Aesuan

Bloomberg has an excellent article on what, exactly, "environmental uses" means. Essentially that's every gallon of water that, once it has settled into a river, successfully flows into the ocean. If any water is released from behind a dam, any part of a river is downstream of any dams... if, in short, a river in California has a mouth, then the water coming out of it is part of that oft quoted 50%.

We can absolutely choose to see that as a waste, but it doesn't change the fact that agriculture uses four times as much water as everything else. KQED had some great stats and graphs on residential water use. A... (read more)

My guess is that more and more of us are living in Ellen Ullman's"Museum of Me":

It is in this sense that the Internet ideal represents the very opposite of what democracy is, democracy being a method for resolving differences in a relatively orderly manner, through the mediation of unavoidable civic associations. Yet there can be no notion of resolving differences in a world where each person is entitled to get exactly what he or she wants. Where all needs and desires are equally valid, equally powerful, I’ll get mine, you get yours, no need for compromise or discussion, I don’t have to tolerate you, you don’t have to tolerate me, no need