[HN Gopher] Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings ...
___________________________________________________________________
Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
Author : zinekeller
Score : 293 points
Date : 2022-12-19 16:09 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomscott.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomscott.com)
| nerdponx wrote:
| I didn't realize this was even an assertion that people made at
| all.
|
| It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. People at the time must
| have known that fires in cities were extremely dangerous because
| they could spread over a great area. It's logical that insurers
| would want to work together to prevent _all_ fires, purely out of
| self-interest to protect their insured properties, and then sue
| the pants off negligent and /or uninsured property owners after
| each near-miss.
|
| The paper in TFA says as much, but it's weird to me that people
| would uncritically accept the proposed narrative in the first
| place.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> It doesn 't make a lot of sense to me._
|
| Consider the following:
|
| * The first Fire Brigade, in Rome, was established by someone
| who would insist on buying your building before extinguishing
| the fire [1]
|
| * In the present day, you can live in an unincorporated area,
| decline fire protection offers from the county and from your
| insurer, and the fire brigade won't come out if you have a fire
| [2]
|
| * The article provides 11 different sources for the apparently
| incorrect claim London's insurance fire brigades circa-1700 let
| uninsured buildings burn.
|
| Personally I find it quite easy to understand why people might
| believe the incorrect claim.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus#Rise_t...
| [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39516346
| Retric wrote:
| The Rome thing may or may not be true.
|
| It's quite possible it is true, but we are a long way from
| any direct evidence that it was generally the case.
| bombcar wrote:
| Half the things we know about famous Romans come from
| writings that were attacking or making fun of them, and
| some are pretty clearly satire or jokes.
| pifm_guy wrote:
| But then what is the incentive for anyone to get coverage if
| they know that any fires will be put out regardless...?
|
| Unless the fire service is paired with insurance covering the
| cost of a rebuild? But I don't think the original fire services
| offered that.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| It's similar to how hospitals are required to save you if you
| are dying but at the same time you are still on the hook for
| any and all costs incurred
| pifm_guy wrote:
| It could be... But were the laws that way in 17th century
| England?
|
| I suspect not, because property ownership in England used
| to be secret - ie. Even the government may not have known
| who owned land. And if you don't know who owns it, who must
| pay the bill?
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is covered in the article; the free-rider problem was a
| problem, in London eventually the fire-brigades appear to
| have basically convinced the city to buy them because they
| couldn't solve it.
| alex028502 wrote:
| > Furthermore, only buildings were insured - neither their
| contents, nor the lives of their occupants, were covered.
|
| Yeah it sounds to me from the article like the insurance was
| for the rebuild, and the firefighting was something the
| insurance company did to reduce their payouts.
|
| So I imagine if you didn't have insurance, you still were at
| more risk than if you did, similar to now, because the fire
| dept isn't going to save everything every time.
| ars wrote:
| > But then what is the incentive for anyone to get coverage
| if they know that any fires will be put out regardless...?
|
| The coverage is apparently to pay for damages. It's not fire
| insurance, it's property insurance, in case of fire.
| constantcrying wrote:
| There are rational reasons to reduce risk, even if it isn't
| some game theoretic optimum. One can easily imagine that
| certain owners either were concerned about an increased risk
| of fire or high damages in such an event and we're willing to
| bear the costs.
|
| The incentives are very clear, if nobody does it, no fire
| brigades will exist. (I can also imagine other reasons, e g.
| membership might have been required by some law or by
| association.) And in the end every fire which is extinguished
| is a fire which didn't spread.
|
| Just some little aside, today there are people who do
| firefighting _for free_. What are the incentives for that?
| sircastor wrote:
| > The paper in TFA says as much, but it's weird to me that
| people would uncritically accept the proposed narrative in the
| first place.
|
| That's the point though. In spite of the logical and practical
| evaluation, there was evidence from multiple, trusted sources
| that said otherwise. And history is full of people doing dumb
| things and making bad decisions, so why not this one too?
|
| Also, it's self-affirming - "Look at us! We've got problems,
| but at least we know well enough to fight fires when there is
| one, despite money problems"
| jtlienwis wrote:
| Maritime Law had a provision for salvors that saved ships in
| distress from sinking. If a salvor saved a ship from sinking,
| they were entitled to a percentage of the worth of a ship. Maybe
| terrestrial law needs something similar in the case of uninsured
| building on fire.
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| With private fire brigades, there was sometimes a monetary
| reward for being first to the scene. Sounds like a good
| incentive, right? But it resulted in competition between
| companies, to the point that they would sabotage each other.
| The article itself has some examples, and there are similar
| ones from United States' history.
|
| I imagine some similar issues have happened at sea, but it
| seems harder to take advantage of and make profit on, since it
| probably wasn't too common for ships with expensive cargo to
| sink. And even if they did, it would be hard to guarantee
| getting there in time. Whereas in a city, fires are a pretty
| regular occurrence.
| woodruffw wrote:
| We probably have better financial structures in 2022 than that,
| like insurance (or taxes that fund professional firefighting,
| like NYC).
|
| Besides: it isn't clear we should _incentivize_ untrained
| professionals to run into burning buildings. Ships are somewhat
| unique in that the people who are saving you are _also_
| sailors, and are presumably at least minimally qualified to
| help another ship in distress.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| There's no reason you can't limit the reward to registered
| groups (ex: existing fire departments).
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I actually think this makes the most sense.
|
| At least in the US - most areas assess the value of the
| structure and the value of the land separately.
|
| I'd be in favor of providing a lien on the existing title in
| the amount of the structure's value (or some relatively high
| percentage of it, maybe depending on how much is salvaged by
| the firefighters) if the fire department puts out an uninsured
| building.
|
| There's no reason to let it burn - it's a waste of resources,
| big source of pollutants, and a risk to neighboring areas. But
| I also think you can't reward property owners for taking a
| gamble that their property won't catch on fire.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Or, god forbid, protect the general welfare of the population
| of Yahoo County by having a fire service?
|
| The government has the ability to tax for such services. As a
| partner who own a piece of a rental property in a ex-urban
| town, the volunteer fire company levies a tax that amounts to
| $300/year (based on valuation) which covers 2-3 towns with
| fire, ems and paramedic services.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Sure - but that doesn't cover the cases where we clearly
| have folks who do not pay, or regions that vote in ways to
| clearly place no priority on those shared services.
|
| And in your case - the results are actually very similar
| (What do you think happens when you fail to pay your
| city/county taxes? A lien on your title happens...)
|
| So again - I'm all for creating shared services and paying
| for them, but some folks aren't. In those cases I'd still
| rather not see people's homes burn (for all sorts of
| reasons) and this is a meaningful incentive to put the home
| out.
| linuxdude314 wrote:
| There shouldn't need to be any external incentive aside
| from it being the firefighters job.
|
| There seems to be a lot of people on this site that think
| life is fair.
|
| Is it fair that you paid for firefighting and your
| neighbor didn't but still had their house saved during a
| fire?
|
| Arguably no, but that is completely irrelevant as it is
| still in the greater public interest for the fire to be
| put out.
|
| There's a certain childish aspect about caring about
| fairness in these types of situations as opposed to what
| is right and moral.
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem comes when the only government is the county -
| it may simply be impractical to have a firefighting crew
| that can reach anything in a reasonable amount of time.
| (There are sparse counties in the US that can't be crossed
| by a firefighting helicopter in less than 60 minutes).
| sethhochberg wrote:
| https://cpb-
| us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.udel.edu/dist/4/10696/fi...
|
| Voters in the county in question did eventually approve
| "universal" fire response, either small prepaid fee or
| post-paid full cost after response, but it sounds as though
| they won't consider converting the fees into standard taxes
| until 70% of residents have opted in to protection. Quite a
| few people who live and vote there seemingly have no
| interest in fire service.
| gusgus01 wrote:
| Interestingly, something similar happens with maritime law as
| to what was alluded to in the article and in this post. Similar
| to the competition and chaos caused by "First to respond and
| put it out", certain salvage companies will ignore Coast Guard
| warnings that a boat is already accounted for, that the
| insurance company has already hired a salvage company to
| reclaim the boat, and instead other salvage companies will try
| to hurry out to the boat and claim it. Similar to the Terry
| Pratchett quote, salvage companies will fortuitously find that
| your boat detached from a mooring ball and drifted to sea if
| it's left unmanned for long periods of time.
|
| So while a pretty good system, it's not without its flaws and
| perverse incentives.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Clearly, the fundamental argument here is about private provision
| of services vs. public provision of services. Is the optimal fire
| protection service one based on private subscriber payment to
| firefighters or a publicly (taxpayer or other government revenue-
| funded) operated fire department?
|
| The best IMO way to view this is to first clarify whether or not
| that service falls into the 'natural monopoly' category, at least
| when it comes to basic provision of services. That category is
| defined by having a lack of meaningful or feasible competition,
| i.e. would multiple competing services result in a better outcome
| than a single state-run service would?
|
| My view is that provision of fire and police services, health
| care and education services, water, electricity and fiber optic
| connectivity service, as well as the maintenance of roads, etc.
| generally fall into the natural monopoly sector, with caveats:
|
| 1) People should be able to augment basic services however they
| wish, to they extent they can afford. One can purchase a fire
| engine and a water tank and keep it on one's property, for
| example. Private security guards can be hired to augment police
| protection. One can hire a home nurse and expensive medical
| equipment, etc. Private tutors can be hired to augment a child's
| education.
|
| 2) State-run services should have competitive processes built in
| - i.e. we may have a public fire department, but the manufacture
| and sale of fire-fighting equipment is a competitive business and
| should not be monopolized, etc. Corruption in the form of fire
| officials giving preferential contracts to sub-par manufacturers
| in exchange for bribes should be a serious criminal activity,
| etc.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| > People should be able to augment basic services however they
| wish, to they extent they can afford.
|
| Here's the problem with such schemes. Often both the providers
| and the customers of "augmenting services" will have an
| incentive to hollow out the state-provided service until it's
| substandard.
|
| For instance, let's say the government provides "basic" health
| insurance but allows private plans. Then the providers of
| private plans will lobby the government to keep the "basic"
| service as low-quality as possible, so that people are
| incentivized to buy the private plans. Furthermore, those who
| purchase private plans will not personally benefit much from
| the state-provided scheme, so they will have little interest in
| its success and little desire to subsidize it.
|
| In the worst case, the result is that the state-run service
| becomes permanently low-quality. Then people attribute this to
| public-sector inefficiency and say that "obviously" the free
| market would do a better job. Then the state-provided service
| gets abolished when it never had a chance to succeed.
| leetrout wrote:
| And here we are in modern times where we do, indeed, let
| buildings burn.
|
| > No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn
|
| > Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground
| because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39516346
| alex028502 wrote:
| > South Fulton's mayor said that the fire department can't let
| homeowners pay the fee on the spot, because the only people who
| would pay would be those whose homes are on fire.
| alex028502 wrote:
| oops - by the time I recovered my password to post this
| excerpt, lots of other people already had
| alex028502 wrote:
| There must be a price that the fire department could
| theoretically charge if they were gonna always charge on the
| spot, and still make a profit, as long as there is some
| minimum number of fires.
|
| Also it says that this TN guy had insurance. I wonder if it
| would have been worth his insurance company's while to make
| sure that $75 was always paid, either by paying it
| themselves, or making him pay it, or paying it and sending
| him the bill, and somehow making it a condition.. to protect
| themselves from having to pay out... as the London article is
| about insurance companies starting fire brigades themselves
| for that very reason
| asddubs wrote:
| sounds like a good way to encourage arson
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| How would you deal with the credit risk? or are you
| assuming that the homeowner has arbitrary amounts of cash,
| at hand, but somehow _not_ in the burning house?
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| I guess they have a house wich could account for some of
| that credit risk?
| lolinder wrote:
| A house that now requires tens of thousands of dollars of
| repairs.
| jahewson wrote:
| Not once it's on fire.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Don't know how it works there, but the bank through which
| we have our home loan requires insurance, payment of
| property taxes, etc. and to ensure all that actually
| happens it's done through an escrow account. We pay one
| bill to the bank every month, they handle the rest. Seems
| like a solid way to make sure these kinda things don't
| happen, and then we can't forget something like the
| property tax, which happens every six months.
|
| Back on the farm, which is 30 minutes from the nearest fire
| brigade, one does have to pay to opt-in for fire service.
| They still answer the phone if you're not on the list.
| You're also strongly encouraged to have a pond or cistern
| near anything you want saved. I don't know if the farm's
| mortgage required payment of that fee, but I do know we
| were given insurance discounts _for_ having ponds near the
| houses and barn.
|
| I do know of one case of a particularly belligerent
| property owner who refused to pay, had fires, still
| wouldn't pay, etc. who did eventually wind up with
| firefighters watching his property burn. Hard to really
| feel bad about something like that.
| fatbird wrote:
| The FD had tried retroactively charging for fire services,
| but then spent more on collections than they'd collect.
| People living in the unincorporated part of the county were
| usually trying to pay as little as possible for anything.
| Three times they voted down taxes to fund fire services
| generally.
|
| Not to mention the question of duress when the FD shows up
| and says "sign this and we'll put out the fire."
| [deleted]
| analog31 wrote:
| A friend of mine lived in a rural town with a weird mistake in
| its code, that let him build at the top of an extremely steep
| grade. The town said, legally we can't stop you (though they
| immediately fixed the code) but there's no way a fire truck can
| get up your driveway. Sure enough, his large detached shed with
| vintage cars in it went up in smoke, and the firefighters tried
| but couldn't get their truck up there.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Money can be exchanged for goods and services. If you want your
| house extinguished then pay for it.
| grecy wrote:
| In developed countries that's where our tax dollars go.
| WalterBright wrote:
| One example in a nation of 330,000,000 is not indicative of any
| sort of systemic problem or of what "we" do.
| red_phone wrote:
| I grew up in a poor, rural area of the US and can attest that
| it's true... if you didn't pay the fee (and affix the requisite
| metal sign below your mailbox) you were on your own in the
| event of a fire.
|
| At that time and place, fire protection wasn't considered a
| public service unless you lived in town. I never heard anyone
| question the arrangement and there was little appetite in that
| era for the tax increase that would've been required to provide
| universal protection.
| bluGill wrote:
| That depends on which rural area. I've lived in several rural
| areas, and we always had automatic fire service provided by
| the township, it was just another required tax line item.
| Normally they contracted with the nearest town (I know in one
| case the township legally owned half the town fire department
| and paid half the costs, the others I don't know what the
| details were, just that there was service from the nearest
| town). I know of townships that don't contract with a nearby
| town - but then they go in with other rural townships to form
| a fire department (generally volunteer - farmers sometimes
| got a call to leave the tractor and fight a fire)
| db48x wrote:
| Townships only exist in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; most
| of the rest have counties. As you say, it varies from place
| to place; any of them could start a fire service if the
| residents vote for it and fund it via local taxes.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Ohio has townships within its counties; they serve as a
| catch-all for areas that aren't otherwise incorporated as
| cities/villages, and that can make a big difference for
| local property tax and services.
| supertrope wrote:
| https://www.wkms.org/government-politics/2012-03-15/south-fu...
| yardie wrote:
| This story still makes the rounds, and the result is still the
| same. The family chose to live in unincorporated land. They
| turned down fire protection when the county offered it to them.
| They turned down fire protection when their insurer offered it
| to them. The fire department did what was required to save
| lives. Insurance can take care of the rest...oh, that's right.
| gambiting wrote:
| Hmmmm. I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life
| even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or
| pay taxes or whatever. I'm not sure I want the same "protect
| at all costs" attitude extended to buildings, but fire can
| definitely spread and even if they don't care about your
| property they might care about other places.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _fire can definitely spread and even if they don 't care
| about your property they might care about other places_
|
| They protected the neighbouring property.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| Not true. An _emergency_ department in the US is obligated
| to provide life-saving care, as are EMS services and
| hospital doctors _if_ the ER doc thinks you have an
| _immediately_ life threatening condition . But a random
| oncologist has no obligation to treat you if you have a
| life-threatening cancer, _unless_ you go to an ER and they
| determine that your condition is immediately life-
| threatening (say, a perforated bowel). Then the surgeon
| _will_ treat you enough that you are not _inmediately_
| dying, but they are not obligated to say, remove an
| underlying cancer if it's not causing immediately life
| threatening problems
| [deleted]
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Hmmmm. I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life
| even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or
| pay taxes or whatever.
|
| ERs in the US are required to provide stabilizing care to
| patients who come in, even if the patient can't pay, by
| law. It's a law because otherwise some of them wouldn't.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It's also a Reagan law. So you can say that it was Reagan
| that introduced universal healthcare to the US.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Eh, kinda, but it's not like you can walk into an ER with
| just _any_ condition and get treated for free. You 've
| got to be having pretty serious problems before they're
| required to do anything about it, and even then they're
| not required to fully treat you, just get you stable.
| Kkoala wrote:
| Imagine thinking that mandatory stabilizing emergency
| care means "universal healthcare"
|
| I hope that was a joke
| superpatosainz wrote:
| That's not what universal healthcare means.
| citilife wrote:
| Then you protect the insured buildings, not really sure why
| it's an issue?
|
| The same logic could apply to police... what if all the
| crime is coming from an unincorporated part of town? Do you
| just go and start policing it (kind of like an invading
| army occupying)? Or do you erect borders / station patrol
| cars near key locations?
| db48x wrote:
| You call the county sheriff. Sheriffs and courts were the
| original reason why counties exist, and why there aren't
| any parts of the country that exist outside of a county,
| while there are quite a lot of people living outside of
| any incorporated city.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Usual response is the city annexes the land and starts
| policing it.
| chadash wrote:
| But people complain about this too. No one seriously talks
| about not treating people in the ER with gun wounds, but
| Obamacare explicitly introduced the mandate that you get
| insurance or pay a penalty to address this very issue.
| Everyone is entitled to a basic level of care, but the
| mandate says that you should have to pay for it.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| "Gun wound" as in a wound caused by (actively) using a
| gun, or a bullet wound, typically caused by someone else
| using a gun? I could understand the former (like
| excluding accidents while skiing, skydiving, whatever),
| but excluding the latter seem pretty cynical.
| dmoy wrote:
| The vast majority of gun wounds in the US are purposeful
| crimes or suicides
|
| For deaths, there's maybe 300 accidental deaths, 10,000 -
| 15,000 homicides, and like 60,000 suicides. Non-death
| injuries scale similarly, with the caveat that like 6,000
| ish people per year try to kill themselves with a gun and
| fail, but still injure themselves.
| vkou wrote:
| The Obamacare penalty for not buying insurance was
| eliminated by Trump, because reintroducing the free rider
| problem is a cornerstone of GOP health policy.
|
| Reinstating the penalty is going to cost political
| goodwill, which is why the Dems aren't doing it.
|
| Regardless of whether the penalty is or is not in place,
| I wouldn't recommend being poor and sick, regardless of
| whether you are insured, or are freeloading.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It wasn't the Trump administration but the 5th Circuit
| Court of Appeals which struck down the mandate as
| unconstitutional and being liberal and a supporter of
| health care reform I think they had a point. I can't see
| in the constitution where the federal government has the
| power to force me to buy health insurance. I like my
| constitutional rights being protected even when the thing
| being compelled (me having insurance) is a good idea. It
| means that things which are not quite so good of ideas
| have less chance of being forced on me later.
| jjeaff wrote:
| The plaintiffs in the case were several gop attorney
| generals. Related cases were also carried out by the
| Trump admin. And several courts had previously upheld
| that the ACA was constitutional because it does not force
| you to buy health insurance. It actually just imposed a
| fine if you didn't and that fine was considered a tax,
| which Congress has constitutional authority to levy. The
| GOP forum shopped to get in front of a rubber stamp
| republican judge.
|
| Additionally, the whole point of these cases was not
| simply to get rid of the penalty. The idea was to get rid
| of the penalty so they could go back to the supreme court
| and again claim that the mandate is unconstitutional
| because now there is no "tax" associated with it.
|
| I don't know where things are at now, but it seems
| unlikely to go anywhere now because it would be difficult
| to argue that buying insurance is required at all at this
| point. So we are left with the backup gop strategy of
| hoping that disarming the mandate will simply bankrupt
| the program. At least until republican voters wake up and
| realize that the program is miles better than what we had
| before.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I likewise do not approve of the Feds expanding their
| powers arbitrarily by declaring the punishment for
| whatever they wouldn't otherwise be allowed to enforce "a
| tax". Calling the insurance mandate constitutional
| because the punishment was a "tax" was abusing the intent
| of the law.
| generj wrote:
| If you worried about fines being used to deter activities
| society doesn't want, and that fine money being collected
| as tax revenue, you are at least 200 years too late.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| It's pointless to try to draw a distinction here, because
| you can re-frame the exact same behavior several
| different ways, some of which are already common, so it
| doesn't represent any expansion of power. Like, raise
| taxes by that much and give people with insurance a
| credit for it, but not those without insurance. Done. No
| "worse" than e.g. child tax credits, as far as
| constitutionality. Insisting that the law do some
| particular word-dance to get to the exact same place
| isn't productive and doesn't defend liberty.
| vkou wrote:
| Trump's government repealed the individual mandate
| penalty, and then the court ruled ruled that in it's new
| form, it no longer qualified as a tax and was
| unconstitutional. (Not that this meant anything, since
| the legality of a fee of $0 doesn't matter.)
|
| The court case as a whole argued that because the GOP
| changed the ACA in a manner that made part of it (the $0
| fee) illegal, the entirety of the ACA should be made
| illegal.
|
| The fifth circuit agreed with some of the arguments in
| the case (the fee one), but did not practically change
| anything about the ACA.
|
| And then SCOTUS, surprising ~everyone, ruled that
| actually the whole of the ACA is constitutional.
|
| Look at this timeline, and you tell me - who spent years
| trying to re-introduce the free rider problem, and to
| break the ACA? Congress, the president, and the plaintiff
| states... or the fifth circuit, which when presented with
| a singular, narrow question, ruled that a $0 fee
| (whatever that is) isn't a tax?
|
| Now, as of 2022, we are in a world where the ACA has been
| thoroughly litigated, and is still here, with the free
| rider problem hanging like a millstone over its neck.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| calling insurance a tax is about as strong an indication
| of regulatory capture as I can think of.
|
| It should have never been a tax specifically because it's
| an unconstitutional act. Calling it a tax is the letter
| vs the spirit of the constitution.
|
| If you and others like yourself want to ensure everyone
| has health insurance then __make it mandatory for the
| state to pay for it__. Anything else and you're just
| taxing the poor for being poor.
| vkou wrote:
| > it's an unconstitutional act.
|
| That is an interesting opinion, but at this point, both a
| conservative, and then a super-conservative, packed-with-
| federalist-society SCOTUS has disagreed with you twice on
| this issue (5-4) and then (7-2). It's about as written-
| in-stone as you can get in the United States.
|
| The courts think this is above-board, the executive
| thinks this is above-board, most of the public thinks its
| above-board, it's safe to say its above-board.
| mbg721 wrote:
| As I recall, the whole "call the penalty a tax" thing was
| Roberts' tortured justification for allowing it in the
| 5-4 vote. Nobody ever really believed it was a tax.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| Slavery was also considered above-board at one point,
| so...
|
| lets not use that as justification, shall we?
|
| carrying private service X is required for you to exist
| in the united states. If you don't pay for X, you get
| fined Y as a punishment.
|
| yep, I'm sure the powers-that-be considering that above-
| board should be the only justification we need!
| vkou wrote:
| > Slavery was also considered above-board at one point,
| so...
|
| It was also perfectly constitutional[0], hence the need
| for that 13th amendment. And that civil war thing. As it
| turns out, the constitution kind of sucks[0], it has a
| lot of problems with it. Fewer than it did in the past,
| but we aren't quite at the end of history just yet.
|
| You're going to need a better complaint than 'it's
| unconstitutional', as this is pretty verifiably
| constitutional. The people who have been empowered[1] by
| the founding fathers to determine what is, and what is
| not constitutional have determined that this is
| constitutional. It's not a matter of opinion at this
| point.
|
| > carrying private service X is required for you to exist
| in the united states.
|
| And that's nothing new. Government can compel all sorts
| of things from you. Showing up to contribute your labour
| to a jury duty. Involuntary servitude in the military.
| Taxing the land you live on. Following emergency orders.
| Not heading a communist political movement. Every society
| - even this society - provides you with privileges, and
| requires obligations from you.
|
| This obligation has been ruled to be well within the
| legal framework of this society, and if you think it
| should be outside that legal framework, you should look
| into passing a constitutional amendment on the subject.
|
| Or, you could believe that this obligation is a
| constitutional, but bad idea, and have the legislature
| repeal it. Either way, it's currently constitutional. [0]
|
| [0] You're confusing 'constitutional' with 'just'. They
| are not the same thing.
|
| [1] Actually, SCOTUS' powers in this sphere are what's
| unconstitutional[2], but we all close our eyes, and
| collectively pretend that they are.
|
| [2] You're not going to find anything in either the
| constitution, or passed legislature granting SCOTUS the
| incredibly broad powers it currently enjoys. These powers
| were invented out of thin air, and are backed by neither
| fiat, nor democratic will. All that the constitution says
| on the subject is 'We should, like, probably have courts.
| That should do stuff, maybe.'
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| stop tilting at windmills,
|
| the question is whether or not the government can force
| you to pay for a __PRIVATE__ service just for
| __EXISTING__ within the borders of the US.
|
| There is __NO PRECEDENT__ for this. The closest you can
| get are things like car insurance where you're required
| to carry insurance in order to drive on US roads. You can
| choose not to drive, you cannot choose to "not exist".
|
| That puts this into an entirely different category. The
| fact that it originally got rationalized as a tax opens a
| whole different can of worms. Good luck refusing to pay
| taxes.
| dahfizz wrote:
| I agree with you, but the "tax" is the penalty for not
| having health insurance. The health insurance itself
| isn't considered a tax.
| djbebs wrote:
| There is no free rider problem.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Elimination of pre-existing condition exclusions, and
| restrictions on which factors can be used to set pricing
| for policies--both wildly popular--create a free rider
| problem.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Funny how it's a problem only in the "richest country in
| the world".
|
| It also pales in comparison to the burden and costs of
| existing system in the US.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Well, right, because most other advanced-economy states
| require you to carry insurance (more-or-less the solution
| we _were_ going for, before the penalty for failing to
| have insurance was eliminated) or cover everyone under a
| government-provided healthcare scheme of one sort or
| another.
|
| If your point is just that the US healthcare system is
| far more-broken than most, and in some unique ways, all
| for no good reason--sure, yeah, of course that's true.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Of course there is. You aren't denied service at a
| hospital even if you don't have health insurance. That is
| a free rider problem.
| mhalle wrote:
| The Reagan administration, I believe, imposed the
| unfunded mandate on emergency rooms to treat patients
| using EMTALA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Med
| ical_Treatment_an...
|
| This mandate makes sense from a moral point of view,
| especially for true emergency situations. However, the
| act didn't take care of the cost of care, which was
| placed on hospitals and ultimately passed on to other
| patients and the government. Obamacare attempted to
| address this issue.
|
| EMTALA also distorted US healthcare be redirecting poorer
| people to expensive emergency care rather than preventive
| or primary care, which might well serve many of their
| needs better. That's also something that Obamacare was
| designed to fix.
| bombcar wrote:
| https://healthcostinstitute.org/emergency-room/ouch-new-
| data...
|
| $80 billion of 3.4 trillion. A rounding error.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| it's fire, if they're ever not doing it with the same
| fervor then we have a problem.
|
| It's one thing to declare something too dangerous and
| work on containment, but what's being described here
| isn't that.
| yardie wrote:
| They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee,
| erectile dysfunction, or failing vision. And they
| eventually put it out to prevent it spreading. Just not
| with the same fervor of preventing property damage.
| flutas wrote:
| > And they eventually put it out to prevent it spreading.
|
| Reading the article, that's not true.
|
| They watered down the fence line to protect someone
| else's land.
|
| > Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight
| the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had
| paid the fee.
|
| > "They put water out on the fence line out here. They
| never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood
| out here and watched it burn," Cranick said.
|
| So to your examples...
|
| > They will save your life. They won't treat your trick
| knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision.
|
| It would be closer to the story if it was "they won't
| save you, but they'll spray down everyone else with a
| disinfectant to protect them from your disease."
| monkmartinez wrote:
| Funny, we get called for much less than a hurt knee and
| failing vision via 911 every day. I don't have a choice
| other to send them to the ER if that is what they want. I
| recently went to a call where the young man thought he
| took too much "extenze"... Long story short, we checked
| vitals and asked if he wanted to be seen at ER for
| further evaluation. "Nah man, I got work to do now...
| just thought I was gonna die for a second." Anxiety and
| Panic... number one call type.
| rhacker wrote:
| My wife called for me because I accidentally drank my
| mouthwash. I couldn't speak and technically couldn't
| breath for a minute. And I would have been fine, but the
| bottle said to call poison control (or something - this
| was 10 years back) if ingested. So my wife called while I
| was wheezing. By the time the ambulance arrived I was
| totally fine... sorry about that too
| Spooky23 wrote:
| They will evaluate you and give you a ride home if you
| are indigent. There are places where it's not uncommon to
| call 911 for a runny nose or whatever, request ER care,
| and get the medicab home.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| > _They will save your life. They won 't treat your trick
| knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision._
|
| I thought in the US, hospitals were only required to
| stabilize, not treat, non-paying patients. For example,
| if someone has cancer, they are not required to perform
| surgery or chemotherapy, just stabilize their symptoms at
| the moment.
| kortilla wrote:
| Saving burning buildings with no people in them is still a
| risk to the firefighters' lives. Why go through that when
| the owners explicitly declined the protection repeatedly?
| zehaeva wrote:
| This actually hasn't always been the case.
|
| In fact Hospitals were not required to treat you until
| 1986, which was part of the COBRA act.
|
| Prior to that there was a large practice of "Patient
| Dumping" where a hospital would kick you out if they found
| out they you couldn't pay for your treatment. Hospitals in
| the US would literally let you die out side the ER doors.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_a
| n...
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| No. Hospitals will do what they have to *against immediate
| threats*. They will not do what's needed in the bigger
| picture if they are not paid. You don't get the
| chemotherapy etc if you can't pay.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Sort of.
|
| They will save you from an acute emergency, stabilize you,
| then dump you into a care home with inadequate care or to
| the street as appropriate, where you play the long game of
| succumbing to whatever ails you.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Going by the linked article, they did care about
| neighboring property (whose owner paid the fee in advance),
| so they controlled the spread.
| fatbird wrote:
| The municipal fire department's insurer told them that they
| would not cover injuries sustained while fighting fires on
| uninsured homes, which was the final straw for the fire
| department.
|
| The FD had tried for years to find a workable solution and
| failed because the people in the unincorporated part of the
| county _just didn 't want to pay for fire services_. IIRC,
| the county had tried three times in the previous decade to
| pass taxes to either fund the municipal FD or set up their
| own; three times the residents of the unincorporated part
| voted against it. The FD had tried retroactively charging
| owners, and spent more on collections than they'd earn.
| paxys wrote:
| Doctors will save your life, not your property. It's the
| exact same in this case.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life even
| if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or pay
| taxes or whatever_
|
| So will firefighters. They'll save your life to the best of
| their ability, no matter any contracts, payments, taxes,
| etc.
|
| Saving your house is another matter.
| monkmartinez wrote:
| Number one priority on any emergency scene. Life
| safety... my crew comes first, but I have taken some
| serious risk to save people. Once the humans and animals
| are safe, everything else is less concerning. Risk a lot
| to save a lot. Most "things" can be replaced. My crew
| takes great pride in saving homeowners animals these days
| as we now have some tools to help post smoke/heat
| exposure (Cyanokit and O2).
| flandish wrote:
| Adding a second reply with same sentiment. I am also a
| firefighter, and my main "assignment" over the years has
| been search/rescue.
|
| We'll always risk to reward. But more and more the phase
| after life saving is trending toward "surround and drown"
| - not that I want to fight like detroit in the 2010's,
| but yes we do make a call sometimes to stop risking when
| lives are all confirmed safe.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's also a point where a structure is a total loss
| even if the "damage doesn't look so bad from out here" at
| which point letting it burn as long as other buildings
| aren't in danger may be the safest thing to do.
| elliottkember wrote:
| Thank you (both) for your service to the community.
| fakedang wrote:
| Coming from a poor "uncivilized" country, while now
| living in an "uncivilized" Arab country with barbaric
| laws, what the f** is even this? I thought that taxes
| were supposed to pay for basic neighborhood services,
| including fire, police and emergency services?
|
| Did capitalism hit America so hard that they kicked them
| back to the Roman Era (yes, I'm referring to Crassus
| here)?
| munificent wrote:
| I suspect you would find services limited in the middle
| of the Arabian desert as well.
|
| The United States is enormous and many parts of it are
| incredibly sparsely populated. For example, Niobrara
| County in Wyoming has a population of 2,467 and an area
| of 6,810 km^2, or a population density of 0.36/km^2.
|
| For comparison, the Northern Borders province, the least
| dense province in Saudi Arabia, has as population density
| of 3.4/km^2, almost ten times more people per square
| kilometer.
|
| People outside of the US really have no idea how empty
| much of the country is. I think there's an assumption
| that just because much of the land is livable (i.e. not
| desert, bare rock, etc.), it must occupied. But that's
| simply not the case here.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I think there is a difference between a remote place that
| is difficult to access and a place that is not entitled
| to use public firefighters' service. IMHO the former has
| no bearing on the latter.
|
| I am not judging the way things work in the US, just
| commenting that I don't think that population density is
| relevant here as the issue is one of right.
|
| Now, of course, if you live 100 miles from the nearest
| town it may well take hours for the police or
| firefighters to show up when you call them. That's
| another issue.
|
| Edit: I must have written something offensive without
| realising it...
| bombcar wrote:
| Much of the Midwest is sparsely populated but not
| unpopulated - you're never more than a half mile from a
| house but never much closer than that. It can cause weird
| servicing issues.
| rayiner wrote:
| State and local governments aren't exempt from tort laws,
| etc. If they commit to service a location 100 miles away,
| and can't practically do so, or someone gets hurt in
| trying to make heroic efforts to do so, they can and will
| get sued. And in such a suit, making that sort of
| unrealistic commitment can and will be held against them.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I don't think that this is how it works (paying taxes
| doesn't entitle to a level of service) but I admit I
| don't know US law.
|
| As a side note, in this very case the issue wasn't
| remoteness since they could have had access to
| firefighters for a small annual fee. Rather it was a
| legal and administrative issue. But I would indeed be
| curious if voluntarily paying a fee rather then being
| taxed can have an impact on any enforceable expectation
| of service.
| munificent wrote:
| _> I don 't think that population density is relevant
| here as the issue is one of right._
|
| It is absolutely relevant because services can only be
| logistically and economically viable at certain levels of
| density. Fire services aren't very useful if it takes
| them a two-hour drive to reach the fire. So they have a
| maximum radius where they are useful. They only provide
| value to the people within that radius. If the density is
| too low, then there aren't enough people in there to
| afford supporting fire services.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Public services are not expected to be 'economically
| viable' on their own. Moreover, whether there are enough
| people to support service is also a purely administrative
| and political issue.
|
| You're not addressing my point, either, which is that
| there is a big difference between getting a crap service
| because you're hard to reach (which does happen including
| here in Europe) and having no right to call for help in
| the first place.
|
| Again, I am not criticising, I am just thinking that
| there are different, separate issues here.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > Public services are not expected to be 'economically
| viable' on their own.
|
| They inherently are. If these neighborhoods have fire
| coverage equivalent to that of a metropolis, but they
| would be paid for via taxation at the rate of $50K per
| year per household, that's not economically viable.
| fakedang wrote:
| Then perhaps the core issue is zoning land properly and
| making sure people don't spread out too thin.
|
| That being said, the locality in question sounds very
| much like the low density suburban locale that I'm
| currently living in. It costs a pretty penny for the
| government to maintain services here, since there are
| only about 100 homes in an area at the edge of the desert
| (which at a rate of 75 per home per month as stated in
| the article wouldn't be able to cover a basic
| firefighting service). Of course, that does not bother
| the government in providing funds for everything from a
| local police station, hospital (yes, not a clinic), fire
| station, municipality, garbage collection, etc. The only
| thing missing (for the local Arabs mostly) is a
| government school, but then folks with families don't
| bother with it.
|
| I could draw a similar example of my place in India,
| which has similar low density characteristics, and to
| make matters worse, is located in a hilly part of the
| district, but that doesn't stop the govt. from providing
| a local police force and fire fighting service complete
| with a helicopter.
|
| Some amenities are basic needs that if you don't receive,
| then what the hell are you paying taxes for? Freedoms per
| second?
|
| And no, I'm not a stranger to America's vast landscape.
| The fact stands that there should have been better zoning
| - or don't expect any facility at all, but don't make
| news out of it.
|
| On a side note, the main link of this thread quotes the
| example of insurance companies in London in the 1830s,
| who would compensate each other in case their
| firefighters took action on fires not in their
| jurisdiction. If our forebears had such sensible
| foresight and collective responsibility, then why not
| America today?
| nisegami wrote:
| By living on unincorporated land, they wouldn't have been
| subject to the tax that pays for the fire department
| (which would be county level or city level I'm guessing?)
| bombcar wrote:
| City; counties only have states above them so there isn't
| "out of county land" usually.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Some states like Virginia have city and county both at
| the top local level. Richmond City is completely separate
| from the extremely rural Richmond county located more
| than an hour away.
|
| Virginia is also technically a Commonwealth and not a
| state as well.
| bombcar wrote:
| Virginia has lots of oddities- like being west of West
| Virginia.
| Majromax wrote:
| > I thought that taxes were supposed to pay for basic
| neighborhood services
|
| _Neighbourhood_ is the operative word here. In some
| parts of the rural United States, homes are far away and
| far between. Public services of the kind expected in
| populated areas are impractical, particularly for
| protection of property rather than life.
|
| With that as a baseline, some "rural" areas maintain this
| peculiar, low-cost characteristic even as they become
| more populated. There's a degree of self-sorting
| behaviour as well, since some residents become attracted
| to the area specifically for its vanishingly small local
| tax burden.
| [deleted]
| comte7092 wrote:
| This is a place where people actively choose not to pay
| taxes instead of paying and receiving services.
|
| "Unincorporated land" means that the landowners have
| chosen not to incorporate (create) a municipal (ie
| city/neighborhood) government.
|
| It's "rugged individualism".
| mushbino wrote:
| Considering the location, I imagine they couldn't afford it.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The family accepted fire protection from their insurer and
| claim they forgot to pay the $75 fee, not declined to do so.
| It's possible they opted out, it's also possible it was an
| oversight. Certainly, the more human thing would be to make
| opting in/out more explicit and handle a late payment by
| sending it to collections (or reminder notifications) instead
| of just turning service off.
|
| Or do you have any evidence they actively opted out of the
| $75 payment?
| fatbird wrote:
| A reporter on the scene spoke to the homeowner, who said he
| didn't pay the fee because he thought he could just pay
| after, like happened previously. He literally thought he
| could get away with not paying unless a fire happened. It's
| a textbook case of moral hazard.
|
| I discussed the case a lot at the time it happened, and it
| never came out that he "forgot" to pay the fee. It was very
| clear at the time that he thought he didn't need to and
| they'd put out the fire anyway.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Exactly. There are two separate cases:
|
| 1) Insured by another company. The sensible course of
| action is to fight the fire and bill them. Every company
| benefits from such cooperation.
|
| 2) Uninsured. The moral hazard problem, if too many
| people are not paying the only sensible approach is to
| let uninsured buildings burn.
| bombcar wrote:
| People do the same with AAA - don't pay to renew until
| you need a tow and pay the renewal over the phone. I
| think they're a bit smarter now and make you pay for the
| years you skipped.
| grogenaut wrote:
| That's hard as I wouldn't back pay but my insurance
| company goes back and forth on doing roadside depending
| on if you have comprehensive and has changed the rule and
| rates to be more or less competitive with AAA. When it's
| cheaper I use my I aurance, when not AAA. If they made me
| back pay I wouldn't use them. But I generally don't just
| do the sign up and tow immediately.
| bombcar wrote:
| I think it's only when you want a tow same day - renewing
| a failed account has a three day waiting period if you
| don't pay the rush fee.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I had not heard that. Reports I saw at the time said he
| "forgot".
|
| At any rate, in response to the story, the county changed
| it so paying when your house was already ablaze was a
| punitive but not impossible option. I believe it was
| $3,500 when they instituted it.
|
| Which, frankly, seems like the proper way to handle the
| moral hazard.
| david422 wrote:
| That's still the same problem though. If nobody pays the
| town is still going to be out money even if it's possible
| to collect $3500. And the reason they don't put out the
| blaze and then just charge if someone doesn't have
| insurance is because they won't be able to collect.
|
| How do you deal with freeloaders in society?
| [deleted]
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Definitely not by letting them or their belongings burn
| down.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Just FYI for all those in the thread who don't know,
| unincorporated doesn't mean "no taxes, no fees". Generally
| the county provides services (Sheriffs and Constables, fire
| dept.), and ambulances tend to all be private anyways. If
| you're in the middle of nowhere then you may have to join a
| co-op for helicopter medical, and the nearest fire station
| may be too far to save your house in a fire.
|
| If you're in the middle of nowhere you're probably also on
| unincorporated land, but the challenges of being in the
| middle of nowhere have nothing to do with the land being
| unincorporated.
| dantheman wrote:
| If it wasn't a gov agency, something could have been worked
| out on the spot. Ask them if they want to pay the full price,
| what is it $10k, $20k?.
|
| If you don't pay, you'd have the lowest priority. But there
| is no reason other than bureaucracy that they couldn't have
| handled it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Article doesn't seem to agree with you here, instead citing
| different reason:
|
| > _South Fulton 's mayor said that the fire department
| can't let homeowners pay the fee on the spot, because the
| only people who would pay would be those whose homes are on
| fire._
| jefftk wrote:
| dantheman was proposing agreeing to pay the full cost
| (tens of thousands of dollars), not just the advance fee
| ($75).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Another problem is the difference between _agreeing to
| pay_ and _ability to pay_. Someone might be wiling to pay
| anything in the moment, but you might be hopelessly
| unable to actually collect.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Fires are pretty rare, I'd take that bet.
| Arainach wrote:
| How do you calculate the "full cost" of having staff on
| call 24/7, well maintained equipment that's regularly
| inspected, building inspectors to verify that fire code
| is being met to keep usage down to sustainable levels,
| and so on? The full cost isn't $10k in salary and
| gasoline and foam, it's millions.
| jefftk wrote:
| My city spends ~$20M/y on the fire department [1] and has
| ~300 structure fires and ~14k callouts annually [2]. The
| cost for a marginal fire is definitely not millions; even
| if you only divide $20M by 300 you get $70k and that
| ignores the tens of thousands of other calls they take.
|
| [1] https://stories.opengov.com/somervillema/published/Bh
| SqQ0eG2
|
| [2] https://www.mass.gov/doc/2020-county-
| profiles/download
| aaronax wrote:
| Total cost of running the department for a year, divided
| by the number of callouts. Possibly weight the callout
| types depending on approximate resources consumed.
|
| Though I am fully in support of just letting the house
| burn.
| mook wrote:
| These costs still exist in a hypothetical year with zero
| fires, though. Additionally, people whose house were just
| on fire with zero insurance are probably not in a good
| financial position (anymore), and they are unlikely to be
| able to pay...
| dantheman wrote:
| If you don't have the money, then a lien is placed on the
| property and it will be sold to pay the debt. Or you can
| take out a mortgage to buy it. In any case you'll be
| richer than if the house is burned down.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Ability to pay still not guaranteed, depending on the
| financial situation. Family can easily have more that's
| than assets to their name, preventing collection.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Your first problem is trivial cuz you can look at a
| multi-year average.
|
| The second part is more significant in people simply
| don't have the money to pay.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| amortize that cost over the population that is covered;
| perhaps discount the services utilized by residents who
| pre-pay and charge a premium for those who pay on the
| spot.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| the guy who can't pay the insurance fee isn't usually going
| to be able to pay the full price of the services
| anotherman554 wrote:
| "If it wasn't a gov agency, something could have been
| worked out on the spot."
|
| Or there would simply be no fire service at all because the
| rural area isn't profitable to service.
| s0rce wrote:
| Do people have that cash lying around, what guarantee would
| you have that people would pay? Maybe you can take the deed
| to the house that you saved?
| jefftk wrote:
| Seems like the agreement could be backed with the threat
| of a lien on your property.
| triceratops wrote:
| The property that just burned down?
| s0rce wrote:
| Presumably they would save it by extinguishing the fire
| then if you can't pay the cost of the service they take
| the property or place a lien on it.
| michaelt wrote:
| The fire brigade would borrow the technique of Marcus
| Licinius Crassus and buy your property as it burned,
| improve its value by extinguishing the fire, then rent it
| back to you.
| [deleted]
| jefftk wrote:
| If the firefighters can't keep it from burning to the
| ground, I doubt you want to be paying for them to do
| anything.
|
| Even then, there's still the value of the land.
| ddalex wrote:
| Hold on there Crassus.
| modderation wrote:
| If they do have that cash laying around, hopefully it's
| not stored on-premises.
| [deleted]
| tlavoie wrote:
| Not quite the same thing, but there are certainly places
| where people will choose to live, without conventional fire
| department coverage. I live on an island on Canada's coast,
| where there is a fire department, funded as a local
| improvement area. It covers ~ 90% of the population, on a
| much smaller proportion of the island's area.
|
| People do live in some of these less-accessible part of the
| island, but it's outside of the department's service area.
| Fires in other areas are officially the responsibility of the
| regional fire service, like for forest fires. Our department
| might go on certain calls, especially life safety, but will
| typically keep some people and vehicles back in our own
| service area in case calls come in there as well.
|
| I think the term for people outside of the district is "self-
| insured", because nobody else will be able to assist quickly.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Even with this information included. I think the moral of the
| story is America has some very serious third-world problems.
| The reason things like this go on in America and not in any
| other developed country is that Americans just accept it.
| "They didn't pay, so they die." Here is how much they accept
| it, firefighters literally stood and watched a building burn
| down instead of playing with their toys. Not only that, the
| fire department refused to accept money to put it out.
|
| This whole "unincorporated land" execuse is a sad state of
| affairs. The whole "You're not with us, so it's not our
| problem" mindset is really why America is so low down on
| every single ranking in the world, except for military might.
| It seems like a constant battle to make sure you're doing ok
| at the expense of others. School kids getting shot? It's ok,
| I can still have my gun. Unarmed people getting shot by
| police? It's ok, they haven't shot me. Corrupt police officer
| hired a town over? It's ok, he's their problem now. People
| dying because they can't afford to visit a doctor? That's ok,
| I can.
|
| Instead of grouping together the US has decided to constantly
| separate it self among itself. Other countries have
| orginisations that deal with entire areas. The US each town
| has to have it's own. It results in a lower quality of
| service. Not every town can afford x,y,z fire equipment that
| is only going to be used once a month but an biradge that
| deals with 10 towns and would be using it two times a week
| can.
|
| The thing is, the solution to most of the US' problems aren't
| hard. They're already figured out by everyone else. We all
| just have to put up with hearing about the craziness that
| comes from the country that thinks it's great while their ass
| is on fire.
| cies wrote:
| It not a nation for people. It's a nation for big business.
| The effective two party system being the best thing for big
| biz: they can simply lobby both.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Right, that's why our elections always come down to a
| 50.001% majority, because if you let the majorities be
| bigger it's more expensive to turn them into a minority
| when they turn against you.
| drstewart wrote:
| >Here is how much they accept it, firefighters literally
| stood and watched a building burn down instead of playing
| with their toys.
|
| I assume insurance of any kind doesn't exist in the rest of
| the world, since everyone else would have long figured out
| that you just don't need to pay it and then reap the
| rewards afterwards by just claiming it then? Or would
| insurance companies in Europe just stand by with their big
| bank accounts and refuse to pay? Sad state of affairs, very
| third world of them.
| chung8123 wrote:
| The alternative is they wouldn't be allowed to live there.
| America allows people to get into situations that may
| result in harm to them if they are not careful. We do the
| same thing with healthcare and our nutrition. We still
| allow tons of processed and sugary food even though we know
| it will result in slamming our healthcare system but
| hopefully you have insurance.
| zpthree wrote:
| If you want the benefits of society you can't ignore the
| costs. Every home that is protected by fire departments
| pays taxes in the developed world, this family chose to
| live in unincorporated land. Btw - The fire was started by
| the homeowners grandson who was lighting trash on fire and
| afterwards the homeowners son assaulted the fire chief.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| If you want to have the benefits of society, you have to
| have a society. And my entire point is the US lacks that
| fundamental thing.
| pdonis wrote:
| You are egregiously misinformed about the US.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| How so?
|
| Do they have a public healthcare system? Nope. What sort
| of society doesn't look after it's own?
|
| Do they have police who have a duty to save you? Nope.
| That alone is just an absolute shit show. What sort of
| country says the police have no obligation to protect
| you? Only to show up and solve the crime once it's
| happened? What sort of society doesn't look after it's
| own?
|
| I could carry on but it's a bit pointless since those are
| two massive things. You need to remember, how fucked up
| the US is, is well documented. It's documented by your
| own media. And confirmed and defended by people like you.
|
| No kind of society doesn't look after it's own. That's
| what a society is.
| interroboink wrote:
| I don't mean to apologize for some of the awful things
| that go on in the United States, but your comment seems
| to come from the point of view of someone whose
| understanding of the country is built on popular media
| and clickbait headlines, rather than first-hand
| experience, if I may be so bold.
|
| Keep in mind that what gets reported on and popularized
| is what sells clicks/views/etc, and is not very
| representative of "normal life."
|
| It's true that services and norms vary widely across the
| different states, and in that sense perhaps there is not
| a "society" so much as "a patchwork of societies, not
| always working together." But I don't think it's quite
| the black-and-white either/or question that seems to be
| argued in this thread.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > but your comment seems to come from the point of view
| of someone whose understanding of the country is built on
| popular media and clickbait headlines, rather than first-
| hand experience, if I may be so bold.
|
| It comes from reading/listening/etc the responses of
| Americans to all the crazy shit that happens there. There
| are factual things that happen. They are talked about,
| Americans are talking about them, I listen. That is first
| hand experience of the American culture I talked about.
|
| Here is the thing. The Americans I meet, you should see
| how embarrassed they are when you start talking about the
| latest American stuff you've seen. The faces of the
| Americans I worked with when I talked about the time the
| cops shoot up a stolen UPS van in the middle of the
| highway killing everyone including the hostage and
| endangered the lives of random drivers who couldn't get
| away. Like they know that stuff happens. And at the same
| time, there are Americans I've met personally and talked
| to frequently online who would defend that. "They stole
| it, they couldn't risk the lives of the police officers",
| etc.
|
| When talking about culture problems, how Americans act is
| first hand experience.
| interroboink wrote:
| > It comes from reading/listening/etc the responses of
| Americans to all the crazy shit that happens there.
|
| Right, no disagreement from me that these things happen.
| And responses are varied, as you say.
|
| What I was trying to get across was that you get a very
| lopsided view by concentrating on "crazy shit" and
| people's responses to it.
|
| For example:
|
| I live in the US. It's snowing where I am. It makes
| things beautiful. Some birds are at the feeder, and the
| furnace just turned on. I'm thankful for the warmth. I
| have some cookies to deliver to the neighbors later on
| (they recently gave us a loaf of their bread, which was
| delicious).
|
| ----
|
| There you go, that was some real American culture (still
| second-hand for you, and admittedly not entirely
| representative). Not very interesting, but it's home.
| Multiply that by hundreds of millions of people, and yes,
| sprinkle in a handful of crazy shit too for good measure.
| Maybe that gets you a little bit closer to reality.
|
| Still plenty that needs fixing, of course. And I'm glad I
| don't live in Mississippi (:
| veb wrote:
| Here in NZ, when the Christchurch Mosque shootings
| happened, the Police just rammed the offender off the
| road and cuffed him... without firing a single shot.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mosque_shootin
| gs
|
| Wee video here:
| https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-
| shooting/11195...
|
| Honestly I think our Police do a lot of good. There's
| some bad apples, there's complaints - but that is normal.
| Overall, they tend to make good judgement calls (most of
| the time).
|
| To the defence of the US, sometimes their system does
| work: https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/11/24/us-jury-charge-
| police-off... honestly though, shooting a guy in a car
| that wasn't in immediate danger to anyone else around him
| (he rung the police originally because he was having a
| mental health crisis - in NZ you do call the cops if you
| can) so they shoot him with beanbag rounds, tase him then
| shoot him six times fatally. A bit over the top...
| Faark wrote:
| German here. We do have a public healthcare system. That
| we can opt out of and go private. The trade-off is it
| being increasingly hard to get back into the public one,
| especially as people get older and thus more "expensive".
|
| Insurances (including fire service or roadside
| assistance) has to be payed. You cannot just opt back
| into it once you need it. If parent is right and they had
| chances to opt into fire service but decided not to, you
| cannot just bill them for a single instance. Otherwise
| they're behavior would be reward, and everyone else had
| incentive to do the same.
| twblalock wrote:
| By your definition, no "society" existed in the entire
| world until the 20th century.
| lmm wrote:
| > Do they have police who have a duty to save you? Nope.
| That alone is just an absolute shit show. What sort of
| country says the police have no obligation to protect
| you? Only to show up and solve the crime once it's
| happened? What sort of society doesn't look after it's
| own?
|
| What country puts that kind of positive obligation on the
| police? I'm not aware of any that do.
| mbg721 wrote:
| The US is built on a fundamental distrust of mainstream
| authority. Our founders were religious radicals who
| thrived as long as they were exiled someplace where they
| couldn't affect anybody who mattered. Our folk heroes are
| dimwitted-but-clever rebels who defeat all the experts
| with old-fashioned know-how. The Russians sent men to
| space essentially as cargo for the mathematicians back on
| Earth to work out; we sent seat-of-your-pants pilots, and
| arguably our most memorable space mission was the one
| that got screwed up until our team improvised their way
| to victory. We proudly pay cash to lawn-mowers and
| restaurant servers we like so they can hide it from the
| taxman. So given all that, why would we ever meekly hand
| our humanity, our free will, to the bureaucrats in the
| police department or hospitals, just so that they can
| abuse it more efficiently?
| pdonis wrote:
| You don't get to declare by fiat what constitutes a
| society, or what counts as "taking care of its own". Nor
| do you get to just help yourself to the assumption that
| other countries, which claim to have things like "a
| public healthcare system" and "police who have a duty to
| save you", actually have those things.
|
| As for "well documented", if you believe what the media
| tells you about anything, let alone the US, you are in no
| position to judge anyone else.
|
| As for "confirmed and defended", since it's impossible to
| have a government that actually does the things you
| claim, of course I can "confirm" that the US doesn't. And
| of course I'll defend freedom, particularly when that
| means explaining what freedom actually means to people
| who don't understand it.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| >As for "well documented", if you believe what the media
| tells you about anything, let alone the US, you are in no
| position to judge anyone else.
|
| They show video footage... Jesus christ, you've bought
| into the Trump propaganda of fake news so much you're
| just saying believing the media is foolish. This whole
| the media is lying wasn't such a thing before Trump.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> They show video footage_
|
| Video footage can tell you that some small group of
| people did some particular things at some particular time
| and place.
|
| Video footage cannot tell you what isn't on the video.
| Which is the vast majority of what the vast majority of
| actual Americans do with their time every day. Which does
| not look at all like your media-inspired, uniformed
| caricature.
|
| _> This whole the media is lying wasn 't such a thing
| before Trump._
|
| Excuse me? The media has _always_ lied. The evidence for
| that is overwhelming for anyone who actually cares to
| look.
|
| Decades ago, we had no way of knowing about the extent of
| lies being told to us by the media (and by our
| politicians, for that matter) at the time they were told
| to us, because we had no other sources of information.
| Now we do. We can spot the lies told to us by _all_ of
| our so-called "trusted" sources, just as they can spot
| lies told to us by Trump. There are _no_ genuinely
| trustworthy sources of information. I agree that sucks,
| but it 's the fact, and trying to ignore it or sugar coat
| it just makes it worse.
| dantheman wrote:
| Society != Government
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| Not saying this is right, but many Americans disagree
| with the very concept, and want to maintain their freedom
| to opt-out of everything that goes along with "society".
| Gault's Gulch and all that. And I think it was that
| famous British voice of reason Maggie Thatcher that said
| "there's no such thing as society".
| stevesimmons wrote:
| This is so frequently misquoted. Or rather, quoted away
| from its context and taken to mean the exact opposite.
| Thatcher actually argued there should be a social safety
| net, but it can't solve every problem and it shouldn't be
| used as an excuse for not working.
|
| In full, she said [1]: I think we have
| gone through a period when too many children and people
| have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is
| the Government's job to cope with it!' or 'I have a
| problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!' 'I
| am homeless, the Government must house me!' and so they
| are casting their problems on society and who is society?
| There is no such thing! There are individual men and
| women and there are families and no government can do
| anything except through people and people look to
| themselves first. [It] is, I think, one of the
| tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which
| were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or
| ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many
| of the benefits which were meant to help people who were
| unfortunate ... [t]hat was the objective, but somehow
| there are some people who have been manipulating the
| system ... when people come and say: 'But what is the
| point of working? I can get as much on the dole!'
|
| [1] 1987 interview in "Women's Own"
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _" They didn't pay, so they die."_
|
| This didn't happen. A building burned but everybody was
| fine. Had lives been at risk, the firefighters would have
| intervened. The "moral" you are taking from this story is
| predicated on gross misinformation.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| No, the moral of this story is you taking a single part
| massively out of context. And the fire department didn't
| go out. So they wouldn't have known if someone's life was
| at risk. So stop you're nonsense.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _And the fire department didn 't go out._
|
| Again, more misinformation! They _did_ go out, and made
| sure the fire didn 't spread off the property. If anybody
| had been imperiled, the firefighters would have helped.
| FFS, it's right in that article:
|
| > _They put water out on the fence line out here. They
| never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood
| out here and watched it burn, " Cranick said._
|
| And if the firefighters were rude to these people, it's
| probably because the people who lived there were a bunch
| of anti-social shitheads and the firefighters knew it.
| But the firefighters _did_ go out anyway. Stop _your_
| nonsense.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| >Again, more misinformation!
|
| No, they went out after the neighbour phoned up because
| of a fire on their property. Anyone who has fully read
| the article will know that. So stop your nonsense.
|
| "Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight
| the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had
| paid the fee."
| jakear wrote:
| So the fire department was contacted, did not hear of any
| lives at risk, and did not show up. What an entirely
| reasonable response to getting a service request from
| someone who has not established a SLA with your company.
|
| Do you personally work at a company? If so, I demand you
| to help me fix a problem I'm having. I haven't paid you,
| but that shouldn't matter. What's that? You won't help
| me? But you helped my competitor who did establish a
| contract with you in which they paid you a monthly fee in
| exchange for a guarantee you'd help them when the needed
| it.
|
| The horror. The absolute travesty. Society has failed.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > So the fire department was contacted, did not hear of
| any lives at risk, and did not show up.
|
| The article doesn't say that does it. They say the fire
| department was contacted and responded that they weren't
| on the list. They refused to accept any payment. And only
| turned up when someone who was on the list called.
|
| We have a phrase for people like you, jog on.
| zdragnar wrote:
| > "They didn't pay, so they die."
|
| This isn't a thing in the US. Hospitals will stabilize
| anyone, regardless of ability to pay. First responders-
| police, ambulance, fire fighters- will save any life they
| are able to. Preventative health care is a different story,
| and even that is complicated.
|
| Unincorporated land holds a very tiny percentage of the
| population of the US; trying to use this as an analogy for
| the rest of society is just disingenuous.
|
| > Other countries have orginisations that deal with entire
| areas.
|
| So does the US. Even unincorporated land falls under the
| jurisdiction of whatever county it happens to be in as well
| as the state and federal governments; the only difference
| is it doesn't have a local town government... because there
| is no local town.
| cheriot wrote:
| > This isn't a thing in the US. Hospitals will stabilize
| anyone, regardless of ability to pay
|
| This is the bare minimum to avoid a PR disaster. When
| someone is dying slowing of a chronic condition
| (diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease) the US system
| will just watch them die unless they have insurance.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| It's not done for "PR". US hospitals are required to
| treat emergency cases, by law. The Emergency Medical
| Treatment and Active Labor Act[0], passed under President
| Reagan, codifies the mandate.
|
| (This is, to my mind, what caused the United States to
| end up with socialized medicine-- albeit a socialized
| medicine system where we don't get to have public
| discourse about how it works.)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treat
| ment_an...
| yamtaddle wrote:
| We don't have "socialized medicine". You can go to the ER
| without insurance and with signs & symptoms of a heart
| attack and they'll try to keep you from dying, but they
| won't give you the triple-bypass and medicine you need to
| keep it from happening again in a month--unless they
| think you'll be able to pay for it.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Without making any moral argument one way or the other:
| If people who can't pay and would otherwise die are given
| "free" treatment then we have socialized medicine. The
| costs are spread over everyone else.
|
| Uninsured and under-insured people are cited as one
| reason why treatment costs are so high. Whether these
| cases actually contribute to costs in a substantive way
| doesn't stop the mandate to provide free emergency care
| being used as a political football.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| This is hair-splitting for no reason, to the point of
| destroying communication. Nobody (because this is HN:
| yes, apparently at least one person, but you know what I
| mean by this) means ERs having to eat the cost of
| stabilizing uninsured dying/in-labor people when they say
| "socialized medicine". You can draw some parallels, but
| trying to put that, plus all the things people _actually_
| mean by the term, under the same umbrella, is a step
| toward making it meaningless.
|
| This is like a burger joint telling you they don't serve
| onion rings, and then you insisting that in fact they do,
| because they put circle-cut onions on their burgers, and
| technically those are both rings and onions. Like... OK?
| So what? Which framing: "this place serves onion rings",
| or "this place does NOT serve onion rings", is more
| likely to confuse a diner?
|
| The only times I've seen people really, seriously try to
| frame this as "socialized medicine" is when they don't
| understand how very limited the mandated scope of care
| is. It doesn't amount to much more than "you can't let
| someone simply _die_ or give birth on the curb right
| outside your ER ". The vast majority of what counts as
| medical care isn't part of it.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I fully admit to being hyperbolic.
|
| Where I live, in a rural area of a red state with a lot
| of wealth disparity, giving free medical care to anybody
| absolutely is seen as "socialized medicine". (Of course,
| there'll be a healthy dose of divisive racial and class
| politics mixed in to the argument, too.) The reasons
| behind that opinion are absolutely motivated by lack of
| understanding, but there are strong political beliefs
| there as well.
|
| I'd like to see substantive discussion about how the US
| healthcare "system" really works. This is a detail that a
| lot of people don't know about or understand. I think the
| idea that "we already don't let people who can't pay just
| die" has a good moral argument behind it.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Where I live, in a rural area of a red state with a lot
| of wealth disparity, giving free medical care to anybody
| absolutely is seen as "socialized medicine". (Of course,
| there'll be a healthy dose of divisive racial and class
| politics mixed in to the argument, too.) The reasons
| behind that opinion are absolutely motivated by lack of
| understanding, but there are strong political beliefs
| there as well.
|
| Suburb in a red state here, grew up mostly in rural red
| America, so I get what you mean. I'm sure there's also a
| lot of thinking that free ER care is a lot more expansive
| than it really is, and belief that "welfare types" (ahem,
| cough, cough, lay-finger-along-side-of-nose) regularly
| use ERs to get ordinary healthcare for free. As is
| usually the case, I expect laying out what's _actually_
| available and how the mandate _actually_ works tends to
| soften resistance to it. I 'm well aware that the Left
| does some of this too, but god I wish right-wing media
| would stop misleading Republicans about how basic things
| like social-safety-net programs and taxes work. The death
| of the Fairness Doctrine, however not-entirely-
| comfortable I may be with the thing, has been a curse on
| this country, in practice.
|
| > I'd like to see substantive discussion about how the US
| healthcare "system" really works. This is a detail that a
| lot of people don't know about or understand. I think the
| idea that "we already don't let people who can't pay just
| die" has a good moral argument behind it.
|
| Ugh, tell me about it. I especially think the enormous
| proportion of medical spending that's _already_ public
| isn 't well-understood enough. Especially since some of
| those tend to cover some of the most expensive
| demographics--the elderly, the disabled, soldiers.
| Failure to grasp how our current system already works
| leads to those infamous "keep government out of my
| medicare!" protest signs and, more importantly, failure
| to appreciate that shifting to cover _everyone_ with one
| variety or another of government-funded healthcare is
| actually a far less radical shift than some seem to
| suppose it is.
|
| Sorry if I pounced on you there, BTW. I could have been
| less confrontational with that previous post.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > Sorry if I pounced on you there, BTW. I could have been
| less confrontational with that previous post.
|
| It's good. The nerd pedant in me can't let a mention of
| EMTALA go by without hammering on it. It's a bit of
| cognitive dissonance to inflict on the "free healthcare
| market"-types who have moral qualms about letting people
| die but aren't about to give an inch on "socialism".
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| >This isn't a thing in the US. Hospitals will stabilize
| anyone, regardless of ability to pay. First responders-
| police, ambulance, fire fighters- will save any life they
| are able to. Preventative health care is a different
| story, and even that is complicated.
|
| The US has the highest preventable death rate in the
| developed world. People die because they don't get to see
| a doctor. First responders will save you. However, the
| amount of deaths because people couldn't pay is massive
| for a so-called developed country. Have diabetes and no
| insurance? That's pretty much a death sentence and
| they'll watch you die. Need surgery? No insurance? No
| surgery and death because of complications caused by the
| lack of surgery.
|
| > Unincorporated land holds a very tiny percentage of the
| population of the US; trying to use this as an analogy
| for the rest of society is just disingenuous.
|
| As used with the multiple other examples, it's an entire
| culture. Not just "Oh unincorporated land, that's just
| crazy". It's disingenuous to act like my point is hinged
| on unincorporated land.
|
| > So does the US. Even unincorporated land falls under
| the jurisdiction of whatever county it happens to be in
| as well as the state and federal governments; the only
| difference is it doesn't have a local town government...
| because there is no local town.
|
| There are state troopers who have jurisction over
| certaint things. However, there is then an array of other
| law enforcement agencies such as towns having a police
| department and sheriff departments which have
| jurisictions over certain things. They don't have a
| simple police force that deals with everything in that
| area. This results in crimes not being truly investigated
| because no one is sure whose job it is.
|
| There is no regional fire department as shown in the
| linked news article. The fire department that was paid by
| a neighbour to ensure they didn't get fire damage ignored
| a fire nearby because they weren't paid by someone else.
| The ignoring of that fire resulted in fire damage to the
| paying customer. A regional fire department would have
| dealt with that.
| Aunche wrote:
| > The US has the highest preventable death rate in the
| developed world.
|
| They also have by far the highest obesity rate in the
| developed world.
|
| > Have diabetes and no insurance? That's pretty much a
| death sentence and they'll watch you die. Need surgery?
| No insurance? No surgery and death because of
| complications caused by the lack of surgery.
|
| I'm supportive of universal healthcare, but this is a
| huge exaggeration. If policy decisions are motivated by
| uninformed memes like this, then if we ever do get
| universal healthcare, it will be a disaster.
|
| You can buy human insulin for $25 a vial at Walmart. It's
| not as good, but it's what people used a couple decades
| ago. Countries with nationalized healthcare often have
| long backlogs for treatments. The cancer backlog in the
| UK is over 2 million people and it's continuing to grow
| [1]. Also, if you are insured, you're typically going to
| get new and more sophisticated treatments on the US
| compared to most places with nationalized healthcare.
|
| [1] https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2020/06/01/over-2-m
| illion-...
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > I'm supportive of universal healthcare, but this is a
| huge exaggeration. If policy decisions are motivated by
| uninformed memes like this, then if we ever do get
| universal healthcare, it will be a disaster.
|
| No it's not. There are reports constantly of people dying
| in the US because they tried to get their insulin to last
| them multiple days and ended up dying. Not everyone has
| $25. But your post that they can just buy it for $25
| proves the point earlier of "They didn't pay, so they
| die".
| Aunche wrote:
| > "They didn't pay, so they die".
|
| The problem with these emotionally charged
| characterizations is that they can be used against you.
| Conservatives will use the rationing caused by large
| cancer backlog in the UK as evidence for "death panels."
| tshaddox wrote:
| The fact that it's possible for someone to repeat what
| you say back to you is not a strong argument. Which of
| those two countries you mentioned has better health
| outcomes?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| In the US we prefer our "death panels" to be handled by
| insurance companies, hospital administrators, and
| pharmaceutical companies. Rather than having public
| discourse about rationing of care we privatize our death
| panels and they operate in relative secrecy.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| The funny thing is they're using the UK which is
| literally going nuts over the state of the NHS. The UK is
| extremely unhappy with the backlogs. And almost certainly
| they'll be getting reduced once a new goverment is voted
| in during the next general election. The really funny
| part, I bet a lower percentage of the captia die from
| cancer in the UK than the US. Because they can get some
| sort of treatment. And of course a system that treats
| everyone is going to have longer wait times than one that
| treats only a percentage of the population. And the
| ability to pay to avoid wait times is still there. Turns
| out having public and private hospitals pays off.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| > The really funny part, I bet a lower percentage of the
| captia die from cancer in the UK than the US.
|
| The US, quite famously, generally has the highest cancer
| survival rates in the world. The standard bearers for
| cancer survival rates in Europe have traditionally been
| Switzerland and France, which are close to the same level
| as the US. A decade ago in the UK there was a public
| outcry when studies showed it had one of the poorest
| cancer survival rates in the developed world; in the
| well-known Lancet study, survival rates in the US were
| 50% higher than the UK.
|
| The UK has improved their cancer survival rates
| significantly over the last decade in response to those
| studies but it isn't near the top tier.
|
| In the US, everyone gets essentially the same cancer
| treatments, even if they are poor. The economic
| stratification occurs around enrollment in _experimental_
| cancer treatments, by virtue of needing to be located
| where experimental therapies are being tested.
| Experimental therapies are a big deal in the US because
| most state-of-the-art treatments are developed and tested
| there before being widely available. If you want to
| enroll in experimental cancer treatments outside of where
| they are being tested, you need to have the economic
| means to travel there. I personally know people on
| welfare in the US who survived Stage 4 cancer because
| they happened to live where highly effective experimental
| cancer therapies were being tested, making it readily
| available to them.
|
| The US lives a little bit in the future for state-of-the-
| art cancer treatments. I know several people that
| survived cancer in the US thanks to experimental
| therapies that are now standard therapies. It usually
| takes a while for these to propagate to other parts of
| the world.
| WarChortle wrote:
| > The US has the highest preventable death rate in the
| developed world.
|
| >> They also have by far the highest obesity rate in the
| developed world.
|
| So... I am sure that is one reason of the highest
| preventable death rate. doesn't invalidate GP point.
|
| > I'm supportive of universal healthcare, but this is a
| huge exaggeration.
|
| Sadly in a way its not an exaggeration at all, will
| doctors and nurses literally watch you die of course not.
| If you go into the ER they legally have to stabilize you.
| But that's it. If I have cancer and and really sick, If
| they take to me to the ER, they will stabilize me but
| they want start treating the cancer. Even if its still
| early, they will watch you die over time as the cancer
| advances and makes you worse.
|
| To be fair, I am certain the doctors and nurses want to
| treat you. But the hospital won't/can't allow it for
| bullshit reasons.
|
| > You can buy human insulin for $25 a vial at Walmart.
| It's not as good, but it's what people used a couple
| decades ago.
|
| I can't believe your defending poor people having to use
| worse insulin. How is that okay for you? We are talking
| about peoples lives, can the richest country on earth aim
| a little higher then throwing decades old medical
| knowledge at poor people to shut them up?
|
| > I'm supportive of universal healthcare,
|
| No you aren't, after that claim about supporting it, you
| spend the rest of your post shooting down universal
| healthcare.
|
| > Countries with nationalized healthcare often have long
| backlogs for treatments. The cancer backlog in the UK is
| over 2 million people and it's continuing to grow [1].
|
| > Also, if you are insured, you're typically going to get
| new and more sophisticated treatments on the US compared
| to most places with nationalized healthcare.
|
| The UK has its issue, but from what I can see its because
| they are purposely starving it of money so they can
| ultimately privatize it.
|
| America's health care is fucking garbage. There is no
| defending it, I'm so tired of spending my time calling
| several different companies to figure out why I am
| getting billed for something I shouldn't be. I'm not
| exaggerating either, literally one or twice a month I get
| the joy of calling my insurance and whatever doctor sent
| the bill and try and solve why my insurance won't cover
| it.
| Aunche wrote:
| > The UK has its issue, but from what I can see its
| because they are purposely starving it of money so they
| can ultimately privatize it.
|
| This isn't true. Healthcare spending has grown every year
| and has never significantly fallen relative to GDP. https
| ://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan..
| .
|
| > America's health care is fucking garbage.
|
| I agree, but it's not for a lack of spending. The US
| government actually spends more per capita on healthcare
| than the UK in total. I'm not opposed to universal
| healthcare. I'm opposed to politicians throwing money at
| a problem to buy votes, but that is the only thing that
| can result from a universal policy that results from
| healthcare at all costs rhetoric.
| dantheman wrote:
| Completely agree, maybe if the USA got rid of the FDA and
| the whole concept of prescription medicine we'd be able
| to buy cheap medicine without the all the protectionism
| that the state bolts on.
| WarChortle wrote:
| I can't tell if your being serious or just trolling.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/aids.suzann
| ego...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_Corporation_of_Ameri
| ca#...
|
| Oh boy, Wells Fargo is so shitty, most of their page is
| about their various scandals.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo#Lawsuits,_fines
| _an...
|
| While not all are directly related to healthcare or the
| FDA, I present this 3 articles as evidence that
| corporations don't give a shit about you and unless they
| are kept in check they will happily sell you a faulty or
| bad product to help their bottom line.
|
| I can produce many many more articles of various scandals
| if you want. There is plenty of them. Reducing regulation
| does nothing, but help corporations provide even worse
| health care to people.
|
| Healthcare should not nor ever be for profit. Its an
| inelastic good, the so called "free market" doesn't even
| apply to it.
| ejb999 wrote:
| >> But the hospital won't/can't allow it for bullshit
| reasons.
|
| Bullshit reasons like they don't want to go bankrupt and
| not be able to serve anyone at all?
| WarChortle wrote:
| Exactly, healthcare should be free, whatever your issue
| is, whatever your status is, you should be able to go to
| the doctor/hospital/whatever, and get treated. End of
| story.
|
| I got news for you its going to happen regardless, turns
| out trying to extract as much profit from healthcare as
| possible is a terrible idea.
|
| Hospitals closing down
|
| https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
| politics/2022/11/28/23424682/...
|
| https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2022/11/22/rural
| -ho...
|
| Or they can't afford to be staffed fully
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/us-hospitals-are-
| so-...
|
| For profit health care is a scam and the US healthcare
| system is failing rapidly. And its only getting worse.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "Hospitals will stabilize anyone, regardless of ability
| to pay."
|
| They will stabilize you and then kick you out to the curb
| quickly. And depending how they felt that day they will
| send you an outrageous bill.
| vxNsr wrote:
| This is false, a hospital cannot kick you out, you need
| to agree that you are ready to leave.
| linuxdude314 wrote:
| That's BS. I've been to the hospital plenty of times in
| USA and have never been asked if I'm ready to leave.
|
| Patients get discharged when doctors say so.
| justin66 wrote:
| > > "They didn't pay, so they die."
|
| > This isn't a thing in the US. Hospitals will stabilize
| anyone, regardless of ability to pay.
|
| It's weird that you think you've offered a retort here. A
| person who cannot afford medical treatment and
| experiences one or more of these emergency room visits
| followed by immediate discharge as soon as legally
| permissible is likely to die before their time, perhaps
| shortly after being discharged.
|
| > First responders- police, ambulance, fire fighters-
| will save any life they are able to.
|
| They do that sometimes when it suits them, but they
| certainly aren't legally obligated to.
| adolph wrote:
| > firefighters literally stood and watched a building burn
| down instead of playing with their toys
|
| Please reconsider your apparent lack of appreciation for
| the work and risks of others. Firefighting is not "playing
| with toys."
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| The question is: on one hand, any sane adult should be able
| to make whatever decision they want regarding their own
| health and property (some text in small font goes here).
|
| On the other hand no sane adult will refuse medical
| insurance: it's an outright suicidal behavior, unless you
| have a seven-digit sum in your account.
|
| So...?
| rayiner wrote:
| > I think the moral of the story is America has some very
| serious third-world problems. The reason things like this
| go on in America and not in any other developed country is
| that Americans just accept it. "They didn't pay, so they
| die." Here is how much they accept it, firefighters
| literally stood and watched a building burn down instead of
| playing with their toys. Not only that, the fire department
| refused to accept money to put it out.
|
| It's not just a question of money, but legal arrangements.
| Going into a fire isn't a game--it puts the firefighters
| and their equipment at risk. What does the firefighters'
| insurance contract look like? If one of the firefighters
| gets hurt, is their insurance going to cover it when the
| fire was outside the jurisdiction of that fire department?
| Insofar as this illustrates a "problem" it's not a "third-
| world" one, but a distinctly American one. Americans are
| the most legalistic people in the world, and reflexively
| accept the consequences of the legal state of affairs. In
| many other contexts, that's a strength, not a weakness.
|
| > This whole "unincorporated land" execuse is a sad state
| of affairs. The whole "You're not with us, so it's not our
| problem" mindset is really why America is so low down on
| every single ranking in the world, except for military
| might.
|
| Even Americans aren't so tribal as to hold grudges between
| towns and adjacent unincorporated land. The significance of
| the house being on unincorporated land is that it
| demarcates the _legal boundaries of the fire department 's
| jurisdiction._ A public body acting outside its
| jurisdiction can have all sorts of consequences.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| You didn't refute parent's main points at all, saying
| 'this is by law and contracts' just confirms his
| statements about bigger problems within society. If
| firemen let someone's house burn while the owner begs
| them for help, its something wrong on very basic moral
| level, and no matter of lawyering around is changing
| that.
|
| Parent summarized well why people like me would never
| want to spend their lives or raise kids in places like US
| although we like visiting there, not when I can see in
| (some parts) of Europe how modern society should work as
| 1 unit, taking care and helping the weak because its
| simply the right fucking moral thing to do. It is in some
| aspects Star Trekkish utopia that actually works long
| term and improves lives of everybody involved.
|
| Yes it costs money, almost nobody here has comparable US
| wages, but what are those numbers for when 1 serious
| visit to emergency can financially wipe out poorer
| families and good luck sending few kids to university,
| which are both basically no-topics here. Suddenly that
| million or two in the bank account seem more like
| necessary minimal backup rather than actually free usable
| money. And how many US families actually have those
| numbers sitting around, its rather mortgages left and
| right.
|
| The amount of constant backstage stress for endless
| stream of regular blue and also white collar joes this
| removes is significant but hard to measure in easy-to-
| present numbers. I tend to call it one very important
| part of quality of life.
| twblalock wrote:
| What's wrong on a moral level about this story is that
| the homeowners refused to pay for the fire department,
| decided to live on unincorporated land, and then expected
| the firemen to risk their lives to save property -- not
| to save lives, just to save property.
|
| We can't have a functioning society if people who opt out
| of paying for it demand to benefit from it anyway. If
| people could get away with that, nobody would pay for the
| fire department and it wouldn't exist. By caving in this
| situation, the fire department would have signaled to
| everyone else that it's ok to not pay.
|
| Maybe the tax that supports the fire department ought to
| be mandatory? Sure, that is how it works almost
| everywhere in the US. People who live in places where
| that is not the case are doing so on purpose, and they
| would vote against changing it.
|
| Want to live in the middle of nowhere and depend on the
| government for little or nothing? Go for it, but don't
| complain when you want the government's help. Want to
| live in a city with a lot of government services? You can
| do that too. At least people have a choice.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Yes, fighting fires is dangerous. Can't blame the
| firefighters for not fighting a fire that they weren't
| legally or contractually required to fight, though fire
| departments can and do often volunteer to fight fires in
| other jurisdictions, so they could have (and perhaps
| should have, but that depends on the details of the
| fire).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > The reason things like this go on in America and not in
| any other developed country is that Americans just accept
| it. "They didn't pay, so they die."
|
| The reason you think this may be because your
| preconceptions stopped you reading what was written. This
| is not what happened, and not what happens.
| mabbo wrote:
| The solution is that the government steps in and says "No,
| you _must_ ". And American culture does not like when
| government says "must".
|
| But in the rest of the world, we act like grown ups and
| accept that sometimes, it's perfectly okay.
| bombolo wrote:
| > And American culture does not like when government says
| "must".
|
| Except when it's about treating everyone like terrorists
| in airports, I presume.
| cragfar wrote:
| Why is it not acceptable for someone to lose everything
| when three different entities (probably more) say "hey
| you should do this".
| pdonis wrote:
| No, you have this backwards. Acting like a grownup means
| taking responsibility for your own actions and not
| expecting the government, or any institution, to
| magically make sure nothing bad ever happens to you.
| Paying for services like firefighting is fine; but being
| forced to pay for things because some government
| bureaucrat decrees it is not.
|
| And acting like a grownup also means letting people take
| the consequences of their decisions. According to other
| posters in this thread, the family in question repeatedly
| refused to pay a fair price for firefighting coverage,
| and the fire was started by a family member. That means
| the consequences are on them.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Acting like a grownup means that you realize that not all
| things that happen to people are their own fault and that
| you yourself can't totally avoid bad things no matter how
| careful you are. It also means to understand that some
| things can be handled much better by a shared effort
| instead of everybody on their own. That's why we have
| police, firefighters and the military.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| I think this is exactly where reasonable people disagree.
| Some (myself included) feel that acting like a grownup
| means exactly that everything that nature (not other
| people) inflicts on you is your _responsibility_. This
| includes your house catching on fire or your person
| contracting a disease.
| linuxdude314 wrote:
| No reasonable person thinks this.
|
| If you truly believe this, your perspective have been
| warped by the culture you are immersed in.
|
| It sounds like you don't find value in living in a
| society.
|
| Try living in a different culture than USA for 6 months
| to a year and I suspect your eyes will be opened.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| I'm not so sure - entire revolutions have been had about
| this, and extensive documents written, for centuries[1].
| Not everyone is a negative utilitarian.
|
| I value living a society where _cooperation_ is
| (maximally) _voluntary_. Involuntary cooperation is
| indistinguishable from a degree of slavery.
|
| 1. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp
| bombolo wrote:
| Declaration of human rights was about the right to have
| your house burn down? You always learn some new made up
| crazy thing on the internet!
| pdonis wrote:
| Police, firefighters, and military don't have to be
| provided by governments. There are plenty of historical
| examples of all three being provided by private
| institutions (indeed, the article referenced in this
| discussion talks about such institutions for firefighters
| in England over a period of several centuries).
|
| Nor does charity for those in genuine need need to be
| provided by governments. Indeed, charity throughout human
| history has worked best when it is provided by private
| institutions made up of people who genuinely want to help
| others, of which there are plenty in the US as there are
| everywhere, not by government departments staffed by
| bureaucrats.
| JetAlone wrote:
| autoexec wrote:
| Adults know the difference between creating sensible
| regulation at the level of government and expecting some
| authority to "magically make sure nothing bad ever
| happens to you". They also know that planning ahead to
| make sure that their government can provide important
| services for everyone doesn't prevent anyone from
| "letting people take the consequences of their
| decisions".
|
| There's a very childish culture in America where people
| react to the idea of cooperation by stomping their feet
| and crying "You're not the boss of me! You can't tell me
| what to do!". It makes it very hard to work together to
| improve things.
|
| It's also a very selfish culture where people aren't just
| indifferent to the terrible things that happen to other
| people, they convince themselves that those people
| _deserved_ terrible things to happen to them. It 's as if
| they think that everyone looking out only for themselves
| will cause only the "best" people to succeed and
| therefore everyone else can and should be ignored. It is
| childishness and it really hurts us as a nation.
| pitaj wrote:
| Coercion is not cooperation.
| pdonis wrote:
| Adults know that making sensible collective agreements
| where necessary is not the same thing as government.
| Governments never limit themselves to that. Certainly the
| US government doesn't--even though that's exactly what
| it's supposed to do under the Constitution.
|
| Also, allowing people to suffer bad consequences from
| their own choices does not mean being indifferent. It
| just means refusing to adopt a "cure" that is worse than
| the disease.
|
| Adults also know that collective agreements to provide
| the means to help those who are in trouble through no
| fault of their own are called "charity", and are best
| done by private institutions made up of people who
| genuinely want to help others (and there are plenty of
| those in the US just as there are everywhere), not
| government departments staffed by bureaucrats.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Adults also know that collective agreements to provide
| the means to help those who are in trouble through no
| fault of their own are called "charity", and are best
| done by private institutions
|
| While your other arguments are subjective, this one is
| just plain factually wrong. It will always be far less
| efficient to depend on a few individuals to shoulder
| large expenses or for disparate organizations (each with
| their own overhead expenses) to find and collect smaller
| contributions than it is for everyone to pay just a small
| amount automatically to collectively cover an expense
| through a single origination.
|
| In addition to the massive inefficiencies of charity, and
| the fact that many charities are really little more than
| scams, there are still several other problems with them.
| See for example:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/charity/against_1.shtml
|
| https://harvardpolitics.com/charity-band-aid/
|
| Some of these problems are even seen by some people as
| benefits. For example, federal or state aid to victims of
| a natural disaster would go to help everyone impacted,
| but a charity to help them can allow someone to only
| support certain people while discriminating against
| others. Some people actually find it extremely preferable
| to restrict all their charitable giving to only people
| with a certain religion, or skin color, or political
| opinion, but the freedom that gives a person to leave
| "the wrong kind of people" to suffer is still a massive
| problem when your goal is to help everyone impacted.
|
| Charity is great, when it's not a total scam, and it's
| equitable, and the origination is lucky enough to find
| enough people willing to take the time to research them
| and give them enough donations to accomplish what needs
| to be done, but it's still no substitute for government
| programs.
|
| Government programs can have their problems too
| certainly. They can be run poorly, they can not do enough
| to help people, and the help they provide can be less
| than equitable, but you're entitled to a much higher
| level of control and transparency over government
| programs and you always have the ability to vote for
| improvements and hold the government accountable when
| they fail to deliver.
| pdonis wrote:
| >* It will always be far less efficient to depend on a
| few individuals to shoulder large expenses or for
| disparate organizations (each with their own overhead
| expenses) to find and collect smaller contributions than
| it is for everyone to pay just a small amount and
| collectively cover an expense through a single
| origination.*
|
| On the assumption that the single organization will
| actually do the job, perhaps. But it won't. Ask anyone
| who has actual experience with such government
| organizations, as, for example, my wife and I have (she
| far more than me--she was a social worker for 20 years).
| They don't actually help the people they're supposed to
| help.
|
| So your claim is factually wrong, not mine. I did not
| claim that private charities are perfect. I only claimed
| that charity is best done by private institutions, i.e.,
| that on net they do better than government programs.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Even if we take your points at face value, which other
| comments clearly don't, you seem to be coming from a rather
| ethnocentric perspective. It seems that you value "solving
| problems" above other things, I'd hazard that your personal
| philosophy can be categorized as negative utilitarianism.
| This isn't a universally shared perspective. There are many
| other worldviews that prioritize other things besides
| reducing suffering. In the case of the US, it seems to me
| that Americans value individual liberty over ameliorating
| suffering. These values do in fact come into conflict
| often, and there's no one "right" answer.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >This whole "unincorporated land" execuse is a sad state of
| affairs. The whole "You're not with us, so it's not our
| problem" mindset is really why America is so low down on
| every single ranking in the world, except for military
| might.
|
| I'm really curious where you're from.
|
| On the specific point of unincorporated land, I think
| you're _vastly_ underestimating how physically _large_ the
| US is.
|
| For example, Rovaniemi seems pretty isolated from the rest
| of Europe, right?
|
| It's level of isolation (both in terms of distance to the
| next large city and hospitability of the land in between)
| is similar to Las Vegas. Salt Lake City isn't too far off
| either. America is _huge._
|
| The US just has _too much empty land_ to offer urban-level
| fire services to everyone who chooses to live in the
| country side. It 's logistically not possible. So instead
| if you _choose_ to live in the wilderness, you can _also
| choose_ to pay for protection, but if you don 't, then I'm
| not sure exactly what your expectations are.
|
| In terms of 'whataboutism' - Europe (assuming that's where
| you are) sure loves shedding the responsibility for the
| chaos they caused in the colonies, while living in
| buildings paid for by/made out of materials physically
| stolen from those colonies.
| rayiner wrote:
| > It's level of isolation (both in terms of distance to
| the next large city and hospitability of the land in
| between) is similar to Las Vegas. Salt Lake City isn't
| too far off either. America is huge.
|
| Right. The issue isn't so much that "America lets people
| die because they don't pay." It's that "America gives
| people the freedom to live in the middle of fucking
| nowhere, including where a state or local government
| can't reasonably commit to offering reliable emergency
| services."
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Except, in the link scenario. Stop trying to twist it.
| Every other country has communities that live so far from
| anyone that they're in trouble if they have a heart
| attack. But you know what? They still have something.
| House burning down? The local volunteer fire fighters
| will help you out. Not, we'll come out and put out your
| neighbours fire and stop and the fence line. And ignore
| you and refuse any offer of money to help you.
|
| The issue is the US can't get it's shit together. And
| they can't get their shit together because Americans
| accept it. They just think "That's they're problem".
| bloppe wrote:
| The US operates on a fundamentally different scale from
| most other countries. It's so big and diverse (in terms
| of both people and biomes) that the only effective way to
| organize is heavily federated. Fire laws in California
| are very different from in Tennessee. There are a few
| ways to accurately paint Americans in broad strokes, but
| not many.
|
| I'd encourage you to travel around America a bit.
| Foreigners are often shocked by how nice and helpful
| people are here. Americans are by far the most
| financially charitable people in the world [1] but can be
| famously neighborly in many more ways than that.
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by
| _charita...
| lmm wrote:
| America has the largest amount of recorded donations to
| their rather stretched legal definition of a "charity".
| This says a lot more about the American tax code than it
| does about American generosity. I'd encourage you to
| travel around the world a bit.
| [deleted]
| RC_ITR wrote:
| The linked scenario was controversial _because_ this one
| small town of 2,500 chose to not help (vs. the standard
| practice of other towns that do help). _Then_ the
| national outcry from _the rest of America_ caused them to
| change it.
|
| Wherever you're from, I'd love to use a town of 2,500's
| actions to define the morality of your country...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Fulton,_Tennessee#%22
| Pay...
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| >On the specific point of unincorporated land, I think
| you're vastly underestimating how physically large the US
| is.
|
| So is Russia, they don't have these problems. The US is
| vast so we can't have basic stuff.
|
| And most of the US population is next to each other with
| large areas of nothing.
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>So is Russia, they don't have these problems.
|
| Really, Russia doesn't have any similar problems? You
| want to rethink that by any chance? because now you are
| making yourself sound quite ignorant.
| Animatronio wrote:
| "America is HUUUGE" comes up everytime someone says
| anything at all. Too many guns? America is huge. Urban
| sprawl? America is huge. No trains? America is huge. The
| US is #4 in terms of total area, behind russia, canada
| and china, and closely followed by brazil and australia.
| If the others manage at least some of this stuff, one
| would imagine that the US can do it at least as well.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Do you have any familiarity with those countries and
| where people live?
|
| Do you _really_ think that metrics on quality of life in
| Krasnoyarsk Krai or Northwest Territories are drastically
| better than Wyoming?
|
| I wont even get started on what life is like in Xinjiang.
|
| EDIT: Also, you're saying that Australia, Canada, Russia
| and Brazil have good train infrastructure? And getting
| even more pedantic, you're a fan of the trains west of
| Chengdu?
| lmm wrote:
| The trains in Xinjiang compare very favourably with those
| in the US. The media paints a very one-sided picture of
| what life is like there; not to defend the CCP's awful
| actions, but if the way certain communities in St Louis
| get treated were reported the same way...
| Yizahi wrote:
| The joys of libertarianism.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| A libertarian scheme would look like what neighboring
| counties in Tennessee do, which is to charge you an hourly
| rate per truck if you didn't pay the subscription fee up
| front. This is a case where clearly no one thought about how
| to handle the free rider problem beforehand. I believe
| they've changed the policy since.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| No, the competing insurance companies as described in the
| video is a libertarian scheme. Counties in Tennessee are a
| state run operation and their refusal to fight fires is a
| function of jurisdictional borders, which does not exactly
| match libertarian values.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I'm commenting on the parent which was responding to the
| anecdote about Tennessee, and not the article. The fire
| fighters in question in rural Tennessee are volunteers
| and NOT run by the state. That's why they came up with
| the subscription services. Some of the counties and towns
| do contract with fire departments, but not all of them
| and not the one in question.
|
| I'm not actually sure what you're trying to say here.
| afterburner wrote:
| If this is the same story I read a long time ago, one of the
| reasons the firefighters didn't intervene is because their
| health insurance wouldn't cover any injuries, due to the house
| not being part of their unit's responsibilities.
|
| Universal health care might have changed the firefighters'
| minds. On the other hand, perhaps other liabilities would not
| have been covered too, so maybe not.
| dantheman wrote:
| I think it was a fundamental lapse of judgement and
| incompetence on the firefighters side. They should have had a
| plan for uninsured fires nearby, and been able to execute it.
| What is the marginal cost of putting out a fire for the
| uninsured, I'm sure its quite low - equipment is paid for,
| staff is payed for, etc. So they should be able to make a
| substantial profit by charging $20k for putting it out, or
| whatever amount they deem necessary.
|
| Just because this was an emergency doesn't mean it wasn't
| unexpected. We would want firefighters to go the next town
| over if there was a fire there, so it seems like their
| insurance policy was improperly under specified.
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>They should have had a plan for uninsured fires nearby,
| and been able to execute it.
|
| They did have a plan, and they did execute on it - exactly
| as they advertised.
|
| ...and if they decided to risk it, and put out the fire
| anyway - and tied up all their pumps hoses ladders and
| trucks, and then another call comes in a few miles away -
| from someone that _did_ pay for coverage - how much
| liability would they have for tying up all of their
| equipment at a fire they are not supposed to be fighting,
| and thus unable to respond to the fires they are supposed
| to be responding to?
|
| People in this country should be free to make stupid
| decisions - and free to suffer the consequences of those
| stupid decisions.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| No solution to the free-rider problem ever makes everyone
| happy.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| Interestingly, the low density of a rural area probably
| changes the calculus on "let it burn or eat the loss as a
| prevention measure" as opposed to places where uninsured
| buildings might be physically touching insured ones.
| [deleted]
| constantcrying wrote:
| > And here we are in modern times where we do, indeed, let
| buildings burn.
|
| The linked article aside, letting buildings burn down is in
| fact standard procedure for fire fighters. A sufficiently dense
| fire is extremely hard to stop as long as it can fuel itself
| and a controlled burn down is often the only reasonable way to
| end a fire. It's not like anything would be recoverable in any
| case.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| I would hope, at least, that firefighters would always
| prioritize saving lives over saving property.
| leetrout wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| Defensive operations on an active fire ground are standard
| operating procedures; no argument.
|
| But most departments do not operate the way this department
| in Tennessee does where they did not run the call when it was
| received because the caller was not on their participant
| list.
|
| They would have likely encountered a brush fire or, at most,
| a room and contents fire from the structures closest exposure
| based on the story and they would not have let it just freely
| burn.
| constantcrying wrote:
| I am absolutely not defending whatever happened in that
| article. Truly a bizarre situation.
|
| Where I live firefighters certain actions will require a
| fee (obviously not paid to the firefighters), like pumping
| out a cellar or felling a tree on private land which is not
| threatening any property, but actually not fighting a fire
| when it would be easily possible would be unthinkable.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Other situations exist in which firefighters don't kill
| themselves (quite literally) over it. Take fast food joints.
| First, they're notorious for not cleaning their grease traps, but
| second, many are self-insured. More interestingly, the fast-food
| companies tend to scrap a building that has had a fire, have it
| scraped down to the concrete pad, and build again. Source: was
| just talking with a fire chief about this.
| alexandargyurov wrote:
| Video: I was wrong (and so was everyone)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wif1EAgEQKI
| modernerd wrote:
| "The Guild of Firefighters had been outlawed by the Patrician the
| previous year after many complaints. The point was that, if you
| bought a contract from the Guild, your house would be protected
| against fire.
|
| Unfortunately, the general Ankh-Morpork ethos quickly came to the
| fore and fire fighters would tend to go to prospective clients'
| houses in groups, making loud comments like 'Very inflammable
| looking place, this' and 'Probably go up like a firework with
| just one carelessly-dropped match, know what I mean?'"
|
| -- Terry Pratchett: Guards! Guards!
| nnadams wrote:
| A great example of the confusing reality that the words
| "inflammable" and "flammable" mean the exact same thing.
| masklinn wrote:
| This is likely more directly inspired by Marcus Licinius
| Crassus:
|
| > The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus.
| Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus took
| advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by
| creating his own brigade--500 men strong--which rushed to
| burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at
| the scene, however, the firefighters did nothing while Crassus
| offered to buy the burning building from the distressed
| property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to
| sell the property, his men would put out the fire; if the owner
| refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the
| ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them,
| and often leased the properties to their original owners or new
| tenants.
| db48x wrote:
| Twoflower the tourist telling people about in-sewer-ants was
| also pretty funny.
| legitster wrote:
| This reminds me of when I learned there was no such thing as "The
| Children's Crusade".
|
| As my history professor put it, "going to the Holy Land was an
| incredibly expensive endeavour reserved for a very few. There's
| no way anyone was going to waste it on young, inexperienced
| children".
|
| Nearly every source we had saying that the crusade involved
| children came much later, after a few writers referred to the
| same source with a mistranslation (think reading "me and the
| boys" as referring to actual children).
|
| But people spent 500 years discussing the horrors of the
| children's crusade without ever really questioning if it
| happened.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Wouldn't children be useful in terms of doing a bunch of tasks
| that aren't worth the time of your soldiers? Ie what was the
| age of the squires for the soldiers?
| PeterisP wrote:
| A squire would generally be between the ages of 14 to 21. A
| pre-teen boy wouldn't be useful for the core duties of a
| squire because of a lack of strength for the physical labor
| involved in handling arms, armor and horses.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Prior to the modern era, the Royal Navy and others had boys
| sometimes 12 or younger on ships as servants, sometimes
| (those boys with higher ranks) being trained to be
| officers. The age for this sort of thing was gradually
| raised with time, but even during WW2 there were still
| minors serving on combat vessels. 134 boy seamen died when
| the HMS Royal Oak was sunk in 1939.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Yeah. I'm not sure where this certainty is coming from
| considering how youngsters couldn't be part of the
| crusades considering they've historically always been
| involved in conflict:
|
| > In 1814, for example, Napoleon conscripted many
| teenagers for his armies.[28] Thousands of children
| participated on all sides of the First World War and the
| Second World War.[29][30][31][32] Children continued to
| be used throughout the 20th and early 21st century on
| every continent, with concentrations in parts of Africa,
| Latin America, and the Middle East.[33] Only since the
| turn of the millennium have international efforts begun
| to limit and reduce the military use of children.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_in_the_military
|
| I can see how it would be controversial because an
| argument could be made that children only are useful when
| you have some kind of artillery that doesn't require the
| strength needed for a bow / crossbow. Still, I wouldn't
| discount anything, especially on the purely modern
| subjective view of "it wouldn't make financial sense".
| Lots of human endeavors and actions don't make financial
| sense. It's not the only axis upon which humans behave.
|
| I suspect of the controversy probably arises from the age
| "child" denotes. Is it a prepubescent human (lets say 10
| and under) or a teenager (let's say 13 and over).
| cafard wrote:
| As far as I know, the draft in the US has always had a
| minimum age of 18, and one could volunteer at 17, but
| only with a parent's consent. Most young men grow
| considerably between 13 and 17.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Why is that relevant? There are also child soldiers even
| younger than 13, today. Just not in the US. Additionally,
| before the 21c US surveillance state, it was very easy to
| lie about your age in a way that would take a long time
| to verify. An enormous number of underage boys lied their
| way into WWII. If you were born at home, you may not have
| even had a birth certificate.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Yeah, I think the above comment is also underselling the
| strength of pre-teen children, or greatly overestimating
| the weight of arms, armor, and the strength needed to do
| things with horses. Children have worked on farms around
| horses ever since horses were domesticated. A sword or
| breastplate only weighs a few pounds, a knight could
| easily employ a pre-teen child to polish his armor, oil
| his sword, wax his boots, make his breakfast, or any
| number of other chores a knight doesn't want to bother
| with personally.
| greedo wrote:
| Swords and breastplate weigh far more than a "few
| pounds." Breastplate is close to 20lbs, a two-handed
| sword up to 10lbs. And that's just a small amount of the
| armor a knight would have (ignoring the fact that most
| warriors of the era wore chainmail, not plate).
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Multiple children could work together to carry the armor.
| Pack animals would be responsible for carrying over
| longer distances.
| legitster wrote:
| Sure, but to that extent the "children" that would have been
| sent would have been considered normal working age.
|
| Funnily enough, the word "infantry" comes from the same word
| as "infant". IE, the young guys on the battle field.
| qwytw wrote:
| > As my history professor put it, "going to the Holy Land was
| an incredibly expensive endeavour reserved for a very few.
| There's no way anyone was going to waste it on young,
| inexperienced children".
|
| While a Crusade made up primarily of children is not realistic.
| The 'People's Crusade' was a thing. During the first Crusade 40
| thousand or so poor peasants and various religious fanatics
| including many women and children departed Northern France a
| couple of months before the 'proper' army left.
|
| It wasn't pretty. Along the way they murdered thousands of
| Jews, sacked or attempted to sack multiple cities and most of
| those who survived the journey were eventually massacred by the
| Turks (according to some that's one of the reasons why the
| Turks were so ill prepared when the actual Crusader army
| arrived, they expected that all westerners were poorly armed,
| disorganized and had no understanding or proper warfare... )
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| That's pretty close to what we think of as the Children's
| Crusade. It was peasants with little weapons or training
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| IIRC, the Children's Crusade never made it to the Holy Land.
| Instead they ended up a port in Europe where some "friendly"
| people offered to take them to the Holy Land on their ships for
| free. Turns out they were slavers and the children were taken
| to Northern Africa and sold as slaves.
|
| This story sounds actually plausible as it may not be that far
| from where the children started to a port city.
| shagmin wrote:
| That's basically how I remember learning it.
|
| The Wikipedia article mentions that also, but only after one
| of the children who apparently had visions from God and said
| the Mediterranean Sea would part into two and leave a path
| (sort of like the Red Sea for Moses) for them to march
| directly to the Holy Land...when that failed they settled on
| hitching a ride on ships from people who turned out to be
| slavers.
| relaxing wrote:
| Wikipedia is right there:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Crusade
|
| It's pretty big jump from "it never happened" to "some things
| happened, just not the way the stories told us."
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| ? The whole of medieval europe swarms with stories of surplus
| children send to fend for themselves as servants and workers
| abroad. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwabenkinder
|
| Whole areas exported there population as soldiers, mercenaries
| and mining people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Guard
| Most of them were like the taliban in afghanistan, interlocked
| in eternal holy wars.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
|
| Well obviously the taliban aint real either. A mountainous
| area, in eternal intertribal warfare.. not actually accepting
| the nation state.. ridiculous thought.
|
| The english soldiers fighting in the independence war against
| the americans, were partially germans, sold by in debted
| aristoctrats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junker_(Prussia)
|
| This was the reality on the ground, even up until the 2nd
| worldwar. The only escape for the peasants and althose 2nd,3rd
| sons who were bound to the land, was to go on pilgrimages.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrimage or to flee to the "new
| world" were the nicer frontier awaited them.
|
| I find the idea of a children crusadd very plausible. The
| crusader knights surely promised the conquered lands to
| peasants who would follow them. And pre-pestilence europe was
| certainly crowded.
|
| Idealism is nice. Success self hypnosis is nice. But not
| believing in the brutality of bygone reality, while some parts
| of it are still around you, is foolish, and spreading that
| foolishness, is preparing for it to repeat itself. Work hard
| and meaningful, if not for yourselves, then to prevent the
| return of the olden times.
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| wow. almost all of your sources (except the last one, which
| is quite broad) misses the timeframe of "medival europe".
| Eleison23 wrote:
| I wrote a research paper in college on the Children's Crusade,
| and the question I posed to be answered was "how many children
| participated in it?"
|
| It turns out that it was a real phenomenon, and many children
| did leave home, but being children, practically none of them
| made it to the Holy Land. The journey for many was much, much
| shorter. And likewise, for many it was merely a spiritual
| crusade and they went nowhere but "TO GOD!" as they were heard
| to shout.
|
| There were eyewitnesses and contemporary accounts, and I
| compiled an impressive list of sources to document what could
| be gleaned from those accounts from a modern perspective.
| ljf wrote:
| Sounds like a fascinating paper - would like to read that, or
| at least more of the sources.
| monkmartinez wrote:
| How times change!!!
|
| We are the defacto fire and medical insurance providers in
| metropolitan areas that employ/staff fire and EMS departments.
| Funded by property or sales tax, we have become the primary care
| providers for thousands of people in our cities.
|
| We also get called for water leaks, hazardous spills, vehicle
| accidents, construction mishaps, swift water rescues, hiker
| rescues, venomous snake removal, bee attacks and dangerous hive
| removal, roof collapses, natural gas leaks, stubbed toes,
| fentanyl abuse, mental health emergencies, gun fights, knife
| fights, cooking fires, refrigerant leaks, trench collapse, people
| and things stuck in very high places, flash floods, electrical
| problems and much much more...
| RunSet wrote:
| I once heard some Lenny Bruce standup that gave me the impression
| that firemen were generally considered opportunistic thieves at
| the time of the material's delivery, independent of its
| punchline.
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| "Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome." --Charlie
| Munger
| bluedino wrote:
| We have a ~$200 fee for trash pickup in our municipality. You get
| the bill every year.
|
| If you don't pay it, a 10% penalty is added. The next step, a
| lien is placed on the property.
|
| They never stop picking up the trash, though. The next purchaser
| of your property has to pay the existing trash bill!
|
| This same council raised water rates so they could reduce the
| penalties for late water bill payments.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Why is trash pickup not bundled with property taxes? It's seems
| ridiculous to charge for it separately when every occupied home
| will generate a similar amount of trash.
| bluGill wrote:
| Why should it be part of taxes at all? I've lived in places
| with city trash pickup, and places where you choose your own
| private company to get your trash (in the later some cheap
| people just drove their trash to the dump every couple
| months). The costs were about the same in the best case so
| long as the private people shopped around, and in the worst
| cases the city didn't shop around and so costs were a lot
| more.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Because with the information I was given above:
|
| - every household gets trash collection service, no matter
| what
|
| - every household must pay a flat fee for trash collection
| service, no matter what
|
| Why charge it as a separate fee?
| pkaye wrote:
| Smaller households can generate less trash. In our area
| you can pick between 3 sizes of trash/recycling/green
| bins. The trash bin size determines the service cost but
| there is no additional cost for the recycling and green
| bins.
| bombcar wrote:
| Probably because you can get them to stop picking up and
| charging if you show some process of your own. Sewage is
| sometimes bundled with property tax, sometimes with the
| water bill - another example.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| You don't want your neighbor to not have trash pickup if
| they live within smelling distance. You want their trashed
| to be picked up. If you live in an area where that can
| easily become a problem, it becomes important to make it
| regular and "included".
|
| If you have more space/land in between, it doesn't matter
| nearly as much.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Sometimes there's other restrictions.
|
| For example,
|
| - In some states there's a cap on property tax increases. So
| the moving to a fee-model takes it off the tax levy by making
| it a user fee.
|
| - Bundling trash services with the tax levy is inequitable in
| that commercial properties are subsidizing services they do
| not use. A 20 unit apartment building usually has to use a
| private hauler, for example.
|
| - Some places try to setup consumption based models, where
| you pay per occupancy unit or even by the bag.
| [deleted]
| cratermoon wrote:
| An interesting analysis of the outcomes of free market forces at
| work.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This seems like an interesting short survey of London
| firefighting history, but I'm missing the debunking people are
| remarking about. The only thing that slightly resembles debunking
| is that in the conclusion the idea that fire brigades ever let
| houses burn is referred to in passing as a "legend."
|
| In regard to the _legend_ - I don 't think that anyone ever said
| that fire brigades would refuse to put out uninsured buildings
| where the fire might spread to other buildings, that fire
| brigades couldn't be induced by cash to put out the fires of the
| uninsured, or that cities never offered baseline inducements for
| fire brigades to put out fires whether the buildings were insured
| or not. That would be adding content to the _" legend"_ in order
| to debunk it. Looking at the record and finding out that all of
| these things happened is expected and unremarkable.
|
| The fires that we would _expect_ not to be put out if the _"
| legend"_ were accurate would be fires that happened to uninsured
| buildings that didn't endanger nearby structures, buildings owned
| by people who didn't have enough cash or credit to convince an
| uncontracted fire brigade to act, that were close enough to the
| city to be accessible to a fire brigade yet far enough away that
| the city didn't feel responsible for them. Additionally, the
| chance that a building owner might simply pay (under flaming
| duress) a brigade that showed up would mean that they probably
| generally _would show up,_ and if they weren 't ever willing to
| watch a building burn, they'd be undercutting their own last
| minute deals.
|
| These are the exactly the fires that we would expect not to be in
| the record. Fires in detached structures, owned by people with no
| money.
|
| It seems that the city started rewarding brigades for putting out
| fires in uninsured households based on the order in which they
| arrived. Additionally, they were consolidating/federating in
| order to take on larger contracts - which incidentally meant
| [original scholarship] that the consolidated/federated brigades
| would always get the first arrival bonus through this collusion.
| As the number of independent brigades dwindled and the
| _socialist_ city reward money became large enough that the actual
| insurance element receded to only being profitable for large
| contracts rather than individual homes, the consolidated block of
| fire brigades organized their own nationalization.
| hristov wrote:
| Sorry but I do not believe this. The paper rings a lot of alarm
| bells. It provides very little evidence for the actual thesis it
| is trying to prove and provides ample evidence that seem related
| to the thesis it is trying to prove but in fact it does nothing
| to prove it. Thus, the paper provides plenty of evidence that
| insurance companies helped each other to fight fires at sites
| insured by their fellow insurance companies, and then
| subsequently reimbursed each other for these efforts, but that of
| course has no bearing on what the paper is trying to prove.
|
| Usually commonly held widely believed oral histories emerge for a
| good reason. So if it was commonly believed that insurance
| companies let un-insured buildings burn, then it is likely to be
| true at least part of the time.
|
| Also, lets look at the source -- he is an "archive and heritage
| consultant", i.e. someone that solicits money for his research.
| Is he getting paid for this article? Is he writing this in the
| hopes that he will advertise his services for insurance
| companies?
| stickfigure wrote:
| There's a significant percentage of people (even here on HN)
| that believes "Facebook sold personal information to Cambridge
| Analytica and they used this information to win the election
| for Trump".
|
| My prior is that people repeat good stories somewhat
| independently of their truth value. Older stories that are hard
| to verify are more suspect. I think we should default to
| skepticism.
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| I'll bite -- so what _did_ happen with Cambridge Analytica?
|
| As far as I can tell[1], the only thing wrong with what you
| said is "Facebook sold...", where in reality, the data was
| surreptitiously gathered. Or are you referring to something
| else?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_
| Ana...
| stickfigure wrote:
| * Cambridge Analytica created an insipid quiz and got many
| people to install it.
|
| * The quiz used public Facebook APIs to gather data; users
| accepted a "share this data with the app" permission
| request.
|
| * Cambridge Analytica conned Republicans into paying them
| for services using this "superweapon".
|
| * There's no evidence (other than self-serving press
| releases from Cambridge Analytica) that this had any
| material effect on the election.
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| So maybe a fair re-phrasing would be: "Facebook provided
| personal information to Cambridge Analytica and they used
| this information to assist the Trump campaign"
|
| With the understanding that (1) the data was taken
| without the permission of all people impacted (i.e. if
| your _friend_ installed the app and gave their
| permission, then _you_ could be affected), and (2) it 's
| debatable how effective the data actually was for the
| campaign.
|
| I think the "public Facebook APIs" descriptor is a little
| off -- Facebook viewed it as a data breach and apologized
| (and got sued, and fined, etc). So it was pretty shady,
| not just simple above-board access.
| SamBorick wrote:
| The article specifically says:
|
| Originally writing in 1692-3, Daniel Defoe noted that the
| firemen were "very active and diligent" in helping to put out
| fires, "whether in houses insured or not insured".[33]
| Insurance companies' instructions to their firemen were clear -
| they were to attend and help extinguish "all" fires. [34], [35]
|
| What specific issue with this do you have? Do you disagree with
| the content of "Of Assurances", in An Essay upon Projects? Or
| the Union Fire Office Board Minutes?
|
| Or did you just not read the article?
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| I can't speak for the person you replied to, but I don't
| think the quote you provided really invalidates the point.
|
| Maybe you two are talking past each other. One way to phrase
| the core question is: "did fire companies let competitors'
| buildings burn, regularly, as standard practice?" And I think
| the evidence in the article pretty strongly indicates "No." I
| think that's what you're referring to.
|
| Another way to phrase the core question is: "Did it ever
| happen, at various points in history, that fire companies let
| competitors' buildings burn?" And I think the article
| indicates that it very well may have. And the possibility was
| absolutely used as a threat, even if it never actually came
| to pass.
|
| I feel like even a handful of such incidents would have been
| so terrible as to get etched into social memory and passed
| on, and I think that's the sort of thing the person you are
| replying to was referring to.
|
| So... I think you're both right (:
| lolinder wrote:
| > Usually commonly held widely believed oral histories emerge
| for a good reason. So if it was commonly believed that
| insurance companies let un-insured buildings burn, then it is
| likely to be true at least part of the time.
|
| Yes, oral histories emerge for a reason, but that reason
| doesn't have to be "because it was literally true". There are
| countless oral traditions that are complete nonsense! Urban
| legends existed 200 and 2000 years ago just as much as they do
| today, and no historian would ever claim that you should take
| _every_ oral history at face value.
|
| > Also, lets look at the source -- he is an "archive and
| heritage consultant", i.e. someone that solicits money for his
| research. Is he getting paid for this article? Is he writing
| this in the hopes that he will advertise his services for
| insurance companies?
|
| He was paid by a prominent YouTuber to find out whether a video
| said YouTuber made several years ago was incorrect[0]. That
| doesn't scream "conflict of interest" to me.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wif1EAgEQKI
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I think it's an article where you need some context.
|
| A relative is a retired fire chief of a city department and
| overall fire buff. He's spent 15 years engrossed in this stuff
| for various cities in the US - the answers vary! Usually in the
| 19th century there were different types of fire service. A fire
| brigade or volunteer company focused on protecting the city or
| subscribers, and protective companies who salvaged buildings or
| contents of buildings. Sometimes they worked differently in
| different places, and you need to understand the context of
| precisely when and where you are talking about.
|
| Keep in the mind the nature of 18th and 19th century buildings
| - often row houses, often with shared attics, etc. Protecting
| property, then and now might mean sacrificing some buildings to
| protect others. Consider the destruction of San Francisco...
| when the leaders of the city fire department were all killed,
| and underground water cisterns damaged by the earthquake, a
| madman Army officer blew up half the city to "save" it.
|
| The property insurance folks had a first priority to save the
| contents of a house - they may be dragging the piano and hutch
| out of a house while the house 3 doors down burned. Or they may
| have helped. From the perspective of contemporary eyewitnesses,
| what they report and write down may vary.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| He was paid for the paper by Tom Scott, the video essayist.
| There's an accompanying video at https://youtu.be/Wif1EAgEQKI
| psychphysic wrote:
| I'll need to update my local yours for when people visit me in
| London.
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| I feel like people might read this (or just the headline) and
| take away a message like "aha, so for-profit fire companies
| actually worked just fine!"
|
| As far as I know, there are still plenty of examples of that
| model failing hideously in various ways (eg: [1][2], and many
| examples of unproductive competition from TFA itself). This
| article is specifically about firefighting in London, in a
| certain time period -- notably starting _after_ the Great Fire,
| when presumably those dangers were fresh in people 's minds.
|
| And also, to its credit, I think the article leaves the question
| pretty muddy and un-answered. [1] https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus#Rise_to_power_and_wealth
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Tweed#Early_career
| bee_rider wrote:
| It also ends with the fire brigades basically asking the city
| to take over because they couldn't solve the free-rider
| problem, so anyone who thinks of it as an example of the free
| market system working clearly didn't read far enough.
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