10 ms·

After Water

81 points by epsylon 11y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
I'm having trouble finding any sympathy.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
    True, but that's false logic. Psychopaths can't empathize, but it doesn't mean that those who can't empathize are psychopaths. Claiming that everyone who doesn't empathize is psychopathic is fallacious. Humans can only empathize with those people who exist within their "monkeysphere" (Dunbar's Number). Those who claim otherwise aren't really empathizing, they're just lying to themselves so they can feel they are socially just.
- civilian 11y ago
  It's pretty reasonable for people to expect that water will be available in cities. This is a small community, and even if they were able to identify unsustainable water usage, they don't have the political power to stop the agriculture machine from sucking the water dry, especially since water right laws were written before California was a state and trying to change them could be viewed as unconstitutional. They should absolutely move and find an easier place to live, and take charge of their own lives. But it definitely sucks.
  - Loughla 11y ago
    "They should absolutely move and find an easier place to live, and take charge of their own lives." What are your views on large-scale immigration?
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
      If the people immigrating are buying or renting the homes they will be living in (and are otherwise obeying laws), how can it be anyone else's business that they live there? If you don't like immigrants, convince your neighbors not to sell to them. Also, you're a dumb asshole.
      - nsxwolf 11y ago
        He asked you a question, and you call him a dumb asshole?
        NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
        No, I said if you wanted to, you could persuade your neighbors to not sell to immigrants, not rent to them. And that would make you a dumb asshole. On reddit, I assume that people that complain are dumb, here I figured you were just glancing through and not reading for comprehension. So go back and see for yourself.
        Loughla 11y ago
        What amuses me the most about this is that I never stated whether I was for or against immigration. You assigned a 'side' to my statement. I was merely asking a question.
    - civilian 11y ago
      I'm for it, or maybe neutral towards it. People should be able to move if they want to. It definitely presents challenges, but they're manageable challenges. Sorry for NoMoreNicksLeft's rudeness.
Retric 11y ago
"But that 2 percent, while small, is vital" Sorry, no it's not. "California’s agriculture business might be, at this point, too big to fail." How can people say crap like that with a straight face? PS: If you actually look at a chart of rainfall over the last 100 years this is really fairly close to normal rainfall levels over the last 10 years. But, most charts only go back to an unusual peak and make it seem like that's normal. Nope, this is fairly normal, this it's really just a case of getting used to unsustainable well usage. Which indirectly subsidized a lot of water use when well water runoff ended up in streams.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  It is not all crops but far too many stories focus on crops, California actually expends most of its water on livestock if you count the water used for crops to feed the livestock. Regardless who is using the water is a man made disaster not one created by nature or climate change. Turning a desert into a breadbasket requires a large amount of water and eventually your going to exhaust your supplies when there no one was ever really charged proper rates for the water they used. They kept the prices artificially too low for too long that people became dependent on the prices and now feel entitled. In a way they are, the government through mismanagement created it. Still would it not be a good idea to treat areas of severe drought like those of severe flooding? You will be paid for the lands and no one comes back?
  - masterleep 11y ago
    No, it wouldn't. What would be a good idea is charging the market price for water and seeing what uses make sense.
    - 001sky 11y ago
      Water rights have massive externalities, so this is a classic 'wrong' answer to the problem.
    - bronson 11y ago
      How are you going to determine market price? For example, what would the Sacramento Delta smelt (the fish) pay for their water?
bsimpson 11y ago
That site was beautiful, most of the time. The looping GIFs made it hard to read, cause you'd have to wait for them to restart to continue. The header that fades in/out when you scroll only made scrolling more frustrating. (If I'm scrolling up, I'm trying to read something, which you promptly cover up with your fading in header.)
rndn 11y ago
Lovely illustrations.
- the8472 11y ago
  I find them quite cumbersome, having to watch a gif for some time just to get a few statistics that could be had at a single glance if it weren't for that gimmick. Animations don't allow you to read at your own pace.
mapt 11y ago
(numbers not precise at all) I see that graph of rainfall, jumping between ~350mm in droughts and ~700mm in wet years; From what I hear, the farming industry has allocated perhaps 3000mm of water rights, is presently consuming maybe 600mm (depleting aquifers) down from their usual 700-800mm, and is complaining about reservoirs running dry and water deliveries not showing up. Water rights that the owner does not attempt to use in a given year are lost forever: It's not "Finder-Keeper", it's even worse than that, overconsumption is being guaranteed by this system. If California wants to be sustainable - and not that word has a specific meaning, 'to be able to continue indefinitely', rather than a vague greenness - it needs to reduce the number it actually uses to perhaps 200mm-300mm. Because reservoirs have run low, aquifers have been mined dry, saltwater intrusion and subsidence has been happening, and the geomorphology has been all out of whack. The invisible damage they're doing to the natural resources they rely on using just 100% of rainfall is enormous; They've killed most of the native ecosystem, most of the native rivers entirely, and turned the hills to fire tinder; The un-farmed areas rapidly went from grassland and swamp to desert. At 175% of rainfall things begin to happen like destroying the topography ("Congratulations, your farm is now on a hill. Water doesn't flow uphill.") which have overt, direct externalities, things visited on one's neighbor rather than on one's great-grandchildren. That's insane. One wouldn't expect even a rugged individualist frontiersman to tolerate their neighbor jacking up their property a few millimeters a day in the dead of night in order to rob them of canal usage; Shotguns would be employed in remedy. Aquifers have an interesting property in that they're not necessarily trivially refillable - pore spaces compress and become less permeable. If you let the Everglades loose again, eliminating humans from Florida, it would look drastically different than it looked in pre-Columbian times because the land has sunk and water would now flow over it rather than through it. So: What will cut back agricultural water usage (usage, not deliveries from canals) by around 2/3 in a durable way, which minimizes the hit to GDP? That's what California should be asking itself. Anything which accomplishes this goal is acceptable from a sustainability & environmental standpoint, be it bureaucratic micromanagement, pricing, blanket moratoriums, state seizure, whatever.
- logicchains 11y ago
  >What will cut back agricultural water usage (usage, not deliveries from canals) by around 2/3 in a durable way, which minimizes the hit to GDP? Reducing agricultural subsidies would both cut back agricultural water usage and improve GDP, as most agricultural subsidies make little sense from an economic perspective, representing a net drain on productivity. They encourage farming in places not conducive to farming, leading to significant environmental degradation. Considering the strength of the agricultural lobby however such subsidies are unlikely to be repealed.

After Water

81 points by epsylon 11y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago

I'm having trouble finding any sympathy.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
  True, but that's false logic. Psychopaths can't empathize, but it doesn't mean that those who can't empathize are psychopaths. Claiming that everyone who doesn't empathize is psychopathic is fallacious. Humans can only empathize with those people who exist within their "monkeysphere" (Dunbar's Number). Those who claim otherwise aren't really empathizing, they're just lying to themselves so they can feel they are socially just.
civilian 11y ago
It's pretty reasonable for people to expect that water will be available in cities. This is a small community, and even if they were able to identify unsustainable water usage, they don't have the political power to stop the agriculture machine from sucking the water dry, especially since water right laws were written before California was a state and trying to change them could be viewed as unconstitutional. They should absolutely move and find an easier place to live, and take charge of their own lives. But it definitely sucks.
- Loughla 11y ago
  "They should absolutely move and find an easier place to live, and take charge of their own lives." What are your views on large-scale immigration?
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
    If the people immigrating are buying or renting the homes they will be living in (and are otherwise obeying laws), how can it be anyone else's business that they live there? If you don't like immigrants, convince your neighbors not to sell to them. Also, you're a dumb asshole.
    - nsxwolf 11y ago
      He asked you a question, and you call him a dumb asshole?
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
        No, I said if you wanted to, you could persuade your neighbors to not sell to immigrants, not rent to them. And that would make you a dumb asshole. On reddit, I assume that people that complain are dumb, here I figured you were just glancing through and not reading for comprehension. So go back and see for yourself.
        Loughla 11y ago
        What amuses me the most about this is that I never stated whether I was for or against immigration. You assigned a 'side' to my statement. I was merely asking a question.
  - civilian 11y ago
    I'm for it, or maybe neutral towards it. People should be able to move if they want to. It definitely presents challenges, but they're manageable challenges. Sorry for NoMoreNicksLeft's rudeness.

Retric 11y ago

"But that 2 percent, while small, is vital" Sorry, no it's not. "California’s agriculture business might be, at this point, too big to fail." How can people say crap like that with a straight face? PS: If you actually look at a chart of rainfall over the last 100 years this is really fairly close to normal rainfall levels over the last 10 years. But, most charts only go back to an unusual peak and make it seem like that's normal. Nope, this is fairly normal, this it's really just a case of getting used to unsustainable well usage. Which indirectly subsidized a lot of water use when well water runoff ended up in streams.

Shivetya 11y ago
It is not all crops but far too many stories focus on crops, California actually expends most of its water on livestock if you count the water used for crops to feed the livestock. Regardless who is using the water is a man made disaster not one created by nature or climate change. Turning a desert into a breadbasket requires a large amount of water and eventually your going to exhaust your supplies when there no one was ever really charged proper rates for the water they used. They kept the prices artificially too low for too long that people became dependent on the prices and now feel entitled. In a way they are, the government through mismanagement created it. Still would it not be a good idea to treat areas of severe drought like those of severe flooding? You will be paid for the lands and no one comes back?
- masterleep 11y ago
  No, it wouldn't. What would be a good idea is charging the market price for water and seeing what uses make sense.
  - 001sky 11y ago
    Water rights have massive externalities, so this is a classic 'wrong' answer to the problem.
  - bronson 11y ago
    How are you going to determine market price? For example, what would the Sacramento Delta smelt (the fish) pay for their water?

bsimpson 11y ago

That site was beautiful, most of the time. The looping GIFs made it hard to read, cause you'd have to wait for them to restart to continue. The header that fades in/out when you scroll only made scrolling more frustrating. (If I'm scrolling up, I'm trying to read something, which you promptly cover up with your fading in header.)

rndn 11y ago

Lovely illustrations.

the8472 11y ago
I find them quite cumbersome, having to watch a gif for some time just to get a few statistics that could be had at a single glance if it weren't for that gimmick. Animations don't allow you to read at your own pace.

mapt 11y ago

(numbers not precise at all) I see that graph of rainfall, jumping between ~350mm in droughts and ~700mm in wet years; From what I hear, the farming industry has allocated perhaps 3000mm of water rights, is presently consuming maybe 600mm (depleting aquifers) down from their usual 700-800mm, and is complaining about reservoirs running dry and water deliveries not showing up. Water rights that the owner does not attempt to use in a given year are lost forever: It's not "Finder-Keeper", it's even worse than that, overconsumption is being guaranteed by this system. If California wants to be sustainable - and not that word has a specific meaning, 'to be able to continue indefinitely', rather than a vague greenness - it needs to reduce the number it actually uses to perhaps 200mm-300mm. Because reservoirs have run low, aquifers have been mined dry, saltwater intrusion and subsidence has been happening, and the geomorphology has been all out of whack. The invisible damage they're doing to the natural resources they rely on using just 100% of rainfall is enormous; They've killed most of the native ecosystem, most of the native rivers entirely, and turned the hills to fire tinder; The un-farmed areas rapidly went from grassland and swamp to desert. At 175% of rainfall things begin to happen like destroying the topography ("Congratulations, your farm is now on a hill. Water doesn't flow uphill.") which have overt, direct externalities, things visited on one's neighbor rather than on one's great-grandchildren. That's insane. One wouldn't expect even a rugged individualist frontiersman to tolerate their neighbor jacking up their property a few millimeters a day in the dead of night in order to rob them of canal usage; Shotguns would be employed in remedy. Aquifers have an interesting property in that they're not necessarily trivially refillable - pore spaces compress and become less permeable. If you let the Everglades loose again, eliminating humans from Florida, it would look drastically different than it looked in pre-Columbian times because the land has sunk and water would now flow over it rather than through it. So: What will cut back agricultural water usage (usage, not deliveries from canals) by around 2/3 in a durable way, which minimizes the hit to GDP? That's what California should be asking itself. Anything which accomplishes this goal is acceptable from a sustainability & environmental standpoint, be it bureaucratic micromanagement, pricing, blanket moratoriums, state seizure, whatever.

logicchains 11y ago
>What will cut back agricultural water usage (usage, not deliveries from canals) by around 2/3 in a durable way, which minimizes the hit to GDP? Reducing agricultural subsidies would both cut back agricultural water usage and improve GDP, as most agricultural subsidies make little sense from an economic perspective, representing a net drain on productivity. They encourage farming in places not conducive to farming, leading to significant environmental degradation. Considering the strength of the agricultural lobby however such subsidies are unlikely to be repealed.