I never responded to an article about it that came out a couple years ago, but I have been thinking of the "#scale problem" a lot on and off. how can the production of things to meet human #needs and #wants scale to the amount of people there are now, in a system beyond capitalism?

got my utilities bill and even living alone in a small studio apt, I used 580 gallons of water in two months (63 days exactly) of normal life bathroom + kitchen usage. I conserve water a lot and this is still about as much as a hot tub.

there are 775,523 people living in seattle, and even though there is a lot of variance in water use per person, the only number I have is my own usage. if everyone used that much, it would be 449,803,340 for 63 days. per day, the city population alone, not considering businesses, uses somewhere around 7,139,735 gallons of water per day.

that water comes from rainwater via aquifers, but how much does it actually rain here?

in the same two months, the avg rainfall is about 10 inches. seattle is 142 sq mi in area, which means it is 570,300,000,000 sq inches. the average rainfall in this time of the year, tho different other times of the year obv, is 10, which gives 5,703,000,000,000 cubic inches of rain over the entire city. realistically, the average rainfall is measured in a few spots and the number would be different if all the area was covered, but using this number shows about 24,690,000,000 gallons of rain.

the population of seattle using my apartment's amount of water for the past 2 months would use about 0.03% of the rainfall in the same period.

most of the water demand comes from businesses. anyone who has worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant knows how much goes down that drain in a day. also manufacturing and agriculture, the latter being not common in the city (but the city wouldn't be able to exist without it)

if there was a decentralized system of collecting rainwater (that was also safe and didn't mess the env up), in the rainy season of a rainy city, there seems to be more than enough water to live on.

the lowest average rainfall is in in july, with .9 inches, which gives 2,222,000,000 gallons of water per the area of seattle (about 10x less). this could cause problems depending on how much water could be stored from the rainy season

where does it get stored? how does that storage get maintained? I can imagine every apartment having cool #SolarPunk (#HydroPunk?) water gathering container that gets piped to the sinks/toilets/showers/whatev for the apartment, but more scalable would be water tank "hubs" for the networks that are multi person housing units.

then the problem of uneven distribution of rain comes up: there are little micro rainshadow pockets caused by various buildings, as you can see by how certain walls stay dry when it's raining sometimes, but most everything gets soaked here. the logistics of delivering water to those areas seem like they'd be minimal.

this particular problem of decentralized organization of resources seems very scalable, given imagination and cooperation, but what about in a place where water is scarce? or with other resources? there are also questions about ecology, sewage etc etc. and the problem of it relying on a technological change (altho i don't see how any change of society wouldn't have an accompanying technology change) that itself would use resources.