vidarh

> It seems like we're mixing up terms here and miscommunicating. I thought we were talking about actually replacing the water here (as in, down the drain, fresh water from the tap)

We are. I changed it while you were writing.

Everything I'm seeing suggests typical loss to backwash of the filters for a short course pool is in the 5k - 10k liters of water a day range, possibly less if you invest in expensive additional filters. 5k a day is ~1.8 million liters a year.

To get below a full replacement every year for a small short-course pool, you need to lose less than 1370 liters a day, or ~1.4 m^3

> Partial cycling when things that can't be filtered get too high (like TDS or CYA for an outdoor pool)

Partial cycling in a high traffic environment seems like it is clearly ending up being a lot of water when every number I can find suggests it is generally expected to add up to several times the total pool volume per year.

> Sounds like that falls into the "unlucky" category.

To me it feels like it falls in the "expected" category somewhere that is dealing with hundreds of swimmers including small children every day.

Keeping in mind this was across dozens of pools - he swam competitively, not a one-off or rare occurrence in a pool or two.

Only if allowed to. Most data centres I've used have no connection to water from the data centre halls other than to the toilets. Using open loop water cooling is a cost cutting measure it's a choice whether or not to allow.

In a public pool?

From experience while my son was swimming competitively, they had to drain most of the pools he swam in completely more than once a year because of various contamination, in addition to the ongoing cycling...

I can't imagine the state they'd be in after a year.

> Also, most residential pool owners don't have half olympic pools in their yard. They're usually much smaller than that.

Hence my caveat at the end. When talking about swimming pools, tiny residential pools is certainly not what springs to mind for me.

Most pools near me are in fitness centres etc. and are 25m pools.

And I certainly wouldn't go swimming in one of those if the water wasn't cycled regularly. Thankfully the data suggest they are.

If we're talking tiny little residential pools, then using a swimming pool worth of water isn't very shocking. Unless I'm way off, a 10-15m shower every day would use a similar amount of water in that case.

The EU is in effect much closer to a confederation than a federation. A lot of the problematic aspects of how the EU is set up are attempts to work around the limitations imposed by not having sufficient public support to reform it into a more federal structure. To some that's a feature, of course, to others it's a significant nuisance.

I'm all for data centres.

But they should be made to report this. AND their use of water should be regulated - they don't need to use any water at all, it's just cheaper for them - and they should be contributing enough to mitigate negative effects on energy prices.

The problem isn't data centres. The problem is not pricing in and regulating externalities, whether caused by data centres or other things.

It would also quickly show us who actually cares about the environmental effects and who are using it as an excuse.

One cubic metre of water is 1000 liters. A typical 25m swimming pool ("short course" / half of olympic size) is 20-25m wide. That's at least 500 m^2 surface area. At an average depth of only 1m (very conservative even for a recreational pool), that is 500,000 liters just to cycle the water once a year. Estimates I can find suggests 3-7 times as much as that on a yearly basis for a typical recreational pool.

So unless you're talking about a tiny private residential pool you're at least an order of magnitude off.

The question is how high that price is, and whether it is viable. We don't know. And secondly, whether or not the consequences will be workable for a cohesive society whether because women choose to have children only for financial reasons or get coerced into it for the same reasons.

It could get very dark very quickly if it turns out to be too hard to induce enough people who actually would want children under the right circumstances to choose to have them.

Fertility is a right now problem for China - it's population has started dropping - its largest cohort is just a few years from being out of child-bearing age, and its fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, and it will take decades to reverse that even if we knew today how to do it.

This isn't just a question of dropping labour, but also a question of the consequent reduction in economic demand.

Which is why China started reacting to the low fertility rate already in 2013 by abolishing the agency responsible for enforcing the one child policy, followed by ending the policy in 2015, replacing it with a 2 child policy, which failed to have the desired effect, followed by a 3 child policy in 2021, followed a month later by removing all penalties for having even more children.

China's workforce also is at most years from starting to contract excluding any immigration - the cohorts retiring are close to the size of those entering the workforce and the cohorts retiring will be increasing for another 20-30 years, while the ones entering the workforce will be decreasing for the same period even if they somehow figured out how to reverse it today.

China's population is dropping, so to the extent they had housing for their peak population, they will have increasing capacity to accept migrants. Their fertility rate has dropped to 1, one of the lowest in the world, despite having now lifted all restrictions on number of children and actively encouraging larger families, so it will become a precarious problem for them soon.

China's migration policies have been extremely strict, so to what extent they will be able to loosen that up without political upheaval is still an open question. So far they've only loosened up the restrictions on internal migration.

There's plenty of land in China. There aren't plenty of empty plots that would be attractive for people to farm. I'm not so sure that has much relevance to modern immigration, though.

I'm very curious how China will adapt over the next couple of decades. Their population has started contracting, and it's clear the government has seen the fertility rate as a problem for some time. There's no obvious way for them to keep economic growth going without either finding a solution to something nobody else has managed to solve (getting the fertility rate back up), or opening up for more immigration. Either will take significant changes.

Only for a year and a bit (parental leave in e.g. Norway is up to 100% of salary for 49 weeks capped at ca $85k, or 80% for up to 61 weeks).

On top of that you get a bunch of other subsidies - e.g. in Norway again, nursery spaces are guaranteed by law and capped at around the $200/month mark, and child support is paid monthly until the child turns 18 at about the same rate.

Norway is below replacement, so we know that rate is too low.

Maybe your 60k/year on an ongoing basis would be sufficient. Whether anyone would be prepared to take the economic hit of trying is another question.

I suspect we'll see a lot of desperate flailing, creeping authoritarianism (e.g. curtailing abortions etc.), virtue signalling (it's your patriotic duty...), and increased reliance on immigration (until that supply also dries for an increasing number of countries) before someone is willing to try to figure out what a high enough number to change it is.

> 1. Mobile phones don't actually shut down unplanned socializing. On the contrary, they make it easier to have unplanned socializing, because they allow you to contact another person no matter when or where either of you happen to be.

If you contact someone ahead of time, it is no longer unplanned. This is meaningless twaddle.

> I dismissed fiction because it deliberately exaggerates for effect, e.g., comedic effect. There may be a grain of truth to it, but fiction by definition is not an accurate reflection of reality.

So you concede that there is a grain of truth to it. That was point. Thanks for conceding

> You can lean whatever way you want, but you're wrong, and you're also wrong about me "forgetting" the rest of the world when the submitted article is explicitly about the United States: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515

The article does not dictate what we discuss, and as you can see from the thread a lot of us are not confining ourselves to discussing the US, including the person you replied to that kicked this off.

So, yes, you are at the very least being obtuse, whether or not it is intentional.

> The submitted HN article is about the US:

And a lot of the conversation is not.

> So yes, we are in fact talking only about the US

I am not, and others in this thread have also not limited themselves to just the US, so no, we are not.

You're clearly being obtuse when you're failing to notice that and failing to pick that up from the fact that multiple people are pointing this out to you.

Someone suggested elsewhere in the thread that you might be autistic. As someone with autistic traits myself and a family member with autism, I tend to agree - this is the kind of literal treatment and rigidity that gets covered in an autism assessment. There's no judgement in that, but you might benefit from reflecting on it as it might help you relate better to people around you.

There wasn't a single critical word about either the actor, the writer, or anyone else in my comment. Maybe try not to read into a comment things that aren't there. If I'd wanted to criticise anyone, I would have.

I really don't think we do know how to stop it. Even massively increasing welfare payments has totally failed to produce lasting change where attempted.

It is possible going significantly higher could, but if so we have not yet figured out how high, and it's clear the threshold is much higher than people have tended to think it would be. E.g. look at financial incentives in Hungary, or the welfare system in places like Norway that makes parental leave in many developed countries look like third world conditions.

Rich people do seem to have a somewhat higher fertility rate, so it is possible that you could fund it enough, but the rise happens at high enough income levels I don't think our economy could handle it.

I agree with the rest of your comment, though - I just don't think we know if purely financial motivation would be sufficient at a level that is actually possible (and I do fear authoritarian approaches will end up being tried instead). It might take a lot more effort than that in terms of lightening the burden and/or making it more attractive in other ways.

Every part of the world is affected by this. Even Niger, which still leads the world in birth rate is seeing falling birth rates. There is no known way to prevent that short of halting economic and social development.

It's clearly a massive exaggeration to talk about population collapse, but India has dropped below replacement, and will start seeing a decline in population in the next few decades, so they're heading in the same direction as everywhere else.

But of course that also makes blaming Modi pretty silly - every country sees this happening as their economic and social conditions improves. We don't know of any way of stopping it short of maybe throwing people into poverty.

(the only remaining places that has not yet dropped below replacement is sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, but they too are seeing birth rates drop).

Played by Brian George, who I don't think has ever lived in India (his parents did, and he is part Indian, but he was born in Israel and grew up in London and Canada).

> Some people actually willingly go down into a crowded basement club with loud music and not just as some kind of tough challenge to survive and shape your character to have tbuilt tolerance for that harsh environment,but they find it enjoyable, no matter how baffling it seems to the rest of us.

The funny thing is that I used to go clubbing regularly because to me that was not about socialising per se. I'd be happy to go alone into an anonymous mass of people and just dance and switch off. I'd still need time to recover, but not nearly as much as with a group of people I'm expected to talk to.

That's universally held for me in other contexts as well. E.g. I can speak in front of thousands - and have - and not stress out at all. They're a non-descript mass at that point. I'm just talking, not conversing. But if any of them try to corner me to talk to me afterward? That is exhausting.

I don't feel regrets per se, but I do certainly need to recover, while after exercise I feel good. Regular exercise usually makes me more likely to exercise more, while with social functions that's not viable for me.

No, my point was not "good riddance to dinner parties". I was explaining to you why the advent of the mobile phone has at least a role in the reduction of socialising by making it easier for people to shut down visits.

It doesn't require people to not want to socialise for it to have that effect. It merely requires a proportion of visits to be unwanted or inconvenient then and there.

> You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise.

It might be to some. Even to me sometimes. But it was enough of a nuisance that the unwanted visit - as I've pointed out already - became a significant a trope in fiction, and a part of our cultural fabric. The "we were in the neighbourhood" was e.g. a regular vehicle for visits in TV series that has now largely disappeared except when it is used to highlight someone intentionally sidestepping social norms to impose an unwanted visit.

You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum. It worked as a trope in fiction because it was a real and significant thing.

You've had this explained to you at length now. I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand, so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.

> Yes, I'm referring to the US.

So, in other words you're writing off the vast majority of the world and forgetting that we're not by any means all in the US here and by no means are all of us talking only about the US.

> I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.

The context I gave was clear: It followed right after pointing out the US is unusual in this respect - the statement referred to that.

It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here, but either way you are being incredibly obtuse throughout this conversation. I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but consider that I'm not the only one here who have picked up on this.

> Local calls were typically unlimited for a fixed monthly rate.

Mostly in the US. Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.

You're still missing the point entirely: A lot of those visits are not wanted and weren't wanted to the point that unwanted visits were a trope in media.

Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them until someone was at the door with a plausible excuse.

WTF are you on about? I made it very clear I did not assume it was a default position.

In fact, I made the comment because the comment I replied to presented the opposite option and I wanted to point out that it depends on personality.

I explained the relevance of mobile phones to you.

People are not always at home.

Without a mobile phone you had an excuse.

Now you don't really.

It doesn't even matter whether or not you were actually home - there was less of a social expectation to always call because it was a recognised excuse that you "were in the neighborhood" and implicitly had no way to check without dropping by.

> Parties etc. can be the same.

They can for some, but to be very clear, I don't. I feel mentally drained in a way I absolutely do not enjoy. The experience can be fun during, but the net benefit to me is low enough, and for many types of socialising it's firmly in the negative, that I restrict myself very much in terms of what socialising I consider worthwhile.

As I said, it's very much down to your personality - most of the time I'd rather spend time in peace and quiet alone or with my wife or son (and I need some of that time to be entirely alone)