[DRAFT #2] The Wealth of Stations

[Tinhampton]

Heh, I figured I might give it a go... (only mildly partially inspired by this)

[title]The Wealth of Stations
[desc]Business has been booming for the dozens of companies that collectively make up @@NAME@@'s newly-privatised fire service - but at the cost of countless structures burning up every month, mostly put down to inability or failure to quickly pay the subscription fees that each company requires. This has only been compounded by the @@CAPITAL@@ Journal's revelations that potentially hundreds of homes have been lost due to the inability of @@DEMONYMPLURAL@@ to immediately foot the bill for fires affecting their mainly working-class relatives.
[validity]Capitalist. Must have selected Option 247.1 (or otherwise has a privatised fire service?)

[option]"It's not my fault that people can't make a living these days," complains @@RANDOMNAME@@, human resources middle-manager at the @@RANDOMLASTNAME@@ Street Unit To Proactively Stamp Out Residential and Commercial Fires in Suburban @@CAPITAL@@. "If you and your family just sit there all day, there's a good chance that you're going to be financially annihilated into kingdom come, and we certainly wan---oh, don't want that. We've asked the lazy to pay, but if they can't, we should forcibly redistribute their subs towards everybody else's houses... that should help, right?"
[effect]it's not an emergency if you don't earn six figures

[option]"It's not my fault that so many expect something for nothing," notes @@RANDOMNAME@@, who oversees the @@ANIMAL@@ City Fire Prevention Zero Liability Company. "If you're under our remit, you pay us Violet-knows-how-many hundred @@CURRENCYPLURAL@@ a year, and if you don't, we'll have to nag Auntie @@RANDOMFEMALEFIRSTNAME@@ to do so within five minutes. We compound that with the fact that if anybody was allowed to bend our ground rules, everybody would do so, and it should be clear: The only way forward is to axe this whole beg-thy-neighbour shenanigans and make payment voluntary, but a criminal offence at once. It's what the people want, after all!"
[effect]the lot of the @@DEMONYMADJECTIVE@@ has become ever more taxing

[option]"It's not my fault that we can't be everywhere at once," laments @@RANDOMNAME@@, one of only six firefighters serving all of western @@NAME@@. "I certainly wouldn't advocate any major change to the free market in emergency services we have today, but perhaps you could help out with building a few more fire stations here and there, providing some funding for us to do our job, allowing us to do so without having to extor... wait, apparently @@RANDOMFIRSTNAME@@'s home is on fire and it'll be a day's round trip, so see you later!"
[effect]the fire service has been renationalised

---

[title]The Wealth of Stations
[desc]Business has been booming for the dozens of companies that collectively make up @@NAME@@'s newly-privatised fire service - but at the cost of countless structures burning up every month, mostly put down to inability or failure to pay the subscription fees that each company requires. This is especially true after the @@CAPITAL@@ Journal's recent reports that many of these companies have both flat-out refused to deal with fires befalling non-subscribers, and then billed potentially thousands of their mostly working-class relatives for them.
[validity]Capitalist. Must have selected Option 247.1 (or otherwise has a privatised fire service?)

[option]"It's not my fault that people can't make a living these days," complains @@RANDOMNAME@@, human resources middle-manager at the @@RANDOMLASTNAME@@ Street Unit To Proactively Stamp Out Residential and Commercial Fires in Suburban @@CAPITAL@@. "If you and your family just sit there all day, there's a good chance that you're going to be financially annihilated into kingdom come, and we certainly wan---oh, don't want that. If we can't force the lazy to pay, perhaps we should show them and forcibly redistribute their neighbour's subs towards other houses... that should help, right?"
[effect]it's not an emergency if you don't earn six figures

[option]"It's not my fault that so many endeavour to cheat us of our hard-earned money," notes @@RANDOMNAME@@, who oversees the @@ANIMAL@@ City Fire Prevention Zero Liability Company. "If you're under our remit, you pay us Violet-knows-how-many hundred @@CURRENCYPLURAL@@ a year, and if you don't, we won't do anything about you, which we don't want. We compound that with the fact that if anybody was allowed to bend our ground rules, everybody would do so, and it should be clear: The only way forward is to make payment voluntary, but a criminal offence at once. It's what the people want, after all!"
[effect]the lot of the @@DEMONYMADJECTIVE@@ has become ever more taxing

[option]"It's not my fault that we can't be everywhere at once," laments @@RANDOMNAME@@, one of only six firefighters serving all of western @@NAME@@. "I certainly wouldn't advocate any major change to the free market in emergency services we have today, but perhaps you could help out with building a few more fire stations here and there, providing some funding for us to do our job, allowing us to do so without having to extor... wait, apparently @@RANDOMFIRSTNAME@@'s home is on fire and it'll be a day's round trip, so see you later!"
[effect]the fire service has been renationalised

[USS Monitor]

both flat-out refused to deal with fires befalling non-subscribers, and then billed potentially thousands of their mostly working-class relatives for them.

This is confusing. What's to bill if they didn't deal with the fire?

[Tinhampton]

both flat-out refused to deal with fires befalling non-subscribers, and then billed potentially thousands of their mostly working-class relatives for them.

This is confusing. What's to bill if they didn't deal with the fire?

Good point. 247.1's speaker indeed says "It's not like we won't put out the fires if they don't have anything on them, we'll just bill them and their children and their children's children until we get all our money." Draft 2 has been put up to reflect this.

[Verdant Haven]

I certainly think this is a good idea for an issue, as privatization of fire services is just an awful thing every time I've ever seen it. These kinds of exploitative schemes have been nothing but trouble going all the way back to Crassus in ancient Rome, who became one of the wealthiest people in all history partly by operating a private fire service that extorted the owners of burning buildings. Choice 247.1 definitely is deserving of a follow-up - good choice.

I agree with USS Monitor's comment on the description - I don't get quite what's going on there. I realize the billing part is a reference to the "children and childrens' children" in 247.1, but as Monitor said, that's for rendering services, not for ignoring people. They can do one or the other.

I think there needs to be a good deal more clarity in the option texts in terms of who is supporting what position. The names of the organizations in Choice 1and Choice 2 in particular are long and unclear, so I have no idea what they are supposed to do. There is humor in having an unnecessarily complicated name, but when it obfuscates the actual meaning of the text, it detracts overall.

Option 1, I have no idea at all who that person is or what they stand for. Forcibly redistributing their neighbors subs... huh? Their neighbors' subscriptions wouldn't have anything to do with a non-paying customer's service - that's the whole problem. Also, the phrase "annihilated into kingdom come" is a bit redundant - just "annihilated" would probably work. I'm also not certain why this speaker confuses wanting people to suffer with not. If they want to get paid, they don't want people to be financially ruined. This especially seems contradictory with what I initially read as being sympathetic to people due to how hard it is to make a living.

The middle option in particular is very convoluted - I can't understand whose side the speaker is on. They seem like they maybe are the private fire department, but they criticize it for its costs. Also, there's no reason for them to call for something to be voluntary and mandatory at once. They don't want payment to be voluntary, they want it to be mandatory, and wouldn't have any qualms about saying so. That definitely would support a stronger effect line of something like "private companies have found that charging taxes is much more profitable than providing services"

Option 3 is the strongest of the present draft, I think. It is clear who the speaker is, and why they feel how they feel. I might remove the very specific number 6 and replace it with something like "one of only a handful of firefighters serving..." since that allows a somewhat less immersion-breaking mental picture (6 people in Western Verdant Haven, for example, would be a single fire truck in an area nearly twice the size of Texas - nothing free market about that!). It might also be good to very slightly soften the statement about not wanting to change the free market situation to make it clear that it does, in fact, change the free market situation.


All in all, I feel like there's a fair amount of work to be done here, but it's definitely an interesting issue, and is on a subject I like and feel should be addressed.

[Australian rePublic]

Wait, that's it. I thought there would have been a few deliberate firs in order to extort more money out of people (if the fire department only gets per fire they extinguish), or (if fire protection is a fixed monthly cost,) I thought that people would deliberately set their own buildings on fire to make use of the service which they pay for. Sadly, there are a lot of dodgy people, and those dodgy people are part of the reason why we can't have nice things.

[Trotterdam]

Wait, that's it. I thought there would have been a few deliberate firs in order to extort more money out of people (if the fire department only gets per fire they extinguish), or (if fire protection is a fixed monthly cost,) I thought that people would deliberately set their own buildings on fire to make use of the service which they pay for.

I doubt people are going to be setting their homes on fire just to "make use of a service". It's not like insurance fraud where you stand to gain money. At best, you'll simply be losing less than from a fire you hadn't been paying for.

However, even if fire protection is a fixed monthly cost, firefighters setting fires to extort non-payers would still be a concern. You know how the mafia's protection money works?

[Caracasus]

Wait, that's it. I thought there would have been a few deliberate firs in order to extort more money out of people (if the fire department only gets per fire they extinguish), or (if fire protection is a fixed monthly cost,) I thought that people would deliberately set their own buildings on fire to make use of the service which they pay for.

I doubt people are going to be setting their homes on fire just to "make use of a service". It's not like insurance fraud where you stand to gain money. At best, you'll simply be losing less than from a fire you hadn't been paying for.

However, even if fire protection is a fixed monthly cost, firefighters setting fires to extort non-payers would still be a concern. You know how the mafia's protection money works?

I'm loving the title here, good work!

I sort of agree with Trotterdam here - there's a real opportunity to have a proponent of this privatized fire service doing something like looking round your office and loudly commenting on how flammable your water cooler looks or something....

[Australian rePublic]

I doubt people are going to be setting their homes on fire just to "make use of a service". It's not like insurance fraud where you stand to gain money. At best, you'll simply be losing less than from a fire you hadn't been paying for.

However, even if fire protection is a fixed monthly cost, firefighters setting fires to extort non-payers would still be a concern. You know how the mafia's protection money works?

I'm loving the title here, good work!

I sort of agree with Trotterdam here - there's a real opportunity to have a proponent of this privatized fire service doing something like looking round your office and loudly commenting on how flammable your water cooler looks or something....

Perhaps also sending PSAs about the dangers of heir competitors' fire extinguishers or something like that

[Tinhampton]

Comments noted. This draft has not been abandoned. Unfortunately, due to my addiction to RealWorldStates, expect to wait a couple of days before this is reflected in Draft #3

[The Marsupial Illuminati]

Comments noted. This draft has not been abandoned. Unfortunately, due to my addiction to RealWorldStates, expect to wait a couple of days before this is reflected in Draft #3

I command you to resume working on this draft.

[Trotterdam]

So I guess "a couple" is greater than 607.

This definitely needs a rework. I can't tell what either of the first two options is actually trying to do.