Insurance Companies do Preventative Maintenance on High-Value Assets
If you own a multi-million dollar house, it's almost better for everyone if you're paying your own money to protect it, and let the public fire fighters spend their resources protecting those who can't afford their own protection.
That said, I have no idea what the cost difference would be here, and I'm aware there are other potential negatives. I was just pointing out there are more options on the table, ones that would benefit both parties even more.
"What if rich people gave away all their money to causes I support" is almost always a valid position, but one that doesn't really help advance any discussion of the merits of any other action that's more viable.
If they were funding a fire station in a third world country where they have zero business interests, than sure, call it altruism. But I was just trying to show that there are more options, some potentially even better for everybody.
I’m pretty sure wealthy owners have done the math and know exactly where altruism begins.
Now if all my neighbors want to put a lot more money into the pot, then we can talk.
I doubt any amount of public investment can make it safe for the masses, short of long-term acceptance of blackouts being the new normal.
Everyone is already doing basic mitigation unless they are breaking the law.
That does mean that the police isn't fit for service. You hire a bodyguard and/or private security firm because you do actually need someone working for you whose duty is to protect your person and/or property. Most people with something to protect just buy insurance or a dog or a firearm, but the rich pay more for more active measures, such as monitored home security systems, or full-time on-site guards.
It doesn't take much of a stretch to realize that public firefighters likewise do not have a duty to protect your house, specifically, against fires.
Hiring private is absolutely an indictment of the inadequacy of the publicly funded protective measures. And once someone has secured a private solution, they have no further interest in fixing or funding the public solution, in the same way that people who send their kids to private schools stop caring about the public schools.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Rock_v._Gonzales
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County
The reality is that for a lot of SoCal, firefighting is a gigantic subsidy to people who can afford very expensive houses in a biome that has been periodically catching fire and burning for millions of years.
That would be fine if the wealthy didn't have an outsized influence on our laws.
And then of course for the rest of the country that can't afford private fire, private schools....
I mean, I know I have plenty of confirmation biases reacting to this headline (generally in the opposite direction), but outside of the headline, I don't get the above conclusion.
If X service has Y service competing with (or being bought in conjunction with) X, then X isn't worthwhile? I have to be missing something, because that doesn't pass the smell test.
Hire a thousand person to just constantly spray water at a single house, I'm pretty sure you'll be able to make sure that house never catch fire, thus is better than any firefighter service.
That doesn't means the public service isn't fit for the purpose, they just literally can't do the same.
As he said, they mostly do preventive care and not actually fighting fire. The public service does that by education (which make much more sense to me even though it's less effective, but that's just my opinion).
People love having a strawman to tear down (or occasionally build up). They just don't know they love it. The news makes money off engagement so that's what they optimize for and outrage click-bait is very good at doing that job.
Articles and headlines based around classism are everywhere these days- and they arent marketing towards people who dont buy that classism is a huge problem. There are an extremely large number of americans who eat this shit up as truth.
Do you think the HN crowd is clicking this headline because it is something they like to see? Sure, some may be but I would feel very safe betting money that more here fall into the "outraged" group than the "existing beliefs confirmed" group.
We are having this discussion is because this is a rare instance where the headline needed to confirm the beliefs of one side and outrage the other side happen to be the same headline.
>Articles and headlines based around classism are everywhere these days- and they arent marketing towards people who dont buy that classism is a huge problem. There
Are we talking Fox News specifically or US media in general? If Fox News then sure. If media in general then I disagree, there's other outlets that cater to the other side of the class coin.