NYC has plenty of water, brought in via aquaducts from upstate. They had the sense to build the city not in a desert.
The hubris of the people who built up the southwest United States in particular astounds me.
As an experiment I dumped a half gallon of water into it and it flushed. Of course the bowl didn't fill up after but this makes me think that my loo would work with one of those reduced water flush mechanisms for when the waste is liquid. I've seen some retrofit kits but they won't fit my loo.
Also as having grown up in the sticks in Alaska, with an electric well and significant power outs, let me just say: walking half a mile to break open some ice, draw 3.5 gallons of water and walking back is some bullshit. I love me some low flow toilets.
I've heard there's an active trade in bootleg Canadian toilets in the Pacific Northwest.
A Toto Drake isn't that much more than even a cheap builder-grade unit. I've been through a number of different ones and I am a stingy tightwad; and I'd still buy a Toto. There are cheaper ones that will flush the same amount of debris, but Totos wash the bowl better; and I appreciate that as someone who doesn't like to spend a lot of time scrubbing ahem "debris". I think their flush is quieter too, but I haven't measured it.
Calcium deposits are what toilet bowl cleaners are for.
According to my local Home Depot, a utility-grade toilet is $79, and the cheapest Toto Drake is $189. That's more than twice as much.
If you estimate that there's roughly one toilet per person in the United States, an extra hundred bucks per person comes out to 30 billion dollars wasted for each replacement cycle (except in the very limited areas, like California, where these things actually make sense).
And no, the water passages in my 60 year old toilet weren't "constricted". It flushed fine. Likely still does.
Of course, your claim that toilets last only a few years only means more money wasted on these gizmos, not less.
But hey, you enjoy whatever sense of satisfaction you get out of spending money to solve a "problem" that is largely nonexistent, other than in California.
The comment you're replying to said "California", and there is not much California population in the desert climate. For example, Palm Springs in the Sonora Desert has a population of about 50K, and Palmdale/Lancaster/Victorville in the Mojave Desert has a combined population of about 400K).
LA and SF may not be "deserts" in some technical sense, but it'll do for practical purposes.
http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2013/10/myth-of-a-desert-metro...
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/los-angel...
LA is in the Mediterranean climate zone.
If you are willing to entertain the idea that not just Los Angeles, but San Francisco is in a desert -- I have no words. Have you been there?
People, typically not very well-informed about California geography and the Southwest, do sometimes lazily refer to LA as a desert. They seem to do this because they have heard other people do it. If you have lived here, you will see how evidently wrong this is. It's July and I can take my dog to a creek that has flowing water. This is not something you can do in a desert.
Have you been to an actual desert, such as the Mojave, the Sonora, or the Anza-Borrego?
As I said, "not in a technical sense", but that's irrelevant to the actual point under discussion, which is that cities have been built in areas that don't have anything like the amount of natural water resources necessary to sustain them.