The idea of finding life on other planets is actually based on statistics. There are literally billions of Earth-like planets in the universe. The chances are that conditions on at least some of those planets has given rise to life.
And what, if I may be so crass as to inquire, do you base that assessment on? The fact that "billions" is a large-seeming number? What if the probability of life (as we know it) forming on an earth-like planet is 1:10^12? The point of the article is that we simply don't know what that probability is, so arguments like the one you are making here are based on fantasy rather than evidence.
There is also a very good statistical chance that there are non-carbon life-forms on other planets.
Again: How do you know? Before, you were making a statistical argument from a sample size of one, which is bad. But now, since we know of zero planets that host non-carbon-based life, you are making an argument based on literally nothing but maybe old Star Trek episodes.
You missed/didn't understand/ignored my main point.
For the sake of argument, let's pretend that those numbers are accurate and that they can be meaningfully compared to one another. That is, Germany really does have a rate of unemployment that is objectively 2.6 percentage points lower than that of the US. Your argument still wouldn't hold water. The countries you mentioned - Germany, The US and UK, Japan, Spain, and Greece - differ in many ways OTHER THAN how hard it is for an employer to get rid of an employee. These other differences may well provide a better causal explanation for the differences in their unemployment rates. In other words, the correlation between laws protecting labor and unemployment (assuming there is one, which you haven't established, either) may be spurious.
I know that's a big, technical term, so let me explain it to you with a simple illustration. There is a correlation between shoe size and spelling ability. If you randomly select one person with big feet and one person with small feet, chances are, the person with big feet will be a better speller. Of course, the suggestion that foot size somehow causes better spelling is absurd. The explanation is, foot size correlates with age (adults have bigger feet than children, typically) and age correlates with experience and education in spelling, which probably does confer greater spelling ability. The correlation between foot size and spelling ability is said to be spurious.
The correlation between labor protection and unemployment (which, again, you haven't actually demonstrated) may be similarly spurious. The only way to find out is to eliminate the influence of all other confounding factors so that you really are "comparing apples to apples." I'm not saying that you are wrong, just that you haven't adequately demonstrated that you are right.
To clarify further, what I'm saying is that to meaningfully compare and explain the influence of a particular policy on unemployment rates in different countries, you'd need to control for all the other differences between those countries first. Even more fundamentally, you'd need a consistent definition of unemployment in order to make an objective comparison. Even the Wikipedia article you linked to points that out. Pity you didn't have the sense to heed that very obvious warning.
That's a meaningless comparison. The claim is (or should be understood to be) that, other things being equal, making it more difficult for businesses to dismiss employees incentivizes them to hire fewer people to start with, which has the effect of worsening unemployment. They might (just for example) choose to invest in more automation or provide additional training to their existing employees instead. I don't know whether that claim is true, but I do know that your counterargument doesn't even come close to casting doubt on it.
If you're only interested in how simulated robots behave, then go ahead and simulate them.
Yes, that's my point. I'm glad that you agree.
I guess you were never in grad school.
Actually, it's because I have been that I've seen many, many instances of, "Look at the eyecatching but basically unnecessary and useless thing we did just because it looks cool!" Presentation and salesmanship is an important part of doing successful (funded) research.
That might be true in some circumstances. For example, if the goal of the research is to create new algorithms for self-driving or piloting, then at some point, you definitely want to actually build the car or the plane and let the software drive/fly it around. It would be impossible to incorporate every situation that a robot like that might encounter in the "real world" into a simulation. On the other hand, if you are interested in robots that scoot around on a smooth 2D surface and the only part of their behavior that interests you is how their communications with one another evolve, it's much more difficult to understand what you gain by actually building them. In fact, I can think of many advantages of a pure simulation in that case: It would (probably) run much faster than in real time, which would permit investigation of a larger range of parameters and also provide more information (is the emergence of dishonesty a fluke, or does it happen often? Let's run the simulation 1,000,000 times from slightly different starting states and see). Nothing would break down. The experiment would be repeatable. It would be much easier to instrument the behavior of the robots. Etc.
My suspicion is that in many cases, these things are physically built because the researchers enjoy goofing off (and have access to money and cheap labor) and it makes for good press releases.
I find this article very satisfying because every time I see a story about robotics research where the main objective doesn't seem to be building robots but developing algorithms, I wonder why they wasted time and money building robots. Like, for instance, that research that made rounds in popular science articles a couple of years ago about robots that evolved the ability to lie. Why bother building and programming little robots to physically carry out the task of gathering "food", when the whole thing obviously could have been simulated?
According to TFA, the vote failed, so he apparently wasn't forced out. Even if he had been forced out, my point would still stand. It's silly to make guesses about why Ereditato resigned based only on whether he appears to the casual, outside observer to have followed the "scientific method". I mean, seriously. Read some of the comments. People are actually arguing that because he was appropriately conservative in his initial claims and owned up to his mistakes, he shouldn't resign.. as though gross scientific incompetence or misconduct are the only reasons that a scientist should resign or be fired!
I know we're all in the great big hurry to use the version of the "scientific method" we learned in the 3rd grade (supplemented by what we've gleaned since then from reading popular science articles and watching TED talks) to dissect whether this guy should or should not have quit. But has it occurred to any of you that maybe he was a bad manager who didn't realize it until he and his team were placed under a lot of stress? Or maybe he is tired of being in charge and wants to go back to his university full time to lead a more normal academic life? Or maybe there's something else internally that happened that we don't know about because it's none of our business?
I know this might be hard to accept, but scientists are not robots who behave in strict accordance with The Scientific Method in every aspect of their lives (however one would actually do that). They are human beings who make life decisions for a wide variety of reasons, just like everyone else.
I'm having trouble connecting the dots between what I wrote and what you wrote. I've never heard anyone advocate private charity as the sole solution to our health care problems. Also, the only options aren't univeral/single payer and the current US system.
The US system is a monstrosity that has arisen after decades and decades of political wrangling and cronyism and combines the worst excesses of central planning and corporatism. I've heard a health care economist say that either a European-style approach (which, despite what you seem to think, comes with its own set of problems which are steadily bankrupting many European countries - chief among them that ordinary people have little incentive to control how many resources they use, and politicians have even less) or an actual free market approach would be preferable to what we have now. One way or the other, I don't think it's by any means obvious that you are "abso-fucking-lutely right" that more government is the solution to our health care woes. Government can't wave a magic wand and change economic realities.
Actually, no, it's not "'nuff said." This is classic goal-post moving. The issue we are addressing here is NOT the amount of real good (in the opinion of Slashdot ACs) accomplished by Americans with their charitable giving. It's whether, as the comment I originally responded to claimed, American culture "discourages altruism and rewards greed - or at least the balance between the two is tilted towards greed more than in most other developed countries." If that assertion were correct, I think one thing we could expect to see is Americans being more miserly with their time and money than other people. The statistics suggest the opposite. That fact remains whether the causes they contribute to pass ideological muster with you or not.
The referenced pdf in the second link reports those numbers on pages 8 and 9. I'll save you the trouble of looking them up yourself. Here's what it says:
The evidence in Table 1 suggests that personal tax might well be an important factor in giving levels: however, it is the level of social security contribution and not personal taxation which seemed most significant. Amongst the EU members in the survey an inverse relationship between average social security contribution as a proportion (%) of income and average individual giving as a proportion (%) of GDP was noted. The pattern among these countries is that the higher the social security contributions, the less is donated to charity, and the lower the social security contributions, the greater the donations to charity are. For instance, in France and the Netherlands, for example, which have proportionally high levels of employee and employer social security contribution, had lower levels of individual giving as a proportion of GDP. Conversely in the UK and Ireland, where proportionally lower levels of employers’ social security contribution through tax were seen, higher rates of giving are found.
So, you are almost right. The reason I say almost is that conspicuously missing from their discussion is the US. They talk only about the trend in European countries. I plotted the data for myself, both total personal taxes vs. charitable giving and SS contribution specifically vs. charitable giving, and in both cases, the US is a distant outlier (in the direction of being unusually charitable).
It's interesting that you raise this as a possibility for another reason. Several months ago, I was telling a friend that I had read that politically conservative people tend to be more charitable than politically liberal people, and I speculated that it may be because liberal people feel that they have already done their duty by voting for representatives who support more government spending on social programs. She was extremely offended that I would impugn the character of her fellow liberals with such a suggestion. On the other hand, I recall reading a news story about a wealthy European businessman disparaging private charity and insisting that government was the appropriate instrument for helping the poor. Could it be that American people (for whatever cultural reason) feel an unusually large responsibility to personally help their fellow man?
The problem is that American socioeconomic arrangement discourages altruism and rewards greed - or at least the balance between the two is tilted towards greed more than in most other developed countries.
With
Q. Are Americans more or less charitable than citizens of other countries?
A. No developed country approaches American giving. For example, in 1995 (the most recent year for which data are available), Americans gave, per capita, three and a half times as much to causes and charities as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and 14 times as much as the Italians. Similarly, in 1998, Americans were 15 percent more likely to volunteer their time than the Dutch, 21 percent more likely than the Swiss, and 32 percent more likely than the Germans. These differences are not attributable to demographic characteristics such as education, income, age, sex, or marital status. On the contrary, if we look at two people who are identical in all these ways except that one is European and the other American, the probability is still far lower that the European will volunteer than the American.
You might also be interested in several of the statistics from this site, too. Notably, in 2006, US charitable giving as a percentage of GDP was larger by more than a factor of two than the second most charitable nation (the UK).
I know, right? How DARE these companies make profits? They should be providing all of us with ebooks at COST out of the kindness of their hearts. It's not like profit motive has ever done any of us any good, anyway.
These days, the traditional role played by a discipline (more accurately, the role that people who probably have no actual knowledge of a discipline assume that it has played) means very little. I don't know anything about Forestry, but I know enough about academia to say that if people or departments think they can carve out a new niche for themselves even in a seemingly unrelated area of research, they will. It means more money and even the survival of the discipline as a whole.
In my own area (chemical engineering), bio this and that has been hot for years. Now we're all going crazy for energy applications like fuel cells, solar cells, and photocatalysis. Only 10% or so of the faculty members in my department work on "traditional" chemical engineering topics.
Except they aren't. Even the submitted articles, tendentious as they are, admit that the trucks are not ordinary. They are also under constant escort by a pair of SUVs that contain god knows what, which the articles omit for whatever reason. Beyond that, I'd say the concerns over Pakistan stem as much from this..
Pakistan is an unstable and violent country located at the epicenter of global jihadism, and it has been the foremost supplier of nuclear technology to such rogue states as Iran and North Korea.
..(From the first article you linked to, FYI) than from any superficial similarities in the ways that the US and Pakistan transport nuclear materials.
I know what you mean. I remember that after reading the preface of the first of the WOT books he wrote, I didn't know whether I was going to be able to continue. I held my nose until the literary equivalent of olfactory fatigue set in, and now I'm actually looking forward to the final installment.
Even though I'm sure more evaporation occurs during the daytime, he runs the sprinklers continuously. I honestly don't know why.
I was going to speculate, but as I thought about it, I realized that there more constraints than I first realized. It's possible to both under-water, and over-water, of course. There's a limit to the flowrate of water he can supply. The sprinkler, even on 100% speed, takes (IIRC) approximately a day to make a full revolution. Watering continuously might be the only way to satisfy all the constraints, even if he does lose significantly more water to evaporation during the day.
Unfortunately, even though I grew up on a farm, I don't know that much about the reasons behind the decision making. My dad kept all that to himself. I just did what I was told.:)
Yes, I understand that ground water is being depleted. So do most farmers. As the links you posted point out, diminishing ground water leads to higher pumping costs, both because it has to be pumped from deeper under ground, and because wells which used to be very reliable have to have work done on them (acid treatments, shooting, etc) or abandoned entirely. New water wells can be incredibly expensive in areas where the water table is hundreds of feet beneath the surface. That's what's driving investment in fancy equipment to reduce water usage, like computer-controlled center pivot sprinklers.
I think I'm probably guilty of reading too much between the lines of your first comment, but a couple of things about it set me off. First, the assertion that we consume "too much" water because its low price causes us to misperceive its true value. Actually, I agree with you to some extent. Water is being inefficiently used by farmers because, for one thing, the government has its thumb on the scale. Farmers are incentivized by ag subsidies to produce certain crops like corn in quantities that far exceed free market demand. Water usage that couldn't be justified at the free market price of corn can be justified when the government is paying for it.
But, I don't think that's actually what you meant. I think you really believe (or at least you assume without thinking carefully) that water has some kind of inherent value independent of what people are willing to pay for it. Here's the part where I'm really reading between the lines: Usually after someone says a thing like that, they follow it up with "Thar oughtta be a law!" that "corrects" this imbalance in what people are paying versus what water is "truly" worth. Because if we don't, all the drinkable water will run out. It's an argument related in many ways to "peak oil" alarmism that has continued without abeyance for decades now, despite being repeatedly proven wrong by history.
The point I wanted to make is, look, market forces are already taking care of this. Obtaining water is more expensive than it used to be, and farmers are investing in giant, sensationally expensive sprinklers to use less water. And the world keeps turning. Ten or fifty years from now, when there's even less water available at the current price, who knows what it will become economical to pursue? Solar concentrators driving desalination plants. Actual water recycling. Maybe we'll finally be rid of the damn ag subsidies. We don't need anyone telling us what the "true" value of water is to make it last or to prevent us from "over consuming." Prices do that already, when the government doesn't get in the way.
Second, I detected an undercurrent of "greedy American bastards!" in your comparison. I apologize if I'm wrong, but you have to admit that such comparisons are de rigueur. As I pointed out, prices have driven American farmers to adopt the same technology for conserving water that people with a lot of money use in the desert. In fact, I rather suspect the flow of technology occurred in the opposite direction.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of finding life on other planets is actually based on statistics. There are literally billions of Earth-like planets in the universe. The chances are that conditions on at least some of those planets has given rise to life.
And what, if I may be so crass as to inquire, do you base that assessment on? The fact that "billions" is a large-seeming number? What if the probability of life (as we know it) forming on an earth-like planet is 1:10^12? The point of the article is that we simply don't know what that probability is, so arguments like the one you are making here are based on fantasy rather than evidence.
There is also a very good statistical chance that there are non-carbon life-forms on other planets.
Again: How do you know? Before, you were making a statistical argument from a sample size of one, which is bad. But now, since we know of zero planets that host non-carbon-based life, you are making an argument based on literally nothing but maybe old Star Trek episodes.
What do you think the methods are based on?
The majority operate at a loss, but many, including UF, do make money.
Cows, maybe not. Pigs definitely do. Many states are having difficulty managing their feral pig populations.
You missed/didn't understand/ignored my main point.
For the sake of argument, let's pretend that those numbers are accurate and that they can be meaningfully compared to one another. That is, Germany really does have a rate of unemployment that is objectively 2.6 percentage points lower than that of the US. Your argument still wouldn't hold water. The countries you mentioned - Germany, The US and UK, Japan, Spain, and Greece - differ in many ways OTHER THAN how hard it is for an employer to get rid of an employee. These other differences may well provide a better causal explanation for the differences in their unemployment rates. In other words, the correlation between laws protecting labor and unemployment (assuming there is one, which you haven't established, either) may be spurious.
I know that's a big, technical term, so let me explain it to you with a simple illustration. There is a correlation between shoe size and spelling ability. If you randomly select one person with big feet and one person with small feet, chances are, the person with big feet will be a better speller. Of course, the suggestion that foot size somehow causes better spelling is absurd. The explanation is, foot size correlates with age (adults have bigger feet than children, typically) and age correlates with experience and education in spelling, which probably does confer greater spelling ability. The correlation between foot size and spelling ability is said to be spurious.
The correlation between labor protection and unemployment (which, again, you haven't actually demonstrated) may be similarly spurious. The only way to find out is to eliminate the influence of all other confounding factors so that you really are "comparing apples to apples." I'm not saying that you are wrong, just that you haven't adequately demonstrated that you are right.
To clarify further, what I'm saying is that to meaningfully compare and explain the influence of a particular policy on unemployment rates in different countries, you'd need to control for all the other differences between those countries first. Even more fundamentally, you'd need a consistent definition of unemployment in order to make an objective comparison. Even the Wikipedia article you linked to points that out. Pity you didn't have the sense to heed that very obvious warning.
That's a meaningless comparison. The claim is (or should be understood to be) that, other things being equal, making it more difficult for businesses to dismiss employees incentivizes them to hire fewer people to start with, which has the effect of worsening unemployment. They might (just for example) choose to invest in more automation or provide additional training to their existing employees instead. I don't know whether that claim is true, but I do know that your counterargument doesn't even come close to casting doubt on it.
If you're only interested in how simulated robots behave, then go ahead and simulate them.
Yes, that's my point. I'm glad that you agree.
I guess you were never in grad school.
Actually, it's because I have been that I've seen many, many instances of, "Look at the eyecatching but basically unnecessary and useless thing we did just because it looks cool!" Presentation and salesmanship is an important part of doing successful (funded) research.
That might be true in some circumstances. For example, if the goal of the research is to create new algorithms for self-driving or piloting, then at some point, you definitely want to actually build the car or the plane and let the software drive/fly it around. It would be impossible to incorporate every situation that a robot like that might encounter in the "real world" into a simulation. On the other hand, if you are interested in robots that scoot around on a smooth 2D surface and the only part of their behavior that interests you is how their communications with one another evolve, it's much more difficult to understand what you gain by actually building them. In fact, I can think of many advantages of a pure simulation in that case: It would (probably) run much faster than in real time, which would permit investigation of a larger range of parameters and also provide more information (is the emergence of dishonesty a fluke, or does it happen often? Let's run the simulation 1,000,000 times from slightly different starting states and see). Nothing would break down. The experiment would be repeatable. It would be much easier to instrument the behavior of the robots. Etc.
My suspicion is that in many cases, these things are physically built because the researchers enjoy goofing off (and have access to money and cheap labor) and it makes for good press releases.
I find this article very satisfying because every time I see a story about robotics research where the main objective doesn't seem to be building robots but developing algorithms, I wonder why they wasted time and money building robots. Like, for instance, that research that made rounds in popular science articles a couple of years ago about robots that evolved the ability to lie. Why bother building and programming little robots to physically carry out the task of gathering "food", when the whole thing obviously could have been simulated?
According to TFA, the vote failed, so he apparently wasn't forced out. Even if he had been forced out, my point would still stand. It's silly to make guesses about why Ereditato resigned based only on whether he appears to the casual, outside observer to have followed the "scientific method". I mean, seriously. Read some of the comments. People are actually arguing that because he was appropriately conservative in his initial claims and owned up to his mistakes, he shouldn't resign.. as though gross scientific incompetence or misconduct are the only reasons that a scientist should resign or be fired!
I know we're all in the great big hurry to use the version of the "scientific method" we learned in the 3rd grade (supplemented by what we've gleaned since then from reading popular science articles and watching TED talks) to dissect whether this guy should or should not have quit. But has it occurred to any of you that maybe he was a bad manager who didn't realize it until he and his team were placed under a lot of stress? Or maybe he is tired of being in charge and wants to go back to his university full time to lead a more normal academic life? Or maybe there's something else internally that happened that we don't know about because it's none of our business?
I know this might be hard to accept, but scientists are not robots who behave in strict accordance with The Scientific Method in every aspect of their lives (however one would actually do that). They are human beings who make life decisions for a wide variety of reasons, just like everyone else.
I'm having trouble connecting the dots between what I wrote and what you wrote. I've never heard anyone advocate private charity as the sole solution to our health care problems. Also, the only options aren't univeral/single payer and the current US system.
The US system is a monstrosity that has arisen after decades and decades of political wrangling and cronyism and combines the worst excesses of central planning and corporatism. I've heard a health care economist say that either a European-style approach (which, despite what you seem to think, comes with its own set of problems which are steadily bankrupting many European countries - chief among them that ordinary people have little incentive to control how many resources they use, and politicians have even less) or an actual free market approach would be preferable to what we have now. One way or the other, I don't think it's by any means obvious that you are "abso-fucking-lutely right" that more government is the solution to our health care woes. Government can't wave a magic wand and change economic realities.
Actually, no, it's not "'nuff said." This is classic goal-post moving. The issue we are addressing here is NOT the amount of real good (in the opinion of Slashdot ACs) accomplished by Americans with their charitable giving. It's whether, as the comment I originally responded to claimed, American culture "discourages altruism and rewards greed - or at least the balance between the two is tilted towards greed more than in most other developed countries." If that assertion were correct, I think one thing we could expect to see is Americans being more miserly with their time and money than other people. The statistics suggest the opposite. That fact remains whether the causes they contribute to pass ideological muster with you or not.
I invite you to look at the report in the second link. It at least attempts to address all of these issues.
Oops, I didn't intend to post that AC.
The evidence in Table 1 suggests that personal tax might well be an important factor in giving levels: however, it is the level of social security contribution and not personal taxation which seemed most significant. Amongst the EU members in the survey an inverse relationship between average social security contribution as a proportion (%) of income and average individual giving as a proportion (%) of GDP was noted. The pattern among these countries is that the higher the social security contributions, the less is donated to charity, and the lower the social security contributions, the greater the donations to charity are. For instance, in France and the Netherlands, for example, which have proportionally high levels of employee and employer social security contribution, had lower levels of individual giving as a proportion of GDP. Conversely in the UK and Ireland, where proportionally lower levels of employers’ social security contribution through tax were seen, higher rates of giving are found.
So, you are almost right. The reason I say almost is that conspicuously missing from their discussion is the US. They talk only about the trend in European countries. I plotted the data for myself, both total personal taxes vs. charitable giving and SS contribution specifically vs. charitable giving, and in both cases, the US is a distant outlier (in the direction of being unusually charitable).
It's interesting that you raise this as a possibility for another reason. Several months ago, I was telling a friend that I had read that politically conservative people tend to be more charitable than politically liberal people, and I speculated that it may be because liberal people feel that they have already done their duty by voting for representatives who support more government spending on social programs. She was extremely offended that I would impugn the character of her fellow liberals with such a suggestion. On the other hand, I recall reading a news story about a wealthy European businessman disparaging private charity and insisting that government was the appropriate instrument for helping the poor. Could it be that American people (for whatever cultural reason) feel an unusually large responsibility to personally help their fellow man?
The problem is that American socioeconomic arrangement discourages altruism and rewards greed - or at least the balance between the two is tilted towards greed more than in most other developed countries.
With
Q. Are Americans more or less charitable than citizens of other countries?
A. No developed country approaches American giving. For example, in 1995 (the most recent year for which data are available), Americans gave, per capita, three and a half times as much to causes and charities as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and 14 times as much as the Italians. Similarly, in 1998, Americans were 15 percent more likely to volunteer their time than the Dutch, 21 percent more likely than the Swiss, and 32 percent more likely than the Germans. These differences are not attributable to demographic characteristics such as education, income, age, sex, or marital status. On the contrary, if we look at two people who are identical in all these ways except that one is European and the other American, the probability is still far lower that the European will volunteer than the American.
(From here)
You might also be interested in several of the statistics from this site, too. Notably, in 2006, US charitable giving as a percentage of GDP was larger by more than a factor of two than the second most charitable nation (the UK).
I know, right? How DARE these companies make profits? They should be providing all of us with ebooks at COST out of the kindness of their hearts. It's not like profit motive has ever done any of us any good, anyway.
I wonder if backwards social conservatives who opposed eugenics at the time were labeled anti-science..
Take a look at his research interests and recent publications. It appears he might know a thing or two about it.
These days, the traditional role played by a discipline (more accurately, the role that people who probably have no actual knowledge of a discipline assume that it has played) means very little. I don't know anything about Forestry, but I know enough about academia to say that if people or departments think they can carve out a new niche for themselves even in a seemingly unrelated area of research, they will. It means more money and even the survival of the discipline as a whole.
In my own area (chemical engineering), bio this and that has been hot for years. Now we're all going crazy for energy applications like fuel cells, solar cells, and photocatalysis. Only 10% or so of the faculty members in my department work on "traditional" chemical engineering topics.
Pakistan is an unstable and violent country located at the epicenter of global jihadism, and it has been the foremost supplier of nuclear technology to such rogue states as Iran and North Korea.
..(From the first article you linked to, FYI) than from any superficial similarities in the ways that the US and Pakistan transport nuclear materials.
I know what you mean. I remember that after reading the preface of the first of the WOT books he wrote, I didn't know whether I was going to be able to continue. I held my nose until the literary equivalent of olfactory fatigue set in, and now I'm actually looking forward to the final installment.
Even though I'm sure more evaporation occurs during the daytime, he runs the sprinklers continuously. I honestly don't know why.
:)
I was going to speculate, but as I thought about it, I realized that there more constraints than I first realized. It's possible to both under-water, and over-water, of course. There's a limit to the flowrate of water he can supply. The sprinkler, even on 100% speed, takes (IIRC) approximately a day to make a full revolution. Watering continuously might be the only way to satisfy all the constraints, even if he does lose significantly more water to evaporation during the day.
Unfortunately, even though I grew up on a farm, I don't know that much about the reasons behind the decision making. My dad kept all that to himself. I just did what I was told.
Yes, I understand that ground water is being depleted. So do most farmers. As the links you posted point out, diminishing ground water leads to higher pumping costs, both because it has to be pumped from deeper under ground, and because wells which used to be very reliable have to have work done on them (acid treatments, shooting, etc) or abandoned entirely. New water wells can be incredibly expensive in areas where the water table is hundreds of feet beneath the surface. That's what's driving investment in fancy equipment to reduce water usage, like computer-controlled center pivot sprinklers.
I think I'm probably guilty of reading too much between the lines of your first comment, but a couple of things about it set me off. First, the assertion that we consume "too much" water because its low price causes us to misperceive its true value. Actually, I agree with you to some extent. Water is being inefficiently used by farmers because, for one thing, the government has its thumb on the scale. Farmers are incentivized by ag subsidies to produce certain crops like corn in quantities that far exceed free market demand. Water usage that couldn't be justified at the free market price of corn can be justified when the government is paying for it.
But, I don't think that's actually what you meant. I think you really believe (or at least you assume without thinking carefully) that water has some kind of inherent value independent of what people are willing to pay for it. Here's the part where I'm really reading between the lines: Usually after someone says a thing like that, they follow it up with "Thar oughtta be a law!" that "corrects" this imbalance in what people are paying versus what water is "truly" worth. Because if we don't, all the drinkable water will run out. It's an argument related in many ways to "peak oil" alarmism that has continued without abeyance for decades now, despite being repeatedly proven wrong by history.
The point I wanted to make is, look, market forces are already taking care of this. Obtaining water is more expensive than it used to be, and farmers are investing in giant, sensationally expensive sprinklers to use less water. And the world keeps turning. Ten or fifty years from now, when there's even less water available at the current price, who knows what it will become economical to pursue? Solar concentrators driving desalination plants. Actual water recycling. Maybe we'll finally be rid of the damn ag subsidies. We don't need anyone telling us what the "true" value of water is to make it last or to prevent us from "over consuming." Prices do that already, when the government doesn't get in the way.
Second, I detected an undercurrent of "greedy American bastards!" in your comparison. I apologize if I'm wrong, but you have to admit that such comparisons are de rigueur. As I pointed out, prices have driven American farmers to adopt the same technology for conserving water that people with a lot of money use in the desert. In fact, I rather suspect the flow of technology occurred in the opposite direction.