Every time this comes up, the simple straightforward actually-legal solution of "let's pay the farmers to use less water" gets downvoted to oblivion. I conclude

Every time this comes up, the simple straightforward actually-legal solution of "let's pay the farmers to use less water" gets downvoted to oblivion. I conclude that many Californians on HN simply dislike farmers and don't want them to prosper. The other possibility, that there isn't actually a water shortage in California so there's no need to waste money managing water, seems to contradict everything I've ever learned on this topic from the commercial news media.