Those Roman firemen would only put out a fire if the owner promised to pay for the work.
RoughRomanMemes
A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.
RULES:
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No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, etc. The past may be bigoted, but we are not.
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Memes must be Rome-related, not just the title. It can be about Rome, or using Roman aesthetics, or both, but the meme itself needs to have Roman themes.
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Follow Piefed.social rules.
Worse - to sell the building to Crassus outright.
Yet still a net gain to a society which lacked firefighters.
Just thinking about it as a distressed asset, it's pretty smart, really. The technology to put out fires far more efficiently existed, but the usual plan was (and is) just to avoid a fire starting, and even with Roman-level fire safety some people managed. Once you have a city of hundreds of thousands, it seems like you could earn your investment on firefighting equipment back pretty quickly.
It would take some gall to actually shake someone down over their burning house, though. I suppose private healthcare can be similar.
A true captive market
Give Elon time. He can still use Tesla's new robots to stifle any unrest should the population ever protest their replacement with AI.
I will be shocked if those aren't total vapourware. Like, they even gave up on automating cars recently.