I'm subscribed to a Substack from a young guy (Maxim Benjamin Smith) who's skipping college and is doing a whole set of prescribed other options. The Substack is called The Great Man Podcast: A Radical Alternative to College (https://www.greatman.com/). So instead of going to college, he's doing things like getting EMT certified, learning a foreign language, etc.
Here's this week's article: https://www.greatman.com/p/what-i-did-this-week-week-58. He's been doing a stint as an EMT on wilderness fires, currently in Oregon, USA. And the gist of the article is - the whole wilderness firefighting thing seems like a scam to him. Here's a quote:
I’ve got to say it
By tomorrow I will have been on wildland fires for 40 total days this summer. And, I’ve got to say, my perspective of it all has completely changed.
Like clockwork, we see videos of engines with their lights and sirens on driving through raging fires somewhere on the west coast each summer. The public sees that and assumes that there are in fact major crises (sometimes there are) and that everyone working on the fire is putting maximal effort in to contain it.
Well, I’ve only got 40 days on wildfires, but I’ve seen a different side of things.
The first odd thing I noticed was how little fire we were seeing. The map we download show us where the fire is, yet while driving so much around us was green and unburned. As it turns out, the maps as well as the publicly available number of “acres burned” measure the perimeter of the fire, not the area.
The Falls fire, which I was on a month ago, was said to have been 130,000+ acres. Unless I need glasses, I can tell you that just isn’t the truth.
It’s deceiving.
So after that I was thinking, “That seems strange.” And, I began to pay more attention.
Hours upon hours of a shift would go by as people working all kinds of different jobs on the fire would sit around to talk. Hell, the new division supervisor on this fire is looking for people who have Starlinks today so that he can watch football during our shift.
I suppose the fire “threatening the community” isn’t urgent?
It goes on along these lines, and is a really interesting article to read.
I agree with him, that the firefighter "heroes", to whom we're supposed to say "thank you for your service" - have mostly lucked or finagled their way into a big payout for doing very little useful work. If firefighting weren't run by the government, we could probably get away with about a fifth of the firefighters (both wildfire and regular) that we have now.
It also reminds me of an incident from a while back. I was putting a diaper on my kid, turned away for a moment, and when I looked back, saw that he'd eaten some diaper cream. I was pretty sure that it wasn't a big deal, that diaper cream wouldn't be poisonous or anything, but I called poison control anyway. They told me that as long as it wasn't some foreign brand of diaper cream, that it was fine, I shouldn't worry. End of story, I thought.
Ten minutes later, there's a knock on the door. And what do I see but 3 firefighters, in FULL equipment? No kidding. Freaking out, I opened the door, wondering what the heck was going on. I didn't even link it to my previous call to poison control.
And it turns out that they came because I had called poison control. Even though it was a completely benign situation, 3 firefighters came out.
I figured then that they came out because they have SO LITTLE TO DO. And they needed to juice their statistics with fake calls, just so they could claim they're doing something.
Also, if you're trying to set up an event for little kids, just call a fire department and they'll give you a tour of the facilities, allow the kids in the fire trucks, let them try out helmets, etc. They're ALWAYS available.
What are your thoughts? I turned this into a bounty because I know I read an article (or maybe watched a video) many years ago, about how most firefighters don't really do much of anything, we have way too many of them, and about 99% of their calls are false alarms, something along those lines.
So here's the actual bounty: find me some articles (or videos or something) about how we need far fewer firefighters than we actually have, that much of "firefighting" is a make-work scam. I did some initial research, but wasn't able to find anything other than the story about scammers calling people on the phone, pretending to be firefighters, requesting donations. But now I can't find any articles like this anymore. It's probably an unpopular topic.
And also, if you find articles like this, please tell me where and how you searched.
2,500 sats paid
Signal312's bounties
Ten minutes later, there's a knock on the door. And what do I see but 3 firefighters, in FULL equipment?
Emphasis on ten minutes... The main thing firefighters do these days is respond to medical calls. They do this because firefighters have plenty of medical training, and they're often the closest first responders to the scene.
What happened here is poison control wasn't sure if you needed help, so they told the firefighters to show up just in case. Three of them showed up because they weren't busy at that moment, they're getting paid regardless, so they might as well come out.
The reason why those firefighters weren't busy comes down to statistics: if you have enough firefighters to deal with the worst calls, most of the time they're going to have nothing to do. Fires happen randomly, so having enough capacity to deal with the situation 0.1% of the time forces too have lots of extra capacity 99.9% of the time.
Re: the stuff about wildfires, that's a very different type of firefighting, not relevant to firefighters in general. Usually an entirely different group of people with different training and equipment are dealing with wildfires. Don't conflate them.
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How: Searched for fire department on mises.org
At first I asked ChatGPT to give me academic evidence that public sector supplied firefighting services were inefficient compared to private, but it told me that public is better than private 😑
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Nice! Thanks. I should have thought to search specific sites like Mises.org.
You'd think I'd remember, because for a recent comment (#673922), I searched specifically on Substack for statin info. I did this because I knew that lots of skeptical doctors posted on Substack. If I had searched any of the main search engines for that statin-skeptical info, I'll bet it would have been a lot harder to find.
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Yeah when trying to find non mainstream or conservative viewpoints you usually have to search specific sites. The bias is real
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ChatGPT will tell you that feeding everyone is a complex and multifaceted task and best served by the private sector.
Then it will tell you that climate change is a complex and multifaceted task and best handled by the government. Kind of weird?
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I mean, that would be the standard neoliberal econ answer, since food is a private good and the climate is a public good / common pool resource.
Yeah, GPT is like a good undergraduate student who can write well, but is basically parroting mainstream neoliberal viewpoints, without much ability to discuss nuances like how even if you agree that climate is a public good, current climate policy creates all sorts of economic distortions and resource misallocations, based on non-existent or extremely shaky cost benefit analysis
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This is outragous, but a very local problem (Los Angeles). You won't see this figures anywhere else and it's not a well-paid job at all.
But regarding the public-private discussion: Imagine the perverse aspects of having a company in firefighting. That's quite a motivation for arson.
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I don't necessarily disagree, but if I were axing government jobs, firefighters might be last on my list to go.
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Yes. It could be improved for sure, but it's one of the last things to worry about considering governmental malfunction. And we shouldn'tthink the market will perform better than government in all fields, that's just nonsense. Volunteer firefighters who live and work locally are cheaper and know the culture/people of that area. That's a huge plus in comparison with a company who will try to put cheap foreign personnel in those trucks.
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55 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 16 Sep
Not interested in proving your wrong but fire fighting is a service that I suspect would exist without the state/government. It would likely be provided by insurance as that is what it really is. The state just sucks at facilititating everything. I wouldn't call it a scam but the state monopoly on it is obviously gonna hinder its efficiency and effectiveness.
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You're right about it being provided by insurance - my first inkling of this was seeing placards like the below, on old houses, in historic cities.
Here's a wikipedia article on fire insurance marks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_insurance_mark
Fire insurance has over 200 years of history in America. The early fire marks of Benjamin Franklin's time can still be seen on some Philadelphia buildings as well as in other older American cities. Subscribers paid firefighting companies in advance for fire protection and in exchange would receive a fire mark to attach to their building.
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Have a friend and have known several voluteer fire fighters. I have heard some pretty negative stuff about professional firefighting from them. Specifically state employees vs. volunteers from the community. It's the same kind of thing you hear about city cops vs sheriffs.
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My best friend's dad was a fire chief, so I saw these guys up close for years. Pretty much everyday was just them hanging out at the station, grilling and shooting hoops, while making crazy money. We're talking $300k+, way back when I was a kid.
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The part time volunteer fireworkers make bank. They would be paid, and would jave a nice retirement packaged based on how long they were there.
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Its part time, not full time. And they make bank on the holidays and trainings. And going out to the fires, and the benefits that come with. Oh, you are from wisconsin?
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Yeah you can make that much at Macdonalds, lol.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Golu 17 Sep
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 17 Sep
If you're cool with scrapping 80%-ish of a country's firefighters, you should take a moment and think about redundancy; Simply having "enough" firefighters for most common situation's simply not gonna cut it.
Also, they're not only putting out fires, but also key in helping with floods, breaking people out of cars, supplying (basic) medical care, and other small incidents à la "cat on a tree".
TL;DR: Reducing the number of firefighters is most likely a dumb idea, and should be one of the last points on your list.
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Firefighter here.
Firefighting is something from the community and/or for the community.
Letting the market do the firefighting will make it MORE expensive and give perverse mechanisms (setting something on fire will generate revenue). Nothing cheaper than volunteer firefighters and NO they don't nearly get paid so much as I have seen in the reactions. Also letting the insurance do it is a conflict of interest, as letting something burn down completely might be cheaper for them than needing to pay for renovation of something half burned.
Professional firefighters are totally different than volunteer firefighters. The myth of waiting for a fire during the 24hour shift is correct, but that's changing in the last years as well. The point of letting civilians enter the fire house and having time to put kids in a fire truck for a photo is 'net positive' for society imo.
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Haha funny fact. This is actually a argument for a public fire department instead of private department.
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Funny thing, my wife's Korean friend's husband, American soldier, is deployed in Italia right now, as a firefighter. He's old and slow. He never had to take out a fire, even less in Europe. Yet, he's being paid a lot to be there. The American industrial military complex truly has a lot of money to spend to send firefighters to Europe.
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I used to think that firefighters would save a home in case of a fire. But then i watched some firefighting and it seems in most cases they will destroy it :)
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What I see is an anecdote from a wildfire firefighter who conjured a narrative reflective of what we hope most firefighters’ jobs are — waiting for nothing.
Moreover, as others have mentioned, firefighting as a full time job is the same as military, search & rescue, etc.: training. Why? Because it’s super dangerous and people don’t want their children/spouses/parents to take a job that gets their loved one killed.
If we want to defund the fire department like others want to defund the police, we have to take the same approach as the ladder: a heavy investment and focus on prevention related to the systemic issues that cause fires. And much like the ladder “defund the police” thing, it would get super political and polarized faster than a spark burning down a warehouse full of fireworks, sawdust, and crisco lard.
I have family who did wildfire fighting in the private sector and yeah, a big part of the job is waiting. The other part is largely not being anywhere close to the fire. It is digging a fireline, getting the fuck outta there, and hoping to god the wind doesnt carry too many big cinders across it to negate that laborious effort.
If you are surrounded by flames immediately around you as a wildfire fighter, you are less likely to be “firefighting” and more likely to at the stage of your job where search and rescue is retrieving your cinders for your family to bury.
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I've seen firefighters put out fires. So..... silly discussion this.
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I believe you without reading the post.
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