[lazide]

The issue is that water is cheap and nearly free when you have enough, and nearly impossible to get when you don’t.

Desalination plants need to be run regularly or everything plugs up/corrodes. They’re also capital intensive and not cheap to operate (as the process itself is expensive per gallon), so expensive to buy and not use, AND not cheap to buy and use.

But 90% of the time, California has more water than it can use (literally!), and the remaining 10% of the time, it still isn’t actually out of water in most places, as the water sources are regional or local, and most local or regional water sources are still fine.

So you’d be spending a massive amount of money to hedge for an edge case that generally never happens in a way the hedge would economically solve. Which is why they generally don’t actually get built, or if they do, they get built and then decommissioned. At least around here.

Other, drier climates (middle east) are different of course. We’ll get there eventually I’m sure.

[legitster]

> But 90% of the time, California has more water than it can use

How can this possibly be true? Nevada and Arizona are both about to go dry because California is still taking a majority of the water from Lake Mead.

[lazide]

Those two facts are not contradictory at all!

See the agreement this is under [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact]. Under current conditions, it’s easy for Arizona or Nevada to no longer have any allotment while California still has plenty left.

That said, now is the 10% of the time the State doesn’t have too much water.

Also note, water supplies are generally local or at most regional. The water pulled from the Colorado under the compact is pulled and transported by the Metropolitan Water District and goes to SoCal. Even if it dries up, and the aqueduct pulling water from the Central Valley and Eastern Sierra breaks - that really only impacts LA.

Which is a lot of people, and would be a crisis (ad unlikely, to put it mildly!) but a tiny portion of California by number of cities, geographic area, etc.

[legitster]

> Even if it dries up, and the aqueduct pulling water from the Central Valley and Eastern Sierra breaks - that really only impacts LA.

Again, you seem to be dismissive that California is about to destroy the economy of two other states in a quest for cheap water.

The CRC:

>Extreme shortage. The most severe shortage considered in the interim guidelines is when the level of Lake Mead drops below 1,025 feet (312 m), in which event 7,000,000 acre-feet (8.6 km3) per year will be delivered to the Lower Basin states: 4,400,000 acre-feet (5.4 km3) to California, 2,320,000 acre-feet (2.86 km3) to Arizona, and 280,000 acre-feet (0.35 km3) to Nevada.

90% of the water in Las Vegas comes from Lake Mead. In the event of Lake Mead drying up, the entire state of Nevada gets less than 0.5% of the volume of the Colorado. While I guess it's nice to know that SoCal has other options when the water runs out, we're talking about a humanitarian disaster for a Las Vegas that has no other options.

If desalination is really unnecessary, California should stop blocking efforts to revise the Compact.

[lazide]

Hardly dismissive - it’s called staying on topic? A question was asked, folks seem to not know the how or the why if the situation - so here I am.

The California diversion of the Colorado is downstream of AZ and NV. California only gets the water they let it have, under the agreement. Which California probably has more lawyers than total population in both AZ and NV state Capitals, so there is that.

California has always out ‘peopled’ and out ‘moneyed’ it’s neighbors, and LA+SF has done that within the state.

When resources were seemingly infinite and the country was growing at a breakneck pace, that was controversial but didn’t really break things.

Everything has a breaking point somewhere. We’ll see if this is one of them.

[daniel-cussen]

Well farmers love to put civilians at the back of the line to the well and hold them hostage. Farmers use something like...hard to measure they really really don't want measurement, but 80-90% of water. In this paper it says roughly that percentage of water is used for agriculture, it's in the charts.

Farmers get water gifts and city slickers get droughts. Basically a farmer is a water thief, surely not in 5000mm rainfall a year but in Mediterranean weather? Water thief all the way. Chinatown was about this. Just stealing water nonstop, bribes murder conspiracy you name it. It's the limiting factor in these climates and it's so so easy to steal.

Take one more drop. What's the consequence? Nothing happens. Classic tragedy of the commons.

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I don't see why a farmer should pay any less for a liter of water than anybody else. Free market for water, you pay for the quantity and the distribution raw every time. People object and insist on price discrimination to protect poor people, when really price discrimination discriminates against poor people. They end up having to buy bottled soda (blacks do this) because the water is too salty to drink, while a farmer with a square mile just pays for the power to his new wells.

Now it's true that salting the water has a huge cost and that turning water into brine to make dentists happy (or they start this crazy squealing screams about children getting cavities at rates they are purely making up) is expensive. Then stop doing it. Cold turkey. And then, don't insist everyone have perfect teeth. Feature people with bad teeth in posters, tell people to see dentists once a year at most, pull teeth now and then, look at artists like Robyn https://music.apple.com/us/artist/robyn/535211 who don't have stereotypical American dentist dream-teeth. It costs $100 a year to salt the water, then you go to your doctor she says you need to eat less sodium meaning shake the salt shaker less. What about instead colluded degreed professionals stop putting that sodium in the water table? Plus that salt in the brine--cannot be called water if it's intentionally salted--tap brine--alters brain chemistry to crave sugar, so it's not even as good at what it's supposed to do as it claims. Causes chemical imbalance, literally. F atoms effing up your sodium-chloride channels into sodium-fluoride channels. They're called sodium-chloride for historical reasons, from an era before F'ing up the water.

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Changing subjects back, price discrimination generally backfires against the poor in favor of the rich. Ever seen people digging a well in a ghetto? That's pretty much what they do in fact do, walk to the eg gas station and buy some big bottles of juice so they don't die of thirst. Ghetto water is so salty they can't even drink it (for political reasons, it's formal oppression, F'ing up the water impedes ghettoes from eg taking people to small claims courts or filing for welfare, or protesting, joining unions, complaining properly, getting an education, competing for slots in colleges, everything everything everything). The people in those ghettoes are the doing what they're doing and are doing as poorly as they're doing because they're smart and coping with poisoning. Same as the rehab I went to, 100% of patients were forced to take clozapine, and almost 100% of them rapidly fattened like fast, doubled their weight. One exception. The paranoid guy, yours truly, recognized the pharmaceutical, Abbott, from a previous round of poison (Valproic acid) with similar shoot-the-moon marketing and dodged the pill. Only skinny guy in the rehab.

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But let's not change the subject. We're talking about poison sure enough, but let us be specific.

That water tastes more like toothpaste than toothpaste itself, which is what sodium fluoride tastes like. That's sodium fluoride's signature flavor. Your body knows what that shit is, every kid hates it and struggles to avoid it, because they're smart. That's how you take mountain water and make it taste like city water, mix in some toothpaste. And in Chile which is more heavily geopolitically oppressed the fluoridation in toothpaste is insane, 250 ppm in USA, 1650 ppm in Chile. Regulation. You have to go to like a Native Chilean (Mapuche) store for non-F-ed-up toothpaste. And F-ing is the specific reason you're told not to swallow toothpaste, that's an acknowledgement that NaF is bad for you, but it's irrelevant you absorb it through your gums and mouth. Much more than with teeth, the least chemically reactive organ.

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Back to the farmer, farmer is out of luck with no water rights, nothing, oh, what? Farmers go out of business? Go, go out of business, business of theft, your subsidized thieving farm going out of business is pure benefit to the economy. Everybody wins. Just leave land as shrubland, come on. Dry, some native grasses, some bald spots, looks beautiful that way, like the land on Highway 280 South of Stanford, or around Apple Campus for that matter. Beautiful, nobody waters it, not exploited for grazing, native grasses outcompete invaders, no maintenance, leave it like that. It's not a waste. That's California. Not a golf course, that would be England. There yeah. East Coast too. Go back to England if you want to have green lawns at a price that rips everyone else off, go and don't come back, if you think the East is better than the West, go to the East from the West.

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That's one of the industries startups (including tons of YC startups, this is the right forum to bring this up) have a really hard time in, looks tempting but no, medicine and agriculture. And music, "don't do a music startup" as pg put it. No particular reason they should be so aggressive against outsiders, right? Look like good sectors? All are heavily subsidized stealing from everybody around them. No sympathy for farmers. At all. Dude just sell the land get a job selling shoes like shrinks propose rehabilitation patients do. Same goes for doctors: forget your degree, if you're a doctor you can get a job selling shoes like you propose your rehabilitation patients do. Sink or swim. No chinitas [as they're called in Chile, like the ladybug insects which do this to each other (no relation to Chinese, it's a coincidence), meaning climbing on someone else's back and drowning them to stay afloat, like both those industries currently are to everything else].

.

So gross to see rich people begging.

[lazide]

The issue you see here is first you'd need to define a price for water.

There isn't a single price. Every water district has a different one, and every water district has vastly different costs for their sources, extraction, and distribution - if for no other reason than California has wildly different climates, geological conditions, and water resources across the state.

Not to mention, under what legal theory should someone pay for water they are pumping out of the ground, under the land they own, with water rights they paid the prior owner for, using infrastructure they paid for and was installed before any of this started being a problem? And who should they even pay it to?

And should they do that even if they're in an aquifer which isn't overdrawn, and which isn't even shared with anyone else? I've got a well on some land which is in a 'pocket' aquifer. Literally 3 other people have land that accesses it. Why should anyone else have any say over how much any of us pump from it?

The state is starting to force people to do that, but it isn't an easy thing to do. You're certainly not going to convince anyone it's fair for them to pay a price per gallon for that untreated water they paid to locate and extract, over treated water at a tap in someones residence in the city.

That said, the general point of 'this is crazy bullshit, why do I have to cut back when they're sitting here wasting water on Almonds for nothing?!' is totally true. There is a LOT of bullshit about water in California.

[daniel-cussen]

> That said, the general point of 'this is crazy bullshit, why do I have to cut back when they're sitting here wasting water on Almonds for nothing?!' is totally true. There is a LOT of bullshit about water in California.

OK let's start with that. In fact many Californian consumers now prefer oat milk to almond milk because they know they're basically drinking 10000 gallons of pure fresh delicious non-F-ed-up water per quart of milk they drink. They hate it because it sucks. It's just shit and they hate it. Almonds are rightly and widely hated. Hatred. Good because that hatred gets rid of them, gets rid of almond desertification.

So you're basically right in everything you say, but there is a distinction to be made presently. The water table. If it were a mineral, like copper, if its under your land hey, go for it. But with water, like oil, and lithium, sucking it out of one place drains everybody else (on the same aquifer, oil field, salt flat). It's regulated with oil, not with water or lithium. So if a neighbor farmer's sucking out water sucks out not only water under his land but water under my land, that's impinging on my rights. He doesn't get to suck out the water from under my land. Any more than he gets to steal my bed from under me (Proverbs).

California specializes in evictions and water theft, though. Landlords steal from you faster than you can take them to court, they end up covering for each other, I am a Roman Law hero and I can vouch.

.

And moreover, there is due to be accorded to being a citizen in California independently of being a property owner in California. Like these farmers can totally split with 1000 gallons for a "city slicker" as they call them. Monthly water bill, or a pack of almonds? Same price really.

Instead of trying to sell them one quart of almond milk. That's the endgame, dry them out, salt their water, negreate their sustenance and then sell them back some terrible shit in terrible plastic at 100000000% the price.

Extortion.

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Realistically it's because the county is loyal to the land, so whomever owns the land gets crazy benefits, blind eyes, et cetera. Obviously has to pay for them, lobbying papering over direct bribes. Obviously there's bribes, nobody with power would allow such blatant shit without a payout, it just doesn't make Historical sense. Nobody does that. I think the police doesn't take direct bribes (I took a risk on the math that there was a 2% chance SFPD was corrupt, couldn't afford that risk so didn't call them up), but small county? Knows the mayor? Invites him to his land? Phone call away from anybody? Yeah bribes. Nobody does it differently, like ever. I don't know, Californians are very square, for sure some counties are square, but really...no. There's bribes. In addition to the lobbying, that's to paper them over. The lobbying gives plausible deniability, to say the favor was done for campaign contributions. But nobody cares that fucking much about their campaign contributions if they can't touch them even diagonally. And there's career paths formally known to lead to that campaign contribution money entering the pocket, I think a Republican lobbyist talks about retiring and becoming "a top lobbyist". If it's indirect enough, like fines or taxes, that's fine, but uh...no dude there have to be bribes. I can't keep denying it in any way, I just divine it, there's crazy bribes and payers and recipients tell each other there's no way for them to be tracked.

Goes back to the water table, or voltages, there's a current flowing out, that doesn't go anywhere. Then there's an equal current flowing over here, that doesn't come from anywhere. They're next to each other. You can't look at what is in between.

Must have some hell of a capacitor in between to not be connected.