No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn

[KrazyHorse]

Yes, all of that valuable water.

Praise be to God that those firemen had the moral fortitude not to use that water to save the home and pets' lives.

Using city resources (the truck, their equipment, their many hours waiting for fires during city-owned time) in pursuit of a goal that would weaken the city's ability to extract payment from county residents is no better than theft, in my book.

[Solomwi]

equipment and personnel are fixed costs, paid regardless of this guy and his problems.

Water & gas. Gas they already had to burn to get there to put out the brush fire (which they had to fight legally).

So we're left with...water.

And those fixed costs are paid by the city. That's a question of who's footing the bill, not what the marginal cost is. They'll burn more fuel pumping the water onto the fire. We've eliminated nothing.

[KrazyHorse]

It's really this simple. This is how I've been raised, and this is what I think is the moral thing to do:

If I'm available and equipped to help someone, I will.

I think people who are available and equipped to help someone and instead does nothing are rather pathetic.

And if the person who equipped you, provided money for you to wait on duty until a call came in, etc. told you not to do so, then you would be stealing from them.

All those resources belong to the people of the city of Butt****, Tenn, not the firefighters.

[KrazyHorse]

By the way, it's pretty ****ing obvious why they can't just charge this guy marginal cost. This is exactly analogous to drugmakers and patents.

The only bad guys here are the people of the county who have neglected to either:

a) Have their own fire department

or

b) Levy a tax to pay for county-wide fire protection provided by the city

oh, I guess this douchetard is a bad guy, but only because he's whining after the fact. If he'd sucked it up and eaten his losses like a man then he would be morally neutral in my book

[Asher]

Let's get real here.

That truck sits idle in a fire hall while firefighters masturbate to online pornography if they don't go out to fight this fire. The only real cost here is a few bucks in gas and whatever it costs to fill up a water truck.

Yes, it would be "stealing" to use these resources to save a family's house and a man's pets if the hicks in TN deem it something that should not be done, just like it would be stealing for me to stop working at my job to render CPR to an elderly lady across the street from work. Or how it's stealing for me to post on Poly while at work. What is your point?

It's still the right thing to do. (Except for the posting on Poly bit)

[Solomwi]

Let's not let the grandson who, despite living in rural ****ing TENNESSEE, can't build a simple ****ing garbage fire off the hook completely. I guess he is part of the group you're rightly blaming, but he deserves special mention, IMO.

x-post.

[KrazyHorse]

I'm also in favor of government buying out drug patents, BTW.

I'm not in favor of blaming drug companies for not giving away their drugs for free to people who "forgot" to buy health insurance...

[KrazyHorse]

Let's not let the grandson who, despite living in rural ****ing TENNESSEE, can't build a simple ****ing garbage fire off the hook completely. I guess he is part of the group you're rightly blaming, but he deserves special mention, IMO.

x-post.

Well, yeah. But the loss from his douchetardiness is contained in the family.

I wonder if he was burning trash because he was too cheap to pay the dump to take his crap...

[Asher]

Let's not let the grandson who, despite living in rural ****ing TENNESSEE, can't build a simple ****ing garbage fire off the hook completely. I guess he is part of the group you're rightly blaming, but he deserves special mention, IMO.

x-post.

The moral of the story here is there are no intelligent people in Tennessee.

No one in the county, no one in the city, and certainly no one in that house.

[KrazyHorse]

Let's get real here.

That truck sits idle in a fire hall while firefighters masturbate to online pornography if they don't go out to fight this fire. The only real cost here is a few bucks in gas and whatever it costs to fill up a water truck.

Yes, it would be "stealing" to use these resources to save a family's house and a man's pets if the hicks in TN deem it something that should not be done, just like it would be stealing for me to stop working at my job to render CPR to an elderly lady across the street from work. Or how it's stealing for me to post on Poly while at work. What is your point?

It's still the right thing to do. (Except for the posting on Poly bit)

The point is that it DOESN'T just impose the marginal cost of a few gallons of water on the good people of Butt****. It ALSO costs them all the foregone protection payments that are a result of their munificence.

[KrazyHorse]

The moral of the story here is there are no intelligent people in Tennessee.

No one in the county, no one in the city, and certainly no one in that house.

People of Butt**** City
People of Butt**** County

[Asher]

The point is that it DOESN'T just impose the marginal cost of a few gallons of water on the good people of Butt****. It ALSO costs them all the foregone protection payments that are a result of their munificence.

So, $75 + cost of gas + water?

I don't think it costs them those payments at all, FWIW, as long as the fire department charges the guy a sufficiently large fee for showing up there. If anything, publicity of the event would provoke others into buying in who previously did not.

[KrazyHorse]

Anybody here who seeks to isolate the actions of the firefighters from the reactions of those who choose to pay or not to pay their annual fire protection premium is being extraordinarily dishonest...

[Solomwi]

The moral of the story here is there are no intelligent people in Tennessee.

No one in the county, no one in the city, and certainly no one in that house.

I know two or three, but they're all transplants who live in Nashville, so I'll concede that point generally. In high school, I did some mission work in rural Tennessee, and pretty much everything I saw confirms the point.

[Asher]

Are you telling me any significant number of people from the city would be furious that this guy's home and pets were saved? Are you telling me the # of people upset about this would be greater than the number of people upset that the firefighters picked their asses while a home was destroyed and pets killed?