An assuring legend is printed on U.S. bills: “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” I have always been glad to know that Uncle Sam is there for me; got my back, so to speak.

But for 14.1 million American adults, that statement is a lie because bills are being pushed aside by bank cards, credit cards, and online payment systems like PayPal. The stranded are the unbanked, the unplasticized.

The unbanked aren’t axiomatically the homeless, the undocumented immigrants, or those who have fallen through the cracks. They are also people with jobs who pay their taxes, and many of whom live exemplary lives but don’t have bank accounts.

That may be because they don’t trust banks or — and this is a big factor for the working poor who are unbanked — they feel having a bank account is too expensive. They have been charged disproportionate fees for bouncing a check, for late payments, or for any of the other creative ways banks go after fees to enhance their earnings, like the high ones for using an ATM.

However, if you choose to keep your money under the mattress or in the breadbox, you elect to be the financial equivalent of undocumented. Essentially, you are immobilized.

All this came to mind while I was checking in online for a recent United Airlines flight. I learned that I would need to save a form of payment for boxed meals and snacks before I boarded because I wouldn’t be able to use credit cards while in flight. United maintains, “We are working to make your trip more enjoyable while maintaining a safer and more touchless travel experience.” In the time of COVID-19, that’s fine with me. But the corollary is they don’t take cash — no credit card, no snack.

Most airport eateries are going to ordering by computer — again, no credit card, no food. I went to one of those wired restaurants at Newark Liberty International and wondered about the unbanked: How would they feed a child if they didn’t know cash wasn’t accepted?

For the unbanked, travel is nearly impossible. First, you would have to go to the airport and buy your ticket with cash. But would they take it? Airline offices are no longer scattered about, and most travel agencies are now virtual. To get to and from the airport, you may have to take an expensive taxi — if one can be found, as you won’t be riding with Uber or Lyft.

Want to stay in a hotel when you arrive at your destination? You won’t have a reservation because you can’t make one without a credit card. Then you must beg the hotel to let you stay.

Once in San Francisco, I had to pay cash for a hotel room because I had lost my wallet. They gave me a room (I was in their guest file because I had stayed there on a previous trip); took a cash deposit for the room, which my office had sent through Western Union; and instructed me not to charge any items to it, not a drink, a meal, or a phone call.

Welcome to the world of plastic, as in credit-card dependency. Who would have thought that your freedom was linked to a small, plastic card?

The road from being unbanked to being banked is littered with obstacles and it takes years to build credit for, say, a new car or a mortgage. The person who has no bank account has no credit history — and that means has little official existence.

There are hidden costs for being unbanked. Your paycheck will have to be cashed somewhere and check-cashing services, like payday lenders, charge fees that can be as high as 3 percent of the check. Also, the unbanked are victimized by dubious operators, performing illegal banking services and other crookery.

The burden of being unbanked is limitless.

I have been in only one earthquake. It was in Izmir, Turkey, in 2014. The earth moved, undulating under my feet. Buildings shook and people’s fear could be felt.

Americans have reason to believe they are in a societal earthquake of unknown intensity or long-term consequence. Everywhere the earth we have known and trusted — political, social, economic, technological, and international — seems to be moving. Institutions are shaking, technology is obliterating the familiar; new and disturbing politics is rampant, left and right; and palpable climate change has arrived.

Our foreign skill set has been found wanting. Fear for the future is resident in our consciousness.

Our politics may be the most shaken of our intuitions. What we used to know how to do — like conduct an election — is in question and the fixes, as in conservative-introduced voting bills, threaten what we have held to be secure, those very elections. Electoral results are widely distrusted in a way they never have been previously.

We used to think we knew how to educate children. Now, that is in doubt as political factions fight over the curriculum, to say nothing of masks for children. To quote a vintage ad, “What’s a mother to do?”

The COVID-19 virus continues its ravages, reduced but not vanquished. It has left its mark: It has reshaped work and play to an extent we don’t yet understand. There are jobs, at least 10 million, going begging and workers who don’t want those jobs. They range from demand for drivers and warehouse personnel, reflecting the revolution in shopping, to airport workers, hospital staff, and, of course, restaurants.

Even the aerospace industry is begging. The Northrop Grumman plant in Maryland has a huge banner facing the Amtrak tracks seeking new hires.

It is a great time to change careers, obviously.

We don’t know whether work-at-home regimes will stay or whether the human need to congregate will win out.  Do you move far from the office or wait out the phenomenon?

Technology controls our lives, and that isn’t always easy to live with. Try talking to any airline, insurance company, bank, or state agency and you will need a thorough familiarity with computers because the person on the line, or the recording, wants you off the telephone and online. This, even if you called because you were stymied online, to begin with.

If you get to a human, usually in Asia, that soul likely won’t have the advantages which come with having English as a first or second language. Hard-to-reach firms’ biggest asset isn’t, as they used to say, you, the customer. You don’t count to any large organization. Stop complaining and wait for a “customer-care representative,” who will tell you to get lost after you’ve waited for hours. You are now an insignificant part of megadata, which some in the data business have called the new oil. Some corporate websites don’t publish a phone number. Don’t bother the tranquility of the C-suite.

The poor, who should be the beneficiaries of the new technologies, are victims. Take the unbanked: That large number of people who don’t have credit cards or a bank account. They can’t get rides from Uber or Lyft, and taxis are almost completely absent from city streets.

The unbanked can’t, should they be able to afford it, check into a hotel without plastic, or make a reservation for tickets to travel or go to a concert. They are non-members of society. They are on the wrong side of the digital divide — and that is a bleak place to be. Theirs are the children who got no education during the lockdowns and who will suffer through all their lives as a result. If you miss the techno train, you walk along tracks behind it.

The rise of China has damaged our self-esteem and we fear we are looking into the chasm of cold war or worse. Likewise, the calamitous end of our time in Afghanistan has further weakened our faith in our ability to get it right. (Heck, even “Jeopardy” can’t pick a host.) Our intelligence agencies seem to have totally failed, and our military doesn’t appear to be the winning institution we have been so proud of for so long.

After an earthquake, nations rebuild the structures. We need to start rebuilding with our institutions, and first among those is buttressing the democratic system. An invincible voting rights act would be a good starting place.

Our democracy hasn’t fallen yet, but it is shaking as the ground shifts under it.

The flooding in New York City, the high winds in New Orleans, and the winter Freeze in Texas usher in a new reality for the electric industry, showing how outdated its infrastructure has become and how it has to expect the unexpected.

Resilience is the word used by utilities to describe their ability to speedily restore power, to bounce back after an outage. This year, resilience has been put to the test with major challenges affecting electric utilities from coast to coast. Mostly, the results have been disappointing to catastrophic.

It is reasonable to believe that resilience means that if there is an outage power will be back on forthwith or within hours, and that is often the case.

But as the attacks on the system from aberrant weather have become more frequent and severe, the bounce-back has been closer to struggle back slowly.

Two cases tell a tale of catastrophe. Recently, the complete loss of electricity to New Orleans during Hurricane Ida, much of which is still in the dark and with people suffering without water, light, air conditioning, or the ability to charge a cell phone.

Even before Ida tore into the Gulf Coast, teams from other utilities were on their way to help. ConEd in New York was one of many utilities that had trucks rolling to the scene before Ida hit. That kind of quick, fraternal response is often what is meant by resilience. Bold and well-coordinated though it may have been, it was not nearly enough. Entergy, which supplies the power to the area, failed the resilience test.

The other standout was in the failure of the Texas grid when Winter Storm Uri struck in the middle of February. It froze much of Texas for five days and more than 150 people died, some by freezing to death in their homes. The unfortunately named Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the electric grid of Texas, abominably failed the resilience test.

Some of the natural gas supply was cut off during the deep freeze because the system hadn’t been weatherized, but the gas that did flow also flowed money.

Gas operators made enormous profits, including Energy Transfer, which made $2.4 billion. Not only had the gas operators not signed on to the concept of resilience, but the idea of commonweal was absent.

While electric utilities — there are a few large electric utilities and more than 80 small ones in Texas — struggled to honor their mandate to serve, the gas suppliers, according to those in the electric utility industry, served their mandate only to their shareholders.

Rayburn, the electric cooperative which has a service area near Dallas, spent what it had budgeted for three years in just five days on gas purchases, CEO David Naylor told me.

On the PBS show “White House Chronicle,” Paula Gold-Williams, president and CEO of CPS Energy, the large, municipally-owned gas and electric utility in San Antonio, said she thought the suppliers of gas to electric generators should be regulated in the same way Texas utilities are.

Wildfires in the West, storms in the East, and up the center of the country have put a huge strain on the electric utilities. What is clear is that “resilience” needs to be defined in a much broader sense. That whole infrastructure of the electric utility industry needs to be re-examined with a view to surviving monstrous weather. The cost in lives and in treasure is very high when electricity, the essential commodity of modern life, fails.

This new imperative comes at a bad time for the electric utility industry, which is struggling with daily cyber-attacks, converting from fossil fuels to alternatives, and straining to find new, durable storage systems.

One of the trends to greater security is to encourage microgrids – small, self-contained grids which can store and generate electricity, often from renewables like solar. These can disengage from the grid in times of stress and continue providing power to the microgrid.

Other suggestions include undergrounding electric lines. California’s Pacific Gas and Electric has proposed undergrounding 10,000 miles of lines to counter wildfires sparked by downed cables. The cost might be insupportably high — over $1 million a mile in level ground, according to one estimate.

Entergy, according to The Energy Daily, has 2,000 miles of lines down in New Orleans. Burying just the most vulnerable lines in the nation would be a massive civil engineering undertaking at a daunting cost. Other ideas, please?

The end of an empire isn’t pretty. Or as Neil Sedaka sang, “Breaking up is hard to do.” The terrible scenes at Kabul’s airport attest to that — as did those, 46 years earlier, in Saigon.

Technically, the United States has never had an empire nor sought one. But we have sent troops far and wide. Like other empires, bringing them home has been difficult, ugly, and made endless by refugees. Empire, or the American equivalent, follows you home.

The British, French, and Russians have found the end of empire hard. As did the Romans in their day. Getting out has been a lot harder and uglier than getting in.

When the British withdrew from the Indian subcontinent, leaving behind a new nation called Pakistan, and an old one called India, the blood flowed freely. The sectarian slaughter then was to lead to wars and skirmishes which have lasted to this day. Improbably, Pakistan was two separate entities, East and West Pakistan. Later, East Pakistan split off and became Bangladesh.

When Lord Louis Mountbatten, a stiff-necked British public servant and aristocrat, set in motion the withdrawal, he ignored plentiful intelligence that there would be strife. An alternative plan called for a slow, measured withdrawal. Mountbatten decided if it were to be done, it should be done quickly, and the result was more than 1 million died and 15 to 20 million were displaced as Muslims fled to Pakistan and Sikhs and Hindus in the opposite direction.

The French withdrew from Algeria and nearly sparked a civil war in France itself. When President Charles de Gaulle announced France would withdraw from Algeria, there was uncertainty as to which way the French generals would go; reluctantly, they stuck with de Gaulle.

Algeria was truly part of France and the decision to leave was a bitter one. Many French citizens, called Pied-Noirs, like the writer and philosopher Albert Camus, had been born in Algeria and regarded it as a part of France. But De Gaulle stood firm and civil war was averted — just.

The worst colonial withdrawal — it is generally agreed — was the graceless Belgian exit from the Congo in 1960. Unlike the many former British colonies which inherited a political structure, complete with a parliamentary system based on the one in London and English Common Law, the Belgians didn’t leave behind a viable political or legal structure for the Congolese.

Simply packing up and coming home is never enough. The French withdrawal from Algeria began an endless immigration stream into France. The British withdrawal from India and the country they created, Pakistan, paved the way for a flood of migrants into the United Kingdom. That isn’t over, as relatives and relatives of relatives still claim the right to join their family.

Resettled Afghans will bring with them their culture and, more importantly, their religion. They will leave their mark wherever they are resettled.

The present and future of Afghanistan are made more complex because with the U.S. withdrawal, a religion cloaked in nationalism is the victor. There are many devout Muslim-majority countries, but Afghanistan under the Taliban will be the most complete. The dominance of religion as the national purpose will be established. The only legal system will be Sharia: And if history is a guide, it will be an extreme and intolerant version that will rule the 39 million people of Afghanistan.

Communism defeated capitalism in Vietnam. But in short order, communism was defeated there, and Vietnam became friendly to the United States and as passionate about business as Singapore or Hong Kong.

There are no expectations for Afghanistan. A big country riled by tribalism, it will resume the export of the three things nobody wants: Heroin (opium poppies are a traditional crop), migrants, and terrorism.

The debacle that has played out with our national humiliation on television won’t, alas, bring an end. It is, in its own way, a beginning.

The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives humanity a simple directive: Get a grip on greenhouse gas emissions or the dear old planet won’t be the dear old planet we have known and loved down through the millennia.

Sounds simple, huh? Like wearing a face mask or getting a COVID-19 vaccine shot.

That is the trouble. Everyone will have their own science and won’t hesitate to inflict it on anyone who disagrees, whether it is verified or not.

Social nagging is about to become a national pastime. I can hear it now: “Why do you drive a gasoline car? You know, your fire pit is a carbon source.” Or “Did you think about the carbon consequences when you booked your vacation in Europe?”

How ghastly the moral superiority of the anti-carbon warriors will be! I can imagine them saying “I can’t imagine why people don’t buy electric cars. We have had one for three years.” Or “Your oil-heated house is a pollution source. We have installed solar rooftop panels. Passive solar houses should be mandated by the government.”

Remember the anti-smoking crusaders? I am afraid you haven’t seen anything yet. The very real climate threat is going to unleash a whole new tribe of social scolds.

Electric utilities are in the crosshairs and there will be no end to their vilification. Watch out for the environmental experts, who once urged the use of coal over nuclear, to take charge of the future with some other counterproductive policy nostrum.

All that said, I believe if we don’t get on top of the greenhouse gas emissions problem, we soon will be wondering, as Robert Frost wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice.” The way it is going, I say the world will end in devastating floods and heatwaves, worsening droughts, and accelerating sea-level rise.

The UN’s climate change panel has declared a clear and present danger. It is a threat that has been growing and largely laughed off over 50 years. I, for one, first heard of the idea of global warming in 1970, when it seemed very remote and a little crazy. It is neither remote nor crazy now. It is at hand, and it should affect a lot of thinking.

In the near term, common sense would have us ship our natural gas abroad so that China, India, and many other countries stop burning coal; not as the anti-carbon warrior would have us close down our production. The best longer-term hope is more science on carbon capture and nuclear power. It is foolish to worry about nuclear waste lasting 10,000 years when, if we keep on the current climate trajectory, life won’t exist in the nearer future on planet Earth.

The fact is that while the science of climate change is well understood, the solutions aren’t. For example, those who would denounce natural gas, which is far less polluting than coal, don’t know the lifecycle costs of the two advocated alternatives, wind and solar.

To build a windmill, you need a large concrete base and a steel tower, both of which are manufactured through carbon-intensive processes. At the end of the life of a turbine, about 25 years, the giant blades, which are mostly made of carbon fiber-reinforced fiberglass, will be disposed of in landfills. The blades can’t be recycled, unlike the steel towers and other components.

Both the manufacture and disposal of solar cells have considerable environmental impact. The impact in making them is known, but the impact of their disposal in landfills isn’t known.

Going forward, the need is to know the science, encourage innovation, and not bow to culture activists who would wish their solutions on the rest of us. When I was a boy, asbestos was the miracle substance, recommended for inclusion in everything because it was fire-resistant. If you didn’t use asbestos, the fire alarmists came down on you.

The moral? Beware of simple solutions to complex problems.

We all know that sinking feeling when the lights flicker and go out. If bad weather has been forecast, the utility has probably sent you advance warning that there could be outages. You should have a flashlight or two handy, fuel the car, charge your cell phone and other electronic devices, take a shower, and fill all the containers you can with water. If it is winter, put extra blankets on beds and pray that the power stays on.

Disaster struck mid-February in Texas. Uri, a freak and deadly winter storm, froze the state’s power grid. It lasted an unusually long time: five terrible days.

There was chaos in Texas, including more than 150 deaths. The suffering was severe. Paula Gold-Williams, president and CEO of San Antonio-based CPS Energy, told a recent United States Energy Association (USEA) press briefing on resilience that the deep freeze was an equal opportunity disabler: Every generating source was affected. “There were no villains,” she said.

Uri wasn’t just a Texas tragedy, but also a sharp warning to the electric utility industry across the country to look to their preparedness, and to take steps to mitigate damage from cyberattacks and aberrant, extreme weather.

This is known as resilience. It is the North Star of gas and electric utility companies. They all have resilience as their goal.

But it is an elusive one, hard to quantify and one that is, by its nature, always a moving target.

This industry-wide struggle to improve resilience comes at a time when three forces are colliding, all of them impacting the electric utilities: more extreme weather; sophisticated, malicious cyberattacks; and new demands for electricity.

On the latter rests the future of smart cities, electrified transportation, autonomous vehicles, delivery drones, and even electric air taxis. The coming automation of everything — from robotic hospital beds to data mining — assumes a steady and uninterrupted supply of electricity.

The modern world is electric and modern cataclysm is electric failure.

Richard Mroz, a past president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, who had to deal with the havoc of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, said at the USEA press briefing, “All our expectations about our critical infrastructure, particularly our electric grid, have increased over time. We expect much more of it.”

Gold-Williams said extreme cold and extreme heat, as in Texas this year, put special pressures on the system. She said the future is a partnership with customers, and that they must understand that there are costs associated with upgrading the system and improving resilience. Currently, CPS Energy is implementing post-Uri changes, she said.

Joseph Fiksel, professor emeritus of systems engineering at Ohio State University, said at the USEA briefing that the U.S. electric system “performs at an extraordinary level of capacity” compared to other parts of the world. He said utilities must rethink how they design their systems to recognize the huge number of calamities around the world that have affected the industry.

A keen observer of the electric utility world, Morgan O’Brien, executive chairman of Anterix, a company that is helping utilities move to private broadband networks, believes communications are the vital link. He told me, “Resilience for utilities is the time in which and the means by which service is restored after ‘bad things’ happen, be they weather events of malicious meddling. Low-cost and ubiquitous sensors connected by wireless broadband technologies are the instruments of resiliency for the modern grid. No network is so robust that failure is impossible, but a network enabled by broadband conductivity uses technology to measure the occurrence of damage and to speed the restoration of service.”

Neighborhood microgrids, fast and durable communications, diversity of generation, undergrounding critical lines, storage, and cyber alertness are part of the resilience-seeking future.

As more is asked of electricity, resilience becomes a byword for keeping the fabric of the modern world intact. Or at least repairing it fast when it tears.

In its first two decades of service, the Douglas DC-3 — maybe the most amazing, safe, and hardworking aircraft ever built — was denounced in folk legend as wildly unsafe. It was branded a flying coffin by those who didn’t know the data.

The myth that it wasn’t airworthy matured into an out-and-out lie. In fact, the DC-3 was the workhorse which launched modern passenger aviation.

The DC-3 was saved by growing aviation literacy in the public. Can nuclear literacy save nuclear power, one of the greatest tools in containing global warming? I believe it can. Literacy trumps myth and superstition.

While nuclear power has comparisons with the venerable DC-3, it is far more important than any single airplane. Those who turn their backs on nuclear power — so needed as climate change accelerates – are akin to those who without knowledge were turning their backs on passenger aviation in 1935.

Today’s major public argument against nuclear power is that it leaves behind radioactive materials — lumped together as nuclear waste – which will be radioactive for 10,000 years, about twice recorded human history.

This argument conjures up images of a monster, breaking out of its repository and marching the earth, laying waste to whatever stands in its way — a nuclear blob from a science fiction movie.

Truth is, in about 200 years, most high-level nuclear waste will have decayed into something less radioactively aggressive. In  the first 30 years, it gets less toxic and more manageable.

As this explanation by William Reville, the eminent, emeritus professor of biochemistry at University College Cork, published in the Irish Times, explains succinctly, “ The intense radioactivity reflects the preponderance of short-lived radioisotopes that are disintegrating quickly.

“This high rate of nuclear decay means the level of radioactivity declines quickly – the radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel reduces to 10-20 percent of its initial activity within six months of its removal from the reactor and within a few decades, the radioactivity reduces by a further factor of two. Radioactivity danger is largely gone within 100 years and within a few thousand years, the stored spent fuel is little more radioactive than the uranium ore that first came out of the ground to be fabricated into new fuel rods.”

Despite this science, when I advocate nuclear, which I have done for a long time, people roll their eyes and say, “What about the waste?” The waste does need to be stored safely, but it decays to a safe state quite quickly.

The most agonized-over nuclear material is the transuranic plutonium. Yes, it will last thousands of years, but it is easily shielded because it is an alpha emitter: It can’t penetrate human skin and can be blocked with a piece of notepaper. Natural uranium, found in rocks nearly everywhere, is an emitter, as is thorium, found in conjunction with rare earths. Radiation is everywhere. It isn’t the devil’s incarnation.

Those facing the climate crisis tend to shy away from nuclear and advocate only wind and solar. Little thought is given to the waste that these low-density energy sources are themselves going to produce.

Wind will create a huge volume of physical waste from the disposal of carbon-fiber turbine blades. These don’t recycle, unlike the steel towers on which the turbines rest. Eventually, tens of millions of tons of solar panels will make their way to landfills.

If you want to fret about waste — and you should — look to the garbage that is crowding the landfills, especially plastic which doesn’t break down. Look to the billions of tons of junk that is making its way into the oceans, killing marine life, and shudder.

The earth can take a lot of nuclear waste from power plants, advanced medicine, and reactors aboard navy ships and spacecraft. But can it take much more of the alternative?

Aviation literacy saved aviation from myth, even after disasters. Myth is a dangerous force when it is the foundation of policy.

If you want a good, safe myth, go with the tooth fairy.

The big story isn’t in Washington. It’s out West. It’s the drought.

After the fires have gone out (there are 80), the crops have failed, the herds have been culled, and the home lawns and gardens have shriveled up, the re-engineering of the West will have to begin. Many things will have to change. Technology will be asked to handle some changes.

The West must innovate both socially and technologically because you can’t move nearly 80 million people to greener lands.

There are no easy fixes for the drought that has eight Western states – Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico — by the throat. This is a calamity with a capital C, but the enormity of the problems has hardly dawned in the East — even when the smoke from the western fires reaches all the way to New York City.

The problem here, I am sorry to say, is my fellow denizens in the Fourth Estate. There is a national disaster that may progress to a national tragedy with people losing their farms, businesses, and homes, and yet — especially on the networks — politics is all.

What is happening in the West is analogous to what happened during the Arab oil embargo, the effects of which have lasted more than two decades. The crisis had been building – there was a gasoline shortage in the summer of 1973 before the embargo – and it didn’t end until fracking technology liberated hydrocarbons in tight formations.

The West has been struggling with its water issues since the 1940s. Some mighty civil engineering work with canals and dams has helped alleviate them, or at least has postponed the reckoning.

That day of reckoning is now at hand: Eight states, and possibly more, will have to make major adjustments — not just to get through this summer, but for years and years. The jig is up; there is no quick fix.

All the water impoundments are below their historic low levels and the summer is far from over. The West’s megadrought, which began in 2000, hasn’t run its course, according to experts. The rains won’t come miraculously next year; the crucial snowpack that sustains the whole region with fresh water and hydropower, may not come either.

Revolutionary changes will be needed, especially in California. Farmers will have to look at the ways the Israelis have reduced water use through drip-feed irrigation and drought-resistant crops. They may have to stop growing thirsty crops like alfalfa.

Wastewater will have to be recycled, used again and again; first for farms and gardens and later, as the filtering technology improves, in homes. Orange County is already a leader here.

New, covered aqueducts will have to be built to convey more efficiently the limited supplies from the rivers that sustain much of the West, the Colorado and the Columbia.

Finally, there is desalination. Everyone talks about it as though it is a mature technology ready to be hooked up, bought off the shelf, so to speak. Alas, it isn’t so.

The primary technology for desalination, used in places like the Arabian Gulf, is reverse osmosis: Seawater is driven through membranes and the potable water is captured, leaving all kinds of impurities in the rejected water, as well as the salt. This brine can’t be returned to the ocean: It forms destructive plumes that kill all life, including that on the seafloor.

So, to make a dent in the water needs of California, there would have to be a major desalination industry with new ways of dispersing the brine. Further, the desalination process consumes a lot of electrical energy, something that California doesn’t have, especially when there is sparse snowpack.

California dreamin’ will need to be of a new lifestyle. This story is California big.