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Absolutely the only thing that needs to be done in California is allowing water markets to function. We do not need to be reading Dune except for entertainment

Absolutely the only thing that needs to be done in California is allowing water markets to function. We do not need to be reading Dune except for entertainment.

pjonesdotca 11y ago
Is this a plea for 'letting the markets solve the problem' ? Because California tried that 15 years ago with their electricity problem and history shows how badly Enron abused the 'markets' for profit.
- pjonesdotca 11y ago
  I love it when a comment gets downvoted with no response. Can't be bothered to explain why you disagree?
  - bsder 11y ago
    Welcome to the tech groupthink brigade. How dare you criticize capitalism! It's because tech people think they're all going to get rich. They don't realize that the genuinely rich regard them as stupid peons to be exploited--if they regard them at all. "Work work. Zug Zug. Dabu."
    - stickfigure 11y ago
      Or, perhaps, you're getting downvoted because you said something stupid.
  - rosser 11y ago
    Comments bitching about downvoting tend to get massively downvoted, so that's why this one's getting it. FWIW, I upvoted your previous comment, though; I think you're right there.
- bsder 11y ago
  Actually, California had a very nice electricity market. We even had green energy companies that you could choose to buy your power from even if it was a little more expensive. Then Enron crapped all over it with fraud and collusion. And, of course, since it was Dubya in charge, the Feds did ... absolutely nothing. I'm not a free market defender. However, we will eventually need something like a market in electricity; there are going to be too many suppliers sending electricity into the grid. In addition, had lots of electricity suppliers existed, Enron would not have been able to get away with what they did. The whole reason Enron could do what they did was that they could deplete the grid capacity by taking single power plants offline for "maintenance". If you could backfill that capacity and make money, Enron never have been able to pull that off. That was why the Republicans went out of their way to sell off California's electricity producers.
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  You have a good point. If California repeated like it did 15 years ago and made a "market" called the California Water Exchange, and required water-supply entities to sell to separate aqueduct companies... and if the aqueduct companies were required to deliver water to farmers/consumers/industry at a government-fixed price ... with the supply available on a 1-day-in-advance contract basis only ... and if they made up special mandatory fees when water moved across state lines that people could exploit for fun and profit ... then yeah, that'd be pretty stupid and wouldn't solve anything. because the entire point of moving to a "market" structure is to make the price variable (and in the case of a drought, making water more expensive). Then everyone is financially incentivized to conserve and the high-water-seniority low-margin alfalfa farms could sell their water rights to the almond farmers who just want their expensive trees to survive until the drought ends.
shostack 11y ago
Speak for yourself--I want a damn stillsuit.
- jerf 11y ago
  You can really build one for yourself today. Go get a wetsuit and start hiking through the desert in it. It'll capture all your water just fine. Of course, you'll also die. The problem with a stillsuit is that you can either evaporate a given bit of water for cooling, or you can capture it, but you can not do both. It's physically implausible. Not necessarily impossible, because maybe hypothetically there's some way to concentrate more heat in less water, evaporate that, and recover the rest, although doing that with A: nothing but human power and B: not actually making it so much harder to walk that it's a net loss. And I'd say the efficiency number given in the book probably are impossible, probably provably so in some manner.
anigbrowl 11y ago
It's not so simple as 'allowing them to function' - rather we have to find out how to force people into a water market, because current agricultural water use patterns are rooted in property and contract law, and canceling people's water rights will result in immediate legal challenges on the basic of an unconstitutional taking (-away of a pre-existing economic interest). You're basically going to have to tell people 'no, you can't take water out of the ground that you own or out of the river that runs through or along the boundary of your property, and any contracts that you had with other people to supply water may also be null and void.' I agree that water markets are likely the way to go but that's going to result in a massive economic dislocation and economic dislocations mean political shitstorms.
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  We could label the farmers as economic terrorists and sandboard them.

Absolutely the only thing that needs to be done in California is allowing water markets to function. We do not need to be reading Dune except for entertainment.

pjonesdotca 11y ago

Is this a plea for 'letting the markets solve the problem' ? Because California tried that 15 years ago with their electricity problem and history shows how badly Enron abused the 'markets' for profit.

pjonesdotca 11y ago
I love it when a comment gets downvoted with no response. Can't be bothered to explain why you disagree?
- bsder 11y ago
  Welcome to the tech groupthink brigade. How dare you criticize capitalism! It's because tech people think they're all going to get rich. They don't realize that the genuinely rich regard them as stupid peons to be exploited--if they regard them at all. "Work work. Zug Zug. Dabu."
  - stickfigure 11y ago
    Or, perhaps, you're getting downvoted because you said something stupid.
- rosser 11y ago
  Comments bitching about downvoting tend to get massively downvoted, so that's why this one's getting it. FWIW, I upvoted your previous comment, though; I think you're right there.
bsder 11y ago
Actually, California had a very nice electricity market. We even had green energy companies that you could choose to buy your power from even if it was a little more expensive. Then Enron crapped all over it with fraud and collusion. And, of course, since it was Dubya in charge, the Feds did ... absolutely nothing. I'm not a free market defender. However, we will eventually need something like a market in electricity; there are going to be too many suppliers sending electricity into the grid. In addition, had lots of electricity suppliers existed, Enron would not have been able to get away with what they did. The whole reason Enron could do what they did was that they could deplete the grid capacity by taking single power plants offline for "maintenance". If you could backfill that capacity and make money, Enron never have been able to pull that off. That was why the Republicans went out of their way to sell off California's electricity producers.
fennecfoxen 11y ago
You have a good point. If California repeated like it did 15 years ago and made a "market" called the California Water Exchange, and required water-supply entities to sell to separate aqueduct companies... and if the aqueduct companies were required to deliver water to farmers/consumers/industry at a government-fixed price ... with the supply available on a 1-day-in-advance contract basis only ... and if they made up special mandatory fees when water moved across state lines that people could exploit for fun and profit ... then yeah, that'd be pretty stupid and wouldn't solve anything. because the entire point of moving to a "market" structure is to make the price variable (and in the case of a drought, making water more expensive). Then everyone is financially incentivized to conserve and the high-water-seniority low-margin alfalfa farms could sell their water rights to the almond farmers who just want their expensive trees to survive until the drought ends.

shostack 11y ago

Speak for yourself--I want a damn stillsuit.

jerf 11y ago
You can really build one for yourself today. Go get a wetsuit and start hiking through the desert in it. It'll capture all your water just fine. Of course, you'll also die. The problem with a stillsuit is that you can either evaporate a given bit of water for cooling, or you can capture it, but you can not do both. It's physically implausible. Not necessarily impossible, because maybe hypothetically there's some way to concentrate more heat in less water, evaporate that, and recover the rest, although doing that with A: nothing but human power and B: not actually making it so much harder to walk that it's a net loss. And I'd say the efficiency number given in the book probably are impossible, probably provably so in some manner.

anigbrowl 11y ago

It's not so simple as 'allowing them to function' - rather we have to find out how to force people into a water market, because current agricultural water use patterns are rooted in property and contract law, and canceling people's water rights will result in immediate legal challenges on the basic of an unconstitutional taking (-away of a pre-existing economic interest). You're basically going to have to tell people 'no, you can't take water out of the ground that you own or out of the river that runs through or along the boundary of your property, and any contracts that you had with other people to supply water may also be null and void.' I agree that water markets are likely the way to go but that's going to result in a massive economic dislocation and economic dislocations mean political shitstorms.

meatysnapper 11y ago
We could label the farmers as economic terrorists and sandboard them.