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During Blackout, Ham Radio Shined
Mark Cantrell writes "An interesting bit on AP through Yahoo today. Seems that ham radio (which recently had a bit of backlash here on Slashdot from a few people thinking it was useless, outdated technology), really shined through during the blackouts. When the power went, ham radio operators, using battery backup power, were able to help coordinate emergency workers while the cell phone networks were overloaded. For anyone wondering why interference due to power line broadband is considered a bad thing, well, there ya go."
Being a slashdotter means never having to say you're sorry when you ostracize a seemingly archaic, yet dependable, technology that shows its worth when all else fails.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
You only need HAM radio once in a while, but there is no substitute for it's low-tech ability to keep communicating.
It is obvious that old methods shine when newer technology fails.
This is why we burn candles during blackouts.
Big deal, lets get on with the other 99.9% of our lives.
The unofficial
... that none of the communications applications mentioned in the article would have used HF radio. HF is used when you want an unreliable, noisy link over extremely long distances. VHF (144 MHz and up) and UHF comms are used for emergency-services work. These services would not be affected by BPL.
HF is pretty much done for as a meaningful communications medium. VHF and UHF are where the action is these days.
...data can never have too many multiple, redundant backups.
Carousel is a lie!
sorry, ran out of space in the subject line...
Many cell towers are equiped with UPSs to work for a couple hours or so, but hardly enough to cover an outage like what we've seen. We've concentrated on building these things cheap. I can't say I blame them -- who expects a two-day-long outage? Even so, many of the backups didn't even work. You could argue that they should have generators for backup, solar panels, gerbil-wheels, or what not, but its our capitalist nature to try and build these things as cheaply as possible.
I'd argue that, instead of relying on grungy old men with ham radios, that emergency personel should have access to ham radios. It'd probably cost a lot less to do that than to create a telecommunications infrastructure resistant to blackouts.
But they DO generate a lot of interference. Makes the radio unlistenable. Some smacktard in the other thread was going on about how a few peoples hobby wasn't important. Well, guess what fuckhole, it is. Amateur radio saved your worthless ass. There would be no amateur radio left if the FCC continues with their stupidity.
That's what we get for depending on electricity so much. HAM radio is nothing special, without those car batteries and other backup power sources it would have been as useless as a pair of tits on a bull.
Just make sure never to get an electric home environment control system.
...and you cause people to not get involved. Less involvement means that the system will fall apart.
If no one is left using the technology because of problems under normal conditions, these people won't be there to save your ass when you need paramedics called and the phones don't work.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Also, there have been disasters that hams have been involved in providing services for where communications were greatly disrupted, but power was not out. September 11, 2001 New York city had a major communications disruption that hams played a very important part in getting health and welfare messages out of and across the city when the phone system was significantly impacted.
But your post also shows an extreme shortsightedness. Do you expect hams to keep maintaining equipment and buying new equipment, and new hams to come into the hobby, if normally the RF interference is so bad that they could only use that equipment in the event of a massive power failure? When lives are lost because the ranks of the ham radio operators have dwindled because they were pushed off the bands (and they certainly have saved many lives) perhaps you can make your little joke again.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
How do you use encryption on this ham based ISP? Wouldn't the banner ads and spam count as broadcasting commercial speech and get you fined by the FCC? Do you really think mom&pop are going to get their technicians license just to send their kid email at school?
The wired telephone network did really well during the blackout, because it was designed with separate reliable power systems, big batteries, generators, and a concern for reliability; except for a few isolated power problems, the real trouble that wired phones had was that too many people were trying to call so there were some capacity issues. Cell phones have similar issues, but the overloading capacity problems are far worse, and the failure methods aren't as clean, and unlike the wired phone network, there aren't decades of work on how to make sure that "important" users get priority during overloads.
Peer-to-Peer systems scale well, and theoretically they'd do better than centralized problems in some kinds of emergencies, but they have to be designed correctly to avoid the overloading-and-failure problem as well. (For example, Napster scaled really well within clusters, but the earlier Gnutella things run out of indexing capacity after a while.)
So you'd expect Ham Radio to be great, because everybody can talk directly to everybody else once they pick channels, but it's not really that way. When two radios can reach each other directly, and it's an emergency situation, everybody's polite and well-trained enough to prioritize and let the doctors and firemen and police talk to each other and move the idle chit-chat or the "Hi, Marge, I'll be home really late" personal calls to other channels. HF seems to work that way, and CB radio Channel 9 somewhat did, but other CB channels are a total zoo, kind of like Usenet without the scalability. But a large fraction of the cute little handheld ham sets (2m, 70cm, etc.) are repeater-based - there's a repeater up on a hilltop with N channels of transmit and receive which lets the little sets get lots of distance without lots of power, kind of like one big cell site per hilltop. It works really well when it's not overloaded, but its only overflow protection is polite users, and that means that if it's too busy, you can't get through, but the busy signal is friendlier and more interesting. One repeater that got mentioned at ARRL.ORG handled about 500 messages over 20 hours, which is about one call every 2 minutes - not a heavy load.
Does anybody know how well ham repeater towers did for power during the outage? I'm guessing most of them are well-enough designed, with batteries and solar to support most of their needs rather than depending on line power, partly because hams are good at that kind of planning and partly because volunteers would rather not have to drive up some mountain during bad weather to fire up a generator just because the power line went down when they've got better things to do.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Interference instantly gone when hams are only really useful.
:)
:)
Hams were the first pioneers of almost all the radio technology you take for granted. You like WiFi? Who do you think tinkered in that frequncy range to begin with? Who do you think you still share that 2.4Ghz band with? Sattelites? Etc, etc.
but they continued to work and emergency personnel went off their powered radio systems anyway. Show me the problem.
Umm, FYI, we lost power to the EMS repeaters for a good 30 mins, twice. Repeaters work off of AC, and if they go down, all the little portable radios that EMS personnell rely on make grat paperweights.
I'm a ham, had a radio that day, and was able to communicate that day at work with a few battery powered repeaters. The operators on the other were ready and willing to help out in any way possible.
Please visit www.arrl.org for more information.
Nice troll BTW.
I haven't keyed up a radio in a few years, but when my license expires in March of 2004, I'm renewing it.
It's just one of those things - you never know when you'll need it, but you'll be glad you had it...
---
KE6FTH
The interference from power-line broadband is capable of travelling hundreds of miles, from places that do have power. This is A Bad Thing.
HAM requires one to pass an exam to receive an FCC issued callsign, and there are specific rules as to what classes of licenses are allowed as far as frequency, power, transmission type, and the like. HAM radio operators can lose their licenses if they violate the rules, and have their equipment confinscated. The exam for the entry level operator class, "Technician", is 35 questions, and you must answer 26 correctly to pass. It's an easy test, costs $10, and applies your license for ten years before another $10 renewal (for ten more years) is required. There is next a Technician Plus Code class, which gives access to an additional frequency over Technician, and then General, which is higher yet, and more difficult, followed by Amateur-Extra, which is the top license, where you get all HAM-allowed privileges.
CB, on the other hand, has some 40 "channels", is technically restricted in power to something like one watt or somesuch, and simply requires you to get in line at Radioshack to buy the kit. You are in theory not allowed to talk to someone that you know is more than a certain distance away from you, CB is designed for local communcation only. CB is not allowed repeaters, and those that have tried setting up CB repeater networks have found themselves in trouble with the FCC. The "Channels" are set frequencies that CB operates on, not actual raw stuff like HAM operators deal with. HAM operators get a significantly larger piece of spectrum, with stuff as low as 10Hz, and up in the GHz range at the top, with all kinds of pieces in between. CB gets it's one section around 10m or 11m or something like that.
Basically, HAM Radio requires you to follow some rules in exchange for significant privileges, CB is a toy.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The simple sad fact is that ham radio is now virtually irrelevant in emergency communications and other direct public service activities. While the non-ham world has embraced analog and digital cell phones, FRS, 802.11, LEO and GEO satellite terminals and the Internet, most of ham radio is still stuck on methods that predate World War 2. And many hams seem perversely proud of it!
The only remaining reason for ham radio to continue to exist (and it's a really important one) is for the utterly unique educational opportunities it provides. Where else can you, as an individual, design your own antennas, build your own radios, conduct propagation experiments, experiment with your own modulation schemes, or participate in the design, construction and operation of a spacecraft? Ham radio has launched many people into productive technical careers, and that has always been its biggest payoff.
Now that really is a supprise.
Oh sure Ham's an old technology. Like Unix. Constantly revising the technology by a community connected by the technology. Like open source. Always informmed like Slashdot working together to keep the signal clear.
Many ham ops use Linux and for a good reason the whole Linux community is very much like the Ham packet community.
Today public wifi is a bunch of hacks with repeaters etc but some day a ham will bring out some technology that will make it work on a massive scale.
But people outside the ham community. They don't see it. They look at ham and say "That ugly tower is going to bring down property values" they say "We'll get cancer" they sue and harrass ham ops.
They don't believe a group of hobbyists can do any better than paid profesionals.
Open source and free software communitys live in the same boat.
Hay if brodband over IP interfears with ham packets then what will happen to cell phones, wifi, broudcast TV and radio..
We don't need archaic hams and we don't need open source software. But if you think the alternitive isn't ditching the technology all together your mistaken.
Good bye open source, good bye Linux, Good bye Internet.
Good by Ham, good bye communication inovations, good bye cell phones and yet again good bye Internet.
We can live with out it. Do we want to?
If Ham had a Microsoft there'd be someone saying right now how Ham got lucky.
I don't actually exist.
On a more serious note:
A lot of people seem to say "Its much more valuable to have thousands of people get broadband internet access than to have ham radio. After all, most of the time, hams just chat and aren't helping with emergencies. Plus, powerline broadband would only affect HF."
However, the general chit-chat that ham operators do IS valuable. Without it, ham radio would become worthless. People aren't going to buy thousand dollar radios "just in case" if they have huge amounts of interference to deal with so they can't chat. Similarly, would YOU pay for internet service that had 99% downtime? Furthermore, current operators will be less willing to keep an operational station if theres nothing to do with it. That radio will just sit in the attic, and if there's an emergency, too bad. Also, people aren't going to be able to do anything even if they have a working station if they haven't ever been able to practice.
Its not that ham-radio is old and more reliable than newer technologies, its that nothing yet can easily replace ham-radio(try to think of something that really can), and seeing how the internet has been turned into a marketing/media tool, there may not be anything for a while. Ham radio is simple, long-range, portable, versatile/flexible, and most importantly, independant of other services.
Cell-phone nets get overloaded with callers.
The internet has no long range portability, and is dependent on physical networks.
Sattelite phones are WAY too expensive and limited.
Etc...
We like radio that way. The FCC isn't about to come shoot you if you allude to business, but we don't want people 'spamming' us on the air.
Things are kept civil on the ham bands. I used to have a CB... I'm glad I don't anymore. They all talked trash, and nothing but trash. I've heard an occasional (*gasp*) trash talk or excessive profanity on the HF bands before. I doubt the FCC did anything. They have better things to do (I'd hope) than sit around listenting to hams discuss baseball waiting for one of them to swear. What happened? People pretty much told the guy to get a life. It's not all like you get booted for saying "damn". It's a lot like Slashdot, actually -- there's some foul language, but the offensive stuff is modded down, and the total wackos rambling about the newest race they've decided to hate are modded even further down. But do you complain about the censorship of modding down ASCII renditions of goatse? No, it's trash.
I really think you have a misguided opinion of the 'censorship'. We keep things professional, but we LIKE that. Things really aren't as overzealous as you might think, and a lot of the 'censorship' is peer-induced to act mature. The people who don't are generally regarded much as the trolls here. The FCC generally just goes after people who make it a point to interfere with other people. We're not 'censored,' we're just not immature. If the FCC tomorrow said that it was going to stop monitoring ham bands entirely, I doubt there'd be a noticable change in how things are done.
(And as a random note: CB is still 'censored' as you speak. The limit's 5 Watts. There ARE laws concerning CB. It's just kind of like copyright laws -- there's rampant ignorance of the laws. The idiots with kilowatt+ amps DO sometimes get cracked down on.)
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Ham radio is not licensed for use as a commercial or government service. It is a non-commercial ("amateur") service only.
Plus, most service workers and emergency personnell have radios that have anywhere from zero (auto-trunking) to five (old style VHF/UHF) "channels". Training them to use the open spectrum and coordinate such use is ridiculous. They're responding to an emergency, they won't have time or patience to establish a net and communications protocol.
We "old" (27 years old) hams are able to take this one little slice of responsibility and learn it very, very well. I don't have to worry about crowd control, or CPR, or evacuating the building--all I have to worry about is maintaining a communications link between myself and the net control, and then passing messages back and forth. What I have that the professional emergency responders do not have is the skill necessary to manage the communications should something unexpected happen, such as a jammer on frequency, blocked communications paths, etc.
Do you think that the police captain running the search-and-rescue drill has the spare time to decide whether a small J-pole antenna or a 35 watt amp is the best way to establish contact and maintain it over a period of hours or days?
JD
To add to that:
As a professional radio operator, I can tell you that operating a transceiver is a perishable skill. If these guys can't use their equipment on a fairly regular basis, they become much less useful in a crisis. It's not like riding a bicycle, where you learn it once and you know it forever. It's more like playing a musical instrument, where if you set it down, it only takes a few short years and you can't play anymore. At least, not well enough to be a useful musician. HAMM radio operators should be considered a national treasure, because if we ever did suffer a economic/governmental collapse, or lose the power grid (which we see is not as unlikely as we thought) or whatever other catastrophy might happen, those guys will be the heroes who tell you Mom and Pop are still breathing.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
If we need to depend on HAM radio operators to ensure that Medical/Police response teams can communicate during various crisis, then we have bigger problems than BPL causing HAM radio interference.
The fact of the matter is, wether or not you like HAM radio, the public should *NOT* have to depend on private citizens to get the help they need in the event of an emergency. Is it a nice "safety net"? Yes. But do I want to depend on a bunch of HAM radio operators to direct rescue efforts? Not really. I pay taxes for services like that, not for say, giving illegal aliens drivers licenses, as we (will) do here in California.
HAM radio isn't the first thing to suffer from progress and certainly wont be the last. The fact that NYC dwellers hadn't seen the stars in a bazillion years is proof enough of that. We allow a great deal to fall by the wayside in the name of progress. Not all of it is good, but if BPL can help bring cheap, fast, internet access to the masses, it's *my* opinion that HAM radio is an acceptable sacrifice. Of course, I'd like to find some middle ground where HAM operators don't suffer from spectrum interference, but all things considered, it is an acceptable loss.
Actually, by "chatting", I mean non-emergency/non-critical communications, which includes: practice contacting people, efficient communication, net operations, traffic nets, etc. in a non-formal manner. It allows you to practice operating skills and is fun too(offers a reason to become a ham).
Basically, chatting give operators experience and practice in ham radio operation. Without that, nobody would be able to do much in a real emergency, since efficiency is important for emergency communications.
If you read books about computers but had never actually USED a computer before, would you be able to just sit down, configure a network, and E-Mail someone quickly? Probably not.
In any case, that's not the point... If the broadband signal pushes ham users out of their 'hobby' then, when the power goes out, there won't be any hams with working radios to help coordinate the saving of your unlit butt.
Reminds me of a parable...
The ham system is rather like an insurance policy. It often seems like a waste -- until the day you really need it. Of course, the day you really need it, is the wrong time to put it together.Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I think you have no understanding of the nature of emergency services. At it's best, emergency services are controlled chaos. Under "other than normal" circumstances it's a complete crapshoot. Having the assistance of *trained* citizens is invaluable, and is a lot more common than you obviously think. The emergency services are there to help you, not wipe your ass for you.
And, quite frankly, all these ultra-high tech communications systems the emergency services use are really nice under normal circumstances, but are completely friggin useless when the main systems fail. Many modern vehicle radios *cannot* talk directly to another mobile unit (multi-frequency). The transmission is sent to a tower, and relayed to the other vehicle/handheld. If the tower fails, every radio in the field becomes a high-dollar piece of junk.
Yes, I do know what I'm talking about, I worked eight years in emergency services, and my wife has over 17 years, and is still working in in the field.
In a free country it is appropriate that we rely on volunteers. Communication is much too important to be left to the goverment.
Well... all you did was to prove his point wonderfully. He could not have done a better job himself in pointing out the current problems and why we need solutions and not some authority wannabe running the show. And yes... I too know what I am talking about. I was a HAM for over 25 years.
All the technology that you quote apart from satellites requires considerable infrastructure that simply doesn't work or is overloaded during an emergency. Satellite terminals work very well in open country, but they don't like high buildings. A friend of mine had a portable INMARSAT terminal to provide emergency communications. He had to go onto a roof to use it. LEO (Iridium-style) is better, but it still has problems amongst the 'canyon walls' formed by high-rise buildings.
You accuse hams of being stuck in the past. Please remember that the hobby is tightly regulated by the FCC. The fights to even get packet radio accepted took a lot of time.
Yes, the training aspect that you mention is important, but the ability of amateurs to provide emergency support is probably still their best justification for the EM spectrum they occupy.
See my journal, I write things there
I've got a few karma points to burn, and you need to be beaten with a clue stick. I suggest you start with the ARRL.
To call amateur radio operators simply hobbiests does them a disservice. They're licensed by the FCC. Listen on your local repeater the next time some severe thunderstorms roll through. I bet you'll hear a SKYWARN net, courtesy of your local ARES group. What's ARES? This is. They are volunteers that work closely with the National Weather Service. If you're lucky enough to still have an active RACES group in your area, I suggest you go look at that site. FEMA, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is the governing body that provides assistance to the local governing bodies, specifically the civil defence bodies that sponsor RACES groups.
Enough examples? No?
Check out an Army or Navy MARS site and note that you can pass a MARSGRAM to any service member, anywhere, through the network of MARS operators. As an amateur radio operator, it was pretty cool to sit (once) at the MARS gateway in Frankfurt, Germany while I was in the Army. More than a handful of messages that came through were on their way to soldiers in Bosnia.
If your metro area lost traditional communications, your local hams would post themselves at the Red Cross, any hospitals, police and fire stations and keep communications going. In fact, this is what they did in New York after the towers came down.
Guess what else. We're volunteers. We don't get paid. In fact, we CAN'T get paid for our radio services. Go read the rules: 47 CFR 97.113(2)
P.S. It says no radio transmissions for hire.
That means every radio operator is out there during emergencies because they want to be. They take an active interest in the community they're serving. They invest in their own rigs and the generators to run them so that they might one day HELP YOU, as well as give them an outlet for their interests. That's a damn sight more dedicated than your whiny, milktoast ass.
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
You overlook the fact that language isn't science. I'm not a big fan of most cultural relativism, but I have to say that when it comes to language, right and wrong are not absolutes.
Take the word 'octopus'. What's the correct plural? 'Octopi'? Wrong. 'Octopi' is actually a hypercorrection. People think the rule, i.e. that which makes the usage correct, is that if you want to pluralize a word that ends in 'us', you drop the 'us' and add an 'i'. They think this because of 'cactus', 'cacti', etc. They see a pattern and incorrectly assume that it's the rule. In fact, the rule for pluralizing words in English is the same as it always has been. To pluralize an English word, add 's', unless the word already ends in 's', in which case you add an 'es'. The exception here is that at one time it was believed that when bringing foreign words into English, one should bring in the plural as well.
And therein lies the problem with 'octopus'. 'Octopus' is from Greek, and so, if you were to follow the rule, you would pluralize it as it would be done in Greek. Thus, the erstwhile correct plural of 'octopus' is 'octopedes' (pronounced ock-TOE-peh-deez).
But who uses that? Most people use 'octopuses' or 'octopi'. Even though 'octopedes' is technically correct, if you used it, no one would understand what you meant. And if no one understands your English, you've rather missed the purpose of attempting to communicate in English. You also come off as a pedantic jerk.
So what makes English usage correct, in the academic sense? What makes English usage correct in this sense is that the usage follows rules. Interestingly enough, those rules are open to dispute. These rules have different sources and some are more acceptable than others. Many of those rules with which the common man would have no quibble are acceptable because they came straight from the common usage. Remember, there weren't always grammar and usage rules. Some people came along and codified what people were already doing with their languages. Thus most English speakers of Eurpean descent have no problem with the rule that subject and verb must agree in number ('they are' not 'they is'). But other rules, such as that about not splitting infinitives, comes, at least in part, from a bunch of pedantic jerks who thought that English should adhere more to the structure of Latin. In Latin, 'to go' would be one word and so, to these pedantic jerks, 'to boldly go' seemed an abomination.
And what makes English usage correct in the common sense, as opposed to the academic sense? In the common sense, correct usage is that which sounds correct to the average speaker, rules be damned. Incedentally, the common man usually wins over the academician. Most academicians long ago gave up the fight over 'octopedes'. They will eventually give up the fight over 'ain't'. Picture if you will an English professor writing the New York times to admonish the Editor that he should use 'thee' and 'thou'. Language changes and so do language prigs, albeit more slowly.
So rules are rules, and nothing more. Personally, I find it perfectly acceptable to say, 'they's (they is) a bunch of mustard greens on the table,' but I wouldn't use that construction in a job interview nor in a paper because it's not correct. But I have to agree with Winston Churchill that there is some 'language up with which I will not put,' no matter how many pedantic jerks tell me how correct it is.
Personally, I think that 'shone' is a much better word than 'shined', but only because it sounds better to my ear. But I'm okay with people using 'shined'. It too is a hypercorrection, but it certainly seems to me to make more sense in that it seems better to follow the English rule that one indicates past tense in regular verbs by adding 'ed'. In fact, my friend, because 'shine shoned' is an irregular verb, it is by definition not following the rule. The only reason it is conside
Whilst people are right, in a disaster zone, the power may well be off, there will be no problem with the Ham operator listening to people worldwide..
The problem comes when the listening station in a safe location cannot hear the signals because his local power lines are working and intefering with the weak signal coming from inside the disaster zone.
liqbase
>> A lot of people seem to say "Its much more valuable to have thousands of people get broadband internet access than to have ham radio....
You're correct to point out the folly of such opinions.
First, it isn't much of a leap to suggest that expanding broadbnd capabilities plays to the financial and employment prospects of many, or most, Slashdot readers. They're hardly an objective, or even thinking, bunch,
Second, DSL or cable access isn't going to do you much good when there's no electricity to power those PC's.
Third, just what are people supposed to do? Climb back into the rubble and send an email to the Fire Department about the tornado that just wiped out their house? Imagining that the Internet can act as a personal communications tool in an emergency is just that: imagination.
All in all, when the lights go out, I'd much rather have a bunch of licensed and emergency trained amateur radio operators around equipped with battery-powered VHF transceivers than a bunch a suburbanites trying to get their AOL client working.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Giving up alternative technologies in favor of a single mechanism would be as silly as having most people run the same operating system, since it would make them all vulnerable to common flaws.
Of course there's NOTHING stopping any emergency personelle from getting their ham license, and in fact many do and then use ham radio very effectively, after they've learned the ropes. But you'd be hard pressed to convince every EMT and fire fighter in the country to add ham radio training to their already busy schedules. And why bother when you have a pool of active hams that can jump into any emergency situation at a moments notice? Why have EMTs fight fires? It does not make sense. Haveing dedicated ham radio operaters makes sense.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Think of all the amateur astronomers whose telescopes became useless due to light polution. It didn't kill off amateur astronomy, but it meant that you had to really want to do it to go for a drive.
That's a stronger analogy than you realize. Lots of people are afraid of the dark, and so they shine light not only where it's needed, but also up into the sky, where it's not needed. Vast quantities of fossil fuels are being turned into greenhouse gasses AND blotting out the sky. Yes, it's nice to have light at night, but it's not necessary to shine it into the sky. Yes, it's nice to have broadband, but it doesn't have to come at the expense of better uses of the spectrum. Light fixtures can direct the light DOWN, and run only enough intensity to show what needs to be shown (to minimize reflected waste), and broadband networking can be run through efficient transmission lines so it doesn't leak so badly.
Now, if we're just going to reassign the entire spectrum to data communications, without regulation, that would at least be logically consistent, though a bad idea. Allowing one special interest to destroy the entire resource is just a bad idea.
the public should *NOT* have to depend on private citizens to get the help they need in the event of an emergency
Is this a troll? Seriously, let me know and I'll shut up. Otherwise, I have to say you look like a complete idiot with that statement.
No private citizens to depend on? Goodbye volunteer fire, ambulance, and police departments. Yes, thats right, in the majority of cities in the US, most EMS people are volunteers. Private citizens, with day jobs.
You want all those services to be paid for by the government? We can do that, just dont bitch when they raise your taxes. There are many necessary services being run by private citizens, that if the gov't had to pick up the tab for, your paycheck would look even smaller.
you cant have it both ways, bub
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.