this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Can someone put that into perspective for me? I also have a hard time figuring how much 30 mil gallons actually is, like how many households for how long etc.
In any case, honest mistake sounds like a blatant lie, but hey, if POTUS does it why shouldn't they?
People should provide article links.
According to the EPA, the average American family of four uses about 400 gallons of water per day, or 12,000 gallons per month. This feels high to me, but we'll use that.
So, 30 million gallons is roughly the monthly usage of 2,500 four-person households, or the daily usage of 75,000 homes.
That definitely feels high, mine is a household of two but I know exactly how much water I use because I'm off grid and I have to go haul it myself from the city my tank on my trailer holds 275 gallons and that's generally enough to last me anywhere between a week to two weeks depending on how much laundry I need to do.
I shower daily, do dishes all the usual stuff so what the fuck is the average family doing with all that water that they are using more in a day than I do in a week
Not living off grid...?
I feel like you missed the part where I said that I'm showering daily, I have a dishwasher, do laundry with a standard front load washing machine i may not be connected to a city water but I have everything plumbed in i have all the usual stuff in a household. The only thing that was relevant about being off grid is that I have an exact understanding of how much water I go through at any given moment
No no I understand, I wasn't meaning to be rude but just by virtue of the fact you are aware of every bit of water you're using and need to plan ahead means you're likely a lot more conservative with your usage, even if you're going buck wild
I feel like they're adding in water usage to manufacture goods and deliver services. We're a family of four allotted 2k gal a month for a base rate, over that is charged extra. We've never gone over that 2k, and we're using normally (dishes, laundry, bathing, watering plants, etc).
How does the average American Family manage that consumption?
German family of Four here: We use around 200liter a day. That’s roughly 50gallons. And we do wash ourselves and our clothes.
It's for sure a lot. Maybe the Epa is counting the water that so many Americans spend watering our trademark huge monoculture lawns so they can stay green regardless of drought/heat wave conditions. Some homes have almost industrial scale sprinkler systems just to accomplish this, although I'm not confident even that would get you up to 400 gallons
Don't a large number of US-Americans also have pools? That's also a big chunk of water.
400 is a lot for 4-person household. are they taking showers night and morning.
Looking up the average for New Zealand, I see everything from 250l per family to 275l per person quoted as average.
Much of New Zealand doesn't meter their water, so all they can do is measure the water put into the system and divide by the number of households/estimated people (minus commercial/industrial use that is metered).
In the area I live in, they are working on putting in meters because they suspect they lose a huge amount of water to leaks on private property that go unnoticed.
I wonder where this water usage figure for the US comes from. Is it measured on meters at their property?
And from what I hear people complain about in memes, I think parts of the US probably use a lot of water for watering lawns, something not that common here because it rains a fair amount.
Edit: lol I was trying to respond to @abcd@feddit.org but 🤷
So that'd be like 200 years of a households usage then, 30 million gallons...?
About 50 Olympic size pools. 50m x 25m x 2m
There is no simple answer to how much that amount of water actually is since different uses have different impacts. E.g. irrigation is fundamentally different from evaporative cooling. And the amount of water consumed by a household directly is miniscule compared to the goods and services that take water to provide.
If you do napkin math you will be outraged.
E.g. lawn irrigation can take up enormous amounts of water, too, with much lower benefit. Asking people to conserve water that way is probably better than shutting down data centers which do in fact render a useful service.
Somebody else provided that napkin math and it had the opposite effect. Now I'm outraged how much water the average US household uses.
The useful service of taking people's clothes off online.
Honestly, if I thought that it would help our leaders to shift focus away from the underaged human beings, I'd be more supportive.
I worry that this will work more as an enticement, especially with their love of gambling.
You can do legitimately useful things with computers and ai, even.
You being nasty is your own problem.