$18 for a beer at the 2022 PGA Championship (Tulsa Oklahoma)

[Bobby Henderson]

Not many low wage jobs can be done remotely. Burger flippers, stock people, etc all have to work in person. At my workplace I'm one of the few people who can do my job from home. But I do not enjoy working from home at all. It's boring as hell. I guess it might be different for people who have really nice houses with extra creature comforts.

I can kind of sympathize for workers in Silicon Valley wanting to work from home. Gasoline prices in California are the highest in the nation. Many workers out there have to drive long distances in their commutes and even get stuck with high parking costs. On top of that the number of road rage related shootings has doubled there in the past few years. It's nuts.

It takes less than 10 minutes for me to drive from my house to the office. That's one nice thing about living in a smaller city or town. I'd consider riding my trail bicycle to/from work if doing so wasn't so dangerous. There's too many distracted drivers. And then there are some motorists who take great offense at seeing an adult riding a bicycle. They figure the bicycle rider is either a liberal bunny-hugger or a hoodlum that doesn't have a driver's license. Plus another downside to riding a bike is you're exposed to the weather. It gets hot as hell here in the Summer. I can even start breaking a sweat riding a bike in the morning if it's 80 degrees. If Lawton had a real network of dedicated bike paths I would probably use by bike a lot more when the weather was nice enough for it.

[Mike Blakesley]

And then there are some motorists who take great offense at seeing an adult riding a bicycle. They figure the bicycle rider is either a liberal bunny-hugger or a hoodlum that doesn't have a driver's license.

I can't decide whether you're a huge pessimist, a serial exaggerator, or if you live in an absolutely awful place. It's got to be one of those.

Around here if we see a person riding a bike or walking, we assume they are riding a bike because they want to...or walking because their car won't start (winter, mainly). And this is a very "conservative" area with a few of those "if you don't like Trump, unfriend me" people around; but we're still nice to each other for the most part, or at least that's been my experience.

It takes less than 10 minutes for me to drive from my house to the office. That's one nice thing about living in a smaller city or town.

Agreed....my commute is about 2 minutes and 45 seconds if everything goes perfectly (no trains on the tracks, no slow drivers in front of me, no idiots at the 4-way stop). If it goes over 4 minutes I get testy.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I don't agree with Musk's "come back or else" strategy. He should allow people to make their own case for working from home on an individual basis, and if their previous performance (and job type) warrants it, why not allow it? Rent those offices out to somebody else.

Musk is an over-hyped, attention seeking, egomaniac crybaby and a serial idiot. Who else sends an e-mail that he's going to fire 10% of his workforce because he "feels" the economy is getting bad and a few days later, once he realizes that it may look a bit bad on him, reverses the decision (for now)? There are hundreds of those examples, so it's hard to take anything out of his mouth for serious. When it comes to the truth, he scores worse than most politicians. Unfortunately, we apparently need asshats like him to get certain stuff done, it's a strange world we live in...

When it comes down to working at home, the the answer is that there aren't clear-cut solutions. You can't assemble a car from home, but that doesn't mean you can't do a lot of the tasks that still involves humans from home. Some creative jobs may benefit from regular exchange with other human fellows, but a lot of jobs only have few of those aspects.

For me, in an average open office environment, my productivity tanks to almost zero. The reason is simply because I'm going to be constantly distracted by people around me, asking me a gazillion things. Which would be fine if most of my work would consist of stuff that requires just a low level of mental involvement. In practice, every time someone interrupts me, I'm losing at least 10 minutes of productive time. When I'm working from home, the amount of distractions go down drastically and as a result, I'm usually much more productive for most of the stuff I need to get done.

Then again, when I'm going to meet for an important meeting, I really prefer meeting people in person rather than via a Teams or Zoom call, but for a short update on an ongoing project, I think it's far more effective to do a short follow-up via a digital meeting.

Not allowing for such flexibility in a highly skilled workforce, but simply setting a "numerus fixus" on the amount of time you need to spend in the office brings me right back to my time in high school, where your presence was required, even though no lessons actually took place, only to get you to the legal number or required hours as set by the government... Or to the crooked Japanese work ethics, where everybody stays in the office, being productive or not, until the boss leaves the building...

[Bobby Henderson]

Around here if we see a person riding a bike or walking, we assume they are riding a bike because they want to...or walking because their car won't start (winter, mainly). And this is a very "conservative" area with a few of those "if you don't like Trump, unfriend me" people around; but we're still nice to each other for the most part, or at least that's been my experience.

Part of the problem here in Lawton is we have a significant low-income population and more than our fair share of property crime. It's a common thing for bicycles to get stolen. A kid has a brain fart; goes inside the house for a snack and leaves his Huffy unattended on the front lawn for a few minutes. Someone passing by steals it. When you see a young adult pedaling a dirt bicycle through the neighborhood it's hard not to jump to conclusions, especially if he looks anything at all like a possible gang member or meth addict. Did he steal that bike? Is he looking at houses to burglarize? Some people only have a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation, either because they can't afford a motor vehicle or they did something to lose their driving privileges. The only other adult bicyclists people here expect to see are those riding high dollar racing bicycles touring around in the Wichita Mountains. If they see a regular adult choosing to ride a bike to work they'll think that person is nuts.

Politics does contribute to the problem. We have a large, retired military population here. Many of those people are conservative. Various city leaders are trying to get Lawton to not look like a city stuck in the 1980's. They're trying to get more sidewalks and bike paths built, to make the city more walk-able and make the city more marketable to out of town businesses. But there is a lot of open hostility to those efforts. The people against the plans think bike paths and sidewalks are a waste of money; people just need to travel by car, so if we're going to spend any money lets spend it on street repairs. The bike riding thing gets branded as being "liberal" for its association with being more environmentally friendly.

Add in the elements of distracted driving and the increase of road rage into this mix. Then there's the problem of bicyclists being forced to ride on the street rather than an adjacent sidewalk (if there is a sidewalk). All of this adds up to a dangerous situation for someone wanting to use a bicycle as a means of commuting to/from work. We have incidents of motorists driving aggressively when passing bicyclists. They don't like sharing the road with something using pedal power. One bicyclist was killed in a hit-and-run accident a couple weeks ago.

Musk is an over-hyped, attention seeking, egomaniac crybaby and a serial idiot. Who else sends an e-mail that he's going to fire 10% of his workforce because he "feels" the economy is getting bad and a few days later, once he realizes that it may look a bit bad on him, reverses the decision (for now)?

I think the only reason why he reversed course on that announcement to fire 10% of his workforce was that Telsa's stock price took a hit. That's what made him effectively say, "just kidding."

When it comes down to working at home, the the answer is that there aren't clear-cut solutions. You can't assemble a car from home, but that doesn't mean you can't do a lot of the tasks that still involves humans from home. Some creative jobs may benefit from regular exchange with other human fellows, but a lot of jobs only have few of those aspects.

A decent number of white collar jobs can be done remotely. The high costs of office space in downtown high rise buildings combined with what commuting to/from downtown costs people in both time and money will force more firms to think outside of the box with how they conduct operations.

While there may be exceptions, I don't think it's as efficient to work from home. It most definitely disrupts the work/life balance. The evidence is pretty clear virtual learning for school kids has been a failure. Homes have too many distractions and temptations. This is a key reason why I think "home gyms" are a complete waste of money. When I go to the Lawton Family YMCA to work out it gets me away from that at-home mindset. When I'm at the gym I'm focused on my workout. Perhaps with some technology improvements working from home can be done with greater efficiency, focus and discipline.

One other hazard with virtual office setups is if an employee can work remotely from the suburbs why not hire a lower paid employee doing the same job on a different continent? We could see a whole new surge of "outsourcing" in this trend. The English language and American culture barrier is our only "safety net" against outsourcing. Foreign born workers can learn to speak English with American accents and pick up American slang and figures of speech.

[Mike Blakesley]

While there may be exceptions, I don't think it's as efficient to work from home. It most definitely disrupts the work/life balance.

Pre-Covid, my wife had a job where she worked in an office at a bank (which is 100 miles from our house) three days a week, so we maintained an apartment in that town so she wouldn't have to keep moving in and out of motels, and she had an office at our house for the two days she worked from home. During Covid, of course, she worked from home all the time and found that she liked it a lot better that way. She's like Marcel above -- if she's at the office, it's constant distractions from co-workers. Even going to the bathroom....in the office it was many feet from her desk, and she would pass by a dozen other desks along the way, everyone wanting to say hello...so a simple bathroom trip would take 20 minutes. In our house, it's across the hall from her office. And, she's able to avoid the temptation of TV and such. So, when the lockdown ended she had a discussion with her boss, who allowed her to continue to work from home all the time, and she couldn't be happier. She's more productive, we were able to give up the apartment, the bank is using that office for other things, and we're saving $$ on gas.

[Marcel Birgelen]

A decent number of white collar jobs can be done remotely. The high costs of office space in downtown high rise buildings combined with what commuting to/from downtown costs people in both time and money will force more firms to think outside of the box with how they conduct operations.

Some of those savings should flow back to those working from home, so they can equip their home office with suitable office furniture and working equipment. Over here, the employer is eventually responsible for providing a proper working environment for their employees, no matter from where they work.

While there may be exceptions, I don't think it's as efficient to work from home. It most definitely disrupts the work/life balance. The evidence is pretty clear virtual learning for school kids has been a failure. Homes have too many distractions and temptations. This is a key reason why I think "home gyms" are a complete waste of money. When I go to the Lawton Family YMCA to work out it gets me away from that at-home mindset. When I'm at the gym I'm focused on my workout. Perhaps with some technology improvements working from home can be done with greater efficiency, focus and discipline.

Like Mike indicated: It's a pretty personal thing. Lots of people are very capable of resisting all the little distractions at home, just like they're resisting many of those at the work place. Unfortunately, there are still people that will only be productive if their boss is looking straight at their fingers, but it's clear that working from home isn't suitable for everybody. I guess employers should just be more flexible and make it a case-by-case thing and not something that's written in stone.

One other hazard with virtual office setups is if an employee can work remotely from the suburbs why not hire a lower paid employee doing the same job on a different continent? We could see a whole new surge of "outsourcing" in this trend. The English language and American culture barrier is our only "safety net" against outsourcing. Foreign born workers can learn to speak English with American accents and pick up American slang and figures of speech.

While I see this as a real problem, the trend of outsourcing to low-cost countries is something that started long before COVID-19 hit. There may be some silver-linings in this too though... I know a bunch of people that moved from Silicon Valley to places where the cost-of-living is WAY lower, while they managed to keep most of their salaries. This only improved their lives: no more hours-long commutes, much more disposable income and much more time with their kids...

[Bobby Henderson]

Some of those savings should flow back to those working from home, so they can equip their home office with suitable office furniture and working equipment. Over here, the employer is eventually responsible for providing a proper working environment for their employees, no matter from where they work.

The situation in the US is different. Large companies have a tendency to spend any substantial money savings on things like stock buy-backs or paying dividends to investors. Still, it's not like every office worker has a bunch of money laying around to properly equip a home office much less have an available room in the home for a dedicated office. For some workers the "home office" is going to be a notebook computer with a built-in web cam. The notebook will be set up wherever there is space, be it a kitchen counter, living room coffee table, etc.

Like Mike indicated: It's a pretty personal thing. Lots of people are very capable of resisting all the little distractions at home, just like they're resisting many of those at the work place.

Everyone has varying abilities to maintain focus on work tasks. The kind of work being done affects the situation too. I shut out a lot of external stimuli when I'm working at the office or at home. I use a $350 pair of Sony noise cancelling headphones at work, listening to music while toiling away on graphics projects. I'm glad I'm not one of the people who has to answer the phone.

We have what I think could be the world's most annoying "door bell" at my work. It makes this sharply electronic "beep, beep, beep, beep, beep" noise whenever anyone opens the front office door. Then it make that noise again when you close the door. If a customer drops in that means four door bell blasts. The door bell is part of our security system. Our studio door is near my desk. One of the motion detectors, with its own loud door bell, is right above that door. My headphones do a good job of eliminating that noise as well as other racket. I can control my environment much better at home. But home has other distractions. Usually though, once I get immersed into a graphics project I'll kind of fall into a "bubble" of sorts and just keeping going. Hours can go by pretty fast.

While I see this as a real problem, the trend of outsourcing to low-cost countries is something that started long before COVID-19 hit. There may be some silver-linings in this too though... I know a bunch of people that moved from Silicon Valley to places where the cost-of-living is WAY lower, while they managed to keep most of their salaries. This only improved their lives: no more hours-long commutes, much more disposable income and much more time with their kids...

A lot of people have been migrating to the interior central valley in California trying to escape the extreme living costs of the Bay Area and LA. But living costs in the central valley region are rising quickly. Plus all of California is in an unsustainable situation with water use.

Bean counters tend to have short term memories. The current supply chain nightmares have big companies considering bringing more of their manufacturing capability back into the US. They'll forget about it if things start moving back to normal any time soon. The same thing goes for phases where American workers are replaced by overseas labor making far less money. American workers need to be doing something that cannot be easily replicated over in China or India.

[Randy Stankey]

... Plus all of California is in an unsustainable situation with water use. ...

That's one reason why my girlfriend moved away from California and now lives in the Great Lakes Watershed.

One problem I foresee is a great exodus of people moving out of California to places like this, bringing their water-hogging habits with them.

Yes, the Great Lakes have plenty of water...enough to generate its own weather systems...but a bunch of idiots moving into the area, thinking that there's water to waste is going to put a strain on the ecosystem.

People who live here don't worry about water, too much, but most of them also understand that they need to conserve what they have for the future.

I think that, right now, people in the Great Lakes Watershed areas need to start passing laws to limit the amount of water that gets exported out of the watershed.

Exporting water out of California, in the form of water-hungry crops like avacados (it takes something like 100 gallons of water to grow one avacado) is one of the top reasons why California has a water shortage. They sent it all away!

[Bobby Henderson]

Water is a very serious issue most Americans take for granted as if it's always going to be there.

The biggest source of California's water problem is, by far, way too many people living in the region. The Southern half of California was pretty much all arid desert 150 years ago. That area was only made habitable for people, agriculture and industry by building dams and tapping into ground water. Only so much water flows into that region. Lake Mead has been hitting new record low levels. Ground water is so badly depleted the land on many smaller family farms and ranches is going fallow, unable to grow anything. The only bright spot in this is California starting to lose population.

Here in my region one of our new problems is people moving here from California. Lawton hasn't had a huge influx of people, unlike places like the DFW metroplex. But that hasn't stopped a lot of speculative real estate activity from taking place, driving mortgage and rent prices well beyond what local incomes can justify.

Water isn't quite as desperate an issue here as it is in California, Arizona and Nevada. But it's still a problem. We've had some really bad drought cycles in recent years. A few years ago the city of Wichita Falls was having to recycle treated sewage waste water into drinking water. Lawton wasn't far from having to do the same. People were getting tickets for watering their lawns.

Our demand for water in Lawton isn't too awful bad; we draw from 3 lakes in the area. The rapidly growing Dallas Fort Worth metroplex is outstripping its water capacity. They've been fighting Oklahoma's state government, individual counties and cities as well as native tribes in court, trying to claim water in our state as theirs. They're trying to use the rationale that water from any river or creek that flows into the Red River is theirs for the taking. People in DFW haven't been paying anyone in Oklahoma for dams, water pipelines, pumping systems and other infrastructure built in this state. The DFW crowd has been losing most of these court battles. But as the metro's population goes from 7.6 million currently to over 8 million before 2030 any future legal fights over water will likely get more intense.

[Martin Brooks]

. The minimum wage in Oklahoma is still $7.25 per hour; for tipped employees it's $2.13 per hour. Any suggestions of increases are met with angry statements like, "flipping hamburgers is not a career!" Yeah, no kidding. But if that burger joint is open Monday-Friday, during the day, while school is in session, grown adults have to flip those burgers. Or maybe we just need to close down all those restaurants during the day and then only open them for an hour in the evening so the jobs can be done by high school kids living at home with their parents.


I do find it disgusting what has happened with the prices of concert tickets over the last decade or so. The face value price of tickets has skyrocketed. And the ticket re-selling industry (cough: scalpers) greatly exaggerate those prices. I'm not playing along with that.

IMO, the $7.25 Federal min wage, which about 20 states use, is as close to slavery or indentured servitude as one can get. It's shameful in the richest country in the world that we pay this. About 30 states have raised it. It's $15 in New York.

Back in the day in New York State, it was illegal to charge more than $1.75 over the cover price of a ticket. But the State Legislature removed all regulation and now we have all the ticket resellers buying up all the tickets and reselling them at even more ridiculous prices than the box-office. And I guess that's happened everywhere. Personally, I don't go to any large shows, which are ridiculous anyway because you're essentially watching the show on TV anyway. I go to small clubs, but even some of those have mandatory ticket issuing fees.

But that's not the only reason for high concert ticket prices. For many acts, it's the primary way they earn a living now because streaming pays nothing and the physical market is all but gone. I know a budding singer-songwriter and one of her songs has been streamed 500,000 times. She's been credited $137.

And acts are even getting screwed on concerts because the same organizations that control ticketing also control the venues. It used to be that the house kept the concessions and got 30% of the gate and the band got 70% of the gate. (There were varying arrangements if the band sold merchandise). But now, the concert companies are taking a larger cut.

[Lyle Romer]

IMO, the $7.25 Federal min wage, which about 20 states use, is as close to slavery or indentured servitude as one can get. It's shameful in the richest country in the world that we pay this. About 30 states have raised it. It's $15 in New York.

Back in the day in New York State, it was illegal to charge more than $1.75 over the cover price of a ticket. But the State Legislature removed all regulation and now we have all the ticket resellers buying up all the tickets and reselling them at even more ridiculous prices than the box-office. And I guess that's happened everywhere. Personally, I don't go to any large shows, which are ridiculous anyway because you're essentially watching the show on TV anyway. I go to small clubs, but even some of those have mandatory ticket issuing fees.

But that's not the only reason for high concert ticket prices. For many acts, it's the primary way they earn a living now because streaming pays nothing and the physical market is all but gone. I know a budding singer-songwriter and one of her songs has been streamed 500,000 times. She's been credited $137.

And acts are even getting screwed on concerts because the same organizations that control ticketing also control the venues. It used to be that the house kept the concessions and got 30% of the gate and the band got 70% of the gate. (There were varying arrangements if the band sold merchandise). But now, the concert companies are taking a larger cut.

Ticketmaster has kinda sorta tried to reduce the scalping with their dynamically priced premium tickets or whatever they call them. It seems like they try to undercut the scalpers in the same seating area so the scalpers can't profit as much.

Another thing is that they tend to not release all seats for sale at first so that the demand looks higher. If you aren't going for premium seats, you can get seats at face value, sometimes lower than the original price when they release more for sale. I've seen patterns where they hold back every other row in some sections or even hold back entire sections.

[Bobby Henderson]

IMO, the $7.25 Federal min wage, which about 20 states use, is as close to slavery or indentured servitude as one can get. It's shameful in the richest country in the world that we pay this. About 30 states have raised it. It's $15 in New York.

It's shameful, but I think a bunch of Americans wear it with pride. Some believe there should be no minimum wage. If you can get some poor sucker to work for $1 an hour you should be able to do it. Who cares what kind of life that employee will have? If he's not a business owner he's nobody.

Money math is the biggest thing driving what they're calling "the great resignation." Flipping burgers or stocking shelves at Walmart is not meant to be career. People doing that work certainly got the message and are leaving as soon as they can -either for better paying jobs or leaving the workforce entirely. The service industry companies are stuck trying to find people willing to work for next to nothing in positions long known for high turnover. Record high prices for gasoline, food and other basics could worsen this situation since those items eat a far greater percentage of low wage worker income. Of course, with finances getting badly strained in so many households customer traffic in restaurants, retail stores and movie theaters may end up plummeting.

But that's not the only reason for high concert ticket prices. For many acts, it's the primary way they earn a living now because streaming pays nothing and the physical market is all but gone. I know a budding singer-songwriter and one of her songs has been streamed 500,000 times. She's been credited $137.

Many music acts do make most of their income via concert revenue. Merchandise sales also helps a great deal. I don't think the performers are the culprits on all this concert ticket price gouging. It's layers of middle men that are doing that. In the past some performers have made considerable efforts to try to get tickets into the hands of real fans and at more reasonable prices. The arenas, ticket selling companies and organized ticket scalping operations do their best to ruin those efforts.

For at least the last 40 or more years there has been a certain level of douchebaggery infecting the live concert industry. I remember my high school days, driving with one of my friends to Capital Center in Landover, MD in the middle of the night to be there in line at the arena box office when it opened in the morning. We did that a few times, hoping to be there early enough to score floor seats close to the stage for some concert. The whole fucking floor area would be sold out as soon as the box office opened. Basically, it was a nice "fuck you" message to us real fans.

Record labels are infamous for screwing their artists out of royalties on unit sales of CDs, music downloads, streaming, etc. They play the accounting game of "the rolling break even" better than Hollywood movie studios. It shouldn't have been too surprising to the record labels if many performers didn't care if people were posting music files on file sharing sites. Some of the contracts performers get suckered into signing are incredibly onerous. Some music labels will even go so far to get big cuts of their concert and merchandising revenue.

[Lyle Romer]

It's shameful, but I think a bunch of Americans wear it with pride. Some believe there should be no minimum wage. If you can get some poor sucker to work for $1 an hour you should be able to do it. Who cares what kind of life that employee will have? If he's not a business owner he's nobody.

Money math is the biggest thing driving what they're calling "the great resignation." Flipping burgers or stocking shelves at Walmart is not meant to be career. People doing that work certainly got the message and are leaving as soon as they can -either for better paying jobs or leaving the workforce entirely. The service industry companies are stuck trying to find people willing to work for next to nothing in positions long known for high turnover. Record high prices for gasoline, food and other basics could worsen this situation since those items eat a far greater percentage of low wage worker income. Of course, with finances getting badly strained in so many households customer traffic in restaurants, retail stores and movie theaters may end up plummeting.

.

Do places around Lawton actually only pay minimum wage or near it? If people aren't willing to work for minimum wage, the employer doesn't really have a choice except to raise their pay rate or not fill the position.

My most recent example has been driving through South Dakota from east to west and back and the lowest hourly wage listed on any "now hiring" sign at fast food places or gas station convenience stores was $12 per hour (most were at least $14 per hour) even though the minimum wage in SD is only $9.95.

I have long felt that there should be a different minimum wage based upon age so that high school kids working for spending money don't get paid the same as somebody who might be trying to earn enough to live off of.

[Leo Enticknap]

The biggest source of California's water problem is, by far, way too many people living in the region.

80% of water consumption in California is on farms, and only 6% is in homes and businesses unrelated to agriculture. So telling us to take three-minute showers and stop watering our lawn will do about as much good trying to haul a 40-ton big rig with a horse.

There may be a limited supply of freshwater up for grabs from the Sierra Nevadas and the Colorado River, but there is a limitless supply of saltwater right next to the PCH. Yet we only have one desalination plant, and a government agency has just vetoed the construction of a second on spurious environmental grounds. Israel and most of the nations bordering the Persian Gulf have invested heavily in desalination, and as a result, have no water shortage problems whatsoever. Furthermore, given California's climate, you could even power these facilities with solar panels and birdie blenders, if carbon footprints is the objection.

Even landlocked Arizona has managed to embrace desalination, by financing the construction of a plant in Mexico (the output of which will be consumed in Mexico) in exchange for the right to suck more water out of the the state's groundwater reserves that would otherwise have gone to Mexico. Here is a solution that is staring us in the face, yet the leadership of this state willfully rejects it.

[Bobby Henderson]

Do places around Lawton actually only pay minimum wage or near it? If people aren't willing to work for minimum wage, the employer doesn't really have a choice except to raise their pay rate or not fill the position.

I don't think there are any businesses left in Lawton who can get away with paying a straight hourly wage of only $7.25 per hour. It wouldn't surprise me if certain "family operated" businesses were doing so. Fast food places like McDonald's have been forced in the $8-$9 range for starting pay. Ongoing labor shortages are bound to force wages higher. Many restaurant servers and bartenders are still getting that puny $2.13 rate. Tips are supposed to make up for that. But not everyone around here bothers to tip, much less tip acceptably well.

80% of water consumption in California is on farms, and only 6% is in homes and businesses unrelated to agriculture. So telling us to take three-minute showers and stop watering our lawn will do about as much good trying to haul a 40-ton big rig with a horse.

I thought the percentage of urban/suburban water use in California would be larger. Even though the state has lost some population there is still nearly 40 million people living in California. Nearly 12.5 million are in the Los Angeles MSA. The breakdown I see by category is 50% environmental, 40% agricultural and 10% urban.

It is disturbing proposals for ocean water desalination plants are being rejected in California. They have to do something. I'm not wrong about ground water supplies in various parts of California getting depleted. Right now 90% of Texas is in severe or worse drought. Reservoirs and underground aquifers are getting strained. As a result policy makers are being forced to have serious conversations about alternatives, like building ocean water desalination plants. That would be a hell of a thing if a deep red state like Texas could get ahead of California on something like desalination.