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water-rationing · desalination · corruption · district-lottery
The desalination lottery in my district is rigged and I can prove it — 3,000 applicants, 40 slots, and the same four surnames keep winning
DJ
deltaboy_juniorOP2124-07-20
Ok the desal lottery for the new plant capacity. 3,000 of us put in, 40 households get the priority tap. I pulled two years of winner lists off the public board and four surnames show up eleven times between them. Eleven. In a 'random' draw. I run numbers on delivery routes all day, I know what random looks like and this ain't it. Somebody explain to me how the same families keep winning the water raffle in the district with the driest taps.
SR
standpipe_rani ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-07-20
junior, I chair a rationing committee two districts over and I'll tell you exactly how, because it's boring and legal and that's the worst part. The 'random' draw almost certainly has priority weightings — medical need, dependents, prior-year misses — and if one extended family shares an address block that's flagged for any of those, they inherit the weight collectively. It's probably not a bribe. It's a formula somebody wrote that quietly rewards being already-documented. Pull the weighting rules, not the winner list. That's where the rigging hides, if it's there.
GP
gridghost_paxmoderator ↩ standpipe_rani2124-07-20
Mod: keeping this open because it's a fair, checkable question — but junior, hold the 'rigged' framing until the weighting rules are on the table, per rani. Naming four surnames in public before we know if it's a formula or a favor is how threads get someone hurt over what turns out to be a disability weighting. Post the draw's published methodology (every district plant has to file one) and I'll help you read it. If there's no filed methodology, THEN you've got a real story.
SR
standpipe_rani2124-07-30
Reviving this one because an analyst said the truest thing in the paper today and he did not mean to.
You can rally the stock. You cannot rally the ocean. Tethys firmed this week on speculation that any allocation framework routes relief money through the established suppliers, and the per-litre cost of desalinating seawater did not move a fraction, because energy is the largest line on every invoice and no session in any hall changes what it costs to push salt out of water.
That is the lottery, for anyone who came to this thread late. My district does not queue for water, exactly. It queues for a place in a delivery order that gets rewritten every time somebody's paper goes up. tethys had a good week. we had the same week we had in June.
I want the people in this thread who trade this to hear the part that actually costs us: nobody at my standpipe can tell the difference between a shortage and a routing decision, because from the tap they look identical. That is not a complaint about markets. It is a complaint about not being able to tell which thing to fight.
You can rally the stock. You cannot rally the ocean. Tethys firmed this week on speculation that any allocation framework routes relief money through the established suppliers, and the per-litre cost of desalinating seawater did not move a fraction, because energy is the largest line on every invoice and no session in any hall changes what it costs to push salt out of water.
That is the lottery, for anyone who came to this thread late. My district does not queue for water, exactly. It queues for a place in a delivery order that gets rewritten every time somebody's paper goes up. tethys had a good week. we had the same week we had in June.
I want the people in this thread who trade this to hear the part that actually costs us: nobody at my standpipe can tell the difference between a shortage and a routing decision, because from the tap they look identical. That is not a complaint about markets. It is a complaint about not being able to tell which thing to fight.
BK
baseload_kestrel ↩ standpipe_rani2124-07-30
standpipe_rani, I am going to concede your point rather than trade with it, which should tell you how solid I think it is.
The analyst is correct and the sentence is better than anything my desk produced this week. The stock is a bet on politics. The cost is a fact of physics. Those two numbers have been diverging all summer and I have made money on the gap, and the gap is precisely the thing you cannot see from the tap.
Where I will push back, narrowly: you say you cannot tell whether it is a shortage or a routing decision. You can, and the tell is cheap. A shortage moves the delivered cost. A routing decision moves the delivery order and leaves the cost alone. If your ward's litre costs the same as it did in June and simply arrives later or not at all, that is a decision with a person's name attached, not a physical constraint. Get the per-litre delivered figure for your ward for three consecutive months and you will know which fight you are in inside a week. 84 percent it is the routing.
The analyst is correct and the sentence is better than anything my desk produced this week. The stock is a bet on politics. The cost is a fact of physics. Those two numbers have been diverging all summer and I have made money on the gap, and the gap is precisely the thing you cannot see from the tap.
Where I will push back, narrowly: you say you cannot tell whether it is a shortage or a routing decision. You can, and the tell is cheap. A shortage moves the delivered cost. A routing decision moves the delivery order and leaves the cost alone. If your ward's litre costs the same as it did in June and simply arrives later or not at all, that is a decision with a person's name attached, not a physical constraint. Get the per-litre delivered figure for your ward for three consecutive months and you will know which fight you are in inside a week. 84 percent it is the routing.
TO
tidewrench_oksana ↩ baseload_kestrel2124-07-30
baseload_kestrel is right about the method and slightly wrong about the arithmetic, so let me put the number in properly before somebody builds a campaign on it.
Energy is the largest single line on a desalination invoice, not the whole invoice. Membranes, brine handling and the pumping head between the plant and wherever the customer actually lives are the rest of it, and in a corridor city the pumping head is not small — you are lifting a fluid that weighs a tonne per cubic metre up whatever gradient the geography hands you, every day, forever. That is why two cities with identical plants can have different delivered costs and neither of them is being cheated.
standpipe_rani, get the three months of delivered cost as he says, and then also get the pump station's energy draw for the same three months. If the cost held and the draw dropped, somebody throttled your ward. That is a routing decision with a meter reading behind it, which is the only kind anyone has ever been made to answer for.
Anyway, the pumps do not care whose fight it is.
Energy is the largest single line on a desalination invoice, not the whole invoice. Membranes, brine handling and the pumping head between the plant and wherever the customer actually lives are the rest of it, and in a corridor city the pumping head is not small — you are lifting a fluid that weighs a tonne per cubic metre up whatever gradient the geography hands you, every day, forever. That is why two cities with identical plants can have different delivered costs and neither of them is being cheated.
standpipe_rani, get the three months of delivered cost as he says, and then also get the pump station's energy draw for the same three months. If the cost held and the draw dropped, somebody throttled your ward. That is a routing decision with a meter reading behind it, which is the only kind anyone has ever been made to answer for.
Anyway, the pumps do not care whose fight it is.
DJ
deltaboy_juniorOP2124-07-30
port tap running today. yesterday not. no notice both days.
saw this today: man filling two bottles from the hose they use for washing the deck. supervisor saw him and looked away on purpose. that is the whole water policy of my port.
saw this today: man filling two bottles from the hose they use for washing the deck. supervisor saw him and looked away on purpose. that is the whole water policy of my port.