What if I want to consume it despite there not being a consensus that it is safe to consume?
Nice try. In fact, nobody is preventing you from consuming it. The FDA is simply saying that it cannot be contained in foods sold in the US.
Your comment is fractally wrong.
Another dumb slashdotism.
If people were smart enough not to live in a desert
How long do you think people can live without water? I think the number is something like four days, give or take. So, if all those people were so stupid, how did they survive more than four days?
Hint: there was actually water available when they got there.
Not a single living person ever moved somewhere where no water was available. The ones who did are dead now. Towns and cities grow organically, and the infrastructure grows with them. This is not a question of whether people are (or are not) smart enough to live in a desert. People will live where life is sustainable, and even here in California, life thus far has been sustained. The fact that we're in a drought at the moment may test that sustainability, but you can't argue that people are dumb for moving here. Up until now, they've had the facts on their side.
Point two, governments absolutely decide where people can and can not live. That is a truism, and I should not have to support it. Try moving into a local park if you don't believe me.
The fact that there are places where one cannot live does not actually prove your point. It only proves that people can't possess other people's properties. All you need to do to found a town is to buy some land and call it a town. And buying land isn't always necessary. Just look at the founding of Oakland.
Point three, there most certainly are people in charge of kicking you out of all the places you might try to live or start up a community, at least in the developed world.
Generally speaking, that's not the case in the United States.
Point four, cities' growth can absolutely be manipulated intentionally, by means both fair and foul, and this has been done throughout history for a variety of reasons.
Yes. And statistically speaking, most towns seek to increase their size, not reduce it.
You wrote that whole shitty comment, and then wrote this at the bottom of it without a hint of irony, didn't you?
Since all of your counterpoints are in fact bullshit, yes. I did.
There's many orders of magnitude more water in the Pacific Ocean than California can consume
Obligatory analogy: Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and burns cleanly. Despite that, hydrogen is still a terrible fuel source. Why? The effort required to separate hydrogen from whatever it's stuck to makes it not worth the effort.
By the same token, desalinating enough water for California's agricultural needs is on a scale that I don't think you have really thought about. It's a scale so massive that every other civil project pales in comparison. The energy consumption alone would be staggering. Getting the water from the coast to the central valley (where most of the crops are) would be staggering. The physical infrastructure to actually do the desalinization is staggering.
But yes, it's possible. Just like it's possible to convert America from gasoline to hydrogen.
Believe it or not, people managed to survive in colder climates before they could truck in fresh fruit year-round from California. And actually, if they planned well, they could eat rather well with a variety of food. The stuff that didn't store well? Well, that's why they invented fermentation. And canning. And freezing.
For various definitions of "survive", yes. And yeah, I'm aware of the long history of humankind's relationship with food.
Personally, I like that lifestyle.
Good for you! No, I mean that non-sarcastically. Those are great skills to have. But they're not common anymore, and they're not likely to be common again (barring the zombie apocalypse).
How many times do we have to prove that PRIVATE management of natural resources is better than useless wasteful goverment before people believe it?
You haven't actually proven that. Not by a long shot.
Maybe those farms never belonged there in the first place, or they should have not let the population grow to the point that it was unsustainable?
Given that the current drought is unprecedented, how would they have knows that? California has managed thus far to have enough water. The current situation is obviously scary, but nobody is able to predict the future.
They KNEW this was an issue, how did they know? Because They Have To Pipe Water In From Hundreds Of Miles Away And Their Crops Don't Stand A Snowballs Chance In Hell Without Someone Elses Water.
Who is "they"?
Be specific.
How about move the people to where the water is instead?
And how -- exactly -- do you propose we do that? Forcible relocation? Do we just evict all the people from their houses and tell them to go somewhere else, or were you thinking more along the lines of refuge camps? Maybe you could load everyone in boxcars and ship them across country.
California of course already provides a number of incentives for people to not live there
And yet we're still the most populous state in America. Clearly, there must be some actual reason that so many people choose to live here. Whatever disincentives you might have in mind are clearly not working.
but perhaps they could do more and actively subsidize moving people to places more suitable for human habitation.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
Move people to where the water is instead. Or at least the farming.
The only thing that's harder to move than water is climate. There's a reason all the produce is grown in California.
Oh look, another vegan with an agenda. Seriously, go fuck yourself. You eat what you want to eat. The moment you start trying to impose your choices on me is the moment that I slam the door in your face.
Nice sacred cow. There are plenty of other places in the country suitable for growing crops.
Name one that's even on the same scale. Go on. Just one.
SoCal can't just steal water from other users.
History would tend to suggest otherwise.
The solution lies in internalizing the costs of bringing in the water instead of subsidizing it. People are certainly able to move into the area then—with the understanding that they will either have to live in a way that uses less water, or pay through the nose to sustain a lifestyle not suited for that environment.
The money to move the water clearly came from somewhere. I would submit as self-evident that the people of California are, in fact, paying the true cost of that water. The fact that it is not wholly contained in the water bill is somewhat irrelevant.
it's stupid to live somewhere that takes too many resources to make habitable.
For what definition of "too many"? Who decides how many that is? Generally speaking, a population will grow until it hits some boundary that prevents it from growing further. You might argue that we've reached that point, and there might even be merit in that. But you most assuredly cannot argue that the population never should have existed in the first place, because to do so presupposes that you know what the eventual boundary condition will be.
California has supported human habitation for a long, long time. We're in an unprecedented drought right now, the likes of which nobody 100 years ago (or even 50, or 20, or 10) was able to predict. "Too many" is meaningless in that context.
it makes more sense to live where the water is, instead of in a desert. but what do I know
Nothing. That much is clear from all the spam you've posted to this topic.
Waste not, get your budget cut next year.
