This is exactly it. I'm also a volunteer for a small town, in a department that is decently funded. We have had the same two engines since 2009. We just (within the last month) received a new engine. It became extremely difficult to provide the level of service the community expects, and come up with money for a new engine. It's a major struggle.
Also something most folks don't know: about 70% of the firefighters in the US are volunteers. If you're in a big city you'll have 4 paid folks on an engine (maybe 3 and 1 intern) but as soon as you venture out of the city you'll see more engines 100% staffed by volunteers. And if you don't know the difference that's a good thing!
Fire departments run on budgets that would also shock you (how low they are).
The issue is that you're expecting trucks to go out in conditions like https://youtube.com/watch?v=7IFEiwNMrZ8, particularly if your volunteer brigade operates in a rural area, and they therefore have to keep crews alive in those conditions. This puts a minimum cost on each one.
Yeah, the minimum cost isn't $2M, but it's probably pretty close to $400k a truck. Then you add on urban rescue equipment if you're not in a rural area and things start to get very expensive.
Put a pump on a trailer. The problem with this country is we're not allowed to have "decent"; we are only allowed to buy the "best" and so we just hobble along with old shit while everything's breaking down and we're paying too much for the things we do buy.
In Australia that's either an ultralight tanker, which would cost around $100k USD today but with far lower 550L capacity and a lower throughput pump than a heavy tanker, or it's a command vehicle, and its modern equivalent would cost about $60k USD but have no pump or water tank. The ultralight tankers are mostly used for getting to fires faster when they're small, dealing with inaccessible terrain, or just being an extra vehicle during blacking out etc.
The problem you're always going to run into is that your truck needs to haul around 10 tonnes of water and protect its crew. You can stick a pump on the back of a hardened ute, but then you need to leave and find water 20x more frequently plus your pump is a dinky little water pistol, or you can drive a commercial water tanker into a bushfire, but then your driver needs to be unusually brave and no longer have much to live for.
I accept that firefighters are getting ripped off, but it feels like maybe 5% to 20% of the cost could be reduced, and then you're still dealing with unaffordable equipment.
Most fire engines in the US don't carry significant water, they're "pumper trucks" for boosting pressure from fire hydrants. 80% of US citizens live in urban areas with access to hydrants. They also carry lots of other gear too: https://rosenbaueramerica.com/fire-trucks/pumpers/
But you can do everything those do with an E-series cutaway ($200k fully outfitted?) and a pump pulled on a trailer. For a whole lot less than $2M.
Here in rural Western Australia there's a range of official vehicles, the local (wheatbelt area) farmers have supplemented them recently with an ex military unimog purchased at auction and fitted with an 8 (ish) tonne water tank (with anti slosh baffles) and extra cab insulation.
Not sure where specifically they sourced it, one of the military surplus auction houses like:
Valid question, and I hear it all the time. Most of the time it's due to preparedness and staffing. By having those 4 people on a fully equipped engine, if something big (structure fire, vehicle extrication, rescue) happens, they can jump in and go with a vehicle full of tools. (provided the ambulance crew can take over).
Otherwise if they're in a car, they'd have to drive back through traffic to the station, move their gear to the new vehicle, and drive back to the scene. It can cost valuable time. Fire engines carry a surprisingly large amount of tools and equipment for a variety of purposes.
That being said, many larger departments are trying out "cars" (usually an SUV) with two people and a med bag to go to medical calls. While the engine/truck and crew stay at the station. This is fairly expensive with the new vehicle, equipment and extra staffing. However it is being done now with success in urban areas.
I think this video from the Not Just Bikes channel shows quite well the major difference in approach between fire departments in the USA vs the Netherlands (which is quite similar to many other European countries): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2dHFC31VtQ
Fire engines in Europe are as well equipped as the American/Canadian ones while not depending on these massive and expensive bespoke rigs.
In the UK the NHS/local health trusts actually have a few fast response cars which contain at least a paramedic but more often someone who is trained higher. Even the fire service will have a small car as part of an incident response team.
I've also seen more ambulances that are based on a transit/mini bus platform for call outs that aren't major, think old person falling over. They save the big boxy ones for more serious issues.
In my country, no fire truck is called unless there's a fire. Extracting people from a mangled car isn't the job for a fire truck. All the needed tools fit in an ordinary van.
Also, going back to get the tools or change the vehicle is incredibly stupid because: 1) crews already know what they're going to be dealing with before they leave, 2) just suppose they forgot to pack the tools - we have mobile phones, you know...
>Also, going back to get the tools or change the vehicle is incredibly stupid because: 1) crews already know what they're going to be dealing with before they leave
They have precognition and can see into the future and know that a house fire is going to start while they're out at a non-fire call in your country? That's amazing! And by "amazing" I mean "bullshit". Now it's perfectly possible in your specific region of your specific country that they have sufficient resources, or face a some what different problem space given local details like types of construction etc, which lets them allocate things differently. But you shouldn't be so quick to lob around accusations of "stupid" at proven emergency response forged through hard lessons and ruthless practical local realities from your limited perspective and thinking.
>2) just suppose they forgot to pack the tools - we have mobile phones, you know...
Did you really just suggest that an extra 20-45min wait is no problem in a life/safety critical situation, or that there will necessarily be someone who can go bring it from a volunteer fire department? Or do think that there is nowhere further then a few minutes from a fire dept? Either way you are in a serious, serious bubble.
> They have precognition and can see into the future and know that a house fire is going to start while they're out at a non-fire call in your country?
Do heart attacks and car accidents usually include fires in your country? I could only find statistics for Finland [1]. It seems that fires are so rare they're put in the "rescue and other authorities" category which has a total of 5% of calls requiring intervention.
In my country I know of only 2 or 3 cases of cars that caught fire in an accident in the last 10 years and they all caught fire immediately, not after ambulance arrived. They're so rare, it's a major news story every time. And I know of no heart attacks that were followed by a fire. /s
Let's assume that somehow a fire starts after the initial crew gets there. I'm sure everyone is trained to: 1) call for the fire truck (that's separate crew, nobody has to go back and fetch it), 2) use the fire extinguisher from the van and 3) as most emergencies are in cities, use the building's fire hoses and extinguishers until 1) arrives.
> extra 20-45min wait is no problem in a life/safety critical situation
That's not what the statistics show. [2]
> Either way you are in a serious, serious bubble.
No, I don't belive I'm in a bubble. I still belive it's a very very big waste of money and resources to call a fire truck if there's no fire.
Fire/emergency stations are placed so they can get quickly anywhere in their assigned area. If they're at another call when a real fire starts, it's not statiscally probable to be closer than if they were at the base station. They could be delayed even more by the traffic jam caused by the car accident they're responding to.
So better send one of the vans to heart attacks and car accidents and keep the fire truck at the base stations for fires only.
Time to arrival of a fully equipped ambulance to deal with emergencies?
Risk and time from dealing with a complex handover of the patient from fire truck crew care to ambulance care?
For me it seems like in the vast majority of cases optimizing for getting a fire truck on scene fast is the wrong solution. Waiting a few extra minutes for the ambulance would improve outcomes.
And it is of course possible to differentiate on calls.
A life or death situation like a cardiac arrest or someone bleeding out would select from all available units. Including the fire department, ambulances and police. But those are a tiny sliver of 911 calls.
Vote up from me, but even this isn't optimal. As opposed to fire trucks, ambulance vans can be parked almost anywhere in the city waiting for calls. They don't need to wait at their base station. They get faster to a call location than a fire truck.
In 99% of US jurisdictions, you cannot even develop land in a way that prevents an enormous firetruck from driving all around the property. Which means less density, more wasted space for road, further cementing a car-centric life.
Yes, in some places there may be more fire stations than ambulance locations. But that's not always the case. In the modern age you would think that either the ambulance or the fire truck could be routed to the destination based on the their GPS locations depending on which is closest.
But also, I don't understand why first responder ambulances don't co-locate with the fire stations (in places where there are more of the latter). If there's an emergency that is not a fire, the ambulance goes.
One of the things people often overlook don't talk about in this arguments is the manager's point of view and how it's contributing to the shakeups in this industry.
As a developer I'm bullish on coding agents and GenAI tools, because they can save you time and can augment your abilities. I've experienced it, and I've seen it enough already. I love them, and want to see them continue to be used.
I'm bearish on the idea that "vibe coding" can produce much of value, and people without any engineering background becoming wildly productive at building great software. I know I'm not alone. If you're a good problem solver who doesn't know how to code, this is your gateway. And you better learn what's happening with the code while you can to avoid creating a huge mess later on.
Developers argue about the quality of "vibe coded" stuff. There are good arguments on both sides. At some point I think we all agree that AI will be able generate high quality software faster than a human, someday. But today is not that day. Many will try to convince you that it is.
Within a few years we'll see massive problems from AI generated code, and it's for one simple reason:
Managers and other Bureaucrats do not care about the quality of the software.
Read it again if you have to. It's an uncomfortable idea, but it's true. They don't care about your flow. They don't care about how much you love to build quality things. They don't care if software is good or bad they care about closing tickets and creating features. Most of them don't care, and have never cared about the "craft".
If you're a master mason crafting amazing brickwork, you're exactly the same as some amateur grabbing some bricks from home depot and slapping a wall together. A wall is a wall. That's how the majority of managers view software development today. By the time that shoddy wall crumbles they'll be at another company anyway so it's someone else's problem.
When I talk about the software industry collapsing now, and in a few years we're mired with garbage software everywhere, this is why. These people in "leadership" are salivating at the idea of finally getting something for nothing. Paying a few interns to "vibe code" piles of software while they high five each other and laugh.
It will crash. The bubble will pop.
Developers: Keep your skills sharp and weather out the storm. In a few years you'll be in high demand once again. When those walls crumble, they will need people who what they're doing to repair it. Ask for fair compensation to do so.
Even if I'm wrong about all of this I'm keeping my skills sharp. You should too.
This isn't meant to be anti-management, but it's based on what I've seen. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
* And to the original point, In my experience the tools interrupt the "flow" but don't necessarily take the joy out of it. I cannot do suggestion/autocomplete because it breaks my flow. I love having a chat window with AI nearby when I get stuck or want to generate some boilerplate.
> If you're a master mason crafting amazing brickwork, you're exactly the same as some amateur grabbing some bricks from home depot and slapping a wall together.
IDK, there's still a place in society for master masons to work on 100+ year old buildings built by other master masons.
Same with the robots. They can implement solutions but I'm not sure I've heard of any inventing an algorithmic solution to a problem.
I think you are right with the building analogy. Most stuff built in the last 25 years is crap quality! But importantly looks nice. Needs to look nice at first.
Hello fellow Manning author! This book is fantastic. I remember reading through a lot of it a couple years back. Super helpful and it's one of those books you can pick up, grab a nugget or two of good info and come back later.
Now that I'm starting another big Go project I'm going to look at it again.
What I like most about this book is it feels like it's all "real world" stuff. You can tell the author has built a lot with Go and can save you time by telling you were the potholes are. Great stuff!
Your father's contributions are immeasurable. Just reading the word "QModem" gave me an instant flashback to my youth. QModem was my gateway to the outside world.
I grew up way out in the country. I was the 80s and I was pretty isolated from technology and didn't even know anyone who cared about it at first. I started tinkering with our home PC, and I finally purchased a modem and figured out how to connect to BBSs. This changed my life. I had many sleepless nights as teenager, connecting everywhere I could. QModem was like a fancy car that drove me anywhere I wanted to go.
I became obsessed with learning and tweaking things. AT commands, autoexec.bat, QModem scripting. Whatever I could figure out to get maximum performance and fast download speeds. Because of Qmodem, I could download games, text files, and even talk with other people. This moment in time defined my future. I knew right then what I wanted to do with my life.
I owe thanks to your father and what he built for my wonderful career, and 40 years of enjoying technology. Without something as easy to learn and reliable as QModem, who knows what path my life would have taken.
I got a C&D from them 20+ years ago for hosting a ROM site. That's fair enough. I complied. But this seems ridiculous. What if they're plugging an 8-BIT NES to an adapter and into a capture card?
The whole thing seems silly as I don't see it's costing them money. But it's their product they can do what they want.
For a whole lot of software companies, the main competitor is the old version of the software.
Same for Nintendo: Newer games might be nicer to look at, but old games are just as much fun. So working older copies of their games do cost them money, and they'd rather see them disappear.
Indeed. This is a bit aprocryphal but I believe to recall reading about them attempting to shut down second-hand video game shops using legal threats somewhere in the 90s?
I guess this is it: Nintendo took Blockbuster to court arguing that rentals constituted copyright infringement. They also sued Galoob for the Game Genie under the premise that using the Game Genie to alter the game in any way constitutes producing an infringing derivative work. They lost in both cases.
>This is just overstretching of IP-laws if you ask me. This madness has to stop.
IP laws aren't a natural concept that exists by itself in nature, they're a construct manufactured and enforced by the governments. So if governments made them, then governments can easily rewrite them if they wish so.
But for that there needs public support and presure form voters to the politicians, but IP laws aren't something the average person cares or even ever thinks about, not when their core worries are inflation, CoL, housing, healthcare, education, etc, so the issue of IP laws is played exclusively on the battlefield of corporations and who has the most money for lobbying.
And corporations don't want laxer IP laws since that gives smaller players more leverage, versus the current status quo the favors the large plyers with the biggest litigation warchests to create large moats for them.
Do they really get to do whatever they like forever with e.g. games and consoles they neither sell nor maintain anymore?
The NES was discontinued in 95, that was nearly 3 decades ago. I don't think they should have the right to prevent hackers to emulate it and share their findings.
Current consoles, yeah maybe, but even then the question would be why they should get a monopoly on the games developed for their platform..
> I don't think they should have the right to prevent hackers to emulate it and share their findings
They do not. Emulation is legal. However it is worth considering that:
0) NES Classic was sold as recently as 2018
1) Nintendo currently rent out NES games as part of Switch online
2) Copyright law ("lifetime" + 70 years) is on Nintendo's side for games themselves
3) Fair use can be a defense against infringement in some cases
4) Although it might or might not be fair use, I feel no guilt downloading Super Mario Bros 3 for an emulator since I've purchased it at least ten times by now, own multiple copies of the game on physical media, and am currently renting it through Switch online.
On the Sony/PlayStation side, I own a PS Classic, which actually runs a version of an open source PS1 emulator PCSX, amusingly enough. (I'm a bit disappointed that it's not a descendant of Connectix's emulator though.[1])
> Nintendo currently rent out NES games as part of Switch online
If Nintendo really cared about this they should create their own version of Spotify for legacy video games and charge a monthly subscription fee for the entire library that’s cross platform and mobile friendly. The strength of Nintendo really is their games, not the hardware. I don’t understand why Nintendo is so attached to their hardware in 2024, especially in the age of the Steam Deck.
> I don’t understand why Nintendo is so attached to their hardware in 2024,
Yes, you do not.
Nintendo makes a lot of money selling hardware. Switch is the third most successful game console of all time, behind the PS2 and Nintendo's own DS. Switch was always profitable vs. component and manufacturing cost, and this has largely gotten better over time with the exception of covid-related supply chain disruptions. Nintendo has no need or desire to follow in Sega's footsteps.
Switch consoles mean Nintendo can sell physical game cards. Physical media are important in Japan, and important elsewhere since they allow fully offline operation.
Moreover, Nintendo doesn't want to sacrifice its platform fees to the likes of Valve, Apple, or Google.
They do, but the majority of their library is not available on current hardware. I think not understanding this as a business decision is a valid opinion.
By restricting access to their classic portfolio, it inflates the value of it so they can periodically release it on new platforms in a time limited fashion.
Disney did the same thing with their classic movies during the VHS/DVD era. If they were all available all the time then nobody would even think to watch them. But by creating scarcity and then periodically releasing them in a time limited special edition they can eke out more money.
So Nintendo do not want everyone to be blasse about their back catalogue. They want the nostalgia to build and then release some of these titles every so often so you buy them over and over again.
> By restricting access to their classic portfolio, it inflates the value of it so they can periodically release it on new platforms in a time limited fashion.
One would think so, but there are incredible games in their portfolio that have never seen a single re-release - on any platform. The old Pokemon games are among it, as is A link to the past.
> One would think so, but there are incredible games in their portfolio that have never seen a single re-release - on any platform. The old Pokemon games are among it, as is A link to the past.
Maybe you're using a different definition of re-release than I am, but I recently played A Link to the Past on the Switch virtual console. I also played the Game Boy Advance re-release of it in the early 2000s. Apparently it's also been released for the Wii, Wii U, New 3DS, and Super NES Classic Edition.
A quick check of Wikipedia shows that in addition to their remakes, Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow were also released on the 3DS virtual console.
Physical media in Japan is important for a lot of reasons. Just looking around, the Music CD rental market is still big here... I have spoken to many people who have no streamers, they buy or rent all their DVDs and BluRays. There's the collectors thing, too, with "special edition" and "limited time" offers, etc. Physical media has a lot of love in Japan.
“I’m not a prophet or anything, but I believe that physical media will have more longevity here for the same reason that I think magazines do, which is that anyone can step out of their house and walk five feet [to buy one],” says Ricciardi. “It’s just easier to get to these things in Japan.”
I think part of the reason Nintendo (and it's not just Nintendo) is very reserved with their historical library is that they do not want to satisfy the demand for games that way while they're still making new ones.
If you can legally play Pokemon GBA or DS games under emulation for a subscription, would that have an effect on demand for buying new Pokemon games, especially for the adult market that has nostalgia for the earlier titles? I honestly think it would, especially given that there seems to be a fairly reasonable consensus online that the franchise peaked in the past for a lot of players - some people say the GBA titles, some say the DS ones, etc. I know personally that I play the old DS, GBA and GameCube titles for a lot of Nintendo franchises more than their current Switch releases.
And with regard to making it cross-platform & available on mobile, Nintendo has always controlled their platforms aggressively. They've never released games on other console platforms other than their own, and their mobile push has been deliberately very conservative (even moreso than other companies with retro libraries like Square Enix, Sega, etc). Plus especially with their handheld lineup, the DS and the 3DS are tricky to do emulated releases for - with the combination of built in touch screens, dual displays, etc.
But I also think that mobile gaming is a poor fit for most of Nintendo's library - unless you're expecting players to buy physical controls for their phones, I can't imagine playing eg Super Mario World is going to be very fun with touch screen button overlays.
Selling their own hardware still works for Nintendo, it's still profitable and it gives them control they'd cede if they released elsewhere. They'd have to pay platform fees, go through someone else's certification processes, etc. They have some of the most recognisable IP in gaming (and with Pokemon etc, one of the most recognisable bits of IP in the world), so they have the market power to pull people to buy their hardware too.
> They have some of the most recognisable IP in gaming (and with Pokemon etc, one of the most recognisable bits of IP in the world), so they have the market power to pull people to buy their hardware too.
I haven’t picked up my Switch since I bought my Steam Deck. That’s not “market power” that’s losing a gamer instead.
This is just baby steps to Nintendo weaseling themselves into Supreme Court to get Sony v. Connectix overturned. MGM v. Grokster attempted to overturn Sony v. Universal (VCR lawsuit), but while the movie studios did win, it was not an overturn of the VCR lawsuit.
Wonder what the EU laws are on this, as for example also things as game mechanics/features are not something you can register in the EU. So I assume they can't really block Emulation there.
And in that case, would it make a difference where the development is done, and if the website is "geofenced"?
> But it's their product they can do what they want.
To the extent that we let them. There's no natural rights going on here, so theoretically (if you believe in democracy) we still get to decide how much power foreign companies have.
The US belongs to various international copyright conventions. The assumption is that countries will respect each others' copyrights.
And the US currently has an extremely long copyright period, life of the author + 70 years. Some (Larry Lessig and others) have argued that this violates the constitution's establishment clause for copyright, but so far the supreme court disagrees, and copyright reform also seems dead in the legislative branch. (And on the executive side, the copyright office is not sympathetic, and international treaties also impede copyright reform.)
But your thought experiment is interesting - suppose the US decides that Nintendo's copyrights no longer hold, and suppose that Japan decides that Microsoft's copyrights no longer hold? If it were only for old games and obsolete software, perhaps little would change. If it were for recent games/software, then I think it might change the incentives to localize games/software for other markets.
A large part of the US economy depends on IP law, including copyright; they're not going to suddenly abandon it.
They could, however, shorten the terms to much more reasonable lengths. It wouldn't hurt the US economy to shorten copyright terms to 50 years, for instance. If they shortened them to 30 years, it would have no real effect on the software industry, though Nintendo would be pissed. I don't think Microsoft would care much about people passing around copies of MS-DOS 3.3.
> If they shortened them to 30 years, it would have no real effect on the software industry, though Nintendo would be pissed. I don't think Microsoft would care much about people passing around copies of MS-DOS 3.3.
Well Windows 95 is coming up soon on its 30th... (and come to think of it MS already open sourced MS-DOS "4.0" for any retro-masochists who might want it.[1])
I'm sure MS Word and Excel must have improved slightly in 30 years, but by how much? They don't seem much more responsive than they were 10 years ago, and most of the shiny new Windows/Office features seem to be things I hate like annoying autocorrect, pointless UI redesigns, new advertisements and telemetry, and worthless and intrusive AI nonsense. Maybe with some incompatible save formats and clunky "cloud" features added in for good measure.
Office's largest enhancement seems to be Office 365, which offers an inferior and sluggish imitation of the desktop apps running in a web browser. This is possibly useful for people stuck with crappy Chromebooks, ARM-based tablets/phones, or Linux.
Different company but if I ever got serious about doing graphics/photo editing again I might actually prefer a dedicated ~2010-era CS installation on a virtualized legacy box over anything that either Adobe or the rest of the market has to offer today. CS4~6 felt pretty "done". Creative Cloud still sucks.
Surely that's a gaping hole in the market waiting to be filled?
I thought Office used OO-XML, which they released as an open standard (mostly) back in the 2000s. I use it at work (unfortunately) and that seems to be what it still uses, and LibreOffice seems to work fine with it too. I don't think anything's changed here in a long time, but I could be missing something.
>new advertisements
I see nothing wrong here at all. Advertisements in Windows and Office are good things, for MS shareholders: they increase profits. Sure, they make the user experience worse, but who cares about them? If you don't like it, use LibreOffice.
>Office's largest enhancement seems to be Office 365, which offers an inferior and sluggish imitation of the desktop apps running in a web browser.
I'd say this is the biggest enhancement by far. Yeah, it's slower than running in a native app, but it was obviously a direct challenge to Google Docs, which I think came out earlier and popularized the idea of a browser-based office suite. The main advantage of it is not being tied to a single PC (or worse, a Windows PC), and probably more importantly, being able to easily share documents with others, even editing them simultaneously. That really is a killer feature for many.
> Which basically proves Nintendo has little to no moat apart from laws preventing their executables from being run elsewhere.
That would cause foreign countries to also ignore copyright held by US companies. Copyright laws only work as well as they do because all countries that matter sort of play by the same rules.
I can't speak for the original author, but crafting a great blog post is fun. And, there are thousands of people a day who read my blog, but even if it were zero it would be the same.
The "polish" and working on it is part of craft, it's no different than carving something out of wood and not showing it to anyone. You still had fun creating the product and shaping it how you wanted.
I have no idea who this person is, but I loved reading this article. The author is clearly a better writer than me and managed cleanly assemble the reasons most of us do this.
I also run a blog and have since 1997. Didn't start seriously contributing until 2008 or so. It's a labor of love and I do it for many of the reasons stated here. Love to write, love to push myself to make things more "usable" for folks other than me. And it helps me check myself on certain topics (do I understand this enough to teach it to someone else?)
I have been hassled by some younger folks who say "blogging is dead" (can't argue with that) and it's a waste of time because it will never make me viral, rich, or famous (I knew that before I started). But I do it for me, and I still recommend other people do it as well. It's good for the soul.
Also something most folks don't know: about 70% of the firefighters in the US are volunteers. If you're in a big city you'll have 4 paid folks on an engine (maybe 3 and 1 intern) but as soon as you venture out of the city you'll see more engines 100% staffed by volunteers. And if you don't know the difference that's a good thing!
Fire departments run on budgets that would also shock you (how low they are).