Intel Sucks Up Water Amid Drought In China 386
An anonymous reader sends along a Bloomberg piece on Intel and the coming water wars. "Intel is going head-to-head with businesses like Coca-Cola to swallow up scarce water resources in the developing world. According a 2009 report ... 2.4 billion of the world's population lives in 'water-stressed' countries such as China and India. Chip fabrication plants in those countries, as well factories such as the soft drink giant's bottling plants, are swallowing up scarce resources needed by the 1.6 billion people who rely on water for farming. ... Li Haifeng, vice president of sewage treatment company Beijing Enterprises Water Group, told Bloomberg, 'Wars may start over the scarcity of water.' China's 1.33 billion citizens each have 2,117 cubic meters of water available to them per year.... In the US, consumers can count on as much as 9,943 cubic meters."
Whats the big deal (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Whats the big deal (Score:5, Funny)
Can't they just drink Coke instead?
Re:Whats the big deal (Score:5, Funny)
It's got what plants crave, electrolytes!
Re:Whats the big deal (Score:4, Funny)
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Except the cake is a lie.
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In India bottled water fraud is widespread. When I traveled there a few years ago, it was far more safe to drink coke than the water, even bottled water. If you've ever seen the movie Slum Dog Millionaire there is a scene where they take used water bottles refill them and glue back the top. I actually had some friends drink such water and get sick. What my friend told me to do was to crush the water bottles after drinking them because there aren't really trash cans or dumps in India. People just throw the t
People, people everywhere (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Informative)
It's not interesting, it's stupid.
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/gwdepletion.html [usgs.gov]
I think in Phoenix, Arizona they banned any further homes from having a grass turf and going instead with native vegetation which is what they ought to be doing.
Golf courses are a major culprit:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91363837 [npr.org]
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True, but today we have the technology to make any water source drinkable - from cleaning up rivers to desalinating sea water. Guys, you got gardens blooming in the middle of the Nevada desert. And still the problem comes up - that's the scary bit.
And partially due to that, water rationing during various summer months since that water supply is also the same one used for other areas that need it for more important things... like drinking the water instead of trying to make a desert look like an oasis.
California depends on snow that accumulates in the Sierra Nevada for much of its water needs. The spring thaw that melts the snowpack is relied on to replenish reservoirs that are vital to millions of people.
The region also takes water from the Colorado River, which runs east of California.
So... the problem isn't limited to China... we experience it here as well. In California, Nevada, and New York City (and numerous other areas). Some of the few areas that do not run into this problem are eastern Long Island where the water comes from d
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All you need to make most of the 'undrinkable' (and not suitable for irrigating crops) water from nearly pure water is energy (to power the distillation or filtration problem, and to pump it to the areas it is needed.
What we need is a cheap, nearly unlimited source of energy (that does not produce CO2), and the means to harness it. Fusion seems to be our best bet, either by a breakthrough in controlled fusion plants here, or better harnessing of the existing reactor that is 93 million miles away.
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Artificially desalinating water is insanely expensive. It is simply unaffordable to supply your water needs like that unless you're super-rich. For third-world countries, it is flatly not an option.
Those gardens blooming in the middle of the Nevada desert are depleting non-renewing aquafers to do it. Check back in a few decades--they won't be doing it any more, and they may be in a lot of trouble.
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Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Informative)
And in the process you're nearly the most wasteful place on Earth [wikipedia.org], claiming almost 3 times more resources per capita than the most "lean" places with comparable standard of living.
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
Water consumption is a really poor example of wastefulness. You can only "waste" water if you have water to "waste", it's not like we import water from 3rd world countries to plant our gardens. If you have it, you might as well use it. You might as well complain about people in Buffalo/Niagra letting all of that water go to waste without using it while people in other parts of the world die for lack of clean water.
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Well if water gets so scarce in China that Intel's profit margins become too slim, then I guess they'll just have to move production back to the USA (or somewhere else) where water in abundant wont they.
cattle (Score:3, Interesting)
Ruminants are fairly good at converting grass/forage to meat, and they also produce a food that suits the palate to billions of people. Does not much good to produce some superfood if it tastes rank and no one likes it.
As to the water needs for processing, I addressed that in my post, saying locally grown/consumed or self processed directly on the farm, along with being grass fed, can result in much lower water consumption.
You are throwing out theoretical highest possible figures,(pure corn fed, corn grown
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You have yet to explain adequately how using more water than other parts of the world actually causes harm. Until you do that you're just spewing senseless nationalism. Clean water is a renewable resource and simply choosing to not use it because others do not have it accomplishes nothing.
If you have nothing to actually contribute to this conversation, then kindly fuck off and stop trolling.
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There are also many countries in the EU among the "almost 3 times leaner, plenty nice standard" group.
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Some areas can legitimately cry drought, but China has dumped so much crud into its rivers that now ANYONE can walk on water. From what people who do business in China have told me, this is the root of their water issues right now -- not lack of water, but how much of it is no longer fit for ANY use.
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is that nuke plants have been at a standstill since the Carter days. What would be the best solution would be a large scale desalination plant system powered by nuclear reactors near enough so voltage losses are minimal, but far enough away that a disaster wouldn't contaminate the water supply. Combine both of these with a large pipeline similar to how oil gets across Alaska, and this would go a long way to ending the water fights in the western part of the US.
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"A whole lot of water" locally, the amoutn being quite miniscule in larger picture. Unless you built more of them...and more...but from where will come the resources for that?
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If it comes down to it, a nuke plant or two has enough power to desalinate a whole lot of water.
Lulz.
Nuke plants have their own water issues.
Nuke plants use water for cooling, which means they dump heat into their water source (usually a river).
The allowable temperature of the output water is subject to all kinds of fun regulations.
(And there are regulations on the amount of water they can use for evaporative cooling)
Ontop of the heat issue, there's the fact that, because of drought and diversions, many rivers are a lot lower than they used to be, which in turn means that many existing nuke plants hav
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Yes, but while some whine about that some go about turning seawater into drinkable water
You know the whole "2/3 of the planet is water"
Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a resource availability problem: it's an infrastructure problem.
Infrastructure is not in place to get the water (in sufficient quantities) from (potentially distant) places where it is available, to satisfy everyone's needs, and perform any processing required to make it usable.
Water can be difficult to carry over long distances in large quantities (such as from the ocean) to remote areas of a continent, due to its tendency to corrode metal and other materials -- not just anything can carry it.
It also requires energy to pump water, or keep it under pressure.
Not to mention, that Ocean water is fairly dirty and requires desalination, and other processing to make it usable, which would be the highest cost. So usually water is taken from sources that are cheaper because they are closer or less processing is involved.
If you ask me... Intel, Bottling companies, and others like them, are creating the bulk of the scarcity problem, and they should foot the bill for the additional delivery infrastructure their presence is causing to be required.
They have a choice of where they build their large facilities, and the money to build new ones in places where water is not scarce, and close down old ones.
They just do not have the financial justification to do so. If the local government makes it massively more expensive to operate facilities in the areas where water is more scarce, the companies will be able to justify opening new plants, or finding alternative means to obtain resources, rather than competing for limited locally available resources.
As well, the plant operators should compensate for any other ongoing or any specific lasting impacts, required by their operations.
For example, if Intel generates a waste substance, such as ruined/spoiled water, there should be metering they are required to do, and a per-pound/per-milliliter charge that they have to pay to cover the risk and eventual cost of that to the public, as an insurance/security deposit, with annual multiple independent 3rd-party investigations, and have the amount that must be paid per unit automatically increased retroactively, if the impact causes harm, spoiling to the environment, or the public, including harm to any animals, any aesthetic damage, or hidden damage to the future utility of any land above ground or underground, in order to pay for fully reversing the impact.
Consumption or spoilage of any resources being a harm.
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Re:People, people everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, how it gets paid for is up to the government. The government needs to consider that the only reason Intel built a plant there is that it was a lot cheaper than doing it elsewhere. If the government starts telling them to pay a lot more for resources and that they can't just dump their solvents into the creek then they might just find some other place to go.
If the company wanted good stable infrastructure they'd have just built the plant in the US or Europe. If you build your job market on exploiting your own populace, then you're stuck with that until there is some other compelling reason to build a market there.
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Water is precious, but TFA is a bit of a troll: (Score:2, Interesting)
On one hand, the claim is made that industries (of various kind) are consuming this very precious resource called water. On the other hand, China is becoming one of the most industrialized countries in the world, and is very much infatuated with it's industrial growth, and you can pry it from their cold, dead fingers.
Well, you know the saying: you can't eat a pie and have it, too. You just fucking can't. It's not politically incorrect, it's a fact, it is what it is. If China has overextended herself - can't
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Water is precious, but TFA is a bit of a troll: (Score:5, Funny)
Oh sure they will, using a little word known as Lebensraum [wikipedia.org].
They had to import a German word to describe their devious plans? Sounds like China's experiencing a word shortage as well.
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China, India, and other countries all have disputed claims on areas of the Tibetan plateau. There was a war fought over some of that territory only a few decades ago. And those disputes are heating up again... because the Tibetan plateau is the location of the headwaters of some of the largest rivers in Asia.
The prospect of war between India and China is a scary one, IMO. I sometimes wonder if China would push into a war over the Tibetan plate
Re:Water is precious, but TFA is a bit of a troll: (Score:4, Insightful)
How do ballistic missile subs help China liberate a country with resources it needs?
If China wants to prevent another country from intervening in some war of conquest that China starts, all China has to do is to publicly say "We have several hundred ICBMs with nuclear warheads that we will shoot at all your major population centers if any of your military forces stand in our way of conquering county . We are deadly serious."
The rest of the world is then faced with the choice of allowing China to swallow up whatever country it has chosen to conquer, or take the nuclear armaggedon end-of-life-as-we-know-it path. Which path do you prefer?
we forgot how to work ourselfs (Score:2, Interesting)
and others have to do it for us...
Instead of becoming muscular, sexy hardworking people, look what we have done to ourselfs in the latest 50 years:
1. we forgot how food is made - have you ever seen a pigslaughter? I have...
2. we forgot how textiles are made, do we even make clothes in western europe? Except expensive ill-fitting italian shit?
3. we have new types of morons: celebrities, entrepreneurs, hairstylists, economists, socionomists
4. we have laboriously invented new psychical diseases - new types of
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We have enough specialists in each of those fields to bootstrap back up if necessary, and I'd rather have a hairstylist than go to my barber for a leeching.
FFT: i don't even know what you mean. I guess FFT strictly speaking grew out of the field of analysis? Unless you are computing the eigenvectors or using it for multiplication, then it's algebra, combinatorics, and number theory. If you're actually implementing a DFT, then it's mostly combinatorics and engineering. My math professor said that his best an
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True, true
But still:
1. Yes. Slaughter day rocks - fresh sausages+beer, and yeah I participated in the work often enough.
2. More that true. The region I was born was huge in textile industry - now it is a post-industrial wasteland.
3. We have been busy inventing new types of morons for centuries. Nothing to see here. More prominent now, though, I give you that.
4. Disagree. Better to actually investigate what is wrong with people than just sticking them into asylum under the general diagnosis of "nutcase".
5. A
Can someone fucking explain this to me? (Score:3, Interesting)
Explain this to me. Water is renewable. It's not getting gobbled up. It's not getting ruined. We're not "running" out of drinking water. It's not syphoning out of the planet. The whole fucking planet is water. It's stupid easy to desalinate water and purify toxic water for drinking. My wife is always telling me about the water crisis. I'm like what fucking crisis? Water isn't going anywhere. Desalination is expensive but it will become cheaper when we need it. Supply and demand. Fossil fuels--THERE is something you should be worried about.
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"when we need it" means demand goes up. That makes the price increase by your "supply and demand" mantra.
Any economies of scale on the supply side are bottlenecked by the price of energy. The cheap form of which is the very thing you said we should be worried about...
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"It's not getting ruined."
While it is not getting destroyed, its usefulness is. Contamination is a problem. So in that sense it is "ruined".
"It's stupid easy to desalinate water and purify toxic water for drinking."
Define "easy". If you mean by a well known scalable process, sure. If you mean by a cost effective, practical one, no. Purifying water can be even worse.
"Fossil fuels--THERE is something you should be worried about."
And what do you think will be used to produce the energy to RUN the desalina
Re:Can someone fucking explain this to me? (Score:4, Insightful)
That sentence is where your rant fails. Yes, there is plenty of water but no, it's not 'stupid simple' to purify OR desalinate. It takes quite a bit of energy to do the latter (and remember, we don't have energy growing on trees). It can be complicated to impossible to bulk purify contaminated water. You are conveniently forgetting that (energy) cost matters.
Your assumption that desalination should become cheaper 'when we need it' is interesting. Care to back it up?
So listen to your wife. She's correct on this one.
Re:Can someone fucking explain this to me? (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine you have a nice creek behind your house. It's water is fresh and clean. You have never in your life had to pay for water. One day some millionaire jackass upstream dams up the creek and diverts 100% of it to water his chinchilla ranch. He digs a small canal to channel their urine back into the creek bed below the dam. The flow rate is very nearly as high as ever, but unfortunately it's chinchilla piss.
Chinchilla piss is mostly water and plenty of it flows behind your house, but nevertheless, you now have a water shortage. You find out that a filter good enough to turn chinchilla piss into drinking water will cost you $100,000. Your upstream neighbor has connections so he spends $5000 on expensive lunches to make sure nobody decides HE has to build the filtration plant. You don't just happen to have $100,000 laying around.
You consider moving, but it turns out that with a river of urine flowing behind it, nobody wants to buy your current home.
That is essentially the situation the small subsistence farmers are facing.
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Water crops with Coca-Cola (Score:2)
It has electrolytes.
2000 m^3 per person per year?!? That's a lot! (Score:2)
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The obvious simple solution: (Score:2)
increase the damn price of water. In fact use a tiered system in which farmers get a free quota as do drinking water supplies, which Coca Cola pays for their first drop.
"But they'll leave and take their production elsewhere", that solves the water problem too. Just find the right price point. If the jobs are more important that people having food and water, set it at 0...
"Water Stressed Countries?" (Score:2)
" According a 2009 report..., 2.4 billion of the world's population lives in 'water-stressed' countries such as China and India"
The combined population of just China and India is about 2.36 billion... So only 40 million people outside of China and India live in water-stressed countries? I would have thought that the population of the countries of just the Sahara desert region would exceed 40 million.
Given that countries can be geographically large with distinctively different regions, and moving huge quanti
cliff notes (Score:3, Insightful)
There's two key themes of the article and both are inadequately covered by the OP.
1. Criticism of China's mismanagement of their water resource, principally with reference to the humanitarian results.
2. The impact on industry if:
a) China continues to mismanage, in which case industry in China is going to have a major problem.
b) China begins to manage, in which case there is going to be a huge opportunity for water supply industries.
Industry itself is given some of the blame but their focus is rightly on the government. It is their responsibility for telling Intel that they cannot build a factory there because there is insufficient water for everyone else. Sure, maybe Intel should install a desalination plant or whatever, but the government is supposed to be demanding that as a requirement for building the factory, not relying on Intel deciding it would be a nice thing to do. Even if Intel suddenly had a case of the guilts and built a plant, all that would happen is someone else builds a factory to utilise the water Intel are no longer using. It would be a totally pointless gesture unless part of a government plan.
Waste water (Score:4, Interesting)
Does Intel *consume* the water like coke does, or do they just use it then eject it out of the building? I bet their 'dirty water' is cleaner then what coke puts in their process and could be reclaimed for human use.
pure water (Score:4, Informative)
Well coca-cola has been a leader in pretty sophisticated and very very large scale water purification systems. The water they put in put in their soft drinks is clean, clear, odorless and tasteless. They use the same water in their Dasani bottled water and charge 2x more than a coke, too bad their bottled water is so tasteless that you can pick up the smells of the plastic bottle before you get anything interesting from the water.
But you do bring up a good point, coca-cola uses water and then ships it out on trucks and boats never to be seen again locally because it is part of their product. While Intel would be using the water for an industrial process and would need to dispose of it. Let us hope that their waste water doesn't contain arsenic or antimony, two common silicon doping agents. I wouldn't want to drink Intel's waste water even through a simplistic purifier unless it was carefully tested.
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I'm not sure that is 100% true. Coca Cola licenses the formula to be used by local bottling companies who "make" the coke for more or less local distribution. Every major city has a coca cola bottling plant for distribution right there.
Bad summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless I missed it I'm not seeing that Intel is "sucking up" water and is only mentioned in passing. The drought in Southwest China affects 24 million of the 1.6 billion people in China/India that rely on farming and Intel's location isn't mentioned. And from TFA: China ... has contaminated 70 percent of its rivers and lakes. Those numbers indicate there are steps that can be taken that will provide more benefit than targeting Intel.
I'm not saying there's not a concern, but to paint Intel as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is a stretch.
Re:2,117 cu meters/yr is a lot of water (Score:4, Informative)
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Or grow rice.
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maybe those numbers include agricultural production - some of its kinds are incredibly wasteful (needing also clea water at various stages)
A kilogram of meat (which is generally overconsumed easily by humans, falling into old evolutionary adaptation of "if there's unspoiled meat around, frakking eat it!", from the times it was scarce) needs something like...thousands of liters in the whole process, from farming to packaging.
Re:2,117 cu meters/yr is a lot of water (Score:5, Informative)
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How many gallons of water did it take to make the clothes you are wearing? How many to grow the food you eat? The water you buy from your local water company is a tiny fraction of your total water requirements.
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"Water flows uphill towards money." -Unknown
Although I believe in captialism, this is just wrong. Intel has the money that they can afford to delsalinate water. Many of their employees are based in India and China, and this is incredibly unfair that they have to make their own employees and those who can't afford water, suffer. If they were efficient, they could probably incorporate a desalination plant and keep a server farm there cooled by water from a salt ocean and then desalinate it.
Capitalism has tak
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel has the money that they can afford to delsalinate water.
But their stockholders have heard that that would lower the profits. Guess what happens next.
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If you are going to establish a dictatorship with nearly unlimited power (like the Chinese system) shouldn't it be that government that provides from its citizens? Considering they don't allow for any civil freedoms, very limited economic freedoms, and a government who "owns" your children (via conscription) one would think the least they could do is provide enough water for its citizens.
If you have a limited governm
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If you are going to establish a dictatorship with nearly unlimited power (like the Chinese system) shouldn't it be that government that provides from its citizens?
+1 idealism, -5 naivety.
Do you really think the party hacks give a damn about mud farmers in the distant provinces? All they care about is adding another 0 on the end of their bank balance.
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Isn't the point of governments to provide for their citizens according to Communism?
That's only the second half of, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Historically, communist governments have put plenty of emphasis on the first part, too.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, this is exactly the kind of situation where you'd expect communism to work, and this is the situation where in real life it fails. In theory the government should reserve water for its citizens. In practice, the people who are actually in charge have more incentive to make tons of money from Intel and Coke than to protect the lives of nearly-worthless workers.
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On the contrary.... this is normally where communism fails.
Whenever you have a scarce resource, the socialist response is to invoke price controls and try to ration.
The capitalist response is that high prices force people to conserve, and the extra money gets poured into new ways to gather that resource.
The easiest example is oil. As supply gets low... prices go high... this spurs investment into harder to reach reserves (oil sands...
In the case of water... if China is short and it spurs higher water price
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In COMMUNISM it would work, but China has been communist in name only for a long time now much in the way the USSR was a democracy.
Communism is a perfect form of government. (Score:3, Insightful)
For social insects.
Humans, OTOH, are aggressive social animals. Put into a system where all are ostensibly "equal", a few will always attempt to become "more equal than others". With appropriately gameable systems in place, this just gives them a framework to work from (rather than constructing one themselves).
This is why communism always fails, eventually.
It's just going to do a lot of damage on it's way down.
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Legislate in such a way that its mandatory for Intel to desalinate ocean water on site, and they will make a token effort at doing so, then pay bribes to the right politicians so they can get away without doing so. Capitalism works on the principle that whatever makes the most money for the corporate owners - regardless of how many people die or are forced to suffer - is the preferred choice. Rationalization to make the corporate lackey's feel like they are acting morally comes afterwords. Capitalism isn't
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
In the western US a decade or so ago, there was a drought, and they had to post armed guards on some of the dams to keep the farmers from taking the water. In the fight between crops dying of thirst and people dying of thirst, the people obviously win, but it really sucks if you just planted an orchard of trees and now they are going to die. Even farther back, as early as the 1800s, there were huge water fights [wikipedia.org] in the western US. Control of water supply is serious. Incidentally, California is predicted to exhaust our water supply by the mid 2030s, so this isn't just in India.
The reason the article mentions that wars may be fought over water (other than they already have been fought over water) is because a number of rivers start in the Himalayas, and China is thinking of diverting water from a river that ends up in India. So who 'owns' the river? Eventually it will probably be settled that each side gets a certain percentage of the water coming from the river, but there is a reason India is interested in building up its army. Water is more important than oil.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I believe in captialism
Why ? Capitalism doesn't believe in you.
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My guess is that much of the farming in China currently is low-tech, and thus very inefficient on a bushels per acre-foot of water basis. There are probably upgrades to China's agriculture that would save a lot of water much cheaper than desalinating more fresh water.
Of course, that leaves the question of who will pay. If we just leave it to supply and demand, pretty soon the rich will be shooting the poor for drinking out of their swimmin
Water is not scarsce, capitalism will find a way (Score:2, Insightful)
Water is not so scarce at all. It's just too expensive in some areas to waste in low-profit businesses like subsistence agriculture.
Meanwhile, the Amazon river [wikipedia.org] is dumping 219000 tons of fresh water into the ocean per second.
When water really starts to become scarce, but long before the water wars start, Intel and Coca-Cola will have relocated their plants from China to Brazil.
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Be more optimistic about that — a good heuristic for more optimism is to consider this phase of the evolutionary process, mankind being the ultimate high end, a(n epic) failure (hints to that may be seen in the overall ecological and economical situation).
So there might be a good chance that evolution may recover from an earlier rerun point, without those (bastards) who have been responsible.
CC.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what determines your worth in China? Capital.
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Those Intel factories are built with capital from capitalist investors. That's the most basic definition of capitalism.
Seriously, read Marx. It's worth the time.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a fan of both of those guys, but they don't write serious economic texts like Capital. That book is about far more than a bunch of problems of English factory workers; he describes the meaning of value itself and its relationship to money. It's a real worldview changer for people like myself who had only been exposed to Chicago-style econ in school.
For leftist reading in general, I consider folks like Chomsky to be more of a starting point than a conclusion, you know? They've got great and worthwhile perspectives, but don't perform the same abstract analysis as Marx. He'll never be outdated as long as capital investment controls production.
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You can have "connections" only if you (or your family, etc.) are worth anything for people in position to keep connections with you. Simply by membership in the Party you can, at best, be a lowly clerk.
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Re:Capitalism !! (Score:4, Interesting)
So lets see here, your trying to prove a point against capitalism in China which is... Communist. Yeah, its not "true" communism but its sure not pure capitalism.
This particular case is pure capitalism: whoever pays more, gets a larger share of a particular resources, period.
When you start worrying about how some people will just die without it, it's not capitalism anymore. It's the beginning of a welfare state.
soooooooooo (Score:2)
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No, of course not. Well, if you ask me - I'm not a libertarian.
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That is a terribly childish view to believe that even in pure capitalism there would be no regard for self preservation.
Without a work force there are not likely to be future gains.
Even a pure capitalist regime would have some system (even if it is external to itself) to provide for at least a set number of individuals.
I believe you are confusing capitalism with the inability to perceive gains beyond the absolute moment.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
So lets see here, your trying to prove a point against capitalism in China which is... Communist. Yeah, its not "true" communism but its sure not pure capitalism.
No, it's not "communism" at all in any meaningful of the word, unless one is of the persuasion that kneejerk-labels any undemocratic and unfree system as "communist". (*) They may have started out as that- supposedly- but they sure as hell aren't now.
One description I've heard of China is as the world's first example of a truly mature fascist state- that's as in Mussolini's original sense of the word where the interests of business and the government are one and the same, and it blatantly *isn't* democratic.
(*) Not that I'm defending communism, but China isn't communist nowadays, regardless of what some- including themselves- might assert. I mean the German Democratic Republic blatantly wasn't democratic, regardless of their self-appointed name.
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No all these links have anything to do with communism or socialism, because all these dictatorships and regimes were simply not understanding and properly instituting communism and socialism.
All those communist parties, communist leaders, communist activists, communist revolutions, communist manifestos, all of them misunderstood Communism and misinterpreted it, no, abused it.
National Socialists were not socialists, the Communist Party of the Union of Socialistic Soviet Republic had nothing to do with either
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Radical Terrorists are to Islam, what Totalitarian Regimes have been to Communism, are what White supremacists are to caucasians, are what the Westboro Baptist church is to Christianity.
they are people and groups who use a basic idealogy, harnessed for radical, evil ends. They are no more the "true expression" of an ideology than "Small Government" Nazis would be Republicans. Just because they share something doesn't mean they are the same.
Also, while you champion capitalism, consider the proper capitali
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National Socialists were not socialists
Actually, they were about as socialist as the German Democratic Republic [wikipedia.org] and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [wikipedia.org] were/are democratic.
They were a command economy, though. Not all command economies are socialist, and not all socialism is a command economy.
Re:Capitalism !! (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism [wikipedia.org]
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the situation in the aforementioned social democrat (socialism is their greater set) countries with regulations and taxes are so that, companies are taxed heavily of their
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Wow, so we are dealing with a real old school firebrand socialist here. How cute, I thought you guys went extinct back in the 80s.
hahahahahaha. save your zeal. you cant cope up with me. im actually not socialist, or social democrat. im actually center view, and have been raised and educated and have been a capitalist a loooong time.
i am supporting social democracy since a while and towards eternity, because despite all the machinations and attempts of the capitalist machine in various countries of the world, they succeeded in delivering what the capitalist ones couldnt deliver to their own people, even at their peak of exploitation
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Oh yeah, desalination, it's like the world can't wait to see even more heavy industrial processes consuming lots of power.
What the humanity is now doing is essentially a slow, not readily apparent scorched earth strategy. Once the balance gets tipped sufficiently you'll see average life expectancy plummeting.
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Um. I'll ignore the easy inhumane shot and point out the potential problem in your pocket:
War and riots cost money. For example, they sabotage the plant with a strike or a bomb... your precious products will suddenly get a huge price increase and/or get a huge rise in cost.