re: Post an uncomfortable truth from your line of work that most people don't realize

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Post an uncomfortable truth from your line of work that most people don't realize

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That there are a lot of complicated structures that process dangerous things like chemicals, etc that are all built by the lowest bidder who employs dudes who just so happened to have passed a drug test on that particular day.

Tax fraud is rampant among low and middle income folks.

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Tigahs24Seven

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Lawyers cause most of the issues in this society.. From becoming politicians and only enacting laws that benefit themselves, to creating red tape and havoc in every other area of society. You might be a necessary evil, but you ain't no hero.

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I think his comment landed a few feet over your head.

We strive for first class people, quality and performance on a third world budget, and we don't want to be among the local industry leaders.

Just make sure that you look good (appearance wise) when you're representing the company.

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there are System owner operators that own assets and dont have accurate maps of their systems. They literally dont know where some of the lines run

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Ever run integrity tests on a line with unauthorized and undrawn house taps? That's fun. Apparently it was once pretty common to give troublesome landowners free gas for life. Then, 50 years later they get a 3200 psi surprise.

We could easily win every war but the American people are too weak to stomach our strategies.

The advent of computers has made engineers coming out of school somewhat illiterate in basic engineering principles. Students just don’t have the in depth understanding of topics they used to have.

This holds true for almost all subjects I would imagine. You don’t really learn when you are always using a computer. Sometimes pen and paper and a slide rule/calculator are superior.

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You don’t really learn when you are always using a computer. Sometimes pen and paper and a slide rule/calculator are superior.

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Seems to be some real science to back that up

Even just reading a real book as opposed to an e reader seems to make a difference

I'll post one.

I owned medical clinics for a living when I was still working.

People think medicine is on the "hard" end of the scale of scientific inquiry and it's really not.

Hard science—at the extreme end of the hardness scale—are things you can set up in a controlled environment, isolate variables exactly, and reproduce.

So you're talking about chemistry and (non-theoretical, of course) physics, and most types and applications of engineering.

Medicine is certainly not as soft as psychology by any means, but it's way down from that hard end of the scale, for at least two reasons:

1. There is simply no way to isolate all of the variables that can potentially affect any given change in the system when the system is a living human being. And people don't realize this, but what we know we don't know about human physiology is greater than what we know.

2. It's impossible to control for the Gold Standard of scientific inquiry—randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial—for anything but medications. First of all, it's impossible for the doctor to not know whether he's performing the procedure or delivering a sham procedure (there are a few exceptions to that rule, but only a few). Second, it's not ethical to tell 40 patients they're all geting a heart bypass and give 20 the bypass while only cutting the other 20 and then sewing them back up without doing anything.

Which is why around 80% of surgical interventions have never been studied at all beyond anecdotal reports. And the more serious the condition, the less likely it is to have been studied.

Just a cheery thought for the next time you go in for a procedure.