Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

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> Their equipment has led to many wildfires

Who are the antagonists in this story?

California decided that people who live in fire areas deserve (1) the last marginal sales price of the homes in their burnt down area (2) paid by taxpayers, in disguise, through their utility bills (3) and in exchange, get what?

Why should anyone be living in the places where these ancient powerlines are?

The essentially infinite land the US + cars have played an important role in keeping home prices from rising to truly stratospheric levels in the urban US. So I understand that it also benefits many communities to have the escape valve of this housing.

But there must be better land and better places than wildfire prone California. You have to draw the line somewhere. There are people who in the same breath say PG&E is the antagonist, that they are to blame and not the recklessness of the communities that live in these places; but then, they complain about wetland restrictions being rescinded and that taxpayers should not be paying for repeat flood victims in Florida, Louisiana, whatever, in red states. It's the same fucking thing!

I don't know why the money to achieve this ridiculous compensation scheme has to meander through the utility company's liability. Obviously if it were an ordinary tax - I mean, it's a tax, that we're paying, through these utility bills - people would not do it. The only reason PG&E liability is on anyone's radar is because of some kind of complex political shenanigans that I do not understand and I wish were not a part of my community at all.

It's only wildfire prone due to the incompetence (corruption?) of PG&E and public forest management. Your argument only works if people aren't the cause of a significant amount of the risk.

Dont the utility regulators and local governments allowing property owners to put themselves in harms way get any blame in this?

This comment reeks of victim blaming. Natural disasters happen literally everywhere on earth. When someone's house is destroyed by a tornado in Tornado Valley do you tell them "Oh well you were really irresponsible for living in tornado valley"? Or how about Florida, which has been hit by over 40% of US-landfall hurricanes? Do you tell the hundreds of thousands of people whose homes have been destroyed that they should have just packed up shop and moved away since they get regular hurricanes?

Obviously I believe that governments should support people suffering from natural disasters, and that even huge amounts of money given directly to victims are an appropriate way to deal with disasters.

> Natural disasters happen literally everywhere on earth

Taxes also happen literally everywhere on Earth. This is an article about rate increases, not natural disaster policies. But like natural disasters not all taxes are the same.

My neighbors have voted themselves a tax benefit where they've been paying property taxes as though their homes are worth 0.01-0.05x what they are, for years. Read all about it here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 - it's the single most important law in this state, if you live in California you ought to understand what it is.

So if I bought a home in San Francisco, I would pay normal taxes like "everywhere else on Earth." But not these folks.

Let's say there's an earthquake in San Francisco and a bunch of crumbling 100y old Victorians valued at $1.5m but whose owners have been paying taxes for decades on as though they were valued $40k-300k - those crumbling houses fall apart. Should we pay every resident in a crumbling Victorian they haven't maintained at all, in communities whose schools and roads and institutions they have not been paying for, yet simultaneously benefitting from their land values rise as a consequence of the human capital arriving every year and sort of have nothing to do with, and they also haven't been paying any meaningful taxes: should we give them a giant check as though they sold their home, at market prices when only 1-5% of home inventory moves a month, in that no longer existing city that wasn't earthquaked?

Listen this would affect me, I mean I know I would love a check that lets me hit the "reset" button the event of a natural disaster, but there was actually no universe in which I live here and benefitted from not paying taxes for decades. That was never given to me as a literal constitutional right it was to people who basically won the lottery.

So who is the antagonist? This is what I am asking you. It's so easy to come from a place like whatever community you live in, where things follow normal rules and you can be pretty confident that your neighbors deserve full and just rescue. But my neighbors have given themselves an entitlement that yielded all sorts of crappy disfunction and I'm not the only person who is sick of that bullshit.

The fire prone areas in California just synthesized their bullshit into some weird ass rigamarole where other Californians pay for that bullshit through the utility company.

Californians are uniquely bad at handling wildfires. Fire is perhaps man’s oldest enemy. We know how to handle it through preemptive controlled burns. California just refuses to implement them.

No, PG&E is uniquely bad at maintaining infrastructure. The fires were caused by century old towers with hooks that have literally worn out:

http://www.wsj.com/graphics/california-wildfire-pge-drought/

( https://archive.is/2023.08.17-195423/https://www.wsj.com/gra... )

> "Oh well you were really irresponsible for living in tornado valley"?

um, yes? I mean if you build it from cardboard especially. that doesn't mean they deserve no support, of course they do, they most likely live in some by-thy-bootstrap central crazytown), but it's not a good strategy to keep encouraging/enabling living/building without the appropriate measures to make it sustainable. (ie. heavy duty sprinkler systems with enough water, sufficient clearing, etc.)

one of the important functions of the state is to inform people of risks, and in a neoliberal setup it is also ought to enforce that markets price in those risks.

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