Haha. This is the dynamic of many a happy marriage :).

yes. it’s literally called the united states of america. at the very least, iowa is much better off as part of the union than it would be on its own

California could do on its own, but any inner region if the USA (Brazil, Russia, China) would be super miserable as a sovereign state.

California would immediately become a failed state on its own, unable to meet even the most basic needs of its residents. California MASSIVELY relies on other states for two of the most essential needs for modern civilization: water and electricity.

California, ecologically, is not capable of supporting its own population independently, and short of geo-engineering at continent scale nothing will ever change that. It has absolutely nothing to do with politics, economics, or any sort of issues like that, it's simply the geographic and ecological nature of the state.

Los Angeles, for example, would be impossible for it to exist without modern technology and mass importation of water, most of which comes from outside of California (although some comes from Northern California where it actually rains).

Anyone, like yourself, who seriously contends that California could survive on its own independent of the United States simply does not understand how anything works, water systems, electric systems, import/export economies, globalism, money movements between coasts, investment funding and how it is structured to take investments from the US heartland and VC companies in Californian tech. Your statement is not just a gross oversimplification of a LOT of complex topics, it's blatantly untrue in /every single/ one of those topics.

SoCal will just use NorCal water along with access to ocean desalination. For residential use, there is plenty, without needing to ship out water in the form of half of the US's fruits, nuts, berries, and vegetables. Solar ramp-up is progressing well, already at 17% vs. 50% natural gas, with battery storage to eventually buffer the rest of the 15% nuclear + hydro.

Desalination will likely be required long term for SoCal no matter what, but currently California is not capable of supporting the energy requirements of desalination to replace the water it gets from out of state. The vast majority of California water comes from out of state, less than 30% comes from sources in-state.

> The vast majority of California water comes from out of state, less than 30% comes from sources in-state.

That's quite a preposterous assertion. Source? CA has ~85% coming from the Sierra Nevada watershed, only 15% is the Colorado River at the bottom. "California receives 75 percent of its rain and snow in the watersheds north of Sacramento."[0] CA is more than water self-sufficient if it loses the 15% Colorado River, but reduces the ag. water usage (80%) that ships out most of it to the rest of the states.

https://water.ca.gov/water-basics/the-california-water-syste...

Do you know how much energy it would take to desalinate water for 30 million people plus all the farms?

We're talking numerous large nuclear power plant levels of energy.

Have you reaf how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant??

Around a decade.

So it's not as simple as just "desalinate"

Right now, 80% of California water is used for agriculture. If you reduce the ag water usage that is shipping most of that produce to the rest of the country, CA has water for residential and ag. for its 39 million.

From where?

I don't understand how that's possible. I don't know of any lakes or rivers or aquifers larger enough to provide water to almost 40 million people in California.

The Sierra Nevada watershed

https://www.nature.org/media/california/california_drinking-...

The large greenery to the right is the Colorado River which provides 15% of CA water at the bottom.

Sierra Nevada watershed is already being used by Northern California.

It provides 60% of California water.

Even removing the farms, I couldn't find any data supporting that it was enough water for the rest of California.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that it can't either.

The data I found says the Sierra Nevada watershed supports 750,000 farms.

Is that equivalent to 15 million people or so?

Californian agriculture is 80% of water usage. That agriculture is largely shipped out of state, internationally, and supplying the rest of the US half of its produce outside staple grains: fruits, nuts, vegetables, berries, etc.

> If you reduce the ag water usage that is shipping most of that produce to the rest of the country,

Those aren’t gifts to the rest of the country (and, actually, much of it is exported directly internationally), they are cash crops, and the lifeblood of rural California.

This whole thread I responded to was about CA self-sufficiency and I was specifically arguing that CA can be quite self-sufficient.

> California would immediately become a failed state on its own, unable to meet even the most basic needs of its residents

Of course CA independence would be economically harmful and disruptive. Doesn't mean CA won't be able to provide its own water by taking an ag trade economic hit.

> SoCal will just use NorCal water along with access to ocean desalination.

There’s not enough NorCal water for that, which is why SoCal already relies on Colorado River water as well as NorCal water.

> For residential use, there is plenty, without needing to ship out water in the form of half of the US’s fruits, nuts, berries, and vegetables.

Sacrificing the state’s agriculture would…rather deeply harm the economy.

> Solar ramp-up is progressing well, already at 17% vs. 50% natural gas, with battery storage to eventually buffer the rest of the 15% nuclear + hydro.

Nearly a third of California’s energy is imported. displacing fossil fuels with clean renewables for in-state generation is good, but it isn’t self-sufficiency.

You can buy electricity, and water in riverways doesn't even belong completely to upstream countries according to water laws.

I'd note that one of the problems Russia has run into with Crimea is that Crimea used to get water from Kakhovka Reservoir but now it doesn't.

It's only a problem if you massively piss off the neighbor who supplies water, to the point that they wouldn't even sell it to you.

An independent California would just buy the things that it needs from its neighbors, like most other countries do.

Secession itself tends to massively piss of the country from which one has seceded, which points to why this would be a problem for an independent California (unless it was a “Greater California” including the headwaters and course of the Colorado River, etc.)

In many cases, you see the opposite - a strong public sentiment to allow or even force secession of some territory that is perceived as a "burden". This is usually represented in economic terms - "why do we have to feed X?" - but it can also be motivated by culture, religion, ideology etc (but, quite often, still coached in economic terms).

> but any inner region if the USA would be super miserable as a sovereign state.

Would they? Would they really?

Sure they'd be poorer but they'd probably just consider that a really, really cheap price to pay for not having to share a country with California (or wherever the line is drawn).

Would you take a 10%-20% pay cut to get your way on almost all political issues? I think most people would and they'd do it with a smile on their face.

Independence doesn't really mean getting your way on almost all political issues, though. If you're independent but economically weak, you're susceptible from all kinds of pressure from your neighbors, and quite often that pressure is explicitly political (sanctions etc).

Yes, let's look at the US.

Despite all the bickering and backbiting and dysfunction in it, the overwhelming majority of its residents and polities do not want to see the union broken apart.

The strongest argument against growth of the EU is, quite literally, inertia. It's not a perfect union, but it's much better for its participants than being marginalized outside it.

As an American, I can tell you that most states generally consider each other rivals, and oftentimes bitter. Texas would like nothing to do with California other than to help knock them down some pegs, for example.

But you know what? If some outsider were to pose a serious threat to any of the states, we're all going to band together and tell said outsider to get wrecked and go pound sand. That same Texas would be among the first to come to California's aid and defence. The only one who gets to dunk on Americans are fellow Americans, nobody else.

fellow American here, re: "most states consider each other rivals," as a person who's lived all over the US, I strongly believe that feeling is in one direction.

There is all this rhetoric in red-state politics, governors shipping immigrants to NYC, Texans obsessing over Nancy Pelosi, babble about "east coast values." That shit simply doesn't exist in the other direction. It's true that coastal elites harbor a lot of resentment toward "rednecks" for things like the recent abortion ruling, but… they just don't obsess the same way. Mostly they just don't think about them at all.

* * *

I'm not talking about individuals, I'm talking about masses of people. Of course blue state people hated Bush, and Trump, and Reagan… I'm talking about this weird notion that I hear from southerners that people in the city "look down on them." They don't. They don't think about them at all. I'm not sure which is worse.

> It’s true that coastal elites harbor a lot of resentment toward “rednecks” for things like the recent abortion ruling

Nah, the abortion ruling is a product of coastal elites; there aren’t any rednecks on the Supreme Court.

That’s true. But Justice Barrett is a Midwestern church mom, which is a core GOP constituency.

And Clarence Thomas didn't move to DC until age 31, saying of his stint at Yale "I peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I'd made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value."

>But you know what? If some outsider were to pose a serious threat to any of the states, we're all going to band together and tell said outsider to get wrecked and go pound sand. That same Texas would be among the first to come to California's aid and defence. The only one who gets to dunk on Americans are fellow Americans, nobody else.

It would have to be a very, very, unifying outside threat.

Division runs deep these days and it seems highly likely that any such external threat would be leveraged by the two teams to try to gain the upper hand resulting in further division.

You had a political zealot attack the home of a senior lawmaker and send her husband to hospital, and large swaths of the population cheered. I doubt the attacker was applauded only because he has an American passport.