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Comment by FollowingTheDao | Hacker News Reader

Hey, as everyone knows here, I’ll be the first one to rag on United States and California, but Israel has 1/4 of the population of California, has pretty much one religion and national unity, and they get 4 billion in aid from the United States at least. So I don’t think Israel is a fair comparison.

Plus, California has the mega rich who own a lot of the California coast. Which one of them is going to want a Desal plant next to their property?

So when you talk about the “United States” I’m assuming you mean the people who actually control the country; the wealthy.

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Israel is “74.2% Jewish, 17.8% Muslim, 2.0% Christian, and 1.6% Druze. The remaining 4.4% included faiths such as Samaritanism and Baháʼí as well as "religiously unclassified", the category for all who do not belong to one of the recognized communities.” So, it arguably has more religious diversity than the US.

The US is largely Christian with no other religion making up more than 2% of the population.

It depends how you view religion. "The Pew Religious Landscape survey reported that as of 2014, 22.8% of the American population is religiously unaffiliated, atheists made up 3.1% and agnostics made up 4% of the US population." [1] Probably the largest unrepresented population in US government, running as an atheist is still considered political suicide.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism

And the Protestant and Catholics were at war with each other countless times (For 30 years in one case!) so it's not fair to say they are not one religion.

The same is true of every old religion. Americans generally lump all Muslims into one category, but there are serious divisions, associated wars and ethnic violence.

Even those major groups have fractal divisions. https://xkcd.com/1095/

America is so religious that a majority of agnostics and 20% of atheists believe in a higher power: https://www.pewforum.org/?attachment_id=29652

But you’re correct that there’s different definitions of “religion” at play. As a foreigner, my observation has been that even secular Americans have internalized much of the belief system of Christianity.

Isreal may have only 1/4 the population of California (~10M vs 40M), but they have only 1/20th the land (~20k sq/km vs 400k sq/km). That $4B is aid from the US is a drop in the bucket to their ~$500B GDP, and mind you, states get aid packages from the federal government every year too. I don't have any figures about what California received in recent years, but I'm sure it is far more than $4B.

The challenge of the rich owning the land where a desal plant would go is an issue that can be solved in the current legal framework, but they'd rather scream about the problem than solve it. Desal is also not the only solution, there are political solutions too. Lower income folks could even solve the problem too, with their vote. It's not just a problem the wealthy are preventing from being solved. It's a problem the entire population of california is preventing from being solved.

I see a few responses saying how you can't compare Israel to California because they are smaller, but I would think a larger economy with better economies of scale would be better able to solve problems, not less.

To be fair I think a little blame can lie with the large slice of the American population (which are extremely well represented on HN) who are not mega wealthy but happily sing the songs and lick the boots of the hyper wealthy because they’re convinced there’s something in it for them.

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