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A Kingdom from Dust (2018)

story.californiasunday.com

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Re: A Kingdom from Dust (2018)

#51

Post by rhizome »

m0zg wrote: post #48
whyisthewhat wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His policies are designed to selectively terrorize migrant labor and make it impossible for them to have recourse to the state. This keeps wages low because no private businesses are seriously penalized for employing migrant labor, but the laborers themselves are at risk of being brutalized by the immigration authorities if they attempt to seek redress for unfair treatment by their employers. The way to actually reso…

It's not "migrant" labor. It's labor which consists of people who _have broken US law_, and it's hired by people who are also breaking US law. It's like that article a few weeks back which called an armed home invader an "unwanted house visitor". These people _can't legally work here_, like, at all. If this is something you don't like, have your congresspeople change the law. Selective enforcement of laws is an insan…

What penalty (or penalties) do you think is fair for companies that hire "people who have broken US law?"

Re: A Kingdom from Dust (2018)

#52

Post by freehunter »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #35
Scramblejams wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the article is correct that water will become more valuable than oil, then of course you're gonna ship that water to California. The economics will mandate it. Now whether the article is correct about that prediction is another question. It's an understatement to say I'm skeptical. Desalination plants produce expensive water, but not that expensive...

I'm skeptical that this "water more valuable than oil" prediction will come to pass. Currently, a thousand gallons of freshwater from a desalination plant costs between $2.50 to $5 to the end consumer in the US. By contrast, a thousand gallons of West Texas Intermediate crude oil costs around $2500. And oil is becoming more scarce as we burn through it. https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-05-15/desalination-expensiv...

I would agree. Oil only exists in certain locations and is extremely difficult to get, so it necessarily has to be extracted by corporations and shipped around the world.

Water, on the other hand, covers a lot of the surface of the planet, and even if you're not standing by a lake or river almost anyone can dig straight down and with an hour or so of work you're likely to find water. The places where this is not true are fairly rare, and the easier solution is to move the people to where water is instead of moving water to where people are. Filtering water to be drinkable is just so much easier than getting crude oil out of the ground.

And worst case scenario, even if you have to move water from one place to another because the best farmland doesn't have water, basically anyone with a tanker truck and a hose can supply water pretty cheap. There's just not enough barriers to entry in the water business.

The only way I see water becoming more valuable than oil is if oil demand falls so far that it's practically worthless.

Re: A Kingdom from Dust (2018)

#53

Post by pm90 »

> One day water will be more valuable than oil, and like oil it will start wars.

Is this true? Its true that natural sources of water might be scant, but what happens if we just build huge desal plants all along the CA coast and pipe in the water? And what if those desal plants are powered by cheap renewable energy?

Re: A Kingdom from Dust (2018)

#54

Post by pm90 »

m0zg wrote: post #16

Help me out here. Why is using such vast quantities of water necessarily a bad thing? It evaporates right back into the atmosphere and then condenses and finds its way to the rivers again and again. It doesn't disappear. It doesn't get irretrievably ruined with industrial chemicals. Is this mostly about limited capacity?

You're depleting natural waterways and groundwater acquifers. Thats why its a bad thing.

Also...they're basically bypassing US labor laws by employing illegal immigrants en-massse. It seems like they've been smart enough to provide them with benefits like healthcare, 401(k)'s etc. But wait until the farms pass on to their kids, who will try to squeeze even more out of the unprotected laborers ...

Re: A Kingdom from Dust (2018)

#55

Post by function_seven »

m0zg wrote: post #43
function_seven wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely is. That's how water rights in this state work. You own the land, you can tap the aquifer to your heart's content. If you're poor and can't afford to chase the water table down, then you no longer get water. The ground is subsiding due to this[1] See East Porterville[2] as an example [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porterville,_Californi…

Thanks for the links, I got a much better understanding of the situation now. Now I don't get why this is allowed to continue.

It's a minefield of property rights and politics. Land owners have water rights. The state can't (or won't) just arbitrarily yank those rights without compensation. At this point, I think that compensation would be in the very high billions of dollars? I'm not sure what the value is.

Water in California is a complicated story. The right solution might be to take over the rights from the private owners and ration water in a systemic way. But politically that is still a non-starter.

If this had been foreseen way back when, with water being treated as a public resource to be auctioned to the highest bidder, we'd all be better off. But it's too late to easily switch to that. There are way too many rights-of-ownership to untangle.

Imagine if the FCC never existed, and spectrum rights were instead allocated based on who has the tallest and most powerful transmitter. That's loosely how water is currently apportioned. He who has the deepest well and thirstiest crops gets the water.

Re: A Kingdom from Dust (2018)

#56

Post by mbesto »

m0zg wrote: post #48
whyisthewhat wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His policies are designed to selectively terrorize migrant labor and make it impossible for them to have recourse to the state. This keeps wages low because no private businesses are seriously penalized for employing migrant labor, but the laborers themselves are at risk of being brutalized by the immigration authorities if they attempt to seek redress for unfair treatment by their employers. The way to actually reso…

It's not "migrant" labor. It's labor which consists of people who _have broken US law_, and it's hired by people who are also breaking US law. It's like that article a few weeks back which called an armed home invader an "unwanted house visitor". These people _can't legally work here_, like, at all. If this is something you don't like, have your congresspeople change the law. Selective enforcement of laws is an insan…

> It's labor which consists of people who _have broken US law_, and it's hired by people who are also breaking US law

Of which Trump himself is guilty of [0]. Why isn't Trump in jail for that specific crime already then? You see the parent's point now?

[0] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-trump-organization-emp...

Re: A Kingdom from Dust (2018)

#57

Post by ebcode »

It's interesting to think of the state of California as one ginormous mining-town. Only instead of some rare mineral that will one day be exhausted, it's the groundwater in the aquifer that underlies the entire valley.

The concept of virtual water may help us to treat this vital resource with more care. I'm imagining something like a nutrition label, where there's an estimate of how many liters/gallons of water is needed to grow the food.

A quick search turned up a food/water required table: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-mu...

Looks like we could do quite a bit to reduce our individual water usage by substituting a meal of cabbage and potatoes for a chicken dinner every so often...

Re: A Kingdom from Dust (2018)

#58

Post by sremani »

hourislate wrote: post #5

California is a special place. No where else in the USA/Canada do you have such a wonderful climate where you can have so many growing seasons (6?). It is the Bread Basket of NA. It would be worth helping find a solution to provide this area of the country with water.

Unless North America is into eating Strawberry flavored Almond Bread, CA is not bread Basket of NA.

Garlic basket - Yes, Strawberry Basket - Yes,

Nut Basket - For sure (if you count hollywood celeb and eccentric world saviors of SV).

But bread basket .. nope. The people of CA think the sun rotates around them. The most arable land in 'Murica is the mid-west and Mississippi river system. America with out CA will happily feed itself without missing a beat, without Almond milk of course.

Re: A Kingdom from Dust (2018)

#59

Post by dharma1 »

It isn't looking great for pistachio cultivation in Iran either - https://phys.org/news/2016-09-iran-pistachio-farms-dying-thi...

We have more frequent droughts in many parts of the world as a result of climate change, and groundwater reserves are being depleted - this will have a large impact on where crops can be grown

Re: A Kingdom from Dust (2018)

#60

Post by dang »

howard941 wrote: post #15

The unexcerpted article is at https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-du...

Yes. We've changed the URL to that from https://longreads.com/2018/02/05/the-couple-who-turned-a-cal...

There was also this thread last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291845.

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