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by bb88 2099 days ago
> Maybe whoever setup the dominoes behind the first one shares the blame as well...

There was a famous story here a couple years ago here where a mountain biker lit some toilet paper on fire and caused half a hillside to go up in flames.

Negligence, sure. Stupidity, no doubt. But it's also dry here in the summer, and that hasn't changed year after year. So sure, I guess, let it be the weather's fault or global warming, why not.

It's easier, afterall, to place the blame on other people or forces than to change behaviors that would prevent disasters in the first place.
2 comments
vlovich123 2099 days ago
No. I think the point is can we change our forestry practices. Ignoring the root causes and blaming the first dominoe isn’t helpful because there will always be some dumb thing to set off a massive fire. We have been assigning blame - is that effective at stopping the fires?

We do blameless post-martens as a best practice in engineering so that when we don’t have constant outages of critical internet infrastructure and that it comes up quickly when issues arise.

Why ignore a successful strategy that may show better results than just blaming whoever happened to be responsible for some sparks this time around? Who are you going to blame when lightning is the spark?

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khuey 2098 days ago
It's hard to have a "blameless postmortem" when 86 people are dead.
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Armisael16 2098 days ago
The NTSB doesn’t seem to have much trouble with it.
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bb88 2099 days ago
> blameless post-martens as a best practice in engineering

First, those don't exist -- despite any evidence to the contrary.

Second, engineers don't have shareholders demanding stock buy backs.

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Kwantuum 2099 days ago
Fires can start from natural causes too. It's ignorant to say that this sort of disaster can be prevented by fixing behaviour, and it's a special form of hubris to think that you can "unstupid" everyone. This is the worst plan you can have. Relying on all individuals not doing something stupid for a long time is a lost cause, just look at the state of covid in the US. There are people literally throwing parties or sending their kids to school while they know that they have covid.
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