[HN Gopher] Wall Street Begins Trading Water Futures as a Commodity
___________________________________________________________________
Wall Street Begins Trading Water Futures as a Commodity
Author : thread_id
Score : 297 points
Date : 2020-12-10 08:42 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (e360.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (e360.yale.edu)
| fdr wrote:
| May be worth reading this article about Harvard's endowment
| consolidating water rights in California as well.
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-quietly-amasses-califor...
| greyface- wrote:
| https://archive.is/CtUVO
| darksaints wrote:
| Two things to note:
|
| 1) Water is a life necessity, but it can also be a superfluous
| want (e.g. lawns) and it can also be a greedy natural resource
| grab (e.g. Nestle). Generally speaking, we have enough water to
| go around for human needs, but people regularly use the emotional
| appeal of human needs to justify low prices for their wants or
| exploitation. At the very least, financial markets for water are
| devoid of shallow emotional appeals to morality and acknowledge
| it for what it is. All that I ask is that we always ensure that
| human needs are met, and that is a job for governments. Let
| financial markets work with the rest...hell, the government
| should probably sell what's left over to the highest bidders.
|
| 2) the real difficulty of selling water is infrastructure. It's
| expensive, and unlike most commodities, it is almost completely
| fixed-cost. And the vast vast hypermajority of water consumers
| only have a single feasible source of water producers. The idea
| of water futures, then, seems a little absurd. This essentially
| limits trading to only those who can feasibly take delivery, and
| in reality that limits you to the same single-source provider
| you've had from the very beginning. I can't help but think that
| auctions or dynamic pricing are a better and more efficient idea.
| eggsmediumrare wrote:
| Water is also necessary for a healthy environment, so "sell
| what's left over to the highest bidders" could backfire in a
| really spectacular way.
| 8fhdkjw039hd wrote:
| If you do not put a price on something, it will be exploited
| more not less.
| Faaak wrote:
| I suppose that most reactions will be against this, but it should
| however fix the "tragedy of the commons" problem where water is
| overused when it is cheep but still used when it's not.
|
| It's a good financial incentive to better your installations.
| mmanfrin wrote:
| > It's a good financial incentive to better your installations.
|
| No it is not. The cost of water is so tiny compared to anything
| else on earth humans make that every single country on earth
| should be able to provide it to their citizens.
|
| This is not a problem the market needs to solve. This has been
| solved since prehistory, and some of the first non-religious
| constructions celebrated in human history are waterworks.
|
| This is a solved problem. All futures do is allow traders in
| faraway places make money off of a substance every human on
| earth ought to have a fundamental right to.
| emteycz wrote:
| The same was said about food and toilet paper.
| Aerroon wrote:
| The cost of water might be tiny if you're drinking it, but
| it's not tiny when you're using it to grow food or use it for
| other industrial processes. One _almond kernel_ requires 3-4
| days worth of drinking water to grow.
|
| Also, humans in many places are using groundwater that's
| _thousands_ of years old. In those places we can 't observe
| any effect humans have had, because we're effectively tapping
| into reservoirs that predate human usage of that water.
| Eventually that's going to run out.
| pseingatl wrote:
| Solved? If you mean by energy-intensive, billion dollar
| solutions, you are correct. Look at the UAE, Saudi Arabia; no
| rivers, no lakes, and the aquifers were long ago exhausted.
| kortilla wrote:
| It's not a solved problem. The Colorado river is
| oversubscribed and people are more or less fucked because we
| didn't think paying for water in a bidding system was a good
| idea so now farmer Ted gets priority to grow his Almonds in
| the California desert for free while people in Nevada can't
| get enough just to drink from the Colorado.
| adrianN wrote:
| Right now the cost of water is tiny in many regions because
| we deplete fossil water reservoirs without properly
| accounting for the externality.
| sideshowb wrote:
| Solved? Um. why then are there droughts currently, and why
| are they projected to increase under all plausible climate
| change scenarios?
|
| Like you though I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a futures
| market
| einpoklum wrote:
| Like the "tragedy of the commons", it is artificially caused by
| concentration of power in the hands of the few. People were
| well able to coordinate use of the original commons; and if it
| weren't for belligerent ruling classes and corporate-commercial
| interests, the people of the world could have handled the water
| issue reasonably well to day.
| paulluuk wrote:
| I think people are afraid that instead of "tragedy of the
| commons", this will turn into "tragedy of the anticommons".
| e.g. a solution to global water shortages might be possible,
| but if it's not profitable then it won't happen.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
| eru wrote:
| (Futures) markets work for basically every other commodity
| they've been tried.
|
| So the presumption is that they'll work here too to allocate
| scarce resources fairly and efficiently.
| chr1 wrote:
| Most people misunderstand how the futures work. This fee
| podcast explains well why it is a useful tool and not a fraud
| as many think https://fee.org/shows/audio/words-numbers/a-game-
| of-risk/
| iSnow wrote:
| Futures have nothing to do with better management of a
| resource, it's strictly a bet traders can place. If you are in
| favor of financial instruments to steer demand, a simple tax
| would work.
|
| Creating water futures is completely tone-deaf. All it will
| cause is outrage and a backlash, a lot like trying to patent
| human genes.
| kortilla wrote:
| > it's strictly a bet traders can place.
|
| It's a way for people who need water for processes to lock in
| prices. If you're genuinely curious about why futures are
| useful, look into "commercial hedging". It's used by both
| suppliers and consumers to reduce price uncertainty (think of
| a farmer being able to buy water for the whole year).
| Faaak wrote:
| I don't really see the relationship between futures and
| patent on human genes..
|
| However, futures are NOT only for traders as you suggest.
|
| Of course, a residential home will not use them, but when you
| become a big player in the field (see an Almond farm for
| example), then your water usage starts getting important and
| you can use these products.
|
| Take a look at potato futures for example, they're used and
| useful. Some farmer's cooperatives don't hedge their prices
| and had some very bad news this year with covid and the
| impossibility to sell their yield.
| konschubert wrote:
| Why do people eat less potatoes during covid?
| eru wrote:
| People are eating more at home and less in restaurants.
| Shifts in diet are plausible.
|
| (Just speculation. And potato prices might have changed
| for reasons independent of covid.)
| lend000 wrote:
| Most water in the region isn't used for drinking -- there's
| plenty for that.
|
| Example use case: almond farmer buys 0.5% of the current
| capacity of the reservoir at the now liquid market price,
| with delivery 6 months from now. Instead of having cyclical
| "rushes on the reservoir" for the remaining farming allotment
| of water in the reservoir whenever capacity gets low (or just
| unexpected bouts of no water coming out of the faucet, when
| transparency into reservoir levels is poor), resulting in
| less efficient water practices/ruined crops, liquid futures
| provide farmers with stability and actionable planning. If an
| almond farmer buys futures delivering a million gallons of
| water each quarter, he can expect that water to be saved and
| available when the crops need it, and can plan crops around
| that.
|
| Other side effects: prices will be more transparent, liquid,
| and consistent across the region. Possible bonus: the
| financial incentive will potentially improve the quality of
| drought modeling in the region. Imagine future weather
| computers that use the futures price as an input.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > Most water in the region isn't used for drinking --
| there's plenty for that.
|
| I live in a densely populated region of the world where
| water tables have lowered due to droughts over the last
| couple of years while rain diminishes.
|
| Groundwater is pumped by farmers over the summer, further
| lowing water tables to a point where water companies sound
| the alarm: if the water table lowers below a certain level,
| water stops coming out of the household water taps.
|
| This literally happened this summers in a few
| municipalities. People didn't have access to clean water
| for basic hygiene, cleaning and drinking.
|
| You might think "what's so bad about that? They can just
| buy bottled water, or install a storage tank?"
|
| Well, this is a public health concern.
|
| The big reason why diseases raged so easily in the past in
| the Western world - and still is in the rest of the world -
| was/is the lack of public access to clean water. Diseases
| such as Cholera are directly attributed to poor sanitation
| and lack of clean water.
|
| Privatizing water sounds good in theory, but if the price
| of drinking water increases to prohibitive levels for less
| fortunate groups in society, you will also see an uptick in
| public health crises. The associated costs are - once again
| - deferred to the public (e.g. healthcare costs)
| kortilla wrote:
| Water for drinking takes up a tiny fraction of uses. If
| this all becomes and open market, tons of wasteful crops
| like almonds will get wiped out way before drinking water
| is a noticeable expense
| Aerroon wrote:
| To put some numbers to this:
|
| > _The water footprint of California almonds averaged
| 10,240 liters per kilogram kernels (or, 12 liters per
| almond kernel)_
|
| [0]
|
| The average human needs about 2.7-3.7 liters of water a
| day or roughly 1,000-1,350 liters per year.[1]
|
| [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S14
| 70160X1...
|
| [1]
| https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2004/02/report-
| sets-d...
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > Water for drinking takes up a tiny fraction of uses.
|
| The argument isn't how much water is used for different
| purposes relative to each other in absolute terms.
|
| The argument is availability. Fresh water isn't
| distributed equally across the globe. That's exactly what
| makes it a scarce commodity.
|
| > If this all becomes and open market, tons of wasteful
| crops like almonds will get wiped out way before drinking
| water is a noticeable expense
|
| As long as those almonds can be exported to profitable
| global markets, almond producers will be able to afford
| pumping up water / buying up water supplies, causing
| water related problems locally.
| eru wrote:
| > As long as those almonds can be exported to profitable
| global markets, almond producers will be able to afford
| pumping up water / buying up water supplies, causing
| water related problems locally.
|
| The commenter you are replying to is implying that in
| many places, like California, by and large almonds won't
| be able to be grown profitably to be sold to the global
| market when you take water costs into account.
|
| Access to global markets doesn't magically make
| everything profitable. (Often just the opposite for
| specific industries, because you'll also face global
| competition.)
| Jochim wrote:
| What happens when there's a drought and the million gallons
| of water that farmer ordered can't be delivered?
|
| What happens when speculators drive prices up because they
| know the people that actually need/want that water _have_
| to pay or risk losing their crops.
|
| Water is important enough that it should be publicly owned
| and distributed. This is pretty much the only way it can be
| effectively managed and distributed, rather than hoarded
| and scalped as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
| eru wrote:
| > What happens when there's a drought and the million
| gallons of water that farmer ordered can't be delivered?
|
| That would be specified in the contracts. Existing
| contracts for eg soy beans already have to take these
| possibilities into account.
|
| > What happens when speculators drive prices up because
| they know the people that actually need/want that water
| have to pay or risk losing their crops.
|
| If current future prices are clearly higher than what I
| expect spot prices to be in the future, I'd sell future
| contracts and make a killing.
|
| > Water is important enough that it should be publicly
| owned and distributed. This is pretty much the only way
| it can be effectively managed and distributed, rather
| than hoarded and scalped as soon as the opportunity
| presents itself.
|
| What makes you think that public ownership and
| distribution is so effective? And what are the limits of
| these benefits, so that they only apply to important
| goods? Why wouldn't we want even goods of lesser
| importance enjoy these benefits?
| Jochim wrote:
| > What makes you think that public ownership and
| distribution is so effective?
|
| Its ability to address needs rather than wants. A free
| market does not distinguish between the need for people
| to drink and the need for a billionaire to fill his pool
| with freshwater in a drought.
|
| This can extend beyond non-survival needs to societal
| needs. Society "needs" educated workers who can
| contribute to the economy. Society "needs" you to be
| connected to other workers either physically or
| electronically.
|
| Public ownership allows us to address concerns that would
| not be appropriate to be driven primarily by profit
| motive. Typically we see this in the form of services
| rather than the direct transfer of physical goods. Most
| people believe communities in remote regions should have
| similar access to utility networks and transport, the
| ongoing cost of providing these typically outweighs the
| revenue that could be charged, so the state steps in.
|
| The fire service is a fairly universal example of a
| service that should not be driven by profit motive and we
| have good records of the damage that occurs when they
| are. The military would be another, it is not in
| society's best interest if your primary form of defense
| is willing to work for whoever will pay it the most.
|
| > And what are the limits of these benefits, so that they
| only apply to important goods? Why wouldn't we want even
| goods of lesser importance enjoy these benefits?
|
| Current governance can be inflexible, it usually requires
| taking everyone's viewpoint into account to minimise the
| risk of failure or of being viewed as misspending public
| funds. Our solution to this at the moment is to allow
| private enterprise to operate in the areas where the
| extraction of profit is likely to cause minimal harm.
| This increases choice but the downside is that it
| introduces a huge amount of inefficiency and waste.
| eru wrote:
| Thanks for the considered response.
|
| How does public ownership differentiate between needs and
| wants?
|
| As far as I can tell, there's something that poor people
| have even less than money: influence and connections.
|
| > The fire service is a fairly universal example of a
| service that should not be driven by profit motive and we
| have good records of the damage that occurs when they
| are.
|
| Could you point me to those records?
|
| As far as I can tell, Denmark does fairly well with
| privatized fire fighters. (And if memory serves right,
| the US, for mysterious reasons, has about twice as many
| firefighter per capita as other developed countries.)
|
| From a more theoretical perspective, would you think that
| a mandate for people to buy insurance against fires (and
| especially against liability for spreading fires) or
| alternatively posting a big bond to self-insure, and
| leaving the rest of the workings to the market should
| work as well? What do you think?
| Jochim wrote:
| > Thanks for the considered response.
|
| My pleasure! It's an interesting topic of discussion, and
| I think there's a lot of value in trying to understand
| where other people are coming from and what their
| motivations are.
|
| > Could you point me to those records?
|
| The well known documentary "Gangs of New York"[1]. More
| seriously, in early Rome fire brigades were often used as
| a tool to extort the compromised property from it's
| owner. Forgive me for quoting Wikipedia, but the article
| and quote is fairly well sourced[2]:
|
| > The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Marcus
| Licinius Crassus. He took advantage of the fact that Rome
| had no fire department, by creating his own brigade--500
| men strong--which rushed to burning buildings at the
| first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however,
| the firefighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy
| the burning building from the distressed property owner,
| at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the
| property, his men would put out the fire, if the owner
| refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to
| the ground
|
| There are also reports of firefighting gangs in the new
| york times before the advent of professional fire
| services in the U.S.[3]:
|
| > Our reporters give an account of another incipient riot
| got up by firemen and runners last evening. For a time
| the brawl went on with great violence, and the rival
| factions or companies enjoyed the pleasure of trying to
| kill each other without let or hindrance, because--and
| here is the fact of main importance--"the Chief Engineer
| and his assistants had completely lost control of the
| men,"
|
| The first professional fire brigades in the UK would
| leave your building to burn if you didn't have their
| particular company's mark on your building[4]:
|
| > If a building was on fire, several brigades would
| attend as quickly as possible. The different brigades
| would use the fire marks to work out if a building was
| insured by their parent company. If they didn't see their
| specific fire mark attached to the building, they would
| leave the property to burn.
|
| > As far as I can tell, Denmark does fairly well with
| privatized fire fighters. (And if memory serves right,
| the US, for mysterious reasons, has about twice as many
| firefighter per capita as other developed countries.)
|
| Privatised fire fighters in Denmark are still beholden to
| the local municipality, which in my opinion is different
| enough from a privatised "user pays" fire service that
| they aren't hugely comparable.
|
| The US is much less densely populated than Denmark and
| dealing with fires is a fairly time sensitive operation,
| I'd imagine that might explain part of the difference.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-vBJ8cS08U
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_firefighting
|
| [3] https://lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/new-york-times-
| coverage-...
|
| [4] https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/museum/history-and-
| stories/ea...
| skela225 wrote:
| >"What this represents is a cynical attempt at setting up what's
| almost like a betting casino so some people can make money from
| others suffering," Basav Sen, climate justice project director at
| the Institute for Policy Studies
|
| question that seems to have been neglected in this thread: how
| does the existence of a futures market over an asset affect the
| price of that asset? -'cause that's what the quote implies.
| dragonelite wrote:
| I don't really mind water futures, as long as the nation I'm in
| makes it easy and affordable to access clean drinking water. If
| the nation becomes to much of a dystopia I will just use my most
| powerful vote "my feet" and take my labor to some other nation.
| People throughout history have done this for millennia. Just make
| sure you have a exit plan and easily transferable wealth
| storages.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Holy crap man for thirty seconds try to think about how you
| don't represent the majority of the people. You know what, go
| trade water futures, you're born for it.
|
| This topic should be a collective home run for ethics, but the
| sheer stupidity of humans knows no bounds.
|
| Sometimes you just need to call the antisocial personality
| disorders out (one whatever spectrum - narcissistic,
| sociopathic, borderline). A lot of the behavior of these
| disorders are tolerated if you are mostly harmless, but don't
| think we can't spot you.
|
| Bunch of jerkoffs want to speculate on water, give me a fucking
| break.
| dragonelite wrote:
| The world is not a fair place and I got lucky that I was born
| in western Europe and did not made to many bad choices in
| life.
|
| I have talked with people about rising house prices(because
| of the low interest rates) and stagnated wages for blue-
| collar workers here in the west, how most of us in our late
| 20s or younger will probably never have a proper pension. How
| cruel and unfair this hyper capitalist system really is, how
| we are quickly devolving back into techno feudalism. How the
| youth is spending their future income by accruing massive
| debts to buy the latest gadgets and shit. Reality is people
| don't fucking care, people don't want to care, they look at
| you as if your some kind of conspiracy theorist.
|
| Once I discovered people don't really care about those
| structural problems, was the moment I started putting some
| money into a exit plan.
| twoslide wrote:
| That's great you have a plan but this is not really an option
| for much of the world's population and perhaps they should not
| suffer lack of water because of this.
| eru wrote:
| Making water tradeable easier should make it easier to provide
| easy and affordable access to it. Same as for any other
| commodity.
| bnt wrote:
| It also eases restrictions to water access, in some distant
| future
| gampleman wrote:
| I thought so, but the recent travel restrictions poured a lot
| of cold water on the ease of that possibility.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Immigration to another nation is extremely difficult.
| perfunctory wrote:
| > If the nation becomes to much of a dystopia I will just use
| my most powerful vote "my feet" and take my labor to some other
| nation
|
| At some point you might run out of nations to go to.
|
| I consider the place I currently live in (subjectively of
| course) to be the best in the world. The problem with that,
| with being at the top of the world, is that there is nowhere to
| run. If things get worse here, everywhere else is most likely
| even worse. So, for better or worse, I have to stay and defend
| my rights here.
| tedk-42 wrote:
| Umm what's the incentive or motivation behind making this trade
| able?
|
| At first glance this seems incredibly concerning, especially if
| we ever get to a point where some people can 'afford' water while
| others can't.
|
| While we don't need oil or gold for our immediate survival, they
| do play key roles into how our society operates. I'm hoping to
| understand more on why we should treat water in the same way.
| solveit wrote:
| It's sad how people just don't believe that markets are good at
| all.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _It 's sad how people just don't believe that markets are
| good at all._
|
| The problem is that the definition of "free markets" has been
| badly muddied. What we have in most of the real world are not
| free markets. It skews everyone's opinion.
| Jochim wrote:
| Free markets would be so much worse than what we have right
| now. Without government intervention to guarantee worker
| protections and curtail corporate power, capital would
| concentrate in the hands of a few and the rest of us would
| be serfs in the neo-feudalist hellhole that arises. Enjoy
| your company scrip.
| eru wrote:
| What makes you think so? Do you have any countries in
| mind that have less government intervention and look more
| neo-feudalist?
|
| As a counter example, many places in Asia have gone more
| pro-market in the last decades and have benefitted
| enormously from it.
|
| It's all a matter of degree, of course. Eg South Korea
| isn't made up of only free markets. But it has noticeably
| freer markets than North Korea. Or China pre- and post
| Deng Xiaoping.
|
| Singapore is perhaps the closest to a free market place
| on earth, and is also one of the richest and safest.
| Jochim wrote:
| > As a counter example, many places in Asia have gone
| more pro-market in the last decades and have benefitted
| enormously from it.
|
| I don't think this is necessarily a counter example.
| Certainly some individuals in these countries are much
| better off than they were before. The economies of these
| countries may be doing better, but this growth has
| increasingly come at the expense of a vast number of
| individuals lower down the pole. The youth of China moved
| to the city from farming towns and villages, and now work
| to enrich the CEOs and executives of Foxconn. Children in
| Bangladesh and India are spending twelve hours a day
| making shoes for Nike. The well off in these countries
| are much more well-off than they were before, but the
| poor are potentially in a worse/more inescapable position
| than they started.
|
| > Singapore is perhaps the closest to a free market place
| on earth, and is also one of the richest and safest.
|
| Singapore is a heavily authoritarian country in which the
| state directly controls large sectors of the market[1]
| and daily life.
|
| Some quotes from the source that illustrate the extent to
| which the Singaporean government is directly involved in
| shaping and controlling the country's markets:
|
| > State monopolies provide all utilities, telephone and
| postal services, port and airport services, industrial
| estates, and radio and television. Government ministries
| provide a large part of medical and health services, all
| sanitation services, and all education for the population
| from primary to tertiary level. The state Housing and
| Development Board houses nearly three-quarters of the
| population in public housing estates.
|
| In the non-social sector they own and operate: >
| Singapore Airlines, ...A state trading company, a state
| shipping company, two state join-venture shipyards,
| ...The Development Bank of Singapore
|
| The government also owns "about 75% of all land in the
| country".
|
| The rest of the paper goes into detail explaining how the
| government routinely intervenes with subsidies and tax
| policy in order to force the market into whatever shape
| it deems fit. So I think the fact that people view
| Singapore at anything close to a free market is more a
| testament to just how effective the propaganda that has
| been pushing free market economic thought has been.
|
| [1] https://sci-
| hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/2644389?seq=...
| eru wrote:
| > The well off in these countries are much more well-off
| than they were before, but the poor are potentially in a
| worse/more inescapable position than they started.
|
| Would you count this statement as falsified, if eg the
| median income in Bangladesh went up? (Or any other
| percentile.) If not, what would falsify that statement?
|
| Singapore is an interesting case. You are right about
| ownership. I am basing my estimate more on eg the low
| rate of government spending compared to total GDP,
| general ease of doing business, light touch regulation.
|
| Close to my heart (coming from Germany) is the absence of
| pervasive occupational licensing in Singapore. Similarly
| the absence of minimum wage laws.
|
| > The rest of the paper goes into detail explaining how
| the government routinely intervenes with subsidies and
| tax policy in order to force the market into whatever
| shape it deems fit. So I think the fact that people view
| Singapore at anything close to a free market is more a
| testament to just how effective the propaganda that has
| been pushing free market economic thought has been.
|
| I am currently living in Singapore, and so far the
| 'propaganda' has been so effective that even living here
| I still see that it's fairly pro-market.
|
| And that includes talking to 'normal' locals, and also to
| people running businesses here.
|
| Malaysia is useful for contrast. The government is a much
| bigger drag on the economy there.
|
| The paper you quote is fairly old, and also doesn't seem
| to reflect the consensus of economists. (It's nonetheless
| interesting though.)
| Jochim wrote:
| > Would you count this statement as falsified, if eg the
| median income in Bangladesh went up? (Or any other
| percentile.) If not, what would falsify that statement?
|
| I don't honestly know. Quality of life is in my mind the
| most important factor and is hard to measure, I don't
| think there's any one statistic or small group of
| statistics that can capture it.
|
| What worries me at the moment is the trend of 40-50 years
| of productivity increases leaving wages far behind. The
| elimination of secure, well paying jobs for the lower
| working classes that have been replaced with gig/service
| work where you hope you'll be given enough hours to make
| end meet that week. Sectors of local economies destroyed
| or made dependent on global capital firms with huge
| losses. I want to know where it will end, because all I
| can see in the future is rising inequality and
| stratification.
|
| > Close to my heart (coming from Germany) is the absence
| of pervasive occupational licensing in Singapore.
| Similarly the absence of minimum wage laws.
|
| I'm not familiar with occupational licensing in Germany.
| But I don't have a problem with it if it's done to ensure
| safety/quality and there are minimal barriers to entry,
| employers seem all too happy to introduce inexperienced
| workers to situations which may not be obviously
| dangerous to the worker without proper training.
|
| Minimum wage is a fairly contentious issue, what is it
| you dislike about it in particular? Interestingly it
| looks like some sectors have enforced a minimum wage:
|
| https://www.minimum-wage.org/international/singapore
|
| I'd be interested in knowing why cleaning and security
| were singled out specifically rather than a more general
| rule.
|
| >I am currently living in Singapore, and so far the
| 'propaganda' has been so effective that even living here
| I still see that it's fairly pro-market. >And that
| includes talking to 'normal' locals, and also to people
| running businesses here. >Malaysia is useful for
| contrast. The government is a much bigger drag on the
| economy there. >The paper you quote is fairly old, and
| also doesn't seem to reflect the consensus of economists.
| (It's nonetheless interesting though.)
|
| It was interesting to see how far back the disagreement
| on Singapore's economy goes.
| eru wrote:
| > What worries me at the moment is the trend of 40-50
| years of productivity increases leaving wages far behind.
|
| First, people usually make that claim for the US. Living
| standards in the developed world have improved too
| visibly. So let's concentrate on the US.
|
| Second, that claim usually comes about by people
| comparing productivity statistics to wage statistics.
| Usually, both of those data sets are inflation adjusted,
| but via different measures of inflation.
|
| To avoid that complication, we can just look at the ratio
| of nominal wages to nominal GDP over time.
|
| https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/estimating-the-
| us-... has a graph that shows that labour share falling
| from about 66% in 1947 to ~58% in 2016.
|
| That's a fall to be sure, but calling the change
| something like 'leaving wages far behind' seems a bit
| dramatic.
|
| If I remember right, most of that lost 8% went to higher
| land rents. The share of capital is generally stable.
|
| I find land rents as problematic as the next Georgist.
|
| > I want to know where it will end, because all I can see
| in the future is rising inequality and stratification.
|
| Globally, inequality has gone down massively over the
| last few decades. Billions of people used to starve. Now
| people in China and (many in) India obsess over which
| smart phone to buy.
|
| > I'm not familiar with occupational licensing in
| Germany. But I don't have a problem with it if it's done
| to ensure safety/quality and there are minimal barriers
| to entry, employers seem all too happy to introduce
| inexperienced workers to situations which may not be
| obviously dangerous to the worker without proper
| training.
|
| In Germany, the government requires a two to three year
| apprenticeship for you to be allowed to eg cut hair or
| fix a computer or lay bricks or cook etc.
|
| In Singapore, you mostly just have to do a short health
| and safety training, and then it's up to the customers to
| reject your bad haircuts.
|
| > Minimum wage is a fairly contentious issue, what is it
| you dislike about it in particular?
|
| They are an instance of the 'Copenhagen interpretation of
| ethics': https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-
| interpretation-of-eth...
|
| If we want poor people to have more money, we should levy
| a general tax of some kind, and then use the proceeds to
| give them more money.
|
| Minimum wages put a burden on people who interact with
| poor people instead. So they encourage you to find ways
| around having to interact with poor people. Eg you can
| avoid the burden by eg replacing workers with robots, or
| by shopping at a more upmarket place than Walmart. Or
| eating at fancy restaurants instead of Burger King.
|
| (You might notice that the people shopping at places that
| hire a lot of minimum waged workers tend to be also on
| the poorer side.
|
| And I don't think business owners are absorbing the costs
| of minimum wages, because capital is internationally
| mobile.)
|
| > It was interesting to see how far back the disagreement
| on Singapore's economy goes.
|
| I asked Google Scholar to tell me who cited the paper you
| quoted to get some further context. The paper and author
| seem to be embedded in some particular corner of
| economics.
|
| Wikipedia and most of the rest of the world describe
| Singapore as free market. (Including also the economists
| blogging at econlog.)
|
| > I'd be interested in knowing why cleaning and security
| were singled out specifically rather than a more general
| rule.
|
| I might look up the history behind that. In general, I
| assume it was some pragmatic bending to political
| pressure. In some instances the population is not quite
| as free market as the government here.
|
| I really like the system Singapore has for cars.
| Basically, the government sets an overall limit for the
| number of cars on the island. It's about a million at the
| moment. Those one million permits are auctioned off to
| the highest bidders for ten years at a time. Each month,
| roughly 1% of permits expire and are auctioned off again.
|
| The auction is a simple affair:
|
| The government takes all the bids from the current month,
| and determines the lowest price that clears the market.
| Ie every one who bid more than the clearing price gets a
| permit at the clearing price. Everyone who doesn't get a
| permit bid less than the clearing price.
|
| To come to the point: often people suggest that instead
| of every winner paying the same price, winners should be
| made to pay what they bid.
|
| For some reason, that's supposed to make big companies
| pay more in the end, and individuals pay less.
|
| Of course, big companies are exactly the kind of
| institutions who can afford the modelling and research to
| forecast the clearing price, and they can also afford to
| miss out or get a few extra cars in their fleet.
|
| (Thus the government understands economics a bit better
| than much of the population.)
|
| It's also a good illustration of how the government
| intervenes here, instead of letting everyone drive a car,
| but does so in a way that econ 101 would approve of.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Uh, the US in comparison with Western Europe?
|
| Student loans, house loans, car loans, payday loans. Food
| deserts, prison standard of living. Social mobility in
| general. "Right to work", worker protection. At-will
| firing. Non-existing safety nets. Days of vacation and
| parental leave. Average savings per capita.
|
| Most of the above are absolutely more feudalist (not sure
| about the neo prefix). Some of these are literally
| unimaginable at the other side of the pond.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Student loans,
|
| Well I wouldn't call this a failure of the free market
| because this is actually the exact opposite situation.
| Americans have decided to solve funding for education
| through private funding, which is fine in principle but
| then they ruined the free market component through
| extreme government intervention that sets up perverse
| incentives. It's a text book example of government
| intervention gone wrong. The way it should have worked is
| that degrees with good job prospects are cheaper to
| finance than those where people end up unemployed. If
| people pick the wrong degree that's fine because they can
| discharge the debt which causes interest to go up and
| make the uneconomical degree more expensive. It also
| means that colleges don't get a free money siphon and
| waste all the money on things that don't improve the job
| prospects of their students.
|
| The free market utopia would be that average people go to
| college and money printing "corporate drones" leave
| college. People can then use their wealth to pursue their
| true interests in their spare time, or you know at least
| feed their kids. Instead what we have right now is
| basically 18 year olds chasing their dreams and everyone
| around them (advisers, bankers, government, college)
| tells them to go ahead while those young people are about
| to blow their foot of with the debt and no job prospects.
|
| >house loans
|
| Not sure what's wrong with those to be fair. The free
| market works here because money is just another type of
| commodity. It's fungible, it doesn't matter what bank you
| go to. The central bank printing press is causing some
| asset inflation but it's not fundamentally broken, just
| tilted.
|
| >car loans
|
| I have heard that it is difficult to get financing for
| small cars in the USA because Americans don't buy small
| cars anymore. I personally can't comprehend this but why
| not just get a used car instead? What else is wrong car
| loans?
|
| >payday loans
|
| Yeah this is definitively a complete failure for the free
| market. There are some people that are doing so badly
| that lending them money for a profit will just make their
| situation worse. This is something that can only be
| solved through charity or welfare with no strings
| attached and no expectation to get the aid back. If
| someone is lacking $500 then charging them $600 isn't
| going to solve their problems. Giving loans to people who
| can't pay them back is always a bad idea. However, there
| is also a group of people who is merely late on their
| payments but can eventually get back on their feet. 30%
| annualized interest for small loans can be a perfectly
| acceptable solution for people who are a high default
| risk. Payday loans are often something insane like 500%
| annualized interest and they also offer extremely poor
| repayment conditions. They just shouldn't exist.
|
| >Food deserts
|
| This is caused by differences in access to
| transportation. If all the "not poor" people use their
| car to drive to a Walmart that is 15 miles away then poor
| people won't get access to a decent store within 15
| miles.
|
| >prison standard of living
|
| Yes, another failure of the free market but also a case
| of the people involved being morally corrupt through and
| through. It's basically legalized slavery and the prison
| wards can always ask for more "slaves".
|
| >Social mobility in general.
|
| Well, this is primarily caused by labor abroad increasing
| supply for everything and pushing down prices to a level
| where richer nations can't compete. The "corporate drone"
| I mentioned above does very well in such a situation
| because his skills are still in high demand. The problem
| we have is that there are not enough "corporate drones"
| who get a profitable degree. Upskilling is extremely
| important because low skilled workers basically compete
| with dirt cheap labor abroad nowadays.
|
| >"Right to work", worker protection
|
| The free market can work in favor of workers if
| businesses are competing for workers. As I said, there is
| a lack of workers that companies want. If you have to
| compete with your neighbors it's a race to the bottom. I
| can't say the free market failed here. It's inherently a
| difference in culture.
|
| > Non-existing safety nets.
|
| Yeah this is one of the weirdest things about the USA.
| It's easy to get fired, but it's also even easier to lose
| everything once you lose that job.
|
| >days of vacation and parental leave.
|
| One of the greatest failings of the free market is that
| it can't ensure reproduction of our species. Going by
| what the bean counters say we would never have kids.
|
| >Average savings per capita.
|
| This is probably influenced by culture. Owning housing
| often causes savings to go up. In renter societies you
| often see people own less capital than in home ownership
| focused societies.
|
| Overall the USA somehow managed to have both the worst
| parts of the free market and the worst parts of
| government intervention in one ugly package. It's very
| surprising to me. I'm pretty sure that if they could have
| avoided the worst parts of government intervention that
| they would put my own country to shame. Instead there are
| some rich dudes in a gated community and lots of poor
| people around the gated communities. Yeah sure the rich
| dudes brag about how rich they are rich but that's not
| the only important thing for me. It's also not guaranteed
| that I will be one of them if I go there. I never want to
| live there. If I was on exile I'd rather go to countries
| that are not as wealthy as Germany than to the USA.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Well thanks for the interesting background info on some
| of these points, but what is your conclusion here?
|
| I readily admit that I just brainstormed to support my
| initial association, so not all points are going to hold
| their water. But you seem to agree to a direct
| relationship of free market and feudalistic traits, so do
| you actually agree, but wanted to introduce nuance?
| triangleman wrote:
| The loan situation can be attributed to Nixon closing the
| gold window and the US having the world's reserve
| currency anyway. Money is cheap these days. It will not
| be forever.
| imtringued wrote:
| Free market and government intervention are just tools to
| achieve a desired outcome. You can have too much market
| freedom and too much government intervention. Moderation
| is key. It's also important to regulate the right things.
| A lot of economies are failing to grow because of
| government oppression or corruption. A lot of economies
| get into undesirable situations because they are too
| liberalized.
|
| The balance is usually tilted slightly towards free
| markets because many governments are often incompetent
| but the free market doesn't tolerate incompetence or
| inefficiencies. In many cases it is so hyper efficient
| that smaller players have such a hard time that
| monopolies form and globalization brought this to a new
| height where we have entire countries like China
| specialize in manufacturing to the point where USA/Europe
| can't compete and seek out other opportunities.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| We are being told that markets solve everything and yet the
| US have the most expensive healthcare in the West and the
| lousiest internet. The belief is empirically supported.
| dagw wrote:
| _We are being told that markets solve everything and yet
| the US have the most expensive healthcare in the West and
| the lousiest internet_
|
| For which there are two possible conclusions.
|
| 1) Free markets are unable to supply reasonably priced,
| high quality health care and internet
|
| 2) The markets for healthcare and internet in the US aren't
| Free markets.
|
| You seem very sure that possibility 1 is the only correct
| conclusion, without examining possibility 2.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| The empirical evidence is that internet is cheaper in
| countries with local-loop unbundling, and that countries
| that have price controls for medical care have cheaper
| healthcare. You can't argue with observable facts.
| dagw wrote:
| I'll happy accept that at face value (even if I think the
| truth of the first statement is slightly more complex
| that you make it out to be). Just not sure that leads to
| the conclusions you seem to be drawing from those facts.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| > markets solve everything and yet the US have the most
| expensive healthcare in the West and the lousiest internet
|
| Neither of which are anything close to free markets.
| eru wrote:
| And this is HN already. The attitude of the general
| population is often worse.
|
| I do remember early HN and even early reddit being much more
| pro-market. I wonder, assuming my perception mirrors a real
| change, whether that's down to changes in individuals'
| attitudes or to different people making up the bulk of the
| communities? Are we just going mainstream?
| ianleeclark wrote:
| > do remember early HN and even early reddit being much
| more pro-market
|
| It shows you have registered in 2007. Quite a lot of
| history has happened since then which may have altered
| people's opinion of the pro-market narrative.
|
| > Are we just going mainstream?
|
| Mainstream opinion is very pro-market. Calling for
| abolition of either markets or value itself is a highly
| niche position--you will typically only see people calling,
| to varying degrees, of smoothing rough edges.
| eru wrote:
| Interesting, from what I can tell the mainstream seems
| crazy far left and in favour of all kinds of
| interventions to 'smooth rough edges' and worse. Rhetoric
| against rich people is rather popular.
|
| But yes, from an even further left point of view, full on
| abolishing of markets ain't that popular. (A few
| countries tried going in that direction throughout
| history, it never ended well.)
|
| In the US the Republicans are against free trade, and the
| Democrats have their usually anti market stance.
|
| About stuff since 2007: the economic difficulties in the
| years after mostly showed that when central banks refuse
| to print enough money, nominal spending drops, and the
| economy tanks. (The Israeli and Australian central banks
| kept their countries' nominal GDP stable, and mostly
| avoided recession.) But you are right that the perception
| in the mainstream does not agree with that perspective
| (as I mentioned, the mainstream is by-and-large anti-
| market.)
| ianleeclark wrote:
| > Interesting, from what I can tell the mainstream seems
| crazy far left and in favour of all kinds of
| interventions to 'smooth rough edges' and worse.
|
| I'd like to see some examples.
|
| > In the US the Republicans are against free trade
|
| This isn't anti pro-market. This is anti market-as-
| totalizing-factor-in-life. These things aren't
| contradictory.
|
| > and the Democrats have their usually anti market
| stance.
|
| They gave us NAFTA. They passed a--i shit you not--
| market-mediated healthcare bill. As you speak, there is
| literally a power struggle happening wherein lobbyists
| are being stacked in Biden's future cabinet to ensure
| favorable market positions for their represented patrons.
|
| I think there's a lot of confusion on your part. I think
| you're mis-using "market," to refer to some "free-
| market," that could never exist. I might be wrong, but
| there's no other way that I could understand how you can
| refer to Democrats, as a whole, as "anti-market." Sure,
| AOC gets a lot of press, but you're missing the forest
| for the trees when this forms your world-view of what
| that party is and does.
| eru wrote:
| You are right that we are probably using different
| terminology.
|
| What I would have in mind is policy more guided by econ
| 101, or alternatively, whatever Estonian, Singapore and
| Hong Kong are doing.
|
| The latter only by-and-large and with big exceptions
| obviously, since they are complicated real world places.
|
| So called 'free trade agreements' are an interesting
| example: econ 101 tells us that free trade agreements are
| pretty silly. Adam Smith and Ricardo already showed that
| you should abolish your own trade barriers unilaterally
| regardless of what the other guy is doing, no need for
| any agreements.
|
| (But that's a digression. I agree that free trade
| agreements are largely seen as pro-market by the general
| public.)
|
| In any case, NAFTA stems from the bygone era of the
| Washington Consensus. It mostly predates the time I am
| talking about.
|
| Yes, there's a tiny bit of market in the American
| healthcare system. But it's a very small sliver.
|
| Have a look at
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-
| cost... and
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-
| the-co... for a more in-depth and even-handed discussion
| than I could give you. Especially the 'certificate of
| need' is interesting. (Basically, existing hospitals in
| an area can veto any new hospital.)
|
| Yes, if you by "market" you mean "corporate welfare" and
| "crony capitalism", than what your comment makes total
| sense.
|
| A perfect free market might never have existed, but good
| enough approximations do; and it's useful to move more
| areas in that direction.
| imtringued wrote:
| >So called 'free trade agreements' are an interesting
| example: econ 101 tells us that free trade agreements are
| pretty silly. Adam Smith and Ricardo already showed that
| you should abolish your own trade barriers unilaterally
| regardless of what the other guy is doing, no need for
| any agreements.
|
| That's obviously stupid because it would undermine all
| regulation because you can always ship products to an
| unregulated market and then ship them back. Free trade
| agreements exist because the countries involved want to
| keep some degree of regulation and they want to have a
| choice which regulation they get to keep.
| kingaillas wrote:
| >What I would have in mind is policy more guided by econ
| 101
|
| I think we're in the mess we're in BECAUSE too many
| politicians act like all there is to know about economics
| is covered in econ 101.
|
| I suggest this book - "What Every Economics Student Needs
| to Know and Doesn't Get in the Usual Principles Text"
| (https://www.amazon.com/Every-Economics-Student-Doesnt-
| Princi...) for some insight into what happens when
| perfect, academic, theoretical models collide with the
| real world.
| ianleeclark wrote:
| > What I would have in mind is policy more guided by econ
| 101
|
| I have a degree in Economics. The first they thing teach
| you in Econ 201 is to ignore everything that happened in
| Econ 101: it's useful to learn to read graphs, but
| everything is largely useless otherwise.
|
| Also, why are you prescribing that we ought to follow
| Econ 101 then 2 sentences later telling us to instead
| ignore Econ 101 in favor of this other thing. This is
| contradictory advice.
|
| > A perfect free market might never have existed, but
| good enough approximations do
|
| Good enough is arbitrary. Go check out Anarcho-
| Capitalists, they want a very different good-enough.
| Furthermore, we're finding another contradiction: your
| pursuit of a free-market, yet you're offering up
| countries with varying levels of market and capital
| control. Estonia, for example, has highly market-
| distorting healthcare/insurance industries through a
| monopsony. This is, again, contradictory, as a monopsony
| is a market-distorting force--especially when constructed
| through government mandate. Or is this where that
| ideology safety-valve kicks in: > The latter only by-and-
| large and with big exceptions obviously, since they are
| complicated real world places.
|
| It's full of contradiction and arbitrary distinctions.
| imtringued wrote:
| If you are interested in a moderately realistic economy
| simulation game then checkout prosperous universe.
|
| https://prosperousuniverse.com/blog/2020/11/03/learn-
| economi...
|
| I think it's incredibly interesting because it helps
| people actually experience economic theory first hand by
| letting everyone run their own virtual business. It's
| obviously highly simplified but if you have spent your
| entire life on the consumer/worker side then you will
| never get to experience even a tiny bit of the complexity
| of running a real business and how economic theory works
| out in practice. When you aren't actually running your
| own business you often get hung up on high profile edge
| cases like monopolies where it's in your face that the
| economy is not in your favor but you never ever stop and
| think for a second about the parts of the economy that do
| actually work out just fine. Things like water futures
| are a net positive compared to the previous situation.
| Instead everyone in this comment section assumes the
| worst and thinks about how this system is going to get
| broken and abused because that is what they experience
| all the time in far more complicated situations like
| health care.
|
| Free markets aren't ideal in every situation. That's true
| but there are also situations in which they are
| excellent. The closer you get to a prefect market the
| more effective the free market. Health care is the
| ultimate counter example to a perfect market and managing
| it as a free market will not yield efficient results.
| [deleted]
| steveklabnik wrote:
| As someone who joined in 2009, and was very pro market at
| the time, as time passed, my opinions changed. No idea how
| representative that is.
| yiyus wrote:
| It happens with everything: markets, politicians, unions,
| revolutions... It's easy to find bad (really bad!) precedents
| which affect lots of people and this creates very strong
| opinions. Although I agree it is sad, it's also very
| understandable.
| deeeeplearning wrote:
| >Umm what's the incentive or motivation behind making this
| trade able?
|
| Uh.. Money? lol
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > especially if we ever get to a point where some people can
| 'afford' water while others can't.
|
| We are almost there. In Bangalore, India due to hockey-stick
| like expansion of houses, mainly high rise gated communities,
| the municipality is just not able to supply tap water. They all
| rely on daily supply of water tankers. However, even that water
| isn't potable. So house holds buy bottled water or have RO
| machines. Bear in mind, this is the situation for middle/upper-
| middle-income group. Lower income groups just drink any water
| they can, waterborne disease is rampant.
|
| This[1] talk from P Sainath about the water crisis in India is
| revealing.
|
| I would the situation would be similar in other emerging
| countries. I remember that a few months ago Cape Town, SA ran
| out of water[2]. Water was strictly rationed.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-l2LvA2dSI
|
| [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/cape-town-
| was-90-days...
| thisistheend123 wrote:
| If the water tanker guys are able fulfill the deficiency,
| then you know that there is enough water. It's only that the
| waterworks aren't supplying enough so that people have no
| choice left but to pay the water tanker guys.
|
| Municipalities in most of Urban India are hand in glove with
| these water tanker mafias.
|
| Good governance is the answer.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If the water tanker guys are able fulfill the deficiency,
| then you know that there is enough water.
|
| Not if they're taking it from folks who now don't have
| enough.
| sumedh wrote:
| The water tanker guys also steal the municipal water supply
| by giving bribes to some of the officials.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Happens in the west too. No bribes required. There's
| already non-secured water everywhere by law: fire
| hydrants.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| > _just drink any water they can, waterborne disease is
| rampant_
|
| Is boiling water not option or am I missing something? On a
| world scale having a potable tap water is more of an
| exception than a norm.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| No boiling required. Enough plastic bottles and a sunny day
| works too.
|
| Even if heating with gas/electricity, aiming for boiling is
| hard to screw up, but an overshoot of what'a required.
|
| This is only good for bacteria/viruses.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Keep in mind, there are also many illnesses and diseases
| that can be caused by inorganic content in water that no
| amount of boiling will make potable and can cause
| everything from poisoning to cancer long term (lead, etc).
|
| To be fair, waterborne illness is very often organic
| related: microbes, viruses, bacteria, etc.
| MisterTea wrote:
| This assumes that people have adequate access to the energy
| required for boiling and have the necessary equipment to do
| so.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Not at all an insignificant amount of energy btw.
| imtringued wrote:
| Purification tablets are also not that expensive compared
| to the effects of crippling diseases.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Crippling disease is free if you don't get any medical
| care.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Ah yes, the American way.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| This is kind of one of those shocks most people will get when
| they goto those countries. Just as you said, even the well
| off have to fill up their water tanks daily and hope they
| don't use it all up. I have no idea how everyone else gets
| by, but certainly in the west we simply take water for
| granted.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| Flint Michigan, probably doesn't take their water for
| granted.... It's still not fixed. We've just all forgotten
| about it, and I read there's a lot of similar issues
| nationwide in other water jurisdictions because of
| fracking.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Just as you said, even the well off have to fill up their
| water tanks daily and hope they don't use it all up.
|
| I thought this was a deliberate approach: the city would
| round-robin supply water and if you're wealthy, you fill
| your tanks when it's your turn, and if you're not, you do
| all of your water consumption during those periods.
| Balgair wrote:
| Speak for yourself there. I know that CO has been in a
| drought more often than not this century:
|
| https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/colorado
| meesles wrote:
| Having lived in CO + TX (both states that get 'water
| restrictions'), never once did I worry about not having
| water to drink or bathe. They usually just ask us to
| conserve water and not water lawns so heavily in the
| summer. Not really comparable to countries where you need
| to plan to acquire and stock water for your family for
| daily use.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The aquifer under the plains states is expected to be
| depleted in the next 30 years due mostly to heavy
| agricultural use. So this could lead to additional
| restrictions or true rationing.
| Balgair wrote:
| True, but it seems like it's only a matter of time then.
|
| What can you call a chronic 20 year drought when it
| stretches to 40 years?
| seattletech wrote:
| A liberal conspiracy /s
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Agreed. We don't know the consequences of pushing
| Mountain West aquifers the way we have. There is good
| evidence we are pulling out more than is replenished and
| therefore are incurring a deficit.
|
| What's more, we tend to think of the "West" as "won" but
| these states are mostly still growing as part of the
| American Westward expansion. A lot of Western State land
| only became easily accessible with the completion of the
| interstates in the 1960s 1970s and even 1980s. Therefore,
| the material abundance necessary for truly large scale
| populations to live in comfort has only come to these
| places in the last 40 years. This has caused a consistent
| population boom in some places which is not yet tapering
| and will lead to increased stress on these resources.
| bluGill wrote:
| Fortunately (except for lawns and the like) water isn't
| destroyed or lost. Cities can take the output of their
| sewer systems and put it right back into the water
| towers. No city does that today, but only because the
| thought grosses people out, the water is safe and clean
| enough that they could.
| katbyte wrote:
| At a cost, cheaper to just get fresh water I would
| imagine
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I wonder if anyone has done an estimate of water losses
| in a home/day to evaporation (e.g. toilet bowl
| evaporation, humidifiers, drying laundry, drying dishes,
| etc.).
|
| R/O is expensive. Tons of opportunities in the average
| home for re-use. Can use that shower/sink/laundry/dish
| water for toilets. A selective automatic bypass system
| could save the (mostly soapless) water to replace
| plant/garden watering (though that's evaporation!).
| AngryData wrote:
| It is the exact reason I chose to live in a water rich part
| of the country/world. I live in an arid area for awhile and
| to me it just seemed like a death trap, your life is nearly
| 100% dependent on local infrastructure operating correctly
| and what little water resources you have not being bought
| up and sucked up by some large corporation to grow and sell
| some specialty crop.
| IronRanger wrote:
| With the core factor being that there are more people than
| the water supplies can support. The solution here is a one-
| child or no-child policy, just as in China.
| berkes wrote:
| No. The solution is to fix the water supply infrastructure
| so it can handle the current population.
|
| Don't push politics and ideologies into things that have
| little to do with it. What you describe is the underlying
| problem, one that needs to be solved _as well_ (though how,
| is another thing). But solving that, even today, won 't
| bring water to the people who need it today.
| IronRanger wrote:
| And who is going to come in and fix this water
| infrastructure, the British?
|
| The fact is that environmental conditions worsen each
| decade in India and quality of life is lower than in the
| 70s when the population was 555million (currently 1.3b).
|
| Meanwhile the upper castes flee the country en-masse to
| the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe.
|
| The Indian population will rise to 1.6b by 2050. It will
| be substantially easier to fix water infrastructure if
| this number was hundreds of millions lower. Population
| management is a bigger part of the solution than pipes
| and dams.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Population management is a bigger part of the solution
| than pipes and dams.
|
| "Population management" is a road leading straight to
| ethical catastrophes, to murder and other horrible forms
| of suffering. There have been _many_ of these -
| genocides, "Lebensraum im Osten" aka Nazi Germany
| invading Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, China's "1 child
| policy".
|
| The best way a society can handle population management
| is fact-based sex education and safe, cheap access to
| contraceptives and medical abortion, and general access
| to healthcare and a social security network so that
| people don't have to have half a dozen children if they
| want one or two to survive to adulthood and care for them
| at old age.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > "Population management" is a road leading
|
| You can say that about anything: socialist policies, "no-
| tolerance" policies, anything that looks like censorship.
|
| You say there have been many such example, then trot out
| Nazi Germany; The fact the Nazis purposefully initiated a
| genocide (the holocaust) out of hatred out the Jews
| undermines the suggestion that there was a genuine
| attempt at population management.
|
| Chinas also has a pretty poor human rights example, aside
| from it's 1-child policy.
|
| Do you have any example of a modern (first-world,
| developed) country with a good human-rights record, and
| QOL index pursuing population management?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Are you sure you're disagreeing with the parent poster?
| It sounds to me like you've just outlined a plan to
| achieve the same goal.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The parent poster advocated for a one-child policy:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372090
| jhowell wrote:
| > And who is going to come in and fix this water
| infrastructure, the British?
|
| Seems like the Brits have done a lot, historically in
| Indian and China, but have their hands full at the moment
| with Brexit to reunite the "kingdom." My money is on the
| Chinese and their scientists in exchange for concessions
| that will further isolate the United States due to
| xenophobic thinking some people in the states perpetuate.
| How long before "their" water born illnesses become our
| airborne viruses?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > to reunite the "kingdom."
|
| BS. They just don't want to be part of a new "kingdom".
|
| Brexiteers don't trust EU politician, but they also don't
| trust UK politicians.
|
| > My money is on the Chinese
|
| Chinese aggression isn't much better than US "xenophobic
| thinking", plus India has pretty good contacts with
| Europe and other south-Asian countries. Plus there is a
| large and influential Indian population in the US, I'd be
| surprised in The Indian population in China are half as
| influential.
| apatters wrote:
| This seems like a comment by someone who lacks a basic
| knowledge of Indian/Chinese relations but has an axe to
| grind against America. India and China are constantly
| saber rattling over turf wars and other geopolitical
| issues, and India withdrew from the recent Chinese-led
| RCEP free trade agreement over concerns that China would
| compromise their economic sovereignty.
|
| India could undergo governmental reform and hire, say,
| German experts (or Indian experts!) to help revitalize
| their water infrastructure. Just illustrating a scenario
| where things change for the better and neither China nor
| America is involved whatsoever.
| bluGill wrote:
| India has more than enough smart people to design and
| build everything they need. Labor is cheap there too, so
| they can dig in pipes everywhere cheaply.
|
| The things that need to be done are public knowledge or
| easy to find out. Most of the west already does it, and
| has been for one hundred years or so. There is nothing
| magical about turning bad water into clean drinkable
| water. All that India is lacking is the will (probably
| because of money or corruption - both real problems).
| betwixthewires wrote:
| You talk about fixing water infrastructure like it is
| really hard (so hard you need the British to do it) and
| your alternative is _to eliminate a significant potion of
| the population_? You think that is easier? Not to even
| talk of the ethical concerns or the unintended
| consequences, just from a logistical standpoint, your
| statement is absurd. There is _no way_ that is is easier
| to reduce a human population than it is to increase water
| availability. I don 't usually attack people (and
| technically I'm only criticizing your statement, not
| attacking you directly) but when malthusians start
| talking I immediately know that they don't know what
| they're talking about.
|
| And on an ethical note, managing populations is something
| you do with sheep and cattle, not human beings.
| imtringued wrote:
| If you fix the problem today one day there will be 3
| billion indians and you have to fix the problem again.
| It's much easier to reduce their reproduction rate
| through education and that education comes with other
| benefits.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| People don't just have kids en masse without a reason.
| People historically had lots of kids for 2 reasons: a lot
| of them died before reaching reproductive age, and they
| needed more hands to produce food because most people
| lived in a subsistence agriculture environment.
|
| The population boom over the last 100 years is not due to
| people reproducing too much, it is due to a decrease in
| child mortality, that and development from agricultural
| to industrial economies meant a cultural lag time in
| reducing the number of kids a woman has.
|
| Once you have an industrial economy, the pressure then
| becomes to have _less_ kids. You don 't need to be told
| in a classroom to do that, it happens naturally. If you
| need proof, these education programs didn't exist in the
| west during development into industrial economies and yet
| the fertility rate decreased simply due to economic
| pressures.
|
| A fertility rate of 2.3 (the .3 accounting for child
| death and people who don't ever have kids) is replacement
| rate. At that rate population does not increase.
|
| Long story short, at least in cities (where the water
| shortage we are talking about is happening) you won't see
| a doubling of the population due to sustained fertility.
| So the shortages you see of water and other resources can
| be entirely attributed to inefficient resource
| allocation, and once capacity is increased to match
| population you won't have to worry about it again and
| again.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > You don't need to be told in a classroom to do that, it
| happens naturally
|
| That's just a theory, and if you're wrong, then what? A
| description of what you think will happen needs better
| evidence. At least one other factor is religious/cultural
| inertia encouraging people to have lots of children, and
| that is somewhat characteristic/unique for each given
| culture s.t. you can't really generalise it too much.
|
| There was a similar theory about non-democracies being
| unstable (Democratic peace theory, wrt greater public
| wealth), and how free trade liberates nations. How did
| that turn out for Chinese superpower?
|
| China is an emerging superpower, and economic powerhouse,
| and anti-democratic to the extend of suppressing
| democracy in HK. It also does _lot_ of trade that never
| seems to encourage an increase in civil liberties.
|
| Now, maybe the theory was all an illusion caused by the
| domination and coercive power, of existing democratic
| nations.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > A fertility rate of 2.3 (the .3 accounting for child
| death and people who don't ever have kids) is replacement
| rate.
|
| This is a good point which often gets overlooked in the
| heated debate of population explosion.
|
| Coincidentally just a year or two ago Indian growth rate
| reached replacement levels[1]. As per the latest data
| (not sure if it's been reviewed/confirmed) it's now
| slightly below the replacement levels.
|
| Also, if you notice, the southern states's growth rate is
| well below that of replacement level.
|
| [1] https://niti.gov.in/content/total-fertility-rate-tfr-
| birth-w...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would say the debate is more accurately about
| distributing resources to an "exploding" amount of
| people. Bringing up the entire population of India (just
| as an example, could be any country) to the living
| standards that are commonly discussed (such as potable
| water, sufficient nutrition, healthcare, etc) could very
| well be practically impossible.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| It's true education is the gift that keeps on giving, but
| India is already at replacement levels of fertility, its
| age 0-19 population has already peaked and is in decline,
| and its population will top out around 1.75 billion.
|
| Their issue here is poor governance, economic inequality,
| and climate change.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| You are purposefully using language that suggests
| genocide. Family planning counts as "managing
| populations" too.
|
| Is every progression on human DNA eugenics? Is every new
| law facism?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I didn't suggest genocide, not at all.
|
| "Family planning" suggests agency. Humans have agency.
| The comment I'm responding to explicitly recommends
| forced reduction in fertility rates, removing agency,
| something you don't do to human beings unless you think
| of them like sheep or cattle. Equating a one or no child
| policy with "family planning" is extremely disingenuous.
|
| Any law that tells human beings how many children they
| are allowed to have is fascism, yes. Any directive
| telling human beings how they have to reproduce is
| eugenics by definition.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > I didn't suggest genocide, not at all
| your alternative is to eliminate a significant potion of
| the population managing populations is
| something you do with sheep and cattle, not human beings.
|
| using the word "eliminate" and 'treating people like
| cattle' isn't consistent with merely incentivising them
| to not have children.
|
| > The comment I'm responding to explicitly recommends
| forced reduction in fertility rates, removing agency
|
| where does it? It's a comment previous that the same
| poster talks about Chinas 1cp, and as I understand it, it
| was implemented as a fine for having more than one child.
|
| Do punitive fines, and tax/welfare
| incentives/disincentives count as being "forced" or "non-
| agency"?
|
| > Any law that tells human beings how many children they
| are allowed to have is fascism, yes.
|
| I disagree. Point me to a commonly accepted definition of
| fascism that agrees, without requiring too much
| subjective interpretation. Anyone can have their own
| notion of what constitutes freedom/oppression etc.
|
| > Any directive telling human beings how they have to
| reproduce is eugenics by definition.
|
| Again, show me that definition. Most that I've seen limit
| the choice of _who_ can procreate. A flat rule of 1-child
| applied to everyone equally doesn 't seem to apply to me
| as there is no differentiation based on genetics. But in
| any case, a rose by any other name: deciding something
| fits a definition doesn't really change the semantics, so
| it doesn't really make any difference, especially if you
| are using a special-case, or non-standard application of
| the definition (e.g. like arguing abortion is bad based
| on whether it counts as murder, or not).
| waterhouse wrote:
| > Any directive telling human beings how they have to
| reproduce is eugenics by definition.
|
| It could be dysgenics, depending on what the instructions
| are. :-P How about private charities that provide
| voluntary incentives for some people to self-sterilize
| and others to have more kids? How about private charities
| that subsidize birth control and abortions? How about
| friends and family encouraging people to marry someone
| smart, or telling people with genetic disorders that they
| should adopt? Do you draw a line somewhere in the above
| between "eugenics" and "not eugenics"? I think your line
| would be far from universal. dictionary.com says "the
| study of or belief in the possibility of improving the
| qualities of the human species or a human population",
| which would indeed encompass all of the above. I'm afraid
| the word "eugenics", like "fascism", has been corrupted
| into "something whose exact definition is unclear, but
| it's definitely a bad thing".
|
| > Any law that tells human beings how many children they
| are allowed to have is fascism, yes.
|
| So what is there to prevent some people from having 10
| children, every generation, until the system collapses
| under their weight? If you say "it's the parents'
| responsibility to provide for the kids, and if they don't
| manage to do so from their own resources or persuade
| anyone else, then the kids may starve and that will limit
| the process", then, fine, that would work; though many
| people think the state should always prevent kids (or
| perhaps people generally) from starving, and I think
| policies with that effect have been enacted even in the
| U.S., and I doubt they will get repealed anytime soon.
|
| You say that people with increased access to education
| and health and such naturally reduce their birth rates.
| That may be. But I think it would be only a matter of
| time before they got selected for impulsivity, high
| libido, inclination to adhere to the parents' religion
| that says to maximize children, or whatever other traits
| would lead to a bunch of people actually having tons of
| kids they can't support. (Perhaps the singularity and/or
| genetic engineering and/or other stuff will happen and
| make that irrelevant long before it becomes an issue.)
| Maybe those traits would also lead to doing things that
| land them in jail for years, getting a reproductive
| penalty that way; I dunno if that would be enough.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| >The Indian population will rise to 1.6b by 2050.
|
| india will run out of resources(and water) before
| population hits a peak. depopulation is a statistical
| guarantee. reducing population voluntarily is the only
| way to assure a reasonable stock of the gene pool before
| the country completely runs out of resources and scarcity
| escalates into wars of depopulation(historically, it has
| been proven that war always follows drought or famine on
| a larger scale..from genghis khan to african tribes to
| vikings to the last syrian war, if you can collect enough
| data sets about world famine/droughts/scarcities, wars
| always follow.)
|
| now..how to go about it. its a multi pronged approach:
|
| 1. stop incentivising children. what does this mean?
| instead of punitive measures or coercive one child
| policy, the state should incentivise responsible
| procreation and reward the child free. like an UBI for
| those who dont contribute to population growth.
|
| 2. provide free preservation of genetic
| material(sperm/eggs/dna) in a gene pool databank for
| posterity. this may not mean anything. it may amount to
| something. the idea that a 'legacy' might have a chance
| in a better world through frozen dna is a perk. it is a
| small cost and a nice gesture to reward selfless action
| for the nation. also: who knows what we might need in
| 300-500 years later.
|
| 3. go back to village or rural economies. by this, i dont
| mean that indians should start turning back time wrt sci
| and tech. what i mean is that people should go back
| village size communities. these have to be self governing
| and self sustaining units that can manage their own
| resources.
|
| 4. diversity is a double edged sword. i am not talking
| about social diversity, but diversity of resource
| expenditure and resource scarcity. there are too many
| people in india and to a certain extent, more cohesion
| and homogeneous living/way of life will give smaller
| communities more agency over how they manage local
| resources.
|
| example: a meat eating population has a different
| resource expenditure pattern than a vegetarian/dairy
| inclusive one. rural communities differ from urban
| community's needs. droughty areas have different
| management starategies than those with monsoons.
|
| 5. it's very easy wrt water. dig more ponds and save rain
| water. protect watersheds and prevent ag/industrial
| runoffs. adopt 'nile valley' model of digging canals.
| take whatever you grow indoors into hydroponic systems.
| india still gets a lot of rain during the monsoons.
| development of rural areas and relieving the pressure in
| urban density will help. but only if there is a limit on
| the number of people per resource budgeted zone.
|
| 6. more importantly..before the depopulation occurs due
| to scarcity of resources, there is a real danger for
| india. if the wet bulb temperatures[1]rise as predicted,
| the heat and humidity will kill people in their sleep.
| they'd go to bed and die in their sleep.[2]
|
| [..]He and his colleagues previously looked at how heat
| waves would evolve with warming in the Middle East and
| found that region will likely be home to the highest wet-
| bulb temperatures the world will see. (Bandar Mahshahr in
| Iran hit a wet-bulb temperature of nearly 95degF during a
| 2015 heat wave, which translates to a heat index of about
| 163degF (73degC).) But South Asia poses the bigger
| concern in terms of threats to people, as it is home to
| one fifth of the world's population and is an area of
| deep poverty.
|
| "That combination is what makes, what shapes this acute
| vulnerability," Eltahir said.
|
| Eltahir and his colleagues found that if greenhouse gas
| emissions continue on their current trajectory, parts of
| eastern India and Bangladesh will exceed the 95degF
| threshold by century's end and most of South Asia will
| approach that threshold.
|
| If emissions are substantially curtailed and global
| temperature rise meets the 2degC (3.6degF) limit agreed
| to in the Paris accord, no place in South Asia would
| exceed 95degF, though wet-bulb temperatures over 88degF
| would be widespread. Such temperatures can still be
| deadly, especially to already vulnerable populations like
| the elderly.[..]
|
| [1]https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/climate-
| change...
|
| [2]https://www.climatecentral.org/news/extreme-heat-
| india-most-...
| imtringued wrote:
| >6. more importantly..before the depopulation occurs due
| to scarcity of resources, there is a real danger for
| india. if the wet bulb temperatures[1]rise as predicted,
| the heat and humidity will kill people in their sleep.
| they'd go to bed and die in their sleep.[2]
|
| Yeah but people have a survival instinct. They won't just
| say"Hey, it's so hot I will die before I wake up. Let's
| go to sleep!". They'll go somewhere where they won't die.
| They will go to where we are...
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| it will not take days and months. one heat wave will kill
| hundreds of thousands of people in their sleep.
|
| and how and where will a few hundred million people
| migrate?
|
| [..]Currently, about 2 percent of the Indian population
| is occasionally exposed to extreme wet-bulb temperatures
| (between 89 and 94 degrees). According to a 2017 study,
| by 2100 that number could increase to 70 percent. [..]
|
| https://scroll.in/article/931865/the-human-body-cant-
| cope-in... : Human body can't cope infinitely with rising
| temperatures - and in India, it is close to its limits At
| a certain temperature, sweat stops evaporating - shutting
| down the body's cooling mechanism, causing death. Parts
| of the world are already there.
|
| When the air temperature exceeds 35 degrees Celsius, the
| body relies on the evaporation of water - mainly through
| sweating - to keep core temperature at a safe level. This
| system works until what is called the wet-bulb
| temperature reaches 35 degrees Celsius. The wet-bulb
| temperature includes the cooling effect of water
| evaporating from the thermometer and so is normally much
| lower than the normal dry-bulb temperature reported in
| weather forecasts.
|
| Once this wet-bulb temperature threshold is crossed, the
| air is so full of water vapour that sweat no longer
| evaporates. Without the means to dissipate heat, our core
| temperature rises, irrespective of how much water we
| drink, how much shade we seek, or how much rest we take.
| Without respite, death follows - soonest for the very
| young, elderly or those with pre-existing medical
| conditions.
|
| Wet-bulb temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius have not yet
| been widely reported, but there is some evidence that
| they are starting to occur in South West Asia. Climate
| change then offers the prospect that some of the most
| densely populated regions on Earth could pass this
| threshold by the end of the century, with the Persian
| Gulf, South Asia and most recently the North China Plain
| on the front line. These regions are, together, home to
| billions of people.[...]
| celticninja wrote:
| It's the distribution of the water that is the problem, not
| the amount.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| The fact that you're recommending a one child or no child
| policy with a one sentence statement tells me you've never
| even done even high level research on the topic of
| population dynamic or resource allocation.
|
| The one child policy has been _disastrous_ for China.
| Imagine a whole generation of people that have no siblings,
| cousins, aunts or uncles (after 2 generations of one child
| policy). The social fabric in China has been gutted by this
| policy. Also it means that after 1 generation of this
| policy the number of working people is significantly less
| than the number of retired people. It destroys economic
| output and ability to care for a population, the oldest
| people suffer in a system like this, and younger people
| spend more of their earnings taking care of older people
| than improving their lives, so living standards stagnate or
| go down, you wind up with _less_ resource availability.
|
| A no child policy leads to extinction after one generation.
| You don't even need to do research on anything to know
| this, just simply thinking about what you're saying for a
| moment works.
|
| A reduction in population does _not_ increase resources
| available to people. Resources must be produced by people,
| a reduction in population also reduces that output. For
| historical proof, look at the numerous examples of famines
| that occurred in previous centuries, when there were less
| than a billion people on earth, by your logic life should
| 've been more plentiful throughout history until recently
| but the opposite is actually the case, because resource
| availability scales with production capacity, it does not
| simply decrease with demand pressure.
| dirtyid wrote:
| GDP/productivity scaled with population PRE-
| INDUSTRIALIZATION. It's why China historically occupied
| greatest share of global GDP, it simply had greater
| proportion of global population. GDP then was also
| proportionally accounted by subsistent farming.
| Civilization was built on the little bits of surplus left
| over. Post-industrialization, capital has been gradually
| accumulating line share of productivity. It's how US
| accounted for 40% of global GDP with 6% of world
| population post-war. Post-automation, you simply do not
| need that much labour for large scale widget factories.
| Nor do you need that many farmers. There is now a curve
| where excess people becomes a drain.
|
| In China's case, even at the height of pre-automation
| manufacturing economy, the manufacturing sector accounted
| for 400M jobs. 300M work in agriculture, kept
| deliberately deindustrialized (until recently)
| specifically as a jobs program. Today, 600M subsist on
| less than 2000 USD per year. These are excess people.
| What do these numbers mean? World demand was/is literally
| not enough of uplift 1.4B Chinese out of poverty. That's
| simply too many people. The sooner China can settle at
| 800M (2100 estimate) the better. There's literally not
| enough resources in the world for China to consume much
| above middle income, let alone high income like the west.
| If everyone consumed like US we would need 5 earths.
| China is 1/5 of global population.
|
| Long term, One Child Policy was the better moral calculus
| despite social ramifications, i.e. demographic bomb,
| which TBF is blown out of proportion. It's better to be
| less populous and rich than the alternative. At minimum
| wealth allows you to import cheap surplus labour to take
| care of aging populations, which China should be able to
| arbitrage internally due to income disparity. Family
| Planning and crudely, millions dead under Mao worked in
| China's favour (well minus purging experts). The
| alternative is geometric population explosion to support
| successive generations. We know from overpopulation
| studies that this is fundamentally a self terminating
| system that will exceed carrying capacity of Earth.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| It is impossible to exceed the carrying capacity of the
| earth. Let me explain why.
|
| Every human being alive is made up of biomass, which
| means that the meat that people are made up of was once
| animals and plants, also eating, also drinking water. So
| the idea that food and water shortages are caused by
| increase in human population is simply not possible. It
| is not possible for there to be more people than there
| are resources to create them in the first place.
|
| The only real difference is that human beings consume
| industrial goods and excess consumption caused by
| increase in standard of living (for example flushing
| toilets, something animals and plants do not do). But
| even considering these things, they're due to an
| _increase_ in standard of living which can only come from
| an increase in production. In aggregate, humans cannot
| consume more than we can produce. So it follows that an
| increase in population that causes resource shortages can
| _only lead to a reduction in living standards_ , and only
| down to the living standards of a subsistence agrarian
| society. Overconsumption of resources then is a self
| correcting problem.
|
| Now, suppose human beings could exceed the earth's
| carrying capacity, which I have just showed you is not
| possible. This would cause many human beings to die from
| starvation, as the decrease in living standards would
| take us below the standard of living of subsistence
| agriculture in this hypothetical scenario. Even in this
| extreme case, it is still a self correcting problem.
| There is no need to artificially correct it.
|
| Any and all problems that appear to stem from
| overpopulation are actually resource allocation problems,
| inefficiencies in resource distribution. The problem with
| China is not that the resources cannot be produced to
| support the population, the problem is that the resources
| are inefficiently distributed, in part because a
| centrally controlled economy cannot possibly distribute
| resources more efficiently than a distributed (or free
| market) economy, but that is a different discussion.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > It is not possible for there to be more people than
| there are resources to create them
|
| People can have different daily-intake requirements as
| children versus adults, plus a growing populations
| consummation can temporarily exceed food production by
| burning trough food stores. Also, local food production
| can vary, place to place, season to season - what's
| sustainable during a good year, might not be during a bad
| one.
|
| Plants and animals can eat and drink things humans can't;
| e.g. a plant is fine with muddy, faeces-contaminated
| water, it would even thrive on it. Livestock may happily
| eat grass/straw long-term.
|
| The killing of one cow won't feed a human for the rest of
| their lives - multiple cows are needed to provide
| constant food, and the cow population may as such
| increase along with the human population.
|
| When the rate at which the cows are eating grass is
| faster than the rate at which the grass grows, your
| population is unsustainable, and you will eventually not
| be able to feed everyone. The only sense in which it's
| "impossible to exceed the carrying capacity of the earth"
| is that when you do, people will die.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Your broad point seems to be problem will fix itself, but
| that's not very illuminating. Self correction spans the
| spectrum of manageable to disastrous. Carry capacity /
| resource availability has temporal element and is not
| stable, allocation today may not be sustainable or
| available tomorrow. Mismanaged environmental cycles means
| feast or famine i.e. fisheries / soil poorly managed and
| becomes increasingly unproductive or oil / water reserves
| tapped faster than new discoveries or replenishment.
| Disaster when you cannot efficiently distribute what's no
| longer there due to poor planning and foresight. Self
| correction could be preemptive population management or
| feast or famine cycles. One is more preferable than other
| for stable society. IMO free market is not capable of
| planning on such long timelines. Some problems become
| sufficiently large and long spanning that only state can
| handle, i.e. national defense is state directed, even if
| frequently poorly optimized in terms of resource
| allocation. Private military / industry could exist under
| free market but works within superstructure set by state.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| My broader point is that there is no problem to fix,
| human population cannot possibly exceed the carrying
| capacity of the earth.
|
| Looking at recorded human history, the long term trend
| consistently is that the population has risen. This means
| resource availability has increased, either due to
| discovery of new sources, invention, efficiency increase.
| Shocking decreases in some or other resource have had
| little effect on this trend.
|
| Unavailability of some resource just means reduction in
| standard of living, for everything except food and water.
| And again, the net biomass on earth does not increase the
| more humans are here, and so the demand for food and
| water does not change whether that biomass is humans or
| buffalo. There can be no food or water shortages from
| overpopulation, only mismanagement and natural disaster.
|
| The free market is the only thing capable of handling
| shocks, no other system is flexible or agile enough to
| quickly resolve a change in resource availability or
| demand. And sudden change of resource availability is not
| what we are talking about, we are talking about resource
| shortage due to overpopulation. A shock decrease in
| resources would result in disaster no matter how many
| people exist, so trying to address it by managing
| population levels is pointless.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| > Looking at recorded human history, the long term trend
| consistently is that the population has risen. This means
| resource availability has increased, either due to
| discovery of new sources, invention, efficiency increase.
| Shocking decreases in some or other resource have had
| little effect on this trend.
|
| I've been filling this bucket with water, and it's never
| overflown. Therefore the bucket can contain infinite
| water.
|
| Free market economics don't work so well when the biggest
| players decide to augment their value proposition with
| the barrel of a gun. Available biomass is not the
| relevant metric when determining the carrying capacity of
| the earth, with the obvious caveat that by carrying
| capacity, we mean some definition that includes the
| continuation of modern society.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Even in this extreme case, it is still a self correcting
| problem. There is no need to artificially correct it.
|
| You're forgetting the most extreme form of self
| correction... People killing each other in a coordinated
| fashion AKA war.
|
| The problem with your argument is that you consider wars
| to be an acceptable solution.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Well, first of all, I demonstrated how this extreme case
| is impossible, but let's address war.
|
| In such a world where there are too many people, we get
| suggestions such as instituting a one child policy,
| forced sterilization, outward extremists even discuss
| culling populations. What's the difference between that
| and war? The difference is, in war you have _agency_. War
| happens organically between people. An authoritarian
| solution takes agency away entirely. People are not free
| to be people, but you wind up with, best case scenario,
| the same result with regard to resource management. So
| yes, even in extreme circumstances where war is a
| response to resource shortages, it is still a preferable
| outcome to authoritarianism.
| salawat wrote:
| >It is impossible to exceed the carrying capacity of the
| earth. Let me explain why.
|
| >Well, first of all, I demonstrated how this extreme case
| is impossible, but let's address war.
|
| Did you happen to be an engineer working on the design or
| marketing of the Titanic in a past life? You sure sound
| like it. You also sound like you have not once ever grown
| a plant.
|
| You can go from perfectly green and healthy to dead in a
| week if you don't pay attention. A seed can flourish just
| fine, only to eventually die as the energy burden
| required for it to thrive is no longer met. If this
| happens before you go to seed, congratulations, your
| population of plants just went extinct due to breaching
| the carrying capacity of their environment.
|
| Try raising an orchid some time. I guarantee you'll learn
| something. One of the Vanilla ones in particular is best.
|
| Your arguments are naive and reek of "not my problem"
| type thinking. You may believe that carrying capacity is
| a a priori defined as "I'm here, therefore not exceeded"
| but it isn't.
|
| We're all hot-house flowers who are facing the
| possibility of the gardener (humanity collectively) just
| saying "screw it" and destroying our chances at continued
| success.
|
| And war... War'll happen, and calling that a systemic
| self-correction is both callous and wretched beyond all
| reason. Nevermind that no one tends to factor in
| environmental damage that occurs as a result of warfare.
| bronson wrote:
| > So yes, even in extreme circumstances where war is a
| response to resource shortages, it is still a preferable
| outcome to authoritarianism.
|
| War IS authoritarianism. History shows that war pretty
| much requires it.
| paublyrne wrote:
| The birth rate in India is not particularly high, at 2.x,
| and my anecdotal experiences of travelling and working
| there is that younger couples prefer to have fewer
| children, only 1 or 2. Of course the population is already
| large, but that's unlikley to get much smaller in the short
| to medium term, so is hardly a useful suggestion.
| imtringued wrote:
| The consensus is that giving women roles other than child
| rearing reduces the birth rat far more effectively than an
| outright ban. The other factor would be to pave all the
| damn dirt roads. Teenagers in Cameroon do dirt road
| maintenance as their summer job. It's a complete waste of
| effort but it encourages parents to have children.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| > It's a complete waste of effort
|
| Why is that a waste of effort?
| rorykoehler wrote:
| Desalination at scale is the solution.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Seawater is the solution; desalination is isolating the
| solvent.
| heyoni wrote:
| Technically, it's GNU/desalination.
| siruva07 wrote:
| I think atmospheric water generation at scale is the
| solution
| cdmckay wrote:
| This has environmental consequences.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| We've opened pandora's box. I'm not saying a one child
| policy isn't a solution but it's not the solution.
| cdmckay wrote:
| How do you know there's not enough water supplies?
|
| In this case, it sounds like what's needed is better city
| planning and more equitable distribution of water. I don't
| know the specifics here, but I suspect there's plenty of
| water but it's probably being tied up in industrial
| applications.
|
| Also, instead of letting the market decide where to build
| houses, why not build them where there's infrastructure to
| support them, instead of building them where the profit is
| highest?
|
| Also, have you even considered what a one-child policy
| entails? It's forcibly sterilizing or aborting pregnancies.
| Razengan wrote:
| How do you know there will ALWAYS be enough water
| supplies?
|
| There must be a real limit to how many humans this planet
| can support.
| jjk166 wrote:
| An area might run out of water, but the planet won't. The
| planet would run out of literally everything else before
| we run out of water.
|
| It takes water to make a human. You will pass the point
| where you can't expand the population before you get to
| the point where you can't maintain the population that
| already exists. If something does decrease the water
| supply, you will in a short period of time have a smaller
| population to support. Such is the nature of carrying
| capacity.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Sure, but practically speaking there is a lack of potable
| freshwater in certain places. You can't just stick a
| straw into the Indian Ocean and glug away.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's a simple analysis - which is easier: bringing more
| water to where it is being consumed or moving the
| consumers to the water. In a wealthy area with a lot of
| stuff going for it, maybe a desalination plant makes
| perfect sense. Everyone in the city drinking non-potable
| water does so because they have judged it more practical
| than moving to a place with better water infrastructure.
|
| If you get a million people to build a city in the Sahara
| and don't build any infrastructure to get water to this
| city, of course they are going to have water shortages,
| but this does not suggest some global water crisis nor is
| a limited birth rate going to fix the problem. Likewise
| if someone sticks their head in a plastic bag they may
| run out of air, but that doesn't mean air is any less
| abundant. There are some resources of which there is an
| actual scarcity such as arable land and energy sources,
| but water is not one of them.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There's certainly a regional crisis that will only
| probably get worse as climate change reduces snowpack in
| the Himalayas, the source of most water in India, China,
| and SEA. The problem with moving is threefold; moving to
| countries without water scarcity legally is not a
| realistic option for most Indians, cities are highly
| sticky, and new cities are incredibly hard to set up and
| set up well.
|
| In fact, China is already considered to be suffering from
| water availability issues, and while this still happened
| with a one-child policy it almost certainly would be
| worse had Chinese population growth had the same
| trajectory as India's. (This is not an argument for the
| general good of one-child policy, and I do not endorse
| such a thing.)
| jjk166 wrote:
| The himalayas are the source of water for the region
| because it is abundant and cheap. Infrastructure to bring
| water in from more distant sources, desalination plants
| to generate more fresh water, wastewater treatment plants
| to recover more water, and changes to water use such as
| different agricultural methods which conserve water are
| all options to increase supply.
|
| On the demand side, if moving is not legally or socially
| acceptable, what is the difficulty of changing the laws
| or culture? If cities are sticky, move the things that
| attract people to those cities elsewhere. If new cities
| are difficult to set up, how difficult is that compared
| to modifying an existing city?
|
| there's a big difference between "there isn't any water"
| and "we won't take actions to get water." Now you may be
| saying "but those things are hard and expensive" to which
| I will respond "yeah, providing for the needs of 20% of
| the world's population is going to be hard and
| expensive," but on the brightside 20% of the world's
| population is an incredible resource if utilized
| properly.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Of course there's "technically" enough water, but that's
| academic pedantry at that point. There's technically no
| such thing as peak oil either, but there is a point where
| it becomes economically infeasible to produce more oil,
| which is what the point of the reserves statistic is.
| Reserves aren't all oil known in existence, they're all
| oil that is known to be feasibly economic to get.
|
| The problem with new cities is generally trying to move
| employment. Unless there is a specific reason to move
| employers tend to like clusters of other employers. Most
| planned cities without a specific employment reason
| either fail or become big suburbs.
|
| Making it easier to move to other countries is not
| exactly within the realm of possibility, given that India
| is not in control of how the US makes legislation and
| pressure would pretty much result in backlash that would
| probably make the situation worse, not better.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > Of course there's "technically" enough water, but
| that's academic pedantry at that point.
|
| The GP comment I was responding to was specifically
| talking about water being "a real limit to how many
| humans this planet can support." Literally the first
| thing I said was that regions could run out of water.
| That said, how we frame our problems influences how we
| think about solutions - how we solve a water
| infrastructure crisis is very different from a water
| scarcity crisis.
|
| > There's technically no such thing as peak oil either,
| but there is a point where it becomes economically
| infeasible to produce more oil
|
| Peak oil is the point when the maximum rate of extraction
| of petroleum is reached, after which it is expected to
| enter terminal decline. Peak oil is most certainly real,
| and likely in the near future. Oil is an energy source
| and it takes energy to extract it - eventually you will
| hit a point where it takes more than a barrel of oil to
| produce a barrel of oil. Further, oil is destroyed when
| used, and it takes more energy to recreate it than you
| get from using it, so there is no sense in replenishing
| it. Conversely, you don't need to spend water to get
| water, nor does it cease to exist when you consume it.
| You can replenish a region's water supplies indefinitely.
|
| > The problem with new cities is generally trying to move
| employment. Unless there is a specific reason to move
| employers tend to like clusters of other employers. Most
| planned cities without a specific employment reason
| either fail or become big suburbs.
|
| If the companies won't move, tax them enough to build the
| infrastructure to support their employees. Either you'll
| have no problem getting them to relocate, or there will
| be no need to.
|
| > Making it easier to move to other countries is not
| exactly within the realm of possibility, given that India
| is not in control of how the US makes legislation and
| pressure would pretty much result in backlash that would
| probably make the situation worse, not better.
|
| 1) The US is not the only country to move to, or even the
| best option 2) The US is a nation of immigrants which
| could most certainly be convinced to take immigrants from
| India with the proper incentive structure 3) As an
| emerging powerhouse, the assumption India has no
| negotiating leverage and is simply at the mercy of other
| nations seems extremely unfounded
|
| As someone descended from poor subsistence farmers who
| moved to the other side of the planet to avoid famine, I
| am extremely skeptical of the claim that millions of
| people will just sit back and wait to die of dehydration
| as the water supplies dwindle. History is a long tale of
| people migrating to greener pastures when they are
| available and making pastures greener when they are not,
| and I see no reason that this time around will be any
| different.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| The problem isn't that there is no water supply, the
| problem is that Indian water supplies are incredibly low
| quality.
|
| Over 70% of surface water in India is unpotable. The main
| problem is inadequate or non-existent waste water
| treatment, but agricultural and industrial runoffs also
| play a large part.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > It's forcibly sterilizing or aborting pregnancies
|
| Why does it entail that? And do you mean forced
| abortions?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Historical precedence isn't exactly kind:
| https://nypost.com/2016/01/03/how-chinas-pregnancy-
| police-br...
|
| And no, forced sterilization, as in the surgical
| procedure to permanently end the ability to conceive, is
| a thing.
|
| More relevant, historical precedence in India:
|
| > As the fertility rate began to decrease (but not
| quickly enough), more incentives were offered, such as
| land and fertilizer. In 1976, compulsory sterilization
| policies were put in place and some disincentive programs
| were created to encourage more people to become
| sterilized. However, these disincentive policies, along
| with "sterilization camps" (where large amounts of
| sterilizations were performed quickly and often
| unsafely), were not received well by the population and
| gave people less incentive to participate in
| sterilization. The compulsory laws were removed. Further
| problems arose and by 1981, there was a noticeable
| problem in the preference for sons. Since families were
| encouraged to keep the number of children to a minimum,
| son preference meant that female fetuses or young girls
| were killed at a rapid rate.[25]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_(medicine)#Na
| tio...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Downvoted for asking for clarification, the hivemind
| strikes again..
| easytiger wrote:
| The same reason grain and cheese have derivative markets
|
| Michael Burry, of Big Short fame, is well known for moving his
| interest to water investment/trading many years ago
|
| https://www.killik.com/the-edit/why-michael-burry-is-investi...
|
| This article goes some way to explaining the rationale
| fakedang wrote:
| And he exited his water positions a few years back too.
| puranjay wrote:
| > The same reason grain and cheese have derivative markets
|
| Grain and cheese are the product of human activity. Fresh,
| clean water exists in plenty in nature.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| On the other hand, moving water is certainly the product of
| human activity, such as California Aqueduct moving water
| from Northern California to Southern California.
| Areading314 wrote:
| The idea that fresh, drinkable water exists "in plenty" is
| extremely off base. Humans need vast quantities of fresh
| water to allow modern-day life. Furthermore it is
| incredibly expensive to provide fresh water at any
| meaningful scale when it is not available naturally.
| jeltz wrote:
| Yes and no. There are huge amounts of fresh drinkable
| water. It is just that it is in Canada and Russia and not
| where we have our agriculture. Here in Stockholm we have
| much more clean water than we ever could use, just like
| Russia and Canada.
|
| Water shortages are local problems. The issue is just
| that a lot of the world's agriculture are on places with
| little water.
| puranjay wrote:
| _Humans_ need vast quantities of fresh water. A human
| does not. There is "plenty" of water for an individual
| in nature.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _There is "plenty" of water for an individual in
| nature._
|
| What do you mean by "nature"? Do you own the land where
| the water is, or do you simply plan on collecting
| rainwater? Otherwise, you don't own the water. This is a
| real-life problem that countries and communities the
| world over are dealing with.
| anoncake wrote:
| Earth is populated by humans, not by a human.
| eru wrote:
| Human industry and agriculture needs lots of water. The
| numbers are fairly large even for individuals.
|
| Humans themselves need fairly small amounts for direct
| use like eating, drinking, hygiene.
| mulmen wrote:
| Dams and pipes are also products of human activity.
| easytiger wrote:
| > Fresh, clean water exists in plenty in nature
|
| Not really no. It requires huge amounts of infrastructure,
| logistics, regulation to get it to people. Industrial
| activity, farming use water to make the food you eat
| harperlee wrote:
| I may need coffee, but what problem is entailed by what you
| state?
| VMG wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_conflict
| eru wrote:
| What about iron ore or gold?
| stevesimmons wrote:
| >Fresh, clean water exists in plenty in nature.
|
| Except in the places/times it isn't, which is much of the
| world for some of the time, and some of the world for much
| of the time.
|
| Water rights exist, and who gets to exercise them in times
| of shortage can be very contentious, and even a cause for
| war.
| puranjay wrote:
| > Water rights exist, and who gets to exercise them in
| times of shortage can be very contentious, and even a
| cause for war.
|
| Which is precisely why trading water futures is an
| immoral idea and can't be compared to trading any other
| commodity. There exist alternatives for every commodity
| on the planet (don't have oil? Use coal. No coal? Use
| wood, etc.), but there are none for water.
| easytiger wrote:
| This is philosophically giberish. The world is not
| delivering water to your exact location at all times on
| demand. Logistics, infrastructure and regulations are.
| eru wrote:
| You probably think that trading organs is immoral as
| well?
|
| There's plenty of alternatives to any specific water,
| just use some other water. (And if you really want to,
| you can make water from oxygen and hydrocarbons.)
| bagpuss wrote:
| 1 litre of water = 1 kilo.
|
| Difficult to extract, store and transport while maintaining
| quality.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| Capitalism's ability to make things into commodities is a way
| of making more of things. The timeliness is that water is
| getting scarce enough that soon people may not be able to
| afford water. This is a way to make it so that water stays
| affordable by incorporating it into a system where there is a
| profit incentive for producing more of it.
| dnautics wrote:
| What's the problem? These are futures, not options, so the
| dynamic is different and you MUST take delivery at the price
| you bid for. If anything this is a fantastic step in the right
| direction of starting to acknowledge that the cost of
| consumption should be borne by the consumers (and not by the
| politically less privileged).
| dheera wrote:
| Except this will encourage people to take delivery and resell
| it at a markup, and the victims of this scheme will be the
| lower income class.
|
| Water should be free upto basic living necessities, and the
| government should be responsible for maintaining that.
| tempsy wrote:
| it's all financially settled. there's no actual physical
| delivery of water with these contracts.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Water's cheap and storage isn't. I would expect resale to
| only significantly affect the price of extreme bulk use.
| Residential use isn't that big and I expect the vast
| majority of the price to stay in distribution and
| filtering.
| [deleted]
| kortilla wrote:
| > Umm what's the incentive or motivation behind making this
| trade able?
|
| Because it's pretty fucking important and the best way to make
| sure it's not wasted is to get it as freely traded as possible.
| Rations are terrible and we need pricing to make sure we aren't
| doing something dumb like growing almonds in a desert with
| water that needs to be used for drinking water or even just
| another crop that isn't so inefficient.
|
| As it stands, the super old water rights around the US of
| farmers are fucking the rest of society because they don't pay
| for it on an open market.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| The title is provocative as people's minds immediately go to
| some sort of dystopia where nobody can afford a water bottle
| because of megacorp capitalism or something.
|
| But it's sobering to realize how much water agriculture can
| waste today.
|
| My cousin inherited some sort of farm license when they
| bought their property in the countryside. It has a well down
| into the water table and river access. He was saying how he
| could freely pump 100,000L/day if they wanted to, mainly
| going on about how weird it was to see how few stipulations
| there were in said license.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > As it stands, the super old water rights around the US of
| farmers are fucking the rest of society because they don't
| pay for it on an open market.
|
| This is just an extension of land. Certain people are granted
| a monopoly on a resource because their ancestors knew the
| right people, or were simply lucky.
|
| Inherited luck. No way to run a country.
| eru wrote:
| Well, a land value tax is a good idea, sure. And would
| extend to water rights that might come with the land.
|
| Or alternatively, the government could officially own all
| the water supply and auction it off.
|
| None of these is an argument against trading of water or
| water futures.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Say I'm a farmer and I need X gallons of water next year. How
| much does that cost me? It costs YX where Y is the cost of
| water per gallon next year - which is unknown.
|
| "Unknown" is something of a problem when preparing the budget
| for next year. I could buy X gallons now, but then I'd need a
| way to store it. Or, I could agree to pay a specific price now
| for water that would be delivered in the future.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| > Umm what's the incentive or motivation behind making this
| trade able?
|
| Money.
| [deleted]
| imtringued wrote:
| Water futures are just a promise to deliver water at a certain
| price. You can sell the promise for money even if you don't
| have the water today but you know you will have the water
| tomorrow. If you sell your water on the day it is extracted
| then you are vulnerable to daily market swings. Sometimes there
| will be gluts, sometimes droughts.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Billions would die without oil as oil pumps and pipes gives
| access to water among many other things.
| lanman wrote:
| > especially if we ever get to a point where some people can
| 'afford' water while others can't.
|
| Aren't we already arriving at that point? The Flint water
| crisis is still ongoing since 2014.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis
| eru wrote:
| You need so little water for drinking that it's essentially
| free or close to free.
|
| Properly trading water is more important for industry and
| agriculture. And I'd be very happy, if some very 'thirsty'
| crops like almonds or industrial applications would stop
| because they might not be profitable once you take the full
| cost of water into account.
|
| The alternative is what you see eg in California, where
| residential users of water often face severe restrictions, but
| many agricultural users have grandfathered water rights that
| they have to squander to keep.
| __s wrote:
| Why call out almond farming when dairy uses even more?
|
| https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths
|
| For almonds you have to frame it about where that water is
| coming from, ie dairy from outside California may be less
| impactful. So the question should be whether futures will
| help sourcing water better in some sense
|
| Side thought: on things using way too much water, it's always
| amusing that more water goes into producing bottles as
| opposed to the water content in a bottled water
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Never got the almond issue. Why not go after beef, or
| fruit, or wine, or any number of other foods.
| dnautics wrote:
| Have you ever seen an almond in the wild? It's basically
| the the thing _inside_ of the pit of a fruit like
| nectarine or plum. The fleshy part of the fruit, which is
| quite moist and watery, gets thrown out.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The flesh is called the husk. What conclusion do you draw
| from that?
|
| If a almond takes the same amount of water per calorie as
| a strawberry, does it matter that it has a husk?
| Cd00d wrote:
| I worked in remote sensing 2012-2014 and we had an
| agriculture customer base in California.
|
| The problem I saw with nut trees, is during the drought
| nuts became far more profitable, largely because they are
| _not_ drought resistant. So, a lot of farms were replacing
| the more traditional, regional, drought-resistant plants
| (hay, alfalfa, soy?) with nut trees that would take 5-8
| years to mature and use way more water.
| yodelshady wrote:
| > You need so little water for drinking that it's essentially
| free or close to free.
|
| Yeah, that's developed-world life talking.
|
| Markets absolutely work at dissuading growing almonds in the
| desert. Until there's too much wealth disparity, and Peter is
| willing to pay more than Paul has in total for desert-grown
| almonds. Either Paul steals the water or he dies, and thieves
| aren't popular.
|
| Of course there's another form of currency - votes. I can't
| really say they're universally distributed, because FPTP
| screws up the purchasing power of a vote. But I'd give good
| odds on a _very_ strong correlation between a functioning
| democracy and cheap water.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Yeah, that's developed-world life talking.
|
| Sure, but this is water in California.
|
| > Until there's too much wealth disparity, and Peter is
| willing to pay more than Paul has in total for desert-grown
| almonds.
|
| You're not going to have so much demand for thousand dollar
| almonds that it makes a significant impact.
| eru wrote:
| Do you have an example of a place that has both a
| reasonably free trade in water and where poor people can't
| afford water to drink?
|
| > Markets absolutely work at dissuading growing almonds in
| the desert. Until there's too much wealth disparity, and
| Peter is willing to pay more than Paul has in total for
| desert-grown almonds. Either Paul steals the water or he
| dies, and thieves aren't popular.
|
| Eh, unlikely. Peter will just get his almonds from the
| cheapest supplier, who is unlikely to be growing in a
| desert.
|
| There's nothing special about water in the scenario you are
| describing. Plenty of other commodities are traded on
| markets, and more developed markets have meant better and
| more secure supply for everyone, especially poor people.
|
| > Of course there's another form of currency - votes. I
| can't really say they're universally distributed, because
| FPTP screws up the purchasing power of a vote. But I'd give
| good odds on a very strong correlation between a
| functioning democracy and cheap water.
|
| Only some countries use FPTP. In any case, there's a strong
| correlation between any attributes generally seen as
| desirable. Figuring out causation is harder.
|
| Btw, you know what poor people lack even more than money:
| influence and connections. I wouldn't look to politics to
| improving their lot.
| yodelshady wrote:
| I don't really care if you think it's unlikely. People
| dying of thirst where water-intensive, non-essential
| industries operate is empirically happening, now. It has
| happened in the past and will do so in future.
|
| Btw, poor people lacking influence is not consistent with
| how _quite a lot_ of European nobles died or the vast
| array of modern working practices that are suboptimal
| from a capitalist 's point of view. I'll leave the debate
| there since I've no interest in arguing a fictional
| universe.
| dnautics wrote:
| > Btw, poor people lacking influence is not consistent
| with how quite a lot of European nobles died
|
| I believe people dying (noble or otherwise) is the
| recurring historical singularity we're trying to avoid;
| so we can both acknowledge that the poor can violently
| and quite temporarily gain political advantage while
| recognizing that during non-singular time periods (which
| is most of time) the converse is generally true.
| solatic wrote:
| Futures markets _improve_ the affordability of the resource by
| its actual consumers by stabilizing its price. Unpredictable
| prices, even if they end up being low, hurt consumers by
| requiring consumers to keep cash in reserve just in case the
| (remember, unpredictable) price swings wildly. That cash in
| reserve is cash that cannot be spent elsewhere, be it
| necessities like food or luxuries produced elsewhere in the
| economy.
| amelius wrote:
| Has this been found empirically or is this just a theory,
| just like how the free market without government intervention
| always is supposed to give the most favorable outcome?
| goodcanadian wrote:
| I think this highlights an oft-missed point. There is no
| such thing as a free market without government
| intervention. Left to their own devices, traders will
| always try to game the market to their own advantage.
| lodi wrote:
| > There is no such thing as a free market without
| government intervention.
|
| Maybe this is true with respect to global financial
| markets, etc. But it can't possibly be true in general.
| People have stably traded physical goods in literal
| markets (i.e. stalls where you buy spices and tomatoes
| and such) for thousands of years with no government
| intervention.
| Hokusai wrote:
| > with no government intervention.
|
| Small amounts of people do not need a government because
| they can just represent themselves. Any city needs a
| government, tasting at any sensible scale needs a the
| government. 3000BC Egyptians had taxes, laws and a
| government.
|
| Can you provide some historical example of thousands of
| citizens trading without a government? That would be an
| incredible experiment on anarchism.
| timeeater wrote:
| Wouldn't traders create their own rules for trading? (As
| presumably they have also done in the past)?
|
| I think most financial constructs were created by
| traders, not governments. Financial constructs are
| basically standard contracts.
| triangleman wrote:
| Indeed the first securities were sold via auction under a
| buttonwood tree, and I don't think any government agents
| were on hand to facilitate it, but I could be wrong.
| eru wrote:
| Your comment is somewhat of a non sequitur.
|
| First, if you look hard enough, you can see traces of the
| hand of government in almost anything on earth, including
| any market.
|
| In practice, government meddling is a matter of degree
| and kind. The dose makes the poison. There are some
| markets that are free enough of interference that we can
| fruitfully analyze them as 'free' markets.
|
| Second, what do you mean by 'try to game the market'? In
| general, markets are sustainable in the long run without
| government interference (and usually actually more stable
| this way).
|
| Interactions in markets often behave like the famous
| Prisoner's Dilemma. So, yes, for a single interaction
| it's profitable to cheat the other guy, but repeated
| interactions tend very strongly towards cooperation.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| Free markets only work when there are large numbers of
| sellers and buyers. One example (out of many) of a
| necessary government intervention is to prevent
| monopolies from forming (or at least regulate them).
| Whenever one party has an outsized influence, they will
| tilt the whole market in their favour. It doesn't even
| have to be a monopoly, if a single player makes up a
| substantial portion of the market, they can affect it in
| non-free ways.
|
| Even Adam Smith recognised the need for government
| regulation to ensure that markets remain free.
|
| Edit: I think you may have misread my comment; I wasn't
| claiming that there is no such thing as a market without
| government interference (though that is probably mostly
| true). I was claiming that a market cannot be free
| without government regulating it to keep it free.
| eru wrote:
| I am challenging that assumption that markets are so
| easily monopolized.
|
| Markets are more robust than you give them credit for.
|
| One argument is that rather often governments themselves
| are trying to monopolize markets with all their
| regulatory might, but grey and black markets usually
| spring up rather quickly.
|
| Trying to monopolize a market as a private participant
| (even a big one) without the government on your side is
| even harder.
|
| I do agree that monopolies are an important consideration
| when designing regulation. But mostly in the sense that
| your regulation has to be careful to avoid supporting
| monopolies. Especially barriers to entry are often
| overlooked.
|
| For example, regardless of content, complexity of
| regulation itself can be a barrier to entry. Compliance
| takes a lot of lawyers and accountants. (Eg most
| agricultural subsidies around the world go to really big
| farms. And financial regulation's complexity essentially
| forces banks to become big.)
|
| If regulators were really interested in combatting
| monopolies, there are a few straightforward strategies to
| try first:
|
| * Encourage foreign competitors to enter domestic markets
|
| * Encourage companies from different industries to branch
| out (eg Walmart tried to offer banking services a while
| ago. Lobbying by banks kept that competition at bay.)
|
| * Encourage start-ups. (This is much harder for
| governments than the first two points. One way to
| encourage start-ups is via simplifying regulations. But
| there are lots of other popular ways that don't work
| well. See eg all the government funding available for
| tech startups in Europe that sadly doesn't seem to
| produce much by and large; but it feels good to hand out
| money.)
| ardy42 wrote:
| > First, if you look hard enough, you can see traces of
| the hand of government in almost anything on earth,
| including any market....
|
| > In general, markets are sustainable in the long run
| without government interference (and usually actually
| more stable this way).
|
| With the market, you don't even have to look very hard.
| Many people like to believe that the market is self-
| regulating and "natural," but that's not the case. It was
| created via government policy (hundreds of years ago),
| and depends on government in such fundamental ways that
| it's inseparable from it.
|
| The market would destroy itself (and much else) without
| government interference, and to claim otherwise is akin
| to denying the mountain because you're standing on top of
| it.
| triangleman wrote:
| You seem to have made 2 claims:
|
| 1) The "market" (for what, you don't say) was created by
| government policy hundreds of years ago (but not
| thousands of yeas ago?)
|
| 2) The market needs constant interference in order to not
| destroy itself (and again you seem to be referring to a
| great range of economic activity, perhaps all of it, but
| not all of it because you're also saying it would destroy
| "much else")
|
| Do you have evidence to support either of these claims,
| other than begging the question? Would you like to modify
| them so that they are more specific?
| ardy42 wrote:
| > 1) The "market" (for what, you don't say) was created
| by government policy hundreds of years ago (but not
| thousands of yeas ago?)
|
| By market, I'm referring to what we refer to as the
| market _today_ , which is a relatively modern invention.
| Sure, for thousands of years there have been things
| called "markets," but they were far more limited in scope
| and their role in society was not nearly the same.
|
| > 2) The market needs constant interference in order to
| not destroy itself (and again you seem to be referring to
| a great range of economic activity, perhaps all of it,
| but not all of it because you're also saying it would
| destroy "much else")
|
| I mean, isn't this obvious? The market itself is not
| going to enforce contracts, it's not going prevent a
| wealthy person from paying for a private army and making
| his own rules, it's not going to do anything about
| monopolies and cartels (at least not on a reasonable
| timescale), it's not going to manage negative
| externalities, it's not going to address or mitigate
| socially destabilizing economic forces, etc.
|
| The market is like a car: it some ways it may be a modern
| marvel, effortlessly regulating the timing of its
| complicated internal workings in a way no person could,
| but without a driver it will run out of gas and as
| happily drive into a wall than not.
| mola wrote:
| If you cheat good enough you can amass power which will
| make your cheating more effective. Not sure why say that
| repeated interactions lead towards cooperation. It can
| lead towards submission as easily as cooperation.
| eru wrote:
| Why would the other participants continue dealing with
| you?
| imtringued wrote:
| That's an argument against government intervention
| because the government will favor the established
| players.
| tobessebot wrote:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378
| 4...
|
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/096031001100880
| 8...
|
| Futures markets do increase spot market efficiency.
| batterseapower wrote:
| These are financial futures. For some evidence that the
| presence of futures stabilises spot commodity prices see
| e.g. http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/CNEH/2005/papers/futures_
| CNEH_030...
| tobessebot wrote:
| Thanks for the addition!
| texasbigdata wrote:
| You're a farmer. You sell 3 crops. You can lock in futures
| to reduce your outcome variability. There are multiple
| benefits.
| forest_dweller wrote:
| The idea of the future markets was because of the
| fluctuating rice supply in Japan during the 17th century.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dojima-rice-
| exchange.as...
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| Its the reason people created futures markets. Producers
| want price stability to hedge in the event of a crash so
| they can pay their workers in 6 months. Purchasers want
| price stability in the event of a shortage so they can
| still purchase inputs and keep their business running in 6
| months. People who have information related to future price
| swings can make a profit by purchasing futures contracts.
| Producers and purchasers then learn about this when the
| price of the contract changes.
| solatic wrote:
| Everybody who has an explicit "rainy-day" fund set aside is
| somebody who is paying a price to try and prepare for
| instability / insecurity. The collective sum of all those
| funds in the US is probably in the billions, if not more.
| Futures contracts provide a more explicit way, with a
| stronger guarantee, of paying the price for security for
| specific assets / resources rather than hand-wavy guesses
| of how much money should be put aside for the Black Swan
| case.
|
| Sure, there are plenty of poor people who are so poor that
| they don't have any savings at all. But surely you don't
| think that rainy-day funds are just a theory?
| aliceryhl wrote:
| The effect is real, and more comparable to insurance than
| the free market thing you mention. If you are a water
| supplier and you sell your water through futures with e.g.
| a 6 month duration, then you know for certain that you will
| be able to sell your water for that price for the next six
| months, and if the price of water drops substantially, you
| have six months to figure out how to pay your employees,
| because it wont hit you until six months later.
|
| Of course, if the price increases, then you don't get the
| profit that this would have otherwise produced. That's the
| price of the insurance against low prices.
| imtringued wrote:
| A lot of markets break the perfect market assumption. For
| example, monopolies shouldn't exist in theory but they do
| in reality. In theory a competitor can always jump in and
| destroy the monopoly.
|
| Commodity markets are much closer to perfect markets than
| anything else.
| algorias wrote:
| > like how the free market without government intervention
| always is supposed to give the most favorable outcome?
|
| Nobody actually claims that, specially not economists. In
| fact, economics study exactly how and when markets _don 't_
| produce the most favorable outcome.
| siruva07 wrote:
| The incentive is to start pricing water appropriately. When
| water is priced appropriately it will be valued. When it is not
| priced appropriately, it is wasted and misused.
|
| We should treat water the same way because water is a human
| right, a commodity, and a resource. This discussion is
| prominent in the early chapters of Planet Water
| (https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Water-Investing-Valuable-
| Resou...)
|
| By mispricing the resource, we've gotten to where we are: 1)
| Massive inequality 2) Bottled water has become the default
| backup system to investing in rebuilding the tap water system
| 3) There is not enough investment to rebuild the tap water
| system. The paradox is best seen at an airport where a bottle
| of water is $5 in a single use plastic bottle (that lasts for
| 450 years) and the water fountain which is "free."
|
| As a social capitalist, I believe "free" water is bad for the
| marketplace. I've written about this more here:
| https://drinktap.substack.com/p/tap-june-2020-update
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > especially if we ever get to a point where some people can
| 'afford' water while others can't
|
| Does the trading of other kinds of future cause this? For
| example, the fact that corn or oil can be traded.
|
| > we don't need oil or gold for our immediate survival
|
| gold, maybe not, it's mostly used by financial institutions as
| collateral, but I think we require petrol _a lot_.
| tasuki wrote:
| > Umm what's the incentive or motivation behind making this
| trade able?
|
| Why shouldn't it be? I buy water every day.
|
| > At first glance this seems incredibly concerning
|
| Why?
|
| > While we don't need oil or gold for our immediate survival,
| they do play key roles into how our society operates. I'm
| hoping to understand more on why we should treat water in the
| same way.
|
| _Because_ it 's very important for our survival!
| [deleted]
| georgeek wrote:
| Almost everything that one would need for daily subsistence is
| tied to benchmark future contracts: cattle, soy beans, rice,
| wheat, sugar, coffee are all traded as futures on exchanges.
| Most coffee in the world is traded against the Coffee C future
| benchmark for instance:
| https://www.theice.com/products/15/Coffee-C-Futures
|
| Giving producers and consumers a way to get a standardized
| contract at a given point ahead in time usually makes the price
| of the underlying commodity much more stable.
|
| It has been argued that the way our society operates is based
| on the concept of futures contracts. It all began with the
| Dutch tulip futures in the 17th century that stabilized flower
| prices and made them a viable business:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
| triangleman wrote:
| Don't miss the "Legal Changes" section of that article. The
| bubble and subsequent bust, it turns out, was caused by
| government meddling (at the behest of powerful economic
| interests, mind you).
| zodiac wrote:
| > especially if we ever get to a point where some people can
| 'afford' water while others can't.
|
| If we do get to a point where this is true, it will primarily
| be because of decreasing amounts of water sources, increasing
| population, etc. Banning water futures won't magically solve
| these problems.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| In fact creating a market for water futures will likely
| contribute to solving these problems.
| figassis wrote:
| But will likely accelerate them
| julienreszka wrote:
| Why would it accelerate problems? More likely people will
| have an incentive to make water sustainable.
| dgb23 wrote:
| When a private company owns one of the most basic
| resources for survival, then they have the ultimate
| leverage over you.
|
| Privately owned water is being extracted from a region
| and then sold. They have no incentive to sell water to
| those who need it to survive, except if they also
| accidentally make the owners more money.
|
| One basic consequence is incredible human suffering and
| an extreme amount of power imbalance. Then, it is a
| matter of time and critical mass until things get ugly
| and violent.
| julienreszka wrote:
| I see your point
| zodiac wrote:
| It sounds like you have a problem against privately owned
| water rights (the exclusive right to extract water from
| some region and then sell it), not against water futures
| per se?
|
| FWIW I'm sympathetic to that position (in some form), it
| would just be better to be more precise... people are
| acting like "water is a basic human right" is a principle
| that can straightforwardly be used to derive the rest of
| our water policy.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Good point. The issue I have with water futures in
| particular is two fold:
|
| It solidifies the notion of privately owned water sources
| in a general sense: That's too much "free market" for my
| taste and goes against my ethical disposition.
|
| Secondly it doesn't solve any problems and challenges.
| The incentive here is to profit from making market
| predictions. No more, no less.
|
| There are more balanced approaches to handle water
| distribution. Via public commissions and regulated use
| for example.
| dagw wrote:
| Sure, but privately owned water and all the problems you
| describe existed long before these contracts came on the
| market and I don't see how futures contracts make them
| any worse.
|
| In fact futures contracts could in theory even take away
| a little of the power they have since, in effect, they
| won't be able to raise water prices on you over night,
| but you can have a 3-6 month warning that a price rise is
| coming and can plan accordingly.
| [deleted]
| zodiac wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're saying - is it that "banning water
| futures" will likely accelerate it, or that "water futures"
| will accelerate it?
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| Contrariwise, it will likely increase access to water by
| allowing futures contract prices to signal future scarcity
| and motivate capital investment in production.
| donmcronald wrote:
| This is one area where I'll take government investment
| over capital investment every time. I can't imagine how
| bad it would be having water production controlled by a
| bunch of capitalists. What happens when private equity
| buys out the tech and rights so they can put it into
| value extraction mode?
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| The cost of the futures contracts would go up in
| anticipation and other capitalists would invest in order
| to make some of that sweet profit and then there would be
| more people competing to produce water. Basically the
| opposite of the government, who would tell you "you use
| too much water", raise taxes and institute rationing.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| Why?
| shaunray wrote:
| Ben Rickert, is that you?
| pulse7 wrote:
| Hmmm... access to water is a basic human right... trading with
| water is... dangerous...
| zodiac wrote:
| > trading with water is... dangerous...
|
| Do you pay a water bill where you live? If so isn't that
| already "trading with water"?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Your water bill (theoretically) funds the infrastructure that
| treats and delivers your water. It's not as if you can bottle
| it at home and resell it on the market, in most cases you
| would need to set up a corporation and make an official deal
| with the relevant parties
|
| This is like claiming that paying your garbage bill or
| firefighting bill (in places that charge for it) is "trading"
| your sanitation or protection from having your house burn
| down. They're services, not products.
| zodiac wrote:
| I guess I don't understand the difference between paying
| for "water-delivery-and-treatment-infrastructure-and-
| operational-costs", and paying for "water". I can't fufil
| these water futures by just transferring legal ownership of
| a piece of land (that I owned) that contains a saltwater
| lake.
|
| Even after defining what the difference is... I'd be
| interested in understanding what makes trading in "water-
| delivery-and-treatment-infrastructure-and-operational-
| costs" OK, but trading in "water" not OK
| mola wrote:
| The main difference is the isn't any speculation
| involved. No one have the financial incentive to create
| artificial scarcity. This is a major advantage when
| talking about the most basic of life needs.
| zodiac wrote:
| Why is there no incentive to create artificial scarcity
| in the "water-delivery-and-treatment" market?
| kevingadd wrote:
| When you buy bottled water you're buying water by volume
| at a price set by the company that manufactured it, pre-
| packaged. They set the price based on the costs they
| incur to bottle it - beyond what you would pay to get the
| same water as a civilian, in part because creating shelf-
| stable bottled water is more difficult and expensive than
| producing regular tap water. To get water, that factory
| is paying for delivery and treatment infrastructure and
| ongoing maintenance costs for their equipment. Your water
| bill similarly covers those ongoing costs. If you buy a
| pack of bottled water and it leaks, nobody from the
| bottling company is going to come patch that hole and
| refill the bottle.
|
| This is almost the same as the distinction between paying
| your electricity bill and buying a pre-charged battery.
| eru wrote:
| Why do you make such a difference between products and
| services?
| kevingadd wrote:
| As an ordinary civilian I can't buy a year's worth of
| electricity and stack it up in the corner of my house
| (some sort of enormous tesla powerwall aside), and I
| can't buy a year's worth of tap water and store it in a
| giant tank in my bedroom. Doing that sort of thing would
| require a bunch of infrastructure that I don't own.
| Instead, I pay monthly to have both electricity and water
| available on demand, and the cost is based on how much I
| use. Long-term storage like that also would introduce
| additional problems, like the passive discharge of
| batteries or the need to store water in special
| containers that won't leach chemicals into it and won't
| allow the growth of naturally occurring algae.
|
| For water I could certainly buy a bunch of bottled water
| and keep it in the kitchen, but how am I going to run
| that through my faucets to wash my hands or run it
| through my showerhead? You can certainly do all that -
| and people in areas with limited access to tap water have
| to - but it's not something the average person is going
| to do.
|
| Where your tap water comes from is also a factor here.
| When I lived in a rural area growing up, our water was
| well water - there was literally no way for us to stock
| up a month worth of that in advance, because we relied on
| the natural return of water into the soil to ensure we
| had a supply to draw from in the well. Things like
| desalination also have limited throughput, so if you max
| that out the only way to get more water is to take it
| from someone else.
| VMG wrote:
| What do people mean by this?
|
| How much water is a human entitled to?
|
| Who has to provide it to that person?
|
| If somebody has no water, who is violating their rights?
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Glad you asked. It's actually quite easily defined when it
| comes to what amount of water a human is entitled to:
|
| https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights/
|
| The provider is still a debate, between letting private
| entities do it (which, as anyone that has seen private
| entities deal with such important things, know is a terrible
| idea), or the state. As to who is violating their rights, it
| depends. Are you in a fully remote place where it is almost
| physically impossible to get you water ? Undefined.
| Otherwise, the provider is expected to perform what is
| expected of them and bring you water, by any means necessary.
| eru wrote:
| > The provider is still a debate, between letting private
| entities do it (which, as anyone that has seen private
| entities deal with such important things, know is a
| terrible idea), or the state. As to who is violating their
| rights, it depends. Are you in a fully remote place where
| it is almost physically impossible to get you water ?
| Undefined. Otherwise, the provider is expected to perform
| what is expected of them and bring you water, by any means
| necessary.
|
| Huh? Why place such a burden on the provider? Just let
| multiple providers compete on price and service as normal
| to determine how much effort is reasonable.
|
| (That idea of competition doesn't preclude having municipal
| water works. As long as you don't ban private suppliers.)
| chii wrote:
| > as anyone that has seen private entities deal with such
| important things, know is a terrible idea
|
| so the privately owned farm that grew your food is such a
| terrible idea...who knew?
| VMG wrote:
| Sorry, but that link does not explain it. How does one
| resolve the conflict between a farmer that requires water
| to grow their food and a village where people want to do
| their laundry more often?
|
| > which, as anyone that has seen private entities deal with
| such important things, know is a terrible idea
|
| Reminder that in Flint, Walmart still provides safer water
| than the State.
| nicbou wrote:
| You know what? Nobody asked that question before, and I find
| it a bit difficult to come up with an answer.
|
| I suppose it just means "we consider access to this resource
| too important to deny it to anyone, whatever the reason".
| It's the ground upon which policy should be decided.
| chii wrote:
| > deny it to anyone
|
| denying requires that there's a party to do the denying.
|
| So when a developing country doesn't have access to clean
| drinking water, who is denying it? Someone from another
| country who _could_ have paid for the infrastructure? Their
| gov't?
| VMG wrote:
| Refusing to deny access to water will guarantee shortages,
| since water is a scarce resource.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Who are you referring to when you say "deny access to
| water"? Because if you are talking individuals,
| congratulations, you are actively calling for the death
| of individuals.
|
| Water may be scarce, but the amount available still is
| much more than enough for living beings.
| eru wrote:
| We could easily give any individual a 'basic water
| income' of, say, ten litres a day for drinking and
| cleaning.
|
| Trading water wouldn't impact that kind of scheme. (Eg
| the government could just buy water at market prices and
| distribute as this basic income in kind.)
|
| The important thing is that we DON'T have enough water
| for all uses we can dream off, like growing almonds in
| the desert.
|
| So you need some kind of rationing. That means denying
| water to some uses.
|
| Rationing via market prices is one of the most
| (economically) effective and just ways we have come up
| with.
|
| (If you want to make some argument about how the water in
| a specific country should be the common good of everyone;
| you can still do the trading. Just have the government
| own all water sources, auction off the supply, and
| distribute the proceeds to everyone individually.)
| VMG wrote:
| I am talking about individuals.
|
| Denying access to water is what ensures that a person who
| needs it can keep it.
| RobAley wrote:
| But everybody needs it, so who is left to deny it too?
| nicbou wrote:
| I think we just need to clarify what "deny" means. I
| meant to deny vital access to water, not unrestricted
| access to it.
| VMG wrote:
| Either you restrict it or you don't.
|
| What is "vital" or not is highly dependent on
| circumstances.
| hikerclimber wrote:
| hopefully humanity dies soon. thats what I hope for.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| This is just embarrassing. Today I'm ashamed, once again, of
| being human.
|
| Sometimes you have to spell it out for these animals, life,
| liberty, pursuit of happiness, and water you dumb animals, and
| water too, why must this be said?
|
| If social media shaming should be used for anything, it should be
| used for this.
|
| Speculation markets lead to speculation.
| hikerclimber wrote:
| also hope that the pfizer vaccine doesn't get approval so we have
| more death.
| tdons wrote:
| I remember hearing about Michael Burry [1] also looking into
| aquifers and future water shortages.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry
|
| > Burry has focused much of his attention on investing in water,
| gold, and farm land. Burry has been quoted saying "Fresh, clean
| water cannot be taken for granted. And it is not--water is
| political, and litigious."[20] At the end of the 2015
| biographical dramedy film The Big Short, a statement regarding
| Burry's current interest reads, "The small investing he still
| does is all focused on one commodity: water."[20]
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Reminds me of a famous video[0] of the CEO of Nestle explaining
| that there exists an "extreme position" that water is human
| right that everyone should have access to.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR_KXZZc13U
| oh_sigh wrote:
| This just seems like the classic confusion between positive
| and negative rights. Many people view "rights" as only being
| negative rights - IE someone else/the government _can 't_ do
| X to you. Any talk of positive rights devolves into slavery,
| because at some point someone needs to do work to provide you
| with your positive rights, and what if they just don't want
| to?
|
| That is - if water is a human right, is _providing_ water to
| people required for that right? Who is on the hook for that?
| Who pays for the pipes, the drilling, all of the
| infrastructure and operations to extract and transport it? If
| the answer is the government, then that is fair enough since
| it is just really a collective of every member of society
| mutually providing each other their rights. But is Nestle
| denying someone their human rights if they don 't give them a
| free glass of water?
| yodelshady wrote:
| How much water is a human right? We know what happens if you
| don't set a per-person limit to, at least, how much is free.
| But that's rationing (?) and evil, apparently.
|
| I'm not entirely sure of the terminology, and I suspect
| there's a deliberate effort to ensure the idea of both
| government and free market supplies in tandem stays out of
| popular consciousness. See "death panels" for healthcare...
| if you can't compete with government, perhaps your business
| just isn't very good.
|
| Alternatively, Universal Basic Income. Then, assuming your
| goal is to ensure people aren't dying due to lacking basics,
| you've only got one parameter to tune and one to monitor.
| gruez wrote:
| That sounds outrageous at first, but it makes sense if you
| think about it. Are there any mainstream political parties in
| the west that thinks food (arguably as essential as water)
| should be a human right (ie. the government provides it to
| anyone who wants it unconditionally)?
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Yes. Most welfare states.
|
| I cannot find any recent reports of anyone starving to
| death in New Zealand, for example. It would be national
| news if it happened and (rightfully) generate a lot of
| hand-wringing and introspection.
|
| Just that the implementation gets complicated and
| politicised for various reasons.
|
| Distributing food nationally is hard (consider cold chain,
| warehousing, distribution, managing expiry, dietary
| requirements, demand), so most welfare states distribute
| money instead and rely on the private sector to provide the
| infrastructure.
|
| Giving people "free money" has it's own problems. It gets
| political. People moralise. Beneficiaries never have
| enough, they might not spend on food, and they often have
| worse food choices available to them.
|
| Since the government distribute money and not food
| directly, they have to add strings to stop people "rorting
| the system". Those conditions can be a problem.
|
| See for example "food grants":
| https://www.workandincome.govt.nz/eligibility/urgent-
| costs/f...
|
| Food banks and free kitchens have to fill in the gaps where
| people inevitably fall through the beauracratic cracks in
| the welfare system.
|
| People do go hungry when the system fails.
|
| But the public view (multi-partisan) in well-off welfare
| states is that of course people have a right to live, and
| access to food is a part of that. It would be political
| suicide to suggest that anyone should be left to starve.
| gruez wrote:
| > Yes. Most welfare states.
|
| Is it guaranteed? ie. do you have to be disabled/retired
| to qualify, or is it open to everyone?
|
| >Distributing food nationally is hard (consider cold
| chain, warehousing, distribution, managing expiry,
| dietary requirements, demand), so most welfare states
| distribute money instead and rely on the private sector
| to provide the infrastructure.
|
| But then the food isn't guaranteed, is it? You're only
| really guaranteed money, which could be converted to
| food. Consider a hypothetical: let's say a country has a
| poll tax of $100 per person, then offsets it by giving
| everyone $100, is it fair to say that you have the right
| to vote in that country? Feel free to replace "right to
| vote" with other rights, such as freedom of speech, right
| to not self-incriminate, protection against unreasonable
| search and seizure.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| > But then the food isn't guaranteed, is it?
|
| You are correct but I feel perhaps missing the woods for
| the trees.
|
| Every person's right tends to be someone else's
| obligation.
|
| When obligations are met by state resources, there is
| then a responsibility to distribute fairly (because the
| resources come from everyone), this introduces hoops or
| conditions.
|
| That doesn't mean that the right, or the obligation
| doesn't exist.
|
| The need to ensure everyone gets food is absolutely part
| of the public understanding and discourse.
|
| You can of course pick holes all day because yes,
| administering public welfare programs is hard.
|
| Conditions where the state is obliged to do or provide
| something tend to be more complicated in practice than
| when the state is obliged NOT to do something (search and
| seizure, freedom of speech etc).
| jansan wrote:
| Michael Burry is one of the people I like listening to, just
| like Peter Thiel. He always has interesting ideas.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Careful, you're not allowed to praise Thiel too heavily on HN
| :) I'll have to look into Burry some more. He sounds
| interesting.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| So far Mr. Burry has been a one-trick pony. His latest target
| is Tesla, which is a graveyard for shortsellers. I guess we
| will see.
| jansan wrote:
| He is usually right, but tends to be right a bit too early.
| wittyreference wrote:
| In anything with a cyclical component, being right "too
| early" and being wrong are very nearly the same thing, and
| certainly close enough as to make no difference.
|
| Do you have an overview of his trading history that
| suggests he's "usually right"?
| hchz wrote:
| Why would he place a naive bet on Tesla's performance
| across all factors and not hedge non-idiosyncratic
| cyclical macro factors?
|
| Wikipedia says the guy's made $300M investing, as a
| notable contrarian - not making his buck from beta.
|
| Can you point to an overview of his trading history that
| suggests he's "not usually right"?
| [deleted]
| kome wrote:
| "Proponents argue the new market will clear up some of the
| uncertainty around water prices for farmers and municipalities"
|
| ahahah. sure, setting up a market like this will surely reduce
| uncertainty and not increase it exponentially.
| elevenoh wrote:
| Canada gon get rich.
| [deleted]
| robviren wrote:
| Next stop perri-air.
| pseingatl wrote:
| The Great Lakes will be the new Ghawar (Saudi Arabia's oil field,
| an ocean of oil).
| waterheater wrote:
| It won't. The Great Lakes Compact forbids, except under
| exceedingly rare circumstances, water diversion from the Great
| Lakes watershed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
| blahedo wrote:
| Which is why Chicago, Toronto, and other Great Lakes cities
| will be the booming metropolises of the late 21st century.
| eru wrote:
| Do you expect water to become globally scarce?
| kortilla wrote:
| That compact will be wiped out by the federal government the
| minute things become dire.
| eru wrote:
| Would you be willing to entertain a bet on that?
| [deleted]
| avvt4avaw wrote:
| Yesterday's traded volume in water futures - 16 contracts.
|
| In Bitcoin futures - about 7,000 contracts.
|
| In S&P 500 futures - about 1.9 million contracts.
| oblio wrote:
| Didn't they just launch water futures?
|
| I doubt they traded 1.9 million S&P 500 futures the first week
| those were launched :-)
| avvt4avaw wrote:
| Very true :)
| silvester23 wrote:
| That's a huge difference for sure, but wouldn't we need the
| volumes of the contracts for a fair comparison?
| avvt4avaw wrote:
| A water contract is worth about $5,000, a Bitcoin contract is
| worth about $88,000 and an S&P 500 contract is worth about
| $183,000.
| nine_k wrote:
| What is the size of these contracts?
|
| I traded three stocks yesterday, but the sum total of these 3
| trades is below $3k. A thousand of trades like mine would be
| worth one trade for $1MM.
| avvt4avaw wrote:
| A water contract is worth about $5,000, a Bitcoin contract is
| worth about $88,000 and an S&P 500 contract is worth about
| $183,000.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Making water tradeable in the presence of scarcity will
| ultimately redistribute some water from where it's plentiful to
| people who can pay more for it.
|
| i.e it will even further increase inequality..
|
| Of course it's all rosy and perfect in free market Econ 101
| theory land but that's not how things tend to play out under
| conditions of inequality in knowledge and access to capital. One
| example is - if a speculator expects water to get scarcer in the
| future, they will buy it today and hold it completely unused just
| to sell it later. The same situation is playing out in the
| housing market in some cities and now empty homes taxes are being
| introduced. Of course no one will ever learn from real life, only
| half baked Econ theory so we will run into the same problems with
| water a decade later
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| There is no physical commodity changing hands unless the
| futures contract is held to expiry and delivery takes place.
|
| It's not like this product enables speculators to hold on to
| water reserves better than they can currently. They'd have to
| have vast warehousing capabilities (or some lakes?) to actually
| sit on the physical product.
|
| Sure, they can try to push the prices by cornering the
| liquidity in the futures market, but again, to actually have a
| sustained impact, they'd have to create a shortage in the
| physical market. This won't change with these derivatives.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| > It's not like this product enables speculators to hold on
| to water reserves better than they can currently.
|
| The presence of a liquid market where they can sell at low
| friction at all times is a big incentive to speculate. It's
| the difference between speculating on rare trading cards or
| exotic wines and stocks.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I disagree with your statement on multiple levels. First, a
| highly liquid market tends to make speculation less
| profitable because your opportunities are arbitraged away
| that much more rapidly.
|
| Second, speculators are not necessarily bad and add further
| liquidity to a market by taking the side that others may
| not be willing.
|
| Third, a liquid market will of course still have
| speculators, but will be less vulnerable to distortion from
| truly malicious actors because it is more difficult to move
| a highly liquid market.
|
| An illiquid and opaque market is worse in almost every
| sense. When things get bad, price discovery is much more
| difficult and bad actors can actually have outsized
| influence by cornering what little liquidity there is.
|
| You seem to be biased against speculators, but the actors
| you should be actually biased against are market
| manipulators.
| mikaeluman wrote:
| More things traded means more information and better prices.
| Runaway prices can function as a clear signal that there are
| problems in the water supply that need to be addressed. On the
| other hand, a stable market will be an indication that the
| infrastructure works, and prices will reflect that trade-off
| between speculators and market participants bearing risk, versus
| commercial users hedging to get stable future costs.
|
| Markets are a wonderful creation and should be welcomed.
| logicchains wrote:
| >Markets are a wonderful creation and should be welcomed.
|
| No, markets are evil, because my left-leaning university
| professors told me they are, and having a high-paying tech jobs
| makes me an expert at things I know nothing about.
| karol wrote:
| You are kindly ignoring speculation. What you presented is an
| efficient market hypothesis, however markets are not efficient.
| They invite speculation bubbles and they do crash.
| eru wrote:
| I invite you to spot bubbles and pop them very profitably via
| short selling.
|
| (Spoiler: there are no bubbles as they are commonly
| understood.)
| mikaeluman wrote:
| No I did not. I merely pointed out that markets cannot change
| reality. They give you a view of reality.
|
| Regarding this contract, it is financially settled. So there
| is no actual delivery of water, and it merely offers you an
| exposure to already existing prices of water in California.
| chii wrote:
| The market crashing over speculation is not going to harm the
| consumers of said commodity. Speculation is a tool to smooth
| out the price for the people who _don't_ want the risk, and
| offload it to those who _do_ want the risk!
| kace91 wrote:
| Honest question, from an economically ignorant perspective:
|
| If people hold houses to speculate with the price of real
| state, that makes the price I pay for the necessity of a
| place to live way more expensive than it would be otherwise
| (this is something I empirically know to be true).
|
| Why doesn't the same logic apply to water once it's
| possible to speculate with it?
| gruez wrote:
| >If people hold houses to speculate with the price of
| real state
|
| ...isn't that one of the problems with housing? It
| already allows for speculation, and in addition to that,
| it's heavily biased towards people speculating in one
| direction: up. People can be leveraged up to 20x (aka. 5%
| down payment), whereas for stocks it's limited to 2x[1].
| There's also no meaningful way to short housing prices.
| You can't short-sell a house, and there aren't
| derivatives for housing (futures/options). The latter
| would also help increase supply because speculators can
| speculate on housing without tying up the underlying
| asset (ie. stories of speculators buying houses and
| leaving them vacant because they don't want to deal with
| the hassle/risk of tenants).
|
| [1] https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor-
| publications/invest...
| mikaeluman wrote:
| To your example. During the US housing price bubble (so
| called) that deflated 08; it was generally much cheaper
| to rent. So a user did not necessarily have to buy a
| house. And when you purchase real estate far beyond what
| is needed, then obviously you will have to rent because
| you can't occupy it all by yourself. The true price of
| living hasn't changed just because people are overvaluing
| real estate.
|
| Consider water. Say a speculator drives the price way up
| in the sky to the extent that ordinary people are
| affected. What will said speculator do with these
| contracts? Either she will sell them (and the price
| rebounds), or she will be stuck with tons of water which
| is burdensome and incurs costs to store. So clearly she
| will want to sell this water and at that point be subject
| to the market demand for it.
|
| In other words, undue speculation drives you out of
| business.
|
| Now, regarding this future contract it is financially
| settled based on the actual index value of what water
| costs. So it's not capable of being driven by silly
| speculation at all.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| I just wish people would actually put effort into achieving
| these side effects instead of just alleging that they will
| emerge naturally out of the behavior of a bunch of random
| people betting on water scarcity. I am extremely skeptical the
| market will do all these extra things you claim it will do.
| mikaeluman wrote:
| Modern financial markets are extremely complicated. Not
| because all parts of the subject are complicated, but more of
| a result of a layer-upon-layer-upon-layer effect mixed with
| jargon.
|
| Anyway, regarding this contract. What happens if a bunch of
| random people bet on water scarcity? Well, if there is no
| water scarcity they will simply lose all their money.
|
| If there is water scarcity, however, this will be a clear
| signal of trouble ahead several weeks (or even months) before
| the scarcity becomes a real problem for real people.
|
| Yes, these greedy speculators will earn a lot of money (from
| people hedging and from other speculators); but it will not
| be because of losses of ordinary people using water on a day-
| to-day basis.
|
| Those people, if water scarcity sets in, will have to ask
| their supplier (the state I suppose? or are there private
| companies in CA?) why this is happening and solve the
| problem.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| You offer no guarantees. I'm sick of gambling and I don't
| trust you. I don't care about gambling. I just want to
| conserve water and distribute it efficiently. That's what I
| care about. I don't need to be tied up in the stock market
| in order to do that. Just shut your dumb mouth and go read
| about what Bechtel did to Bolivia. That's what happens when
| you start screwing around with water and treating it like
| it's some stupid useless commodity like onions.
|
| You know nothing about the real world clearly. Real life
| rarely lines up with these abstract economic simulations
| you read in your textbooks. You're like a Christian,
| conflating scripture with facts. Put down your finance
| textbook and maybe take a look out in the real world. And
| stop gaslighting everyone. You have no idea how much that
| pisses me off. If I could reach through this screen, grab
| your shoulders and shake you I would.
| logicchains wrote:
| >I am extremely skeptical the market will do all these extra
| things you claim it will do.
|
| Why are you so sceptical it won't do those things for water
| when it's done those things for other commodities? Ask a
| large scale farmer how worse off they'd be if they couldn't
| hedge their harvest risks with futures.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Because those other commodities are not water and Americans
| have a very bad habit of using cherry-picked anecdotes to
| justify poor management and decision-making.
|
| Just stop pretending like you give a shit about anything
| other than money. I'm sick of being gaslit by people like
| you. Talk about prices. Play your money games. But please
| stop pretending like you actually know anything about the
| real world, just because you play with money all day.
| xondono wrote:
| Actually there's a pretty nice natural experiment in the
| US, because of the Onions Futures Act. There are several
| studies and some division between the experts on the
| details, but there's a strong case to be made for futures
| contracts reducing the volatility in these markets.
|
| One thing that people don't tend to realize is that
| speculation happens anyway, it's just not made in a
| public manner and through other types of contracts. In
| fact, if futures do reduce volatility then they reduce
| speculation, since it's volatility what drives
| speculation profits.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Water is not onions. Bechtel managed to acquire control
| over water rights in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1999. They
| started charging a licensing fee just to collect
| rainwater. Within a year there were hundreds of thousands
| out on the streets demonstrating, as the speculation
| didn't actually fix the water scarcity in the city. It
| just made it worse, with over half the population lacking
| access to fresh water.
|
| Water is not onions. You cannot just talk about onions
| and pretend like you've said anything substantial about
| water futures.
| efdee wrote:
| People trying to explain to you why you are wrong is not
| the same as people gaslighting you. Your judgment seems
| to be heavily influenced by how you feel about people
| partaking in the stock market.
|
| When you're done with the ad hominems, try reading and
| understanding what people are saying.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| You're just shutting down because you're ashamed of how
| flawed and ignorant you are. When you learn to find joy
| in discovering your flaws, you will be a more effective
| person. More likely to survive and make money. You like
| money right?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| This made me think of how people don't have enough air and it is
| used for coercion on Mars in the dystopia of Total Recall.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| i have written several times about CME water futures contracts. i
| thought i posted this on HN during this round of news releases,
| but i guess i didnt.
|
| long story short: it is for the almond farmers. but its more
| complicated. i have been pursuing agtech and SV for small farm ag
| robotics for 5-6 years now and only have had doors shut on my
| face.
|
| consistently, VCs flock towards agtech opp that are data
| harvestors. agree that data is crucial for deployment of
| autonomous systems, ai and robots in the field, but the weird
| thing was that they were coming up with stuff that farmers didnt
| need. they were creating entire new categories of data that wasnt
| necessary before and selling that to farmers who didnt even know
| that they needed it.
|
| there are diff kinds of ag and my focus was on small acreage sub
| 100 acre farming that needed automation in the field to eliminate
| labour and bring down labour costs. AI has very little value. but
| agtech in the past 5-6 years has been collecting and collating so
| much data. and i knew that it wasnt for the farmers. it was
| always..ALWAYS for wall street. but i was looking at commodity
| trading..like hogs, grain, soy and fibre. i was looking at what
| data they were collecting about water and
| fertilisers/herbicides/pesticides...so that they can use that
| data to sell more inputs to the farmers.
|
| and let's not forget seed. in 2017, dow and dupont merged. the
| corteva cropscience was spun off this merger and began trading as
| a separate company. at the same time, sygenta was sold off to
| chemchina. and of course, bayer bought out monsanto. this is a
| consolidation of a handful of companies that have complete
| control over seeds, pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers, gene
| patents and biosciences. and now, data. sweet sweet..fat juicy
| agtech DATA! all you have to do is say AI and then twirl three
| times chanting 'blockchain blockchain blockchain' while rubbing
| the top of your head...VCs will rain wads of cash over you. Data
| makes the world go round.
|
| they consolidated and started investing in agtech and robotics
| and ag machinery sector(hello, JD!) wanted to join in, but DoJ
| kept squashing the promised mergers. now..remember, ALL of this
| is traded in the exchanges ALL OVER THE WORLD. not just wall
| street. ag has to be 'managed'. you need data for that. i could
| go on that tangent, but its not needed now. (example: climate
| corp was part of monsanto. but bayer didnt get a piece of it.
| DCVC was monsanto's VC arm and has since dissolved.) and then the
| story of california's stolen water from the rio grande and the
| grandfathering of water rights and the patchwork quilt of various
| water rights sharing agreement, its a maze and noone really
| understands that mess. (i can recommend cadillac desert by marc
| reisner..that was the basis for polanski's movie china town
| starring jack nicolson and later LA confidential starring russell
| crowe/kevin spacey. also recommeded fiction reading..waterknife
| by paolo bacigalupi)
|
| anyways, back to water...we now know how much water all the crops
| need when agtech is unleashed in..let's take ca as an
| example...salinas' lettuce field(1+billion) or strawberry fields
| or almond orchards in central valley. each one of the crops have
| about a billion dollar ave revenue in a 45 billion dollar
| california ag revenue. wonderful company owned by the resnicks,
| for example..(pom, halos, cuties etc) has about $4 billion
| revenue annually. oh. privately held or as ag co-ops.
|
| and then there is the dairy and ranching industry. hay/alfafa esp
| ..which is a good export crop and goes to china in the returning
| empty shipping containers during our droughts to provide fodder
| for china's fledgling and largely parched dairy industry because
| they may have cows, but their aquifers have run dry. ca has so
| many ag revenue streams but so diverse. agtech start ups found
| out that they can not only collect data and can consildate it and
| sell it to various publicly traded companies..perhaps they
| dont(its illegal), but the information can be used for other
| products. for example, safeway and walmart are publicly traded
| and strawberry industry's data has immense value to them. we are
| not talking soy and wheat or hogs that is the mid western
| specialty.
|
| but even with the diversity of data, most of it is noise.
| capturing signal from noise is profitable enough. but consider
| this..what is common for ALL of ag sector. water. we all need
| water. be it an one acre boutique farm or a 15000 acre commodity
| crop growing mid western farm. we need water. and is it any
| surprise that this can be traded as futures?
|
| while its packaged as something to hedge because of the recent
| spate of wildfires and drought and what not in california, the
| real reason has always been about how this can be used to trade
| on wall street. agtech has ALWAYS been about wall street and
| harvesting of data that can be exploited for speculative trade.
| it was never about the food. that's why i cannot still find a
| reasonable streamlined solution for labour cost cutting ag
| robotics for sub 100 acre farms. because we still import most of
| our food and food growing farms are all really hobby farms. the
| agtech we need is consumer level and not industrial scale like VC
| backed agtech.
|
| this is going to end very badly.
| tankenmate wrote:
| And again Dr Michael Burry proves he was ahead of the curve.
| dyeje wrote:
| Meanwhile Nestle is pumping 1.1 million gallons of groundwater
| per day in Michigan for the cost of $200 a year.
|
| https://www.clickondetroit.com/consumer/2018/07/18/residents...
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Michigan is not lacking in water, and 1.1 million of gallons a
| day is pretty much a drop in a bucket. Like Michigan loses 10
| 000 times as much every day due to evaporation, for example.
| mint2 wrote:
| Not having a lot of background on Michigan aquifers, but
| equating surface evaporation to ground water pumping is
| completely wrong in western states.
|
| Surface evaporations is largely from water that is easily
| replenished on a relatively short timescale. Pumping
| groundwater at too high rates irreversibly decreases the
| groundwater reservoir capacity and even if it doesn't, can
| take ages to replenish.
| coryfklein wrote:
| Tangential, but is Michigan considered a western state?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Tangential, but is Michigan considered a western state?
|
| It's typically considered a "Midwestern" state (a term
| which is kind of odd with the modern boundaries, since
| the "Midwest" is in the northern half of the country
| running, on the east-west axis, from the central part of
| the continental US fairly far to the east.)
| triangleman wrote:
| Still they ought to pay their fair share
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| They are. this is on par for most agricultural and
| industrial water.
| ahepp wrote:
| They do pay their fair share. Anyone in the state of
| Michigan can stick a straw in the ground and start sucking
| out water. If they suck out a lot, they have to pay a
| couple hundred dollars for a permit.
|
| These rules are the same for farmers, industrial users
| (like car manufacturers), nestle, or you and me.
| triangleman wrote:
| Well then I'd say the rules ought to be changed and if
| you pump more than 100 gallons per month, you should pay
| a little more.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| If they are paying to pump their own water and it is
| sustainable, why should they pay anyone?
| Cerium wrote:
| Ten thousand gallons per month would be a more reasonable
| limit, enough to cover basic home usage.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Why should they subsidize home usage. If they are paying
| to pump their own water, and doing so in a sustainable
| matter, why do they own anyone anything?
| triangleman wrote:
| Yeah my bad, I meant 100 gallons per day, or 3000 gallons
| per month.
| dontbeevil1992 wrote:
| you and me are not a multinational billion dollar for-
| profit corporation. we have different capabilities,
| incentives, and externalities to our behavior. nestle is
| taking advantage of the commons for massive profit, they
| should contribute back
| ahepp wrote:
| To say they are "taking advantage of the commons" implies
| they're leaving the commons worse off. I haven't heard
| any good arguments that this is the case. Particularly
| because the amount of water they're pumping really isn't
| that significant compared to agricultural or industrial
| users.
|
| They do contribute back through taxes, including income
| tax their employees pay directly to the state of
| Michigan. If they aren't paying enough, I think reforming
| corporate taxation is a better solution than arbitrarily
| taxing extraction of a plentiful resource out of dislike
| for the extractors. Hopefully that doesn't make me some
| kind of anarcho-capitalist nut.
| mr_woozy wrote:
| >you and me are not a multinational billion dollar for-
| profit corporation.
|
| ahhhh my sweet summer child........
| Cd00d wrote:
| I find that number dubious. I'd need some evidence that 1.1
| million gallons is a drop in the bucket - I have trouble
| imagining that size of water, tbh. Looks like the Onassis
| reservoir in central park is a billion gallons. Honestly
| uncertain if 0.1% daily is drop in the bucket or not. I guess
| technically 0.1% of a 5 gallon bucket is about a tablespoon,
| so bigger than a drop.... Ooops, I got distracted.
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.001*5gallons+in+tabl.
| ..
|
| Anyway, even if the referenced "drop" is accurate, it's not
| like the evaporated water only rains down in Wisconsin or
| Indiana.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > I'd need some evidence that 1.1 million gallons is a drop
| in the bucket
|
| As I said, 1 million gallons of water evaporates from Lake
| Michigan every 10 seconds. That's the deal: where water is
| abundant, it's _really_ abundant.
|
| Almost all of the cost of municipal water, for example, is
| from building and maintaining the distribution system. In
| non-arid areas, there almost never is any shortage of water
| at the source, and water pricing is priced per use not
| because it costs that much to "produce it" or because the
| reservoirs are running short, but rather to limit the use
| so that there is no need to expand water carrying
| infrastructure.
|
| If Nestle is building its own infrastructure, and the water
| is so abundant that there is absolutely no risk of it
| running anywhere close to short, why should the government
| or people care? Suppose Nestle builds a farm of windmills,
| that slows down a million gallons of moving air by 20 miles
| per hour every day. To be sure, they would be using up
| large amounts of natural resource, the wind energy. Should
| they pay significant fees for the privilege? I don't think
| so; that would be completely ludicrous.
|
| There are of course circumstances where Nestle should pay
| more. For example, if they were using water coming from
| government built and maintained infrastructure, or if the
| water was not so abundant as it is in Michigan. For
| example, if they were pulling it from deep aquifer that's
| depleting faster than its refilling, as it is the case in
| many places of arid Southwest. But, to my knowledge, none
| of this is the case for Nestle in Michigan.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >I find that number dubious.
|
| 1 million acre feet is a pretty small amount in comparison
| to most industrial or agricultural uses.
|
| The common unit of water usage is acre _feet 1 million
| gallons is ~ 3 acre_ feet
|
| California wine production uses 667,000 acre*feet per year.
| [1] California total agricultural uses 24,500,000 acre feet
| per year [2]
|
| 3/24.5 million =0.00000012
|
| https://aic.ucdavis.edu/publications/Economic%20wine%20and%
| 2... https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2019
| /2017C...
| [deleted]
| m4r35n357 wrote:
| Scum
| sideshowb wrote:
| Well I guess bubbles in water have been a thing since, like,
| forever...
| terramars wrote:
| I agree this is ripe for abuse, but I also know enough about the
| CA water ecosystem to know it's a welcome development from an
| agriculture capacity planning perspective. There may be some
| speculators, but overwhelmingly the people trading this product
| will be water utilities and large farms who need multi-year
| planning for in particular tree crops. It looks like it's purely
| a cash backed contract and there isn't delivery, so it's going to
| just be used for hedging. Privatization of water is a huge issue
| especially in the developing world, but this isn't the same
| problem.
|
| EDIT for clarification : water is a basic human right, but
| pumping 1 million acre feet to grow almonds and make bank is not.
| opinion-is-bad wrote:
| I agree that tree crop farmers can really benefit from access
| to this type of product. I am a little concerned that this will
| only encourage even riskier nut development when the aquifers
| are already stressed as much as they are. I am still hopeful
| that California will consider something similar to cap-and-
| trade for water rights, but for now I guess we just have to
| wait and see what all those little SGMA districts come up with
| instead.
| eru wrote:
| Why do they even need cap-and-trade? That would at most be a
| second best.
|
| Just make water rights fully tradeable.
|
| Of course, you might also want to remove grandfathered water
| rights. Good luck getting that past the lobbyists.
|
| But even with the existing silly initial distribution of
| water rights, making them fully tradeable would increase
| efficiency:
|
| The almond farmer would still get lots of water, but at least
| he'd turn into a former almond former and just sell his water
| on the market to someone with a better use.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > that this will only encourage even riskier nut development
|
| What risks?
|
| Farm income this year has tripled entirely because of
| subsidies. It is obviously completely and utterly irrelevant
| how you structure water markets or who's buying and selling
| what nuts, in a world where a 10 minute decision in an
| afternoon can 3x profitability.
| dnautics wrote:
| > water is a basic human right
|
| What exactly does that mean? I agree that it would be nice if
| everyone could afford to have water, but it just doesn't seem
| the same as, say "the right to not be tortured", which is an
| abstract and not a commodity that a priori must have non-free
| infrastructure to provide to everyone.
| santaragolabs wrote:
| This reminds me of the science fiction novel The Water Knife by
| Paolo Bacigalupi. From the Amazon description:
| "In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a
| trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez "cuts"
| water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its
| lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of
| a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent
| south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat
| index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive."
|
| Highly recommended read.
| jokoon wrote:
| Yeah it really reminds me of the end of "The Big Short", where
| the character played by Brad Pitt starts following any news like
| this related to water.
| opinion-is-bad wrote:
| Current price is just under $500 for an acre-foot of water, and
| you have to buy in increments of 10 acre-feet. If you are
| unfamiliar with that unit of measurement, it's pretty much what
| it sounds like. It's the amount of water needed to cover one acre
| of land in one foot of water and is equal to 325,850 gallons. It
| is standard in agriculture to measure water output to crops in
| inches and feet because this makes the calculations for water
| usage much easier. For additional context, almonds use about 4
| acre-feet of water per year and over the last ten years have
| generally been able to gross from a low end of $5000 an acre to
| upwards of $15000 depending on yield and price. Considering costs
| remain essentially fixed regardless of gross in almonds, this
| water price would therefore range from ruinous to fairly
| inconsequential.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > almonds use about 4 acre-feet of water per year
|
| Q: What unit of almond measurement uses that measurement of
| water?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| $5,000 is the average gross for almonds in california[1] and
| $15,000 is a red herring. Average costs are ~$4,500/acre[2].
| Water is the second largest costs of production following
| land[3], so I would argue that there is no inconsequential
| increase in water price.
|
| Also, Water/acre is meaningless without considering yield/acre
| or calories/acre. The caloric output/unit water for almonds is
| on par per calorie with many fruits, and much lower than many
| meats.[4]
|
| https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/California/Pub...
| http://progressivecrop.com/2020/04/economic-trends-in-almond...
| https://www.almonds.com/sites/default/files/content/attachme...
|
| https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...
| latte wrote:
| I wonder what makes people launch new products using non-metric
| units in 2020.
|
| Oil trading has a tradition of using barrels, but crop areas
| are measured in hectares and water volumes in cubic metres in
| most parts of the world.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| The troubled and now almost defunct Hyflux has contracts in
| Singapore (on a multi-year committed contract at volume) back
| in 2011 for desalinated water at $0.45/m^3 or $554/acre foot.
|
| 1 acre foot = 1233 m^3.
|
| very close to where the spot market right now is for water.
| water futures are trading at almost the same price as is the
| cost of desalination. make of it what you may..
|
| meanwhile: almonds in
| california..https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almonds_in_California
|
| [..]
|
| 1.Almonds were California's third most valuable agricultural
| product in 2016, accounting for $5.2 billion (about 11%) of
| agricultural output. The state produces 80% of the world's
| almonds and 100% of the United States' commercial supply.
|
| 2. Almonds are California's most valuable export crop. Farmers
| exported $4.5 billion worth to foreign countries in 2016, about
| 22% of the state's total agricultural exports. The majority of
| these exports went to the European Union, China and India.
| While the EU is the largest consumer, the latter two countries
| are expanding markets where the state's Almond Board has
| actively marketed the nuts as a healthy snack.
|
| As part of the 2018 China-United States trade war, China has
| imposed a 50% tariff on almonds. As a result, some Chinese
| businesses have resorted to importing almonds from other
| producers in Africa and Australia.
|
| 3. California suffered a severe drought from 2011 to 2017. In
| addition to economic consequences for the state's almond
| growers, the industry came under criticism for its water use.
| As of 2015, almond cultivation consumed about 10% of the
| state's water. Furthermore, almond acreage increased by 14%
| from 2007 to 2014, while almond irrigation increased by 27%.
| Critics have pointed out that the state's 6,000 almond farmers
| use roughly 35 times the amount of water as the 466,000
| residents of Sacramento.
|
| To supplement reduced deliveries from the state's water system,
| many almond farmers increased groundwater pumping, which can
| unsustainably deplete aquifers and cause land subsidence.
| m1ckey wrote:
| 1 acre-foot = 1233m^3 = 1233000L 0.41$ / m^3
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > almonds use about 4 acre-feet of water per year
|
| An acre with almond trees, to be specific. 4 acre-feet of water
| per acre, per year.
| nickparker wrote:
| Scrolled pretty far and haven't seen mention of this:
|
| Water shortages will be entirely solved in the next decade by
| cheap renewables and desalination.
|
| Clean water can be manufactured, and effectively free electricity
| will make it dirt cheap
| eru wrote:
| Where are we getting the free electricity from?
|
| (I do agree that very cheap electricity means very cheap
| water.)
| dgrin91 wrote:
| This is the first time I've heard such claims. Can you point to
| some sources?
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I doubt it. Last time I checked (~4 years ago), desalinization
| would cost huge amounts of money: it's not just energy cost,
| it's infrastructure cost.
| tozeur wrote:
| People said the same about solar, but alas like always,
| innovation kicks in the costs improve. Every piece of tech
| starts off expensive.
| Loughla wrote:
| Is solar affordable now? We had it quoted for our home, and
| to cover 60-75% of our annual usage, the system cost ~
| 20x-28x our annual usage depending on which system we
| chose, with a life-span of, wait for it, 15 years and
| warranty of 10.
|
| If it wasn't for heavy, heavy government subsidies in this
| space (some states match 50-75% of the up-front cost over
| the course of a year or two), I am not convinced it would
| be popular, at all, for regular Joe Schmoe.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Yes, the effeciency rate of solar is what makes it "worth
| it" or not, and within the last couple of years it has
| hit a sweet spot where in many to most cases it is
| "worth" the investment costs. That said, you need to
| watch out for unscrupulous installers not installing the
| latest panel tech, or installers who overcharge, etc, and
| it is preferable to research and utilize all available
| subsidies you can get your hands on (tax deductions,
| insurance, local electricity policies, etc).
|
| The tech itself is at the right level now, it's the
| middle men and bureaucracies or bad rates that are the
| main problem. Source: family member who has overseen
| installation and maintenance of many major solar
| installations.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >effectively free electricity will make it dirt cheap
|
| Effectively free? For a first world country, maybe. But the
| countries where water shortages are an actual life or death
| situation already have trouble getting a good enough power
| grid. Noone is going to show up to a village in the middle of
| Ghana and install solar panels for free so they can have water.
| This is a horribly first-world centric point of view.
| wurstfinger wrote:
| Funny you should choose Ghana as an example. They have
| actually overbuilt their power generating capacity in recent
| years and are looking for ways to fruitfully soak up the
| excess electricity (e.g. electric vehicles
| https://cleantechnica.com/2020/07/20/ghana-pushes-for-
| adopti...)
| perched_robin wrote:
| Aren't there charities doing literally that?
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| Yes, the website hasn't been updated but these guys are
| constructing a well in Kenya this year.
|
| https://www.globeleadership.com
| christophilus wrote:
| > Noone is going to show up to a village in the middle of
| Ghana and install solar panels for free so they can have
| water.
|
| There are plenty of organizations who will do exactly that.
| But I think I agree with the general slant of your comment,
| which is that much of the world will have to rely on the
| charity of the developed world to solve this problem for
| them. That charity is not guaranteed to be timely, effective,
| or predictable.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Thank you for sending this hopeful message.
| baq wrote:
| this is the strongest signal yet that we're heading for a
| disaster as a civilization. if water can't get to people, people
| will get to water, or at least try to.
| tasuki wrote:
| How does trading water futures cause "water can't get to
| people"?
| baq wrote:
| It isn't the cause. It's a sign that it's already happening
| and maybe an attempt to remediate the issue somewhat.
| kwere wrote:
| no, everthing is scarce on this material world and pricing
| items like water (accounting even ecological costs) could be a
| way to make people people/corps accountable of their choices.
| KenanSulayman wrote:
| These aren't water contracts as in "settlement in water" --
| they're settled in cash and they're water INDEX futures. There's
| simply no way this will affect actual water shipments beyond
| maybe being used as hedge for water producers (which is rather
| unlikely).
| piker wrote:
| This is wrong. Many contracts use cash settlement as an
| effective way to hedge against an increase in the cost of
| something. This product provides a hedge for water producers
| _and consumers_. To the extent water is a volatile-cost input
| into agriculture (perhaps an open question), this is likely to
| see significant usage.
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