Context from the official statement is that PG&E does expect to require blackouts, but it will not be the same magnitude of black outs as seen a few weeks ago.
Where did you infer that? Literally the first sentence is...
>The CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. told California energy regulators that the state will likely see blackouts for another 10 years like the one imposed last week that left as many as 800,000 customers without power.
Not only that, but it's impossible to claim that future blackouts won't be of the same magnitude. The blackouts are determined by weather patterns, none of which can be predicted this far out. It's entirely possible we get another weather forecast in a year that calls for the same region-wide high winds and dryness.
I've lived in two developing countries in my life, and its interesting how CA is morphing back into that. Small enclaves of super-rich, very high price communities where everything works, surrounded by large swaths of shanty towns where nothing works.
After living in LA for a few years, it certainly does feel exactly the way you describe within the city.
But those juxtapositions are literal blocks apart from each other. The Google campus is next door to a shanty town in Venice, and their security sic the police on them for any minor infractions (or just made up ones). Very similar situation with the redevelopment downtown.
It really does give you a bleak portrait of the tolerance for inhumanity within the context liberal Capitalism. California is ostensibly as “wacky leftist” as the US gets and it’s a bleak, cruel place in many regards.
American liberals are always yelling for more “humanity”, but they keep quiet about the requirement that humanity must come at someone else’s expense. Yes, we need cheaper housing - but not here. Yes, guvment must build better jails - but not here. Yes, please run more buses - but not down my street. Yes, we must accept more refugees - but put them somewhere far away, certainly not anywhere near my child’s route to school.
Liberalism and NIMBYism are joined at the hip. Liberalism is loud and ostentatious, while NIMBYism is prosecuted quietly via the court system, lobbying, and political donations. There’s a certain poetic beauty to how both seem to coexist in the same group of people.
Humanity must come at someone else’s expense? Just meditate on that thought for a minute. Think about it carefully. In your mind, on whose backs do you suppose that wealth was built?
Yes, that's what the liberals are saying. They're yelling for more humanity, but they want it to come at someone else's expense. This isn't my principle; it's the liberals'. I'm not the one who should be meditating on anything, as I'm also not the one preventing affordable housing from being built.
Wrong answer. The wealth of those you want to protect from taxes is and has always been built on the backs of the poor who you want to deprive of public services.
They built your homes, they tend your gardens, they raise your children, they guard you while you sleep. Yet you whine and complain when they want buses that run on time and a place to sleep.
There is a two-step process here for your builders, gardeners, nannys, security guards, etc. First the things they want must be produced, then they have to secure access to those things.
There is no question that tax-and-redistribute can make step 2 happen. However, the problem is that the plan for step 1 is usually some variant of 'Massive taxes aren't going to change what gets produced. What's gonna happen, people gonna stop working on important things?'. That plan often doesn't work because it turns out massive taxes change what gets produced, often much for the worse.
You can get morally outraged if it makes you feel better, but your comment inspires no hope in me that you've thought your solution through. There is substantial evidence that, economically speaking, going for a big pie unevenly shared is a much better solution than going for a small but evenly sliced pie.
They won't stop working on important things. What is their alternative? Sell everything they own and move to Canada? Just sit around and drink beer all day?
Broad brush strokes that have no basis in reality are a great way to see the world. You think there aren't conservatives who are just as shitty as the liberals you talk about?
A: there are
I’m not sure where you get those ideas? Where I live in NYC, they recently shut down a major street to cars so buses could run more easily — and the furthest left want to expand that. The left leaning people I know want to close jails, not build better ones elsewhere. We opposed an Amazon campus in our backyard specifically because it would drive up rents — and the furthest left want rent control.
Liberals are obviously not a monolith of only ethically consistent people, but I definitely don’t see the pervasive NIMBYism.
The Left in New York City are largely socialists by now, who had enough of a long-standing working-class tradition to avoid allying with liberal NIMBYs.
He's honestly pretty spot on about liberals, as the spot on the spectrum in between conservatives and social democrats.
Maybe so, but I don’t read the original comment as a critique of centrist Democrats in particular. (I also don’t think centrist Democrats are alone in the gap between their professed values and their actual ones.)
I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Here the same people who yell for affordable housing also go to court to block construction of new towers. The same people who complain about buses stuck in traffic on W 86th St also prevent the introduction of universal metered parking and congestion pricing.
But my original comment was mainly addressing the NIMBYism in California. Look at SF: it's a low-rise city of sky-high demand and prices. Who's preventing new construction? The same local NIMBYs who enjoy rising property values due to severely restricted supply of land that can be built on.
I until very recently lived downtown, where congestion pricing would actually take effect, and the people most in support were again the furthest left.
SF does seem to be more NIMBYish, but I’m not sure why you think it’s a microcosm of liberalism.
I think you are conflating entirely two different concepts. NIMBYism is a unique California value and closely related to California history rather than a true left ideology. In fact, leftist policies are for more denser urban development, public transit etc as you can see in European countries
> It really does give you a bleak portrait of the tolerance for inhumanity within the context liberal Capitalism. California is ostensibly as “wacky leftist” as the US gets and it’s a bleak, cruel place in many regards.
Maybe that means that “leftism” isn’t actually the thing that makes for more tolerance for humanity? Leftist policies haven’t prevented California from having the highest poverty rate in the country, the highest income inequality in the country, sprawling homeless encampments, etc. Many places in the US are considerably less “leftist” but also considerably less bleak. Homelessness rates, for example, are much lower in West Virginia and Mississippi than in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/homelessness-californi....
There are a wide range of “leftist” policies, but they generally include things like higher taxes to support more social services, strong support for labor unions, higher minimum wages, higher government regulation of various aspects of the economy, various social policies including deemphasizing traditional families and religious institutions, etc.
California may not be “socialist” like Sanders wants (and frankly, no country in the OECD is “socialist” anymore the way Sanders wants), but it’s certainly more leftist than the rest of the US. It’s got the highest taxes, among the highest social spending, much more government regulation of the economy, higher percentage of union workers than the US average, the highest minimum wage, etc. If should be doing a lot better than other US states.
So it sounds like "leftist" is just a term you use for any democratic policy, not a subset? Like it's not just Sander's dems, its California which is not all that extreme (yet?)
> California may not be “socialist” like Sanders wants (and frankly, no country in the OECD is “socialist” anymore the way Sanders wants)
Sanders “Democratic Socialism” is basically European social democracy; none of the things Sanders seeks are all that uncommon, or even for the most part particularly “socialist”, by OECD standards.
> [California]’s got the highest taxes
It's not even in the top 20% of states by tax burden, coming in at 11 out of 50. (Iowa, which somehow never gets called leftist, is #10) [0]
Not sure why you're downvoted. I tend to think of leftist as relating to left wing ideologies (socialism, Marxism, communism, whatever), but in many internet enclaves, it seems to refer to being on the further and of the American Democrat party.
That is what I think, but in usage, for instance here, the person is identifying Cali as a bastion of leftist policies and I don't think Cali is particularly far left.
Harris, Feinstein and Pelosi are all pretty center, until 2011 they had a Republican governo,r and these tech companies and their values are decidely not liberal.
Further, Cali is home to some very conservative politics, Devin Nunes is way out there as is Kevin McCarthy.
The idea of leftist doesn't seem consistent with the usage.
More standard centre right positions (in UK /EU terms ) in a lot of cases - Pres Obama was in UK Terms a on nation Tory like Rory Williams or Ken Clark.
Correct-ish. In the US, "left", "liberal", and "Democrat" have been related for so long that they've been nearly synonymous for a good two decades. Which isn't the case in almost any other part of the world.
> In the US, "left", "liberal", and "Democrat" have been related for so long that they've been nearly synonymous for a good two decades. Which isn't the case in almost any other part of the world.
In most of the world (outside of some one party states where the ruling party shifts with the poltiical winds to avoid losing dominance, like Mexico when it was under one-party rule), especially in multiparty democracies, the association of ideologies with parties is much stronger and more consistent than in the US. That aside, the dominant ideology of the Democratic Party has actually been consistent for a little over two-decades, but that ideology is center-right neoliberalism, not leftist. “Lefist” has mostly been associated with the Democratic Party because of the propaganda efforts of the even farther right party, not because of any real substance. It's only recently (since about 2014) that a faction even vaguely leftist has given any significant challenge to the dominant center-right faction of the Democratic Party.
That’s all correct, but you’re choice of starting point is a bit misleading. FDR was not a center right neo-liberal. There was a brief interregnum during which Clinton and Obama governed as center-right economically and center-left socially.
To someone who grew up during that period, the allegations of socialism from the right never made any sense to me. It was only recently when Democrats started fighting to distance themselves from Obama that I understood the criticism from the right. I would also argue that you’re understating the profound shift that has happened in the last two years. The Green New Deal is an openly socialist document, and every Democratic candidate has committed to supporting it. It’s again the party of FDR, not the party of Clinton or Obama.
> The Green New Deal is an openly socialist document, and every Democratic candidate has committed to supporting it. It’s again the party of FDR, not the party of Clinton or Obama.
We’ll see about that. No sweeping legislation has been introduced, and words are cheap. I’m not convinced that many of the Democrats who support it now won’t suddenly find reason to water it down or oppose it when they need to put their vote on the record. It looks like Democrats are becoming the party of FDR again, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
> That’s all correct, but you’re choice of starting point is a bit misleading.
The commenter who made the accusation of present leftism chose the time period of interest (the last couple decades.) Discussing within that frame rather than changing the subject to the distant past isn't "misleading".
> FDR was not a center right neo-liberal.
FDR died more than 70 years ago.
I mean, I might just as relevantly point out that Thomas Jefferson was a follower of the kind of old-school liberalism that modern center-right neoliberalism seeks to return to in reaction--at least within the Democratic Party--against center-left progressivism.
> There was a brief interregnum during which Clinton and Obama governed as center-right economically and center-left socially.
Well, except the Democratic Presidents governing from the economic center-right include Carter, as well; 1977-2008 isn't all that much shorter than 1932-1968 (the FDR-Johnson period). It was no "brief interregnum".
> To someone who grew up during that period, the allegations of socialism from the right never made any sense to me. It was only recently when Democrats started fighting to distance themselves from Obama that I understood the criticism from the right.
But the criticism you didn't understand didn't concern the times that you describe it as making sense. So...how did the later change validate it?
> I would also argue that you’re understating the profound shift that has happened in the last two years. The Green New Deal is an openly socialist document, and every Democratic candidate has committed to supporting it.
(1) The shift didn't happen in the last two years, more like the last 5.
(2) You are overweighting establishment candidates seeking deny candidates challenging the establishment ground to fight from, while burying substantial differences in policy below the level of headline positions; its a fairly standard strategy. Also, the GND is not, in any case, an "openly socialist" document; it does endorse both environmental and social-democratic goals, but does within a capitalist framework.
> It’s again the party of FDR
I think you are jumping to conclusions on the flimsy basis of early primary campaign strategy.
We have centrally planned currency, education, military, pensions, increasingly food and healthcare. We have among the farthest left immigration policies of any wealthy state and at the federal level among the farthest left abortion laws. When people say the US is on the right they generally mean we have guns and some semblance of private healthcare. I think the idea that the US is right leaning or that Democrats are anything resembling center right is an illusion put forth by far left socialists.
Good. You should be. Rayiner is pointing out a legitimate contradiction: that the actually existing coalition labeled "the Left" and the set of goals, values, and commitments that self-declare as "left-wing" are, in our present time and in certain places, contradictory. This leaves open the question of which one will be realigned to the other: the commitments, or the coalition?
I'm asking what he or you think the coalition that makes up the left is. Is it just a more derisive term for dems? Is it a subset of dems with specific policies? I'm asking for a definition of the term he and you are using. Not your critique of a group that I don't understand the definition of.
I would say I'm talking about the "progressive wing" of the Dems, such as "the Squad" and similar. The funny thing about that particular coalition in California is that it seems to have become a pro-rent-control, anti-construction, anti-tax NIMBY lobby on housing and infrastructure.
The political term “left” actually started at the beginning of the French Revolution, where the legislative chamber was distinctly left and right sides, with the left side occupied by those waving the banner of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” and who increasingly slaughtered anyone whose views differed from Robespierre.
The term continues today, with similar physically left-right distribution of comparable views within the U.S. legislative chamber.
In general, Leftists are people who hold equality as their principle political value. Originally, leftists were people who opposed monarchy and supported democracy, because they wanted everyone to have an equal role in making political decisions. Socialists and Communists are universally considered left-wing, because they support economic equality. Movements that advocate for the social equality of disempowered groups, like women, immigrants, racial minorities, and LGBTQ people, are also usually considered left-wing.
In the US, the Democratic party is the more left-wing of the two main parties and is sometimes included under the "leftist" umbrella. However, some people, mostly on the far-left, reserve the term "leftist" for those who oppose capitalism.
> Many places in the US are considerably less “leftist” but also considerably less bleak.
I’ve spent just as much time time in the “dying” rust belt as coastal cities (it’s where I grew up), and it’s just a different kind of bleak.
It’s true that if you can manage to belong within certain in-groups in these places (often religious, reactionary), there is not as much baseline cruelty. But if you’re outside them for whatever reason, good luck. It’s made all the worse by the fact that many of their judgements of others are laundered through religion, making them even more entrenched. Wealth, poverty, disease, addiction lose much of their social determination and instead come to be a reflection of how “right you are with God.”
> It’s true that if you can manage to belong within certain in-groups in these places
Let’s be clear, the majority of people fall within these in-groups. As contrasted to say California or New York, where the in-groups are defined in a much more class-based way that excludes most people.
As to the rest belt—that’s an odd point of comparison. Those economies are devastated, while California’s is thriving. I’m thinking of places that still have an economy—Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, Idaho, Utah, Wisconsin, etc. These places manage to have half the poverty rate of California. California has about double the number of homeless families with children (adjusted for population) as Kansas. More than double that of Texas or Mississippi. (New York has more than 10 times the rate of homeless families as Texas or Kansas.)
> It’s true that if you can manage to belong within certain in-groups in these places
Let’s be clear, the majority of people fall within these in-groups. As contrasted to say California or New York, where the in-groups are defined in a much more class-based way that excludes most people.
I’m just curious - are you from one of these places? Because the class distinctions you’re describing are very much in place in the same way as in big cities, they’re just mediated through many of the same forces. So you have the rich church and the poor church, but also god forbid if you’re poor and don’t go to church at all. The lowest of the low. And many people likewise just feign belief in this culture because the material circumstances are much worse on the outside than in.
As to your point about homelessness, given the cost of living in California, wouldn’t you expect people to be more prone to homelessness than in a place Kansas? Especially since wages are actually quite bad in California (for the median household), relatively speaking.
If you’re argument is that liberal Capitalism is more openly cruel than liberal Capitalism, mediated through religious in-groupings, I’d say sure, that’s possible.
I’m a coastal elite, but my wife is from small town Iowa. The kind of town where everyone went to the same high school. Yes, they have poor people. But what’s remarkable about California, New York, DC, etc., is that it’s not just the poor people who are on the outside looking in. It’s middle class people. It’s far more exclusionary in practice than places that put a heavy emphasis on religious affiliation. My wife’s high school friends who live around Des Moines own their own houses in their 30s. That’s a linchpin of stability and societal belonging that is out of reach to middle class people in places like San Francisco.
Two things that really shook my views on the last several years was (1) living in downtown DC for a year; and (2) traveling regularly to Texas. In DC we lived in Chinatown, which has been completely gentrified. Everyone was rich, and nobody had children (the local schools are still terrible). There was an extreme disparity between the (white and Asian) gentrifiers and the people of color they were displacing. Despite there being lots of white people, you almost never saw a white kid working a service job. (All this gave me flashbacks to Bangladesh, so I packed up and moved my family to somewhere less dysfunctional.)
Texas, especially East Texas, was the opposite. Thriving suburbs of people enjoying Big Box amenities. No Michelin star restaurants and lots of religion, but with much lower display of class and race distinctions. Tons of families with children. I encountered a cab driver in Austin who sang the city’s praises. He was from Morocco and had moved to the Austin suburbs about a decade ago. He and other cab drivers were able to buy three bedroom homes with pools in a good school district. He was living the American dream.
As to cost of living in California, that goes to my point. California isn’t “liberal capitalist” in terms of housing. It’s centrally planned in the extreme.
I agree entirely with your depiction of the professional class and their displacing of poor communities of color. It’s cruel and callous to the extreme and often dressed up with a veneer of “progressive” values that makes it all the more dark and patronizing.
But I would caution you from contrasting this too much with how class differences and racial disparities manifest in more rural states. How the white working poor are treated by their “betters” (including the middle class) is often as vicious and cruel, but masked by a veneer of racial and cultural homogeneity. And the private, “dinner party” racism among middle class whites in these regions is amongst the most extreme and normalized I have ever witnessed. People do go a lot further to mask this though, hence things like the concept of “Midwestern nice.”
I fail to see how housing in California is centrally planned in anyway. It seems entirely defined by laws that protect incumbent property owners and developers, who then use their resulting wealth to buy off the government and protect this advantage. But maybe this is a difference in definitions because I mean “liberal Capitalism” in its lived, pragmatic, and arguably corrupt sense, not as a philosophical ideal.
> And the private, “dinner party” racism among middle class whites in these regions is amongst the most extreme and normalized I have ever witnessed.
As a brown person myself, I don't know what midwesterners say at dinner parties. But I also don't really care. "Midwestern nice" is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned. What is important, to me, is that it's a society that's flatter and more egalitarian than anything I've observed on the coasts. Middle class people aren't on the outside looking in, people aren't jockeying to send their kids to private schools or a handful of competitive magnets, those kids can get normal jobs and afford to live near where they grew up. You aren't defined by your job and there are institutions that draw broad swaths of society into shared experience. (Often, because there is no alternative--in small town Iowa, the surgeon's kid goes to the same high school as the farm worker's kid because that's the only high school.) And all that appears to pay real dividends in quantifiable statistics such as poverty rates and homelessness rates.
> I fail to see how housing in California is centrally planned in anyway.
If you need permission from the government to build anything, and permission is granted based on a central zoning plan, and you have to jump through hoops and follow detailed specifications on height limits, etc., that's central planning. By definition.
> What is important, to me, is that it's a society that's flatter and more egalitarian than anything I've observed on the coasts.
Fair enough, but that really doesn’t jive with my experience. I graduated from a class of 300 people in a farming community and many of my classmates I know have left because of an inability to find decent paying or meaningful work.
The nearest large town of about 100,000 people is in the middle of a housing crisis and has to grapple with all the same issues that large coastal cities have been dealing with for a decade. And they’re certainly not egalitarian about any of the solutions. Large, national real estate companies have moved in, developing primarily luxury stock, but also buying up existing housing and apartments to make sure prices and rents stay high. There’s all kinds of eliminationist rhetoric about the poor and homeless being tossed around (which honestly was always the case, even when I was a kid). Local politics are controlled by a handful of extremely wealthy families. They’re archly right-wing, which is different from the coast, but not really too much in terms of how much the poor are cared for. I looked up the stats for Texas and they seemed pretty bad on inequality, healthcare, etc.
> You aren't defined by your job and there are institutions that draw broad swaths of society into shared experience. (Often, because there is no alternative--in small town Iowa, the surgeon's kid goes to the same high school as the farm worker's kid because that's the only high school.)
Again, I really want to emphasize that just because it doesn’t seem as apparent to you doesn’t mean it’s there. In my very small school, the class distinctions were very sharp, even if we weren’t as easily segregated. That happened too, but mostly in the form of kids being sent off to expensive religious schools for middle and high school.
Wealthy kids bullied and mocked kids from families who were service workers. Everyone knew who lived in the trailer parks versus the subdivisions. Poorer, working farmers were mocked by those who had wealthy hobby farms (and often took care of animals like horses for the rich kids). It’s definitely a different tapestry of cruelty from city life, but it shouldn’t be romanticized or misunderstood in anyway.
> If you need permission from the government to build anything, and permission is granted based on a central zoning plan
Right, but there’s not a central zoning plan as far as I’m aware, there are many competing corrupt ones who seemingly stifle all but the most unaffordable development. A state-level, less restrictive, centralized zoning plan would probably actually be an improvement.
You are conflating so many issues here. 1) your experience in DC - you are ignoring the whole history of segregation and white flight and residual racism that makes DC what it is. These are not issues in central Texas 2) what you experienced about big box store and middle class people is not unique to Texas and is as common in Virginia or New Jersey or Sacramento 3)Have you double clicked your experience as it relates to deep social issues - Texas has the lowest rate of insured for example. Or protections against LGBT rights or incarceration rates ? 4) California housing is the opposite of central planning. It is an outcome of intense democracy and a patch work of very local zoning laws. Thus you will cities like Dublin and Hayward that build a lot, while other cities like Palo Alto which doesn’t build anything
> 1) your experience in DC - you are ignoring the whole history of segregation and white flight and residual racism that makes DC what it is. These are not issues in central Texas
Yes, DC has a very dark past in that regard, but decades of progressivism hasn't fixed anything. And the most recent trend in the city has been yuppies who vote the right way and say the right things pushing out all the people of color, leaving a starkly segregated and stratified society. Meanwhile, given what's going on at the border, I don't think it's accurate to say that Texas doesn't have its own issues with respect to disenfranchised demographic groups. But the combination of cheap housing and plentiful jobs is allowing broad-based prosperity in Texas.
> Have you double clicked your experience as it relates to deep social issues - Texas has the lowest rate of insured for example. Or protections against LGBT rights or incarceration rates ?
There is a place to talk about social issues, but that's not what I'm talking about here. The material prosperity of the people in the middle is a really important thing too. Indeed, that is deeply inter-connected with social justice issues, such as how easy it is for immigrants to assimilate into the country and establish themselves.
Speaking as an immigrant myself, what was important to my family when we were first starting out wasn't the incarceration rate, or how our neighbors felt about people from Muslim countries like the one we came from. It was the fact that, on a middle class income, without my mom working, we could afford a decent house in a good school district. That's something that Texas delivers on, and that results in tangible prosperity even (especially?) among immigrant groups.
The median income for a hispanic household is just 2% higher in California than Texas, but the median house in California costs 3 times as much. If I were in my parents' shoes, trying to pick a place in this country to get started, I'd pick the suburbs of Houston or Dallas over the suburbs of San Francisco in a hearbeat. It wouldn't even be a question.
> California housing is the opposite of central planning. It is an outcome of intense democracy and a patch work of very local zoning laws.
That it's the product of democracy and local zoning laws doesn't mean it's not central planning. Californians have used democracy to create a zoning system that forces construction into centrally planned models. You can't renovate your house or build a new one (or, god forbid, turn your single family home into an apartment building) without going through a central bureaucracy. That bureaucracy considers things like the "zoning plan" and the "character of the neighborhood." That's central planning!
As a person from West Virginia this is because you can rent a garbage trailer for like $200 a month there. There's also no jobs or hope, but plenty of meth. Yay!
California doesn’t have the highest poverty rate in the nation. A lot of deep red states have the highest poverty. It only has highest poverty when adjusted for housing costs, a separate measure called supplemental poverty rate. I know conservatives have failed this country and their states by electing Trump and converting once thriving industrial states to ghost towns and now they are clutching at straws with comments like that
If you sort by Supplemental Poverty Measure, you'll see California is by far the highest (23.8% vs 19.8% for the next highest state) - that's what happens after you adjust for cost of living.
That’s right. It is a supplemental measure impacted by housing costs. Which in turn is driven by unprecedented economic growth and NIMBY population. But is very different than poor people not having access to healthcare, food, schools etc
For a lower-income household, housing is a major driver of the budget, and people will sacrifice things like food and healthcare in order to pay the rent. So measuring housing costs relative to salaries is a critical component of measuring poverty. The supplemental poverty measure, moreover, does take into account things like access to food, childcare, etc.
I would take away the opposite conclusion. Left-wing government isn’t the solution in California any more than it is in developing countries and failed states; it is the problem.
It’s the same in Brazil.
We are basically converging to become Rio de Janeiro minus the natural beauty.
Well and the shantytowns in rio have better views.
Can you describe the basis for your "Google sic the police on the homeless" comment? There was a shitty local magazine article about this but my personal experience does not match this perception at all.
I’m friends with housing activists in LA who work on these issues. There was a similar thing with Google Maps cars conveniently showing up right after violent camp dispersals in my old neighborhood.
California has one of the lowest average IQs of any state. If you remove the tech workers and the old-time republicans, there's not many big brains left to go around.
This was the first google result. California is 48th. And that of course includes all the smarties in silicon valley who I assume bring up the average.
Nothing personal, but this kind of comment really grind my gears. When I read a claim like the one made in that comment, I take that as a lead and am grateful that someone brought light to that POV so I can explore more, e.g. freaking google it.
The [Citation Needed] approach would make all comments boringly long and harder to write, all conversations white-paper like, which isn't bad of course, but has its place.
How many times I felt lazy and just dropped my comment because I knew that the [Citation Needed] comments were bound to come, and while I have a good insight about the subject, I had no will to spend more energy on that nor any inclination for taking flak from lazier unconstructive commenters.
We've banned this account for using HN for ideological battle. This site exists for intellectual curiosity, and one of those things destroys the other.
I did expect to be banned, but if the hacker news crowd fails to find the underlying reasons for negative change, then it isn't very intellectually curious. You can't just not ask yourself as a 12 year old why Einstein happened to be Jewish, and continue to ignore the role of intelligence for the rest of your life.
> high price communities where everything works, surrounded by large swaths of shanty towns where nothing works.
This isn't something that's only attributable to CA. Economically depressed towns relatively close to highly concentrated areas of wealth are all over America. Also, the scale of poverty in places like the south, Appalachia, the rust belt, rural America often meets or exceeds that of third-world countries.
This never goes over well when I say it but, on my most recent trip through America driving across 5 States, much of what we drove through did not look like what I would consider developed. For hundreds of miles the only towns we'd come across had nothing but fast food places a gas station and usually multiple churches and then just houses, no schools, no grocery stores, no hospitals or doctors, though usually a pharmacy, and not much else for at least a hundred miles in any direction from these places. Between these would just be highways dotted with billboards telling you not to kill yourself or smoke meth. You could always see the 'towns' coming about 50 miles away though, first you'd see the massive McDonald's sign in the distance, then maybe a Burger king sign or a gas station sign, a massive monolith spiking 100m into the sky. A lot of it felt really bleak.
Oh please. Fuel? Fast Food? Its right next to the highway, so you can pass through without spending too much time in town. The statement was offensive, and they were called-out. Lets not nit-pick unnecessarily.
That's because most of the country is wild and rural which non americans do not seem to get. This is a good thing and something without precedent in Europe where the wilderness has been stamped out
That's simply a function of usable land. There is very little desert in Europe. Much of the Alps and the Nordic region is "wild". Much of Southeastern Spain is fairly desolate.
Much of the US "wild" area is simply not economically useful for major settlement, with the possible exception of the Pacific Northwest and far Northern California.
A drive through rural France looked much the same as a drive through Texas, in terms of how often you'd encounter a town and the setup for a particular town. The major difference being that the transition from major city to rural is a lot faster since France has restricted urban sprawl quite a bit more.
You just described most of the Midwest. That geographic structure is just the product of the large agricultural sector. But on many objective measures (home ownership rates, homelessness rates, poverty rates, median purchasing power, school quality, homicide rates), Iowa, Nebraska, Idaho, Minnesota, etc., significantly outperform California or New York.
Bleak is a relative term. I’d call it “bleak” if young people have to leave the place where they grew up just to be able to afford a house in a decent school district. Where people are tied together by little more than what industry they work in or maybe the fancy gym they go to.
How can you compare states with little population to a state with 40 mn people ? Of course numbers will look better in a smallish state. Also, how do these states perform when it comes to healthcare access, LGBT rights, environmental changes, renewable energy, immigrant rights ? School quality ? Comparing mostly white states with a state that has 50% 1st or 2nd generation migrants, with non native English speaking parents ? Homicide rates ? SF is on track to have the lowest homicide rate in 50 years. On average, California performs far better than any of the states you mentioned and that is proven by the population differences
> How can you compare states with little population to a state with 40 mn people ? Of course numbers will look better in a smallish state.
These are percentage rates, not absolute numbers, so it's not obvious why the numbers will look better in a smaller state.
> On average, California performs far better than any of the states you mentioned and that is proven by the population differences
California performs worse on many metrics even accounting for demographic differences. For example, in Iowa, Hispanic children score an average of 273 in NAEP's 8th grade math test. In California, they score just 262. In Texas it's 274. Median income for hispanic-headed households in California is about $46,000, versus $48,000 in Iowa. (Adjusted for cost of living, Hispanic households in Iowa have 30% more purchasing power than Hispanic households in California.)
The Midwest is a lot more diverse than people realize - this comment just betrays a lack of knowledge. The Midwest is a lot more than Iowa cornfields and American flags.
This comment makes no sense. In developing countries power gets shut off, because there is not enough of it. CA actually over produces power. The shut off is a result of acute climate change and dry conditions that have affected the state. And unlike a developing country, a corporation in a developed country is responding to legal risk and shutting power down. This is exactly opposite of a developing country, where corporations face no legal risk of their actions at all
That doesn’t equate to “developing country” like living standards as the OP was suggesting. There is a distinction. As someone who actually was born and raised in India, this is not even remotely the same thing. It is like saying traffic jams in NYC are like Mumbai, therefore NYC is like a developing country
>The shut off is a result of acute climate change and dry conditions that have affected the state.
No, no, nope. They are shutting off power to aged infrastructure. This is the one time a global warming culprit is using global warming to gain sympathy. They refuse to update extremely aged and damaged power lines. The same lines that can fall due to normal hazardous weather. Newer ones are not in as much risk.
Look at a map of the blackouts. They aren't large grids. They are specific small areas.
Conversely I find it interesting how quickly discussions of California quickly morph into the implication that there is little worth considering outside of the specific economy of 'silicon valley'.
I can think of no one - from the people I've known since Kindergarten from the people I've met in the last few months at my new job - who can be described as 'super-rich' or living in 'shanty-towns'. There are plenty of working class folk living quite comfortably but their stories don't fit into our 'outrage culture' so they are conveniently ignored.
Ya except Mill Valley and Sausalito in Marin county both experienced blackouts during the most recent shut down. Both of those cities being rather wealthy.
As a South African, the initial reaction is a knee-jerk, snide comment "get some", since we have frequent power outages due to a combination of institutional incompetence and malicious actors. (Apparently, at one point, we had outages that were "staged" in order for the Gupta family to make money from coal sales; I am not sure how it worked.)
But as a more sober and conscientious observer, what are the reasons for this? Is it that fires have been causing too much damage? Is it that the utility companies are slacking? From the article it is not clear whether putting off the power is a successful mitigation strategy. It's a bit unimaginable for California to have the same problems that we have. In our case we have politics that inadequately qualified people are promoted to management and hence my question about whether there is logic to this.
But the main difference is we don't have the same fire issues that California has, or at least, situations where the power lines are the cause of fires.
Edit: We do have fires, but I think we have other (less straightforward/tangible) issues that we debate in our spare time.
PG&E has been paying out dividends and executive bonuses instead of reinvesting in their infrastructure for years. And bought off a number of state politicians.
Now that climate change is creating conditions for the already wildfire-prone landscape of California to suffer more frequent and severe events, the power companies are washing their hands of it. Short of some major state or federal investment in upgrading energy infrastructure (like the green new deal), I wouldn’t expect that to change.
> PG&E has been paying out dividends and executive bonuses instead of reinvesting in their infrastructure for years. And bought off a number of state politicians.
Re the dividends part, that's an issue on which our present society will have to work more and more, because afaik most of those dividends go into the coffers of pension funds/insurance companies/big institutional investors which by their very nature "trickle down" that money mostly to people aged over 45 or 50. Most of those reinvestments you mention will get their financial return in 20-30 years' time, by which point the age-group I mentioned earlier (the over 45-50) will either be dead or to old too care that much about it.
Shouldn’t PGE forgo payouts to shareholders in order to keep infrastructure to a better standard? Surely the long term value of PGE is diminished (and thus their ability to pay dividends) if they are found liable for fires or effect rolling blackouts as a “solution”. The pension funds could invest in something else instead.
RE: pension funds; that is something that bothers me eternally. How do you find a store of wealth for normal people? Financial managers have opted for shares and bonds and in the process risk economic instability through overvaluation. The French, being the French, instead makes you pay the current people's pension in taxes and in turn promise to do the same when you are a pensioner.
Let's hope they don't do it "the South African way".
Bonuses are something that’s easy to get outraged by, but look like an infinitesimal fraction of the business numbers. A judge approved a $235M bonus structure across 10,000 employees[1], while the wildfire liabilities are at least $18B [2], their 4-year infrastructure investment plan is $28B [3], and their top-line annual revenue is $17B. How many competent execs are going to want any part of that shitshow? $235M doesn’t sound like enough…
Dividends was listed before bonuses. It is clear that the primary role of the bonuses is to generate outrage at them giving themselves bonuses for such bad performance.
Dividends have been very substantial, and evidently outcompeted maintenance. The lawsuits will collect more data in discovery.
Make no mistake, the outage and the threat are attempts at coercion, trying to force California to indemnify them, for free, against their own very deliberate negligence.
If PGE does not want to be a public utility anymore, California should confiscate their assets and turn them over to someone who does.
Also South African here, I don't think it would be the same set of problems.
Seems like less of an incompetence/malice thing and more like a long history of bad strategies with grid infrastructure and power generation.
California has been constantly lowering its power stability throughout the day by shutting down reliable power plants for more intermittent solar and wind farms, without building the storage needed to avoid a blackout.
On the infrastructure side, it seems like there hasn't been much recent investment, and as power sources get further and further from the consumer the likelihood of a problem on some section of the lines increases.
Problems with power lines is an unfortunate reality of states where population centers are spread fairly far apart (we deal with this in Canada too). They're very expensive, especially long distance ones, so it can be hard to make incentives for infrastructure upgrades.
Ultimately it's a consequence of privatization. Power in California (and particularly PG&E) has been poorly managed for decades and focused on profit at the expense of safety measures, maintenance, etc. Even if these blackouts were a necessary safety measure, the way they were performed is a great example of this - they failed to properly notify customers, their website was broken, their services available for people with medical needs were inadequate, etc. The only way to explain how poorly it was handled is cost-cutting - they had plenty of time in advance to prepare for this.
I'm not really sure whether strong regulatory oversight of PG&E would fix things or if the state just needs to take over. I'm sure privatized power works in other places but I've lived in this state for decades and PG&E has always been a disaster company with a high death count that pays out to investors and execs aggressively.
In SA it's the opposite—govt entities are pitifully incompetent and in debt; Naspers, one of the only state owned companies that went private is I think now close to the most valuable company on the JSE (although they spinned off Prosus to compensate for undervalues Tencent shares).
In any case, maybe Naspers is not what you would want all the state owned entities to turn into? There is always an argument for the risks of privitasation as well...
You can, there are some fairly straightforward principles of building in these environments to prevent the spread of fires, the technique works. Now, getting folks to care about fixing their homes, when they are insured for such a small proportion of the costs they generate, is a taller order.
Well, like hundred years of propaganda starting from the Edward Bernays times convinced generations to accept this broken system of privately owned monopolies, which has this inherent perverse incentive to rent seek with no limit and neglect actual products or services they are supposed to provide.
I asked this in another thread and got a healthy dose of downvotes instead of an answer. But why can’t they do a controlled burn along the path of the power lines?
If it’s too risky they could even do it at a different time of year when there’s less risk.
It's not just alone the paths, but also near distribution stations, which are closer to urban areas where you can't do burns. Some lines are close to urban areas. Some areas can't be burned at all because the smoke always hits urban areas. And before you can burn you have to clear a long way from the power poles themselves so that they don't get damaged. And so on.
Controlled burns aren't all that controlled in reality. It's hard to do in places that are near human settlements.
(I do disaster planning work in Australia, and while I'm not an expert on bush fires or controlled burning by a long shot, I don't see why those things would be different between the two places).
There are a few related risks coming into play here, and controlled burns specifically along power transmission paths may not be appropriate.
Fire risk largely boils down to:
1. Ignition.
2. Fuel.
3. Weather.
4. Endangered resources, particularly but not exclusively structures.
5. Fire spread mechanisms.
Weather is largely beyond control, but includes both immediate (high winds, low humidities, high temps, dry soil and vegetation) and long-term (drought, flood-drought cycles) elements.
Ignition is where PG&E are largely concerned. Electric lines and other equipment can and have caused previous fires. Keep in mind that activities such as mowing grass, getting flat tyres, and hammering have caused previous major conflagrations. At this point, ignition is all but a certainty.
Fuel includes both plants and structures. Due to 80+ years of near-total wildfire suppression, and exacerbated by climate change and plant disease, fuel loads are extreme.
Wildfires are typically wind and ember driven, rather than simply being a wall of frame. Hotspots and ignition points occur outside the principle fire front by distances of hundreds to thousands of metres -- a quarter mile to several miles in Freedom Units.
Structures specifically are vulnerable to wildfire largely when embers impinge on structures or immediately surrounding flammables: exposed decks, surrounding brush, eves, and the like. If immediate ignition can be limited, through architictureal, landscaping, or treatment (sprinkler, foam, gel) mitigations, most structures are actually fairly resilient, though heat and smoke damage can still result. A near wall-of-flame approach can still shatter window glass and ignite interiors through radiant heat.
To your suggestion:
What safes transmission lines more than anything is clearing any nearby brush or trees. You don't need to burn it away, you simply need plant matter not to contact transmission wires and equipment. This is generally an easier, and far more controllable approach than even prescribed burns. Road and heliocopter-based tree-trimming and removal can and do work.
Prescribed burns can work on overall fuel load. This is a treatment applied generally at a regional level, affecting acres to miles of terrain. It's generally best done during or immediately after the wet season (to avoid uncontrolled burns), and away from structures, including power equipment.
One of the huge weaknesses of many utility systems is adequate monitoring. For all the industry advocacy I've seen of "smart meters" and the like, applying sensors, monitors, and active monitoring of transmission lines, gas likes, water systems, pipelines, etc., seems absolutely primative. Smart meters are revenue-generating (or loss-avoiding), equipment monitoring and controls apparently aren't seen that way.
Finally: construction and emergency planning around wildfire events clearly needs to be upgraded. The good thing about institutional and methodical approaches is that they can incorporate collective wisdom. The bad thing is that they are frequently reactive, conservative, and cruft-ridden. Early-stage approaches are often grossly inadequate, late-stage approaches are often geared at outdated assumptions, experience, and methods.
Paradise, CA, had a wildfire disaster plan. It was abolsolutely inadequate to the situation faced. The 2018 Camp Fire began at 6:33 am. First units were on scene slightly before 7 am. As of 7:34, 911 operators were still telling Paradise residents there was no immediate danger. (https://ktla.com/2019/02/01/first-camp-fire-911-calls-reveal...). The fire entered Paradise at 8 am...
Having looked at all of these options recently, I can say very few people would chose Powerwalls and solar over a standby generator. A whole house generator capable of running everything in your home, including HVAC, for many days on end will run ~$10-14k installed. A single Powerwall alone costs about that much and can't distribute nearly as much power as the generator.
My uncle lives in a place that loses power often. His system is propane. When the power goes out you might notice the lights flicker. I don't know how much fuel it consumes.
The switch over time is around 30 seconds. When your power is restored from the grid, it switched back seamlessly.
Fuel is a great question. I have never looked at the consumption. Mine runs off the natural gas line, so I have no tank to fill. With this setup I feel I am in good shape for short and extended outages.
This has always felt risky to me. Sure, your setup will work for a garden-variety power outage, but not when it really matters like an earthquake or other natural disaster.
My impression of wealthy Californians is that they'd rather not have a noisy stinky polluting generator running for days requiring fuel deliveries, and if there's a "green" option that requires zero fuel, makes no noise or pollution, and is within their means, they'll prefer it.
Not to mention generators are a bit of a maintenance and operational nuisance in my experience, at least the diesel piston motor kind I've used in the past as power backup in datacenters. Most households would rather not have yet another piston engine to keep in good working order.
The majority of solar panel systems that allow feeding excessive energy back into the grid won't work in a blackout to allow line workers to completely isolate a section for line maintenance, in addition to phase synchronization issues on some of the cheaper systems too. As 99% of home IC generators are designed to function only when whatever they are powering is completely disconnected from the grid they don't have this issue.
You can buy a decent 'emergency' generator (aka high air pollution and noise) for ~ $500 sufficient to run most homes. Compared to cost of living in California, that is dirt cheap (a week or less of living expenses).
One problem with these emergency portable generators of course, is they lack safety components to stop them from catching fire. So we might end up with notable fires caused by generators used because PG&E shut off power to 'stop fires'. It shifts the liability to the consumer though, so PG&E is off the hook.
Few people really believed PG&E was going to do this, so a lot of people haven't purchased equipment yet. We'll see how it shapes up long term.
As people turn to home power generation, PG&E will lose revenue. So, PG&E will suffer in the longer term as they lose customers. Not very good business planning.
Keeping a gas or diesel generator fueled and running for days at a time is not super cheap. Plus if your whole city's power is cut and everybody else is running their generators, there's a risk of fuel price increases or even fuel shortages.
Solar & batteries are a solution but people won't adopt as a solution with this sort of timeline and current solar/battery prices. There'd need to be a slow but certain rise in PG&E prices and a some sort of tax rebate to really get people to convert over.
Reliability is what sells me on electric supply. Take that away, I will find something more reliable, and I will make the investment in local, personal generation if there isn't a source.
Local, personal generation is usually incredibly inefficient due to loading factors (you need to buy a generator that can handle most of your peak load, but they are only efficient at roughly half that - so your idle load is a huge waste, and when near peak you will be horribly inefficient).
Maintenance is also a huge pain - I've got an off grid cabin, and I can assure you, you will quickly tire of dealing with it if you are using it as your day to day power source.
Backup (propane or natural gas) generators that auto kick in aren't a bad option, but are much more expensive (about an order of magnitude higher).
And if that's still too much, you can walk away for a $350 one at harbor freight (whether it starts again the second time you need it to run is certainly questionable)
The liability risk from the fires is so high nobody is going to want to invest money in PG&E to fully clear all the fire prone lines. Also significantly raising prices is usually not allowed. Instead the existing share holders just try to bleed out whatever money they can.
When the free market does not work for a necessary public service it should be time for the government to take over.
I was in CA last year with the major wildfires going on. Not there this time, so am curious if this approach worked this year.
If yes, I suppose that controlled, scheduled blackouts is a positive move (not a competent one given that this is CA we are talking about) as it avoids a huge loss of lives, property, forest and avoids a ton of air pollution. (The generators are gonna cause it anyways. :( )
On the flip side, is PG&E using this time to improve infrastructure or should expect it to extend the timeline by another decade in 7-8 years from now?
That's definitely a dimension of what's happening, none of the utilities have ever been cool with the nebulous liability presented by inverse condemnation. I think if anyone were in their shoes, they wouldn't be either.
PG&E knows that they're way less liable for damage caused by service interruptions than they see they are for being responsible for wildfires. They're doing what California wants them to even if it's not the intent of the law.
That's mainly why I think seizing PG&E doesn't solve your problems in the short/medium term. If the state owned their lines tomorrow, they haven't seen the last wildfire. I just don't see a scenario in which the state is as eager to pick as high a number when determining liabilities.
Unless I'm missing something this completely ignores the decades of mismanagement and paying huge bonuses/salaries instead of reinvesting in infrastructure. PG&E put themselves in this position should be held accountable.
Right, I'd be sympathetic to this liability argument if they weren't extracting profits and neglecting maintenance. Obviously the fire issue is bigger than a single utility, but their actions here leave them little public good will.
I would demonstrate my sympathy for their desire not to be a public utility anymore by confiscating their assets, firing their management, and turning their assets over to someone who does want to be a public utility.
PG&E is a company with owners and while you may not like it you can't just take other peoples' property.
There are appropriate venues to vent your frustration. There is judicial system where you can go and defend your own rights if you feel PG&E stepped on it. You can go and vote for somebody to step up and solve the problem. You can also make other people aware of the problem by using your right to free speech.
No. A public utility is permitted what would be anti-trust violations, and handed a monopoly, in exchange for acting in the public interest. When they abandon the public interest, they have violated their end of the bargain. The stockholders are responsible to prevent that; if they fail, they lose their investment.
The educational system has failed you if you never learned about this. Anticipating your next objection: no, public education is also not Communism.
Communism, by numerous well-attested examples, means exterminating millions of citizens for no offense but existing. I don't find anyone proposing that. Here.
That's not really my point, and all I can say about that is that executive compensation, dividends, expected revenue, those get presented in a utility's rate cases, I think California's general rate cases are every 3 years. The CPUC and the state was in the room every time PG&E laid out their plans for these decades of mismanagement.
I'll admit it's certainly plausible I'm being too pessimistic, I don't know what about people's experience makes them think a public entity is going to invest the proper amount of money in a utility in the last let's say 30 years. And when they ask what you diverted billions of dollars to, you have to get up and say "vegitation management"
My problem is that none of the risks have properly been priced, and no amount of pillory about huge bonuses is going to solve the problem, because that money was never going to be enough.
Electricity rates are supposed to compensate the risk of doing business. Claw back all the profit you want, the rates have likely been too low, and likely egregiously low to compensate for the risk that if there's a particularly bad wildfire, you get sued into the shadow realm.
I am from the east coast, and compared to where I grew up, the power grid is way more reliable. Where I grew up, the utilities were not undergrounded, and many neighborhoods were heavily forested. Whenever there was a big front of thunderstorms in summer or, worse, an ice storm in the winter, large swaths of the area would lose all of their utilities besides natural gas. Sometimes these outages would last several days.
It was inconvenient, but nobody wanted to pay for the cost of undergrounding utilities, so it was something you just dealt with. A few people bought generators, but most didn't. The only time the outages really caused hardship was during ice storms, but fortunately those were pretty rare.
I now live in CA. PG&E made the right call here. A couple days of no electricity is better than burning an entire town to the ground in a firestorm.
It’s really sad how tribalist politics have pervasively overtaken rational discussions. I dream of discourse that doesn’t devolve into conversations about leftists, conservatives, and various interest groups.
I don't understand how the powerlines can affect to wildfires. They can put powerlines in any place or how it works?
In my country (Spain) there are laws to say exactly how much meters of free space are needed depending on what capacity has the powerline. That means that you can't build anything there and that if a powerline goes in your forestal terrain you can't plant any tree there (thats why people don't like powerlines over theirs lands).
That also does that all the forestal ground have a good number of firewalls because of the powerlines.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] thread>The CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. told California energy regulators that the state will likely see blackouts for another 10 years like the one imposed last week that left as many as 800,000 customers without power.
Not only that, but it's impossible to claim that future blackouts won't be of the same magnitude. The blackouts are determined by weather patterns, none of which can be predicted this far out. It's entirely possible we get another weather forecast in a year that calls for the same region-wide high winds and dryness.
But those juxtapositions are literal blocks apart from each other. The Google campus is next door to a shanty town in Venice, and their security sic the police on them for any minor infractions (or just made up ones). Very similar situation with the redevelopment downtown.
It really does give you a bleak portrait of the tolerance for inhumanity within the context liberal Capitalism. California is ostensibly as “wacky leftist” as the US gets and it’s a bleak, cruel place in many regards.
Liberalism and NIMBYism are joined at the hip. Liberalism is loud and ostentatious, while NIMBYism is prosecuted quietly via the court system, lobbying, and political donations. There’s a certain poetic beauty to how both seem to coexist in the same group of people.
They built your homes, they tend your gardens, they raise your children, they guard you while you sleep. Yet you whine and complain when they want buses that run on time and a place to sleep.
There is no question that tax-and-redistribute can make step 2 happen. However, the problem is that the plan for step 1 is usually some variant of 'Massive taxes aren't going to change what gets produced. What's gonna happen, people gonna stop working on important things?'. That plan often doesn't work because it turns out massive taxes change what gets produced, often much for the worse.
You can get morally outraged if it makes you feel better, but your comment inspires no hope in me that you've thought your solution through. There is substantial evidence that, economically speaking, going for a big pie unevenly shared is a much better solution than going for a small but evenly sliced pie.
Liberals are obviously not a monolith of only ethically consistent people, but I definitely don’t see the pervasive NIMBYism.
He's honestly pretty spot on about liberals, as the spot on the spectrum in between conservatives and social democrats.
But my original comment was mainly addressing the NIMBYism in California. Look at SF: it's a low-rise city of sky-high demand and prices. Who's preventing new construction? The same local NIMBYs who enjoy rising property values due to severely restricted supply of land that can be built on.
SF does seem to be more NIMBYish, but I’m not sure why you think it’s a microcosm of liberalism.
Maybe that means that “leftism” isn’t actually the thing that makes for more tolerance for humanity? Leftist policies haven’t prevented California from having the highest poverty rate in the country, the highest income inequality in the country, sprawling homeless encampments, etc. Many places in the US are considerably less “leftist” but also considerably less bleak. Homelessness rates, for example, are much lower in West Virginia and Mississippi than in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/homelessness-californi....
California may not be “socialist” like Sanders wants (and frankly, no country in the OECD is “socialist” anymore the way Sanders wants), but it’s certainly more leftist than the rest of the US. It’s got the highest taxes, among the highest social spending, much more government regulation of the economy, higher percentage of union workers than the US average, the highest minimum wage, etc. If should be doing a lot better than other US states.
No. The 1996 Democratic platform was quite right wing for example. And California Democrats’ policies on criminal justice were very much to the right.
> Like it's not just Sander's dems, its California which is not all that extreme (yet?)
I’m comparing states to each other, so I’m using “leftist” to indicate that California’s policies are further to the left compared to other states.
Sanders “Democratic Socialism” is basically European social democracy; none of the things Sanders seeks are all that uncommon, or even for the most part particularly “socialist”, by OECD standards.
> [California]’s got the highest taxes
It's not even in the top 20% of states by tax burden, coming in at 11 out of 50. (Iowa, which somehow never gets called leftist, is #10) [0]
[0] https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...
Harris, Feinstein and Pelosi are all pretty center, until 2011 they had a Republican governo,r and these tech companies and their values are decidely not liberal.
Further, Cali is home to some very conservative politics, Devin Nunes is way out there as is Kevin McCarthy.
The idea of leftist doesn't seem consistent with the usage.
Perhaps pondering that question will trigger a recalibration.
In most of the world (outside of some one party states where the ruling party shifts with the poltiical winds to avoid losing dominance, like Mexico when it was under one-party rule), especially in multiparty democracies, the association of ideologies with parties is much stronger and more consistent than in the US. That aside, the dominant ideology of the Democratic Party has actually been consistent for a little over two-decades, but that ideology is center-right neoliberalism, not leftist. “Lefist” has mostly been associated with the Democratic Party because of the propaganda efforts of the even farther right party, not because of any real substance. It's only recently (since about 2014) that a faction even vaguely leftist has given any significant challenge to the dominant center-right faction of the Democratic Party.
To someone who grew up during that period, the allegations of socialism from the right never made any sense to me. It was only recently when Democrats started fighting to distance themselves from Obama that I understood the criticism from the right. I would also argue that you’re understating the profound shift that has happened in the last two years. The Green New Deal is an openly socialist document, and every Democratic candidate has committed to supporting it. It’s again the party of FDR, not the party of Clinton or Obama.
We’ll see about that. No sweeping legislation has been introduced, and words are cheap. I’m not convinced that many of the Democrats who support it now won’t suddenly find reason to water it down or oppose it when they need to put their vote on the record. It looks like Democrats are becoming the party of FDR again, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
The commenter who made the accusation of present leftism chose the time period of interest (the last couple decades.) Discussing within that frame rather than changing the subject to the distant past isn't "misleading".
> FDR was not a center right neo-liberal.
FDR died more than 70 years ago.
I mean, I might just as relevantly point out that Thomas Jefferson was a follower of the kind of old-school liberalism that modern center-right neoliberalism seeks to return to in reaction--at least within the Democratic Party--against center-left progressivism.
> There was a brief interregnum during which Clinton and Obama governed as center-right economically and center-left socially.
Well, except the Democratic Presidents governing from the economic center-right include Carter, as well; 1977-2008 isn't all that much shorter than 1932-1968 (the FDR-Johnson period). It was no "brief interregnum".
> To someone who grew up during that period, the allegations of socialism from the right never made any sense to me. It was only recently when Democrats started fighting to distance themselves from Obama that I understood the criticism from the right.
But the criticism you didn't understand didn't concern the times that you describe it as making sense. So...how did the later change validate it?
> I would also argue that you’re understating the profound shift that has happened in the last two years. The Green New Deal is an openly socialist document, and every Democratic candidate has committed to supporting it.
(1) The shift didn't happen in the last two years, more like the last 5.
(2) You are overweighting establishment candidates seeking deny candidates challenging the establishment ground to fight from, while burying substantial differences in policy below the level of headline positions; its a fairly standard strategy. Also, the GND is not, in any case, an "openly socialist" document; it does endorse both environmental and social-democratic goals, but does within a capitalist framework.
> It’s again the party of FDR
I think you are jumping to conclusions on the flimsy basis of early primary campaign strategy.
The term continues today, with similar physically left-right distribution of comparable views within the U.S. legislative chamber.
In the US, the Democratic party is the more left-wing of the two main parties and is sometimes included under the "leftist" umbrella. However, some people, mostly on the far-left, reserve the term "leftist" for those who oppose capitalism.
I’ve spent just as much time time in the “dying” rust belt as coastal cities (it’s where I grew up), and it’s just a different kind of bleak.
It’s true that if you can manage to belong within certain in-groups in these places (often religious, reactionary), there is not as much baseline cruelty. But if you’re outside them for whatever reason, good luck. It’s made all the worse by the fact that many of their judgements of others are laundered through religion, making them even more entrenched. Wealth, poverty, disease, addiction lose much of their social determination and instead come to be a reflection of how “right you are with God.”
Let’s be clear, the majority of people fall within these in-groups. As contrasted to say California or New York, where the in-groups are defined in a much more class-based way that excludes most people.
As to the rest belt—that’s an odd point of comparison. Those economies are devastated, while California’s is thriving. I’m thinking of places that still have an economy—Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, Idaho, Utah, Wisconsin, etc. These places manage to have half the poverty rate of California. California has about double the number of homeless families with children (adjusted for population) as Kansas. More than double that of Texas or Mississippi. (New York has more than 10 times the rate of homeless families as Texas or Kansas.)
I’m just curious - are you from one of these places? Because the class distinctions you’re describing are very much in place in the same way as in big cities, they’re just mediated through many of the same forces. So you have the rich church and the poor church, but also god forbid if you’re poor and don’t go to church at all. The lowest of the low. And many people likewise just feign belief in this culture because the material circumstances are much worse on the outside than in.
As to your point about homelessness, given the cost of living in California, wouldn’t you expect people to be more prone to homelessness than in a place Kansas? Especially since wages are actually quite bad in California (for the median household), relatively speaking.
If you’re argument is that liberal Capitalism is more openly cruel than liberal Capitalism, mediated through religious in-groupings, I’d say sure, that’s possible.
Two things that really shook my views on the last several years was (1) living in downtown DC for a year; and (2) traveling regularly to Texas. In DC we lived in Chinatown, which has been completely gentrified. Everyone was rich, and nobody had children (the local schools are still terrible). There was an extreme disparity between the (white and Asian) gentrifiers and the people of color they were displacing. Despite there being lots of white people, you almost never saw a white kid working a service job. (All this gave me flashbacks to Bangladesh, so I packed up and moved my family to somewhere less dysfunctional.)
Texas, especially East Texas, was the opposite. Thriving suburbs of people enjoying Big Box amenities. No Michelin star restaurants and lots of religion, but with much lower display of class and race distinctions. Tons of families with children. I encountered a cab driver in Austin who sang the city’s praises. He was from Morocco and had moved to the Austin suburbs about a decade ago. He and other cab drivers were able to buy three bedroom homes with pools in a good school district. He was living the American dream.
As to cost of living in California, that goes to my point. California isn’t “liberal capitalist” in terms of housing. It’s centrally planned in the extreme.
But I would caution you from contrasting this too much with how class differences and racial disparities manifest in more rural states. How the white working poor are treated by their “betters” (including the middle class) is often as vicious and cruel, but masked by a veneer of racial and cultural homogeneity. And the private, “dinner party” racism among middle class whites in these regions is amongst the most extreme and normalized I have ever witnessed. People do go a lot further to mask this though, hence things like the concept of “Midwestern nice.”
I fail to see how housing in California is centrally planned in anyway. It seems entirely defined by laws that protect incumbent property owners and developers, who then use their resulting wealth to buy off the government and protect this advantage. But maybe this is a difference in definitions because I mean “liberal Capitalism” in its lived, pragmatic, and arguably corrupt sense, not as a philosophical ideal.
As a brown person myself, I don't know what midwesterners say at dinner parties. But I also don't really care. "Midwestern nice" is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned. What is important, to me, is that it's a society that's flatter and more egalitarian than anything I've observed on the coasts. Middle class people aren't on the outside looking in, people aren't jockeying to send their kids to private schools or a handful of competitive magnets, those kids can get normal jobs and afford to live near where they grew up. You aren't defined by your job and there are institutions that draw broad swaths of society into shared experience. (Often, because there is no alternative--in small town Iowa, the surgeon's kid goes to the same high school as the farm worker's kid because that's the only high school.) And all that appears to pay real dividends in quantifiable statistics such as poverty rates and homelessness rates.
> I fail to see how housing in California is centrally planned in anyway.
If you need permission from the government to build anything, and permission is granted based on a central zoning plan, and you have to jump through hoops and follow detailed specifications on height limits, etc., that's central planning. By definition.
Fair enough, but that really doesn’t jive with my experience. I graduated from a class of 300 people in a farming community and many of my classmates I know have left because of an inability to find decent paying or meaningful work.
The nearest large town of about 100,000 people is in the middle of a housing crisis and has to grapple with all the same issues that large coastal cities have been dealing with for a decade. And they’re certainly not egalitarian about any of the solutions. Large, national real estate companies have moved in, developing primarily luxury stock, but also buying up existing housing and apartments to make sure prices and rents stay high. There’s all kinds of eliminationist rhetoric about the poor and homeless being tossed around (which honestly was always the case, even when I was a kid). Local politics are controlled by a handful of extremely wealthy families. They’re archly right-wing, which is different from the coast, but not really too much in terms of how much the poor are cared for. I looked up the stats for Texas and they seemed pretty bad on inequality, healthcare, etc.
> You aren't defined by your job and there are institutions that draw broad swaths of society into shared experience. (Often, because there is no alternative--in small town Iowa, the surgeon's kid goes to the same high school as the farm worker's kid because that's the only high school.)
Again, I really want to emphasize that just because it doesn’t seem as apparent to you doesn’t mean it’s there. In my very small school, the class distinctions were very sharp, even if we weren’t as easily segregated. That happened too, but mostly in the form of kids being sent off to expensive religious schools for middle and high school.
Wealthy kids bullied and mocked kids from families who were service workers. Everyone knew who lived in the trailer parks versus the subdivisions. Poorer, working farmers were mocked by those who had wealthy hobby farms (and often took care of animals like horses for the rich kids). It’s definitely a different tapestry of cruelty from city life, but it shouldn’t be romanticized or misunderstood in anyway.
> If you need permission from the government to build anything, and permission is granted based on a central zoning plan
Right, but there’s not a central zoning plan as far as I’m aware, there are many competing corrupt ones who seemingly stifle all but the most unaffordable development. A state-level, less restrictive, centralized zoning plan would probably actually be an improvement.
Yes, DC has a very dark past in that regard, but decades of progressivism hasn't fixed anything. And the most recent trend in the city has been yuppies who vote the right way and say the right things pushing out all the people of color, leaving a starkly segregated and stratified society. Meanwhile, given what's going on at the border, I don't think it's accurate to say that Texas doesn't have its own issues with respect to disenfranchised demographic groups. But the combination of cheap housing and plentiful jobs is allowing broad-based prosperity in Texas.
> Have you double clicked your experience as it relates to deep social issues - Texas has the lowest rate of insured for example. Or protections against LGBT rights or incarceration rates ?
There is a place to talk about social issues, but that's not what I'm talking about here. The material prosperity of the people in the middle is a really important thing too. Indeed, that is deeply inter-connected with social justice issues, such as how easy it is for immigrants to assimilate into the country and establish themselves.
Speaking as an immigrant myself, what was important to my family when we were first starting out wasn't the incarceration rate, or how our neighbors felt about people from Muslim countries like the one we came from. It was the fact that, on a middle class income, without my mom working, we could afford a decent house in a good school district. That's something that Texas delivers on, and that results in tangible prosperity even (especially?) among immigrant groups.
The median income for a hispanic household is just 2% higher in California than Texas, but the median house in California costs 3 times as much. If I were in my parents' shoes, trying to pick a place in this country to get started, I'd pick the suburbs of Houston or Dallas over the suburbs of San Francisco in a hearbeat. It wouldn't even be a question.
> California housing is the opposite of central planning. It is an outcome of intense democracy and a patch work of very local zoning laws.
That it's the product of democracy and local zoning laws doesn't mean it's not central planning. Californians have used democracy to create a zoning system that forces construction into centrally planned models. You can't renovate your house or build a new one (or, god forbid, turn your single family home into an apartment building) without going through a central bureaucracy. That bureaucracy considers things like the "zoning plan" and the "character of the neighborhood." That's central planning!
I like this phrase - very expressive.
Edit: link here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...
California is somewhere in the middle. Failed red states have the worst poverty rate
https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20...
Of course PGE spends millions every year lobbying against them.
Here’s an article about it from back in 2015:
https://pando.com/2015/06/22/we-got-geeks/
https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/we-compared-average-iq-sc...
The [Citation Needed] approach would make all comments boringly long and harder to write, all conversations white-paper like, which isn't bad of course, but has its place.
How many times I felt lazy and just dropped my comment because I knew that the [Citation Needed] comments were bound to come, and while I have a good insight about the subject, I had no will to spend more energy on that nor any inclination for taking flak from lazier unconstructive commenters.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Indeed, and these same people often constantly prattling on about progressive politics.
This isn't something that's only attributable to CA. Economically depressed towns relatively close to highly concentrated areas of wealth are all over America. Also, the scale of poverty in places like the south, Appalachia, the rust belt, rural America often meets or exceeds that of third-world countries.
When you dismiss it like that, you're giving up on a solution and letting it fester.
Yes there are schools, pharmacies, and grocery stores, you just didn't see them because you were passing through.
That is nowhere near the level of homeless shooting up in the street, it's just a small community.
Of course you see signs and gas stations, because you are driving through the towns on the highway...
Much of the US "wild" area is simply not economically useful for major settlement, with the possible exception of the Pacific Northwest and far Northern California.
A drive through rural France looked much the same as a drive through Texas, in terms of how often you'd encounter a town and the setup for a particular town. The major difference being that the transition from major city to rural is a lot faster since France has restricted urban sprawl quite a bit more.
Bleak is a relative term. I’d call it “bleak” if young people have to leave the place where they grew up just to be able to afford a house in a decent school district. Where people are tied together by little more than what industry they work in or maybe the fancy gym they go to.
These are percentage rates, not absolute numbers, so it's not obvious why the numbers will look better in a smaller state.
> On average, California performs far better than any of the states you mentioned and that is proven by the population differences
California performs worse on many metrics even accounting for demographic differences. For example, in Iowa, Hispanic children score an average of 273 in NAEP's 8th grade math test. In California, they score just 262. In Texas it's 274. Median income for hispanic-headed households in California is about $46,000, versus $48,000 in Iowa. (Adjusted for cost of living, Hispanic households in Iowa have 30% more purchasing power than Hispanic households in California.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279406
No, no, nope. They are shutting off power to aged infrastructure. This is the one time a global warming culprit is using global warming to gain sympathy. They refuse to update extremely aged and damaged power lines. The same lines that can fall due to normal hazardous weather. Newer ones are not in as much risk.
Look at a map of the blackouts. They aren't large grids. They are specific small areas.
I can think of no one - from the people I've known since Kindergarten from the people I've met in the last few months at my new job - who can be described as 'super-rich' or living in 'shanty-towns'. There are plenty of working class folk living quite comfortably but their stories don't fit into our 'outrage culture' so they are conveniently ignored.
But as a more sober and conscientious observer, what are the reasons for this? Is it that fires have been causing too much damage? Is it that the utility companies are slacking? From the article it is not clear whether putting off the power is a successful mitigation strategy. It's a bit unimaginable for California to have the same problems that we have. In our case we have politics that inadequately qualified people are promoted to management and hence my question about whether there is logic to this.
But the main difference is we don't have the same fire issues that California has, or at least, situations where the power lines are the cause of fires.
Edit: We do have fires, but I think we have other (less straightforward/tangible) issues that we debate in our spare time.
Now that climate change is creating conditions for the already wildfire-prone landscape of California to suffer more frequent and severe events, the power companies are washing their hands of it. Short of some major state or federal investment in upgrading energy infrastructure (like the green new deal), I wouldn’t expect that to change.
Re the dividends part, that's an issue on which our present society will have to work more and more, because afaik most of those dividends go into the coffers of pension funds/insurance companies/big institutional investors which by their very nature "trickle down" that money mostly to people aged over 45 or 50. Most of those reinvestments you mention will get their financial return in 20-30 years' time, by which point the age-group I mentioned earlier (the over 45-50) will either be dead or to old too care that much about it.
Let's hope they don't do it "the South African way".
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Judge-approves-...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-09/pge-looks-...
[3] https://www.pge.com/en/about/newsroom/newsdetails/index.page...
Dividends have been very substantial, and evidently outcompeted maintenance. The lawsuits will collect more data in discovery.
Make no mistake, the outage and the threat are attempts at coercion, trying to force California to indemnify them, for free, against their own very deliberate negligence.
If PGE does not want to be a public utility anymore, California should confiscate their assets and turn them over to someone who does.
Seems like less of an incompetence/malice thing and more like a long history of bad strategies with grid infrastructure and power generation.
California has been constantly lowering its power stability throughout the day by shutting down reliable power plants for more intermittent solar and wind farms, without building the storage needed to avoid a blackout.
On the infrastructure side, it seems like there hasn't been much recent investment, and as power sources get further and further from the consumer the likelihood of a problem on some section of the lines increases.
Problems with power lines is an unfortunate reality of states where population centers are spread fairly far apart (we deal with this in Canada too). They're very expensive, especially long distance ones, so it can be hard to make incentives for infrastructure upgrades.
I'm not really sure whether strong regulatory oversight of PG&E would fix things or if the state just needs to take over. I'm sure privatized power works in other places but I've lived in this state for decades and PG&E has always been a disaster company with a high death count that pays out to investors and execs aggressively.
In any case, maybe Naspers is not what you would want all the state owned entities to turn into? There is always an argument for the risks of privitasation as well...
If it’s too risky they could even do it at a different time of year when there’s less risk.
https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-he...
TL;DR it's a mix of human resources and education issues
Controlled burns aren't all that controlled in reality. It's hard to do in places that are near human settlements.
(I do disaster planning work in Australia, and while I'm not an expert on bush fires or controlled burning by a long shot, I don't see why those things would be different between the two places).
Fire risk largely boils down to:
1. Ignition.
2. Fuel.
3. Weather.
4. Endangered resources, particularly but not exclusively structures.
5. Fire spread mechanisms.
Weather is largely beyond control, but includes both immediate (high winds, low humidities, high temps, dry soil and vegetation) and long-term (drought, flood-drought cycles) elements.
Ignition is where PG&E are largely concerned. Electric lines and other equipment can and have caused previous fires. Keep in mind that activities such as mowing grass, getting flat tyres, and hammering have caused previous major conflagrations. At this point, ignition is all but a certainty.
Fuel includes both plants and structures. Due to 80+ years of near-total wildfire suppression, and exacerbated by climate change and plant disease, fuel loads are extreme.
Wildfires are typically wind and ember driven, rather than simply being a wall of frame. Hotspots and ignition points occur outside the principle fire front by distances of hundreds to thousands of metres -- a quarter mile to several miles in Freedom Units.
Structures specifically are vulnerable to wildfire largely when embers impinge on structures or immediately surrounding flammables: exposed decks, surrounding brush, eves, and the like. If immediate ignition can be limited, through architictureal, landscaping, or treatment (sprinkler, foam, gel) mitigations, most structures are actually fairly resilient, though heat and smoke damage can still result. A near wall-of-flame approach can still shatter window glass and ignite interiors through radiant heat.
To your suggestion:
What safes transmission lines more than anything is clearing any nearby brush or trees. You don't need to burn it away, you simply need plant matter not to contact transmission wires and equipment. This is generally an easier, and far more controllable approach than even prescribed burns. Road and heliocopter-based tree-trimming and removal can and do work.
Prescribed burns can work on overall fuel load. This is a treatment applied generally at a regional level, affecting acres to miles of terrain. It's generally best done during or immediately after the wet season (to avoid uncontrolled burns), and away from structures, including power equipment.
One of the huge weaknesses of many utility systems is adequate monitoring. For all the industry advocacy I've seen of "smart meters" and the like, applying sensors, monitors, and active monitoring of transmission lines, gas likes, water systems, pipelines, etc., seems absolutely primative. Smart meters are revenue-generating (or loss-avoiding), equipment monitoring and controls apparently aren't seen that way.
Finally: construction and emergency planning around wildfire events clearly needs to be upgraded. The good thing about institutional and methodical approaches is that they can incorporate collective wisdom. The bad thing is that they are frequently reactive, conservative, and cruft-ridden. Early-stage approaches are often grossly inadequate, late-stage approaches are often geared at outdated assumptions, experience, and methods.
Paradise, CA, had a wildfire disaster plan. It was abolsolutely inadequate to the situation faced. The 2018 Camp Fire began at 6:33 am. First units were on scene slightly before 7 am. As of 7:34, 911 operators were still telling Paradise residents there was no immediate danger. (https://ktla.com/2019/02/01/first-camp-fire-911-calls-reveal...). The fire entered Paradise at 8 am...
Would it be useful for service interruptions or only full blackouts?
Fuel is a great question. I have never looked at the consumption. Mine runs off the natural gas line, so I have no tank to fill. With this setup I feel I am in good shape for short and extended outages.
This has always felt risky to me. Sure, your setup will work for a garden-variety power outage, but not when it really matters like an earthquake or other natural disaster.
My impression of wealthy Californians is that they'd rather not have a noisy stinky polluting generator running for days requiring fuel deliveries, and if there's a "green" option that requires zero fuel, makes no noise or pollution, and is within their means, they'll prefer it.
Not to mention generators are a bit of a maintenance and operational nuisance in my experience, at least the diesel piston motor kind I've used in the past as power backup in datacenters. Most households would rather not have yet another piston engine to keep in good working order.
You're describing conventional battery-less residential grid-tied solar installations.
I specifically described Tesla Powerwall + solar.
One problem with these emergency portable generators of course, is they lack safety components to stop them from catching fire. So we might end up with notable fires caused by generators used because PG&E shut off power to 'stop fires'. It shifts the liability to the consumer though, so PG&E is off the hook.
Few people really believed PG&E was going to do this, so a lot of people haven't purchased equipment yet. We'll see how it shapes up long term.
Solar & batteries are a solution but people won't adopt as a solution with this sort of timeline and current solar/battery prices. There'd need to be a slow but certain rise in PG&E prices and a some sort of tax rebate to really get people to convert over.
Maintenance is also a huge pain - I've got an off grid cabin, and I can assure you, you will quickly tire of dealing with it if you are using it as your day to day power source.
Backup (propane or natural gas) generators that auto kick in aren't a bad option, but are much more expensive (about an order of magnitude higher).
When the free market does not work for a necessary public service it should be time for the government to take over.
If yes, I suppose that controlled, scheduled blackouts is a positive move (not a competent one given that this is CA we are talking about) as it avoids a huge loss of lives, property, forest and avoids a ton of air pollution. (The generators are gonna cause it anyways. :( )
On the flip side, is PG&E using this time to improve infrastructure or should expect it to extend the timeline by another decade in 7-8 years from now?
PG&E knows that they're way less liable for damage caused by service interruptions than they see they are for being responsible for wildfires. They're doing what California wants them to even if it's not the intent of the law.
That's mainly why I think seizing PG&E doesn't solve your problems in the short/medium term. If the state owned their lines tomorrow, they haven't seen the last wildfire. I just don't see a scenario in which the state is as eager to pick as high a number when determining liabilities.
PG&E is a company with owners and while you may not like it you can't just take other peoples' property.
There are appropriate venues to vent your frustration. There is judicial system where you can go and defend your own rights if you feel PG&E stepped on it. You can go and vote for somebody to step up and solve the problem. You can also make other people aware of the problem by using your right to free speech.
The educational system has failed you if you never learned about this. Anticipating your next objection: no, public education is also not Communism.
Communism, by numerous well-attested examples, means exterminating millions of citizens for no offense but existing. I don't find anyone proposing that. Here.
I'll admit it's certainly plausible I'm being too pessimistic, I don't know what about people's experience makes them think a public entity is going to invest the proper amount of money in a utility in the last let's say 30 years. And when they ask what you diverted billions of dollars to, you have to get up and say "vegitation management"
My problem is that none of the risks have properly been priced, and no amount of pillory about huge bonuses is going to solve the problem, because that money was never going to be enough.
Electricity rates are supposed to compensate the risk of doing business. Claw back all the profit you want, the rates have likely been too low, and likely egregiously low to compensate for the risk that if there's a particularly bad wildfire, you get sued into the shadow realm.
It was inconvenient, but nobody wanted to pay for the cost of undergrounding utilities, so it was something you just dealt with. A few people bought generators, but most didn't. The only time the outages really caused hardship was during ice storms, but fortunately those were pretty rare.
I now live in CA. PG&E made the right call here. A couple days of no electricity is better than burning an entire town to the ground in a firestorm.
Strikes me as a CEO that suddenly wants very much to have his golden parachute and be out of this pickle.