27 ms·

Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

379 points by zinekeller 4y ago

cratermoon 4y ago
An interesting analysis of the outcomes of free market forces at work.
alexandargyurov 4y ago
Video: I was wrong (and so was everyone) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wif1EAgEQKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wif1EAgEQKI
psychphysic 4y ago
I'll need to update my local yours for when people visit me in London.
nerdponx 4y ago
I didn't realize this was even an assertion that people made at all. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. People at the time must have known that fires in cities were extremely dangerous because they could spread over a great area. It's logical that insurers would want to work together to prevent all fires, purely out of self-interest to protect their insured properties, and then sue the pants off negligent and/or uninsured property owners after each near-miss. The paper in TFA says as much, but it's weird to me that people would uncritically accept the proposed narrative in the first place.
- pifm_guy 4y ago
  But then what is the incentive for anyone to get coverage if they know that any fires will be put out regardless...? Unless the fire service is paired with insurance covering the cost of a rebuild? But I don't think the original fire services offered that.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    It's similar to how hospitals are required to save you if you are dying but at the same time you are still on the hook for any and all costs incurred
    - pifm_guy 4y ago
      It could be... But were the laws that way in 17th century England? I suspect not, because property ownership in England used to be secret - ie. Even the government may not have known who owned land. And if you don't know who owns it, who must pay the bill?
  - constantcrying 4y ago
    There are rational reasons to reduce risk, even if it isn't some game theoretic optimum. One can easily imagine that certain owners either were concerned about an increased risk of fire or high damages in such an event and we're willing to bear the costs. The incentives are very clear, if nobody does it, no fire brigades will exist. (I can also imagine other reasons, e g. membership might have been required by some law or by association.) And in the end every fire which is extinguished is a fire which didn't spread. Just some little aside, today there are people who do firefighting for free. What are the incentives for that?
  - alex028502 4y ago
    > Furthermore, only buildings were insured – neither their contents, nor the lives of their occupants, were covered. Yeah it sounds to me from the article like the insurance was for the rebuild, and the firefighting was something the insurance company did to reduce their payouts. So I imagine if you didn't have insurance, you still were at more risk than if you did, similar to now, because the fire dept isn't going to save everything every time.
  - ars 4y ago
    > But then what is the incentive for anyone to get coverage if they know that any fires will be put out regardless...? The coverage is apparently to pay for damages. It's not fire insurance, it's property insurance, in case of fire.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    It is covered in the article; the free-rider problem was a problem, in London eventually the fire-brigades appear to have basically convinced the city to buy them because they couldn’t solve it.
- sircastor 4y ago
  > The paper in TFA says as much, but it's weird to me that people would uncritically accept the proposed narrative in the first place. That's the point though. In spite of the logical and practical evaluation, there was evidence from multiple, trusted sources that said otherwise. And history is full of people doing dumb things and making bad decisions, so why not this one too? Also, it's self-affirming - "Look at us! We've got problems, but at least we know well enough to fight fires when there is one, despite money problems"
- michaelt 4y ago
  > It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Consider the following: * The first Fire Brigade, in Rome, was established by someone who would insist on buying your building before extinguishing the fire [1] * In the present day, you can live in an unincorporated area, decline fire protection offers from the county and from your insurer, and the fire brigade won't come out if you have a fire [2] * The article provides 11 different sources for the apparently incorrect claim London's insurance fire brigades circa-1700 let uninsured buildings burn. Personally I find it quite easy to understand why people might believe the incorrect claim. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus#Rise_to_power_and_wealth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus#Rise_t... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39516346 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39516346
  - Retric 4y ago
    The Rome thing may or may not be true. It’s quite possible it is true, but we are a long way from any direct evidence that it was generally the case.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Half the things we know about famous Romans come from writings that were attacking or making fun of them, and some are pretty clearly satire or jokes.
leetrout 4y ago
And here we are in modern times where we do, indeed, let buildings burn. > No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn > Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39516346 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39516346
- yardie 4y ago
  This story still makes the rounds, and the result is still the same. The family chose to live in unincorporated land. They turned down fire protection when the county offered it to them. They turned down fire protection when their insurer offered it to them. The fire department did what was required to save lives. Insurance can take care of the rest...oh, that's right.
  - gambiting 4y ago
    Hmmmm. I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or pay taxes or whatever. I'm not sure I want the same "protect at all costs" attitude extended to buildings, but fire can definitely spread and even if they don't care about your property they might care about other places.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > fire can definitely spread and even if they don't care about your property they might care about other places They protected the neighbouring property.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      > Hmmmm. I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or pay taxes or whatever. ERs in the US are required to provide stabilizing care to patients who come in, even if the patient can't pay, by law. It's a law because otherwise some of them wouldn't.
monkmartinez 4y ago
How times change!!! We are the defacto fire and medical insurance providers in metropolitan areas that employ/staff fire and EMS departments. Funded by property or sales tax, we have become the primary care providers for thousands of people in our cities. We also get called for water leaks, hazardous spills, vehicle accidents, construction mishaps, swift water rescues, hiker rescues, venomous snake removal, bee attacks and dangerous hive removal, roof collapses, natural gas leaks, stubbed toes, fentanyl abuse, mental health emergencies, gun fights, knife fights, cooking fires, refrigerant leaks, trench collapse, people and things stuck in very high places, flash floods, electrical problems and much much more...
jtlienwis 4y ago
Maritime Law had a provision for salvors that saved ships in distress from sinking. If a salvor saved a ship from sinking, they were entitled to a percentage of the worth of a ship. Maybe terrestrial law needs something similar in the case of uninsured building on fire.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  We probably have better financial structures in 2022 than that, like insurance (or taxes that fund professional firefighting, like NYC). Besides: it isn't clear we should incentivize untrained professionals to run into burning buildings. Ships are somewhat unique in that the people who are saving you are also sailors, and are presumably at least minimally qualified to help another ship in distress.
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    There's no reason you can't limit the reward to registered groups (ex: existing fire departments).
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  I actually think this makes the most sense. At least in the US - most areas assess the value of the structure and the value of the land separately. I'd be in favor of providing a lien on the existing title in the amount of the structure's value (or some relatively high percentage of it, maybe depending on how much is salvaged by the firefighters) if the fire department puts out an uninsured building. There's no reason to let it burn - it's a waste of resources, big source of pollutants, and a risk to neighboring areas. But I also think you can't reward property owners for taking a gamble that their property won't catch on fire.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Or, god forbid, protect the general welfare of the population of Yahoo County by having a fire service? The government has the ability to tax for such services. As a partner who own a piece of a rental property in a ex-urban town, the volunteer fire company levies a tax that amounts to $300/year (based on valuation) which covers 2-3 towns with fire, ems and paramedic services.
legitster 4y ago
This reminds me of when I learned there was no such thing as "The Children's Crusade". As my history professor put it, "going to the Holy Land was an incredibly expensive endeavour reserved for a very few. There's no way anyone was going to waste it on young, inexperienced children". Nearly every source we had saying that the crusade involved children came much later, after a few writers referred to the same source with a mistranslation (think reading "me and the boys" as referring to actual children). But people spent 500 years discussing the horrors of the children's crusade without ever really questioning if it happened.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Wouldn’t children be useful in terms of doing a bunch of tasks that aren’t worth the time of your soldiers? Ie what was the age of the squires for the soldiers?
  - legitster 4y ago
    Sure, but to that extent the "children" that would have been sent would have been considered normal working age. Funnily enough, the word "infantry" comes from the same word as "infant". IE, the young guys on the battle field.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    A squire would generally be between the ages of 14 to 21. A pre-teen boy wouldn't be useful for the core duties of a squire because of a lack of strength for the physical labor involved in handling arms, armor and horses.
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      Prior to the modern era, the Royal Navy and others had boys sometimes 12 or younger on ships as servants, sometimes (those boys with higher ranks) being trained to be officers. The age for this sort of thing was gradually raised with time, but even during WW2 there were still minors serving on combat vessels. 134 boy seamen died when the HMS Royal Oak was sunk in 1939.
for_i_in_range 4y ago
"Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome." —Charlie Munger
bluedino 4y ago
We have a ~$200 fee for trash pickup in our municipality. You get the bill every year. If you don't pay it, a 10% penalty is added. The next step, a lien is placed on the property. They never stop picking up the trash, though. The next purchaser of your property has to pay the existing trash bill! This same council raised water rates so they could reduce the penalties for late water bill payments.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  Why is trash pickup not bundled with property taxes? It's seems ridiculous to charge for it separately when every occupied home will generate a similar amount of trash.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Sometimes there's other restrictions. For example, - In some states there's a cap on property tax increases. So the moving to a fee-model takes it off the tax levy by making it a user fee. - Bundling trash services with the tax levy is inequitable in that commercial properties are subsidizing services they do not use. A 20 unit apartment building usually has to use a private hauler, for example. - Some places try to setup consumption based models, where you pay per occupancy unit or even by the bag.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Why should it be part of taxes at all? I've lived in places with city trash pickup, and places where you choose your own private company to get your trash (in the later some cheap people just drove their trash to the dump every couple months). The costs were about the same in the best case so long as the private people shopped around, and in the worst cases the city didn't shop around and so costs were a lot more.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
hristov 4y ago
Sorry but I do not believe this. The paper rings a lot of alarm bells. It provides very little evidence for the actual thesis it is trying to prove and provides ample evidence that seem related to the thesis it is trying to prove but in fact it does nothing to prove it. Thus, the paper provides plenty of evidence that insurance companies helped each other to fight fires at sites insured by their fellow insurance companies, and then subsequently reimbursed each other for these efforts, but that of course has no bearing on what the paper is trying to prove. Usually commonly held widely believed oral histories emerge for a good reason. So if it was commonly believed that insurance companies let un-insured buildings burn, then it is likely to be true at least part of the time. Also, lets look at the source -- he is an "archive and heritage consultant", i.e. someone that solicits money for his research. Is he getting paid for this article? Is he writing this in the hopes that he will advertise his services for insurance companies?
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  He was paid for the paper by Tom Scott, the video essayist. There's an accompanying video at https://youtu.be/Wif1EAgEQKI https://youtu.be/Wif1EAgEQKI
- stickfigure 4y ago
  There's a significant percentage of people (even here on HN) that believes "Facebook sold personal information to Cambridge Analytica and they used this information to win the election for Trump". My prior is that people repeat good stories somewhat independently of their truth value. Older stories that are hard to verify are more suspect. I think we should default to skepticism.
  - turtledragonfly 4y ago
    I'll bite — so what did happen with Cambridge Analytica? As far as I can tell[1], the only thing wrong with what you said is "Facebook sold...", where in reality, the data was surreptitiously gathered. Or are you referring to something else? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
turtledragonfly 4y ago
I feel like people might read this (or just the headline) and take away a message like "aha, so for-profit fire companies actually worked just fine!" As far as I know, there are still plenty of examples of that model failing hideously in various ways (eg: [1][2], and many examples of unproductive competition from TFA itself). This article is specifically about firefighting in London, in a certain time period — notably starting after the Great Fire, when presumably those dangers were fresh in people's minds. And also, to its credit, I think the article leaves the question pretty muddy and un-answered. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus#Rise_to_power_and_wealth [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Tweed#Early_career
- bee_rider 4y ago
  It also ends with the fire brigades basically asking the city to take over because they couldn’t solve the free-rider problem, so anyone who thinks of it as an example of the free market system working clearly didn’t read far enough.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Clearly, the fundamental argument here is about private provision of services vs. public provision of services. Is the optimal fire protection service one based on private subscriber payment to firefighters or a publicly (taxpayer or other government revenue-funded) operated fire department? The best IMO way to view this is to first clarify whether or not that service falls into the 'natural monopoly' category, at least when it comes to basic provision of services. That category is defined by having a lack of meaningful or feasible competition, i.e. would multiple competing services result in a better outcome than a single state-run service would? My view is that provision of fire and police services, health care and education services, water, electricity and fiber optic connectivity service, as well as the maintenance of roads, etc. generally fall into the natural monopoly sector, with caveats: 1) People should be able to augment basic services however they wish, to they extent they can afford. One can purchase a fire engine and a water tank and keep it on one's property, for example. Private security guards can be hired to augment police protection. One can hire a home nurse and expensive medical equipment, etc. Private tutors can be hired to augment a child's education. 2) State-run services should have competitive processes built in - i.e. we may have a public fire department, but the manufacture and sale of fire-fighting equipment is a competitive business and should not be monopolized, etc. Corruption in the form of fire officials giving preferential contracts to sub-par manufacturers in exchange for bribes should be a serious criminal activity, etc.
- jasonhansel 4y ago
  > People should be able to augment basic services however they wish, to they extent they can afford. Here's the problem with such schemes. Often both the providers and the customers of "augmenting services" will have an incentive to hollow out the state-provided service until it's substandard. For instance, let's say the government provides "basic" health insurance but allows private plans. Then the providers of private plans will lobby the government to keep the "basic" service as low-quality as possible, so that people are incentivized to buy the private plans. Furthermore, those who purchase private plans will not personally benefit much from the state-provided scheme, so they will have little interest in its success and little desire to subsidize it. In the worst case, the result is that the state-run service becomes permanently low-quality. Then people attribute this to public-sector inefficiency and say that "obviously" the free market would do a better job. Then the state-provided service gets abolished when it never had a chance to succeed.
at_a_remove 4y ago
Other situations exist in which firefighters don't kill themselves (quite literally) over it. Take fast food joints. First, they're notorious for not cleaning their grease traps, but second, many are self-insured. More interestingly, the fast-food companies tend to scrap a building that has had a fire, have it scraped down to the concrete pad, and build again. Source: was just talking with a fire chief about this.
modernerd 4y ago
“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?’” -- Terry Pratchett: Guards! Guards!
- masklinn 4y ago
  This is likely more directly inspired by Marcus Licinius Crassus: > The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus. Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus 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 firefighters 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.
- db48x 4y ago
  Twoflower the tourist telling people about in-sewer-ants was also pretty funny.
- nnadams 4y ago
  A great example of the confusing reality that the words "inflammable" and "flammable" mean the exact same thing.
RunSet 4y ago
I once heard some Lenny Bruce standup that gave me the impression that firemen were generally considered opportunistic thieves at the time of the material's delivery, independent of its punchline.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
Even with this information included. I think the moral of the story is America has some very serious third-world problems. The reason things like this go on in America and not in any other developed country is that Americans just accept it. "They didn't pay, so they die." Here is how much they accept it, firefighters literally stood and watched a building burn down instead of playing with their toys. Not only that, the fire department refused to accept money to put it out. This whole "unincorporated land" execuse is a sad state of affairs. The whole "You're not with us, so it's not our problem" mindset is really why America is so low down on every single ranking in the world, except for military might. It seems like a constant battle to make sure you're doing ok at the expense of others. School kids getting shot? It's ok, I can still have my gun. Unarmed people getting shot by police? It's ok, they haven't shot me. Corrupt police officer hired a town over? It's ok, he's their problem now. People dying because they can't afford to visit a doctor? That's ok, I can. Instead of grouping together the US has decided to constantly separate it self among itself. Other countries have orginisations that deal with entire areas. The US each town has to have it's own. It results in a lower quality of service. Not every town can afford x,y,z fire equipment that is only going to be used once a month but an biradge that deals with 10 towns and would be using it two times a week can. The thing is, the solution to most of the US' problems aren't hard. They're already figured out by everyone else. We all just have to put up with hearing about the craziness that comes from the country that thinks it's great while their ass is on fire.
- cies 4y ago
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    Right, that's why our elections always come down to a 50.001% majority, because if you let the majorities be bigger it's more expensive to turn them into a minority when they turn against you.
    - cies 4y ago
      Yes, just a small nuance: > always come down to a 50.001% majority It's not a person-vote-majority, but some sort of aggregate. Due to the aggregation scheme it becomes even easier to manipulate/game with "key counties" and "key states". A party does not even need to convince the general population anymore, but just focus on a tiny fraction.
pessimizer 4y ago
This seems like an interesting short survey of London firefighting history, but I'm missing the debunking people are remarking about. The only thing that slightly resembles debunking is that in the conclusion the idea that fire brigades ever let houses burn is referred to in passing as a "legend." In regard to the legend - I don't think that anyone ever said that fire brigades would refuse to put out uninsured buildings where the fire might spread to other buildings, that fire brigades couldn't be induced by cash to put out the fires of the uninsured, or that cities never offered baseline inducements for fire brigades to put out fires whether the buildings were insured or not. That would be adding content to the "legend" in order to debunk it. Looking at the record and finding out that all of these things happened is expected and unremarkable. The fires that we would expect not to be put out if the "legend" were accurate would be fires that happened to uninsured buildings that didn't endanger nearby structures, buildings owned by people who didn't have enough cash or credit to convince an uncontracted fire brigade to act, that were close enough to the city to be accessible to a fire brigade yet far enough away that the city didn't feel responsible for them. Additionally, the chance that a building owner might simply pay (under flaming duress) a brigade that showed up would mean that they probably generally would show up, and if they weren't ever willing to watch a building burn, they'd be undercutting their own last minute deals. These are the exactly the fires that we would expect not to be in the record. Fires in detached structures, owned by people with no money. It seems that the city started rewarding brigades for putting out fires in uninsured households based on the order in which they arrived. Additionally, they were consolidating/federating in order to take on larger contracts - which incidentally meant [original scholarship] that the consolidated/federated brigades would always get the first arrival bonus through this collusion. As the number of independent brigades dwindled and the socialist city reward money became large enough that the actual insurance element receded to only being profitable for large contracts rather than individual homes, the consolidated block of fire brigades organized their own nationalization.
yreg 4y ago
Reminds me strongly of CGP Grey was wrong[0]. Although he has obsessed about his mistake for a lot longer than 2 weeks IIRC. [0] – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua4QMFQATco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua4QMFQATco
fragmede 4y ago
Tom Scott also published a YouTube apology video on this https://youtu.be/Wif1EAgEQKI https://youtu.be/Wif1EAgEQKI
CSMastermind 4y ago
Can we just appreciate that Tom took his videos so seriously that he hired a researcher to investigate when one of his sources turned out not to be true.
harriet1 4y ago
[dead]

379 points by zinekeller 4y ago

An interesting analysis of the outcomes of free market forces at work.

Video: I was wrong (and so was everyone) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wif1EAgEQKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wif1EAgEQKI

psychphysic 4y ago

I'll need to update my local yours for when people visit me in London.

nerdponx 4y ago

I didn't realize this was even an assertion that people made at all. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. People at the time must have known that fires in cities were extremely dangerous because they could spread over a great area. It's logical that insurers would want to work together to prevent all fires, purely out of self-interest to protect their insured properties, and then sue the pants off negligent and/or uninsured property owners after each near-miss. The paper in TFA says as much, but it's weird to me that people would uncritically accept the proposed narrative in the first place.

pifm_guy 4y ago
But then what is the incentive for anyone to get coverage if they know that any fires will be put out regardless...? Unless the fire service is paired with insurance covering the cost of a rebuild? But I don't think the original fire services offered that.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  It's similar to how hospitals are required to save you if you are dying but at the same time you are still on the hook for any and all costs incurred
  - pifm_guy 4y ago
    It could be... But were the laws that way in 17th century England? I suspect not, because property ownership in England used to be secret - ie. Even the government may not have known who owned land. And if you don't know who owns it, who must pay the bill?
- constantcrying 4y ago
  There are rational reasons to reduce risk, even if it isn't some game theoretic optimum. One can easily imagine that certain owners either were concerned about an increased risk of fire or high damages in such an event and we're willing to bear the costs. The incentives are very clear, if nobody does it, no fire brigades will exist. (I can also imagine other reasons, e g. membership might have been required by some law or by association.) And in the end every fire which is extinguished is a fire which didn't spread. Just some little aside, today there are people who do firefighting for free. What are the incentives for that?
- alex028502 4y ago
  > Furthermore, only buildings were insured – neither their contents, nor the lives of their occupants, were covered. Yeah it sounds to me from the article like the insurance was for the rebuild, and the firefighting was something the insurance company did to reduce their payouts. So I imagine if you didn't have insurance, you still were at more risk than if you did, similar to now, because the fire dept isn't going to save everything every time.
- ars 4y ago
  > But then what is the incentive for anyone to get coverage if they know that any fires will be put out regardless...? The coverage is apparently to pay for damages. It's not fire insurance, it's property insurance, in case of fire.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  It is covered in the article; the free-rider problem was a problem, in London eventually the fire-brigades appear to have basically convinced the city to buy them because they couldn’t solve it.
sircastor 4y ago
> The paper in TFA says as much, but it's weird to me that people would uncritically accept the proposed narrative in the first place. That's the point though. In spite of the logical and practical evaluation, there was evidence from multiple, trusted sources that said otherwise. And history is full of people doing dumb things and making bad decisions, so why not this one too? Also, it's self-affirming - "Look at us! We've got problems, but at least we know well enough to fight fires when there is one, despite money problems"
michaelt 4y ago
> It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Consider the following: * The first Fire Brigade, in Rome, was established by someone who would insist on buying your building before extinguishing the fire [1] * In the present day, you can live in an unincorporated area, decline fire protection offers from the county and from your insurer, and the fire brigade won't come out if you have a fire [2] * The article provides 11 different sources for the apparently incorrect claim London's insurance fire brigades circa-1700 let uninsured buildings burn. Personally I find it quite easy to understand why people might believe the incorrect claim. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus#Rise_to_power_and_wealth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus#Rise_t... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39516346 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39516346
- Retric 4y ago
  The Rome thing may or may not be true. It’s quite possible it is true, but we are a long way from any direct evidence that it was generally the case.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Half the things we know about famous Romans come from writings that were attacking or making fun of them, and some are pretty clearly satire or jokes.

leetrout 4y ago

And here we are in modern times where we do, indeed, let buildings burn. > No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn > Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39516346 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39516346

yardie 4y ago
This story still makes the rounds, and the result is still the same. The family chose to live in unincorporated land. They turned down fire protection when the county offered it to them. They turned down fire protection when their insurer offered it to them. The fire department did what was required to save lives. Insurance can take care of the rest...oh, that's right.
- gambiting 4y ago
  Hmmmm. I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or pay taxes or whatever. I'm not sure I want the same "protect at all costs" attitude extended to buildings, but fire can definitely spread and even if they don't care about your property they might care about other places.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > fire can definitely spread and even if they don't care about your property they might care about other places They protected the neighbouring property.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > Hmmmm. I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or pay taxes or whatever. ERs in the US are required to provide stabilizing care to patients who come in, even if the patient can't pay, by law. It's a law because otherwise some of them wouldn't.

monkmartinez 4y ago

How times change!!! We are the defacto fire and medical insurance providers in metropolitan areas that employ/staff fire and EMS departments. Funded by property or sales tax, we have become the primary care providers for thousands of people in our cities. We also get called for water leaks, hazardous spills, vehicle accidents, construction mishaps, swift water rescues, hiker rescues, venomous snake removal, bee attacks and dangerous hive removal, roof collapses, natural gas leaks, stubbed toes, fentanyl abuse, mental health emergencies, gun fights, knife fights, cooking fires, refrigerant leaks, trench collapse, people and things stuck in very high places, flash floods, electrical problems and much much more...

jtlienwis 4y ago

Maritime Law had a provision for salvors that saved ships in distress from sinking. If a salvor saved a ship from sinking, they were entitled to a percentage of the worth of a ship. Maybe terrestrial law needs something similar in the case of uninsured building on fire.

woodruffw 4y ago
We probably have better financial structures in 2022 than that, like insurance (or taxes that fund professional firefighting, like NYC). Besides: it isn't clear we should incentivize untrained professionals to run into burning buildings. Ships are somewhat unique in that the people who are saving you are also sailors, and are presumably at least minimally qualified to help another ship in distress.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  There's no reason you can't limit the reward to registered groups (ex: existing fire departments).
horsawlarway 4y ago
I actually think this makes the most sense. At least in the US - most areas assess the value of the structure and the value of the land separately. I'd be in favor of providing a lien on the existing title in the amount of the structure's value (or some relatively high percentage of it, maybe depending on how much is salvaged by the firefighters) if the fire department puts out an uninsured building. There's no reason to let it burn - it's a waste of resources, big source of pollutants, and a risk to neighboring areas. But I also think you can't reward property owners for taking a gamble that their property won't catch on fire.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Or, god forbid, protect the general welfare of the population of Yahoo County by having a fire service? The government has the ability to tax for such services. As a partner who own a piece of a rental property in a ex-urban town, the volunteer fire company levies a tax that amounts to $300/year (based on valuation) which covers 2-3 towns with fire, ems and paramedic services.

legitster 4y ago

This reminds me of when I learned there was no such thing as "The Children's Crusade". As my history professor put it, "going to the Holy Land was an incredibly expensive endeavour reserved for a very few. There's no way anyone was going to waste it on young, inexperienced children". Nearly every source we had saying that the crusade involved children came much later, after a few writers referred to the same source with a mistranslation (think reading "me and the boys" as referring to actual children). But people spent 500 years discussing the horrors of the children's crusade without ever really questioning if it happened.

vlovich123 4y ago
Wouldn’t children be useful in terms of doing a bunch of tasks that aren’t worth the time of your soldiers? Ie what was the age of the squires for the soldiers?
- legitster 4y ago
  Sure, but to that extent the "children" that would have been sent would have been considered normal working age. Funnily enough, the word "infantry" comes from the same word as "infant". IE, the young guys on the battle field.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  A squire would generally be between the ages of 14 to 21. A pre-teen boy wouldn't be useful for the core duties of a squire because of a lack of strength for the physical labor involved in handling arms, armor and horses.
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    Prior to the modern era, the Royal Navy and others had boys sometimes 12 or younger on ships as servants, sometimes (those boys with higher ranks) being trained to be officers. The age for this sort of thing was gradually raised with time, but even during WW2 there were still minors serving on combat vessels. 134 boy seamen died when the HMS Royal Oak was sunk in 1939.

for_i_in_range 4y ago

"Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome." —Charlie Munger

bluedino 4y ago

We have a ~$200 fee for trash pickup in our municipality. You get the bill every year. If you don't pay it, a 10% penalty is added. The next step, a lien is placed on the property. They never stop picking up the trash, though. The next purchaser of your property has to pay the existing trash bill! This same council raised water rates so they could reduce the penalties for late water bill payments.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
Why is trash pickup not bundled with property taxes? It's seems ridiculous to charge for it separately when every occupied home will generate a similar amount of trash.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Sometimes there's other restrictions. For example, - In some states there's a cap on property tax increases. So the moving to a fee-model takes it off the tax levy by making it a user fee. - Bundling trash services with the tax levy is inequitable in that commercial properties are subsidizing services they do not use. A 20 unit apartment building usually has to use a private hauler, for example. - Some places try to setup consumption based models, where you pay per occupancy unit or even by the bag.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Why should it be part of taxes at all? I've lived in places with city trash pickup, and places where you choose your own private company to get your trash (in the later some cheap people just drove their trash to the dump every couple months). The costs were about the same in the best case so long as the private people shopped around, and in the worst cases the city didn't shop around and so costs were a lot more.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago

hristov 4y ago

Sorry but I do not believe this. The paper rings a lot of alarm bells. It provides very little evidence for the actual thesis it is trying to prove and provides ample evidence that seem related to the thesis it is trying to prove but in fact it does nothing to prove it. Thus, the paper provides plenty of evidence that insurance companies helped each other to fight fires at sites insured by their fellow insurance companies, and then subsequently reimbursed each other for these efforts, but that of course has no bearing on what the paper is trying to prove. Usually commonly held widely believed oral histories emerge for a good reason. So if it was commonly believed that insurance companies let un-insured buildings burn, then it is likely to be true at least part of the time. Also, lets look at the source -- he is an "archive and heritage consultant", i.e. someone that solicits money for his research. Is he getting paid for this article? Is he writing this in the hopes that he will advertise his services for insurance companies?

frosted-flakes 4y ago
He was paid for the paper by Tom Scott, the video essayist. There's an accompanying video at https://youtu.be/Wif1EAgEQKI https://youtu.be/Wif1EAgEQKI
stickfigure 4y ago
There's a significant percentage of people (even here on HN) that believes "Facebook sold personal information to Cambridge Analytica and they used this information to win the election for Trump". My prior is that people repeat good stories somewhat independently of their truth value. Older stories that are hard to verify are more suspect. I think we should default to skepticism.
- turtledragonfly 4y ago
  I'll bite — so what did happen with Cambridge Analytica? As far as I can tell[1], the only thing wrong with what you said is "Facebook sold...", where in reality, the data was surreptitiously gathered. Or are you referring to something else? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

turtledragonfly 4y ago

I feel like people might read this (or just the headline) and take away a message like "aha, so for-profit fire companies actually worked just fine!" As far as I know, there are still plenty of examples of that model failing hideously in various ways (eg: [1][2], and many examples of unproductive competition from TFA itself). This article is specifically about firefighting in London, in a certain time period — notably starting after the Great Fire, when presumably those dangers were fresh in people's minds. And also, to its credit, I think the article leaves the question pretty muddy and un-answered. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus#Rise_to_power_and_wealth [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Tweed#Early_career

bee_rider 4y ago
It also ends with the fire brigades basically asking the city to take over because they couldn’t solve the free-rider problem, so anyone who thinks of it as an example of the free market system working clearly didn’t read far enough.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Clearly, the fundamental argument here is about private provision of services vs. public provision of services. Is the optimal fire protection service one based on private subscriber payment to firefighters or a publicly (taxpayer or other government revenue-funded) operated fire department? The best IMO way to view this is to first clarify whether or not that service falls into the 'natural monopoly' category, at least when it comes to basic provision of services. That category is defined by having a lack of meaningful or feasible competition, i.e. would multiple competing services result in a better outcome than a single state-run service would? My view is that provision of fire and police services, health care and education services, water, electricity and fiber optic connectivity service, as well as the maintenance of roads, etc. generally fall into the natural monopoly sector, with caveats: 1) People should be able to augment basic services however they wish, to they extent they can afford. One can purchase a fire engine and a water tank and keep it on one's property, for example. Private security guards can be hired to augment police protection. One can hire a home nurse and expensive medical equipment, etc. Private tutors can be hired to augment a child's education. 2) State-run services should have competitive processes built in - i.e. we may have a public fire department, but the manufacture and sale of fire-fighting equipment is a competitive business and should not be monopolized, etc. Corruption in the form of fire officials giving preferential contracts to sub-par manufacturers in exchange for bribes should be a serious criminal activity, etc.

jasonhansel 4y ago
> People should be able to augment basic services however they wish, to they extent they can afford. Here's the problem with such schemes. Often both the providers and the customers of "augmenting services" will have an incentive to hollow out the state-provided service until it's substandard. For instance, let's say the government provides "basic" health insurance but allows private plans. Then the providers of private plans will lobby the government to keep the "basic" service as low-quality as possible, so that people are incentivized to buy the private plans. Furthermore, those who purchase private plans will not personally benefit much from the state-provided scheme, so they will have little interest in its success and little desire to subsidize it. In the worst case, the result is that the state-run service becomes permanently low-quality. Then people attribute this to public-sector inefficiency and say that "obviously" the free market would do a better job. Then the state-provided service gets abolished when it never had a chance to succeed.

at_a_remove 4y ago

Other situations exist in which firefighters don't kill themselves (quite literally) over it. Take fast food joints. First, they're notorious for not cleaning their grease traps, but second, many are self-insured. More interestingly, the fast-food companies tend to scrap a building that has had a fire, have it scraped down to the concrete pad, and build again. Source: was just talking with a fire chief about this.

modernerd 4y ago

“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?’” -- Terry Pratchett: Guards! Guards!

masklinn 4y ago
This is likely more directly inspired by Marcus Licinius Crassus: > The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus. Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus 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 firefighters 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.
db48x 4y ago
Twoflower the tourist telling people about in-sewer-ants was also pretty funny.
nnadams 4y ago
A great example of the confusing reality that the words "inflammable" and "flammable" mean the exact same thing.

RunSet 4y ago

I once heard some Lenny Bruce standup that gave me the impression that firemen were generally considered opportunistic thieves at the time of the material's delivery, independent of its punchline.

that_guy_iain 4y ago

Even with this information included. I think the moral of the story is America has some very serious third-world problems. The reason things like this go on in America and not in any other developed country is that Americans just accept it. "They didn't pay, so they die." Here is how much they accept it, firefighters literally stood and watched a building burn down instead of playing with their toys. Not only that, the fire department refused to accept money to put it out. This whole "unincorporated land" execuse is a sad state of affairs. The whole "You're not with us, so it's not our problem" mindset is really why America is so low down on every single ranking in the world, except for military might. It seems like a constant battle to make sure you're doing ok at the expense of others. School kids getting shot? It's ok, I can still have my gun. Unarmed people getting shot by police? It's ok, they haven't shot me. Corrupt police officer hired a town over? It's ok, he's their problem now. People dying because they can't afford to visit a doctor? That's ok, I can. Instead of grouping together the US has decided to constantly separate it self among itself. Other countries have orginisations that deal with entire areas. The US each town has to have it's own. It results in a lower quality of service. Not every town can afford x,y,z fire equipment that is only going to be used once a month but an biradge that deals with 10 towns and would be using it two times a week can. The thing is, the solution to most of the US' problems aren't hard. They're already figured out by everyone else. We all just have to put up with hearing about the craziness that comes from the country that thinks it's great while their ass is on fire.

cies 4y ago
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  Right, that's why our elections always come down to a 50.001% majority, because if you let the majorities be bigger it's more expensive to turn them into a minority when they turn against you.
  - cies 4y ago
    Yes, just a small nuance: > always come down to a 50.001% majority It's not a person-vote-majority, but some sort of aggregate. Due to the aggregation scheme it becomes even easier to manipulate/game with "key counties" and "key states". A party does not even need to convince the general population anymore, but just focus on a tiny fraction.

pessimizer 4y ago

This seems like an interesting short survey of London firefighting history, but I'm missing the debunking people are remarking about. The only thing that slightly resembles debunking is that in the conclusion the idea that fire brigades ever let houses burn is referred to in passing as a "legend." In regard to the legend - I don't think that anyone ever said that fire brigades would refuse to put out uninsured buildings where the fire might spread to other buildings, that fire brigades couldn't be induced by cash to put out the fires of the uninsured, or that cities never offered baseline inducements for fire brigades to put out fires whether the buildings were insured or not. That would be adding content to the "legend" in order to debunk it. Looking at the record and finding out that all of these things happened is expected and unremarkable. The fires that we would expect not to be put out if the "legend" were accurate would be fires that happened to uninsured buildings that didn't endanger nearby structures, buildings owned by people who didn't have enough cash or credit to convince an uncontracted fire brigade to act, that were close enough to the city to be accessible to a fire brigade yet far enough away that the city didn't feel responsible for them. Additionally, the chance that a building owner might simply pay (under flaming duress) a brigade that showed up would mean that they probably generally would show up, and if they weren't ever willing to watch a building burn, they'd be undercutting their own last minute deals. These are the exactly the fires that we would expect not to be in the record. Fires in detached structures, owned by people with no money. It seems that the city started rewarding brigades for putting out fires in uninsured households based on the order in which they arrived. Additionally, they were consolidating/federating in order to take on larger contracts - which incidentally meant [original scholarship] that the consolidated/federated brigades would always get the first arrival bonus through this collusion. As the number of independent brigades dwindled and the socialist city reward money became large enough that the actual insurance element receded to only being profitable for large contracts rather than individual homes, the consolidated block of fire brigades organized their own nationalization.

yreg 4y ago

Reminds me strongly of CGP Grey was wrong[0]. Although he has obsessed about his mistake for a lot longer than 2 weeks IIRC. [0] – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua4QMFQATco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua4QMFQATco

fragmede 4y ago

Tom Scott also published a YouTube apology video on this https://youtu.be/Wif1EAgEQKI https://youtu.be/Wif1EAgEQKI

CSMastermind 4y ago

Can we just appreciate that Tom took his videos so seriously that he hired a researcher to investigate when one of his sources turned out not to be true.

harriet1 4y ago

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