No one is advocating punching anyone in the face. The journalist is essentially advocating public shaming, i.e. "Hey, look at this asshole who dumped the whole complimentary bowl of lollipops in their bag."

I find the Hacker news response to this pretty interesting. I think you'll find that many/most programmer/engineer types will think about this from a "does it follow the rules of the system" perspective: He's following the law as it exists, so if there's a problem, the issue is with the system. Many/most other people, however, will approach this from a social expectations perspective: This person is acting in a socially unacceptable way, so they deserved to be shamed.

I'm not saying which way is better or right, but as someone firmly in the programmer/engineer camp, it's been important for me to understand how so many people approach the "rules" of the world from a very different perspective.

The "programmer/engineers" also seem to ignore how the laws get made, and how changes are opposed. This is an adversarial system. If your adversary can block progressive reform then shaming is really the only answer.

Also, stopping short of doxxing, it's simply useful for people to know that this level of private consumption exists.

>it's simply useful for people to know that this level of private consumption exists.

Why? How can we assume that this water is being wasted? What if the owner has a private hydroponics system, and they sell produce to farmers markets? It's legal, productive, and requires a lot of water.

Starting a witchhunt because a wealthy person uses a lot of water in a water-scarce area misses the point entirely, because we have no idea what the water is being used for. If there's a legitimate use for it, and they're able to pay, I don't see what the problem is.

If you're worried about water being legitimately wasted, work towards getting water usage regulated so we can determine which activities are wasteful, and which are not. Then, customers would be forced to explain water-usage like this, and could be penalized if it were deemed unnecessary.

We can't ask whether it's justified if we don`t know it's happening.

Investigating a potential problem requires recognition that there may be a problem. That's what's happening here -- investigation. I'm surprised you find that controversial.

Sometimes investigations start with the regulators, and sometimes they start with members of the public.

We shouldn't have to wait for the regulators to change the regulations before we're allowed to ask "what's going on here?" In fact, what reason is there to change any regulation if there's no perception of a problem, nor desire by anybody to see it changed?

You seem to be arguing that anything that is not explicitly prohibited by regulations should be acceptable to the public. If people can't regulate themselves to at least some degree, this means we'd have to explicitly codify all "good behaviour". This is unworkable, and frankly undesirable.