Well, well.

Water use anywhere is sustainable within the recharge and filtration parameters of the aquifer/surface supply. And the cost to bring the water to US drinking water standards. Trouble has been that water rights laws are traditionally written in scientific ignorance, and politics will trump science for the time being, usually to the detriment of real individuals in favor of the most recent sub-category. If you want an entertaining read on the subject, try 'Centennial' by Jamess A. Michener. Skip the dinosaurs, and the murder mystery, and go to the aquifer part. But global warming has consequences for water beyond sea level rise. Now that the Great Lakes don't freeze over each winter, evaporation continues all year. Malaria is coming back to the Ukraine now that the swamps don't freeze and kill of the mosquito population. The Brits are making wine. No worries there, though, cause none will make it offshore, both as a consequence of local demand and external standards. The overwhelming preponderance of humanities' unsustainable global activities are a result of concentrated waste injection (feed lots, chicken & pig farms, sewerage outfalls, and everyone pees upstream of NO), or water use/diversion (as in the movie Chinatown). The circulation of water is like blood in an animal. It can take a certain level of bleeding, cuts & scrapes, or pathogenic attack, and survive. But what we're doing in both willful ignorance and greed (privatization of water supplies in South America) is accelerating the detriment that global warming represents to inland fresh water supplies, and will sicken and kill the beast. Hell, women have anti-freeze and flame retardent in their breast milk because our water filtration / treatment systems aren't meant to keep that stuff out. So, look for water wars next, and for your water bill to start looking like your cellphone charges, and for businesses to crop up to make water re-use (toilets) more common. The earth makes a great natural filter, unless poisoned with heavy metals. Or mining runoff. Look to the coal industry for a huge contribution to lowering water quality, both as a function of runoff, and of drastic geological changes that cap or divert natural surface flows. Look for the poisoning of entire ecosystems by fracking. They (Warren Buffet, et. al.) were smart, and got grandfathered in before the burning tapwater, and surface hydrocarbon venting started. It takes 1 PPM of any petroleum component to make water undrinkable, and it's a bitch to remove the lighter molecules either by filtration, RO, or catalytic settling. So, don't pour your crankcase oil down the storm sewer, recycle it. Don't water your lawn, let it die off in favor of locally hardy species. Stop treating for minor pests, and go organic for gardens, with natural remedies for pests. Jacques Cousteau said that the earth, if scaled to the size of an egg, would be different from a stone only by the addition of a single drop of water, and a speck of dust. Love him, or sick-to-death of his preaching (while using some pretty energy intense equipment) he understood how complicated and complex the water issue is. A few hundred nodes on a Cray would be a good start for local basin study, and something bigger for the global picture. It's as complicated as atmospheric weather, but while interconnected, is much more difficult to quantify. It's mostly underground, and you can't rubber ducky it as easily. And, God Almighty, stop Monsanto and their brethren, who developmpatented GMO corn, etc, so their Roundup will not affect the plant. But it's only creating 'super pests' that drink roundup like koolaid.

Personally, I like the added sense of security I feel while drafting a semi at 85, (knowing I'm getting that extra 10 MPG) and Ford's radar brake interlocked cruise control is keeping me at a steady 22 feet off the back end of a load of X-Boxes on their way to Laredo, While I dare to text...To hell with all the wireless self-drive tech, just lock my ass onto a cross-country semi, and I'll swing like Tarzan from vine to vine. I just need something bigger to push the air. (see silent movie w/Ben Turpin using magnets in engineless car for same purpose)

Could it have been as simple as 50 little asterisks all in a row?

Henry Ford tried to create a car for the masses. He had to do a little 'if you build it, they will come', but he intended to build a car that would, by its nature, create a market that had not existed before. Hell, there were only a few hundred miles of paved roads in the country then. But Ferrari, on the other hand, had no such pretensions. He built for the glory of winning races, and sold just enough of his cars to homologate them.

When the 747 was first put in service for commercial flights, there were lower deck seats that faced forward, and which had a spectacularly intimate view of landing and takeoff runways. These seats were quickly and universally removed, or the windows permanently replaced with non-transparent aluminum. The problem wasn't vomiting so much as screaming uncontrollably and leaving skidmarks down the aisle during landings. But I don't guess Boeing cares much if Airbus makes the same mistake. At least in Boeing's case, the affected group was a small subset of passengers.

It wasn't the government breaking the windows. In the 1950's in Illinois, the glaziers' union (more powerful than government then, apparently) required that pre-hung glass (as in, factory scab labor) on all new home construction be manually removed and replaced by union glaziers. Thank god that, as time has marched on, theft has replaced the union wielded hammer as the #1 cause of window shrinkage on the jobsite. Except in northern New Jersey, where it's stray bullets, and thrown cannolis.

Try the cabinet hardware dept at your local home improvement superstore. Little door/drawer bumpers work, and if your laptop outlasts them, they come on sheets of 20 or so.

If their nukes haven't been upgraded or maintained better than some of their other Cold War hardware, their detonation point could be anywhere between launch, and 'holy motherland, Boris, that one made it!'. And the Ukrainians have probably chopped the ones they could get at. Battlebotski.

If it's anywhere near Chernobyl, bears & wolves won't be much problem. The trees, though...

I was introduced to Senator John Glenn just after having inhaled a balloon full of helium at the FL Democratic Convention years back. "Why, hello Colonel Glenn" came out as you'd expect. He was amused. Momentarily.

Transocean was contracted by BP to drill the well. BP would have been the seller of the crude from the well. BP was technically contracting the labor and equipment for their benefit, and was ultimately responsible for evacuating the heavier drilling mud from the hole after the concrete seal (that later failed) had been placed at the bottom of the cased portion of the well. Mud withdrawal was a BP decision by their PM on the platform, and because seawater is less dense than mud, it was less able to resist the upward pressure in the well. The well casing was forced upwards within the wellshaft, and apparently was contorted enough to send metal shrapnel upwards into the shutoff valve, bricking it. In other wells, seawater works. In this one, they went through strata of 'unconsolidated' rock that made for a less well shaped hole, and for lateral loss of huge amounts of mud into cracks in the formation. It seems to me like a perfect shitstorm, where the safety valve used did not include an acoustic shutoff, the formation, besides being deep, was fractured and relatively unstable, and they pulled the mud out of the hole, assuming the seawater would hold down the pressure.

The American colonies first manufacturing ventures were largely of copying British items the colonists needed, or liked. The Brits began to rankle at losing their potentially huge market, and so began taxation of locally made items that competed with the British goods. It's not an Asian mindset, it's a pretty universal one. Let the R&D costs be paid by someone else, seek out disgruntled ex-employees, buy a single copy of something and take it apart for reverse engineering (why early Toyotas sounded like Mercedes). Isaac Newton said 'Nature abhors a vacuum'. Capitalism just sucks harder.

And my ex put several potato and rice rich casserole science projects down the drain/disposal, then had the nerve to ask what happened when the dishwasher barfed. My penance was to crawl under the house and saw off the cast iron trap, then rebuild during several round trips to the local iron monger. Now I know why plumbers have a love/hate relationship with disposals.