The California Aqueduct delivers water from the western Sierras through the Central Valley and to Los Angeles. This is likely what NorCal refers to when they say SoCal is 'stealing our water'.
SoCal does, yes; about half the water going through the SWP from NorCal, or ~75% if you include Bakersfield/Kern as part of SoCal (though most would consider it Central Valley).
But SoCal isn't only LA. LA itself gets a bit less than half of their water from MWP, which manages the water from the SWP and the Colorado. About the same amount it gets from the the eastern Sierras. These are supposed to drop to ~10% of LA's water supply as recapture/recycling projects complete.
Or computed the other way around, LA only has rights to ~20% of the water managed by MWD. Of course water supply, distribution, and rights are all blended and traded around all the time, but generally speaking it's not "LA" using up that water from NorCal, the consumption is significantly more from the cities and farms that came after.
tl;dr: Urban water use is tiny. In NorCal, the vast majority of the water flows unimpeded to the sea. In the Central Valley, most water is used for agriculture. Agricultural water use in any one of the 3 major basins in the Central Valley is more than all urban areas in California combined. Unsurprisingly, urban use is the primary one in the SF and LA areas, but the absolute totals are very small compared to total CA water supplies.
Not just agriculture but highly water intensive agriculture like almonds. Also I read that a lot of laws about water in some US states contain so many grandfathered clauses that few people 'control' a lot of water use, not sure how much.
ChatGPT v5.0 spiraling on the existence of the seahorse emoji was glorious to behold. Other LLMs were a little better at sorting things out but often expressed a little bit of confusion.
A few years ago I met a guy at the Smith Creek hot springs out in the middle of the Nevada desert towing a glider. He told me about glider flights from Truckee CA or Minden, NV to Utah and I was amazed then.
Another impressive journey was Truckee CA to Nephi, UT and then back again against the prevailing winds.
The trees right up against the above-ground structures make me weep for defensible space. While the underground structures may be survivable in the event of a wildfire and the trees are beautiful I'd be happier seeing a property that feels more survivable in the types of fires we've been seeing in California.
Seems like a good place to mention The Usual Suspects, a group that has built emulation of the Motorola DSP5630 and associated hardware to allow playable virtual instruments.
These guys do amazing work! I wish Korg hadn't beat them to the MicroKorg VST though. I've used the MicroKorg extensively in music over the years, and would have loved an accurate VST. Unfortunately the filter in Korg's VST doesn't quite match the original, and I can't recreate some of my patches. For understandable reasons these guys aren't going to step on Korg's toes and compete with an actual commercial product.
These guys are awesome .. their interaction with Kemper&co, about their amazing emulation work, not so much.
There's a hard lesson for hardware manufacturers to be learned in this drama.
If Kemper were supportive, they'd have a very clear road to a next-gen Virus TI (a "Proton"?) on the horizon .. but the word on the street has it that they're hostile to the effort of emulating the Motorola DSP ...
The Virus TI series are truly impressive even.. or especially, by modern standards. 16 multitimbral parts, up to 90 voices... 20 years ago!
These days you can spend $1000 and get 8-16 voices without multitimbral feature. Hydrasynth Deluxe or Novation Summit in the $2k-3k range for 2 parts and total of 16 voices is considered good now.
Everything has moved to DAW centric workflows tethered to your computer and the hardware has really stopped innovating.
Sure, the DAW is king in the 21st century .. but hardware synths have their time and place. Access was one of the first to get hardware/software integration working with the TI - but as we can see, its a difficult thing to support, going into the future .. the TI plugin is no longer a viable feature unless you dedicate archaic hardware/OS to its functionality - however the synth hardware itself is still as operational and useful as it ever was. This is as true of the synth world as ever.
Its wonderful to have the Virus TI hardware working in a DSP emulator - one can only hope that eventually the reverse-engineering eyeballs will also tackle the TI plugin feature, some day ...
Its not. The Virus TI was the end of the Virus line .. if Kemper do something else related to synthesizers, its likely to be a brand new product.
Lets see! An update for their synthesizer users is quite long overdue .. however, of course, the Kemper Profiling Amp is generating plenty of customers for them, meanwhile. Kemper Profiling Synthesizer in the future? One can only hope to see it, however it happens ..
Some apps do, the most used I know of is Blackmagic's Davinci Resolve, the video editor with a relatively full featured free edition available. I think this has more to do with its roots being in a high end networked environment but still, the local desktop version installs Postgres.
Oh, interesting! But that's more of a desktop application now, right? I was thinking of web servers when writing the article, but I can see how that's not totally clear. :-)
Cakewalk has been scripted with a LISP (CAL) from the early days, at least through the 90s. I see hints that it still is but not sure with all the changes from Bandlab.
Not to discount slower speeds for thinking but I wonder if there is also value in dipping into a talk or a subject and then revisiting (re-watching) with the time to ponder on the thoughts a little more deeply.
This is similar to strategies in “how to read a book” (Adler).
By understanding the outline and themes of a book (or lecture, I suppose), it makes it easier to piece together thoughts as you delve deeper into the full content.
Take a look at the visual feedback section any try some of the examples, they may help. I play guitar a bit and came to realize that my understanding of chords and scales and some of music theory was very pattern based so I’m interested to see if that will translate to trying this intersection of music and programming with those visual aids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct
Would be interesting to see the relative amounts of use by LA and by agriculture in the Central Valley though.
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