I’m hearing that the USFS has laid off huge numbers of firefighters, including veterans, and won’t be allowed to hire their usual seasonal firefighting force this year.

Edit: ProPublica now has a detailed article

  • @[email protected]
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    8 days ago

    Time to start auctioning off public land

    My wife works for the NPS and she says they’re next.

  • @[email protected]
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    8 days ago

    Fuck around = laying off many thousands of combat veterans

    Find out = creating a small army of combat-trained Luigis

  • FuglyDuck
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    248 days ago

    Can we talk about how PG&E causes most of the fires- because they’re too cheap?

    • nickwitha_k (he/him)
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      228 days ago

      Maybe we can talk about how the California government, including Newsom, have explicitly allowed PG&E to pass along the fines for their responsibility in the fires and being convicted of manslaughter to customers. And how this has made the penalties for their criminal negligence meaningless.

        • @[email protected]
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          15 days ago

          we need a corporate death penalty also, thats not steered by the need for jobs. We need to reform capitalism itself. The current iteration doesnt work.

          • @[email protected]
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            5 days ago

            we need a corporate death penalty also

            I would say that the corporate equivalent of the death penalty is seizure of the corporation, which is pretty much what I’m talking about. Issue “share” fines constituting 50% + 1 of the ownership, and the former company no longer exists. Its assets are now yours to control.

        • @[email protected]
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          108 days ago

          Or measured in percentage of overall profits. Preferably both.

          If they have to forfeit say half of the years profits and a 10% share of the company as punishment, they might actually start trying to avoid committing mass negligent homicide.

          • @[email protected]
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            118 days ago

            Never profits. Has to be revenue.

            Companies and legally hide profits and show losses on their balance sheets whereas revenues are much easier to calculate and harder to hide.

            • @[email protected]
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              58 days ago

              Well that’s a separate issue that we ALSO need to solve: closing all avenues of tax avoidance via legal fraud, basically

              • @[email protected]
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                7 days ago

                If I’m running a business, 100% of its earnings will be paid out. Any earnings I haven’t previously allocated will be paid out as bonuses. My workers and I will all have income from that business, but the business itself will never show a single penny in profit.

                That’s not fraud. That’s not “tax avoidance”. That should be the objective of every responsible business: paying out every earned cent to the people who created those earnings.

                It’s also pretty easy to implement: Set corporate income taxes at 100%, and the effective corporate income tax rate fall to zero. No business will hold back any profits; everything will be paid out.

                Parent comment is correct: Fines cannot be a percentage of profit. They could, conceivably, be a percentage of revenue, but that’s not particularly good either: Any action you take on the cashflow within the business disproportionately affects the workers and customers of the business.

                Whatever actions we take must target the owners and managers. The decision makers. The people responsible for setting policy, not the people carrying out that policy. That means we don’t touch the profits or the revenue. We dilute their shares. For every 19 outstanding shares, we create a new one and put it in an IRS liquidation portfolio. Now we own 5% of the company, and we auction those shares off to the general public over time. The existing shareholders lose ~5% of their value, and are incentivized to hold their management team accountable for their losses.

      • FuglyDuck
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        38 days ago

        it’s almost like they should, I dunno, make a regulation or something that says power lines must be underground or something.

  • Franklin
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    128 days ago

    surely laying off fire protection agency officials during historic droughts brought by ever worsening climate change won’t have any negative impact.

    I can’t wait to hear how this is good actually and if it isn’t it’s the Democrats fault.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      188 days ago

      We want to run prescribed burns when it’s wet, and suppress the high-intensity fires that destroy everything. Both actions require trained fire crews.

    • @[email protected]
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      38 days ago

      Not only that, periodic wildfires are a critical component in some ecosystems. I live near a an ecosystem that relies on prescribed burns from the Forest Service in order to keep it in shape. Before the FS was a thing our local Indigenous tribes were the ones doing these burns and maintaining the land. Letting it run wild would put us in a similar situation to the Western US, on top of the invasive species outperforming and choking out the native ones.

  • @[email protected]
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    57 days ago

    Meanwhile, Guantanamo prepares to deploy free labor the likes of which no one alive today has ever seen before!.. Only read about on books about slavery.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      88 days ago

      I responded to it:

      We want to run prescribed burns when it’s wet, and suppress the high-intensity fires that destroy everything. Both actions require trained fire crews.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 days ago

      It’s only called the smokey bear effect, this is a sprawl and nimby problem.

      Many fire experts embrace controlled, or “prescribed,” fires — purposely set fires that do the cleanup job that small natural fires once did. It takes the tinder out of the tinder box.

      But people have built homes and towns close to forests; they don’t like the smoke, and prescribed burns sometimes get out of control.

      Allowing controlled burns is a whole separate issues than smokey bear telling people to put out their camp fires and not throw cigarettes into dry leaves…

      • @[email protected]
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        27 days ago

        Oh the smokie program had a lot more going on then that. It was more the change in how forests where managed that did the damage. Smokie is just the spokesbear.