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UberJew posted:It's a really good book, anybody with any interest in water rights in California (and if you don't have any interest in it but are posting in this thread you should, there really isn't anything more entertaining, or horrifying, in CA politics) ought to read it. People should also read up on the Central Valley project, and then drive down I-5 and see the gigantic aqueducts and pipes running over the grapevine in to SoCal. If you have lived in CA and haven't ever personally been affected by the never ending issues surrounding water, you probably aren't paying attention. Due to the Delta ruling they are putting in a lot of pipelines and whatnot upstream (on most of the rivers) in order to divert the water, it's just taking time. Basically a series of water transfers southwards from one district to the next to make up for the loss of the delta. Re: Pensions - it's an issue not just because of the size, but the ease of abuse (in terms of gaming the system to make well more in retirement than during actual employment), grandfathering of contracts that should never have been given, and also for many years CALPERS basically said "yeah we're fine" (during the bubbles) so states and counties stopped paying in. Then came the crash and the lack of payments made the loss even harder. There were definitely larger unions (hello CHP / state police) who got absolutely amazing deals, on top of the large %'s getting disability (at a rate far higher than that of private industry). That's part of why you are seeing cities and counties all watching the bankruptcies being declared by Stockton etc - once it starts it's just going to go through and all those liabilities will be shed one way or another, regardless of whether they are reasonable or not. It's going to suck for the less powerful unions (of which there are many - small independent unions). Even if prop 13 was removed and magically property prices remained stable, I don't think we'd have anywhere near enough revenue (until UHC comes to the US, so never) to deal fulfilling with pensions and infrastructure work and whatnot that's necessary. We'll slowly crawl back but the budgets aren't going to be fixed with the current contracts (and the prison system). edit: I also forgot about the issues up near Sacremento about the rapid building of cities. Cities/Counties were approving construction basically in the vast flood plains, while the state was effectively on the hook for flood insurance and disaster stuff. Most of the levees in the Central Valley were not built by a government, but by farmers and other private folks, and have all sorts of issues (like trees, ground squirrels, etc). The army corps of engineers came in and audited and whatnot and finally a "stop all construction" order came in for a variety of cities because they were basically all depending upon levees that were nowhere near what would be necessary to safeguard (in the event we have an actual wet year instead of drought). So now there's like a 10 year (or 30 year) project to go around and fix all the levees. (Not to mention places like Folsom, where the dam and lake is not designed to a single lake system, and nearly overtopped a couple years back. It's supposed to be part of a two dam system but the 2nd one was killed by environmentalists back in the 70's and the folsom dam wasn't adjusted to deal with the really wet years) Pervis fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Jun 28, 2013 |
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Jun 28, 2013 18:34
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redscare posted:They got underfunded because the employees were only asked to contribute a token sum and the demographics stopped being favorable because pension plans, like most social welfare programs, are demographic-based ponzi schemes that are only sustainable if there's a ton of employees with a small pool of retirees. This obviously isn't the case and full benefit pensions after 20 years with no minimum age are insane. A cop or firefighter can retire in their 50s and still collect their pensions while going back to work. Then there's all the other various BS calculations in other places like the DWP that only look at the last few years of employment for calculating pension size. Pretty much. The late 90's really screwed the whole system up. Taxes haven't ever gone down but the pension/employment portion of spending has grown vastly faster than revenue. You can read up on Stockton and Contra Costa county if you want, but basically they had no hope in hell of ever fulfilling those obligations, unless you believe that the tech bubble would never implode. Part of this is due to the never-ending healthcare cost issues, but it's not like you couldn't see this coming at the end of 2000 once the bubble started the pop. This has all been a long time coming.
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Jun 28, 2013 18:56
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Ron Jeremy posted:Palo Alto is still balanced. You have the rich people in PA and the poors in East PA. The latter which are slowly being pushed out to places in the Central Valley or elsewhere. Same with the bad areas of Oakland and Hayward. About a decade ago I was talking to a Eurogoon about the structure of our cities and I said that only the really rich and the poor regular workers lived in our cities, but it turns out SF has now started to be more structured like a European city - dirty poors out in the boonies and rich folks living closer or in the city. There's just so many highly paid folks along the peninsula and south bay that it pushes the entire market up drastically. We'll probably get another downturn of sorts in the industry and the insane appreciation will stop for a while. The process of taking old industrial areas and converting them in to dense town houses, apartments, and condos continues though. Given the insane job market I don't expect things to utterly crash as long as the bay area continues to be a huge nexus for venture capital and massive amounts of high-end tech workers, including a shitload of asian (primarily chinese and indian) immigrants. The businesses are here because of the talent pool and experience, and the immigrants have fairly large networks and support structures here. It's amazing seeing the change in the census data from 2000 to 2010, having grown up in the East Bay. Factor in the realities of a lot of the high-end talent being very visibly aware of red-state politics, I'm not worried just yet. By the time that places like Texas or elsewhere are an equivalent place to live and work, it will be because (like say Colorado) they've been flipped blue and the old political machines overthrown or co-opted. For a while I had heard of NC as being a good tech hub, and now that's largely not something I hear at all, due to the shenanigans there. I remember reading something like "as goes California, goes the nation" and I think it's still largely true. Industry that could have left California for another country continues to do so (rather than to another state), although the country is not always China (for manufacturing) or India (for tech outsourcing) like before. Some industry that has left will go to other states, but it's largely the industries that are politically-entrenched and highly subsidized like Defense or Telco.
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Nov 23, 2013 20:19
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Dusseldorf posted:I mean LA steals water, but not from the same places from where the bay area steals water. Sorta, but not really. The Central Valley project is basically a gigantic system all designed around sending water southwards, both for irrigation purposes and city use. Water that used to flow down rivers, through the delta, and out the bay is now piped up and over the grapevine (in addition to just being used for farms in the southern SJ valley). Cities in the bay area would take water from the dams on these rivers and then largely dump it right back in to the bay, but we pump vast quantities of water up and out of the central valley down in to SoCal, which obviously doesn't come back. You can see the giant pipes up the grapevine and the aqueducts all the way down I-5. That water is certainly not moving northwards. It's basically a game of water transfers southwards from district to district, so while it's not "LA takes from Oregon and Shasta" directly, effectively that's what we've been doing. Water is taken from the Trinity River (ie, Klamath river system, aka Oregon), dammed, pumped up and over the mountains down in to Whiskeytown lake, which will then flow down the Sacramento. Various reservoirs are even on the west side of the Central Valley (aka desert) which were put in solely to store and send water south. Repeat this process all through the valley in a series of southwards movements from various rivers, lakes, etc, culminating in a series of gigantic gently caress-off pipes over the grapevine and down in to Castaic lake. Some of the water that's sent southwards from the north goes to irrigate the southern portion of the Central Valley, which is more desert-ish, but not all. It's not as much water as is taken from the Colorado river, but it certainly is taken from the same place that towns and cities along the central valley and the bay would use. And in this state, water is quite literally money, so it tends to get noticed. Water usage/politics is loving crazy as a result.
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Dec 10, 2013 22:22
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