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Private Equity Finds a New Source of Profit: Volunteer Fire Departments
- gregsadetsky 10mo agoDisgusting!
- MangoToupe 10mo agoWe're just a couple steps away from reanimating Crassus at this point—if one interest controls both this sort of software and a REIT.... I suppose you might argue he's already achieved immortality as "capital", but that feels a little bland of an observation. Anyway, https://archive.is/p7B8l https://archive.is/p7B8l
- blindriver 10mo agoI’m tired of living in a world where everything is financially engineered and those sociopathic money-hungry deviants use every trick in the book to turn all of us into life long subscribers. What can we do about this?
- ericd 10mo agoSeems like someone motivated could make an open source alternative to ESO’s lineup and make it impossible for them to make a monopoly in that niche. I wonder if you put out a call to all volunteer fire departments, if they have enough devs collectively to oust the aholes.
- azemetre 10mo agoYou tax them enough so they can't use money to buy power and have to rely on organizing like us poors to enact change.
- underlipton 10mo agoThere is a rather infamous old tactic to fight back against this. When Brown v Board of Education made segregation illegal in public schooling, many white families started private academies, avoiding regulations by stripping everything they could from the public systems and transplanting them into private ones. Obviously heinous, but perhaps a path forward here. People decry extreme, scorched-earth approaches, except it seems to work mighty well for conservatives. You're just not allowed to do it if you're "woke", I guess. (Who says? Do it anyway.)
- drowsspa 10mo agoWe have gambling addicts and the sociopaths they worship deciding the fate of mankind... Seriously I can't see any benefit in this large scale financial engineering
- SoftTalker 10mo agoYou're complaining to the wrong people here. The conventional advice for any software startup here is "raise your prices."
- cjbarber 10mo agoWhat are the systems that need to change such that individual PE firms don't have incentive to do this? See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points
- Blackthorn 10mo agoWe could ban the firms.
- mhurron 10mo agoHonestly how? What law could be written that would ban PE firms and lookalike businesses that would hold up to scrutiny. No one with a brain likes what PE does, but really, what do they do that's illegal as opposed to people finally realizing that capitalism is essentially evil?
- jennyholzer2 10mo ago> capitalism is essentially evil even though nearly every post on this website makes this point, the commenters here really do not like it when you state this explicitly.
- immibis 10mo agoThis is the website of a bunch of rich capitalists who got rich by doing capitalism. Of course you can't call the owners of the website evil on that website.
- underlipton 10mo agoOf course you can. They just get really mad about it.
- immibis 10mo agoYou actually can't. They hide your post and ban your account.
- anotherhue 10mo agoStallman was right. Thankfully this seems like it should be relatively easy to replace. If anyone knows a friendly hacker collective to point this way...
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoSo tell me why should I spend my time helping cities whose population are too cheap to fund necessary infrastructure? The article pointed out that firefighters are being forced to fundraise just to get their physical equipment fixed. These same “rural departments” are in areas that claim to hate “big government” and are anti tax and aren’t willing to fund essential services and vote for national politicians who are defunding programs that could help them. Yes I would be all in favor of my federal tax dollars being redirected to rural areas whose taxpayers can’t fund firefighters so they don’t have to fundraise to buy equipment.
- scheme271 10mo agoThis isn't cities, these are fire departments in rural counties that may have a few thousand people living in it at most.
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoAnd then we should be helping them on the state and federal level. I have replied a couple of times here that I have no problem with my tax dollars going to help them. Unfortunately, they overwhelmingly vote for politicians that believe just the opposite on the state and federal level.
- xienze 10mo ago> And then we should be helping them on the state and federal level. That’ll just lead to people on the opposite side of the spectrum (politically and in terms of being more urban) asking why their tax dollars are going towards a bunch of rednecks living in the middle of nowhere and destroying the earth with their heavily car-dependent lifestyles. _They should move to the city if they want a fire department! Otherwise, pay for it yourself or quit yer bitchin!_ > Unfortunately, they overwhelmingly vote for politicians that believe just the opposite on the state and federal level. Perhaps the reason is because the people they “should” be voting for, according to you, are tied to a lot of social policies that these rural folks find deeply disagreeable. In a similar vein, if the 2024 Republican president campaigned on true free healthcare and massive taxes for the rich, you wouldn’t chide Democrat voters for not voting for that candidate on account of his social policies, now would you?
- xeonmc 10mo agoAre the PE firms by any chance involved with someone by the name of Count Olaf?
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoI’m the last person to defend PE companies. I saw first hand what they were like when I was responsible for integrating acquisitions software. But there seems to be a lot more at play. Taxpayers too cheap to fund infrastructure. The article calls out fundraising drives needed to keep equipment up and running and training. Why are firefighters volunteers anyway instead of getting paid? Why should any company create software that they can’t do at a profit - ie rewriting software for a new federal standard? Every problem is downstream of people wanting government services and not wanting to pay for them.
- NordSteve 10mo agoI'm guessing you don't live in a rural area in the US.
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoI grew up in South GA and my family still lives there. I got the hell out of dodge the week after graduating from college in 1996. I said in another reply, I’m all for the state and the federal government helping rural America where their own tax base isn’t strong enough. I’m also for universal health care that would help rural areas far more than me. I wouldn’t complain about my taxes paying for it. It’s rural America that keeps voting for local, state, and federal politicians that put them in this place.
- gottorf 10mo ago> It’s rural America that keeps voting for local, state, and federal politicians that put them in this place. In my experience, not everyone's primary policy goal is to ensure that as much taxpayer money as possible gets redistributed in their favor. Of course, this isn't to say that the problem you described (of people wanting government services but not wanting to pay for it) does not exist, but I find that to be applicable broadly, not just to rural America.
- SoftTalker 10mo ago
- websiteapi 10mo agoIt's strange that this software isn't actually provided by the government to begin with. Quickly checking eso.com, most of their use cases are governmental to begin with. what I don't get is the government collectively would save money just making it themselves.
- CodingJeebus 10mo agoMarkets have essentially prevented this from being a reality. Government can't pay anything close to competitive with the private market, if they did it would be an easy target for "government waste", and even if they could, why take a job that could be axed during a budget cut? The people doing the firing could justify it by claiming an outside vendor would be cheaper anyway.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoGovernments are generally very bad at software, or any kind of highly technical project that the legislators really don't understand. I know several people in tech who are volunteer firefighters. Why don't they form an open-source project? The software described in this article doesn't sound too complex; at a couple of points I was thinking "just use a spreadsheet."
- logsr 10mo agolooking at ESO's homepage their main pitch is around NERIS compliance (https://www.usfa.fema.gov/nfirs/neris/ https://www.usfa.fema.gov/nfirs/neris/) so it looks like this is a case of regulatory capture forcing fire departments to buy new software. An obvious solution here is that any government mandated information system must come with an open source implementation that guarantees compliance.
- renewiltord 10mo agoFire Departments are the number one rent-seekers in the US so this is more like a cockroach being parasitized by a fungus. FARS regulations, in particular, are obvious crony capitalism. Elevator standards are less so, but still suspicious.
- hypeatei 10mo agoWhy wasn't this software open source from the get-go? The writing seems to indicate that it was initially developed with altruistic intentions, but I don't see that at all. If the original developers wanted fire departments to have an affordable, lasting solution then proprietary software and VC funding seem like the wrong direction.
- OutOfHere 10mo agoObviously the problem is relying on commercial software in the first place. The software in question needs to be open source. It needs to be developed and managed by multiple fire departments for everyone's use.
- ahupp 10mo agoDo they need software? Presumably the volunteer firefighters 30 years ago didn’t have this and did fine. Plenty of volunteer organizations are built on Airtable or some spreadsheets.
- pavel_lishin 10mo agoBy that reasoning, do any of us?
- volk45 10mo agoOne anecdote I can provide - the department I volunteer for swapped to software based (see: mobile app) personnel calling because the county swapped to the system. The software can quickly load box data (PDFs of hydrant locations and building details), as well as provide route mapping for individual at their location compared to call. Additionally, every volunteer has a somewhat modern smartphone in my rural/suburban area. Pagers are not in huge demand anymore.
- chkaloon 10mo agoI'm always suspicious of articles like this. Having been part of a company that was the target of a few NYT articles, there is always more to the story. And parts that are just flat out wrong, but not being an expert or in the industry you just need to take their word for it and believe their anecdata.
- insane_dreamer 10mo agoThis is the type of need that open-source software exists to fill. Why doesn't anyone start an open-source project that all fire departments can adopt? Yes, you still might need some paid support, but it wouldn't be anything close to what the PE vultures are charging.
- dgeiser13 10mo agoVolunteer Fire Departments = Amish Barn Raising