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CopperHound posted:I don't want to stop anyone from shutting on PG&E but the High Voltage (not the 14kv poo poo, but 100s of kv) lines are not something I'd expect to be shut down in all but the most extreme cases. lmao the high-voltage transmission line that failed & caused the Camp Fire was 99 years old
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Oct 26, 2019 00:59
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Fly Molo posted:lmao the high-voltage transmission line that failed & caused the Camp Fire was 99 years old What the gently caress did you just loving say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class at PG&E, and I've been involved in numerous secret shutoffs on California, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I'm the top Power company in the entire US . You are nothing to me but just another shut-off target. I will shut off your power with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my loving words. You think you can get away with saying that poo poo to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of power plants across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the 80 MPH wind-storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your power. You're loving dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can turn off your power in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in power shutoff, but I have access to the entire grid of the United Statesand I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable rear end off the face of the continent, you little poo poo. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your loving tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will poo poo fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're loving powerless kiddo.
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Oct 26, 2019 01:20
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Remember that time in the 50s when PG&E wanted to build a nuclear plant on top of the San Andreas fault? https://www.sonomamag.com/nuclear-fault-line/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJLDKKmos5Y xarph fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Oct 26, 2019 |
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Oct 26, 2019 01:36
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:What the gently caress did you just loving say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class at PG&E, and I've been involved in numerous secret shutoffs on California, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I'm the top Power company in the entire US . You are nothing to me but just another shut-off target. I will shut off your power with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my loving words. You think you can get away with saying that poo poo to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of power plants across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the 80 MPH wind-storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your power. You're loving dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can turn off your power in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in power shutoff, but I have access to the entire grid of the United Statesand I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable rear end off the face of the continent, you little poo poo. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your loving tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will poo poo fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're loving powerless kiddo.
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Oct 26, 2019 02:00
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FMguru posted:LOL Even if the stock had a negative valuation I think it would still be a bad deal. It’s going to take years to catch up on all the deferred maintenance and in the meantime they’re on the hook for any fires that can be blamed on their old rear end janky equipment, and also whatever liability there is from cutting service. (Not coincidentally this is also why I’m a little nervous about the idea of the state taking them over)
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Oct 26, 2019 02:18
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I’m thinking about that Enron documentary where they interviewed a bunch of regular joes who had their pensions and life savings in funds that were heavily invested in Enron. Executives had inside information and cashed out immediately with relatively few consequences and plenty of money. I’m wondering if the same thing will happen again with this.
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Oct 26, 2019 02:44
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Family Values posted:Even if the stock had a negative valuation I think it would still be a bad deal. It’s going to take years to catch up on all the deferred maintenance and in the meantime they’re on the hook for any fires that can be blamed on their old rear end janky equipment, and also whatever liability there is from cutting service.
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Oct 26, 2019 02:49
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Family Values posted:Even if the stock had a negative valuation I think it would still be a bad deal. It’s going to take years to catch up on all the deferred maintenance and in the meantime they’re on the hook for any fires that can be blamed on their old rear end janky equipment, and also whatever liability there is from cutting service. That will be paid for by the consumers either way. I don't live in PG&E administrated areas anymore but I'd prefer to pay taxes towards it rather than saddle NorCal consumers with that liability, which is what happens under continued PG&E control. The benefit of taking control sooner is that the decade+ of maintenance backlog can start to be addressed. Climate change is here and will continue to make Cali a tinderbox so PG&E's dogshit practices are riskier the longer they go unaddressed.
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Oct 26, 2019 02:51
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And don't forget that even if PG&E stays solvent and somehow pays every penny of liability and maintenance the bought and paid for PUC will let them raise rates as high as they want to compensate. gently caress 'em all, take the whole thing over, break it up into municipal-controlled, non-profit entities, and start using whatever funds we get out of the still kicking corpse to update the infrastructure.
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Oct 26, 2019 03:03
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People with SMUD etc will undoubtedly bitch about their taxes being used to fix PG&E and why did the rest of the state let it get so bad, etc. But you can either fix it with taxes or put the fires out with taxes.
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Oct 26, 2019 04:04
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Family Values posted:Even if the stock had a negative valuation I think it would still be a bad deal. It’s going to take years to catch up on all the deferred maintenance and in the meantime they’re on the hook for any fires that can be blamed on their old rear end janky equipment, and also whatever liability there is from cutting service. No, no, no. PG&E is already more or less "on the hook" for liabilities that exceed their value. As more of their lovely infrastructure burns poo poo down--and it will--there is absolutely no way they will be able to pay for it, which means they wont! And to the extent that they do, shareholders will be paid long before their customers or victims. By declaring bankruptcy, and proceeding along any sort of plan other than outright public ownership, they can at least transfer ownership of their garbo assets and infrastructure to another for-profit entity who can resurrect the vampire. Under public ownership, the taxpayer will ultimately be liable for the damages caused by the lovely poo poo they now own, but unlike the present situation they will actually have the power (and incentive) to do something about it. As far as deferred maintenance etc., It's going to take *anyone* not years, but decades, to unfuck the infrastructure here. All the more reason to do so under an ownership and funding structure that fundamentally recognizes the importance of that work as an urgent public good and not a vehicle for producing shareholder value to be meted out according to quarterly earnings.
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Oct 26, 2019 04:04
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Morbus posted:By declaring bankruptcy, and proceeding along any sort of plan other than outright public ownership, they can at least transfer ownership of their garbo assets and infrastructure to another for-profit entity who can resurrect the vampire. Is there anything to stop them selling all their power generation assets and the lines which aren't at risk of starting fires to Totally Unrelated Gas and Electric for $1 right now? I guess the majority of shareholders wouldn't like it very much, and they are the most important people after all 
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Oct 26, 2019 04:17
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So I casually (and not literally) suggested to someone that PG&E's board members should be  for incompetence and they replied with something about a California law that says after a fire they have to inspect every single something or other in the state and that keeps them from blah blah blah bullshit. Does anyone know if there's an actual law about this, and if there is, how did it get distorted into a corporate bootlicker talking point?
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Oct 26, 2019 04:29
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Morbus posted:No, no, no. Buttcoin purse posted:Is there anything to stop them selling all their power generation assets and the lines which aren't at risk of starting fires to Totally Unrelated Gas and Electric for $1 right now? I guess the majority of shareholders wouldn't like it very much, and they are the most important people after all PG&E is hosed from all their negligence, and the state is going to wind up paying for it, but because they've hosed up in such a colossal manner, the state does actually have a chance to just step in and take over to tell them they can't keep loving people over like this anymore.
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Oct 26, 2019 05:55
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fermun posted:Victims during bankruptcy are administrative claimants, meaning they jump to the very front of the line and have to be paid out before the bankruptcy proceedings can occur. So if the Kincaid fire does turn out to have been caused by PG&E as it currently appears to have been, then victims of this fire are the highest priority to be paid, even before the Camp Fire victims that PG&E filed for bankruptcy to avoid paying in the first place, and PG&E can't pay out shareholders before paying out Kincaid fire victims. Yes that's a good point, and explains why they were so gung-ho about the shutoffs in the first place. But in any case, a privately owned PG&E, in whatever form, simply is not going to be able to maintain solvency after the inevitable liabilities keep pilling up. In any kind of sensible world, they would be taken over by the state because its really the only option. But I'd say its 50/50 that we just get an endless parade of restructured vampires that keep setting poo poo on fire until they go bankrupt, because from a political point of view nobody in the government wants to be responsible for this bag of exploding poo poo.
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Oct 26, 2019 06:07
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FMguru posted:LOL  Maybe had they worried about maintaining and updating infrastructure they wouldn't be in this boat right now.
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Oct 26, 2019 06:08
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PGE's queue for who gets what they're owed paid goes like this: 1. administrative claimants, as fermun explained 2. maybe bondholders (senior debt) or maybe victims, or both 3. shareholders get what's left The focus is too much on shareholders. They're already hosed. It's the bondholders effectively calling the shots right now, and they went to the bankruptcy judge recently with a deal they'd worked with some of the lawyers for the previous victims: basically, a better deal for the victims than what PG&E was proposing, but also a much much better deal for the bondholders, in that they propose to grab a majority stake in the company away from the stockholders. The current executives have a legal responsibility to do what they can to emerge from chapter 11 and reward shareholders with a solvent company that can make them profits; so they are going to fight to reduce payouts to victims, even if that's morally wrong, because it's their legal duty to try to get as much debt discharged as possible for as little payout as possible. In addition, after previous disasters like the san bruno gas explosion, the state passed laws prohibiting PG&E from passing the costs of compensating victims on to ratepayers (all other costs are effectively passed to ratepayers, plus a built-in guaranteed profit margin, which is one of the things that makes it utterly hosed up that PG&E is a privately-held company). This is why the company's in bankruptcy at all: absent that law, the company could have reached a settlement with the victims and then just raised everyone's rates to pay for it. Finally, do keep in mind that PG&E has a brand new CEO, and turnover by executives is common; this means that no matter what happens, the actual humans who ran the company to maximize profits at the expense of safety are either long gone with their pockets stuffed, or on their way out with their pockets stuffed, but definitely not going to suffer at all. Like, as much as we want them to suffer, it's very very hard to pierce the corporate veil and assign liability directly to executives; that did happen with Enron but it took ages and what the execs went to jail for was the fraud they committed prior to and during the investigation. There's no indications I'm aware of that PG&E execs committed major fraud, they just... didn't spend money to update or maintain stuff whenever they didn't have to or could get away with it, more or less legally. In a court they'd claim they were doing their duty to their shareholders. Essentially what happened was completely predictable, and the fault is with the state and voters for setting us up with a privately-held guaranteed-profit monopoly utility in the first place. So, as much as we'd like it to happen, I think it's very unlikely that any execs will suffer for what they did. Pragmatically we should probably try to focus on the political options for breaking up PG&E and wresting control of our utilities back from the not-actually-free market. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 07:01 on Oct 26, 2019 |
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Oct 26, 2019 06:58
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Guns don’t kill people. PG&E kills people. Roseville electric rules.
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Oct 26, 2019 08:05
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Henrik Zetterberg posted:Guns don’t kill people.  My tiny, 2,000 customer irrigation/electric district is going to be the only area with power for 100 miles3/4 of the state will be without power but these almond orchards are going to stay watered at all costs
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Oct 26, 2019 09:57
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Thank God Fresno is so lovely wildfires avoid it.
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Oct 26, 2019 10:52
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Gen. Ripper posted:Thank God Fresno is so lovely wildfires avoid it. Luckily dust isn’t flammable.
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Oct 26, 2019 13:19
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Fresno gets its share whenever sequoia or kings canyon national parks catch on fire, as they often do.
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Oct 26, 2019 14:59
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Henrik Zetterberg posted:Guns don’t kill people. Does this mean that if people were able to set PG&E executives houses/money on fire, PG&E would stop setting our houses on fire?
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Oct 26, 2019 15:24
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Boot and Rally posted:Does this mean that if people were able to set PG&E executives houses/money on fire, PG&E would stop setting our houses on fire? Only you can prevent forest fires... by setting PG&E Executives on fire.
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Oct 26, 2019 15:41
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BeAuMaN posted:Only you can prevent forest fires... by setting PG&E Executives on fire. That's called a California Controlled Burn
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Oct 26, 2019 16:01
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So I've been keeping an eye on PG&E's weather page since their PSPS updates page is absolutely useless, and came across this gem:quote:Yet another offshore wind event is possible Tuesday into Wednesday. Although not as strong as the current event, wind gusts in the 40-50 mph range are possible across the central and northern portions of the territory. Dead fuel moistures are near historical low values and live fuel moisture remains at or below critical values, making them highly susceptible to ignition and explosive fire spread.
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Oct 26, 2019 17:16
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Hard for the affected people to coordinate and form an angry mob when social media requires electricity
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Oct 26, 2019 18:39
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It's a once in a generation wind storm, not seen since 2017 when the wine country fires broke out. Oh, btw it was 30 degrees hotter in Sonoma county the day those fires broke out than it is today. Seriously, the day before those fires started, my car read 113F in Petaluma.
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Oct 26, 2019 18:56
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The Glumslinger posted:It's a once in a generation wind storm, not seen since 2017 when the wine country fires broke out. Oh, btw it was 30 degrees hotter in Sonoma county the day those fires broke out than it is today. quote:It's a once in a generation wind storm, not seen since 2017 quote:not seen since 2017 Perhaps PG&E should've built a power grid capable of withstanding something that happens twice in three years.
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Oct 26, 2019 19:00
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Complications posted:
Yeah, that sounds cool, but have you heard of stock dividends?
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Oct 26, 2019 19:04
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Dumb Lowtax posted:Hard for the affected people to coordinate and form an angry mob when social media requires electricity Print out the addresses of the PG&E execs and start posting them at evacuation centers
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Oct 26, 2019 19:50
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Chiming in on the gently caress PG&E bandwagon and also gently caress the CPUC. They are owned part and parcel by PG&E and its disgusting how derelict in their duties they've been. Funny story I used to work with the CPUC in one of their other regulatory areas and they were the most incompetent, unprofessional, and lazy people I've ever worked with. And I worked in the public sector for a while. As a public sector employee I was embarrassed to even be associated with them. They would routinely fall asleep during meetings even with their managers in the room. One guy answered his phone multiple times and talked loudly during a meeting with a bunch of local, state, and federal directors in it completely oblivious to everyone staring at him in disbelief and frustration. I was amazed. Pinche Rudo fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Oct 26, 2019 |
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Oct 26, 2019 20:24
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:So I casually (and not literally) suggested to someone that PG&E's board members should be So I did find this from the CPUC which requires a yearly patrol of urban power lines and an inspection every 3-5 years https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/General.aspx?id=7719
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Oct 26, 2019 21:49
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Kincade Fire update: 2 entire cities under mandatory evacuation, 50,000+ people, and the evacuation prep zone extends all the way from the Kincade Fire to the pacific coast. Holy gently caress
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Oct 26, 2019 21:55
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Fly Molo posted:Kincade Fire update: 2 entire cities under mandatory evacuation, 50,000+ people, and the evacuation prep zone extends all the way from the Kincade Fire to the pacific coast. Another $50 billion liability on PG&E for the pile, I guess. Hopefully by the time this shakes out shareholders get literally nothing and PG&E ends up nationalized.
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Oct 26, 2019 22:29
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Keep in mind they're being very cautious with this one. The good news is that this is mostly a wilderness area with low population and wineries. The one two years ago was blowing through suburbs. They told everybody living on the northern edge of the Santa Rosa sprawl to head downtown so they don't get ambushed the way that Fountaingrove residents were in 2017.
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Oct 26, 2019 22:36
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Guess who's behind letsownpge ? The Democratic Socialists of America. Charged a ridiculous number of devices; am now down to my Kindle and electric toothbrush. Whee. Didn't realize that a fridge would only keep things safe for 4 hours; thought it was 12. Taking this as an opportunity to declare fridge amnesty.
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Oct 26, 2019 22:36
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Man, Jenner, Fort Ross and Bodega Bay are in the potential evacuation zone... I wonder what the insurance on a two hundred year old wooden fortress is like.
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Oct 26, 2019 22:37
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Guess who's behind letsownpge ? I didn't sign up on it because I was afraid it was a giant honey pot, so I'm glad to see its being organized by the right people I'm also sitting here in disbelief that the PSPS website keeps saying I won't lose power despite repeated texts saying 99% of Marin County is going to lose power. Guess I'm now part of the 1% 
The Glumslinger fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Oct 26, 2019 |
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Oct 26, 2019 22:38
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Guess who's behind letsownpge ? Well yeah, who would you expect to put it up? PG&E's competition?
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Oct 26, 2019 22:39
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