The Los Angeles wildfires are self-inflicted

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.

> 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.

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!

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

One more tool that we could be quickly ramping up deployment of is herds of goats [0].

Much cheaper than people, can clear terrain that's too difficult for people, no smoke or noise of herbicides needed, etc.

Herds can be grown over time too. (Brief googling tells me they reproduce annually, and tend to usually have twins or more, so you could do a quick back of the envelope calculation to project growth.)

Used in conjunction with other methods of clearing biomass, they could help a lot.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/10/1192905277/goat-grazing-calif...

The flagging system is getting a little out of control.

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"

Long-form armchair quarterbacking at its finest.

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.

We should all live in caves and eat grass.