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Comment by fjabre | Hacker News Reader

What is trailblazing about this? A state home to best and brightest engineers on the planet and they can't figure out how to put out a fire. But they can make self driving cars, rockets to mars, uber scooters, and delivery drones.

The answer to this isn't the forest service or the state government. The answer to this is in the private sector.

Instead of making the next facebook how about saving the state from fires that could wipe out its offices?

Is this really the best California can come up with? Does anyone know of any ventures in this space that are up to the challenge?

There is nothing trailblazing about the plan in this article. It's more of an iteration on the same failed policies of the past that got us here in the first place. The forest service is ill suited for this challenge.

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What in the world are you talking about?

You can't throw 10 Elon Musks at a megafire and expect it to put the fire out. The thermodynamics of putting out a huge fire don't make sense. The logistics of preventing any such fire from starting are impossible.

The article is very clear on how we got to this point, and on how this plan is different.

My comment was clear. I am talking about throwing 10 Elon Musks at the problem. Heck let's throw 50 Elons at it.

The article spends more time describing the Californian landscape and history of fire fighting than what it proposes as a solution. Good luck keeping up with the super blooms. California is a large state with lots of unreachable areas. Where and when these things start is clearly unpredictable.

Mediocrity at its finest.

I am talking about throwing 10 Elon Musks at the problem. Heck let's throw 50 Elons at it.

We're trying to prevent the huge wildfires, not give some narcissistic idiots platforms for personal aggrandizement while they burn the entire state to the ground.

Prescribed burns work. The problem is that the season is too narrow and the area required too big for existing resources to handle. Private enterprise won't solve that. It will just make everything more expensive and result in less fire prevention activity.

Prescribed burns work. Agreed. It's a partial solution we already know about.

Would love to hear some new ideas in 2019 however, but maybe that's asking too much.

> I am talking about throwing 10 Elon Musks at the problem. Heck let's throw 50 Elons at it.

Sure. We just need to find 50 Elon Musks's, and then convince them all to work for the state. Let me know when you have them all lined up ready to go.

Dunno if appointing geniuses will work.

It seems to me that part of the problem is that the different parties involved have different needs and resources.

. Homeowners would like to not have their homes burn. They are on 30 yearish investment horizons but buy insurance a year at a time. They are a minority of homeowners in the state.

. Insurance companies want to make a profit but have little to do with forest management. Their only knob is your bill or a cancellation. They are in the position of a health insurance companies who can cancel a sick person's insurance at any time.

. The state .gov is only loosely related to the people, these are not elected officials running the show after all. The urban areas are in charge in any case, just keep the water flowing and the occasional state park for weekends.

. No doubt it's an interesting challenge to the feds, but the occasional town burning down is just a statistic.

. PG&E is not in the fire suppression business whenever possible, keeps costs down, went bankrupt anyway.

It's all at cross purposes.

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