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Old 08-04-2014, 15:54   #61
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Re: Costs of rescue...

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Originally Posted by letsgetsailing3 View Post
Actually, I've been on quite a few.

The military members you see leaving early on Friday may well have been at work before you hit the snooze button. But none of that has any relevance at all to the actual cost of a rescue mission.
Keep dreaming and as said before, the rescue mission was paid for before it happened.
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Old 08-04-2014, 15:54   #62
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Re: Costs of rescue...

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Which will be undertaken by the duty section, which has already been budgeted for and thus will cost nothing extra in actual dollars.

If what you said was true, Congress would have to meet and pass an appropriations bill every time someone made a distress call. There is no such thing as extra money in a gov't or military budget. It's either spend it or lose it.

Face it, the system is structured such that if someone calls for help, they can do it without worrying about money. If no one needs assistance, then they go out and train as if they're rescuing someone. Whether they're doing it as a training exercise or for real, nobody has to scratch out a check to make it happen. There is no added cost for a real rescue.

Just like my monthly internet bill. Whether I'm arguing with you for 48 hrs straight, or I'm sleeping, the bill is exactly the same.

LOL

There are real dollars being budgeted, allocated/re-allocated, and spent. Just because it's not an additional appropriation doesn't mean the cost isn't real.

It doesn't have to be "extra cost" in order to be a cost. If you budget for a car, put the money in an account, and then buy the car, does it make the car free? No. The car still has a cost, even if there is a budget for it.

And just because I'm not going to say "Oh, it was free", doesn't mean I'm not a member of this community or supportive of Eric and Charlotte, or supportive of their rescue. I'm just not willing to concede that these sorts of things don't cost anything. That risks the cost of being misunderstood.

Of course, this thread has a cost. We could have used the time to do something else. That's opportunity cost, and it has grown too high.
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Old 08-04-2014, 15:55   #63
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Re: Costs of rescue...

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Keep dreaming and as said before, the rescue mission was paid for before it happened.
Which makes it free?

Check your math.
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Old 08-04-2014, 15:58   #64
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Re: Costs of Rescue...

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Let's be grateful that, with the vast majority of developed nations, we are fortunate that we can risk our lives and the taxpayer will rescue us without fuss and from the public purse.

Long may it continue

Dave

Finally, something I can agree with!
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Old 08-04-2014, 16:04   #65
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Re: Costs of rescue...

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Originally Posted by letsgetsailing3 View Post

There is a certain laziness of thought there, and it very quickly falls into the trap of saying, and I quote, "Whether they are doing a rescue, or sitting in the office Facebooking, or sleeping, they get paid the same." The implication there is that the military is sitting on their butts, waiting for something to do.

I know it wasn't meant that way, but I see it as disrespectful to the armed forces in general. The implication is that military is always just training, and not doing anything useful. Training is important. Not just any training, but the kind being developed by people who we're trusting to know what they're doing. I'm not all that familiar with the Navy, but I have to assume that someone, somewhere, is doing smart planning to keep the Navy in ship shape, in response to their mission. If you divert them to rescue someone, there is a cost to that mission. Worth it? Yes. Free? No. I don't think it should be taken for granted that they've nothing better to do than rescue leisure sailors. If you're swabbing the deck in the Pacific Fleet, navigating to different positions probably seems like such a waste. But somewhere, somebody else is making sure people are being trained in the right kind of maneuvers.
I appreciate your support of the military, but frankly you are wrong. I spent four years in the marine infantry. My job was to shoot a very big gun at people, and blow them to bits. In my four years I spend hundreds and hundreds of hours training to do this, and was very good at my job. However in the entire time I served I never actually shot a gun at anyone.

On top of my job, I was however involved in numerous resue operations, peace keeping, hurricane responce, fighting forest fires, earthquake responce, tornado responce, and probably a few other things. None of which I recieved any training for (except a brief orientation).

However my normal work week was Monday - go run, clean weapons, Tuesday - go run clean weapons, Wednesday - go run, clean weapons, Thursday - go run, clean weapons, Friday - go run, clean weapons. Then repeat the next week.

Trust me after a few weeks of that our guns were so clean I would have rather eaten off them than plates... But then we would have to clean them. We relished, in fact drew lots to see who would volunteer to go do anything because we were so bored. It really didn't matter what it was, I would rather be doing it than staying on base cleaning that stupid gun.


The reality is that only a small percentage of people who ever serve in the military will be called upon to fight in a war zone. So we sat around and plaid x-box a lot. Much like a firefighter... You don't pay them to sit around and do nothing 95% of the time! you pay them for that 5% when you need them and need them now, not in six months when new recruits can be trained.
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Old 08-04-2014, 16:09   #66
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Re: Costs of Rescue...

Hang the cost....get on with the rescue....
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Old 08-04-2014, 16:29   #67
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Re: Costs of Rescue...

There are lots of discussions about military and CG rescues. Does anyone know the ratio of those types of rescues versus rescue by commercial vessels.
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Old 08-04-2014, 16:39   #68
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Re: Costs of Rescue...

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There are lots of discussions about military and CG rescues. Does anyone know the ratio of those types of rescues versus rescue by commercial vessels.

If you mean rescue by ships and the like, they actively participate in very few rescues

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Old 08-04-2014, 17:54   #69
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Re: Costs of rescue...

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Originally Posted by letsgetsailing3 View Post
There are real dollars being budgeted, allocated/re-allocated, and spent. Just because it's not an additional appropriation doesn't mean the cost isn't real.

It doesn't have to be "extra cost" in order to be a cost. If you budget for a car, put the money in an account, and then buy the car, does it make the car free? No. The car still has a cost, even if there is a budget for it.
A car is actually almost a decent metaphor. It would be perfect if you needed to run it 1000 miles a month, whether you had errands to run or not, in order to keep the car and the driver in fit condition. Now that would be exactly like this situation.

So it is true -- of course! -- that running the car has a cost. Of course it's not free. But running out after your cousin Bob who's had an accident does not cost a proportional share of your annual car expenses. You wouldn't send him a bill for $2.50 a mile, because that includes fixed expenses including depreciation, annual insurance, parking, etc. -- expenses you would be paying anyway. At most you would count just the fuel burned as your real cost of picking him up -- that's because this is the variable cost -- the incremental cost if you like. The difference between your cost without picking Bob up and your cost with picking Bob up. But if picking Bob up fell within the 1000 miles a month you have to drive anyway, then you really wouldn't figure that it cost you anything.

Of course theoretically it does -- you do have a certain annual cost, and one way to look at it is to divide all the annual costs by the number of errands. But since you keep the car anyway, and are spending the money anyway, picking up Bob is really not costing you anything other than your time.

Likewise with rescue services. UNLESS of course there are so many rescues that they can't be performed within the normal annual budget. That would be a different case, of course.
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Old 08-04-2014, 21:22   #70
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Re: Costs of Rescue...

Under SOLAS regulatuons

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"Masters obliged to respond to distress messages from any source.
Ships can be requisitioned by the master of a ship in distress or the search and rescue authorities."
https://mcanet.mcga.gov.uk/public/c4...gulation33.htm

The Canadian Criminal Code

Quote:
"Every qualified person who is the master of a vessel in any waters, on receiving a signal from any source that a person, a vessel or an aircraft is in distress, shall proceed with all speed to render assistance and shall, if possible, inform the persons in distress or the sender of the signal.

"The master of a vessel in Canadian waters and every qualified person who is the master of a vessel in any waters shall render assistance to every person who is found at sea and in danger of being lost."
The fine is $1,000,000

The Obligation to Render Assistance at Sea
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Old 08-04-2014, 23:27   #71
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Re: Costs of rescue...

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I appreciate your support of the military, but frankly you are wrong. I spent four years in the marine infantry. My job was to shoot a very big gun at people, and blow them to bits. In my four years I spend hundreds and hundreds of hours training to do this, and was very good at my job. However in the entire time I served I never actually shot a gun at anyone...


...The reality is that only a small percentage of people who ever serve in the military will be called upon to fight in a war zone. So we sat around and plaid x-box a lot. Much like a firefighter... You don't pay them to sit around and do nothing 95% of the time! you pay them for that 5% when you need them and need them now, not in six months when new recruits can be trained.
I've been told I'm wrong so many times in this thread. Mostly over things I didn't even say. I guess I'm just porting an unpopular opinion, or simply an inconvenient one.

Your deployment figures just show how personal experience can vary, I suppose. Let's poll the Army and Air Force from this century about deployments, shall we? You realize that we just fought two wars, right, and still have troops in Afghanistan?

It depends on when you serve, what force you serve in, and what your specialty is. If you were in the Army, Special Forces, or Air Force during the last 10 years, the chances are that you would have been deployed, and in all likelihood multiple times. In 2011, 73% of the active duty Army had deployed to combat zones, according to RAND. (I had to look that one up.)

My wife is an Air Force nurse, and she deployed twice in the last four years. So my opinion is likewise affected by my own personal experience.

Active duty marines don't deploy? Who knew? I certainly didn't. I always thought they were the first to go in.
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Old 09-04-2014, 00:04   #72
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Re: Costs of rescue...

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A car is actually almost a decent metaphor. It would be perfect if you needed to run it 1000 miles a month, whether you had errands to run or not, in order to keep the car and the driver in fit condition. Now that would be exactly like this situation.

So it is true -- of course! -- that running the car has a cost. Of course it's not free. But running out after your cousin Bob who's had an accident does not cost a proportional share of your annual car expenses. You wouldn't send him a bill for $2.50 a mile, because that includes fixed expenses including depreciation, annual insurance, parking, etc. -- expenses you would be paying anyway. At most you would count just the fuel burned as your real cost of picking him up -- that's because this is the variable cost -- the incremental cost if you like. The difference between your cost without picking Bob up and your cost with picking Bob up. But if picking Bob up fell within the 1000 miles a month you have to drive anyway, then you really wouldn't figure that it cost you anything.

Of course theoretically it does -- you do have a certain annual cost, and one way to look at it is to divide all the annual costs by the number of errands. But since you keep the car anyway, and are spending the money anyway, picking up Bob is really not costing you anything other than your time.

Likewise with rescue services. UNLESS of course there are so many rescues that they can't be performed within the normal annual budget. That would be a different case, of course.
I see what you're saying, and agree with everything you said.

Let's just say that 50 of those miles out of the 1000 are planned to swing by and pick up Bob. Does that mean that the 50 miles and time you spend picking up Bob is free? Does it mean that if you spend 59 miles picking up Bob, that it is also free because you still had to go the 1000 miles? You could have also spent those 50 miles picking up your sister in the other direction, since she needed a ride the same day.

Another analogy is the UPS guy delivering a package. He's in your neighborhood anyway, so can he just collect your package for free? It's only one block out of his way, and an extra 5 minutes of his time. Does it have any cost at all? After all, it's trivial compared to his whole day.

The original question was "Do rescue missions have a cost, and how do you figure that out?" I think they do have a cost, and there are people who figure that kind of thing out.
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Old 09-04-2014, 01:56   #73
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Re: Costs of Rescue...

One other perspective might be to play the game of, "If people everywhere were more careful (including seamanlike), would we be able to reduce the costs of providing emergency and rescue services?" (i.e., the fixed costs)

This would likely turn out to be somewhat true in urban areas, where emergency funding and staffing is partly predicated on being able to respond to multiple emergencies sometimes within short or overlapping time frames, and where some emergency services workers have periods of "maxing out" responding to back-to-back-to-back emergencies. We for sure know of overworked urban ambulance drivers and hectic weekends in the emergency room.

But outside of densely populated urban areas (including out at sea), staffing and resources for emergency services is more based on requirements of geography and response time, which remain fixed regardless of variations in the rate of accidents.

So, my guess would be that for any given reduction in accident rates, we will see a quite smaller reduction in the costs of emergency staffing and services, and that this will be especially true for rescues at sea.

As pretty well argued previously, rescues of recreational sailors don't have much of an incremental or marginal ("beyond budget") effect on the costs of rescue services.

Additionally, recreational sailors are a pretty small group among those being rescued at sea and are not a big driver of the fixed costs of maintaining ocean-capable rescue units; yet even variation within the total population of those needing rescue at sea is still not a direct or proportionate driver of the cost of maintaining rescue organizations.

Sure, it would be a worthy goal to cut the number of serious deep-water recreational sailboat accidents in half -- but that might only cut the costs of maintaining emergency ocean rescue services perhaps by some tiny fraction of a tenth of a percent...a small enough proportion so as to be hard to measure with accuracy.
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Old 09-04-2014, 05:16   #74
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Re: Costs of rescue...

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Active duty marines don't deploy? Who knew? I certainly didn't. I always thought they were the first to go in.
What?

Marines deploy to Helmand as war in Afghanistan winds down - News - Stripes

Pendleton Marines deploy to Australia | UTSanDiego.com

Marines Deployed to Guard U.S. Embassy in Kiev - NBC News

Fallujah on Minds of Deploying Marines | Military.com
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Old 09-04-2014, 07:06   #75
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Re: Costs of rescue...

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What?

Marines deploy to Helmand as war in Afghanistan winds down - News - Stripes

Pendleton Marines deploy to Australia | UTSanDiego.com

Marines Deployed to Guard U.S. Embassy in Kiev - NBC News

Fallujah on Minds of Deploying Marines | Military.com
Yes. That's the point I was trying to make. Reread that line in context, as well as the post I was responding to, and the entire post will make more sense as a whole.

I'm guilty of using a little sarcasm there, but I thought it was pretty clear in context.
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