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Surely water is more strategically important than chips? It's just that chips are scarcer and thus easier to deny an enemy. If an enemy had the choice to deny o

Surely water is more strategically important than chips? It's just that chips are scarcer and thus easier to deny an enemy. If an enemy had the choice to deny one of the two resources, water would be the better strategic choice.

FredPret 5y ago
No way, if water gets really scarce, the price will go up, and two things will happen: 1. many frivolous uses will go away - swimming pools, spray-and-pray agricultural irrigation 2. new sources will become viable - like desalination Ultimately we live on a planet replete with water, it's just uneconomical to purify most of it for use at current rates. The same is not true of microchips.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Given that there's numerous cities and countries that are suffering from water shortages, you'd think that the price of water would go up already. But it hasn't, because there's interests at play to keep the price of water relatively low. Anyway you'd need different prices for different types of consumers, because it's a basic need for humans; you can't make water unaffordable for poorer people. I'm all for increasing the price of water and electricity for big consumers though, so that they will invest more R&D into reducing their consumption. Because when it's cheap, they'll just use more of it without thinking. That's also why coal power was (is?) a thing for so long.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > Given that there's numerous cities and countries that are suffering from water shortages, you'd think that the price of water would go up already. But it hasn't, because there's interests at play to keep the price of water relatively low. That just means the shortage is not sufficiently severe to cause prices to move. > Anyway you'd need different prices for different types of consumers, because it's a basic need for humans; you can't make water unaffordable for poorer people. The simpler way is to give poorer people money.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > you'd need different prices for different types of consumers Water shortages are a policy choice in any country above middle income. A simple x gallons for free per person or residence and market pricing thereafter would solve the issue for 90% of the spectrum, with potentially agricultural subsidies filling the gap. Instead, we choose a regressive policy system where individuals subsidise almond farmers.
  - Sevii 5y ago
    The price of water can't go up significantly because the marginal cost of water to farmers is lower than that to residential consumers. Its a lot easier to buy out a few farmers than to take the political hit on high residential water prices.
- g_sch 5y ago
  Markets aren't going to fix everything. You know what else desalination requires a lot of? Energy, which currently comes largely from nonrenewable carbon-intensive fuel sources. Can we simply spend more money to bring renewable energy sources online? It's unclear, because in addition to being pretty expensive, it raises questions of resource extraction (lithium for batteries, rare earth minerals for wind turbines) and land use (wind and solar farms take up a lot of space). And while we're spending all that money, we're presumably deciding not to spend it on other stuff, like other types of critical infrastructure or social programs. At some point it becomes simpler to address this problem at the starting point rather than assuming the market will automatically fix any downstream issues.
  - lazide 5y ago
    The problem is (and why market driven or markets as a major component countries do tend to do better over the long run, near as we can tell), is that there IS no 'starting point', and downstream/upstream is often oversimplifying. Everything interacts with everything else in a way far to complex to fully understand for any one person or organization. The most we can do is pick something and try to set it, and let the other knock on effects work themselves out (which markets help with), and then when THOSE cause undesirable problems, rinse and repeat.

FredPret 5y ago

No way, if water gets really scarce, the price will go up, and two things will happen: 1. many frivolous uses will go away - swimming pools, spray-and-pray agricultural irrigation 2. new sources will become viable - like desalination Ultimately we live on a planet replete with water, it's just uneconomical to purify most of it for use at current rates. The same is not true of microchips.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Given that there's numerous cities and countries that are suffering from water shortages, you'd think that the price of water would go up already. But it hasn't, because there's interests at play to keep the price of water relatively low. Anyway you'd need different prices for different types of consumers, because it's a basic need for humans; you can't make water unaffordable for poorer people. I'm all for increasing the price of water and electricity for big consumers though, so that they will invest more R&D into reducing their consumption. Because when it's cheap, they'll just use more of it without thinking. That's also why coal power was (is?) a thing for so long.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > Given that there's numerous cities and countries that are suffering from water shortages, you'd think that the price of water would go up already. But it hasn't, because there's interests at play to keep the price of water relatively low. That just means the shortage is not sufficiently severe to cause prices to move. > Anyway you'd need different prices for different types of consumers, because it's a basic need for humans; you can't make water unaffordable for poorer people. The simpler way is to give poorer people money.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > you'd need different prices for different types of consumers Water shortages are a policy choice in any country above middle income. A simple x gallons for free per person or residence and market pricing thereafter would solve the issue for 90% of the spectrum, with potentially agricultural subsidies filling the gap. Instead, we choose a regressive policy system where individuals subsidise almond farmers.
- Sevii 5y ago
  The price of water can't go up significantly because the marginal cost of water to farmers is lower than that to residential consumers. Its a lot easier to buy out a few farmers than to take the political hit on high residential water prices.
g_sch 5y ago
Markets aren't going to fix everything. You know what else desalination requires a lot of? Energy, which currently comes largely from nonrenewable carbon-intensive fuel sources. Can we simply spend more money to bring renewable energy sources online? It's unclear, because in addition to being pretty expensive, it raises questions of resource extraction (lithium for batteries, rare earth minerals for wind turbines) and land use (wind and solar farms take up a lot of space). And while we're spending all that money, we're presumably deciding not to spend it on other stuff, like other types of critical infrastructure or social programs. At some point it becomes simpler to address this problem at the starting point rather than assuming the market will automatically fix any downstream issues.
- lazide 5y ago
  The problem is (and why market driven or markets as a major component countries do tend to do better over the long run, near as we can tell), is that there IS no 'starting point', and downstream/upstream is often oversimplifying. Everything interacts with everything else in a way far to complex to fully understand for any one person or organization. The most we can do is pick something and try to set it, and let the other knock on effects work themselves out (which markets help with), and then when THOSE cause undesirable problems, rinse and repeat.