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And, insurance companies cancelled fire coverage before the fire.
This is how Crassus got rich. When a house burned, he’d show up with his firefighters, and then buy the house for an insultingly low price, because, well, the house was on fire. Then his firefighters would put the fire out.
I dont remember that in morrowind.
will pay any amount
No, he won’t. He will promise any amount and pay half of that to a lawyer to weasel out with some bullshit legalese.
Obviously in true ancap fashion, he’ll need to put the agreed payment in multisig escrow up front. Only an outlaw would refuse!
“Landlords deserve tons of money for no effort because they take on the risks of homeownership”
Landlords when that risk manifests:
Not that it stops this guy from being a pos idiot, but he did say “any amount”. Your critique would fit if he were complaining about local FD “not doing their job” or something.
The point of the post is that he claimed he doesn’t pay taxes for services that, if they were more robust, could have prevented this desperate, hilarious tweet.
He (incorrectly) thinks he can buy his way out of it when it matters. And I have no sympathy for him, fwiw. If it was just his house burning, I’d bring popcorn.
Kinda ironic that the dude is called Wassermann which literally translates to waterman in german.
We laugh, but his follow up will be “see! You all paid taxes and your houses still burned down! Proof that the socialist experiment failed!”
And my follow up will be: I could not care less about what this person thinks.
Oh I am all about 1%'er schadenfreude
And they didn’t tax the fossil fuel industry that can shoulder a lot of the responsibility for this. In fact, they heavily subsidised it.
No taxes, no fire service.
Even if he’s evading taxes we still have to put out the fire or it’ll spread. Keith is painfully unaware of how externalities work.
Or painfully doesn’t care about the costs to other people.
Fair point, especially in fire-prone places. This is why we have public fire service.
Ironic that his name is “water man”
Hey Keith, need some water, man?
Any amount, you say?
Even more than what it would cost in taxes?
Call Crassus!
I wonder if it is even real.
Multiple sources claim so.
Would not be surprising and hilarious if true.
This is definitely one I had to check lol
I didn’t know private firefighters are even a thing.
That is one of the ways Marcus Crassus got rich in Rome.
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.>
He did pay for his greed. When he failed in his campaign in Parthia, the parthians put him to death by pouring molten gold down his throat.
Guillotines are out. Molten gold cleanses are IN.
It’s completely natural and organic too
Cyberpunk Dystopian before Cyberpunk was even a genre
I feel like the modern version would be putting out the fire no matter what because it might spread to surrounding properties and then charging you for it anyway and putting a lien on the property if you can’t pay.
I kinda figured the Cyberpunk in Cyberpunk Dystopia refers to a counter cultural movement within those societies.
🎶same as it ever was, same as it ever was…🎶
Caesarpunk? Circensespunk? Idk what to call it, but I want cyberpunk-but-ancient-Rome to exist as a genre
Sandalpunk
So get at least a little money but lose the property, or let the property burn down out of spite so nobody gets it. You’d still own the land it’s on, right? Decisions, decisions…
I guess it depends on if you have enough resources to rebuild or not. I don’t think insurance existed back then.
The first option is bad but at least some of your stuff is saved. It depends on if anything was irreplaceable, but then you got to pay this ass clown rent.
The second one is when no one wins, but if you have resources then just rebuild. If you have nothing then sell a plot of land for cheap, but still have nothing from the fire.
Yeah, saving your stuff from the building is a pretty big motivator since he’s only buying the property, not everything in it. I’m sure he got a lot of takers.
he did become the richest man in rome off it, so it would seem so.
In the land of the free, the goal is to privatize everything.
Land of the
freefee
I’ve never heard of them in the modern day, but I know that’s how fire brigades started in the UK
Correct, it’s also the birth of insurance. People would pay a subscription style fee to the fire brigade so their house would be protected in case of a fire.
It’s something satirised in The Colour of Magic, the first Discworld novel.
Precisely.
There’d be fire markers on the outer walls to indicate which fire protection company covered that building and whichever firefighter turned up would bill that fire protection company who’d then bill the customer/customer’s insurance company.
Edit: typo, damn these supposedly opposable thumbs!
I think you meant fire maRkers
There was a Roman who was rich because of private fire fighters, Crassus. Being the richest person in Rome’s history, it will no doubt come as a shock when history shows he was instrumental in turning the Republic into the Roman Empire.
The cycle continues. Democracy will die because the rich hoard the power and money speaks loudest when it is accepted speech.
I’ve never seen one in the US, and upon further research, they don’t really exist.
All that being said, if you’re rich, you’re more likely to have a firebreak created for you by landscapers. The city also creates firebreaks surrounding neighborhoods like the palisades.
There are private fire departments. They are owned by companies that own industrial facilities with high fire risk, that need immediate response, such as oil refineries, chemical plants, and and factories.
But you’re right that there aren’t private fire companies to serve anyone on demand. There are no manned fire trucks in LA waiting for a high enough bidder to respond to the fire.
That’s fire insurance, but yeah, pretty much the same thing. I have my cert in personal lines. We provided that everywhere but where it was needed. FEMA would step in. We have a risk pool. If the number of claims/ emergencies outweighs the risk pool, there’s nothing we can do. There’s no money, no resources, and no people.
My family owns a ranch in SoCal. Don’t even start man lmao
There are private firefighting companies, and in this fire any efforts they could add would have been welcomed, since the strong winds prevented nighttime air assault. But unless they had water-tank vehicles they would have been subject to the same problem of hydrants running dry from insufficient supply. Their best bet would be to pump from swimming pools. The multiple real Fire Departments would have been fine with being able to send their personnel elsewhere. I say “would have” because I just don’t know if any were working there. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were, though.
I suppose oil well firefighters like Red Adair and similar specialized companies could be counted as private firefighters.
They are. The ones I know mostly contract with states or federal governments to do wildland fire fighting but I’ve read about private firefighters operating in neighborhoods in California a few years ago.
Montana’s new senator (Sheehy) made his money with a private aerial firefighting company.
Lessons learned
We hired a property management company, but eventually took it in-house. “That was a really big mistake,” Wasserman recounts. “ My wife and I were going up on weekends to rent units. We don’t really speak Spanish so we often relied on Google Translate to speak with potential tenants. We quickly realized that we weren’t the right people to manage those properties so we eventually sold those assets, too.”
Bakersfield taught them some important lessons:
9:36pm on Tuesday. Depending on where the house was there are some problems that can’t be solved with money.
That fire tore through Pacific Palisades. Aftermath looked like Lahaina. Literally no stopping it.
You see, the trick to not having leopards eat your face is in fact to intentionally starve them, and then brag about it publically!
Oh how the turntables…
