But unlike the East, CA has all year growing. That greatly increases a farm's earning potential. That attracts a lot of farmers.

Kentucky & TN: Booze is a major part of the economy.

Powdered booze is made of booze.

"No or few reviewers? I don't take the chance."
I'd go with 1 review if it was trusted. Astroturfing sockpuppets... there's not really safety in numbers.

Kudos to the author for including a google maps link. All news stories should do that now.
If you look south of the sludge pond you can see what looks like an older sludge pond that is being processed. Yes, it's nasty and dangerous and definitely should be contained, but isn't that what sludge ponds are for? To keep all that nasty stuff contained for later processing.

Smartphones are so powerful now that cryptography software hasn't caught up yet. We have the computing power in phones now to do things not possible just a couple years ago. You could do things like real time steganography where the real audio message is hidden inside a fake conversation. The hardware is here, we just need an app for that.

Not everyone has the same experience as you do.
Another quote from the article:

Kolbe believes the site's flaws are felt more keenly outside the West. "People in the developing world don't always understand how Wikipedia is created. It's such a credible website, it comes so high up the search rankings - people think it's just another encyclopedia."

All this information could also be legally found out by following a person around.

I think more financial education would have a bigger impact on people's lives. Personal finance tied in with higher education and career planning. Basic cost/benefit analysis. Also business finance like how corporations work and how to start a company.
All they taught me in high school was how to write a check.

Please, please don't use the term "virtual" to describe the use of this real water.
Use iWater instead.

So. Cal has a ways to go before it sees its "worst droughts". A paper published last year shows evidence of 2 multicentury droughts in Southern California in the last 3000 years.
Not a typo. They were multi-CENTURY droughts.

I've noticed that the last few summers the oranges in our local groceries in Ohio are coming from South Africa and Austrailia instead of California.

You can call me a moron if you want. I really don't care, but it detracts from your credibility.
My point was to mirror your comment but swap the IPCC with Mr. Moore in order to show that your argument applies to anyone who makes an income related climate change.

On the other hand, the wallets of people working for IPCC are dependent on global warming. If global warming is not a problem, the IPCC goes away and they are all looking for new jobs.

The rest of your post is pure speculation.

He shows he hasn't looked at paleoclimate reconstructions

Neither have you.

We are still well below the average temperatures for the Cenozoic era (and life goes on).
For a majority of the Cenozoic there have been no polar ice caps (and life went on).
We are currently in an ice age inter-glacial period.
50, 100, even 1000 years is an extremely short period geologically speaking.

Patrick Moore believes that anthropogenic global warming is not a grave threat to the planet and that climate change is being used as a scare tactic for political purposes. Based on the geologic record, I'd have to agree.

People running large organizations generally try to increase their business by increasing their customer base. This rewards them by increasing their income and influence. It's the human nature of personality types that gravitate to running large organizations.
Now what if the large organization is a government entity? How do they expand their "business"? How do the people running them increase their income and influence? They do it by increasing the output of their "product". Unfortunately for citizens, the government's "product" is regulations and control.

TLDR: Due to human nature, unless some definite boundaries are set in law, any government entity will eventually try to expand its powers and influence.