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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

Hell, after the long long first week of Trump, I'd be relieved if the worst they did at any given day was trying to flood some Californian streams.

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The worst isn’t flooding some streams, it’s the crop failure from lack of water during the summer thanks to emptying the reservoirs over winter.

This is active sabotage of the nation’s food supply.

I can’t wait to find out how this will be blamed on Biden.

The crops had too much DEI.

Don, Eric, and Ivanka?

That's gold. I may have to steal that

It's been making the rounds on Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/myrnadash.bsky.social/post/3lh33szm...

That’s precisely the plan. So when we have crop problems this summer due to lack of available labor they can instead point to “irresponsible water management by California”

You mean easily exploited illegal alien labor? These arguments sound similar to a previous debate that happened around the 1850s.

“Defenders of slavery argued that the sudden end to the slave economy would have had a profound and killing economic impact in the South where reliance on slave labor was the foundation of their economy. The cotton economy would collapse. The tobacco crop would dry in the fields. Rice would cease being profitable.” [1]

[1] https://www.ushistory.org/us/27f.asp?srsltid=AfmBOopur7dsLKE...

It's not a perfect system at all but the Cesar Chavez movement and subsequent actions have greatly strengthened these workers' protections. These workers take these jobs willingly. This is not slavery, and your attempt to derail the discussion by equating it is poor form. Should there be more done to protect them? I think so, but that is an entirely different topic than the attempted sabotage of our food supply by artificially induced drought.

> You mean easily exploited illegal alien labor?

Does that mean you support laws to protect those workers from exploitation by enforcing workplace safety standards and giving them legal guest worker permits? Great, let's hold the exploiters accountable by protecting the exploited.

But the plan isn't that, nor is the plan to deport them. Rather it is to put them in a state of fear of deportation so they don't complain about the exploitation.

You don't actually think the exploiters want to pay Americans a living wage, leave crops to rot in the field, or slow down meat packing plants do you?

No, that will provide justification to divert the 60% of "environmental water" flow sustaining natural wetlands and fish populations into agricultural usage, an issue central valley farmers have been unhappy about for years.

What are they unhappy about?

(Most) water rights in California work on what's called a "prior appropriations" system: everyone with rights is ranked in order of priority, and those with priority are allowed to exercise their full rights before the next person can exercise any water rights.

There's a separate issue where the nominal water rights in any given year significantly exceeds the amount of water available, so some people are left with no rights they can exercise and they're forced to buy from others. Further, the full natural flow isn't allocated to the water rights system. Roughly 60% of the natural flow goes towards so-called "environmental flow" to prevent various ecological disasters like salinization of the San Joaquin delta or extinction of various fish.

Farmers would generally like more water to be available so that they can exercise their water rights and they either don't understand or don't care about the consequences of diverting the already-limited environmental flows.

This is actually in the name of the EO being discussed here: Putting people over fish, which inverts a popular rallying cry for people opposed to environmental flows.

Thankfully, we all live outside of the environment.

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