The Greatest Generation grew up during the Great Depression, fought World War 2, came home, got married, built and bought houses, got jobs, and had children. They swore their kids would not go through the same hardships they had. And those children are the most spoiled generation in history. The grownups survived the war and built wonderful public works: roads, bridges, airports, skyscrapers, huge businesses that employed lots of people and gave them the opportunity to become better people, to buy houses and raise families of their own. But the Baby Boomers didn't bother. They got HIGH, and screwed anybody they could, and then got religious cults and more drugs and divorces and abused their families and turned into worthless crap. And while they were staring at themselves in the mirror, preening, the roads and bridges were rusting and falling apart.
So here we are today, with the baby boomers retiring after exporting the jobs and burning all the oil and having a really great party out of life, leaving Gen X, Y, and Millenials to clean up after there trash and mistakes and mismanagement. And its a big job. We really could have used the money they spent on big screen TVs and useless foreign wars and imported cars to keep up the roads and bridges, but they left us a quadrillion in debt, held overseas by nations which don't necessarily like us very much and hold the power to dump it all at once and utterly destroy our currency in a week. And we still need to fix the bridges before they fall into the river, like the one in Minneapolis.
Pretty much every bridge in America will do this at the wrong time, when the most weight is on them, which generally means heavy traffic.
Basic infrastructure has common weaknesses, namely rust and stress. In engineering sheer stress after deformation is well known. Since the shearing parts are often covered in paint or concrete so you can't see them the failure is often preceded by small clues or none at all. Then you get collapse. In the future of greedy retired Baby Boomers and no construction loans, the population mourns the deaths, cleans up what they can, and then learns they can't build a new bridge after all, and that means going around or using a river ferry, which is dirt slow and pretty useless for large numbers of cars. And businesses, the primary reason for the bridge, suffer. So they either get new staffs, move closer to their workers on the correct side of the river, or close down.
Here in California, we've got a hugely embarrassing boondoggle caused by the asinine mayors of San Francisco and Oakland shooting their mouths off. The New San-Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge cost 10x what is was supposed to, isn't done, and is rusting when new due to contractors not finishing their work, or the next contractor not getting assigned for three months when the steel was exposed to salt. Steel + salt water/air = serious rust. And the steel that's rusting is a critical structural part, promising to fail like the Minneapolis Bridge above. Only, the fall will be a couple hundred feet, killing the working population of San Francisco on the way to the Market District, where the Billions are traded and managed daily. San Francisco is called the Paris Of The West, which is not inaccurate. It has lots of corniced buildings, maintained Victorians, slums, and dogshit. Its very dirty, crowded, and full of hatred and money. More importantly, it is one of the better developed cities on the Pacific Rim, like Tokyo and Shanghai. The Pacific Rim, in general, has lots of Earthquakes, so there's strong need for carefully engineered structures and the understanding that rebuilding is necessary after a quake, which still knock down your best efforts because the energies are so fierce. Quakes in Oregon are capable of killing thousands in Japan, thanks to Tsunamis. Same with quakes in Alaska able to kill thousands in Hawaii and dozens on the northern California coast near Crescent City and Eureka.
We also have a lot of rivers in California, which hold little water most of the year, but too much water some of the year, during the spring thaw. The Sierra Nevada Mountains catch pacific storms and store that water as snowpack in the high country. In spring, it melts, roaring down river channels and into the flatland, where rivers wind in the farmland, protected only by earthen levees. Levees are a particular engineering challenge. Initially they sound like a good idea, a kind of long dam that keeps the river within its banks. In reality, the physics of hydrology, the study of water and sediment are such that rivers naturally curve and cut. They can't go straight for very long, and a mild turn will become a severe one, naturally, due to how water works. Civil Engineers know this. Rivers form their own levees, low ones, then rise in flood and cut through them, leaving abandoned stretches of former river. Rivers are anarchists on benders. They don't contain themselves when they get riled up. Eventually the rivers will burst. California does get serious types of rainstorms which are warm, coming from Hawaii, called Pineapple Express. These systems can stabilize for weeks, bringing inches of rain a day and melting the snow in the high country, or drastically adding to it, and then flooding downstream all at once, completely filling reservoirs and overtopping dams to then surge downriver and burst levees weakened by normal river action over years. The farmlands that flood, such as around Marysville, grow rice that feeds 1 billion people. That's one billion. Most of the population of Japan eats rice from Marysville. China is a big buyer as well. They ship us electronics in big shipping containers. We fill the containers with rice and ship them back. We get toys, they live another week. Everybody wins. Unless the levees fail.
And why would the levees fail? Because the state contracted ineffective repairs, for bribes no doubt, to not repair them but look like they're doing something, to be seen doing something. They aren't really being repaired in many places, though a recently passed funding bill has them started on repairs near Marysville. That location is getting slotted metal plates, which will help, but not actually save the levee from natural physics.
They need to fix the ones in Stockton too, unless they are planning to flood out that violent city and force the population to leave. Stockton is on very soft and unsteady ground. The highway there is worked on continuously for over a decade now, and never seems to be finished. It is also at sea level and is a port where containerships offload rather than pay the higher fees at Alameda's Port in the SF Bay. The San Joaquin Delta is a tricky place due to being slightly below sea level, again behind levees, and potentially turning into a salt marsh in the event of a flood and high tide. This would cut off Los Angeles, the East Bay and San Jose from drinking water, all at once. It would also block water to the West side of the South San Joaquin valley, which runs nearly to LA in desert conditions, getting 2-4 inches of rain a year. The east side has the rivers out of the Kern reservoir. The west is sand and tumbleweed and I-5 (highway). Lose the fresh water from the Delta pumping station near Tracy, just east of Livermore's Altamont Pass, and LA has to evacuate in 90 days, which is how much water they've got in their basin's reservoirs. Really. It is that serious. Only civil engineers seem to know or care about this, but its tremendously important to around 25 million people, most of whom are blissfully ignorant. If the Baby Boomers had been less selfish and more thoughtful, they wouldn't have built homes and businesses dependent on one pump.
Honestly, even America can't afford to lose LA and SF all at once. Nobody has to die, but the evacuation of millions is hugely disruptive to the economy and we're talking trillions in real estate and business losses. The businesses can possibly relocate, but without some options viable to the employees, they evaporate too. If you move and your employees don't come with you, you have to start over with new people and go through the training costs and mistakes all over again. Few companies can survive that. People find a way to be essential so they can't be fired, and this includes NOT documenting essential secrets of a position. If you doubt this, ask someone in a Union. The economic impact of 25 million people seeking new homes, all of them in bankruptcy, is trillions of dollars of disaster. Its bad enough to collapse the US stock market and bond market, a housing disaster as they try to find shelter, and the loss of farming, including the national supply of vitamin C oranges (different from orange juice sweet oranges) which is completely dependent on the aqueduct. So the nation gets scurvy, too. It would be a sort of reverse Okie, with all those fleeing California for the East and Midwest, presumably to relatives that can cram these unemployed and disenfranchised into their homes and towns and not dissolve into domestic violence or even riots. It would mean decades of poverty as all those disenfranchised and evicted attempt to build some kind of life, including starting businesses that are heavily loaded with regulations put into place by bribe-taking communists. Small business is a major enemy of communism, which is why the local pot growers are submitting a voter registration cards to change their political party. Democrats are Communists, obviously. Progressive just means Totalitarian, which is another name for Nazi. Their politics are too extreme, and they attack the middle class. The whole point of a small business is profit, and being told by the head communist Democrat "You didn't build that business" is a declaration of war against 80% of the population who either own a small business or work for one. Big corporations exported their labor overseas so are not just enemies of the public commerce. They should have thought of that while alienating all the voters with the ability to "get even" through trade tariffs.
And meanwhile, little work has been done to protect against infrastructure collapse. The roads are worse than ever. Houses stand empty, and sewer systems are leaking into broken water pipes to give residents cholera they think is from bad food. This is not just a public health problem. This is bigger than that. Civilization itself is defined by public works. Roads, bridges, clean water, public libraries, hospitals, fair law enforcement, fair taxation, garbage men and ambulance services. Variations on this make for huge differences of opinions and even civil wars. In the past, Islam was in favor of these things, but they've since fallen into Oligarch worship and suicide squads. Cordoba Spain had public lighting in the streets during the dark age, though it is worth noting they weren't the first city to try this, and while Timbuktu had a famous library, it was wiped out by continued drying in the Sahel, a grassland south of the Sahara desert but north of the equatorial jungles, where the Silk Road ran across Africa carrying spices, coffee, silks and slaves. The bible, and Koran, are full of justifications for slavery and treating people like animals. This is one of the reasons I'm an Atheist.
Civilization has standards of living, most of them around public behavior and cleanliness. We used to call them Decency. The Anti-Humanist "progressives" are utterly failing to maintain standards of decency, have failed to maintain public works for the public good, which is all that taxes should be used for, not social experiments to dehumanize people and take away their choices. If you want to be a Nazi, live in some Socialist country instead of here. Like Massachusetts or New York City; countries like that certainly aren't American anymore. Drive through Oakland and Hayward and you smell the stench of broken sewer lines, and see the bright green in the gutter. The locals feel abandoned by our civilization so behave like violent barbarians, killing, raping, and getting lost in drugs. If their streets were clean and there were a good reason for civic pride, would it be like this? I wonder. Racists think black people are inherently evil, prone to violence and self destruction. They dehumanize those who live in crappy conditions and suffer traumatic abuse. More racists spent lots of money on psychology and drug addiction and crime enforcement (the opposite of LAW enforcement) in those areas, rather than improving basic living standards. The streets are broken, they stink, and people get sick and sick of being treated like animals. Slumlords are allowed to ignore basic standards of living and housing enforcement doesn't correct this. It is ugliness that shouldn't happen.
The consequence of letting your infrastructure fall apart is eventually the cost of fixing it makes the place uninhabitable and people leave when there's an event sufficient to get people to notice there's hip deep in sewer runoff. It isn't quite there yet for Oakland, but it is close. When the rains come back and Stockton floods, that city will see people leave too. And South Sacramento floods, and power blackouts in the summer make the heat there beyond miserable. Sometimes its easier to build a new city with new infrastructure than it is to fix the old stuff when there's so much else wrong you are "this close" to throwing up your hands, packing a Uhaul, and leaving town for good. The rural areas are friendlier. Its mostly a matter of a job, and if you take your business with you its still better than dealing with the crime and ugliness of a hip deep sewer.
Besides, building a new town is a lot of jobs for a lot of people. All sorts of business opportunities. This is one of the reasons Japan used to move its capitol every few centuries. It made for a building boom and stimulated the economy. Maybe America should be thinking about this too? Drop DC, move the nation's capitol to Denver, like they'd been discussing for a century. The water is radioactive and full of heavy metals, but there's lots of space to build and a swamp like DC needs a rest.
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