Transcription
On January 7, 2025, massive wildfires broke out all along Los Angeles, California, making for some of the worst fires in California history. Huge amounts of damage have already been done. Eleven have already been confirmed dead, and there's so much more.
Now, I got a lot of emails and questions about this to figure out what really happened and where the blame lies. So, I thought I'd try to capture everything, lay out the foundation of how we got here, what to expect next, and where the blame actually should be because there's a fair bit to go around. So, let's see if we can't figure this out together.
I'm Ricky, and this is Stupid of Vinci. To start, apologies if I sound weird; I've been super sick and trying to recover, and I want to get this video out. But let's start with how this happened.
In the morning of January 7th, Nick Lionti was the first to report the Palisade fires from his home on P Marada Drive in Pacific Palisades. On Tuesday morning, like I mentioned, so far we have 11 confirmed deaths, and so far it's burned about 60 square miles, about 40,000 acres.
To put that into perspective, it's about 28,000 football fields. Now, so far more than 12,000 structures have been burned, including thousands of homes and businesses. Now, private firms and insurance adjusters have put the cost so far in damages between $50 and $150 billion.
Now, there were actually six fires in total, but the Lydia fire and the Sunset fire were both smaller, and at the time of recording here on January 11th at 8:00 p.m., those fires are 100% contained. So then we have the Palisades fire here, we have the Eaten fire here, and if you kind of zoom in, you can see the current fire front and the evacuation regions.
There's the Kenneth fire up here and the Hurst fire up here. Now, the two biggest fires by far are the Eaten fire and the Palisades fire. To start, first and foremost, my heart goes out to all the people affected by this. I live about 100 miles from here, and this is heartbreaking.
California has been my home for the majority of my entire life, over 35 years at this point, and this is really, really sad. So first and foremost, please keep on the news, monitor all those evacuation warnings, and take heed. I know losing your home is horrible; we'll get to that here shortly, but loss of life is what we want to keep to a minimum. Eleven could have been much worse than that.
Obviously, evacuations have helped, so stay safe and listen to the instructions coming from authorities. Also, really quickly, we don't actually know the cause of the fire. The normal culprits are accidents, arson, lightning strikes, or electrical service utilities. So far, there's no evidence of accident, lightning, or electrical fires from service utilities, but there have been some arsonists that have been caught and arrested.
We don't know if that's the cause of all these fires in that particular neighborhood; we're not sure just yet. That will all come out. Now, before we get into the complex parameters of water and failures of leadership, let's talk about the perfect storm of ingredients that came together to make this fire as bad as it's been.
The first is drought. The LAX weather monitor stations typically measure about 3 and 1/12 inches of rainfall in the last three months of the year. This is the winter; this is when we get our rains. But this year, the last three months of 2024 have been super dry, about 0.3 inches of rain. That's 1/100th of what we average.
The second ingredient is a high-pressure weather system that was perched over Southern Idaho. If we look at this incredible telemetry data and wind data coming from Zoom Earth, we can see here that there's this high-pressure system working its way down. Now, high-pressure systems in the northern hemisphere rotate clockwise like this.
Okay, that was 4:00 a.m. Now, if we start zooming forward in time, you can see those wind speeds really pick up. Now, this is funneled by the fact that the Sierra Nevadas block some of that wind. You can see how it's diverted and channeled through here.
Then there's the second parameter: a low-pressure system coming off of the Gulf of California. You can see right here. Now, low-pressure systems in the northern hemisphere rotate counterclockwise, so you can see right here.
What that means is that here in the LA area, if we fast forward further in time, around 4:30 or so, you can see how this low-pressure system is pinching the winds upward, the Nevadas are pinching it downward, and that air gets funneled. That resulted in gusts, according to the weather station data from this particular app, of speeds of 50 to 60 mph.
But for individual regions around that area, we were seeing winds of up to 100 mph. Now, fire and wind are a deadly combination because winds just feed oxygen, which is the fuel that fires need. Now, these sorts of weather patterns by themselves individually aren't particularly uncommon, but when they come together causing 100 mph winds in LA, that is really uncommon.
I've lived in Southern California for the last 15 to 18 years; I've never seen wind speeds that high. The bad news is that these winds and this whole weather pattern are just beginning. Most reports from meteorologists claim that the wind speeds will remain high through the weekend and all the way through Wednesday.
So, there's going to be increased fuel for this fire for at least the next couple of days. Next, let's talk about some of the flight operations being carried out to try to suppress this fire. This is the SEAL 415 firefighting plane, aka the Super Trogger, and this legend of a bird flies right along, skimming along the ocean, picking up water to go and drop up to 1,500 gallons at a time on active fire locations.
Now, one of the really cool parts about this story is that countries like Canada and even Mexico have been sending aid. Canada sent two of these planes to help with our firefighting efforts, and Mexico has sent dozens and dozens of firefighting personnel to help with us on the ground. I love that camaraderie, that teamwork; banding together is a really positive story.
But as quickly as there's good news, there's bad news because in the early hours of operations, people were flying drones, and this happened. One of these personal drones crashed into the wing, rupturing it and causing the aircraft to be grounded. As you can see here, probably around here on the plane.
But we didn't just lose one plane; we had to ground all flight operations for some period of time to figure out what was going on because it's hard to tell. You don't want to keep losing other aircraft, right? This is infuriating. In those early hours, if we had extra flight support to be able to drop 1,500 gallons of water at a time, we might have been in better shape.
Right? Because as that fire grows, it gets harder and harder to contain. I made an entire video about the future of drones and how we've seen this whole pop-up of all these drone activities and stories, and it's going to be really serious. I hope whoever was responsible gets the full brunt of law enforcement, and we make an example of them.
Let's also take a moment to thank the heroes: the first responders, all the firefighters, all the people involved in this, the pilots, the students, operations, and everybody else. Amazing, amazing to see this in action.
Let's also just take a quick look at what this aircraft is all about. You can see it skimming here along the water surface, recollecting water. This means that the plane doesn't have to land; it doesn't have to refuel. It just skims along the water, refills its tanks from seawater, which is endless, and gets right back to work.
Now, I bring all this up because I have some questions when it comes to budgets and spending. Like, why don't we have 100 of these things in California? 50 in Northern California, 50 in Southern California to deploy whenever this happens? The entire state, I think, has 10, and who knows how many of those are operational?
But there are no easy solutions in firefighting because, again, those early hours with 50 to 100 mph sustained winds, it's really hard to fly aircraft, especially helicopters. Helicopters are really tricky to fly in wind speeds of 50 mph; they can stall on the retreating blade as it comes across the air, just leading to loss of authority and crashes and stuff. So, they can't really fly.
Now, one of the key criticisms that people have voiced is fire mitigation strategies and pre-burns to try to control the vegetation. Now, California is a massive state with all kinds of topology. We have forests, we have some of the oldest trees in the world, we have lowland areas, deserts, and everything else.
But the Pacific Palisades are covered in chaparral vegetation; it's just a thin shrub and brush. These are not forests. If you try to do a controlled burn around here, it's hard to say where it would stop; it might just spread all the way and just completely destroy everything.
Now, I'm not an expert in fire prevention. If you are, leave us a comment; I'll pin that, and I'll share the information in it. But it's not that straightforward. Typically, controlled burns are really effective in forests. As you can see here, here's a little graph showing what happens if you untreat and the end result and what happens if you do thin only, if you do a reactionary burn and a thin and RX burn.
So, you can see how much more of the trees you can preserve. But again, we weren't talking about forests; there was no thin or dead shrub and growth that you could burn to keep the trees because the trees take much longer to catch fire than vegetation and smaller brush, right? Just surface area.
But California does do controlled burns. For example, just a really quick look, there's one happening right now, the V House's prescribed burn. Now, for the heart of the controversy, the firefighters ran out of water after battling the flames for about 15 hours. LA's fire hydrants ran dry.
Now, they have three 1 million-gallon reserve tanks up high with just gravity feed for pressure to power their hydrants, and that ran out after about 15 hours. Now, 3 million gallons of water is actually not that much. But here's the problem: this is the Santa Ynez Reservoir right here.
Okay, this holds 17 million gallons. That means that this could have refilled those 3 1 million-gallon tanks over 30 times. And guess what? This was out of operation, and this reservoir has been empty since February 2024, nearly a year.
Why? Because of a tear in the floating cover, which allowed in debris and bird droppings and let it into the water supply. Now, this was a minor repair. The Department of Water and Power drained the reservoir and put out bids, and in April was looking for a cost around $889,000.
When it finally signed off to get the repairs done, it cost $130,000, and it happened in November, almost 7 months later. Now, it's not clear how the repairs are going, but the reservoir is scheduled to reopen in February, weeks after this happened. That should drive you insane.
Over a covering $89,000 to $130,000 is nothing. I'm going to bring up money a lot in this episode because California is unique in the world when it comes to money in many and all ways. So, keep these numbers in your head: around $130,000 to repair this lining cover on this reservoir.
Now, California Governor Gavin Newsom called for an investigation into the loss of water pressure and the reservoir's lack of availability, but we'll come back to him in a minute. If you're not already mad enough, think about this: this reservoir was about 1 mile from where the fires started. That's it; that's what we're talking about.
Now, there are two things to this. If there's a fire and they turn off power, was there emergency backup power to pump water back into those highly elevated water tanks? If not, then they would have been stuck anyway. That's poor urban design.
But having that reservoir empty is downright a failure of our leadership; there's just no getting around it. For seven months, they had to repair a liner. I couldn't imagine if you had the willpower; you could get it done in 30 days.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, there's one more thing to remember about this: that reservoir sits at 750 ft. Okay, but where the fire was first reported was at around 1,220 ft, and where the tanks were was even higher at 1,500 ft.
This means that we would need mechanical pumps and electricity to get that water up again. Nothing you can't engineer; it's not rocket science; it's something you could do. But it's hard to know if that capacity was there, especially with how quickly we were draining the reservoir.
But again, this could be designed right. We could build these pumps to withstand that level of demand and pump fast enough to refill those reservoirs to keep water pressure continuously in the event of all emergencies. Everything is heightened to the maximum, right? You don't need any emergency systems until you do, and when you do, you need all of it.
The average water demand is around 1,100 gallons per minute, but the firefighters were pulling around 3,300 gallons per minute—3 to 4 times the normal demand—and that's why it was depleted in just 15 hours.
So again, there are two parts to the story: the failure of the infrastructure already in place that is on leadership and the maintainers of our cities, and number two is, were these systems built sufficiently? That's more of an engineering challenge where you need great leadership to be able to have good requirements and enforce them.
So, how this Palisades water system works is that water is fed up, continuously pumped up to those three 1 million-gallon storage tanks. That's done continuously. It then flows down to the Palisades, generating pressure by gravity. All tanks were empty by 3:00 a.m. on Wednesday, so there was no way to generate pressure in the hydrant of the upper Palisades.
That tells you a couple of things: one, that the pump rate back up is probably around 1,000 gallons per minute, and the firefighters were drawing probably closer to 3,500 gallons per minute. That means that eventually, they would run out.
But if I was a city planner, I would have backup systems, backup pumps that normally don't operate with a backup energy generation station. So if the power goes out or anything else, you could still pump extra water. If you could pump the same rate you're discharging, you could fight the fire indefinitely—40 more times, right?
40 times 15 hours is an insane change in the preparedness that we would have. But we'll save that for the end when we talk about what we have to learn from this.
So after 15 hours, due to poor planning and preparation, the firefighters on the ground have no water pressure in the hydrant. Now, our only weapon in the fight is aircraft. As we've mentioned, there are some aircraft that will load fresh water and dump it onto the active fire area.
Other planes, the super scoopers, go to the ocean to get salt water wherever it's available. California has no end of that to dump it again on the active site. But if you've ever seen this, this is actually fire retardant. It's actually a product called Fost Track LC95, which is sold by a company called Perimeter.
It's a mixture of water, fertilizer, and then this red color is actually just rust. What's amazing about this is it contains two types of salts: diammonium phosphate and ammonium polyphosphate. Looking at this thing, that is a DC-10, and that is not something they teach you in civil aviation school.
That pilot flew over the ridgeline in a DC-10, an old and decommissioned aircraft, which is still used by like FedEx and things for freight. He climbs over the ridgeline and drops back down. That is absolutely legendary flying—just amazing. I'm blown away by the pilots and the people doing this sort of thing.
Now, the goal of the Fost Track is to coat all the trees and shrubs and plants, and then when the fire's heat starts to consume it, instead of allowing that carbon to become a flammable carbon material that will basically be food for the fire, it actually breaks down, absorbs some of that energy, and becomes a non-flammable carbon material.
But if you can lay down this fire retardant ahead of the fire, it will actually try to help and keep the fire contained and minimize the new biomass available for the fire to consume. This is an old tactic, and it's a very effective one. It's amazing seeing it in action; it's one of those things that never fails to impress.
Now, in these stories, I'm always blown away by the operators, pilots, and engineers, but the politicians, usually not so much. Here's a little breakdown of some of the policies that have plagued this event. LA Mayor Karen Bass made a $17 million budget cut to the city's fire department.
The chief of LA's fire department, Kristen Crowley, has been throwing her under the bus, saying that her team was not equipped for this, that they didn't have the assets and the apparatus in place either for action or even pre-deployment. A lot of times when you know a fire is happening, firefighters will send equipment, trucks, personnel, and apparatus to nearby fire stations in preparation for what's going to happen.
They were saying that they were so understaffed and under-equipped they were not able to do that. $17 million budget cuts for LA, a city that is known to have fire issues and lots of money—hard to imagine.
Okay, the next story involves Gavin Newsom and his alleged desire to destroy dams in California and how that led to this issue. The dams in question are in the northern part of the state, basically at the border with Oregon. This is Copco; this is the Copco Lake right here, and then you can kind of see the Iron Gate Reservoir.
Down here would be the dams in question. Now, his goal was to remove a series of dams along this section. Now, the meme pretty much goes that Gavin wanted to save some fish and killed Californians. So, here's some pictures: Copco Dam before and after.
That's Copco 1. This is Copco Dam 2 before and after, and this is the Iron Gate Dam before and after. Now, the goal of these dam removals was old architecture, and they wanted to remove it to restore natural waterways to preserve fish, salmon, and other fish.
It's hard to say; I'm not privy enough; I'm not a hydrologist to know how that affected water down in Southern California. But I know we had other water; we have aqueducts and stuff. So, odds are that part of the story about these dams being destroyed to save the fish is just a meme, and it's not true.
But before you think I'm letting Gavin Newsom off the hook, I got to get to the financials of California. Remember when I said California's financials are just insane to understand? According to Statista, here's a breakdown of tax revenue by state. California makes $20 billion in tax revenue; the next biggest is New York at $125 billion—about $100 billion less.
Texas, which is really profitable, a well-run state, has no income taxes, so as a result, they only collect $86 billion. So, we have $220 billion each and every year—by far and away the largest tax collector in America.
Now, let's contextualize it one step further and compare that with the entire GDP—that's every dollar a country makes. Okay, now here's a list of the top countries by GDP. There are only 56 countries on Earth with a GDP higher than California's tax income from taxes. The rest of these countries all have a lower GDP than what California makes—not from GDP; California's GDP is insane; it's in the trillions just from taxes.
So, when I hear that we have to cut, we don't have money for $130,000 to tear a liner, that we don't have $17 million for firefighters, I got to tell you, as a long-term Californian, I'm completely fed up with this. I think our financial state is absolutely insane.
A lot of countries, a lot of states don't have the kind of money to take on large infrastructure or to fix all their problems. That's not the case here. $220 billion goes a long way. So, what do we actually spend it on?
I'm going to put how insane $220 billion every year is in context, but first, we have to talk about how we are spending this. How is California in a budget deficit? It's absolutely maddening. So, I pulled up the data, and what I wanted to know is how it's changing over time.
So, over here are the 2017-2018 numbers, and over here are last year's numbers. Okay, and I wanted to just show the difference in growth. So, if we look over here, the largest growth sector is a bucket of money called Health and Human Services. The second largest is K through 12 education.
Let's talk about K through 12 education first. You might be thinking California is the biggest state in the Union; that is true. We are the biggest state in the Union, but maybe not for long. Here's a look at enrollment numbers for K through 12. We hit our peak of over 6.3 million students back in 2004, and we have been on a decline ever since.
The latest numbers I could find are about 5.8 million. Okay, so that means that we now spend 150% more, or $27 billion more, on K through 12 education for fewer students. And by no report I've ever seen does California somehow get a miraculous grade of some of the greatest schools in the nation. It's not the case at all.
So, this has to do with administrative bloat—that's salaries being paid to non-teaching positions. Right? I am a huge advocate of public schools. I believe that's the great equalizer. If you want to give people equal opportunities, investing in great schools across the board—not only in rich neighborhoods but everywhere.
But what we have done is hired administrators, and there's a level of bloat that's really prevalent, especially in higher education. The number of positions, the number of non-teaching positions has gotten completely out of control, and we have to fix that.
We cannot spend that much money per student, which is way more than any of the really great countries spend for these kinds of outcomes. I think that's something that has to be better. But as if the general fund wasn't enough, we have special funds; we get bonds. We can't even stick to our original budgets, and as a result, this is why we run in deficits.
But this amount of money for Health and Human Services is probably the spending that everyone gives California a hard time over. This is the homelessness problem; this is low-income housing; this is all those projects. So, that means that K through 12 education and Health and Human Services is nearly $200 billion.
Again, we make about $220 billion; I think this year might be $230. Well, we'll see after all this, but that's a huge amount of our spending. Now, before I get into how the Health and Human Services is performing, here's a general call to reason: we should tell all of our elected officials to return to a 2016 budget that was around $183 billion and enforce that because I think we need to have $40 to $50 billion of surplus to handle disasters and to have a massive water reclamation and water mitigation project that should span a long time.
But when you have this much money coming in, it's more than doable. So, how is the homeless problem going? California has 188,000 homeless people; that's about a quarter of all the homeless people in America, and that number grew 3% year-over-year, and it basically grows every year.
The homeless population is growing. Now, does that mean that more people are falling into homelessness, or are we attracting homelessness? I mean, California has some of the best weather in America all year round. There are places in California you can live outside in a tent all year.
Those things, I don't know, but I can tell you that these plans are not working, and there's huge levels of unaccounted-for allocations, money not being spent properly, and all the rest. But to put that into perspective, that part of the government is eating up $14 billion. That cannot continue.
If we cut that in half and forced California to $50 billion or some number, they might actually have better outcomes because maybe we'd have better people in charge who could do a better job of handling it. By the way, that $220 billion doesn't include property taxes.
Okay, the average per capita that a person in California pays is $1,1950 per person. Okay, the population of 39 million people—that's $76 billion every year in property taxes. Now, that money isn't counted to the state because it goes into local coffers, but that's another nearly $80 billion combined—$300 billion.
Now, think about that for a minute. So, remember earlier when I said Gavin Newsom probably isn't to blame for the dams in the very north of the state? This is where he definitely is to blame. This is an article that talks about the 42 aging dams in the state that need money for restorations—about $50 million in total.
Now, apparently, there's no money for these dams to fix them, and as a result, they've had to run at lower than usual capacity. Okay, now I want to put this into context for you: $50 million, after the numbers that we've just been talking about, is less than nothing.
Why is this so bad? I live in San Diego. Last winter, a year ago, we had really, really good rainfall. We basically get really good rains every couple of years, like every four years, kind of the El Niño cycles, and then kind of dry, clear blue skies and no rain.
So, when I heard stories a year ago that there were dams in San Diego, in particular, and other parts of the state that were so damaged that the dam operators had to open levees and let the water out because if they kept the water back, the pressure from all that water could cause catastrophic failure.
So, dams were so compromised that they couldn't hold back about 107 billion gallons of capacity of water. That's what was lost by not repairing these dams. So, $17 million to fund the fire department out of zero, give them $107 million, and $50 million—potentially $100 million because these things cost more than they say—$200 million, $500 million, whatever that number was.
We could easily afford to fix it, and if we had 107 billion gallons, that's like having 1,000 Santa Ynez reservoirs—1,000! Picture that! That reservoir that we showed you near the Pacific Palisades—1,000 of them that we could litter across the state, across all the major population centers, Northern and Southern California, in the event of the next one, right?
That wasn't done over $50 million, and that is where you should be absolutely furious because I remember that story, and I remember thinking we are letting beautiful, fresh, clean water go right back to the Pacific Ocean instead of storing it all because we don't have the political wherewithal or the power of will to get the work that needs to get done, done.
Right now, the infuriation about this story is multifold for me, right? Because as an engineer, I always think about how do you design a system with redundancy, with failure, and backup, right? The Santa Ynez Reservoir should be one of many. There should be other reservoirs, so if there's construction or anything happening in one reservoir, you have multiple that can jump up.
You should have two pumps in operation and two backup pumps that are maintained and checked at all times. If there's a failure of any pump, you're never without water. You should be able to output enough water to maintain a critical fire. These are the exercises that you should go through, right?
Airplanes are built this way. We talked about planes in the past with redundant hydraulic systems, multiple redundancies in terms of motors and engines and pumps. We have to build better, and it's all doable when you make $200 to $300 billion every year. There's no excuse for not being able to do any of this stuff.
Finally, insurance—what does this mean for insurance? Because I mentioned that $220 billion tax base that's based on really wealthy people paying taxes. Just like in federal income taxes, the upper 50% of earners pay the majority of state and local taxes as well. So, if we lose them because we can't insure their homes, we're in trouble.
So, California's insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, has already issued a mandatory one-year moratorium on non-renewals and cancellations to protect Southern California residents affected by recent fires. They have a list on their website, which you can put in the description, where you can check to see if you're under that list.
That means that if you had no previous notice or anything, they cannot cancel your policy for one year. What happens after that? We'll get to that. The other thing is that they've also told the insurance companies to do the right thing for any non-renewals in the past 90 days before the fires broke out.
This is for people who got letters saying we're going to cancel your insurance effective this date. If you got that letter 90 days from when the fires broke out, they're asking these companies to do the right thing, but there's no guarantee.
I've had my insurance canceled on me before. I had Farmers, and they told me we're dropping you, and now I have another company. I'll be honest with you; I don't know what will happen to us in the future if I'm going to start getting letters as soon as they can to drop us.
Companies have already been pulling out of California and Florida. This is not just a California problem. Florida has huge devastation, especially last year, and they have similar risks where companies are saying it's just not worth the reward, and we're going to drop coverage.
Home values in California are especially crazy because of how expensive they are. Average homes in the Pacific Palisades were over $4 million, and that's why even if the fire is relatively small in the grand scheme of things, the damage has been absolutely insane.
About 1,600 policies in Pacific Palisades were dropped by State Farm in July as a result. Homeowners in the Pacific Palisades had increasingly shifted to Fair, which is California's Fair Access to Insurance Requirements plan, with roughly 1,400 of the town's 9,000 homes covered by the plan. That's like one in seven.
This is a backup for people who can't get insurance, not a normal insurance vendor. Since 2019, more than 100,000 Californians have lost their insurance. These numbers become insane, especially at the very expensive nature of the state—homes, labor, and everything else to rebuild these homes.
Now, climate disasters and climate change are the reasons for these companies to abandon California and Florida and other parts of the world. Now, if you believe in climate change or not, the insurance companies and their models sure as heck do, and that's why they're getting out in front of this, saying I don't want to cover because we would have to charge these people so much money that it wouldn't even be worth it.
And it's really unfortunate for people like me who paid homeowners insurance for 20 years, never used it for a dollar, and when they drop me, I get nothing back, right? This is the reality in the post-aftermath, even for people not affected by this fire that we will have to face.
And that's why I urge everybody to have some compassion and sympathy for the people involved in this. If you're able to donate, we'll put a donation and a charity link in the description that you can give to help people. We will do the same, and hopefully, we can do better in the future.
But I urge you, and this is a call for anybody who's watching because I know my audience: if you're an engineer, a hydrologist, you work in water, or you know large water works, you're an accountant, you have any kind of high technical engineer or scientist background, I urge you to run for political office.
Because currently, politicians are social workers, lawyers, and politicians, and they are just not equipped to solve the big problems. If we had more engineers in politics, I'd have a lot more optimism for the future. I'm not quite there yet; I still have a big mortgage to pay off, but maybe in 10 years.
So, if you're close to that point in your life and you have civil service in you, it'd be an amazing way to help your country, your state, and so much more because we need smarter people with industry knowledge running things. We can't keep doing things the same way, and we need drastic changes.
But the good news is, with how much money California makes, it's possible unless we screw this whole thing up, drive all the high earners out of here, and drop that tax base. Then we're all screwed; there's no way we can recover.
My optimism and my hope only exist if we can fix this problem. But you've heard of people leaving California largely now; it's lower-income people who just can't afford to buy a house. But we start losing the really rich people with their $10 million homes and their huge property tax bills and state taxes.
When we lose that, we won't even have the resources to dig ourselves out of this, all while running deficits. It's unacceptable, and if you have any ideas for what we can do in terms of the citizenry, write to me, leave me a comment; I'll see what I can do.
But we have to demand better because I think we have to. There's so much that we need to fix in California, and it's doable, and it's worth it. It's a state that I love, and I'm not giving up hope.
All right, that's a quick look. Thank you guys so much; we'll catch you next week.