A point against: if someone was an early adopter in a community that urbanized over 30 years, in effect the increased value means their future ownership at present rates requires the collective subsidy of their neighbors. Young families subsidizing the elderly in this way is a huge issue in tax burden disparity where I live.
How so? e.g. anywhere I've looked, schools are a huge part of the budget. Special education alone is over 10% of the county budget where I live. Schools in total are over half of city+county. The elderly wouldn't be contributing to service demand there. They're likely also not going on tons of crime sprees necessitating police, generally another large budget item.
Like another poster said, things like pensions and medicare might overall drain the entire economy, so the end result is the same, but that seems more diffuse than local tax bases, and wouldn't properly appear in local government budgets.
Also a graduate of NOLS WEMT, and it was one of the best-run educational experiences I've been through (Including Undergrad, Masters, professional development, etc).
Highly, highly recommend paying them a visit - truly a special organization, though I've neglected trying out one of their proper expeditions.
I'm midway through a similar journey - jumped from engineering to fire then into armed forces. At the back of my head I can always go back to the office, but the passage of time guarantees the reverse is much harder.
To anyone that has even thought of something more outside an office, try it so long as you're physically able. Compensation is one thing, but the experience for me has been priceless.
> Compensation is one thing, but the experience for me has been priceless.
Yep. When I got hired on at the fire department I took a $12,000 pay cut. Overtime was abundant so it was easy to make up the loss plus some. But you definitely can't purchase the experience
The firefighters in my small northwest Iowa town don't get paid at all, it's strictly volunteer. Same for our EMTs, which the county is having trouble finding volunteers for.
Back when I was hired in 2006 and going through fire school we were told 70% of the United States is volunteer.
Either due to the remoteness of rural living or just people in rural areas have more grit, the call volumes are much lower.
I live in Florida, but I am from a small rural town in MO and my mom still lives where I grew up. I was just there in August and I picked up a brochure for the county ambulance. They have 5 ambulances for the entire county and their call volume was approximately 3000 calls per year!
The county fire department I worked at has approximately 40 station and the busiest station doing 3000+ EMS calls on its own. Our department did all the 911 transports. When I left in 2020 we ran approximately 90,000 calls.
Seems to be jurisdiction based, but I had always thought "volunteer" was more of a historic term and they're more like casual on-call firefighters and get paid for each call they take. But some are truly uncompensated. That's a shame, but also incredible of those people to do such important work just for the good of their community.
That's exactly what I thought too, that the firefighters in my town were getting paid some small amount for the calls they took. But I looked into it and yeah, they don't get a dime here. It's really too bad, I used to work with a guy who volunteered and he had some harrowing stories about the things he'd seen while responding to calls for farm accidents or traffic accidents. I don't think he'd do it if he didn't feel some sense of duty.
Same feedback - conditional probability until you eventually straight pipe a 100% reliability sorter to the solution. I think one workaround is to have a max reliability for the level - say 95% - requiring actual infrastructure in the long run.
One could argue there's a double count: about one-fifth of fish are caught to feed other animals (mainly fish, but also terrestrial animals). But I don't think one kill offsets another.
> around half of wild-caught finfish numbers are destined for reduction to fishmeal and oil, of which, respectively, 70 and 73% are used for aquaculture feeds
Topical, with RAGBRAI just around the corner. I'm constantly awed at just revolutionary the bicycle seems to be from an industrialization perspective. To me, bicycles and smartphones are two real thick lines to draw on when the world became something different.
As much as I like to scientifically validate my drug dependency, is the EEG work here really that much more rigorous than a polygraph?
I see a lot of domain specific terms like "FOOOF algorithm", filtering signal spectra etc. and the geist of my schooling asks me whether the elephant is wiggling its trunk.
