• intensely_human@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      107
      ·
      19 hours ago

      This is fun. This is the moment in history when the fire department stops being an example of successful socialism.

      The government made a situation in which there’s no water available. That’s the problem with socialism: it’s a monopoly without an incentive structure to continue providing services. It’s great until the government fucks up the service so badly that nobody can get access to it. Then the socialized thing becomes a nothing.

      • _stranger_@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        7 hours ago

        The government is people, and people acting in bad faith are the foundation of the shittiest parts of human history.

      • Spaceballstheusername@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        19
        ·
        13 hours ago

        Are you saying privatizing systems makes them better prepared for extreme circumstances? The energy infrastructure in Texas is an example where they aren’t incentives to invest in rare occurrences and therefore people die when it snows in Texas.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        14 hours ago

        Fire fighting is a category that has tried privatized model and thoroughly thoroughly shown to not work at all as a privatized endeavor.

        Key problem in that is that requires the firefighters to protect only properties that have paid for their services. So a wildfire breaks out in the middle of nowhere, and you see it, but no one pays to protect “middle of nowhere”, so business wise it doesn’t make sense to fight a fire without a customer. Nevertheless, that’s your only hope to control it, so you end up protecting a whole lot of non-subscribers to try to protect your subscribers. What if your customer is surrounded by non-customers? You shouldn’t fight fires back, but unless you push back on the neighbor properties your customer gets burned. If you know your neighbors have protection, you might opt out knowing that, practically speaking, their coverage means you get covered.

        Another problem is that privatized suggests competition. Which means coordinated response is severely limited. Also, they can’t run parallel fire hydrant infrastructure in any reasonable way, so water on the truck or from the customer direct are all you can get. This is a recipe for being highly ineffective.

        This is putting aside how private industry loves to optimize around the normal day to day demand. Being prepared at all times for the worst case is expensive, so private industry tends to shit the bed when faced with a catastrophe because they only have the modest capacity to keep expenses under control. When this is something like a shortage of smartphones, no big deal people just have to wait for the scenario to subside and get by as-is, it’s worth it to have affordable smartphones 99% of the time. But for a wildfire that would cause multiple gigantic catastrophes a year. What we see in LA now would be a routine disaster in the privatized scenario.

      • samus12345@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        46
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        19 hours ago

        This was a case of not being prepared for climate change. There was four times the normal demand for 15 hours straight. The water ran out because nobody anticipated needing the amount they did. That wasn’t because of socialism.

      • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        25
        ·
        19 hours ago

        Is having a functional society with public services not a good enough incentive for you ? that’s your return on investment

      • Yes, let’s scrap the whole thing because of this one fire. /s

        There are 50 wildfires burning in the US right now, and that’s a very low number, only because it’s winter.

        Do you realize just even 20 years ago how many kids used to die in fires? We’re doing fantastic. 50 years ago, I’d wager everyone knew a kid that died in a fire.

        https://www.fireweatheravalanche.org/fire/

        https://www.statista.com/statistics/376703/us-civilian-fire-deaths/