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Comment by scyzoryk_xyz | Hacker News Reader

True further east, here in former Germany, now Poland. Especially throughout the construction and investment boom that's been happening since 00's. Just last year my neighborhood was evacuated.

Unexploded Soviet ordnance - insane how much of it was dropped and buried in the rubble to this day. You're right though - weird to think that nobody would notice, but so much Europe was turned to rubble at that time. These things got turned to unrecognizable rusty mush after a few decades.

Pretty sure it's also an excuse to keep the bomb squad and evacuation procedures in practice. These things are pretty routine, there is no fear or panic. IThey just diffuse and take the thing away to some military range to dispose of it.

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"Pretty sure it's also an excuse to keep the bomb squad and evacuation procedures in practice."

Definitely not in this eastern part of germany where I live. Every major construction needs to check for bombs, but it also happens randomly that a excavator finds a bomb.

There were just a looot of bombs dropped. (And they don't always move it, often it is too rusty also to defuse and then controlled explosion if the surroundings allow it (they use lots of water bags on top, witnessed it once))

>Definitely not in this eastern part of Germany where I live.

A farmer or construction worker (or at least one outside of Germany or any other culture famed for incessant rule following) only needs to watch the bomb squad guy rip a shell out of the ground with a shovel and no specific care given once before they realize it's best if they just do that damn job themselves and avoid the hassle.

Hm, but they maybe know when it is safe to do so, because they immediately recognize the device and know there is no mechanical fuze that can go off by handling it rough.

Because that can happen. And if they know, it still can go wrong.

From TFA:

"In June 2010, three bomb-disposal experts in Göttingen, Germany, were killed by a 500kg American bomb found beneath the site of a new sports arena. "

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/02/germany-bomb-w...

> only needs to watch the bomb squad guy rip a shell out of the ground with a shovel and no specific care given once before they realize it's best if they just do that damn job themselves

Do you apply this logic to surgery, engineering, etc.?

"The expert makes it look easy, therefore it must be easy."

I know it's really easy to make this out to be big and scary and complex from your ivory tower but the person doing this has already seated a tractor tire with starting fluid, used a forklift as a work platform, welded up the leak on the air compressor and half a dozen other things that you said would kill them that day and it's not even noon. Using the leaf blower and a broom to dig an artillery shell that didn't go off 5min ago when you hit it with a piece of machinery isn't that much of a stretch. These people live in a different (better) world than you.

Please make sure they put your HN username in the obit so I can read it from the “don’t touch the unstable WWII bomb without knowing how to manage it” ivory tower.

None of what you listed implies familiarity with bombs. They did not said that farmers are dumb, they said they are not experts on safe bomb destruction.

I never said they were familiar. I said that the realities of their daily lives mean they don't really care about what the same people who fill the internet comments with sneering takes about how all sorts of mundane things these people do is wrong or unsafe. They simply don't care what you or I or anyone else here thinks.

Regardless, farmers across the EU pull thousands of tons of shells out of the ground every spring. They, as a demographic, have infinitely (because anything is infinitely more than zero) more experience than some out of touch office workers who read the official recommendations the local bomb squad writes up and screech about the fact that nobody follows them.

Reality of the farmers life mean they do not care about potential WWII bomb exploding while they are right there? There is difference between a shell (a projectile) and a bomb. And reality across EU is that farmers and construction workers do care about not blowing themselves up.

Frankly, the only out of touch person here is you - likely office worker who imagine that all farmers are irrational macho men. And someone who genuinely thinks that if some safety rules are skipped for comfort, then surely most will try to hit the bomb with random equipment to see whether it blows.

You are intentionally misconstruing my point in an attempt to used craft a comment that appeals to others. There is no moral code under which this is not bad behavior that reflects poorly on those who engage in it.

The farmer or backhoe operator or whatever does not typically know there is a shell or whatever there until after it's been hit with machinery. This is not the year 1100. People are generally not engaging the ground with hand tools. They are engaging it with buckets and implements that do their work in bulk. When you encounter anything man made it's usually only after you've moved it about. "Hey that's an odd looking rock, oh wait that's a shell". Once it's already been hit by your bucket or whatever the sensible thing to do is put it down somewhere far away, call it in, and keep doing whatever you were doing in the meantime.

You dont live in a country that got bombed do you?

Defuse. Diffuse has a different meaning.

Diffuse is the state of it after an unsuccessful defuse attempt.

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