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Comment by drilldrive | Hacker News Reader

If you want to see the faults of near-pure democracy, look no further than the north/south divide of California. Two key characteristics of Northern California today: (1) has most all the State's water (2) has a great deal of the State's fires. Now as a negotiation offer, the water in theory should be a strong hold for the State to put ample effort for deforestation, but as of today water is a Human Right (thus Southern California has a non-negotiable right to the Northern water) and the bloated bill for forest fire management put perhaps a 100th of the effort needed for forest-management practices.

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Are you referring to AB 685? That's drinking water. If you're talking about water rights, i.e. lakes, rivers, streams, California is not unique in having this complicated regime that goes back to early settler ranching and farming to make sure an upstream user can't claim 100% of the water, leaving everyone downstream with none. What does the water right regime have to do with democracy? It's based on the earliest claims/users, earlier the right was acquired the more valuable. If anything I'd call it it a throw back to feudalism than anything democratic.

"Every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes."

Not just drinking water, 685 covers most all standard water usage. What the water-claimant regime is pointing to here is that nothing is even remotely comparable in State government control under a democracy to raw population. And thus a minority population is left with no recourse.

Is the problem that you don't believe water should be a human right or that California is not one state, and should be split into two parts with individual rights to their own water?

Neither, the problem is raw population is the only metric of state-impact, even essential goods like water are paltry for impacting state-direction as the raw population of the many major cities of Southern California.

The point of water being a human right is not the actual on-the-face claim (of course!) but that California is the only State in the Union to declare it so. This is purely politics at State-level, not a humanitarian objective (a la "national security" at the federal level). The exchange of this essential good should pay forward to the state-control and security for the North via deforestation is my point.

Think: Northern California already would be called Jefferson by now if Southern California pushed for it as well, but they refuse on the basis of Northern water, yet they give no due State power, that is the fundamental hypocrisy of Democracy.

From my perspective, California has always been just California. I've never seen the south/north divide you're describing. If they thought deforestation or whatever was the solution to the fires in the North, they would've done something about it, considering the one-party nature of the state. Instead, they believe the problem is climate change or whatever warming, and they have voted and taken action toward mitigating climate change. If you have more info about SoCal blocking the north from being able to put more resources toward deforestation, I'd love to see it.

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