I call bullshit on the seriousness of people who rag on California, and you say it is taking it personally?
Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but we have the largest economy of all states, by far. If you treated us in word scales, our economy alone, even in tough times, ranks well in the top 10 compared to all the nations of the world.
Do we simply consume what we make ourselves?
No, we do not.
We export, to other countries and 49 other states, our excess products and services.
The consumption of our products and services is so ingrained into the way of life of all of American and most of the world, that doing without does not even seem like a concept that makes sense.
But people have no compunction about seeking to deny California access to the economic inputs and trade, in semi-serious proposals, that we use to create the products and services you so desire.
We hear it all the time. “The land of fruits and nuts, fuck them - oh honey did you book the vacation to Disneyland yet?”.
Seriously, you didn’t understand my post if you think that local grown tomatoes are the issue. Table tomatoes don’t come from CA, processing ones do. Go to your supermarket, and any processed food that has tomatoes in it, probably from CA. Sure eat your local tomatoes a few months a year, import them from MX or wherever the rest of the year, but in the end - no CA tomatoes, means no pizza anywhere else, no ketchup on burgers and fries, no Campbells soup, no salsa and so on.
Sure, maybe many Americans can and do go years without eating avacadoes, but are you so willing to toss out table grapes? Eating oranges? These are but a few examples, there are many many crops here. In total, as I said, I think we provide 40% of the fruits, nuts and vegetables in the US.
In other realms, perhaps you envision a life without SoCal entertainment such as film and tv (or other video or audio content)?
Maybe you would rather use Gulf of Mexico or East Coast ports rather than Oakland and LA to import stuff from Asia or export stuff to Asia?
Perhaps you don’t appreciate the contributions to the military, both in facilities and defense firms that are in California?
Perhaps Californians are less patriotic, so you can live without the men and women in the military across the US and the world? I don’t know for sure, but I think their numbers must be proportional to the general population, and that would mean roughly 1 out of every 8 or 10 service members is from CA. If you don’t need them, can you send the ones you have back, and can you stop taking away new ones?
If you don’t need them, then go ahead and joke about water. You drink the you have water instead of the vegetables and fruits from here, and then 30 million or so people in CA can internally migrate to the rest of the US. Because I am sure the rest of the US is prepared for that. :rolleyes:
And you’d be wrong.
it’s convenient because it is ubiquitous, and it is ubiquitous because of the economic efficiencies in the growing and distribution system at a huge national scale. Local truck crops won’t cut it either on that scale. What does your supermarket have when things are out of season? In Chicago in the winter, if left to local devices, you would have nothing locally, and would import from elsewhere.
And btw, midwest farming is as unsustainable as CA, maybe worse. You might want to google “Oglalla aquifer” if you think living in the Midwest is so sufficient water-wise. It is not CA that is most likely to demand the water from the Great Lakes, it is the states between the Mississippi and the Rockies, and there are no real geographic barriers to moving the water in that direction.
I look forward to your telling us which products and services from CA you would have the country and the world do without, since you seem to have opinions about how much water we are entitled to, perhaps feeling that we already use too much to produce what we do. Be specific!
