Hi Guys: Perth, Australia here. We started water restrictions nearly two decades ago, and I’m here to tell you it’s going to be okay. ‘The new normal’ becomes just normal eventually.
We started with bans on watering your lawn between certain times of the day. After a few years, that changed to only being able to water your garden on certain days of the week (using a sprinkler, you’re allowed to water by hand anytime).
We have serious use of grey (reprocessed) water and bore water for public areas and gardens. We put in a desalinisation plant which now covers something like 15-20% of our water supply. There’s been a variety of measures to encourage people to use more water efficient devices (washing machines, toilets, water tanks, etc). The end result is a situation that isn’t much better but is more manageable.
California is starting from a very different place - there doesn’t seem to have been much prep work done for this and farms and cities apparently draw from the same water supply? - but there’s plenty of room to move. A decent long-term plan along with a few years of restrictions and legislation encouraging more water-efficient crops and households would probably have a very positive impact.
(Disclaimer: I don’t know anywhere near enough about californian politics and local economy to make blanket statements like this, The example I’m using was in a different country and came from a different starting point, and a different order of magnitude in terms of population. Please take this as a description of things that worked somewhere but may not apply to you)
California uses prior appropriation water law, which might be well described as “Ayn Rand’s Wet Dream” (or “the final destruction of the American Indian” if you wanted to go over the top.) In saner jurisdictions, such as riparian law states, it is not entirely legal to own water supplies; water that falls from the sky and bubbles up from the ground is a commons and you aren’t supposed to harm it or hoard it. It seems to me that nothing you do in California is going to make water allocation “fair”, in any sense of that word, while you retain your “to the conqueror go the spoils” racist manifest destiny water allocation system.
The metric system of measurement is an anthropomorphic system, based on the numbers of fingers on your hand. It is for some purposes better than other systems, because it lends itself easily to calculators and computers. It is for some purposes inferior to the standard American English measurement system, which is based (instead of on child-like finger counting) on sound mathematical principles, such as optimizing the number of whole divisors in a unit of measure. It is typical of people who do not understand math, history or logic that they reverse this relationship, based on their misapprehension that the word “foot” indicates something to do with a human foot. In reality, the metric system is fundamentally anthropomorphic, based on the number of digits on your hand, while the SAE system uses objective, scientifically derived standards instead. Both systems are valid and have optimal uses; neither is fundamentally better than the other, although most individuals will no doubt have a preference based on their childhood indoctrination.
These being some of my less popular beliefs, I shall don my fire-retardant suit now.
What disturbed me about that article was the defense of Nestle as putting the water to it’s most productive use-- drinking water. While technically true, (under California’s water laws), it is an indictment of the sort of philosophy that drains aquifers,
Just one data point, but my parents taught me Imperial units and I am able to use both (they only use Imperial units). If I go to a market in the UK, I’ll buy a pound of fruit. If I’m in a supermarket, I’ll buy 500g. I instinctively think in miles when I’m driving, but in km when running. If I’m doing any calculations, it’s metric all the way. Imperial units seem to work better in isolation - 6 miles, 7,000 feet, 1 gallon etc. Maybe it’s because I mainly learned Metric in school, but it seems to work much better when it comes to working with large numbers or multiple units. As you say, each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but:
On Fahrenheit’s original scale the lower defining point was the lowest temperature to which he could reproducibly cool brine (defining 0 degrees), while the highest was that of the average human core body temperature (defining 100 degrees).
That’s my favorite example of why I prefer Fahrenheit! You can calibrate a Fahrenheit thermometer outside the lab - and people have done it, many times, during the settling of Alaska by the round-eyes for example. You can’t get the same level of accuracy with Celsius outside of a lab, because nano-pure water is not generally found in nature, and it’s quite difficult to figure out what salts and other impurities are suspended in your water.
Fahrenheit thought a lot about that scale, and the system we know was not his first attempt. One of the things he wanted to do was make negative numbers unnecessary for nearly all common purposes - it is a scale for a businessmen and farmers, it isn’t optimized for a lab scientist. In the lab (particularly in the chemistry lab) I think centigrade is preferable.
To be fair, while the rest of the world has gained sanity, we learned it from watching you.
[quote]NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One Shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Wichfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:
Two farthings = One Ha’penny. Two ha’pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.[/quote]
Precisely. There are no absolute right or wrong ways to measure, but there are better ways for given applications. Metric is amazing for calculations. Imperial is great for mundane day to day tasks.
But don’t get me started on time. FSM I hate time measurements so. Expletive. Hard.
There is a special place in bell where Timey, the time demon lives. And some day me and sam/dean Winchester are gonna go there and pants him.
Lawns don’t use much water. Rice fields do. Why do they grow rice in CA? Fisheries that provide habitat of questionable need for a couple of species of some protected guppies use water. Millions of gallons. Maybe we should grow rice somewhere else and take care of people instead of fish.
What’s wrong with imperial, a gallon of water weighs eight point, er, and some change pounds. Wait, ill start again. A mile is five thousand two hundred eighty feet, which is intuitive since I have feet. But why don’t we still use a length similar to the length of my arm…? Oh, I have a good name since I love the art style of mine craft, a cubit!
7.9 to 8.3 depending on temp(32 or 212, intuitive right?!) I used to press cheese with tubs of water and had to hit very specific weights. They are burned into my brain.
But that’s one of the primary concerns when there is drought–that there won’t be agriculture. People gotta drink, sure, but people still have to eat. I doubt dehydration is actually the major concern at this time. People still get plenty of drinking water, it’s agriculture that suffers first.
