For the US in particular, water issues come down overwhelmingly to unfettered agricultural use, often with crops like alfalfa that are both mostly water by weight and are shipped out of the country to other places. Domestic use is only a fraction of the total.

And in some other places it's so abundant that water companies don't even bother metering it, you just pay one flat fee a month and you can use as much as you like.

That's the thing, dollars are usually a better indicator, unless something somewhere is burning money to prevent prices from reflecting real scarcity.

Assuming you use the same amount of soap and what nots, and get the same amount of dirt and debris off your body, the more water you use during a shower, the easier it is to process the water at your sewage treatment plant, if your waste water is treated.

If your waste water isn't treated, and is discharged to water ways as-is, the more water you use, the more dilute your pollution.

If you've got a septic system, I dunno? Probably doesn't help, but if your system is well sized, no big deal? Some of your outflow probably recharges aquifers, so it's kind of circular (although a lot of the outflow evaporates, so less directly circular there)

Yes, I mean when you are 'wasting water' you are mostly wasting the effort it takes to clean the water. Not the water itself.

As opposed to eg 'wasting petrol', where the petrol really is gone afterwards. At least it has been chemically transformed.

> You can't dump everything to the soil and say "that's your problem now, nature. Cope!".

Nature couldn't care less. Nature works on much larger timescales than humans. It's the humans that are impacted.

Just like climate change, plastic, and all other environmental issues -- humans are paying (or will pay) the price, not nature.

I'm convinced there's a pareto distribution of crop water usage. We're depleting our aquifers to grow sileage crops and almonds (which aren't even that good).

Just because you live near a lucky point on earth, thinking that everyone has the same luxury is a bit absurd.

I traveled through Mongolia for a week. Every camp we stayed had a water tank, and water use was extremely constrained. Same for electricity and heat.

Your position is akin to getting power from the first distribution point near a nuclear power plant and saying that electricity is indeed infinite for everyone on the planet.

Just because you don't prepay (but pay as you go) for fresh water doesn't mean that everyone has that luxury. I have shared a couple of maps down there. Maybe you should give them a look about our planet's state.

us: the humanity in general, today: the state of world water stress level [0], [1], eligible: the correctness of the thing you are doing regardless of the legality of the thing you're doing.

IOW, "I pay the bill, now get off my lawn" is something you can do. But should you really do it, just because you can do it?

[0]: https://www.wri.org/data/water-stress-country (This is decade old, we're worse now)

[1]: https://riskfilter.org/water/explore/map

If you think you can do whatever you want regardless of the things you're causing, then we're on a completely different page, and continuing this little chat has no point. We can't converge and agree on a point.