The most interesting part is that Minas Gerais has unusual top-of-the-hill aquifers, instead of in valleys. The rare mineral formation in its mountain tops collects water and only slowly dispenses it to the subsoil, keeping its quality.[0] Needless to say, unfortunately I hold very little hope for it, considering it also sits on some of the most desirable iron ore deposits in the world.
[0] https://www.projetopreserva.com.br/post/os-raros-aquiferos-d... (in Portuguese)
it comes at the sacrifice of many non-western countries and this conversation is never on the table
it's such a shame things that could otherwise last for thousands of years will get destroyed by a few decades of mismanagement
The term is often used to avoid (or sometimes conflate) what have become problematic and/or obsolte terms, including colonial empires, advanced vs. undeveloped countries, NATO vs. Soviet Bloc states, or the similarly cardinal-directed "Global North" vs. "Global South".
Pedantry on the point (my own included) isn't particularly illuminating or interesting.
Wikipedia's disambiguation page suggests the vagueness of the term: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_(disambiguation)>.
Also the reason for the existence of the Norwegian port town of Narvik, connected to Kiruna by the world’s most northerly train line.
Short tangent: I want to stop and admire that you shared an article in Portuguese and in seconds I could read it with Safari’s translation feature. It even translated labels on the images, and got the hydrologic cycle figure right! (However, I think “Rio de 28 Old Women” is probably an error.) This makes me feel connected with you in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago.
I don't know how useful LLMs will ultimately turn out to be for most things, but a freaking universal translator that allows me to understand any language? Incredible!
However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still.
It's a bit sad that websites can't rely on the languages the browser advertises as every browser basically advertises english, so they often auto translate from english anyways if they detect a non-english IP address.
I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data. Yes, there's a canonical language which, in many cases, contains information that gets lost when translated (see: opinions on certain books really needing to be read in their original language).
I think Chrome got it right at one point where it would say "This looks like it's in French. Want to translate it? Want me to always do this?" (Though I expect Chrome to eventually get it wrong as they keep over-fitting their ad engagement KPIs)
This is all a coffee morning way of saying: I believe that the browser must own the rendering choices. Don't reimplement pieces of the browser in your website!
In my experience, users who genuinely don't want English will most definitely have their browser language set to the language they do want.
I think what you might be seeing is that many users are OK with English even if it's not their native language.
By the way, the name of the river translates to “River of the Old Ladies”. I don’t know where the label got the 28 from!
"Rio de 28 Old Women" sounds like a theme park ride.
Today we are experiencing unprecedented droughts in the region. In the future, we will pay a much higher price.
Cape Town is already there.
- Bill Mollison
- H. L. Mencken
This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
sounds like if 90% of their water goes to agriculture, mostly export, and their country is cash strapped due to their habit of kidnappings, then maybe there's a simple solution here
You say that if it was some cultural oddity, and not a completely understandable reaction and exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation.
It is unlikely Tehran will just evacuate all at once. They will do something drastic when the problem can no longer be ignored. And random events like rain will delay the inevitable for a while longer.
Perhaps this is how climate change will end up as well.
There will always be lot of other factors - the first time we're going to really collectively notice sea level rise is on the high tide during a storm surge. The rest of the time, the change will be within the range of variation that we're used to dealing with.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira... says Iran’s population today is over five times that of 1950.
It also is a safe bet that water consumption per capita went up, too.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if qanats couldn’t support current water usage.
Maybe that “coincided” doesn’t imply “they stopped using qanats, so the water table dropped” but “qanats weren’t sufficient anymore, so they started drilling deep wells, and the water table dropped”?
But it also says several other things, pointing to poor water management policies, extreme damification drying up wetlands downstream, lack of necessary maintenance on some qanats, and more.
I'm not so sure they could have done much different.
Current environmental movement is downstream from that period - a reaction to abuses that happened. At least where the political situation tolerated its emergence.
Note that the Aral Sea, which lies geographically nearby, dried up for nearly the same reasons - too much water consumed - even though the Soviet Union was not in a position where they "couldn't have done much different"; they had plenty of productive soil elsewhere.
The underlying factor was the technocratic Zeitgeist which commanded people to "move fast and break (old fashioned) things". Such as qanats or old field systems in Central Europe.
I don’t want to be a doom and gloom guy, but the climate change collapse is starting to happen in front of our eyes—and not just in a far off ‘eventually this will be a problem’ way.
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
...
While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis, they say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.
I think the impacts of climate change vs growing populations became real to me around 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
I wasn't talking about what they were discussing (desalination for farming). I was talking about moving an entire city, as opposed to getting enough water to deal with just that city.
I suggest you read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
And don’t confuse moving the capital city with actually relocating Tehran. Tehran’s not going anywhere. What they’re proposing is building a new capital city, but it’ll be the rich and the political and religious elite who move there. The millions of poor and powerless living in Tehran will get left behind. Some will be able to migrate south, but many won’t.
I’m convinced my conjecture was wrong.
No issue.
But the number 100 billion was mentioned as the cost of moving the capital.
Qatar has no surface freshwater or groundwater. So all of their water is desalinated. It’s often still quite salty to the taste though - the last few ppms would be an exorbitant cost to remove.
However, Qatar has 3 million people. Iran has 92 million people - 9 million in Tehran alone. So their half of that gas field in the Gulf contributes far less energy per capita.
And even if the energy is free (unlimited natural gas, fusion, magic, whatever) desalination is still fairly expensive. I think only about 50% of the cost is energy, the other half is CapEx, operations, and replacing the membranes as they get used up.
I'd think that this kind of research would be a priority. It won't be long, before we start having water wars (like olden times, but with nastier weapons).
If you have gigawatts of low grade waste heat (Iran does, in theory), you can run multistage flash distillers of the waste heat, and those have more than an order of magnitude separation to the thermodynamic limit (they also have lower CAPEX, lower maintenance and lower water pre-treatment requirements than reverse osmosis).
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-world-first-israel-begins-p...
Datacentres don't consume water.
Iran probably hasn't built (m)any of those yet but that will be the next step.
For example, only 60% of Equinix’s DCs use closed loop, non-evaporative cooling systems…
https://www.cdotrends.com/story/4492/balancing-energy-and-wa...
- evaporation from cooling. the water will come down as rain again, but not necessarily in the same region
- when disposing the water into the sewers, the water might get "lost" into the oceans, where it's not available as drinking water
- when disposing water used for cooling into the rivers it was taken from, there might be environmental issues with water temperature. i know that this is an issue with rivers in europe where the industry is allowed to measure and report their adherence to the laws regarding the maximum allowed water temperatures themselves and, to no ones surprise, the rivers are too warm.
so water is not destroyed, but it can be made unusable or unavailable for the locally intended purpose.
The parent comment said DCs don't use water. This claim is easily proven to be incorrect.
But, correct, DCs outside Iran have little/no impact on the situation in Iran today.
Your kidneys are filtering 200 liters of blood per day. OMG, where's all that blood coming from?!
That isn't a closed loop exactly although there is a complex system connecting my digestive/urinary tract with my bladder etc.
Amusing/telling/sad how these self proclaimed anti-imperialist Islamists cargo culted western technohubris just the same
The saddest thing about Iran I’ve noticed is the stark contrast between the current state of the country and the intelligence of the people I’ve met from this country.
Consider too the selection bias in those you've met from Iran, presumably outside that country. Both on ideological and socioeconomic / aptitude bases.
I'd first encountered a similar observation in the 1970s or 1980s, then directed largely at those from Soviet Bloc countries encountered in the West. Typically these were academics, engineers, or similarly highly-skilled professionals, who presumably found greener pastures outside their homeland. Presuming that these were necessarily representative of the larger population ignores sampling dynamics.
Tldr: City that outgrew its water supply recommends moving to a place with more water.
Although you wouldn't really get that from reading the article, which seems more about blaming people for Tehrans rapid growth and weather conditions.
The Iranian mullahs locked up everyone who warned them about the upcoming water crisis.
chris_wot•2h ago
Waterluvian•2h ago
mrits•1h ago
ForHackernews•1h ago
Waterluvian•1h ago
I think the extent to which it’s effective may be a proxy for an electorate’s intellectual health. So while we see failures to take responsibility (what role models the world has for leaders…), that scapegoating doesn’t always work. And if so, not for long.
What got me thinking about this is the Conservative guy up here in Canada has been trying this playbook and it’s just not working. Worse, it’s actually eroding his party’s power in a very measurable way.
Tehran becoming intolerably difficult to live in because of basic resource mismanagement will be a very hard one to spin. But I suspect we will see an attempt at scapegoating.
citrin_ru•2h ago
cubefox•2h ago
csomar•2h ago
The prime minister suggesting evacuations is probably political. It is much easier to adjust to lack of water than to move your home/job somewhere else.
a2tech•1h ago
csomar•48m ago
> people of Tehran will either need to move or die
No. I've lived (along a million other people) without water for many months during a hot summer episode. It was a major lifestyle degradation (and major doesn't even begin to describe it) but death was not a threat (though there was fear of disease spread due to possible degradation of sanitary conditions but that didn't happen either).
Cthulhu_•1h ago
For my uninformed take, Iran is not a free country, the US is somewhere in the middle but I don't think an insurrection against the current regime (which has been deploying the military to mass-abduct people) would end well.