It’s changed a bit. Most of it comes because Rick Perry was the Lt Gov until Bush got elected POTUS.
Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka created a list (called “Dear Yankee”) to help out the fortunate folks who don’t know much about Our Guv:
No link right now because they want me to re-register & I haven’t gotten my new password. Texas Monthly runs some good stories but I’ve been avoiding the rag due to their long-time, eager fellating of the Bushes…
Oh, many of the areas burning near Houston needed more than “clearing brush.” They are far-out suburbia in the Piney Woods. Trees, not brush. (Oh, and many of what Larry McMurtrey called Houston’s “sexy trees” are not doing so well.)
The latest posts at Burntorangereport (UT colors are Burnt Orange & White) include detailed coverage of the fires–much of which is beyond politics. But they do drop reminders that the last state budget cut funding to volunteer fire departments by 75%. (When that went through, the drought was already underway & wildfires were already a problem.)
Oh, Perry is staying Out West a few days more to raise funds for his campaign. “Members of his finance team says ‘it is going like wildfire’ and their California schedule backs up the claim.”
And the horse you rode in on, Ricky…
One important difference between the two examples is that mine only has one point of failure: idiot neighbor doesn’t clear his land. Yours has at least six. While that’s certainly still something that can occur, it’s unlikely that all of those factors will come into play at the same time with any sort of regularity. “Idiot doesn’t clear his land,” is, I would think, much more common - particularly if there’s no sort of agency that can be called in to force him to clear his land and thus prevent a fire.
Actually, it’s based on one assumption: people who lose everything in a catastrophic accident shouldn’t be cast out into the streets to starve. With a strong federal government, there’s protection against that. The only protection available in a Libertarian system is the assumption that you’ll be able to locate a responsible party with enough material wealth to be able to make you whole.
Yes, the other taxpayers will suffer, to a tune of less than a fraction of cent each. And that’s not money that’s stolen from them, that’s money that they’ve paid into the system with the understanding that, if they were in the same situation, they would have the same safety net.
That is, of course, assuming you can afford fire insurance. I suspect that, in a free market, it would be virtually impossible to get fire insurance in areas that are commonly susceptible to wild fires. Voluntary fire brigades also presumes that you have enough people in the area who are physically able to work as a fire fighter. Lastly, I’m not certain that purely voluntary fire brigades are sufficient to fight the sort of fires we’re talking about here. The fires in Texas have drawn professional firefighters in from all over country to help fight it. I don’t see that happening with purely volunteer fire brigades. Even if there’s enough people with the will to fly across the country and throw themselves in front of a raging inferno for free, how many will be able to afford to walk away from their jobs for weeks at a time to do it?
Because even the stupid and lazy don’t deserve utter ruin, and the cost to the rest of us to prevent this, on an individual level, is miniscule.
Only if you define justice as a rigid adherence to an abstract ideal in the face of overwhelming human misery. For myself, that’s not a kind of justice I want any part in.
That there harebrained aye-deeah a’ yers shure smacks of soshulism, son. Y’all a commie Nazi or summin’ ? Cuz we don’t much like commies 'round these here parts, no sir !
The man has all the qualities of a rattlesnake, but lacks the warmth.
They live in towers that they have hewn from the very rock itself using only their wits and their strong calloused hands. Towers that are built entirely using self-taught skills and do not rely on government theft from others to build.
Or, they live in towers that they inherited from their father. One or the other.
BTW, just to redirect this hijack, I was never suggesting that the government send jackbooted thugs with rifles to stand over landowners to force them to clear their brush. What I was saying is that saying we didn’t need fire teams because every land owner would see his self interest and clear his brush was naive in the extreme. The world is so full of people working against their own best interests - including every heroin addict and all criminals except for rare evil geniuses - that this view makes believing in the tooth fairy look like hard-headed realism.
**Sometimes it’s not “brush.” ** Much of the burning land is residential–with lots of trees. Now, no trees. No houses, either.
Most of the fires have been fought by volunteer firefighters–usually landowners. But they can’t do all their own fundraising. (I remember barbecues when I was a kid.) That funding was cut by 75% in the latest State Budget. Which was voted in after the drought had begun & while some wildfires were already burning…
This bears repeating; these aren’t fires being spread solely by failure to clear brush. Everything is dry and dead here, grasslands, yards, parks, trees, leaves, medians, playgrounds, football fields, everything. I just had five bags of leaves raked, shed by trees I’m fighting hard to keep alive under water restrictions. The entire yard looked like fall even though we’ve had triple digit temperatures for months. It’s absolutely shocking to see, and more than a little frightening even before the current fires. Imagine being surrounded by hundreds of thousands of miles of land that’s covered in shredded newspaper and you’ll get an idea of the situation. The only way landowners could completely prevent wildfires on their property is to completely till them over and remove all vegetation whatsoever. We’re talking about multiple wildfires, some almost 20 miles wide and covering tens of thousands of acres, and they’re being fed and spread by high winds causing the flames to spread even across roadways.
I’m so glad you used this as an example. For those not familiar with the case here is the Huffington Post link: San Bruno Explosion: One Year Later, A City Still Recovers
The report pinned blame for the pipeline’s failure on both PG&E officials and the regulators tasked with keeping the public safe. The politically powerful San Francisco-based corporation had been granted exemptions from the requirement to regularly pressure-test its lines by the California Public Utilities Commission and the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. The explosion was the result of “a company that exploited weaknesses in a lax system of oversight and government agencies that placed blind trust in operators to the detriment of public safety,” said NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman.
And it was eight people killed, and 38 homes destroyed. And the proactive solution to this problem? More regulation. Come on guys, the government is proactive, and libertarianism is reactive. Right?
NTSB faults PG&E, regulators in gas explosion
“About half the gas transmission lines — roughly 150,000 miles — were built prior to 1970 and so are exempt from many federal safety requirements, NTSB officials said”
Thank og we have the government looking out for our safety, proactively.
Also, what happens if the fire is caused by the government? I know it sounds far fetched, since the government is there to look out for our safety, but what if:
The fires were not the result of a cigarette butt tossed carelessly out a car window or of lightning striking a dead tree, but were deliberately set by the National Park Service to prevent worse fires.
A certain percentage of police officers has committed crimes though the whole reason they were hired was to fight crime. Most reasonable people don’t consider that an argument for throwing our hands in the air and disbanding all police forces. :rolleyes::smack:
You left out an even better aspect of the story. The regulators granted PG&E rate increases to inspect and replace faulty pipes. In many cases, PG&E decided that they had other priorities for that money.
However, I don’t get your point. It is not like anyone is claiming that regulation is perfect, or claiming that powerful companies don’t lobby to reduce the impact of regulation wherever possible. Do you really believe that PG&E would have done a better job with no regulation? My point was that knowing that their carelessness would get them sued if something happened didn’t stop them from being careless - and losing the pipeline records.
If you are a manager, under financial pressure to make your numbers, do you go over your budget now (and possibly lose that raise) because there might be a possibility of a problem possibly a decade in the future, or do you convince yourself that cutting corners is okay because it hasn’t caused a problem yet? Now, consider the same situation if you know that a regulator is going to ask for your paperwork. That’s why we have regulation.
Forest fires are natural. There were fires long before there was man. Letting them happen in a controlled way is hardly absurd. I didn’t major in forest management in college so I’m not qualified to say if that particular fire was warranted or if it was started in the proper way. I doubt you are either.
Forget crimes. Sometimes police officers make mistakes. So does everyone. So do doctors. The problem isn’t the mistake, it is covering up the mistake or pretending the mistake never happened.
But I’m lucky. As a programmer, when I make a mistake I get an incorrect output no matter what my intentions were. It teaches humility.
You’re right, of course. That was just shorthand for the limited amount of control a landowner has, which is actually even less than I was saying.
My little town in NJ had a volunteer fire department (the son of a friend was a paramedic on it) because we were too small to be able to afford full time firefighters. But even when you cut personnel costs you still have equipment costs, and a booth at the town fair only gets so much. Fire equipment is expensive. And we were a pretty rich town.
Yes, yes, we all know that you feel the solution to the problem of inadequate regulations is to then remove the regulations in their entirety. Makes total sense :rolleyes:
Or if you have a situation where a corporation causes death as a result of “a company that exploited weaknesses in a lax system of oversight”, we all know that your favored solution is not to make the oversight less lax, but to eliminate it alltogether, since the corporation will then magically do the right thing. :rolleyes:
But feel free to call me stupid or something. That always works too.
Ah clearly they have not discovered the power of fundraising spaghetti dinners. Works for folks with no healthcare who need an operation too.
The Catholic Church down our block got to that one first.
Damn religion. 
It does? Do you mean there are only maybe fifty snotty, arrogant programmers, and I met all of them? Well, lucky me!
Did you read the same article I read? The article is placing blame on the government’s lack of proactivity in this case. How on earth does that prove that the government shouldn’t be proactive?
The government should have enforced stringent safety regulation. This wouldn’t have happened if they had done so.