Comment by cucumber3732842
5 hours ago
Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are.
Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another but that's less than zero sum because it costs you use of state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall. At some point for things to actually get better overall, for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone. If not a nuclear powered desalination plant then it will be something else.
> You might make things fairer doing that but you won't make them better overall.
Huh, yes it will? You don't need state violence to reduce wealthy farmers' water rights from 10B gallons per year to 8B, which will instantly free up water for others, more important uses. Their quality of life won't decrease if they have to switch a few plots from alfalfa to wheat, if that's what you're afraid of.
> for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone
I dislike how you just assumed that because I prefer a simple political solution over an over-engineered decades-long project on this one issue, I must be opposed to all new infrastructure. In this case, there's plenty of water to go around.
> state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
1, you don't need much (or any) state violence to keep a few rich families from stealing water, and 2, how is that more expensive that a fucking nuclear plant??? And what about the ecological cost? Nuclear is cleaner that most energies, but it's not free. And nuclear capacity could be put to much better use than offsetting inefficient use of the commons.
> Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another
Yeah, that's exactly what those problematic water rights are achieving: they take most of the available fresh water and give it to a tiny minority that benefits immensely from it. I'm suggesting we improve on that.
> Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are.
I just can't get over how arrogant and mean this line is. The pie is continually growing, the only thing preventing people from getting a slice is that capital owners keep it all to themselves. We didn't get to this situation because the people is too greedy and impairing oligarchs from building stuff. It's quite the opposite.
We have bloated contractors receiving billions for very little in exchange, and in this situation, people like you are suggesting we don't solve this very simple resource allocation problem and instead shovel a few more billions of public money to the private sector for completely superfluous infrastructure we won't catch a glimpse of before 2048.
>Huh, yes it will? You don't need state violence to reduce wealthy farmers' water rights from 10B gallons per year to 8B, which will instantly free up water for others, more important uses. Their quality of life won't decrease if they have to switch a few plots from alfalfa to wheat, if that's what you're afraid of.
Why develop local gas fields and solar when we can just invade nations with oil?
The only way to win sustainably is to make the resource, whatever it is, more accessible or less needed, somehow.
A few billion on this or that is pocket change compared to the economic and political cost of political policy with very obvious and well defined classes of losers. Taking things isn't free even if done domestically.
>1, you don't need much (or any) state violence to keep a few rich families from stealing water
Yes, you do. It will just be spent on schools to tell the kids how to think and carrot/stick grant programs to financially incentivize compliance among the municipalities and subsidies with strings attached and inspectors to verify these things and studies and surveys and all manner of other stuff like that rather than bombs and missiles but you absolutely need to spend untold sums of money to enforce policy that is "bad" for whoever you're enforcing it upon.
>I just can't get over how arrogant and mean this line is.
I'm jaded beyond caring about such things at this point.
>The pie is continually growing, the only thing preventing people from getting a slice is that capital owners keep it all to themselves.
>We have bloated contractors receiving billions for very little in exchange, and in this situation, people like you are suggesting we don't solve this very simple resource allocation problem and instead shovel a few more billions of public money to the private sector for completely superfluous infrastructure we won't catch a glimpse of before 2048.
I want you to do the math on what the capital owners actually make. Sure, they're filthy rich and putting their thumb on the scale in various bad ways but the rent they take is peanuts compared to the money just pissed away on goods and services that are far outside of whatever the critical path is.
For every dollar the CEO or board members or other large shareholder of some megacorp are paid the megacorp pays tens or hundreds to the "bloat" which you rightly identify as a problem in a lot of these project.
To use a metaphor, paying the football coach and the chancellor less isn't gonna fix the price of a college that has a non-teaching non-researching administrator for every two students.
Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful? Of course not.
At the end of the day we need to find a way to reduce the bloat and waste because the bloat and waste are not only why the nuclear desalination plant (or whatever) looks expensive and unattractive, it's also why the farmers care to hold onto the water. If pivoting was cheaper/easier/more reliable than perpetually fighting they would.
The past 50yr of regulation has been the kind of quasi centrally planned financial tomfoolery to incentivize the "right thing" (for who's definition?) and it's worked so poorly here we are in these comments discussing how LA has stagnated to the financial detriment of most there. No, I don't think "just one more centrally planned tweak" is gonna fix it whether we're tweaking water or something else.
> Why develop local gas fields and solar when we can just invade nations with oil?
Non sequitur. Better analogy: why dig new wells when you waste half of your oil anyway? Because that's what alfalfa is: wasted water. But it's slightly more profitable to the water rights holder, so that's what they grow. Could this fresh water be used in more productive ways? Doesn't matter to them.
> The only way to win sustainably is to make the resource, whatever it is, more accessible or less needed, somehow.
Yes, by cultivating more water efficient crops in regions under hydric stress, like California. Why do you refuse to engage with my argument in good faith?
> Yes, you do. It will just be spent on schools to tell the kids how to think and carrot/stick grant programs to financially incentivize compliance among the municipalities and subsidies with strings attached and inspectors to verify these things and studies and surveys and all manner of other stuff like that rather than bombs and missiles but you absolutely need to spend untold sums of money to enforce policy that is "bad" for whoever you're enforcing it upon.
Utter nonsense. You pretend to despise "centrally planned financial tomfoolery" so why do you spend so much energy to support the current water rights holder?
On your last paragraphs: again, why are you misrepresenting my arguments?
"Capital owners" doesn't mean CEOs and rich people, it's all stakes in the financial markets. So when you say "paying the football coach and the chancellor less isn't gonna fix the price of a college that has a non-teaching non-researching administrator for every two students", it's true, but that's not what I meant, at all. And I think you know it.
What I meant, is that for-profit schools and PE-owned football clubs are responsible for jacking up prices, to feed useless middlemen that weren't there before. That's the bloat. The actual economy is growing very slowly while financial markets have 4% annual growth. Do the math.
That's why a single missile costs 15M and 3 years of labor, and involves dozens of private contractors, when the US was able to build multiple planes a day during WWII under Roosevelt for pennies. So when you ask "Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful?", the answer is yes. The proof is the New Deal, how Roosevelt was able to wrestle the country back from the jaws of Capital and build public infrastructure using public workers, efficiently.
You only believe in private over public because of decades of propaganda, when the reality is the government has never subcontracted more of its work and we can't get anything fucking done! California abandoned its high speed rail project after feeding billions to various companies for literally nothing in return.
> If pivoting was cheaper/easier/more reliable than perpetually fighting they would.
The farmers aren't fighting, because there's no one in office to even fight them. Capital completely owns the government, to the point that a simple law such as "farmers have to use slightly less water in the middle of a fucking desert" feels so impossibly hard to pass that we can seriously entertain building a nuclear power plant and dozens of desalination plants to produce fresh water when we already have enough for everyone!
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