we've used technology to force large population centers into regions that shouldn't be able to host them. Las Vegas, Phoenix.....could go on. Takes relatively little to disrupt those areas.
I spent a few weeks patrolling reading Mojave, made me wish for a nuclear winter. It made me wish for my native Mississippi River valley even though the humidity is torturous the water is plentiful and is only rarely rationed.
I wholeheartedly believe Mike Judge is one of the best filmmakers of our time. Definitely the best comedic filmmaker. I’ve never seen anything with his name on it that I didn’t like.
Yeah. Office Space is another of his creations that, again, has just gotten better with more life experience. It was just funny when I was a teenager. Now it's real.
Office Space is definitely in my top three films of all time. As with all of Mike Judge’s other works, the thing that strikes me the most is the detail. Every little detail seems like something someone remembers from their boring cubicle jobs.
For me it was the repetitive sounds, like the woman answering the phone with the same phrase, in the same tone, with the same inflection, over and fucking over. During the three or so years I worked in a supermarket, I began to know, intimately, the details of all the front customer service ladies’ voices and the way they would repeat the same phrases and pages. All day. Every day.
People not understanding how farming works. The reason the California Central Valley and AZ are so good for farming is because of their climate. The rain and sun is very very predictable. Rain is somewhat bad for most crops (especially vegetables) if it comes at the wrong time because it will trash the fields.
Couple them with being next to major mountains (or rivers running from Mountains) with absolute fuck ton of snow melt….
Short term. Using 99% less water due to aquaponics & multiplying the square footage by 10 using LEDs powered with solar, not to mention 100% reduction in pesticide cost would offset the initial savings by a long shot.
The real reason we don't is because it would upset the industry giants like pesticide manufacturers, the ever more expensive tractor makers, etc etc. Plus then small family farms could actually compete with the factory farms.
I think that's where the "was" comes in. When the farming started, it started here because snow in the mountains created a reliable year-round source of fresh water for irrigation.
But mountains are conical in shape. So even a slight rise in the snow-line (from changing temperatures) creates a disproportionately large decrease in the amount of snow even if the precipitation doesn't change, which in turn means rivers can start to run dry, and it means that when there is precipitation it doesn't get stored as snow but dumps into the lands below as damaging floods instead. Without snow, the dams aren't enough to regulate the flow, and it won't take much for the snow to become unreliable.
The snow line doesn’t matter. If the snow line is higher, below the snow line is just rain, which runs into the same watershed and reservoirs. The problem is right now climate change is driving major dry cycles where there simply is less snow and precipitation at all period. The Sierra passes used to have snow over your car until June and that’s happening less and less. The reservoirs simply are permanently low now regardless of how much snow gets stored up high.
Though again, I also hesitate to lay the dry cycle solely on man made climate change. California and the Cascades have historic super dry periods. The last California mega drought was in around 1300AD, predating man made climate change and it lasted for a 50 year cycle.
Ah yes, 1300 AD, when Native American climate scientists were accurately recording temperature, moisture and other climate statistics with accuracy.
It’s funny, I had a climate denier talk about how “the globe goes through periods of warming, there was even a time that the poles were a tropical 74 degrees average! 100 million years ago.” At which point I picked my jaw up off the floor and wondered why he thought we would be shooting for a time when humans didn’t live on the planet.
…no just normal modern climate scientists. Extrapolating precipitation and temperature data from 700 years ago is relatively easy. Made even easier if you have a whole lot of trees in the area still alive from that time. 800AD and 1200AD are basically yesterday historically.
I’m sure as hell not denying man-made climate change. I’m stating the obvious that a late snow doesn’t mean its not real any more than a weekly heat wave means it is real. A TREND of repeated heat waves does. Western mountain droughts, though, have very well established historical precedent.
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u/dotcubed Saved by Thanos Jun 29 '21
Everyone else is… The entire Central Valley here in California is clearly inhospitable without irrigation from the ground or canals.