Fixing poverty’s not simply about giving away money. You do understand that, right?

Because you didn’t seem to understand my first post, which was critiquing the idea of a “global drought.”

No. My point is that there is actually no change in the amount of water on the planet—so it’s a question of where the water is and who has access to it. There’s no such thing as a “world-wide drought.”

California has droughts—it’s the nature of the beast and climate change doesn’t help since it creates more extreme…

Yeah, normally, the farmers rely on a variety of water sources, but with the drought being so drawn-out, they’ve relied increasingly on groundwater—the feds cut back sending water to farmers to zero a couple of years ago and there have also been cutbacks by the state on various allocations.

The aquifer won’t collapse…

I’m not sure what’s troubling, per se, about this chart—irrigation isn’t an innately terrible thing. Any place with dry summers is going to rely on irrigation—that doesn’t automatically translate into running out of or overusing water. I think the condition of aquifers is a more telling guage as is spreading…

Partly right. However, the green lawn thing *isn’t* a myth—it’s half of residential water usage. Now, residential and urban water usage is a small percentage of overall water usage. However, urban/residential usage relies on surface water—i.e. it’s more dependent on snowfall and it’s the lack of snowfall that’s…

Oh geez. I’ve *been* physically attacked and gotten away without a gun. You keep your damn wits about you and hope there are no guns *anywhere*. Guns escalate a situation. You do *not* want that. If someone is close enough to grab you, it is difficult to get a gun out and use it safely. If they’re not that close, you…

How common do you think random homeless-people murderers are? The homeless are way more likely to be the victims than the perps in those circumstances.

Yep. There was this sort of freak-out about lockers a while ago, but nobody came up with a way for kids to carry their stuff except drag around backpacks all the time. Some parents just buy their kids extra copies of textbooks, but that gets expensive.

Yeah, I was thinking this will probably put them out of business—but maybe heart_of_pyrite’s right and they’ll do a gofundme campaign.

Still, a smaller fine would have gotten the point across—it’s a effin’ cake for chrissakes. They should have baked the cake, but still . . .

So, elephants have always been my favorite megafauna and their current slaughter is something that breaks my heart. One of the very few ways I can deal with that and the devastation of climate change is to take note of how a strong environmental effort actually does work and it is possible to bring back severely…

Which is why the list should include Portrait of Jennie and toss out Brigadoon—1948 beats out 1954.

I don’t think so—unless one of the Time Machine movies is earlier. I don’t really think of Brigadoon as a time-travel story, but I guess it is.

I know this article is on rewind, but this time I’ve noticed that there’s no Portrait of Jenny—Jennifer Jones keeps appearing at different ages to our painter hero over a short period of time—but she really lived and died in the past. Definitely counts as a time-travel story. Plus, it showed up on YouTube for a while…

Poor Jane Austen—the things that happen to your work when it ends up in the public domain.

One year—I agree doesn’t mean a whole lot, but I was thinking more of the general trend if the problem’s not fixed. I’ve always paid more attention to the Nebulas and Hugos than the Locus award, but as a casual reader type, I found myself looking at the Locus awards more than I have previously. Despite my being in the…

Oh, don’t get me wrong—I’m all for amending the Hugo voting rules to avoid power plays that damage the awards. Just thinking that for an outsider like me, I’ve simply found myself paying more attention to other awards—and I suspect a lot of readers are like me.

In some ways, all the Sad Puppies fiasco has done is made the Locus and the Nebula awards more important—for more casual SF/Fantasy readers like myself, I’ll simply use those two awards as indicative of a possibly interesting book. The Hugo, on the other hand, is now a more questionable metric and possibly less…

Yeah—it’s well known that in Palo Alto, Gunn HS has higher scores than Palo Alto HS (though both are high—the dividing line for the two is mostly along Oregon expressway. Both sides are purple—but it’s much more magenta south of the road and more indigo to the north.

It was also used to fight slavery. I mean, seriously, as a non-religious person, I’ve always had a certain pride on not being a narrow-minded bigot. The new know-nothing atheists make us look bad. There have been many, many admirable and heroic religious people—Christianity, in particular, began as a slave…