After Ruining a Treasured Water Resource, Iran Is Drying Up
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As Iran's treasured water resources dwindle, commenters debate whether the regime's downfall will be triggered by its own mismanagement. Some argue that the regime's arrogance and incompetence will ultimately lead to its demise, while others point out that authoritarian regimes can survive despite population suffering, citing North Korea as an example. The conversation takes a detour into the effectiveness of scapegoating, with some commenters suggesting that a regime's ability to deflect blame may be linked to the electorate's intelligence. Meanwhile, others share examples of countries adapting to water scarcity through desalination and price adjustments.
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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.
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
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.
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
Also the reason for the existence of the Norwegian port town of Narvik, connected to Kiruna by the world’s most northerly train line.
One of the most fun games to ever deliver a message hah.
Pretty sure it's in the Flashpoint Archive actually, if you want to play it.
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 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.
The parent comment is essentially correct that translations of the same material into different languages represent different views of the same data. A human translator must put in quite a bit of effort establishing what underlying situation is being described by a stretch of language.
Machine translations don't do this; they attempt to map one piece of language to another piece of (a different) language directly.
ie a compressed jpg of an image can retain quite a lot of the detail of the original, but it can introduce its own artifacts and lose some of the details
For things where the overall shape and picture is all that's required, that's fine. For things where the fine details matter, it's less fine.
Translations seem to be similar in that regard.
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.
"Rio de 28 Old Women" sounds like a theme park ride.
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!
Today we are experiencing unprecedented droughts in the region. In the future, we will pay a much higher price.
okay, so your instinct is to downvote this. i am mocking this chronological, tell-me-what-i-want-to-hear storytelling in the first place. do you see how, as soon as the little story doesn't say something "aligned," you stop listening and feel like, what the hell does this guy know? your own comment is the same thing! everything you say might be true, but if you really care about the environment, the long and winding Expanding Brain Meme journey leads to one place: win an election. then you at least get to the meat of the matter. "a much higher price" indeed.
[0] For those that do not speak Portuguese: I think the book title can be translated as "The Dragged Ones".
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.
- Bill Mollison
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.
And siege mentality. Right. Like how instead of funding water works Iran surrounded Israel by funding Hamas, Hezbollah, and militias in Iraq.
Israel had tried to help Islamist Iran negotiate with the US through the Contra debacle, shared intelligence with Iran against Iraq (failed reactor bombing) and outright sold weapons to Iran to support them against Iraq.
There was a naive belief in Israel that the daily "Death to Israel" chants are just rhetoric like in the arab countries it used to deal with.
At the same time Iran fought Israel through their mercenaries in Lebanon up to the point where all of Iran's resources were consumed by the failed attempt to encircle Israel, which has collapsed completely in the last two years
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.
Except it doesn't put one in a stronger position. It systematically weakens the economy. It only makes sense for domestic power-consolidation since a poor economy that can't trade with anyone except the state is entirely beholden to whoever controls the state.
Stupid idea. Stupid people.
Nationalizing western assets half a century ago probably has something more to do with that. See also: Cuba, Venezuela. (The former in particular. It's desired normalization of relations with the US for a very long time, it's done nothing to fuck with the US for decades, but every time Trump gets elected, it goes right back on America's shit list.)
The most important difference is that the deranged things the Saudis are doing isn't aimed at the West which makes them useful allies, also their current ruler is enacting reforms while Iran is only going backwards
The US' treatment of Cuba is the better example. It's doing none of the things the parent poster listed, yet it's still treated by the US as a pariah state. Uncle Sam doesn't care about how you treat women, or whether you have elections, but he deeply cares about you taking some corporation's stuff 70 years ago.
That is the original sin that can never be atoned for.
What do you think about Vietnamese-US relations?
Didn't... uh, didn't they... try?
And then Trump killed it?
My understanding is that there are allegations they were still pursuing nuclear capability but, we still don't have any actual evidence, and then we bombed them anyway.
No-one normal is suggesting that the Iranians did not have practically weapons-grade fissile material, the only argument was whether we successfully destroyed it or just kicked the can down the road.
Recall that the regime calls us (the U.S) Satan, and openly calls for killing us all - and actually indoctrinates their kids to mass kill us - a result of which is attacks such as the one on the former World Trade Center.
It is really, really hard for an American to grok their worldview because it is so different then ours (and for that matter, it is NOT at all the view of all Arabs or all Muslims - see the hero Ahmed El Ahmed last week!). But that is just burying your head in the sand - since the indoctrinated are ready and willing to kill US!
Now, some have an attitude, "let's believe them that they are just developing fissile material for energy, and let's even pay them gobs and gobs of money to do that. The fact they wont let us inspect is just a curious fact..." And then they are shocked when the material is really weapons grade. But if a nuclear weapon [a "dirty bomb"] went off in the States - which it 100% will if the Ayatollahs have the ability to make it happen - then IMO being shocked is not really a good enough excuse.
If you live in NY or LA, you should be aware that the regime claims they are going to take you out - at any price to themselves - as soon as they could, no different than they are targeting Jerusalem. The sanctions are an attempt to forestall some really unpleasant scenarios.
And that is when looking at just the regime in Iran. The bigger picture of how and where they invest their oil wealth and their previous American support is even more dangerous for us naive pretty summer boy western cultured folks.
/rant
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
No, the government installed by the Shah and non-democratically-elected Majles, which stopped an election not going Mossadegh's way, was overthrown
This sure is an interesting way to frame fifty years of organized sanctions
Because that's their entire MO for their existence I can produce an endless stream of this really
Both statements are false, Israel does not "kill americans on a regular basis" and Saudi Arabia has not supported proxy warfare killing thousands of Americans.
The links I pasted are well established to Iran, I can post more but that would waste both of our times as you try to synthesize new facts
Have you not turned on the news recently? The IDF regularly bombs american citizens living in palestine.
Then there's the USS Liberty bombing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
> Saudi Arabia has not supported proxy warfare killing thousands of Americans.
Neither has iran. Wtf are you referring to
- H. L. Mencken
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.
I remember reading about droughts in Syria every year since ~2006. Somehow those news stopped after 5 years. Did they sort it out?
Humans are notoriously bad heading off long term consequences.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry but this one is just 100% the fault of the government involved. It could have easily been prevented and it was known to the month when it would happen decades in advance, nothing was done.
“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 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
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.
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