After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
The most interesting part is that Minas Gerais has unusual top-of-the-hill aquifers, instead of in valleys. The rare mineral formation in its mountain tops collects water and only slowly dispenses it to the subsoil, keeping its quality.[0] Needless to say, unfortunately I hold very little hope for it, considering it also sits on some of the most desirable iron ore deposits in the world.
[0] https://www.projetopreserva.com.br/post/os-raros-aquiferos-d... (in Portuguese)
it comes at the sacrifice of many non-western countries and this conversation is never on the table
it's such a shame things that could otherwise last for thousands of years will get destroyed by a few decades of mismanagement
The term is often used to avoid (or sometimes conflate) what have become problematic and/or obsolte terms, including colonial empires, advanced vs. undeveloped countries, NATO vs. Soviet Bloc states, or the similarly cardinal-directed "Global North" vs. "Global South".
Pedantry on the point (my own included) isn't particularly illuminating or interesting.
Wikipedia's disambiguation page suggests the vagueness of the term: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_(disambiguation)>.
Edit: /Brazil has claims/s/has/& additional/
"G-n", where n is typically in the range of 6--20, and most canonically refers to the G7 nations of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, is another formulation, though that omits Australia (reasonably significant) and NZ (a small country, though quite "western" in a cultural sense). Other significant exclusions are of course China, as well as South Korea, any South American states (Mexico and Brazil would be the most likely candidates), as well as numerous European states which aren't as dominant but are still internationally significant commercially and politically, though those last can claim some inclusion under the EU, the "non-enumerated member".
Also the reason for the existence of the Norwegian port town of Narvik, connected to Kiruna by the world’s most northerly train line.
One of the most fun games to ever deliver a message hah.
Pretty sure it's in the Flashpoint Archive actually, if you want to play it.
Short tangent: I want to stop and admire that you shared an article in Portuguese and in seconds I could read it with Safari’s translation feature. It even translated labels on the images, and got the hydrologic cycle figure right! (However, I think “Rio de 28 Old Women” is probably an error.) This makes me feel connected with you in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago.
I don't know how useful LLMs will ultimately turn out to be for most things, but a freaking universal translator that allows me to understand any language? Incredible!
However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still.
It's a bit sad that websites can't rely on the languages the browser advertises as every browser basically advertises english, so they often auto translate from english anyways if they detect a non-english IP address.
I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data. Yes, there's a canonical language which, in many cases, contains information that gets lost when translated (see: opinions on certain books really needing to be read in their original language).
I think Chrome got it right at one point where it would say "This looks like it's in French. Want to translate it? Want me to always do this?" (Though I expect Chrome to eventually get it wrong as they keep over-fitting their ad engagement KPIs)
This is all a coffee morning way of saying: I believe that the browser must own the rendering choices. Don't reimplement pieces of the browser in your website!
This is a tempting illusion, but the evidence implies it’s false. Translation is simulation, not emulation.
The parent comment is essentially correct that translations of the same material into different languages represent different views of the same data. A human translator must put in quite a bit of effort establishing what underlying situation is being described by a stretch of language.
Machine translations don't do this; they attempt to map one piece of language to another piece of (a different) language directly.
ie a compressed jpg of an image can retain quite a lot of the detail of the original, but it can introduce its own artifacts and lose some of the details
For things where the overall shape and picture is all that's required, that's fine. For things where the fine details matter, it's less fine.
Translations seem to be similar in that regard.
In my experience, users who genuinely don't want English will most definitely have their browser language set to the language they do want.
I think what you might be seeing is that many users are OK with English even if it's not their native language.
For business use cases sometimes it's based on the company's default language that you're an employee for.
By the way, the name of the river translates to “River of the Old Ladies”. I don’t know where the label got the 28 from!
"Rio de 28 Old Women" sounds like a theme park ride.
Today we are experiencing unprecedented droughts in the region. In the future, we will pay a much higher price.
[0] For those that do not speak Portuguese: I think the book title can be translated as "The Dragged Ones".
I hope the rulers solve this problem as quickly as possible without causing pain to the civilians.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
> not because the facts of the US backed coup damaging Iran are at all in dispute.
I mean, they are, GP just admitted they stand corrected[0] and "democratically elected government" of Mossadegh is factually incorrect. Other comments have pointed out he was installed not by the people, but by the Shah and Majles, stopped 1952 elections when they didn't go his way, then tried to dissolve parliament and vest power solely in himself
In the events that followed his popularity rose and he tried to gather a government but was blocked by the shah, which made him even more popular, to the extent that the armed forces backed off from containing the demonstrations. It's against this background he sent a bill to the majlis that would give him six months of emergency powers to push through with his political program and the nationalisation, which was approved.
After those six months he asked for another twelve months and got it, but his base had started to wither away and allies switched sides because the reforms didn't have enough effect fast enough in the international climate they were in. I.e. trade boycott and foreign influence operations and so on, which of course hurt his constituents. Some of his allies were also afraid that he might turn against them, hence they turned on him.
Churchill convinced Eisenhower that Mossadegh were going to deport the shah, and then they launched the coup.
A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mossadegh nationalized and refused to concede to western oil demands.
As in everywhere else.
He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.
For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.
The UK spent a lot of resources conspiring against this project, which ultimately failed, to a large extent because he did not have a solution to the blockade that followed nationalisation of the oil production. Perhaps he also did not expect as many members of the majlis to join the foreign conspiracy as did when the blockade got inconvenient.
It's also not like democratisation followed under the shah, rather the opposite, like the establishment of rather nasty security services and a nuclear program that the later revolutionaries inherited.
Right up until he was about to lose an election, then he suspended counting votes and tried to dissolve the Majlis in alliance with the communist party.
He stopped the counting at 79 members, just enough for parliamentary quorum, out of which 30 belonged to his party.
Tellingly his first act after seating a half empty Majlis was to have them grant him emergency powers that allowed him to dictate laws. This is not a democratic system.
>at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems
I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a rival power center was largely a result of the Anglo-Soviet invasion which deposed Reza Shah, prior to that the Majlis had functioned in more of an advisory capacity, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was always lookign for ways to push back against the Majlis.
It is also important to note that the constitution in place in the early 1950s gave the power to appoint and remove the prime minister to the shah, Mossadegh was recommended to the shah by the Majlis who appointed him prime minister. That is factually how the government worked. It is also important to note that in 1952 Mossadegh stopped the counting of an election that it looked like he was going to lose. In 1953 Mossadegh organized a referendum to dissolve the parliament and vest sole power in the prime minister. This gave the shah the excuse he needed to remove Mossadegh and triggered Anglo-American support for the Shah and Iranian army to remove Mossadegh.
The CIA certainly helped the Shah get generals on side and plan the coup, this is not in dispute. However the idea that Mossadegh was democratically elected is not really true, and the idea that the coup was entirely carried out for external reasons is entirely false.
Ray Takeyh a professor of Near East studies who wrote The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (Yale University Press, 2021) holds the position that the coup was internally driven. We also know from declassified document that the CIA thought the coup had failed and that their part was rather insignificant, but Iranian on the ground under their own direction carried out the coup.[1]
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20150603235034/https://www.forei...
You’re being too liberal with meaning of “illegal” here.
There was a referendum to dissolve the Parliament then.
edit: typo
>The ballot was not a secret one. Separate polling places were provided for those voters favoring dissolution and those against, and the vote had to give his name, his address and the number and place of issuance of his identity card.
Time Magazine from the same month in 1953 [2]:
> Da’s in 1946. Last week Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, the man in the iron cot, topped them all with 99.93%.
> This is the way he did it. Having unconstitutionally dissolved the Majlis, Mossadegh ordered a national referendum to judge his act, crying: “The will of the people is above law.” The 1906 Iranian constitution (which Mossadegh as a young revolutionary helped put across) requires a secret ballot.
From a 1953 article in The Middle East Journal [3]:
>Two days after the bloody confrontation of Tudeh mobs and security forces on August 11, 1953, Mosaddeq’s government arrested a large number of its opponents again.
So here we see Tudeh thugs attacking his opponents, and the man himself jailing the opposition.
> Two of Mosaddeq’s closest associates, Dr.Karim Sanjabi, a founder of the National Front and Minister of Education and Dr. Ghol-am-Hossein Sadiqi, the Minister of the Interior advised against dissolving the Majlis and holding a referendum. Both argued that the Majlis had supported Mosaddeq and that it had been the King who had appointed Prime Ministers since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 subject to parliamentary approval. Without the Majlis, the Shah would be free to oust the Prime Minister and appoint another. Mosaddeq’s reply to both had been the same: Shah jor’at-e in kar ra nadarad [The Shah would not dare].
We also see that Mossadegh's own advisors were cautioning him against trying to dissolve the Majlis, and reminding him that it would allow the Shah to constitutionally remove him. We clearly see a picture of a man, Mossadegh trying to become a dictator.
It would be too much to unpack here but the role of Ayatollah Kashani is also relevant in the story.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1953/08/04/archives/mossadegh-gets-9...
The link from TIME is an op-ed? Who’s the writer? That’s not a source, credible or otherwise.
- https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/7...
Venezuela is about to be turned into another Vietnam. Iran is next. I remember invading them in a mission in BF3. The USA itches to implement what its media anticipated.
Most Europeans seem to be fine being under the EU where they don’t get to vote those bureaucrats in.
The political power in the EU comes from the national governments (directly and via the European commission) and the EU parliament. The members of parliament are elected. The national governments are also formed out of elected parliaments. There's also a body of administration and bureaucracy that comes out of these power structures, just like there is, by necessity, in any government ever, democratic or not.
Insinuating that this somehow equates to authoritarian forms of government appears deeply ignorant or dishonest to me.
In the end, your argument can be used against the other levels of government. National governments of not directly elected officials and bureaucrats and remote parliaments dictating to whole regions, who lord it over cities and communities, who oppress individual people, who should not have to cede a bit of their sovereignty to anybody else to decide or act on their behalf.
Nothing is perfect, nor is the EU, but with your line of thinking, you effectively deligitimize every practical way of organizing government as "colonial".
Maybe that's what you want, maybe you misunderstand and don't care if you do. There are many reasons good and bad to dislike the EU. Yours just appears to be nonsensical.
From the US, Russia and china to local powers like Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran themselves.
Either you're a scholar studying the region, if not your comment feels naive at best
What's problematic is Phoenix agriculture is the focus on extremely water hungry crops like alfalfa and not really the presence of agriculture in general.
This is entirely an artifact of arcane water law in the US. Any rational allocation would make alfalfa untenable there.
China is an interesting counterfactual. Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...
The PRC was doing just as fine before they executed all the CIA's agents. I don't see any relation. There's never been any hint from either the US or China that those agents were doing anything other than passive intelligence collection, as opposed to actively interfering in domestic Chinese politics. And in any event, the scope of historical CIA operations has always been overblown. In every case I'm aware of, the CIA leveraged a tipping point already well underway to nudge things one way or another. Developing countries are often already highly unstable and prone to regular disruptive power shifts; it's a major cause of their poverty and inability to fully develop. And in many of the outright coups the CIA has been implicated, the extent of the CIA's involvement was simply talking to and making promises to various power players already poised to make a power grab, Chile being a prime example--the Chilean Senate was the architect of the coup, and the CIA merely offered safe harbor to nudge Pinochet, who was waffling because he wasn't convinced it would succeed. The exceptions were during the middle of the Cold War, ancient history in modern foreign affairs.
The KGB/FSB has always been lauded for opportunistically taking advantage of preexisting situations with small but smart manipulations, but that's just how intelligence agencies have always worked in general. When your interventions are too direct and obvious, which they always will be if you're creating a crisis from scratch, you risk unifying the country, Iran being a prime example.
Beyond being self-contradictory (CIA is passive but also they interfere on key issues) this is just false. The West has spent a lot of (covert) resources undermining China in the past decade in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, trade and tech wars, COVID, and so on. All attempts which have failed dramatically, perhaps partly due to the lack of IC penetration into society and government.
I said the CIA's intelligence network in China which was dismembered was passive, the same way China's network in the US is passive, not that the CIA is passive everywhere else. But maybe you wouldn't describe either as passive, which is fair, but I don't think that definition fits with how most people conceive of what active political manipulation looks like. Note also I didn't mean to imply that promoting a coup by offering safe harbor is passive in the same sense; I would definitely categorize that as direct domestic political disruption, just not of the kind Hollywood or conspiracy theories depict, which is what people assume when CIA involvement is implicated.
And I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding Hong Kong, Xinjiang, or Taiwan. Is public criticism interfering in domestic politics? Sanctions arguably are, which the US uses regularly around the world, but in the context of China, it's always about money and trade wars and international disputes. The US is active militarily in Taiwan in terms of training and arms supplies, but this is largely at Taiwan's insistence, and the US does much less than Taiwan wants. And none of this involves direct CIA involvement beyond the intelligence collection and sharing networks, both with and without the local government's approval.
I'm curious if you have specific examples. I know the US has proposed sanctions for China's policies in Xinjiang, but I don't remember anything actually coming of it. If I'm misremembering, that's fair, and I understand why China would consider actual sanctions domestic political interference, but note that this is also a cultural divide between Chinese and Western political philosophies--the latter is much more moralistic, and interventions against perceived human rights abuses aren't necessarily considered to violate the principle of state sovereignty.
> We share similar struggles, though I recognize that Turkey's situation involves much less external interference than Iran's... ours is mostly our own doing.
Can you explain what you mean by Turkey having issues "of it's own doing"? Do you mean something like corruption, or some other factor? I know very little about Turkey or the issues it faces, other than some cataclysmic earthquakes.
Erdogan also has some interesting ideas about the economy. A quote from his Wikipedia article: "He has pushed the theory that inflation is caused by high interest rates, an idea universally rejected by economists. This, along with other factors such as excessive current account deficit and foreign-currency debt, in combination with Erdoğan's increasing authoritarianism, caused an economic crisis starting from 2018, leading to large depreciation of the Turkish lira and very high inflation."
The resulting crisis has its own article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_economic_crisis_(2018%...
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira... says Iran’s population today is over five times that of 1950.
It also is a safe bet that water consumption per capita went up, too.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if qanats couldn’t support current water usage.
Maybe that “coincided” doesn’t imply “they stopped using qanats, so the water table dropped” but “qanats weren’t sufficient anymore, so they started drilling deep wells, and the water table dropped”?
Humans are notoriously bad heading off long term consequences.
But it also says several other things, pointing to poor water management policies, extreme damification drying up wetlands downstream, lack of necessary maintenance on some qanats, and more.
I'm not so sure they could have done much different.
https://harpers.org/archive/2013/07/the-tragedy-of-1953/
It should be noted that while the Shah obviously benefited from the coup, he remained suspicious of the Western powers who had supported it; he was not foolish enough to believe they were honest allies. Consequently, he was inclined to support attempts at autarky.
1: https://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/new-york-times/march-...
Current environmental movement is downstream from that period - a reaction to abuses that happened. At least where the political situation tolerated its emergence.
Note that the Aral Sea, which lies geographically nearby, dried up for nearly the same reasons - too much water consumed - even though the Soviet Union was not in a position where they "couldn't have done much different"; they had plenty of productive soil elsewhere, being literally the largest country in the world and having been blessed with a lot of chernozem.
The underlying factor was the technocratic Zeitgeist which commanded people to "move fast and break (old fashioned) things". Such as qanats in Iran or old field systems in Central Europe.
Dams are highly ineffective when the goal is water conservation. Censorship and punishment are also highly ineffective methods for water conservation.
Assuming that the water taken through qanats would eventually make it into aquifers (fat from unlikely, I think, as it takes water from underground that’s less likely to evaporate) one could even argue that tapping rainwater with qanats prevent aquifers from getting refilled, so it’s taking from the same water source.
The saddest thing about Iran I’ve noticed is the stark contrast between the current state of the country and the intelligence of the people I’ve met from this country.
Consider too the selection bias in those you've met from Iran, presumably outside that country. Both on ideological and socioeconomic / aptitude bases.
I'd first encountered a similar observation in the 1970s or 1980s, then directed largely at those from Soviet Bloc countries encountered in the West. Typically these were academics, engineers, or similarly highly-skilled professionals, who presumably found greener pastures outside their homeland. Presuming that these were necessarily representative of the larger population ignores sampling dynamics.
There's a lot of Americans here in London, from all over the US, and virtually none of them are anything at all like the stereotypical flyover-state USian - and yet in the US itself, there's plenty of those. Heck, go to any of the countries where smart, hard-working immigrants are said to come from and you'll find plenty of dumb, lazy or just not-that-capable people
So it's almost inevitable that e.g. a Somali who ends up in Leeds is going to be smarter, more motivated and harder working than both the average Leeds native and the average Somali.
Iran is somewhat special in that a culture of highly valuing education and producing high quality scientists has persisted among the populace, despite a half century of despotic religious rule.
There are no other countries that come to mind that manage to do this despite such a large, long period if government-populace mismatch. Other countries that produce large quantites of scientists generally have a government that actively supports the pursuit of science. Those countries aren't immune to flareups of anti-intellectualism but they are generally short-lived.
Don't think that it can't happen here too.
I don't know where you are reading history from but listening to random factoids rather than a comprehensive understanding is the worst way to do so.
It’s commonly accepted that Mossadegh was thrown out by a coup and that Khomenei seized power through a revolution.
"Iranian people voted in their beloved leader, who was then toppled by the mastermind West" is a cartoonish level of geopolitical understanding by those who have read the first couple paragraphs of wikipedia
The state of the country seemed quite beautiful to be honest. I have a hard time thinking it's a total disaster right now
It is unlikely Tehran will just evacuate all at once. They will do something drastic when the problem can no longer be ignored. And random events like rain will delay the inevitable for a while longer.
Perhaps this is how climate change will end up as well.
There will always be lot of other factors - the first time we're going to really collectively notice sea level rise is on the high tide during a storm surge. The rest of the time, the change will be within the range of variation that we're used to dealing with.
I remember reading about droughts in Syria every year since ~2006. Somehow those news stopped after 5 years. Did they sort it out?
It's quite something they are envisioning a 100 billion dollar project to move the capital instead of limiting water waste in desert agriculture and closing Tehran's water loop by reclaiming sewage, greatly reducing the net demand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhCNpX3s-D8
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S194439862...
This editorial elaborates on some of the political corruption, as well as Iran's dismantling of cooperation with foreign water engineers.
- Bill Mollison
- H. L. Mencken
This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
sounds like if 90% of their water goes to agriculture, mostly export, and their country is cash strapped due to their habit of kidnappings, then maybe there's a simple solution here
You say that if it was some cultural oddity, and not a completely understandable reaction and exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation.
Israel had tried to help Islamist Iran negotiate with the US through the Contra debacle, shared intelligence with Iran against Iraq (failed reactor bombing) and outright sold weapons to Iran to support them against Iraq.
There was a naive belief in Israel that the daily "Death to Israel" chants are just rhetoric like in the arab countries it used to deal with, and Iran can be a quiet ally like before 1979
At the same time Iran fought Israel through their mercenaries in Lebanon up to the point where all of Iran's resources were consumed by the failed attempt to encircle Israel, which has collapsed completely in the last two years
And siege mentality. Right. Like how instead of funding water works Iran surrounded Israel by funding Hamas, Hezbollah, and militias in Iraq.
Until like a couple years ago, autarky was generally not in the Western playbook. It’s a stupid idea that tends to be embraced by stupid people. The only ones who have done it sustainably are the Kims, as a nuclear monarchy over a totalitarian state.
The point of autarky isn't that you want to isolate yourself from the world, but that because you credibly could, you're in a much stronger negotiating position in all those mutually beneficial deals you would like to make.
Except it doesn't put one in a stronger position. It systematically weakens the economy. It only makes sense for domestic power-consolidation since a poor economy that can't trade with anyone except the state is entirely beholden to whoever controls the state.
Stupid idea. Stupid people.
Something makes me think that those aren't the reason for why Iran is everyone's favorite whipping boy in the region.
Nationalizing western assets half a century ago probably has something more to do with why they are treated the way they are.
The most important difference is that the deranged things the Saudis are doing aren't aimed at the West which makes them useful allies, also their current ruler is enacting reforms while Iran is only going backwards
Regarding nationalizing, Egypt had done that and has successfully jumped ship to the western sphere, it's completely possible. Saudi Aramco used to be American owned, you can nationalize with tact
The US' treatment of Cuba is the better example. It's doing none of the things the parent poster listed, yet it's still treated by the US as a pariah state. Uncle Sam doesn't care about how you treat women, or whether you have elections, but he deeply cares about you taking some corporation's stuff 70 years ago.
That is the original sin that can never be atoned for.
(For another example of that, see last night's deranged speech about Venezuela 'stealing' America's oil.)
What do you think about Vietnamese-US relations?
I don't follow the logic why Iran has no way out
Didn't... uh, didn't they... try?
And then Trump killed it?
My understanding is that there are allegations they were still pursuing nuclear capability but, we still don't have any actual evidence, and then we bombed them anyway.
No-one normal is suggesting that the Iranians did not have practically weapons-grade fissile material, the only argument was whether we successfully destroyed it or just kicked the can down the road.
Recall that the regime calls us (the U.S) Satan, and openly calls for killing us all - and actually indoctrinates their kids to mass kill us - a result of which is attacks such as the one on the former World Trade Center.
It is really, really hard for an American to grok their worldview because it is so different then ours (and for that matter, it is NOT at all the view of all Arabs, or most Iranians or all Muslims - see the hero Ahmed El Ahmed last week!). But that is just burying your head in the sand - since the indoctrinated are ready and willing to kill US!
Now, some have an attitude, "let's believe them that they are just developing fissile material for energy, and let's even pay them gobs and gobs of money to do that. The fact they wont let us inspect is just a curious fact..." And then they are shocked when the material is really weapons grade. But if a nuclear weapon [a "dirty bomb"] went off in the States - which it 100% will if the Ayatollahs have the ability to make it happen - then IMO being shocked is not really a good enough excuse.
If you live in NY or LA, you should be aware that the regime claims they are going to take you out - at any price to themselves - as soon as they could, no different than they are targeting Jerusalem. The sanctions are an attempt to forestall some really unpleasant scenarios.
And that is when looking at just the regime in Iran. The bigger picture of how and where they invest their oil wealth and their previous American support is even more dangerous for us naive pretty summer boy western cultured folks.
/rant
Countries as religiously deranged as Iran are close US allies (Saudis), Iran had many chances of changing that in the last 40 years.
Also, that popular 50s coup story of bad imperialists vs good natives does not only seem too simple to be true, it is
No, the government installed by the Shah and non-democratically-elected Majles, which stopped an election not going Mossadegh's way, was overthrown
This sure is an interesting way to frame fifty years of organized sanctions
Because that's their entire MO for their existence I can produce an endless stream of this really
You gotta do more to convince me that iran is any worse than either
Half the things you linked barely have anything to do with iran; certainly much less connection than saudi arabia had with 9/11. Do better!
Both statements are false, Israel does not "kill americans on a regular basis" and Saudi Arabia has not supported proxy warfare killing thousands of Americans.
The links I pasted are well established to Iran, I can post more but that would waste both of our time as you try to synthesize new facts
Have you not turned on the news recently? The IDF regularly bombs american citizens living in palestine.
Then there's the USS Liberty bombing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
Not to mention the likely hundreds of americans assassinated by mossad, cf Rise First And Kill
> Saudi Arabia has not supported proxy warfare killing thousands of Americans.
Have you never heard of 9/11? Also Wtf are you referring to? None of the proxy wars allegedly funded by iran (as if we haven't done orders of magnitude more evil things with proxy wars, cf the war in ukraine) have killed "thousands of americans".
And frankly, even if this were credible, who could blame them given the sanctions? We're actively destroying their ability to live life for seeming no reason other than arbitrary geopolitical control.
About Saudi Arabia, the 9/11 hijackers might have been partially Saudi, but not backed by their government. Even if Iran only killed a thousand US troops and not thousands (marine barracks bombing, iraq war and others) that's two orders of magnitude more than Israel or Saudi Arabia, and there's a good reason, these are intentional attacks against US armed forces.
> sanctions? We're actively destroying their ability to live life for seeming no reason other than arbitrary geopolitical control.
The reasons for the sanctions is Iran's insistence on kidnapping diplomats, supporting terrorism and proliferating weapons. If you believe they are people like you and me and have agency, they are also responsible over the course of 40 years of choosing actions that led to them being completely isolated
This can be seen as the knock on effects from the downfall of the Persian and Ottoman empires, and to a greater extent the destruction of the Persian civilization as the leader in the Middle East, replaced by the British and later American empires.
Water depletion and failure is but one small symptom of their civilizational decline. These issues wouldn't have been circumvented by better planning, it was to some extent written in the sky that this would come to pass. How can they support the needed infrastructure spending and policy goals, not being a leading global power? For example, not being able to control inflows from neighboring countries, or have the USD or trading partners available to pay to import food.
Most academic sources say the death toll of the famine was modest.
The only source for a 25% fatality rate is based on US State Dept population figures for Iran over time, not on any actual Iranian sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_famine_of_1942%E2%80%9...
This is the comment I originally commented under.
Also, that "Tehran will run out of water in two weeks" statement came from the president, and some neighborhoods really don't have water for several hours each day. The official advice is to "install water pumps and storage tanks."
[1] Why Iran is Rapidly Dying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8kSGH4I8Ps
Of course they do. The forced expulsion of Afghan workers and refugees didn’t get a lot of coverage, but it’s prominent in regional sources.
OP isn’t arguing there isn’t any good in Iran. Just that the corrupt theocracy has pursued unsustainable goals cruelly and incompetently, and in a way that has turned Iran into a unique menace to the region through its embrace of similarly-totalitarian proxies who couldn’t give fewer shits about their populations.
To the extent there is a propagandized version of the story, it’s the one that ignores what every Iranian refugee and what every one of Iran’s’ neighbours say. The irony of that is Iran behaves as a revanchist imperial concern, the precise philosophy many enlightened types in the West claim to reject.
Rural Californians put up signs that say we’re “wasting most of the water in the river” by which they mean our policy of allowing the river to flow into the ocean.
We should look to places with less intelligent geoengineering to see what would happen if we were so foolish. Their combination of resourcefulness and low-IQ will show us what happens when we prioritize extraction alone.
I wasn't talking about what they were discussing (desalination for farming). I was talking about moving an entire city, as opposed to getting enough water to deal with just that city.
I suggest you read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
And don’t confuse moving the capital city with actually relocating Tehran. Tehran’s not going anywhere. What they’re proposing is building a new capital city, but it’ll be the rich and the political and religious elite who move there. The millions of poor and powerless living in Tehran will get left behind. Some will be able to migrate south, but many won’t.
I’m convinced my conjecture was wrong.
No issue.
But the number 100 billion was mentioned as the cost of moving the capital.
also 90%+ of waste water is recycled and used for irrigation
Qatar has no surface freshwater or groundwater. So all of their water is desalinated. It’s often still quite salty to the taste though - the last few ppms would be an exorbitant cost to remove.
However, Qatar has 3 million people. Iran has 92 million people - 9 million in Tehran alone. So their half of that gas field in the Gulf contributes far less energy per capita.
And even if the energy is free (unlimited natural gas, fusion, magic, whatever) desalination is still fairly expensive. I think only about 50% of the cost is energy, the other half is CapEx, operations, and replacing the membranes as they get used up.
I'd think that this kind of research would be a priority. It won't be long, before we start having water wars (like olden times, but with nastier weapons).
If you have gigawatts of low grade waste heat (Iran does, in theory), you can run multistage flash distillers of the waste heat, and those have more than an order of magnitude separation to the thermodynamic limit (they also have lower CAPEX, lower maintenance and lower water pre-treatment requirements than reverse osmosis).
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-world-first-israel-begins-p...
> Qanats are gently sloping tunnels dug into hillsides in riverless regions to tap underground water, allowing it to flow out into valleys using gravity alone. They have long sustained the country’s farmers, as well as being until recently the main source of water for cities such as Tehran, Yazd, and Isfahan. But today only one in seven fields are irrigated by the tunnels.
> Iran has an estimated 70,000 of these structures, most of which are more than 2,500 years old.
2500 years old is roughly the beginning of Persia, with the conquest by Cyrus. If the network is mostly older than that, Iran may have a tradition of using them, but it doesn't seem to have much of a tradition of building them.
$100B is such a high number that it becomes funny money but… idk, doesn’t it still feel like a lowball in terms of losses?
Amusing/telling/sad how these self proclaimed anti-imperialist Islamists cargo culted western technohubris just the same
Gonabad qanat network, reputedly the world’s largest, extends for more than 20 miles beneath the Barakuh Mountains of northeast Iran. The tunnels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thousand feet, and are supplied by more than 400 vertical wells for maintenance.
Net immigration is down. That counts illegal immigration and deportations, presumably which are way down and way up, respectively. Both stats have nothing to do with how many people _want_ to be in the US, just how many people are able to get here.
How long is the of _applicants_ for residency in the US? That's the metric you're looking for. I suspect, with the increased difficulty in illegal immigration, that there is an increase in applications for legal immigration. That's speculation though, I have no idea where to get those numbers.
I think the extent to which it’s effective may be a proxy for an electorate’s intellectual health. So while we see failures to take responsibility (what role models the world has for leaders…), that scapegoating doesn’t always work. And if so, not for long.
What got me thinking about this is the Conservative guy up here in Canada has been trying this playbook and it’s just not working. Worse, it’s actually eroding his party’s power in a very measurable way.
Tehran becoming intolerably difficult to live in because of basic resource mismanagement will be a very hard one to spin. But I suspect we will see an attempt at scapegoating.
Immigration inflow is caused by lax border control, not by being a great place to live. No matter how bad it is, there's always someone worse off willing to try their luck.
The prime minister suggesting evacuations is probably political. It is much easier to adjust to lack of water than to move your home/job somewhere else.
> people of Tehran will either need to move or die
No. I've lived (along a million other people) without water for many months during a hot summer episode. It was a major lifestyle degradation (and major doesn't even begin to describe it) but death was not a threat (though there was fear of disease spread due to possible degradation of sanitary conditions but that didn't happen either).
For my uninformed take, Iran is not a free country, the US is somewhere in the middle but I don't think an insurrection against the current regime (which has been deploying the military to mass-abduct people) would end well.
The Iranian mullahs locked up everyone who warned them about the upcoming water crisis.
Simple as that.
Tldr: City that outgrew its water supply recommends moving to a place with more water.
Although you wouldn't really get that from reading the article, which seems more about blaming people for Tehrans rapid growth and weather conditions.
Las Vegas water is less expensive than mine, and we have in excess of 10x the precipitation and everything is naturally green.
Cape Town is already there.
I don’t want to be a doom and gloom guy, but the climate change collapse is starting to happen in front of our eyes—and not just in a far off ‘eventually this will be a problem’ way.
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
...
While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis, they say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.
I think the impacts of climate change vs growing populations became real to me around 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
Sorry but this one is just 100% the fault of the government involved. It could have easily been prevented and it was known to the month when it would happen decades in advance, nothing was done.
Datacentres don't consume water.
Iran probably hasn't built (m)any of those yet but that will be the next step.
For example, only 60% of Equinix’s DCs use closed loop, non-evaporative cooling systems…
https://www.cdotrends.com/story/4492/balancing-energy-and-wa...
- evaporation from cooling. the water will come down as rain again, but not necessarily in the same region
- when disposing the water into the sewers, the water might get "lost" into the oceans, where it's not available as drinking water
- when disposing water used for cooling into the rivers it was taken from, there might be environmental issues with water temperature. i know that this is an issue with rivers in europe where the industry is allowed to measure and report their adherence to the laws regarding the maximum allowed water temperatures themselves and, to no ones surprise, the rivers are too warm.
so water is not destroyed, but it can be made unusable or unavailable for the locally intended purpose.
DC pulls water out of local water supply. DC uses evaporative cooling (not all use closed systems, and even those that do see some loss over time) Water lost to cooling is now in the atmosphere.
If the DC (and other local users) withdraw water faster than local conditions allow it to be replenished, you end up without any local water.
The parent comment said DCs don't use water. This claim is easily proven to be incorrect.
But, correct, DCs outside Iran have little/no impact on the situation in Iran today.
Water is evaporated and not consumed.
Also, I hope you apply same standard and scrutiny to the water impact of the food you consume.
And, yes, our food supply also has an impact on water availability in areas where food production occurs.
I wasn't speaking specifically US/EU.
A theocracy having that level of access to people's private info will be interesting.
"40% of data centers are using evaporative cooling" doesn't mean that other 60% are fully closed loop water to air coolers or what would be called "dry cooling systems" by the manufacturers. The other 60% could be "adiabatic coolers" or "hybrid coolers" or if data center is close to large body of water/water heat exchangers, where 2/3 of those still depend on evaporating water, but the manufacturers would put them in separate category from evaporative coolers.
Just took a looked at offering of one of the industrial cooler manufacturers. They had only 1 dry cooler design, compared to a dozen more or less evaporative ones. And even that one was advertised as having "post install bolt-on adiabatic kit option". Which feels like a cheat to allow during initial project and build claim that you are green by using only dry coolers, but after the press releases are done, grant money collected and things are starting to operate at full capacity, attach sprinklers to keep the energy costs lower.
I flew over Iran many years ago. Much of it reminded me of central Australia. Very arid and desolate, but beautiful from thousands of feet up.
Your kidneys are filtering 200 liters of blood per day. OMG, where's all that blood coming from?!
That isn't a closed loop exactly although there is a complex system connecting my digestive/urinary tract with my bladder etc.