Coastal Erosion California

Waves caused by a hurricane off the coast of California has washed many beaches away from San Diego to Los Angeles. If you examine the embedded video, you can see how development and sea walls so close to the ocean can exacerbate the effect of the waves. It's work for civil engineers.

Remember California

The exodus from California is real, businesses and people are leaving the state as its economy and crime rates worsen.

California Faces Fuel Crisis

Hard to believe I know, but oil rich California has been so badly managed, the lower supply of oil has resulted in expensive fuel prices at the pump. Who'd a thunk? The state is now reliant on non-US supply despite sitting on the resources to drive the whole state.

This is a lot like New Zealand. It now lacks a refinery and is wholly reliant on overseas fuel supplies, despite sitting on a mountain of crude.

Is this a conspiracy to collapse the economies of both territories, or just stupidity on the part of governments?

Oil and Gas New Zealand

New Zealand shut down its only oil refinery and California is now experiencing a similar conundrum, with two large refineries announcing they're shutting down. The issues raised in the embedded discussion apply to NZ almost exactly. Wind and solar won't do it, and areas with oil shows and earthquake activity are ideal areas for productive oil fields. NZ has a lot of both.

Peculiarly, NZ does have a vast resource of wood waste from its large forestry industry. This could be used to produce biofuels, but I'm not aware of anyone doing it. Weird huh. Yeah, not so weird because the wind and solar industries hold the politicians captive, especially the Greens. Big Green capital skews the market and so all commonsense evaporates when they start talking. I hear people say wind and solar are great, but what they miss is that they do not pack enough punch. 

Seawater on Wildfires?

To answer the question: yes, you can use seawater on wildfires and it often is used in the Northeast US, and in harbours when a ship or shore facilities are on fire:

Santa Monica Fire Live Feed

I found the embedded link of one of the LA fires. It's interesting to watch and follow, the crews in the air and on the ground are doing a great job, but something else that does crop up is just how incompetent the political leaders in California are, they're seriously stupid people:

(Updated with a new stream)

California Wildfires

Victor Davis Hanson explains what is happening; civilisation breakdown where politicians do performance art but real work is ignored or has its funding reduced.

Musk Leaves California

Will the last person out of California, please turn the lights out, thank you.

NZ Salmon could be the Answer for California

Evidently chinook salmon are extinct in northern California, but New Zealand could hold the answer to repopulating the region.

Canterbury NZ rivers are the only place in the world where salmon, descended from the right part of California, still thrive.

Read about it here:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/103154846/rakaia-salmon-dance-into-native-american-hearts

https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/105731111/nz-link-to-salmon-wiped-out-in-california-70-years-ago

New Zealand: How Big Should It Be?

It depends how you measure it, in land area New Zealand is about the same size as Japan or the British Isles, or if you're American, the same size as the state of Colorado.

Another way of looking at it is to measure the economy. NZ's total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is about $185 billion (US Dollars).

Compare that with the largest companies; Walmart has a total revenue of about $482 billion, Volkswagen $237 billion and Berkshire Hathaway $211 billion.

How about comparing staff numbers? Walmart employs 2.3 million worldwide, Volkswagen 610,000, Berkshire Hathaway 331,000; while little old New Zealand has 4.5 million people producing that GDP, in total less than the any of the three companies mentioned.

What about management? New Zealand has approximately 45,000 public servants and another 28,000 local authority employees.  If you accept that these people are roughly equivalent to managers at some level in the corporate world, then NZ has 73,000 of them.

Walmart has fewer than that number of managers for a revenue almost three times the size of NZ's GDP. My guess is Volkswagen will have fewer managers than Walmart and Berkshire Hathaway much fewer still. At the top in Berkshire Hathaway sits an executive team that is very small operating out of the Kiewit Plaza in Omaha, Nebraska.

Am I making my point? NZ is grossly and excessively governed. NZ does not need all these people. The state of Colorado employs about 32,000 at the state level off a population of 5.3 million and a GDP 40% larger than NZ's. I'm not sure what the total head count is if you combine federal, state and local authorities; someone may like to provide the numbers.

California has 204,000 full-time employees and that state on its own would be the world's fifth largest economy with a GDP of $2.4 Trillion; it has 4.5 times the number of government employees but is more than twelve times bigger economically (and much bigger territorially as well).

This is one area where National has failed miserably, they promised to reduce the head count at government level. Where is this going to end, when everyone is working for the government?

Trucks in the USA

I'm not sure why heavy trucks are the way they are in the USA. If someone can explain then I'm all ears.

The most common type of truck I saw on my recent trip were semi-trailers. Almost all of the tractor units were conventional with hardly any cabovers. Is there a good reason why that's the case?

Then combinations were interesting. In California I'm not sure I ever saw a B-train or B-double rig, where the two trailers are each connected to a turntable. What I did see a lot of was a semi-trailer pulling a draw-bar trailer, and that draw-bar was often rising up from the front axle of the trailer, not perpendicular with the trailer body.

Then in most states I visited; aggregates were being transported on trucks that to my eye looked far too heavy to carry a useful payload. The trailers were often side dump or bottom dump, while others appeared to be transfer dumps such as the type in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woi0T4XVf1s

The trucks in the above video do appear far too heavy for a useful load of aggregate. Here's an Australian equivalent rig, I'm pretty sure this set-up delivers more in the one trip, correct me if I'm wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYVT2_toS3I

In Nevada I saw road trains, but they too appeared to be heavy tare weights.