Fast-food minimum wage, lies and lying liars ...

We can see the same happening in California right now in terms of the conflict between cities needing water for drinking and corporate agribusiness sucking the rivers dry to feed the farms.

I had told myself I was not going to participate any further in this thread but I have to reply to this statement. The agribusiness in California was there before the hordes of people were consuming the water. The cities are taking the water from the farms, not the other way around! As a matter of fact, the cities are also taking water from surrounding states instead of developing alternatives such as desalinization to solve the water problems. Despite the severe lack of water most California cities are still encouraging people to move there which is extremely counterproductive to everyone including you and I the fruits and vegetables coming from the California Farms.

So generally I either pay attention to BBC, Guardian or Spiegel. I also tend to enjoy some of the Atlantic and Al Jazeera America, depending on the story. But for most economic news I read either The Economist or Bloomberg Business News.

I think we agree about the reporting on economics. The thing is it's bad for all of science too. The vast majority of reporters have no STEM training and they are credulous, left-wing parrots for the most part.

The key is making an effort to read many different point of views. But it is difficult finding serious right of center reporting these days. Even the Economist has drifted left over the past several years, so it really isn't fulfilling that role anymore. And Bloomberg has it's own integrity issues.

Here are two awesome and excellent stories about reporting economic news and why its so messed up. They are actually really good reads. The Business Week article is how the West has gone about systematically destroying economic facts, on purpose in order to obscure what the market is doing ie the mortgage crisis and the financial meltdown.
Harvard Magazine
Business Week

I'll check out these articles when I get a chance. Thanks.

But I'll just note up front that market distortions caused by the government did much to set the stage for the mortgage backed securities crisis and is now likely 'polishing' economic reports for agenda driven reasons.

I was at one time as well. Until I acknowledged the fact that business will do ANYTHING in order to pursue profit. And there's nothing wrong with that. But they simply dont have a self-regulating emergency stop measure, as some like to imagine. Nor does the market "punish" bad business in the way others would like us to believe.
Which is how we ended up with Clean Rivers Act. Because without government interference and regulation the rivers, just like the Cuyahoga, were going to keep catching on fire from chemicals.

This is a classic Tragedy of the Commons scenario. Though I'm not sure that I'm *that* Libertarian, the Libertarian response would be to assign 'ownership' to the river to someone.

But if you've been paying attention, there are clear signs that our government isn't exactly 'self regulating' either. Any human institution will run of the rails if there are few restraints on it's power. I'll never understand this assumption of government benevolence. Maybe folks just assume that government power will only ever be used on the 'other' side, e.g. the lying liars and haters. This is just a return to a form of tribalism under the color of democracy.

Those same clean water regulations are now used against farmers building farm retaining ponds and a big reason we end up with $1 billion bridge projects that should cost a fraction of that.

We can see the same happening in California right now in terms of the conflict between cities needing water for drinking and corporate agribusiness sucking the rivers dry to feed the farms.

California stopped developing new water projects decades ago. And most of the water projects developed before were planned to support agriculture. This is hard to believe for some urbanites, but rural people are still people, and urbanites still have to eat. It's the cities in California wanting to change the deal, not the farms.

This is really another case of Tragedy of the Commons. If folks had to pay market rates for their water, then there would not have to be government enforced rationing. Cities would not grow as fast, and farms might switch to less water intensive agriculture.

Are there exceptions to this? Of course, which is how we end up with companies like Costco who pay far above minimum wage, or other companies that practice sustainable business policies whether its retail, manufacturing or agribusiness. They have committed to trying to seek profit while minimizing impact, but companies like that are the exception to the rule rather than being the norm.

The thing is though, government mandated virtue is not really virtuous. WalMart and Family Dollar do more for low income people than Costco. Forcing them to operate the same way would leave some under served markets, both for low income consumers and entry level employees.

We can see the same happening in California right now in terms of the conflict between cities needing water for drinking and corporate agribusiness sucking the rivers dry to feed the farms.

I had told myself I was not going to participate any further in this thread but I have to reply to this statement. The agribusiness in California was there before the hordes of people were consuming the water. The cities are taking the water from the farms, not the other way around! As a matter of fact, the cities are also taking water from surrounding states instead of developing alternatives such as desalinization to solve the water problems. Despite the severe lack of water most California cities are still encouraging people to move there which is extremely counterproductive to everyone including you and I the fruits and vegetables coming from the California Farms.

So taking my own advice I did some research on the topic. And you are pretty much right.

Except for two minor points we could debate.
#1. At the start California's farms were predominately wheat fields and irrigation (artificially supplying them with water) was unheard of. But by 1939 wheat was next to nonexistent as a crop anymore, being supplanted by fruit, nuts and vegetables, along with nearly 75% of farms being artificially irrigated.
It was that change to a higher profit commodity and market which drove the demand for irrigation.
But what really seemed to doom the availability of water was World War 1 and cotton shortages. Cotton is a water dependent crop, and California's increasing use of irrigation lended itself beautifully to growing cotton. By 1950 it was the state's most valuable crop. And by 1959 they were the second biggest cotton producer in the US.
The same has happened with livestock. Im sure we can both agree dairy cattle require a lot of water. And yet as of 1993 California supplanted Wisconsin as the largest dairy producer in the US.
So yes while agricultural farming has been in California far longer than its huge population boom, its was those farms and agribusinesses, seeking better profits, that moved from low water and less intensive crops like wheat to livestock and fruits and orchards.

#2. So my point? Seeking profit, as businesses tend to do, is what has driven the explosive growth of intensive agricultural crop production in California, along with the exponential increase of it's livestock production. So, the debate would be who has more rights to that water? The population to drink? Or the companies to turn a profit? And who regulates how much water and to who that water is doled out if not regulators trying to maintain a balance between the public good and the private businesses?


Sources:
http://giannini.ucop.edu/CalAgBook/Chap1.pdf (History of California's agribusinnes)
http://www.fao.org/nr/water/cropinfo_cotton.html (Cotton's water requirements)

All I see is that company s seem.to want to pay as little as possible my buddie works at GE and said they have been told when new company takes over his pay could drop to 13 hr from 27 hr ?? If they dont want plant to move over seas,in hotels they keep are tips on partys pay ten an hour would have been thirty w whole tip I call that trickled up not down iv seen the NRA ( not gun lobby) get laws ppassed for years in the service industry that only help ownership not me and the sad part is to me is that tip was,never there's to begin w they just found a legal way to steal from staff who could live a nice middle-class life but I guess us lowly service people don't deserve to get ahead

If u look at most kitchen peoplein in chain restaurant they work two years jobs,( 60 hr week ) no overtime to live dream.of being Americans no pension one week payed vacation and no real raises at prob 12 dollars an hour my grandparents could buy house car and save money on a 40 hour work week and they were not educated Im not for the government over regulation but in pay u get the shaft if not and iv seen allot of companies that just want to take and not give back in my 27 years in the work force just what I see !