A Ritzy L.a. Enclave Learned a Bitter Lesson About the Limits of Its Wealth

1. I could read a newspaper without a subscription. I could buy just one issue. NYT does that that online

2. A newspaper in a vending machine showed you more than just the headline. Like the subhead, for example. I can’t even see that. The default NYT experience without a subscription gives you only the title. And I have to agree to $25/month to get anything else assuming I’m not using a paywall bypass

“We have stuff, we say you’ll like it, cough up a bunch of money to find out what” is a tough sell for me.

Paywalls that give you at least the first few sentences make far more sense to me.

Now that newspapers are online, an end user may be presented with hundreds or thousands of them, asking for a subscription.

The cost of the above is orders of magnitude greater than some loose change adjusted for inflation.

Heck, now we have multi-billion dollar companies selling us ads (Google, Meta) but no one wants to pay the people whose jobs include investigating government corruption (as well as reporting on Taylor Swift getting a ring...). Somewhat understandably, since ads on the Internet are much more obnoxious than ads on newspaper/magazines.

Not X dollars per month with a yearly commitment that auto renews and for which you need to stay on hold for 6-12 hours to cancel...

Cry me a river.

If "newspapers" really wanted my money they'd band up and set up a micropayments agency so I could pay them for the issue i'm interested in again.

But they're only chasing whales instead so I have zero compassion.

Using guidelines from the National Fire Academy to suppress housefires, they would've needed to simultaneously deploy 10 or 12 thousand industrial-zone (not residential-zone) fire hydrants. Not only do those not exist, but there would've been no way to pressurize them simultaneously.

At only hour 4 of the fire (1200 acres, assume 5% are structures), they already would've had to deploy 1800 industrial-zone fire hydrants to suppress it. Again using NFA's flow rate guidelines. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, had it been full, would've been emptied in about an hour assuming it could maintain pressure (which it couldn't).

Wildfires are fundamentally fought with firebreaks and aircraft, both of which are extremely challenging in high-wind urban environments. They are contained until they burn out their fuel. They are not ever combatted with municipal water supplies.

Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures?

Should they do more? Of course. With what resources?

I recently learned 82% of California fire fighters are unpaid volunteers. That doesn’t include the prison labor.

The entire government has its priorities completely wrong, especially at the federal level. Blaming the city of LA makes very little sense.

Blaming environmentalists for consistently sounding the alarm over this stuff for 50+ years and then being ignored also doesn’t make sense.

One thing that does make sense: Look at the writings of the people that blocked wind and nuclear power in the 1980’s, and solar / batteries in the 1990s.

They explicitly said they knew their actions would burn the planet down, and it didn’t matter to them. Now they’ve dismantling our democracy, eliminating emergency response groups like FEMA, and retasking the national guard (California’s last line of fire defense) as an illegal police force.

Rioting is not needed for police to abuse their authority.

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

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