I find the SSC "Too much dark money in almonds" post interesting because it starts from the premise that there obviously isn't too much dark money in almonds, an argument from incredulity, and uses this (and similar) to argue that there isn't too much dark money in politics, but
-
Show this thread
-
if you start looking at almonds, it seems like there's too much dark money in almonds? For example, here's a water policy expert who thinks a lot about CA water policy discussing the impact of almonds on CA https://onthepublicrecord.org/2015/05/05/turning-the-tables-on-almonds/ … https://onthepublicrecord.org/2015/04/17/more-almonds-make-them-prove-they-have-the-water-first/ …https://onthepublicrecord.org/2008/12/17/i-dont-even-like-wine/ …
3 replies 1 retweet 31 likesShow this thread -
Those posts are targeted at an audience of water policy nerds, so they don't lay out the full case because it's expected that readers will generally know what's going on in CA water policy, but IMO, if you look into this in detail there's a decent case to be made that
1 reply 0 retweets 14 likesShow this thread -
California water policy is a disaster on the same scale as California housing policy, caused in part by water policy that enriches some of the richest people in California, e.g., almond billionaires, at the expense of most others.
7 replies 1 retweet 52 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @danluu
Scott has of course also written about thishttps://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/ …
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @ciphergoth
I don't really agree with this, and in IMO the section that follows indicates that Scott didn't really dig into what implementation details would look like. Yes, water is severely underpriced and this causes serious problems. However, his example is a "spherical cow" example.pic.twitter.com/5Eq7ufVdMJ
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @danluu @ciphergoth
Fifty years of people trying to use water markets to solve these problems has shown that this isn't the case. Just for example the cost of water for a small farmer is highly dependent on whether farmers around them fallow and retire their fields or continue to irrigate because
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
water districts have extremely high fixed costs as we run them. There are market mechanisms that can address this, but they would be really non-trivial to implement, IMO saying that markets would just fix this indicate a lack of understanding of the real problems involved.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.