4 ms·

That isn't instead. It's in addition. Anyone saying that we need to only save water at restaurants is clearly wrong. Anyone saying that we mostly need to save

• stouset 12y ago
  It's really probably not, is the thing. "Any little bit helps" just isn't true when you consider the relative scale. One glass of water per resident per day is something like a thousandth of the per-capita water usage state-wide, which itself is dwarfed by agricultural and landscape use. This is utterly pointless.
  • azakai 12y ago
    It's true that one glass of water for lunch is almost negligible. But residents do account for 20% of total water use, and it's been shown in various countries that residents can reduce their water consumption significantly, by a mixture of efforts. Any reduction in that 20% would help the bottom line, and it would come from a combination of little things, including not wasting water at lunch. I'm not saying we should focus on those things. We as a society should focus on the 80%. But for most of us, we can only directly influence residential water usage, that's why you notice it at restaurants and so forth. You and I wouldn't notice when e.g. a farmer switches to drip irrigation to save water. Again, the 80% matters more than 20%. But cuts in the 20% are a good thing too.
    • aetherson 12y ago
      Residential isn't 20%, it's 14%. 6% is commercial/industrial. And glasses of water in restaurants are probably counted in the 6%, not the 14%. And even of the commercial/industrial usage, how much can glasses of water possibly be? Surely not even 5% of that usage. So if we reduce consumption of glasses of water at restaurants, by, say, 80%, we've done what? Lowered total usage of water by 0.24%? My sense is that that's a hugely optimistic amount.
      • zeroonetwothree 12y ago
        Moreover, drinking less at restaurants will likely lead to drinking more elsewhere (at home, or even worse: bottled water).
        • azakai 12y ago
          The goal isn't to get people to drink less at restaurants, it's to not serve water without people asking, which often ends up not being consumed and just flushed.
          • henryl 12y ago
            Saves them from washing it too.
    • throwawaymsft 12y ago
      We have to consider the opportunity cost. Focusing attention on the minor problem is a mistake, even if it "helps". When a patient comes in with a gunshot wound and a paper cut, we have to be smart about the triage.
      • azakai 12y ago
        There is no doubt that if we must choose to do something either to affect the big stuff, or the small stuff, we should prefer that to the small stuff. But I do not see how ordinary people not wasting water at restaurants has any opportunity cost wrt agriculture water usage. There are different people involved, at different times.
        • hueving 12y ago
          >I do not see how ordinary people not wasting water at restaurants has any opportunity cost wrt agriculture water usage. They are both legislated by the same group of incompetent politicians. These politicians are driven by re-election, so they will focus on things that look like helping more than things that actually help. Legislating day-to-day consumers will have much more visibility than major org water usage restrictions. People like you are the reason they get away with this. You support what they are doing because you think it helps, so they will not bother with the stuff that really helps because that's actually hard.
        • throwawaymsft 12y ago
          The opportunity cost is not to the individual, but to the lawmakers and society's attention. They spent time deliberating about water at restaurants when a single almond takes a gallon of water to produce.
    • stouset 12y ago
      You are missing the point. Cutting water usage this way doesn't even move the needle. Fifty measures on this scale wouldn't stave off the inevitable by even an hour. If this was the most efficient use of our legislators' time for finding a path to make it through this drought, we are well and truly fucked. You say elsewhere that, while we should fix the big stuff, it doesn't hurt to try and deal with the small, too. This completely ignores the fact that legislators and regulatory agencies have actually spent time drafting, discussing, voting on, and implementing these measures. This time would have been infinitely better spent on addressing something that might have a chance in hell of affecting statewide water usage. Edit: I can't reply to you, so this will have to suffice. In case you've forgotten, this subthread, all of my replies in it, and seemingly all of your replies as well, have been discussing restrictions on restaurants serving water to customers without prompting. While yes, there is some that California residents and businesses can do to reduce their own water footprint, measures like the one we are discussing are completely and unquestionably pointless. That "evidence" you are looking for is precisely the fact that they have wasted valuable and ever-diminishing time pushing forward measures that will have a absolutely zero discernible impact. Do you truly believe that time by the relevant bodies attempting to regulate water usage amounting to less than 0.001% was time well spent?
      • azakai 12y ago
        By "this way" do you mean saving water at restaurants? More generally, the topic is saving water as consumed by ordinary people. That involves saving water at restaurants, not taking excessively long showers, not cleaning one's dishes in inefficient ways, fixing leaky pipes in one's house, etc. etc. All of those things add up, and can make a dent in the 20% or so of water consumption that is due to ordinary people. Of course it would be better to make a dent in the 80%. But I don't think the two preclude each other - there have been improvements in the 80% with some agriculture moving to drip irrigation, and so forth. If it is shown that legislators spending time on the 20% makes them less effective at tackling the 80%, I would immediately agree that we should ignore the 20%. But I haven't yet seen that evidence, if it exists.
        • hueving 12y ago
    • ptaipale 12y ago
      I'd say that if serving unasked water to 20 customers in a restaurant makes one of them order one glass less of beer, wine or soft drinks, then the environment has won. The amount that people actually drink (or pour away from table) is completely negligible when compared to the amount that is used for production of industrial goods (including beverages). (Of course the restaurants then loose money if people don't buy beverages, so it's not in their incentives to serve water, which is probably why such policies exist in the first place: it's green-washing of greedy actions.)
  • zaroth 12y ago
    Not just utterly pointless but actively harmful. The glass of water at the restaurant is on average the healthiest thing they will bring to the table. What's the negative externality on not properly hydrating before a meal?!
• shit_parade 12y ago
  The cost of one tourist suffering from heat stroke and dehydration because the restaurant didn't put a glass of water in front of him while eating far outweighs any water savings. Utter hogwash.