391–400 of 440 posts
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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!
No, it's about not being forced into compulsory insurance schemes in various disguises.
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It is really weird reading this, it makes me realize that motivations and rationalizations of people who joined Jan 6 and similar events are really nothing new under the sun.
The motivations of people who joined Jan 6 are very simple: they thought they had been disenfranchised because of unprecedented anomalies during vote counting on election day, which their opposition made no effort to explain.
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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.
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.
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But it’s not “money rules everything.” Americans spend tremendous amounts of public money on, for example, extending the life of old people a few months. American social security is quite generous compared to other countries. Instead in Americans are extremely rigid about rules and norms. You never just “not worry” about “legal liability.” It’s a country where criminals can sue you if they injure themselves robbing y…
> Americans spend tremendous amounts of public money on, for example, extending the life of old people a few months. Medicaid is extremely stringent when it comes to income and asset thresholds for nursing homes (and in many states receiving social security can effectively disqualify you from Medicaid, even though Medicaid would be more helpful). So in many cases that public money is only applied once hospitals and n…
You see this all over the place. American schools will spend $50,000/year ensuring a child with dyslexia can get individualized educational support. But they won’t give free lunches to kids whose parents could technically afford them but don’t use their money wisely.
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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…
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.
Most states also have a county, but this is different from a township. New Jersey and Pennsylvania (as part of the original 13 colonies) don't take part in the federal township system and have their own system with the same name that is otherwise not related.
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> 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.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The claim “firefighters wouldn’t come if someone’s life was in danger from a fire” is extraordinary. The evidence “firefighters didn’t come when no one’s life was in danger from a fire” isn’t. Come up with real evidence or quit bellyaching.
that the firefighters didn't know if anyone's live was in danger because they didn't show up.
The evidence is
that they refused to show up when called and only showed up when called by someone else. Without being prescene at the scene it is not possible for a firefigther to know if someone's life is endanger or not because the person calling isn't trained to know that.
The real evidence for the very basic claim is there.
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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…
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 chi…
Honestly - I think your attitude here is actually far more childish than mine. You're preaching about what's right and moral - I'm discussing practical details and incentives that might make people actually go do a thing.
My attitude is hardly making an assumption that life is fair - it's about making sure that service (fire fighting) has a space in which to exist at all.
Because what we're really talking about here is a social contract...
When it becomes clear that violating the social contract has no downside - many more folks start to do it, and we rapidly end up in a spot where the company that wrote the contract (Us - we the freaking people wrote the contract) are bankrupt. And now not only do the people not paying not have a fire service... NO ONE has a fire service. Because few people were willing to chip in the money when they got the benefit for free.
So back to your silly, silly question:
"Is it fair that you paid for firefighting and your neighbor didn’t but still had their house saved during a fire?"
That's absolutely relevant outside of a single isolated case. It might not matter for one instance - it matters a whole freaking lot in aggregate.
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>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."
There is approximately a zero percent chance the 911 operator neglected to ask if anybody was in the burning house. They didn't save the house but they did show up anyway to contain the fire. The claim of callous disregard for human life you're making about American firefighters is completely unsupported by evidence. The closest example you have is case where nobody was harmed. But we've already established that you…
The person on the phone often doesn't have all the info. It often happens that fire department only discover a risk to life upon arriving where someone mentions that someone is in the house. Or that X,Y,Z is there.
Someone phoned the fire department. The fire department didn't visit because they weren't on a list. The person who was making the decision if there was a risk to life was not on scene nor trained to make that decision. Someone dies the lawsuit would be massive for that level of incomptence.
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>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. You are revealing your lack of knowledge about the American wilderness simply by stating this. The US is so vast that there are massive swaths of land that you could not get a fire t…
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>>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.