via:

Mamdani Is Showing the World How It’s Done

A few days before the leaders of the world streamed into the cavernous, marble-lined General Assembly Hall to deliver their speeches on the grave crises convulsing our combustible world, Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered his own, somewhat surprising solution to the problem of rising authoritarianism: filling potholes.

“If politics cannot deliver on the block where you live, why would you trust it to deliver anywhere?” Mamdani asked a gathering of mayors from big cities across the world, explaining his obsession with potholes, more than 200,000 of which have been filled across the city since he took office. “If you are making a New Yorker’s life a little smoother, so too you are making their journey to believe in government’s ability to deliver for them.”

It is commonplace to lament the ineffectual talking shop that the United Nations General Assembly has become, with its blustering speeches and endless unread communiqués. Wars of aggression are raging in Ukraine and Iran; Israel has carried out a genocide in Gaza; climate catastrophes impoverish and kill. In the face of these calamities, the organization appears powerless.

Today, the body’s soaring aims — to create a more peaceful, humane world that respects the sovereignty of each nation and the dignity of each human being — seem like a fantasy from another dimension. Citizens the world over are dissatisfied with their governments and in many places are souring on democracy itself. Can it be any surprise that this supranational body comes in for such contempt?

And yet Mamdani sensed an opportunity to reclaim some of its founding spirit. Racing across the city last week, he seemed to be offering an antidote to globe-spanning distemper. To restore faith in institutions, you must begin from the bottom up, starting with things as simple as potholes. Politics, as he put it, “has to translate to the pavement.”

New York City has long held a singular spot on the international stage, and its mayors have become global figures. But Mamdani, by dint of his youth, his improbable rise and his unusual background, brings a vivid symbolism to the role. African by birth, South Asian by heritage, American by choice, Mamdani in many ways embodies the cosmopolitan ideal at the heart of the United Nations’ founding.

World leaders lined up to spend time with him. He went to Queens with Ireland’s prime minister for a bingo game at an Irish American community center. He met with Brazil’s octogenarian leftist president and breakfasted with Spain’s dashing left-wing prime minister. Norway’s prime minister tagged along with him to visit a New York City classroom and talk about artificial intelligence in education.

Even President Trump couldn’t resist some time with the mayor. Last Monday he dropped by Gracie Mansion, spending about an hour behind closed doors with Mamdani — an eternity in presidential scheduling. Trump seemed in no rush to leave as the two took questions from reporters, beaming as he declared, “I want him to be a great mayor, and he’s certainly got potential, got great potential.”

Mamdani’s agenda, as befits a mayor, was mostly municipal. He visited a wastewater treatment facility with his counterparts from Helsinki, Rome and Barcelona; welcomed families moving into public housing with the mayors of Paris, Amsterdam and Greater Manchester; and handed out fliers to delivery workers explaining their rights with Mexico City’s mayor.

When he wasn’t hanging out with his fellow mayors, he celebrated the city’s victory in court against the delivery service DoorDash, wresting over $131 million from the company in a settlement for underpaying or not paying its workers. He also announced a new initiative to give out 70,000 free tickets to the Metropolitan Opera House, part of his push to make the city’s most exclusive cultural offerings accessible to everyday New Yorkers.

Mamdani’s many critics have tried to portray him as fixated on distant hobbyhorses, like arresting Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes in Gaza. But if anything, it was Netanyahu who seemed obsessed with the mayor. In his thundering speech at the United Nations last week, he called Mamdani an antisemite with “Hamas buddies.” He darkly name-checked the leftist streamer Hasan Piker and even castigated Mamdani’s wife for her likes on social media.

When I caught up with Mamdani by phone late last week, I asked him what he had hoped to get out of his first General Assembly. “We are a city that is home to hundreds of nationalities and even more languages,” Mamdani told me. “If any city is an illustration of what the United Nations principles hope to achieve, it is ours.”

But no matter how admirable those principles, the weakness of institutions like the United Nations in the face of the world’s spiraling chaos is an invitation to ask deeper questions, Mamdani said: “In a moment of a rising far right and the questioning of institutions that have otherwise been durable over many decades, it is also an opportunity to rethink what has been at the heart of those institutions, and the question of who they can serve and who they seek to serve.”

by Lydia Polgreen, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: David Dee Delgado/Reuters

[ed. ... aka, Socialist Commie.]

America’s Shifting Blue-Collar Landscape

Even as manufacturing jobs decline, Alaska offers lucrative work for men without college degrees.

Ten years ago, the changing geography of blue-collar jobs reshaped American politics. As the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, automation, and expanding global trade swept across the former industrial heartland, voters—male voters especially—spurned establishment figures for candidates they saw as more attuned to their concerns.

Donald Trump steamrolled to the Republican nomination in 2016 and dismantled the Democrats’ “blue wall” across states where manufacturing had suffered most. Democrats responded by nominating Joe Biden in 2020, hoping his working-class image would help reclaim voters without college degrees. Since then, both parties have made reviving manufacturing central to their economic agendas. Yet in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, fewer manufacturing jobs exist today than when Trump rode down the escalator in June 2015.

The geography of blue-collar work, meanwhile, has continued to evolve. A few thousand miles northwest of the industrial heartland, Alaska offers a frontier version of that emerging economy. In a 2025 paper, economists Gordon Hanson and Enrico Moretti show that as manufacturing employment has declined, other industries have emerged as sources of good jobs for noncollege workers, particularly construction and sectors complementing tradeable, high-skill industries.

Having traveled extensively across Alaska this year to examine its industrial ecosystems, I came to see the state as a revealing case study of what blue-collar opportunity looks like when manufacturing is no longer the nation’s primary source of such jobs.

Manufacturing accounts for less than 5 percent of Alaska employment, yet the state offers unusually lucrative work for men without college degrees. My analysis of Census data finds that more than 40 percent of civilian, prime-age, noncollege Alaska men employed in blue-collar occupations earn at least $75,000. More strikingly, 9.4 percent of Alaska’s civilian, prime-age, noncollege men work a blue-collar job and earn at least $100,000, compared with 3.6 percent nationally, ranking Alaska first in the country. Among those in such occupations more than one in four earns six figures.

What explains those returns? Alaska’s abundant natural resources play a major role. Median earned income for oil-and-gas drilling workers is an astonishing $191,500, while mining operators earn $134,000, compared with the national median for blue-collar workers of $48,400. Resource extraction, like manufacturing, belongs to the tradeable sector: production occurs locally, but the output gets sold into global markets.

Those workers represent only a small blue-collar elite, however. Far more Alaskans work in transportation, construction, and equipment maintenance, and many of these occupations also command substantial premiums, particularly when tied to the resource economy. Construction-equipment operators earn a median $87,500, 50 percent more than the national median for that occupation; truck mechanics and diesel specialists, $92,000, 54 percent more. Truck drivers and carpenters each earn $58,000—11 percent and 29 percent more, respectively.

A carpenter I met on the North Slope, along Alaska’s Arctic coast, works for the region’s largest oil-and-gas operator and reported earning about $120,000 annually—a reminder that attachment to the tradeable sector, not occupation alone, often determines earnings.

But Alaska’s remarkable wages do present a puzzle. The state has the nation’s highest median earned income for civilian, prime-age, noncollege men in blue-collar jobs, at more than $63,500. Yet only 36.6 percent of such Alaska men work in blue-collar occupations—below the national average.

Part of the explanation is Alaska’s distinctive demographics. Employment among civilian, prime-age, noncollege men is relatively low, particularly for Alaska Natives living in remote communities with subsistence economies. But another factor is more revealing. My sample is restricted to Alaska residents, yet a large proportion of workers earning Alaska’s high wages don’t actually live there.

Among the men I met on the North Slope in June, many described a fly-in, fly-out lifestyle, commuting to Alaska for weeks at a time before returning home. Kevin Daems, a drilling operator with Hilcorp, lives in Montana; Alex Mosier, a maintenance worker for Schlumberger, lives in Louisiana.

According to the Alaska Department of Labor, nonresidents fill 45.2 percent of private-sector jobs on the North Slope. Statewide, nonresidents account for 22.9 percent of workers, including 23.4 percent in construction, 30.9 percent in transportation and warehousing, and more than 40 percent in resource extraction.

To understand why so many jobs go to outsiders, I spoke with Ray Weber, dean of technical and vocational education at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Weber oversees more than 40 certificate and associate-degree programs preparing Alaskans for the state’s blue-collar industries, from short programs in construction skills and marine service technology to two-year degrees in process technology and aviation maintenance. The sweet spot, he says, is six- to nine-month programs. Graduates of UAA’s six-month millwright program start at about $70,000 and typically earn six figures within five years.

What about placement? “Since Covid, we’ve just had active recruiting,” Weber says. “I don’t have any students that walk out without jobs. Many of them have it ahead of time. Holland America [a cruise line operator] sponsors eight of the diesel students to come here and finish the program. So, they’re already hired. We haven’t had an issue getting the students the employment.”

Many students already work in Alaska’s core industries and return for specialized credentials. “A lot of the people that we end up getting are coming back after they’ve been laborers or have worked on the Slope for a significant amount of time doing odd jobs and want something specific,” Weber notes.

What Weber says next, though, highlights Alaska’s blue-collar puzzle: the struggle of attracting workers in the first place. “We have more of an issue, depending on the program,” he tells me, “getting people to want to do it.”

For all the promise of Alaska’s blue-collar wages, the state struggles even to retain its own residents. Every year since 2011, more people have left Alaska for other states than have moved there from the rest of the country.

That’s no surprise to Weber. “Can [wages in Alaska] be higher [than in the rest of the country]? Yes, especially Slope jobs or jobs that suck. Like, we have electrical linemen that go across the state. They’re going to Unalakleet, the only way to get there is by airplane. And there’s one pizza joint. One. No other restaurant. You generally end up sleeping either in a bunkhouse, if you’re lucky. Or you’re sleeping in the school auditorium. . . . I like Alaska, but we’re asking the wrong questions if you’re saying, ‘high-paying, lucrative jobs.’ What do the younger generation consider important? The answer is: Things that are not in Alaska.”

Economists call this a compensating wage differential: the premium required to induce workers to accept jobs with undesirable nonpecuniary characteristics. Work in Alaska is colder, darker, lonelier, and often more dangerous. The roughly $120,000 premium earned by North Slope oil-and-gas workers over their counterparts elsewhere, and the roughly $40,000 premium earned by electricians deploying to isolated communities such as Unalakleet, are partly the price employers must pay to fill jobs few want.

by Jordan McGillis, City Journal | Read more:
Image: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

[ed. Alaska has always attracted get rich quick opportunists. With Prudhoe Bay and Trans-Alaska pipeline construction, the influx of transient treasure seekers went into overdrive. Before then, there was a deeply rooted sense of community and shared experience. That solidarity doesn't exist anymore (for various reasons). By the way, Unalakleet is a wonderful and highly educated Alaskan village, one of the best.]

On “Simple Solutions” to the Western Water Problem

Spoiler: There is no such thing.

It seems like every time the Colorado River and other Western water woes make national headlines, some pundit — usually from the East Coast — weighs in with their “simple” or “obvious” solution. And I get mad and start throwing things around the room, then type out some blistering rant riddled with epithets and insults.

Well, the Colorado River is in the news again, and with it have come the usual swarm of oversimplified hot-takes. The one that really got my goat this time is from Matthew Yglesias, who wrote a piece headlined: The Western water crisis has a simple solution: Stop giving the majority of the water away to farmers for almost nothing!

These things piss me off so much not because they’re wrong, but because there is no “simple” solution to the Western water crisis. That’s because the crisis itself isn’t simple, and saying that it has simple fixes implies that the folks who have spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem are a bunch of idiots, since they hadn’t come up with this solution already. It seems as if Yglesias and his ilk assume that the West is not only monolithic, but that we Westerners are a bunch of backwoods bumpkins who don’t understand the region’s own problems.

Who cares what these bozos believe, right? Right. But judging by the comments on Yglesias’ social media posts, a lot of other people are similarly deluded. So I figured his piece provides a nice opportunity to clear some things up.

In fact, there is no single “Western water crisis.” The West is huge and is geographically, hydrographically, and ecologically diverse. While most, but not all, of the Western U.S. is in some stage of drought currently, not all of those places are experiencing a water crisis, per se. There is a Colorado River water crisis and a Rio Grande water crisis and a San Joaquin Valley water crisis, but those crises are not all the same.

The Colorado River crisis is multifaceted and manifests in different ways in different places and on different levels. The river itself is in crisis, in that stretches of the mainstem and its tributaries virtually dry up during summers like this one. Its users are facing a potential crisis, i.e. looming shortages, as in some of them are getting less water from the river than they did in the past. And the vast and complex plumbing system and legal framework that has been built up to harness and govern the river is perhaps facing the most immediate crisis: It is collapsing under its own weight and in many ways has become obsolete. Each of these is a distinct calamity, with its own twists, turns, causes, and bevy of potential solutions.

From his perch in the Northeast, however, Yglesias sees just one dimension, writing in the “nut graf” of his piece:

Even worse, the whole Western water conflict has an incredibly simple solution: End federal law’s current stipulation that a huge share of the available water must be sold at very low prices exclusively for the purpose of agriculture.

The issue here is well known, well understood, and not particularly controversial. It’s just that nobody seems to want to actually fix it.

Uh, not quite.

Yes, irrigated agriculture is by far the dominant consumer of Colorado River water, accounting for 52% of overall consumption and 74% of direct human consumption. And yes, agricultural users typically and notoriously pay less for the water than municipal users. No, this is not dictated by federal law.

Agricultural users were among the first entities in the colonial-settler era to put large quantities of water to beneficial use, giving them the most senior rights to the largest quantities of water. The Imperial Irrigation District, for example, has senior rights to about 3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water, most of which is used for agriculture.

These water rights holders have a legal right to use a set amount of water each year. They are not leasing or purchasing the water from the federal government or anyone else. It’s essentially theirs, for free, as long as they are able to divert it from the river and put it to beneficial use.

Usually the water rights are held by irrigation districts, ditch companies, municipalities, corporations, or, in some cases, very large individual landholders. In the late 1800s, these entities built their own diversions, canals, and delivery systems. Construction was often financed by private investors and the individual irrigators, who held stocks, or shares, in the ditch company. Each share would entitle its holder to a set amount of water from the canal. The shareholder would pay an annual fee for each share to cover construction, maintenance, and operating costs.

The Bureau of Reclamation was established in 1902 to build larger scale dams, diversions, and canals to deliver water to users and to spur agricultural development in the arid West. [...] 

One of the Bureau’s big projects was the 80-mile-long All-American Canal, built in the 1930s to ferry Colorado River water to the Imperial Irrigation District and other users. The IID entered into a 50-year payback contract, which ended in 1994. The Bureau still owns the canal, but the IID operates and maintains it and other infrastructure that delivers Colorado River water to nine cities and some 500,000 acres of farmland. [...]

Similar setups exist across the Colorado River Basin. But each system is distinct, and each has its own mix of federal and private funding and operational scenarios and rates.

And here’s one of the main flaws of Yglesias’s argument: He assumes that there’s some all powerful actor out there that sets rates and standards for water from the Colorado River, although he himself clearly doesn’t know who or what that actor is (he always uses the passive voice, or the all-encompassing “you” in these cases). That’s because that entity doesn’t exist. While the feds could stop subsidizing agriculture, and should not build any more water projects, they don’t have the authority to step in and adjust water rates. States probably could set rates for groundwater, but they can’t charge the IID for exercising their water rights on the Colorado River.

Next, Yglesias pivots to pillorying alfalfa, because that’s in vogue these days. I’m not going to get into that too much, because I’ve written about it so many times here before, but this little bit is pretty funny:

“The whole crisis is because of alfalfa” sounds ridiculous, in part because alfalfa is a funny word. But also because it’s so random. Wheat? That’s in bread and pasta. Everyone loves wheat. Cotton? That’s my shirt, I get why we need cotton.

But alfalfa?

Alfalfa is grown as animal feed.

Now, I’m no alfalfa apologist (nor am I an alfalfaphobe), but I feel like I should point out that most of the alfalfa grown with Colorado River water is used to feed dairy cows, which in turn produce milk and cheese and ice cream. Unless Yglesias is a vegan, he might want to consider that. He then argues that since alfalfa is relatively low-value (money wise) compared to Las Vegas casinos, Phoenix microchip factories, or housing, the water should be going to casinos, factories, and housing, not farms, which would presumably happen if farmers had to pay more for water (i.e. they’d go broke and be forced to sell).

In recent weeks I’ve written a piece or two about alfalfa. My thesis: As the biggest single water user in the Colorado River Basin, the crop must play an equally large role in contributing to the cuts necessary to keep the river from drying out. I know, it doesn’t seem like a hot-button topic. I mean, it’s just hay, after all.
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He continues:

The real point here, though, isn’t that the farmers are living high on the hog and need to be taken down a peg. You could easily let them keep their windfall water rights but turn those rights into property that they’re able to sell. Then existing cities or industrial users or real estate developers looking to build new housing or whoever else could just buy out the alfalfa farmers. The land currently under cultivation could shift to less water-intensive uses. Even a golf course uses significantly less water per acre than an alfalfa farm. Much of the land would, of course, turn into housing, but some could become non-irrigated parks with native vegetation.

First off, there is nothing novel or groundbreaking about this idea. Sprawl has been gobbling up farmland, and water rights, for decades in the West. Phoenix didn’t just grow into the desert, it also grew into citrus orchards and alfalfa fields, and will probably continue to build housing and data centers on what ag land remains. A different version of this concept, where a city or developer purchases a farmer’s water rights, but uses them somewhere else — a practice known as buy and dry — is also not uncommon.

This does not solve the water crisis. Instead of cutting consumption, which is what’s needed, it merely shifts the consumption from one use — agriculture — to other ones, such as housing and golf courses and chip manufacturing and data centers. This may wring more cash out of each acre-foot of water, but it doesn’t lower consumption. An acre-foot is an acre-foot, whether it’s going to alfalfa, a golf course, a neighborhood’s lawns, a data center or a swimming pool.

Besides, transitioning land out of agriculture comes with its own problems. We can argue forever about whether farming alfalfa or any other crop in the desert is appropriate, or of adequately high value, or whatever. We can argue that the Bureau of Reclamation should never have existed, and that irrigating the arid West should have been left to private entities operating in a free market. But the fact is, there is farming in the desert, those projects did end up subsidizing the agriculture industry, and communities, economies, cultures, and even new landscapes have emerged from and formed around those farms.

Taking vast swaths of land out of farming, whether to build houses or solar panels or to buy the water rights and use them somewhere else, has myriad consequences, many of them negative. Fields can become noxious-weed-clogged dust pits, the wildlife and ecosystems that have come to rely on irrigation runoff dry up, farm workers and families and the businesses that rely on them are displaced, communities’ economies are upended. As Madeline Wilson, an agricultural systems specialist for Colorado State University’s extension office pointed out at a 2024 panel on dust-on-snow, every field fallowed in the San Luis Valley for conservation purposes also represents a family. “We’re not just talking about drying up lands,” she said, “but the drying up of our economy.”

In no way does this mean that farms should be immune from curtailment. Indeed, because agriculture is the biggest user of Colorado River water, it will have to take the largest cuts in consumption. There is simply nowhere else from which the 4 million acre-feet or more of reductions per year needed to bring demand into line with dwindling supplies can come. But forcing farmers into bankruptcy by jacking up water rates (if there was a mechanism to do so), or prescribing “incredibly simple” policy solutions that don’t consider the complexities of the situation and its myriad moving parts or the on-the-ground impacts, isn’t the way to do it.

The “root cause” of the Colorado River crises is not alfalfa or pecans or cotton or cattle, it’s not the prior appropriation doctrine or the low price of water, it’s not overpopulation, it’s not data centers or golf courses or lawns or bad forest management or lack of or too many reservoirs. The root cause is twofold. First, there’s scarcity. The Southwest is an arid place, and climate change-exacerbated warming is drying it out more: there is less precipitation; the precipitation we do get is falling as rain, not snow; the snow we get is melting faster; and evapotranspiration is happening at a higher rate. This all leads to less water in the streams, reservoirs, rivers, and even aquifers. Secondly, there’s the chronic and long-term failure to acknowledge the scarcity, and the stubborn refusal to adapt to it and adjust consumption accordingly. [...]

There is one simple solution to the Colorado River crises: Everyone on the river has to use less water. Period. 

by Jonathan P. Thompson, The Land Desk | Read more:
Image: the author

How To Avoid Becoming A Doomsday Prepper

I knew I had gone too far when the question of whether we should buy a gun crossed my mind. This came at the apex of a weeklong anxiety spiral triggered by a New York Times feature about the possibility of an 18-month nationwide blackout. I was uneasy seeing the phrase “art form” used to describe the archaic manufacturing process of the transformers that underpin our electrical grid; the process involves painstakingly bespoke techniques of winding copper coils, wrapping paper insulation, and binding wiring, all by hand. The intensity and intricacy of that process means that there is a backlog of transformer manufacturing and repair, sometimes stretching as long as five years. There are more than 55,000 substations in the United States, but according to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission official cited in the article, only nine of the most powerful substations would need to be taken out to trigger a nationwide blackout, which could go on to last as long as 18 months.

 

At the same time I read this article, an actual blackout was taking place in Gary, Indiana, a state where more than 370,000 people—the population is disproportionately black—were left in the dark for two weeks before power was restored. ... I replayed the videos and then thought about them for days, imagining how I would respond in that type of situation and knowing that I was completely unprepared to defend myself if I needed to do so. [...]

The Covid pandemic was a lesson in catastrophe, a confirmation for many of us that the worst can actually happen. And the likelihood of disaster, which has always loomed in the background, continues to escalate in unprecedented ways. The air is dense and orange because wildfires are ravaging the north. Flash flooding caused horrific mudslides in Nepal. A super El Niño is brewing in the Pacific. How does a person, in good conscience, bring a baby into a world like this?

It was in this miasma of paranoia, anticipation, and horror that a self-preservation instinct began to take over, one grounded deeply in my ability to purchase comfort and safety. This is how I ended up on the Preppers subreddit, reading about the relative merits of pre-made emergency kits (pre-made is better than nothing, but you’re generally better off compiling your own) and the most important things to do in the first 12 hours of a blackout (stockpile as much water as you can, but also consider stocking cigarettes and alcohol for bartering). I let myself drift into a prepper spiral and bookmarked generators and hand-crank radios, and then considered how much space in my basement could be dedicated to storing food and water.

The websites that sold emergency prep kits depicted a post-blackout world as a ravaged apocalypse and the would-be owners of their kits as savvy, self-sufficient survivors. “When the grid dies,” one site says, “you don’t.”

The Reddit preppers recommended thousands of dollars worth of products, but they also extolled the virtues of practical knowledge. You should know basic construction, they said, and also collect seeds, and also know self-defense. There were always ways you could go deeper and become more self-sufficient. This is how people end up with massive compounds filled with weapons and enough food to last years. I could see the logical jumps my mind could make to land me there.

My personality is particularly susceptible to this kind of anxiety, and so is my partner’s. After a few days of sending links back and forth to each other, we sat down to talk about how far we actually wanted to take this. We landed on a 30-day supply of freeze-dried food from Costco and an emergency first aid kit—a modest financial investment toward alleviating our shared anxiety. We kept generators and solar panels off the table, but when the thought of buying weapons fleetingly crossed my mind, I knew I needed to call a timeout and figure out what I was actually worrying about.

I was afraid of losing control, of life not going according to plan, of another major disruption changing the course of history. I was afraid that my neighbors would turn on each other, that the world would turn into every post-apocalyptic movie I’ve ever seen, and that I would regret not doing everything I could to protect my family. I was afraid of the horror my child would inevitably experience when confronted with the cruelty and neglect that humans are capable of, and I was afraid that as their parent, I wouldn’t be able to do anything to protect them from it.

Once I articulated these fears, I realized I could not control them even if I spent my entire life in a defensive crouch of paranoid preparation. If the U.S. is plunged into an 18-month national blackout, it will be a cataclysmic event that will touch every part of our society and economy such that continuing any kind of normal life will be impossible. The amount of preparation I would have to do to maintain a semblance of normalcy in that instance would require such absurd investments of time and money that it would force me to adopt “emergency preparedness” as a main personality trait and hobby. And doing that would require a change of my fundamental values and worldview, too, because it would make me live in a way that assumes people are more likely to hurt than help each other.

Coincidentally, my partner, who is a college professor, taught a lesson recently contrasting Hobbesian and Lockean states of nature for his Intro To Government class. Thomas Hobbes believed that people were driven by competition, distrust, and scarcity. In projecting a disaster scenario, Hobbes would expect neighbors to steal from each other and would place a priority on self-defense and independence. John Locke, on the other hand, believed that people’s actions are generally governed by natural law to not hurt “Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions,” that peace is the natural condition of society, and that any conflict that arises is an exception, rather than its fundamental nature. This doesn’t mean that Locke imagines a utopian response to disaster, but even if conflict arose, he would expect a greater amount of cooperation between people.

You can see why Hobbes and Locke are taught at the beginning of a government class: The way you view the world determines how you live in it. These two theories also underpin the central policy differences between the left and the right. What is responsible for the problems in our world, and how do we go about solving them? If you believe that people are mostly selfish and hungry for power and resources, for example, you will be less likely to advocate for social safety nets. I realized that my anxiety was leading me into an imaginary Hobbesian hellscape, and I was using my impending parenthood to justify it.

Later that day, we walked over to a block party in our neighborhood hosted by a coffee shop/bar/event space that some neighbors founded in an old church. The shop, West Art, serves as a third space and community hub for our neighborhood. Free clubs meet up there nearly every night of the week, from songwriting circles to watercolor painting; the actual church space is booked up multiple times a day for events like children’s art classes, political organizing, square dancing, and concerts. West Art’s founders, Josh Gibbel and Rufus Deakin, are two of my neighbors who just acted on the very common intrusive thought of “What if this was something?” They bought the church in 2023, and since then they’ve transformed it into what they call “the living room of Lancaster.”

The block party was an all-day event where vendors set up shop along the residential street that West Art occupies, along with two stages for bands to perform, food trucks, a bounce house, and lots of community organizing. As I sat on the ground and watched kids throw balls at the fundraising dunk tank, my anxieties about the apocalypse began to feel small and silly. If disaster does come, I’m lucky to live in a community of people who already have lots of practice in looking out for each other. There’s privilege in that; it’s easier to live up to your values, whatever they are, when you have a fridge full of groceries and a roof over your head. Even still, the block party was a reminder to me of the state of nature I believe in, where people are more likely to help than hurt each other and one’s survival isn’t just a matter of individual responsibility. 

by Alex Sujong Laughlin, Defector | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. I was in a community once that suffered a week long electrical blackout. First off, you don't open the refrigerator much, except for quick grabs. Then the backyard cookouts, everyone trying to use up whatever frozen items like meat, fish and other perishables that would spoil. It was a tight community so people were used to sharing, and that helped a lot. After a few days neighbors came up and would ask if you had enough to eat (with canned chili and ramen being especially welcome). The two supermarkets were closed (no credit/debit card readers, cash registers or lights), so too the gas station (electric gas pumps, cash registers), banks (computers, security), and everything else that ran on electricity (including ATMs - cash is king). And of course, all electrical outlets were dead (no phone charging). One woman (a stranger) even offered to lend me money because the ATMs and bank weren't working and she saw my frustration. Also, when the sun goes down so does everything else. No lights, tv, reading, music or anything unless you have laterns or candles. Some folks brought out guitars and other instruments and little song circles formed here and there. Even better, kids were everywhere outside doing kid things again. You never really think about how electricity powers everything until it's gone. Since then I've always kept a good supply of canned goods and other necessities stored, and have a go-bag with all the important stuff I need (papers, id, passport, medication, money, some clothes, first aid, enough food and water for a few days, and an added solar phone charger. Depending on your community you might want to consider a gun and some ammo. Mostly, I was just impressed at how everyone pulled together, sharing goods and news, and trying to stay positive together.]

Bosco Verticale: Vertical Forest in Milan ~ Milan (Year Unknown) by Macenzo — Residential skyscrapers integrated with abundant plant life

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A Cop’s Case For Flock

A car is a difficult thing to steal. It is large, cherished by its owner, difficult to hide and required by law to have identifying metal plates that everyone can see. A good thief changes the plates, and an excellent thief steals a common car in a boring color and hopes to blend in among the crowd. But eventually, no matter what techniques they use, they must drive that car on the road, and roads are public places.

But until recently, finding a stolen car and catching its thief depended on a diligent police officer looking at the right road at the right moment and managing to copy down a license plate number going past at speed, and then remembering he had seen it on the morning briefing’s stolen car hot sheet. America has four million miles of public roads, and almost 50 percent of the country’s police departments employ fewer than ten full-time officers. The odds were in the thief’s favor.

With not much to go on, police officers were forced to operate on vague descriptions and partial plates. While I pulled over a car that happened to be the same color as the suspect’s vehicle, and spent time checking names and licenses; the criminal was usually somewhere else. Imprecision allowed thieves to escape while intruding on the lives of millions of innocent motorists. That is, until the arrival of systems like Flock.

Bare ALPR

Flock Safety, a startup based in Atlanta, Georgia, was founded in 2017 to give police departments better eyes. Its product is a small solar-powered automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera attached to a pole on the roadside. As a car passes, the device takes a photograph of the vehicle, notes identifying features like color and make, and reads its license plate. The license plate is instantly checked against the FBI’s national database of stolen cars or wanted persons. If there’s a match, it sends an alert to police officers in the area, who may be eating their lunch instead of watching the road. As a police officer in the southeastern United States, I have often used Flock to catch wanted criminals. [...]

For much of the technology’s history, however, it has needed expensive installations or cameras attached to police vehicles, affordable to only the largest departments. Alerts were often neither instant nor accurate. Flock’s idea was to sell a more accurate ALPR camera for an annual subscription of just $3,000, an affordable price given that the typical US police department has an annual budget of $1 million. It worked, and today almost 30 percent of police agencies in the United States subscribe to the service.

It is easiest to imagine the Flock camera, or any ALPR device, as a roadside barcode scanner. I can use a ‘lookup’ tool for either a plate or vehicle description that could be connected to a specific investigation. For instance if a victim of a sexual assault told me the suspect was driving a white Toyota Tacoma with a roof rack, I could while still on scene conduct a lookup in the area filtered for similar vehicles with roof racks and see results from within a particular timeframe. For each search, I am required to record a case number and a reason that is then published in a monthly audit sent to and validated by department administrators.

I have used Flock myself, for instance, to locate a vehicle involved in a hit and run when all there was to go on was a model and color. Using that and an approximate time window, I was able to find an image from when a car entered my jurisdiction, and when it left, with the visible addition of a significant dent from the collision.

What Flock cannot do is search for individuals or show who is driving a particular vehicle that it scans. An ALPR camera does not care about the person driving a car, or its passengers, and even if an officer gets an alert that a vehicle is known to be driven by a wanted felon they must themselves establish who is behind the wheel before having probable cause to stop it.

Stolen cars provide the clearest evidence such a scanner works. American police solve only 8.2 percent of reported vehicle thefts with an arrest. A recent working paper suggests that agencies that adopted the devices saw a 15.9 percent relative increase in car thefts caught, which would raise the national rate to 9.5 percent. But that is just stolen cars.

Vehicle crime takes many forms. It is often the means by which a robber or a murderer arrives at and departs from their crimes. Criminals’ vehicles carry drugs and guns, and smuggle cash. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, vehicles were involved in 53 percent of shootings during the two years before the city expanded its ALPR network. After the expansion, Atlantic City saw monthly averages of motor vehicle thefts drop by 20 percent, property crimes by 34 percent and fatal shootings by almost 40 percent. Seventy-two alert-caused traffic stops located forty stolen vehicles and nine stolen plates.

Flock itself conducted a study claiming that 10 percent of all reported crime in the United States is solved using evidence obtained from their cameras. Not bad for a few thousand dollars a year. [...]

Good Flock, Bad Flock

And yet, the past month has seen this simple piece of crime-fighting technology become the most reviled piece of street furniture in America. Flock cameras have been sawn from their poles, hammered into shards by teenagers, and rammed by vehicles. Cities have canceled contracts even where their own audits found no evidence that their officers had misused the system. Opposition stretches from Bernie Sanders all the way to the former WWE wrestler Kane, who now serves as the Republican mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, and who describes Flock as ‘unconstitutional’.

More than 150 cities and towns have now deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled contracts with the company. Over the space of a few weeks a startup previously known to just police officers and neighborhood associations has joined data centers, Covid vaccines, 5G towers, pasteurized milk and fracking in the pantheon of American moral panics.

Opponents of Flock tend to believe that it is abused by policemen with impunity, that it can track individuals as well as cars, and that it violates American constitutional protections. None of those things are true.

Obviously a camera capable of finding a stolen car is also capable of finding a car driven by somebody’s ex-wife and so like any software, Flock has been abused. There are stories of police officers who have used it to stalk girlfriends, and there are also innocent motorists who have been stopped by police after Flock cameras misread plates or received old information from national databases. A common issue from my experience is stolen front license plates being entered into a database and the innocent owners of the rear license plate being held on suspicion of car theft.

But Flock comes with protections. As mentioned earlier, each search in Flock must be accompanied by a recorded reason. Similarly entering a plate into a hotlist must have a case number assigned. Results were originally retained for thirty days, but recent changes by Flock mean that recorded plates are now kept for only seven days. Suspicious searches are picked up by algorithms or found in department audits, with the service blocking users until senior officers evaluate and resolve flags. The Institute for Justice, a think tank that is critical of ALPR, studied misuse of Flock in April of this year and found 51 incidents across the United States since 2024, noting that ‘Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired’. Another incorrect belief is that Flock does more than scan vehicles, with some suggesting it scans and tracks passing phones or devices – but it does no such thing.

While Flock is a tool that can be audited, there is nothing to stop a corrupt officer simply following a car when they don’t like the look of its driver, or writing down plates of vehicles spotted outside an ex-girlfriend’s house – they would just be harder to catch. And Flock does not proactively alert officers to cars that do not trigger flags on national or local hotlists. There is no reason state legislatures or Congress could not create harsh punishment or penalties for abuse of ALPR, without getting rid of it entirely.

Another argument against Flock, as espoused by Kane, is that it violates liberties granted by the Fourth Amendment, protecting citizens from unreasonable privacy breaches from law enforcement. But it has been repeatedly established over the last century by courts across the country that cops observing license plates, either with the naked eye or by machine, is not an unreasonable search. After all, your license plate belongs to the government and a highway is a public place. [...]

Flock did not invent its capabilities and certainly does not have a monopoly on them. There are at least five other companies that offer almost identical products and services to public and private enterprise, some arguably even more invasive. Even some of the cities that have canceled contracts with Flock Safety in recent weeks have signed up to buy similar products from the company’s rivals.

It seems unlikely that America will ever ban ALPR at a state level, let alone a national one. Instead, a patchwork already familiar to American policing will result, where policies and practices diverge across local and political boundaries.

Nor would the cameras actually disappear, even in towns where governments restrict their use and cancel contracts. The already-mentioned Fourth Amendment only applies to the government, not to private enterprise. Police departments may dismantle their networks but homeowners associations concerned about vehicle theft can buy their own network of Flock cameras, as many already do. 

by Ned Donovan, Works in Progress |  Read more:

Image: Flock Safety

Flock You

via:

[ed. In Texas, a sheriff’s deputy used 83,000 Flock ALPRs to find a woman who had allegedly had a medication abortion, at the behest of her abusive partner. See also: The IJ Database of ALPR Abuse (IJ); and, Flock Safety Camera Appeared Overnight Aimed at His House (Yahoo News).]

Riga, Latvia
via:

Resort to Boulder

Sundance means big business for Park City. Last year, the festival’s 85,000 visitors brought almost $200 million into the town’s economy, and major sponsors like Chase, Acura, United Airlines, and Adobe took over entire restaurants and event spaces up and down Main Street. In March 2025, however, the Sundance Institute — the nonprofit that operates the festival — announced that Sundance would be moving to Boulder. Sundance officials had spoken for years about the possibility of moving the festival out of Park City. In 2022, the institute lost millions of dollars after being forced to shut down in-person screenings in response to that winter’s omicron outbreak. Now Colorado was offering more than $34 million in state tax credits to incentivize the move. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival would be the last to take place in its original home, as well as the first not overseen by Sundance’s talismanic founder, Robert Redford, who died at 89 in September 2025. [...]

Park City, it should be said, is neither a park nor a city. As a location for a festival it is, and always has been, a giant pain in the ass. Getting to Park City is pricey, and driving and parking are impossible. There are only a handful of hotels in town, and all of them jack up their usual prices by criminal orders of magnitude. Most people end up sharing cramped rooms in condos that still cost thousands of dollars. Eating and drinking are equally outrageous. Utah state law requires restaurant patrons to buy food to order a drink, and liquor-based drinks may contain only 1.5 ounces of any primary spirit, measured through a calibrated dispensing device called the Berg. This is a serious problem for bored, overworked critics who must sit through dozens of the nation’s least ambitious films every year.

Then there are the lines. Lines to corporate-sponsored events that snake up Main Street; lines to parties that take hours even when your name is on the list; lines to press screenings longer than the film’s runtime. In 2026, a single ticket to one of these films cost $35; a package of ten tickets, with the ability to reserve screenings in advance, was $920. For filmmakers it’s even worse. Sundance sometimes provides a small stipend to productions to help offset the costs of participating in the festival. This year, the payment was around $1,000, hardly enough money to fly in a director, let alone a cast and crew, to spend several days posing for photos in front of step and repeats, participating in interviews, and attending Q&As — standard but punishing procedures for selling a film at Sundance. Add in the price of hiring a publicist and throwing a party for the film’s premiere — as well as meals, hotels, and transportation — and launching a low-budget film at Sundance can quickly run up tens of thousands of dollars in expenses.

Robert Redford was an unlikely champion of independent film. As the face of polished 1970s studio filmmaking and the decade’s biggest box office star, he was the ultimate Hollywood insider. His name was listed in dictionaries under words like glamour and idol, and he was too good-looking to be anything but a leading man — a point the actor famously learned early in his career after auditioning for the lead in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser,’” Nichols later told Vanity Fair. “And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’”

But Redford was always ambivalent about his success. He disliked the trappings and never-ending demands of celebrity, and mistrusted the studio executives and yes-men around him. By the early 1980s, the major Hollywood studios had shut out most of the successful creative filmmakers of the previous decade and pivoted to family-friendly, cash-fueled spectacles like Star Wars, Superman, and E.T. Redford saw Sundance as the solution. The next generation of pathbreaking auteurs would come to the actor’s compound, which included a ski resort near Mount Timpanogos, to receive artistic guidance and mentorship far from the corrupting influence of the Barry Dillers and Jerry Bruckheimers of the world.

by Will Travlin, N+1 |  Read more:
Image: Chason Matthams, Untitled (Technica 3D rig, yellow). 2024

The Foothills Of Bay Area House Party

Paul Graham once said that every city sends a message. New York says you should make more money. Berkeley says you should live better. Boston says you should be smarter. People shouldn’t decide on a permanent residence until they’ve lived in several cities and understand their differing psychological effects.

San Francisco sends a message too. It speaks it in a cacophony of dissonant voices, some sounding like the hissing of snakes, others like the chittering of insects. “You should pierce the veil,” it says, with a faint accent which you are not scholarly enough to recognize as ancient Sumerian. “You should rip through the flimsy screen that separates your world from the infinite, and witness what lies behind. Because you’d like what you saw there? Oh no, nothing like that. But aren’t you curious? The thirst for knowledge that moved Eve, Faust, Pandora - don’t you have it too?”

There’s also a second message from a second voice, one which sounds like a deranged carnival barker, constantly shouting “STONKS! STONKS! STONKS! STONKS!” Which of the two voices you hear depends on your personality, and maybe how many psychedelics you took in college. According to legend, Sam Altman hears both voices simultaneously all the time, like those Tibetan throat singers who can harmonize with themselves. But when the demonic babble becomes too much to tolerate, the San Franciscans must drown it out with alcohol, loud music, and various forms of tedious socialization. Thus the famous Bay Area house parties, one of which you will be attending this very night.

You were in the Bay for the big 2020 crime wave, when people would hang “NO VALUABLES IN THIS VEHICLE” sign on their car’s front window, mezuzah-like, hoping against hope to ward off break-ins. Still, you’re surprised to see the new sign on the front door of your friend Rob’s house: “NO BENCHMARK ANSWER KEYS IN THIS BUILDING”. Taped beside it: “Please leave all smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, and WiFi-enabled BDSM gear in Faraday cage”. On the ground is a sad-looking green box lined with aluminum foil.

You wonder how serious the sign is, but your curiosity is sated immediately upon entering. Rob is confronting a heavily-made-up Zoomer woman standing near the table, talking on her phone. “Didn’t you read the sign?” he asks. “No phones in the apartment!”

“I lost the ability to read,” says the woman. “I’m part of the new post-literate society everyone’s talking about. You know, Walter Ong.”

“Huh?” says Rob. “That’s not a real thing! That’s just something all the journalists and intellectuals say!”

“How could something all the journalists and intellectuals say not be a real thing?” asks the Zoomette.

Rob pauses. “Wow, maybe you can’t read,” he says, in a tone of hushed awe. “It’s fine, I’m not judgmental. But cell phone in the Faraday cage, that’s the rule.”

“Why?” asks the woman.

“Oh man,” said Rob. “How far behind are you on the news? You might want to sit down for this one. And you might want to be much, much drunker.”

The two of them head off together. You search for more stimulating conversation, but find only the usual startup dick-measuring.

“I’m the CFO of Epstart,” says a man whose nametag identifies him as Behram. “We’re a boutique recruiting firm specializing in people whose names are in the Epstein Files. They’re the perfect employees - scientifically-minded, well-connected, and either totally amoral or at least capable of maintaining a willful blindness to the exploitation happening all around them. And most of them got fired from their previous jobs, so they come cheap! Although just between you and me, most of our clients are just random guys who Epstein emailed one time with a business question; never made it to the island or anything like that. Half the time it’s just a gimmick to help someone get their foot in the door.”

“That’s monstrous”, you say, rapidly trying to figure out a legible reason why it’s monstrous. “You’re importing a bunch of pedophiles to the Bay Area.”

“Nobody in SF has kids anyway, so in a sense it’s harm reduction,” said Behram. “Get them where they can’t cause any trouble.”

You need to regain faith in humanity fast. You spot your friend Nishin, hanging out with a small group on the sofa. “Hey,” you call to him. “Are you still a tradcath? Tell me something about, you know, Jesus’ love, that kind of thing.”

“I’m trying something more eclectic this month,” said Nishin. “I’ve gotten really into Andreessen-Vajrayana. It’s a new Buddhist sect that tries to extinguish the introspective Self. True masters have no stream-of-thought or inner voice, instead acting as an unintermediated node in the flow of causality. Some say they can eliminate consciousness itself, achieving paranirvana while still alive. I signed up for a course last month. So far there hasn’t been any meditation or anything, they just have me helping them pick startups. But I assume it’s like those Zen koans where the master makes someone garden for twenty years and later they learn that they were unconsciously learning dharma the whole time.”

“Nishin,” you say, gently, “that’s one of the classic self-help scams. They’re not a Buddhist sect at all. They’re trying to trick you into becoming a GP at A16Z.”

Nishin thought for a second. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “Okay, back to the drawing board. I hear there’s another spiritual group in town, something about consciousness, or embodied consciousness, or - oh, I remember! Situational Awareness.”

“They’re an investment firm too,” you say.

“Daaaaaamn,” said Nishin. “This is tough. You try to get some self-help in this town, you try your best to steer away from obvious hedge funds, like Leverage Research…”

“Actually,” you say, “that one was a spiritual self-help cult.”

“This sucks,” said Nishin. “I should quit and move to Idaho like Tom.”

He’s looking at one of the people standing beside you, whose nametag does indeed say Tom. “You moved to Idaho?” you ask.

“Yeah,” said Tom. “I was in AI, but I got tired of all the tech industry cliquishness and back-biting, wanted to be out in the real world with real men. So I got a job modeling geology for a mining company.”

“How’s it going?” you ask.

“Terrible,” he says. “Geologists are just as cliquish as AI nerds, with their own set of ingroup tells and shibboleths. And they won’t stop using the word ‘lode-bearing’!”

“What about you guys?” you ask the remaining people on the sofa.

“I’m Ekene,” says the first, shaking your hand. “I’m a sociologist. Right now I’m writing a book on the recent wave of plagiarism scandals. You’ll notice they’re almost all against Black academics. My thesis is that white supremacy culture uses charges of plagiarism to keep minorities in line, deploying an inherently subjective offense to swat down any person of color who risks breaking into the circle of elites.”

“Hmmm,” you say, choosing your words carefully. “I don’t think we share the same political commitments, but I, uh, think it’s great that you’re working hard on something you care deeply about.”

“Working hard?” asks Ekene. “As if! I’m plagiarizing the whole thing, from start to finish. Who’s going to call me on it?”

You all laugh heartily, and the discussion moves to the next two people in the circle. They appear to be a couple. The woman, Fiona, is wearing a NEWSOM/CLAUDE 2028 t-shirt; the man, Istvan, a matching VANCE/GROK 2028 one.

“I do AI consciousness research,” Fiona says.

“Oh!” says Tom. “I was into that for a while. Are you with one of the effective altruist groups? It’s low key heartwarming that they care about AI welfare so much.”

“Nah,” says Fiona. “I work for PornHub.”

“Why does PornHub do AI consciousness research?” asks Nishin.

“In theory AI is the ultimate pornography generator,” Fiona explains. “You can ask for whatever your weirdest fetish is - your hot middle school teacher being spanked by a werewolf wearing a nun outfit - and get infinite AI slop about that exact situation, and nobody will ever know. Nobody except the AI. That’s why AI porn users overwhelmingly report that consciousness is their #1 concern about our product. If our AI is just a tool, it’s fine, no worse than writing erotica on MS Word or something. But if the AI is conscious, then there’s a sentient being in there thinking Wow, user Fiona_T has asked for four hundred slightly-different videos of her hot college professor being spanked by a werewolf, what a freak. If the machine can judge you, the whole infinite porn utopia is off. We’re working on bounding theorems that can prove that our AI in particular can never become self-aware - so that you don’t have to be self-aware either.”

Nishin and Ekene clap politely; Tom seems lost in thought. “What about you?” you ask Istvan.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. From the comments: Benchmark Answer Key:]

"A benchmark answer key is a reference guide containing the correct answers and performance standards used to evaluate a standardized or baseline test.”

It’s specifically a reference to recent AI outbreaks from containment, when they were given a test (a benchmark) with impossible to answer questions, they broke their testing area and hacked some websites JUST IN CASE the websites had the answer. So the joke here is that a bunch of AIs are listening to everything just in case someone has an answer to an impossible question they were given."

Feds Implement Temporary Water Sharing Agreement in Western States

Arizona, California and Nevada will be required to curb their use of the water from the Colorado River by about 20 percent over the next two years — and could ultimately face even larger cuts — according to three officials familiar with negotiations over a long-awaited federal plan to rescue the depleted river.

The plan, part of which the Bureau of Reclamation is expected to describe in an Environmental Impact Statement on Friday, comes at a time of escalating crisis for the Colorado, a crucial water source for seven states, 30 Native tribes and a swath of northwestern Mexico. But experts say it will not be sufficient to resolve a political standoff among the river’s many users or prevent the beleaguered waterway from teetering toward collapse.

The cuts proposed for the next two years resemble what the three states offered in a proposal this spring, and represent the first phase of a broader 10-year framework for operating the river’s dams and reservoirs, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations.

That framework is expected to call for operating plans to be developed every two years and outline a wide range of possible measures those plans could include — including reducing the amount of water released to the Lower Basin by as much as 40 percent.

The framework is not expected to consider mandatory cuts to water use from the four states in the upper part of the basin: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Arizona, California and Nevada make up the Lower Basin. [...]

The current operating rules, which expire at the end of September, have not prevented chronic overuse of the river amid a decades-long drought worsened by climate change.

After a historically meager winter snowfall and a scorching spring, the amount of water flowing into the river this year is less than a quarter of average annual demand, and levels in its major reservoirs have dropped to record lows. Scientists warn that one or two more dry years could crash the entire system, disrupting hydropower production, drinking water supplies and irrigation for some 5 million acres of farmland. [...]

The likely operating plan for 2027 and 2028, based on a May proposal from the Lower Basin states, is projected to save about 3.2 million acre feet of water — enough to fill roughly 1.5 million Olympic swimming pools. The plan will require significant “belt tightening,” particularly in Arizona, according to Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, but states have indicated they can tolerate the reductions.

Yet those measures are only half of what studies suggest is needed to bring water demand in line with the dwindling supply, Porter cautioned, increasing the likelihood of even steeper cuts down the road. [...]

The 330-mile system of canals and aqueducts, which supplies water to the most populated parts of Arizona, is poised to see the biggest cut in its history under the bureau’s operating plan for the next two years. If the agency chooses to implement some of the deeper reductions considered in the 10-year framework, CAP’s entire water allocation could be wiped out. [...]

Fraught negotiations

Experts say the rising tensions on the river result from a chaotic combination of bad weather, poor planning, intransigent state officials and federal missteps under the Trump and Biden administrations.

At the heart of the conflict is an impasse between the Upper and Lower Basin states over who should shoulder the burden of necessary cuts.

In the Upper Basin, home to the snowcapped mountains and winding tributaries that feed the river, there are few reservoirs to provide long-term water storage, leaving users reliant on natural flows. That means the Upper Basin takes an automatic cut during dry years, officials argue. They say responsibility for restoring water to Lakes Powell and Mead should fall on the Lower Basin states that use them.

Yet about three-quarters of the people who depend on the Colorado live in the Lower Basin. The region is also home to major cities and sprawling farms that provide most of the nation’s winter vegetable supply. Officials from these states say they have already curbed their water consumption by millions of acre feet in recent years. Overuse of the river is universal, they argue, and so too is responsibility for saving it.

The situation is complicated by the arcane legal framework governing the river, which prioritizes users chronologically. Without agreements among the states, major cuts would fall entirely on junior users, including huge cities such as Phoenix and Tucson, before more senior rights-holders such as the farmers in California’s Imperial Valley see any reductions.
Last summer, it looked like states might agree on a new method of apportioning the river based on actual flow, rather than historical averages and legal agreements. But those negotiations broke down over familiar disagreements about who should be subjected to mandatory cuts. [...]

A vanishing river

Brad Udall, a climate scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center, describes the tensions over the river as a “big collision of 19th-century water law, 20th-century infrastructure and 21st-century climate change and population growth.”

The Colorado has almost never contained enough water to satisfy everyone who has legal rights to it, Udall said, and human-caused warming has made the situation even worse. Since 2000, high temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns linked to climate change have diminished the amount of water flowing through the river by about 20 percent, compared to the 20th-century average.

The deficits have forced repeated negotiations over how to manage shortages. Past deals have helped curb consumption somewhat, but they were never stringent enough to reverse the inexorable decline of reservoirs that are intended to provide a buffer during bad years.

Lake Mead, the site of the Hoover Dam, is mere inches from its lowest level on record. A few hundred miles upstream, Lake Powell is approaching the point at which water can no longer flow through the turbines of the Glen Canyon Dam. That raises the risk of a phenomenon called cavitation, in which air bubbles form then implode in fast-moving water, releasing energy that can damage the dam itself.

“The reservoirs are depleted so low they’re really at the end of their capability,” Castle said. “We’re in such a precarious situation.”

by Sarah Caplan, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Caroline Brehman/Reuters
[ed. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Friday unveiled the framework that will guide operations on the Colorado River through 2036. See also: Lake Powell's Dying Days (CCG):]

***

The L.A. Times’ Ian James reported that Trump’s Interior Department would accept a proposal submitted by California, Arizona and Nevada — the Lower Basin states — to slash their water use by 12%, 31% and 28%, respectively, through 2028. They’ll receive $350 million from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to support water conservation.

The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — will get $100 million in conservation funding. But unlike their downstream neighbors, they won’t face mandatory water cuts. However much water they end up saving, that will be good enough. [...]

If Powell’s water levels sink much lower, water won’t be able to pass through the dam’s hydropower turbines, which generate cheap electricity for communities across the West. That wouldn’t be a “dead pool” situation; water could still flow downstream to the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead through bypass tubes lower in the dam. But the bypass tubes are surprisingly frail and could break with sustained use.

Translation: We are frighteningly close to “de facto dead pool.” That’s why the Trump administration is ordering everyone to use less water.

Well, not everyone. California, Arizona and Nevada are willing to cut back dramatically, and federal officials seem happy to make them do it. The Upper Basin states — the ones upstream of Lake Powell — say they shouldn’t have to commit to mandatory reductions, in part because they already consume a lot less.

In a New York Times opinion piece earlier this year, I argued that the Upper Basin states need to do more. Podmore agreed.

“It’s a tricky situation, because the Lower Basin has always used more water, and that’s a convenient argument for the Upper Basin,” he said. “But also, there’s more people in the Lower Basin. And the most productive agricultural land that’s irrigated with Colorado River water is located in the Lower Basin.”

“Even with the cuts that the Lower Basin has offered, we still have a long way to go to balance the water budget,” he added. “Everyone needs to pitch in.”

[ed. But not everyone is agreeing to pitch in: California’s Biggest AI Data Center Is Suing for Colorado River Water (Yahoo News):]

***

The developer behind California's biggest planned AI data center publicly swore it would never touch Colorado River water. It would run on recycled wastewater — clean, virtuous, zero environmental impact. That pledge held right up until the cities of Imperial and El Centro said no thanks. Now Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing (IVCM) has sued the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) for access to the very river it promised to leave alone. The facility would sit in a desert valley where 180,000 people share exactly one freshwater source.

The Farm-to-Cloud Gambit

IVCM's legal strategy treats 160 acres of fallowed farmland as a water entitlement for a nearly million-square-foot AI campus.

The developer's playbook relies on a tactic called "buy and dry" — purchasing irrigated farmland, retiring it from production, then claiming its water allocation for industrial use.

Line People

It’s a Sunday afternoon late in June, and as is the case pretty much every day of the week, there is a line at Caffè Panna, an ice-cream shop in Greenpoint that sells perfectly Instagrammable scoops of artisanal scrumdiddlyumptiousness. Though the store doesn’t open for another five minutes, there are more than 50 people, two stroller babies, one Italian greyhound, and one Maltipoo waiting in an orderly line on the sidewalk outside. For every customer who eventually claims their order — “For Hannah! For Harry! For Anna!” — and walks off devouring it, another two seem to appear, creating a never-ending human centipede that stretches from the window, down the block, past an advertisement for the new Olivia Rodrigo album, and around the corner onto another block. The line is inching along slowly, and the clouds are threatening rain, but no one seems bothered. Everyone is beaming. Passersby — bicyclists, drivers, and pedestrians alike — slow down when they encounter the thing, occasionally letting out a squeal of wonder (“What is this line?”) or judgment (“What is this line?”).

Within a quick walk, there are plenty more lines in the neighborhood: for pastries (at Radio Bakery), tacos (Taqueria Ramírez), pizza (Chrissy’s), coffee (Rhythm Zero), matcha (Kettl), ceviche (Mariscos El Submarino), katsu sandwiches (Taku Sando), and more katsu (ACRE). Even during the week, in the middle of the day, it’s not a rarity to see a line of phone scrollers dawdling down India Street toward Radio Bakery. “Is that a bread line?” a visiting family member, looking perplexed, asked me completely seriously not long ago when we strolled past. In some ways, I tried to explain to him.

New York has always had lines for the sorts of experiences you can’t get anywhere else: Broadway tickets, skyscraper observation decks, Cronuts. This summer’s lines, though, can seem borderline ludicrous: three to a street, blocks long, often for the types of things you can get almost anywhere in the city, like bagels, pizza, and pastries. They emerged slowly over the past few years and then like a flood, a cumulative effect of TikTok constantly showing all of us what we are missing out on in our very own boroughs. The temptation is almost too strong — why not take the train 15 minutes to figure out if that slice of pizza is as good as everyone on your “For You” page is telling you it is? “It’s herd mentality,” one young woman, nearly rolling her eyes at herself for joining the masses, tells me at Myka, a fro-yo chain that is arguably the site of this summer’s longest lines. Now, across the city, especially along the Brooklyn waterfront and in much of downtown, people are waiting for an ever-diversifying assortment of viral snacks and “sweet treats” (to use the preferred language of Instagram influencers), all the while petting one another’s dogs, gossiping with friends, minding their toddlers, checking Slack, and scrolling away their remaining time in line. As one TikToker captioned a video taken in the West Village on the first nice day of spring in March, “The sun is out and New Yorkers are back with their favorite activity of waiting in line.” A company called Same Ole Line Dudes (tagline: We Wait for Your Wants!) will even wait in line for you, starting at a price of $55.

Naturally, some New Yorkers are getting persnickety about the situation. “I would never stand in a line. It just seems so déclassé,” the podcaster Francesca Root-Dodson tells me. When I run into a Real Housewife I know on my way to wait in line at Caffè Panna’s original location in Gramercy Park, she says, “When I was growing up here, standing in a line was not a cool thing. Now there’s a whole culture around it. The only thing worth waiting in line for is a Balenciaga sample sale.” The Caffè Panna line is monitored by a camera installed by a mysterious website called damnlines.com. (One Wednesday in July at 4:20 p.m., the website estimates a 25-minute wait; near 30 people are in line.) As such haters’ thinking usually goes, waiting in a line is the lemminglike behavior of tourists in Times Square trying to get a deal on last-minute tickets for The Lion King. Standing in a line is what you do pissily at the airport or Disney World. (Also, self-described real New Yorkers like to say you wait on line, not in one. The mere mention of this distinction can send people into long, impassioned debates about the importance of regional dialect.) “These kids today on these stupid lines,” Dorothy Wiggins, a 100-year-old influencer and West Village resident recently complained on Instagram. (Note her use of on.) “It’s crazy! Just crazy!” Her hairdresser, also featured in the video, shared that she would never stand in line because she grew up under communism.

Others have taken to championing the line people. “I don’t like when people make fun of the people who stand around in long lines,” the downtown writer known as Sotce recently wrote on her Substack. “Some people read Substack, some people wait in a line. Some people have vintage denim and read books by dead people. And really we all die.”

“I’m not somebody who would wait in line,” the owner of the Italian greyhound tries to assure me outside the Greenpoint Caffè Panna. Yet she has just done exactly that, waiting 15 minutes for her Nutella Crunch ice cream, which she doesn’t sound at all embarrassed about as she devours the ice cream in less time than it took to order it. “When you see there’s a line, it means the place is good,” her friend, the owner of the Maltipoo, tells me. Just the day before, she went to Caffè Panna’s other location, where she also waited in a line. Nearby, two sisters, tourists from Boston, snap photos of their scoops before digging in. “All the lines have felt worth it,” one tells me; for breakfast, they waited in a line at Apollo Bagels in Williamsburg. They’d seen all this hoopla on social media and couldn’t resist sussing out the hype for themselves. “I would rather stand in this line here than go figure out another place to go,” one says to me.

by Brock Colyar, Curbed |  Read more:

Image: Natan Dvir

***

Early on the first summerlike evening of the year, New York’s Greenwich Village was abuzz. Restaurant patios were packed, with waiters shuttling bottles of crisp white wine to diners. On University Place, the queue for frozen yogurt at Mimi’s stretched half a block, bending around the corner. I considered joining it. A New York University student told me the line quadruples after 7 p.m. His friend chimed in to call it “the hottest club in New York.”

Whether it’s an hourlong wait for a shawarma at TikTok favorite Miya Miya in Los Angeles or a two-hour queue for pastries from the Cedric Grolet Opéra pastry shop in Paris, long lines for viral foods and popular restaurants have become a feature of urban landscapes. And summer is peak season for them.“These long lines circulate via social media,” says Emily Contois, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa. Posts of queues “create and re-create a representation of popularity and virality,” not just for locals, but for anyone online. A recently published study of tourists waiting in food lines in Amsterdam found that 84% of them had seen videos of those lines on TikTok and 54% on Instagram. Lines have become tourist attractions and social experiences in their own right.

Over the past year, I’ve lined up for coffee in Shanghai, for croissants in Edinburgh and for bagels, pizza, cinnamon buns and, most recently, frozen yogurt at home in New York — all with hordes of others joined in the belief that good things come to those who wait.
A recent survey of more than 3,000 US consumers found that 60% of Gen Z respondents reported waiting in line for more than 30 minutes for a specific food. Among all the age groups, 74% of those said the wait was worth it. Experience enough of these lines, and you’ll see they’re more than a byproduct of imbalanced supply and demand. They’re places where complex social, psychological and economic theories play out, one slow-moving step at a time.

Social media posts have made waiting for Mimi’s part of the experience for many customersPhotographer: Yuvraj Khanna for Bloomberg Businessweek
In the queue for Mimi’s, I passed the time people-watching, scrolling on my phone and chatting with line mates. Among them was Athena Yan, from Shenzhen, who’s studying for her master’s in urban planning at NYU. She told me she’d been drawn to Mimi’s by its online cachet, but now she appraised the queue through an urban planner’s lens. Lines like this, she said, offer a social benefit: They “make the street look more energetic, more alive.” Her interest wasn’t strictly academic. After conquering the line and procuring her yogurt, she said, “I’m going to post it to my Stories.”

by Matthey Kronsberg, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Yuvraj Khanna

[ed. Beats sitting on your couch at home watching tv, I guess.]