
PG&E Files for Bankruptcy Following California Wildfires - howard941
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-files-for-bankruptcy-following-california-wildfires-11548750142
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aasasd
> _PGPG &E E_

Pretty sure it's the first time that I see, in the wild on the web, a result
of erroneous sed-style replacement.

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howard941
Fixed. Thanks!

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aasasd
So. What the heck is your procedure for posting to HN that involves sed or Vim
or something?

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howard941
Copy/paste with extra sloppiness

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hn_throwaway_99
> California’s legal framework renders utilities liable for damages from
> wildfires started by their equipment, even if they weren’t negligent.

This seems like a mistake to me. I mean, even if PG&E did _everything_ right
(and I'm not saying they did), the statistical chances of electrical equipment
sparking a fire, and that fire causing huge damage, especially with global
warming making things worse, seems like it would be impossible to have an
electric company that wouldn't go bankrupt.

Seems maybe we'd want something similar to the National Vaccine Injury
Compensation Board. That is, no matter how safe a vaccine is, some (very, very
small) percentage of people will get injured, but we still want to have viable
vaccine producers instead of having them getting sued into oblivion, the VICP
will provide compensation to the injured but in a no-fault system (details at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court)
).

Not sure how this would work for electric companies, as you'd still want to
punish negligent behavior, but putting all of the causes of huge wildfires
(global warming, poor fire safety design, people not trimming trees away from
their houses, etc.) just onto the company that sparked the initial fire seems
like a mistake.

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tzs
This is what insurance is for. Where liability falls just determines who buys
the insurance. If the electric company is liable, they'll buy the insurance.
If not, the property owners will have to buy it.

Since estimating the risk is highly dependent on information that the electric
company has and that the property owners generally do not have, it makes sense
to want the electric companies to deal with insurance.

Also making the electric company be the one that buys insurance means that the
costs can be passed on to the electric company's customers. The risk was taken
to benefit those people, not to benefit that property owners, so it makes
sense that those people should be the ones who pay.

It's also easier to have one electric company deal with obtaining insurance
for their risks in a place than it is for hundreds of property owners to
separately each do so.

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hn_throwaway_99
> This is what insurance is for. Where liability falls just determines who
> buys the insurance. If the electric company is liable, they'll buy the
> insurance.

I disagree, completely. In fact, part of my main point is that when, say, a
single sparking transformer can result in $50+ billion in liability, no sane
insurance company (or even reinsurance company) would take that risk, and that
is what happened.

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kss238
[https://outline.com/ZEdJEV](https://outline.com/ZEdJEV)

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crankylinuxuser
So why do we allow companies who allow gross malfeasance to get off easy by
bankruptcy, get rid of all their debts of all kinds, and then continue as
normal?

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todipa
I don't think the equity holders call it getting off easy when they lost over
50% of their value in their investment.

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crankylinuxuser
Boohoo, a bunch of rich people lose a small percent of their diversified
wealth. Frankly, I'm not concerned about that at all.

What about all the homes and businesses and people who died and were injured?
What about all the land, and crops, and trees? What about air quality and harm
done to all the peoples' lungs being in that? Usually how bankruptcy courts
work, those are considered "unsecured debts". They're handled below everything
else, and usually not paid at all. And that's why PG&E is doing this, to dump
them.

As a _person_ (and not a figment of my imagination corporation), I can't
declare bankruptcy for student loans, even though they're eating me alive. Not
available. And that's for dubious "classes" of various quality at the local
university. Yet if a company kills people, or has malfeasance that leads to
their deaths, its cool... Just declare chapter 11 and rid yourselves of "dead
weight".

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rburhum
Not only "rich people" have stocks. I for one lost a few thousand with that
drop.

Global warming is an issue at play even though it is always easier to point
the finger "at the evil [X] corporation"

