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Why are there no request proposals from YC for new or novel firefighting tech? Are wildfires not an engineering problem? California is YC's backyard. PG and f
by fjabre 5y ago
Why are there no request proposals from YC for new or novel firefighting tech?
Are wildfires not an engineering problem?
California is YC's backyard. PG and friends all have their lives in Nor Cal where most of these recent fires have been taking place.
I am perplexed by the silence of YC and other bay area stars like Google, Apple and the bay area tech giants that seem oddly silent on the matter.
Would it take Google or Apple's campus burning down before they took the threat seriously?
- yupper32 5y agoThe bay area campuses are not in danger from the fires, except for smoke. And there is otherwise not much money to be made in firefighting tech. That's about it.
- fjabre 5y agoSo they are ok with their vacation homes and the other half of the state burning down as long as their campuses are ok? Not much money to be made by saving lives, health, and billions of dollars in infrastructure damage?
- yupper32 5y ago> So they are ok with their vacation homes and the other half of the state burning down as long as their campuses are ok? Apparently! > Not much money to be made by saving lives and billions of dollars in infrastructure damage? No, there's not. Where would the money come from? The public? Good luck with that.
- dylan604 5y ago>Not much money to be made by saving lives, health, and billions of dollars in infrastructure damage? I think you are confusing the money that can be lost due to damage from a fire being a large number compared to the amount of money available to spend on fire fighting itself. A private company in business to make money does not care about the money saved from things not being damaged. Insurance companies have an interest in that. The only way for fire tech to make money would be to come up with an extremely vile scheme to ensure people used their services. Fire tech could extort insurance companies/private owners a percentage of their property's value in order to save their home from the fires. You'd then see door to door sales people using phrases like "it'd be a shame if something were to happen to this lovely home of yours". Some distopian level of society where your house is actively worked to prevent it from burning, but you neighbors house is now a pile of burning embers because they weren't a member while the team working your house stands there and watches.
- fjabre 5y agoIf the space race can be disrupted then so too can this one. Space was government only until very recently.
- dylan604 5y agoThere is money to be made in lifting things out of the gravity well. It's an obvious pile of cash to go after. Comparing the two is a bit disingenious.
- fjabre 5y agoNo money to be made by saving lives, infrastructure, and air quality?
- dylan604 5y agoYou asked the question that I've already provided my line of thinking on, so why don't you share you're line of thinking on where that money is to be made?
- fjabre 5y agoThere's money to be made of course. Tech could be used to help with home defense first, then neighborhoods, then could be scaled from there. If you actually had a solution in hand for even small scale fires that was effective and could scale you easily make this profitable. I'd be the first customer. I live in a fire prone area. Fear sells.
- dylan604 5y agoThat's great that you've identified the very obvious service, but you've failed to identify the source of income. Who's going to pay for this service? Insurance companies? Bwahahahahah. Not a chance. Individual homeowners? They don't even pay for insurance. Renters? Nope. What about commercial? Those are also all renters, so why would they pay for something when they could piggyback off of any of the other tennants paying for the service? Landlords? Hell, they won't pay to for the most basic of service unless forced. So you're panacea of if they build it, they will come isn't as realistic as you are hoping. Edit: Also, you'd better have one hell of a legal team to draft up some BS ToS to protect from when ultimately your firefighting efforts fail. One lost property, and your valuation drops to 0.
- lostlogin 5y agoExpecting billionaires to solve this problem seems crazy. This is for countries to solve and the state to work on. As with all things that are a collective responsibility, getting anything to happen js very very hard.
- wwweston 5y agoI'm given to understand leasing/outfitting 747s to drop fire retardant can be fairly profitable: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/can-10-million-firefighting-machine-actually-stop-fires/ https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 5y agoThe company that developed the 747 tanker went bankrupt, and the company that acquired it built two more then also went bankrupt, and all three aircraft have been retired. I can't see how you got from those facts to "fairly profitable".
- wwweston 5y agoRetirement is news to me; I've seen one in action within the last year. Where can I read about the developments you're talking about?
- fallingknife 5y agoA major cause of the problem is that we put out the fires in the first place. The forest is supposed to burn. Left to its own devices it will burn periodically in small low intensity fires. If we put those out, fuel will build up until you get the massive wildfires we have now.
- fjabre 5y agoIt's a start at least. But from the best and brightest in the world? People who put rovers on Mars but don't want to put a fire out that could destroy half of their state?
- lazide 5y agoSure - but that doesn’t help us now, as fuel has built up in many areas to the point fires are apocalyptic. The time to go that route would have been in the 50’s or latest 70’s.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mananaysiempre 5y agoThat’s why you need forest rangers, isn’t it? (... I’m not really sure what this job is called in English.) If you don’t allow fires to clean out fallen, rotten or decrepit trees, you can have people that just walk the forest and clear them by hand. That doesn’t mean there won’t still be fires, of course, but they won’t be fatally bad unless you happen to be there at the time. Then again, I’m thinking of a pine forest in a temperate climate, in which a fire of this kind doesn’t really harm the mature trees much. I think some other types just burn out instead and have a succession of ecosystems that restores the resulting patch from the literal (extremely fertile) ashes over the course of several decades. I’ve no idea where a California forest ranks on this scale, and while a forest may be completely fine with letting many square kilometres be completely razed and then heal over the course of a couple of centuries, as long as it happens rarely enough, humans will be understandably miffed.
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- jdavis703 5y agoGoogle and Apple campuses are far from the WUI. Their biggest concern would be toxic air pollution levels. So if these folks were operating purely out of self interest they’d be working on better air purification tech (both personal devices and building-wide systems.) And some of the most important tech is stuff that’s fairly iterative. It’s things like better modeling fire behavior, enabling pilots to fly in mountainous terrain in the dark, detecting fires earlier, etc.
- fjabre 5y agoAre their vacation homes and the places they like to spend time with their families away from the office close to the wildfires? I don't understand. Do you mean to say they are ok with half of the state burning down as long as their offices are unaffected? Air quality will affect the output of their workforce. They can probably measure it in dollars. Better offense is needed. Yes it's good to understand fire dynamics but not very useful when nothing can be done about it. I was hoping we'd figure out a better way by now than throwing more firefighting humans at the problem.
- plusbryan 5y agoDon’t rely on a “they” to solve a problem you’re passionate about. If you feel passionate about it, you should solve it!
- fjabre 5y agoAgree with you. I'm doing my part. Also raising awareness is part of that. Thank you.
- wwweston 5y agoIt's good to approach the topic in terms of solution-thinking, but it more or less looks like a lot of the problems involved are political: https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-management-sierra-nevada https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-ma... For the executive summary, look here: https://lhc.ca.gov/sites/lhc.ca.gov/files/Reports/242/ExecutiveSummary242.pdf https://lhc.ca.gov/sites/lhc.ca.gov/files/Reports/242/Execut... California is big, the state itself controls a fraction of land, so there's a coordination problem with private and federal parties. Prescribed burns can actually be a tough sell. Resources are an issue in every corner. Known positive policies don't proceed apace because these are unsolved political problems.
- fjabre 5y agoYes I agree with you here. Solution is not government as with the Space race. It will be won by private industry. I'm perplexed that more bay areas thought leaders haven't jumped on this problem given how close it is to their back yards.
- wwweston 5y agoThat's not exactly the point the existing reports linked lead me to... It's plausible that you could see some private solutions to accomplishing known goals, and see those sold to the government. But that leaves the resourcing problem, which is why some known policies aren't already being implemented in the first place. Could private landowners invest in this themselves? Maybe, but it has the same incentive/risk-management problems that are the reason most people rely on public fire departments.
- fjabre 5y agoYou could sell solutions to consumers at first. The solution is one that would scale up to big fires but handle the small ones first. If I had a solution to put out a 20 acre brush fire near my house in under an hour I would not be waiting for the fire trucks to arrive
- shadowtree 5y agoPG has moved to the UK.
- lostlogin 5y ago> PG and friends all have their lives in Nor Cal where most of these recent fires have been taking place. Thiel and Page have bought New Zealand residency, so maybe thr billionaires have sorted a solution? It does rain an awful lot down here.
- fjabre 5y agoWell for sentimental reasons I guess then ;) They love to solve problems and use California as a testing ground for the latest photo sharing app. But where are the DIY fire fighting apps and devices? Where are the startups that promise 10,000 drones that can put out a 50,000 acre fire in under 2 hours?
- dmitriy_ko 5y agocat videos are more profitable.
- michaelt 5y ago> Are wildfires not an engineering problem? No, they're 90% a political problem. It's politics that dictates whether we have a workable schedule of controlled burns. It's politics that dictates whether electrical cables get buried. It's politics that dictates whether you can build new homes in wildfire-prone areas. It's politics that dictates whether those new homes get electricity without paying the costs of burying the supply cables needed. It's politics that dictate how many firefighters we're willing to pay for, and what equipment they have. And it's politics that dictates whether idiots can get their hands on explosives for gender reveal parties. Oh, there are some contributions that could be made with engineering - lower cost ways of burying cables, for example - but I doubt the adtech companies have any special expertise there.
- fjabre 5y agoWas the Space industry 90% a political problem before SpaceX and friends disrupted it?
- hackeraccount 5y agoThis. I can't tell if no one understand this or if they're just being willfully obtuse. I think saying I want to do X because of Science or Religion or Justice or whatever confers such an impetus that we ignore how it confuses means and ends. Saying the ends justifies the means is cynical but it makes more sense then saying the means justifies the ends which seems to be common way of thinking for all parties.