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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like the correct thing to do. There was at one point in time a more popular push in India to “connect all the rivers”. I was too young to fully understand what that meant, and also it’s not always easy to know whether something that’s proposed is truly feasible.

But infrastructure to move water around your country especially when a large chunk is a desert makes perfect sense. I originally imagined this would mean somehow exploiting the Great Lakes but the argument suggested here seems quite practical.

Not saying wasteful agriculture on export crops shouldn’t be banned (it should) and perhaps people should stop having so many golf courses, but free flowing water is a true mark of advanced Civilization and it’s not unfair for a country to build the infra to guarantee it.

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No, it's the stupid status quo thing to do. People need to move where resources are, not shift resources across an entire fucking continent doing god knows what to the ecosystems in between.

This godlike arrogance thinking we can just rearrange the earth on a whim for our needs is the fucking problem. This is why humanity is a cancer.

Should... should. So. Should they move the canneries, ports, flat land, abundant sun and all the skilled labor and their families? Mechanics, installers, fabricators, etc.

It's not like it's a small operation. There are canneries almost a mile long. There are small mountains of peach pits that form when they're processed (these are used for other purposes by the way!).

What about mature orchards?

I'm not sure why people hate California so much. It's got a lot of problems, like most places... But it's pretty amazing how much shit goes on there.

I don't hate California at all, I'm a Washington Liberal.

But the agriculture in California in the face of climate change is completely unsustainable. It is up there with the coal mining and fracking in Pennsylvania.

We need to properly manage the crisis and reduce the amount of human suffering involved because uprooting people in painful.

The alternative seems like we could wind up having literal water wars at some point. This proposal caps the diversion at 5% but that seems the same as building more freeways to me, which just causes more traffic. Give California more water and the agricultural industry will expand and you'll kick the can down the road again.

I hate california because out of hubris they create their own huge problems, ignore the obvious but slightly detrimental to the elite there solutions, claim the actual solution is some huge overengineered, overthought, magic bullet solution that is pretty much impossible to actually happen, and then that all allows Republicans to point and laugh and pretend the rest of the Democrat led states aren't perfectly functional and doing very well.

This seems reasonable to me. 5% of the water that’s just going into the gulf otherwise seems perfectly reasonable.

On the other hand, the engineering to elevate that much water will be interesting.

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