Seven Sons

Here is a great representation of the ideological history of the Supreme Court.  Click on the image to go to the web site and start playing with the data. It is interesting that our activist court is quite firmly in the red, on average.

The Martin-Quinn ideological scores of Supreme Court justices

The city of San Diego is likely to enforce water restrictions this summer. Some highlights from the article:

• Each household will be allocated a water usage based on a baseline year, possibly 2006 or 2007 or both.
• If you use more than your baseline, you’ll pay rates up to 5 times the going rate.
• There will probably be a waiver system for people to appeal their allocation.
• It is possible the city will analyze sewer usage and enforce deeper cuts on irrigation water for landscaping.

The plan has some serious flaws. Many of these are pointed out by the comments on the web site cited above, and include the following:

• If you recently moved into a house that was unoccupied, rarely occupied or occupied by an old lady whose cats took more baths than her, you get nailed on your allocation.
• If you recently had a child (a newborn, or worse! a boomerang, or even worse! octuplets!!) then you aren’t given credit for the additional water you’ll require for real sanitation needs – baths, laundry, food prep (including warming all those bottles) and cleaning.
• If you have a drought-tolerant yard, use greywater on the roses and shut off the shower while you soap up (military style), while your neighbor lets their irrigation water run out of their fabulously green lawn and down the street past your house twice a day, the neighbor will end up with an allocation much higher than yours. Yes this is a personal example and the reason I’m peeved.

So why this plan? Because politicians can’t seem to grow the rocks they need to ask people to sacrifice – they have a very low threshold for whiny constituents who feel like they deserve to live their lifestyle at the expense of everyone else. 

In an effort to be a little more constructive than most of the commenters on the cited web site, I’ll offer this plan, based on the assumption that sanitary use of water in a city of 2.5 million is more critical than landscaping.

• Give every person in the city (adults and children) a water share. 
• Estimate the water supply for the year, lop off industrial usage, and divide the rest evenly among the shares.
• Optionally include a safety factor if the water supply gets even worse

People can use their share for showers, the vegetable garden, the pet llama or whatever they decide. This plan doesn’t provide an incentive for renters who don’t pay a water bill to conserve, but neither does the city’s plan. A financial kickback (rate reduction?) to property owners who can get lower water use from their renters might be a good idea. Then again those owners may be able to cut way back on their irrigation to offset renter usage.

Finally, since I love to solve things with technology, let’s propagate some real-time water meters to every household, and include remote displays (in the kitchen, bathroom, laundry, garage) that show instantaneous water usage in gallons/minute and $$$. It is well known that a good feedback system is the best way to get people to regulate themselves. The cost of such a system will pay for itself eventually.