Firefighter arson a long-standing issue – expert

There's roughly 200 doctors convicted every year in the U.S. alone of criminal 'patient abuse or neglect', for data compiled between 1988 and 2026 [1]. While I'd prefer to cite the 'patient abuse' figure since 'patient harmer' is the most equivalent behavior to 'firefighter arsonist' (both cause the problem they treat), I think it's worth remembering that human beings — regardless of their profession — have a slim but non-zero chance of deciding to create problems that give them professional satisfaction to solve.

[1] https://plaindiscipline.com/action-type/conviction-patient-a... —

It's as it should be: fires are fairly random, so if firefighters are always busy fighting fires, then they aren't available if another fire breaks out.

I believe the calculation is that fire fighters should only be fighting fires 10% of the time to ensure that there are almost always fighters available.

Lots of other professions should not be always busy for the same reason: doctors, nurses, police, secretaries etc. The main reason why quarantines were continued so long in my country is because hospitals were at 110% before COVID and COVID was causing significant nurse burnout.

That deliberate idling of fire fighters might explain why they are more likely to create work for themselves than doctors or SRE's

So, the number '100', has to wildly low, as some arsonists will not have been caught, or only started one or two fires.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

Car mechanics who break things so you come back for more business?

Airline pilots who... hijack their own flight?... Hm

I knew it was the developers!

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

Seems like a set of people that suddenly made themselves really useful.

...

You can also look at lots of events that trigger wars where the side looking to get into the war seems to have a very convenient tragic even to validate their entry into a war.

Or situations where people make other dependent on them so they can constantly save them from not being able to be independent.

Or people who like to pick fights try to make it so someone will do something that will unwittingly offend them.

The world is full of setups, many subconsciously created, so that one person can be the hero or main character in their own narrative.

Heck we even do it to ourselves when we procrastinate so much that we have to save ourselves with Herculean effort to get something done on time.

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.

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.)

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?

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?)

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.

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”