Roads are only partially covered by fuel taxes. It's been many years since fuel taxes covered more than 50% of the cost of road maintenance and construction in most areas of the US. The rest comes from general funds at whatever levels of government are doing the maintenance.
That's only true at night, on a rural road, where there is no shoulder to walk on and you're exiting the roadway whenever a vehicle approaches.
In all other conditions you should walk with traffic in a normal way, behaving as traffic behaves.
That's incorrect.
Pedestrians walking in the roadway should walk facing traffic. Pedestrians can stop and change direction effectively instantly so it's to their benefit to see oncoming traffic. They have different motion characteristics than wheeled vehicles. The CDC page on pedestrian safety agrees with this.
Cyclists riding on the roadway should ride with traffic and follow traffic rules and behave as a part of normal traffic.
The CRC program isn't new - I have a friend who managed to miss the W years by getting a CRC chair shortly after he was elected. It's a very good program that attracts a lot of international researchers, both US researchers and people who might otherwise have gone to the US. So it's not a handful of academics, it's a steady stream, and it's no so different from how the US became a research powerhouse. The US research community is very far from homegrown - it came about because from WW II at least through the cold war it welcomed researchers from around the world and gave them a comfortable lifestyle that made it attractive to stay rather than returning to their home countries. It may not be enough at a time to be noticeable in the US research establishment, but it's very effective in enhancing Canadian research.
Property taxes have also historically deductible at the federal level - what does it matter at the federal level how it's applied at the state and local level if it's still federally deductible?
And those states are by no means "sticking it to people in other states by shifting part of their federal tax burden". Those states tend to be payer states that get back less than they pay to the federal government - in many cases they would be better off independent. If we want things to be all fair across states, each state should be getting back from the federal government the same amount that it's residents paid in, no? The states that *are* sticking it to people in other states are the ones that choose to have very low taxes and low services and take large amounts of spending from the federal government. Curiously, those states that are receiving far more from the federal government than they pay in tend to vote consistently republican.
You're deflecting. When YOU personally get to dodge out on a bunch of your federal taxes while a guy in a DIFFERENT deep-blue state (which also "pays more than it receives") that manages to run its state more responsibly on lower local income tax rates, you are passing part of your federal tax burden off on that other person.
People who make enough to itemize in high tax, high cost of living states are subsidizing both those within their state (via state taxes) as well as other states via federal taxes. US federal income tax has historically (at least for all of my life) allowed taxpayers to deduct taxes paid to other entities from their income (not their tax). This includes state income tax, property tax, car registration tax, and even sales tax (yes, you can deduct sales tax on big ticket things). In order to simplify the tax code, they also created a thing called the "standard deduction" which is large enough that it's more than a large fraction of taxpayers would get to deduct if they went to the trouble of itemizing everything. So the standard deduction is effectively a subsidy of people with lower incomes who don't itemize. I have enough deductible things that I itemize. I'm also fine with people getting a benefit from the standard deduction (and wouldn't mind it being higher, either). But don't make it sound like people who pay enough taxes to itemize are getting a special break, particularly when it's just state and local taxes, it's actually the other way around.
You don't pay for a PhD in STEM in the US except in the form of lost income. Virtually all STEM grad students are supported by the grants that fund the research that they're doing or teaching assistant positions - you get a tuition waiver and a salary that's enough to live on, though not have much of a life (incentive to finish and get a job that pays). If you get into a PhD program and they don't offer you some deal that pays your tuition and a stipend, you didn't really get in.
The issue is that for a street like mine, you would need a charging point every 7ft on each side of the road, and those charging points would need to handle multiple users accounts.
It's been done. Way back before modern car batteries, there were cold places that had electrical outlets attached to the parking meters so you could plug in your block heater while you were parked. Modern parking meters have no trouble reading credit cards and charging your account. Integrate the two and you're done. It wouldn't be cheap to do all at once, but it's certainly doable by cities as a long term program.
You can't call them contracts, because the results aren't a fully delivered product with solid specs behind it. But there's R&D attached to them that is returned to whoever's handing out the money.
And NASA / USAF / DOD and government in general does this all the time - they basically gamble a little bit of their budgets and spread it about in the commercial/academic world to try and advance the state of the art, because the payoff is that those advances make things cheaper in the long run for them.
It depends on the agency - the gov't can and does do R&D contracts where the deliverable is demonstration of performance, sometimes on a best effort basis. Sometimes the only deliverable is a report on what they've done.
I don't think they even looked for an excuse - they were having trouble getting any plane at all. The first plane (already the smaller one) was MX'd out at the beginning of the day to the extent that they couldn't even tow it from the gate. They after a bunch of gate drama they managed to get a plane and a gate at the same time and it left about 25 minutes late.
I've done this many times. Usually at the end of a vacation where I have some slack and I'm in no hurry to get back to work. I've never had work even close to rigid enough that I couldn't just send an email "Got bumped, will be back a couple days late, call/email if there's anything urgent". In some cases it's when I'm going to spend the night at home no matter which end of the trip I'm on (either parents home at holidays or partners home when I was bicoastal.) It's not that different than weather delays, which happen all the time at the holidays. As soon as they're having weather and my flights look questionable (you can track your aircraft several legs prior to your flight with FlightAware), I'll get on the phone and ask them for alternatives that are convenient for me. It's generally easy to get them to make a free change that relieves them of having to deal with an extra body screaming for a flight while sitting on the couch eating cookies and watching netflix (and arranging for a few extra days of that).
There are other times when there's no way I'm going to take a voucher (coming home on the third transcon RT in three weeks, all of which were on less than 24 hours notice and were 12-14 hour days at the working end. On those flights I'm going to buy the upgrade to first when they offer it at check-in!)
IF they book EVERY SEAT, then the seat, ***even if unused*** IS STILL PAID FOR.
Not if they sell refundable or changeable tickets. Every seat is paid for until suddenly someone goes online and makes a change and it's not. If they do that close to departure time then the airline risks the seat going out empty, which is essentially product spoilage for them. So they overbook, counting on a certain fraction of travelers to change their plans at the last minute and have the plane go out exactly full.
The typical counterargument is "well, they should just make tickets non-refundable within X hours of departure", except that their reliable customers are business customers who like the flexibility and are willing to pay for expensive refundable tickets, expensive last-minute tickets, and change fees if they're buying non-refundables. The excess that those customers are willing to pay for the flexibility more than compensates for what they have to bid for one of 75 or more people to take a $200-$400 voucher to accept VDB. So they can sell tickets to business travelers right up til departure on most flights, counting on the ability to get someone to take a voucher in return for accepting a later flight.
Happens all the time. Meetings get canceled or rescheduled. Incoming leg gets delayed and they misconnect. Also, changes to tickets have the same effect if done in the last week or two when it will be difficult to resell the seat.
Last week or two? I think about 90% of my tickets for work travel in the past 10 years were booked less than a week out, and I regularly change flights within 24 hours before the flight, often after check-in, for reasons that many others have listed.
If there were demand for 1000, the airline would add more flights. It's the case where there's demand for a fractional extra flight that things get tricky.
Adding flights in a busy airport can be non-trivial. They are often constrained in takeoff, landing, and gate slots and can't simply add flights without several years of politics and infrastructure improvements.
In the old days, it was a free round trip ticket to anywhere - but like most things that fly out of airports, it's been getting worse as time goes on. The last one I volunteered for was a $100 travel discount... that's hitting my threshold for "no thanks."
UA was offering $800 vouchers on a flight that I was on earlier this week because they'd downgauged to a smaller aircraft and needed to get rid of 14 or so people. As far as I can tell, they did. Whenever I've been on flights with people getting IDB'd they call them to the podium at boarding time. Once they announced $800 they seemed to have no shortage of volunteers (they probably threw in hotel, too). They couldn't offer a seat til the next day, and I wasn't interested in waiting around that long or renting a car one-way, so I declined and took the flight as planned. There are plenty of other times I might have taken that much (and have in the past). Back in the 80s and 90s when I took VDB I ran about 50% on getting first class on the new flight.
When traveling for work it's pretty routine for me to change either my outbound or return flight or both *after I've already checked in*.
Schedules change- "The test is running ahead of schedule - we need you there tomorrow morning instead of three days from now" or "something broke, you're not needed til next week" as I'm about to head to the airport. The same thing happens on returns - I might slip my return day-for-day as some part of a test gets delayed or runs long. It's perfectly reasonable to me that they're overbooking to compensate for such behavior (I'm hardly close to the only one). Such behavior also gets compensated by me and similar people finishing work early and not waiting the extra day or whatever to fly home, but changing to get on the next flight that's easy to make and will leave/arrive at reasonable times.
I did this on a much smaller scale for a short time. I flew at christmas for three consecutive years on a single purchased America West ticket. Each of the first two years I was on an overbooked flight at some point in my itinerary and took the voucher. In one case I was coming down with the flu and simply showed up at check-in and asked if they were overbooked. They were and happily handed me a voucher and rebooked me for a few days out and I went back to my mom's house and took a couple days getting over it before I flew home.
The powder comes to $2 for a 500 calorie meal full of vitamins and minerals. I can't imagine how you could prepare a meal with the same nutritional value for less than that.
Noodles (ramen or otherwise) with chopped mixed vegetables. Cheap, tastes good, and nutritious. All it takes is some boiling water and a minute or two of chopping. Soylent gets about half its calories from fat, which is way too much.
fresh bread is extremely easy to make and doesn't have to be labor intensive (18 hour, no-knead). Also very tasty.
What takes 10 minutes to say in voicemail can probably be read in 1 or so, and more easily referred back to.
My employer started doing video documentation instead of written documentation for in-house tools and classes and it's extremely irritating - it's a population of very well educated people who are used to reading large volumes of technical information for detail and digesting it, so they started distributing information in the lowest bandwidth, least random-access way they could think of.
My local SAR group are all made auxilliary deputies and get paid $1/year or something like that so that they get full legal benefits of being first responders. Presumably that would include RC aircraft use exemptions, too.
There's actually an eagle's nest very near one of the recent fires around here. They created a 1000' radius no-fly zone around the nest so as not to disturb the eagles (who don't fly near the fire, as others have already pointed out).
Surveying the fires is generally done from high altitude fixed wing aircraft unless it's a small fire and one or two helos with buckets spotting and dumping on their own. Your post indicates that you don't know what the firefighting aircraft are doing-- most of them are not scouting the fire or looking for trapped people, they're carrying 500-1000 gallons (or more for the skycranes and fixed wings) of water and fire retardant and doing precision drops. I've watched a pumper truck park near my house with an inflatable pool and supply two helos with water to knock out a ~5 acre fire on a steep mountainside that would have taken hours to get handcrews to, and been impossible to get a truck to. They completely knocked out the fire with no people on the ground within a mile of it.
As for scouting for people - if you're in a wildland fire and aren't by a road, you're pretty much SOL. The best they'd be able to do is drop water on you (which they'd do) if they see you at all, but you're not getting picked up til it burns past unless you're well away from the fire. They get people out by filling the neighborhood with fire equipment and telling people to leave. The drones in the air don't stop the firefighters on the ground, but they do stop the air support they depend on. There are 28 helos and probably a half-dozen fixed wing aircraft assigned to the Sand fire right now - they do water and fire retardant drops to support the ground crews, especially in areas that are difficult or dangerous for the hand crews to get to, and might have restricted escape routes.
You haven't been around a brush fire at the urban/wildland interface. It's very common for there to be fire right up close to a neighborhood that's still full of people, or just far enough and with favorable winds that they aren't forcing people to evacuate but you could easily pilot a drone from your backyard. I've got co-workers who were in their backyards while firefighters were setting backfires from their yard. So there can easily be hoards of non-emergency personnel within range of a large drone. There was just an article in the paper about a guy who got caught because he posted fire video from his drone. And there aren't always high winds- part of why the Station fire in 2009 was so bad was that it wasn't windy and it slowly burned through and set all the trees on fire, too, instead of just the undergrowth.
Most firefighting aircraft around SoCal are helicopters. They're easier to maneuver around in the narrow canyons and steep mountains. They do bring in fixed wing aircraft for the big fires, but they don't have nearly the precision of the helos. LA City and County also flight firefighting helos at night (Forest Service still doesn't, and I don't think CalFire does), and a drone could be very hard for them to spot.
The drones are most certainly not threatening the jobs of firefighting helo pilots. How many drones can haul 500-1000 gallons of water?
Firefighting aircraft are generally flying in terrible conditions - smokey, low, often in canyons or near mountainsides, and around powerlines, and they're hauling ~4000-8000 lbs that they're going to dump in an instant. The last thing they need is to worry about getting some big quadcopter caught up in the rotor.
Most of the aircraft used to fight fires, at least here in SoCal, are helicopters, occasionally some with open cockpits. They're often flying in terrible visibility due to the smoke and have enough to worry about avoiding (powerlines, mountainsides, and the fire itself) without worrying that they're going to get a drone caught up in their rotor. Any drone capable of getting to where it's a problem without obviously being controlled by someone standing around waiting to get picked up by the Sheriff's Deputies is likely large enough to cause trouble for a helicopter.
The DC-10 tanker could probably take a drone hit and not notice, unless it went into an engine. Those things fly *way* lower than you expect, and don't do things you expect a widebody jet to do.
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Roads are only partially covered by fuel taxes. It's been many years since fuel taxes covered more than 50% of the cost of road maintenance and construction in most areas of the US. The rest comes from general funds at whatever levels of government are doing the maintenance.
That's only true at night, on a rural road, where there is no shoulder to walk on and you're exiting the roadway whenever a vehicle approaches.
In all other conditions you should walk with traffic in a normal way, behaving as traffic behaves.
That's incorrect.
Pedestrians walking in the roadway should walk facing traffic. Pedestrians can stop and change direction effectively instantly so it's to their benefit to see oncoming traffic. They have different motion characteristics than wheeled vehicles. The CDC page on pedestrian safety agrees with this.
Cyclists riding on the roadway should ride with traffic and follow traffic rules and behave as a part of normal traffic.
The CRC program isn't new - I have a friend who managed to miss the W years by getting a CRC chair shortly after he was elected. It's a very good program that attracts a lot of international researchers, both US researchers and people who might otherwise have gone to the US. So it's not a handful of academics, it's a steady stream, and it's no so different from how the US became a research powerhouse. The US research community is very far from homegrown - it came about because from WW II at least through the cold war it welcomed researchers from around the world and gave them a comfortable lifestyle that made it attractive to stay rather than returning to their home countries. It may not be enough at a time to be noticeable in the US research establishment, but it's very effective in enhancing Canadian research.
Property taxes have also historically deductible at the federal level - what does it matter at the federal level how it's applied at the state and local level if it's still federally deductible?
And those states are by no means "sticking it to people in other states by shifting part of their federal tax burden". Those states tend to be payer states that get back less than they pay to the federal government - in many cases they would be better off independent. If we want things to be all fair across states, each state should be getting back from the federal government the same amount that it's residents paid in, no? The states that *are* sticking it to people in other states are the ones that choose to have very low taxes and low services and take large amounts of spending from the federal government. Curiously, those states that are receiving far more from the federal government than they pay in tend to vote consistently republican.
You're deflecting. When YOU personally get to dodge out on a bunch of your federal taxes while a guy in a DIFFERENT deep-blue state (which also "pays more than it receives") that manages to run its state more responsibly on lower local income tax rates, you are passing part of your federal tax burden off on that other person.
People who make enough to itemize in high tax, high cost of living states are subsidizing both those within their state (via state taxes) as well as other states via federal taxes. US federal income tax has historically (at least for all of my life) allowed taxpayers to deduct taxes paid to other entities from their income (not their tax). This includes state income tax, property tax, car registration tax, and even sales tax (yes, you can deduct sales tax on big ticket things). In order to simplify the tax code, they also created a thing called the "standard deduction" which is large enough that it's more than a large fraction of taxpayers would get to deduct if they went to the trouble of itemizing everything. So the standard deduction is effectively a subsidy of people with lower incomes who don't itemize. I have enough deductible things that I itemize. I'm also fine with people getting a benefit from the standard deduction (and wouldn't mind it being higher, either). But don't make it sound like people who pay enough taxes to itemize are getting a special break, particularly when it's just state and local taxes, it's actually the other way around.
You don't pay for a PhD in STEM in the US except in the form of lost income. Virtually all STEM grad students are supported by the grants that fund the research that they're doing or teaching assistant positions - you get a tuition waiver and a salary that's enough to live on, though not have much of a life (incentive to finish and get a job that pays). If you get into a PhD program and they don't offer you some deal that pays your tuition and a stipend, you didn't really get in.
The issue is that for a street like mine, you would need a charging point every 7ft on each side of the road, and those charging points would need to handle multiple users accounts.
It's been done. Way back before modern car batteries, there were cold places that had electrical outlets attached to the parking meters so you could plug in your block heater while you were parked. Modern parking meters have no trouble reading credit cards and charging your account. Integrate the two and you're done. It wouldn't be cheap to do all at once, but it's certainly doable by cities as a long term program.
You can't call them contracts, because the results aren't a fully delivered product with solid specs behind it. But there's R&D attached to them that is returned to whoever's handing out the money.
And NASA / USAF / DOD and government in general does this all the time - they basically gamble a little bit of their budgets and spread it about in the commercial/academic world to try and advance the state of the art, because the payoff is that those advances make things cheaper in the long run for them.
It depends on the agency - the gov't can and does do R&D contracts where the deliverable is demonstration of performance, sometimes on a best effort basis. Sometimes the only deliverable is a report on what they've done.
If the driver behind the Tesla was any good, they were looking well beyond the collision and reacted before seeing any brake lights on the Tesla.
I don't think they even looked for an excuse - they were having trouble getting any plane at all. The first plane (already the smaller one) was MX'd out at the beginning of the day to the extent that they couldn't even tow it from the gate. They after a bunch of gate drama they managed to get a plane and a gate at the same time and it left about 25 minutes late.
I've done this many times. Usually at the end of a vacation where I have some slack and I'm in no hurry to get back to work. I've never had work even close to rigid enough that I couldn't just send an email "Got bumped, will be back a couple days late, call/email if there's anything urgent". In some cases it's when I'm going to spend the night at home no matter which end of the trip I'm on (either parents home at holidays or partners home when I was bicoastal.) It's not that different than weather delays, which happen all the time at the holidays. As soon as they're having weather and my flights look questionable (you can track your aircraft several legs prior to your flight with FlightAware), I'll get on the phone and ask them for alternatives that are convenient for me. It's generally easy to get them to make a free change that relieves them of having to deal with an extra body screaming for a flight while sitting on the couch eating cookies and watching netflix (and arranging for a few extra days of that).
There are other times when there's no way I'm going to take a voucher (coming home on the third transcon RT in three weeks, all of which were on less than 24 hours notice and were 12-14 hour days at the working end. On those flights I'm going to buy the upgrade to first when they offer it at check-in!)
IF they book EVERY SEAT, then the seat, ***even if unused*** IS STILL PAID FOR.
Not if they sell refundable or changeable tickets. Every seat is paid for until suddenly someone goes online and makes a change and it's not. If they do that close to departure time then the airline risks the seat going out empty, which is essentially product spoilage for them. So they overbook, counting on a certain fraction of travelers to change their plans at the last minute and have the plane go out exactly full.
The typical counterargument is "well, they should just make tickets non-refundable within X hours of departure", except that their reliable customers are business customers who like the flexibility and are willing to pay for expensive refundable tickets, expensive last-minute tickets, and change fees if they're buying non-refundables. The excess that those customers are willing to pay for the flexibility more than compensates for what they have to bid for one of 75 or more people to take a $200-$400 voucher to accept VDB. So they can sell tickets to business travelers right up til departure on most flights, counting on the ability to get someone to take a voucher in return for accepting a later flight.
Happens all the time. Meetings get canceled or rescheduled. Incoming leg gets delayed and they misconnect. Also, changes to tickets have the same effect if done in the last week or two when it will be difficult to resell the seat.
Last week or two? I think about 90% of my tickets for work travel in the past 10 years were booked less than a week out, and I regularly change flights within 24 hours before the flight, often after check-in, for reasons that many others have listed.
If there were demand for 1000, the airline would add more flights. It's the case where there's demand for a fractional extra flight that things get tricky.
Adding flights in a busy airport can be non-trivial. They are often constrained in takeoff, landing, and gate slots and can't simply add flights without several years of politics and infrastructure improvements.
In the old days, it was a free round trip ticket to anywhere - but like most things that fly out of airports, it's been getting worse as time goes on. The last one I volunteered for was a $100 travel discount... that's hitting my threshold for "no thanks."
UA was offering $800 vouchers on a flight that I was on earlier this week because they'd downgauged to a smaller aircraft and needed to get rid of 14 or so people. As far as I can tell, they did. Whenever I've been on flights with people getting IDB'd they call them to the podium at boarding time. Once they announced $800 they seemed to have no shortage of volunteers (they probably threw in hotel, too). They couldn't offer a seat til the next day, and I wasn't interested in waiting around that long or renting a car one-way, so I declined and took the flight as planned. There are plenty of other times I might have taken that much (and have in the past). Back in the 80s and 90s when I took VDB I ran about 50% on getting first class on the new flight.
When traveling for work it's pretty routine for me to change either my outbound or return flight or both *after I've already checked in*.
Schedules change- "The test is running ahead of schedule - we need you there tomorrow morning instead of three days from now" or "something broke, you're not needed til next week" as I'm about to head to the airport. The same thing happens on returns - I might slip my return day-for-day as some part of a test gets delayed or runs long. It's perfectly reasonable to me that they're overbooking to compensate for such behavior (I'm hardly close to the only one). Such behavior also gets compensated by me and similar people finishing work early and not waiting the extra day or whatever to fly home, but changing to get on the next flight that's easy to make and will leave/arrive at reasonable times.
I did this on a much smaller scale for a short time. I flew at christmas for three consecutive years on a single purchased America West ticket. Each of the first two years I was on an overbooked flight at some point in my itinerary and took the voucher. In one case I was coming down with the flu and simply showed up at check-in and asked if they were overbooked. They were and happily handed me a voucher and rebooked me for a few days out and I went back to my mom's house and took a couple days getting over it before I flew home.
The powder comes to $2 for a 500 calorie meal full of vitamins and minerals. I can't imagine how you could prepare a meal with the same nutritional value for less than that.
Noodles (ramen or otherwise) with chopped mixed vegetables. Cheap, tastes good, and nutritious. All it takes is some boiling water and a minute or two of chopping. Soylent gets about half its calories from fat, which is way too much.
fresh bread is extremely easy to make and doesn't have to be labor intensive (18 hour, no-knead). Also very tasty.
What takes 10 minutes to say in voicemail can probably be read in 1 or so, and more easily referred back to.
My employer started doing video documentation instead of written documentation for in-house tools and classes and it's extremely irritating - it's a population of very well educated people who are used to reading large volumes of technical information for detail and digesting it, so they started distributing information in the lowest bandwidth, least random-access way they could think of.
My local SAR group are all made auxilliary deputies and get paid $1/year or something like that so that they get full legal benefits of being first responders. Presumably that would include RC aircraft use exemptions, too.
There's actually an eagle's nest very near one of the recent fires around here. They created a 1000' radius no-fly zone around the nest so as not to disturb the eagles (who don't fly near the fire, as others have already pointed out).
Surveying the fires is generally done from high altitude fixed wing aircraft unless it's a small fire and one or two helos with buckets spotting and dumping on their own. Your post indicates that you don't know what the firefighting aircraft are doing-- most of them are not scouting the fire or looking for trapped people, they're carrying 500-1000 gallons (or more for the skycranes and fixed wings) of water and fire retardant and doing precision drops. I've watched a pumper truck park near my house with an inflatable pool and supply two helos with water to knock out a ~5 acre fire on a steep mountainside that would have taken hours to get handcrews to, and been impossible to get a truck to. They completely knocked out the fire with no people on the ground within a mile of it.
As for scouting for people - if you're in a wildland fire and aren't by a road, you're pretty much SOL. The best they'd be able to do is drop water on you (which they'd do) if they see you at all, but you're not getting picked up til it burns past unless you're well away from the fire. They get people out by filling the neighborhood with fire equipment and telling people to leave. The drones in the air don't stop the firefighters on the ground, but they do stop the air support they depend on. There are 28 helos and probably a half-dozen fixed wing aircraft assigned to the Sand fire right now - they do water and fire retardant drops to support the ground crews, especially in areas that are difficult or dangerous for the hand crews to get to, and might have restricted escape routes.
You haven't been around a brush fire at the urban/wildland interface. It's very common for there to be fire right up close to a neighborhood that's still full of people, or just far enough and with favorable winds that they aren't forcing people to evacuate but you could easily pilot a drone from your backyard. I've got co-workers who were in their backyards while firefighters were setting backfires from their yard. So there can easily be hoards of non-emergency personnel within range of a large drone. There was just an article in the paper about a guy who got caught because he posted fire video from his drone. And there aren't always high winds- part of why the Station fire in 2009 was so bad was that it wasn't windy and it slowly burned through and set all the trees on fire, too, instead of just the undergrowth.
Most firefighting aircraft around SoCal are helicopters. They're easier to maneuver around in the narrow canyons and steep mountains. They do bring in fixed wing aircraft for the big fires, but they don't have nearly the precision of the helos. LA City and County also flight firefighting helos at night (Forest Service still doesn't, and I don't think CalFire does), and a drone could be very hard for them to spot.
The drones are most certainly not threatening the jobs of firefighting helo pilots. How many drones can haul 500-1000 gallons of water?
Firefighting aircraft are generally flying in terrible conditions - smokey, low, often in canyons or near mountainsides, and around powerlines, and they're hauling ~4000-8000 lbs that they're going to dump in an instant. The last thing they need is to worry about getting some big quadcopter caught up in the rotor.
Most of the aircraft used to fight fires, at least here in SoCal, are helicopters, occasionally some with open cockpits. They're often flying in terrible visibility due to the smoke and have enough to worry about avoiding (powerlines, mountainsides, and the fire itself) without worrying that they're going to get a drone caught up in their rotor. Any drone capable of getting to where it's a problem without obviously being controlled by someone standing around waiting to get picked up by the Sheriff's Deputies is likely large enough to cause trouble for a helicopter.
The DC-10 tanker could probably take a drone hit and not notice, unless it went into an engine. Those things fly *way* lower than you expect, and don't do things you expect a widebody jet to do.