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Is water scarcity a thing in your area? Perhaps your water is cheap because its readily available in your area. In Chicago, they have so much water in Lake Mi

Is water scarcity a thing in your area? Perhaps your water is cheap because its readily available in your area. In Chicago, they have so much water in Lake Michigan, most homes don't even have water meters.

manquer 5y ago
Living close to a water source or reservoir doesn’t make conservation less important.It is a intricate system with complex interconnects A lot of places downstream will be using the water from your Lake /Dam /river as their only source. Same reason why in some states like Colarado it is illegal to rain water harvest. Riparian rights and ethics are complex
- secabeen 5y ago
  Fair. I still prefer an honest system that charges a fair, flat rate for the infrastructure, and then a usage charge for usage. If we want to disincentive usage, we can put a tax on the consumption rate; that's certainly better than wrapping up some/all of the infrastructure costs into the consumption rate just to make the latter higher.
  - manquer 5y ago
    It is not just about conservation and high consumption. For example, it is lot easier to build infra when you charge people 4x their consumption cost as single item, than split into line items. When you need to build a new power plant the infra costs are going to shoot a lot and nobody would want to pay for that when they see an line item for infra. Every SaaS company and all of Cloud is built on this human behavior . I would even go so far to say that even mortgage, insurance, any credit business depends on this behavior. Most people would pay extra for their server by hour or second rather than pay for consumption + infra. Also infra costs split equally is unfair ? if you consume more, more of the infra costs have to be apportioned to that person right ? Basically if power plant producer 1000MW the person consuming 900MW has to pay 90% cost of building the plant in addition to paying 90% for consumables for generating that 1000MW . The solution here is to have spread between buy / sell rates which account for distribution losses, maintenance, infra and storage and peak capacity planning etc
  - jabl 5y ago
    > I still prefer an honest system that charges a fair, flat rate for the infrastructure, and then a usage charge for usage. There's a lot of things where the infrastructure costs are baked into the per-unit cost of stuff you buy. I'd say it's even vastly more common than separate infrastructure vs. per-unit charges. You don't pay a separate constant infrastructure fee for the petroleum refinery infrastructure when filling up your car, it's all baked into the per-liter (or per-gallon) cost. Nor do you pay a fixed cost for funding the astronomically expensive semiconductor fabs when you buy something containing electronics, it's all baked into the per-unit cost. Etc. etc.
- appletrotter 5y ago
  Maybe it does sometimes though? Speaking of the great lakes, if you live in the region it doesn’t take you very long to drive out of the watershed for your respective lake. That should be where the bounds of effect end, and that entire region will generally have plenty of water. For example, Ohio has two watersheds, one for the lake up north and another for the Ohio river which takes up 2/3 of the state. Excess water consumption in the lake erie watershed shouldn’t ever hurt the ohio river watershed. Issues with the rivers that feed the ohio river might cause issues, but the point is this: the degrees to which regions are linked in terms of water varies dramatically.
  - brnt 5y ago
    Waterpipes have been known to cross watershed boundaries. Or am I missing your point?
    - appletrotter 5y ago
      That using water within a watershed is fine. Piping out water is different.
- rhino369 5y ago
  >Living close to a water source or reservoir doesn’t make conservation less important. It doesn't necessarily make conservation less important. But it certainly does in some places like Chicago. They pull water from the same water shed that it eventually flows back into after use. And they control how much water flows from Lake Michigan into the Chicago river (and eventually the Mississippi River) via a damn. It's probably a bit more complex than that, and creating that system did change the water flow in the Great lakes (but that damage was done 130 years ago). But right now, its essentially free water. In Illinois, all roads (waterways) lead to Rome (the Mississippi).
  - manquer 5y ago
    I don't have detailed knowledge of Great lakes to give you specifics on why this is a problem However generally no water system is closed or independent of each other. Precipitation, weather and other cycles (wind, heat, underground etc) make even small changes in distant places drastically impact outcomes anywhere ( the OG butterfly effect). So I would still say conservation of use is independent of how abundant it seems locally and how disconnected it looks on the surface to other problems.
jabl 5y ago
Where I live we have plentiful of clean water. However what constitutes a major part of the water bill is the sewage treatment. No separate metering for clean water vs sewage, they just assume that everything you use also goes out as sewage.

manquer 5y ago

Living close to a water source or reservoir doesn’t make conservation less important.It is a intricate system with complex interconnects A lot of places downstream will be using the water from your Lake /Dam /river as their only source. Same reason why in some states like Colarado it is illegal to rain water harvest. Riparian rights and ethics are complex

secabeen 5y ago
Fair. I still prefer an honest system that charges a fair, flat rate for the infrastructure, and then a usage charge for usage. If we want to disincentive usage, we can put a tax on the consumption rate; that's certainly better than wrapping up some/all of the infrastructure costs into the consumption rate just to make the latter higher.
- manquer 5y ago
  It is not just about conservation and high consumption. For example, it is lot easier to build infra when you charge people 4x their consumption cost as single item, than split into line items. When you need to build a new power plant the infra costs are going to shoot a lot and nobody would want to pay for that when they see an line item for infra. Every SaaS company and all of Cloud is built on this human behavior . I would even go so far to say that even mortgage, insurance, any credit business depends on this behavior. Most people would pay extra for their server by hour or second rather than pay for consumption + infra. Also infra costs split equally is unfair ? if you consume more, more of the infra costs have to be apportioned to that person right ? Basically if power plant producer 1000MW the person consuming 900MW has to pay 90% cost of building the plant in addition to paying 90% for consumables for generating that 1000MW . The solution here is to have spread between buy / sell rates which account for distribution losses, maintenance, infra and storage and peak capacity planning etc
- jabl 5y ago
  > I still prefer an honest system that charges a fair, flat rate for the infrastructure, and then a usage charge for usage. There's a lot of things where the infrastructure costs are baked into the per-unit cost of stuff you buy. I'd say it's even vastly more common than separate infrastructure vs. per-unit charges. You don't pay a separate constant infrastructure fee for the petroleum refinery infrastructure when filling up your car, it's all baked into the per-liter (or per-gallon) cost. Nor do you pay a fixed cost for funding the astronomically expensive semiconductor fabs when you buy something containing electronics, it's all baked into the per-unit cost. Etc. etc.
appletrotter 5y ago
Maybe it does sometimes though? Speaking of the great lakes, if you live in the region it doesn’t take you very long to drive out of the watershed for your respective lake. That should be where the bounds of effect end, and that entire region will generally have plenty of water. For example, Ohio has two watersheds, one for the lake up north and another for the Ohio river which takes up 2/3 of the state. Excess water consumption in the lake erie watershed shouldn’t ever hurt the ohio river watershed. Issues with the rivers that feed the ohio river might cause issues, but the point is this: the degrees to which regions are linked in terms of water varies dramatically.
- brnt 5y ago
  Waterpipes have been known to cross watershed boundaries. Or am I missing your point?
  - appletrotter 5y ago
    That using water within a watershed is fine. Piping out water is different.
rhino369 5y ago
>Living close to a water source or reservoir doesn’t make conservation less important. It doesn't necessarily make conservation less important. But it certainly does in some places like Chicago. They pull water from the same water shed that it eventually flows back into after use. And they control how much water flows from Lake Michigan into the Chicago river (and eventually the Mississippi River) via a damn. It's probably a bit more complex than that, and creating that system did change the water flow in the Great lakes (but that damage was done 130 years ago). But right now, its essentially free water. In Illinois, all roads (waterways) lead to Rome (the Mississippi).
- manquer 5y ago
  I don't have detailed knowledge of Great lakes to give you specifics on why this is a problem However generally no water system is closed or independent of each other. Precipitation, weather and other cycles (wind, heat, underground etc) make even small changes in distant places drastically impact outcomes anywhere ( the OG butterfly effect). So I would still say conservation of use is independent of how abundant it seems locally and how disconnected it looks on the surface to other problems.

jabl 5y ago

Where I live we have plentiful of clean water. However what constitutes a major part of the water bill is the sewage treatment. No separate metering for clean water vs sewage, they just assume that everything you use also goes out as sewage.