The Los Angeles wildfires are self-inflicted
(caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)59 points by surprisetalk 14 hours ago
59 points by surprisetalk 14 hours ago
It's also not necessarily the case that we can reinstate old burn practices successfully. Zero-fire policies and climate change have made it harder to run prescription burns. And when we do, these fires today burn hotter, larger, and more completely than historical fires once did. How quickly our ecosystems can recover from large scale prescription burns is an open question, nevertheless whether we are able to run enough to make a difference. There is some evidence to suggest they don't recover as easily as they once did.
It's a thorny problem. There's good reason to believe we could have been in a better situation today, but we should be skeptical of overly simplistic approaches to correction.
> It's also not necessarily the case that we can reinstate old burn practices successfully.
I thought I saw somewhere that they actually planned to do burns but determined that it was so dry they couldn't do it safely. I couldn't really blame them for not endangering people's lives and waiting until the situation improved and the burns could happen safely, it just sucks that the fires happened before it could be done.
>the New South Wales fire service most recently adopted rule 10/50, which gives homeowners the right to clear trees within 10 meters of a home and non-tree vegetation within 50 meters of a home, without approvals. No friction!
You can look at it as really complicated but quite likely the above rule change could fix/have fixed most of the problems.
> Afterall, it is possible to place an endless thicket of regulations on deliberate human activities, but one can’t simply outlaw wildfires and horrific destruction and loss of life.
Great read, learned a lot.
Also, the web's gotten to where making it a few scrolls down a high signal page without being bombarded by ads makes me start feeling really nice. Maybe point me to a charity at the end as a way to show support & thanks for the work.
This was a great read. Opinionated for sure, but I don't need to believe it entirely to enjoy it. The fact that it's now flagged and gone is regrettable.
CEQA & NEPA resistance to prescribed burns deserve all the criticism heaped upon them and more. Though tt's a little unimaginative to locate the ultimate responsibility with "handful of unelected specialists in bureaucracy". Why not carry that analysis through to the outside groups (mis)use CEQA to effect their own ends?
I'm somewhat conflicted by his take on price controls . We need clearly need price signals to provision housing for 10-15k households, and the materials & labor to rebuild those homes. At the same time there's a huge potential for predatory pricing and outright scams targeting people that are, for the moment, quite vulnerable. A bit of drag to keep landlords from absorbing huge chunks of the inevitable insurance bailout in the form of ALE payouts seems appropriate, and far from 'punishment'.
There's also some outright dissonance b/w
> expedient rebuilding will be blocked at every turn
and "Newsom cut through CEQA so easily, why doesn't he do that for other projects"
Also the take on preventing unsolicited real estate offers seems remarkably unsympathetic for someone so nearly impacted by the fires.
The usual memes (CA's 14.4% tax rate, $770 FEMA checks, $950 petty-theft, ...) feel a bit trite and out of place for an otherwise thoughtful
So this article says > Evidently, a city full of deranged arsonists began to hyperventilate and frantically collate their kits of accelerants and blow torches. ABC7 reported at least 300 fires were started intentionally during this period…
But the link is to an ABC7 news story of one fire suspected as arson with a suspect in custody. The source cited here definitely doesn’t back up this very sensational claim of 300 arsons. People sure can make stuff up about 300 times faster than anyone can fact check it!
He's saying that ABC7 made up the number. They could have backed off on that since he wrote the article, and you wouldn't know it. News organizations edit their stories in real time now, and then people point at them and say "See! This story published that day doesn't back up what you're saying!" Besides, can't one person start a ton of separate fires? I think one person with a car could burn down a hundred houses in a day, or more.
I don't know the solution to the memory hole problem. The Internet Archive helps but they probably can't scrape news stories on an hourly basis or whatever, and many things like videos can't be scraped. Screenshots are better than nothing but not good enough.
While he's flawed the stuff Elon Musk bangs on that you can't do anything much in the US due to an every growing accumulation of regulations seems to make some sense in these cases. I wonder if you could set up a ChatGPT like thing with instructions "you are a well meaning entity wanting common sense regulations that improve human wellbeing, please rewrite a summary of these regulations," feed in the current mess, get simplified rules out and then force them through congress etc. Couldn't be much worse than the current mess.
I like the author’s viewpoints in some respects, but their belief in the power of the market to solve all problems is excessive. The market is captive to private landowners, coastal wealth, and lobby-tainted politics at every level now, and deferring housing policies to the forces of supply and demand is blatantly broken in California and will not be restored by simple deregulation alone. He states clear requirements for rebuilding after fires that ought to be enforced by the government — densification, fire control plans for neighboring regions, and even earthworks to impede fire — but these things will require the exact regulations decried, that may constrain supply but are also critical to increasing it.
The section about the patchwork of fiefdoms should be critical reading for college-level US politics courses. Let a hundred thousand students study and learn about their local fiefs, write about them and interview them and shine a naive spotlight into that nest of dark corners. They would leave school with a clear understanding of how local power can be used and misused, and how to investigate it and document it. We may not have journalism much these days but there is a master’s thesis opportunity here to document the specific offices of every branch of government and lobbying responsible for fire management (and its failure) for a single coordinate on the map.
this comment was to help those who still think the government is capable of solving basic problems (even during its utmost failures)
Amusing.
"I don’t ordinarily write about events “in the moment” but for this I will make an exception, as I was personally affected. "
could have said
" I may write about events 'in the moment' if I am personally affected, ensuring I have neither the emotional nor temporal distance beneficial to insightful reflection"
In the same way that the Japanese reactor incident was self inflicted, sure. Life is unsurprisingly more complicated. And a large portion of what made this possible is growth always tends to build things that are not resistant to problems not constantly faced. Is why many trees in my yard have to be aggressively pruned or they will fall under their own weight.
Like, I get it. Much of this could have gone differently. As much as it annoys folks to say, much likely could have still gone the same way, given conditions that actually existed. Arm chairing this is a fun private exercise. Casting blame, though, jumps over to something else.