With the ongoing insanity of the Ungovernable California continuing to selfishly ignore all but the cities where its majority of voters live, there is something to this. Yes, its not done yet, but its getting closer.
I live between Yuba County and Placer County, with Sierra to our North. If Placer goes, Nevada County will have to follow, though Jefferson state will have to offer something locals want to get the county to accept the deal. Such as lower taxes and restored civil rights stripped by the state's ever growing social programs which largely don't apply to the 92% white residents. Reverse discrimination is a real thing, after all.
Both parties should be in favor of keeping kids in school all five days of the week, instead of "teacher training". And getting rid of the teacher's union which protects child molestors in schools, there could be some advantages for the conservatives. Why is keeping child molestors out of school a conservative value? Are Democrats in favor of molesting children? It is their union. If the money raised by local taxes stayed local, that would help quite a lot. Probably. We might even get funding to repair all those campgrounds and pay a war veteran to look after them, like they used to back in the 1980's. Like California stopped doing in the 1990's.
And maybe Jefferson state would reopen the mental hospitals and put the "homeless" back into their padded rubber rooms again? That would be a good thing. Would really cut down on the weird crimes and creepy shouters on the street. Schizophrenia is very sad. That one was Regan's fault. But Clinton could have funded their reopening instead of staining some hooker coeds dress and lying about it. Same with the current president. The homeless around here sleep under the trees and die of cold or heat. They are mental patients abandoned by their govt. They deserve a roof, medication, and doctors.
I will continue to watch the progress of this movement. If they win I hope to find myself in the new state and have better job opportunities result. None of these California scams. We can have all new scams.
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.
There's a new law, put into place by communist State Senators, signed into law by the head communist of California. Its called Affirmative Consent. It affect all college students, making it a sex crime felony to have sex without affirmative consent for each and every action involved. Violating it makes you sex criminal, not only kicking you out of college/university but also putting you on the Megan's Law list, a list which is permanent and denies you legal rights you had before. After reading this law I can only say I am glad not to be a college student.
The entire concept is ridiculous. Young women are not generally very vocal or affirmative during intercourse. Some are, and go into pornography. Most aren't. Since most aren't the sort to make lots of Yes noises, and few men want to interrupt the flow of things to ask permission for every step like Milktoast missing the necessary bits for the act in the first place, I can only conclude the entire law was created by people with other intentions.
What would be the point of effectively banning sex for college students?
Preventing distractions, though the frustration will probably create more spree crimes.
Preventing college sweethearts from marrying by making sweethearts into felons.
Reducing births by preventing sex.
Denying young women legal access to sex.
Driving young men to seek sex from professionals in states where such laws don't exist.
Reduce tuition costs by removing students from the state colleges entirely.
Reduce out of state attendance rates by discouraging students from coming to California at all.
Increasing cat adoption for the lonely spinsters.
It wasn't clear from the description of this insane law whether the felony applies when non-college students have sex with college students, or the fiscal impact from losing all that tuition from Male out-of-state college students who will no longer be attending in California.
I think the Lesbian League has miscalculated. When a Lesbian breaks this law, the consequences are the same as a male "raping" a coed, under this new definition. She will be facing the same vicious consequences and become a sex predator for life, face Megans Law for life, go onto the map and have to visit official counselors, for life. Neighbors will shiver on sight at the clearly listed pervert and child molestor, because that's what the Law makes official. Same as skinny dippers in rural rivers.
The only folks gaining from this are the SPCA, who will be offloading lots of cats to insane spinsters who will never get to have sex because they lost their best years in college and ran out of places to meet the sort of men they'd kinda like to know better. Too late. Missed their chance. Get surrounded by stacks of newspapers and cat pee. This law makes cat ladies.
And its going to be great at driving college students out of California, of both sexes. Free college tuition just won't be enough to correct this attack. I can't see the state supreme court likely to strike it down. This state is insane, and the govt running it is eccentric. The kind of senile that needs to get into the rest home, and serious medication and a nurse to wipe up the dribble. This is the trouble with good weather. You get old people moving in, and not as sharp as they used to be.
You may have heard of a hippie festival in August called Burning Man. It is held at Black Rock Lake in Northwest Nevada, Northeast of Pyramid Lake, North of Reno. It's the bed of former Lake Lahontan, a really huge dry lake 100 miles across but cut by mountain ranges as islands, and went to 600 feet deep that existed during the last ice age and will refill again someday from the runoff out of Lake Tahoe, once the ice comes back. The lake beds from the Big Dry are spread all over, and being salty, aren't worth much to the local ranchers. Renting them out is dirt cheap.
The festival forms by cars loaded with tents and tables, RVs, trailers towed behind various vehicles, and even old VW Camper (Westphalia) vans. Pop-top campers, they're called. They trickle in from all over the world for this festival of art on a lakebed. It's a boom town, and in a few days it cleans up, everybody leaves and goes home again. This is proof that the ability to throw together a town, for a reason, remains possible.
Snow Birds, a type of retired RVer and Trailer-dweller that still have the money for fuel, form an annual town in Yuma Arizona, near the Mexican and California border close to where the Colorado reaches the Sea of Cortez. It is warm there in the winter, and approximately 1 million RVers gather there annually to wait out the winter in a warm place. RVs have minimal insulation so "If its warm outside, its warm inside. If its cold outside, its cold inside." In Spring, the Snowbirds pack up again and leave for the warming mountain meadows which offer low priced parking, excellent trout fishing, fantastic views and wildflowers for the amateur photographer, bicycling, rafting, and hiking. All the stuff they swore they would do while toiling in crappy jobs where they earned the money for this.
Snow Birds create villages of each other in campgrounds around the west, gathering, making friends, going to the local sights together or politely waving to each other. Some tow a cheap bubble car or a jeep, others carry a Vespa on the reinforced bike rack and leave the RV parked in a central location, then use the Vespa to go out to dinner or park at a trailhead. Thankfully, people don't seem to steal them, and Snow Birds pay their bills, unlike the hippies from Burning Man, so they're welcome in towns and restaurants.
With RVs and trailers, you can tow or drive a surprising number of like minded people to a location and create an economy like a flash mob. A surprising number of craftsmen follow festival events for every conceivable hobby or trade show. They live in RVs too. Some build their hardware on the road, others build in the offseason in a workshop with a foundation, store it for sale during the year. These vendors and craftsmen can be a festival draw all their own.
At present, brick and mortar cities are coasting on inertia and reputation that they offer the best workers or the most high paying jobs at a particular location. The Bay Area around San Francisco Bay is a prime example of this con. The workers aren't any smarter. The jobs don't pay enough to make up for the higher costs for everything, including rent, so you largely end up just as poor and unhappy as you would anywhere else. The only real advantage of the place is space to anchor ships and natural summer air conditioning from the sea, though that's not as good as you'd expect it to be, and fog for A/C is available on the entire coast, and the Bay is either too shallow to anchor ships or moving too fast thanks to the river to anchor there. The big and important downside of the SF Bay is there's no drinking water supply for the 10 million people living there. Its pumped over mountains, and the pumps aren't free. They are subsidized by state taxes. This has become a substantial cost, and one that displaces benefits of operating there. A rational business leaves the Bay Area. The voters, slowly being dominated by communists, keep voting themselves raises. You can't be profitable in that situation.
So if you're a business looking for a place to be, you can be anywhere the critical elements are and the essential geography favors your operations. The workers will follow. If they don't, they'll starve. And you can train new people, if you are a competent business anyway. In the post-oil economy, which we're inevitably drifting towards, transportation costs are relevant to your calculations. Maybe not so much this year, with oil falling temporarily, but in the next decade and those after certainly. In the future, efficient movement of goods is understood to be done with electric powered freight trains. You can supply the electric grid with hydroelectric power or nuclear power or wind power if it works for long enough, or solar panel farms. This isn't free, but it is sustainable in the long term, with effort and maintenance. There will be jobs for people looking after it.
There are a lot of places in the Western states which have water, which allows life, but lack conventional geographic advantages other than NOT being in the expensive and overpriced Bay Area. I believe that the Bay Area is going to empty, eventually. It doesn't make sense if you aren't requiring the Bay itself. And most of the port activities are currently done in Stockton to avoid all the costs of the Longshoreman's Union in Alameda. Since we're all getting poorer, there's decreasing need for gigantic container ships from China and Japan anyway. Which is ironic because ships are fuel efficient ways to move cargo, like trains. We still need ships. We don't need them that big, however.
When I was in High School, I used to hear the Pacific Coastal Railroad horn blow when the lumber express zoomed through town. My town, Santa Rosa, was still industrial back then. The train wound down from the north coast, and the tracks were usually open more than the highway, which often washes out in storms. This being earthquake country, the roads built through brittle canyons prone to landslide and wildfire and fallen trees and even flash floods. They'd shut the thing, leaving a 300 mile detour through a different road which also would wash out, sometimes in the same storm, and the North Coast got rain year round, unlike the Bay Area and Central and South Coast, which only got rain in winter. There's a crucial ocean temperature difference which seems to gain the jet stream's passage and funnel storms up there just like Portland and Seattle.
Being a few hundred miles south of Portland, yet getting a Portland level of rain, you would think this would be an ideal place for people, provided they build their homes to resist/survive earthquakes. This is less difficult than you might think. Wood frame houses with anchor bolts on their foundations do pretty well in quakes. If the town in question is started by a population that arrives with critical craft skills in RVs and Trailers to construct the critical infrastructure (public utilities and streets), creating the temporary boomtown which turns into the real thing as people work to more permanent construction. Ordinary people and ordinary businesses just can't make the math work in overpriced areas like the Bay Area. Relocate to the North Coast, northern Sacramento Valley, Eastern Oregon, Nebraska, and it works again. And since we as a nation desperately need lots of jobs to employ our youth to avoid a civil war over the poverty caused by unemployment, we need places to do it in. Right now, many future companies are simmering in garages and hobby shops and kitchens, waiting for the time to be right. Namely, for the economics to work. Right now, with communists running the govt and preventing business, this is the wrong time. But in time, the hobbyists who want business profits and employees are shifting into a sense of mobility. Staying in stupid places, like the Bay Area, is becoming painfully obvious a way to lose. Moving to the next business boomtown, that has more of a future. Whichever opens up first is likely to gain the next big business. Right now, Reno is trying by removing obstacles and they're employing people, at minimum wage, at Amazon. That's not good enough, but it is the right direction. Tesla is building, or will be building, a battery pack factory. They won't make cars there. They're likely going to ship the batteries they make to China, via the railroad to a port that's cheap, probably Stockton or Sacramento, which also has a containership port. You need a big crane for that, and a deep water channel so a fully loaded ship won't get stuck getting to and from the Bay.
Between railroads and containerships you can get your raw materials and ship your finished products to market. Provided you've got access to one or the other, you're in business. Just so long as the idiots paying too much, in the wrong places, don't bribe the officials to shut you down because you make them look stupid to their stockholders, and they like their lives of privilege and golf course country club memberships. Moving them away from that makes them feel poorer. Another Baby Boomer problem fixed by retirement. Its going to feel really painful for homeowners to abandon their homes, or sell at market rate, in the Bay Area and Los Angeles and relocate, build a new home, construct a new building for their business, and train new employees at the new location far away, where water is both available and cheap, unlike the Bay Area and LA. This is a big step, but its one that will happen because desalinating sea water is very expensive, very energy intensive, and costs even more than pumping. Those who get there first gain the benefits. But they also take the risks. But when the first arrivals have wheels, they can also leave pretty easily too.
Realistically speaking, this is the future. San Francisco is a Bay that's shrinking from alluvial infill. There is no port of San Jose anymore. Alameda must be dredged just to stay open, and cheaping out on port dredging has gotten ships stuck, which results in big lawsuits by captains against the pilots steering the boat, and increased costs, making the point of the port moot. Eventually, San Francisco Bay will be a delta with a fast moving river in it and a smallish area for port business. It doesn't have enough local drinking water. It can be emptied by the pumps shutting down, or salt water reaching the pump entry point. That event, such as would occur with the flooding and collapse during an Ebb tide of the local levees, would doom both San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles, all at once. Too much rides on that. No sane business would allow itself to experience panic over one reasonably high chance of failure thanks to Baby Boomers declining to do maintenance AGAIN. The existing neighborhoods will get a lot of foreclosure signs, and shortly after that, be red-tagged as condemned for health violations. Most have black toxic mold in the walls, and most of the owners don't do maintenance, being Baby Boomers. See the pattern there? The city doesn't make sense. It is time for it to suffer the consequences of its laziness and for the dirt already present to be its primary reputation, rather than claiming itself to be the "Paris of the West", which is famous for dog muck and dirt and crowds. And now, Muslim terrorists. I suppose San Francisco can stay a tourist destination if the surrounding areas empty due to lack of water and lack of jobs. Its going that way, anyhow. Already, it has moved California colleges to the "Avoid" list thanks to the new Cat Lady Law just enacted with the new year.
I'd like to see boom towns start up for new businesses. I think its got a better future than the communists have in mind. Ironic that the pot growers are forced into Capitalism because the Communists are doing their very best to prevent their success. Funny how that is. Leftists are always Splitters. This is a big part of why, along with basic human nature, Communism can't work.
It is difficult to resist pointing out how every demand they've made has been tried and failed to defeat human nature, that every demand has resulted in making things worse. Cuba caused starvation and poverty worse than the govt they replaced. They're rather famous for running child-brothels for Canadian pedophiles in Havana. And the US president wants to normalize relations with them. I met a Cuban escape survivor, a few years ago. Said that starvation is so bad in Cuba that people actually die from hunger. Only place in the Western world where that's true. But, the reality is a secondary (important) issue which distracts from understanding what the Communists want. What their optimistic true believers, who aren't willing to commit murder to get their way, want.
So what are they picturing?
Electric cars for everyone.
Electric trains.
Gap year backpacking hostels everywhere pretty.
Free education, all the way through PhD level
Artisan support so artists won't starve
Food kitchens, free meals
Free coffee
Free books and music
Free healthcare
Free childcare and support for unwed mothers
Free housing
Green renewable energy, and safe nuclear power
Robots farming food supply
Most jobs maintenance or healthcare, resulting in extra credits or comforts in life
No pockets (star trek disease)
Wait, nix #15. Still, I think this is what the commies want. Trouble is, most of this is what we actually had during the 1990's. Or close enough to free that everybody could afford it, even on minimum wage. Now inflation has made minimum wage = starvation. Electric vehicles are technically difficult without overhead wires. Overhead wire electric vehicles, like trains and city trams, are common and reliable and use grid power rather than batteries. Reasonable expectations makes those possible, but California's train to nowhere isn't reasonable. It stops too much, it avoids the intelligent route, and it takes longer than it should, even if it gets built, which it hasn't been. I suppose they could fix that. Or use that track as a supporting route, with the main express running up I-5 like it was supposed to. From LA Grand Central right up 5 to a tunnel through the mountains to San Jose grand central station, and another one connecting that station to Emeryville, which has an express to Sacramento, which has expresses to both Reno and Oregon. Good trains would free people from cars. Nice trains, clean and elegant and comfortable, wouldn't stink like a Greyhound Bus does. Those things are like Submarines that don't get cleaned. I think Communists think things get cleaned via magic, much like maintenance. They keep citing civic pride, which doesn't exist, but they believe in it.
The other thing is they probably imagine bicycle tourism hostels, clean, polite, and well maintained, so people touring the country on their gap year via bicycle have a safe place to sleep and a couple meals. Communists have really strange ideas.
If you imagine all these things are possible, completely opposite of human nature which is more about materialism, rape, murder, arson, child abuse, mass murder, and mayhem, things which are contrary to the kind of serious optimism required to think Communism could work in the first place. Really, communists are completely delusional. In the old days we'd just put them into looney bins, where delusional people belong. And they mostly got what they wanted, there. That and drugs to keep them calm. Communists generally fall back onto creating equal poverty and disarmament so the peasants find it harder to revolt. Then they put in the secret police to disappear and torture anyone who complains things aren't good enough. When you've reached the level of propaganda where you terrorize by making people vanish to scare everyone else, your empire is doomed.
If the Commies read more philosophy by cynics they would probably keep to more reasonable goals. Or become civil engineers, since public utilities benefit everyone. Instead of trying to overcome human nature, they would be improving living conditions, which makes life a little easier, and the chance to be better people instead of worse. And in the real world, that's the best you can hope for.
Every region in America gets its own kind of disasters, usually natural disasters, which makes staying there during events and recovery economically unfeasible or unwise. Hurricanes Katrina and that one in New Jersey have shown how effective the US govt is at responding to natural disasters. In case you missed it, since the damage is still being repaired by contracting scams fed by the govt taxes... not well.
America gets terrible hurricanes on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. It also gets flash flooding in the Southwestern deserts such as Las Vegas and Phoenix associated with the storms that peel off from a hurricane that disintegrates down near the tip of Baja Mexico. Those thunderstorms can ALSO cause wildfires in California via dry lightning in the mid to late summer. Wildfires are rarely personally dangerous, but the smoke is annoying and some roads are closed. It is claimed that pot growers lost lots of their "garden grows" to the various wildfires last summer, some of which were arson by competing pot growers. After all, if you burn up your competitors fields, the price you get for your pot is higher. This spirit of competition now results in annual wildfires. Eventually, all the undergrowth will be burned up and the understory clearing project will be considered a success, which should end the tax and spend assessments which infuriate people who own homes in wildfire territory and refuse to clear the brush themselves but don't want to be charged for convicts to do it either. They don't seem to get many wildfires in the East, since it rains constantly there, and the PNW (Pacific North West) is largely too wet. The Interior PNW is dry like Nevada, most of the way to the Canadian Border, due to rain shadow effects and the dry and bitter cold north winds coming down the Rockies out of the polar north. We have been under the influence of this wind for the last week and may see snow here tonight. The upside of this dry wind is it cuts down on ice because the air drags it away to the Southern part of the Valley and off to the coast.
The entire west coast is capable of earthquakes, most of which are merely nuisance level. Once a decade we get some that crack buildings, break windows, and damage pipes and infrastructure. Despite the showy destruction of the Bay Bridge and the Cypress Freeway that was such interesting news in 1989, it was the cracking of the water and sewer pipes which cost the most in repairs and took over 10 years to replace. Those billions caused the recession in California which still lasts today. The building boom came and went in a few short years, following the collapse of the Dot.Com bubble, which ran from 1995 when the internet got popular to 2000 when it was clear that the Millenium Bug wasn't going to destroy civilization after all. All those vaporware stocks imploded, and couples who lost half of their retirement funds in that crash started getting married, buying houses and having babies. The housing bubble inflated, and quality crashed while prices rose. Most of those houses were 3x their value and are empty now, many of them rotting from Cheap Chinese Drywall emitting actual sulfuric acid into the wiring and pipes and leaking everywhere. Some are red tagged for bulldozing. While I disagree with much of what James Howard Kunstler says, I do agree that McMansions were a terrible use of resources, up there with the Spanish Armada attempting to invade England by sea right as a storm came and sank them, back in 1680. Spain never recovered from this. Still hasn't in case you wondered with Never meant.
The Midwest gets tornados, ice storms, and the remainder of hurricanes. They also get nasty blizzards and stationary thunderstorms, and flooding. Honestly, knowing that trailer parks in the Midwest are notorious tornado magnets, I would not be inclined to live in one there, though the ability to drive out of a town with your house hitched behind after being missed by a tornado probably has a certain satisfaction. And driving away from flood, and out from under persistent rainstorms that hover over a town like they get in the Midwest, or away south from the ice storms. That could be okay. I'm sure the Communists would like to limit this, since people getting away from killer storms makes their paperwork more complicated and most Communists I've met have either had debilitating OCD or serious drug habits, which explains why they still think Communism has merit. Anyone who has worked retail knows that's BS.
The South gets that sweaty heat, and again hurricanes. For some reason, the rich people who own mansions on the barrier islands on the Carolina Coast get insurance that rebuilds their houses every 10 years when they're ground into splinters by storm surge waves and hundred mile per hour winds by the latest hurricane. This is the sort of spending that must be stopped. This should not be protected stupidity paid by taxes. If rich people want to own homes that get destroyed, let them pay out of pocket. Same as the fools who build houses surrounded by trees that burn down in California wildfires. No more welfare for the rich. We won't be paying it for the poor soon. America is too broke.
As for big earthquakes, New Madrid is a worry. It has done serious damage, and its last three quakes are 300 years apart. The next quake will topple buildings, destroy bridges, crack water pipes, cut off wells, break levees and dams, and destroy a few trillion dollars of infrastructure, then do it again a year later, and again, and then do it again in a decade, and again. You can see where this is going? New Madrid tends to do some terrible damaging quakes that prevents public utilities from getting fixed for long. Anything underground will get shattered. Anything on poles will risk being dropped or snapped. All utilities will have to become locally backed up, town by town and ranch by ranch. That's quite expensive. This problem will affect that whole region along the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys. And the energy will shake, as it did last time, up to Montreal and down to Jacksonville and New Orleans. I suspect most large public earthworks in the Mississippi River Valley will have to be abandoned due to costs of repairs and renewed damage from the faults, which gave serious aftershocks for 70 years last time. I don't know when the next series will start. It might be the end of this century, or it might wait longer or come sooner. Can't really say. The cause of the faulting and earthquakes, btw, is well understood regardless of what ignorant Spanish grad students say. We've known for decades. Failed shear zones leave faults behind which don't move much but they can move to deal with distant stresses, such as the tearing on distant parts of the continental plate. Differential stresses can be expressed in the center. This happens in metals too.
Another area facing really big quakes is the PNW, on the subduction zone of the Juan De Fuca plate and the North American continent, running from Eureka California to the northern tip of Vancouver Island.
This quake is due. It last went off in 1700, Jan 29th, 9 PM, a 9.6 magnitude based on evidence collected by geologists and stories by the native americans in the area, as well as the tsunami damage in Japan. The tsunami damage on the PNW coast goes up to 30 miles inland, though most is more like 10 miles. Still, if you live on the flatlands of the coast, there are now tsunami warning sirens and signs to escape tsunami just as bad as the ones that hit Sumatra and killed 250,000 people back in 2004. This is an obvious "drive away to high ground" kind of disaster. If you don't, you die there. Upside is that most of these towns aren't hit by tsunamis often, and so rebuilding isn't an annual problem like with hurricanes or tornados.
The Northeast is finally getting proper blizzards again. Same with the northern Midwest. These were common back in the 1980's, happening for months at a time every winter. Cars skidding around on icy roads and inches or feet of snow on the ground for months at a time? That was called..."Winter". People who got tired of "Winter" moved to the South or Arizona or LA to live where you can wear shorts all year and work on your tan. This is just how it is. People who have not had proper winters because they don't remember the 1980's or weren't born yet are likely to accept all sorts of religious reasons for the return of normal weather, but the thing is: this is normal weather. Normal weather. Mild winters for a decade was slightly abnormal, but you get abnormal during Interglacial Periods like this. Normal is a statistical thing. Stuff balances out eventually.
Finally, America has volcanoes. None are erupting at the moment, except in Hawaii and Mount Spur up in Alaska, but in the lower 48, there are several that worry people. Mount St. Helens is considered active, since it blew up a few decades ago. Mount Lassen erupted in 1911 and exploded to the northeast. There have been recent earthquakes which bordered its magma chamber so it will likely go off again in coming decades. It is being watched. Mount Shasta has a nice even shape because its eruptions are tidy rather than explosive so it will go off again. Next time it does, it may become the tallest mountain in the lower 48. Its only tens of feet below Mount Whitney, current tallest in the lower 48, itself only feet taller than White Mountain above Bishop, CA, a mountain we know to be growing due to local earthquakes. White Mountain overlooks the Long Valley Caldera, a previously explosive volcano that covered most of the USA in ash from one huge eruption. It is not going to go off again. Its magma source is cut off and its chamber is cooling. Yellowstone however is likely to explode again, and its chamber is 1000 times bigger than previously thought, so can produce debilitating levels of ash across the USA and make Wyoming, Montana, and the Great Plains uninhabitable for decades and destroy windshields in New York City for centuries, because the ash particles are just that sharp. When Yellowstone goes off again, many in the Midwest will quickly find reason to live outside the ashfall area. Last time it hit northern Florida and Greenland, Montreal, Chicago had feet of ash, and the Great Plains were buried so deep it killed most animals living there very quickly. Paleontologists have lots to study from the eruption death tolls. The further away from the eruption, the less irritating the ash will be. Ash decays into good topsoil, so where it is thin enough, plow it in and get the mineral benefits. Where it is thick, it retains its heat for months and eventually melts into glass, which won't grow anything. Breaking through that crust can parboil a limb or vent superheated steam and kills herd animals. Hard rains can create boiling mud flows downstream for miles, which killed hundreds of Filipino tribesmen near Mount Pinatubo, few of which spoke Tagalog so couldn't understand the warnings to stay out of the murky boiling mud streams. Many died trying to cross. Horrible because the camera crews and translators couldn't get through to them.
So the important thing to remember is that nowhere is actually safe from disaster, and some disasters are best left behind. Whether this means snagging your photo album and running for it or packing a Uhaul and leisurely selling your place as you mosey on out like everyone else, that's depending on the scale and severity of the destruction. Life can be challenging, and sometimes that challenge is stupid. Sometimes the right answer is to walk away from the stupid and let some other fool try and show mother nature how tough he is by getting snuffed out instead of you.
Ansible: aka quantum entanglement. Faster than light communication using special relativity effects since verified to actually exist in the CERN experiment with fiber optic cable lengths. Its positively EERIE, too. Serious work is being done with this effect to build unhackable encrypted military radios since they don't transmit via EM waves, rather directly connecting separated components without intervening wires. Invented by Ursula K. LeGuin as a key point in her novel The Dispossessed, which is a powerful refutation of communism, thus banned by more libraries. No, I'm not kidding about that either.
Generation Ship: this is a large space vehicle, big enough and armored enough to survive impacts, which carries thousands of people, entire generations of people, into space at sub-light speeds from one solar system to another, along with everything they need to terraform and planet and populate it with plants, animals, crops, trees, fish, frogs, etc and turn some space rock into another Earth. Generation ships experience Genetic Drift, teratogenic mutations, and possibly rebellions/mutiny and possibly wiped out by accident, disease, or impact with a rock too big for the armor to handle. Some versions of this idea provide consensual hallucination during Cold Sleep/hibernation which allows passengers to make the trip in suspended animation and gives their brains something to do. Japanese Anime Megazone 23 (Part 2) is about a generation ship that arrives on a planet after carrying its passengers brainwashed into never wanting to leave Tokyo, which is actually just a life module inside a generation ship going between stars. More recently, Sora Mo Otoshimono (anime) is the story of passengers on another generation ship managed by androids self aware enough to know they want to be more human which interact with the passengers shared hallucination.
Ringworld: see "Bigger Than Worlds" article by Larry Niven, Caltech professor of Mathematics. A type of large space habitat which orbits a sun in the Goldilocks Zone but instead of gravity, works by spin. Smaller roofed habitats sometimes appear in movies. If a light source is provided (safely), such habitats can serve as generation ships.
L2/L5: L points are stable orbits which use tricks in gravity to stabilize their positions. In the real world, such points are often occupied with space rocks.
Kessler Syndrome: see Gravity (2013 movie) or Planetes (anime) which is about the build up of LEO space debris sufficiently dense to destroy LEO objects, creating more debris to destroy newly launched vehicles or objects and becoming a type of shield against gaining higher orbits, essentially blocking space exploration. There is a good chance that if there are alien worlds out there, with people-ish aliens on them, their own Kessler Syndrome has caused serious trouble, possible civilization collapse for the several centuries the debris is capable of. Worse, attempts to wait and then launch objects for communications, for example, can just make more debris if unlucky.
Geosynchronous/stationary Orbit: 26200 miles out from the Earth's surface is Geosynchronous Orbit, where an object orbits along the equator and appears to be stable in relation to the surface. This is where we put our satellite TV broadcasters for Dish Network and HBO etc. Ground stations transmit encoded messages, which the satellite retransmits pointed at North America or Europe so you can pick it up off a 2-foot dish on your roof for endless channels of Gilligan's Island and Jersey Shores.
LEO: aka Low Earth Orbit. LEO objects include satellite radio and the International Space Station, which as we saw in Gravity is at real risk of being tin-canned by a bit of space debris. Until 2009, it was unarmored and completely at risk, but use of aerogel armor is now protecting it slightly. The advantage of LEO is you can use less fuel to get objects up there. The downside is they're barely out of atmospheric drag range, and the ISS has to get a boost periodically or eventually it will fall out of the sky like MIR and Skylab both did. It is also important to realize that snowballs drift out of the atmosphere and fall back into it again at LEO, so they're another risk.
Wormholes: alas the best math I've seen on these is two different kinds. The femtosecond quantum sized ones which are said to exist and vanish again across the fabric of space, according to Stephen Hawking, and the more stable kind only two atoms wide in the extremely rare binary black hole systems which can't be observed because the wormhole exists inside the event horizon. Neither is useful. Sorry, Stargate fans.
Schroedinger's Cat: thought experiment famous a century ago on how quantum states work, misappropriated to explain lots of things wrongly. The cat is both alive and dead, but PETA hates the entire thing and has stopped using cellphones, which take advantage of quantum states to work in the first place. Only they haven't because PETA is a bunch of hypocrites.
Multiverse: popular scifi writer gimmick for diverging parallel worlds based on Schroedinger's Cat, usually as an excuse to offer infinite worlds with only slight differences created by every quantum state, every femtosecond.
Onionspace: not to be confused with The Onion parody newspaper. Onionspace, proposed by Russian mathematician, suggests 2D windows between finite but expanding universes still being created by an infinitely running Big Bang making finite but nearly infinite number of universes, constantly expanding. We live in one of those, created 13 billion years ago, but more were created just a second ago, only we can't see it because we're in a universe 13 billion years older. Unproven and untestable, potentially just some mathematician's way to get invited to cocktail parties and go on a world tour instead of spending the winter in a Russian apartment shivering and drunk on potato vodka.
10 dimensional space: 1950's theory about how complicated the universe is, being 10 dimensions but we only perceive 4 of them. Three directions and TIME, lest you forget. Several of those other ones govern quantum mechanics, light, and define constants like columb's law and natural logarithm. If you don't like math or physics, don't investigate these things. You'll get nightmares for years once you understand.
String Theory: disproven by experiments in 1982, but still popular by the same scifi writers that like Wormholes, often used as a bunch of babble which amounts to "space magic". Any scientist who suggests string theory is valid is an easy clue you're dealing with a fake/crazy.
Quantum Collapse: corollary to Multiverse, collapse of quantum matter states back into lesser number because the energy separating the two states of matter no longer sufficient to keep them apart. Might actually be happening constantly without people noticing.
Global Warming: took place 19,500 years ago, Earth warmed 10'C in a decade, melting off the Pleistocene glaciers and ice sheets covering North America, Europe, and much of Russia. Mass of ice mostly melted but took 9000 years. Remaining ice still melting today much slower. Temporary event. Ice will return, as it has several times in the past under the Milancovic Cycles in the previous ice ages. Milancovic Cycles are orbital in nature. Popular scam and source of scifi novels. See Waterworld by Kevin Costner.
Interglacial Epoch: 10,000-18,000 year periods of time where ice melts and earth warms up before glaciers return and earth cools once more. Tied to polar orientation to planet and sun, completely unrelated to people or fossil fuels. The glaciers ALWAYS come back and will once more. We are about due for the return.
Antigravity: space magic.
Space Elevator: really stupid idea that won't die. Place very long thin cable connected to equator thousands of miles long with counterweight in orbit, use elevator system to physically lift elevator car carrying sealed atmosphere and contents from surface into space without using rocket thrust. Materials to do this do not exist. Stresses on cable, and weight of cable exceed properties of all materials, including diamond, and as attack on mounting point by terrorist would cause 26,000 mile long cable, because that's how long it has to be, is capable of delivering nuclear weapons level gigaton strike energies to the entire equator by the second half of the cable coming down. But since it is impossible to build the thing in the first place, there's little danger of it crashing. Any alien civilization that attempted this insanity was likely completely destroyed, which may be why the universe is so quiet.
Aliens: people from other planets, probably not human exports or colonists. As there are 52 different amino acid bases, and we only use 4 of them, we being ALL organisms on earth down to bacteria, viruses, black smoker worms and the slow bacteria inside of volcanic rocks, ALL of everything alive on earth uses the same 4, aliens real aliens, would likely use other bases than we do, odds being what they are. Of course, aliens are just a manifestation of the irresponsible religious nonsense which plagues our species. They are a fantasy. Probably. Odd favor alien life, but most astronomers who make estimates about inhabited worlds are seeking further funding for their telescopes rather than offer realistic limitations, much less understand the 32+ necessary feedback loops required for our planet to have a stable place to live, feedback loops which are probably necessary for life to exist, much less evolve. Throw into the mess that we've only been broadcasting beyond our atmosphere for 80 years and turned our solar system into a trinary system instead of binary (Jupiter is HOT with microwave emissions like a red giant) which should get the attention of aliens, if they existed and had a network able to pick up our transmissions. Since FTL doesn't exist in this universe (true, it doesn't), they're at least a century out if they exist at all, and since we don't pick up anything for thousands or millions of light years, odds suggest our local group is empty of life. We're it. The Milky Way Galaxy is 200,000 light years across. And its millions of light years to the next galaxy. Nothing alive there either. The universe is huge, something like 26 billion light years across, with millions of galaxies, and trillions of planets and stars, and we're the only life. Deal with it. Being alone in the universe despite the odds is just part of the irony of our existence. I might be proven wrong about this someday, but it feels right that we're completely alone in the vastness of the universe.
FTL: fantasy of string theory. Does not exist. Stands for Faster Than Light. FTL violates relativity. Relativity is absolutely true. Nuclear bombs work by relativity. Nuclear bombs exist. FTL doesn't. Sorry, Star Trek fans. You suck.
Gravity Lens: massive object in space which warps light around it. Light warps and bends when passing through objects with different densities, which is how a pair of glasses works. This is common, not magical. A gravity lens is one of the reason we know about supergiant black holes, about dark matter, and other curiosities.
Dark Matter: whirlpool galaxies like our own spin like a record, with the outer portions staying in relative position to the inner, as if both were fixed and rotated. This is very odd without a massive globe of invisible matter above and below the plane of the record. Think of this record being a slice of invisible orange. We can't see this matter, but it is believed to be there because the galaxies do move in this extremely odd way, exactly unlike our solar system where inner planets move faster than outer. Dark Matter is 99% of the universe. This is odd but predicted by Stephen Hawking's work. Dark Matter remains undetectable despite our best efforts. May be a larger scale corollary of the Strong Force, which prevents atoms from exploding apart. Nightmare fuel, I tell you.
Dark Energy: responsible for the ongoing expansion of the universe, which is accelerating apart rather than slowing down like it should be. The energy required for acceleration of the universe is 99% invisible, thus called dark. We can't even detect it other than inferring the expansion. This will give you nightmares if you understand it.
Nanotechnology: imaginary robots so small they can manipulate atoms and are able to float in your blood and body tissues. Fantasy. No power supply viable at that scale, and movement any distance so difficult as to make them useless. Used often for comic book effects but ridiculous to people who can do basic math.
Grey Goo: nanotechnology gone rogue, possibly AI. Turns everything into more grey goo nanites.
Turing AI: Alan Turing, mathematician in WW2 cracked the Enigma Code, father of modern cryptography devised a test by which an artificial intelligence can pass for human. Popular subject of scifi since then. Hal 9000 was a Turing AI in the movie 2001. So were the androids of Blade Runner, but NOT Skynet of Terminator since it wouldn't pass the test.
Technological Singularity: AI which surpasses human intelligence and develops technologies beyond which we can currently imagine. Religious people believe this is building God. Popular subject for scifi for decades now.
If you understand the above things, you get most of scifi.
