Another Hit For the Cs: Californian Exodus

Interesting article from Germany

California's coast is sinking
Ground subsidence affects millions of residents of San Francisco and Los Angeles


Creeping danger: In many coastal areas of California the ground literally sinks away from under people's feet, as measurements reveal. The subsoil there is sinking by up to eight millimeters per year - making these areas doubly susceptible to sea-level rise. Up to eight million people are affected, including the inhabitants of the metropolises Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The coastal areas are among the most densely populated areas on earth, and at the same time they are the areas most affected by sea-level rise and storm surges. Some 250 million people already live less than one meter above the flood line. And that is not the only problem: On many coasts, the ground is also sinking further and further, thus increasing the risk of flooding. The Mekong delta and other coasts of Asia are affected by this, as well as parts of the US east coast.

Sink rate of up to eight millimeters per year

Now it is becoming apparent that the subsoil is gradually sinking even on the Californian coast. Researchers led by Emma Blackwell of Arizona State University have determined this with the help of high-resolution satellite radar data and ground-based measurements. This allowed them to estimate the subsidy along a good 1,300 kilometers of coastline to within a millimeter per year and a spatial resolution of 100 meters.

The result: although there are some coastal zones in California where the ground is rising - including parts of Central California and an area north of the Bay Area - the results are very encouraging. However, the measured data show a significant ground subsidence, particularly in many densely populated urban areas. According to the data, the subsoil is sinking by up to eight millimeters per year in some zones up to 300 kilometers in size.

San Francisco: Near plate border strengthens subsidiarity

Four already low-lying metropolitan regions are particularly affected by the subsidence of the ground: San Francisco, Monterey Bay, Los Angeles and San Diego. In the Bay Area, the subsidence rates reach values of 5.9 millimeters per year on average. At San Francisco Airport, the values are even around ten millimeters per year, as the team determined as early as 2018. This could make it unusable in the long term.
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The reason for this subsidence is primarily the location of the Bay Area directly on a plate boundary: "The subsidy around the Bay of San Francisco is strongly influenced by tectonics, especially the San Andreas Fault," explain Blackwell and her team. But gradual compression of the soft sediment also plays a role, for example at San Francisco Airport.

Los Angeles: groundwater extraction and oil production

In Los Angeles, the subsoil is sinking, especially in some areas directly on the coast and in parts of the hinterland. "This reflects the heavy use of groundwater in this region and also the extraction of fossil fuels," the scientists explain. The subsidy rates of this metropolis are two to three millimeters per year, and the situation is similar in San Diego. There, however, the soft sediment causes much of the subsidence.

By far the strongest subsidence is in the area around Monterey Bay. There the subsidence rates reach up to 8.7 millimeters per year. One reason for this is the tectonic activity of the San Andreas Fault and other disturbances, according to the researchers. On the other hand, however, the soft ice age sediment that gradually becomes denser in these old river alluvial areas.

Up to eight million people affected

All in all this means: In these four major metropolitan areas alone, millions of people are affected by both sea-level rise and subsidence. Above all, the often flat but densely built-up parts of these cities are thus exposed to an increased risk of flooding. In Los Angeles and San Francisco alone, more than two million people each live in such risk zones, as the researchers report.

"Overall, we estimate that between 4.3 and 8.7 million people in California's coastal communities are affected by the subsidence of the ground," say Blackwell and her colleagues. "Our study thus underscores the urgency with which flood control plans must also be adapted to this subsidence of land areas.

 

Published 2 days ago UC Berkeley KTVU FOX 2
BERKELEY, Calif. - UC Berkeley has announced sweeping pay cuts that will affect thousands of its employees.

Chancellor Carol Christ says that the university has lost $340 million since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

It's been able to recover $140 million through federal relief funding, a temporary halt on pay raises, short term borrowing and other initiatives.

But more cost-saving measures are needed.

Crist says that under the new plan, union-represented staff will have hours cut.

Those not in unions will see furlough days and pay cuts for at least a year.

 
It really is bizarre watching so-called elites fouling and destroying their own nests, their own base of support. Reminds me of Lobaczewski's discussions of "negative selection."

Pathocrats’ achievement of absolute domination in the government of a country would not be permanent since large sectors of the society would become disaffected by such rule and find some way of toppling it. Pathocracy at the summit of governmental organization also does not constitute the entire picture of the “mature phenomenon”. Such a system of government has nowhere to go but down. Any leadership position, (down to village headman and community cooperative managers, not to mention the directors of police units, and special services police personnel, and activists in the pathocratic party) must be filled by individuals whose feeling of linkage to such a regime is conditioned by corresponding psychological deviations, which are inherited as a rule. However, such people become more valuable because they constitute a very small percentage of the population. Their intellectual level or professional skills cannot be taken into account, since people representing superior abilities are even harder to find. After such a system has lasted several years, one hundred percent of all the cases of essential psychopathy are involved in pathocratic activity; they are considered the most loyal, even though some of them were formerly involved on the other side in some way.

Under such conditions, no area of social life can develop normally, whether in economics, culture, science, technology, administration, etc. Pathocracy progressively paralyzes everything. Reasonable people must develop a level of patience beyond the ken of anyone living in a normal man’s system just to explain what to do and how to do it to some obtuse mediocrity or psychological deviant. This special pedagogy requires a great deal of time and effort, but it would otherwise not be possible to maintain tolerable living conditions and necessary achievements in the economic area or intellectual life of a society. However, pathocracy progressively intrudes everywhere and dulls everything.
 





Bay Area's share of VC deals predicted to fall below 20% for first time in 2021
By Cromwell Schubarth – TechFlash Editor, Silicon Valley Business Journal Dec 14, 2020, 10:08am EST
After pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into research and development, Revance Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: RVNC) began selling its first product in September. The company also licensed another product from Europe and acquired a fintech company, giving Revance its own payment platform. In a single year, the biotech's headcount more than doubled to 450 people.

Revance CEO Foley and other company leaders also decided that instead of trying to draw more employees to its California home base, it was time to bring its headquarters closer to that talent and the company's customers. It chose Nashville, becoming the Music City's newest public company in a move formally announced Wednesday by company and state officials.

The San Francisco Business Times reported Revance's move last month.

"Before, we had to drive everyone to California. We were missing out on big opportunities to go after the best talent out there," Foley said in an interview. "We needed to make sure we had access to top-quality people in a friendly place to do business, that was centrally located, easy to get to and get out of. … Today’s workforce doesn’t want to be told, 'You have to be here for the job.' Frankly, in Covid, the idea of having a distributed workforce is resonating."

Foley will lean on Nashville's existing workforce and ability to attract talent more than the typical corporate relocation. Revance isn't closing any California offices or operations with this move: The company says it plans to retain manufacturing and offices in Newark, where its headquarters had been located, a technology hub in Pleasanton and commercial offices in Irvine.

Initially, fewer than 20 employees will relocate to Nashville. However, Foley said, Revance plans to create about 150 new jobs in Nashville during the next five years, not counting the small number of jobs shifting here.


Revance joins a small but growing roster of biotech companies in the region, beginning to fill a slice of its legacy health care industry that is largely missing.

"We tried to look … from a development and growth standpoint, a metro area that’s doing it right and has all the ingredients to support long-term sustainable growth. We felt Nashville really checked that box," Foley said. He said the company evaluated options in Arizona, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia and Florida (he declined to identify the other finalist contender that Nashville topped).

Revance is leasing 40,661 square feet of office space at the newly opened Gulch Union office building, including all of the tower's 20th floor — its top floor. Part of the office space will become an "experience and training center" for Revance to deepen ties with existing customers and recruit new ones.

Foley said the headquarters move is not about where Revance has been, but where he believes the company is heading. Revance makes a Botox-alternative injection aimed at doing everything from smoothing out wrinkles and crow's feet to combatting arm spasms, a crippling neck-muscle condition and plantar fasciitis, a common cause of heel pain.

Foley envisions even more therapeutic possibilities like that, including to potentially treat migraines and overactive bladders.

"These are billion-dollar categories we're going after," Foley said. "In our market cap [of $1.8 billion], you can see there are high hopes and high expectations in the investor community. As we look at where we're going … we think the health care expertise exists in Nashville that allows us to lean on those who understand reimbursement, payer dynamics, adoption models — all those things in health care."

Revance reported cash, equivalents and short-term investments totaling $435.8 million as of Sept. 30, which the company forecasts is sufficient to fund operations into 2023. The company sold $2.8 million of facial injections in the quarter. It reported a year-to-date net loss of $203.8 million.

A Dec. 16 state press release indicates that the state Department of Economic and Community Development and also the Tennessee Valley Authority offered incentives to Revance Therapeutics. Exact amounts were not immediately clear. It does not appear that Metro offered incentives.

"There was healthy competition for our business. The incentives were competitive, but I wouldn't say they were make-or-break for us," Foley said. "Clearly, if there was a big enough gap (between Tennessee and competing markets), that could have influenced the decision we made. With Tennessee, I come back to the fact that they're very business-focused. They get it's a competitive process, the dollars matter, the investments we'll make in the people we'll hire will be economically beneficial."
 
With Oracle moving its headquarters to Texas, there’s a growing sense that it’s only a matter of time before another major Bay Area company takes its head office out of California.

There’s a short list of companies that already seem to have one foot out the door — whether it’s Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC), with its CEO based in New York, or Chevron (NYSE: CVX) employing more people in Houston than it does in the Bay Area.

The Bay Area’s Fortune 500 companies often reiterate their commitment to the region — until one day unveiling plans to move their headquarters out of state. Such was the case with McKesson (NYSE: MCK), which told the San Francisco Business Times on Nov. 8, 2018, that its headquarters is in San Francisco. Three weeks later, McKesson disclosed that its headquarters was headed to Texas.

Site selection consultant John Boyd told me in April that a headquarters move is one of the easiest elements of a corporate structure to move since it can be done with the issuance of a press release — or dropping the news in an SEC filing, as was the case with Oracle.

“Companies no longer view the headquarters as simply housing its talent and real estate,” Boyd said. "They view the headquarters site selection process as an opportunity to rebrand the company and recalibrate its image in the marketplace."

Here’s a look at a handful of companies I’m keeping an eye on for a possible headquarters move out of the Bay Area and how what they’ve told me has subtly changed over time when I asked if they were considering doing so. One wants to be careful about reading too much into a corporate statement, but it’s good to be observant. Companies often choose their words very carefully when discussing sensitive topics, such as a potential headquarters relocation.

Readers hoping to hear the Bay Area’s corporate titans praise the region’s strengths as a place to do business or wax poetically about how they’ve done business in San Francisco since the Gold Rush, will be disappointed.

Wells Fargo — The bank, founded in 1852 in San Francisco to handle the gold coming out of California, now has its largest employment center in Charlotte, North Carolina, and key elements of its C-suite in New York. Wells also aims to cut $10 billion or almost 20% of its annual expenses, so a headquarters move could be appealing.

“It would almost be malfeasance if Wells Fargo executives did not consider leaving California,” Boyd told me.
When I asked Wells Fargo in April whether the bank’s headquarters would leave San Francisco, a spokesman said: “Wells Fargo will continue to be headquartered in San Francisco. The company has a nationwide footprint, a nationwide customer base, and a workforce of 263,000 dedicated to serving our customers and communities during these challenging times and beyond.”

When I asked Wells on Dec. 23 about a possible headquarters move, the same spokesman said, “Wells Fargo continues to be headquartered in San Francisco, and we have more than 13,000 employees in the San Francisco Bay Area.”

Levi Strauss & Co. — The jeans maker (NYSE: LEVI) is seeking to sublease more than 25% of its San Francisco headquarters, or about 100,000 square feet.

Asked about the possibility of the company leaving its hometown since Levi Strauss stitched his first pair of jeans amid the Gold Rush, a company spokesman said: “The sublease listing is our only current update. We can confirm that two floors of our San Francisco headquarters at Levi’s Plaza (1155 Battery St.) have been listed for sublease. These plans do not affect our current lease agreement.”

Chevron — The oil giant has gradually moved more executives to Houston, where the company employs more people than in the Bay Area. Chevron employs 5,187 people in the Bay Area, as of last July, and 6,989 in the Houston area, as of September, according to data from the San Francisco Business Times and the affiliated Houston Business Journal.

When asked in March 2019 whether the company will move its longtime Bay Area headquarters from San Ramon to Texas, a spokesman said, “Our corporate headquarters is and will remain located in San Ramon, California, in close proximity to major energy assets in the state. Chevron is a California-based company, and has continued to be an important part of the state’s economy and growth for more than 140 years. We remain committed to the state.”

When asked Dec. 23 about a possible headquarters move, another spokesman said, “Our corporate headquarters are located in San Ramon, California, in close proximity to major energy assets in the state. Chevron is a California-based company, and has continued to be an important part of the state’s economy and growth for more than 140 years.”

Visa — Visa (NYSE: V), with a large campus and former headquarters in Foster City, is planning to move its San Francisco headquarters from 1 Market St. to the Mission Rock development in San Francisco. In recent years, I’ve asked CEO Al Kelly about the company’s commitment to keeping the headquarters in San Francisco.

After the January 2020 annual meeting, Kelly spoke with me about Visa’s decision to keep its headquarters in San Francisco: “It’s been our home for quite awhile, and we have a lot of talented employees here. We want to keep them close to home and at the same time we wanted to get a larger space.”

Asked in the January interview whether Visa had considered moving the headquarters elsewhere, Kelly said, “We looked at a wide range of options, but we didn’t go into it with any religion on what we would do one way or another.”

Pinterest has shown that leases can be broken, saying in August that it had paid $89.5 million to get out of a lease for 490,000 square feet in San Francisco that it had just signed in 2019. Visa has much deeper pockets should it decide that it has had enough of San Francisco’s zest for new business taxes.

When asked on Dec. 23 whether the payments giant is considering a headquarters move out of California, a spokesman told me: “No, nothing has changed regarding our plans to have San Francisco remain our corporate headquarters.”

Uber — The ride-sharing company turned heads in 2019 when it got $36 million in Texas government incentives for what was billed as a “new U.S. general and administrative hub.” That was one of the largest incentives in the past decade to spur economic development in Texas, igniting speculation that Uber's (NYSE: UBER) headquarters could be heading to Dallas. In August 2019, the company was eager to squash that idea, with a spokesman saying: “We are not moving our corporate headquarters there, and we don’t have plans to.”
Last May, with Uber seeking to cut costs as the pandemic slammed ride-sharing, I asked again whether the headquarters was moving to Dallas. The same spokesman said: “We’ll decline to comment on this.”
 
Denial and distopya as California prepares for 2021.

2020: A "Hell of a Year" In Review
Premiered Dec 14, 2020

A dystopia is a community or society that is undesirable or frightening. It is an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Sir Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence and poverty. Wikipedia
 
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I just watched a clip from Dave Rubin where he talks to Adam Carolla, where Adam says at one point that the California politicians "run the state into the ocean" with their regulations, high taxes, and tyranny. That made me think of the C's prediction ...
He says this within the first 1 minute of the video:
 
By Stephanie Lai Jan. 12, 2021 6 AM
90

Andrew Kindler, a retired aerospace engineer, packing up his longtime San Marino home Dec. 16 to move to Arizona.n (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

The California dream has been fading for a long time, and people have been voting with their feet.

In the last few years, the exodus has accelerated, with tens of thousands more people leaving than moving in.

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted even more people to give up on the state, experts say. Some have retreated to their hometowns elsewhere because they lost their livelihoods. Others are taking advantage of working remotely to escape the state’s high housing prices and long commutes.

In the fiscal year that ended in July, Los Angeles County had by far the greatest net loss due to migration of any California county — more than 74,000 people, according to state demographers. Some moved to nearby areas with lower costs of living; others ventured farther or left the state altogether.

California’s beachy lifestyle and creative energy in entertainment, the arts and technology still exert a strong pull — but increasingly, only the wealthy can afford these perks. Dowell Myers, an expert on demographic change and a professor at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, said there is not enough affordable housing to keep young families in the state. Native Californians often stay for personal reasons, but for those who came from somewhere else, there’s little keeping them from heading to cheaper, less-crowded pastures.

“Those who migrated earlier are turning around and going back to where they came from because they just couldn’t achieve the American dream in California — because that involves buying a single-family house,” Myers said.



 
Thanks for keeping up on this c.a.

I think this trend is long overdue. We're surprised it's taken this long.

I love the Northwoods/mountains but we're not currently living there and are just another statistic planning on leaving. Very soon.

We were in SF [and area] about 3 weeks ago and the tent cities are growing at alarming rates. If one is around long enough, it's very plain to see. I can't imagine what might be the result of "easing border restrictions".

Much appreciated.
 

Where California goes today, the rest of the United States and much of the Western world goes tomorrow. But what we are now seeing in America’s most populous state is the complete internal collapse of the entire liberal progressive civilization and the society that has most frantically tried to fulfill it.
......

But if America’s future now has no future – what future can the rest of America look forward to?
 
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