Mandatory Water Restrictions in California Fail to Address Abuse of Resources

A good short interview. All over the world people are thinking we have an abundance of water & hence, we can use it as we wish, for as long we wish. Ask about the lack of water from those people who don't have access to this precious commodity; water is the blue gold.

In water stressed countries, governments & the general public needs to start thinking how to conserve water. We can't stop its use but we all need to start self-auditing ourselves, in regards to water usage, & start thinking how do I save water. Governments, like when California was going through drought, need to start mandating how much water people can use. Problem is people start thinking about water conservation when it's too late. Water conservation strategies need to be thought out & implemented way before the deadline when water is expected to be finished for all.

In Pakistan, the general public & the government are thinking that building dams is going to save the country from impending water crisis. Heck, no!! Dams is one of the solutions out of many, to help a little bit in alleviating the pain of water scarcity. Dams will be able to store some water that when the water crisis hits, the public can be provided with water for a few days. But that stored water will eventually end. Then, what? Water conservation strategies still need to be implemented. But saving water at that time would be a lot harder, since the public is not used to it, then implementing those strategies right now, when water is almost scarce, & work towards postponing that water crisis deadline for as long as it's possible.

As Maude Barlow says it in the end that, "there isn’t a place in the world where we don’t have to start taking care of water in a very different way than we have."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo7uA2ZN93A

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Governor Brown of California’s mandatory reduction of 25%, I guess, is first of all a reflection of a broad, global problem. But let’s start first of all with California. Do you think this measure is adequate?

MAUDE BARLOW, NATIONAL CHAIRPERSON OF FOOD & WATER WATCH: Well, it’s terrible that it’s taken so long for California to actually take this kind of action. It was only last year that they brought in legislation to give some kind of control to their groundwater, which has just been a free-for-all. Everybody’s known this has been coming for 30 years. There’s no snowpack, the overextraction of water is incredible. In California, 80% of the water use goes to agriculture and much of that is for export to other states, but they produce all the almonds, 80% of the almonds for the world, for instance. I mean, they use so much water to produce almonds every year that you could take a shower for ten minutes every day for the next 86 million years. That’s how much water it takes.

So there’s no, there’s been no control. There’s been no limit. There’s been a kind of everybody can take whatever they want mentality. Move it around from one place to another through canals and aqueducts and so on. And hence the problem. And this is not only in California but around the world.

We have this notion that, what I call the myth of abundance, that we don’t have to take care of our water and we wait until the crisis hits before we take inadequate measures.

JAY: with climate change, at least to begin with. If I understand it correctly, California’s been draining water from neighboring states for decades, also affecting the water table in those states. And everyone knows this has been coming.

But how much does climate change, do scientists thing, have to do with the current drought?

BARLOW: Well, climate change, of course is a part of it. But it depends on how you define climate change. Most people think of it as greenhouse gas emission changes the climate and warms the climate, and that’s true and that impacts water. But what we’re beginning to really understand is that when we displace water from where it is put in watersheds, or we displace the vegetation that protected that watershed, we actually change the local hydrologic cycle.

What’s happened in California is not as much climate change from greenhouse gas emissions as climate change from the abuse, mismanagement, and displacement of water. Water has been put where it belongs. As you say, not only has California been borrowing from other states, it’s been borrowing from its future groundwater. They’re pumping groundwater far faster than it can be replenished by nature, and the system of water rights that gives these big industrial interests the right to do this basically says they can keep doing it till the cows come home.

Well, at some point, something’s got to give. It’s like a bunch of people around a bathtub, and they all have blindfolds, and they have straws, and they’re drinking the water as fast as they can. And they think it’s fine. And it is fine. Until one day it isn’t fine for anybody.

They have had a system of allowing basically the commodification of water, privatization of water, through these water rights. And what California needs to do is declare its groundwater to be a public trust. They need to bring in terribly strict management. They have to bring in a hierarchy of access. And frankly, they’ve got to stop making all the almonds and the, the hay for Japan, and everything. Alfalfa that they ship off to Japan. They’ve got to start taking care of their water, and put it back in the center of all policy.

JAY: But can you do that and at the same time have such a massive agribusiness in California?

BARLOW: No. You can’t have both. But you’re not going to have it, anyway. The water dries up, it’s gone. I remember being in Australia a couple of years ago when they first announcement that the rice exports were down 98%. I mean, the bottom fell out of the rice industry, which is huge in Australia, because they ran out of water. So ... it’s not like jobs versus the environment. If you don’t have water, you can’t grow crops. There isn’t any such thing as big agribusiness, or small farming, if we don’t have water.

We have to have what I call a new water ethic, where water is put in the center of our lives, and all policy, from how we grow food to how we produce energy, to how we trade with one another, asks the question about the impact on water. And until we do that, California’s just going to be one of the many crises we’re going to face around the world.

Another happening right now is Brazil. Brazil, up until recently, has been seen as the most water-rich country in the world. But greater São Paolo has about 20 million people. They don’t think they have enough water to last six months. That’s because they’ve cut down the Amazon, and that has removed the whole hydrologic cycle that produced the rain.

So, we have to stop thinking that somehow, big technology is going to fix this. We are a planet running out of clean, accessible water.

JAY: That certainly is the thinking, that somehow eventually it will become economical to spend the money for technology to save us. So for example, in California, at some point it becomes profit-making and worthwhile to bring water down from Canada. There is lots of fresh water not that far north of California agriculture.

BARLOW: There’d be an awful big fight if Americans or California or businesses think that Canada’s going to sell its water to the United States. It’s a very, very hot issue here. We need our water. We do not have that much. We have about 6.5% of the world’s available water. Most of our water is running North, in mighty rivers running north, and there is no way that we’re going to allow the re-engineering of our entire environment to, frankly, to feed a state that hasn’t looked after its own water.

I mean, I think a lot of people around the world are going to say, what did you do to protect your water? And when you run out because you haven’t heard the warnings that have been at least 30 years coming, why should other parts of the world so-called share their water, or sell their water to you when you haven’t taken care of it yourself?

We need to understand that everywhere there are maybe different water realities, but there isn’t a place in the world where we don’t have to start taking care of water in a very different way than we have.

With 6,000 new warehouse jobs, what is Amazon really delivering?

It is simply common sense that a person doesn't get rich while paying living wages to its workers. You have to have "slaves" to increase your own wealth. After all, that's how the Western world became rich; with the work of millions of slaves in Australia, Europe, & North America.

The billionaires we see on the Forbes list every year didn't become multi-billionaires by caring for their fellow human beings by paying them good wages, so their fellow human being can also enjoy life. Oh, hell no !!! They became billionaires by forgoing every inch of ethics & humanity from themselves & becoming the cause of poverty in modern world by paying government-mandated minimum wages. If the government removes that wage floor, then you will see how soon those wages go down to mere pennies. Ironically enough, all those billions help them control the government, too.

Irony on top of all this is these multi-billionaire entrepreneurs are celebrated in the business community. They are invited to give talks & reinvigorate the young minds of university students. Internet is flushed with tips & tricks of doing business gleaned from these unethical & inhumane execs. Some of these famous business people include Steve Jobs (let's take the jobs out of North America & put them in Asia, & pay those workers minimum wages, which will drive them to suicides.), Jeff Bezos (well, this article pretty much lays out what he pays to his employees & how he treats them), Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey & etc.

Then, we cry foul over how bad this world has become. Well, what kind of world you were expecting when you & a majority of world population is learning how to treat their fellow human beings from multi-billionaire sharks. I am even humiliating sharks by calling these people "sharks".

Anyway, so some people will counter me by saying that well, these multi-billionaires pay higher taxes or they generously donate to charities. Well, as for the taxes, you should look into what is their real tax rate is. After all the deductions & such, it is usually far less than your average taxpayers' tax rate; these billionaires pay around 10-15% tax in US, while an average taxpayer pays around 30%.

Now, as for donating to charities, what would be a better way of doing things? Not paying a living wage & treating your employees like they are not even humans & after hoarding all that money, donating like a few percent to a charity to help a few people. Heck, those donations are also tax-deductible, & hence, there is a financial incentive to donate a little. Or, paying a living wage to your employees, so they can look after their families in a good way, & raise the standard of living of your employees & their communities. Heck, if the salaries are good enough of those employees, they will donate to charities themselves, anyway. So, charities will get their donations, but on a much larger scale & scope.

Another thing our society is looking at is more chaos in our communities in the near future. Since, these entrepreneurs can only squeeze out enough blood & sweat from their employees, now they are turning to tech to squeeze out more profits out of their operations. After robots & AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been improved or perfected over the next few more years, human employees will be laid off en masse. Why? Because robots will cost a lot less than having a human employee around.

But, hey, since these multi-billionaires achieved what every one of us want for ourselves, let's learn from them in TEDx conferences, university graduation convocations, & international conferences how much worse to treat your fellow human being, so someday I can be one of these tyrants, too.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/17/idUS199953413420150617#tRwbKHDomj1zlGzi.97 

Some people showed up before dawn. Others spent an hour waiting on a line that stretched out the door. That was the scene ... when hundreds of job seekers converged on an Amazon hiring event in Chattanooga, Tennessee. All hoped for full-time work picking, packing & shipping orders at the online retailer’s local distribution center, a warehouse the size of 28 football fields. “I’m blessed to be here!” one smiling 23-year-old applicant told television reporters.

... On May 26th, Amazon announced 6,000 new full-time job openings at 19 of its distribution centers. Many are in communities that doled out generous tax credits & other incentives — including $10.3 million in Kenosha, Wisconsin, alone — to bring Amazon jobs to town.

So it’s a good time to ask: Are Amazon’s warehouse jobs worth lining up for? Should they be subsidized with taxpayer dollars? And what do they mean to the long-term economic health of their host communities?

On his 2013 jobs tour, President Barack Obama stopped to deliver a speech at the aforementioned Amazon warehouse in Chattanooga. The audience cheered when he called for restoring the middle class through “good jobs with good wages.” But today that same warehouse is hiring at $11.25 an hour. That’s $23,400 annually, or $850 below the poverty line for a family of four.

Hourly wages at the other warehouses listed in Amazon’s recent hiring announcement range from $11 in Jefferson, Indiana to $12.75 an hour in Robbinsville, New Jersey & Windsor, Connecticut.

Even by industry standards, those are some thin paychecks. Wal-Mart pays distribution center employees an average hourly wage of $19, said a spokesman for that company.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s treatment of warehouse workers has been under scrutiny since 2011, when an investigation by the Allentown Morning Call newspaper revealed what were — quite literally — sweatshop conditions. When summer temperatures exceeded 100 degrees inside the company’s Breinigsville, Pennsylvania warehouse, managers would not open the loading bay doors for fear of theft. Instead, they hired paramedics to wait outside in ambulances, ready to extract heat-stricken employees on stretchers & in wheelchairs, the investigation found. Workers also said they were pressured to meet ever-greater production targets, a strategy colloquially known as “management by stress.”

Amazon declined to answer the newspaper’s specific questions about working conditions in the warehouse but, 8 months after the story was released, company officials announced that they’d spent $52 million to retrofit warehouses with air conditioning.

In my own interviews with dozens of Amazon warehouse workers, I’ve heard reports of repetitive stress injuries, pain & exhaustion. (Some called themselves “Amazombies.” Others said they tried to think of the job as a free fitness program.)

Those issues relate to job quality. What about job quantity?

On the same day Amazon announced 6,000 new hires, teams from around the globe competed in the first-ever “Amazon Picking Challenge” in Seattle. Their goal? Build robots that can “pick” shelved items — in this case, the objects ranged from rubber ducks to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – with enough dexterity to someday replace human hands. (Amazon already has some 15,000 Kiva robots that transport shelves of merchandise to human “pickers,” but the act of picking has proved much harder to automate.)

Amazon maintains a very low headcount for its sales volume, which rose to $89 billion last year. Amazon creates just 17 jobs for every $10 million in sales, according to figures in its annual report. Compare that with traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, which create jobs at more than twice that rate: 42 positions for each $10 million in sales, according to an analysis of census data by the non-profit Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

“From a regional perspective, this is clearly not a path to greater employment & more economic activity,” said Stacy Mitchell, the organization’s director. “Your particular community may come out a bit ahead in terms of job numbers, but it comes at the expense of your neighbors.”

She & other community development advocates worry that, with its low-cost merchandise & expanding same-day delivery service, Amazon will eviscerate smaller businesses that put more of their earnings into hiring workers. (The company is already famous for pursuing massive growth while accepting razor-thin profit margins.) Amazon already has an edge over traditional brick-and-mortar retailers in the 25 states where it pays no sales tax. And local governments have also strengthened its advantage, lavishing Amazon with more than $430 million in tax credits & other incentives since 2000, according to Subsidy Tracker, a database created by the economic watchdog Good Jobs First.

Tossing out tax incentives for Amazon jobs might be good short-term politics, but when it comes to lasting employment, let the buyer beware. In 1999, the city of Coffeyville, Kansas showered Amazon with more than $4 million in infrastructure improvements & cash incentives for a 1 million-square-foot distribution center. Soon Amazon was one of the area’s largest employers. But its sales strategy kept changing. Since same-day shipping requires distribution hubs that are closer to urban centers, Amazon grew out of Coffeyville. Executives announced in October that the warehouse would shut down.

Jim Falkner, then Coffeyville’s mayor, created a Facebook page pleading for help. “Please leave suggestions concerning the Amazon job-loss recovery effort,” he wrote. 5 days later, he added, “Amazon is the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to unemployment in the community.”

How the internet is destroying us

Super loved this article ... left me speechless. Flawless. I tried picking a few lines to put it here, but it seemed every line was more important than the previous one, so I ended up putting here almost the whole article. Ironically, regardless of how much I loved this article, I still gotta use social media.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The internet, its many evangelists tell us, is the answer to all our problems. It gives power to the people.
 
It’s a platform for equality that allows everyone an equal share in life’s riches. For the first time in history, anyone can produce, say or buy anything.
 
But today, as the internet heads towards putting more than half the world’s population online, all this promise has evaporated.
The dream has become a nightmare, in which I fear we billions of network users are victims, not beneficiaries.
 
In our super-connected 21st-century world, rather than promoting economic fairness, the net is a central reason for the growing gulf between rich & poor, & the hollowing out of the middle classes.
 
Rather than generating more jobs, it is - as I will explain - a cause of unemployment. Rather than creating more competition, it has created immensely powerful new monopolists such as Google & Amazon in a winner-takes-all economy.
 
Its cultural ramifications are equally chilling. Rather than creating transparency & openness, it secretly gathers information & keeps a watch on each & every one of us.
 
You need only have read the stories ... about how smart TVs can spy on us in our living rooms to realise that Orwell’s vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of a Big Brother society, is becoming a reality.
 
And thanks to the explosion in social media, rather than creating more democracy, the internet is empowering mob rule.
 
The internet has also unleashed a seemingly unstoppable flow of increasingly hardcore sexual materials. Only this week it emerged that half a million pornographic images are posted on Twitter every day.
 
Britain’s most senior judge warned recently that online pornography is a serious danger, fuelling rape & murder. Where will it stop?
 
And when people are not looking online at other people with no clothes on, they are looking at themselves.
 
Rather than fostering an intellectual renaissance, the internet has created a selfie-centred culture of voyeurism & narcissism.
 
Far from making us happy, it is provoking & channelling an outpouring of anger at the world around us.
 
Of course, the internet is not all bad. It has done tremendous good in connecting families, friends & work colleagues around the world.
 
The personal lives of 3 billion internet users have been transformed by the incredible convenience of email, social media, e-commerce & mobile apps.
 
Yes, we all rely on & even love our ever-shrinking & increasingly powerful mobile devices. Yes, the internet can, if used critically, be a source of great enlightenment in terms of the global sharing of ideas & information.
 
The app economy is already beginning to generate innovative solutions to some of the most pervasive problems on the planet, such as mapping clean water stations in Africa & providing access to credit for entrepreneurs in India.
 
But the hidden negatives outweigh the positives. Under our noses, one of the biggest ever shifts in power between people & big institutions is taking place, disguised in the language of inclusion & transparency.
 
Rather than providing a public service, the architects of our digital future are building a society that is a disservice to almost everyone except a few powerful, wealthy owners.
 
It’s easy to forget the crusading intentions with which the internet revolution began. But then the mantle passed from the techno wizards & visionaries to businessmen.
 
The internet lost a sense of common purpose, a general decency, perhaps even its soul. Money replaced all these things.
 
Amazon reflects much of what has gone wrong. Now by far the dominant internet retailer, it has achieved this position by crushing or acquiring its competitors & selling everything it can lay its hands on.
 
It has felt the need to expand so ruthlessly because in its type of e-commerce, margins are extremely tight & economies of scale vital. In 2013, Amazon made sales of $75 billion (£49 billion) but returned a profit of just $274 million (£178 million).
 
To succeed, it has to make itself a virtual monopoly, stifling rivals along the way. Inside the company this is known as the Gazelle Project, after founder Jeff Bezos instructed one of his staff that ‘Amazon should approach small book publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle’.

The book trade - which is where Amazon began - was initially quite enthusiastic about the new arrival but now sees it as a predator as shops close down, unable to compete.
 
As Amazon expands into more retail sectors - from clothing, electronics & toys to garden furniture & jewellery - it is having the same effect there.
 
The impact on jobs is huge. While bricks-&-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every £65 million in sales, Amazon employs just 14, making it a job-killer rather than a job-creator.

‘Robotisation’ in its warehouses may reduce job numbers even further, until eventually Amazon eliminates the human factor from shopping completely. The ‘Everything Store’ is becoming the ‘Nobody store’.

Then there is Google, which discovered the holy grail of the information economy with its search engine sifting & indexing the mass of digital material on the worldwide web.
 
Last year Google processed 40,000 search queries a second, equal to 1.2 trillion searches a year. It controls around two-thirds of searches globally, with 90% dominance in markets such as Italy & Spain.
 
The service is free to use. Advertising pays the bills & makes the profits.
 
The irony is that Google was invented by a couple of idealistic computer science graduate students who so mistrusted advertisements that they banned them on their homepage. Now it is by far the largest & most powerful advertising company in history, valued at over £260 billion.
 
Unlike Amazon, its profits are mind-bogglingly high. In 2013, it returned nearly £10billion for its investors, from revenues of nearly £39billion.
 
Even more valuable, from Google’s point of view, is what it learns about us. And Google, for better or worse, never forgets. All our digital trails are crunched to provide Google & its corporate clients with our so-called ‘data exhaust’.

From this concept other internet services have developed, including Facebook, Wikipedia, the business networking site LinkedIn, & self-publishing platforms such as Twitter & YouTube.
 
Most pursue a Google-style strategy of giving away their tools & services free, relying on advertising sales for revenue. In the process, they have created significant wealth for their founders & investors.
 
On the surface, this seems like a win for everyone. We all get free internet tools & the entrepreneurs become super-rich.
 
But there is a catch. All of us are, in fact, working for Facebook & Google for nothing, manufacturing the very personal data that makes these companies so valuable.
 
The result is another massive loss of jobs. Google needs to employ only 46,000 people, compared with an industrial giant like General Motors, which is worth just a seventh of Google’s £260 billion but employs just over 200,000 people in its factories.
 
For all the claims that the internet has created more equal opportunity & distribution of wealth, the new economy actually resembles a doughnut — with a gaping hole in the middle where millions of workers were once paid to manufacture products.
 
Take the photo app Instagram, which allows anyone to share their own snaps online for others to see. When it was sold to Facebook for £651 million in 2012, it had just 13 full-time employees. Meanwhile, Kodak was closing 13 factories & 130 photo labs & laying off 47,000 workers.
 
Or WhatsApp, the instant messaging platform for which Facebook paid £12.4 billion. In one month it handled 54 billion messages from its 450 million users, yet it employs only 55 people to manage its service.
 
That’s because we are the ones doing most of the work. In this e-world, the quality of the technology is secondary.
 
What’s important — & what is actually being traded when these companies change hands — is you & me: our labour, our productivity, our network, our supposed creativity.
 
Yet for our input in adding intelligence to Google, or content to Facebook, we are paid nothing, merely being granted the right to use the software free. And that’s what is driving the new ‘data factory’ economy.
 
We think we are using Instagram to look at the world, but actually we are the ones being watched. And the more we reveal about ourselves, the more valuable we become to advertisers.
 
From social media networks such as Twitter & Facebook to Google, ... the exploitation of our personal information is what counts. These companies want to know us so intimately so they can package us up &, without our consent, sell us back to advertisers.
 
Another great irony in all this is that the internet was created by public-minded technologists such as the English academic Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, who were all indifferent to money, sometimes even hostile to it.
 
Yet the internet they produced with such high humanitarian hopes has triggered one of the greatest accumulations of wealth in human history.
 
Jeff Bezos has made £19.5 billion from his Amazon Everything Store that offers cheaper prices than its rivals. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has accumulated his £19.5 billion by making money out of friendship.
 
In 25 years, the internet has gone from the initial idealistic banning of all forms of commerce to transforming absolutely everything into profitable activity. Especially our privacy.
 
Tim Berners-Lee never imagined that his ‘social’ creation to help people to work together more easily could be used so cynically, both by private companies & by governments. Yet that’s what is happening.
 
As the internet transforms every electronic object into a connected device, we are drifting into a world where everything — our fitness, what we eat, our driving habits, how hard we work — can be profitably quantified by companies such as Google.
 
Faceless data-gatherers wearing all-seeing electronic glasses watch our every move. Our networked society is like a claustrophobic village pub, a frighteningly transparent community in which there are no longer any secrets or any anonymity.
 
We are observed by every unloving institution of the new digital surveillance state, from big data companies & the Government to insurance companies, healthcare providers & the police.
 
Google & Facebook boast that they know us more intimately than we know ourselves. They know what we did yesterday, today &, with the help of predictive technology, what we will do tomorrow.
 
And it is, frankly, our fault for choosing to live in a crystal republic where cars, mobile phones & televisions — hooked up to the internet — watch us.
 
Far from being the answer to our problems, the internet, whose pioneers believed it would save humanity, is diminishing our lives.
 
Instead of creating more transparency, we have devices that make the invisible visible. The sharing economy is really the selfish economy. Social media is, in fact, anti-social. And the success of the internet is a huge failure.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2962509/How-internet-destroying-pioneers-hoped-web-transform-society-devastating-new-book-says-way-diminishes-humanity.html