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Comment by namecheapTA | Hacker News Reader

For a lot of people that live in waterless areas, I have a feeling they also drive a lot. I personally use several gallons of gasoline a day. Think of how hard that gasoline is to get to me. It would be trivial to get me a 2 gallons of water a day to live no matter how large the desert I live in is.

As long as food production is taken care of where water is, getting people drinking water is pretty easy.

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People use significantly more than two gallons of water a day, be it for flushing toilets, personal hygiene, cooking, or washing laundry and dishes.

My family of 5 uses 100 to 125 gallons a day on average, based on my water bill. I'd guess our largest use is showers. I should note that we have low flow everything and high efficiency appliances, plus no sprinklers.

If all your fixtures are equally recent, it's likely that the toilet is the biggest use. But it might also be the most difficult one to reduce. In any case your per-capita consumption is already exemplary. Here in California the most extreme conservation measure they have managed to think up is households using more than 1000 gallons per day will be charged slightly more at the margins. I always look at these conservation proposals, then I look at my own bill, and I figure there's nothing I personally need to do.

Right, short of going without there isn't much more we can do.

In Hong Kong, 80% of homes flush with seawater [0]. It's provided for free by the government to encourage people to connect to that supply rather than the drinking water supply. I'm sure this can be done elsewhere.

[0]: https://www.wsd.gov.hk/en/core-businesses/water-resources/se...

I'm certainly close enough to the ocean for that. It would be a lot of infrastructure to add. Interesting idea and I would be willing.

I think the problem here is that a huge amount of food production happens in places that were deserts before aqueducts were built. The sources of their water was assumed to be infinite, and a series of perverse incentives make is to that if they dont use the maximum amount of water afforded to them at all times they lose future water access. Ironically, these same sort of bad incentives are one of the reasons government projects are so expensive, if you're ever under budget your get punished by having your budget cut next year, so you better use as much money as you possibly can!

Yes you can absolutely pay for potable water to be trucked to you. It's normal for people who live on their own rain water to have to do this to fill their tanks during dry years.

That water is trucked a very short distance. I'm talking more about water being trucked in from entirely different regions. But yes, at a scale, shipping water isn't all that expensive if it came down to life or death for people.

Would you like to pay $4.50 per gallon of water?

To stay alive? Easily.

Also, the cost to transport gasoline is not $4.50 a gallon. The actual commodity is almost all of that. You can already find water in retail stores transported thousands of miles for $1 a gallon at retail.

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