Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?
These are the kinds of routine jobs that fire crews handle everyday that are invaluable to society.
It makes sense for them to automatically show up for some situations (eg car accidents), but there should be a properly funded triage system.
Same goes for the police, which are often called for situations where there should be some other social workers available (again, there are exceptions where police should also be present in those situations).
Which is to say the small cheaper car only makes sense after you have enough large ones and conclude you still need more cars.
That's how it is in NYC[0] too...
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/nyc-council-and-fdny-po...
If the two needs are distributed such that it works well to have one group of full-time workers able to do both, then I reckon that’s fine.
carrying grandma out of a burning building and carrying her downstairs after a fall are the same skill sets
Please, let's hear your ideas. (blows away in the wind)
Let me think for a few seconds about ideas. Fitter EMTs who can assist people in more demanding physical situations. A subset of firefighters who can provide medical assistance but don't need the complete fire training curriculum and so can be paid less. Maintaining the ratio of firefighters and stations which was previously found satisfactory but adjusting it for requiring fewer of them since we have fewer fires.
Your turn.
Also, firefighters need to know how to dismantle a house quickly to support their operations. So if the door needs to come off the hinges to get grandma down the stairs, firefighters will be prepared for that and have it done in 30 seconds
They are like seat belts, or audit logs. You don't need so many of them, right up until you do.
On a fundamental level, efficiency and resilience are always a trade-off. A perfectly efficient system also tends to be perfectly brittle! In practice everything needs some buffer.
We shouldn't aim for "as close to 100% efficiency on <metric> as possible," but rather "lowest risk-adjusted expected cost, including mishaps." The latter correctly prices rare events.
Yeah. That makes sense a lot of the time. It also makes sense to reduce capacity when the need lessens while still maintaining adequate slack.
Yes, that's why the phrase "when the need lessens" is important.
Besides that, it may be a reasonable decision that 95% utilization is acceptable in order to spend the additional money on something that provides more benefit.
OMG so many people died, we need to spare no expense in insuring this doesn't happen again.
[time passes]
OMG these emergency services are so expensive, why do we even have them.
[budget cuts, size cuts, personnel cuts, cuts cuts cuts]
OMG, I'm on fire, everything is on fire, why did the state do this to me, we need to spare no expense in insuring this never happens again.
> Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?
If they need to do that, it's not because of the public. It's probably because they got a "challenge" from some clever idiot with a business or economics degree.
Also, people typically want something valuable to do, so they go find it. That's not something the proponents of our coming AI utopia seem to understand.
Keeping firefighters from being bored is why you see them playing pickleball or other sporty things around the firehouse. If your firefighters are that bored, you should look at having the chief replaced with someone better trained. Especially for the city the size of Ontario.
Their work 8 hours which is a mix of physical fitness training (carefully designed to keep them in shape without being too wore out to respond if something does happen as they finish training) and training. They have a lot of time to learn about all the latest medical emergency treatments, the latest in fire fighting. They get constant CPR refreshers because even though they are often first on the scene when CPR is needed it still doesn't happen often enough to remember.
The other 16 hours - 8 of them are sleeping. the other 8 are theirs to do whatever. Any good firehouse will keep plenty of games (TV, board games, pickelball...) so that they are not bored.
I better go show up to metaphorical fender benders more
It's hard enough in Germany to balance that, but we at least can draw on the advantage of Germany being decently settled which means we can have support crews come in from neighboring cities. But in the US where it might be the case that the nearest city with enough staff is hours of driving away? By the time you get enough staff on site, the entire plant is gone.
Most of the land in the US doesn't have enough population to support a large chemical plant. The plant needs not only the people who work in the plant. It also needs schools, grocery stores, libraries, doctors... And that many people also really want things like sports teams. A small chemical plant can locate in a rural areas, but not a large one.