> I'm wondering why california isn't investing in more desalination for SoCal, especially for LA.
Because California has plenty of water for residents. What California doesn't have is plenty of water for agribusiness.
And the agribusinesses do NOT want people paying close attention as all the valid solutions to water problems are basically "shut down agribusinesses in arid areas".
people are always trying to conserve water, and droughts have been a plague for the past few decades. Even if the agriculture is taking up all the water, it doesn't change how water scarcity is a a very real part of socal life. You don't have to shutdown agriculture elsewhere, and it is a vital part of california's economy, that's just a lazy solution. I can get behind getting the agriculture industry to finance partly the desalination plants so they can free up the fresh water via the aqueduct.
In the unlikely event california becomes independent, water rights will be a big deal too, those natural water sources won't be so reliable without nevada's cooperation.
> In the unlikely event california becomes independent, water rights will be a big deal too
This is all hypothetical of course but the logical eastern border of an independent state centered in what's now California would be near Denver for precisely this reason.
> You don't have to shutdown agriculture elsewhere, and it is a vital part of california's economy, that's just a lazy solution.
Agribusiness is under 2% of the California economy and an even smaller employer. You could wipe it completely out and the state would barely notice.
And nobody is saying to wipe out actual food production. Mostly people want to stomp on things like growing and exporting alfalfa (which is effectively exporting water for all intents and purposes).
> droughts have been a plague for the past few decades
Droughts have been a plague forever. Quoting Steinbeck from East of Eden:
“During the dry years, the people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
In yet another great cosmic irony, one of the things that is notorious for making it difficult for a woman to get pregnant is the stress of trying to get pregnant.
Placebo or not, anything which reduces the stress of the mother-to-be can be extremely helpful.
Although, a bunch of LLM researchers basically saying with their actions "Don't judge me with an LLM" is particularly ironic. Doubly so when caught using the LLM for the task they, themselves, want to opt out of.
> [1] Real estate is generally a good investment and will hold value or appreciate in the long term, because supply will adjust to demand shocks to rescue values
Real estate is NOT supposed to be a good "investment" and only became so because the government started propping it up with bank bankstops, zoning, NIMBY, redlining, etc. If your pricing is working correctly, real-estate should be close to zero-sum.
Austin, in particular, had several nasty bust cycles where real estate prices tanked after overbuilding which is precisely what kept the cost of living under control. Alas, that is a thing of the past after 2008 when everybody realized that the federal government will backstop the banks "Real estate number must always go up! Brrrrr!"
For nearly every homebuyer, a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth. It needs to be a good long term investment that at least reasonably paces with inflation, otherwise you are losing money by buying a home and everyone has to rent and then you have feudalism with extra steps.
The good news is this is totally fine with keeping cost of living under control and overbuilding, because prices will go back up over time. Most people aren't going to own their home until the 30 year mark so it really is a much, much longer term investment than anything like overbuilding or other factors can reasonably affect.
The problem is really that people started seeing 2x-10x returns on homes and started treating that like the norm. That is not a 'good investment' that is a 'money printer,' and in most cases the government does not want to safeguard that behavior, but it's hard not to when those same people panic like crazy if their home only goes up 2% in value in a year or, god forbid, decreases in value for a year.
There is really no good solution to that mentality, if there really was one then Wall Street would have uncovered it ages ago to get more people into long term ETFs.
> a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth
That's bad and a central part of the problem.
I accept that my car is depreciating in value every year I own it, and but I need a car so I buy one. I don't need it to be a good long term investment, despite it being a major purchase.
The entire mindset of treating a family's home as being an investment class rival to bonds and equities is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that's clearly been detrimental to many.
> > a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth
> That's bad and a central part of the problem.
Why? Or to ask in a different way, how could it not be?
For nearly all regular working people, there is nothing they will ever buy that costs more in labor and materials than a home. So of course it will be the most expensive purchase most people ever make. How could it not be?
No, it needs to be roughly zero sum but only over very long timescales. Anything else is a disaster.
If housing is a "good investment", it attracts rampant speculation and concentration of ownership to the capital class. You need regular wipeouts to force the speculators out of the market (doubly so if they are buying on leverage).
If housing is a "bad investment", people abandon the real estate and you get blight which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle downward.
Things need to be kept balanced in housing so that people can use it to be a place to live. We are currently in the middle of seeing the dysfunction that happens when being "shelter" is overshadowed by being an "investment".
Also "Wipe out a whole boatload of techbros who artificially inflate prices". Nobody is talking about that part of the equation.
Austin was one of the places a lot of tech folks flocked to when everybody was working online. RTO and layoffs have wiped a lot of them out. I'd estimate almost 1/3 of the tech folks that were floating around last year are now in other cities.
> 35% of Americans rent their homes. And they almost invariably rent from investors. Therefore if more than 35% of homes are owned by investors this drives down rent. If less than 35% are owned by investors rent goes up.
This only holds until the percentage owned by the investors becomes a monopolistic chunk. At that point the investors would rather leave some apartments empty rather than see rents go down.
> The whole of France is eating quite a lot of unpasteurized cheese. If done correctly, it can be quite safe.
"If done correctly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The "classic" processes are generally done for exactly the reasons of maintaining safety. They create conditions where, even if bad bacteria exist, the growth is minimized in various ways--temperature, acidity, competing good bacterial growth, etc.
The problem occurs when you try to industrialize these processes. These kinds of artisanal processes are generally expensive, almost never scale, and people in the field recognize this.
Unfortunately, in the US, the overlap between "raw milk consumers" and "nitwit to be fleeced" is quite high. This attracts charlatans like these "Raw Farm" con artists, and you wind up with outbreaks like these.
And, yes, I am quite salty that these Raw Farm dingleberries somehow manage to distribute a bunch of dangerous raw milk products to multiple states while I can't even get a gallon of double cream (pasteurized or otherwise) in order to make butter.
I grew up in a location where people always drank raw milk, not from any bizarro beliefs but because for several centuries the way you got your milk was to watch for the cows heading for the barn, then about 30 minutes later send one of the kids over with a pail to collect the milk for the day. It was still warm from the cow, you put it in your fridge or, before electricity, in the basement cool room, and there was never any problem with it. As you say though, industrialisation of the processes and it taking days, weeks, possibly months between squirted-out-of-the-cow and consumption have messed that up.
And the reason I don't believe you is because my family two generations back milked cows just like you claim. And everybody in the family boiled their milk religiously.
Folk wisdom was "boil the milk" and they didn't worry much about what it did to vitamins or taste.
Even worse, they would freeze the milk afterward. I still remember the horrible taste of that stuff. Yuck.
Gonna make you cough up a reliable citation on that one.
The kombucha folks don't seem to have a problem with vitamins of aseptic purees after processing and generally seem to have converged to aseptic as being superior in terms of nutritional content than any other mechanism including freezing and preservatives. And Vitamin C is notoriously fragile to heat. Generally, Vitamin C is far more fragile than anything in milk (standard pasteurization knocks down Vitamin C by about 50%!).
Overall, though, the nutritional content is "mostly" unaffected by UHT. B1 and B12 drop roughly 10-20% for both types of pasteurization.
The primary issues with UHT are Lysine and folate. Lysine gets clobbered by the Maillard reactions. The folate you cited is definitely a concern given that folate and Vitamin D are factors in preventing birth defects.
And, you are correct that the taste does change since UHT kicks off Maillard reactions in UHT milk. TIL.
However, we come back to the fact that "standard" HTST pasteurization changes are so minimal that the risks of raw milk FAR outweigh any possible gains therefrom.
And if you don't have a reliable cold chain, UHT pasteurization is pretty good with caveats.
I hate UHT - and one thing I've learnt from cheap hotels is a teaspoon of natural yoghurt makes the milk taste fresh enough to me to have with cereal. Not sure why.
Because California has plenty of water for residents. What California doesn't have is plenty of water for agribusiness.
And the agribusinesses do NOT want people paying close attention as all the valid solutions to water problems are basically "shut down agribusinesses in arid areas".
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