I grew up in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a region full of natural resources and, thankfully, aquifers and natural water reservoirs. However, centuries of extraction mismanagement and, more recently, over exploration of mineral resources puts these water resources into jeopardy. (Other problems include mining in open pits and with sludge dams that led to two of the worse environmental disasters in the world in 2015 and 2019, in Mariana and Brumadinho.)
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.
You forgot to mention what may be the most serious water problem in Brazil. Agribusiness invests heavily in the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna. In the Cerrado originate the vast majority of Brazilian rivers, which supply water to almost all of Brazil. Its trees, with deep roots, retain the scarce water of the region. This entire region has been deforested for the production of soybeans and cattle ranching. Brazil is a great exporter of water, which it currently does in the form of meat, soybeans, coffee, and paper.
Today we are experiencing unprecedented droughts in the region. In the future, we will pay a much higher price.
Yes, that is right. I didn't forget to mention it, just thought the Minas Gerais case was the most unique geologically as opposed to the far-too-common negative externality problem as is the agricultural excessive use of water + deforestation. But you are completely right. I actually live deep in the Cerrado region now, in Brasília, and I can see first-hand the negative effects of over exploration of water in the region.
Wow. That’s a hydrological feature I’ve never come across in my studies. Thanks for sharing.
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 feel like machine translation is the unsung hero of the recent AI wave. Gone are the days of just barely being able to discern the meaning of Google Translate. Now I can just read it.
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!
Machine translation has certainly become better, and that's amazing and wonderful to see. Definitely an amazing thing that has come out of the AI boom.
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.
Early in my career I spent a lot of time thinking that HTML was antiquated. "Obviously they had 20th century ideas on what websites would be. As if we're all just publishing documents." But the beauty of HTML eventually clicked for me: it's describing the semantics of a structured piece of data, which means you can render a perfectly valid view of it however you want if you've got the right renderer!
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!
Not sure that every browser advertises English, but mine certainly does. However, as I'm in Portugal, many websites ignore what my browser says and send me to translated versions, I assume based on my IP. That causes problems because the translations are often quite bad, and they do it with redirects to PT URLs so I can't share links with people who don't speak the language.
Does "advertises" in this context mean what's put in the "Accept-Language" HTTP header? Might be worth seeing what that value specifically is the next time this happens. A "clever" IP-based language choice server-side seems far too complicated and error prone, but I guess that's what makes it so "clever."
Yeah I've seen this a few times on the backend that decides this. The standard should be to use the accept-language header, but all the time when people write their own code on top of frameworks (or maybe use niche shitty ones) they just geoip for language.
For business use cases sometimes it's based on the company's default language that you're an employee for.
Try to use any Google site while traveling. I have two languages in my Accept-Language header, but Google always give me language based on location if I'm not logged in. There are also many other sites that does the same, often without any option to change language
Yeah! I don't know what methods Safari on iOS uses, but in general translation has become pretty magical. It feels like we've kind of slepwalked through the invention of the Universal Translator. I just haven't heard as much gushing about it as I feel it deserves. I can just effortlessly read a sciency news article originally written in Portuguese!
A nice thing with LLMs is that you can ask them for a more comprehensive and detailed translation, and explain the nuances and ambiguities rather than trying to match the style of the original. This is great for things like group chats in a foreign language, where it’s full of colloquial expressions, shorthand, and typos.
I'm also from Minas Gerais. Mariana and Brumadinho were truly devastating... The sludge is still visible in the rivers to this day. What gets me is how unnecessary it was. Could have been prevented.
Never on which table? “Exporting” environmental degradation is an incredibly widely discussed issue. Especially for South America, due to illegal rainforest clearing for soy farming to feed the NA/EU cattle industry, and lithium mining in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.
Not just soy farming, a part of which is surprisingly legal in the Brazilian Amazon. Some of the largest problems we have with respect to illegal rainforest deforestation involves logging or, even worse, artisanal gold mining.
Always interesting when people select an environmentally friendly technology that will help the transition away from destroying the environment somewhere or indeed everywhere else as the "villain" in this discussion. As if oil or coal extraction were without their controversies.
The problem is allowing the companies doing any natural resource extraction to get away with not paying the full cost of the environmental degradation they cause.
NB: "West" is less a term of hemispheric fidelity (Australia and New Zealand are typically seen as "western" countries, despite being in the eastern hemisphere), than it is of cultural derivation (on which Brazil has additional claims, via Portugal), and far more prominently, geopolitical and industrial significance, focusing on the industrial, colonial, and financial powers of the world, largely the US, western Europe (a large portion of which is ... in the eastern hemisphere), AU and NZ as mentioned, and arguably Japan.
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.
As someone of Turkish origin with Kurdish, Bulgarian, and Greek roots (somehow my genes don't fight each other!), I'm deeply saddened by the current state of the region. Growing up in western Turkey, I didn't give much thought to the eastern part of the country, let alone Iran. Funnily, my first real interactions with Iranian culture didn't happen until I moved to Germany. Aside from their cuisine being the only one besides Turkish where I actually enjoy the rice (pilav/pilaf), I've found Iranians to be such warm, kind people who have suffered far too much due to politics. Maybe that's why we connected so deeply... We share similar struggles, though I recognize that Turkey's situation involves much less external interference than Iran's... ours is mostly our own doing.
I hope the rulers solve this problem as quickly as possible without causing pain to the civilians.
> We share similar struggles, though I recognize that Turkey's situation involves much less external interference than Iran's... ours is mostly our own doing.
Can you explain what you mean by Turkey having issues "of it's own doing"? Do you mean something like corruption, or some other factor? I know very little about Turkey or the issues it faces, other than some cataclysmic earthquakes.
This is sort of a bad and inaccurate summary of a much more complicated situation. Mossadegh was trying to dissolve parliament and was in conflict with the Shah before the British got involved. The Shah was already planning to try by constitutional means (which he had legal power to do) to remove Mossadegh. Would he have done it without British and US backing, is a debate for historians.
I don’t think any serious post WWII historians would agree with you. There was a concentrated effort by the UK and US to displace Mossadegh, who was democratically elected by the way. At the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems when it’s been proven that the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet were actively destabilizing their society so that oil revenue would continue flowing into western pockets.
Mossadegh was elected but was also illegally trying to dissolve parliament.
>at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems
I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a rival power center was largely a result of the Anglo-Soviet invasion which deposed Reza Shah, prior to that the Majlis had functioned in more of an advisory capacity, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was always lookign for ways to push back against the Majlis.
It is also important to note that the constitution in place in the early 1950s gave the power to appoint and remove the prime minister to the shah, Mossadegh was recommended to the shah by the Majlis who appointed him prime minister. That is factually how the government worked. It is also important to note that in 1952 Mossadegh stopped the counting of an election that it looked like he was going to lose. In 1953 Mossadegh organized a referendum to dissolve the parliament and vest sole power in the prime minister. This gave the shah the excuse he needed to remove Mossadegh and triggered Anglo-American support for the Shah and Iranian army to remove Mossadegh.
The CIA certainly helped the Shah get generals on side and plan the coup, this is not in dispute. However the idea that Mossadegh was democratically elected is not really true, and the idea that the coup was entirely carried out for external reasons is entirely false.
Ray Takeyh a professor of Near East studies who wrote The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (Yale University Press, 2021) holds the position that the coup was internally driven. We also know from declassified document that the CIA thought the coup had failed and that their part was rather insignificant, but Iranian on the ground under their own direction carried out the coup.[1]
He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.
For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.
Nationalizing resources simply gives the capitalist west a legitimate casus beli to “liberate” all the assets that were stolen.
Venezuela is about to be turned into another Vietnam. Iran is next. I remember invading them in a mission in BF3. The USA itches to implement what its media anticipated.
When a country with vastly superior resources intervenes in the affairs of a country with less, then it tips the scales in an unnatural way. Do they depend on greedy, self interested members of Iranian society to succeed? Of course. But that doesn’t excuse western behavior at all.
My point is that western behavior has really nothing to do with Iran going on a foolish dam building spree, or over pumping in a foolish attempt to grow water hungry crops in arid mountain plateaus.
Kind of like how the US built Phoenix and LA in the middle of the desert, and allows farming in the desert as well, setting the stage for a near term water crisis in the region when the Rocky Mountain snow melt gets cut in half?
No, you see the instant a western power interferes with a region, all agency is immediately stripped from every single person there. It's really sad, they all become puppets or automatons reacting purely to external stimulus.
The West hasn't stopped interfering in Iran though. They did massive terrorist attacks there just a year ago. Israel would openly salivate at the prospect of destroying Iranian agriculture and water supply.
China is an interesting counterfactual. Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...
I personally am not well read on this, but I know lot of people blame the US and the UK since after they overthrew the democratically elected socialist government and installed a brutal dictator[0], the only elements that survived to oppose the dictatorship were hardened islamists, who later took power from the US backed Shah[1]
This is basic, commonly accepted history. That’s why all of the comments defending US actions deflect and blame the accomplices within Iran like the Shah.
> However, unpublished national observations revealed groundwater depletion in some plains from as early as the 1950s. This coincided with the gradual replacement of Persian qanats, which were sustainable groundwater extraction systems and UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites9, with (semi)deep wells.
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”?
And the reason qanats weren't sufficient anymore, was that they pursued a policy of food independence, due to sanctions/a desire for political autonomy.
I'm not so sure they could have done much different.
Sanctions, including an attempted blockade [1] of oil exports, imposed by the British Empire, still in existence at the time, in response to a dispute over the ownership of Iranian oil fields, which were a primary factor in the fall of Mossadegh. See e.g.:
It should be noted that while the Shah obviously benefited from the coup, he remained suspicious of the Western powers who had supported it; he was not foolish enough to believe they were honest allies. Consequently, he was inclined to support attempts at autarky.
We tend to forget that the 1950s and 1960s were a period of large-scale engineering: intensification of agriculture, massive construction of dams, roads, mines etc., where nature and environmental footprint was at best an afterthought. In the US, in the Soviet Union, and also in (the Shah's) Iran.
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, being literally the largest country in the world and having been blessed with a lot of chernozem.
The underlying factor was the technocratic Zeitgeist which commanded people to "move fast and break (old fashioned) things". Such as qanats in Iran or old field systems in Central Europe.
The article does say that a number of qanats was overdrawn.
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.
Clicking through the link to the original paper, the point seems to be that qanats are inherently sustainable because they only produce as much as goes in. You may gradually exceed their capacity, but there won’t be a sudden “oops, no more water” crisis as can happen when you pump an aquifer dry.
Yes, they do, but if what goes in is insufficient by a wide margin, people who can afford to will start drilling for water.
Assuming that the water taken through qanats would eventually make it into aquifers (fat from unlikely, I think, as it takes water from underground that’s less likely to evaporate) one could even argue that tapping rainwater with qanats prevent aquifers from getting refilled, so it’s taking from the same water source.
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.
That doesn't sound correct. My understanding of the history is that Iran democratically elected a socialist who wanted to nationalize Iran's oil fields so they could keep the oil revenue inside their country instead of giving it away to BP and Exxon. The British orchestrated a coup to install the old monarchy (the Shah), who brought back the British extraction companies and harshly repressed Shia Muslims. Then in 1979 the Shia hardliners toppled the government in the Islamic Revolution which is where the current government originates from. The last real democratically elected president of Iran was the socialist one, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
No. Mossadegh was appointed by the Shah (who was still head of state), but his own autocratic actions such as dissolving parliament and giving himself autocratic powers pushed most political forces against him that a confrontation was inevitable. There is a reason the military stood back as he was disposed. Furthermore, the Shah did actually have the legal right to fire Mossadegh, when je ignored that the situation was already extra legal.
I don't know where you are reading history from but listening to random factoids rather than a comprehensive understanding is the worst way to do so.
> In Iran, some 90 percent of the water abstracted from rivers and underground aquifers is taken for agriculture.
It's quite something they are envisioning a 100 billion dollar project to move the capital instead of limiting water waste in desert agriculture and closing Tehran's water loop by reclaiming sewage, greatly reducing the net demand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhCNpX3s-D8
These predictions assume that nobody will do anything, which is almost never true. The crisis is no less real just because a lot of resources was put into delaying its effects.
Back then they said Tehran will go out of water if there is no rain in coming weeks and it is raining in Tehran, now. Also they rationed water for a few weeks. Many regions of Tehran only had water during the night.
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.
Ever hear of reading the article you comment on? There was no mention of "moving all at once". As stated, moving the capital from Tehran "would take decades"...
It IS climate change, to a large part. And yes, I think you're right it's how climate change will show up for us 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.
As far I remember a large reason for the water crisis is subsidizing water for agriculture which does not fit the local climate
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
The USA has several regions that appear to be headed in the same direction because of some ancient laws about water rights; bureaucracies motivated by have budget/must use for only development of water resources; developers who benefit from government projects exploiting water resources (most egregiously the farming land and urban development in deserts in Southern California, and Arizona) - all under the guise of democracy documented in Cadillac Desert.
> This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
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.
I don't say it's a cultural oddity, western culture had its fair share of self-destructive regimes which ideological underpinnings created great disasters, especially in the 20th century
> exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation
Until like a couple years ago, autarky was generally not in the Western playbook. It’s a stupid idea that tends to be embraced by stupid people. The only ones who have done it sustainably are the Kims, as a nuclear monarchy over a totalitarian state.
They have not been in the same situation, and that is sufficient explanation. No cultural geists need to be posited.
The point of autarky isn't that you want to isolate yourself from the world, but that because you credibly could, you're in a much stronger negotiating position in all those mutually beneficial deals you would like to make.
Their country is cash strapped and needs to be independent because of US sanctions. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected government in the 50s which led to the Islamic Republic.
That's true, but on the other hand the CIA today isn't forcing Iran to sponsor terrorist organizations or arrest women for being immodest or keep Islamists in charge. If they want to eliminate the sanctions then the path to doing so is clear and would have tremendous benefits for the Iranian people.
The CIA had supported coups in many countries yet these countries have not kidnapped 50 diplomats, that's probably the single worst thing you can do diplomatically.
Countries as religiously deranged as Iran are close US allies (Saudis), Iran had many chances of changing that in the last 40 years.
Also, that popular 50s coup story of bad imperialists vs good natives does not only seem too simple to be true, it is
I like the idea of working with nature to solve problems. As a start, instead of, as you suggest, depopulating Tehran, they could populate it with trees. Chad is a perfect example of how to turn a deserted landscape into a "Great green wall of Africa" as they call it. And they did in only two years.
Use less water? Probably by recycling the water that is actually used. If las Vegas can survive in the desert, any city can. The problem is getting the money to apply the fixes required.
True, and they haven't dried it up. Given some starting amount of water, recirculating it through the system more efficiently will keep the "running out of water" problem at bay, right?
I’m surprised that Iran can contemplate affording this. There must be such immense losses of all the land, homes, and capital assets in Tehran. And then operational costs of moving people around, building new homes, etc.
$100B is such a high number that it becomes funny money but… idk, doesn’t it still feel like a lowball in terms of losses?
Sounds like it would be cheaper to build desalination plants on the coast, and pipe the water in. Iran certainly has the technology and brainpower to do that.
They share the same gas field with Qatar, who does all their desalination with all the excess gas production they can’t sell.
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 have read about experimental desalination techniques that do a better job, and use less energy, but I haven't heard much about that, lately.
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).
The low hanging fruit have been long picked. Reverse osmosis is within 50% of the thermodynamic limit.
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).
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.
Actually it says the desalinated water is too expensive even for farming, it’s only used for heavy industries, so it’s certainly not a solution for the domestic supply of 9 million people.
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.
Rain water collection structures that distill H2O in terms of pH.
Gonabad qanat network, reputedly the world’s largest, extends for more than 20 miles beneath the Barakuh Mountains of northeast Iran. The tunnels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thousand feet, and are supplied by more than 400 vertical wells for maintenance.
Recently, RealLifeLore has been my to go channel to watch the current state of geopolitics thorough the world, I discovered them through the video of "How Rwanda is Conquering Their 100x Larger Neighbor" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N34UFbWpFk)
Not surprising. A country that invests all of his money on nuclear weapons and threatens the West with bombings- will actually care if it's capital is drying up?
I used to think people didn't actually believe the propaganda they were fed, but now I've come to realize it's the only thing many know about the world.
It's not completely wrong, though. Iran has spent significant resources on a nuclear weapons program, as well as sponsoring foreign terrorist organizations and other military activities. We can argue about whether those things are right or wrong but they really happened and consumed resources that could have been used to improve water infrastructure. Guns or butter.
Believe it or not, other things do happen in the country aside from what is reported on in western media. Claiming this is all they do is heinously ignorant.
Of course. Like embezzlement. I live in Iran and if you want a more detailed picture of the situation I find data provided in [1] well-researched. The executive summary is that one of the military branches really doesn't care about the environment as long as they get more power / money / anti-US proxies.
Also, that "Tehran will run out of water in two weeks" statement came from the president, and some neighborhoods really don't have water for several hours each day. The official advice is to "install water pumps and storage tanks."
> other things do happen in the country aside from what is reported on in western media
Of course they do. The forced expulsion of Afghan workers and refugees didn’t get a lot of coverage, but it’s prominent in regional sources.
OP isn’t arguing there isn’t any good in Iran. Just that the corrupt theocracy has pursued unsustainable goals cruelly and incompetently, and in a way that has turned Iran into a unique menace to the region through its embrace of similarly-totalitarian proxies who couldn’t give fewer shits about their populations.
To the extent there is a propagandized version of the story, it’s the one that ignores what every Iranian refugee and what every one of Iran’s’ neighbours say. The irony of that is Iran behaves as a revanchist imperial concern, the precise philosophy many enlightened types in the West claim to reject.
Don't presume to put words in my mouth. No one is claiming that military activities is all that Iran does. But the reality is they do choose spend a fortune on military aggression. These are optional activities. They could choose to stop and devote those resources to civilian infrastructure if they wanted to.
Back when I read Dune as a teenager I didn't know what a qanat was and I didn't bother looking it up. I might have to read it again with this new understanding. I seem to remember them featuring quite a bit in Children of Dune.
So... given that the Iranian regime is not paying any heed to the experts, does this mean that the end of their regime will be because of their own arrogance and incompetence?
Iran has 3 million illegal immigrants, FYI. (Or had; they recently implemented mass deportations.)
Immigration inflow is caused by lax border control, not by being a great place to live. No matter how bad it is, there's always someone worse off willing to try their luck.
Net immigration is down. That counts illegal immigration and deportations, presumably which are way down and way up, respectively. Both stats have nothing to do with how many people _want_ to be in the US, just how many people are able to get here.
How long is the of _applicants_ for residency in the US? That's the metric you're looking for. I suspect, with the increased difficulty in illegal immigration, that there is an increase in applications for legal immigration. That's speculation though, I have no idea where to get those numbers.
Not only is that wrong, it’s not relevant to the topic of a regime doing dumb things and then trying to scapegoat.
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.
Unlikely. My country have been through this (at a whole country level, not just a single city) for two years. It sped up desalination projects. People re-adjusted to the lack of water. Prices adjusted. Lots of water is wasted and very little water is actually being used for drinking. At the end, the rain came and it coincided with many desalination plants starting operations.
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.
They’re already straining to truck in enough water for survival now WITH some of the wells still working. If the ability to source water locally stops the people of Tehran will either need to move or die. With aquifers running dry from iran to Afghanistan they’ll have to migrate even further. I think we could see the entire region plunge further into chaos as the water crisis worsens.
That's just a Western pipe dream. The water crisis could trigger a revolt but the fundamentals for such revolt have to be there rather than the water crisis being the sole reason.
> 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).
I can't answer that, but for a long time, there have been predictions that water and foot shortages will trigger (civil) wars and / or mass migrations. Whether it'll be the one or the other depends, I think, on how free a country is. A non-free country will have a strong police / military force that may resort to deadly violence in the case of an uprising. A truly free country will vote the regime out. Somewhere in the middle it'd be said police / military that would take over.
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.
Being efficient in watering golf courses in the desert in certainly nice, but maybe it's time to question having over 50 golf courses in the desert with an impending massive water shortage.
LOL. Las Vegas water prices are ridiculously low for the paltry amount of water they have. It's hard to get people to not waste the water when the price is artificially kept low.
Las Vegas water is less expensive than mine, and we have in excess of 10x the precipitation and everything is naturally green.
The next one is likely Utah, they are drying up the Great Salt Lake for alfalfa production, producing the next Owens Lake, likely making Salt Lake City and other cites unhabitable within a decade or two.
From the article, Iran has depleted its aquifers in an attempt to maintain food self-sufficiency. While the sanctions did not restrict food imports, sanctions may have induced this policy by limiting exports to raise capital and more generally making a regime insular.
In 10 years there won’t be a regime in Iran because Iran won’t exist as it does today. With the collapsing water table people are going to be forced into either death or migration.
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.
A major factor, but also include aging infrastructure and population growth. The giant data centres around the world are going to use up high amounts of water and electricity.
“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.
Industrial cooler manufacturers and DC PR teams have their ways to greenwash the truth.
"40% of data centers are using evaporative cooling" doesn't mean that other 60% are fully closed loop water to air coolers or what would be called "dry cooling systems" by the manufacturers. The other 60% could be "adiabatic coolers" or "hybrid coolers" or if data center is close to large body of water/water heat exchangers, where 2/3 of those still depend on evaporating water, but the manufacturers would put them in separate category from evaporative coolers.
Just took a looked at offering of one of the industrial cooler manufacturers. They had only 1 dry cooler design, compared to a dozen more or less evaporative ones. And even that one was advertised as having "post install bolt-on adiabatic kit option". Which feels like a cheat to allow during initial project and build claim that you are green by using only dry coolers, but after the press releases are done, grant money collected and things are starting to operate at full capacity, attach sprinklers to keep the energy costs lower.
Am I missing something? How data centers in US/EU evaporating water thousand of miles from Iran affect it? Does it disturb the rain cycle in Iran or something?
Not sure if serious... but just in case, very simply put...
DC pulls water out of local water supply.
DC uses evaporative cooling (not all use closed systems, and even those that do see some loss over time)
Water lost to cooling is now in the atmosphere.
If the DC (and other local users) withdraw water faster than local conditions allow it to be replenished, you end up without any local water.
of course not, but as far as i understand there are a few factors that are relevant for local water supplies:
- 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.
Its a thing that cannot be generalized. However, many datacenters use evaporative cooling. Especially when the DC is built in a region with relatively warm outside temperatures, it‘s basically the only viable way to get rid of all that heat.
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)
Today we are experiencing unprecedented droughts in the region. In the future, we will pay a much higher price.
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!
This is a tempting illusion, but the evidence implies it’s false. Translation is simulation, not emulation.
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.
For business use cases sometimes it's based on the company's default language that you're an employee for.
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.
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
Also the reason for the existence of the Norwegian port town of Narvik, connected to Kiruna by the world’s most northerly train line.
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)>.
Edit: /Brazil has claims/s/has/& additional/
I hope the rulers solve this problem as quickly as possible without causing pain to the civilians.
> We share similar struggles, though I recognize that Turkey's situation involves much less external interference than Iran's... ours is mostly our own doing.
Can you explain what you mean by Turkey having issues "of it's own doing"? Do you mean something like corruption, or some other factor? I know very little about Turkey or the issues it faces, other than some cataclysmic earthquakes.
A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mossadegh nationalized and refused to concede to western oil demands.
>at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems
I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a rival power center was largely a result of the Anglo-Soviet invasion which deposed Reza Shah, prior to that the Majlis had functioned in more of an advisory capacity, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was always lookign for ways to push back against the Majlis.
It is also important to note that the constitution in place in the early 1950s gave the power to appoint and remove the prime minister to the shah, Mossadegh was recommended to the shah by the Majlis who appointed him prime minister. That is factually how the government worked. It is also important to note that in 1952 Mossadegh stopped the counting of an election that it looked like he was going to lose. In 1953 Mossadegh organized a referendum to dissolve the parliament and vest sole power in the prime minister. This gave the shah the excuse he needed to remove Mossadegh and triggered Anglo-American support for the Shah and Iranian army to remove Mossadegh.
The CIA certainly helped the Shah get generals on side and plan the coup, this is not in dispute. However the idea that Mossadegh was democratically elected is not really true, and the idea that the coup was entirely carried out for external reasons is entirely false.
Ray Takeyh a professor of Near East studies who wrote The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (Yale University Press, 2021) holds the position that the coup was internally driven. We also know from declassified document that the CIA thought the coup had failed and that their part was rather insignificant, but Iranian on the ground under their own direction carried out the coup.[1]
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20150603235034/https://www.forei...
He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.
For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.
Venezuela is about to be turned into another Vietnam. Iran is next. I remember invading them in a mission in BF3. The USA itches to implement what its media anticipated.
From the US, Russia and china to local powers like Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran themselves.
Either you're a scholar studying the region, if not your comment feels naive at best
China is an interesting counterfactual. Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
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”?
Humans are notoriously bad heading off long term consequences.
I'm not so sure they could have done much different.
https://harpers.org/archive/2013/07/the-tragedy-of-1953/
It should be noted that while the Shah obviously benefited from the coup, he remained suspicious of the Western powers who had supported it; he was not foolish enough to believe they were honest allies. Consequently, he was inclined to support attempts at autarky.
1: https://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/new-york-times/march-...
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, being literally the largest country in the world and having been blessed with a lot of chernozem.
The underlying factor was the technocratic Zeitgeist which commanded people to "move fast and break (old fashioned) things". Such as qanats in Iran or old field systems in Central Europe.
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.
Assuming that the water taken through qanats would eventually make it into aquifers (fat from unlikely, I think, as it takes water from underground that’s less likely to evaporate) one could even argue that tapping rainwater with qanats prevent aquifers from getting refilled, so it’s taking from the same water source.
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.
Don't think that it can't happen here too.
I don't know where you are reading history from but listening to random factoids rather than a comprehensive understanding is the worst way to do so.
It’s commonly accepted that Mossadegh was thrown out by a coup and that Khomenei seized power through a revolution.
It's quite something they are envisioning a 100 billion dollar project to move the capital instead of limiting water waste in desert agriculture and closing Tehran's water loop by reclaiming sewage, greatly reducing the net demand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhCNpX3s-D8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
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.
This editorial elaborates on some of the political corruption, as well as Iran's dismantling of cooperation with foreign water engineers.
- 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.
Until like a couple years ago, autarky was generally not in the Western playbook. It’s a stupid idea that tends to be embraced by stupid people. The only ones who have done it sustainably are the Kims, as a nuclear monarchy over a totalitarian state.
The point of autarky isn't that you want to isolate yourself from the world, but that because you credibly could, you're in a much stronger negotiating position in all those mutually beneficial deals you would like to make.
Countries as religiously deranged as Iran are close US allies (Saudis), Iran had many chances of changing that in the last 40 years.
Also, that popular 50s coup story of bad imperialists vs good natives does not only seem too simple to be true, it is
This sure is an interesting way to frame fifty years of organized sanctions
Amusing/telling/sad how these self proclaimed anti-imperialist Islamists cargo culted western technohubris just the same
$100B is such a high number that it becomes funny money but… idk, doesn’t it still feel like a lowball in terms of losses?
The Iranian mullahs locked up everyone who warned them about the upcoming water crisis.
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.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-world-first-israel-begins-p...
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).
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.
Gonabad qanat network, reputedly the world’s largest, extends for more than 20 miles beneath the Barakuh Mountains of northeast Iran. The tunnels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thousand feet, and are supplied by more than 400 vertical wells for maintenance.
Simple as that.
Also, that "Tehran will run out of water in two weeks" statement came from the president, and some neighborhoods really don't have water for several hours each day. The official advice is to "install water pumps and storage tanks."
[1] Why Iran is Rapidly Dying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8kSGH4I8Ps
Of course they do. The forced expulsion of Afghan workers and refugees didn’t get a lot of coverage, but it’s prominent in regional sources.
OP isn’t arguing there isn’t any good in Iran. Just that the corrupt theocracy has pursued unsustainable goals cruelly and incompetently, and in a way that has turned Iran into a unique menace to the region through its embrace of similarly-totalitarian proxies who couldn’t give fewer shits about their populations.
To the extent there is a propagandized version of the story, it’s the one that ignores what every Iranian refugee and what every one of Iran’s’ neighbours say. The irony of that is Iran behaves as a revanchist imperial concern, the precise philosophy many enlightened types in the West claim to reject.
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.
Immigration inflow is caused by lax border control, not by being a great place to live. No matter how bad it is, there's always someone worse off willing to try their luck.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghans_in_Iran
Net immigration is down. That counts illegal immigration and deportations, presumably which are way down and way up, respectively. Both stats have nothing to do with how many people _want_ to be in the US, just how many people are able to get here.
How long is the of _applicants_ for residency in the US? That's the metric you're looking for. I suspect, with the increased difficulty in illegal immigration, that there is an increase in applications for legal immigration. That's speculation though, I have no idea where to get those numbers.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
Las Vegas water is less expensive than mine, and we have in excess of 10x the precipitation and everything is naturally green.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake#Shrinking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq0FhcfAbG0
Cape Town is already there.
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.
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
“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.
Datacentres don't consume water.
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...
"40% of data centers are using evaporative cooling" doesn't mean that other 60% are fully closed loop water to air coolers or what would be called "dry cooling systems" by the manufacturers. The other 60% could be "adiabatic coolers" or "hybrid coolers" or if data center is close to large body of water/water heat exchangers, where 2/3 of those still depend on evaporating water, but the manufacturers would put them in separate category from evaporative coolers.
Just took a looked at offering of one of the industrial cooler manufacturers. They had only 1 dry cooler design, compared to a dozen more or less evaporative ones. And even that one was advertised as having "post install bolt-on adiabatic kit option". Which feels like a cheat to allow during initial project and build claim that you are green by using only dry coolers, but after the press releases are done, grant money collected and things are starting to operate at full capacity, attach sprinklers to keep the energy costs lower.
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.
DC pulls water out of local water supply. DC uses evaporative cooling (not all use closed systems, and even those that do see some loss over time) Water lost to cooling is now in the atmosphere.
If the DC (and other local users) withdraw water faster than local conditions allow it to be replenished, you end up without any local water.
- 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.
Iran probably hasn't built (m)any of those yet but that will be the next step.
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.