Comment by dumbo-octopus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dumbo-octopus | Hacker News Reader

The article is casting them in a needlessly antagonistic light. The "more water then..." claim is sourced from this (far superior) article [1], which makes clear that for one, it's saying more water than the houses in LA, not the city (residential use seems to be approx 2x commercial use), and for two this is for every farm these people own in CA, not just the pistachios. So that includes POM Pomegranate juice, Wonderful Pistachios, Cuties Clementines, and some almonds. Indeed, the owner of the second largest produce company in America might be expected to use water on the same level as the residents of the second largest city in America.

That's not to say they're free from ridicule: one particularly damning tidbit in the article linked below outlines a plan by which they bought water from the state for pennies on the dollar then sold it back to the taxpayers at a massive profit. Anyone paying water bills or taxes in CA could find just cause to be upset about that.

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...

At a certain point though, I’m inclined to point my finger at the state for signing terrible business deals. Like, the 1995 water deal was so staggeringly poorly negotiated by the state that I find it hard to get too mad at the farmers that took them up on their giveaway.

Leaving my door unlocked doesn't excuse burglary.

One party can make a bad deal, but that doesn't mean the other party isn't immoral for taking that deal, especially when it has substantial negative externalities.

No, but leaving your door open with a sign that says “Anything you want, $1” does excuse people ripping you off (which is more or less what happened here, the state traded something very valuable for something comparatively worthless). I’m not saying that the farmers here are saints or anything, but at a certain point it’s at least partially the state’s fault for not trying very hard to protect its own resources.

Well, times change, so well - laws change and society can renegotiate laws if they oppposse the common good. Nothing written in stone.

You would need a constitutional ammendment.

The Contracts Clause: The Contracts Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 10, Clause 1)

> No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title ...

You could still take it back with eminent domain probably, but would have to compensate I think at current value, not at bad negotiated value from some time ago.

The $48 million in political donations might have something to do with the terrible deals.

The history of CA is a history of sleazy backroom water rights deals. At any point in history one could pretty accurately make the claim that "they" were conspiring against "us" to redirect the allocations of water.

Certainly don't make the mistake of separating the state from the corporations and their lobbies when assigning blame.

There's an apocryphal Mark Twain quote, that "Whisky is for drinking, and water for fighting over".

That saiod, pistachios, pomegranates etc are high-value crops, not like the alfalfa the Saudis grow using senior water rights and then ship to feed cows in Saudi Arabia.

The big problem is that California is too chicken to flatten the baroque system of senior and junior water rights because of the decades of litigation that would entail, and at the same time agricultural water is heavily subsidized and there are perverse incentives for farmers not to invest into more efficient irrigation schemes, often simply flooding entire fields.

You're trying to paint this as a fumbled negotiation on the part of the state, when it was actually graft.

It's really kind of sad that people don't seem to understand this. If these politicians were really so bad at making deals, they wouldn't get elected. They know what they're doing.

It’s not clear to me why this comment thread is ignoring the obvious and repeatedly proven point that such corrupt “deals” are lobbied for and passed for the mutual benefit of the lawmakers and business owners. The only losers are normal citizens.

It’s 2023, stop acting so oblivious.

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