this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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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

top 48 comments
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[–] RememberTheApollo_ 16 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Only the Left Coast burns, so this administration is fine with that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] RememberTheApollo_ 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

They won’t care until it’s them burning.

[–] kreskin 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I wonder if anyone cares about or respects anyone else anymore, even in the same neighborhood. We're also raising a generation of future adults in this stew of hatreds.

[–] RememberTheApollo_ 2 points 4 days ago

Americans are crabs on a bucket. Of all the westernized countries I think they have one of the worst senses of civic, and social, duty and responsibility.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Nah, Florida does too. But at one point in time they were good about prescribed burns. Nothing stinks quite like a swamp fire.

[–] MehBlah 13 points 6 days ago

Smokies dead. Just ask the orange tumor what the south african told him to do?

[–] franklin 12 points 6 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.

[–] esc27 7 points 6 days ago

"This is fine"

[–] werefreeatlast 5 points 6 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.

[–] randon31415 6 points 6 days ago

RFK Jr. dumped Smokey's corpse in central park.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

It was proven forest fires are caused by dei...

/S

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 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] 5 points 6 days ago

Yeah but they want more fires to blame on DEI and the democrats.

[–] 1995ToyotaCorolla 2 points 6 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] 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

The whole "Smokie" program was a massive failure. The fire fighters loss is horrible but don't do them dirty by comparing them to the forest fire equivalent to the D.A.R.E program.

Its been said in another comment but in case you don't see it: https://www.npr.org/2012/08/23/159373691/how-the-smokey-bear-effect-led-to-raging-wildfires

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 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.

[–] TheKingBee 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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] 2 points 6 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.

[–] Graphy 43 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Time to start auctioning off public land

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

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yeah, they're firing everybody who was hired in the last two years, no matter what they work on. That includes people who do stuff like nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship — Musk denied a national security exemption for them.

[–] stickly 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Hey at least that means the nukes might not work?

[–] chiliedogg 9 points 6 days ago

They don't maintain the nukes. They make sure they're accounted for.

When I worked retail, we took inventory of stuff even if the computer said it hadn't been sold, because people would steal shit. If we stopped doing inventory, we'd never know the thefts had happened.

Imagine that, but instead of iPads, we lose track of nuclear weapons.

[–] kreskin 1 points 4 days ago

also, if all the national parks burn, no more need for a park service at all, or a fish and wildlife agency. #winning.

[–] EvergreenGuru 23 points 1 week ago (4 children)

No, it means someone might walk away with some nukes.

[–] kreskin 1 points 4 days ago

I'd bet real money that Israel is the place we'll see nukes going off.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

That is nightmarish.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Someone is going to get to LARP as Raven

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Drive away is probably more realistic, though. Those things are a bit heavy..

[–] FuglyDuck 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

You’d be surprised what you can fit in a Prius,

I guess that’s still driving though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

a Prius,

I guess that’s still driving though.

[–] ramenshaman 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Fuck around = laying off many thousands of combat veterans

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

[–] kreskin 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I might be wrong, but it seems like we're a ways from right winger on right winger violence.

[–] ramenshaman 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The 2nd most recent attempted assassination was by a Republican. Also democrats join the military too.

[–] kreskin 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

True, but pew says, "63% of veteran voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, while 35% are Democrats or Democratic leaners."

So it seems like 2/3 of the military are likely to be republicans. Not sure how that factors into radicalization but I assume republicans are going to be less inclined to rebel. But I'm not an expert.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/30/military-veterans-remain-a-republican-group-backing-trump-over-harris-by-wide-margin/

[–] FuglyDuck 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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] 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Fines against publicly traded companies need to be in the form of shares, not dollars.

[–] kreskin 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 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] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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] 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 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 2 points 1 week ago

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

what a poor country, they really should start to developed civilisation there, its worth it.

[–] RedditWanderer 7 points 1 week ago

It's funny because this meme is about 8 years old.