The idle musings of a former military man, former computer geek, medically retired pastor and now full-time writer. Contents guaranteed to offend the politically correct and anal-retentive from time to time. My approach to life is that it should be taken with a large helping of laughter, and sufficient firepower to keep it tamed!
We've written a lot about that subject here over the years (see the sidebar for some article links), but we never stop learning - particularly from the experiences of others. After the Los Angeles fires, there's a lot more of that out there.
Eaton Rapids Joe has just published three articles on his blog that you may find useful:
It examines the pro's and con's (there are many of the latter!) of "bugging out" with a backpack to avoid a dangerous situation. There are times when one may have no choice in the matter (the Los Angeles fires being a prime example), but in general it's best to stay put and ride out a disaster in one's home (assuming one has applied basic forethought to one's preparations).
... here's a helpful tool from cartoonist Stephan Pastis. Click the image to be taken to a larger version at the "Pearls Before Swine" Web page.
I don't know how many building and/or repair contractors there are in the greater Los Angeles area, but I suspect they're going to have enough work on their plates to keep them fully occupied for years to come.
I spoke with an acquaintance yesterday who's on the brink of abandoning his burned-out Los Angeles home and leaving the state. It was his grandfather's and his father's home before him. He had no mortgage on the house, but was under-insured compared to its current market value (or what was its market value prior to the fire). According to him, he's already been advised that the insurers will apply averaging to what they pay out, considering him to be self-insured for part of the value, so they won't give him the full amount for which he'd insured the house with them. Needless to say, he's not happy. However, his place of work went up in smoke along with several thousand houses, so he's suddenly free to consider a move. All things considered, he's probably going to take the insurance money for his house, sell the land on which it stood (which might still be worth a considerable amount in its own right) and head for a freer state with more opportunities for his teenage children. He was asking me all sorts of questions about Texas, particularly our housing prices, which are low enough compared to California that he can probably buy something acceptable for cash. If he can find a job that fits his qualifications and experience, I daresay he'll be heading this way within weeks.
I suspect he's likely to be the first of many . . .
This is one news story I would never have expected to read.
In a gleaming laboratory in Edinburgh, robotic machines whirr and mix. The final product that they are creating will be a pine-smelling chemical that can be used as an ingredient in perfumes. But the starting point is very different: a brown, gloopy, fat mixture, recently fished out from below ground - fatbergs.
Fatbergs are the foul phenomenon found lurking in (and blocking up) sewers. The development of the technology used to perform this apparent alchemy is being described by some as a new industrial revolution.
. . .
Prof Stephen Wallace from the University of Edinburgh is among those turning the fatbergs into perfumes. "It's a crazy idea," he admits to me, "but it works."
Fatbergs are accumulated lumps of fat from cooking oils, toilet and other food waste that people put down their drains. Prof Wallace gets his from a company that specialises in fishing them out of sewers and turning them into biofuels. They arrive at the lab in a tube.
The first step is to sterilise the material in a steamer. Prof Wallace then adds the specially modified bacteria to the remnants of the fatberg. The bacteria have a short section of DNA inserted, to give the bacteria their particular properties.
The fatberg gradually disappears, as the bacteria eat it, producing the chemical with the pine-like smell - this can be used as an ingredient in perfumes.
There's more at the link, including more maggot-gagging pollutant products that are being "reprocessed" into something useful.
Would you apply a perfume to your body that had started out as a fatberg? I find the very concept repulsive . . . but I guess it's not much different from drinking recycled, purified sewer water, as millions of us do in many cities every day. In this day and age, we have so much waste to dispose of that it makes sense to recycle and reuse it, rather than create even more pollution by dumping it somewhere.
Nevertheless, the thought of a fatberg being used as a perfume ingredient is about as cringe-worthy as anything I've ever heard!
The Wall Street Journal reports that a little-known change in California's insurance regulations last year means that the enormous property losses caused by the current Los Angeles fires may end up being paid by all California property owners - not just those directly affected.
The new policy affects the backstop for California’s Fair Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which sells fire-damage policies to homeowners who can’t get coverage elsewhere.
The worry is that the Fair Plan lacks the resources to pay for the quickly escalating cost of the fires, which have destroyed tens of thousands of structures.
The rules change means insurance companies can bill their customers if they are forced to bail out the plan, which has an estimated $200 million in cash and $2.5 billion in reinsurance, according to data it reported last year.
That is likely not enough to cover the Fair Plan’s share of the losses from the fires, forecast at up to $6 billion by analysts at Evercore ISI.
. . .
Analysts at Morningstar DBRS now forecast insured losses of up to $30 billion—the highest for any fire in the world in recent times ... the spiraling cost could financially overwhelm the Fair Plan, the decades-old, government-created insurance safety net.
Like similar insurance safety nets in more than 30 other states, including disaster-prone places such as Florida, the Fair Plan wasn’t set up as a typical insurer. It operates with little cash in the bank, as a way of keeping rates—while higher than private insurers’ premiums—within reach of policyholders. Regulated insurers agree to bail out the plan, if needed, as a price of doing business in the state.
The Fair Plan is required to take all-comers, which means its customers are heavily concentrated in fire-prone areas.
. . .
If the Fair Plan breaches its financial resources, the state can call on commercial home insurers to pay the rest of the claims, by imposing what’s called an assessment on the companies.
The charge on each company would be roughly proportionate to its share of the home-insurance market ... companies can add to their customers’ bills 50% of the first $1 billion of an assessment, and 100% of any amounts over that, subject to [the California insurance commissioner's] agreement.
. . .
Consumer advocates are up in arms about the prospect of a potential charge of hundreds or even thousands of dollars being added to home-insurance bills.
“Homeowners across the state shouldn’t pay because insurance companies dumped homeowners on the Fair Plan,” said Carmen Balber, the Los Angeles-based executive director of Consumer Watchdog.
There's much more at the link. If you own and/or insure property in California, it's a must-read article.
Think about it like this. You own a house in, say, Redding, a city in northern California, about 550 miles from Los Angeles as the crow flies. You're paying your regular homeowner's insurance on your property, presumably a manageable amount, because you're not in a high-risk zone. Suddenly your insurer demands that you pay double that insurance premium for 2025, because that's "your share" of its bailout costs for California's Fair Plan insurance scheme, which has been drained by fire losses in Los Angeles - losses with which you had nothing to do. You object? So what? California's rules, regulations and laws make it legal to rob Peter to pay Paul - and in this case, you're Peter. You say you can't afford the bill, and don't have the money? Then your insurers will sue you, and may end up taking your house and selling it out from under you to get the money the State of California says you owe them. Doesn't that give you a warm, fuzzy feeling?
I am so very, very glad that I don't live in the socialist hellhole known as California . . .
Fire all 8,222 Federal Senior Executive Service (SES) employees. Rehire if needed as Limited Term appointments only as defined under 5 U.S.C. 3132 (a)(5): limited term appointee means an individual appointed under a nonrenewable appointment for a term of 3 years or less to a SES positions the duties of which will expire at the end of such term. In 2024, the basic annual salary for SES members ranges from $180,000 to $246,200.
Fire all 93 federal district attorneys.
Fire all Ambassadors (they have to submit their resignations with each new administration, they serve "at the pleasure of the President",) and all 7,999 Foreign Service officers, called "generalist" diplomats.
Fire all serving active-duty general and flag officers (GFOs) and impose a ten year moratorium on working for industry after retirement. Employ two phases: retire all flag officers with an odd number in their SSN in February 2025 and even numbered SSNs in March 2025. As of March 2024, the number of GFOs in the US Department of Defense (DoD) was 809. This was 48 fewer than the maximum of 857 authorized by law. Reduce the GFO authorization to 100 authorized by law immediately.
Relocate all 168 Foreign Embassies and 727 Consulates placed in the territory of United States to Greenland once it is acquired.
. . .
Close the UN in New York and reflag it as Trump Tower. Relocate the 6500 NY UN personnel to Diego Garcia in Quonset huts or barges in the atoll.
Just think of the kerfuffle if the Trump team were to take such advice literally! It'd have a seismic impact on the USA. Unfortunately, it's not practical as written, but it contains a whole lot of things that I'd like to see implemented on as wide a scale as possible, given the constraints of reality.
I'm seriously thinking of recommending that FEMA staff be retroactively and immediately relocated to any and every disaster that they try to alleviate, 24 hours after it occurs. Let them live and work under the same conditions the survivors have to endure, and see how long their bureaucrats remain disdainfully ignoring the reality they're supposed to administer!
The city’s subways aren’t just on the brink of collapse — the breakdown of the aging system has already begun. The number of train delays caused by faulty infrastructure and equipment last year shot up by 46% since 2021, MTA data shows. Major incidents — defined as problems that delay 50 or more trains, like the one on Dec. 11 — reached their highest levels last year since 2018.
During a three-month investigation, Gothamist reporters toured eight transit facilities that are off limits to the public and got a first-hand look at the MTA’s old, crumbling infrastructure. Reporters interviewed more than 100 riders on nearly every subway line across the city about the daily inconveniences they endure due to the shoddy system.
"The way the world looks at New York, it's like there's so much money here. It's like the capital of capitalism, everything's great and whatever. And the train is terrible," said J train rider Marcela Toro, 34.
Internal MTA records obtained by Gothamist and the agency’s public data reveal that service breakdowns are on pace to become more frequent in 2025 than during New York’s infamous “summer of hell” in 2017, when the subway’s reliability fell to its lowest level in decades. MTA officials blame those problems on “deferred maintenance,” or decades of cost-saving measures that kept equipment in use far past its expiration date. But those same problems persist, and experts warn the same thing is about to happen again, creating cascading issues throughout the system.
"If you don't invest in the foundation of a house, the house is going to fall down when the wind comes,” said John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union.
. . .
The subway system runs on electricity, which makes the system vulnerable to the growing number of flash floods fueled by climate change. On a dry day, 254 pump rooms pump about 14 million gallons of water out of the subways. During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the system was inundated with more than 60 million gallons.
The equipment that expels water from the system includes technology installed in the 1920s, according to Jamie Torres-Springer, the MTA’s head of construction.
Two of those old pumps are behind a door at the 116th Street station on the 2 and 3 lines. Commuters who pass by likely have no clue they’re standing just feet away from infrastructure that looks like it should be in a museum.
The two oldest pneumatic pumps in the room are so old they can’t be automated and run on air pressure that’s calibrated by the twist of a handle.
. . .
“A pump room like this, the equipment is over 100 years old, so it's often in poor condition,” said Torres-Springer.
“It's being held together with chewing gum and twine in a lot of cases and it doesn't have the capacity to handle the water flow that we see because of heavier rainfall events.”
The MTA wants to spend $65 billion on upgrades and improvements, but there's no guarantee even that enormous sum will be enough - and it'll be yet another immense financial burden on the shoulders of already overtaxed and overextended New York residents.
If I knew that the odds of my suffering a criminal attack, or a breakdown that prevented me getting to my destination on time, or a weather or other natural disaster-related event that might threaten my safety (even my life) . . . why would I even think of spending my hard-earned money on a service that increasingly appears to guarantee all three outcomes?
I've just had the unpleasant (!) news that I'm going to have to pay over $3,500 up front for two medical examinations, one involving nuclear medicine (to compare the function of my kidneys) and the other a CT scan of their current physical state. Of course, it's the new year, and whereas last year I paid my entire deductible in the first half of the year (plus some charges my insurance wouldn't cover), and thus had a "free ride" for the second half of the year, we're back at square one for 2025. Very fortunately, my wife and I have been saving our shekels for this, knowing it was coming. Even so, it's a big hit, and we'll have to pay twice that before I hit my maximum deductible this year. That's bound to happen.
However, I also have to admit that despite medical costs being (seemingly) very high in this country, there are valid reasons for that. DiveMedic addresses some of them.
This woman here had a child that was born prematurely. That child spent a month in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The bill came to $738,360, and the mother complains that the cost is too high. There are many in the comments that agree, and it’s filled with comments about how other countries have free healthcare, which is of course false.
The bill for that child’s care is completely reasonable. Let me explain why:
Nurses work 3, 12 hour shifts per week, and NICU nurses are frequently on 1:1 care, meaning one nurse to one patient. A 30 day stay in the NICU means that your child had the undivided attention of 5 nurses for a month. An experienced nurse, (for obvious reasons NICU nurses tend to be fairly experienced, qualified, competent, and educated) aren’t cheap. The average pay for a NICU nurse in the US is about $130,000 a year. Night shift makes even more, thanks to shift differentials.
The nurses in charge of your child’s care cost the hospital $70,000 in direct compensation, plus the costs of insurance, training, and other HR expenses. In all, just the nursing care for that month in the hospital cost that hospital about $140,000. Now add in the costs of everyone involved in that from the doctors to the lab technicians, and even the janitors.
Each of those people is highly educated, even the janitor. Yes, the janitor. To comply with Federal law, that janitor has to be instructed on CPR, stroke procedures, HIPAA compliance, Medicare and Medicaid laws, sex trafficking, recognizing child abuse, disposing of medical waste, and a host of other laws. He also needs to be background and possibly drug checked, especially to work in a pediatric wing. All of this raises the cost of hiring that janitor.
Back to the nurses. It takes 3 years of schooling to become a registered nurse. Then it takes years of experience, training, and work to specialize as a NICU nurse. In all, the average NICU nurse has been a nurse for 5 years or more and has attended far more schooling than a beginning nurse. Pediatrics is a specialty. So is neonatology, as is critical care. NICU nurses have to certify as all three. That’s why they make what they make- competence costs money.
Then there is the lab work, the cost of provider that supervises those NICU nurses (usually a nurse practitioner), lab technicians, respiratory therapists, medications, medical equipment, supplies, meals, and even the guy that empties the trash. Then there are the doctors, as well as the regulatory costs of compliance.
In total, labor costs alone for that stay were probably in the neighborhood of $300,000, so I don’t think $700k is out of line once you do the math.
That isn’t even considering what procedures may have been done- if surgery was involved, you can also add anesthesia, scrub nurses, surgical nurses, and a host of other specialties and specialized equipment.
DiveMedic acknowledges that in many countries with so-called "free" or "public" health care, these costs are never seen by the patient: but that's because they're paid by taxpayers in general. Whether the patient pays them directly or pays a wodge of extra taxes to subsidize them, she's going to pay, one way or the other. "Free" healthcare isn't.
That's why I can't complain too hard about having to pay close to five figures last year in insurance deductibles, plus pretty much the same again in costs not covered by insurance. At least I live in a country where the medical system is good enough to treat me, and advanced enough to offer the latest technology, and I don't have to wait forever to see a doctor who may or may not be competent! I can certainly understand the frustration of those who need treatment but can't afford it, but even there, many hospitals offer arrangements whereby they take the financial hit and offset it against their taxes as a charitable donation. Other generous individuals donate to help cover the cost of expensive procedures (as one reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, did for me last year - for which my eternal gratitude!). There are ways.
These two examinations, later this month, will determine whether I need further kidney procedures (up to and including losing a kidney if things don't look good). I'm hoping and praying for the best. Thereafter, as soon as the kidney situation is dealt with, I have to look at further spinal fusions near the site of my existing one. After 21 years, that area of the spine is showing the strain, and needs reinforcement. That's going to be very painful and very expensive, I suspect . . . but we'll see. Again, thanks be to God that I live in a country where such advanced care is available! I shudder to think what the fusion procedure might be if I still lived in Africa. It would probably involve baling wire and strips of rubber tire!
Blue-collar workers (on manufacturing assembly lines, transport drivers, maintenance, etc.) have seen some impact from robotics so far. That's generally been in the form of big machines permanently planted in given locations on an assembly line, performing one or more functions under supervision, then sending the article onward to the next assembly station. In terms of transport, artificial intelligence-boosted computerized copilots have already flown, some of them capable of taking an aircraft from takeoff to landing without human intervention. Driverless vehicles are already riding America's roads, and becoming more common. However, the basic structure of the workplace - a "traditional" factory, or transport, or whatever - has not (yet) been fundamentally challenged.
That's about to change. It looks as if Elon Musk and Tesla are in the vanguard, developing humanoid robots that can run their own assembly line, moving and functioning in a human fashion rather than being restricted to one place and one job. Because the robots are now (or soon will be) autonomous, the entire nature of the factory as we know it may change drastically.
Tesla is Revolutionizing Manufacturing—And Few Are Talking About It
"The most under-discussed thing in the analyst world about Tesla is not the new vehicles coming, nor the growing discussions about autonomy, but rather Tesla's next product: their new way of manufacturing.
It's a big deal, a huge step in how products are made today, and I don't think many investment firms have the right research people actually looking into what this impact is and what it's going to enable.
It's going to enable the variable cost to build products to shrink further and further, approaching zero. This is the step function needed for cost reduction to achieve further scale, and I don’t think enough people are talking about it.
It’s going to be how the Cybertruck is made, how Optimus will be made. Tesla versions its factories like they version their product.
They spend time perfecting it and have design reviews of their factory designs just as they do with their products. They have specs and performance attributes they are trying to meet. This is very different from what happens at other companies at the executive level."
That's an excerpt on X.com from this hour-long discussion of what Tesla is doing, and how it may impact other manufacturers and interests.
It sounds very similar to what SpaceX has done with its rocket engine design and manufacture. It has three generations (so far) of its Raptor rocket engine (click the image below for a larger view):
Each generation has been "smarter", lighter, more powerful and simpler than the preceding one. Furthermore, production has speeded up immensely. According to Elon Musk, SpaceX is producing one of the third-generation Raptor engines every day at its factory in California - and that'll have to increase significantly if SpaceX hopes to launch two of its mammoth Starship rockets every month this year. Only ultra-modern manufacturing techniques, using robotics and computer-aided manufacture whenever possible, can hope to achieve that rate of production. Traditional manufacturing, with its high number of human employees, literally could not work fast or accurately enough to produce them. Sounds like a poster child for the new manufacturing techniques discussed above . . . and for other industries too.
This is such a profound statement because a lot of the stories that I hear are related to, like, say Tesla capitalizing on making manufacturing the product—really just honing in so much on the factory that it becomes the product, the you know, and where we throw around 2 million cars per year, five million cars per year per factory, tens of millions of bots per year sooner than people think. The usual narrative is crazy, pie-in-the-sky; they can’t do that, look at Ford, look at BYD, they can only do so much.
But what we’re missing here is that we’ve had decades of just sitting on our asses, leveraging cheaper labor versus going out of our way to really push the boundaries of engineering and manufacturing. And now that we have a company that’s willing to do that because the leader is viewing that as a first principles approach to manufacturing, right? Instead of like, okay, cheap labor is good, but why aren’t we pushing manufacturing and engineering as much as we can to make this as efficient and as productive as possible?
Of course they’re extremely talented, they’re doing something very unique, but it’s also on the backs of 30-40 years of, I’m going to call it laziness. Like, you’re just taking the easy way out, and I get it, more profits, you’re taking care of shareholders—I get it—but you’re not really pushing the boundaries of manufacturing. I think what this leads to is, if companies and leaders truly take this to heart, we’re going to see an explosion in manufacturing across the board. It’s not just going to be a Tesla thing; I think we’re going to see it all over the place.
Another aspect is the introduction of robotics into areas like farming, where human labor has until now been indispensable. We've discussed in these pages robots that dispense insecticide and fertilizer, or harvest certain crops; but now robots are set to play a much larger role, simply because some jobs require labor that is no longer available (or willing to work for affordable wages), and/or are too dangerous to risk human lives. One commenter on the video embedded above said:
As a "small" scale rural farmer (no tractors) our biggest expense is labour, about $28,000 per employee (40 hrs/ week @ $20/hr for 8 months/year). And that is IF we can find any willing workers. IF we can they often make many costly mistakes, take time off for vacations, and productions plummets if it is too hot, too cold, too rainy, or when they are too tired.
Humanoid robots are terrifying to me, but at the same time I can't help but be drawn to the possibility that they could be the solution we have been looking for...
The remote-controlled robot was created by a Nebraska family whose farmer friend pleaded with them to build him a robot so he never had to risk going into a dangerous grain bin again.
Noting on their website that there are around 25 grain-bin engulfment deaths a year, Grain Weevil has adopted the motto “No boots in the grain.”
That’s a motto that sits well with Rabou, who grows wheat and other grains near Cheyenne.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of grain you’re raising, it’s all dangerous when it’s in a bin,” Rabou told Cowboy State Daily. “All you have to do is just collapse one empty pocket, and it can just, as soon as it has pressure on it, collapse and pull everything into it.”
Everything, in the case of many family farms, is likely to be either a good friend or family member. That makes grain-bin entrapment a very personal tragedy, both for the farm family and the surrounding farming community.
Rabou said given the choice of sending a robot into a grain bin or a person, it’s going to be the robot every time.
Add to that experimentation in other countries for new ways to use robots, particularly humanoid ones (for example, Japan has a great need for elder care, and nowhere near enough people to fill all those jobs, so it's experimenting with robotic delivery of elder care instead), and it looks as if traditional blue-collar work across many industries and economies is about to be severely shaken up. That's an important consideration for young people looking at their future careers. Can their chosen field be automated, and is it cost-effective to do so? If so, they might want to look somewhere else.
On the other hand, could the advent of such advanced automation save older industries that have become too expensive with human labor, and can't recruit enough skilled workers to produce their output? We spoke a few days ago about the USA's shipbuilding industry crisis, and how we might have to look to other countries to manufacture our ships. Could the extensive automation of US shipyards change that picture?
Finally, we have to ask what we'll do with thousands of blue-collar workers, particularly those who are untrained or without complex, in-demand skills, who will be left without work as a result of this new wave of automation. How are they to support themselves? Will some sort of universal basic income become a necessary, even an essential element of our society? Will our cities become merely residences for unwanted former workers, while factories migrate from them to new industrial zones organized around and built upon automated systems, with minimal human involvement? Who knows?
Victor Davis Hanson calls the current and ongoing California wildfires "a DEI, Green New Deal Disaster, something out of Dante's Inferno". In the blurb accompanying the short video below, he "discusses the mismanagement of resources, lack of effective forest management, and prioritization of diversity and inclusion over merit in firefighting efforts. He labels the situation as a 'systems breakdown' and warns of the larger implications for California's future."
It's a very succinct look at why and how the wildfires got so big, so quickly, and so far out of control. It's less than eight minutes long, and well worth your time to watch it.
He concludes:
I don't want to be too pessimistic or bleak tonight, but this is one of the most alarming symptoms of a society gone mad, and if this continues and if this were to spread to other states, we would become a Third World country if we're not in parts already.
