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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   23297 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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I agree and also respect the Arabs for what they are trying to do. I view places like Dubai, similar to places like Las Vegas or phoenix, as a testament to the idea that you can really just decide to make someplace nice. Even with unlimited amounts of money that kind of infrastructure takes functional governance. It’s sad that in this age I don’t think the us could do as well. For instance do any communities in California besides San Diego have any kind of desalination capacity?

I don't know that desalination capacity is really the best measure of competence. California doesn't desalinate because, most of the time, there's enough water in the mountains that can be impounded that it doesn't make sense to desalinate. Consider that California supports large-scale agriculture that the UAE doesn't have anywhere near the capacity for. Urban water use is a drop in the bucket compared to that. Desalination is energy-intensive, and brine disposal is a real problem, so it's only done when there aren't any better options.

I claim that given the state of Californian infrastructure they couldn't do it even if they wanted to.

The barriers are all legal and paper based, which are actually more real than gross physicality it turns out.

See also: Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable from SSC. It's getting to the point that geology is more mutable than society.

Half jokingly California is a third world country with a 100,000 outer space alien enclave.

That's not true.

We've got at least half a million outer space aliens in the enclave.

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