jack

Water rights in Colorado are wild. Our state is relatively arid and just coming out of a long term drought, yet has the headwaters for many of the nation's major rivers; overusage here can have an outsized impact on downstream states.

A lot of these measures are responses to falling water levels and climate change. Every state on the Colorado river is party to a federally-negotiated water sharing agreement, which means we're always at some level of water rationing. You would think they'd strictly target bigger agricultural operations, golf courses, and the like, but... here we are.

The most common setups I've seen use "first flush diverters" to let the first bit of rainwater run off before collecting the rest, which will handle a large chunk of the impurities. The nastiest stuff tends to come with the initial volume.

You could further filter/distill but I don't think that's as common.

Just as an addendum, make sure you're careful about rain barrel sizing. Colorado imposes limits on how much you're allowed to collect.

I wish there were fewer hurdles to that as well. Where I live, we only recently lifted a ban on collecting rainwater, though we're still severely limited. That the water is "spoken for" by downstream desert alfalfa farms makes it even harder to swallow.

Decentralizing agriculture to local gardens is part of how we solve this mess. Actively promoting replacement of ornamental monoculture lawns with native, low-water, pollinator-friendly plants would also be a positive step. Golf courses, big ag, corporate and individual property owners... there's a long list of entities that need to reevaluate their relationship with and responsibility to the land they ostensibly maintain.

Gooseberries grow like crazy in Colorado, every other garden around here has at least one bush. Never seen them at a grocer though.

Food security isn't an issue of production but rather distribution

Having done work on the distributor side of food security, this is absolutely correct. I wish this was common knowledge.

Did you read the article?

I'm left wondering if you read it. It doesn't make the assertion you do:

no physical means of trapping insects is going to only target the problem insects

This seems self-evident, but I have to ask why you didn't cite a source that backs that up before slapping me with an "Um.No kidding."

Maybe your communication skills are less developed than you realize?

Thrips aren't beneficial.

"Littoral" is effectively equivalent to "nearshore". Makes sense as written.

I think you're thinking of the Steam Link.

The Steam Deck can stream games from your PC, but it is a perfectly capable standalone gaming device.

Nice job on the migration! Excited for the update!