Scott made the following comment:

"I thought CA was supposed to run out of natural resourses by now (Water, oil, land, etc...)"

California has hit its limit. My children are third generation "prune pickers" (native born Californians). My grandfather was a failed New Mexican homesteader who drove to California in a decrepted Model-A pickup truck to escape the Dust Bowl.

California WAS without question the best place on Earth to live. It's still pretty good but now only about par with the rest of America. California once had vast deposits of petroleum. I remember as a child seeing oil wells around Bakersfield spreading out to the horizon (they're all gone now). I remember as a child (during Ronald Reagan's term as governor) seeing hills covered with the stumps of old growth redwood trees. The destruction of old growth forests during that period was amazing. The shame of Los Angeles is the Owens Valley. The Owens Valley was a rich farming area that was destroyed to provide drinking water for LA. The shame of San Francisco is the Hetch Hetchy Valley. The Hetch Hetchy Valley was almost as beautiful as Yosemite but was flooded to provided drinking water for San Francisco. I remember as a child knowing that we were getting close to Disneyland by seeing all the orange tree orchards as we approached Anaheim (they've all been cut down). When I lived in Santa Clara, I remember the walnut and orange tree orchards being cut down to clear land for residental development. Orange County, Santa Clara County and the San Fernando Valley were all prime farm land with some of the world's richest top soild (they're now all covered with asphalt and houses). (Un)fortunately continued growth in California is impossible. The state has literally run out of water. All of the places that can be easily dammed are already dammed. Many of the older reservoirs (almost a century old) are already silted up. These older reservoirs can not be dynamited because the silt is full of heavy metal runoff (mercury) left over from the 19th century gold rush (it's literally toxic waste). Things will be grim when we have our next big drought.

The dot-com implosion was the best thing that every happened to the San Francisco Bay Area. All of the Bay Area's resources had been pushed past the breaking point. The freeways were almost always jammed (lots of fancy cars bought with credit or IPO money). The cost of commercial real estate was so high that 30 year old businesses were folding because they could not pay their rent (those building are now empty along with vast tracks of new and empty office buildings left over from the dot-com bust). The dot-com is a monument to breath taking greed.

Gary