And now I have to go out, but I'll try to be back for pointless arguing later.
I'd like to understand desalination plants and why they don't help as much as you'd think better than I do.
We got so much rain yesterday that the sky was green from water in the air. I hadn't seen that in a while.
3: When I first moved to Chicago I was told the creepy green sky thing meant, "Tornado!" IDK, man.
In Nebraska, it would mean a good chance of one. There was no tornado here, but there was quite a bit of damage anyway.
Indeed. Thankfully only a large branch fell on our yard this time, not an entire tree, but it's going to be a pain to clean up.
1: now you're going to swim? WELL YOU CAN'T BECAUSE THE SWIMMING POOL IS NOW ONE ALMOND AND I EATED IT.
6: Beechwood is still closed from a tree that fell across it.
7 is great.
Urban economic activity is far more valuable to California than agriculture.
California's agriculture is probably more important to the other 49 states than its urban economic activity though, right? (I don't actually know the answer to this question.)
2: I think I distractedly read1/3 of and article about the fact that it's about the environmental consequences of ending up with heaps of very salty water and having to put it somewhere.
Apologies for typos the cat evolved and has thumbs and let herself out of the room I put her in when she is reciting the national cat epic at 6 am and I'm tired.
Or else it gets the wasteful-use-of-fresh-water hose again.
heaps of very salty water and having to put it somewhere
That would be Mexico, if I recall Cadillac Desert correctly.
I suppose I could have put my Berkeley Pit comment from the other thread here, but that's a different fucked-up water situation.
California's agriculture is probably more important to the other 49 states than its urban economic activity though, right?
Then the other states can pitch in.
Then the other states can pitch in.
What are you, a socialist?
Given that 60% of LA's water is from the Colorado River, it seems that they are doing quite a bit already.
There was a CA water thread? I really should stay in more.
I can't even find the water thread. And now I have to leave. Oh well.
Von Wafer: The water thread started at 154 in Guest Post - Master Race.
The L.A. basin could leverage one of it's core competencies and arrange some sort of porn for water exchange with the rest of the states.
Ogged: The Fall 2013 issue of Boom looked at California's water history, spring boarding from the centennial of the LA Aqueduct. It's pretty breezily written, but discusses the history, promises, development, and goal setting for the future of LA and southern California generally.
http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2013/09/fall-2013/
Thanks, Mooseking.
And someone should have pointed out by now that my unknown unknowns are actually known unknowns.
22: thanks! Now I have something to do as this meeting drones on and on.
Another example: in the model in the linked paper, even after 72 years of drought, desalination never makes economic sense.
Its possible that economic model, published in 2010, was not accounting for the case in which we have now entered an era of cheap natural gas, so that desalination may end up making more economic sense now than before. I say this noting that my current location is one with ample gas supplies and a massive desalination plant. And, not coincidentally, a massive carbon footprint.
It rained enough that the ceiling of my second floor was leaking. I live in a three story house.
OK, that's misleading. A part of the second floor ceiling that's underneath the part of the roof that's behind the third floor knee wall was leaking. Nonetheless, sucky news. With taxes due, we have no $$ for roof repair, let alone replacement.
Near our house, a large branch fell atop a Taurus in a parking lot, yet miraculously doesn't seen to have done any damage. It seems that all the smaller branches completely enveloped the car without hitting it (hard), cushioning the fall of the larger branch parts that would smash glass or crush steel. A real test of whether one is an optimist or pessimist.
Personally, I'm intrigued by the possibility of putting now-sidelined offshore oil rigs on the task of drilling for offshore fresh-water aquifers.
30.2: Had you considered half-assing it? Because the wide strips of self-adhesive rubber flashing can really last.
30: I had small bit somehow finding its way to dripping off of an inside windowsill. Still not sure of the path, but not happy-making.
I am very content that whilst I was spending some quality time with the supremacy clause I achieved the goal of sparking dissension amongst the ranks! Immature, as it was totally predictable dissension, but oh well. Have fun lovely people I'm now off to subject matter jurisdiction land for a few days! If I have time I'll come back and tell scary tales of correlative rights, basin wide adjudication and the horrifyingly loooooooong time frames currently anticipated to BEGIN requiring the most minimal of disclosure and reporting of groundwater use. Which, let's face it, is more properly called mining as currently practiced in the majority of the SJ Valley.
9: My impression of urban California economic activity is that it's 50% production of mediocre works of entertainment and 50% selling Americans' private information to marketers, so yeah.
9: You might be overlooking the whole Silicon Valley thing--the reason commutes are so terrible for a wide swath of the bay area. Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Cupertino, and all of those are (I suspect) a large part of the CA economy. Especially once you add back in the router, switch, and other internet infrastructure firms that are also in the area to serve those clients.
(I suppose that was more to 35 than 9, sorry.)
First, you have to assume (and the linked paper explicitly does) that the people in charge are going to make "efficient" decisions. But already we have proposed cutbacks for urban users with the inevitable reckoning for agriculture punted.
Naw, I don't have to assume that. I just have to believe that urban users will vote for their own self-interest. I have no problem believing that.
but farmers still have a lot of leverage that will make the process long and painful
I don't actually believe that either. I think two more years of solid drought and this transformation would happen within a single year. That's what emergency powers are for. The drought's just not bad enough yet.
Third, water still needs to be moved from where it is to where it isn't. I confess I don't know much about the infrastructure details, but as I understand it, LA gets about 60% of its water from the Colorado river, which is itself drying up, and which Colorado is fixin' to claim more of. Replacing that water is possible, but not a matter of flipping a switch.
You are right that cities aren't going to find a new big source of water from the outside. But rich cities can re-use the water they get a bunch more times, which is like getting more, except that collecting/cleaning/pressurizing it is expensive everytime water cycles through.
I am not worried about big coastal cities. They'll get theirs, mostly by paying much more than they do now. Small cities that aren't right by their source will feel a lot of hurt, and I predict a big decline in irrigated acreage.
A FOTB who purports to know explained to me recently that the impact of of cheap energy on the cost of desalination is a lot less than you might think, because the cost structure is very heavy on capital costs and on operating costs other than energy, especially consumable materials (specifically membranes, in the most common plant designs).
That's interesting. I'm familiar with one desal plant, on a very small island, (pop: 350 in the summertime) where they are putting in solar to replace diesel. The expectation is to save 60% of the cost, but that may just be on the energy side. Membranes are expensive. Maybe figuring out cheap membrane technology would make a significant different here.
In large desert areas (like say, the UAE) I wonder why its not effective to ditch the membranes altogether and just use the mechanism of solar evaporation over a large surface area. Like, what would a 100 acre greenhouse built to collect the condensed evaporation of seawater yield in terms of output of freshwater? The capital cost would be a bunch of glass, some pumps, and a patch of desert. But your energy input cost would be close to nil.
Don't worry TRO, Ogged's CA water views pale in comparison to his views of SLC and Denver where the shortage fears require scenarios like "if the population were to double or triple we would not have enough water".
36: Comment 35 should be read as making light of TRO's, k-sky's, and the various Silicon Valley commenters' jobs. And aren't all those routers made in Taiwan anyway?
Had you considered half-assing it?
I have! I fell asleep* to thoughts of getting up on the roof, which is slightly steeper/higher than my comfort level, but this emergency may get me over that
*I discovered the leak as I went to brush my teeth, the house at last quiet enough to hear a slow drip falling 9 feet.
40.last: You still need to pump the water in and out, and I'm not sure it's possible with current efficiency of solar cells to supply enough energy to both speed evaporation and pump the water in and out of your plant. My intuition is that while you could make evaporation relatively cheap, the rest would be very expensive.
Basically, the best would be fairly inexpensive membranes that work at low pressure so you don't need high volume pumps and don't end up with huge operating costs forever.
Marine life mortality on intake and brine disposal are constraints as well, CA SWRCB just released revised draft policy docs including CEQA compliance doc.
40 is a question I'd be interested to know the answer to. You could probably grow vegetables in greenhouses that way. I did that for a grade school science project. My plants were okay, but that was mostly because of poor light conditions.
his views of SLC and Denver
DOOOOOMED.
I honestly don't know details of Denver/SLC water forecasts. And another winter as long and dreary as this one, and I'll say fuck it, and become part of your overpopulation problem.
You still need to pump the water in and out
If the geography was right, you could have the tide do it for you.
Spike, all I know about reverse osmosis I learned from the instruction manual of the filter under my sink, but I'm pretty sure you're sounding like a crazy person.
Well, as we all have learned from Silicon Valley, the dumber your idea sounds, the better it is. Don't think "crazy", think "disruptive."
Also, I guarantee you, California's water problems would be flat-out solved if we tore down Los Angles and replaced it with a massive, tidal powered, evaporation-based desalination project.
And I think we should do it. Because cheap almonds are important to me.
Maybe we're going about this the wrong way. Instead of expensive desalination plants, couldn't we invest that money in developing some sort of super-efficient cyborg kidneys that would let us drink salt water? And genetically engineering oceanic almond trees?
Sure, that would work for drinking water, but it wouldn't work when it came to watering the lawn.
What about the mountain laurels?
52.last Some kind of radically awesome mangrove/almond hybrid takes over the world. You heard it here, folks.
Hey, no reason we can't genetically engineer lawns to take salt water as well, or possibly build super-efficient cyborg lawns. Either one would be way more awesome than boring desalination plants.
I would start with genetically engineering oceanic pistachio trees. They have a higher initial salt tolerance.
I love statements like 51. At least they make their priorities explicit. Sure, if that's the priority than your method is decent. I can work with that so much better than vague undefined bullshit.
Do oceanic pistachio trees have a higher salt tolerance than the terrestrial ones?
Because cheap almonds are important to me.
Good news. You could torch two thirds of those orchards and still grow more than the current domestic sales.
You could burn a lot of couches on the bonfire from 600,000 acres of almond trees.
In as much as I live overseas, I'd appreciate it if the almond exporting continues. I'd hate to have to make almond runs to Miami.
Don't worry - Miami will be there for like, another ten years maybe and then that's it.
60: And how. Almond is a crazy good firewood, high temp and low ash.
Couches burn perfectly well. Just not low ash, especially not if springs count as "ash".
I think I'd like a beanbag chair stuffed with almonds. Wouldn't that smell nice? Almonds get cheap enough, you could do it.
Nothing says "comfort" like a chair filled with hard, pointed objects.
I'm not a hater. I just crush a lot.
Here I am, doing my small part to support Americas embattled almond industry, and all you can do is make jokes.
Maybe you're just a stooge for Big Pistachio.
K-Sky, if you are looking for work, my almond beanbag chair start-up needs a social media strategist. And my evaporative desalination start-up needs an algae scrubber.
I just got so much extra work that I won't be able to hardly go drinking at all for the next week. But, I get paid extra.
Well, that algae certainly isn't going to scrub itself.
Just market almond essential oils in spray preparation.
I want to go to the bar, then work hard. Stupid, inflexible rules of temporal order.
in addition to being more jobless than usual, my household has been fighting either a flu or a neurological disorder for what seems like the past eleventy weeks. I'm ready to be solvent and healthy again.
(The neurological disorder was Φ's acute cerebellar ataxia, a post-inflammation bonus track from a nasty virus, which was awful and scary and required two nights at Children's Hospital but seems to be halfway gone and continuing to recede. It has set back her walking a fair bit, and that was not her strong suit to start with.)
OTOH rich people use more water so America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the... sprinkler? xeriscape?
I'm glad it seems gone. That kind of stuff is really awful.
And that "that kind of stuff," I mean nights in the hospital with babies. I don't even know what ataxia is.
Glad it's getting better. Moby is right.
Actually, since typing 80, I've learned what ataxia is.
Moby doesn't even see neurological capacity for coordination of muscle movements.
Thanks. In other news, I think I just found a very tiny JRoth & AB in a high school friend's facebook photo album. I'll keep you posted.
Everybody is putting pictures of themselves with their siblings on my Facebook feed. Thinking of putting up a picture of my son captioned, "Sorry."
65: Morgantown Bans Outdoor Couches In Attempt To Halt Couch Burning
What could possibly go wrong?
Didn't Pittsburgh pass a similar law?
Somebody played the song where Hank Williams Jr. explains why he drinks and smokes. I haven't heard that in years.
So no more saving your parking space with a couch?
Why did the Irishman put a couch in his driveway?
To keep a crazy Russian emigre from parking in it.
If I'm understanding the essence of MobyHickistan.
He's smoked and drank all his life and he ain't dead yet.
Now somebody played Taylor Swift. Which is different for here. But I can shake it off.
Everybody is putting pictures of themselves with their siblings on my Facebook feed.
I noticed this in my feed too. So "National Sibling Day" is, like, an actual thing now?
By nearly any moral standard, I'm better than Hitler too.
104: "I know it's not much, but when you get up there in front of the big guy, that's what you got to go with. Maybe shave the moustache."
This suggests that desalination is a relative bargain. Average water bill $75/month, adding one plant to provide 7.5% of water will raise that bill by $5/month (6.6%) so switching entirely to seawater would roughly double water bills if it scales linearly. You'd expect economy of scale to build 15x as many plants, although who knows about energy costs- maybe have to build a solar plant along with each water plant. Expensive but far from intolerable.
Good catch, right? You guys are so tiny.
somebody played Taylor Swift. Which is different for here. But I can shake it off
I'm playing with the all-student cover band tonight, and we're playing that song plus another one by T-Swo. Those I don't mind. It's the Bruno Mars "Uptown Funk" song that I really don't like playing. It's actually kind of fun to play, but the song itself seems over-the-top derivative of a bunch of songs. And I liked his other stuff so far.
You know that expression"salt the earth" re biblical condemnation to penury and infertility of land? It's based on like reality. Desalination on a scale sufficient to serve a decently sized city has serious environmental impact issues.
110: You should wear curlers for that song.
I'm at one of those authentic Japanese restaurants where they make an onion-flare and catch an egg in their hat. On topic because this type of dining is only possible because California grows sop much food.
The top five egg-producing States are Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Texas.
(California is the biggest producer of onions, so fair enough on that.)
This whole deal takes so much longer than McDonald's.
A surprising number of students are eating here. Nearly all women.
They make an onion what and do what with an egg? Who told you this was authentically Japanese, bob?
The chef was from Castle Shannon. How much more authentic can you get?
The onion thing is when they stack the sections of an onion slice into a tower, fill the tower with cooking oil, and light it. They also flip an egg from the hibachi into the hat on their head using a spatula.
You have kids. How did you not go to these places?
I've never even heard of these places. Why would a person do that with an egg? Is this some kind of absurdist restaurant?
119: then do you have to eat the hat?
There is a fascinating longform piece about the fights between the heirs of the guy who started that restaurant, one of whom, hilariously, is superstar DJ Steve Aoki.
Oh, it's that place? I thought they just tossed knives around and set stuff on fire.
Who told you this was authentically Japanese, bob?
The Japanese do like eggs, top five in the world by most measures, though not often juggled.
Often raw on rice, for the glutinous texture. And perhaps some national pride in quality control.
Also various kinds of omelettes filled with (sometimes flavoured) rice, covered with plain ketchup. The Japanese like ketchup, even serving it as a spaghetti dish.
I am not a foodie, and spend much more time than I like watching Japanese eat.
Ahh! The wonders of Japanese fine cuisine!
Natto, tempura, curry, cheeseburgers, kfc, grilled fish with pickled vegetables and rice, whatever the fuck miso is, riceballs filled with beans. Cake!
Apparently narrative and character development is propelled by conversation, and writers think frank or otherwise conversation is lubricated with food or drink, so I have to watch Japanese eat boringly all the fucking time.
Besides the rice cooker, more often you got the 1 liter or so hot water heater. You take the cardboard bowl from the shelf, add water and eat the noodles. In-fucking-scrutable.
This whole deal takes so much longer than McDonald's.
Speaking of Ursula LeGuin. I have found the BBC radio series to be decent through the years, I hope they don't mess up LHoD.
Ooh, thanks for flagging that.