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When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

nytimes.com

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Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#41

Post by TruthAndDare »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #34
TruthAndDare wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> predatory practices by private companies It does sound awful not to have access to fire service to someone like me who is used to it,* but then again, have the company done anything wrong by offering the service? Starting no company at all and offering no service at all would have been acceptable, right? I mean, that's what most of us do. Then, is there really anything wrong with offering people a service, even at…

In Germany, as far as I know, towns are mandated to have a fire service. Either the town raises a volunteer firefighter force, or the county will levy taxes and put a force in for the town. There's something to be said for a functioning civil service, not every issue has to be fought over every year in city council, and the only one who benefits are politicians seeking exposure.

OK, but what does it have to do with my comment?

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#42

Post by jimmaswell »

gozur88 wrote: post #22
arcanus wrote: post #2

> A man in the suburban South watched a chimney fire burn his house to the ground as he waited for the fire department, which billed him anyway and then sued him for $15,000 when he did not pay. Is one typically billed when you have the fire department arrive? I thought it was a public good.

Depends on where you live. In some areas you pay for something akin to fire insurance - a yearly fee that covers fire service. You don't have to pay, but the fire department isn't under any obligation to help you if you don't. And if you engage their services on an as-needed basis it's going to be very expensive.

Someone shouldn't be able to opt out of fire insurance - a fire can start more fires and have other repercuasions beyond the owner's property

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#44

Post by refurb »

arcanus wrote: post #15
freditup wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sexism, racism, homophobia, jingoism, etc are all considered unacceptable and politically-incorrect, but for some reason condescension and unjustified attacks are A-okay when it comes to certain regions of the US. I don't really understand this, although my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority.

> my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority As well as good old fashioned, 'fear of people with different values and culture than your own'

Reminds me of a guy I knew in San Francisco. He was talking to a friend of mine who grew up in Georgia and was Indian (South Asian).

He starts off with "Wow! That must have be tough growing up as an Indian in Georgia! Those guys are so backward."

My friend replies "Actually, I had a great childhood. Never had any problems being Indian. Georgia is a great place to grow up."

Of course the guy from SF had never actually been to Georgia.

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#45

Post by takeda »

jzwinck wrote: post #16

In the US a lot of us grew up with the idea that when something really bad was happening you would dial 911 and people would appear very soon to help you. I don't know whether this myth was ever true, but it certainly is not true today. I have called 911 or its equivalent more than a dozen times on three continents. No magic helping people appear within five minutes. Or ten. Usually not twenty either. Sometimes not a…

It depends on location. John Oliver had a segment about it https://youtu.be/A-XlyB_QQYs

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#46

Post by Klinky »

dexterdog wrote: post #33
andrepd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very simplistic way to do things. If there were no private firefighters then it wouldn't take long for there to be enough public pressure for a firefighting force to be financed by the state. Because these predatory companies are already in place, the government won't bother and will just shrug. So the alternative to private firefighters isn't no firefighters.

But does the public version cost less than the private one. I would be shocked if it did.

You'd have to analyze it on a case-by-case basis. The hope would be that public programs have less of a profit incentive to gouge people. That said, public programs are often bloated. However, that bloat often comes from contracting out to private entities with connections. Going pure private, profit motives may cause an entity to strive for efficiency, or it could make them strive to have a monopoly stranglehold on a market and gouge customers as much as possible.

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#47

Post by winstonewert »

gozur88 wrote: post #36
winstonewert wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that bad? If it costs the insurance company more to stop the fire then to replace my house, the rational action to take is to let the house burn.

I think it is bad, for two reasons. One, firemen do more than just put out fires. If there's nobody around to put out your burning house, there's nobody around to pull you out if you've been overcome by smoke inhalation. Two, people tend to accumulate objects of sentimental value. Your great grandfather's watch ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFtHjV4c4uw ) might be priceless to you and only worth $50 to an insuranc…

Good points.

Both are actually, in some sense, the same thing. Both are costs which you will pay instead of your insurance company. Because they don't pay those costs, their assesments of the costs of a fire will be off. Thus they will let some houses burn which optimally, would not burn.

However, my underlying point was really that it does make rational sense to allow some houses to burn. We could put a fireman on every street, and we'd probably save a lot of houses, lives, and heirlooms. But that would prohibitively expensive. Instead, we have to engage in trade-offs, having cheaper fire protection at the cost of risking some houses, lives, and heirlooms.

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#48

Post by humanrebar »

Trill-I-Am wrote: post #23
humanrebar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why not fix the problem at the demand side and not the supply side. If people can't afford essential-to-life services, isn't that the problem? While I'm on the subject, centrally planning and allocating the services doesn't really solve the problem of whether it's worth the cost to have one ambulance to serve a town of five people who live in the middle of nowhere. Someone still has to make the decision. We can co…

How do you make people have more money to pay for services?

There are a few approaches. Basic guaranteed income approaches are popular on HN. Vouchers (like special use debit cards) could work, too.

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#49

Post by Lazare »

URSpider94 wrote: post #32
rayiner wrote: post #24

The article's focus on the private equity boogeyman is misdirected, for reasons that become apparent if you read far enough: > Private equity gained new power and responsibility as a direct result of the 2008 crisis. As cities and towns nationwide struggled to pay for basics like public infrastructure and ambulance services, private equity stepped in. The budgets of state and local governments around the country are…

There's more than enough blame to go around. Part of the issue is that private firms come in and pitch an option to cities and towns by which they can get out of their budget scrape by privatizing schools/fire/jails/traffic enforcement in return for granting a monopoly to a company and allowing them to charge new fees. This looks like an attractive option, rather than raising taxes, but I can't think of a time when I…

A lot of privatised systems work very well. Denmark has an almost entirely privatised emergency system; one company alone runs 65% of their fire brigades and 85% of their ambulance services, and it seems to work great.

Frankly, this story seems to be "terribly run towns that mismanaged their way almost into bankruptcy and can no longer afford to provide critical services are also terrible at negotiating other contracts too!" Which, you know...yeah?

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#50

Post by Lazare »

arcanus wrote: post #2

> A man in the suburban South watched a chimney fire burn his house to the ground as he waited for the fire department, which billed him anyway and then sued him for $15,000 when he did not pay. Is one typically billed when you have the fire department arrive? I thought it was a public good.

A "public good" is, technically speaking, one which is "non-excludable and non-rivalrous". In a dense urban area, firefighting is clearly a public good, because to stop the building owned by Paying Client A burning down, you need to stop the building next door owned by Non-Paying Client B burning. You can't just stand around and make sure it doesn't spread across the property line to paying clients. Or to flip it around, paying firefighters to fight your fire benefits everyone around you.

In non-urban areas, at least if there's no serious risk of wildfires, firefighting is clearly not a public good. If your farmhouse start to burn, it's not going to threaten anyone but you, and paying firefighters to save it doesn't benefit anyone but you.

And in a (rare?) case of economic theory working in practice too, that's what we often observe: Rural fire departments often require fees to be paid, and won't fight fires if you haven't paid up.

(That being said: Just because rural firefighting isn't a public good doesn't mean it shouldn't be communally funded out of general taxation. Lots of what governments spend their money on aren't actual public goods.)

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