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Specifically NorCal water being redirected to Southern California and particularly LA.
[...]
The drought scam in California has been entirely fictional, and mostly related to the mega-cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles stealing all the water from the eastern range [...] The same applies to Southern California agriculture

BS. Cities and towns only use about 10% of the water. The vast majority of water is used for agriculture and for environmental reasons (keeping rivers flowing, wetlands wet, and preventing saltwater inundation in bays). Yes most of the water used by LA metro residents is piped in from elsewhere. But it's a tiny fraction of the water that's redirected around the state. Southern California has very little agriculture - a few orange groves and scattered ground crops. The vast majority of agriculture is in central California (note that the Bay Area is actually in the middle of the state, not Northern California as its generally called, and is adjacent to most of this agricultural productivity).

What needs to happen is for the price of agricultural products grown in California to increase to truly reflect the scarcity of water. Agriculture contributes only 2% to California's GDP, but consumes 80% of its non-environmental water use. California's agriculture industry needs to be charged full price for the water it uses. People in other states will then either pay the higher prices for California crops and livestock, allowing California farmers to afford to buy water from sources in other states. Or they'll refuse to pay the higher prices, allowing production to move to states where it makes more economic sense to grow those crops and livestock. Both of these alleviate the endemic water shortages. But as long as the state government insists on subsidizing its agriculture industry with cheap water, it'll result in water shortages for residents outside of the agricultural areas. That's what happens when you subsidize something - it distorts the economy causing shortages elsewhere.

I've been a programmer in everything from 6502 assembly language to Java with struts and Ajax. I spent 3 years cleaning almost non-functional programming delivered by young, ignorant IBM college grads into something elegant before I became a project manager and then team lead over 15 developers. And I saved my ass off the entire time. Because I knew my time would come.

And it did- in a company that had never had layoffs before after it tried (against a lot of senior programmers advice) to convert to all six SAP packages at the same time and failed catastrophically (because a lot of young people said it could be done if we just ran at it fast enough and "believed!" it would work. I know so many people who had nice houses, kids in college, and good skill sets who never got programmer jobs again.

I'd seen it before after Y2K as well. Mass layoffs. 40 and under got jobs easily- 55 and over left the field. Even tho they had more knowledge than us younger folks.

Age discrimination among programmers is rife and regularly reported in the industry. It's rife in other fields too. But IT is the worst. 80% of people leave the field by age 40. It is not really a career you can count on.

Anyway...Good luck. I'll leave you these to digest.

Time for bed, I'm retired and I'm helping a young whippersnapper programmer friend of a friend who hasn't got a clue how to remove wet sheetrock and insulation from his flooded house. (It's dead simple- you can find it easily without even requiring google fu- he's just young and lacks confidence and much worse physical condition than I am- but I ski 3-4 weeks a year and exercise regularly). After that, I'll be helping a couple other folks with their flooded houses. Then maybe I'll do something longer term thru a formal group like RC (I don't trust their legal document tho) or Barkley (a united way group with a much friendlier legal document.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

He told us, "Sooner or later, your corporation will get rid of you, not because youâ(TM)re old, but because they are concerned what kind of face they put in front of their clients," he said.

"They want to be thought of as youthful, to look progressive, and they won't put a guy out there who is 60 years old. I know it's stupid, but you would be surprised how many people think like that."

"Whatâ(TM)s happening in the tech sector is a general trend toward youth," Dermody tells us.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Salesforce have young work forces. Google's median age based on data from 2014 is the ripe old age of 30. (See chart on median employee age from salary analyst PayScale, below).

"At some Silicon Valley companies, the top executives are explicit in their preference for workers under 35," she says.

https://www.javaworld.com/arti...
A late-1990s study by the National Science Foundation and Census Bureau found that only 19 percent of computer science graduates are still working in programming once they're in their early 40s. This suggests serious attrition among what should be the dominant labor pool in IT.

http://www.scpr.org/programs/a...
But in tech, people tell a different story. Programmers in their 40s leave their graduation years off resumes so as not to tip the employer off to their age. Engineers with 15 years of experience canâ(TM)t get a response from potential employers. Hiring managers at companies in Silicon Valley have spoken openly about preferring younger candidates because they will work longer hours for less money and usually don't have certain family or home obligations that older employees with families might have.

Part of the problem could be that the indus

Los Angeles consumed about 17,957,000,000 in August of 2013

A gallon of sear water contains 4.5 oz of salt

So if LA used exclusively desalinized water, they would have 10,100,812,500 lbs of salt on their hands (17,957,000,000*4.5/8)

This is about 126,260,156 cubic feet.

Your average Panamax cargo ship has about 3.6 million cubic feet of space.

This is about 35 ships worth of salt.

There are about 16,900 bulk carrier ships operating in the world.

The actual solution is to not do business with companies that use H1-B workers at all

So I should stop using electricity from Southern California Edison, then? Maybe I can build my own nuke plant and run 2,000 miles of wire and build my own little substation down the street.

(51% of the water in CA is given to animal agriculture.)

Are you sure? That number seems well out of whack from my understanding of how water is used in most agricultural water systems. First you probably mean that as a percentage of the water consumed because it is unlikely that more than 50% of the water in California is consumed, most of it will be used to manage the system itself (checking facts.... yep... http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/...). So once you correct for that detail and turn to agriculture, fixed plantings and cropping are metered and use giga litres per annum but livestock water is such an insignificant amount that it's not even metered (as long as the pipe is small enough). Perhaps in the US (and the big valley in particular) feed is a big part of that cropping.... rudimentary googling suggests it is nearer to 25% than 50% and that includes alfalfa or nearer to 10% if you are measuring irrigated pastures. It's a bit different where I am from since we don't usually irrigate pasture except for dairy use.

I wholeheartedly disagree with almost everything you say, but if you are going to run the argument you may as well use facts a little closer to the reality. Who knows your argument might even hold water for some folk under those condition, if you will excuse the pun.

Farmland gets 80%

I don't know where you're getting that number, it's no more than 60% in a good year. In bad years, it's less.....farmers only got ~20% of their normal allocation this year, and have been restricted for the past several years.

They used to arrest people in the Los Angeles subways for the same thing - but the Mayor finally stopped the ridiculous practice:

"This is simply common sense. I want our law enforcement resources directed toward serious crime, not cell phone charging."

http://www.scpr.org/news/2014/...

She (Diane Ravitch) believed in testing and charter schools and getting rid of unions.

You must have her confused with her former self. Diane Ravitch advocates AGAINST standardized federal testing and has stated that she believes charter schools are an attempt to privatize public schools. She also did an about face on the prospect that so-called Super Teachers and their sidekick techie assistants could replace the public schools.

I am glad of this. I worked for a period of time at the University of Washington, helping to facilitate research into the use of VR in public schools. The research was biased in favor of a positive outcome, and I learned to be quite skeptical of the promotion of 'technology' in education. Apparently, the LAUSD (LA Unified School District) has learned this lesson the hard way, after investing over a billion dollars in a ,failed project to hand kiddies iPads from Apple with the promise that their techie partner, Pearson, would deliver super-teachers-in-a-box.

Ravitch is also a staunch critic of charter schools, like the one Jeb Bush backed in Miami. Liberty City Charter School should be a bell whether for anyone interested in what management focused on the bottom line in education may create... In this case they created a smoking hole in an already underserved neighborhood.

You assume AGW is the cause for the current drought.

Previous to the California "dry spell", climatologists were saying that AGW would make Calif WETTER, not dryer.

Your claim is based on erroneous assumption.

GIGO.

A recent study by the University of Minnesota and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute found that while the amount of precipitation wasn't unusually low for a drought the intense heat was. That causes increased soil and plant evapotranspiration leaving the soil dryer making the the worst drought in the past 1,200 years. The intense heat is easier to connect to AGW.

Nearly 2,000 flights in Chicago have been canceled so far today as federal aviation officials slowly resume operations at O'Hare and Midway airports following a fire that was deliberately set at an FAA radar center, apparently by a disgruntled worker.

If a single person can cause so much havoc without killing anyone — and without the condemnation and sympathy for the victim concomitant with any would-be murder — the terrorists don't need to kill.

Heck, they don't even need to set fire — just phone-in an anonymous warning.

A moderately motivated group could also disable a city's subway system for hours — by boarding the trains on carefully picked stations and pretending to have a seizure of some sort. Our kind society's rules (as evidenced in that paragon of humanity New York City) say, you can not be taken out of the train — except by "qualified personnel". So all other passengers will be removed from the car and the train will wait for the EMS to arrive and figure out, what to do with you. If your friends do the same to every other subway lines at the same time — during rush hour — your organization is bound to get donations, all without you killing or maiming a single person...

...The defendant always as the advantage in US criminal law.

That's hilarious! I wish I had mod points this is definitely a +5 Funny!

San Onofre is being shut down due to intentionally obstructive Federal and California regulation. After the leaks were found in the new equipment, SCE was wrangling with the Japanese supplier (Mitsubishi) of the bad tubes and trying to put together the plan to replace them and bring the plant online, but CA anti-nuke activists, incluing the luddites at FOE lobbied Democrat Senator Boxer and the Obama administration to make it unworkable. SCE (who was paying large amounts of money every month for all their basic costs including the employees) could never get an answer from the federal regulators on WHEN their applications to re-start the plant would even be processed if they spent the money to replace the pipes (this was NOT normal). When you are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to operate a plant that is producing nothing, and government regulators keep delaying giving you a date when you will even be able to dream of using it IF you make it over the increasing number of hurdles politically-motivated people keep throwing up, at some point you "pull the plug" and cut your losses.

Nearly all the inflation in the costs of nuclear power has come from regulations and lawsuits. Had it not been for the Ralph Nader style of crusading legal actions designed to kill things (sue anybody making any technology they cannot prove is perfect... and let's not notice that nobody else, like lawyers, are being held to that standard) we would indeed have very cheap and plantiful electricity thanks, in large part, to nuclear power (which has been stuck with ancient tech for many decades because the regulatory/legal environment makes newer safer more-efficient designs uneconomical TO GET CERTIFIED)

Thanks for that link.

I didn't realize Rhythm & Hues filed for bankruptcy recently this year?!
http://www.scpr.org/blogs/econ...

Southern California gets wildfires in the spring and the fall due to the prevalence of strong Santa Ana winds (hot dry winds blowing from the deserts, over the mountains, toward the sea) and, given that the region is essentially an irrigated desert there's ALWAYS material ready and willing to burn. Any time a fire starts in the brush or in a canyon for ANY reason it will naturally become a massive wildfire unless fire fighters get it out in a hurry while it's still small

Some wild fires are started by power lines knocked-down by strong Santa Ana winds. Many are caused by illegal alien migrant workers who camp-out in some of the brush-filled canyons and use small fires to cook or keep warm on cold nights (one body has been found in the remains of such a campsite in the canyon where one of the current fires began). Some are started by morons throwing cigarette butts out of cars. Occasionally some hunter causes one. Many are either directly caused by federal land management activity or made worse by federal policies. And then, of course, one should never underestimate the destructive power of a pair of stupid teenage males who clearly have no valid reason to live.

Nowhere in that list was "global warming". In fact, there were some really bad fires in the 1960s that were only matched, NOT in the 70's or 80's or 90's but in 2012. When you consider that Southern California has been getting more and more-populated and developed decade-by-decade, it should NOT surprise if the number if fires detected (with more people around, and more arsonists present) and fought (with more property at risk) goes up - indeed the trendline for value of property should also go up (because more developed property, with higher value, is threatened when more land is developed and populated). Lining-up such fire data with climate data will easily provide a correlation-causality illusion. Of course, such false relationships are the sort of propaganda no self-respectingAGW alarmist can resist: When the "weather" seems severe it's proof of global warming, but when the "weather" is cold or fails to produce the predicted hurricanes and tornadoes, these uber-intellectual titans insist that "only an idiot" would conflate "weather" with "climate" - and they think the general public is too stupid to spot the completely dishonest and hypocritical "spin"...

Note for the future: When Katrina hit and Al Gore was running around pushing his book and film, he and his friends were pointing to a rise in hurricanes and tornadoes as evidence for AGW - but we are (and have been for severl years) experiencing a record low-level of such activity (and A.G. and his friends are notably quiet about these "weather" incidents). It is inevitable that hurricaine and tornado activity will rise in the future - when it does, look for Al and his compatriots to once again start using "weather" as "proof" of their "climate" theories. Given that we continue to build more-valuable things in more desireable (and riskier) locations, we can predict that the monetary damage caused by those future weather events will go up and up too, which will no-doubt make it into some dramatic (and intentionally misleading) graphs...

I guess you have not been incarcerated in a California prison:) http://www.scpr.org/news/2012/05/04/32295/california-officials-attorneys-inmates-sumbit-plan/

As far as I have heard, it has been limited to federally controlled areas like National parks.

There is much more going on. Examples of federal efforts as well others.

But how could he not write the sniffer program? A co-worker of mine wrote a fun screen-saver. It posted each image sniffed over wifi in a random place on the background, creating a real-time collage of what people were viewing on the Internet. He wrote the program and showed it to his boss, and fortunately being at a start-up, he found it amusing. He also hacked our WEP security in a few hours with some hacker software, leading us to upgrade our protection rather than get pissed. It is the nature of good engineers to be curious, and Joe Engineer does not offend me. It's the government that scares me.

How about Southern California Public Radio?

http://www.scpr.org/programs/patt-morrison/2012/02/14/22523/monsanto-lawsuit

Also, New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/dining/a-suit-airs-debate-on-organic-vs-modified-crops.html

I remember when Evelle J. Younger was running against Brown in the late 70s. It was the first election I could vote in, anyway he had a funny commercial of Jerry Brown caricature and an old washing machine. The ad had the repeating lines of "Indecisive, Wishy-Washy" about how Brown had flip flopped on issues and was basically a hypocrite. Of course all politicians are hypocrites but it still was one of the funniest political ads I can remember.

I think the Malathion he drank has affected his brain because NFW would I allow a cop to rummage through my phone. Hopefully the marketplace will answer with some intrusion/wipe detection apps.

We do have a right to privacy and must defend it always. I understand the need to protect the public from criminal activity but there should be a barrier to prohibit privacy barriers from being circumvented as well. I guess this falls into the category of going through the glove box in your car when you get pulled over or going through your trunk so I presume there has to be probable cause established for this but undoubtedly the courts will have to decide this. In 1928, In Olmstead v. United States Justice Brandeis in dissent

"Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the Government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet. "

This was about the first case brought before the court about wire tapping and after this case, it set off a rash of other rulings that brought the idea that technology could be used to intrude on privacy. Although the evidence in the case were transcripts, the information in the transcripts were used to arrest other people who were importing and distributing liquor. Eventually laws were put into place that meant that wiretaps had to be authorized by a judge and evidence of probable cause produced.

We always have to protect our privacy just like we protect anything else we value otherwise there will be someone in our government trying to take it away.

PS: in before RTFA, he's modifying consoles for financial gain, how is this different from building a computer for financial gain?

Because as per this link http://www.scpr.org/news/2009/08/03/xbox-crime/ , he was advertising on the Web that he was modding people's consoles for money so that they could play pirated games.
So he explicitely wrote that he was making a business of circumventing protections to allow illegal things, like play pirated games on its consoles.
There just aren't any excuse for this guy, like the original article try to mislead people into thinking him having not done anything wrong.

It's terrifying to me (and a sign of the times) that we can't do what we please with the material we've paid for. Sure, violating copyright is counter productive in the long-run, which is why we have it, but tinkering with stuff has a long proud history.[...] I doubt this guy was doing anything innovating, but he sure won't be doing so now.

But there's no problem with that. Or perhaps there are problems with that, but you won't get caught and won't face potential 10 years in prison.
But if, like this guy (the link : http://www.scpr.org/news/2009/08/03/xbox-crime/ ), you specifically advertise on the Web that you will modify people's consoles for money, so that they can play pirated games, then no wonder you're facing such hardships.
Sure what he was doing wasn't innovating, and I hope he won't be doing so ever again.

The researcher is on KPCC (NPR station) right now, 11:36 am PST. MP3 pls stream or go to KPCC and listen live for web stream.

I am an NPR junkie. I have a one-hour commute every day. I no longer listen to the radio and just to the shows I downloaded from NPR on my non-Apple MP3 player. My routine is this:

1. Once a week, I go through the npr.org and scpr.org (Southern California Public Radio -- my local NPR station) and download the .smil or .ram files for the specific shows I want to listen to. I skip the ones where I can get as podcasts already, such as Science Friday, since I can already download them as MP3 files. This takes about an hour a week.

2. I run a script that downloads and converts the .smil and .ram streams into .mp3 files. This gives me enough listening material for about a week. I run this script overnight, since it can take a while.

3. When I've exhausted the current audios on my MP3 player, I copy the new shows over.

I do contribute to KPCC, my local NPR station, so I do not feel like I'm "stealing" the shows. Below is the script I use. It requires mplayer (with Real codec), sox, and lame. If you use this script, I kindly ask that you contribute to your local NPR station as well.

#!/bin/sh

export SOX=sox

for i in $*
do
echo $i
filename=`echo $i | sed 's/\.ram//'`
filename=`echo $filename | sed 's/\.smil//'`

# download real stream and save as WAV file
mplayer -playlist $i -ao pcm:file=$filename.wav -vc dummy -vo null

# extract the largest volume adjustment without clipping
VOLUME_ADJUST=`$SOX "$filename.wav" -t .wav "$filename.tmp.wav" stat -v 2>&1`
echo "VOLUME ADJUST: $VOLUME_ADJUST"
# perform the volume adjustment
$SOX -v $VOLUME_ADJUST -t .wav "$filename.tmp.wav" "$filename.wav"
# remove temporary file
rm -f "$filename.tmp.wav"

# reduce to mono for size
$SOX "$filename.wav" -c 1 -t .wav "$filename.tmp.wav"
mv -f "$filename.tmp.wav" "$filename.wav"

# convert from WAV to MP3
lame $filename.wav $filename.mp3

# remove wav file
rm $filename.wav
done

You would run the script like this:

./npr.sh *ram *smil

School yard sort of way? For weeks solid everywhere you looked, people would say, or write, gore said he created the internet, he's a dumba$$... we'll vote for bush. He's not very bright, but at least he's honest. In fact, my parents, both reasonably intelligent people (having both completed at least the master level of grad school) thought that Gore actually meant he created the internet. Only one of my parents is a republican, so it's not because of party lines...

Odd thing, this whole bush is dumb thinking... if you listen to one of George bush's debates from 10 years ago, and a recent debate/speech you'd notice he went from being very polished, neither making up words nor screwing up existing words. (sorry you have to actually listen to something... life goes on) Did Bush have a frontal lobotomy? I doubt it, he just thought more people would vote for him if he was a "common man". In a nut shell, Bush seems to think that the average american wishes an idiot in office. What really scares me is that ~49% of the voters proved him right.