Hacker News Reader

Comment by DarkNova6 | Hacker News Reader

I come from a country which specializes in water reprocessing, but doing so diligently is an expansive endeavour. Especially where private companies are doing this, the incentive is to keep costs low and just be above barely-legal (and maybe not even that).

There is a myriad of drugs, pesticides and chemicals which are known to be inside the water system in the us. Your neighbour is depressed? Good for you. You might get some anti-depressants yourself (no, the body does not break down drugs completely, they are mostly escaping with the wastewater).

But hey, maybe I am just paranoid.

Good watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FccVv5NsIY

View on HN

Currently almost all countries sell water earmarked for industrial use at absurdly reduced prices, when compared to consumer prices.

Jack up the rate so both pay the same, and introduce a huge pollution / cleaning penalty for companies that don’t emit virtually fully (talking something like 99.999% here) cleaned wastewater.

It’s slowly happening in Europe, but we’re decades to late with it. Even in The Netherlands and Belgium we’ve allowed companies to dump a continuous stream of PFAS-production polluted water straight into a river. Clown world :)

It gets worse; Microsoft datacenters have been allowed to use up huge amounts of drinking water for cooling; it gets treated to avoid clogging up the lines, heated up, then just dumped back in the river.

It's shameful and wasteful, and our country will run out of fresh water in my lifetime; I even heard one that says the aquifers will be running out within ten years. And they just used it for cooling.

Likewise, there's heavy investments in offshore wind parks, but companies like Microsoft just come in (with government subsidies) and buy up the whole capacity. It was supposed to replace, not supplement, existing power generation options.

> It's shameful and wasteful, and our country will run out of fresh water in my lifetime; I even heard one that says the aquifers will be running out within ten years.

This doesn't seem to track.

They take water out of the river and put the same amount back in as its a closed system in a pipe. How can they be responsible for lower water levels if they are net zero in usage?

Send me a link that backs up your claim that they are depleting the water table so I can fix the holes in my knowledge

> It gets worse; Microsoft datacenters have been allowed to use up huge amounts of drinking water for cooling; it gets treated to avoid clogging up the lines, heated up, then just dumped back in the river.

> It's shameful and wasteful

What you've described does not sound shameful OR wasteful?

It’s not so much fun if you’re a fish.

Not so much fun for a fish, but that's the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose. Existence itself carries a cost to those around the being that exists; should it be feasible for a datacenter and fish to coexist it ought to be done, but were I to pick one over the other, I'm afraid the fish has to go.

All sorts of things can be tracked through wastewater; cocaine use, COVID prevalence, that kind of thing.

As always "if done correctly" carries a bit of an asterisk.

Tangentially, there have been numerous studies linking trace levels of naturally occurring lithium to lower rates of mental health problems and suicide.

Maybe we'll find out that the reduction in violence we've seen since the 90s is partially due to SSRIs in the water. Might not be helping obesity rates either.

That's interesting and quite worrying isn't it?

Makes sense that with such a huge global pop and increasing usage of medicines and pesticides the global water supply will eventually turn into a toxic sludge.

Anti depressants have just been found deep underwater in Antarctica so it seems all fish are swimming in a soup of blood thinners and psycho-active medication.

I wonder when the ocean ecosystem will collapse from this and when humans will turn "weird", if they haven't already done that. Imagine constantly being medicated with 1000 medications from the moment you are in the womb.

I hope many of these things are so trace that it's almost homeopathic, ie. doesn't have an effect - can anyone confirm or deny this?

>> I wonder when the ocean ecosystem will collapse from this and when humans will turn "weird", if they haven't already done that

Indeed. At least in the case of fish it turned out that plastic pollution starts to affect the hormonal balance males starting from the 3rd generation.

Makes you think about the ever lowering sperm-count in males across the board.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com