The output from a good modern water-treatment plant is usually distinctly superior to the input you get from a river.
Solution: just stick the output pipe into the input pipe; then all you need in the way of fresh water is to make up for leakage and evaporation.
Note that the Israelis have gone from less than 10% of urban use being desalinated water (the output water from sewage treatment is put into their national irrigation carrier or injected into aquifers) to over 40% and rising fast from desalination in only 15 years, mainly by drastically increasing the efficiency of/cutting the cost of desalination.
In fact, the big desalination plants under construction in SoCal are using Israeli technology and Israeli companies, mostly.
The difference and the reason SoCal hasn't made this transition is the planning and approval process.
The Israelis just decided to do it, and did it. SoCal is sitting around with its thumb up its collective butt yakking and talking and having meetings... and yakking and talking and suing each other... and...
The result is that droughts set people in California squabbing and fighting, further slowing things down. In Israel nowadays, they barely notice them.
]]>Or that there will be memetic counterstrikes.
This is not quite so dumb as the people who assume at some point their opponents will slap themselves on the forehead and exclaim: "Yes, yes, I see it now! You are Good and Right and I am Bad and Wrong! So Bad! So Wrong! Now I will abandon my Bad, Wrong narrative and adopt your Good, Right narrative and perform penitence rituals!"
But it's still pretty dumb.
]]>A) your wishes will make you stupid. Emotion destroys the capacity for rational thought; rationalizing thought takes over. The more IQ and information you have, the worse you will do, because you'll be better at convincing yourself of what you want to believe.
(This applies to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future.)
B) It would be inherently impossible anyway. There is too much information and you can't tell what part of it is significant or how it interacts.
Eg., try to imagine a Roman deciding in 0 CE that the future would be utterly shaped by a mystery cult based on a dead Jewish preacher.
This is why I don't do contemporary or near/future SF. It reveals your biases and/or ignorance too starkly and too soon.
Don't try to predict the future. Don't imagine that you can, or that anyone can, understand some underlying structure which would account for and predict people's actions. Don't imagine that you know what'll overdetermine events 10 years from now.
Incidentally, this is why "planning" in any comprehensive sense always fails.
]]>This is the only solution worth seriously discussing.
Nobody is going to abandon growth, or reduce their standard of living, or frankly to give up so much as a cabbage, nor are countries like India and Indonesia going to be content to remain poor.
]]>Hence the sort of baroque crazy that uses VX to kill people when a gun would be much simpler and more reliable.(*)
For that matter, the first serious intelligence agencies of the 20th century, back just before WW1 (before that it was all improvised and temporary) modeled themselves on fictional organizations -- like the Indian Secret Service on "Kim"... because when Kipling wrote "Kim", there wasn't actually any Indian Secret Service. There were government spies, but no central organization with institutional continuity.
Likewise, the percusors of MI5/6 and so forth were made up by spy fiction enthusiasts in the decade before 1914. In that year, the head of the British secret service was personally cruising around Germany in a bad false mustache, and the German naval intelligence service had a grand total of 5 employees, because Admiral Tirpitz didn't want one because it would report to the Naval staff and he didn't like the staff.
(*) you can tell when the Israelis kill someone -- usually it's a couple of low-velocity .22 rounds to the head. Sometimes their phone explodes when they answer and say: "Yes, this is Ibrahim."
]]>The European political class are blundering through the marshlands to their asteroidal doom, bellowing and trumpeting in denial; they just can't deal with a political environment in which their gatekeepers can't control information, restrict entry or enforce the "boundaries of respectability" set by the bien-pensant consensus. They tried to restrict political action to a meaningless ritual designed to validate decisions made by committees of technocrats behind the curtain, and it's not working anymore.
Even though the consequences are likely to be bad, I can't avoid a certain degree of schadenfreude at the head-butts and groin-kicks to their ineffable smugness and joy at their increasing degree of bewildered terror.
It's the return of the repressed, with a (quite literal) vengeance. After the tortures and indignities they've inflicted on people like the Greeks, they've got a world of pain coming. Karma's a bitch.
Scottish independence is unlikely though. The rest of the UK is more important to them than Europe economically if they have to chose one or the other, and even a "soft independence" with both parties in the EU lost when put to a vote.
A "hard independence" with customs barriers and passport controls on the English border will be considerably less attractive still.
Not to mention that if Wilder and Le Pen win or even do really well (looking increasingly likely) the view across the North Sea is going to be massively unattractive as the EU crashes and burns.
]]>Dude, newsflash: nobody likes being mocked. Mockery is never intended to make those who are the objects of it laugh; it's intended to make them -bleed-. The intent is to hurt and harm; it's a psychological weapon.
The difference between Hitler's reaction and most people's is that Hitler actually killed people who mocked him, rather than just thinking about it.
Because... Hitler.
Stalin and Mao were the same way. It's your standard murderous dictator "thing".
]]>Shooting was more efficient than gas.
The camps were used instead because of the political fallout from "massacre in place", and because the wastage among the executioners had gotten very high.
The aim of the extermination camps was to keep the killing out of sight, and to limit the number of Germans who had to do actual hands-on stuff.
]]>I stepped over the dead and dying bodies of famine victims on my way to school on occasion in my childhood. I saw people beaten to death (I'm pretty sure) by the police; or at least severely injured.
And once when I was about 11, I walked into a small room where two men had killed each other with pangas (machetes) while blitzed out on Nubian Gin.(*)
There were pools of blood on the floor, bits and pieces (a thumb, I think, but it was certainly a digit), and when something dropped on my head I looked up and blood dripped into my mouth and eyes (tastes nasty).
My observation is not that this made me more "empathetic" about human suffering. Less so, if anything.
(*) the local moonshine, by rumor distilled using old car radiators. It could do odd things to your central nervous system.
]]>An independent Irish government -- which would have been dominated by landowners in alliance with the middle classes -- would probably have done less.
Virtually no farmers starved in Ireland during the Famine; even small tenant farmers usually survived. The people who died were landless laborers and their families (a majority of the rural Irish at the time) and "cottars", people who got a small potato-patch in return for semi-bound labor for farmers (themselves usually tenants).
But a lot of Irish -landlords- went bust because London tried very hard to make Irish landowners pay for the cost of famine relief, which was orthodox political economy at the time. About a quarter to a third of the land of Ireland changed hands in the ensuing generation, often being bought by rising Catholics.
The actual Irish peasantry, who didn't become demographically dominant until the 1870's when famine and emigration had swept away most of the laborers and cottars, reacted to the famine with understandable brutality, guarding their property and leaving the really poor to die.
Mind you, without what the British government did several more million would have died.
]]>Anyone who's been following events in France lately and still believes in the "Republican Front will hold" is probably basing their overall strategy on Queen Galadriel's intervention with her elvish legions.
Oh, well, there's an upside -- I'm still hoping that when that mob gives Jean-Claude Junker what he deserves someone uploads the video to YouTube.
]]>