Cloudy with flurries this morning. We decided to turn off the TV early and go with a Lord of the Rings marathon. The news isn't new and no one is saying anything we haven't heard before. So it is time to go to the e-mail.

We have heard about food deserts for a couple of decades now. Efforts to bring in grocery stores in low income neighborhoods have pretty much failed. Some of the chains go into an area with great publicity and quietly exit only a very few years later. Most make the excuse that there just isn't enough profit in the effort. This article at Boondoggle makes a different argument. The big chains make sure that no competitor can move in by tying up the abandoned land and buildings in restrictive covenants. I saw this in action about fifteen years ago. A Kmart store in a town north of us closed down when the chain went bankrupt but he land and perfectly good building sat decaying for most of a decade because the no competing retail outfit of any size could buy it or even rent space. In another case in our area a major grocery store closed and built a new, larger store across the street from the old one but refused to allow any competitor to open up in its old space. Several years later the buildings were torn down and much of the parking lot dug up. It is finally, only now, being redeveloped slowly. Evidently some cities and states are getting tired of the mess.

Yves Smith at NAKED CAPITALISM posted this story about a recent U.N report on "water bankruptcy" around the world. U gave been reading stories from various place about water shortages and none of them bode well for either the people directly affected or the broader areas. I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the five states that make up the Colorado River Compact have yet to come to an agreement on how to share the water flowing down the river. They have been negotiating for years now. Recently, the U.S. and Mexico had an episode in their on-going argument over water from the Rio Grande which has often run dry along some of its length. But a very, very short snippet concerning who is supporting Trumps moves on Greenland: tech bros wanting space (and water) for data centers. Resistance to data centers which demand a lot of electricity and water is growing in areas where the tech industry is wanting to place them in this country.