The study from IIHR-Hydroscience and Engineering at the University of Iowa is the first to detail the flood risk to farmland statewide. The researchers used flood maps developed at the Iowa Flood Center, and incorporated data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create the crop flood-risk analysis.
Among the main findings:
- Nearly 450,000 acres of Iowa farmland are located in a two-year flood return period, meaning there's a 50% chance the land will flood in a given year. That's less than 2% of the total farmable land analyzed in the study.
- Iowa agriculture sees crop losses, on average, of $230 million a year due to farming that takes place in flood-prone areas.
The researchers also identified four watersheds as most vulnerable to flooding and crop losses: Middle Cedar in east-central Iowa, North Raccoon and South Skunk in central Iowa, and West Nishnabotna in southwest Iowa.
[...] The researchers analyzed nearly 25 million acres of agricultural land in Iowa and farming operations from 2016 to 2020 to classify the flood risk according to eight scenarios: 2-year, 5-year, 10-year, 25-year, 50-year, 100-year, 200-year, and 500-year return periods. Cropland located in a 2-year return period has a 50% chance of flooding in a given year; farmland in a 5-year return period has a 20% of flooding in a given year; while farmland in a 100-year return period has a 1% chance of flooding in a given year.
[...] Iowa has seen its fair share of flooding. Since 1953, 29 flood-related disaster declarations have been issued for the state, according to FEMA. Major, if not historic, flooding has occurred four times over the past decade and a half alone -- in 2008, 2014, 2016, and 2019.
[...] "We highlight the $230 million in average annualized losses to show that there is farmland that is frequently exposed to floods and has a low corn suitability rating -- why not consider changing its use?" Yildirim says. "That, of course, would require further conversations, but you have to look at the costs and benefits of continuing to farm that land."
Journal Reference:
Redirecting, (DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.154165)
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Friday April 08 2022, @04:08PM (39 children)
Or something water loving?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08 2022, @04:21PM (33 children)
Better yet, store the water, and/or pipe it to California. I hear they can use some. If we can pipe oil and acids across the continent, this should be a piece of cake
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday April 08 2022, @06:22PM (32 children)
Thank you, came here to write that. NM and AZ too. And seeing what you wrote, and thinking about free-enterprise, profit, and profit, there's not enough $ in it compared to oil. But looking into the future, it's looking like moving water will become more valuable to both entities, so win-win.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08 2022, @08:29PM
>> there's not enough $ in it compared to oil
have you compared the price of bottled water to gasoline recently?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday April 08 2022, @09:35PM (30 children)
Finance.. If you can ration money, you can ration anything, and hold the rest hostage
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Saturday April 09 2022, @02:59PM (29 children)
If you don't ration money, then it has no value. No point to comparing it to other goods for which artificial scarcity isn't beneficial.
But then, I've come to expect that people who babble [soylentnews.org] about usury have no understanding of economics or money.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Saturday April 09 2022, @05:45PM (22 children)
Artificial scarcity of money is always vulnerable to ignorant or vicious politicians who decide to inflate the supply. Natural scarcity is a better choice (gold).
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday April 09 2022, @06:18PM (18 children)
There really is no such thing any more. If we measured our economy in human effort, as we should, we would find that nothing is scarce when the process is mechanized, so the myth must be propagated. I find khallow's attempt very amusing
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @12:39AM (1 child)
I would find his viewpoints more amusing if they didn't cause so much misery. It's like laughing at the funny graffiti on the walls of Buchenwald.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 10 2022, @04:22AM
And yet here we are in the greatest improvement [soylentnews.org] of the human condition ever. Funny, how people can keep talking about "causing so much misery" when we're actually doing something for once to fix that.
Something's wrong with the narrative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @02:18AM (6 children)
Mechanisation relies upon energy, sources of which, and means of capture of which are not infinite.
At best you're displacing some scarcities with others.
There are other fundamentally constrained resources anyway, regardless how loudly you whistle past the graveyard.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday April 10 2022, @02:41AM (5 children)
Energy generation can also be mechanized, just like agriculture, mining, and anything else.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 10 2022, @04:23AM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @04:50AM (1 child)
The Sun is for all purposes infinite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @05:26AM
Right, I'll put out a square inch of solar panel, and power all of the US, after all the sun is infinite for all purposes.
Wait, why isn't it working? You mean that the rate of insolation isn't infinite? It was all a lie? How can I live on such a planet? I renounce the church! Hail Satan!
... or not, because I wasn't that stupid to begin with.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday April 10 2022, @05:37PM (1 child)
I'll leave you to tell us when we're half way there
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 12 2022, @01:49AM
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Sunday April 10 2022, @04:16AM (8 children)
So if we want really valuable ditches, we should start digging them with a spoon? No, you're displaying your ignorance yet again. Measuring an economy in so-called "human effort" is a pointless metric. It doesn't make the economy more efficient or help it deliver more of our wants.
"Process is mechanized?" I see yet another sign of your ignorance about the "human effort" metric. And how do you mechanize the process, when you don't have the technology to mechanize it? Right, you're just going to insist that it's otherwise without even the slightest understanding of why that doesn't happen.
And I find your feeble attempts very pathetic.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday April 10 2022, @05:57PM (7 children)
Our only limit is time. You only think of profit, something for nothing, interest, not exchange. The goal is the reduction of human effort, that's why we mechanize everything we can, otherwise you wouldn't have your electric can opener and Roomba. We already have machines building machines, supplying the energy is just another part of the process. We haven't even dug 3 miles into the planet. We will soon uncover and use more energy than the planet surface and atmosphere can dissipate. Your little charade there fails to impress, but still amuses.. as always
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @07:17PM (6 children)
We mechanise things because it is more affordable, given the necessary inputs, than doing it manually. If energy were $1,000/watt, shovels would be a better investment than a backhoe for your ditch-digging needs.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday April 11 2022, @12:09AM (5 children)
Not to the shoveler, unless he gets that thousand bucks
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @01:08AM (4 children)
Maybe. Maybe not. He sure as shit isn't becoming a heavy equipment operator at $1,000/watt.
What else is on offer?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday April 11 2022, @03:42AM (3 children)
That's right. The heavy equipment reduces costs through less human effort, making the item much cheaper and less scarce (more abundant), win - win for everybody except the greedy speculator who needs scarcity where there is none to increase their profit.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @01:45PM (2 children)
OK, got it, artificial scarcity is a demonic pact between speculating fiends and their diabolical ultracapitast backers.
But energy isn't infinite, costs vary, equipment isn't always available, and then shovels are the smart choice. If you have a new business starting up with tight capital, the capital cost of loading up on automation can be simply infeasible. No speculators in sight except for the new business founder trying to pull on those bootstraps.
I'm starting to see why you get confused every time economics comes up.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday April 12 2022, @06:08PM (1 child)
:-) No, it's perfectly normal human behavior, some people are insatiable. Your strawman is on fire.
I never said anything about "infinite". I'm talking about human time (measured in man-hours) and effort, the only real capital there is. You're trying to give value to your paper. The less human effort put into to something should make it cheaper and more abundant, easier to meet demand.. Most businesses see better profit from high demand and low supply, so when the demand is not there, they will cut back on supply and convince you there is a "shortage". Well, whatever, carry on.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @09:00PM
From this post alone we can conclude that you don't understand the word "capital", that you're somehow conflating an observation of limited resources with fiat currency, and ... yup, continuing to show utter incompetence and monumental ignorance when it comes to economics.
It's not that fucking difficult, dipshit. Even wikipedia would help.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 10 2022, @04:26AM (2 children)
Notice the paradox of the "artificial scarcity is bad" viewpoint. Here, said politicians are making things worse (and effectively stealing a bunch of wealth) by artificially increasing the supply of an artificially scarce good. You can't understand what's going on with a "let's make things not scarce" argument which ignores both physical law and the dynamics of real world economies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @04:55AM (1 child)
Let's hope a Randian billionaire will rescue us, amirite?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 11 2022, @07:53PM
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday April 09 2022, @06:10PM (5 children)
:-) Classic, man... you're one post closer to your great fortune, reducing the distance by half every time and forever more
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 10 2022, @04:18AM (4 children)
You're not even close to Zeno's paradoxes because you're not shortening the distance between your viewpoint and reality even a little, much less by half. Nor am I trying for a "great fortune". This wouldn't be the first time someone has accused me of being a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday April 10 2022, @05:34PM (3 children)
:-) It's not temporary
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 11 2022, @07:54PM (2 children)
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday April 11 2022, @09:57PM (1 child)
Yeah, so will everybody else that expects a livable wage
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Tuesday April 12 2022, @01:48AM
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday April 09 2022, @12:47AM (3 children)
Rice generally needs a very delicate balance of water levels to thrive. As far as piping the flood water away, there are too many chaotic variables involved, and anything we tend to do to alter things invariably has negative consequences down the line. Ecosystems along a river tend to thrive with a certain amount of flooding (see history of Egypt and the Nile River), but when you start having hundred or thousand year floods every few years, something is drastically wrong.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday April 09 2022, @03:59PM (2 children)
I was stationed in Thailand in the Air Force, and they seemed to have no trouble at all farming rice. Tapioca was also heavily farmed; after smelling tapioca in its raw, natural state I doubt I'll ever eat tapioca pudding again.
But the rice didn't stink and they seemed to have no trouble producing it.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @07:26PM (1 child)
Thailand also has a millenia-long tradition of growing rice in an environment where they get to pick where they grow it, and water management is built into how they've done things for millenia, and they don't try to do things like pipe megatons of water across the Rockies from Iowa to California.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 11 2022, @07:58PM
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday April 09 2022, @03:56PM
Five hundred years ago farmers welcomed floodwaters every few decades, but that was before artificial fertilizers and levees. It's very possible that the Cahokian civilization [wikipedia.org] was destroyed by a megaflood.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08 2022, @04:30PM (12 children)
Why do the farmers do that? Crazy, right?
Because that's where the money is.
Why is the money there? Isn't the USA overproducing corn like crazy?
Because that's where the subsidies are, because government wants wild, crazy overproduction.
Why? That doesn't make sense!
It makes perfect sense, if you consider that right now, what with reduced supplies of wheat from Russia and Ukraine, places such as Egypt are feeling real fear and expecting famine and uprisings.
Spreading the love further from corn, and allowing for flexibility in production would anger the corn lobby, but only be a minor rewrite of existing laws and regulations. It would also strengthen the nation's position by introducing greater robustness through variation, smarter agronomic choices and overall resilience to local conditions. If written to bias in favour of small producers, so much the better.
But we are where we are now because of heavy decisions made by heavy hitters far from the soil.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08 2022, @04:54PM (9 children)
Well, that's a lot of hogwash. Corn is being subsidized for the ethanol industry and for animal feed. "Shortages" (even through war) are created to manipulate the commodities markets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08 2022, @05:35PM (8 children)
Corn is used for ethanol, and corn ethanol has (separate) subsidies that drive demand for corn, but that has little bearing on corn price supports, which are the major driver for farmers. Corn subsidised for animal feed goes straight back into - you guessed it - feeding animals, which relates to agriculture. However, there's no magic rule that stipulates that it has to be corn that animals eat. Again, while demand might be driven through corn that doesn't mean that it couldn't go to wheat, or rice, or quinoa, or whatever.
As for shortages being created through war to manipulate commodities markets - are you seriously proposing that Putin and Zelensky had a coze fireside chat with the Chicago bankers and decided on a fun little war to juice the markets? Because if not, that's pretty much what it sounds like, so you might want to rephrase that.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 08 2022, @05:56PM (1 child)
I'm not really sure that the feedlots could substitute rice or wheat for corn. They would at a minimum need to be processed a lot differently. Chickens, OTOH, could switch really easily.
OTOH, feeding animals (except birds) is really quite iffy. (Birds are different because they've got a built-in mini-mill called a gizzard.) Personally, when I have a choice I always avoid grain-fed beef, because that's a really bad thing to do to a cow. Their digestion isn't built for it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @02:20AM
Feedlots could absolutely substitute. They just tweak the formulation of the ration to hit the right combination of nutrients. If they're using a pellet mill, there's no real process change.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2022, @12:16AM (5 children)
If Chicago bankers want a war, they will get one, with or without Putin's and Zelensky's permission or even consultation. War is determined on the whim of finance, not politics, much less politicians.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2022, @01:48AM (4 children)
Right, because they use their magic hypnotic powers, the gnomes of high finance drive Putin into a frenzy of warmaking, despite the fact that it's clearly bad for russian finance and business ... this makes less and less sense all the time. Try again, less crazy flavour.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2022, @06:40PM (3 children)
In case you haven't noticed, propaganda does indeed have "magical" powers. Look how many of you believe that Putin was unprovoked, if he even fired the first shot. You know nothing but what mass media is telling you. Look how easy it was to sell the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the Americans, and they still reelected the guy who started them, and those that keep them running right up to the present day. Your reaction is a perfect example of how well the magic works, pure reflex. War is a business, strictly business, the flag waving is advertisement, don't try to deny that it works like a charm, and on you in particular
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @02:35AM (2 children)
All of which has nothing to do with Chicago financiers inducing Putin to start a war with Ukraine. Or (more far-fetched) Zelensky somehow doing the same.
What does Occam's razor say? Putin is a classic political strongman, who bases his appeal in thuggish oppression of the opposition (just ask the dead journalists, or Navalny, for that matter), oppression of external dissent (leaving a trail of blood and wreckage in the Caucasus) and imperialistic hunger (Crimea, creating client states in Moldova, Belarus and so on) and sabre-rattling in every other direction (just ask Poland, Finland, the baltic states ...) where he doesn't find complicit allies (China, for example).
Ukraine tells him to fuck off out of Crimea, eastern Ukraine and by the way to clean up the damage. He gets all hissy-fit, and decides to show those uppity provinces that Holy Mother Russia is still top dog, starting with a tank-driven fuck-you.
Alternative theory: Putin's just a regular dude who really would rather go ride a horse and exercise on the judo mat, but the mind control rays emanating from Chicago, New York, Shanghai and London tell him that he and Zelensky need to have a warhead-tipped pissing-match, because it will be good for ... something-something-commodity-markets. Russia's markets? Fucked. Russia's exports? Fucked. Prices rise, but unfortunately consumer confidence drops like a rock, inflation continues its merry canter up the boards and of course all this presages massive unrest in EMEA when food shortages bite. But the Masters of the Market either a) couldn't predict this or b) particularly benefit by it.
... yeah, Occam says you're on crack. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so you're going to have to come up with something much stronger than this crap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @06:17PM (1 child)
Quite simply, without finance and profit, there is no war. "Chicago bankers" is any generic financial institution, public or private, that funds the action
The world is full of them, the Americans finance more than half of them. Putin is the "competition", he's not, really, still plenty of money changing hands between him and the rest. It's still about market share. Coke vs. Pepsi
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @07:19PM
So which financiers benefit to what extent from this war, and precisely how do they influence Putin? Just the fact that someone, somewhere, might want to juice their wheat futures doesn't mean that they have a mind control satellite with access to Putin. Where's the link?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday April 09 2022, @04:07PM (1 child)
No, subsidies have little, maybe nothing to do with it. Corn sells easily because it's so useful. Cattle feed, human food, corn oil, and after the cattle feed is produced you can turn what's left into ethanol. I don't think you can make cattle feed from rice. Rice is far, far more labor intensive to grow than corn; most of corn's production is mechanized. Labor was cheap in Thailand; you could ride a taxi anywhere in the country for a dollar, a bus for a nickel, and feed four adults in a restaurant for a dollar.
Rice isn't very suitable for American farming.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @02:48AM
Subsidies have a hell of a lot to do with it, in the form of price supports.
Here's how it works: in a bad year, there's not enough corn to flood out demand, prices are remunerative, farmers do OK if they have corn to sell, if not they usually get crop insurance (or similar, and by the way there are official supports for that as well). In a good year, the farmers produce so much that the market is flooded, and the bottom pretty much drops out. The government steps in as a buyer at a price floor, and simply snorks up all the available corn at the set price. As long as farmers could produce their corn for that price per bushel, they're golden. By the way, this has all sorts of other fucked up consequences for geopolitics because the government doesn't put that corn on the market, but rather gives it away (think: third world food policy) - but enough about that.
I don't happen to farm corn myself, but I know a few corn farmers, and their basic attitude to corn is that, as long as they can grow it or cash in a crop insurance policy, it's a baseline part of the business. Sure, some cattle, some alfalfa, some soybeans all fit in the big picture, but corn means keeping the lights on. Beef is iffy - it's a real boom-and-bust item. Dairy is a way to go broke unless you're a very big operator. Alfalfa is for animal feed, soy operates on a similar basis to corn, up to a point.
There is not infinite market demand for corn, and the existence of the price supports, and activation of the price supports, is proof positive of that fact.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 08 2022, @05:04PM (10 children)
The bigger news on flooding right now is in Australia. Floods have been 75% of the news there for weeks now. It's interesting because when it was dry 6-8 months ago and there were all sorts of bush fires everyone was screaming about climate change and how the Earth was dying. Now it's lush and green with all sorts of water about and not a peep out of the same people. It is hard to get the whole story when they only tell half the story, or less.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Informative) by HiThere on Friday April 08 2022, @05:59PM (1 child)
I don't know about Austrailia's weather, but both floods and droughts should be expected to be more common with a warming atmosphere, because the decreased temperature difference between the poles and the equator cause the jet streams to slow down, so weather patterns more frequently get stuck sitting in one place.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @05:10AM
Blah blah blah - not a peep out of these people, see?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08 2022, @11:03PM
Not sure if you understand the way fluid dynamic work, which is fine, but I hope you aren't convinced by arguments like ignorant Senators holding up snowballs at the lectern to "prove" hoaxes or something ("how can there be global warming when I can go outside today and get this snowball?"). Heat a pot of water and really stare at it sometime and watch as you keep adding heat to it, how much the fluid moves. Then watch some time lapses of NOAA satellite images showing the global movement of the clouds. You may look out your kitchen window to see a sunny day and wonder about all the nonsense talk of too much rain. I know around where I live people complain about it being too cold, and then 6 months later they're complaining about it being too hot! There's a MUCH bigger world out there than you might imagine and sometimes it helps to stand back to see the bigger picture.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday April 09 2022, @12:42AM (6 children)
Floods and fires have always been part of the ecosystem there. The difference now is that they seem to be oscillating between extreme floods and extreme fire, which only very rarely happened before. You might have seen one or the other in any given season, not back to back like what is occurring now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2022, @03:27AM (1 child)
this exactly, until very recently they called them hundered year floods and such. had to backpeddle that terminoligy real real fast when "only 10 years ago you say, oh this one is just the next 100 year window" kinda comments only made it worse when describing probabilities instead made more sense, even to the plebs.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday April 10 2022, @12:47AM
Australians do enough gambling that we all understand odds. I don't know who brought in that ten year/hundred year/thousand year flood bullshit but I bet they were a condescending arsehole who didn't think the proles could understand probability.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Sunday April 10 2022, @07:27PM (3 children)
More atmospheric CO2 means more energy in the system, which drives more energetic weather. That is what climate change is. That is a real dynamic and is itself a cause for concern and action.
My original post meant to point out the selective narrative bias of certain parties. That is, instead of talking honestly about the real character of climate change they choose instead to distort and manipulate by lies of omission and commission. It is a counter-productive rhetorical strategy, because it constantly undermines your credibility and strengthens counter-narratives when you pathologically lie and distort.
As a practical matter, if Australia is suffering more extremes of drought and flood, then we cannot say that it is becoming drier if it is also becoming wetter. Instead there is a quantity and distribution imbalance. Other regions and cultures around the world have dealt with climate change by building reservoirs, wadis, seeps, canals, and other works to cope with similar drought/flood dynamics. The aboriginal inhabitants of the Amazon basin lived on raised mounds that stood above seasonal flood waters and connected them with causeways that also remained dry; they tended incredibly productive gardens that used terra preta. in the dry season they farmed in the lower lying ground and farmed fish.
Maybe Australia should consider doing something similar to adapt to its new weather conditions.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday April 12 2022, @01:03AM (2 children)
The problem with a changing climate dynamic is that it is not simply an incremental change (it was x, it is now y). It is likely to be entirely unpredictable, in the sense that you can't really decide that you need to farm here instead of there, this way instead of that. Many aboriginal communities are suffering as a result, their old ways of adapting to seasonal changes don't work all the time anymore, if at all.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 12 2022, @08:29PM (1 child)
Aboriginal communities did have to adapt before to climate change that they themselves induced [theconversation.com].
Drought has affected Australia and the aborigines [australiangeographic.com.au] before, long before the Age of Oil.
But we're not really talking about aborigines as hunter-gatherers anymore.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2022, @07:18AM
The average abo now goes hunting at the bottle-oh and gathers a slab of VB.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08 2022, @08:12PM (3 children)
I hope it falls into the ocean and drowns. Wait... Iowa? Sorry I thought you said California. Retract that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @12:43AM (1 child)
Why do you hate America bro? Why you trying to destroy the economy, even sacrificing grandma won't fix the economic collapse of destroying California. The less fortunate in your communities will also lose the tax money keeping them from starving, but to someone like you that is probably a good thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10 2022, @07:24PM
We keep hearing this, but it's not at all clear that the tax revenue from California is all that relevant. For starters, the US government doesn't even pretend to try balancing any budgets, so that argument immediately dies on the vine. So then the question becomes one of how much of a pain, versus how beneficial California is in other terms.
.... yeah, seems pretty painful.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday April 10 2022, @07:29PM
Iowa doesn't just grow corn anymore. It is also a major producer of wind power. Ranchers and farmers there have acquired a great passive, second income from the wind turbines.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08 2022, @08:56PM (1 child)
Nothing pisses off the big guy more than false Christians using the teachings of Jesus to spread hate and fear. The real God, not the convenient god that preachers like to use to give their hate more traction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @01:06AM
Zarquon!