Comment by abathur | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abathur | Hacker News Reader

I've seen similar variants of this headline floating around, so I don't want to over-blame this Fox outlet for something that's just in the water by this point (I don't recall if they were all on Fox-family outlets, but probably not). That said, the headline seems pretty manipulative...

> 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

Another suggestion for a non-clickbaity title:

  Insurance Companies do Preventative Maintenance on High-Value Assets

But yes, this feels like ... class-baiting or something. This headline is everywhere, made to rile up folk for.... what?

For page views & engagement. The same reason YouTube has been promoting anti-vacination, flat earth, and extremism videos to passive users.

> This headline is everywhere, made to rile up folk for.... what?

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.

You really think this headline is engineered for people to click because they're outraged, not because they agree?

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.

>You really think this headline is engineered for people to click because they're outraged, not because they agree?

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.

Wake me when the tax code and justice system is blind to class.

Some people consider that, when the rich are hiring a duplicate of a public service, it proves the public service is not fit for purpose.

I think I agree, but I don't see that as an indictment on the system or the folks doing supplemental hiring. Plenty of people have home security systems, or if you're rich/important enough, hire a bodyguard or private security. That doesn't mean the police isn't fit for service, it just means that the police have to care about everyone, and sometimes your personal risk profile is different than the average of everyone.

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.

But it would be even better for everyone if the well-off person spent those resources on additional public fire fighters. Maybe a new (closer) fire station, better trucks, more full-time fighters to staff it, etc. Work with the local government to help keep it going after an initial cash infusion.

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.

Potentially, but just because people aren't doing the 100% most altruistic thing all the time doesn't mean they should be shamed for doing something that seems, at worst, neutral to everyone else.

"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.

It's not the most altruistic thing. If the problem is that their new expensive house has inadequate firefighter coverage, helping fund a closer one is very much in their interest. Having the locals fund it after you've helped get it off the ground and the charitable write-offs you could probably get aren't either.

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 disagree. If my house is in danger, I’m going to protect it, no the whole town. I already pay taxes for the town’s coverage but I cannot support everyone.

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.

But you could put in/donate millions of dollars into your local fire station, and there is still no guarantee that they will come and save your house when it's on fire, because maybe someone else needed help first so they are all occupied. You could buy another 20 firetrucks and the problem still could happen. Sure, it's a great thing to do for the community, but from a personal point of view, I'd like to have both a functional public service and a guarantee that there are people on standby to help me in a fire(I mean, how is that different than a home alarm, which I am sure many of us not-so-rich people have? When the alarm triggers, the security company sends someone over to have a look before calling the police, so in a way you are already replacing public service with a private one for your own benefit)

It would be far, far better if every able-bodied person performed basic fire prevention mitigation on their property. It would be far better for those replacing their roofs to use fire-rate shingles, or for county/city codes to mandate improvements. The well-off can pay someone to do that, and can afford to live in environments where the new normal is >75 mph winds.

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.

Building codes have already made it so safe for the masses that fire departments often have a tough time justifying their own existence.

Everyone is already doing basic mitigation unless they are breaking the law.

The federal appellate has ruled [0] that the police do not have a duty to protect anyone in particular. SCotUS ruled in similar cases [1] [2] that cops just don't have to lift a single finger if it would save your life.

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

If the purpose is "protect homes built in wildfire prone natural areas", the public service shouldn't exist, so there you go.

You're being downvoted, presumably by the people who think that the onus of providing firefighting services to, say, a five-million-dollar residence in east San Diego county situated on ten acres of combustable chapparal should be bourne equally by urban apartment dwellers.

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.

This was my first thought :P

Can you imagine the outrage if public money was used for preventative maintenance of expensive homes?

It's worse than that. When the wealthy take their money to private rather than public institutions they de-value the public institutions — begin to question why their tax money should pay for them at all.

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....

...? How?

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.

> Some people consider that, when the rich are hiring a duplicate of a public service, it proves the public service is not fit for purpose.

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).

Fire protection, schools, healthcare, they are all specific cases of the general issue that wealthy people are... wealthier than poor people, which some people find unfair. That's a valid and complex debate (capitalism, communism, socialism, social democracy, progressive taxation, inheritance tax, etc) but it's annoying to slog through every specific applied case that doesn't add anything to the overall analysis.

The rich are not directly paying for this, but insurance companies are focusing on high value assets protected by high cost insurance. Similarly, the kind of homeowners associations that can pay for this is found in expensive communities. So, these firefighters are largely working for the wealthy by protecting their assets.

That’s more in depth reporting than I am used to.

I don’t even read Bloomberg and NYT links anymore, just head straight to the discussion and see if this is something I need to get bothered about.

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