Simple “policy” proposal: fire vigilante. Someone (who takes pains to keep their identity secret) goes around lighting fires at places/times where they’re likely to be relatively-less-bad—e.g. maybe there’s a big rainstorm coming in a couple days which is likely to keep the fire under control. (That’s just spitballing, I don’t really know what the main determinants are of fire controllability.)
Main advantage of this proposal: can be unilaterally implemented. Requires dealing with zero institutional bullshit, zero broken metaincentives, zero coordination problems, zero politics, etc. Essentially no social points-of-failure; the problems-to-be-solved are entirely physical. That also means it could be implemented by a small team or even an individual. I would give it a dramatically higher chance of success than any political approach.
Uh, this is not a call to arson. While lots of the restrictions on prescribed burns are bureaucracy and poorly thought out liability, other pieces are important: coordination with local firefighters so they don’t scramble to put it out, good understanding of the weather, plans for if it gets out of control, etc
It occurs to me that if PG&E were evil, it might decide that it’s cheaper to secretly hire ‘fire vigilantes’ to start fires which PG&E is not responsible for, than to bury the cables.
Typically, as long as the expense is deemed prudent by regulators, utilities are permitted to ‘rate base’ the expense and earn a return on investment. If PG&E think it’s politically possible to increase expenses by $20-30B because there’s a good narrative to offset complaints of rising utility prices, it’s the selfish thing to do. The times that require strict scrutiny for investor-owned utilities is when they jump on the bandwagon of a politically popular spending proposal (wise infrastructure investments comes from experts getting the politicians on board, not politicians getting the experts on board).
Does it count for this purpose when the fire vigilante is actually a fireman who just wants the overtime? It is physically the same, but there are broken incentives at work.
Simple “policy” proposal: fire vigilante. Someone (who takes pains to keep their identity secret) goes around lighting fires at places/times where they’re likely to be relatively-less-bad—e.g. maybe there’s a big rainstorm coming in a couple days which is likely to keep the fire under control. (That’s just spitballing, I don’t really know what the main determinants are of fire controllability.)
Main advantage of this proposal: can be unilaterally implemented. Requires dealing with zero institutional bullshit, zero broken metaincentives, zero coordination problems, zero politics, etc. Essentially no social points-of-failure; the problems-to-be-solved are entirely physical. That also means it could be implemented by a small team or even an individual. I would give it a dramatically higher chance of success than any political approach.
Uh, this is not a call to arson. While lots of the restrictions on prescribed burns are bureaucracy and poorly thought out liability, other pieces are important: coordination with local firefighters so they don’t scramble to put it out, good understanding of the weather, plans for if it gets out of control, etc
Beautiful. I love supervillain storylines where I root against the heroes because the writers haven’t done the math.
you mean like https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10360716/1/The-Metropolitan-Man
Do you have any recommendations of such stories?
Watchmen was pretty good on this front. Worm (https://parahumans.wordpress.com/) is LONG, but great.
Here’s a novel you might enjoy.
It occurs to me that if PG&E were evil, it might decide that it’s cheaper to secretly hire ‘fire vigilantes’ to start fires which PG&E is not responsible for, than to bury the cables.
Typically, as long as the expense is deemed prudent by regulators, utilities are permitted to ‘rate base’ the expense and earn a return on investment. If PG&E think it’s politically possible to increase expenses by $20-30B because there’s a good narrative to offset complaints of rising utility prices, it’s the selfish thing to do. The times that require strict scrutiny for investor-owned utilities is when they jump on the bandwagon of a politically popular spending proposal (wise infrastructure investments comes from experts getting the politicians on board, not politicians getting the experts on board).
Does it count for this purpose when the fire vigilante is actually a fireman who just wants the overtime? It is physically the same, but there are broken incentives at work.