater is the solution; desalination is isolating the solvent.
  - heyoni 6y ago
    Technically, it’s GNU/desalination.
- siruva07 6y ago
  I think atmospheric water generation at scale is the solution
cdmckay 6y ago
How do you know there's not enough water supplies? In this case, it sounds like what's needed is better city planning and more equitable distribution of water. I don't know the specifics here, but I suspect there's plenty of water but it's probably being tied up in industrial applications. Also, instead of letting the market decide where to build houses, why not build them where there's infrastructure to support them, instead of building them where the profit is highest? Also, have you even considered what a one-child policy entails? It's forcibly sterilizing or aborting pregnancies.
- eurasiantiger 6y ago
  The problem isn’t that there is no water supply, the problem is that Indian water supplies are incredibly low quality. Over 70% of surface water in India is unpotable. The main problem is inadequate or non-existent waste water treatment, but agricultural and industrial runoffs also play a large part.
- Razengan 6y ago
  How do you know there will ALWAYS be enough water supplies? There must be a real limit to how many humans this planet can support.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    An area might run out of water, but the planet won't. The planet would run out of literally everything else before we run out of water. It takes water to make a human. You will pass the point where you can't expand the population before you get to the point where you can't maintain the population that already exists. If something does decrease the water supply, you will in a short period of time have a smaller population to support. Such is the nature of carrying capacity.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      Sure, but practically speaking there is a lack of potable freshwater in certain places. You can’t just stick a straw into the Indian Ocean and glug away.
berkes 6y ago
No. The solution is to fix the water supply infrastructure so it can handle the current population. Don't push politics and ideologies into things that have little to do with it. What you describe is the underlying problem, one that needs to be solved as well (though how, is another thing). But solving that, even today, won't bring water to the people who need it today.
- IronRanger 6y ago
  And who is going to come in and fix this water infrastructure, the British? The fact is that environmental conditions worsen each decade in India and quality of life is lower than in the 70s when the population was 555million (currently 1.3b). Meanwhile the upper castes flee the country en-masse to the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe. The Indian population will rise to 1.6b by 2050. It will be substantially easier to fix water infrastructure if this number was hundreds of millions lower. Population management is a bigger part of the solution than pipes and dams.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > Population management is a bigger part of the solution than pipes and dams. "Population management" is a road leading straight to ethical catastrophes, to murder and other horrible forms of suffering. There have been many of these - genocides, "Lebensraum im Osten" aka Nazi Germany invading Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, China's "1 child policy". The best way a society can handle population management is fact-based sex education and safe, cheap access to contraceptives and medical abortion, and general access to healthcare and a social security network so that people don't have to have half a dozen children if they want one or two to survive to adulthood and care for them at old age.
    - matthewdgreen 6y ago
      Are you sure you’re disagreeing with the parent poster? It sounds to me like you’ve just outlined a plan to achieve the same goal.
celticninja 6y ago
It's the distribution of the water that is the problem, not the amount.
betwixthewires 6y ago
The fact that you're recommending a one child or no child policy with a one sentence statement tells me you've never even done even high level research on the topic of population dynamic or resource allocation. The one child policy has been disastrous for China. Imagine a whole generation of people that have no siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles (after 2 generations of one child policy). The social fabric in China has been gutted by this policy. Also it means that after 1 generation of this policy the number of working people is significantly less than the number of retired people. It destroys economic output and ability to care for a population, the oldest people suffer in a system like this, and younger people spend more of their earnings taking care of older people than improving their lives, so living standards stagnate or go down, you wind up with less resource availability. A no child policy leads to extinction after one generation. You don't even need to do research on anything to know this, just simply thinking about what you're saying for a moment works. A reduction in population does not increase resources available to people. Resources must be produced by people, a reduction in population also reduces that output. For historical proof, look at the numerous examples of famines that occurred in previous centuries, when there were less than a billion people on earth, by your logic life should've been more plentiful throughout history until recently but the opposite is actually the case, because resource availability scales with production capacity, it does not simply decrease with demand pressure.
- dirtyid 6y ago
  GDP/productivity scaled with population PRE-INDUSTRIALIZATION. It's why China historically occupied greatest share of global GDP, it simply had greater proportion of global population. GDP then was also proportionally accounted by subsistent farming. Civilization was built on the little bits of surplus left over. Post-industrialization, capital has been gradually accumulating line share of productivity. It's how US accounted for 40% of global GDP with 6% of world population post-war. Post-automation, you simply do not need that much labour for large scale widget factories. Nor do you need that many farmers. There is now a curve where excess people becomes a drain. In China's case, even at the height of pre-automation manufacturing economy, the manufacturing sector accounted for 400M jobs. 300M work in agriculture, kept deliberately deindustrialized (until recently) specifically as a jobs program. Today, 600M subsist on less than 2000 USD per year. These are excess people. What do these numbers mean? World demand was/is literally not enough of uplift 1.4B Chinese out of poverty. That's simply too many people. The sooner China can settle at 800M (2100 estimate) the better. There's literally not enough resources in the world for China to consume much above middle income, let alone high income like the west. If everyone consumed like US we would need 5 earths. China is 1/5 of global population. Long term, One Child Policy was the better moral calculus despite social ramifications, i.e. demographic bomb, which TBF is blown out of proportion. It's better to be less populous and rich than the alternative. At minimum wealth allows you to import cheap surplus labour to take care of aging populations, which China should be able to arbitrage internally due to income disparity. Family Planning and crudely, millions dead under Mao worked in China's favour (well minus purging experts). The alternative is geometric population explosion to support successive generations. We know from overpopulation studies that this is fundamentally a self terminating system that will exceed carrying capacity of Earth.
paublyrne 6y ago
The birth rate in India is not particularly high, at 2.x, and my anecdotal experiences of travelling and working there is that younger couples prefer to have fewer children, only 1 or 2. Of course the population is already large, but that's unlikley to get much smaller in the short to medium term, so is hardly a useful suggestion.
imtringued 6y ago
The consensus is that giving women roles other than child rearing reduces the birth rat far more effectively than an outright ban. The other factor would be to pave all the damn dirt roads. Teenagers in Cameroon do dirt road maintenance as their summer job. It's a complete waste of effort but it encourages parents to have children.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  > It's a complete waste of effort Why is that a waste of effort?

thisistheend123 6y ago

If the water tanker guys are able fulfill the deficiency, then you know that there is enough water. It's only that the waterworks aren't supplying enough so that people have no choice left but to pay the water tanker guys. Municipalities in most of Urban India are hand in glove with these water tanker mafias. Good governance is the answer.

sumedh 6y ago
The water tanker guys also steal the municipal water supply by giving bribes to some of the officials.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  Happens in the west too. No bribes required. There’s already non-secured water everywhere by law: fire hydrants.
  - gmadsen 6y ago
    you think there is rampant theft of water in the US due to fire hydrants? I have never heard of that, do you have a source?
    - riversflow 6y ago
      Yeah I doubt that much water is stolen from hydrants in the US. I have heard of business using it, but as I understood it they are required to get permitting and pay for usage by monitoring their flow, at least in California.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      Usually it happens at the geographic fringes of civilization where cisterns/tanks get filled from municipal water supplies. Not people running a hose to their house. But there’s also a lot of truck-delivered water used in construction/dust control. No shortage of reports/charges: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fire+hydrant+water+theft https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fire+hydrant+water+theft

huhtenberg 6y ago

> just drink any water they can, waterborne disease is rampant Is boiling water not option or am I missing something? On a world scale having a potable tap water is more of an exception than a norm.

imtringued 6y ago
Purification tablets are also not that expensive compared to the effects of crippling diseases.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  Crippling disease is free if you don’t get any medical care.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Ah yes, the American way.
  - coddle-hark 6y ago
    You’re forgetting the opportunity cost.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      You have to have opportunities to have opportunity cost.
MisterTea 6y ago
This assumes that people have adequate access to the energy required for boiling and have the necessary equipment to do so.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  Not at all an insignificant amount of energy btw.

runawaybottle 6y ago

This is kind of one of those shocks most people will get when they goto those countries. Just as you said, even the well off have to fill up their water tanks daily and hope they don’t use it all up. I have no idea how everyone else gets by, but certainly in the west we simply take water for granted.

Balgair 6y ago
Speak for yourself there. I know that CO has been in a drought more often than not this century: https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/colorado https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/colorado
- meesles 6y ago
  Having lived in CO + TX (both states that get 'water restrictions'), never once did I worry about not having water to drink or bathe. They usually just ask us to conserve water and not water lawns so heavily in the summer. Not really comparable to countries where you need to plan to acquire and stock water for your family for daily use.
  - Balgair 6y ago
    True, but it seems like it's only a matter of time then. What can you call a chronic 20 year drought when it stretches to 40 years?
    - seattletech 6y ago
      A liberal conspiracy /s
    - DubiousPusher 6y ago
      Agreed. We don't know the consequences of pushing Mountain West aquifers the way we have. There is good evidence we are pulling out more than is replenished and therefore are incurring a deficit. What's more, we tend to think of the "West" as "won" but these states are mostly still growing as part of the American Westward expansion. A lot of Western State land only became easily accessible with the completion of the interstates in the 1960s 1970s and even 1980s. Therefore, the material abundance necessary for truly large scale populations to live in comfort has only come to these places in the last 40 years. This has caused a consistent population boom in some places which is not yet tapering and will lead to increased stress on these resources.