Note its not just climate thats causing the water shortage. The article even mentions that a bunch of that water is being used for livestock feed like alfalfa. It takes ~620 gallons of water to make a 150g hamburger and ~859 gallons for a gallon of milk (1). And 56 percent of the water of the colorado river is used for growing livestock feed (2).

Climate change is important to have in the conversation about our rivers drying up, but we can’t forget about the elephant (or cow) in the room.

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1470160X11004110?via%3Dihub

2: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/22/climate/colorado-river-water.html

Idk, that seems like a difficult technical and political challenge, so I don’t think that’s very likely.

However, what I think is much more likely to happen is cameras detecting copyrighted content and not recording it. Or automatic instant takedowns of copyrighted content when the video is shared. Then, all the government would need to do is play copyrighted music when they don’t want you to record.

Oh wait, this is already happening [1] albeit not commonly or to an extreme extent. But really, this is why we need to be very careful about technological enforcement of laws. It can lead to unintended (or intended) negative consequences to civil liberties. And its also why its critical for your devices to always be acting on your behalf, and not for the government or corporations.

1: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/1/22558292/police-officer-video-taylor-swift-youtube-copyright

I love my current pixel 5. Ive had it for several years now, and the size is really nice. My battery is starting to show wear and the charge port doesn’t connect very well, although I probably just need to give it a good cleaning.

Unfortunately, Google will only push security updates until this October. Third-party OSes like Calyx or Graphine will keep the open source components patched as long as they can, but they can’t fix any bugs in the proprietary pieces.

Although its definitely more expensive, I keep thinking about grabbing a refurbished pixel 7 or 6, since google promises 5 years of security updates.

CalyxOS on a Pixel 5. Its nice and micro G works fine in most situations. When I have the time though, I’m probably going to try graphine os with sandboxed google play and see how that works for me.