California matters

Seeing as it's getting international media attention:

• Surreal scenes unfold as a fire ‘like Armageddon’ barrels toward West Hills. This one's close to the town (Thousand Oaks) where that mass shooting happened.
• Meanwhile on the other side of the state California’s most destructive wildfire should not have come as a surprise. The town of Paradise has been incinerated.

Death toll from the fires has risen to 23.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/10/us/california-wildfires-camp-woolsey-hill/index.html

Edited by Rationalinsanity on Nov 10th 2018 at 11:11:09 AM

There are also about 100 missing.

Death toll has risen to 44 (2 of them resulting from another fire), with many more still missing. The Camp Fire is now the deadliest fire in the State's history.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/12/us/california-wildfires-woolsey-camp-hill-missing/index.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/11/politics/california-wildfires-trump-tweets/index.html

Trump makes assumptions again regarding the fires.

His comments about the fires are absolutely disgusting. Seems like he's more interested in punishing us for political reasons than anything else. Wildfires have been particularly bad over the last few years (drought, climate change, whatever else), but they've always been a thing. No one's blaming Florida for hurricanes or Kansas for tornadoes.

God help us if the big earthquake we're overdue for hits while he's in office.

The death toll is now up 50.

Also, just one among many similar stories but the effect the Camp Fire has had on a school.

Camp Fire: Paradise residents say they received no mass cellphone alerts to evacuate, or to warn of fires. That sounds like something that shouldn't have happened, does it?

Reading the article, it seems like a "shit happens" situation where the system just didn't work. (Can't imagine this being a phone company conspiracy like the internet throttling during the NorCal fires since other systems like radio weren't going off.) At least they practiced an emergency evac a couple years back, which probably mitigated further loss of life.

Edited by Karxrida on Nov 18th 2018 at 12:42:08 PM

Seems like the Camp Fire is finally controlled as the rainy season is starting. And apparently the death toll has actually gone down a bit as some errors have been found.

Also, California Democratic Party chairman under investigation over allegations of sexual misconduct. Didn't already a lot of lawmakers there land in trouble for sexual harassment?

Let's face it: In this day and age, who hasn't lost their prestige because they were accused of sexual misconduct?

You have Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, one of San Diego's recent mayors, an San Diegan police officer (the police chief retired over this, if I'm right), several YouTubers; I know there's more, but my favorite example is banned for some reason.

"Seems like the Camp Fire is finally controlled as the rainy season is starting. And apparently the death toll has actually gone down a bit as some errors have been found."

Both of those are a big relief. Well, the former is a mixed bag, I guess. Out with the fires, in with the mudslides.

"Also, California Democratic Party chairman under investigation over allegations of sexual misconduct. Didn't already a lot of lawmakers there land in trouble for sexual harassment?"

I'll be interested in seeing what the investigation turns out. Good that they hired an outside investigator.

As for the numbers, I think the high profile cases were, like, three? Out of 120 members of the Legislature?

"You have Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, one of San Diego's recent mayors, an San Diegan police officer (the police chief retired over this, if I'm right), several You Tubers; I know there's more, but my favorite example is banned for some reason."

Case in point, this list only had two public officials. The rest were actors or some random people on You Tube.

I'm well aware of what I said, Parable.

Well, it seems like that chairman of the Democratic party has stepped down. So it looks like there was fire beneath that smoke.

Definitely the rainy season—it's been raining on and off all day. I got soaked when I got off work this morning because I didn't have the foresight to bring an umbrella.

We really need this after the recent fires. Can't wait for the nearby hills to be green again.

Raining is a mixed-bag - San Diego county is hardly good with rain prep and the gutters get backed up like crazy.

Defintely. There were evacuations over where the Holy Fire burned because of fear of mudslides and flooding.

Bunch of politics news (unless there is more discussion to be had about weather and flooding)

• After a month of counting, California considers a new scoreboard for elections. Seeing as a fair amount of ballots are counted weeks after the actual election and thus the first results are often misleading (there were 4 seats in Congress which switched their outcome through the late ballots)
• Relatedly, David Valadao - incumbent Republican in the Central Valley - conceded 2 days ago. Interesting how this guy was reelected in 2016 despite Hillary winning his district by 15%.
• After its collapse in the midterms, California Republicans did look for a new leader but this guy doesn't exactly sound promising.

Also, something dear to me there are apparently already 200 bills, resolutions etc. pending in the state legislature for the next session, including (I assume these are stable URL):

• 2 bills dedicated to restricting or outlawing private prisons.
• 1 bill reinstating redevelopment agencies which were scrapped in 2011 (?) due to budget cuts I believe.
• 1 bill codifying that certain kinds of workers cannot be called "Independent contractors"; which is apparently the gig economy's way to circumvent labour laws.
• Bunch of fire management bills, no less than two about the Camp Fire.
• 1 bill about how political candidates with names in non-English languages are handled.
• 1 bill to exempt diapers from sales tax.
• 1 bill proposing a discussion on replacing (?) sales taxes with carbon taxes.
• A number of housing bills, for examples one about housing density, one about housing close to roads one about disclosing tenants' rights and one disallowing certain housing ordinances
• 1 bill to expand domestic partnerships to non-same sex couples.
• 1 bill that sounds like it would allow non-citizens to hold public office in some circumstances.
• 1 bill demanding that presidential candidates publish their tax returns.
• 1 bill requesting better monitoring of river systems.
• 1 constitutional amendment (I presume it needs to pass a referendum as well) about scrapping the Board of Equalization.
• 1 constitutional amendment authorizing extra property taxes currently disallowed by Proposition 13.
• 1 constitutional amendment that allows affordable housing projects without a popular vote.

OK, hope that's not too much.

Incidentally, from one of these bills I got the impression that California's penal code is over 18,000 sections long. That's a lot, isn't it.

Well, stuff pertaining to imprisoning people definitely are things that you don't want loopholes in.

I'm perplexed by the domestic partnership one. Are domestic partnerships in California designed for non-straight people first? Because I'm sure that there's plenty of straight couples out there who aren't married but otherwise live together.

The legal definition specifies, per the text of the bill, that the couple either needs to be of the same sex or one or both must be over 62 to qualify. The bill would excise that provision, allowing any couple over 18 to register as domestic partners.

Edited by TheRoguePenguin on Dec 10th 2018 at 10:37:06 AM

It may have been an oversight when the LGBT rights discussion began in earnest some years ago. Like, the point of domestic partnership was to confer the rights normally provided for married couples to same-sex couples, who couldn't get married yet. Only after the fact people started considering "wait, what if I want those rights as well but I don't want to get married and we're not a same-sex couple?"

Yeah it’s recently become a thing in the UK, I think it’s largly going to be used by non-religious couples who find even a civil marriage to religious for them.

Not sure that I buy that re: Penal code: Switzerland's penal code seems to be only ~400 sections long and Germany's seems to be actually even shorter. And from what I can tell each section of California's code seems to be of equivalent length to one section of Switzerland's code.

Re: Domestic partnerships: While these things have been originally introduced as a separate-but-not-equal alternative for gay and lesbian couples in lieu for same sex marriage, it seems like there is indeed a push to let heterosexual couples have them as well. This 2010 article discusses this, so it's not some new development either.

About civil partnerships vs civil weddings vs religious weddings...

I think a lot of it comes down to the sheer expense and cultural expectations involved in a wedding and marriage. Even with civil weddings there is the whole, you know... wedding thing (honeymoon, cake, dress, reception, trying to keep Faction A from killing Faction B while Faction C gets popcorn and Faction D somehow "forgets" they're walking off with gifts meant for the "happy" couple...). On top of a lot of unsaid (and often said) expectations of what being married means to a lot of people.

Partnerships don't have near as much cultural baggage behind them, so if you want small, you can go small. If you want big, you can go gigantic if you want. If you want two separate rooms and a sink each, forget just beds, just go for it... If you want to be able to split without fearing a decades-long divorce battle in case things don't pan out (as quite a few burned divorcees feel), ta-da!

But, a marriage... People have a roadmap with that: and, not all of it is scenic. Particularly if your background has primed you to shy away. <_<

On a different note. Apparently California is considering taxing text messages to make up for lost revenue due to people not calling as much. A natural evolution, but one that does have consumers and watchdogs concerned. Thoughts? (personally I am kinda in support of it because the goverment does need money.)