BrainBurrito

It's my understanding that there were seasonal wetlands in some areas of the valley and the farmers DRAINED them to plant crops. Now they have signs up accusing the government of creating a "dustbowl". I don't know what they're thinking.

It came to my attention recently that over half the country's vegetables and over half the country's fruit is grown in California (please correct me if that's wrong). It's unsettling to learn the nation's food supply is teetering on such a precarious, antiquated and politics-laced infrastructure.

Informative pdf for the layperson like myself.

One thing that irks me is when I drive through the valley and see farmers have to water their crops at high noon with 100+ degree weather. I'm told that they get water for a certain block of time and if it's at a shitty time, that's just what they get. Is there any way around that? It just seems like an unfortunate setup. Also, it's my general impression that in the past few decades, a lot of farming moved into what looks like a desert essentially. What is up with that? I mean, I know we've got a lot of drought resistant crops such as pistachios etc, but is it possible to farm the less arid coastal areas? There seems to be a lot of that available. (I'm not a farmer and don't know what I'm talking about, just throwing it out there)

Basically my question is: Is anyone looking at changing the way things are done entirely, rather than scooting water around and enforcing regulations/fees? The amount of farming CA does and the average person's luxurious use of water just don't appear sustainable to me :/

EDIT: A letter for spelling

Recently, we had a lot of problems getting the wrong books shipped to us. Amazon was great about it and facilitated refunds, shipping discounts, etc. We are trying to collect a set of reference books which all look the same but have many different volumes & subsets, so I think that's why the sellers keep mixing them up. I was wondering, does amazon get alerted to our high number of returns and begin to view us with suspicion? I was so worried about it that I've completely stopped trying to order those books because we get the wrong ones more often than not. Do you know of a good strategy to ensure I get the seller to send the correct books in the first place?

If my old frames are in good condition, can I take those to the optometrist and get a new Rx fitted into them? Do you think that's something an optometrist or lab would agree to do? Or do they all require purchase of new frames?

EDIT: Also, my eyesight is 20/400 (last time they told me about 5+ yrs ago, possibly worse now). Is that bad enough to necessitate thinning?

Thanks for responding. I don't personally blame Amazon. I used to work in a warehouse as order picker, then shipper, then setup crew and at some point worked in almost every department. I noticed that no matter how well the warehouse is set up or how good the training is or how good the inventory software is, it comes down to whether that particular order picker cares. We had order pickers who purposefully assembled orders incorrectly because they didn't feel like looking for the item. Of course that screwed up inventory which meant we had unsalable items sitting around in the warehouse not represented in inventory and we sold items that did not exist. When people downstocked they also didn't look to see whether the item they were downstocking actually was supposed to go in that bin. Sorry, I could go on forever. I don't know how that place sold anything at all.

EDIT: Here is a description of the warehouse where I worked.