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Comment Re:Desalination plants cost a lot to operate (Score 1) 678

SoCal could solve the "water crisis" today if they stopped watering all their fucking lawns.

I'm surprised that after all this time people still have this misconception. Lawn watering is just part of that little 4% sliver at the bottom. Farming uses the vast majority of water.

And farmers indeed are the ones cutting usage by the most. The point isn't that they use more of it, it's that the difference between water at the tap in LA or SD costing the same during the drought is everyone just not wasting it on green grass. No one is dying of thirst but prices are going to get pretty ridiculous here soon, as some munis run out of water entirely (having not managed to get price hikes through) and all the residents rely on bottled water which is far more expensive.

Comment Re:Well done! (Score 1) 540

It's not really just about annoying the neighbours. If you stick all the poor people in the same neighbourhood, then all the poor kids will go to schools with poor kids, and all the rich kids will go to school with rich kids. Since schools are funded by property taxes, the poor kid schools always end up having less money. If you mix poor and rich kids in the same areas, and they attend the same schools, and benefit from the same property taxes, then things end up much more even. Instead of one school having everything, and another having nothing, you'd have all the schools with similar amounts of resources.

224 units is not enough to build even an elementary school around, so don't worry. This is definitely "mixed in" with the other residents compared to most income-gap boundaries. However, at this level the indigenous population will almost certainly be sending their kids to high pricetag private school even from kindergarten. However, I have a feeling that all the property taxes in the coffers from the dozens of multi-million dollar homes will be enough to afford the "poor" residents of Lucas' Groundwalker Ranch (still workshopping the name) who are still almost all in the upper 50% of income nationwide, a decent place to send their kids.

Comment Re:Well done! (Score 1) 540

On one hand I'm glad he built this low-income housing...on the other hand I don't like that the mere existence of poor people in the vicinity is being used as revenge. I mean it's hilarious and not his fault that rich people think like this, but participating in it seems wrong in itself.

"Won't let me build my studio huh!? Well then eat poor people, motherfuckers! Muahahaha!"

I can only hope that the "poor people" (no doubt average people to you and me) are such good residents that they make the property value jump for Lucas and drop for all his nose-up neighbors (because you don't have to spend several million just to live in Nicasio any more).

Comment Re:Well done! (Score 2) 540

Yes, that's the problem. Once it starts it tends to build on itself. That is why it is better to spread it out more. Not 200+ units in one development.

200 units on 54 acres is a breeze, really. 1/4 acre per unit is a TON of room, you won't have any problem telling who the good neighbors are and who the shitheads are. 800 units on 54 acres? Then you are into some downward spiral trouble unless you pour a lot of money into managing it.

Comment Re:first (Score 2) 30

This sounds like a honeypot to me..

Especially when selling 0-days isn't actually illegal in most circumstances, only rather shady. Researchers do deals all the time. Total anonymity on one or both sides doesn't really help anyone. Hell, it's so commonplace they have discussed it on NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

If anything this is just a new way to scam people out of money or to ferret out security researchers for further recruitment/waterboarding by the CIA.

Comment Re:Desalination plants cost a lot to operate (Score 0) 678

And $30B will get you 30 desal plants like Carlsbad's, which cost $1B, and which will provide 7% of what San Diego area residents need.

But the $30B won't get you the power it takes to run them (new power plants?) Or the energy required to power the power plants.

Also, CA's agriculture depends upon cheap water, not expensive desalinated water.

That said, would a $30B pipeline bring in the same amount of water as desal plants? Or more? Operating expenses are sure to be lower, but there'd need to be a detailed economic and engineering case made for one solution over the other.

--PM

Desalinated water is ready to drink, so you would effectively be taking all the normal purification plants offline and freeing up all the water that went through them for agri use. That being said, SoCal could solve the "water crisis" today if they stopped watering all their fucking lawns.

Comment Re: Why not? (Score 2) 678

...so the poorer people will move out. Nice plan. How about putting water meters on farm consumption, most have no meters at all. Most ag water users pay zero, or close to that. How about letting the market decide where almonds and lettuce should be grown, instead of giving CA farmers a massive subsidy while cities go dry?

The market decides by way of water rights on certain parcels (that drives up/down land value). The landowners then get to decide which crops (i.e. ones that are the most valuable per gallon) to grow with their water. If water were truly scarce the farmers would be just bottling the water and selling it (some already are, but most are just growing almonds like always). The market is working nicely, thanks. And if poor people can't afford to live in SoCal? (its already really really hard unless you are OK being a homeless bum) Let them move to a cheaper place to live and maybe they will enjoy their minimum wage a little. Then, prices on everything in SoCal will go up (even more) and the market will kick in and force some of the rich people to move out too. This is Adam Smith's plan at work, why disrupt it?

Comment Re:Honestly ... (Score 2) 342

Of course, all they need to do is not get caught. Same thing happens with slot machines and other random chance electronic games... it's easier than lobbying:

1) Casino boss invites high ranking government official.
2) Boss says, "We know you'll have fun, but I think you'll have more fun on machine number 57 if you grant consideration to improving legal conditions surrounding our fine establishment."
3) Official wins jackpot
4) Boss wins jackpot (figuratively)

You're a fool if you don't think this happens. This is why I'm against electronic gambling. Not because of some moral "gambling is of the devil" thing... but because it would be trivial to rig these machines and then erase all evidence that anything fraudulent happened. Politicians can literally transform your hopes and dreams into money lining their wallet.

There (should be) a paper trail of payouts to any winner from any casino, for tax purposes. The distinction that a mechanical vs electronic device was "rigged" is totally secondary to that fact. If this was skirted, then several other laws were also broken that day.

Comment Re:Can't Fight the Future (Score 1) 279

It might be useful to inform an admin to look at suspicious postings, especially if they can get the accuracy higher. BUT I hope no one uses such algorithms to automatically stop suspected trolls. This can only lead to unforeseen consequences and stifling of free speech (unless of course stifling is not an unforeseen consequence, but an intended one).

Moderation at a privately owned/operated site can be freely used to filter anything they don't want their users to see, even if it creates a slant. However, the odds that they will start filtering specifically subversive content is pretty low, since it's those kind of posts that generate hundreds of follow-ups of disagreement, bolstering even more traffic. More likely, they will filter the truly atrocious (bland death threats, etc) that add little in terms of desirable content.

Comment Classic brinksmanship (Score 2) 108

If no one paid for a .sucks domain, Google (where all information discovery starts out at on the internet anyway) would simply rank .sucks domains nice and far down and mcdonalds.sucks would be no more relevant than mcdonalds-sucks.tumblr.com so you can thank whoever it is that bought the first .sucks for this shitstorm. I just can't believe that it's 2015 and we are still debating how best to handle basic squatting. If someone owns a particular trademark, why not just wait for someone to shell out for the .sucks version, and then lawyer the shit out of them? Maybe because it would cost more than $2500 anyway.

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