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Comment by illumin8 | Hacker News Reader

It's a good question, but many of these rural southern towns are very poor, and governed by conservative ideologues that have privatized all non-mandatory services.

These towns are required by federal law to provide school service to children within them, however, anything else like police, fire, and ambulance services are not required.

I think it's truly a shame that this has led to predatory practices by private companies who charge "fire insurance" rates of $500 a year, and charge exorbitant rates to people who might innocently dial 911 while their house is burning and don't have insurance.

For what it's worth, this is not normal practice in most civilized parts of the US (pretty much anywhere on the east and west coasts), but if you get far enough into the poor rural southern states, it really is like a 3rd world country.

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> predatory practices by private companies

It does sound awful not to have access to fire service to someone like me who is used to it,* but then again, have the company done anything wrong by offering the service? Starting no company at all and offering no service at all would have been acceptable, right? I mean, that's what most of us do. Then, is there really anything wrong with offering people a service, even at a high price, if you don't take away any alternative they already had (which in this case would be to let the house burn)?

* I haven't actually ever used the service, but I count on that they will come if I call. I count on the fire department coming more than I do the police, because if there's a fire, other people's stuff and lives are on the line. When it's just about me, I'm not as sure that I am considered worth the cost. For the record, I'm in Europe.

That's a very simplistic way to do things. If there were no private firefighters then it wouldn't take long for there to be enough public pressure for a firefighting force to be financed by the state. Because these predatory companies are already in place, the government won't bother and will just shrug. So the alternative to private firefighters isn't no firefighters.

That would mean that the rest of the people (i.e. not the fire fighting company) aren't rational. I'm not sure we can put the responsibility on a company to behave so as to save everyone else from their irrationality.

But does the public version cost less than the private one. I would be shocked if it did.

You'd have to analyze it on a case-by-case basis. The hope would be that public programs have less of a profit incentive to gouge people. That said, public programs are often bloated. However, that bloat often comes from contracting out to private entities with connections. Going pure private, profit motives may cause an entity to strive for efficiency, or it could make them strive to have a monopoly stranglehold on a market and gouge customers as much as possible.

Similar situation here in my country (middle Europe). There is one big corporate connected to some political representatives. They bought few hospital, 112 ambulance service (equal to 911 service), pharmacies, some local medical centers, they even have one health insurance company (one of three acting here).

They have great diversification. In some locations they have monopoly. If you need immediate help (you see or are member of accident, you have strong pain no matter where (head, teeth, back)) you have almost no choice. You are still calling emergency and/or paying to one pocket.

From one side, public hospital all very old and incredibly indebted, outdated medical devices, buildings are old and need renovation. Mentioned corp invested huge amount of money in renovation, improving environment and business process. People have better services and new private hospitals has very good financial health and level of customer services.

On the other hand, very sad thing is that public representatives are able only talk about nothing and perform reformation feasibility studies and studies about studies. They are not able to get needed public services to desired level. If private corps will own entire public health-care system this will be an issue. Charging for services will not limited at all. There is almost no competition in this area since have huge entry difficulties. And even someone would be able to get into competition with this shark corp. they simply buy him.

Cost? Probably very similar. However, should the private fire service be around when your house is on fire, you are in no position to refuse whatever price they ask for (and they will happily pocket the difference).

You are always in a position to refuse and I would assume that in most places if the price is astronomical you would have a pretty good case in court after the fact.

In Germany, as far as I know, towns are mandated to have a fire service. Either the town raises a volunteer firefighter force, or the county will levy taxes and put a force in for the town. There's something to be said for a functioning civil service, not every issue has to be fought over every year in city council, and the only one who benefits are politicians seeking exposure.

OK, but what does it have to do with my comment?

What I'm trying to say is that the private-equity model isn't an inevitable outcome. It all depends on the legal and cultural environment.

I'm all of removing regulation where it makes sense, replacing public with private where it makes sense. This seams like a clear regulatory failure, as in not enough regulation and not enough right kind of regulation.

So while the company could (and should) have done more. The real issue is that there should be statewide clear policy and regulation that defines what standards (public / private) entities must meet if they provide these services. And I do image these would be stringent and complex.

I recall a lecture that proposed the home/fire insurance companies own the fire departments and your policy includes fire department services. In theory it should ensure incentives are aligned but then there is the issue of logistics and scale.

It might not work out as well as you'd expect. Insurance companies are going to run the numbers, and if they make the most money by covering only 95% of the houses and then just paying out the last 5% that's what they'll do.

Is that bad? If it costs the insurance company more to stop the fire then to replace my house, the rational action to take is to let the house burn.

You'd be a ward of the state because your largest asset just burned down. Your neighbours might object because they have to foot your welfare now.

The scenario is the insurance company pays to replace your lost items because it's cheaper to pay out than provide fire service. So that's not an issue.

Money doesn't replace one of a kind items or data on storage.

I think it is bad, for two reasons. One, firemen do more than just put out fires. If there's nobody around to put out your burning house, there's nobody around to pull you out if you've been overcome by smoke inhalation.

Two, people tend to accumulate objects of sentimental value. Your great grandfather's watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFtHjV4c4uw) might be priceless to you and only worth $50 to an insurance company.

Good points.

Both are actually, in some sense, the same thing. Both are costs which you will pay instead of your insurance company. Because they don't pay those costs, their assesments of the costs of a fire will be off. Thus they will let some houses burn which optimally, would not burn.

However, my underlying point was really that it does make rational sense to allow some houses to burn. We could put a fireman on every street, and we'd probably save a lot of houses, lives, and heirlooms. But that would prohibitively expensive. Instead, we have to engage in trade-offs, having cheaper fire protection at the cost of risking some houses, lives, and heirlooms.

Firemen get trucks with sirens and lights. There is no need to locate one on every street.

Where are you getting your definition of rational? Are you saying you can assign a fair, total ordering of value to every thing?

> Firemen get trucks with sirens and lights. There is no need to locate one on every street.

But we'd still save more lives, houses, and heirlooms if we did put one on every street. Every additional kilometer between my house and the fire station increases the level of risk for my house. My point is: it's not binary: you have fire protection or you don't. You have varying degrees of fire protection quality with varying degrees of cost and you have pick the one you want.

> Where are you getting your definition of rational? Are you saying you can assign a fair, total ordering of value to every thing?

No, I certainly hold to the subjective theory of value which rejects the idea that there is an objective fair total ordering of value.

By rational, I mean its a decision that makes sense given your subjective valuation. You aren't going to reduce the risk as much as possible because that would be far too expensive. You are going to choose a level of risk that in your estimation trades off expensive and risk in an acceptable manner. That's subjective, and will vary from person to person, but no matter what your decision is, you will end up having some risk that you could have gotten rid of it, if you were willing to pay for it.

Yes, it's bad if people's posessions are destroyed or even lives are potentially lost.

Is it bad for the company that you are paying specifically to protect your house from fire to decide that they'd rather let your every mortal possession burn to ash and then cut you a check?

I want to be clear. Is this actually the question you're asking?

If you are paying the company to protect your house from fire, obviously they should actually protect your house. Hopefully, they would offer an SLA for how quickly they'll get to your house, the quality of service, etc.

But in the case postulated above, you aren't paying the company to protect your house from fire. You are paying the company as an insurance company. Fire protection is just something they do in order to reduce their losses.

Also, it is not likely they would simply decide not to protect your house. It is more likely they would have fewer fire stations, older equipment, etc that puts your house at a higher risk then you prefer.

But my point really was: regardless of who does it, some houses will end burning because it was too expensive to save them.

> this is not normal practice in most civilized parts of the US (pretty much anywhere on the east and west coasts)

Much of the interior of the US could be described as civilized...

Sexism, racism, homophobia, jingoism, etc are all considered unacceptable and politically-incorrect, but for some reason condescension and unjustified attacks are A-okay when it comes to certain regions of the US.

I don't really understand this, although my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority.

> my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority

As well as good old fashioned, 'fear of people with different values and culture than your own'

Reminds me of a guy I knew in San Francisco. He was talking to a friend of mine who grew up in Georgia and was Indian (South Asian).

He starts off with "Wow! That must have be tough growing up as an Indian in Georgia! Those guys are so backward."

My friend replies "Actually, I had a great childhood. Never had any problems being Indian. Georgia is a great place to grow up."

Of course the guy from SF had never actually been to Georgia.

That's pretty normal. I hear people who've never been south of the Mason-Dixon bashing the South on a regular basis. They get all their information from coastal journalists. Who've never been there either.

These are the same people who would bristle if you said something bad about people in another country and say "How do you know? You can't understand a place by reading about it in the newspaper."

I think it has less to do with superiority than many people believe. Consider the gist of this idea I made up now:

If a person is considering ideas (especially political ideas) then they might view those ideas as being held by a person like themself. Some ideas are very easy to picture being held by a very similar person (e.g. spicy food), but the more complex the idea (e.g. Trexit) the more difficult it becomes to conceive of the mindset that the similar person would need to have in order to have reached the differing conclusion.

The key here is that it's not really about a differing mindset, so much as different circumstances that construct the differing mindset. This, I assert, is very difficult to account for completely without simply accepting all views at face value as both perfectly valid and a complete mystery, unknowable outside each person's mind.

As such, it is inconceivable to the person who thinks they understand both the issues at hand and the mind of the relevant populace to reach a conclusion that contradicts the logical consequences of the (broken) assumptions, and thus the conclusion is that the one who holds such opinions is an illogical dunce, and unacceptable in this rational age. In actuality the assumptions are broken in a subtle way such that it is easy to miss the leap made to broad-brush painting.

It could be, but get deep into the poor rural south, and prepare to go back in time to a place where electricity is optional, people live in trailers, and poverty is rampant.

So it's okay to attack rural poor people because they're not subsidized as heavily as the urban poor?

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