I think that's a bit of color on that, since those homes weren't worth $0 until PG&E caused a fire that burnt them down by neglecting required maintenance.
No, it's making people whole for real monetary and property damages caused by PG&E's negligence. It's the settlement of a lawsuit, because PG&E was negligent and caused damage.
Whether those people rebuild in Paradise, CA or move somewhere else with the money they received from the settlement is an entirely different proposition. This is not "subsidizing people in the country side". PG&E fucked up and now they have to pay. PG&E is choosing to pass the cost to its customers rather than eating into its profits, which is a decision that California allowed them to make.
EDIT: You and the GP I originally replied to seem to be making the argument that after PG&E burned all these people's homes down they should have been allowed to just tell them to get bent so your utility bill wouldn't go up in the city? What happens when it's /your/ home that gets burnt down? "Sorry bucko, but your house is worth $0 as it's just now a smoldering ruin. No soup for you. - Thanks PG&E"
I'm not saying PG&E shouldn't pay out, they were directly responsible.
But I will say that Paradise was in a bad state prior to the fire, simply nobody knew how bad. While a wildfire like that wasn't guaranteed, they were just one bad lightning strike away from the same disaster.
Funding FEMA, forest management services, and wildfire fighters something that isn't always prioritized and it should be.
It was a 100 year old C hook that caused the fire. Which failed in high winds. Which drove the fire. It was PG&E's responsibility to know "how bad" this was. They literally lost track of their own transmission lines.
If it wasn’t that, wouldn’t it have been a lightning strike, or something else? Fundamentally, the problem is that the houses were in an area that has become incredibly flammable. It’s not all PG&E’s fault.
Those have been known to start smaller fires before. Management strategies for them and recognition of the conditions that give rise to them were implemented. This fire burned worse than before because of poor maintenance on and around the line and because they did not shut it off quickly enough to prevent additional damage. The line was in a remote location and access to it was severely degraded.
Fundamentally the problem can be solved with management and engineering. It's entirely PG&E's fault. This was adjudicated and settled.
I am actually not saying PGE shouldn't have to pay etc. But this dynamic is part of being a country. In some ways, it's similar to the insurance industry where we get a pool of very healthy or young and sick or old people.
What PGE did was terrible, but also there's a lot to blame on CA directly too.
You've apparently never had power run out to a new property that's not had it before. You pay for that. The poles, the lines, the installation. The power company doesn't just run power to you because you ask. They subsidize themselves.
Then PG&E takes the money, leaves 100 year old equipment in place, which inevitably breaks, and burns down an entire forest along with their homes.
You genuinely think these people are being "subsidized" by all this? That it's their fault the PG&E top brass didn't earn a bonus that year?
Subsidizing in an insurance sense. It's a high risk area, insurance should have covered it. If it was too high risk, insurance shouldn't have covered it, or charge much more etc.
Insurance premiums are different for different people and are decided by underwriters based on expected risk. What subsidy are they receiving on those premiums? They were previously paying a special property tax to cover the additional fire services required for the area. This is not a particularly high income area.
Meanwhile everyone in Sacramento can buy federally subsidized flood insurance. The federal government also built the levees surrounding the county. The entire downtown core had to be jacked up several feet due to persistent flooding. Should everyone in Sacramento move too? Should we end the insurance subsidy?
You could argue that nobody should be living in a place guaranteed to be destroyed, whether by landslides or wildfires, but the government tried that in Palos Verdes and got sued, lost, and now is bailing out those homeowners to get out of services obligations all the same.
Suffice it to say, you have bought into a very well marketed point of view. There was a lot of ceremony to enact procedural blame on PG&E, but it obscures all the far simpler solutions, that are far more just. People in San Francisco are paying higher rates, no? So PG&E may have been responsible for something somewhere, but the liability is being borne functionally by taxpayers, via a compulsory payment for energy, to balance the books on assholes living in places at risk of wildfires with overinflated asset values. Ultimately, the government here has decided that you should get government-guaranteed-risk-free market rate returns on owner occupied real estate.
Yes. As I recall it, the fire was caused by downed lines that were energized during a dry spell, and the reason the lines were downed was due to negligence around maintaining the C-Hooks holding their high voltage transmission lines. PG&E knew that they needed to be replaced every so often, had a policy that dictated when they needed to be replaced, and then ignored that policy which ultimately allowed a C-Hook to fail and the energized line to start the fire. In fact, PG&E had commissioned a study as far back as 1987 to look into this issue and confirmed that these hooks had a limited lifespan.
They had clear knowledge of the issue. They had a responsibility to maintain the system to prevent the issue. They set policies around how that maintenance should be conducted. Then they willfully ignored their own policies, which lead to the issue they were responsible to prevent. That's textbook negligence.
So, yes, PG&E /did/ cause the fire. They were negligent in doing so. They are liable for the damages.
I agree PGE was negligent, but it also doesn't make sense to assign the entire cost of the resulting fire to PGE. The scale of the fire damage was a result of many factors, only some of which are due to PGE. A huge destructive fire was a matter of time. Whether it was caused by PGE, lightning, or an RV tire blowout was a matter of chance.
Or another way to put it, how much liability would you give the RV drivers in these two scenarios?
The cost wasn’t assigned to PG&E. Brother, the CPUC is approving the rate increases to pay back the settlement. You are getting the same electricity today as you did in 2019. The entire cost was assigned to YOU.
There are so many smart people on this forum. How hard is it to understand the spelled-out-in-the-law relationship between your compulsory payment for electricity rising and the cost of the settlements?
So then, $1.6B of liability to the driver of the RV at the Carr fire, and a few thousand to the Colorado RV driver? For the exact same error in both cases?
Legally, maybe you are right. I honestly don't know. It doesn't seem right to me though.
You could certainly argue that some sort of fire was inevitable, and that the fire would have been much less damaging if people hadn’t built their houses in such bad places.
But the law doesn’t really care about that. You can’t avoid liability by arguing what would have happened or what should have happened. If your negligence causes a fire and that fire destroys a house, you’re liable for it regardless.
California has contribitory negligence. If the court determined it was negligent to build or keep a house in these places and that contributed to the loss, it must determine the share of loss attributable to each party and reduce the award. In some states, a party must have be less than half at fault to receive compensation, but California doesn't have a minimum, if you are 99% at fault and the other party is 1%, you can get 1% of your loss compensated.
> This buyout program provides a viable pathway forward for our most vulnerable community members
> Hong estimates that his home would have been worth about $3.6 million two years ago
Yeah, this person who was able to afford a $3.6M home sure sounds like "our most vulnerable" people. He needs a bailout for making a poor decision on buying that house in a place prone to landslides. Not the hungry kids in our schools whose parents can't afford/won't provide healthy meals.
We got money for millionaires but not hungry kids and people with chronic medical needs.
Then it should be obvious to you the parallels with Paradise, CA, where average home sales prices were at $700k just prior to the wildfire, growing faster than San Francisco’s prices: the reason we are doing this bailout is due to the politically powerful interests of a lot of wealthy savers. The people in this thread saying “it’s PG&E’s fault” are incredibly naive.
That 3.6M million dollar home might have been worth a lot less before asset appreciation happened. There's quite a few people living in expensive areas that bought homes 20-30 years ago when it was dirt cheap, the place became popular, and now they're a teacher or something who owns a multi-million dollar home while living on 80k a year or something.
The article also mentioned their home was a new build and they moved in a few years before this happened.
But sure, keep telling me their new mansion on quicksand needs a bailout and they're far more needful than hungry malnourished kids.
> now they're a teacher or something who owns a multi-million dollar home while living on 80k a year or something.
TBH, if their home is now worth millions, they should retire and move someplace cheaper. The market is telling them that land is worth way more than a lifetime of their earnings. They should capitalize on that. They're still far weather people that he vast majority of Americans, and probably the top 0.001% of people on Earth. That they failed to cash their lotto ticket in time before their mansion on the quicksand fell apart leaves me zero sympathy.
I wish I could fail at cashing in my $3.6M lotto ticket I bought for relative pennies. At least I would have been given the chance, no?
I feel exactly the opposite. It's somewhat ironic as well, because socially I have and have had a reputation as someone who is both 'gadget obsessed' and 'bougie', but I don't think you can really be both. I have much much less 'stuff' than almost anyone I know, but almost everything I own I spent at least a few months researching before buying it and I plan to keep it as long as possible (and repair it if possible when it breaks). As a tech guy, the most obvious place this exists is in my desk setup, which currently (laptop and USB chargers not included) has an average age of around 5 years for everything on it. The oldest item I acquired 12 years ago and have no intention to ever replace if possible. The newest item was acquired as part of a move 2 years ago and pulls the average down.
It's a constant struggle though, because even when I find something of high quality (recently pants and shirts), this doesn't prevent the company from discontinuing the product or changing it. I've had to since switch pants and shirts, and rotate my wardrobe because of button and zipper failures on a brand I previously relied on heavily and recommended to others. They likely made this choice as a company to cut materials costs to not move their price point, but I would have happily absorbed a 20-30% price increase to maintain quality and not need to spend another 3 months figuring out which pants to start buying. Instead, they've lost a customer entirely that previously directed them additional customers. I wish consistency of quality was more of a thing, so even when you find something you always have to keep an eye on it.
John McCain, a Republican, famously voted to save the ACA during a time when the Republicans had a Congressional majority, even though his health was failing. He died shortly after the vote.
I was talking about the 2010 passage of the ACA, not the 2017 repeal attempt. The 2010 legislation was written by Democrats. Moreover, since as you mention, the Republican repeal attempt failed, it can't truly be said that Republicans have "gutted" the ACA. It is true that for some (dumb) reason the ACA gave significant power to the states, which has been abused by Republican governors and legislatures, but that was entirely the choice of the Democrats who wrote the ACA.
This was less interesting than I was hoping for, because it wasn't specific. It said I don't have a non-native English accent. Great, I already knew that. But I'm curious if it could place my regional accent in the United States. I'm originally from the Southern Midwest which has a distinct accent, but have made a great effort to neutralize my accent and believe I now sound neutrally American (what used to be called Nebraska Newscaster).
Sounds like others tried and had similar results (not identifying Australian or Irish accents).
Yep, as a New Zealander/Australian (spent half my life in both) I was curious what it would give me. Turns out "native english speaker" is all you get. Even if I really put it on thick
Great article, and very important things to consider. As a practice, I take my holidays at the end of each year to consider my career, my life, and my worldview. A long holiday is an opportunity to refocus from work to introspection, and allows you to find comfort with your place in the world. The primary things I ask myself near the end of this introspection period are:
1. Is the work that I am doing advancing my personal goals?
2. Is the way I spend my time good for my mental health, my physical health, and my family?
3. Is the work that I do aligned with my ethical worldview?
4. Am I being renumerated appropriately aligned to the value that I am bringing?
5. Am I still learning something each day?
6. Are my family happy with the outcome of this year and the way I contributed to it through my work and otherwise?
If I get a no to any one of these questions, I start looking for a new job. I've moved across country and across the world, and I've been at companies for a long time and a short time throughout my career (that's nearing 20 years at this point). I've switched industries and areas of technical focus many times, and I've even switched entire career paths by simply asking myself these questions after a relatively short period of introspection.
I encourage everyone to consider the ethics of their work, but also to consider regularly whether or not your work is advancing your goals, making you happy, making you healthy, and supporting your family in the way they need to be happy and healthy. Ethics is a core part of this. If you are doing work you don't agree with for purposes you would not agree with, it can be traumatic to your own psyche and deeply affect both your health and happiness, including how you treat other people and especially those closest to you.
The entire argument for high CEO renumeration is that they take on total responsibility for all actions of the company. The buck stops with them. So, why do we think it's acceptable for that not to be the case when the company does something bad?
Thats a good argument in a vacuum. But the world has determined "I was just following orders" is not a good defense.
We know the crimes against humanity are bad and subordinates are guilty if they do them. We don;t just let everyone off free except the head of state.
Not to see that united healtcare (as bad as they are) are anywhere near that, but I am saying that its clear that we, as a society, already hold all people complicit in evil as guilty. Not just the person at the top.
> This depends a lot on context you haven't provided. Most importantly - is this legal?
Whether it is legal or not is irrelevant. You are entering into a conversation about morality. The law does not dictate morality, as much as it can morality dictates the law. The entire point of the person you are replying to is that acts with moral equivalence are treated differently by the law because of the social and economic status of those likely to commit those acts.
A very real example of this from American history is that crack cocaine and powder cocaine had different mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for charges of simple possession as well as charges of possession with intent to distribute. Both are effectively the same drug, but one version of this drug is more commonly use by poor and non-white people, and the other version used by rich white people, and so we ended up with a gross disparity in the law over exactly morally equivalent acts.
You are not actually engaging with the argument that the person you are replying to is making. Nobody gives a shit what the law says, they care about what is right and what is wrong. Then we mold the law to match.
> Whether it is legal or not is irrelevant. You are entering into a conversation about morality. The law does not dictate morality, as much as it can morality dictates the law.
There are various ideas about morality. But I think even in the most common-sense interpretation of morality, most people agree that there are things that are legal, but immoral, things that are perfectly moral but illegal, and that respecting the law is a meta-rule that is important regardless of morality.
Simple example: Most people agree that cheating on a spouse is wrong and immoral. Not illegal though. Do you think it makes any sense to suggest that the only options are either we change the law to make adultery criminal, or we take vigilante justice on adulterers? Or is it just possible that some things might be immoral (to some people) but should be legal?
> A very real example of this from American history is that crack cocaine and powder cocaine had different mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines [...]
Yes, and I think the law was wrong in this case, like it's been wrong many times in history (slavery was once legal too). The correct thing to do was to try and change it, which is what eventually happened.
An incorrect option would've been to jailbreak prisoners because you disagree with the law, despite lots of people being imprisoned for longer than they should've been.
> You are not actually engaging with the argument that the person you are replying to is making. Nobody gives a shit what the law says, they care about what is right and what is wrong. Then we mold the law to match.
I am engaging, because I disagree with this idea. The law and morality are connected, but distinct things, as I've shown above. We have to have legal systems in place to make broad decisions - we can't go based off of people's personal moral ideas. Explain to me how you would like things to work and still be compatible with that idea, given the above examples I've given.
And I think the idea that "nobody gives a shit what the law says" is a statement that is... very, very incorrect.
The biggest question here is: what is the purpose of the law?
The standard answers are things like, the law exists to protect people, or enforce broadly agreed conduct, or to deter or punish criminals.
Those answers are all wrong. The purpose of the law is this: to convince people not to take matters into their own hands.
Civilization depends on people mostly not taking violent revenge when wronged. The law exists to replace revenge with “justice” in the minds of the aggrieved. Everything else is window dressing.
If this starts to break down then the law is failing. The fix isn’t to convince people that following the law is inportant, the fix is to show people that the law offers a viable notion of justice, whatever that might entail.
> If this starts to break down then the law is failing. The fix isn’t to convince people that following the law is inportant, the fix is to show people that the law offers a viable notion of justice, whatever that might entail.
I agree. I just don't think the system is as broken as you seem to think it is. Compared to almost any other place and time, the system is the best.
> Those answers are all wrong. The purpose of the law is this: to convince people not to take matters into their own hands.
Btw, while I do agree with this in a democracy, note that many, many people throughout history (and today!) live and have lived in places where some people really are above the law. That doesn't seem to preclude society functioning.
Have you lost a loved one because health insurance refused or delayed payment for treatment? I can't take you seriously when you say the system isn't that broken when I see people sharing their experiences of how people died and suffered unnecessarily because some health insurance company fought them on it. How is that not insanely broken?
Here in Germany, I've never had to worry about whether my healthcare would pay my treatment when I've had to go to the hospital and had to be operated on. The idea that this is possible in other countries is unfathomable to me. I didn't choose to have whatever illness I might have. My doctor decided the best way to treat my illness. Why does some third party get to decide "but nah bro, it can't be that bad, let's just wait and see how the patient does in a week or two". Why can they override what a doctor thinks is best?
And why are there people like you who thinks "it's not that bad/broken".
Let me clarify. First, I'm not from the US. I completely agree with you that their healthcare system seems incredibly broken.
That, however, is not what I was referring to - I was talking about the system of laws, of democracy, etc. That was what the discussion was about - whether it's "ok" to kill someone in a vigilante way, and whether the legal system or general system of Western countries works well in terms of aligning the law to what people think it should be.
> And I think the idea that "nobody gives a shit what the law says" is a statement that is... very, very incorrect.
I would say almost the entire body of social science and moral philosophy (setting aside the replication crisis for the moment) more or less proves the correctness of saying "nobody gives a shit what the law says". Society is bound by social mores, not by laws, laws are intended to encode social mores and give a vehicle to systematically enforce those mores without relying on vigilantes. Without the law, we'd have more direct culture clashes around topics like immigration, because people try to bring their cultural values and social mores with them, the law encodes and enforces whatever social mores exist, as much as the people of a society can control its laws.
It's not the law people care about, it's the social mores. And the social mores extend from the collective consensus of morality. People don't generally kill other people, not because it's illegal, but because it's wrong. But sometimes, killing other people isn't wrong, such in the case of self-defense or protecting your family. Sometimes the law even convicts and punishes people for committing crimes, because the law has a narrower interpretation at the margins than wider social mores. This is exactly what you're observing here. There is a moral equivalence between murdering thousands of people via a bureaucratic decision and pulling the trigger on the gun, but the law treats them differently, society does not. /This/ is why so many people condone the shooter's actions.
You aren't getting it. The law does not matter. The law is a reflection of society, society is not a reflection of the law. The law is a tool of language to try to explain, communicate, and enforce something that exists outside of it, but the thing which gives law power is the thing which exists outside of it. Morals are way more important than laws.
For all situations that actually matter, nobody gives a shit what the law says, and they never will. They only care about what other people will think of them, what they will think of themselves, and how their moral compass and social mores guide their decision-making process. This is exactly why we generally think of people who murder as being sociopaths, lacking a moral compass, because it's the moral compass and not the law that prevents most people from being murderers.
You think I'm being flip, I'm actually making an incredibly cogent point that you continue to miss, just as you missed the point of the person you replied to originally.
> You think I'm being flip, I'm actually making an incredibly cogent point that you continue to miss, just as you missed the point of the person you replied to originally.
I think it's a bad approach to assume that you're making incredible points and I'm just not getting it, rather than assuming we're just disagreeing and that, potentially, you are wrong.
> Society is bound by social mores, not by laws, laws are intended to encode social mores and give a vehicle to systematically enforce those mores without relying on vigilantes.
Maybe we're talking past one another by talking about whether the law "matters" or not.
Social mores are against adultery. Many people do in fact commit adultery, and continue to have totally fine lives, despite this.
On the other hand, lots of people hate taxes. Try not paying your taxes, and you'll end up in jail.
I don't think the law is a reflection of social mores - almost everyone agrees that the law, while obviously based on many in society, shouldn't encompass all social mores, and has to include things that are not, prima facie, moral. You shouldn't, in general, put someone in jail for being too poor to afford food, and stealing some food. Very few people agree that that's moral in a specific instance. But if you don't jail people for stealing, very soon society breaks down.
I'm not sure which of the above, if any, you disagree with. Maybe none of it - in which case maybe we just agree with each other and are using different language to explain ourselves. If you disagree with something in specific, maybe we should drill down on that.
> On the other hand, lots of people hate taxes. Try not paying your taxes, and you'll end up in jail.
You seem to be making the argument that the law has a life of its own, which isn't entirely untrue, but case in point: While most people don't enjoy paying taxes, they do so because they understand it's necessary to have a functioning society they want to be part of. There are many legal ways to get around paying most or all of your taxes, but they're generally so costly to setup that they're only available to the very rich and to corporations, and most people morally judge this as a negative thing even though it's legal, they don't generally morally judge paying their taxes as a negative thing, but the avoidance as negative.
We do disagree, and it's not a question of semantics, it's a question of causality. You are essentially saying that the law and social mores have no causality relationship, I am saying the law comes from social mores, and the law does not influence them. The law is /subordinate/, which is why nobody really cares about it. Obviously "nobody" is intentionally overbroad, policy-makers, lawyers, and judges care quite a lot about the law, but the vast majority of the population (99%+) does not, they do however care very very deeply about social mores and cultural norms.
This actually is useful, because it allows the symbols to visual indicators when reading currency figures and can be used in a programmatic way. $ becomes a start marker for the beginning of a currency figure where the most significant digit is immediately after the marker and anything remaining after flows from that, and the same is true for cents where the symbol acts as an end marker and infers a lower bound. They can almost be thought of as start and end markers in regex, although they are not used together so not exactly that way.
It makes a sort of rational sense, at least to me.
The rationale I've always heard for having the $ at the beginning of the number was so that a handwritten value on, say, a check couldn't be modified by sticking a number at the beginning. 1.00$ could be forged into 91.00$, but not so with $1.00.
This is a nice idea, and one I also advocate for, however it's important to keep in mind that the idea of reproducibility relies on determinism. So much of what goes into a build pipeline is inherently nondeterministic, because we're making decisions at compile time which can differ from compilation run to compilation run, setting aside flags. In fact, that's the point of an optimizing compiler, as many reproducible build projects have discovered, turning on optimizations pretty much guarantees no reproducibility.
As long as the compiler is not optimizing by "let's give this 3 seconds of solving time, then continue if no better solution is found", then optimizing is not inherently nondeterministic.
Counterpoint: Archlinux is 89% reproducible with optimizations enabled. The only thing I see which is difficult to make reproducible is optimizations with a timeout.
Instead of using a timeout, an optimization that can must be cut off if the cost is excessive can keep some kind of operation or size count, where the count is strictly a function of the input. For example, an optimization based on binary decision diagrams (BDDs) can put a ceiling on the number of nodes in the BDD.
This is defeatist: compilers do not usually use the system RNG to make decisions, so what's happening is entirely accidental introduction of difference which propagates.
There is "intentional input" (contents of the source files), and "accidental input" (source file full paths, timestamps, layout of memory given to you by the OS, and so on). A reproducible build system should give the same output for the same "intentional input".
(the only place where you do see RNG driven optimization is things like FPGA routing, which is a mess of closed toolchains anyway. It has no place in regular software compilers.)
Well, lot of things can influence here. Multithreaded build, PGO, or even the different access order of the hash table inside the code optimizer can be a factor. Things are getting probalistic and thus somewhat nondeterministic: the build itself is nondeterministic but the runtime/final execution is deterministic
"Reproducible" isn't necessary for "not modified from what everyone else gets", and that still makes some attacks FAR harder (and easier to identify, as you know what the "normal" one is). And a published Merkle tree just makes it easier to verify "none of this has changed", as opposed to SHAs on a website that could change any time.
For sure, which is one of the big benefits of git + git tagging, but the issue is even if you know you received the same binary as someone else, without reproducible and auditable builds, you have no idea if that binary originated from the same code in the case of a targeted attack.
> For sure, which is one of the big benefits of git + git tagging
That's not enough for serious security though, because git is (still) using SHA1 instead of SHA256. You would need something extra, like a signed commit.
There's also the much simpler pitfall of an attacker just creating a branch named the same as a commit, in the hopes that people will accidentally check it out instead.
I've been doing photography as a hobby since I was a kid, learning from my dad who also did photography as a hobby. We've both won numerous awards, although I have not won as many as my dad, and none of them are particularly prestigious (mostly local / regional contests, often tied into a fair)
Pretty much all of the stuff being discussed here is meaningless, although a table stakes that every person should learn. The most important thing in photography is learning about light and lighting, how light works, how the camera interacts with light, and how to capture and harness light. Every single thing you see with your eyes, and every single thing you capture with your camera is just a reflection of light off your subject and the subject's surroundings. If you don't understand light, you cannot formulate a composition, and if you can't formulate a composition it doesn't matter what settings you use on the camera, it's not going to be a good photo.
I love the technical aspects of cameras, both film and digital, and I delve very deeply into that myself out of my enjoyment of these aspects, but they're really ultimately not important to the actual art of photography and taking good photos. They're just tools. What matters most is composition. I see a lot of great photos online that are taken with smartphones, and there is nothing wrong with that. I have complicated gear because I enjoy futzing with complicated gear and some of the things I do visually are not possible (easily) with a phone, but for the most part these days I take most of my photos with a phone and some have even been printed and hung in galleries.
There's no reason to worry about any of the meaningless things this article talks about until you understand light, composition, and have figured out what you want to say with that photo. Keep in mind your phone, and any camera you can buy today has more digital resolution than any of the professional grade digital gear available just a decade ago, and in some cases more digital resolution than was available on 35mm film. Even with the revival of film today, you get more stops of dynamic range on a current-generation professional mirrorless camera than you can get on 35mm film.
These technical details basically have ceased to matter within the last 3-5 years, all that matters is composition, storytelling, and lighting.
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