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Comment by robertcope | Hacker News Reader

When you get fined $30 billion dollars for a fire, yes, it makes sense.

When you neglect maintenance and cry fowl when a state wants to charge for your negligence.

There’s a difference between getting fined for lax maintenance and “you’re bankrupt now”. To put this in software terms it’s equivalent to if you miss one bug, anywhere in your code you post on GitHub, and the government comes and takes your house. Because that’s about how easy it is to accidentally start fires in California in the dry season. How much code do you think you would publish in that case?

There’s also a difference between “lax maintenance” and “you started fires causing millions of dollars in damage, destroying many homes and killing people.”

When you are writing software that you know is being run on medical devices around the country, you need to raise your coding to a higher level of rigor than some rando writing an open-source utility for finding anagrams.

But in this case, the fire could’ve started from a lightning bolt or a single cigarette, instead statistics chose a cable spark.

Or, to look at it another way, the chances of a catastrophic fire starting were increased dramatically by all the poorly-maintained cables.

It's not like the DM pulled a "forest fire" event and rolled "cable spark" as the initiator. Events in our world are linear and causal, not narrative in nature.

> Or, to look at it another way, the chances of a catastrophic fire starting were increased dramatically by all the poorly-maintained cables.

As well as building homes / subdivisions in areas with high risk of fires, and individual home owners not maintaining their properties to reduce risk:

* https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/Fire-causes-and-risks/...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1WxCBU6JAM

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL_syp1ZScM

Just like with plane crashes, there is rarely a single event that causes catastrophe, but a chain of events, avoiding anyone one of which could break the path to the disaster.

This except the code you put on GitHub was part of a billion dollar contract that specifically required static code analysis to catch bugs because it was going to be used in life or death situations, and then a bunch of people died because you got lazy and didn't do the static code analysis.

But, even if you had done the static code analysis, you still would have been liable for any bugs that were missed. There is no level of diligence that would have released PG&E from liability.

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