5 ms·

1 L/min is 1 L/min, and it's not a great sacrifice to turn off a faucet when you don't need it. So even if the farmer is not judiciously using water, it doesn't

1 L/min is 1 L/min, and it's not a great sacrifice to turn off a faucet when you don't need it. So even if the farmer is not judiciously using water, it doesn't mean you shouldn't.

vasco 5y ago
You should take a look at Ahmdal's law. "Every little bit helps" type thinking is a detriment to the fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always. This is a rule of optimisation that can be extended for most other things.
- astockwell 5y ago
  While that is true in the theoretical, it ignores human psychology. For example the Debt Snowball method has been so widely successful for ignoring precisely this black&white pragmatism.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  Ahmdal's law lets you calculate the theoretical speedup of a job given how parallelize-able it is. I don't see how that is applicable here. If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument. But to say that people _shouldn't_ conserve resources just because they aren't the largest consumer of the given resource is ridiculous. Me being conscientious of how much water I waste from my faucet doesn't slow progress in dealing with the larger water wasters. There is no reason not to do it. > fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always This only applies if you can only fix one factor at a time. That is never the case in real world, complex, societal issues. Society is not a computer science puzzle.
  - stormbrew 5y ago
    > If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument. I mean.. that doesn't seem very far off from the truth?
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
I wasn't suggesting people shouldn't make that particular 'sacrifice', I suppose the analogy could be better. My point was that individual action may be neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent the bad outcome from happening: agriculture could cause aquifer depletion even if suburban houses used no water at all, while without agricultural use, suburban houses could be incredibly wasteful and the aquifer might be fine. In this case, the 'bad outcome' is crummy thin-and-light disposable laptops with insufficient numbers of obsolete ports, proprietary drivers, bad thermals, and closed operating systems, and no options for power users who want good laptops. It has felt to me, for a long time, that Apple, Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. have been pressing further in this direction. My 'boycott' of these products is not heard in any of their boardrooms or design committees; the strategy of buying business' discontinued Thinkpads on eBay works for now but does not work long-term. A successful Framework laptop might make some waves. Somewhere in some conference room, someone will float the proposal that their new mobile workstation should obviously save $0.25 per unit by gluing in the battery, this would be a data point to say that some people who might be making decisions like this would actually like a laptop that includes a screwdriver.

1 L/min is 1 L/min, and it's not a great sacrifice to turn off a faucet when you don't need it. So even if the farmer is not judiciously using water, it doesn't mean you shouldn't.

vasco 5y ago

You should take a look at Ahmdal's law. "Every little bit helps" type thinking is a detriment to the fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always. This is a rule of optimisation that can be extended for most other things.

astockwell 5y ago
While that is true in the theoretical, it ignores human psychology. For example the Debt Snowball method has been so widely successful for ignoring precisely this black&white pragmatism.
dahfizz 5y ago
Ahmdal's law lets you calculate the theoretical speedup of a job given how parallelize-able it is. I don't see how that is applicable here. If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument. But to say that people _shouldn't_ conserve resources just because they aren't the largest consumer of the given resource is ridiculous. Me being conscientious of how much water I waste from my faucet doesn't slow progress in dealing with the larger water wasters. There is no reason not to do it. > fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always This only applies if you can only fix one factor at a time. That is never the case in real world, complex, societal issues. Society is not a computer science puzzle.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  > If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument. I mean.. that doesn't seem very far off from the truth?

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

I wasn't suggesting people shouldn't make that particular 'sacrifice', I suppose the analogy could be better. My point was that individual action may be neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent the bad outcome from happening: agriculture could cause aquifer depletion even if suburban houses used no water at all, while without agricultural use, suburban houses could be incredibly wasteful and the aquifer might be fine. In this case, the 'bad outcome' is crummy thin-and-light disposable laptops with insufficient numbers of obsolete ports, proprietary drivers, bad thermals, and closed operating systems, and no options for power users who want good laptops. It has felt to me, for a long time, that Apple, Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. have been pressing further in this direction. My 'boycott' of these products is not heard in any of their boardrooms or design committees; the strategy of buying business' discontinued Thinkpads on eBay works for now but does not work long-term. A successful Framework laptop might make some waves. Somewhere in some conference room, someone will float the proposal that their new mobile workstation should obviously save $0.25 per unit by gluing in the battery, this would be a data point to say that some people who might be making decisions like this would actually like a laptop that includes a screwdriver.