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Comment by microtherion | Hacker News Reader

If there were any place in the world where one would think that your supposed capability of creating ecosystems wholesale would manifest, it would be California with its nexus of engineers and venture capital. And yet, California is suffering from ever worsening drought conditions and forest fires, with no solutions in sight.

Conversely, depopulation on an otherwise healthy planet is a trivially solvable problem. Our species IS entirely capable of reproducing (even though the secret to doing so may have fallen into obscurity in certain incel segments of society).

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If you turn labels off, and Google Earth the CA - MX - AZ border, you can spot the All-American canal diverting the Colorado river across actual Saharaesque fields of sand dunes long before you see the thin grey lines of Interstate 8 right next to it.

It feeds that large patch of green/farms/food entirely surrounded by sand, and drains north into the inland sea created by the first botched attempt at diverting in the 1900s.

That’s arguably the least important part of the state that isn’t desert (anymore), and a small scale version of what we’ve done to the Central Valley.

CA has a nexus of software engineers, and dot com capital

Not Civil, Mechanical, or other engineers.

Also venture capital has no interest in fighting 1000's environmental lawsuits and 10,000's of pointless regulations designed to stop any construction or development that would improve CA

> CA has a nexus of software engineers, and dot com capital

> Not Civil, Mechanical, or other engineers.

What on earth makes you think that? All sorts of hardware is designed and developed here. It has the largest aerospace sector of any state. A lot of automotive design is done in the LA basin for the auto majors.

And that’s just off the top of my head. I’m in SV and even up here though we lost most of the defense manufacturing (e.g. tanks and ships) though a lot remains further south, when I need parts machined there are still plenty of local machine shops etc. I’ve brought in welders from the Central Valley when local ones were too busy.

Top 10 States for Aerospace are Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Utah, Virginia, Georgia, New York, and Texas.

>> A lot of automotive design is done in the LA basin for the auto majors.

Source...

>when I need parts machined there are still plenty of local machine shops etc.

There are plenty of machine shops in my town, I would not proclaim my town to be a mecca of engineering.

> I’ve brought in welders from the Central Valley when local ones were too busy.

Ok, and?

Incel segments of society are symptoms of going past carrying capacity.

The much derided (sometimes rightly so tho’) subject of Evolutionary Psychology will probably have a couple of books worth to support that.

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