Private firefighters go to work for California's wealthy
foxbusiness.com
foxbusiness.com
> However, private firefighters are more likely to contract with insurance companies like USAA to offer mitigation services to customers. Sometimes neighborhood associations hire private firefighters, according to The Post.
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> Homeowners hiring private firefighters make up about 5% of the industry, David Torgerson of Wildfire Defense Systems told The Los Angeles Times last year.
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> Firefighting crews working for insurance companies do not just wait around for the fire to spread to the areas they're protecting. They often install sprinkler systems and spray retardant, according to The Post.
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> When trying to fireproof a particular home, crews will take the time to rake away vegetation surrounding the home and close windows and vents, The Times reported.
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> title: Private firefighters go to work for California's wealthy
Insurance Companies do Preventative Maintenance on High-Value Assets
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.
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).
That’s more in depth reporting than I am used to.
1. Public perceives the rich do not pay enough taxes and have continued to pay money into politics to keep it this way
2. Firefighters working for municipalities do not make enough money due to public funding shortages (see above taxes)
3. Firefighters go to work for Insurance companies / the rich instead of working for municipalities because of said pay disparities
4. There are not enough firefighters to protect my home because they are working for private companies after I paid to train them.
End result perception: That rich person is getting preference because they are rich, when it should be that all citizens should have equal access to public services like a fire engine to put out flames - at least according to our typical societal norms when there isn't an out of control blaze.
"I'm rich so I can pay for it" is totally right, but only works until an angry public burns the house down. A better long-term solution that provides public services for more citizens at a higher level of reliability is one potential outcome.
Second, it's difficult to talk about compare national fire levels when you're talking about localized forest fires and the need to surge to protect.
If your house is burning, but your rich neighbor is fine, you start asking questions. So what you get is "my house is burning and the mayor is saying there aren't enough resources to save it but only the rich guy got the mitigation" - people start asking questions.
The solution is (like all things) somewhere in the middle - raise the level of public services in a way that allows for better mitigation / protection (which requires money), so that the reasons for misperception are no longer there (the house doesn't burn).
If you were wealthy, would you do something like this? In this case, if you were wealthy, would you pay to have extra protection for your home by hiring private firefighters? Almost willing to bet their answer would always be yes.
I'd argue the outcome is because we don't directly see the effect of the poor who lose their home (and if we do see poor people "it was probably their own fault"). If you could observe the outcome directly (which would require one to dive into the specific subject), I'd wager you'd have either compassion, or you'd be among the exceptional 1% of psychopaths in the world.
By keeping it abstract and non-personal, we are able to cope with such tragedy.
A: "A fire-engine will be dispatched within 20 minutes"
--- In another part of the country ---
A: "We're sorry we don't provide Prime fire service for your location, please direct your query to the local authorities"
Local fire department: "We will try and answer your call as soon as possible, but due to budget cuts from a reduced corporate tax income we have had to reduce our services in the area."
If you want to complain about tax revenue, point to the fact that Americans don’t pay VAT (like everyone in Europe does) on all the cheap crap they buy on Amazon. Or in the case of California, complain about Prop 13 limiting the property taxes people pay on McMansions. (Which, after all, are what pay for your local government functions like fire service.)
Edit: Curious why facts are downvoted? Does HN not like discussing solutions and people actively working on solutions?
However
A 10% sales tax is a 10% tax on poor people's disposable income since they have almost no savings. How do we square that regressive circle?
$ 1000/adultmonth = $ 12 000 / adultyear. -> requires $120 000 of disposable income spent per adult. Very few people spend $120 000 of VATable (A family making $300 000, a good income, doesn't spend anywhere near $120 000)
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-of-vat-on-different-goods-...
Unless you are arguing for a federal sales tax, which OK sure federal tax is great, except it doesn't pay for local services. Also, now you also have to argue about the regressive nature of sales tax in general.
embedded taxes benefit the tax man and the easiest to make regressive thereby clawing back much of the money spent on services
My question was honest though. Is there something special (good) about VAT vs. sales tax that I'm missing? Because the OP implied we don't pay sales tax in the US, which is (generally) not true.
Now, I don't disagree that a mechanism that tames American consumption would be good, and is also counter cycle to the economy.
But the question remains unanswered: How about the effect of sales tax on people and families at the margins [0]? 20-25% sales tax is a lot for them. A sales tax rebate check at the end of the year like Canada does? $70 hardly covers the bite of the sales tax!
[0] Including my in-laws, so I'll admit this is a bit personal.
It’s a middle class cop-out. The American middle class says they want to help those at the margins, but they don’t want to pay 25% VAT on MacBook Pros. They’re only in favor of increased welfare if Jeff Bezos is the one who pays for it.
- VAT is applied to business to business transactions. Sales taxes are just applied to consumer transactions.
- Sales taxes are applied to total amount of sales. The amount of VAT that the user pays is on the cost of the product, less any of the costs of materials used in the product that have already been taxed.
- Since value is not generally created in a second hand sale. (Unless the item is restored) VATs are usually not applied to used/second hand items. Sales taxes are.
This is not true. The final user pays the sales tax. So if a company buys a bolt and uses it to make its product: no tax. If they buy bolts and build shelves to hold inventory: pay the tax.
At least for Germany even that is not true. As a business all VAT payments are refunded (Vorsteuerabzug).
However your comment is about VAT and the end result is also the same: the Vorsteuerabzug only applies to goods sold on to a subsequent buyer.
So the business pays VAT on everything it buys (that is subject to tax), but when it sells something it collects VAT on the sale. It can then deduct VAT paid on the inputs to that sale (i.e. the bolts in my example). This is central to the concept of VAT thus is basically how it works in every country with a VAT/GST.
This is explained in the law itself: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ustg_1980/__15.html
I'm in Denmark, where the rate is 25%.
I pay 25% on something I order from a Danish online shop.
I pay 25% on something I order from a large German online shop, even though the VAT rate in Germany is lower.
I pay 19% (the German rate) on something I order from a small German shop, to reduce the administrative burden on that shop.
(In every case the advertised price includes VAT, although the middle case may use 19% until I input a delivery address, depending on how they guess my location.)
My understanding is that, in reality, people pay 0% in the USA if they order from a different state.
Most states are now imposing sales tax on online retailers, so the point is pretty much moot now.
That used to be the case, but online retailers now must collect sales tax for any state that demands it [0]. Many states have complicated rules on the matter, for details consult an attorney.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair%2C_Inc.
The key here is that when something is classified as "interstate commerce" different laws apply than if you're buying something in-state. Enforcement varies, and can be expensive, and the laws are catching up sometimes, and purposefully not present in others, depending on the state and their approach to interestate commerce.
As an American, I'm quite happy there is no Federal sales tax. There is no reason to capture value at that level and allocate at the Federal level. States already have these taxes, and are much better equipped (in terms of need / proximity - not in terms of functioning government at times) to allocate the money toward local services.
> Exempting, zero rating, or excluding certain essential consumption goods from the tax base (e.g., foodstuffs, medicine, health care) can reduce the regressivity of a VAT.
That's what's done in Europe.
https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/r...
Note that even if it were applied entirely consistently and without bias it would still only reduce the regressivity, it wouldn't make it non-regressive.
If a person with low income buys a gallon of milk they pay the same VAT on it as a person with high income would. If they buy cheap off-brand cheese they pay the same VAT rate as they would pay for expensive luxury cheese (except they likely can't afford the latter).
VAT doesn't account for income inequality, it just makes everything more expensive for everyone. Income tax OTOH impacts high income households more than those with low income. At least in theory: in practice income tax (especially in the US) has massively gone down for high income households, again just affecting everyone equally like VAT does.
My province was really raking it in. We paid a 10% provincial ("state") tax and then the GST on top of that tax. Yes a tax on a tax.
The advantage of corporate taxes is they collect money from foreign investors which would otherwise leave the US. Lowering corporate taxes requires increases US taxes so it can lower them for foreign wealth funds etc.
If anyone has more info on this apparently discriminatory action I'd love to chat more.
PG&E is less than one-third done with its 2019 tree-trimming work
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/PG-E-is-less-th...
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/07/12/0135227/superco...
Could it be that they anticipate that future earth quakes could cause such devastation that repairs to underground cables would be too difficult/time consuming?
Granted, it's about the least earthquake prone area in the world. Also differences in grid architecture between USA and Europe might make burying more expensive in USA. https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/north-american-ver...
This stuff goes back to Enron and even further. The liabilities utilities are exposed to in California don't match the rates people are paying, and the electricity rates are already really high. You can claw back all the profits, all the bonuses you want, the money you're talking for proper maintenance is way higher than that, the money for a complete overhaul is higher than that.
You can make the utility public, but then you have to contend with the fact that CPUC has been there every step of the way.
His testimony was based around the fact that on average the cost to bury lines is roughly 10x more expensive than running them above ground, and he has had this experience across multiple different projects.
So when people say "it's expensive" they are literally referring to a factor of 10x cost increase. Maybe it's worth it in some cases compared to the costs of power outages and fires, but understand that we're not talking about a "slight increase" here, and that the people making these decisions are generally highly trained and experienced subject matter experts who are already doing cost/benefit analyses to take the best course of action that they can.
Consider doctor testimony that used to be given for deaths while under anesthesia. "It's normal" and "it just happens." Luckily juries didn't listen and anesthesiologists were forced to reconsider their daily practice.
The answer seems to be 'no'. Digging and burying pipes is something we've been doing on a massive scale for hundreds of years and there's no reason to believe more volume will improve the economics. It's probably getting worse since new development means more roads to dig up and more structures to plan around.
Consider the fact that we lay oceanic cables.
It costs $1 million per mile (roughly) to bury transmission lines. PG&E has about 18,000 miles of transmission lines. That's about $18 billion to bury the lines. Sounds like a lot, but...
...the estimate price of these multi-day blackouts is on the order of $1 billion per blackout. Given multiple blackouts per year, and we're talking just a few years to pay back the price of burying the transmission lines. https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/A-cool-billion-...
But that's not the cost to PG&E. PG&E (or the state) would have to find a way to get some of that somewhat hidden opportunity cost.
It's not like there aren't other solutions; generators, batteries etc.
FFS with the pressing need to decarbonize energy you're upset about people not being able to handle a few days a year of intermittent power?
> The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Marcus Licinius Crassus. He took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the fire fighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire, if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground.
I do see where it talks about only doing preventative measures when working for insurance, but it also implies that not all their work is for insurance companies. One of the links to the LA times even talks about a homeowner hiring a private fire fighter to save their home, and these instances involve actually fighting fires, not just clearing brush.
There was a thread last week on what are good business areas to get into, and providing security to rich people is quite promising.
It seems to have an event called "autoplayblocked": https://developer.akamai.com/tools/AdaptiveMediaPlayer/docs/...
In fact, in my console there's a message that says this:
"Autoplay is only allowed when approved by the user, the site is activated by the user, or media is muted."
> The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus. He took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the fire fighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire, if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants. [1]
Seems unfortunate in times of lack of supply of fireman that this is tolerated.
I’m fairly certain that fire retarding private lawns is not the most efficient use of resources considering the circumstances at the moment.
Read the article, they aren’t fire retarding private lawns. They are doing preventative work that keeps the fire far away. If it hits the lawn, it’s too late.
More firefighters are better, regardless of which areas are being contained with higher priority. If they were taking away fire fighters from the publicly funded groups or volunteers, then there would be something to bitch about.
What do you mean with that comparison? This would be quite a legitimate reason for complaining!
Morally, I think that the people who push for private security and firefighters are doing a net damage to society.
In other words, a state-provided service is not always perfectly on-time, but if I want to hire some private service with super-fast response time for my twenty million dollar beach-front property, why not? How does me hiring a private fireman _harm_ someone else? If anything, might it not reduce the load on public infrastructure?
Likewise, if you decide to throw all your garbage on a forest, it is neither positive nor negative. If it is only you who does that, it can be argued that its net effect is negligible, neither positive nor negative. Maybe a bit of purely aesthetic disgust for somebody who happens to walk by while you are throwing it. But that is all. If anything, it may reduce a little bit the load on public garbage collection.
Will 20 such private firemen be a problem? No, but 2,000? That would absolutely have an impact on available firefighters for the public.
The great thing about capitalism, for better or worse, but mostly better is that you or any one other person does not get to decide what constitutes efficient use of resources. Everyone decides that for themself based on self interest and the market ends up magically having this sort of collective intelligence that allocates far better than any alternative system ever has.
Show me the evidence this is happening.
Are you implying that there are open fireman positions that no one is applying for? If so your market is incredibly different from the one I know. Here in Australia a job as a fireman is very hard to get.
Step 2: The government can't afford firefighters.
Step 3: Rich people use the tax money they've saved to employ private firefighters to only protect their property.
Step 4: Poor people are left to die in otherwise controllable fires.
There are more poor people than rich people so the poor people had to vote for those that lowered the taxes at the expense of the firefighting services, which in turn means that it cannot be that clear cut.
I'm sympathetic to #1 on a general level, many (though not all) rich people have lobbied for lower taxes, and/or simply employee tax experts who can take advantage of legal ways to reduce their taxes a great deal. But in this instance at least it doesn't work, California isn't low tax. And your progression further falls apart at #2 because firefighter salaries aren't at the level of "can't afford it" even for California alone, let alone the federal government. California looks to have around a $144 billion budget for the 2018-19 period, and I see from a quick search a Fortune article indicating they had allocated a $442 million firefighting budget, total (which apparently got exhausted, and importantly does represent a sharp upward trend from the previous 5 years, in 2013 they spent $242m). But while a few hundred million more is certainly a lot of money, it's not at the level where it's killing California. And again, California isn't a low tax state anyway.
So no, I don't think you're justified here, or at least you'll need more support. There could certainly be more spent from by the public on the level of expense private firefighters represent, and it's not clear that there is any zero sum game here. And I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with multiple levels of response, at the theater and local levels. That's particularly when part of it is preventative, like creating fire perimeters on properties by cutting down and removing dangerous vegetation. That doesn't require the same skills, expense or risk as direct large fire containment but can be a big help. Finally, as with floods there are arguably private properties that the public simply shouldn't be on the hook to defend at all because they're in known very dangerous areas. If someone wishes to expend their own surplus resources on it though that's no different than any other luxury expenditure is it?
It is reasonable to debate what balance budget should have in all this, and whether the government should be doing more to invest in better infrastructure up front. For example, from what I can tell from various sources like this one [1] a few billion a year would cover a significant amount of buried HVDC distribution backbone. California apparently has around 26000 miles of high voltage primary lines, and about 240k miles of secondary. Focusing on the primary first it'd probably cost a good $35-55 billion based on what I can find, which is a lot but is the sort of project to be done over time and focusing on the most important areas (going through high vegetation risk spots) first. It'd add up over a decade or two of effort, and blackouts aren't free either. And it might at least be worth it to look into whether there are any economies of scale to be gained or standardization and improvements that can be done to bring the cost down further. Or instead, perhaps it'd be more cost effective to just abandon certain parts of the state, some towns may face the same issue as coastal ones.
But I don't think the negative reaction to private individual efforts is justified either, and unnecessarily creates bad feelings not conducive to further work.
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1: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Indicative-capital-cost-...
Lobbying is a form of weak power by comparison.
What if one person had enough resources to pay all firemen to not fight fires at all? The "collective intelligence" of the market has obvious blind spots.
That's exactly how pricing signals work. "Firemen" is not a fixed set of people.
Intelligence does not imply perfection.
As does the collective intelligence of the voters and the state. Whichever is more, and more consistently intelligent is apparently not obvious.
1. The first type of firefighting is your traditional city structure firefighting departments. These are the ones we see most of the time in the movies(Backdraft, Ladder 49). These are government funded by local and municipal taxes. They traditionally provided structure and medical services to a city. While the firefighting portion of these departments has stayed public the medical(ambulance) services have been heavily privatized for years. Due to the large migration we have seen of people wanting to live closer to nature, wildland Urban Interface firefighting has become a service that these traditional structure departments have stepped up to provide as they have expanded their boundaries to provide services to the ever increasing number of homes that have been built outside of the traditional city landscape.
2. Wildland firefighting has traditionally been paid for and managed by the Federal Government. Last I saw around 40% of wildland firefighting resources are privately owned. This includes fire engines, water tankers, showers, food caterers, hand crews(20 man crews that dig fire line in an attempt to contain the fire), tree fallers(loggers who are brought in to fall dangerous trees), air tankers, and helicopters. This particular part of firefighting has been privatized for 20+ years and the Federal government shows no signs of changing this trend anytime soon.
There is also a lot of talk of people leaving the structural "public" fire departments to go private. In my experience the trend is actually the opposite. Private firefighters are generally significantly underpaid compared to their government counterparts. When I was working for the Federal government 15 years ago, I was making a base wage of $15-$20 an hour, if I went out on a fire I got $2 an hour hazard pay for the entire day. If I went over 40 hours in a week I then was paid time and a half and anything over 80 was double time and a half. If I got sent out on a fire for a 14-21 day tour I would work 16 hour days for 14-21 days straight and just be raking in the money. My private crew counterparts were making somewhere between $7-$12 dollars an hour and were only getting time and a half over 40 hours.
Source: Spent 10 years as a volunteer structure and wildland firefighter.
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/27/736715592/the-private-firefig...
The Guild of Firefighters had been outlawed by the Patrician the previous year after many complaints. The point was that, if you bought a contract from the Guild, your house would be protected against fire. Unfortunately, the general Ankh-Morpork ethos quickly came to the fore and fire fighters would tend to go to prospective clients’ houses in groups, making loud comments like ‘Very inflammable looking place, this’ and ‘Probably go up like a firework with just one carelessly-dropped match, know what I mean?'
Another thing I struggle with is that we arrest the poor and send them into harms way to protect the wealthy for $1 an hour.
We are rapidly approaching a time of the rich living in protected enclaves and the poor in polluted unsafe neighborhoods policed by forces only intent on keeping the rabble pacified. In New York City, the richest city in the world, 1/10 of public school kids are homeless...
For the record, firefighters per neighborhood could work, but not multiple competing companies. We used to have that here in NYC. Here is a scene from Gangs of New York which is historically accurate and correctly mentions the Bowery Boys and the Municipal Police Riot (two diff sets of police)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DmsB5bcygB4
This, friends, is one of the potential pitfalls of anarcho-capitalist utopia
Apparently a thing already in some parts of the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/world/europe/portugal-wil...
https://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-rights/prisoners-are-get...
Funny how it was just a year ago when the media was having a meltdown over the suggesting of raking away brush.
Tell me again that YCombinator isn't basically a right-wing troll site?
This is what happens when firefighting and house maintenance are in the same interest. The libertarian argument argues for a private interest, but it could very well be turned on its head in favor of a public interest.