Probably by the Sea Viper system from a destroyer parked in the Dover Strait. Now, the UK probably doesn't have enough interceptors or destroyers carrying them to be confident they'll be able to stop a proper all out attack, but that seems to be a common problem with every Western country right now with a peacetime military budget in an increasingly unpeaceful time.
I want a PHEV Cayenne. If budget wasn't a concern, that'd actually be my first choice for replacing my ICE SUV. The convenience and flexibility of a PHEV far outweighs any cost savings from fuel economy improvements for me. A Porsche was never about financial sensibility anyway.
On the other hand, if I'm in the market for a Porsche or BMW commuter, the cost of fuel is basically negligible and a PHEV for performance or convenience or comfort would influence my decision far more than a relatively insignificant amount of fuel savings.
The problem is alfalfa is expensive to transport (heavy due to desired moisture content). So while it can be cheaply grown in the Midwest, it can't be cheaply transported from the Midwest to where buyers of alfalfa are (typically overseas).
Alfalfa is also a staple for crop rotation, so any farming operation will still grow some alfalfa to maintain rotation for good soil health (or during bad condition seasons since it's hardier to poor conditions and not a permanent crop).
If alfalfa cannot be exported (through policy or economic conditions), the low price attracts more livestock production in-state (which would be even worse for water use).
Those things makes it a hard crop to target for sustainability and export.
> it can't be cheaply transported from the Midwest to where buyers of alfalfa are
Trains.
Alfalfa isn't the only alternative, and they should switch to higher-value crops anyway. They would if they had to pay for water. We simply need to charge everybody for water usage.
Owens valley, where LA "steals" water from, is on the eastern side of the Sierras.
NorCal, including Sacramento, is on the western side of the Sierras.
So unless they planned on pumping the water over/under the mountain range that surrounds it in every direction except for towards LA, that water was never available for any NorCal city to use.
The California Aqueduct delivers water from the western Sierras through the Central Valley and to Los Angeles. This is likely what NorCal refers to when they say SoCal is 'stealing our water'.
SoCal does, yes; about half the water going through the SWP from NorCal, or ~75% if you include Bakersfield/Kern as part of SoCal (though most would consider it Central Valley).
But SoCal isn't only LA. LA itself gets a bit less than half of their water from MWP, which manages the water from the SWP and the Colorado. About the same amount it gets from the the eastern Sierras. These are supposed to drop to ~10% of LA's water supply as recapture/recycling projects complete.
Or computed the other way around, LA only has rights to ~20% of the water managed by MWD. Of course water supply, distribution, and rights are all blended and traded around all the time, but generally speaking it's not "LA" using up that water from NorCal, the consumption is significantly more from the cities and farms that came after.
tl;dr: Urban water use is tiny. In NorCal, the vast majority of the water flows unimpeded to the sea. In the Central Valley, most water is used for agriculture. Agricultural water use in any one of the 3 major basins in the Central Valley is more than all urban areas in California combined. Unsurprisingly, urban use is the primary one in the SF and LA areas, but the absolute totals are very small compared to total CA water supplies.
Not just agriculture but highly water intensive agriculture like almonds. Also I read that a lot of laws about water in some US states contain so many grandfathered clauses that few people 'control' a lot of water use, not sure how much.
Owens valley is basically dried up from the water that LA takes. It's interesting as you drive in the towns in the Valley and you see all the LA Department of Water and Power offices over 200 miles from Los Angeles. The courts had to force the LA DWP to quit taking too much water from the streams that feed Mono Lake as it was in danger of drying out.
Yep, Owens valley is basically an environmental disaster created by LA. So in the grand scheme of things, buying water from NorCal is better than stealing from the Owens valley through antiquated water rights.
But really, California (and really the entire Western US) needs a water rights governance overhaul. Right now the focus is all on urban water use, which is practically negligible compared to the agricultural water rights usage.
I disagree I drive through there every winter and the lakes are very large. The ecology of the valley is dry but nowhere near as dry as say the mojave just to the south.
they are saying that LA takes water from sources which would otherwise drain into the sacramento and san joaquin river delta. The video from this post mentions the California State Water Project which takes water from the Feather River (Oroville Dam) and distributes it along the Western edge of the central valley South to Bakersfield where it is then pumped over the mountains both towards Los Angeles and further East to San Bernardino and Riverside. It provides way more water to SoCal than the two Los Angeles-specific aqueducts from the Owens Valley on the Eastern side of the Sierras.
The CWP is designed for robustness, on top of delivery. Those aqueducts you're pointing to that feed into the municipal portion of the Inland Empire are frequently empty because the IE has it's own (mostly) self-sufficient water store (the San Bernardino Mountains). They exist in case there is a point in which those regions need water fed in. You can literally just drive down to them at pretty much any time through the year and see that they're dry.
Additionally, if you're focused on the 6% (out of 11% total) water allocation that goes towards supporting the infrastructure of 22million people over the 50% that goes into non-optimal agriculture (almonds, for instance) in-between the two...then you're missing the forest for the trees, my friend.
LA definitely treats the water. Both the surface water before consumption (I'd be surprised if any city doesn't do this) and the wastewater, for reclamation for nonportable use like irrigation, and for recycling back into the general clean water supply.
The aqueduct water is specifically purified by the Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant. That plant is gravity fed, but it doesn't operate without power.
LA just has the advantage of having mountains in the city, so it's cheaper building more elevated water storage so the capacity lasts longer during power interruptions (which are also not as common or extended as they are in the east). They will still eventually run out if they're not replenished by powered pumps.
For phones, I think it's just the Sony and Asus and Chinese brands that support it. Pixels and Samsungs generally don't since they use Tensor/Exynos instead of Qualcomm/Snapdragon SoCs, and definitely not Apple.
Story is even more bleak on the headphones side, Sony prefers their own LDAC codec so they support that instead of AptX Lossless, a pattern shared by many Asian headphones manufactuers. Many western brands only support up to AptX HD and AAC because Apple/Samsung devices have the majority marketshare. Qualcomm's own site only shows 12 headphones that support AptX Lossless.
Now my opinion is LDAC is close enough to lossless that it's probably good enough for Sony and most people (the 1411kbps for uncompressed 16/44.1 CD quality generally compresses to under 900kbps which is below the 990kbps max of LDAC). Bose does have a headphone that supports AptX Lossless. It's just the Airpods that are far behind the competition.
There is a large number of competing and overlapping suppliers because they're all competing for business and none have gained market dominance.
The US and most of the west is largely in a post-capitalistic market, where competition is no longer necessary because monopoly/duopoly status has been reached and segment leaders can simply use their capital to prevent challengers instead of competing on product/service quality, and margins can be widened and quality can decrease because there's no other option.
To me, it seems the solution is to make it possible again for smaller more agile players to compete against bloated and stagnating established companies. The large legacy companies are preventing innovation to protect their domain instead of innovating to keep up.
> segment leaders can simply use their capital to prevent challengers instead of competing on product/service quality
This is done through regulations. If you are the market leader, you have the resources to comply with new bureaucracy (that you lobby for through standards organisations) and you don't really want to do much risky new development so ossifying your product is fine. That makes it really hard for new competitors to enter the sector.
Standards and regulations are simply one tool, and not even the most common one. In the US auto market for example, standards besides FMVSS (and IHS testing practically speaking) are purely optional. You can read FMVSS for free and compliance is self-certified. Emissions regs are slightly tighter, but not a hurdle for EVs.
And outside automotive there's plenty of leaders that don't dominate based on regulations. Google search doesn't dominate based on regulations. Spotify doesn't dominate because they enshrined themselves in copyright law.
Some Hackers news folks like to downvote legitimately good comments like yours.
I agree, China has more capitalism than Europe (despite calling themselves officially "communist"), and soon it might have more capitalism than US and Canada as well, and this is the main reason why they are succeeding. China currently has much less grift than Europe.
The reason was sillier: China forced Ford to sell Mazda to enter the Chinese market, because Mazda entered the Chinese market before Ford and China considered them the same entity subject to the same outside manufacturer limits).
Mazda handled the small vehicle chassis design for Ford. So without Mazda, Ford no longer had the knowledge for continued development of their sedans and crossovers based on sedan platforms.
Ford was with Mazda in China with a joint venture with a Chinese company (as required): Changan, and they were building those shared Ford/Mazda platform vehicles there.
Ford wanted to also build trucks for the Chinese market, with a different joint venture. However, the rules limited companies to two joint ventures, which was a problem because Mazda also had a joint venture with FAW. Which meant it counted as part of Ford's 2 joint ventures.
So Ford sold Mazda. Changan Ford/Mazda got split in their respective halves. FAW was no longer associated with Ford and left with Mazda. Ford could then pick up a new joint venture for trucks, which they did and I don't believe they're doing well.
Ford just really wanted to double down on trucks, in more than one market.
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