After stopping to play tourist, I continued driving and stumbled upon a stranded 3 person group, a hetero couple and the wife's sister, the and that probably weighed 1500 pounds between the 3 of them (no judgements). Their minivan was out of commission, and there was no cellphone reception cuz quiet zone. I offered to help, but I could physically only fit one of them in my Ford Focus hatchback, which could normally fit up to 5 people (uncomfortably). Husband asked if I could get him to Durbin, about 30 minutes down the road, and I said yes. All 500 pounds of him squeezed into the front seat, which itself was an adventure because I am 6'5" and was a heftier 300 pounds myself, and he was spilling a bit into the driver's seat. I was basically squished between the car door and a human wall.
I loved every minute of it. Husband was an awesome dude. We chatted about his career bas a coal miner (complete with a mild case of black lung disease and pending heart failure), life in a sleepy area, and all sorts of stuff. When we got to Durbin, he just asked me to let him own, where he planned to find a phone to call his preacher, who also happened to be the "local" tow truck driver. He walked/waddled off towards some buildings off the main road, and I continued my journey.
[1] https://statescoop.com/meet-the-guy-paying-for-west-virginia...
Anyone interesting some history of coal country, a great book is "Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area" By Harry M. Caudill. Published 1962.
https://www.amazon.com/Night-Comes-Cumberlands-Biography-Dep...
https://archive.org/stream/nightcomestocumb1963caud/nightcom...
While the focus of the book is eastern Kentucky, a lot of the content applies to WV and coal country in general.
"At the time it was written, Night Comes to the Cumberlands framed an urgent appeal to the American Conscience. Today it details Appalachia's difficult past, and at the same time, presents an accurate historical backdrop for a contemporary understanding of the Appalachian region."
Blockchain's shining strength is transparency, so if done somewhat properly, a corrupt government could be the perfect test ground.
Perhaps in the near future we will be treated to a layman's explanation of the prevalent (and corrupt) usage of federated blockchains, 'exposed' in a Netflix doc. :)
Edited to add: our household does this. we live in a rented townhouse, so we're unable to add our own plumbing or electrical stuff. Yes, it's an expense to buy our own drinking/cooking water, but we just don't trust city water. If you live in a nice area with a diligent water authority, that's fine, but those types of places are a vanishing minority in the USA nowadays.
I've never heard of other issues with the water quality in Charleston (assuming it's city water and not straight from the Kanawha), and I consider it some of the better-tasting municipal water in the Mid-Atlantic region.
But a quick check of boil water orders (i.e. bacterial infestations) suggests that Massachusetts needs five or six a year, and West Virginia needs five or six a week. That could be sampling bias.
1. We are net exporters of many vital resources (food, in particular wheat and corn, is one I can think of off hand)
2. We have an abundance of natural resources and a wide variety of those natural resources to grow our economy
3. At various stages in history, we were basically the word's largest exporter of raw and manufactured goods and materials.
Yet, we aren't classified as having suffered through this.
Odd right? Or is my casual understanding just incorrect?
In the eastern half of the USA, most of the land is owned by (relatively) small holders, who are too numerous to not compete against each other. That is slowly changing as consolidation continues to occur, but the base ownership of resources is so diffuse that there would still need to be a lot of consolidation for resource cartels to become dominant.
Besides winning the Civil War and outlawing slavery, the Lincoln administration also passed one of the most momentous series of laws in American economic history with the Homestead Acts, which sold almost 10% of the total area of the US for pennies as long as the land would be homesteaded, that is, occupied by someone who worked the land. This was a deliberate policy of the Free Soil movement to prevent moneyed interests, primarily plantation owners, from gobbling up the frontier.
In eastern places where large estates had already been assembled, such as Appalachian coal country and the Mississippi Delta, politics has been predictably corrupt and exploitative.
Where the frontier land was not homesteaded (mostly arid western lands), "land barons" gained control of much of it and began to manipulate local politics in a similarly predictable way.
The remaining western public lands also benefited from the notion of "scientific administration" in vogue during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some land agencies are worse than others (Parks service is a far better steward than the BLM, for example) but by and large the federal agencies have succeeded in preventing the formation of new land baronies.
We were immensly helped by the world wars wiping out so much capital abroad. Even before that, the civil war while costing much life only jump-started our industrial capacity as the fighting was never that far north.
The resource curse is basically a mercantilist problem where the resources extracted are almost entirely exported, and little domestic industry outside of resource extraction.
The drinking water plan has alarmed some environmental groups, who worry it sets a precedent of the state using the cap and trade money for other purposes as the state struggles to meets its emission reduction goals.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/article233066507.html
So, it sure looks like, in order to address certain water supply problems, which are admittedly exacerbated by global warming, California will diminish its own efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions!
Consider that the "... Central Valley has been sinking ... since the 1920s and is estimated to have sunk up to 28 feet. During drought years, the valley is prone to accelerated subsidence": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence
As far back as 1988 there was scientific consensus that the earth was on a trajectory toward a doubling of CO2 levels and by 2001 the IPCC said "it was much more likely than not that our civilization faced severe global warming": https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/discovery-of-glob...
California's government has officially acknowledged global warming since at least 2006: https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/ab32/ab32.htm
Also in 2006, the Union of Concerned Scientists noted that global warming would impact future water supply by reducing the Sierra Nevada snowpack: https://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/im...
About 30 million Californians rely at least partially upon groundwater sources for their water, but the state didn't get around to regulating well drilling until 2014 with a relatively weak law that "does not go as far as other Western states by granting state agencies the power to authorize or prohibit groundwater withdrawals": https://www.kqed.org/science/21706/what-to-know-about-califo...
I predict that we'll keep seeing well failures in California and that government's actions will not be enough to reliably provide safe tap water to all of California's communities.
The fact that there is government provided bottled water in some places should not be looked upon as good management or a success story. It's a bandaid on a broken system and a statewide failure to manage and provide safe water resources and infrastructure.
The the appropriations bill you mention does not make up for the years of failure to provide clean, contaminant free tap water on an equal basis to all communities statewide. And even if it succeeds across the state in every community, it will take years to actually fix all of the tap water problems.
Five days ago, The NY Times reported As many as 1,000 community water systems in California may be at high risk of failing to deliver potable water — one out of every three — according to a previously undisclosed estimate by senior officials at the California State Water Resources Control Board:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/us/the-crisis-lurking-in-...
The Guardian reports that some Central Valley communities have water contaminated by arsenic, It’s cruel to be living in a state that’s so powerful, so rich, but we can’t count on clean water...:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/18/californ...
Maywood, a poor city in Los Angeles County, has had a multi-year contaminated tap water problem:
https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/project/assessing-groundwater-cont...
Typical flyover state simpletons. If they were were thinking long term like the enlightened people in the urban coastal states they would direct the proceeds of their corruption at their party. After doing this for a couple decades they can have a de-facto one party state and doll out government jobs and contracts to a much wider cross section than just their friends and family further cementing their party's (i.e. their professional network) grip on power.
(this is sarcasm, in case that isn't immediately obvious)