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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15188 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Fires in California seem really bad - Mandate of Heaven in danger?

Let me just preface this in that I'm not American so I don't fully really appreciate what it's like over there or how systems are supposed to work. Anyway, when we have fires in Australia, it exclusively impacts rural areas right next to woodland. Rich people tend to live closer to the cities in inner suburbs, near the sea. It's unthinkable that a fire reaches them, it'd have to burn through huge swathes of suburban sprawl first. All that happens for most Australians (and especially rich Australians) is that air quality gets horrendously bad for two weeks. Of course the state still tries very hard to protect homes but it's very much a rural issue, the rural fire service goes out to volunteer and firefight.

I'm reading that in Los Angeles, it's the opposite. Rich people live on the edge of the city, right next to woodland. You've got expensive houses burning down.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg525q2ggl4o

There are pretty serious complaints about political neglect too. I hear that the mayor of LA was off in Ghana (which is frankly bizarre, this whole subnational diplomacy meme needs to be put down and buried in the backyard). I hear that the LA fire hydrants are somehow out of water in the Palisades. There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this. TBH fire-lighting seems like very low-risk, high-return terrorism, it's astonishing we haven't seen it become more common in certain vulnerable countries.

Naturally the first have turned into a political issue. Anti-Trump people have started blaming climate change and arguing that Trump wanted to cut fire defence spending.

Pro Trump people have pointed out that Trump was critical of California's water infrastructure before. And it's not as though California is known for being run by legions of Trump toadies: https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1877055198604017790

There also seems to be dysfunction in insurance, a very high number of fire insurance plans were cancelled right before the fire (possibly due to regulations preventing rate rises): https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1877128641802285064

IMO the solution is intensive backburning when it's cool. There can be no fires if you destroy the fuel beforehand.

However, it does seem like a major failure in state legitimacy if you can't even protect the rich from fires. From Chris Bakke on twitter:

The situation in Pacific Palisades is devastating, heartbreaking, and is also the most “California” thing to happen in California.

The homes burning down are $5M+ homes in neighborhoods surrounded by 1000s of other $5M+ homes.

Owning a $5M house in CA means you pay about $60,000 per year in property taxes.

So you and thousands of your neighbors all pay $60,000 or $80,000 or $120,000, or way more in property taxes every year.

And when a wildfire comes down the hill toward your neighborhood, the firefighters show up and there’s no water in the fire hydrants.

Never change, California.

Thoughts? I don't really have a thesis here.

First, California has been mismanaged all to hell since the days when that was bipartisan consensus because there were republicans in government. Not filling the reservoirs over ‘a stupid and worthless fish called a smelt’ is just California being California and the lack of water in the hydrants is probably not solely attributable to that. Second, it’s not like, a fixable issue. The sorts of people running California are not willing to compromise the iron law of bureaucracy mission of state agencies in order to serve the public. Political heads will not roll; this is a one party state.

The lack of water in hydrants isn't anything surprising. No water system is designed for a wildfire that's impacting 2000+ structures. Depending on how the system and lift stations and such are planned out, you're typically planning for 1 or 2 residential fires per zone, more for commercial, more for industrial. And you have to keep in mind that once a structure becomes compromised, their water pipes are going to be effectively turned on at max (the pipes and valves being compromised by heat or gravity loads) creating even more demand on the system. Reservoirs are pretty much your best and only affordable option for water for wildfires and such.

I keep seeing this take, and it frustrates me.

Somebody was tasked with designing a system to deliver water to fire hydrants. They designed the system in a way where it fails during a fire.

California is a cargo cult of government competence. It's all performative. They make things that look functional until they need to be used and, like the bamboo airplanes, they do nothing when needed.

It's basic infrastructure engineering. You can allocate nigh-infinite resources to making something safer or stronger or higher capacity and there will still be a theoretical load case that will exceed it. We don't have anything close to nigh-infinite resources to throw at anything so you determine an acceptable level of risk or design load case based on the probability of exceedance and the cost of mitigation and that is what you design to. This isn't California specific, this is the case in all responsible engineering everywhere.

What is possibly California specific is not having additional options available when their design cases are exceeded, i.e. reservoirs holding that excessive rain from last year. Or if some of those videos are to be trusted, not even having extra buckets and hoses for LAFD to use.

If California is so determined not to collect rain water, I don't see why they don't invest in (nuclear?) desalination plants. Would solve a great deal of the water disputes they seem to be having with adjacent states as well.

There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this. TBH fire-lighting seems like very low-risk, high-return terrorism, it's astonishing we haven't seen it become more common in certain vulnerable countries.

It's not exactly proof, but there is evidence that someone witnessed a group starting a fire and was willing to risk prosecution (for a false police report) to call it in: https://x.com/hubermanlab/status/1877236580676493784

They didn't video catching them in the act, just after it happened.

There also is video evidence of powerlines sparking on trees: https://x.com/kylezink/status/1876870818153828459

There is a lot of tinder, physically and metaphorically.

What's the story on them apparently not doing routine controlled burns? What considerations are at play?

The Forest Service tried to get what's called a Categorical Exclusion from NEPA for controlled burns and other brush removal. The Sierra Club sured (Sierra Club v Bosworth, 2007).

Of course, the court case never actually turned on (or even entertained) the object-level question of whether those actions were a good idea. It was all procedural -- whether the Forest Service performed the administratively-appropriate reviews and so forth.

The result of all that is that the Forest Service needs to perform an EIS with lamentably predictable results.

lamentably predictable results.

I personally wouldn't have predicted the magnitude of the results. I was imagining situations like "this year's rainy season was wetter than average and spawned too much growth, but by the time we get a months-long analysis done it'll already be the dry season again and it'll be too late until next year". Reality is "paying attention to particular seasons is pointless because the average time between the beginning NEPA analysis and beginning a prescribed burn is (pdf warning) 4.7 YEARS". If there's an EIS required then the lead-up to a controlled burn is 7.2 years. The NEPA phase of the delay is about 1.3 years in the average case and 2.5 in the average EIS case, but then there's more years of delay before the NEPA approval turns into forest service activity and more years before the treatment begins.

I do get that there should be some analysis. I grew up visiting Bandelier National Monument, where we learned from the rangers about how the old policy of trying to squelch every small forest fire had contributed to the undergrowth buildup that led to the devastating La Mesa Fire (fun fact: the fire only got to Los Alamos chemical explosives labs, and the nuclear material got lucky). But even after paying attention to undergrowth buildup, they still later had an equally large fire in 1996, a bigger fire in 2011, and most horrifyingly a bigger fire resulting from a "controlled" burn going out of control in 2000. It's really hard to keep hundreds of thousands of acres from occasionally becoming a tinderbox without preemptively burning a lot of the buildup in huge swaths, and yet it's also really hard to safely start and manage huge fires in an almost-tinderbox, and even in a location where the worst-case scenario is a radioactive forest fire we're having trouble getting it right.

What I don't get is how a years-long analysis could possibly be useful. The important timescales here are days and weeks (as weather conditions change), months (as seasons change), and decades (as climate and construction patterns change). Anything in the years-long category seems like it should be too slow to keep up with any of the former changes, in which case why can't we just just reuse the last scheduled-every-couple-decades analysis immediately upon noticing a problem, rather than commissioning and waiting for a new one? I'm a big SpaceX fan, and always tempted to unfairly rag on the FAA when they take months to approve a Starship test flight, but at least when they're slow there's always some flight change or prior-test analysis to justify taking a "long" time; the FAA has also approved a launch license almost immediately after the previous test, in a case where the previous test had no unanticipated failures and the next test wasn't adding any massive changes. Is that kind of turnaround just completely unimaginable for environmental review for the Forest Service?

What I don't get is how a years-long analysis could possibly be useful.

It’s not useful, but that doesn’t matter. The text of NEPA requires agencies to describe “any reasonably foreseeable environmental effects of the proposed agency action.” Try sitting down for 30 seconds to think about all of the reasonably foreseeable environmental effects of setting the environment on fire.

Photos taken seconds (months) before disaster: https://www.kqed.org/science/1994972/forest-service-halts-prescribed-burns-california-worth-risk

This week, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed.

“I think the Forest Service is worried about the risk of something bad happening [with a prescribed burn]. And they’re willing to trade that risk — which they will be blamed for — for increased risks on wildfires,” Wara said. In the event of a wildfire, “if something bad happens, they’re much less likely to be blamed because they can point the finger at Mother Nature.”

You can only backburn at certain times of year. It worsens air quality. There are risks of it getting out of hand. But if you don't do it...

California passed a constitutional amendment decades ago where property taxes can only be increased on an home with the same owner by 1% a year. So some of those people bought their homes back in 1990 and only pay like $2000 a year. Made up numbers, but it's directionally true.

From what I've seen wealthy Californians spend their lives in a dreamy utopian state where the only evil is Republicans.

Their usual system of blame is to look at the various levels of government, City, State, Federal, and put the blame on the first Republican they find.

When they can't find one, they blame institutional racism or climate change.

Thus, I predict they will all blame it on climate change and nothing will happen.

Now this one is going to be particularly bad because California passed laws a few years ago restricting fire insurance premiums and most insurers left the state. So a lot of these homes are uninsured.

California has had problems with electricity for the past 20 years and has been dealing with it with things like rolling brownouts. Their wildfires are worse than they should be because environment groups sue to stop brush management to reduce fire spread. They have continual water problems because they refuse to build additional reservoirs to keep up with their growing populations.

There is not much hope of things changing. Their elections have major problems, ballots from ballot harvesters keep coming in for weeks after election day.

Some of the currently in-use electrical infrastructure in California is so old that it was built by Thomas Edison himself. I’m not joking, it literally was.

Now this one is going to be particularly bad because California passed laws a few years ago restricting fire insurance premiums and most insurers left the state.

This is not actually true - some companies declined to renew some policies at one point, but this was mostly a saber rattling exercise to get the government to stop being so unreasonable. To my knowledge no insurers have actually stopped issuing policies altogether.

So a lot of these homes are uninsured.

I would be shocked if more than, say, 10% of these homes are uninsured. Even if no private company will issue you a policy, the state will, and the people in Pacific Palisades are not particularly price sensitive.

California passed a constitutional amendment decades ago where property taxes can only be increased on an home with the same owner by 1% a year. So some of those people bought their homes back in 1990 and only pay like $2000 a year. Made up numbers, but it's directionally true.

Even if you steelman the above with non-made up numbers, then while true, this is irrelevant. Sure, without Prop 13, Californian municipalities would likely have more money, but so what? The actual question is, do they actually have enough money to cover services? The answer is, of course they do.

There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this.

Unlikely. There were 80 mph (120 kph) winds before the fires started, but it was dry for many weeks beforehand without incident, which suggests to me that winds blew down power lines (or equivalently, branches next to power lines), and sparks from shorting cables are enough to get dry brush started.

Humans naturally have a tendency to search for intention in chance events, but here rumors of bad actors deflect blame from the likely cause: mismanagement on the part of PG&E and the local forest/parks service, so I expect those rumors to be encouraged in the media.

I also see people reaching for the Global Warming explanation, but to me this is a series of proximate systemic failures in administration and in holding individuals/companies accountable. Which just about captures half my complaints about the state of American governance: too much consensus-building, not enough action or taking accountability. Definitely a loss of Mandate of Heaven moment.

I mean, might homeless people have set fires? They’ve been known to do that when it’s cold.

The strange thing is they had very accurate forecasts several days ago, and already said they were going to deenergize a huge portion of the LA area. But then it seems like they didn't go through with it?

Unstructured thoughts:

the insurance situation is fucked because the state government has to keep the prices artificially low to keep homeowners happy, or be voted out for someone who will. Insurance companies are not allowed to project future risks when pricing plans (they may only look at historic risks). Rate increases (for auto and home insurance) must be approved by the state. Huge correlated risks (like Pacific Palisades burning down) are, basically, uninsurable. The state cannot long protect people from higher premiums. I don't know if we'll see ""price gouging"" for people living near the wilds or some kind of scheme where people in SF cross subsidize people in Pacific Palisades.

There's a good chance that this fire is caused by PG&E fuckery. The standard redditor response is to demand nationalizing PG&E so that they would invest more in maintaining their power lines. Would that really work? I kind of doubt it. PG&E is already a quasi-state run enterprise - it has to run basically every decision by the California Public Utilities Commission, including approving company budgets and rates. The frequent counterarguments are that the governor/the cpuc are in the pockets of PG&e, and maybe that's true, but I don't see why this couldn't happen if PG&e were nationalized.

The ultimate question has to be, where is the money going? I can't really make heads or tails of their quarterly statements to figure out how much money is going to salaries vs operations but they earn 1.3B a quarter and they serve 16 million people, so they're making $30 of profit per month per person. It's not nothing, but the average customer pays $300 a month. A 10% discount would be nice, but we're not talking about major changes here. Meanwhile, burying power lines costs $2 million dollars a mile. There's 90 thousand miles of lines (I don't know how many are high voltage lines in fire prone areas). Who's going to pay for that? Well, pg&e has only one source of income, and that's the ratepayer - that's not going to change if it's nationalized.

The common theme here is that the math is simply not mathing. It seems that for a while California has been able to outrun reality by kicking the can down the road(defer maintenance to keep prices down, defer fire prevention to save costs and the environment, keep insurance prices low since fires are rare) and now the gods of the copybook headings are here for their tribute.

And burying powerlines in earthquake-prone areas creates more problems.

Does it actually? I guess maybe if you're burying them across a fault, but probably that causes problems for overhead lines too.

Fires in California seem really bad - Mandate of Heaven in danger?

California has been forsaken by God for longer than I've been alive.

Some fun word play with your title aside, it feels like at this point if you are stilling living in California, you deserve it. Once upon a time I would have looked at the devastation Democrats have wrought and felt bad for the state, which in my youth was still regarded a purplish state. The home of Ronald Reagan. Now I just can't feel anything. Everyone there voted for this for at least a decade. They voted for it again quite recently in a recall election. They are literally willing to die in a fire than vote for someone who might say something that offends a chosen minority.

I mean they literally refuse to hire white male firefighters. People voted for that. Like this isn't their first wild fire. Their priorities are unfathomable.

It's like hearing about the Heaven's Gate Cult in the 90's. What? They all dressed, talked and acted the same? Some of them chopped their dicks off?! And then they all killed themselves over a prophesy? Some people were able to feel sympathy for the cult members. Maybe they'd lost someone to a cult, or felt they had a close brush with one at a vulnerable time in their life. For most people it was entertainment. They were a laughing stock. And so California is to me now.

The suffering of a Californian is as the suffering of a Flagellate to me. A spectacle of suffering coming from a place of otherworldly confidence that it cleanses. I can't feel bad for them, because they so willfully chose it, and would actually probably hurt me if I tried to save them from themselves. It's best to just leave them to it until they kill themselves.

Edit: Your right, I forgot who I was talking to. Go ahead Californian Rationalist. Keep doing you. This isn't on you at all. Don't change a thing.

Everyone there voted for this for at least a decade.

What in the world are you talking about? 38% of California voted for Trump in the last election. More than 40% voted for the Republican in the most recent gubernatorial election. California is only about 60% Democrat. Very very far from "everyone".

I disagree with this in the strongest possible terms. The flagellate was more than a spectacle of suffering. The flagellate truly confessed and remembered his sin before his self-punishment. There’s psychological research to support both this practice and the medieval “mechanical” treatment of repentance generally. When a memory is reactivated (retrieved) it becomes labile (malleable) immediately and for up to six hours, in which period the valence and instinctual response regarding the memory can be modified. Provided that the flagellate has reactivated the memory of his commission of sin before his punishment, this would act as powerful counterconditioning which will (unconsciously) make him averse to the sin in the future (this may take a month to fully occur neurologically). This has been studied for instance in respect to alcoholism: “Disruption of relapse to alcohol seeking by aversive counterconditioning following memory retrieval”, “Long-term behavioural rewriting of maladaptive drinking memories via reconsolidation-update mechanisms”, etc. (The opposite can occur as well, which supports the mechanical way that gratitude was “practiced” (reactivating prosocial cues before the enjoyment of, say, a succulent Chinese meal)). If there were flagellates in California, perhaps things would be different.

Let us consider the California Question with special attention to what our Psalmists have to say —

Fret for your figure and fret for your latte and

Fret for your lawsuit and fret for your hairpiece and

Fret for your Prozac and fret for your pilot and

Fret for your contract and fret for your car

It's a bullshit three ring circus sideshow

The archetypical LA mindset is characterized by distraction and consumerism. It is not characterized by the recognition or repentance of sins (errors); it’s questionable whether the local leaders even believe in those. The fire is the Divine Mandate, contrary to the OP, at least symbolically speaking. The fire is “improbable but longterm-certain threat that has gone unrecognized”, and “failure to plan longterm”, and “failure to elect strong-minded leaders who care”, and then “failure to prioritize changing politicians”, which involves “failure to prioritize changing culture”, and descending to the relevant individuals with wealth and time there is “failure to sacrifice status in order to grow the right culture”, reaching to those who fretted figure and latte and contract and sideshow more than than what is actually Good. A ton of innocent people are going to suffer from this, too, which makes their sins so much worse.

Destruction leads to a very rough road but it also breeds creation

And tidal waves couldn't save the world from Californication

Someone who whips themselves for religious reasons is a flagellant. Flagellates are micro-organisms with whip-like tails.

I mean they literally refuse to hire white male firefighters. People voted for that. Like this isn't their first wild fire. Their priorities are unfathomable.

People vote for all sorts of reasons. When Californians had a direct vote on things like AA they rejected it

Write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation. As you've been reminded somewhat recently.

Yes, even Californians. Yes, even your outgroup. While your comment is not entirely devoid of substance, it brings far, far more heat than light. Let's see, last time I wrote:

You do your substantive position no favors by cranking the rhetoric to 11. Your occasional AAQCs only get you so much lenience. It has been a while since your last ban, after which you became a quality-content machine for a bit! But recently your warnings have been arriving with increasing frequency. Let's try another week-long ban.

Two weeks this time, I guess.

Everyone there voted for this for at least a decade.

In fact, not all Californians are members of your outgroup.

I mean they literally refuse to hire white male firefighters.

Are you sure there is a literal refusal to hire white male fighters? The small story from the LibsofTiktok outrage slop -- slop you chose to share -- reports on this organization which facilitates recruitment of minorities. If wildfire firefighters are primarily white, male, and have shit wages why would it not make sense to target other demographics to fill the ranks?

Maybe Californian disasters would be better managed and mitigated by voting Republican. Makes sense to me that competition has a better chance at breeding competence. They might have less damage from fires if they paid firefighters $30/hr instead of 15-20. I'm not sold it's because of bait from LibsofTikTok for one organization doing recruitment in one area targeting one demographic.

If wildfire firefighters are primarily white, male, and have shit wages why would it not make sense to target other demographics to fill the ranks?

Why would it?

Being a janitor is a job with shit wages. Do you have to go target minorities to take the position?

It seems like a pointless discussion anyway: the fact that it's too white and male implies that it's just the usual thing. I can see racial diversity but some jobs probably should be have gender skews.

I mean janitors work a shit job with shit wages that is also heavy on brown women.

Why would it?

Because minorities can probably adequately haul water to flames for 15/hr too.

Being a janitor is a job with shit wages. Do you have to go target minorities to take the position?

You don't have to, but many janitors do happen to be minorities.

In 2021 this Marin County Fire Dept. unit looks pretty white and male. Maybe they need communication operators and support staff. They think they can make quota by getting some girls. I don't know what goes into firefighting. Yes, yes, it could be the woke mind virus and probably is to some degree. I don't think Marin County Fire Dept's program is burning LA at the moment. This was my main objection to the framing in the parent.

Let's not slam down LibsofTikTok slop-bait as if it is authoritative.

You don't have to, but many janitors do happen to be minorities.

The point is we didn't need a diversity programs to make this happen.

Maybe they need communication operators and support staff. They think they can make quota by getting some girls. I don't know what goes into firefighting. Yes, yes, it could be the woke mind virus and probably is to some degree. I don't think Marin County Fire Dept's program is burning LA at the moment. This was my main objection to the framing in the parent.

I mean...sure. If your argument is that they did not categorically refuse to hire while male workers but instead showed a preference for non-whites,to the point of quotas (what happens when they don't fill their quotas and have more white men than they can use? They're not going to "literally refuse to hire" those excess wypipo?) and that it probably was driven by wokism...then I guess we have no disagreement.

I won't defend WhiningCoil's maximally uncharitable statements, but that's really the only set of charges this sort of argument is a defense again.

Yeah, the devil's in the details. Firefighting, like all fighting, should probably continue to be mostly male. There are a lot of ponytails on that website, suggesting they would really like more women, which seems unlikely for physical reasons. Who's the girl in the overalls and headband supposed to be? The local police force here hired a woman with beautiful long hair and her bouvier or some such animal to give presentations, such as at elementary schools. She starter out as a vet tech, and now brings the dog around and lets the children pet it while teaching them a bit about safety. That's fine, sure, but not very central.

Of course there doesn't seem to be a reason English speaking mestizo men wouldn't be firefighters. In a heavily hispanic state like California, I'm surprised they're not, and I suppose worth reaching out to?

I’m pretty sure there’s an under representation of mestizos in wilderness firefighting because wilderness firefighters come from rural communities which value wilderness firefighting- ONCOR in Texas is similarly very white for the same reason.

It's anecdotal, but Seattle attempted to solve its "white male firefighter" problem by testing recruits on "memoirs of a transgender firefighter." Applying to this "fire foundry" program requires you to write a Diversity Statement just like applying to the UC system, and we already know how that process works to commit racial employment discrimination.

After so many years of the same pattern repeating over and over in "the unbearable white maleness of X" campaigns, I would need significant evidence to assume something different. And I don't trust that anyone who gleefully supports it isn't trolling.

Claim: the majority of California, or even area, firefighters aren't recruited through organizations such as this one. Which is most likely an ineffectual, tax skimming grift via state grants. It could also be a genuine, if misguided, attempt to scoop bodies for the Marin County Fire Department as it claims.

I wouldn't implement it. If they have a dearth in recruitment and need bodies they should either open parallel grifty grant programs for anyone likely to be qualified, or make one big one and take whoever qualifies as they apply.

I'd be open to the idea that, like the military, we see firefighter recruitment issues that may be worsened by poor propaganda or DEI preference. Which I don't consider a top 3 factor, but do consider a top 10 one. I would not require much evidence to update this way. Even a credible enough looking firefighting forum post could do it for me. I won't update off of Libsoftiktok bait though.

Yep, if anything I’d expect the headline shared to work to increase the number of firefighters not decrease it?

Trying to target new demographics who typically don’t go for those jobs, sounds pretty cool.

This argument is outdated by about a decade. SocJus outreach programs are always originally justified through "we don't want to discriminate, it's just to tap in to new demographics" and they've descended into attacking straight/cis/white/males enough times, that you have at least an equal burden of proof to show that it didn't happen this time.

we don't want to discriminate, it's just to tap in to new demographics"

And then, when the untapped population of gay hijabi prodigies who were clearly being held back by racism don't show up when the barriers are pulled down, the finger has to be put on the scale.

Sometimes, even if they do:

Blind auditions, as they became known, proved transformative. The percentage of women in orchestras, which hovered under 6 percent in 1970, grew. Today, women make up a third of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and they are half the New York Philharmonic. Blind auditions changed the face of American orchestras.

But not enough.

American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions, especially in regard to Black and Latino artists. In a 2014 study, only 1.8 percent of the players in top ensembles were Black; just 2.5 percent were Latino. At the time of the Philharmonic’s 1969 discrimination case, it had one Black player, the first it ever hired: Sanford Allen, a violinist. Today, in a city that is a quarter Black, just one out of 106 full-time players is Black: Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet.

The status quo is not working. If things are to change, ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.

I thought that article looked immediately familiar.

Has it worked that way in any other "there are too many white men" cases? At all? From air force pilot recruiting to air traffic control recruiting to electricians to engineering students to orchestra players to academic jobs?

Can’t speak to the rest of those things, but if you are a white male and want to become an electrician there will be no one attempting to stop you.

Oh right, I never finished that post about the new WA electrician apprenticeship program requirements. They all need to be licensed by the state now, and the license renewal is contingent on not training too many white men.

Things are worse than most people know.

This sneering is completely unsupported by the reality that in 2020 there were more Trump voters in California than there were in Texas.

And more Biden voters in Texas than there were in New York. (xkcd #2399)

That doesn't change the way the state is managed though. It's a one-party regime, and no number of Republicans showing up to the polls has done anything to even slow down the insanity.

Sure, but it does mean that WhiningCoil's argument that Californians have only themselves to blame is ridiculous.

The insanity has certainly slowed down but it remains to be seen if it's the start of a trend or merely a speedbump.

It's happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_firestorm_of_1991

People like living around trees.

Who wouldn't want shade in the summer?

People who don’t like the smell of linden trees :p

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aoqlYGuZGVM?feature=shared

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Dcgikq73isVL9x1Q9 good view of some of the houses in question. You can see how much money there is in Beverly Hills, and how impossible it is to clear the forest away from the houses. As far as I'm aware there's really no option but evac and rebuild every so often if you want to live there, because prevention and fighting are both a lost cause in that environment.

That doesn't look egregious. Build a fire-resistant concrete home, controlled burn the forest behind the house yearly, keep a few cisterns of rainwater in the attic to wet the ground near the home before the next fire, a generator to pump water from the pool when the power goes out, and keep a go bag ready for evac. These are relatively expensive engineering problems, but not intractable if you have the money.

A bunch of this stuff is illegal in California, though, some of it for good reasons, some of it for extremely stupid ones, and the rest for reasons in between.

fire-lighting seems like very low-risk, high-return terrorism, it's astonishing we haven't seen it become more common

Used to great effect during BLM riots. Caused billions in property damage. Arson works, in that sense.

Why do all these outbreaks of mass arson seem to occur exactly when there is historically extreme fire weather conditions?

https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10279345

Are they that competent to plan exactly when the conditions on the fire triangle are perfect and then go out to set fires together?

Same thing with the Canadian fires in 2023. Apparently there was this historically unique epidemic of arsonists setting fires all through the boreal forest even deep into the north country exactly when the climate conditions were extraordinarily prone to wildfire.

There were clear arsons during BLM riots. Buildings burning in major cities that have nothing to do with wildfires in other parts of the US.

There's a video of a burning building in an urban center and an urban youth cutting a fire hose to prevent it from being put out. Crystal clear unambiguous arson.

Yes? Because that's exactly when all the news is going "be careful this weekend, because one match could send the entire state up in flames! Anyone could just go out there with a can of gasoline and choose from this extensive list of high risk areas to incinerate! Smokey the bear says: only you have the sweet sweet power of life or death over thousands!"

Maybe arsons in less-flammable times don't result in newsworthy conflagrations. Nobody cares about the fires that remain small and burn themselves out quickly. During fire-prone times, any arson is liable to become a big deal.

I agree, but this negates what is often used as a point to discredit the claim that climate change plays some role in recent extreme wildfires.

I often point to figure D from the paper I linked, showing that there’s an incredibly tight relationship between annual area burned and atmospheric aridity (measured as vapor pressure deficit).

And in fact, we know very well that increasing continental vapor pressure deficit extremes is a key aspect of climate change.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51305-w

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016JD025855

I’ve seen a lot of the back and forth rhetoric about the conditions in California right now. One side, it’s climate change! The other, it’s homeless camps who are lighting fires!

All I know is that Southern California is currently experiencing their second lowest winter (wet season) rainfall totals in 150 years of record keeping and then the Santa Ana winds arrived.

https://calmatters.org/environment/water/2025/01/california-rain-drought-north-south/

That drought may or may not be related to climate change, but these type of scenarios almost always have an angle where the climate is playing a primary role, for one reason or another.

Small potatoes compared to what’s possible. It’s like bombing a plane vs flying it into a skyscraper. Imagine you were a patient, clever, and well-prepared terrorist in LA yesterday, how much damage do you think you would be able to cause?

Agreed. This was sporadic and disorganized. Merely riots going a bit further than usual.

A fire just broke out in the Hollywood hills. Hellicopters are swarming. I expext the authorities to pull-out all the stops to protect Hollywood.

The West coast is a pretty unique climate and biome. We don't have fires like this in the Eastern US, even though parts of the East are incredibly overgrown.

A fire just broke out in the Hollywood hills

Oh no! Now where will I drive my 47 Lamborghinis?

The other problem with fire suppression on the West coast is that no reinvestment was made into the most effective air assets. The most common water bombers you see out West are aircraft that rolled off the production line 60-80 years ago, so they're all either constantly down for maintenance or simply being retired due to a lack of parts availability or simple airframe fatigue.

Even if the polities in those areas wanted to suppress the fires like they did back in the '70s and '80s (back when those planes were still reasonably usable, and when it was policy to suppress said fires as detailed by Dean below) they no longer have the equipment to do this, and now that it's no longer possible to buy a dozen anti-submarine prop planes for pennies on the dollar (designs that coincidentally were very adaptable to a new mission of scooping up water from nearby lakes to drop on the fires) rebuilding that capacity is going to be very expensive.

the most effective air assets

I dunno tbh. I guess if you're paying war-surplus prices everything is more cost-effective, and scooper types probably are the best of a bad lot if you have a suitable body of water around. But neither aerial water or retardant works all that well for the money in heavy fuels or high winds.

Ironically cali is far more overgrown than normal due to all the rain last year. those strong Santa anas dessicate anything even after recent rainfall, then all you need is a spark.

We don't have fires like this in the Eastern US, even though parts of the East are incredibly overgrown.

Here on the east coast, water often falls from the sky without any assistance from humans, which is rare much of the Western part of the country. When it doesn't we do get fires though a lot smaller than out west.

Pine Barrens have some potential, maybe: https://archive.is/ZdeSh

I'm just smug about Florida apparently doing it right. I get endless texts alerting me of controlled grass burns in my region, and they let me be both safer and also dunk on states with more money and less sense.

Engaging charity for a moment, maybe controlled burns in forest are harder somehow? Uglier? More expensive?

Flat, road access (and roads to use as containment features), water supply/draft sites, and to an extent fuel type. And Socal chaparral isn't really adapted to low-intensity burns the way some coniferous forests and grasslands are--if it burns, it's gonna be at a high intensity and challenging to control.

Cheers, appreciate the facts you're spreading here, rather than the standard pure political smarm. I dug into some USDA docs on firebreak engineering, it's nifty reading.

It’s easier to do in Florida because the climate there isn’t conducive to explosive out of control fires, so there’s less risk.

I live in Arizona where we do a ton of prescribed fire, it’s taken very seriously. Still though, it’s risky out west. Half of the iconic mountain here is bare of trees because a prescribed fire got out of control a few years ago.

A lot of care is taken to only burn during certain conditions. Still, it can sometimes get away from the crews who are out there burning.

Nonetheless, kudos to Florida, it is a good thing.

California as a state that is about 33 million acres of forest. That is only 1/3rd of the state, but this is where you remember that california is also about 1/3rd desert, and another 1/3rd agriculture lands. In short- anything that isn't a city or farm is either a desert or a forest. As a result, if your city isn't surrounded by farms or desert, it's going to be near forests.

California in turn is a state that bought into late-20th-century environmentalism hard, including the belief that any wild fire was bad in and of itself. This is because burned forests are ugly and the pacific conservationist movement was significantly shaped by the beauty of nature. As a result, there was an extended effort to suppress and prevent wildfires and maximize forests in the name of the beauty of the environment.

This was bad ecological conservation, because nature isn't pretty and natural wildfires are needed to clear away dead brush that acts as fire tinder. As a result California has a tendency for exceptionally bad wildfires, especially in droughts, because of above-average underbrush compared to the more systemic burns practiced in the Appalachian forest regions.

The US Forest Service's policy of fire suppression wasn't related in any way to late 20th Century environmentalism. The Great Fires of 1910 happened only a few years after the Forest Service was founded and suppression followed soon after and was the policy for decades. Conversely, it was around 1970, just as the modern environmental movement was founded, that the Forest Service started to back off of this policy, though this wasn't due as much to environmentalist influence as it was to scientific research done in the 1960s that showed fire as essential to forest ecosystems, independent of the increased risk of "the big one". Controlled burns have been the preferred method of wildfire management for some time.

The problem with this burns, though, from a practical standpoint, is that there's only so much you can do. I'm on the board of a nonprofit that deals extensively with PA DCNR, and while the rangers love doing these burns, they have their limitations. In Pennsylvania, you can't burn in full leaf because it won't burn, and you can't burn in the winter when the ground is too saturated to burn, and you can't burn when it's too wet for anything to ignite, and you can't burn when it's so dry that the fire could easily get out of control, so you're basically limited to a few weeks in early April when the ground is dry, there's no foliage yet, and the spring rains have yet to start, and even that's weather permitting. And maybe you get another shot in November. And assuming you actually can burn, you can only burn as much as you have staff on hand to control it. They do several burns a year in a state park that runs about 20,000 acres, but none of them are more than a dozen or so acres at a time, and most are smaller. Things are obviously different out west where wildfire risk is greater, but they still have to work with the weather.

Thanks for this post. I hadn't considered that the conditions for controlled burns could be so restrictive and in the context of California, there's almost certainly permitting and approvals required that add additional cost and time to it.

The 10am policy wasn't late 20th century, particularly environmentalist-aligned (the Forest Service has historically been a timber agency), or unique to California (see e.g. pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070810191055/http://www.nifc.gov/fire_policy/docs/chp1.pdf).

I'm not going to say that it's impossible to carry out RX in steep chaparral surrounded by structures, but it's a lot more technically challenging than cleaning up long-needle litter or dead grass.

This is a good comment, I really appreciate the specific technical description coupled with the cultural insight.

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