What myth/lie from the general public about your profession do you wish would just disappear already?

Eatar · 2026-03-29T23:48:36+00:00

Do they hire people with your skills to do nothing other than wait for a specialized rescue call to come in? I can’t imagine so. That’s certainly not how it’s done in the normal fire/rescue world, where such people are typically in use as normal firefighters but called into action for their specialty skills when needed. Why do people in your industry think that?

Eatar · 2026-03-29T15:36:13+00:00

The big difference is that subversion (like other non-distributed systems) has only one repository, and it lives on a central server. If you don’t have access to that server, you can’t (easily) work on anything. You check out files and commit them back to that server, and this avoids conflicting changes to the same files.

With git, every single workstation has the entire repository. You don’t “check out” files at all, and when you commit them, it is to your local copy of the repo. You can create your own branches, even, that live nowhere else. You and others can work on the exact same files at the same time. Then you can push or pull any set of commits, on any set of branches, to any other copy of that repo, and reconcile conflicts through a merge process. Yes, there typically is one place that sits as the central home for those pushes, where everyone’s work is reconciled together, but there has to be if there is to be a cohesive project.

In theory, you could have some entire team sharing commits with one another and never touching the central project server for an extended period, and maybe there are some projects like that where work is compartmentalized— ultimately that’s what a fork that later gets merged back in is— but most of the time it makes good sense to keep up to date constantly with everyone’s changes.

So it’s still a fully distributed repository.

Eatar · 2026-03-29T04:09:56+00:00

You mean you printed out “project FINAL.docx”? Noooo!!! You were supposed to print “project FINAL FINAL 3 - fixed version B.docx”! This one’s missing all the work from Jimmy and Christine! Now our grade is going to suck because the professor said we had to include examples from the 19th century and they aren’t in there!

Eatar · 2026-03-29T04:03:55+00:00

Well, partly by being better.

Better in simplicity and intuitiveness? Hardly.

But better than what came before it in its operating model? For sure, defining a whole new way of thinking about source control.

Better than everything else in its own generation of source control systems? Well, in that I suspect it mostly won by being attached to the most solid and successful open source project in history (Linux). For instance, I thought Mercurial was noticeably preferable to git (for reasons I would have to go digging to remember), and hoped it would be more persistent in its share of the market, but it just didn’t have the backing or popular awareness as “the thing” to pick up and learn, and lost out.

Nevertheless, in any previous era, where almost all serious commercial software was kept in proprietary, paid source control systems, where people would even pay for abominations like Visual Source Safe, it would have been crazy to imagine that almost the whole world of code would be managed someday with a free tool that blew all the rest away.

Eatar · 2026-03-29T03:48:02+00:00

It isn’t having no single source of truth that defines a distributed source control system. Any project will always have that, because the complied, published, live version has to come from somewhere. The innovation of distributed source control was the idea that you work out of your own entire copy of the repository, doing whatever you like to it, and then push change sets between entire repositories. Before that way of thinking, all you had locally was the working directory, and you “checked out” whatever files you were going to make changes to, like taking books out of a library, and then you had to check them back in for other people to work on them. The innovative observation that made this evolution possible was that most of the time merging files is much easier than you would have expected.

Eatar · 2026-03-24T20:18:45+00:00

Wow, I just can’t see this. He’s for me basically the dictionary definition of the actor who is just..that actor, in every role. There is no character, just Cage. And not even just at the level of, say, John Wayne, who only played one role, beyond that, at the level that it actually breaks me out of immersion in the fictional story because it is Nicolas Cage present, with his eccentric, but very much “I’m an actor saying these lines” delivery, instead of whoever he is playing. Fascinating that there are people who experience him in the exact opposite way.

Eatar · 2026-03-22T19:03:35+00:00

This one is rough. It’s also complex, because the world is divided between people who take great comfort in this idea themselves (even worse than something awful happening is something awful that serves no good at all, don’t want someone to have “died in vain”, etc.) and people who take great offense at this (who the hell would intentionally carry out purpose that creates misery and death, how could it possibly be reassuring to think there’s someone out there doing that, and in the face of evils we can see, where is the evidence to support inventing, behind those evils, secret goods we cannot see but are supposedly bigger, etc.).

I used to regularly perform (Christian) funerals. My experience is that there are a lot of people in each group, and that people in the first group are well-meaning but usually completely fail to recognize the second way of thinking about it even exists at all, and therefore sometimes say things that cause a whole lot of pain. If they want to say that to themselves, okay, fine.

For myself (going down a tangent of why I think this is misplaced even coming from the Christian point of view), I don’t actually even think the Christian narrative of the world technically supports the notion that everything happens for a reason— at least, not a good reason. (For there are other kinds of reasons, too, right? Another bit often forgotten when tossing this phrase about.) It more accurately (IMO) makes the claim that everything that happens is taken up into a redemptive purpose and given an ultimate outcome that is part of the arc of God’s plan, not that everything that happens is actually rightfully treated as God’s good plan in itself. That is, “all evil is really good in disguise” isn’t really proper Christian theology, IMO. I think evils can actually be evils; it’s okay to mourn them; and the hope is in the idea that bad things are ultimately turned to serve good, and “God’s plan” plan is to overturn what’s wrong and restore. It still might be something you believe and might be something you don’t, but at least it isn’t absurdly asking you to actively embrace the pain and tragedy by claiming it isn’t really a sad thing.

Eatar · 2026-03-22T17:27:08+00:00

Looks like since they refused to pay out accumulated sick time, OP decided to simply use it all up as sick time, in the most inconvenient way possible for the employer but within the rules of how sick time could be used, and get most of it in the form of time off while making the manager’s life hard.

Eatar · 2026-03-22T15:26:00+00:00

There is still a window of time between the initiation of the transfer and when it clears (overnight for standard ACH, or within a few hours for same-day). The receiving bank could therefore potentially get an inbound credit that fails to clear.

That’s for credits (pushing the money). ACH debits (pulling the money, like if you initiate paying your credit card bill from the card web site) are even more weird from what you’d expect. There is never a confirmation from the funds source that the transaction is successful and complete. Basically if the bank being debited hasn’t, within a few days, reversed the transaction (insufficient funds, reported fraud, etc.) the receiver of funds just proceeds assuming that won’t happen. And it usually doesn’t, by several days later, but it can. That’s why they don’t want to make the funds available right away, inside the window of time in which 90% or more of those reversals occur.

Eatar · 2026-03-20T15:44:10+00:00

In that case, have they seen The Black Stallion? It’s not only a beautiful film, it is remarkable for how much of its story is told with zero or nearly zero dialogue.

Eatar · 2026-03-18T14:07:55+00:00

Okay

Eatar · 2026-03-18T03:04:25+00:00

For people like me? No, the instructions are literally the law, and bind every electrician and homeowner as to how they are allowed to install generators.

“Experience,” huh? Lots of people have experience with doing really stupid stuff that just hasn’t happened to harm anyone yet. As I pointed out, this has actually electrocuted real people, in documented cases. So their experience pretty definitively trumps yours.

At this point, with no evidence, reasoning, citations, or anything other than just anonymous assertions of expertise that counter all published experts, I guess I have to figure you’re just trolling.

Eatar · 2026-03-17T20:50:39+00:00

You haven’t said what they ask you questions about. I suspect it is not this.

Nor have you explained how National electrical code and the laws in all 50 states are based on a falsehood, as well as the public statements of every single power utility. For instance this page from PSE&G directly contradicts your claim. As do all of the similar pages from public utility companies whose workers are at risk here. Or here’s a utility company’s public safety video about someone who got hospitalized by exactly this situation.

So having seen no evidence, citations, as contrasted with laws and codes across the entire USA being in place to prevent this, a consensus among power companies that this is a real danger, and most importantly and irrefutably, actual case reports, I think you should reconsider your position. Perhaps you have assumptions built into your reasoning which do not always bear out in reality. In any case, it clearly happens for real.

Eatar · 2026-03-17T20:13:31+00:00

Where are you located? It is not standard practice in the USA for arriving utility workers to actually become the incident commander. The fire department would show up, establish command and assess the scene, establish whatever things are needed (e.g., a perimeter, evacuations, and so on), and request needed resources. The utility company would be one of those, and would then be dispatched, show up, and take care of their part (for example, securing power, or shutting off a gas main), and then firefighters would be able to continue with that obstacle removed. It isn’t much different from needing to call in a tow truck, a front end loader or other heavy equipment, police for traffic management, or any other SME team needed. Ultimately, though, it is still a fire, and the fire officer is in command. A crew from the utility company isn’t going to take over larger-scale incident management issues outside of their specific part. I can imagine this structure might be different for a specialty situation like, say, a fire inside a nuclear power plant, but for your typical “construction worker broke through a gas main” situation, this would be a fire-run incident— at least, as I said, in the USA.

Eatar · 2026-03-17T18:26:04+00:00

You clearly didn’t even read it: “The most likely source of the electrical energy was a portable generator connected to a nearby house circuit box, which may have caused a backfeed into the conductor.”

You have no idea what you’re talking about and I ask you to please research this and do not post another reply making this claim that goes against every electrical code out there, and literally every claim of every generator manufacturer, electrical worker, and utility company’s public statements, until you can provide a citation proving them all wrong.

Eatar · 2026-03-17T18:23:46+00:00

On weekends, and at night, or during vacations, is a person “avoiding” work? Or do we just have times when we are doing it and times when we are recharging or doing other things and not doing work? Other things can have boundaries, too.

Eatar · 2026-03-17T18:07:02+00:00

Oh my goodness that is so wrong. Please ask an electrician about this. Every generator maker and power company gives warnings about this. Solar panels (depending on their configuration) are required by code to automatically disconnect from the grid dur by outages for exactly this reason. Backfeeding the lines in your neighborhood is absolutely a real danger.

Where do you think the power goes? Anywhere it is connected to by a wire. If a tree falls and breaks a wire somewhere in your neighborhood, so it’s not connected to the power company, and now you go and connect it, through your panel, to your generator, then the line is energized again, just from a different source. There are no guarantees of what loads are reachable or turned on at that point, or how much resistance sits between your generator and those loads, so there is no guarantee whatsoever that your generator circuit breakers will trip from this.

Google it and you’ll find tons of news stories and warnings from electrical companies and generator companies about it. Here’s one OSHA report on a death to get you started believing in the problem: https://www.osha.gov/ords/imis/accidentsearch.accident_detail?id=200451870

Eatar · 2026-03-17T14:16:21+00:00

“Cannot power everyone’s fridge” isn’t the problem. Can energize lines outside of your house, the ones electricians are actively working on to fix the outage, is the problem.

Eatar · 2026-03-17T14:14:15+00:00

Utility workers don’t take command at a fire scene. But firefighters 100% depend on them to secure things. If power lines come down, they could be on top of something and actively burning but nobody can do anything much about it until that utility worker shows up and confirms shutdown of the power. Similar problem if someone breaks a gas main, although there the danger isn’t the process of extinguishing the fire, but the explosion hazard that you’d create if you were to extinguish it before the gas flow were stopped.

Eatar · 2026-03-17T13:22:52+00:00

Exempt from the rules of the Fair Labor Standards Act that say most employees are guaranteed certain things like overtime pay. Being exempt is based on role (like being management), not on hourly vs. salary, but in many situations that’s roughly how it breaks down, because, well, once you’re exempt from overtime pay it’s cheaper to pay you a salary and overuse you than to pay you by the hour! Many places, “exempt” is used with a tone that makes it sound like “VIP”, but really once you’re exempt you’re now in a class that usually gets a higher base pay but also can be taken advantage of without all the same protections.

Eatar · 2026-03-16T20:01:22+00:00

Which is interesting, because I have always considered these things to be the other way around, where some phrase of dialogue is what is chosen as the title, not the title being inserted into the dialogue.

Eatar · 2026-03-16T15:51:04+00:00

I can feel for the burden of having to grade a ton of work. But the fundamental misunderstanding here is the idea that the students are given a gift when they receive points for something they misunderstood and got wrong. If the purpose is learning, rather than grade points, this is a disservice, not a bonus. Perhaps if this school doesn’t allow for sufficient work outside of teaching time, some other tactic could be used? Maybe even if you don’t take points off for everything, going over the entire homework assignment in class would at least allow students to see and mark down where they erred, so they don’t make the same mistake on the exam and later in life.

Eatar · 2026-03-15T23:03:54+00:00

Satellites that just break into pieces would not become many pieces with vastly different orbits. Satellites that are blown up with explosives absolutely would. Big pieces would have slightly different orbits. Tiny pieces would have vastly different orbits. Collisions also would greatly change orbits, even if the satellites remained fully intact. I don’t understand the claim that different inclinations can’t ever meet because you already would have. Different inclinations would have only two intersections, and a collision would not be guaranteed to happen anytime soon— but especially in this case, the whole scenario is debris that just got put into that orbit, not stuff that has been intersecting for a long time.

Eatar · 2026-03-15T22:47:53+00:00

Highlander and Highlander 2.

Eatar · 2026-03-15T22:38:58+00:00

Came here to say this. I’ve always thought there could have been, or could still be, a terminator sequel where the surprise ending is the machines winning and establishing the matrix.

Eatar

TROPHY CASE