Casey Handmer(@CJHandmer):It's because building anything at all is illegal. We have multiple canal systems built nearly a century ago that leak or can't run anywhere near capacity, because fixing them would (normatively) take two guys and a bulldozer but (descriptively) consume 10 years and billions of dollars of payoffs to a 100-turtle-deep layer of the usual suspects. We could easily desalinate another 10 million acre feet of water per year, but ... building anything at all is illegal.

Casey Handmer

@CJHandmer

Physicist, Immigrant, Pilot, Dad. Former Caltech, Hyperloop, NASA JPL. Founder @terraformindies. Hiring!

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Casey Handmer@CJHandmer

2026.08.25 16:08

It's because building anything at all is illegal. We have multiple canal systems built nearly a century ago that leak or can't run anywhere near capacity, because fixing them would (normatively) take two guys and a bulldozer but (descriptively) consume 10 years and billions of dollars of payoffs to a 100-turtle-deep layer of the usual suspects. We could easily desalinate another 10 million acre feet of water per year, but ... building anything at all is illegal.

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