I think it's a matter of interpretation. "A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down" is not equivalent to "A house thirty feet from an entire forest on fire will never burn down."
It's a bit tricky because in truth a house may be touching trees that are one fire and "will never burn down" (in the sense that it won't that time) can also be a true statement.
I think a generous interpretation is that "A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down." is meant to mean that a house thirty feet away from the forest fire likely won't while a house right next to the forest fire likely will.
It was poorly worded, but it isn't necessarily saying what you state.
You're arguing semantics in a non-cooperative way. I had to re-read your first sentence five or six times to glean the meaningful difference. It's unfortunately put you in the camp of either trying to make a moving target argument, or dismissing your peers as children - neither of which is a positive end.
Like with anything, you have to pick what the likely scenario should be and build to it. You can build a nuclear power plant to resist 40ft high swells and still get a 50ft swell and be powerless. Obviously more protected is better, but also more expensive (which makes housing less available and affordable, etc). The recurrent nature of the problem suggests to me that the code may be too lax currently, and that the solutions are non-trivial: likely major work for existing homes (from a homeowner perspective, forest management may be able to do more).
> You're arguing semantics in a non-cooperative way.
Huh, I think that's the first time I've been accused of being non-cooperative for saying what is essentially "I think perhaps how you're interpreting that statement is not how it was meant and you're talking past each other."
All I was saying is that it appears that zzzeek interpreted the original statement as "do X and Y can't happen" when I think ambiguous wording was used and that wasn't the intent, as I didn't interpret it that way.
I'm arguing semantics because I think there is a misunderstanding of people's positions because of those semantics. I understand that it got a little long into the weeds, but there was a point.
You should read it again and understand what’s behind said. If you’re missing the grammatical structure you are probably misunderstanding a huge percentage of the language people are using around you.
The word used was “can” and it means something is possible.
Your misunderstanding is quite commmon in English these days. People say things like “men are pigs” or “chickens fly” and many will interpret that as if a broad claim was made. But “all chickens fly all day long” is a totally different sentence than “chickens fly” and “chickens can fly“.
It's a bit tricky because in truth a house may be touching trees that are one fire and "will never burn down" (in the sense that it won't that time) can also be a true statement.
I think a generous interpretation is that "A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down." is meant to mean that a house thirty feet away from the forest fire likely won't while a house right next to the forest fire likely will.
It was poorly worded, but it isn't necessarily saying what you state.