California is building desalination plants, for example [1]. However, these are expensive to construct and energy-intensive.
It's definitely worth the expense to ensure that people will have access to water, even in a future with intensifying droughts.
But is it worth it to ensure that people's lawns have access to water? Probably not. Especially when there are plenty of landscaping options that have much lower water requirements than a lawn.
A "growth mindset" generally refers to growing the amount of economic value produced - not the amount of resources consumed. Often, such growth can come as a result of technological improvements that increase efficiency. For example, more fuel-efficient aircraft allow airlines to fly more passenger-miles with reduced fuel consumption. Water conservation technologies - including some things, like xeriscaping, that you might not immediately recognize as technologies - are in the same category.
Desalination is exceptionally expensive compared to just waiting to have water fall from the sky.
You can do it in extremely arid climates, for example to provide water to cities, but it makes no economic sense when you already have huge amounts of free water that you waste on inefficient irrigation techniques.
Those three premises are still insuficient to warant desalination.
"Shortage" means little, what we have is a restricted supply curve, that can still meet demand at a higher price. And if that price is insuficient to pay for desalination then it won't happen: when you build your desalination plant and try to sell water at production costs, you won't find any takers. They'll tell you yes, we have a shortage, water prices have exploded by 100%, 2 cents instead of 1 cent, but they certainly won't pay you 10c for desalination.
mostly no, although they do use wells but aquifers are drying up leading to salt water intrusion and subsidence. Further, most underground water can be more easily treated for drinking than surface water.
Hah, but this time _they_ have the dollar printer. They can actually take the convertibility of 1 dollar = 1 dollar all the way to the stratosphere if they want.
Yes every permanent money system suffers from this problem. You can permanently take money out of circulation thereby forcing the government to replenish the supposedly lost money.
Do you mean in market share or the actual product? Because I use Firefox daily and honestly feels less bloated and better to use than Chrome. I do use Chrome daily also, for some work-related apps
Started january 2016, so I’m almost 4 years in. I’m actually thinking about dropping some consultancy clients so I can focus even more on my own projects.
I get that it’s not for everyone but I grew up on a farm so I kind of got used to the quietness early on I guess.
The really wealthy will always find loopholes in any system: that's not an excuse to do away with all societal structure or rule of law. No system can be perfect, but the idea is to strive to close such loopholes (even if this may be somewhat of an arms race—many things in life are)
> 2) It discourages saving and investment.
It discourages saving, but not investment (and only the latter has intrinsic societal benefit). One could argue it might skew investments more toward short term return, but I doubt this.
> 3) It encourages consumption and spending on frivolities.
Spending is generally framed as societal good and the definition of a "frivolity" is highly subjective.
However, if we do run with the subjective, I would argue that the biggest driver of frivolous spending is having a lot of (/too much) disposable income, which often stems from inheritance.
It's also often argued that inheriting does little to teach the "value" of money and as such encourages frivolity (though tbh I don't know how much I believe this).
> Imagine if everybody would have to start from the ground up, we would rarely see any progress at all.
Wow. Are you seriously proposing that only those who inherit riches can improve the world??? Or, worse yet, only those should have that opportunity???
> This type of policy is proven to be regressive
Define "proven" here. Where/when has this policy been implemented? What were the environmental factors?
In general, savings is investment, as an identity. An economy must save in order to invest for higher future standard of living.
Short term investment goals is precisely the problem. If one invests for a return only in their lifetime (for consumption), one can't make longer-term investments that have intergenerational benefits (consider the concept of investment broadly).
Only the state would be able to do that, so you'd better hope for a good state.
Only the state is capable of intergenerational investment? There are a number of long-lived, fiscally successful private organizations that would beg to differ. Not everyone is hyper-focused on short-term yields, and as I see it the average politician is no more likely to take the long view and sacrifice their own present well-being for the benefit of future generations than anyone else.
> It discourages saving, but not investment (and only the latter has intrinsic societal benefit).
Not true. To begin with, what most people think of as "savings" is actually an investment—unless your savings take the form of cash stuffed in a mattress. An interest-bearing savings account is an investment, after all, even before we consider that larger sums would normally be held in money-market accounts or CDs. Even if you did keep your savings stuffed in a mattress, though, that saving still benefits others. You produced something of value and you're not spending the cash you received in return on things other people also want to buy. This reduces the supply of cash in circulation relative to the amount of goods available to be purchased and thus lowers prices for everyone else compared to what they would have had to pay if you'd chosen to spend the money. Normally in a healthy, growing economy this forbearance would be rewarded through appreciation of the purchasing power of the unspent cash over time—price deflation—but TPTB have decreed that price deflation is evil and must be avoided at all costs. (The key lesson here is that it's a really bad idea to treat any fiat currency as a store of value, since they can always make more and dilute your savings.)
>> 3) It encourages consumption and spending on frivolities.
> Spending is generally framed as societal good and the definition of a "frivolity" is highly subjective.
I'll grant that "frivolity" is subjective but consumption is pretty much the opposite of a societal good. It's not a bad thing, of course. Production without consumption would be pointless and wasteful. However, it's the process of production that provides value to others; consumption is just the opposite, claiming one's own personal share of what all the members of society have collectively produced.
> Are you seriously proposing that only those who inherit riches can improve the world???
It is an objective fact that those few lone individuals who can claim to have lived their lives free of unearned gifts from their parents or other interested parties (apart from life itself, which is a major concession) have not been particularly successful at improving the world beyond the narrow scope of their own necessities. That's because they're spending their entire lives and all of their energies just trying to survive. Just having parents who take even the most basic care of you as you're growing up is a huge inheritance in its own right. More indirectly, we have the vast stores of knowledge left to us by previous generations as well as a huge amount of capital to amplify the productivity of our efforts. We tend to focus on mere differences in inherited material possessions, but in reality that pales in comparison to the vast riches gifted to even the poorest among us has by those who came before.
Even the kid of this Tycoon ended up becoming the CEO of his father's company. What a coincidence!
He won't inherit wealth, but he already did inherit the means to become wealthy himself. Probably is by now.
> It discourages saving and investment.
It won't do so significantly for your average Joe. Rich people not hoarding their money can also arguably be good for the economy. Though I'm undecided on that issue.
If the reported size was from that fs command (assuming that is similar to linux's du) and that he did it in his git clone version, then it includes all the git files, including file versions (that with 60k changes every 2 weeks should be pretty huge), and branches (different editions, targetted to different markets, etc, that may not have trivial changes).
I don't think he copied the structure without the git files to make the count, nor deleted/moved elsewhere the .git directory for that. Neither that is just source code there, (versioned) bitmaps, third party drivers blobs and more probably it's there too.
That’s quite a few assumptions, at least one of which likely isn’t correct; at Microsoft, the .git directory doesn’t contain ”all the git files, including file versions […] and branche”
”GVFS allows our developers to simply not download most of those 3.5 million files during a clone, and instead simply page in the (comparatively) small portion of the source tree that a developer is working with.”
”the Windows repo, which has over 3 million files in the working directory, totalling 270GB of source files. That’s 270GB in the working directory, at the tip of master. To clone this repo, you would have to download a packfile that is about 100GB in size, which would take hours. And once you’ve succeeded in cloning it, local git operations like checkout (3 hours), status (8 minutes), and commit (30 minutes) would still take way too long to run”.
I'd say that it's very likely that a repository of such size would be "shallow cloned", i.e. with `--depth n`. This would substantially cut down on the size of a large repository with hundreds of thousands of changes.
