There is no magical desalination technology that is going to replace the thirst that Southern Californians have for the Colorado River, and no amount of technomagic that would replace the absent the Sierra snowpack that is crucial for Central Valley and preventing the mountain forests from yearly megafires. If the current drought trend continues much of California’s agricultural economy will be severely impacted, especially water-thirsty crops, and much of the Los Angeles/San Gabriel Valley/Inland Empire region will become unsustainable at current population trends. San Francisco, San Diego, and the coastal regions will still be viable but without its enormous and diverse agricultural economy California won’t be self-sustaining, notwithstanding that the highly conservative northern and western part of the state would like nothing other than a reason to secede from the more liberal parts south of Santa Rosa and east of I-5.
It would be difficult to pick four states with a continuous geographic distribution that are more different from one another. Although Oregon has a reputation for being “hipster” which is a perception you would get from watching Portlandia but outside of Portland, Eugene, and Bend is deeply conservative. Washington is basically noveaux-riche Seattle liberal that pro-environment and anti-labor, the Olympic Peninsula which is a sort of libertarian paradise/hellscape that has signs advertising “ethanol-free gasoline’ every few miles because reasons, and the rest of the state that would like to join with Idaho as long as they don’t actually have to wear white nationalist insignia in public. Nevada is fucking tired of everybody trying to ram nuclear waste up their yucca and really wishes that people would just come to Vegas, lose all of their mortgage payment money, and go back to whatever nameless shitkicker holler they came from. And California is just an absolute basketcase in every conceivable way where people can’t figure out of they are coming or going, what with the oceans and the earthquakes and the mountains and the fires and the paddleboarding and the shit-is-that-a-tsunami and save the environment by pushing all of the polluting activities off to other countries halfway around the world.
The idea of a California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington compact is like expecting all of the Baltic nations to join together in solidarity. In some multiverse their might be a strange alternatives that could work together but not in this timeline.
I think you’re right, and one would quickly learn where they should and shouldn’t go on Maui. You would also mainly hang out with people like you, mainlanders who have made Hawaii their new home. My point was you could live there for 20 years and would still not be considered a local by the locals, and that’s understandable considering how the locals have been treated. Plus Hawaii can’t survive without importing foodstuffs, oil, and other supplies that come from thousands of miles away. When food becomes scarce you’re competing with people who have lived on those islands for hundreds of years, and you may not survive.
For sure. As a sort of pessimistic thought experiment, my partner and I sometimes wander his 3-acre property, which has a reasonable supply of food crops, and discuss how long we’d last if society broke down and we were reduced to living off his land. We joke about eating the pets and speculate how long we could last on the sweet potato crop before we out-ate its new growth.
But it’s strictly a mental exercise we engage in because we’re curious people with very dark senses of humor. We both know that in the (hopefully highly unlikely) event that real food scarcity occurred, the property would be taken over by somebody else.
One of the things that does seem unappealing about Hawaii is the hierarchy of, tension between, various ethnic groups. Hey, I’m a Hoosier, born and bred. I’m not really up on being thought of as a “haole.” I lived eight years as a “gaijin” in Japan and eventually tired of it.
Another option is to just stay in Indiana after the implosion. It will most likely join the Red side, but it will probably be a more reasonable entity within it.
A “political implosion” would almost certainly result in broad civil unrest if not outright war, and given the divisiveness between states it is difficult to see it just breaking along red/blue lines; it would more likely be a balkanization along more pragmatic boundaries with many states actually breaking asunder because of the inability of political control from the governor being insufficient to maintain integrity of the state. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are a perfect example; both deeply red but with a liberal Democrat in the Governor’s Mansion thanks to the dominance of the urban demographic. The Detroit-Lansing-Ann Arbor Triangle forms a liberate enclave in an otherwise conservative leaning independent state governed from Grand Rapids, while the Upper Peninsula secedes into its own libertarian-conservative thing taking Wisconsin down to the Wausau-to-Chippawa Falls with it. Eau Claire forms a defensive alliance with St. Paul (which fights with Minneapolis even though they aren’t actually politically that different), and Madison declares itself to be an anarcho-syndicalist commune and turns the University of Wisconsin Fusion Technology Institute to developing energy weapons that heretofore were just notions in the fanciful imaginations of science fiction writers. At least everybody hates Illinois and Chicagoans in particular who are viewed as criminals to be shot on sight.
I had a point when I began this but it has since evaded me like a burned-out shell of man, wandering the wastelands in search of a water purifier. War…war never changes.
That youtube is so full of lies and crap. The Queen was nutso. She fore up the constitution, and wanted to bring back absolute rules and the taboo system, which means all the land belonged to her. She had zero support, even among the natives. There was no military occupation, just a few sailors and marines to keep the peace and there was no resistance. The island brought back the constitution, which was the will of the people, not some crazy monarch. There was no need of a treaty since the people petitioned the USA to join. Then the Hawaiians asked to become part of the USA, as the choices were that or Japan or Germany etc. Several nations were in line to take the islands as a colony. So, pretty much 100% bullshit.
There is really no shortage of water in CA. 80% goes to Ag, and a large part of that goes to grow ecological damaging and super water thirsty crops like almonds. A single almond takes 12 liters of water to grow. And, overall, almonds give back the least nutrition of any crop. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X17308592
Not to mention almonds need massive amounts of pesticides, etc, and are causing the deaths of millions of bees. Which indeed they need for pollination.
If big Ag cuts back water wastage by a mere 10%, that would be more than residential cutting their water by 50% .
But there is no reason to assume Global climate change will mean drought for CA, just a couple of years ago CA had record rainfall.
Interesting. I’ve lived in California for 24 years and I’ve found that the areas east of I-5 (the Central Valley) are much more conservative than west of it (the coast).
For comparison consider these east vs. west of I-5 pairs of cities; each pair at a similar latitude:
WEST / EAST
Mendocino /Yuba City
Santa Rosa / Placerville
San Francisco / Stockton
Salinas / Fresno
SLO* / Bakersfield
Santa Barbara / Barstow
Los Angeles / Twentynine Palms
*Hahahaha heehee. I wrote SLO instead of San Luis Obispo to emulate the many, many Dopers who seem to take pleasure in abbreviating terms that most other Dopers wouldn’t know (especially military and weapons systems–hoo-boy are y’all having a field day in the Ukraine threads!) I think it’s a lazy, stealth-bragging, ignorance-promoting habit that has no place here but many of you folks seem to think it’s fine so… I though I’d try it.
My error; that should have been “west of I-5”. You are correct, the ag-and-petroleum corridor up Hwy from Bakersfield to Modesto is scarcely less conservative than Kansas, and just about as boring except for the mountains in the background.
I mean, SLO is how everyone there talks of it, and anyone who isn’t familiar with the term probably doesn’t know where San Luis Obispo is, anyway. It’s one of those upcoast areas that is too far north from Santa Barbara and too far south from Monterey for casual tourists to visit. And frankly, I like it that way; Morro Bay has yet to be overrun with tech moguls building giant, scenery-blocking megamansions, and going to Cayucos is like stepping back into 1970.
You can’t trust wiki on political hot issues. The article has been expensively rewritten to make the USA look bad and the insane Queen look good.
However, still, she unilaterally abrogated the constitution. Her new constitution would make her nearly a absolute ruler. It also disenfranchised all white people, even those born on the islands. That is pure racism.
Not a single Hawaiian soldier put up any resistance. The marines didn’t have to use force at all. Nor did they overthrow the monarchy.
And a true independent Hawaii would have not lasted long in the era of colonialism. Germany, Britain and Japan all had eyes on the islands.
By the way, I read on Wikipedia about how Hawaii became a part of the US and… it was quite the mess. My feeling was that it was neither truly just and democratic nor the worst thing ever. Further, the local government seemed to have been in disarray for awhile without much outside influence making it so. But I’m sure everything could be spun one way or another.
Every once in a while we get these despairing OPs (especially after or soon before elections) about how life is on a downward spiral to hell in the U.S. and I’m-a-gonna-emigrate-to-Nirvana-land.
The trouble with all those scenarios is some combination of 1) they don’t want you (lack of useful skills, prejudice against non-natives etc., and 2) they’ve got their own problems which would be magnified with an influx of cranky U.S.ers.
Hawaii is too isolated, dependent on imports and strategically vulnerable. California is at severe risk of natural disasters and water and energy supply disruptions, Canada only wants people with certain skill sets and besides it’s friggin’ COLD up there.
Best to either put in the effort to improve things in America, cultivate your garden, or maybe even both.
[quote=“Jackmannii, post:38, topic:963908, full:true”]
Every once in a while we get these despairing OPs (especially after or soon before elections) about how life is on a downward spiral to hell in the U.S. and I’m-a-gonna-emigrate-to-Nirvana-land.[/quote]
Though I think that’s usually about foreign countries, right? I’m talking about moving somewhere in the US. Also, I think such OPs have typically been along the lines of, “The US is gonna suck, so I’m leaving,” whereas I’m talking about the US actually breaking apart. Do you think it’s unrealistic at this point? Also, don’t you think not being a part of the US during the Trump years would have been a good idea for a lot of people? Mental health and all that. In sum, I wouldn’t dismiss such OPs as meaningless.
Yeah, it might be a bad idea.
I could go back to Japan at any time, however, because I do have the skill set needed there.
Who is the “we,” though? I have no doubt that the right thing to do was to support the autonomy and local governance of the Hawaiians.
Nevertheless, once Hawaii became a US territory, weren’t the Hawaiians part of the “we” that was doing things there? In other words, it wasn’t–and isn’t–all white people vs. brown people. Unless the thesis is that Hawaiians have had zero agency and have been completely oppressed from the beginning.
I don’t have the knowledge to say that was absolutely not the case, and there is no doubt that things were tilted heavily toward TPTB exploiting the people and the environment. At the same time, however, it’s not like Hawaii has been turned into some kind of hell, and Hawaiians are still in the majority there.