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Comment by anonym29 | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I also think it's ridiculous for the people who decided to set up shop in Las Vegas and Phoenix to whine about water. Nohody forced them to decide to live in a desert.

And regarding the Ganges, it's a property of culture and policy, not the people themselves. There were American rivers that were literally on fire from excess pollution not that long ago. Policy and culture changed and it greatly ameliorated river pollution problems.

You're the one who brought poor brown people into the discussion as a rhetorical shield from criticism. You can't whine about topical criticism against the shield you chose. If you wanted the criticism to be directed at wealthy westerners, you should've chosen wealthy westerners as your rhetorical human shield, I'm perfectly happy to critique their mistakes, too.

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Lol. Yes, no one has ever been born in a water scarce location.

If you were born in a small rural town with no jobs, do you stay, or do you move to the big city where the jobs are? People are not robots programmed to never leave their birth location no matter how poor the conditions are.

Were you born in NYC or did you, like most residents, move there?

Water, jobs, food, safety, community - humans can, should, and do move to where the resources are. The world does not revolve around us. We have to exercise agency to get what we want.

Nobody is entitled to move to deep in Antarctica and rationally expect to have some kind of god-given right to water, food, shelter, high-speed internet, a job, and a car there without leaving. Everyone knows those resources aren't there, it's not a mystery.

So if you are born in a water scarce town, just move somewhere else.

But what if an entire country or a large area has this kind of issue?

Don't you need money, or something you can trade, to travel and build a new home somewhere else? Do you think everybody has enough money and resources to move an entire family in a new country?

What about language? Do you think everybody, even poor uneducated people in a small rural town with very limited access to water, know English or another common language? And if this is not the case, how easy it is to settle down somewhere where no one speaks your language?

Additionally, borders exist, and some countries have stricter immigration policies than others. You may not find it easy to move to a close country even if you have the money to travel, simply because the country you are going to may not want immigrants. Illegal immigrants exist, but then there are additional risks, like jail or death.

Even without enforced borders, don't you think concentrating a lot of people in the same area can recreate some scarcity issues, unless resources keep increasing with the population?

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