Wall Street Begins Trading Water Futures as a Commodity (yale.edu) 183
Wall Street has begun trading water as a commodity, like gold or oil. The country's first water market launched on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange this week with $1.1 billion in contracts tied to water prices in California, Bloomberg News reported. From a report: The market allows farmers, hedge funds, and municipalities to hedge bets on the future price of water and water availability in the American West. The new trading scheme was announced in September, prompted by the region's worsening heat, drought, and wildfires fueled by climate change. There were two trades when the market went live Monday. "Climate change, droughts, population growth, and pollution are likely to make water scarcity issues and pricing a hot topic for years to come," RBC Capital Markets managing director and analyst Deane Dray told Bloomberg. "We are definitely going to watch how this new water futures contract develops." Proponents argue the new market will clear up some of the uncertainty around water prices for farmers and municipalities, helping them budget for the resource. But some experts say treating water as a tradable commodity puts a basic human right into the hands of financial institutions and investors, a dangerous arrangement as climate change alters precipitation patterns and increases water scarcity.
Future Fiction (Score:5, Insightful)
Future fiction [wikipedia.org] calls it again.
(Ok, probably not, but it was still a good book, as was his [windupstories.com] first one, "The Wind-up Girl".)
Back in reality, it remains to be seen if this will be a positive, by channelling investment into, for example, desalination plants, or if it will be manipulated by already wealthy sociopaths, resulting in higher prices and / or shortages down the line.
My cynicism suggests that it will be the latter...
Re:Future Fiction (Score:5, Insightful)
it will be manipulated by already wealthy sociopaths, resulting in higher prices and / or shortages down the line
Like Enron, but with water
Re: (Score:3)
Just wait until they raise a private army to take Canada with it's burgeoning water reserves
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Future Fiction (Score:4, Informative)
Not everyone lives in the US West :)
Where I am, we have way more water than anyone else in the US and much more then needed, but the only limiting factor here is not water, but water treatment. Thus we get "water shortages" in the Summer. The Gov does not want to increase capacity because "it costs real money".
It is time the Gov start investing in infrastructure instead of sending all the money to the top 1%
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Canada with it's burgeoning water reserves
Once you conquer Canada, how do you plan to move the water from the Yukon to southern California?
Re: (Score:3)
Like Enron, but with water
Way ahead of you. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I still remember the documentaries about Enron and how companies where gaming the electricity market. "Burn, baby burn!" was one traders comment when told of fires potentially disrupting supply [The Smartest Guys In The Room]..
Re: (Score:2)
I still remember the documentaries about Enron and how companies where gaming the electricity market. "Burn, baby burn!" was one traders comment when told of fires potentially disrupting supply [The Smartest Guys In The Room]..
Those Enron reprobates were truly disgusting. I do not think water futures will be so manipulatable though. Water can be stored cheaply, while electricity (especially 1990s electricity) is almost unstorable, making its markets particularly weird and volatile.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think there's much question (Score:5, Insightful)
I watched this happen when the food commodities market was deregulated in the Bush Jr era (as part of broader deregulation efforts that lead up to 2008). Previously in order to purchase food commodities you had to take possession of said commodities. So if you wanted to buy 100 tons of hog jowls you needed a warehouse to hold them. After deregulation you could trade commodities without taking possession.
The result was an almost immediate 5%-10% increase in the price of food. I was flat broke at the time thanks to a couple of illnesses in the family and remember it clearly as it hit my pocket book hard. A handful of extremely wealthy investors got to skim 5-10% off every morsel of food we buy and there was zero improvement to food security (which is largely handled by our farm system being a quasi public/private thing with heavy regulation and subsidies).
Re: (Score:3)
As a historical sidenote, this is exactly what happened when the price of oil went negative [nymag.com]. People who bought contracts had to make a decision: do they take literal possession of thousands of gallons of oil [visualcapitalist.com], and the requisite costs to store it, or do they pay someone to take the oil off their hands?
Re: (Score:2)
Right but that happened partly because in the old days ( I don't think it was actual regulation unless it was state laws) but the Oil futures guys did not let you bid on contract unless it appeared you were at least capable of accepting delivery. IE before you got in the door you had to show you owned some oil tankers, or a storage well, or some tanks some place etc or you had to be a producer.
So while there were participants in the market who maybe could not actually take delivery (storage already full) an
Re: (Score:3)
I am not sure that is a *bad* thing either freemarketer though I am, I don't see why people who are NOT actually in given should be there putting their thumbs on price action.
An argument in favor of allowing participants incapable of delivery is that many business have an interest in commodities even if they cannot take delivery. For example, an airline food supplier cannot take delivery of oil, but their main customers' profits (and thus their own) depend on aviation gas pricing and can usefully be hedged with oil futures.
Re: (Score:2)
It hasn't been for thousands of years (Score:2)
We can't rise up and fight, BTW. A modern military can and will easily put us down. If you want to do something about this the path forward is to use the levers of Democracy, but for that to work we need to shift the Overton window.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think we're a
Re: (Score:3)
Commodity futures trading has nothing to do with hoarding, because what is being traded is contracts for delivery of specified amounts of the stuff at specified times in the future. It's a market for the producers and consumers of that commodity to freeze a price certain on the date they will either need X amount of the commodity in manufacturing or have X amount of it for sale. Speculators just "thicken" the market by increasing the volume of trade.
Re: (Score:2)
It's also great for drinking water if you live inland. Coastal populations are so high that if, say, the fifteen million people of greater Los Angeles have to desalinate their own supply, it will free up inland water all the way up to Wyoming.
And it will scale to the needs of agriculture when it is critically needed for agriculture. This might look like 20 gigawatts of Arizona desert nuclear driving several square miles of graphene filters in Salinas, CA. The power would be traded for California's treaty sh
Re: (Score:3)
It will definitely be the latter. This kind of thing is going to result in poorer places in the US, then the world selling water to the US to pay debts.
On the other hand, perhaps this might be enough to get companies like Coca Cola and Nestle to actually pay for water they use in bottling their beverages. In some cases these companies are paying nothing, or less than the residents of the nearest city.
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, look at Jeff Bezos, for fuck's sake.
Futures (Score:3)
The US government banned futures trading on onions in the 50's. Initially it stabilized the price of onions after someone tried to corner the market (on onions?) but since the 90's, onion prices were among the most volatile in the agricultural sector.
The effect on consumers isn't huge - onions are a replaceable commodity and usually pretty cheap to begin with - but the effect is huge on growers and manufacturers who use onions.
It's admittedly a different situation with water in California, as water supply is almost always a government monopoly. I think an interesting effect of a futures market might be a moderation on how much governments subsidize water prices for agriculture. For instance, almonds are a major export in California. Growing almonds takes a *large* amount of water. If California water departments see the futures market rising, and traders start making money off of the disparity in the subsidized price and demand, they are going to start wondering why they are charging such a low price for a valuable commodity.
You can stabilize the market with subsidies (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically it lets the folks up top skim 10% off our food supply, and now we're going to let them do it with water.
TL;DR; every one of us is about to take a 10% paycut as our water bills sky rocket.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I’m uneagerly awaiting the day we have clean air and sunlight commodity markets. After all, can’t have lazy people just soaking up gasses and radiation for free like some kind of natural sponge. That dystopian nightmare isn’t going to build itself you lazy bums.
Of course then you'll have President Skroob hoarding all the Perriair
Price Controls (Score:5, Interesting)
which is by and large what we do.
Temporary subsidies quickly become permanent subsidies. Look up on why the US government is subsidizing cotton farmers in Brazil, because of a WTO complaint that they won't stop subsidizing cotton farmers in Texas. Interestingly enough, that whole debacle is also related to water prices.
Also the modern commodities market is *very* different. In the 80s you were required to take possession of the commodity. Bush Jr's administration removed that requirement. So you can "buy" 100 tons of onions and "sell" them without ever owning a warehouse.
Somewhat correct, but you are using the wrong example. As I posted, trading onion futures is banned. Which means, as an onion grower, you don't have a good idea how much money you will get when you try to sell your onions at the end of the growing season. So, growers are dis-incentivized from growing onions. Companies that rely on a steady supply of onions end up buying onion farms to ensure a steady supply at a constant price.
Basically it lets the folks up top skim 10% off our food supply, and now we're going to let them do it with water.
If you are getting a 10% return on commodities trading, you deserve it. Usually a 7% return is decent. Due to COVID related inflationary pressures, it's much higher now, but that will likely go away.
The other side you need to look at is price stabilization. Would you rather everything be 10% cheaper, but the price fluctuates by 50-100%?
Re: (Score:2)
On the other hand, onions remain inexpensive and plentiful.
Relativity (Score:2)
As I pointed out before, to the average consumer, it doesn't make much difference. You can go into the store and buy a couple of onions for a couple of dollars. If the price per unit goes from $0.50 to $1.00 each, a 100% increase, most people won't notice a difference. Sysco WILL notice a difference when they go to buy a million onions to distribute to restaurants.
Likewise, if the price of a gallon of water doubles, people ARE going to notice that on their water bill when it doubles.
Re:Relativity (Score:4, Interesting)
Weird how I still see onions in everything form prepackaged food to upscale restaurants then, you'd think without that price stabilization you keep hyping, they'd be too expensive.
Maybe futures trading isn't really as necessary for price stabilization as it was when the concept was invented. You know, during the age of sail? Before refrigeration? Maybe, and I am just spit-balling here, maybe it's just another form of legalized gambling for the very rich, like just about every other form of betting on markets.
I mean, onions keep without refrigeration. And very little is going to impact the onion harvest in every onion producing country in the world, in the same way.
So maybe you can explain how futures trading isn't just a perverse incentive to "corner the market" and drive up prices? Bonus points if you can explain why capitalists always try to "corner the market" while at the same time worshipping the concept of a "free market?" Seems to me, capitalists don't really like competition at all.
Re: (Score:3)
Are you honestly unaware of the history of US intervention in Central and South America? Have you heard of this thing called the cold war? Why was the Soviet Union, our erstwhile ally in WWII, suddenly our mortal enemy?
And of course I already gave you an example earlier. Chile. We helped overthrow Salvadore Allende, and installed Pinochet, a brutal dictator.
As you failed to read and/or understand the entry on the Banana Wars, I have little hope you'll give this any attention, but on the off chance you care
Re: (Score:2)
However, I'm not seeing that much variation at the grocery store. The trick is that wholesalers buy a lot when prices are lower, and only a few when prices are higher (supply and demand) and smooth out the bumps with proper storage.
The great TP crisis of 2020 shows why JIT logistics (commodities trading without physical delivery is 100% JIT) are bad for society. Had there been warehouses full of TP used for price stabilization, the only evidence of the crunch would have been half empty warehouses. Prices wo
You say that like it's a bad thing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The free market does a pretty terrible job of feeding us.
Now pull the other one.
I have actually visited Moscow in Soviet times and seen rows of empty food market shelves. The one complaint the world has about American food is that we're getting fat on it.
Subsidies (Score:2)
We subsidize food growing because if we don't we starve.
The US subsidizes growing food because farmers vote, and farmers vote for people who approve farm bills that give them money. Otherwise, the US would be importing food equally as cheap from other countries. Part of the US's crappy foreign policy is giving money to other countries so they'll buy the US's own produce with it, to further prop up the price. The US does it with military hardware, too, but that's another can of worms.
The dumbest part is that most of the farm bill subsidies go to giant corporation
Re: (Score:2)
There is a funny story at daily WTF where a coal trader mistakenly receives a huge shipment at their office, which was near a port. It turns out they actually ordered coal, instead of trading futures.
https://www.reddit.com/r/busin... [reddit.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Like most of reddit.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but what premium are we paying to get a more stable price? A real marketplace that changes based on yields means people can be efficient. You have to pay a lot of an overhead to guarantee onions at a certain price a year from now when the yields could be 1/3 of normal. In a functioning civilization, onion use simply goes down when we get onion plagues ravishing our crops.
Re: (Score:2)
The US government banned futures trading on onions in the 50's.
That's why we used to tie onions to our belts.
We're either going to build desalinization plants (Score:5, Interesting)
The trouble is, the people in charge are going to make a ton of money off water scarcity. So no private business is ever going to be able to raise the capital to solve the problem. This means the government is going to have to do it, and they'll be fought tooth and nail by those private businesses who don't want their "investments" decreased in value.
And for you guys back east laughing at the Southwest, what's going to happen to your cities and your jobs when you've got tens of millions of "water refugees"?
On the other hand, American politics is going to get real, real interesting as blue California empties out into the redder states...
Re: (Score:2)
We are already seeing that in Arizona and Georgia. We will begin to see that continue into other areas as remote work becomes more mainstream with various industries. States that invested in IT infrastructure and have 1GB to the majority of the populace will have better opportunities to pick up the nation's remote workers while states that neglected to invest will suffer.
Your post makes it sound A-Ok (Score:3)
Also, if you empty out the Southwest due to water scarcity it's going to be a disaster. The rest of the country doesn't have the infrastructure and jobs to handle 50 million water refugees.
Re: (Score:2)
False.
All jobs that do not require physical presence (eg farming and factory/warehouse operations) can be done remotely if the infrastructure is in place, and even then, remote control of a robot doing farming/factory/warehousing is possible if the investments are made. Telepresence may limit the distance at which this can be done safely (eg someone remotely driving a truck would be super dangerous since internet connectivity isn't solid or stable everywhere in the US.
But all "office-worker" jobs can, and s
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if fear of dying of dehydration will overpower fear of nuclear power. It seems like at the levels of water needed, dedicated power facilities to produce the volume of fresh water needed will be a requirement.
Re: (Score:3)
I wonder if fear of dying of dehydration will overpower fear of nuclear power.
No, because that is a textbook example of a false dichotomy.
It seems like at the levels of water needed, dedicated power facilities to produce the volume of fresh water needed will be a requirement.
Why? What advantage could there possibly be over putting the power on the grid, where it can also be used for other purposes? You're going to want the desal plants up and down the coast so that you don't have to move the fresh water produced any farther than necessary. Where the most water is needed (because there is the least natural supply) is Southern California, which is an ideal environment for solar power. Solar is cheaper, safer, and less po
Re: (Score:2)
I live in the southwest, family has been here since the late 1800's
We used to be ranchers and miners, but have modernized and adapted to the changing economy
afaik, there may be some reduction in new arrivals, or late comers running away, but I fully expect to be living here decades from now.
Read up on water recycling in the Phoenix Metro area where everybody is already drinking treated and ground-filtered urine
Maybe I am being myopic, but I do not get the "scare" here
Re: (Score:3)
Read up on water recycling in the Phoenix Metro area where everybody is already drinking treated and ground-filtered urine
Maybe I am being myopic, but I do not get the "scare" here
Agriculture accounts for 80-90% of US water use. No amount of sewage reuse is going to provide for that, literally.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No amount of sewage reuse
You are using a narrow definition of 'sewage'. Expand that to encompass the inefficiencies of agricultural uses. Consider filtering and reprocessing excess irrigation water instead of draining it back into waterways. The extreme example of such optimization being vertical farming [wikipedia.org]. Granted, this is not applicable to most of our agriculture. But there are some simple technologies that can conserve a significant amount of water. We just have to provide the economic incentive to do so.
Re: (Score:2)
No 'circular' sewage system is 100% efficient. New water must be entering the cycle. Where is that water coming from?
To answer that we do have to consider the other uses [youtube.com] that water is put to, before we can consider whether the inflows cover the outflows.
And the short answer to that is: No!
*I get that the source of the video is not ideal, but it was the easiest to find. My google-fu failed me in finding the documentary I was looking for. Sorry.
Solar and wind do just fine (Score:3)
The problem with desalinization isn't electricity, it's having the political will to build and run the plants. Especially when there's so much money to be made short term off water scarcity.
Average water bill in California is $65 bucks. 13 million households. That's almost a billion dollars a month.
Re: (Score:2)
Think of the people in the Political Party that you didn't vote for. Imagine them and their idiotic policies and ideals towards having to operate and manage a piece of infrastructure that will need to have a plan for thousands of years to maintain.
The risk of nuclear power isn't the fear of a big Boom. Or the locals getting irradiated, but from the stock piles of nuclear waste, that will need to be managed and kept safe four thousands of years, to a point where History would have our times, with the birth
Re: (Score:2)
So predictable (Score:3)
Industry and government destroying the water supply, corporations sucking the wells dry, Wall Street monetizes it. Lather rinse repeat.
Next up? Air. Bet on it.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: So predictable (Score:2)
It's not free, there has always been a price. Artificially low or high. The problem is that it is starting to fluctuate too much.
Futures basically stabilizes the price so that people can plan accordingly. Obviously that doesn't work when you have a monopoly on supply or demand, but still helps.
If the stable price is high, some businesses may choose to raise their product price or cut production; saving or divesting their funds. If the stable price is low, they may spread that discount across a wider range
Re: So predictable (Score:5, Insightful)
Futures basically stabilizes the price so that people can plan accordingly.
Statement assumes facts not in evidence...
Futures establishes a 'market' that enables gambling. Markets are not stable and, worse, aren't even theoretically bounded (witness market caps for certain firms that make no 'logical' sense based on traditional measures, and companies being paid to use electricity).
I am surprised this hasn't happened sooner.
Likewise, but I can't help but wonder if eagle eye hindsight hasn't subtly influenced my internal schema because "well, that's bloody obvious".
I expect it to help a lot for the global fresh water shortages.
That's certainly one way it could go...
Re: (Score:2)
Derivative contracts would create a more stable market than what it is now if they had pure monetary settlement. The ability to force the counterparty to take/make delivery is what makes derivatives so prone to wild swings.
On the other hand the ability to force the counterparty to take/make delivery is the thin red line which divides a proper derivative market from a betting market and online gambling is illegal in the US. I don't see how this water market can be legal, it's a pure betting market ... not a
Re: (Score:2)
Once Goldman Sachs entered, it's been Vegas ever since.
Coca Cola and Nestlé can and will lobby (Score:3)
The market is not free. Big players get taken care of first. Individuals (like you and me) are left to fend for themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with water is that it is both too cheap and too expensive.
Water coming from your tap is extremely cheap, to the point where the water company will just ignore a lot of small leaks because it costs more to fix them than they lose.
On the other hand when there isn't enough water it's really expensive to do anything about it. Building new facilities is a pricey proposition, as is doing environmental works.
As a result it's hard to develop new technology for saving water or finding new sources or movi
Re: (Score:2)
That's why you pay a water bill. You bill pays for infrastructure maintenance. I know it's shocking to hear that but it's true. And yes new technology is developed too. I know shocking You can fuck off now.
Sounds Familiar. What could go wrong? (Score:3)
You're going to start trading Water like you did Electricity!
How did that work out for ya?
Re: (Score:2)
You nailed it. If there's a futures market for it, that means volatility. Part of it will be intrinsic to the resource itself. The other part will be due to active manipulation for financial gain. I think some will win and some will lose. Unfortunately, it will not be in equal measure.
Re:Sounds Familiar. What could go wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
So hey there California! You're going to start trading Water like you did Electricity! How did that work out for ya?
Study the history of Enron, which by the way, was a company in Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Cali was the victim, not the perp.
However, if you are making the point that just as Enron illustrates, shady accounting practices, fraud and possibly "owning the libs", gives me great pause in thinking that the exact same scenario will probably occur with water. We've already seen a callous disregard for life that has made the USA the leader in a particular area, I have no doubts that the same people have no problem allowing people to die of thirst because the water now belongs to them.
Quantum of Solace (Score:2)
That means the James Bond movie "Quantum of Solace" was a prediction of things to come!
Re: (Score:2)
This is so wrong. (Score:3)
Access to water is literally a human right because humans cannot live without it. To commoditize water is to in effect state that humans have no right to live because they now have no right to water.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm torn. On the one hand this seems horrible.
On the other hand, Nestle and Coca-Cola are notorious for abusing access to abundant water to the point of exacerbating water shortages. I *could* see how this could disproportionately hit those companies.
Of course, I can't thing of scenarios where this sort of thing made things *easier* for anyone but big corporations. Gonvernment regulation in this case seems a better bet to help the people and curtail Nestle and Coca Cola.
Re: (Score:3)
can't be a right if it costs someone else money to provide.
It's a human need.
Re: This is so wrong. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Err, it falls out of the sky, and in places like Bolivia and parts of the USA, it is illegal to harvest the stuff falling out of the sky.
Re: (Score:2)
The UN says otherwise. [unwater.org]
Re: (Score:3)
This isn't what you think it is.
You either don't live in the southwest, or haven't been paying attention. The demand for water has exceeded supply for decades if not centuries. To keep things fair, this was solved with a system of water rights. A better term might be water drawing rights, with downstream having priority when there is less precipitation. Those are not being changed. Every source of water is already spoken for.
Areas that want or need more water already buy the water rights from others.
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately, it is not a human right
The UN says otherwise. [unwater.org]
Colosseum (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I assume to fallow the land and send the water down stream to the highest bidder.
In sensible jurisdictions you lose the water rights permanently if you fail to use the water for irrigation...
Re: (Score:2)
Now that it's traded.... (Score:3)
How to make water cost a fortune. Monetize it. (Score:2)
This is the sure fire way to make water cost a fortune and hard to obtain for the poor. Should be illegal.
Been done for years. (Score:2)
Anxiously Awaiting Air Futures! (Score:3)
-Can those with residential private wells get in on this?
anxiously awaiting (Score:2)
Michael Burry (Score:2)
Not useful (Score:2)
Water futures... (Score:2)
and like healthcare inmates will get water for fre (Score:2)
and like healthcare inmates will get water for free
Popcorn (Score:2)
I can't want for some dumb retail trader getting assigned and having to take deliver of 500,000 million gallons or something.
Pending geological disaster (Score:2)
It's like mass murder. But without any emotions. (Score:2)
Which leads some ... people ...to argue that they "did nothing wrong".
Hey, if you wanna be te first against the wall when the riots start, ... go ahead, trade water "futures".
And pray they get you before I do.
How Will This Really Work? (Score:2)
The futures are for California water??
For those water users on California's state water project, the state sets the price. That price does not usually change more often than once a year. In southern California, it is sold by the water project to the Metropolitan Water District (MWD), another government agency, which again only changes the price once a year. MWD is a wholesaler, selling water to local governments, who also only change their prices once a year.
The city of Los Angeles owns the source of its
price (Score:5, Interesting)
from the ./ summary
"But some experts say treating water as a tradable commodity puts a basic human right into the hands of financial institutions and investors, a dangerous arrangement as climate change alters precipitation patterns and increases water scarcity."
It is people who think like that which cause the shortages. Remedies to a tragedy of the commons are not to impose a commons, they are to either sell the commons or to price grazing at an efficient rate. Pricing prevents overconsumption by internalizing externalities. If you are concerned about the poor, then give them money, but do not use your phony concern for them as justification to squander resources by destroying functioning markets which govern responsible consumption.
Those same "experts" opposing the commoditization of water necessarily oppose the seemingly equitable rule that those who benefit from consumption should be the same ones who pay.
There is one very simple rule which works very well to both conserve resources and to maximize the social benefit of their consumption: Resources should be priced at their cost. When we lower a price artificially with subsidies to be "fair" is when things go to shit. Also, when the price is not the cost because you fail to price in any externalities such as pollution, then that also has harmful outcomes. For example, it is why we still have insanely toxic coal emissions. If those burning coal had to pay the cost of the medical harm caused by those emissions, then today nobody would burn coal.
One of the most famous essays in the English language, The Use of Knowledge in Society [wikipedia.org], explains pricing. That expresses a fundamental and universal truth about the way societies function. If you fail to understand that, then you will go through life getting much very important stuff completely wrong, such as advocating for disastrously infeasible policies like socialism. The results of inevitably failed attempts to implement infeasible systems are social collapse, mass poverty, starvation and death. It's important. So read the essay.
By the way, the article quoted within the ./ summary seems bullshitty, attempting to bolster opposition to pricing by referring to the opponents as "experts". In fact, these so-called "experts" are ignorant of long-standing basic economic arguments and the overwhelming evidence of history in support. Journalists do often describe those with whom they side as "experts", the outcome being that we rebellious peasants are conditioned to dismiss the "expert" labelling as merely an expression of journalistic bias, and for the ruling classes to mock us as willfully ignorant for ignoring "the experts".
Quoting Basav Sen, a higher-up at a radical-left political political outfit which has a history of pro-communist advocacy and purported roots as Soviet front organization, without that context, seems a tad slanted as well.
Real economic policy is not publicly debated (Score:2)
The reasons behind the runup in house prices around the world and the runup in education costs are never discussed. Real economic policy is created by the triumvirate of the government, central bank, and Wall Street.
Low interest rates the world over lead to housing booms/bubbles around the world. Governments only care about low borrowing costs and property taxes so they're all in. It hammers savers via "financial repression [google.com]". No serious discussion about this.
Central banks printing money to buy debt and ass
Not sure how this would work (Score:2)
probably an improvement (Score:2)
Water rights are a mess (Score:3)
In general, but especially in thw Southwest, water rights are a mess. It makes zero sense to raise rice in a desert, but California does it.
Clean up water rights, drop antiquated regulations, and you would already solve most problems.
Vonnegut (Score:2)
Microsecond Arbritrage strikes again!
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, that one never made sense to me. No one can practically afford to put so much water storage on their property that the water doesn't eventually end up in the ground anyway. Also, storing water like that reduces flooding which offsets the flooding caused by most human construction.
Re: (Score:3)
outlawed collecting rainwater that falls on your own property
Washington State had this. They looked the other way for rain barrels under downspouts. But larger cisterns were banned in places that had public water utilities. Not because of water rights but because you might use your own water for irrigation and not spin the city's meters.
Then they said that storm runoff was too much for the city to handle. So housing developments and new commercial development have to put in storm water retention tanks and ponds. But don't you dare pump that out and use it for wateri