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[Toady One]

(edited out a remark, please refrain from insulting people)

[Egan_BW]

Firefighters should be paid, but shouldn't a firefighter help put out a fire even if they can't be paid for it?

[Maximum Spin]

but shouldn't a firefighter help put out a fire even if they can't be paid for it?

It would be a kind thing to do, but "should" is a stretch. It's obviously supererogatory.

[smjjames]

Firefighters should be paid, but shouldn't a firefighter help put out a fire even if they can't be paid for it?

That would be my view as well, that they should put out a fire regardless of whether the owner paid or not.

[Maximum Spin]

That would be my view as well, that they should put out a fire regardless of whether the owner paid or not.

I don't understand why this obligation would apply to people who are paid to put out fires more than to, for example, you. Shouldn't this mean that everyone who can is obligated to become a volunteer firefighter?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

If my neighbor's house caught on fire I'd at least pull my damn hose out. We don't need infinite firefighters, we need firefighters who engage in an ethic of public service instead of unbridled capitalism. Nobody denies that they ought to be paid for their work, but the world does not end at a paycheck.

More specifically, we need to organize for politicians who know better then to pass hare-brained costsaving schemes like "what if we let people decide to let their houses burn down".

[smjjames]

If my neighbor's house caught on fire I'd at least pull my damn hose out. We don't need infinite firefighters, we need firefighters who engage in an ethic of public service instead of unbridled capitalism. Nobody denies that they ought to be paid for their work, but the world does not end at a paycheck.

More specifically, we need to organize for politicians who know better then to pass hare-brained costsaving schemes like "what if we let people decide to let their houses burn down".

Exactly.

In this case, the owners were at fault, but what if the fire had other causes than human stupidity?

[Frumple]

Matter of expertise, really. You're not obligated to have it but once you do there's some responsibilities that come with it, or you can expect the privileges that come with said expertise to bugger off, possibly with a bit extra as ye' old social contract isn't terribly cheerful about folks that are able sitting around when stuff's burning to the ground unless they got a reason substantially goddamn better than "I wasn't paid upfront."

We largely shit on doctors that refuse to give emergency aid when it's needed, paid or not, too, unless there is a real bloody good reason better than not being able to be immediately (or previously) paid for it. If the animus is less towards firefighters it's probably due to the field largely not being pants-on-head enough to privatize to the degree some of their guys are half-assing a modern reenactment of an old timey protection racket. Hell, even much of privatised medicine isn't quite that bad. It's pretty rare they won't at least do the equivalent of stopping a house from burning down if they're at all able to.

[redwallzyl]

Its almost as if there's more to a functioning society the money. I absolutely hate with a burning passion the destruction of society for profit machines. Everyone ends up poorer for it.

[Reelya]

Also, this is just offloading costs to other people, it's not saving anything.

e.g. if you had house insurance, but the local firefighters refused to save your house because of a technicality, and then the insurance company had to pay out a lot more because of it, guess what's happening to insurance premiums in that location? they're going to skyrocket, because the lost assets of even a single mishap where someone forgets to pay this bill are worth 1000's of people's yearly firefighter fees.

Basically, there are much less dumb ways to enforce extraction of this tax, that never involve letting houses burn down. Just bundle the firefighter costs it into a single city service fee, and say that if you don't pay it, we do things like stop collecting your garbage, or any number of small services you're no longer entitled to if you're not paying your city council rates. That's what most towns actually do, and all those little saved things add up to more than the cost of the occasional firefighter call-out.

Normal towns, all the extraneous services is what you lose if you don't pay the property taxes, but things like police, fire, ambulance, those are in the "ok you need those even if you're a tax dodger" category.

[bloop_bleep]

Also, this is just offloading costs to other people, it's not saving anything.

e.g. if you had house insurance, but the local firefighters refused to save your house because of a technicality, and then the insurance company had to pay out a lot more because of it, guess what's happening to insurance premiums in that location? they're going to skyrocket, because the lost assets of even a single mishap where someone forgets to pay this bill are worth 1000's of people's yearly firefighter fees.

Basically, there are much less dumb ways to enforce extraction of this tax, that never involve letting houses burn down. Just bundle the firefighter costs it into a single city service fee, and say that if you don't pay it, we do things like stop collecting your garbage, or any number of small services you're no longer entitled to if you're not paying your city council rates. That's what most towns actually do, and all those little saved things add up to more than the cost of the occasional firefighter call-out.

Normal towns, all the extraneous services is what you lose if you don't pay the property taxes, but things like police, fire, ambulance, those are in the "ok you need those even if you're a tax dodger" category.

^ this.

The blame should probably go on whoever decided that the house should be ignored because the owners didn't pay the fee; it could be the firefighters, or it could be some higher authority that would probably fire the firefighters if they didn't comply, in which case the firefighters are not as culpable.

[Culise]

Also, this is just offloading costs to other people, it's not saving anything.

e.g. if you had house insurance, but the local firefighterefused to save your house because of a technicality, and then the insurance company had to pay out a lot more because of it, guess what's happening to insurance premiums in that location? they're going to skyrocket, because the lost assets of even a single mishap where someone forgets to pay this bill are worth 1000's of people's yearly firefighter fees.

Basically, there are much less dumb ways to enforce extraction of this tax, that never involve letting houses burn down. Just bundle the firefighter costs it into a single city service fee, and say that if you don't pay it, we do things like stop collecting your garbage, or any number of small services you're no longer entitled to if you're not paying your city council rates. That's what most towns actually do, and all those little saved things add up to more than the cost of the occasional firefighter call-out.

Normal towns, all the extraneous services is what you lose if you don't pay the property taxes, but things like police, fire, ambulance, those are in the "ok you need those even if you're a tax dodger" category.

It's worth noting that there was no town with direct jurisdiction in the incident in question that sparked this debate.  The city involved happened to be offering its own firefighting services to rural residents in the county in exchange for an additional charge where no such obligation exists. There's nothing that suggests that they're offering any other municipal services beyond their own city limits to create some sort of "city service fee," and legally they have no jurisdiction to assess such a fee in the form of taxation unless you want to open a *really* nasty legal and moral can of worms (to wit, if polities can enforce laws on hinterland territories where they have no legal jurisdiction).  Given that this occurred in Tennessee, they don't have organized rural townships, either.  As such, the lowest level of government he had to deal with was the county, which had no county-wide fire department system at all as per the original story linked in the thread.  Now, that lack of county services could be something to consider concerning depending on what kind of funding Obion County can actually manage, but I'm not sure there was a better way to collect the fee before the event. 

EDIT: An extra "country" slipped in.  I should hope that a single county doesn't offer country-wide emergency services; it seems it'd be stretched awful thin.

EDIT 2: It also occurs to me that they probably don't rent garbage services from the city anyways; a lot of rural areas don't have those any more than they have dedicated fire services.  Plus, the fire started when they were disposing of trash by burning it.  Upgrading a "fire protection fee" to a "city service fee" doesn't really solve any issues whatsoever save for making the fee more expensive.

[Trekkin]

That would be my view as well, that they should put out a fire regardless of whether the owner paid or not.

I don't understand why this obligation would apply to people who are paid to put out fires more than to, for example, you. Shouldn't this mean that everyone who can is obligated to become a volunteer firefighter?

I'm going to answer this question in a more serious spirit than the one in which it was asked, because I think it touches on something more fundamental to these debates that people tend to lose sight of: all human behavior is at least mostly economic in a local sense, but not all of it is driven by money or profit per se. We all want to use what we have to get what we want, and as little of the former for as much of the latter as possible without cutting into something else we want more. The central problem of human civilization, then, is how we make sure that what we individually want at the local level matches the consensus of what we want at the national or global level.

Firefighting, and public safety more generally, presents a problem for the myopia that implies. There's the obvious question of time, for one, because people want firefighters trained and equipped, and this requires money spent before the fires start -- and spent continuously to maintain that readiness. But there's also a question of efficiency and the incentives to maximize it, particularly for firefighting, where someone else's problem can rapidly turn into both your problem and a problem too big for you to solve. Municipally paid firefighters are incentivized to go after fires as soon as possible, even before they start. Private firefighters are incentivized to protect only the areas they're paid to protect, even if that means everything else is burning; after all, you wouldn't want to pay for some random person's fires to be put out on your dime, now would you, anarchist? And when that blaze becomes too large to contain and it burns your house down, well, you should have contracted with more firefighters.

It's the same with pandemics, or really any problem that gets bigger on its own. Either everyone collectively pays for the capacity to solve the problem at the most efficient time to do so, or everyone sits in their private castles and pays more for the ability to protect themselves from whatever it snowballs into. Putting arbitrary restrictions on what individual responders can do because so-and-so didn't enter into their contract between free individuals also restricts how they can solve the problems you paid (your hard-earned money, etc.) for them to solve.

Unfortunately, people don't want to believe that there's a more efficient solution than watching their neighbor get screwed, which is why its best for these things to be compulsory; the local sovereign citizens' compound might have been built next to something worth preserving, you see, and that means paying someone to hose it down once all the contracts and ammunition catch fire and melt the Krugerrands -- but we can estimate a priori how many people we'd probably need and can pay (and train and equip) that many people rather than training an unpredictable number of volunteers, and what's more we can rely on them to show up since they're being paid. Volunteers are not free, and as long as we're paying for equipment it's more efficient to pay for the expertise to use it.

So there you go. Provided we don't want fires, it's best to allocate money toward minimizing them -- and the best incentive to minimize them happens if that money is paid collectively. How much is required is calculable, and given the random nature of the event it makes sense to pay to have the most predictable possible response rather than risk too many or too few firefighters being available when needed.

[Descan]

I'm just letting it be known that not all dwarf fortress players are liberals. Love the game, love toady one and the incredible work of the modders.

Hopefully I'll get a new pc so I can ennoy the upcoming update.

uh yeah im pretty sure we all know that, otherwise there wouldn't be vicious political arguments every twenty pages or so.

True, but these days, it feels like a lot of that arguing is being done between people who are all more-or-less liberal. We used to have a few pretty conservative posters on here, but they've mostly stopped posting since the election.

Eh. Well. Actually, most of the ones who've "stopped posting," have gotten banned for some reason or another. Usually politics...

[wierd]

Pretty much. The most recent casualty is Neonivek.

I dont really consider myself liberal, nor conservative-- I have tendencies that are ascribed to both sides, depending on the issue. For instance, I am not a fan of porkbarrel politics. I am of the opinion that this is the very definition of graft and corruption. This is a very (old school) conservative position. (I am well aware that modern conservatism loves the shit out of some porkbarrel politicking, however I do not consider neocons to be conservatives, I consider them neofascists, because that shoe fits much better.) However, I also feel that it is not governments place to meddle in people's sex lives, or to make rigid definitions of what a marriage is, or things of that nature-- ESPECIALLY when religious dogma is involved.  That is very much a liberal position.

At one time in the past, there was one of those online questionnaire things that gave a multi-axis breakdown of your political leanings. IIRC, it said I favored liberalism more than conservatism.  The issue I have, and why I do not associate myself with the liberal banner, is because that whole thing is rife with "Not liberal enough! Come drink the koolaide with us, or suffer our wrath!", that goes part and parcel with nonsense like what Reelya WTFd about in the WTF thread recently. (because a nearly equal chance of violent crime is CLEARLY indicative of misogyny. Somehow. /s) That kind of thing is so out of control that I want precisely NO PART of it. It is bullshit, it is insane, it makes no sense, and is counter to the very notion of gender equality. The "Gender war" bullshit is only one aspect of the derailed crazytrain that mainstream liberalism has become. No. I like old school liberalism, and old school conservatism. This new, modern shit can go fuck itself, because it is screwed beyond all comprehension. (Both neocon, and neolib groups.)

I am only in my 30s. I should not feel like I am the old baby boomber screaming about how things used to be in the face of current reality.  Instead, I will staunchly put my feet down and say how things SHOULD be, and condemn bad behavior from both modern groups. (Fellating big business is bad; trying to combine government with big business interests is straight up neofascism. DO NOT WANT, IT SHOULD NOT BE.  Giving preferrential treatment to women to the point where it is "alarming" that there is a nearly equal probability of something happening to one vs to a man, is not equality. What is "alarming" is that these people honestly think that the situation reported by Reelya is "alarming" in any way. (I share is WTF on that matter.) This ideology is also DO NOT WANT, IT SHOULD NOT BE. Neither one should be seriously considered as a guiding factor in political dealings for a country. Focus instead on things like income inequality, poor educational system performance, excessive spiraling costs of healthcare, the failing physical infrastructure of the country that has been neglected for 50 years and is literally falling the fuck apart--- THOSE kinds of things.  Priorities people, priorities!)

This makes me an out-lier to the modern political debate process, but I still feel that my views are worth mentioning and fighting for.  It is not my fault that the collective nation has lost its fucking mind, and is more concerned about homosexual genderqueer bathrooms than about people being systematically starved and made to needlessly suffer from treatable conditions due to income inequality and outrageous healthcare costs--- or about how much "the other side" hates women, or some such shit.  If these people want to play their fiddle while rome burns, I have no qualms about calling them mad emperors.