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Comment by DelaneyM | Hacker News Reader

It’s fascinating that this is a paper - we did the math about 20 years ago and have been using excess electricity for desalination in Cayman ever since.

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Texas tried to do this in the early 2000s; we even built a bunch of desalination plants (here's a comment about this I made recently):

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38422172#38424191

Long-story–short (based on my experience with these chuckleheads): it was killed because the current political establishment didn't own the desalination plants, so there was no way they could personally profit off of them; they own oil/gas/fracking & ERCOT.

Texas generally seems to have chosen an odd path politically, which to me has been strangely highlighted by their failure to supply their own people with electricity. Aside from the usual left-right dichtomy¹ one could start to consider to just elect people who at least pretend to care about the problem. Electricity has become kinda important.

¹: A divide that is seen more as a centrist — far-right divide from my european perspective.

The state is extremely gerrymandered: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/20/texas-redistricting-...

Oof; yeah. So, Texas has a primary and then election system: candidates are selected for the ballot in the primary, and then voted on in the general election. The probability that a candidate will win the general election having won the primary is north of 95%. That means the "real" election is the primary. The turn out for the primary is the highest turnout in my district (Williams; US HD 25), which is ~25% in a contentious year, but usually 10–15%. The race is usually split 3-ways, with Williams just barely getting 50%. That means, the most competitive district in Texas chooses their rep with ~12% (high! or ~5-7%, norm) of the voting age population.

Most US representatives from Texas are elected with far fewer; many Democratic gerrymanders mean that as little as 1% of the population is choosing the representative.

As always, I advocate for some form of random election (sortition) — it'd be way more representative — and it'd be harder for people to mess with the election: we'd literally have more representative representatives and more robust elections. (I'd also require risk limiting audits, paper trails, and non-identifying ballot checking.)

Please do not link to stories claiming gerrymandering without showing maps. Whatever map is the closest to a bunch of little squares is the fairest.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=map+of+texas+state+congressional+d...

Compare that to other states: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=map+of+new+york+state+congressiona...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=map+of+newcalifornia+state+congres...

Maybe you can enlighten me how the shape plays a role here? In the end isn't this about how close the absolute vote matches the political outcome? One could easily come up with rectangular districts that skew the result, right?

I am from somewhere where all important democratic elections are won by absolute numbers, so we don't even have the whole problem.

Really?

The term gerrymandering comes from a district that was drawn so convoluted that it looked like a Salamander.

If you want fair elections, without districts being gerrymandered, just draw rectangles with about equal populations and be done with it.

Sadly that's just about true for most things, whether it's city state or federal. God forbid Congress tries to tackle the health care industrial complex, it might hit their portfolio!

Isn't there an unused desalination plant in santa barbara?

EDIT it seems like it may be back on?

https://www.sbck.org/our-work/advocacy/water-supply/desalina...

It’s very much back on and expanding.

We love rediscovering things and writing papers [1].

[1]: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...

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