91–100 of 132 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there's really only so long you can make an aqueduct This doesn't make any sense. Oil pipelines cross continents.
Good luck watering your fields with a 1m diam pipeline...
Reading this I couldn't stop thinking about the Jack Nicholson movie Chinatown. It's a story of rich men fighting over water rights in the thirties. Apparently very little in California has changed over the years.
> 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?
Before that happen, it will probably be cheaper to buy water from poorer countries, which will destabilize those regions (locals won't be able to buy their own water), and thus start war.
[0]: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/2012109936...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But where you are located isn't what matters, it's where the water was consumed. It does not matter where you are eating Californian almonds; those almonds still used Californian water.
That's another good point. Then the only way I could see it working universally is if you assign a price to the water consumed, where it's costlier in CA than VA. Then you can say that a single almond grown in CA uses $.001 H2O, but in VA it's $.0001 H2O, or something like that. It's just a thought experiment, of course. But it seems like a worthwhile one, if only to introduce the idea of accountability for the cost…
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?
Most rainfall (77% according to this [0]) falls over the ocean. So we suck fresh water out of the ground and then turn it into salt water. [0] https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/233/what-is...
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 ne…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or people will have the city of LA in a more sensible region.
The temperature itself already makes LA a pretty sensible location. It also takes resources dealing with weather and extremes of temperature it lacks. Doing the math an aquaduct pipeline from a wet region could ironically be the cheaper option compared to heavier use of heating and air conditioning.
I would urge everybody to watch the National Geographic video on Netflix “Water & Power: A California Heist”. Gives a complete different view of this couple. https://www.netflix.com/title/80168231
The impression I got from the article wasn't one that wholly praised them.
So, is it me, or is their font choice obnoxiously hard to read? Why can't people just choose screen readable fonts. This is their font: http://www.hoftype.com/sinanova It is very obvious it was designed for printed text, not screens. It's like they wanted Garamond (ahem: https://designforhackers.com/blog/garamond/ ), but shot themselves in the foot with an even worse one. Usually I can prove bad font choices happen b…
It's the fault of designers who think UX is just pretty UI.
> 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?
Before that happen, it will probably be cheaper to buy water from poorer countries, which will destabilize those regions (locals won't be able to buy their own water), and thus start war.
Vox recently covered the history of their Fiji Water brand.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/7/18171384/fiji-water-gir...