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Comment by thisistheend123 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

The water tanker guys also steal the municipal water supply by giving bribes to some of the officials.

Happens in the west too. No bribes required. There’s already non-secured water everywhere by law: fire hydrants.

Companies don't need to steal water in the US, they get it for free or subsidized:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/23/pepsi-coke-b...

Because we haven't commoditized it. People seem to be upset on one hand because we aren't making people buy water, and they turn around and express outrage at the notion that maybe water should be sold.

you think there is rampant theft of water in the US due to fire hydrants? I have never heard of that, do you have a source?

Yeah I doubt that much water is stolen from hydrants in the US. I have heard of business using it, but as I understood it they are required to get permitting and pay for usage by monitoring their flow, at least in California.

Usually it happens at the geographic fringes of civilization where cisterns/tanks get filled from municipal water supplies. Not people running a hose to their house.

But there’s also a lot of truck-delivered water used in construction/dust control.

No shortage of reports/charges: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fire+hydrant+water+theft

"Good Goverance" - so, Socialism? Markets work better.

Honest question: how do we know markets work better? Where would I start a quest to read peer-reviewed research of how markets are better than centralized planning in the 21st century, where have powerful computers that are capable of assimilating terabytes of information?

It's not just a matter of parsing lots of information, you also have to collect the information, and interpret it correctly. Maybe one day in the future, a real AI will be able to do better than markets (by what metric, though). But not yet.

Show me the computer program that knows how to create a pencil? And then a toaster? How does it know how many toasters will be needed? Is a toaster more important than a smart watch?

Also, if you have such a Computer program, you could use it to beat the markets. You could use it to compute the perfect prices of futures (because you know the future demand and supply). So I guess there is your answer: if you had such a Computer, you could beat the markets, as long as you don't do that, markets are better.

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