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America: Funding cops to shoot black people, defunding actual helpful social needs since 1864.
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The new budget was increased over the previous year.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/los-angeles-mayor-karen-bass-pushes-back-criticism/story?id=117512817
lmao, what an argument for them to make. “It’s not a budget cut, the unions fought us, won, and made us hand over more money after we slashed their already hilarious low budget!”
Yeah, I don’t think taking $17m from $837m results in this. If anything, it might have something to do with those cat 1 hurricane level winds.
Building houses without concrete and bricks and then located in the woods - what can go wrong.
What I don’t understand- most countries have fire fighting airplanes for these things.
How in a world US being a country with such a mighty economy - doesn’t have them or doesn’t want to use them. PatheticCan’t target properly with 100MPH winds
The US absolutely does have those planes. (That’s 1 example, here are others) But high winds are keeping most of them from operating (the winds are what is spreading the fires).
They are using helicopters, but those can’t carry as much.
I don’t think you have any concept of the size of the burning area or the intense weather conditions in the western US. Months of drought conditions then 90mph wind gusts. Once a blaze is going it will jump all over the place due to the wind, making it virtually impossible to contain until the winds start to subside. Cleaning out underbrush can help, but with winds that high fires will jump directly from tree to tree. Some of these fires only took one spark to start. And the conditions will only grow more intense as climate change continues. This is not a problem that’s easy to solve.
California didn’t used to burn like this. Yeah, there were fires, but they were far more rare and didn’t affect as many people because the state wasn’t as populous and nowhere near as short of water.
As to your second statement, it’s bullshit. Wth the “mighty economy” statement has to do with anything. There’s a huge firefighting industry on the west coast and in California, both ground and air. They are using aircraft, even with a temporary stop due to high winds.
Bricks and mortar houses would burn, too under these circumstances.
At least a bunch of rich fucks in Malibu and Pacific Palisades are paying the price for it.
Doesn’t help the lungs and bronchial passages of people with asthma and other breathing issues though. A lot of people will die who were nowhere near the fires.
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Apparently not insured enough to not be fretting about it.
From my understanding the water towers had completely ran out of water and pumps couldn’t keep up. There’s was no issue with volume through the existing water system, there’s just no way to contain a fire that big. They should be taking preventative measures such as raking the forest.
Can’t tell if this is idiocy or peak satire.
Well done.
Oh it’s even better than that. They’re referencing a direct quote from trump.
I was aware of that, but thank you for providing context!
I was not. Sounded reasonable except the raking part, from someone who knows fuck all about forest fires or building in fire prone areas.
Where is Arial firefighting? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_firefighting.
How come I can find videos of Russian be 200 everywhere, but I’ve never seen anything similar in US?
I’m confident US has no such planes ( or no good ones) or they are too expensive in US or some bullshit issues like imminent domain preventing them refilling in lakes nearby.
The fire grew this big due to high winds from the giant winter storm earlier in the week. Winds were too high to use planes/helicopters.
I’m confident US has no such planes
This is just peak ignorance. A quick search says the US has 200-300 firefighting planes and even lists 6 different varieties.
LAPD cops can shout and order the fires to freeze!
They could also shoot it if it does not obey!
This is incorrect.
the updated budget in November saw a $53 million increase over the previous year once the council took into account the department’s unappropriated balance calculation, which provides funds after the budget is approved.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/los-angeles-mayor-karen-bass-pushes-back-criticism/story?id=117512817
Careful. I also said this and my post was removed for misinformation. Looks like musks crew are invading.
Screenshotting this because I don’t know how to reliably link comments across instances.
"No they didn’t, it was only a budget cut until the unions fought them and forced them to hand over more budget’ isn’t exactly the win you think it is here.
Even worse, despite call numbers increasing over 5x from 1960, the fire program has been completely unable to expand since 1960 and was basically completely at the mercy of people doing brutal amounts of overtime to keep things going… until they lost the ability to pay them overtime too! The fire department is absurdly understaffed and underfunded. Imagine still making the same salary as 65 years ago, while having to do 5x the work!
While the 53 million budget increase the unions managed to grab is a good improvement, along with the ~200 more trainee firefighters it allowed them to hire but aren’t yet ready to deploy, it’s the definition of too little and too late.
High winds preventing firefighting planes and copters, low water levels since the city has let nestle steal all of it for free, electrical problems to prevent pumps from sending water from afar, and not enough man hours to manage and prevent fire conditions in the first place- as it says in the article you posted, no amount of budget could have prevented this, because there was more to play here than just the budget. But enough people and man hours to properly manage things would have done a lot to limit the scope of the disaster.
Fire is a natural part of the ecological system. You can by time, but eventually, it will happen. Building in wildlands is a recipe for disaster, if you don’t create breaks, or defencable zones. It’s not a simple problem, with a simple solution. A big part of the problem, is building all those homes there, but if you’re gonna build, then you should protect. A lot of people build in forested areas and don’t create defensible zones, because, that’s why they move there, for pretty trees.
True, it’s a multi-level fuck-up, which nature is showing us quite clearly. Solutions would not need to be that difficult, just gradually stop burning fossil fuels, stop eating meat, build responsibly and spread money evenly. Too bad that all the people getting rich from these things have a succesful propaganda campaign going on. Nature will not be tamed however, not in the foreseeable future.
Meh, same thing with healthcare. Who needs a medical professional to help a person with a mental health crisis when you can have a guy with highschool and six months of “training” put a few bullets in em?
They cut ~2% of the budget. Anyone spewing this funding cut bullshit is a partisan hack.
Quit being reactionary.
that’s not what reactionary means
$17.5 million, or around 2 percent of the previous year’s budget of $837 million. It was the second-largest departmental operating cut to come out of the city’s 2024-25 fiscal year budget, which shaved funding from the majority of city departments — but not the police.
the article does say the percentage… and maybe it’s insane to cut their budget at all, given california’s recent fire problems, and they should’ve increased it by about 100%….
so, given the difference between -2% and +100%, and half the city burning down, it’s a pretty big deal.it’s not even remotely close to half of the city burning down. But given the damage estimates are running somewhere around $150 billion, it’s bad enough
the “half” figure was hyperbole… you should check out the concept.
Fires are increasing every year. It’s the lady thing that should be cut. It should’ve been the other way around.
I suspect they could have doubled the budget and they still wouldn’t be able to control those fires.
Still it looks like it’s affecting rich people, so something will probably get done about it.
Why do you think it’s okay to cut funding to the fire department while keeping the police(gang) force that is notorious for not actually doing anything to help it’s citizens?
Think about the priority of the
communitywealthy community members.Fires cause insurance payouts. This means big paydays when those ‘priceless’ works of art go up in smoke. You sell the land and buy somewhere without the insurance hikes. Win-win-win for the wealthy.
Crime causes property values to decline. A break in is harder to deal with. Rabble protesting for fair treatment can get violent. The homeless need to be driven from the wealthy areas so the wealthy can enjoy their champagne and caviar in peace after snorting coke off of a trafficked sex slave’s tits. Police are so very valuable for keeping the wealthy safe.
They know exactly what the right priority is… for the people who actually matter (not us.)
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Given the history of wildfires in California, someone has anti-survival traits.
Based on my own experience, this is how most cities handle their PD/FD funding, unfortunately. The fire department is just not important… until it is.
That’s karma. The longer we seek instant gratification, neglecting doing the hard, dirty necessary work that yields no immediate discernable benefits, the more severe the bite is, when it comes back around and bites us in the backside. As a collective, we stay on the wheel of suffering, figure out we need to do something differently, figure out necessary changes, then implement them… Then a few generations, the wealthy overlords convince us we’re spending too much on very sensible investments that yield no immediate discernable benefits and we repeat the cycle. It’s like Groundhog Day over centuries (which add up to millennia,), rather than days, weeks, years. Because they plan family fortunes for centuries, rather than days, weeks and years, because they can afford private communities, with private police and fire departments, and comprehensive health. The rest of us are means that justify their ends, and the sooner we, as a collective, wake up and smell the roses and love each other enough (which preserves our own arses) to figure out ways to fix this mess, for centuries that turn into millennia, the better off we and the rest of our ecoweb will be. Or not. 🤷♀️
Can confirm. source: Am Australian.
I suspect Scott being a doomsday death cult evangelical made those cuts deliberate instead of just being a standard short sighted git. Especially when he decided to take a vacation during your crises.
That’s not really how it works in Australia though.
Every property owner pays an Emergency Services Levy which pays for the fireys. State governments pay for the police force. So there’s no organisation that chooses whether police or fire gets whatever money - funding is procured separately.
That said, I take your point that the fireys don’t get a lot of attention until there’s a disaster. That’s just human nature I guess.
In my area, if there’s a bushfire that looks like destroying someone’s house, the volunteers, fire service, and bombing planes are on to it in minutes.
I don’t have “data” but from my anecdotal observations they don’t seem to be hamstrung by a lack of funding.
Maybe if they all shoot the fire in the back when it’s sleeping?!
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The main problem is that the houses are made from wood and cardbord, and are placed in and/or surrounded by dry-as-a-fart forests and brushwork. Which is a stupid idea in an area that is known to regularly hve forest and brushwork fires. More now with global warming, which makes the plants even dryer.
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Nonetheless, all the houses I have seen burning in the news were surrounded by dry trees and shrubs. And those houses burned as well as any other American cardboard houses. Somehow, I see no difference between them and houses with not as strict building codes. So either they only show homes that have been grandfathered in, or those building codes make no serious difference.
My understanding of the situation is the fires are currently burning the historic districts and grandfathered homes. The newer buildings have not been touched yet.
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… You realize it’s in the middle of the winter, right? All greenery is going to be dry looking, you can’t just not have greenery at all.
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I saw more LA houses in the news, and again all what was left was the chimney. To me, it looks like houses there are just part of the fuel. But one cannot tell whether those houses were the ones that were grandfathered in. And if the new regulation is in power for just a few years, just keep in mind how many new houses with new standards have been built since then.
Unlike houses here in Europe, which are usually made of stone, bricks, or concrete. Our house has a reinforced concrete basement and floors, foam concrete insulating walls, and concrete tiles on the roof. While it would definitively see damages if placed into the middle of such a firestorm, it would resist way longer, and would not contribute to the fire. I’d say before our house would get damaged beyond the need to just clean and repaint it, everything combustible (vegetation, sheds, fences) around would be long gone.
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I mean, yes, but also fuck the cops and fund the fire department
So the lesson here is to get more slave labor to fight these fires?
Sure but climate change just isn’t sexy. “Hey everyone that problem we’ve been telling everyone about for decades has resulted in the predicted outcome, it’s pretty terrible.”
You don’t understand wildland fire mitigation very much, do you. Every penny helps you troll. And by the way, I have my red card, and a minor in forest fire management.
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To keep it short, it’s called mitigation. You “prevent” crazy fires by eliminating fuel sources. But remember, homes are fuel sources as well, often great fuel sources. I will let you do the math.
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