If the supply of precursors weren't limited, then other companies could step in and manufacture the generic drugs, and thus the companies that are limiting these drugs would end up sabotaging their own sales.
However, since supplies are very limited and there are high barriers to entry due to DEA rules, there isn't much competition and companies can lock up the entire supply of precursors.
But "wouldn't it be nice" is not a good enough reason to take away people's liberty to do what they want with their own bodies.
How about saving lives? Is that a good enough reason?
Basically the fundamental issue is socialism, whether applied to medicine or finances. If you don't like socialism, then you won't like forced vaccination. If you like socialism, then you probably won't be against forced vaccination (at least not for the reasons you suggest - many oppose vaccination for perceived health reasons).
I agree it is an ethical dilemma. If I enact a given healthcare policy it will result in n people dying who would be unlikely to have died without it, but will save 100n people. Is that ethical?
I'm not convinced that it is always unethical to force somebody to do something not in their interest for the sole benefit of others. That's basically the entire principle behind socialism, which a significant portion of the world's population supports. I'm not sure that sticking needles into people is all that much different from taking their money.
So, the only people who experience crashes are people who want to use an app but who value their privacy.
You don't consider that a "feature"? I do. "Huh. I won't let it rape me, so it crashes. Good to know. Bad app. Uninstall."
You can have that feature. I'm using this one:
Huh, I won't let it rape me, so it just works but uploads an empty contacts list and dummy IMEI to its server. Good to know - I can keep using the app safely.
I don't want to not use half the popular apps out there - I want to firewall them...
It still takes quite a bit of energy to send water up there, and water is about as gentle as buckshot when you're talking about orbital velocities. If you want gentle you need something like aerogel.
I keep thinking that a huge aerogel mass in orbit might be more effective. It would stay up there much longer and collect more junk, but it would still de-orbit over a period of days or weeks due to its high surface area compared to mass.
The trick with any of this stuff is not messing with functional satellites. If you target and grab one thing at a time that is easy, but super-expensive. The cheaper unguided solutions just sweep huge chunks of orbital space and destroy anything in their path (they would destroy far more than they deorbit). You'd have to define areas to be cleaned years in advance so that no functional satellites end up there.
The state of the water is almost completely immaterial. Liquid water is used at speeds far lower than orbital velocity to cut through steel plates.
Also - a ballistic trajectory won't stay up there for more than 15 minutes or so, and I don't know that it is a given that water will even freeze in that amount of time unless the drops are REALLY tiny. In space you only have radiative heat loss, and you have to lose a lot of heat to freeze water.
Your level of selfishness is shocking, in a free society.
How is anything I posted selfish? I have no known vaccine allergies and have already been vaccinated against anything likely to affect me. I'm the poster child of somebody who would agree with you if my only motivation were selfishness.
The apps are written with the assumption that a request to retrieve a list of contacts will retrieve a (possibly null) list of contacts - not an error. I don't really see them as bad apps.
I don't see crashing apps as a feature in any case. Very few people care enough about privacy to use these features, so app writers have no incentive to "write their apps properly." Ordinary users don't see the crashes - they just have no privacy.
So, the only people who experience crashes are people who want to use an app but who value their privacy. You can already choose to not install the app. So, adding a feature which lets you install the app but still not be able to use it doesn't really add any value.
The kind of argument being made here by some is that if you value your privacy you should just live off the grid on some hill in West Virginia. If I can have my cake and eat it too, why shouldn't I?
First to have a market you have to have property rights. That is ownership.
And there can be ownership - you own a gallon of water, not a perpetual right to draw a gallon of water per day from some river without further cost.
I think you're upset that the government doesn't own all the water. I think your notion of a market might be the government just dolling water out to whomever it deems is worthy and charging a fee it finds reasonable. That isn't a market. That's a monopoly... and that is dysfunctional.
I don't propose that the government arbitrarily doll out water. I'm suggesting that it auction off whatever is available to whoever wants to buy it. Those who can extract the greatest economic value from it can bid the highest. This is usually the most effective way to utilize scarce resources.
Water rights only exist with the consent of government in any case. If there were no government, then anybody could dam up anybody else's supply lines, or draw as much as they wanted from the supply. Then people could stand around with guns shooting at each other and whoever has the biggest guns would end up getting the water. Government is in practice defined by whoever has the biggest guns.
It sounds like government fiat was what caused the problem in the first place. Hundreds of years ago some government administrator told somebody that they could draw 20% of the water from some stream. Today we have a big problem. If government can create the mess, I see no reason that it can't fix it.
By all means the government can pay for whatever "property" it confiscates, if it is owned by an individual. I'd value the rights at whatever the individual valued them at when they paid the inheritance tax on it when they got it from whoever had it before them. Chances are they didn't say that it was priceless back then, so it isn't priceless now. Corporate rights could be purchased at the average rate that individual rights were purchased for, since corporations don't pay estate taxes (which is one of the reasons that corporations tend to get out of control).
I'm all for private ownership - when it makes sense. However, private ownership of scarce commodities like water causes more problems than it solves, especially when coupled with bad legislation.
I think the bigger issue is the UI complexity and ease of use.
If you have several global namespaces that apply to everything from contacts to the SD card that probably wouldn't be hard to implement. If you have some areas that are namespace-exempt that would also be easy to implement. What gets tricky is when you want to have a particular app be able to see all of the SD card but a subset of your contacts and recent calls, but another app should see a subset of the SD card and the recent calls but all of your contacts. Extend that to every database on the device and you end up with a per-app configuration list that has 14 choices. That's the sort of thing that causes namespaces not to get used much on linux desktops either - if you really want everything to be configurable you have to configure everything.
...Generating high temperatures in a huge furnace is a lot easier than doing it in a small one..
I believe you have this backwards; not sure why you got all the positive mods.
I can trivially generate a 1000 F temperature on the end of a cigarette, but I sure can't do that to a football field.
Similarly, I can reduce the size of the chamber in my foundry and it will heat up faster, easier, and cheaper.
If you dumped a huge pile of cigarettes onto your football field, you'd find that it takes far fewer of them with less ventilation per cubic inch to heat them up to 1000F, compared to what you have to do with a single one. Sure, it does require more heat, but not more heat per unit of volume.
Heat is lost through the surface of an object - the larger an object is, the less heat it loses per unit of volume through its surface, since the former increases with the cube of size, and the latter increases with the square.
All that said, it is true that it takes a smaller heater to heat an oven than a foundry. It just takes a bigger heater per unit of volume to heat a kitchen oven.
Nobody in the US is compelled to take an internship, and as a rule they have to at least pay minimum wage. They also need to fully comply with OSHA standards. The rules in the US are likely not quite as strong as those in Europe, but the contrast with China will be dramatic.
Now, the word "internship" in the US does mean different things to different people. In some shops it basically means minimum-wage temp employee. In others it isn't unlike Google's Summer of Code where you're given real projects with real challenges and it is a meaningful experience, often with very decent pay.
I can't speak for every company, but in my company internships are viewed as a way to recruit talent while also providing a service and still getting some level of business benefit. The process resembles Google's Summer of Code in a sense - anybody who wants to hire an intern has to essentially propose some kind of project and there is a selection process. You can't hire an intern and just give them a stack of papers to file. They can perform routine administrative tasks as part of their job just like anybody else, but you have to create a genuinely interesting project for them to work on. Interns are also involved in special programs at a corporate level beyond working in a particular department/etc.
Now, with the general turn in the economy it seems like our internship program is almost non-existent these days. That should also tell you something - if it were just a cheap labor sweatshop then it would be booming...
why should I take even the tiny risk of having a vaccination to protect some idiot who refuses to get vaccinated themselves?
Simple - some people are unable to be vaccinated due to perfectly valid medical issues. They still benefit from herd immunity as long as the herd actually has it.
One person might be highly allergic to eggs and might not be able to get some particular vaccine as a result. However, if everybody around them isn't allergic to eggs wouldn't it be nice if they were vaccinated, thus greatly reducing the chance that any of them will get sick?
Some medical issues really do involve a tragedy of the commons. One is vaccination. Another big one is antibiotic use.
I'm not sure how prevalent this still is with the general downfall of HMOs, but some doctors are just paid by insurers a flat rate based on the number of patients they have. That gives them an incentive to keep them healthy - healthy patients mean they get paid the same to do less work. Non-compliant patients mean more work since they won't stay as healthy, so I can see why doctors would tend to not want to have them around. Now, the downside to this metric is that it also gives them incentive to write off people who are really sick.
I know from my support days that case throughput as a metric tends to encourage people to cherry-pick easy cases. Cases which are moderately difficult tend to get extra attention to get them done just in time. Cases which are impossible to solve on time essentially get written off before they're worked on like a battlefield triage system - if you know you'll get dinged on the metrics no matter what you do, it is better to just let the case wither and spend your time on a case where it will make a difference.
What I'd like to know is how to tell if my key is a bad one or not. I don't mind throwing some CPU-time at the problem, but I don't see any info online for how to check your own key.
Since I know my own private keys, perhaps an algorithm would be able to analyze how "similar" my keys are? Or, do you need to have the original primes?
So we have water RIGHTS. I don't have to dispense my rights to anyone else. They're mine. I own them. I can sell them if I choose but you can't take them. Possibly you could try some sort of eminent domain to pull them but that would be a hilarious political crapstorm.
Clearly this is a dysfunctional market - the people who own the rights are unwilling to transfer them. Maybe regulation is interfering with the transfer of rights, or price-fixing makes the rights of limited commercial value, so people sit on them? Even if in theory the rights are transferable that doesn't mean that a near-monopoly couldn't exist, and those need to be regulated. A famous case of this was land ownership in Hawaii, where property was seized and redistributed because its high level of concentration resulted in a horribly-expensive rental market. Similar principles exist around rights of way - ownership of property isn't an absolute right.
If water rights are getting in the way of the general welfare, then they need to be constrained. Nobody likes losing property, but sometimes it is necessary. A simple way to accomplish this is to give the existing rightsholders a property right to a portion of the water source - perhaps 95% to start. Then over time you ramp that from 95% down to 0%, so that the value of the water right diminishes over time. Those who use the water would have to steadily pay more and more to continue to use the same amount of water, until everybody is paying the same.
Of course, if opening up the market to trade the existing water rights is possible, that might be an alternative solution. I just don't want society to be beholden to paying somebody a fortune to buy rights that are owned simply due to the luck of inheritance, unless they've really been paying generational estate taxes on the valuation these rights are now being given.
Keep in mind those same laws of thermodynamics dictate that the larger the temperature difference, the higher the efficiency. Now, temperature isn't the same thing as heat, so that doesn't automatically put limits on small-scale operations. However, in practice it tends to do so. Generating high temperatures in a huge furnace is a lot easier than doing it in a small one, which is why a coal plant is more efficient than a car engine.
This is basically making the same point I was making. The only reason that water is scarce for the farm is because government is dictating how the water can be used, and not simply making it available at the cost of production. By saying that 20% of the Colorado or whatever has to be used for LA you're imposing artificial scarcity elsewhere.
If the State or Federal government simply auctioned off the water rights at the source annually to the highest bidders, then whatever utility had the most demand would get the most water. Prices everywhere would tend to reflect the same base price combined with a transportation charge based on how far the destination was from the source (since water would be auctioned off at the source).
Earmarking resources for particular exclusive uses tends to create imbalances and perverse incentives.
Your understanding of the economics here is faulty. The breakdown is in thinking that food scarcity is one-sided. Food becomes scarce because it becomes uneconomical to make it. The price has to rise to make up that deficit, and then food production goes back to "normal", but with more cost. That cost doesn't translate into more freely spendable money for the farmers, because the supply chain is why the cost went up in the first place.
Food is fungible. If I want a bun for my hamburger I don't care if the wheat was grown across the street or across the planet. I'll obviously have to pay more to transport the latter.
If prices on food rise, then the value of it anywhere on the planet rises as well. Sure, initially most of that money will go to pay for transport, and farmers far from population centers won't see any of it. However, somebody who owns a farm NEAR a population center can charge a slightly lower price and sell a ton of food and capture almost all of that price difference.
So, if California doesn't artificially restrict how water is used, and the price of food rises, then local farmers will be able to irrigate more land, then sell the resulting food for more than the increased cost.
Lastly, if water rose to fifty cents a gallon in any community, demand for the water would drop to zero because nobody could afford to run any kind of business, and the residents would move because there'd be no work. There's an upper limit on how much water can cost before it's cheaper to move operations than try to irrigate locally.
Obviously I was using hyperbole to make a point. The price wouldn't go from cheap to super-expensive overnight. The price would rise slowly, and as the price rises slowly there would be increased pressure to increase supply. Now, if the reason the price of water is expensive is because you're living on the moon, then moving might be your only option. However, if a perfectly usable river is available and imbalanced environmental regulation is the only reason it isn't being tapped, then that is a problem government can easily correct and make its voters happy.
Perhaps part of the issue is that it is hard to move people around, and people don't like to sell property for less than what they paid.
Unless the total amount of arable land decreases worldwide we shouldn't see a food shortage as a result of climate change in theory. However, in practice if a huge chunk of farmland becomes a desert, and a big metropolitan area turns into ideal farmland, it is hard to actually transplant a city to follow the climate.
There is also an issue of sustainable population. At some point you can only have so many people living on the Earth. With improving technology this number can increase, but to the extent that it requires non-renewable resources it isn't sustainable.
The modern judicial system recognizes that convicting people is hard. Therefore, the process has been engineered to be as punitive as possible before a verdict is rendered, and to tarnish your reputation as much as possible after the verdict is rendered regardless of what it is.
Get accused of a crime, step one execute a search warrant and be sure to generally destroy all your personal property in the process of rummaging through it. Step two is to grab any computers you own and hold onto them for several years as evidence. That computer you bought for $1500 last week will get returned to you just in time for you to claim a $100 tax deduction when you give it away to a local school. Step three is to drag you through the press. Step four is to charge you with 47 life sentences and a bazillion dollars in fines, and then try to get you to plea to 15 years in prison. If they can't get you to accept the plea they just make the proceedings long and expensive - since so much is at stake you can't afford not to mount a vigorous defense. Oh, if they can seize any property without a trial under forfeiture, we go ahead and do that too.
By the time it is all over, a guilty verdict is just the icing on the cake for the authorities. They've sent a clear message regardless of the outcome.
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If the supply of precursors weren't limited, then other companies could step in and manufacture the generic drugs, and thus the companies that are limiting these drugs would end up sabotaging their own sales.
However, since supplies are very limited and there are high barriers to entry due to DEA rules, there isn't much competition and companies can lock up the entire supply of precursors.
But "wouldn't it be nice" is not a good enough reason to take away people's liberty to do what they want with their own bodies.
How about saving lives? Is that a good enough reason?
Basically the fundamental issue is socialism, whether applied to medicine or finances. If you don't like socialism, then you won't like forced vaccination. If you like socialism, then you probably won't be against forced vaccination (at least not for the reasons you suggest - many oppose vaccination for perceived health reasons).
I agree it is an ethical dilemma. If I enact a given healthcare policy it will result in n people dying who would be unlikely to have died without it, but will save 100n people. Is that ethical?
I'm not convinced that it is always unethical to force somebody to do something not in their interest for the sole benefit of others. That's basically the entire principle behind socialism, which a significant portion of the world's population supports. I'm not sure that sticking needles into people is all that much different from taking their money.
So, the only people who experience crashes are people who want to use an app but who value their privacy.
You don't consider that a "feature"? I do. "Huh. I won't let it rape me, so it crashes. Good to know. Bad app. Uninstall."
You can have that feature. I'm using this one:
Huh, I won't let it rape me, so it just works but uploads an empty contacts list and dummy IMEI to its server. Good to know - I can keep using the app safely.
I don't want to not use half the popular apps out there - I want to firewall them...
It still takes quite a bit of energy to send water up there, and water is about as gentle as buckshot when you're talking about orbital velocities. If you want gentle you need something like aerogel.
I keep thinking that a huge aerogel mass in orbit might be more effective. It would stay up there much longer and collect more junk, but it would still de-orbit over a period of days or weeks due to its high surface area compared to mass.
The trick with any of this stuff is not messing with functional satellites. If you target and grab one thing at a time that is easy, but super-expensive. The cheaper unguided solutions just sweep huge chunks of orbital space and destroy anything in their path (they would destroy far more than they deorbit). You'd have to define areas to be cleaned years in advance so that no functional satellites end up there.
The state of the water is almost completely immaterial. Liquid water is used at speeds far lower than orbital velocity to cut through steel plates.
Also - a ballistic trajectory won't stay up there for more than 15 minutes or so, and I don't know that it is a given that water will even freeze in that amount of time unless the drops are REALLY tiny. In space you only have radiative heat loss, and you have to lose a lot of heat to freeze water.
Your level of selfishness is shocking, in a free society.
How is anything I posted selfish? I have no known vaccine allergies and have already been vaccinated against anything likely to affect me. I'm the poster child of somebody who would agree with you if my only motivation were selfishness.
The apps are written with the assumption that a request to retrieve a list of contacts will retrieve a (possibly null) list of contacts - not an error. I don't really see them as bad apps.
I don't see crashing apps as a feature in any case. Very few people care enough about privacy to use these features, so app writers have no incentive to "write their apps properly." Ordinary users don't see the crashes - they just have no privacy.
So, the only people who experience crashes are people who want to use an app but who value their privacy. You can already choose to not install the app. So, adding a feature which lets you install the app but still not be able to use it doesn't really add any value.
The kind of argument being made here by some is that if you value your privacy you should just live off the grid on some hill in West Virginia. If I can have my cake and eat it too, why shouldn't I?
dysfunctional market?
First to have a market you have to have property rights. That is ownership.
And there can be ownership - you own a gallon of water, not a perpetual right to draw a gallon of water per day from some river without further cost.
I think you're upset that the government doesn't own all the water. I think your notion of a market might be the government just dolling water out to whomever it deems is worthy and charging a fee it finds reasonable. That isn't a market. That's a monopoly... and that is dysfunctional.
I don't propose that the government arbitrarily doll out water. I'm suggesting that it auction off whatever is available to whoever wants to buy it. Those who can extract the greatest economic value from it can bid the highest. This is usually the most effective way to utilize scarce resources.
Water rights only exist with the consent of government in any case. If there were no government, then anybody could dam up anybody else's supply lines, or draw as much as they wanted from the supply. Then people could stand around with guns shooting at each other and whoever has the biggest guns would end up getting the water. Government is in practice defined by whoever has the biggest guns.
It sounds like government fiat was what caused the problem in the first place. Hundreds of years ago some government administrator told somebody that they could draw 20% of the water from some stream. Today we have a big problem. If government can create the mess, I see no reason that it can't fix it.
By all means the government can pay for whatever "property" it confiscates, if it is owned by an individual. I'd value the rights at whatever the individual valued them at when they paid the inheritance tax on it when they got it from whoever had it before them. Chances are they didn't say that it was priceless back then, so it isn't priceless now. Corporate rights could be purchased at the average rate that individual rights were purchased for, since corporations don't pay estate taxes (which is one of the reasons that corporations tend to get out of control).
I'm all for private ownership - when it makes sense. However, private ownership of scarce commodities like water causes more problems than it solves, especially when coupled with bad legislation.
I think the bigger issue is the UI complexity and ease of use.
If you have several global namespaces that apply to everything from contacts to the SD card that probably wouldn't be hard to implement. If you have some areas that are namespace-exempt that would also be easy to implement. What gets tricky is when you want to have a particular app be able to see all of the SD card but a subset of your contacts and recent calls, but another app should see a subset of the SD card and the recent calls but all of your contacts. Extend that to every database on the device and you end up with a per-app configuration list that has 14 choices. That's the sort of thing that causes namespaces not to get used much on linux desktops either - if you really want everything to be configurable you have to configure everything.
I believe you have this backwards; not sure why you got all the positive mods.
I can trivially generate a 1000 F temperature on the end of a cigarette, but I sure can't do that to a football field.
Similarly, I can reduce the size of the chamber in my foundry and it will heat up faster, easier, and cheaper.
If you dumped a huge pile of cigarettes onto your football field, you'd find that it takes far fewer of them with less ventilation per cubic inch to heat them up to 1000F, compared to what you have to do with a single one. Sure, it does require more heat, but not more heat per unit of volume.
Heat is lost through the surface of an object - the larger an object is, the less heat it loses per unit of volume through its surface, since the former increases with the cube of size, and the latter increases with the square.
All that said, it is true that it takes a smaller heater to heat an oven than a foundry. It just takes a bigger heater per unit of volume to heat a kitchen oven.
Nobody in the US is compelled to take an internship, and as a rule they have to at least pay minimum wage. They also need to fully comply with OSHA standards. The rules in the US are likely not quite as strong as those in Europe, but the contrast with China will be dramatic.
Now, the word "internship" in the US does mean different things to different people. In some shops it basically means minimum-wage temp employee. In others it isn't unlike Google's Summer of Code where you're given real projects with real challenges and it is a meaningful experience, often with very decent pay.
I can't speak for every company, but in my company internships are viewed as a way to recruit talent while also providing a service and still getting some level of business benefit. The process resembles Google's Summer of Code in a sense - anybody who wants to hire an intern has to essentially propose some kind of project and there is a selection process. You can't hire an intern and just give them a stack of papers to file. They can perform routine administrative tasks as part of their job just like anybody else, but you have to create a genuinely interesting project for them to work on. Interns are also involved in special programs at a corporate level beyond working in a particular department/etc.
Now, with the general turn in the economy it seems like our internship program is almost non-existent these days. That should also tell you something - if it were just a cheap labor sweatshop then it would be booming...
why should I take even the tiny risk of having a vaccination to protect some idiot who refuses to get vaccinated themselves?
Simple - some people are unable to be vaccinated due to perfectly valid medical issues. They still benefit from herd immunity as long as the herd actually has it.
One person might be highly allergic to eggs and might not be able to get some particular vaccine as a result. However, if everybody around them isn't allergic to eggs wouldn't it be nice if they were vaccinated, thus greatly reducing the chance that any of them will get sick?
Some medical issues really do involve a tragedy of the commons. One is vaccination. Another big one is antibiotic use.
I'm not sure how prevalent this still is with the general downfall of HMOs, but some doctors are just paid by insurers a flat rate based on the number of patients they have. That gives them an incentive to keep them healthy - healthy patients mean they get paid the same to do less work. Non-compliant patients mean more work since they won't stay as healthy, so I can see why doctors would tend to not want to have them around. Now, the downside to this metric is that it also gives them incentive to write off people who are really sick.
I know from my support days that case throughput as a metric tends to encourage people to cherry-pick easy cases. Cases which are moderately difficult tend to get extra attention to get them done just in time. Cases which are impossible to solve on time essentially get written off before they're worked on like a battlefield triage system - if you know you'll get dinged on the metrics no matter what you do, it is better to just let the case wither and spend your time on a case where it will make a difference.
What I'd like to know is how to tell if my key is a bad one or not. I don't mind throwing some CPU-time at the problem, but I don't see any info online for how to check your own key.
Since I know my own private keys, perhaps an algorithm would be able to analyze how "similar" my keys are? Or, do you need to have the original primes?
So we have water RIGHTS. I don't have to dispense my rights to anyone else. They're mine. I own them. I can sell them if I choose but you can't take them. Possibly you could try some sort of eminent domain to pull them but that would be a hilarious political crapstorm.
Clearly this is a dysfunctional market - the people who own the rights are unwilling to transfer them. Maybe regulation is interfering with the transfer of rights, or price-fixing makes the rights of limited commercial value, so people sit on them? Even if in theory the rights are transferable that doesn't mean that a near-monopoly couldn't exist, and those need to be regulated. A famous case of this was land ownership in Hawaii, where property was seized and redistributed because its high level of concentration resulted in a horribly-expensive rental market. Similar principles exist around rights of way - ownership of property isn't an absolute right.
If water rights are getting in the way of the general welfare, then they need to be constrained. Nobody likes losing property, but sometimes it is necessary. A simple way to accomplish this is to give the existing rightsholders a property right to a portion of the water source - perhaps 95% to start. Then over time you ramp that from 95% down to 0%, so that the value of the water right diminishes over time. Those who use the water would have to steadily pay more and more to continue to use the same amount of water, until everybody is paying the same.
Of course, if opening up the market to trade the existing water rights is possible, that might be an alternative solution. I just don't want society to be beholden to paying somebody a fortune to buy rights that are owned simply due to the luck of inheritance, unless they've really been paying generational estate taxes on the valuation these rights are now being given.
My understanding is that in practice greywater often ends up being partially-treated sewage - thus being between fresh and black.
Keep in mind those same laws of thermodynamics dictate that the larger the temperature difference, the higher the efficiency. Now, temperature isn't the same thing as heat, so that doesn't automatically put limits on small-scale operations. However, in practice it tends to do so. Generating high temperatures in a huge furnace is a lot easier than doing it in a small one, which is why a coal plant is more efficient than a car engine.
That is a VERY good argument. If only I could mod it.
If you don't beat me to it I might just log it on the issues list as an AOSP enhancement request, assuming it isn't already there.
This is basically making the same point I was making. The only reason that water is scarce for the farm is because government is dictating how the water can be used, and not simply making it available at the cost of production. By saying that 20% of the Colorado or whatever has to be used for LA you're imposing artificial scarcity elsewhere.
If the State or Federal government simply auctioned off the water rights at the source annually to the highest bidders, then whatever utility had the most demand would get the most water. Prices everywhere would tend to reflect the same base price combined with a transportation charge based on how far the destination was from the source (since water would be auctioned off at the source).
Earmarking resources for particular exclusive uses tends to create imbalances and perverse incentives.
Your understanding of the economics here is faulty. The breakdown is in thinking that food scarcity is one-sided. Food becomes scarce because it becomes uneconomical to make it. The price has to rise to make up that deficit, and then food production goes back to "normal", but with more cost. That cost doesn't translate into more freely spendable money for the farmers, because the supply chain is why the cost went up in the first place.
Food is fungible. If I want a bun for my hamburger I don't care if the wheat was grown across the street or across the planet. I'll obviously have to pay more to transport the latter.
If prices on food rise, then the value of it anywhere on the planet rises as well. Sure, initially most of that money will go to pay for transport, and farmers far from population centers won't see any of it. However, somebody who owns a farm NEAR a population center can charge a slightly lower price and sell a ton of food and capture almost all of that price difference.
So, if California doesn't artificially restrict how water is used, and the price of food rises, then local farmers will be able to irrigate more land, then sell the resulting food for more than the increased cost.
Lastly, if water rose to fifty cents a gallon in any community, demand for the water would drop to zero because nobody could afford to run any kind of business, and the residents would move because there'd be no work. There's an upper limit on how much water can cost before it's cheaper to move operations than try to irrigate locally.
Obviously I was using hyperbole to make a point. The price wouldn't go from cheap to super-expensive overnight. The price would rise slowly, and as the price rises slowly there would be increased pressure to increase supply. Now, if the reason the price of water is expensive is because you're living on the moon, then moving might be your only option. However, if a perfectly usable river is available and imbalanced environmental regulation is the only reason it isn't being tapped, then that is a problem government can easily correct and make its voters happy.
Perhaps part of the issue is that it is hard to move people around, and people don't like to sell property for less than what they paid.
Unless the total amount of arable land decreases worldwide we shouldn't see a food shortage as a result of climate change in theory. However, in practice if a huge chunk of farmland becomes a desert, and a big metropolitan area turns into ideal farmland, it is hard to actually transplant a city to follow the climate.
There is also an issue of sustainable population. At some point you can only have so many people living on the Earth. With improving technology this number can increase, but to the extent that it requires non-renewable resources it isn't sustainable.
Read for yourself here.
I think the issue is that many of the CM devs care about their reputation in the phone industry. They don't want to tick off vendors, or Google.
The modern judicial system recognizes that convicting people is hard. Therefore, the process has been engineered to be as punitive as possible before a verdict is rendered, and to tarnish your reputation as much as possible after the verdict is rendered regardless of what it is.
Get accused of a crime, step one execute a search warrant and be sure to generally destroy all your personal property in the process of rummaging through it. Step two is to grab any computers you own and hold onto them for several years as evidence. That computer you bought for $1500 last week will get returned to you just in time for you to claim a $100 tax deduction when you give it away to a local school. Step three is to drag you through the press. Step four is to charge you with 47 life sentences and a bazillion dollars in fines, and then try to get you to plea to 15 years in prison. If they can't get you to accept the plea they just make the proceedings long and expensive - since so much is at stake you can't afford not to mount a vigorous defense. Oh, if they can seize any property without a trial under forfeiture, we go ahead and do that too.
By the time it is all over, a guilty verdict is just the icing on the cake for the authorities. They've sent a clear message regardless of the outcome.