For such an impressive thinker and communicator as Rast is, I am greatly looking forward to his response to OP's claims.

Took a look and my average monthly water usage for family of 3 with a small garden is 3200 gallons.



2,400,000 gallons/year would be 200,000 gallons/month or about 60x+ as much as I typically use. I guess in desert area + pool + garden + several people/big house maybe it's possible, but it does sound like a lot of water and I'm not exactly frugal with our water usage.

There used to be a book which published not only people's addresses but also their phone numbers.

The book would be mailed to every home annually.



Regarding water, the Earth has had approximately the same amount of water for billions of years. So, no water is being wasted.

We could improve the distribution system. But, that's a relatively simple solution which civilization has been handling for thousands of years.

Lol yeah I always wondered about that wasting water thing

But I assume the issue is that it doesn’t get back to where Las Vegas can use it. But delivering that specific message is much longer than just saying to stop wasting water

There's always the possibility of a water leak and that his bills went on auto payment and he didn't spot the Brobdingnagian bills.

Virtue signaling leads to hypocrisy, if even correct.

So we should never try to hold people to account, because it might be virtue signalling, and everyone is a hypocrite anyway? yay let's live in a world with no accountability

The first part of your post is correct and spot on, the second part, not so much. Earth has lost about a quarter of its water over time. Water is and can be lost to space, although extremely slowly and not a huge threat anytime soon. Early oceans also had a smaller deuterium/hydrogen ratio then today's oceans. Your last statement is quite uninformed. See this exact issue at hand for proof lol.

You do realize the crops that use the most water aren't essential food crops.

you do realize that just California produces 3.5 billion dollars worth of almonds alone

that's just one of the high water intake items

tens of billions are produced via agricultural irrigation each year - and yes, we could stop technically producing things like almonds and lettuce and just eat lima beans like a bunch of cucks with super green lawns

but we can't even do a rice and bean diet because rice is water intensive as well

so farmers are significantly poorer, we stop exporting some of the last products we made which were desired abroad, the country gets far less tax revenue

and we just eat beans man, beans for breakfast, beans for lunch, beans for dinner and green luscious lawns as far as the eye can see - paradise!

and don't forget, they are the musical fruit

Think it’s somewhat implied that virtue signaling is something that you do solely to make yourself seem like a great guy but otherwise doesn’t impact society for the better at all.

If it was somewhat helpful it probably wouldn’t be labeled as such

The point is the public is a tiny part of the problem when it comes to the depleting water supply. It's akin to mice arguing over water usage while a elephant strolls up and drinks the majority of the water. Imo the public having water is more important than making companies like blue diamond richer. Who do you think should be more responsible for conserving water? The group that uses 80% or the group that uses a lot less.

Sure, but there's a problem when any 'criticism of another' can just be labelled as virtue signalling and thus we do away with the social constructs of feedback and accountability entirely. Saying 'eating imported meat is bad for the environment' says nothing about my own habits, but can easily be construed as virtue-signalling by people who dislike the idea that others can have an opinion on their behaviour.

I’m working under the assumption that everything is correctly labeled.

But you wouldn’t see any issue with him possibility posting something like “Gize let’s take care of our Earth, she’s all we got” on Twitter and then seeing this water usage?

oh i get your point entirely

but fact is that place is a desert, the lake is drying up to the point of mob bodies being uncovered

and last i checked the economy and avoiding famine are slightly more important than having a green lawn


so comparing who uses what is a bit of a moot issue when without one of them the economy and society collapse and without the other we can still have pretty cool yards and lawns that fit in with the desert ecosystem

yes, we could adapt and grow beans instead - but i'd rather have almonds, lettuce, meat, and a whole slew of you know, options to eat, along with better school districts and this for a lawn





southwest water issues are very close to my heart - it was an area of concentration of mine of in college - i'm very much on the "we need to stop growing so many damn almonds and grow less profitable & more sustainable goods" bandcamp

but the "cost" of every household watering their lawn a little less often or switching away from lawns is much lower than asking agriculture to suddenly drop everything and transition

an almond tree takes 5-12 years before they even start producing almonds and then are usually good for about 25 years of production - so it's a massive up front investment which again is why you can't really tell them "dig up your almond trees and plant beans" - it would ravage the economy

also, companies like blue diamond do not own the land nor grow the almonds themselves, they have contracts with farmers and buy up their production

and california produces 80% of the world's almonds - we've basically cornered the market - so anyone who drops out will only put much price pressure on them - which will cause someone else who is on the fence about producing them to invest in growing almond trees themselves on land that previously grew more sustainable products

if we shut down all existing almond growers in the us right now, we'd probably have 2x as many new producers in 5 years time do to the sharp price increase that would result drawing fresh blood into the game


but more importantly, your comment is just stupid for other less nuanced reasons - you can easily swap out water/lawn/farms for other stuff and you'll see how dumb it is

The pacific ocean is like 3 hours away, can’t they just build a big pipe?

Googled question, said it would take 500 years and 180 billion dollars to fill up lake mead

Vegas was built by people who dared to dream big. I have a dream. A pipe dream.

All good, it was cover for me to go a little political/policy-oriented as much as anything. I think NVG is more open to "poker adjacent" topics when we're not seeing busy threads get knocked off the first page in just a few hours.

Usually it makes sense to go after the low-hanging fruit first, and lawns would definitely fit in that category. Looking at those US/Canada/Euro numbers, it doesn't seem that crazy to envision a 50% reduction in residential/business water use, which would be a 10% overall drop going by that 80/20 split - a great start. Of course something has to be done on the farming side as well, but that's going to be more complicated.

But when you say the public is a tiny part of the problem - that's who they're growing the food for, so the public is all of the problem in the end, just not as directly. And I'm not casting stones from my glass house as I go to cook up some ground beef for taco night here, but a lot of us need to change our habits.

This.

Right. But we might have to give up some of that other stuff too. I wonder if more of it can be grown/raised in areas where water isn't as much of an issue. But of course the climate those crops/herds need likely comes with that same problem most places, at least to some extent. Cow greenhouses in Canada? But maybe it will be possible with things like almonds in greenhouse/hydroponic facilities. Obviously, I have zero faming expertise.

Funny/odd thing is, I have no idea how much water we use, as water metering isn't really a thing here in BC, but then neither is lack of water for the most part - although we can't be completely ignorant of our usage as different areas even here have problems in the late summer/early fall. I'm sure more widespread water metering will eventually happen here as well.

Sure. Might be a couple of dollars for that though, and then a couple more for the massive desalination plants.

In all seriousness, I can't see how the Southwest US is sustainable without spending a lot of money on more projects like that - not shipping it up to NV, but desalinating for some of CA needs, maybe leaving more upstream (or hopefully upriver) for landlocked states.

Well played.

Bobo - the thing that makes california so insanely productive is that it basically is a mediterrenean climate with the same forecast year round - this means a lot of warm weather plants can grow there year round for longer or multiple growing seasons each year for insanely high output

for example, a mature almond tree will yield around 30-50 pounds of product and nearly all of those 50 pound trees are in california

but it's not just about yields, a lot of the stuff grown there like almonds are extremely finicky and won't survive in the vast majority of earth's climates - hence why california corners the market


the real problem isn't the farmers nor the people, it's that the government allows the water to be used for essentially nothing - hence why someone like brian rast can use millions of gallons of year

so the cost, despite that it's draining the aquifers dry is not enough of a deterrent and just like oil - there's still enough of it where it's not going to be gone in our lifetimes (there are exceptions like Vegas and Phoenix) and we all expect that desalinization will become cost-effective enough to operate on a grand scale by that time - which is true in the sense that even if we don't get better at that, the value of the water will rise enough to make it worthwhile to do it

i've always felt the real solution is to have water bills go in a progressive format, ie you use the typical household amount +50% then standard fares, more than that your price is now 10% higher, triple 20%, etc so someone like Brian Rast would be paying 10x per gallon what a typical vegas resident pays (which is almost nothing)

That was going to be a question of mine, after a certain amount of gallons can they just charge a somewhat extreme amount per gallon?

the main concern are once you put in progressive pricing for individuals then we have precedent to move that forward for industries and agriculture - many of which would no longer be feasible with higher water cost

and that people like brian rast would then just hire a lawyer to argue he's operating a grass farm to get the agricultural rate

a lot of people plant apple trees on their properties in new england because if you have enough of them you can classify it as agricultural land with a much lower tax rate even though they never harvest any of the apples and they just get eaten by deer

Right I see

Plan B would be to pour a milkshake over his head when he’s in Bobby’s Room

Inb4 reddit outrage, the chicagojoey expose' podcast, and Doug Polk somehow trying to make this about him.

Also, what does Mike Postile and Tom Dwan think about this?

That's for you to decide. I'm merely making an observation, and my caveat was meant to imply that there's no need to throw out the baby.

I would think that anyone posting on a forum would have a proclivity to virtue signal. Case in point: me.

He’s just a very thirsty dude