LA Mayor Shuts Off Power at Hollywood Hills House That Hosted Large Parties
npr.org
npr.org
Cutting off water and electricity for order violations sets a very bad precedent, and is highly irresponsible. I'm shocked that it's even legal to do so.
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/davidryucc/pages/2849/...
As part of it this woman was to interview some rich guy.
He offered to do it over a dinner and picked her up in his lambo.
When they arrived there was no free space so he parked in the disabled space. When she mentioned that to him he replied.
"Don't worry its a $400 parking space"
The thing is he is not wrong.
There are myriad of stories of companies making millions cheating and when caught paying thousands in fines.
Thats not a deterrent but attractor of bad behaviour.
The fines meant to be fines - something that stings and burns - and not get out of jail free for one's who can afford it.
In the worst case scenario, they could just order a few trucks of bottled water alongside the kegs, and set up a portable generator. Shouldn't cost more than 20 grand or so.
And so what has this new enforcement tool actually done against the belligerent hyper-rich? And in exchange, what danger does it present to the poor?
They are trying to solve the wrong problem.
Also, an idea: rather than handing fines and fees to the government -- which incentivizes all kinds of bad behavior, from civil forfeiture to crazy permitting laws -- you stick it in a general fund, and hand it back -- evenly distributed -- to the taxpayer as a dividend at the end of the year.
Do that for every bit of revenue that government makes outside of collecting taxes.
I'm curious where this falls down (outside of implementation difficulties).
Imagine a town where the police always ticket passing cars for 1000 dollars per violation, except when the car belongs to a town member in good standing in which case they just give a warning.
Income scaled fines are not existing legal tools.
This is kind of like that Bruce Willis movie scene where his wife tries to say her affair with his best friend was "an accident" and he says something like "Whoops! I fell down and my dick accidentally ended up in your wife."
If you don't want your water cut off, don't invite your 200 closest friends over during a pandemic, two weeks after they announced this was a potential consequence and after the police have previously visited your house and warned you in specific. Duh.
This power & water cutoff thing was originally introduced in 2019 to combat unauthorized commercial cannabis farming as an alternative to criminal charges (which is not terrible because no human basic needs are being withheld in a commercial context).
Now suddenly it's being expanded to combat residential ordinance violations, which is a quantum leap in bad ideas. I'm surprised that nobody sees the problem here, especially the enlightened HN crowd. It's not like there haven't been sufficient tools to deal with property nuisances & safety violations for hundreds of years in ways that are effective against both rich and poor, and especially not tools that can lead to such terrible consequences for the poor as we slide down this slippery slope.
I think this is one of those situations where you want to survive this situation well enough to have (the threat of) the sorts of problems down the road that you are worried about rather than having worse problems because so many people died in the pandemic that the fabric of society has fallen apart and some of the rich people with bunkers in New Zealand are hunkering down there while the not rich remain stranded in what is left of the US.
I also see that as a vastly worse legal precedent than shutting off your water to deter disease-spreading large gatherings. That's a great way to make sure we can throw lots and lots of poor people in jail -- just as soon as the pandemic is over the our jails aren't overwhelmed as a matter of course.
This is an existing tool, and it's one that the occupants were warned would be used if they continued their violations.
Criminal charges are slower, and don't do as much to stop the immediate threat without custodial arrest and pretrial confinement, either in jail, which itself is a public health issue, especially when high-risk transmission behavir is involved, or in separate isolation (which IIRC is available for public health order violations but is manpower intensive.)
Uh, the main existing tool for property nuisances is forfeiture. While in this specific case I would enthusiastically support the use of that tool, I don't think it's a more modest or restrained response than what has been given.
It's like arguing “we've authorized use of guns for this problem for centuries, why are we taking the extreme step of bringing out a taser?”
(To be honest I wonder if shutting off power will work... can they just get a generator or set up tiki torches?)
oh and new business idea: powerbnb
Direct action against a property makes it much harder for them to continue.
The announcement comes two weeks after Garcetti first warned that properties hosting "un-permitted large gatherings" could have their water and power service shut off as a consequence.
Seems completely reasonable to me. I find it bizarre that the internet has an issue with it, the same internet that talks like the Gestapo about trying to force every last person to wear a mask at gun point.
Punishments granted for health violations shouldn’t make the situation even more dangerous. This won’t stop parties.
I don't have a better way of phrasing that.
This is, perhaps, both the best and worst part of our culture.
On the one hand, it gives you rebels that challenge the status quo. That don't take "no" or "that's impossible" for an answer.
On the other hand, it gives you a population that would slice off their own noses if the government told them that having one was mandatory.
I think our best course of action would have been to just... ask.
Across the board.
Republicans and Democrats, carnivores and vegetarians, people that understand that the toilet paper needs to go over the top of the roll and inhuman monsters bent on the destruction of all that is good in the world... all of them needed to agree that Masks Probably Couldn't Hurt And We Should Just Wear The Damn Things.
Do everybody a solid, and wear a mask. No, we won't fine you, or shoot you.
There's nothing to rebel against when people just sort of shrug and go "okay, whatever".
Also, work overtime to make the masks cool.
I think we'd have a higher rate of mask use with the Carrot and the Meh, as opposed to just the Stick.
If the property owner faces a financial burden, that will incentivize a change in behavior.
I admire your ability to see the silver lining. I see it as selfishness to the point of toxicity.
I think the ship has sailed on asking people to wear masks. These people--whether they have a borderline ODD tendency to "question authority" and "stick it to the man" for the sake of "personal freedom" (read: selfish masquerading as principled), or if they just can't care about how their choices affect other people anymore because we are n months into a pandemic with no end in sight--have made their choice.
They are not willing to do the bare minimum such as wear a mask or not attend giant parties. I have to say, as far as measures to slow the spread go, these two requirements are incredibly fucking easy to abide by.
So I say shut the power to their party so it sucks, and make it harder for them to spread the virus even faster. Fines based on a percentage of income would be better.
This thing looks awfully like a pissing match, and it's not just with the one homeowner in Hollywood -- it's with every person that feels the same way.
I would lay good money the cardinality of that set is not a small number.
Doesn't matter whether or not it is a pissing match. It looks like one.
Were I running the state, I'd rather spend my time and energy on doing things that would actually Get People To Wear Masks, as opposed to another round of Pissing Match: San Andreas.
And the action taken to shut down someone's power is to call the power company and tell them to do some clicky clacks on a keyboard.
So definitely an apples and oranges comparison. That said, it probably would be a pissing match ultimately as that person said.
Maybe I don’t understand what self-determination means, but wearing a mask and keeping 6 ft of distance from another person, does not prevent one from participating in government.
I am waiting for people to advocate their free speech rights are being violated for not being allowed to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
Here is the full text of the decision - it’s a very interesting read on both sides of the argument:
https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/1142/5020...
Also your comment could be made about literally any enforcement action ever taken.
This is incredibly melodramatic. To think that restricting a party during a global pandemic risks freedom more than, say, backing coups in Honduras is a ridiculous position.
(this channel is like the TMZ for youtuber/tiktok)
If you're willing to expose your private life and you have access to parties of actual celebrities, then you're going to get some amount of attention by people scrolling their feeds and auto-playing YT recommendations.
Then our own president said some people didn't even know they had it comparing it to a cold. Then reports that some doctors have been threatened to lose their job if they don't sign off on COVID because the hospital gets extra money even if someone died from Cancer. Then another doctor thought the ventilators were doing more harm than good so if the doctors kill people with ventilators that's a extra 50 grand. Some people are worth more dead than alive. I think there's a virus just like other things but we're being played in a way to influence the election. Just like how with Obama they were scaring everyone about Swine Flu, working on a new vaccine for that too but that just kinda fizzled out. I know I'm skeptical personally and it is very concerning all the big sites are censoring this stuff. I think because the big drug companies run advertising on these sites, I know in other countries they banned advertising drugs but in the USA that's big business.
Covid will never go away till we develop a vaccine.
I get the impression some countries aren't taking this as seriously as others.
https://covid19.healthdata.org
The estimate is that the US will be at 300,000 deaths by end of year. Whilst NZ will be at 22. US is 65x more populous so if they adopted similar policies would have been at 1430 deaths. And it could even be a million deaths by the time a vaccine is readily available.
And people like to bring up the island nonsense but fact is that the borders are largely closed with Canada and Mexico so the problem is purely to do with domestic policies and behaviours.
I wouldn’t choose to be in any other country at the moment, but this second lockdown has caused much more negativity than the first.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/424048/covid-19-what-hap...
Though there is one massive difference Germans hate having freedom and are not willing to die for it from Covid.
On a more serious note, this looks like a symptom of some fundamental crack in a fabric of US/UK etc societies where the baseline trust is almost non-existant (towards government, science, institutions).
And the behaviour of people in societies are determined by (a) leadership and (b) policies of the various levels of government. That is where the US clearly has failed.
It has to do with how people behave, as we see in the article here, and NZ gets much less international traffic than the US and the island take has some merit. Iceland had 10 cases, Madagaskar around 150. You could argue that South Korea is an island too since there probably is little exchange on land routes. Australia wishes to be a continent, but... okay, maybe it really doesn't really fit here.
Infections aren't spread homogeneously, so I believe behavior of people is the main factor. Too bad, because you cannot just blame all this on someone.
I think the causes of infections get misattributed just like the performance of economies to immediate government policies.
US has always been completely free to implement similar policies.
This is about electricity and the law and COVID-19.
> Haha! They shut us down! We sure showed them!
Wouldn't they rather being able to continue partying with the power on?
So the city stops nothing and the people keep party. Sounds like they will win.
It is also society’s loss to see the state and her leaders lowering themselves to such spiteful tactics.
If it’s against the law, arrest them. Denying them access to civilization is just the sort of retributive justice that makes so much of US law and order problematic. What next? Ban them from buying food? Force them to wear dunce hats in public? Throw them in the village pond and see if they sink?
Arguably it’s far more serious than a law and order issue though. A CDC cordon and enforced quarantine would have tackled the actual issue: public health.