Thank you for sharing your story, which is horrifying and only could be told by someone that lived it. It reminds of how fragile our lives are and the world we live in.
I live in Los Angeles near the Pacific Palisades fire, but safely out of its reach. We have not needed to prepare a "go bag" but have made a list of items that we would need. It did not include a copy of our fire insurance policy, but I will add that. An even better way to deal with that is to ask your insurance company to send a copy in PDF form to your email, and make sure you keep an electronic copy of it. You can do that for important pictures that are not digitized by just making a copy with your smart phone.
We had a power outage due to high winds when the LA Fires started. We were not aware of the fires until my daughter called us to help with her UCLA student, and alerted us to the app called "Watch Duty" which is a good thing to use in Los Angeles to keep track of the fires during the ongoing Santa Ana wind storms (which continue as I am writing this.)
One thing that PSS talked about on the podcast/news story that I completely agree with is that government has not done a "competent" job in dealing with the emergent threat of wildfires. I agree with PSS who withdrew his LA Times endorsement of Mayor Bass who prioritized giving large 5 year raises to government employees over using funds for fire preparation, and who left town for a trip when the fire started. She blames the fire losses on high winds and dry conditions, and does not accept any responsibility for the $150 B losses in the Pacific Palisades fires, which in retrospect are going to cost government huge property tax losses due to the loss of 12,000 structures (so far) in the fire, and the losses of huge insurance payouts, currently estimated at something like $20 B, and the much more important losses to families of their homes. Plus, there have been a significant number of deaths.
PSS raised the question of "competence" of government because there were many warnings and it seems now that it was inevitable this was going to happen sooner or later if no one took action to protect property. I read an article in which it was claimed that Trump called Governor Newsom in 2019 and urged action against the build up of brush and fire fuel.
I don't know myself what could have been done or should have been done, but Bass did not increase the City Fire protection budget and spend money on the problem. She did give fire protection measures passing mention in her campaign, but did give much more priority to the problem of homelessness in Los Angeles spending significant funds on housing homeless people in Hotels and Motels which PSS challenges as a bad use of funds. From the prospective of hindsight, I would prefer that she had taken action to do a better job on clearing the brush and protecting structures.
The question is how to obtain "competence" in government employees before these disasters happen? PSS suggests that people should elect those with business know how. This would place more emphasis on people like Trump and Musk for government due to business successes, but there is a lot of baggage those types bring to the job.
I now think that the city should have elected Rick Caruso, Bass's opponent as he had more experience with land management and fire laws as a successful real estate executive and he included fire protection in his campaign. There is no way to know what he would have done, but as a successful business man, who knows how to manage a payroll, which PSS discusses as one element of "competence", perhaps he would have done a better job. It would have been difficult to do a worse job than Bass.
Anyway, my bottom line from your story is that I asked my favorite AI for some suggestions about stocks to buy in view of this mess, and it came up with a list of 10. The one I like best was PRM, which I bought today after reading your story.
Thank you again for sharing it. |
