Nautalax

The west has maintained more of the larger, predators certainly. Not as much here in the east. Coyotes are invading and sort of acting in the now unoccupied larger land predator niche but given their small size they still don’t really take out deer in any serious quantity.

They are extremely overpopulated in much of the US, in part because most of the natural predators capable of keeping their numbers down have been killed off and there has been a huge artificial increase in field/forest interfaces where they thrive. Huge amounts of starving deer abound and descend on diminishing native vegetation with a voracious appetite while generally ignoring weird invasive foreign plants. Many native plant gardeners are vexed by their tendency to gnaw native plants, trees and shrubs to death unless those are caged in and some got a taste for venison out of revenge haha.

Would be cool if we could re-introduce red wolves and the like to keep a lid on the deer without like half of the predators ending up shot or run over

Great! That should certainly clear up next year then, many many brambles are on the property and spreading now but since most are so new this was the only one old enough to flower. Plenty of burrowing bees and such on the property already to take advantage of the food when it comes.

People would love to live in a state with Mediterranean climate mostly year-round regardless of subsidence. You can say it would reduce agricultural jobs if charging for unsustainable water use put down farms dependent on it and that would make California less attractive economically. But even assuming the entire hulk of California agriculture was destroyed, that’s in the low single digit percentage of the state’s economic activity.

It’s not just a matter of that the soil went down. The water was extracted from a matrix of soil and water, and the soil sinks because the matrix of soil and air no longer stands up to the weight above it and gets compacted down. Less voids in the soil means that when rain comes in, instead of seeping down and recharging aquifers it piles up on the surface in sheets that then race down to lower elevations in floods that sweep away whatever is in their path. And with enough extraction and lessened recharge eventually the wells stop working and force the issue. Everyone suffers from natural disasters for the benefit of a few who just so happened to get water rights from early settlement.

~30 ft subsidence at a California farm from extraction of the groundwater. Agricultural use is immense and wipes out historic rivers, lakes, even seas and slowly replenished groundwater reserves and something like 40% of water used is wasted because the sun just evaporates it before it used by the crops.

Everyone (agricultural or data center) would be far less wasteful if they had to at least pay for the true value of the water they’re extracting in their local area, i.e. a lot more if it’s scarcer/from slowly replenishing sources. Though that would probably result in a lot of economic relocation to wetter areas as many business models in dry areas become unviable.

Mozambique has you covered

12 inches isn’t that bad as far as subsidence issues can get. The ground below you is filled with very tiny holes and gaps that water seeps down into and fills and flows through, kind of like a sponge. While water fills those pores it’s difficult to squish down the soil.

If a heavy weight is on them like a building, though, that can put on enough pressure to push the water out of those pores and flow down out and around. A mix of soil and voids/air give much less resistance to weight than a mix of soil and water filling the gaps so then the voids get compacted down and the ground sinks. Different soils in different conditions may not evenly subside and that can give you a situation like the Leaning Tower of Pisa where one side was subsiding faster than the other side. In modern construction people try to get the water out and compact the ground ahead of time so that it acts more consistently and doesn’t make big changes when a heavy object is placed on it.

Here’s a picture from an agricultural area in California illustrating ~30 ft of subsidence that occurred in that area over a half century of pumping out the groundwater to water the crops.

(This also makes flooding worse… ground that used to be filled with holes that could channel the water down and away into large aquifers is now compacted such that those holes are gone. So instead water piles up on the surface in huge sheets that flow and wipe out whatever is between them and a lower elevation.)

Realistically red state depopulation is not happening by next census. There has already been substantial net migration towards red states since the last one and it would be quite a tall order to go back to the 2020 status quo in time let alone to substantially reverse those migrations. And the regressive policies of red states aren’t unknown; most people making those moves just consider them less as important than the housing affordability angle as evidenced by them still making those moves even as many are getting more extreme in policies. In theory it would be easy to game the electoral college if people moved in organized ideological ways but most people are moving for mundane kitchen table reasons rather than for their rights and ideology.

I’m not saying it’s unsolvable, just that it’s not solved right now which is why there is currently a stream of people going to red states that are building. That needs to be fixed to stop before that stream can be turned around. I want that solved so more people can afford to live in states that aren’t psycho! Red states have indeed not solved NIMBYism either but their advantage is that building single family homes in sprawl around major cities is easier under current zoning regimes than building up; they can still build that low hanging fruit since they historically were less desired places to live and had lower populations, whereas the best spots for that easy to build sprawl have generally already been built a while back in blue states.

Here’s the chart of vacancy rates. I considered new housing permits more relevant in the last post because people are putting money on the line that the house they’re building is worth it either for themselves to live in or to sell or rent to someone else, so generally that’s tied in with proximity to a local economic center. If considering vacant houses the problem is that say if the local mill shut down and the place has no jobs then maybe they have a ton of vacant homes after much of that community left but no one wants to live there since you can’t make a living. So ex. West Virginia has a huge number of vacant homes but they no longer have the economic centers that made most of them viable so people are generally still moving out rather than in. Whereas say the Carolinas have well developed economies in the areas where they are building & and are building at a huge clip so the large number of vacancies from new construction are desirable and many people are flooding in to buy those relatively cheap homes near decent jobs.

I agree that those laws can be changed and I would like that to happen. There is room for expansion still in blue states - not so much horizontally because generally any place that could be sprawled out within a long commute near a city with a decent economy has had that happen already. People also won’t move to houses built in the middle of nowhere where no jobs are available. But, there can be much more vertical, denser building. Even returning to historic densities would be a big help in buffing blue states politically (ex. Manhattan had a peak population of 2.3 million in 1910 but is now only 1.7 million.) But there is a big NIMBY problem to overcome before getting there since homeowners have big incentives to oppose new housing whatever the source, and those special interests have not disappeared just because the states are blue.

Below are two photos of internal migration by state and new housing permits per capita. Since housing is THE major cost in most people’s budgets there is a flow going towards where housing is cheapest. Some have actually coined the term “New Great Migration” as many African Americans are now coming to the South on net. This is buffing the political power of those states even while the politics are rather rancid.

After a spell of being a NEET I managed to wiggle my way into my old job despite being a fresh out of college grad … they were desperate to hire because they couldn’t hold onto people willing to be regularly on-call, occasionally flipping to nights and working twelves at random and extended times in the worst site of that industry in the worst state of the union, AND it was legally required so they had to have it. Each time they hired someone they had to not only spend usually two years training them while they were on intro engineer salary before they could become useful, but also spend a few tens of thousands of dollars on contractors to teach classes and the valuable time of qualified people as mentors. Then after the trainees got qualified it was like coin flip odds of them either staying for a couple years or instantly booking it and the whole investment wasted.

The bosses were constantly showering the qualified people remaining with promotions, raises and golden handcuffs and so on to placate people to please stay and not have them do more rounds of interviews, even when the people weren’t that good. Of course, that also meant it was a great way to develop the resume for an exit artificially early too.

Talked to a doctor there, there was a deal for foreign doctors to be stationed in undesired places like that in exchange for progress towards getting a green card. On finishing their time the department they joined could be on the verge of dissolving from the older people ditching so then BOOM program director by attrition rather early in their career. Which then looks great on their resume when sent to someone else so the cycle continues lol.