318 Comments

Not his Small Johnson?

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PAB saw Furiosa.

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What a whack job. I lived in California most of my life, and I have never seen said faucet unless perhaps it's been recently installed? All shiny and new, from the Home Depot plumbing department?

Aisle? Bin?

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Yes. Clearly Trump is not well. We don’t have a giant faucet. (#agathawinking.gif) No faucets here. Yep. No faucets.

[throws giant towel over giant faucet on Gallbladder’s lawn.]

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I'm amazed it didn't devolve into how, if Canada didn't "pay up", we'd turn off the faucet, as with the UN.

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Worst "Chinatown" reboot ever.

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Trump may have also been thinking of the water intake gates in the Sacramento Delta for water entering into the California Aqueduct, bringing water from the delta to Los Angeles.

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Commander Hadfield LIBELZ!!1!!!!!11!!!!!!!

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How timely. While reading this article and comments, I received two notifications--one from my Irrigation District saying my irrigation ditch will be turned off for the year either today or tomorrow. By way of a massive valve that takes all day to turn, I guess.

The 2nd notification was from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, informing me of job opportunities on the L.A. Aqueduct. Trust me, they never turn that valve off.

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I would guess that trumpy is well into his second childhood if he had ever, in fact, gotten past his first one.

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Forget it, Jake...

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As little as possible.

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He’s a massive takes a day to turn his brain idiot.

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It's always George Soros.

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There is no point explaining why f23's concepts are impractical, or wrong, or just plain looney. It is like arguing with a believer in a literal Noah's ark or an anti-Darwinian. It is better, and a lot more satisfying, to ridicule him mercilessly.

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Just about any time California is in drought, the idea of diverting from the Columbia or Snake rivers has come up. And the PNW is not having it. When it came up in the 1960s, the region's congressional leaders managed to get a moratorium on even studying the plan put on it until the late 1980s. When that was getting ready to expire, they managed to get in a federal law that would permanently ban any diversion of the Columbia. And then Oregon has put in its laws that would prevent water from being diverted out of state to go across state lands. https://columbiainsight.org/for-drought-plagues-california-diverting-columbia-river-water-is-a-pipe-dream-for-now/

That doesn't even get into the obstacles. In Cadillac Desert, the author talks about the idea and says that it would require a minimum of 6 nuclear power stations to get enough energy to pump the water across all of the numerous mountain ranges in the way. It would be such a clusterfuck of engineering, that it probably be less prohibitive for California to just go to the Arctic and ferry down their own icebergs (which wouldn't really work either, but it would be a somewhat smaller degree of not working than the other plan).

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Or really, just get serious about desalination plants. They have their own environmental issues, but at least they can be located closer to farms. There have also been some interesting concepts for directing flood water to places where it can help recharge aquifers (which have also been losing water since 150 years ago).

Oh, and BTW stupid people, we like to eat salmon and trout, too. No rivers, no fish - it's that fucking simple.

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The aquifers aren't really going dry on their own, either. They're being over-pumped. Then land subsides and can't contain as much water as before no matter how much you might be directing flood waters. That creates lakes in places like Tulare which removes that land area from agricultural use. Where I live in the Owens Valley, Los Angeles has been taking all the surface water for over 100 years and has been pumping groundwater for almost as long. It's a trainwreck.

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TBF, Tulare was a lake when Europeans got here; it was drained for farming sometime between their arrival and now (there had been boat-borne commerce until then). But yeah, I didn't mean to imply that the aquifers were drying up on their own - "losing water" should have been worded "sucked dry").

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Yes. The Ogallala Aquifer has been over pumped every year since the end of WWII. The Great Plains should not be used for growing corn (one of the worst water hogs on the planet), especially since all they do with it is make high fructose corn syrup and ethanol.

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