That's a youtube thumbnail. I believe it's been altered, which also explains the strange brown substance that looks out of place.

Most of the video content has the correct coloring, from my experience observing the aqueduct.

I think it's edited to look like water he uses in his garage demos.

> the up-front costs of massive desalination

Desalination is dominated by operating costs.

I don’t think the brine pollutant issue has been meaningfully solved. You are also now pumping water inland uphill the whole way.

Or another kind of take:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071315/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8...

(Chinatown)

Came here to post this. Dam good book on the shifty maneuvering that resulted in the Owens Valley Diversion and ultimately the population center that is LA.

The LA water system is dependent on power as a whole. There’s many pumping stations along the various aqueducts.

I know NYC doesn't treat their water at all, but LA doesn't either?

My city runs on surface water, so we have treatment and then pump to storage tanks. You would have to be out for quite a while to run the city out of water, though - the tanks are large.

The only places I've heard of losing water during power outages are houses that use a private well (no power, no well pump), which would be the case anywhere. Municipal water systems may or may not use power to provide pressure, but are going to have generator power outside of the most severe outages.

I wonder if this was in an apartment building. We owned a condo in a 5 story (4+1) apartment building and because it was taller than the San Jose water system was built for, our building needed (electric) pumps to provide water pressure to the building (there were tanks on the roof). If we lost power, then we lost water.

Now that we have moved to a 2 floor detached home (also in San Jose) we do not have that issue, and everything is gravity fed.

I don't think you're wrong. Every time someone says we can't do high speed rail it makes me very sad. And as far as Seattle goes... my commute is substantially affected by the I-5 closures. It's somewhat shocking to me that we allow infrastructure to decay as much as we do.

I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(

It’s too complicated to corruptly make money off of a large project like that. It’s much easier to just buy a bunch of drugs and needles and give it to the methheads, or spend money on homeless while building zero homes.

You mean, like NYC Water Tunnel #3? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No....

Seattle just got done building light rail tracks over a floating bridge.

It is an insane engineering achievement. A train literally running on tracks on a road that is floating on water!

Those projects would literally be impossible today with the environmental regulations in place, especially in California.

There is no water scarcity in California, only misallocation. The vast majority of our water is heavily subsidized and used for agriculture, and a substantial amount of those crops are grown for export, yet agricultural exports makes up an insignificant part of California's economy.

We could end all California water scarcity talk today, with no impact to food availability for Americans, by curtailing the international export of just two California crops: almonds and alfalfa.