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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

Multiple bitter lessons

1. Somehow people moving into houses that went for $4 to $25 million didn't notice or bother to check that there's a landfill a mile from their houses.

2. Ash waste from last year's huge wildfires needs a place to go, but it's de facto toxic.

3. A waiver granted to allow the toxic waste to be dumped into landfills not rated for handling it.

4. Rich people find they have no more power than residents of Flint, MI

Addendum: at least the cops are deferential to the crowd of protestors that include rich white moms with a babies. They didn't declare a "riot" and didn't fire teargas or rubber bullets at anyone.

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I think point #4 is a little off. Rich people think they have more power than poor people, but at least in this case they lacked the motivation to actually try to change things.

Look at the facts. The article throws out a bunch of famous names, and shows the Kardashians protesting. And yet the protest seemed to last only a few days before one person was arrested and the rest lost interest. A city of millionaires only raised $76k in a GoFundMe.

This doesn't paint a picture of powerful people being thwarted. It's a bunch of unserious people writing letters for a few weeks and then losing interest when things don't immediately go their way.

> This doesn't paint a picture of powerful people being thwarted. It's a bunch of unserious people writing letters for a few weeks and then losing interest when things don't immediately go their way.

They are powerful, but they probably don't have the incentives, especially when you consider that people who have that kind of wealth typically have many homes. That's quite a set of incentives than someone protecting the only home they have.

> 1. Somehow people moving into houses that went for $4 to $25 million didn't notice or bother to check that there's a landfill a mile from their houses

Presumably, it's not a landfill that you can smell or see readily, otherwise a wealthy enclave wouldn't have developed there.

> 4. Rich people find they have no more power than residents of Flint, MI

I think this is a rare exception, and not representative of normalcy. Nuch of the toxic waste is itself from a well-off area (the Palisades), and the state government wouldn't want to be seen as giving special treatment to wealthy celebrities.

Of course people with babies didn't riot, and of course rubber bullets can't be fired near them. What are you suggesting?? There's some truly "weird" stuff on HN as of late.

Moving on.

Perhaps they didn't riot.

Whereas we know that a lot of actual riots in the past six years weren't treated enough as such. Allowing the populations that they affected to be terrorized, sometimes over an extended period of time.

Peaceful protestors in Washington D.C. have been teargassed in recent memory.

Rioting is not needed for police to abuse their authority.

The comment under discussion was the one psychopathically lamenting that well-off peaceful protestors "with babies" weren't met with force. In contrast, no one thinks that the recent LA riots were peaceful.

Sometimes the riot happens after the teargas and rubber bullets. Sometimes the riot happens because people whose humanity isn't being respected choose not to respect your property. And sometimes riots happen because people are assholes and nobody is going to stop them.

The neat thing is all 3 of those can be true at the same time.

>Sometimes the riot happens after the teargas and rubber bullets.

Gaslighter

>Sometimes the riot happens because people whose humanity isn't being respected choose not to respect your property.

A psychopath's excuse to harm innocent people.

People who want to destroy property will always claim that their "humanity isn't being respected". Psychopaths commonly play the victim to justify harming people who have nothing to do with them.

>The neat thing is all 3 of those can be true at the same time.

Pseudo-intellectualism.

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