Why is Hacker News uniquely such a hotbed for uninformed libertarianism?
1. There were concerns about lead poisoning that were only quelled with testing. I doubt you have knowledge beyond an environmental protection agency, or a crystal ball.
2. As someone else has already said, a break that small for a fire that large is laughable.
3. Fighting this fire put human life at risk.
4. Fighting this fire also used resources that could’ve been allocated elsewhere, or not at all.
Every business operation does not exist in its own vacuum, and you cannot say that concern is illegitimate just because “nothing bad happened”. Again, you did not have a crystal ball then, and you still don’t.
It’s a pretty common attitude in software and business. A significant number of people mistake their work implementing processes in software as domain expertise. (Why would I talk to a building engineer, I has the Google?) It’s a type of hubris or arrogance.
Often times software people get deep in the weeds and think a lot about a particular problem set, but don’t realize that they are actually working inside a fence and don’t see the bigger picture. It’s just like driving - your skill on a racecourse is scoped by the ability of generations of engineering of the brakes that enable you to go fast.
Nowadays, we have mid career tech people here who have never known anything but building stuff in clouds, and have had everything related to building facilities magically taken care of behind the AWS curtain. Anything related to datacenter facilities is black magic.
1. There were concerns about lead poisoning that were only quelled with testing. I doubt you have knowledge beyond an environmental protection agency, or a crystal ball. 2. As someone else has already said, a break that small for a fire that large is laughable. 3. Fighting this fire put human life at risk. 4. Fighting this fire also used resources that could’ve been allocated elsewhere, or not at all.
Every business operation does not exist in its own vacuum, and you cannot say that concern is illegitimate just because “nothing bad happened”. Again, you did not have a crystal ball then, and you still don’t.