The biggest problem seems to be parochial NIMBYs. People don't like that TSMC needed to bring in Taiwanese workers to staff up the plant. They are currently posting AI generated renderings of factories with billowing smoke stacks when talking about the proposed Amkor semiconductor packaging plant in Peoria.
This is also why I laugh when people in wet areas talk crap about my state's water problem. My state's problem is your problem too buddy.
Predictions are all over the place but the average prediction seems to say that at least half the US gets more water.
If you've seen otherwise and have references, I'm interested. I'm thinking about where to live next.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/sites/www.e-educati...
These are the ones that showed up first.
Drying in the southwest is more likely than in the northwest, probably. The specifics are all over. But the bigger distinctions tend to be north versus south.
I get your point, but not all farms are created equal. Is it really so bad to shut down farms that grow feed for Arab race horses to produce computer chips?
That, I agree. I noticed a sibling comment also mentioned that. If the farms in question are of that kind, it is reasonable. I'd just like to object to the creation of a general sense of sacrificing farms for fabs.
If you're concerned about food security, subsidize actual food that could go to people in some way, but let water hit a real market price.
Else, we end up subsidizing water for clever export and other uses we don't really want, and we remove any incentive for efficiency in water use.
"I was wrong, but I think my comment was still right based on vibes, so I wasn't wrong after all."
Until recently Saudi Arabia was using these laws to grow alfalfa in the desert.
In California, water intensive crops like almond trees get free water.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-ara...
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...
The report has a graph showing their farms consume more water then all LA homes.
"Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown."Maybe another big player in the system would even help build momentum to get these laws changed permanently…
Who needs logic and reason when you have false dichotomy?
* humor
See #15 here[0]
From what I understand, the area is more seismically stable, so the special building structures and equipment for more seismically active places are not needed.
There is the presence of ASU. The ASU president had been hired a while back to implement a very different kind of university system focused on broadening (not gate keeping) higher education and building up innovation. This includes both improving graduation rates in the traditional tracks and expanding non-traditional educational tracks. I don’t know if all those were considered by TSMC; they like hiring engineers straight out of college and training them in their methods.
The modern canal that runs through Phoenix is built on top of ruins of a much older canal built by indigenous people for farming.
It both is and isn't. Have you seen PETA footage from inside factory farms? It's hellish in that special way only the industrial revolution could produce.
Agriculture is largely practiced with industrial methods now, but it's been around a lot longer before proto-industrial methods (water and wind mills). For example, Egypt, as a civilization, benefited from the natural flooding and silt of the Nile. It's been the bread basket for empires for several thousand years. They were not using industrial methods two or three thousand years ago.
There are also other forms of agriculture that is not easily recognized by the narrow lens we have today -- such as perennial food forests, hidden in the ruins of Amazonian jungles, or the Pacific Northwest, or the forest that used to cover the lands between the Appalachia and the Mississippi river. Those were not organized with the concept of employment, and it is distinctively low-tech.
TLDR: America has spent a whole lot of money trying to make land more productive for farming, including land where it probably doesn't make much economic sense once you account for the infrastructure costs.
That canal became the basis for Phoenix, and eventually, the big canal that transport water long range through the state.
The other is that, with sufficient water, you can grow year round.
Not that I think industrial ag is good for society.
Phoenix itself is a metro area whose primary economic driver is real estate speculation. Many older citrus orchards has been surrounded, and sometimes bought and redeveloped.
California is a desert too.
Looks like the fab requires about 40,000 acre-ft/yr of water. If they really do start running out of water, adding desal of AZ's brackish aquifers would cost the fab about $20m/year. Not really worth it for farming, but completely fine for a fab.
... is "acre feet" a common measurement of volume in the USA?
In other words, the fab requires about 20,000 swimming pools of water every year... or equivalently, 1 swimming pool every 27 minutes.
> The acre-foot is a non-SI unit of volume equal to about 1,233 m3 commonly used in the United States in reference to large-scale water resources, such as reservoirs, aqueducts, canals, sewer flow capacity, irrigation water,[1] and river flows.
Seems to be.
So, it's the unit that gets used when discussing irrigation. Or water usage that competes with irrigation. :P
We measure our land in acres and water is the limiting resource for using it. Water requirements for crops are expressed in feet/year (or inches/day). Combine the two and you get acre-feet.
m^3 would be a less useful unit in terms of calculating water needs out here, the metric equivalent would be hectare-meters (10,000 m^3).
This is basically why the word "rationing" exists in the first place.
What good is being "productive" (whatever your definition of it) if poor people die from lack of access to water because chips need to exist.
That works out to 0.032¢ per liter. A quarter (25¢) will buy you 760 liters of water, enough to survive for three months. That's about 1000× lower than a price at which even Phoenix's homeless might start dying of thirst due to the cost of water. (Homeless people don't pay the water utility, but they get water from people who do.)
Poor people in the country get their water from wells, which cost money to drill but basically nothing to pump more water from.
Rationing might be a reasonable thing to do to keep the aquifer from being depleted, but it would be likely to hit poor people much harder than rich people, because poor people don't have the political influence to prevent the enactment of regulations that would hurt them badly, such as a requirement for an environmental review before drilling a new drinking-water well.
Rationing could cause poor people to die from lack of access to water. Markets won't, unless you're talking about something like a Mars colony.
Add in some market mechanics and that problem disappears. The only entities left without water are the ones unwilling to pay a small fraction of a cent.
I'm not particularly concerned with the viability of people farming their own food but that seems plenty cheap.
Even desalinated water would be under a thousand dollars, and we could 10x the water supply at that point.
> and again we would predict that rationing measures would favor politically powerful agribusinesses and perhaps the Indian reservations over most small farmers
If the system allocates free water which can then be easily resold, the end result is basically the same as everyone paying but some entities get free money. Anyone expecting to buy their water should be no worse off.
"[The Saudis] used sprinklers to grow alfalfa in La Paz County and exports it to feed dairy cattle in Saudi Arabia. The company did not pay for the water it used under the old agreement."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-arabia-water-access-arizo...
Just because people don't like what the water is used for doesn't mean the water isn't priced appropriately. You'll still get farmers growing thirsty / pricey crops in the desert if it covers the cost of irrigation.