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Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

> I'm surprised they still blame the lawn and havent moved on to pools or something more easily associated with wealth to really try and stir the poor vs rich debate.

I understand these figures may not mean anything because private individuals consume relatively imperceptible amounts of water compared to (the agriculture) industry.

But reflect for a moment that Kim Kardashian blew through over one quarter million gallons of water in June. [0] (There are other offending celebrities listed in that article. Kardashian is the most egregious of them.)

I’m all for restricting and regulating agricultural waste of water. But surely some attention should be given to flagrant offenders among individual citizens.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1119112184/kim-kardashian-kev...

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You’re begging the question. They are only offenders at all because the law against residential use has been passed. The claim is that it’s a useless law, and your response is to say that people should be punished under the law.

For context vs the quarter million figure for a month for a celebrity:

yesterday it rained about 20 million gallons of water on my family’s small Iowa farm. Like a middle class income size of farm.

Or, to put it a different way she used as much water as 4 acres of farmland in California (averaged over all crops, only 3 acres if its growing almonds).

If everyone, farmers, industry and people all paid the same per gallon as Kim kardashian water use would be cut in half

Flagrant offenders?

No. There’s an extremely simple way to solve this problem that would work; Everyone pays the same price for water. If the government is not going to do that then blame the government.

Are you suggesting the same dollars per gallon? Because I callus also see a reasonable argument to charge for water in percentage or person that per gallon. As the article mentions, some people are perfectly happy to pay more money. Which’d be fine if there was a guaranteed supply with enough for everyone. But that’s not how the water supply in CA is today. Poor people should not die of dehydration just because rich people want lawns and pools.

It should be simple enough to have a baseline allocation, along with an increased price after that's used up.

It's also worth noting that water probably doesn't need to be very expensive before usage starts getting curbed quite heavily by the main consumers. If there's no price, might as well use as much as you're allocated - there is no direct consequence for doing so.

> Poor people should not die of dehydration

Places that do charge for water (places like Perth, Western Australia) charge a few dollars per thousand litres - enough for several months of drinking water. Nobody is going to die from dehydration.

The prices should not go up a lot, because if they did, farming would become unprofitable.

E.g., tomato farming produces around $4000 worth of produce per acre and year[0], and requires 2.5 feet applied water. ($4000/acre)/(2.5 feet) = 0.5 cents/gallon. If the water got that expensive they'd need to stop growing tomatoes, since just the water would already cost more than the produce would be worth.

By contrast, residential water is 0.7 cents per gallon[1], so the prices involved are really tiny compared to what human users are already paying.

[0] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...

[1] https://www.calwater.com/docs/rates/rates_tariffs/ela/202201...

You mean farming of water-intensive crops would become unprofitable. Yeah that is fine.

The flip side of this is that it never was profitable to begin with and only was done because citizens gave enormous handouts to these companies (paying for all their water). You can keep doing that, but make it more explicit: Make them pay for all the water, but give them a subsidy of $X and change it if they waste water.

Noooo… tomatoes would just get more expensive to the point where demand balances out. You need to think beyond the first effect. All of this stuff ripples through the entire market.

You can still grow tomatoes outside California though, surely production would shift to a place with cheaper water? And if the prices are too high people would stop buying tomatoes.

I agree that the prices would not be exactly the same, my point is just that these prices are still extremely low. You don't need to fear people dying from dehydration (like the comment above suggested).

But, as has been pointed out many times in this thread already, it’s not because of pools and lawns.

Probably pay the same price such that water doesn’t deteriorate past a point though right? It does need to be affordable for families. If you don’t also put some usage level maintenance then it’ll get depleted to the point that it remains too expensive for all but the wealthiest users (personal or corporate or government.

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