4 ms·

>They're really just stupid out here. Oh, they are not stupid. I can bet the ruling class in California has their own generators and does not have to drain the

>They're really just stupid out here. Oh, they are not stupid. I can bet the ruling class in California has their own generators and does not have to drain their swimming pools due to water shortage. In fact, they are very successful at manipulating the general public at turning a blind eye at them and even not wanting all these things. Why build infrastructure for the plebs if you can pick a few activist groups, give them the power to bully the fellow plebs over zero-cost topics, and keep the society busy? This is very smart. USSR has failed at it, so did many other dictatorships. The U.S. situation appears pretty stable. People seem to genuinely believe that shaming your neighbor for having kids and demanding that schools drop math exams will solve all the problems. Ironically, U.S. used to do use the divide-and-conquer approach overseas some decades ago. They would support multiple competing guerilla groups to keep them in a permanent state of fight, and prevent the territory from becoming strong enough to be a threat. Now the same tactic is aimed at your own middle class and nobody seems to care...

skybrian 5y ago
Rich people aren’t a monolith and some of them live in rural communities with severe water shortages. There are stories about people having water trucked in, which has to be very expensive. But the politics is basically that people don’t want to pay for expensive new infrastructure and see their utility rates go up. This isn’t just water - you see the same thing for replacing outdated sewer treatment plants. I don’t think it’s the rich who are worried about their utility bills?
- john_moscow 5y ago
  The bills go up anyway, in order to maintain the permanently growing army of bureaucrats. The only realistic way to solve it is to bring back competition. If you have multiple competing small operators, and one of them offers better infrastructure at a reasonable extra cost, people will switch. If you let them all get merged and managed centrally, of course all you get is a carefully written apology letter blaming climate change.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    I don’t think this is realistic for water. Economy of scale matters. Small-scale operators have higher costs and are more vulnerable. At the small scale in the West, water comes from pumps that can go dry as the water table drops, or from streams that can dry up in a drought.

skybrian 5y ago

Rich people aren’t a monolith and some of them live in rural communities with severe water shortages. There are stories about people having water trucked in, which has to be very expensive. But the politics is basically that people don’t want to pay for expensive new infrastructure and see their utility rates go up. This isn’t just water - you see the same thing for replacing outdated sewer treatment plants. I don’t think it’s the rich who are worried about their utility bills?

john_moscow 5y ago
The bills go up anyway, in order to maintain the permanently growing army of bureaucrats. The only realistic way to solve it is to bring back competition. If you have multiple competing small operators, and one of them offers better infrastructure at a reasonable extra cost, people will switch. If you let them all get merged and managed centrally, of course all you get is a carefully written apology letter blaming climate change.
- skybrian 5y ago
  I don’t think this is realistic for water. Economy of scale matters. Small-scale operators have higher costs and are more vulnerable. At the small scale in the West, water comes from pumps that can go dry as the water table drops, or from streams that can dry up in a drought.