Identifying - Us Fire Administration: Fill & Download for Free

I offered part of this as a reply to a poster below, but I think it's worth restating as an answer.Every week the US Fire Administration sends out a notice of a firefighter fatality. The number of volunteers who die in the line of duty have always (excepting 2001) exceeded the number of paid firefighters who perish. Not surprising, given that only 9% of departments registered with the National Fire Department Registry identify as career - only, but it's often not an indication of training or capability, but rather that fire - and the related hazards - are equal opportunity destroyers.Fire doesn't care what color you, your gear or your vehicle is. It doesn't care if you're paid $120,000 a year with benefits, or in donated eggs and meat. It doesn't care if you're in a same-sex relationship, in a traditional marriage with kids or alone. Fire will grow, eating all it can, breathing all it can, and devouring everything in its path, until it consumes all it can reach, or someone stops it.As someone who started on a volunteer (paid on call) department in 1989, before getting hired on a full time basis, and served 25 years, allow me to offer a respectful suggestionYou use the term “professional” to contrast non - volunteers against volunteers, which is common. In the urban areas it's almost a stereotype of {mostly} rural part time firefighters exemplifying “Bubba”, doing some sketchy sh*t and using obsolete or inadequate equipment, I have known part time, paid on call and volunteer firefighters who took the job more seriously and were forced to operate their departments against insane levels of difficulty than several firefighters who were paid to do the job as their primary employment.Professionalism isn't based on a paycheck, but on integrity, dedication, and attention to detail. Call them paid, career, or full time, but don't assume someone is a professional just because they're paid to do it.So “are volunteer firefighters real firefighters”? You should be able to discern my answer.

Excess production capacity: the Chinese government hoped that the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) would take up some of this capacity, but this project has come under fire from non-Chinese in 2018, so that it is unlikely to accept this excess capacity. Chinese SOEs will have to adjust to this new reality.The Chinese private sector does not trust the Chinese government, specifically the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese private sector has been responsible for most of China’s growth over the past 30 years, but given a chance, most private Chinese business owners prefer to leave China. This is in spite of recent comments from President Xi directing the party to support the private sector. Most believe that this is just talk, and are still preparing to leave.President Xi has been emphasizing the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party during its next stage of reforms. Most private business leaders were hoping for more space for the private sector, but they are not seeing that, which is why they want to leave China.The US tariffs have hit the Chinese economy very hard, starting with Chinese equity markets. Many manufacturers are complaining that their orders are drying up.Internal reforms in the Chinese Communist Party are happening too slowly. For the past 40 years, the emphasis has been on increasing production capacity and on real estate value growth. There is too much production capacity, and real estate values have largely plateaued; so what is going to replace them? Nobody seems to have any ideas, and most officials are sitting on their hands.Two years ago, the Chinese government bet on the BRI as part of China’s next stage of growth, but outside China, in countries like Pakistan and Malaysia, it is much less popular. But the Chinese government had no Plan B.Also, the Trump administration has identified China as a bad player internationally, and this seems like one of the issues which Republicans and Democrats can agree on. The Chinese government got too comfortable under previous US administrations, and assumed that the US would just peacefully move aside and let China become the leader. How naive!This has put the Chinese government very much on the defensive in 2018, and it is not quite sure how to react.In 2018, just about everything which could go wrong did go wrong for China.

Yes.Contrary to some posts, the President is NOT the chief law enforcement officer in the US. It’s the attorney general and he’s not supposed to be taking orders from the President on who to investigate. Here’s the DoJ website identifying the AG as the chief law enforcement officer for the US: “The Judiciary Act of 1789 created the Office of the Attorney General which evolved over the years into the head of the Department of Justice and chief law enforcement officer of the Federal Government. The Attorney General represents the United States in legal matters generally and gives advice and opinions to the President and to the heads of the executive departments of the Government when so requested. In matters of exceptional gravity or importance the Attorney General appears in person before the Supreme Court. Since the 1870 Act that established the Department of Justice as an executive department of the government of the United States, the Attorney General has guided the world's largest law office and the central agency for enforcement of federal laws.”To order an investigation into US citizens for possible crimes, you need reasonable suspicion. And there’s a problem, there is none. No evidence that either Biden did anything wrong: CNN - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos Prosecutors or Presidents don’t get to say “I don’t like this guy, let’s investigate him.”Think about this for a second—the Trump argument is crazy. The FBI doesn’t need approval to investigate a US crime. And foreign governments don’t investigate for US crimes. So Trump is asking Ukraine to investigate the Bidens for violation of Ukrainian law? Actually he isn’t, he just wants to be able to say “crooked Joe Biden—he (or his son) is under investigation in Ukraine—you know he’s corrupt!”All it takes is just a little digging to see how corrupt and incompetent the Trump argument is. The Prosecutor (Viktor Shokin) who Biden pushed to have dismissed was regarded as a corrupt pig. Specifically, the IMF, the EU, the Obama Administration, and NATO had all publicly called for his dismissal. Biden was just the point person. What did Shokin do? Well, he wouldn’t prosecute the snipers who killed over 100 civilians in the streets during the Maiden demonstrations. He wouldn’t investigate or prosecute political or business corruption. He (Shokin) had actually shut down an investigation in to Burisma the year before Hunter Biden joined them. In other words, Trump is arguing that Joe Biden (who was doing Obama Administration policy) was corrupt for getting a corrupt prosecutor fired who wasn’t investigating the firm his son was at and by getting that prosecutor dismissed, it made an investigation of Hunter Biden possible. That is what the Trump argument effectively is—crazy isn’t it.