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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

Water is fungible. If they need to pipe in 1 gallon of water, who pays the extra cost? The entity that used the last gallon? The entity that used the most? Nah. It’s averaged out across all users.

You also cannot scale up these alternative sources at will. They need to be sustainably commercially viable.

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Right, so just make Amazon pay whatever is a commercially sustainable price. This shouldn’t be particularly hard.

That means _everyone_ pays the higher price. Water is fungible. You can tax them if you want. But you can’t expect market forces to do it.

Wait, what? Utilities all over the world have rate systems that offer higher or lower prices based on who's paying. "Water is fungible" doesn't mean that you can't charge Amazon more for it than you do the little old lady down the street.

I'm not saying that the current rate systems in Mexico, or California, or XYZ place are perfect -- far from it! But there's no reason they couldn't be changed to fit society's goals.

Those are the result of heavy regulation, not deregulation.

Edit: and they’re still drastically biased. Eg farmers getting preferential rates for wasteful crops like almonds.

Your last sentence disproves the first.

Deregulation is good, they said. Don't be an alarmist, they said.

? Yeah, actually, deregulated water would mean Amazon would have to pay the full price instead of a subsidized price for water.

And if it turns out that Amazon would still "win" the price fight over the people who lived there before Amazon came there, it's all good?

And who owns the water? Anyone with a plot of land who can access the watertable? Anyone with a plot of land next to a river? What about those downriver from that plot?

"Deregulation" is as meaningless as "defund the police". If you scratch the surface it can mean anything between total anarchy and "keep only this specific set of laws that I believe are good".

What's needed is regulation which promotes a wanted outcome.

I was responding to someone who made a joke about an obvious mispricing by the govt as being due to deregulation when it’s really the opposite.

As far as who owns the water, well for mineral water sources, I’d say the citizens do, and the best way to handle that is probably still to charge Amazon the same amount and then use the proceeds as tax revenue for the general welfare so the people don’t have to be so poor in the first place.

>> Water is fungible

I call bullshit & shenanigans on this. Water is not money. A certain grade of crude oil can be fungible, but what about after it’s used?

There are many types of water: potable clean water being essential to human existence, but other less pure types can be used in agriculture and industrial applications.

Once water is used, or before it can be reused, processing and transportation is necessary, and that represents significant cost. The cost of processing or transporting money is negligible enough to make it really fungible and usable. Water is heavy, wet, and more volatile than that quarter in your pocket!

If you want to get overly pedantic, money is not fungible either then. Sanctioned currency, dirty money that needs laundering, etc.

But that’s just being purposefully oblivious to the context we are talking about

The existence of various grades of a commodity says nothing about whether that commodity at those grades is fungible. Mostly it implies the opposite, in fact.

But you can't then say unqualified that "water is fungible". Sewer water is not fungible with potable water. Greywater is not fungible with distilled or RO water. I'm not convinced that sewer water is fungible at all, considering its unknown content!

People do this all the time actually. "Cotton is fungible", "oil is fungible".

The grading is assumed.

I will remember this next time Amazon tries to ship me Artesian Spring Deuterium or Tritium to me, and extra shipping/handling charges apply

There are two tremendous storage reservoirs full of dihydrogen monoxide here, but only the cats and toddlers drink it. Birds have wised up.

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