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- Hacker News
- One wonders if the key issue here is 'not enough live fire drills', which while a charming pun I do mean seriously: should every firefighter be guaranteed a certain number of live 'build it and burn it' exercises per year as a condition of employment?
If they did so in concert with building code inspectors beforehand to try out various new things, had the 'what were the circumstances leading to this fire?' fire drill conditions sealed in an envelope, and won a pizza party if the arson investigators guessed incorrectly on whether those circumstances were or were not arson — then I think that firefighters might have much less cause for arson. Certainly having done IT for fucking ever, I can come up with some extraordinarily evil things to do, but my industry has 'red teams' and 'onsite penetration tests' because we understand the need for this. TREX apparently conducts 1-2 burns per year as a big serious training event, which is nice — but that's so few and so many fires are so boring and there probably aren't enough TREX burns to meet demand for live fire exercises. And, yes, I wish my own hometown's firefighters would build a structure every month and then burn it to the ground and then try to defeat the arson investigators. This can only reduce the chances of firefighter arson, and no amount of 'firing blanks' exercises are going to have a serious impact on this issue. And, introducing a competitive aspect creates a professional 'hero' outcome for the firefighters who manage to defeat the arson inspectors — they're not only now a hero among their fire industry peers, they're also a hero for the lives that will be saved by future arson investigations solved by their own fire drill arson. Sure, this isn't 'hot neighbor' adulation as many U.S. young men might dream of — but it's peer adulation, and I suspect their dreams would have little difficulty adapting.
by altairprime - Computer viruses. Anti-virus companies making viruses happens to be one of my favourite conspiracy theories.by karim79
- > “There’s roughly 100 firefighter arsonists convicted every year in North America and all of them are serial arsonists, which means three or more fires,”
OK, so why should I care? A brief Google shows the population of North America at ~600 million people. And the number of firefighters in North America at ~1.3 million. So your likelihood of being victimized by a serial firefighter arsonist is about the same as being struck by lightning, dying in a plane crash, or being killed by a falling coconut.
by psunavy03 - Excellent point. We absolutely should not care that the people we hire to protect are are sometimes convicted of harming us. It's only a few hundred victims a year so we should utterly ignore that it's happening. That traditionally solves all issues.by kstrauser
- This reminds me of the movie Backdraft, about firefighters and a mysterious arsonist.
- I looked it up: About a million firefighters in the US, including volunteer firefighters.
Having 1 in 10,000 of them convicted of arson each year is a wild statistic.
by Aurornis - This is the fact that’s literally a .0001% chanceby vladmk
- Your stats sent me into sobering-thoughts-mode...
More sobering thought: conviction rates are typically a small percentage of the people who do the foul deed. The definition of "arsonist", for example. What if someone started "just one" fire?
A more sobering thought: of the total fires fought each year, how many are started by those rogue firefighters?
A most sobering thought: why is it that there is so much fallow time, that they get bored?
- Most guys that go into firefighting really enjoy looking at fire, I can say that much. And this problem exists globally.
Maybe we can also ask why women don't join to fight fires and there's 10% or less participation. Compared to police forces globally there's under 10% female firefighters but around 30% female police officers, so it's not as simple as "it's dangerous and women are afraid".
by vasco - I’m curious what other professions have analogous issues.
Police who seed crime? (Surely.)
Developers who insert bugs?
- Garbageman comes to mindby dosisking
- > Developers who insert bugs
I knew it was the developers!
by zaik - Tire dealers that go around puncturing tires has been a urban legend for decadesby riffraff
- Why will developers insert bugs and make their own work harder? there is no extra recognition there, which is primarily a reason why they are doing it. But if you are regularly shipping bugs because you feel good at then fixing it and expect people to appreciate you for it, how long do you think that dev will last at a role?by altmanaltman
- Cybersecurity researchers who let loose worms or ransomware?
Car mechanics who break things so you come back for more business?
Airline pilots who... hijack their own flight?... Hm
by Timwi - Maybe politicians. They try to stage violent attacks against themselves and then accuse other parties for their own political gain.by num42
- There is nearly a 100% conviction rate of the closest family member if the spouse/child/parent dies soon after a life insurance policy is created
My theory is that there is at least one serial killer that is a life insurance agent or someone that can see all the new policies
by yieldcrv - 20y ago in Poland there was a huge story where the ER responders were killing people to sell hints to a funeral house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_Huntersby kuboble
- Arsonists drawn to firefighting field. People with mental health issues becoming therapists. People with eating disorders becoming dietitians.
I'm trying to figure out what pathology I'm hiding as a software engineer.
- You're secretly a robot.by bot403
- As a software engineer you may be lacking a sense of selfhood(outside of external validation and roles). You may find you are kind of a people pleaser, confident at work, but also privately resentful at times.
The software engineering job skips dealing directly emotional regulation, experiencing emotions and directly confronting others in vulnerable way or a negative way like boundaries.
Instead you are given a problem, and you can fix the problem, control the variables and see if your solution works logically and tangibly.
You cannot do this with people interactions. Emotional orbits, feelings, insecurities, needs, wants are messy overlap .. are not easily definable , and flux … software engineers may not thrive here I would guess.
by roody15 - For fun, I'll say. You're trying to apply reason to emotion, not realising emotion drives everything. Consequently you think it's acceptable to force everyone to accept (your) superior reasoning, for their own good, whether they want it or not. Think Vulcan.by verisimi
- Creating problems that can only be solved by writing software! It's a subset of the 'expert user PEBCAK' category — a term any long-term IT help desk professional will recognize immediately, even if they've never encountered it before.
Experts create the worst problems and when experts bring the help desk those worst problems, sometimes the reply must be "You caused it, you fix it; or, we can restore your device to an IT-supported state after you backup whatever data you don't want to lose". So, what problems have you created that require you to engineer solutions for them? Did you create those problems intentionally? A lot of us do so in our 'home lab environments', and that's what they're for. But doing so intentionally at work — not accidentally — is called 'making work for yourself so you get paid by someone to fix problems you created', and that is a perfect match for 'firefighter arsonist'.
(None of this is accusation, this is just analogy-building; both 'software' and 'you' are swappably generics for any profession and any engineer, respectively.)
by altairprime - Australia gets very dry and pretty severe bush fires. We have the same unfortunate phenomena, 2019, 2023 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-31/hunter-valley-rfs-fir... There is a hero complex associated with this type of occupation, coupled with boredom perhaps. This is however not recurring theme, an anomaly in the statistics. Year on year we do have many brave, volunteer and professional firefighters rescue many properties and lives.by tdu01
- > Australia gets very dry and pretty severe bush fires. We have the same unfortunate phenomena, 2019
2019 was an American right wing/Facebook/Twitter job to downplay climate change and instead push the narrative that it was all done by arsonists
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-08/fires-misinformation-...
He said the topic appeared to be attracting a "suspiciously high number of bot-like and troll-like accounts".
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Sad to see that American narrative about Australia still being spread
by ikt - This is a completely useless article. Is 100 a lot? The article never even hints at what percentage of firefighters that is, let alone total arsonists. Should we be outraged? Are firefighters more likely to be arsonists?
It says "in North America", so I assume that's across US and Canada. There are 1.2 million firefighters in the US, and about 150k in Canada, so let's call it 1.3 million. 100 out of 1.3 million is statistically irrelevant.
How's that stack up against the general public? That'd be good to know, but the article doesn't touch on it. The latest data i can find is for the US in 2024, where there were 65,795 arson convictions. There are 349 million people in the US, so the number of arsonists is 0.0001% of the general population. The number of firefighters that are arsonists (100/65,795) is 0.0015%, so I suppose it's slightly higher that the general population.
All this should have been in the article.
- This 'article' (its a blog post if anything) is based on this this CBC article.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fires-set-by-firefig...
The article refers to a report that 404s.
Both the OPs post and the CBC article say records aren't detailed for this so unless theres some studies (lol funding in current political era) you prob will never have real percents.
But i think its fair to say yea firefighters are more likely to be arsonists i guess.
by user- - > There are 349 million people in the US, so the number of arsonists is 0.0001% of the general population. The number of firefighters that are arsonists (100/65,795) is 0.0015%, so I suppose it's slightly higher that the general population.
You comparing arsonists/pop with firefighter-arsonists/arsonists. That’s the wrong comparison. You should be comparing arsonists/pop with firefighter-arsonists/firefighters. Or firefighters/pop with firefighter-arsonists/arsonists.
(On top of that, mixing numbers from different sources can be problematic. For example, how are repeat convictions treated in the different sources? Who counts as a firefighter?)
- > the number of arsonists is 0.0001% of the general population. The number of firefighters that are arsonists (100/65,795) is 0.0015%, so I suppose it's slightly higher that the general population.
Trying to imagine being really into math and seeing one number that’s fifteen times bigger than another number and posting “that’s slightly higher”
by jrflowers - Key information:
There’s roughly 100 firefighter arsonists convicted every year in North America and all of them are serial arsonists, which means three or more fires,” Nordskog told CBC.
According to Nordskog, firefighter arsonists tend to be young males who recently joined the fire service, who may become bored, desire recognition and struggle with anger or frustration.
All things considered, it’s probably a smaller percentage vs. doctors doing un-doctor things, cops, etc.
by keiferski