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0 pointsesperent3y ago0 comments

I'm from a northern European country and I moved to a tropical country. I sweat buckets here, quite possibly literally.

You can bet I shower daily. Sometimes I shower several times a day (although fortunately I live by the sea so I try to jump in there instead when possible). I also sometimes go though several shirts in a day and have to take care to manage my electrolytes and hydration.

Showering this often is not a luxury, it's a necessity. To avoid becoming a stinking sweat monster who would send children screaming, I mean.

Locals don't have this problem. I've been living here for years and I don't think my body is going to adapt.

America is a big place, and a lot of it is hot and populated with many people of a similar ancestry to mine. Maybe it's where their "obsession" comes from?

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petodo3y ago

Last time I checked US was not a tropical country. Obviously when I travelled around Southeast Asia I was showering daily. We are talking here about your regular American living and working in AC home and moving between them in AC car and shopping in AC shops and not doing manual labor.

> Locals don't have this problem.

Oh they do, but for instance they use prickly heat powder in some of those tropical countries. And that's also reason why everything is airconditioned and you freeze in buses, cinemas, etc. so they are comfortable and don't sweat that much.

US water consumption per capita is 4X higher (3794 litres) than Germany (855), 9X highter than Czechia (422).

Even warm Spain and Greece have half of US water consumption, Thailand little bit over half, Malaysia less than 1/3 of US consumption, so there is no reasonable excuse why Americans waste that much water.

dahfizz3y ago

Looking at municipal water usage per capita,

US uses 175.9 m3 per capita

Germany uses 236.5 m3 per capita

Czechia uses 57.5 per capita

So individuals in America (i.e. showering) do not use abnormally high amounts of water. The country in total uses more water because we have more farming and more industry than Germany or Czechia.

https://www.worldometers.info/water/us-water/

https://www.worldometers.info/water/germany-water/

https://www.worldometers.info/water/czechia-water/

ehnto3y ago

You're fixating on water consumption as a measure of the impact of showering, but for a households usage it's more likely the amount of grass Americans maintain that pumps those numbers up.

I would also like to point out how massive America is, it has almost all the climates, and it has almost all the infrastructure variants in regards to where the water comes from and how impactful that usage is.

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