Re:One Way to Fight California's Drought: Desalt the Ocean
by mangecoeur on Monday August 03, 2015 @05:03PM
(#9999789)
because water is a public utility and heavily regulated, and for good reason - you want to guarantee that everyone who needs water gets it, even if you are poor and unpopular. Of course that's vulnerable to pressure groups, in this case the agricultural sector who want lots of cheap water. Then again if it was all run privately with no regulation, all the water would probably be put in bottles and sold at 1000x the price.
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Re:One Way to Fight California's Drought: Desalt the Ocean
by ancap on Monday August 03, 2015 @05:29PM
(#9999971)
Your comment shows an ignorance of how prices work. Companies cannot arbitrarily set whatever price they want.
Re:One Way to Fight California's Drought: Desalt the Ocean
by mangecoeur on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @09:39AM
(#10003285)
No, but they will set the highest price the market can bear. It appears people are willing to buy bottled water at around 1000x the price per unit volume compare to tap water, so given a free reign companies would sell as much water as bottled water at that price as they could.
This is actually happening in California with Nestle's bottling operation where the oversight of their water use has been very lax.
Re:One Way to Fight California's Drought: Desalt the Ocean
by bradleyjg on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @11:17AM
(#10003940)
You are being manipulated by a PR campaign. Nestle draws ~2000 acre-feet a year. It's a rounding error. Same thing with shutting off the water while you brush your teeth, restaurants not serving water until you ask for it, and so on.
The uses that matter are agriculture, agriculture, agriculture, industrial (e.g. power plant cooling towers), and far off in the distance outdoor domestic / commercial use (pools and lawns). (Also, if you consider it a 'use' - not draining every river in the state, but rather allowing some of them to continue to be rivers. This is the so-called environmental use.)
When you bring up red herrings about poor people dying of thirst because rich techies are buying bottled water from nefarious companies stealing public water, you are being a patsy of BigAg.