alt Hacker NewsIs that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?
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The problem is that the need is spiky. You don't need many of them until an old apartment building or factory catches fire because of cladding made in the 70s.
They are like seat belts, or audit logs. You don't need so many of them, right up until you do.
>> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
> Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?
If they need to do that, it's not because of the public. It's probably because they got a "challenge" from some clever idiot with a business or economics degree.
Also, people typically want something valuable to do, so they go find it. That's not something the proponents of our coming AI utopia seem to understand.
yeah sure, they're so bored they spend half their week cutting people out of their wrecked cars. Just to make you think their salary is justified
we need approximately 0 of you, want much less though
You might not need (say) 100 firefighters for the day to day work in a medium city any more... but you absolutely need 100 firefighters when the large chemical plant goes up in a blaze.
It's hard enough in Germany to balance that, but we at least can draw on the advantage of Germany being decently settled which means we can have support crews come in from neighboring cities. But in the US where it might be the case that the nearest city with enough staff is hours of driving away? By the time you get enough staff on site, the entire plant is gone.
Firefighters do a lot more than you probably realize. For instance, who is carrying grandma with her broken hip down the rickety stairs from her top floor bathroom? It's probably not just the two-person ambulance crew. You going to get grandpa to help?
These are the kinds of routine jobs that fire crews handle everyday that are invaluable to society.