<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>danaris</author><text>&amp;gt; If solar + batteries + RO plants could produce water at a price that made agriculture economically viable, then I just don&amp;#x27;t see how it wouldn&amp;#x27;t already be happening.&lt;p&gt;The costs of solar and batteries have been dropping for decades. It&amp;#x27;s 100% believable that this type of thing has been considered, repeatedly, and discarded as economically infeasible, leading to the major players in the field choosing to ignore it for a while—but that the costs have &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt; dropped enough that the economics work out.</text><parent_chain><item><author>MostlyStable</author><text>I know he inputs some numbers, but I am just supremely skeptical of them. If solar + batteries + RO plants could produce water at a price that made agriculture economically viable, then I just don&amp;#x27;t see how it wouldn&amp;#x27;t already be happening. Or at the very least be being proposed more broadly than some random guys blog.&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, it is his plan for extracting value from the brine which represents the biggest unknown&amp;#x2F;the most need for development, while also being the thing that makes it all make sense. I&amp;#x27;ve never heard of any of the existing worlds desal plants doing this, so either it must be harder than he supposes or else he must think that every single person in charge of a desal plant the world over is an idiot.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, I realize that sometimes people miss obvious things. And sometimes, there really &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a $100 bill on the ground, despite what the apocryphal economist would have you believe.&lt;p&gt;But in this case, areas like that are what I need to be convinced of. While it&amp;#x27;s maybe true, you don&amp;#x27;t just get to assert it.&lt;p&gt;As they say &amp;quot;What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest</title><url>https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/01/09/a-vision-for-the-alleviation-of-water-scarcity-in-the-us-southwest-and-the-revitalization-of-the-salton-sea/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>shermantanktop</author><text>Agree with the skepticism, and furthermore if this were such a killer moneymaker you&amp;#x27;d expect multiple commercial efforts in this space already.&lt;p&gt;But this is California - there may be reasons that are not economic or technical that have prevented anyone from trying to develop or pursue such an idea.  The concentrated salt-brine discharge, for example, may be impossible to get environmental approval for at these volumes.</text><parent_chain><item><author>MostlyStable</author><text>I know he inputs some numbers, but I am just supremely skeptical of them. If solar + batteries + RO plants could produce water at a price that made agriculture economically viable, then I just don&amp;#x27;t see how it wouldn&amp;#x27;t already be happening. Or at the very least be being proposed more broadly than some random guys blog.&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, it is his plan for extracting value from the brine which represents the biggest unknown&amp;#x2F;the most need for development, while also being the thing that makes it all make sense. I&amp;#x27;ve never heard of any of the existing worlds desal plants doing this, so either it must be harder than he supposes or else he must think that every single person in charge of a desal plant the world over is an idiot.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, I realize that sometimes people miss obvious things. And sometimes, there really &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a $100 bill on the ground, despite what the apocryphal economist would have you believe.&lt;p&gt;But in this case, areas like that are what I need to be convinced of. While it&amp;#x27;s maybe true, you don&amp;#x27;t just get to assert it.&lt;p&gt;As they say &amp;quot;What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest</title><url>https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/01/09/a-vision-for-the-alleviation-of-water-scarcity-in-the-us-southwest-and-the-revitalization-of-the-salton-sea/</url></story>