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…
Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
241–250 of 440 posts
Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
City; counties only have states above them so there isn’t “out of county land” usually.
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.
Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
#243Earlier 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…
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.
Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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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."
Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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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...
Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
#247Even 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 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.
Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
* 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…
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.
Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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 o…
Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
#250In 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.