171–180 of 440 posts
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, t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
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 we…
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 comp…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
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, t…
> "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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The Reagan administration, I believe, imposed the unfunded mandate on emergency rooms to treat patients using EMTALA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_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 governm…
$80 billion of 3.4 trillion. A rounding error.
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 w…
> 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 childre…
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, t…
> "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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wou…
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…
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, t…
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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."