Least Wrong Fixed Point

fuck your stereotypes

long hair is not “girly”

the same way short hair is not “manly”

hair has no gender

hair is just hair

&as long as you’re not disrespecting a culture with the way you do it

First, read this:

Second, realize that the exact opposite is true

For the Indentation paragraphs: If a line of code is followed by a different line of code “twelve spaces left,” how many blocks did it just exit? The compiler knows, but the human does not - but if there are three ending braces, it stepped out three blocks.

For the Tab paragraph: If blocks are important, use a character that steps a whole block at a time. If you’re using spaces, congratulations, your indentation size is one space. There, now you have an obvious answer to the first question - stepping twelve spaces left stepped twelve scopes left.

With electricity-sparked wildfires causing billions of dollars of damage, and scheduled power outages affecting hundreds of thousands of Californians, people blame the utility company PG&E. Governor Gavin Newsom said “As it relates to PG&E, it’s about corporate greed meeting climate change. It’s about decades of mismanagement.”

I looked into the way PG&E’s regulation works, and came away thinking that this was less about choosing the cheapest option to enrich shareholders, and more about the regulator wanting to keep electricity rates low rather than pay for increased safety.

Every three years, PG&E asks its regulator (CPUC, the California Public Utilities Commission) to approve its expenditures, line by line. CPUC has an internal office called the Division of Ratepayer Advocates (DRA, or sometimes ORA for Office of Ratepayer Advocates), which reviews the proposed expenditures and objects to some of them, then PG&E responds to the objections, and then CPUC makes a final decision.

This is the 2014 expenditure document from the CPUC website. In it, we see that PG&E asks for approval for fire risk reduction expenditures, and the DRA advises that CPUC not approve this. Fortunately, CPUC did approve it:

4.8.2. Fire Risk Reduction

DRA claims that ratepayers should not pay the $11.113 million forecast by PG&E for additional Fire Risk Reduction. PG&E’s current work to reduce the risk of fires is recorded as Routine Tree Work. DRA claims it is inappropriate to require increased ratepayer funding for activities already embedded in historical expenses.

PG&E responds that its Fire Risk Reduction Work forecast is not embedded in historical amounts.

…

We conclude that PG&E has justified its forecast for Fire Risk Reduction Work and adopt it. As PG&E notes, the forecast increase is intended to cover more intensive inspections on the highest risk fire areas that is beyond the scope of work covered in embedded funds.

They obviously should have spent more money on fire risk reduction, but with the DRA opposing the amount they did ask for, it seems plausible that there was no reasonable prospect of getting approval to - as I’ve seen proposed - bury all the electricity lines. Not all safety improvements that PG&E asked for were approved; for example, PG&E wanted approval for a $10 million Distribution Integrity Management Program for its gas lines, but CPUC only approved $4.7 million, so it doesn’t seem that they can expect blanket approval for safety measures.

I got started looking at this because of this Twitter thread by Chris Garnett. Garnett says:

The cynic in me says the system is working exactly as intended–PG&E is a quasi-public entity that looks private to laypeople, providing a layer of plausible deniability (and liability shielding) for the public officials with ultimate control

Having to choose between much higher rates, frequent blackouts, or massive fire losses is a unwinnable scenario for any elected to be in; obscuring responsibility is the only way to survive.

Some things I don’t know:

If PG&E spends less on safety, does it get higher profits? From what I can tell in the document, it appears not, but I’m not completely sure.

If PG&E spends more in general, do the executives get paid more? It looks like their compensation is approved in the expenditures process, but it’s probably easier to argue for larger executive pay if their overall budget is larger.

To what extent has PG&E captured its regulator and is therefore responsible for its mistakes?

What is the largest amount of fire risk mitigation spending PG&E could have gotten approval for?