On 2011-01-02 09:32, Woland wrote:

4) Not to change the subject, but as an example of how environmentalist government interference hurts rather than helps: Eight of the 10 metropolitan areas in the USA with the worst unemployment are in California, and 7 of those are in the "Central Valley." These communities now have unemployment rates of from 16% to 30%. The Central Valley was once the most productive agricultural region in the world; the value of its produce was, IIRC, roughly equivalent to the economy of Belgium. Now, almost 25% of the families in the Central Valley are on "government assistance" in order to eat.

How did this Zimbabwefication of a rich agricultural region in America come about? Simply by government fiat. A Federal judge, acting on a lawsuit by environmentalists to protect a fish called the "Delta smelt" shut off water supplies to farmers in the Central Valley. Without water from irrigation, the Valley is turning into a desert.

The Central Valley is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation’s agricultural output by value: 17 billion USD in 2002. Its agricultural productivity relies on irrigation from both surface water diversions and groundwater pumping from wells. About one-sixth of the irrigated land in the U.S. is in the Central Valley.

On 2011-01-02 15:39, MagicSanta wrote:
The central valley, as you call it, consist of a lot of bedroom communities for people who commute to the silicon valley and San Francisco for work, my sister did it for years. So a lot of those unemployed there lost jobs outside of the valley not so much related to the farming industry.

A group of on-duty Sanitation supervisors is under investigation for allegedly buying booze and chilling in their cozy department car for hours Monday night after the blizzard stranded a bus and three snowplows blocks away.

The city Department of Investigation is probing the incident after witnesses said four snow blowers blew off their duties to get blitzed, buying two six-packs of beer from a Brooklyn bodega. The workers then walked five blocks to their car, which was in 20 inches of snow in the middle of 18th at McDonald avenues near the F train entrance, passing the stuck bus and idle plows on 18th Avenue between Third and Fourth streets.

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Department of Investigation Assistant Commissioner Keith Schwam said "we're looking into what happened."

The DOI is also investigating whether Sanitation workers contributed to the chaos with an organized slowdown.

Yesterday, city officials claimed every street in the city had seen a plow and said garbage pickups would resume tomorrow, starting with street-corner cans and, possibly, residential trash.