Recall when there was an imminent Rail Workers' strike in the news? Which Congress bravely stepped in and prevented? Weren't safety issues like this part of the workers' complaints?
I suspect we're seeing more and more of these issues due to corner cutting in various industries. Air travel has already been a tight margin industry and take at look at all the air related issues we've seen recently, from FAA systems down to mass cancelations due to infrastructure to the recent runway conflicts and accidents we've seen.
Speaking from anecdotal experience, over the years this constant push for more complex and efficient work from individuals has lead to me cutting more corners than I ever wanted to and producing more questionable products and services in the name of efficiency. Hiring contract workers for some household work I've done seems to be a lot of the same as well.
I think we as a society need to come to the realization that growth demands can't always be met by piling more costs and work on people. Much of that rock has been squeezed dry, we need to start looking and managing expectations based on growth from new innovative process changes, technology, or shifts in cultural expectations as far as growth goes, at least that's my opinion for whatever it's worth.
> Speaking from anecdotal experience, over the years this constant push for more complex and efficient work from individuals has lead to me cutting more corners than I ever wanted to and producing more questionable products and services in the name of efficiency.
I read a while ago a perfect word to describe this world we're living in: crapitalism.
You're kidding yourself if you think the op was suggesting we abandon capitalism. This absolutist mindset has to stop. We can acknowledge our current system is flawed without suggested we abandon it entirely for something else. The reality is that our regulation of our system could be better.
Your binary thinking is lazy and closes you off to the possibility that we could improve our system.
What an absurd comment. The only purpose? That seems like quite a jump. I read it as a dumb comment pointing out a funny name for the current state of things.
Also, is the world really so simple that anything that isn't capitalism is a dictatorship?
If you think about what you just said, it makes no sense:
> I've given two examples of different economic systems that I've deemed failures that prove our specific implementation of an economic system isn't problematic.
That's like saying:
> In my opinion bikes and trains are failures that prove my gas guzzling SUV is the best vehicle in the world and there's absolutely no room for improvement in any way.
Not that I disagree with you, but me and many others are planning our retirements accounts around assumptions of 8-9% growth. Stock market returns and real economic productivity aren't the same thing, but I think it would be deeply challenging for us to change course. Low growth creates a lot of new issues which are debatably worse than the axles-on-fire problem, but this is a conterfactual argument.
> Not that I disagree with you, but me and many others are planning our retirements accounts around assumptions of 8-9% growth.
Actions have consequences. When the entire retirement plan of everyone in the country able to set money aside in a 401k (which isn't applicable for a lot of low-wage employees) is tied to the stock markets, politics is effectively held hostage by the companies in the S&P 500 - politicians simply can't risk enacting any policy that could send these stocks tanking.
The US is in for a really, really wild ride for the next decades as a lot of things that have to be done simply to keep the planet able to support human life will be things that massively complicate or, in the case of anything fossil fuel related, make impossible the business of a lot of large companies, which will send their stocks tanking.
When I was young, I assumed the 401k had been around forever. But it was introduced in 1978! We're nearing the end of the 50-year period that the guys who invented it would really need to get staggeringly rich off of the concept, and now that they're getting ready to die everyone's overreliance on the system they set up is causing total gridlock in American life. You can't do ANYTHING that threatens the stock market. The President can't give good advice like "save your money and don't go into debt on new cars" because if people stop spending, everyone's retirement accounts stagnate.
(Edit: as a matter of fact, recently the President has been actually advertising going into debt for new cars. And it works! My poor-with-finances brother wants to buy a $38,000 truck, and he's got less than $500 in savings and rents an apartment.)
I'm between 25-30 and I'm not even remotely planning on having enough money when I retire. My plan is to have kids, teach them to be clever and resourceful, and then live with them. If they won't have me, I'll live as a pauper in the grand new order when I have to retire. Greater men than I have died penniless.
I have a very similar outlook. It's pretty clear to me that things are moving faster and faster in society and likely not towards anything very good. So it seems naive to expect the old models to continue working.
My "retirement plan" therefore is something between conventional wisdom and prepping. Put some money into savings for emergencies and the remaining possibility that stocks may have some growth in future, but diversify into self-reliance. Buying land and tools that can be used to live off at low cost (i.e. no rent, do my own maintenance, grow some of my food and fuel) and assume that I probably won't ever afford to retire but hopefully will afford to just be able to work less and less over time.
Your last statement is certainly a good and humbling thing to remember. What's the point in amassing all this wealth anyway, since we certainly can't take any of it with us when we go. Giving your children the wealth of knowledge they will likely need in times to come is probably much more practical.
I'm glad to hear you say that. There are a lot of people out there who are kind of thinking the same thing. The only thing I really worry about is that if the time does come and we really need to use our paltry reserves of food, land, ammunition, etc. whether or not we have the ability to do the real civilizational dirty work--forming strategic alliances, committing violence when necessary, avoiding starvation through back-breaking farming work that actually yields harvests, etc.
Like, I've got some acreage, the skills to warm my old house through the winter on the woods, and enough knowledge to garden through the summer. But what about food in spring and fall? What if a band of 200 raiders from the city walks down the groomed road my driveway is off of and decides they want to live on my patch?
And even if civilization doesn't fall, do you really "own" land when your ownership claims are validated by paid police and the people who don't own land not thinking to come and take your land? I wouldn't say civilization "fell" between 1900 and 1930, but surely those Russian landowners assumed they "owned" their land before the Bolsheviks started peacefully discussing their ideas with the Tsarist government.
You start thinking about this stuff and realizing that these problems have been solved over and over again, since before writing. All of the stuff in history that seems so antiquated (like needing elaborate gift-giving rituals when meeting neighboring foreign nobility) suddenly seems clever and meaningful when it's juxtaposed against the context of starvation, enslavement, death by the plague, and no electricity.
These outcomes are pretty extreme and therefore I think pretty unlikely. I think it's useful to consider but maybe harmful to expect them and prepare only for such events. One thing I also think is very important, maybe most important of all in regards to what you bring up, is to invest not only in things but to invest in people.
Build a community of people around you that you can depend on and who can depend on you, a mutual aid network. Strong relationships are what's needed when state/societal or bureaucratically demanded relationships break down. But in a less extreme setting, like if you lose your job or have a tragedy or catastrophe in your life/community, having strong support among friends can be the difference between getting back on your feet or ending up homeless or otherwise worse off.
Just the push back on financial advice by guys like Dave Ramsey is shocking. You tell people to save, avoid debt, don’t buy new cars, etc and people react with almost anger at the suggestion.
It's impossible today to have any sort of major asset without going into debt. Simply said, wages are so low you can't really save up for anything - like what, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck?
Back in the Ford era, it was at least commonly understood common sense that people need to be able to afford products. Today? The people are held poor so that they can't afford to strike, much less openly revolt, and nickeled-and-dimed by the credit industry.
The advice from Ramsey and friends makes sense and is objectively the best thing people can do, but at the same time its messaging is clear: miss out on the fun everyone else has achieved by debt.
> Today? The people are held poor so that they can't afford to strike, much less openly revolt, and nickeled-and-dimed by the credit industry.
I think it's less that they're held so "poor" (i.e. not having access to a lot of cash) as that they are so completely effectively barred from any kind of sustenance outside of the Debt System that striking would mean the total abandonment of any kind of life they're used to. A real revolution would mean complete blockage from almost every public space and service--unlike the past, there's not anywhere for you to go if you're at odds with the banking system. You'll starve, or you'll be tracked and thrown in jail to suffer the wrath of the stupid, uncivilized drug-addicted gangs. There's not even food in the lands surrounding the towns and cities, it's all single-crop cash yields that get exported.
People are also very carefully manipulated (not necessarily deliberately--it's just the net result of all aggregate manipulation) to be extremely suspicious and cautious of anything that would upset the life they're used to. If you talk to anyone above $140k/year household aggregate about the possibility of living 2-3 families in one home or never travelling by air again they look at you like you're speaking a foreign language.
I think there's pushback because it's kind of a "just buy more money" solution.
On the whole, the problem isn't that people are buying $70k trucks and escalades that's keeping them poor. It's not having enough income.
The difference personally between $70k and $90k is massive and the difference between $90k and $120k is massive. That's the difference between underfunding my retirement and no savings and still being fairly tight on fun money, and having all of those things and still being able to pay that surprise $2k vet bill and just not save as much that month.
And I pay less to own than I did to rent, in a nicer house, and I'm building equity when I do it.
Was there an attitude change towards savings/etc there too? Sure. But like, the biggest difference was just having more money. You can't save when you don't have money coming in.
And at $70k I was making more than the median family with kids. People have to make do with a lot less than that. And that becomes "can't fix the car" or "can't afford to go to the hospital" or "kids don't eat breakfast" at the bottom end. $40k with kids is poverty, and that's an awful lot of people. When your shitty insurance drops you a $40k bill for a weekend in the hospital you're not paying that and it will take the rest of your finances with it.
At an individual level yes, acting wisely with money is all any one person can do. But it comes off as entitled when you tell people that they personally are doing it wrong, when the overwhelming majority of people in the economy are losing. The middle-class lifestyle as we have come to know it basically requires you be in the top 10% of income earners in your local economy. At some point it's a society-wide problem, people respond to the incentives you give them as best they can with the resources they have. But a talk-show host saying "just buy more money" isn't going to fix those social-level problems. The problem isn't people, and if your system requires magical rational-actors who will wageslave for 50 years without the occasional vacation or other nicety and die penniless in retirement after cutting social security, then your system is going to fail.
At a societal level, there is no "one weird trick from a talk-show host" to bypass the incentives we've set up or vastly increase the amount of resources any one person is allocated. Well, crime I guess.
This was a very well-written response to the parent commenter and to my own attitude to which the parent commenter was responding.
> The middle-class lifestyle as we have come to know it basically requires you be in the top 10% of income earners in your local economy.
Absolutely true. I've found that to not worry about any of (health, retirement, surprise bills, vehicles, housing) you need about $100k/year post-tax, and that's in a heartland state with "low" COL.
> The problem isn't people, and if your system requires magical rational-actors who will wageslave for 50 years without the occasional vacation or other nicety and die penniless in retirement after cutting social security, then your system is going to fail.
Amusingly, this is one of the reasons I'm not too worried about the inevitability of the system crashing. The current system is bound for failure. It's practically designed to fail. Once it fails, something will have to take its place. I think there's just enough civilizational inertia that the US isn't headed for total anarchy, as is always a risk for less-developed places when the currency and the food importation falls through.
I appreciate your habit of acknowledging the response and style, it's very disarming even if you were to then disagree ;) Just feels very much in the spirit of what HN is trying to encourage even though it's a hot-button topic (I saw yet another thread got folded into this one, lol).
I mean I just feel that on average you get what you incentivize. Yeah for any one person, advice can help them break the average but on the whole people respond how the system has encouraged them to respond. It's the same as the critique people make about communism... if your system requires people to go against human nature, it's not going to work. Individuals may, but on the whole, humans are gonna act like humans. Implying that people are doing it wrong personally because they're failing in a system in which the overwhelming majority of people are failing becomes personally offensive and that's why people react negatively.
The crushing underlying fact of american society is that the middle class isn't middle anymore, probably over half of people are working-poor at this point and there's really only a handful of middle-class left in america (in the "own a house, go on vacation once in a while, not worry about surprise bills" sense). And maybe that's part of why people react viscerally negatively to it too... nobody wants to think of themselves as lower-class and that's rubbed in your face when Ramsey tells them to live within their means. You can't afford that vacation and neither can your friends, you're all wage-slaves, just like 90% of america. Back onto your treadmill, hamster.
Building local communities and building for resiliency is really important, as another commenter was discussing. I have this early 80s tractor that I inherited from my grandparents, it's nothing special but it's had very little wear since my grandpa got alzheimers soon after and they started having it mowed by a service, and it's had some basic preventative maintenance (oil changes once a decade, new tires, etc) and I've found myself thinking that I probably should keep it around even if I upgrade to something newer. Because it's got a briggs+stratton 2-cyl boxer motor on a steel frame and it's going to be something I can find parts for forever and repair it if it comes down to it, and that's kind of a novelty in a world of cheap throwaway junk. Same for appliances, I have old 90s washer+dryer that came with the house and it's nothing particularly special, it's worn out and needs at least a couple hundred bucks of parts each, but I hear nothing but horror stories about the newer stuff. Or cars are another one... everything is digital now and not really intended for user service beyond changing the oil and brake pads and such. There is a small crossover between ESC (which is really important around here in winter) and the point everything became unserviceable and that "window of repairability" seems very desirable.
Societally we are just getting to this place where reliability and durability is something that's starting to nag at me, and it's interesting to hear I'm not the only one.
I have a veteran friend who is working to get his translator from afghanistan and his family a visa and get them moved over here... he's got a little farm so he'll have a place to put them. Same thing. I think people are starting to look over the cliff and worry about what comes after. And building local communities is going to be the ticket.
Just buy more money isn’t an accurate summary. If anything, Ramsey’s advice is aimed to helping people climb out of the pit.
Saving $1,000 for an emergency fund. Paying down debts one at a time with the “debt snowball” approach.
His advice doesn’t appeal to people who are making a lot of money at all and most of the push back is from people who will give you speeches about compounding interest rather than paying debt.
“Live like no one else, so you can live like no one else.”
What’s the alternative? Pensions? If your retirement is dependent on a pension, and the pension goes belly up, then you’re left with a fraction of what you planned for (since PGBC doesn’t cover it all)
Ultimately retirement always has the same problem: a retired person wants to consume something today without producing anything today. They can't genuinely save it up: if they packed meat in their 20s and wrote code in their 40s, the meat isn't going to be any good and the code will be deprecated in their 80s. The theory of retirement is that there is some surplus of work being produced which can be redirected to people who are not working. A pension plan or a retirement plan or personal savings effectively causes some of your income to be unspendable today, making it today's surplus for today's retirees (even if it causes the value of a database record in your name to increase). But when you are retired, it doesn't matter if that previous surplus was achieved through a pension plan or a retirement fund or personal savings or the kindness of their children: if there is no surplus today, then you can't have it today. When it happens, perhaps it will look like a bank run or a currency collapse or a crash in the stock market. But those are just the economy's way of telling you your society is already bankrupt; they don't necessarily cause the bankruptcy in the first place.
So what is the alternative? Is there one? If you want to eat a steak, either you slaughter the cow yourself, or someone else makes more than they need and chooses to sell it to you. The way a retirement is funded might change whether someone with more than they need choose to sell it to you, but it isn't going to make steaks exist.
You are bang on. The question comes down to whether or not you can produce something in exchange for fuel, textiles, shelter, food, medicine, law, and the protection of violent men. If you can't, you have to rely on stashed currency. In the current system, stashing currency slows down the market returns of the people who designed and own the system, so every single facet of life is designed to making stashing currency difficult or ineffective.
The only way to care for unproductive populations is to make personal sacrifices and care for them, at a loss/to the detriment of your own possible financial and lifestyle returns.
There has got to be another way at beating the system but as it stands how does one get over the fact that inflation would wipe away the value of the currency you are holding? Some argue that bitcoin is the answer but who knows really.
My personal feeling is that current currency system is fatally flawed and set up deliberately to not be stable. The plan for continuing market gains is to import consumers, import low-wage labor, and continue to consolidate production into hyper-corporations. I think that eventually something is going to happen that the system really can't account for (famine, plague, war, etc.) and it will be broken down and built "anew", with new norms for behavior and lifestyle expectations.
There's no way to beat a game by its own rules when the rules are set up specifically to allow certain parties to take advantage of the game. Apologies for sounding like a high school libertarian, but I can't think of any simpler way to say it than that.
The realistic alternative is multigenerational family units sticking together.
Grandparents help raise the grand kids instead of day care and baby sitters. Kids take care of their aging parents. Communities pull together to help each other.
There are complexities to it, but without a lot of the artificial financial structures that we have in place (loans, insurance, stocks, government programs) that’s probably what society has to revert to and in many ways it’s the most efficient long term way for society to function.
Outright impossible to do with the demands of employment these days - young people are expected to go wherever the jobs are, they cannot stick around in some backwater rural town to take care of their parents. Not to mention that people these days don't have anywhere close to enough children, and it's pretty immoral to force people to breed like rabbits for their retirement.
Children sticking around isn't the only option. My mom intends to follow me once I've found a place to settle down in the next few years. I'll give her extra money which should allow her to live quite well on top of what she has saved and she's already expressed interest in helping with grandkids if I have any (I probably will at some point).
Obviously this plan is made much easier by remote work and good earning potential for tech workers and I suppose some parents will be more attached to where they currently live than my mom is. But multi-generational is not outright impossible, I'd wager a significant chunk of the population could pull it off to varying degrees in one way or another.
Instead of having a thousand tiny pension corps we could just... have one big one. Some kind of Social Security system, perhaps.
And yeah social security is running a deficit and will have to reduce payments by a whole 25% or 30% in another 20 years... unless we just remove the payment caps. Wow.
Like at the end of the day the resources are present in american society to take care of the elderly in retirement. We are not physically running out of green bean casserole. It's just a question of allocation. At the end of the day the money needs to be allocated and just like day 1 of the social security program, there's going to be a lot of people who don't have time to pay into a system before drawing out. The resources will need to be allocated to pay for the wageslavery of the last 30 years.
Boomers are going to get theirs regardless, they will make sure of that, but, they're intent on pulling the ladder up behind them like they've done on every other major social issue.
Boomers don't care if Xers or Millenials don't have anything saved up, they got theirs and they got social security on top. But if things don't change, there's gonna be an awful lot of starving grandparents again when X and Millenials hit retirement, cause we don't and they're making sure we won't have social security either.
Social Security was introduced as a solution to the problem of economic security for the elderly. If we fail to meet this goal, and people see the consequences of the failure, it would likely be a bad look for politicians; public support for the program will rise, and the program will be reformed.
There is no pragmatic alternative. A debt-backed financial system will always fail to adequately provide for unproductive populations (children, elderly, disabled, insane). In fact, every financial system will fail to adequately provide for that population. The only thing that can provide for them is the deliberate actions of productive, able-bodied people, regardless of what financial system everyone is participating in.
I have a lot of ideas about what could be done, but it's all armchair revolutionary theorizing.
In Germany, we have a "rollover system" - you pay a government-mandated fixed percentage of your income into pensions system in exchange for pension credits. The contributions from all current payers (plus a sizable chunk of tax money) are then distributed to current pension receivers, and the worth of a pension credit point ("Rentenpunkte") is regularly-ish adjusted for inflation.
I'm no expert in US pension schemes to be honest, but I quickly looked up - y'all pay 6.2% each (employer and employee) of your wage, here in Germany it's 9.3% each - and our wages tend to be lower than in the US as well.
And yet, we here don't really need private pension savings. It'd be interesting if someone with a better understanding of USSS could chime in for the reasons.
Houses are another fun one. There are a lot of boomers who will be looking to cash in on their houses at the same time as everyone else. Plus the increases to interest rate will have the effect of pushing down the amount people are willing to bid on future houses.
Boomers who bought in the 80s-90s are in no danger of being underwater, but, there's going to be a lot of people whose houses are worth a lot less than they were in 2021. People who bought in the last 5-10 years are going to find that their assets at best are not going to appreciate very much, and sometimes investments do go down, that's the risk. It's not going to be an automatic escalator to the upper-middle class like it was a few decades ago.
And that's a good thing for younger generations (if landlord corps don't buy everything up) but the political power of boomers and of heartland states are really the elephant in the room with american politics.
Honestly, I'm kind of drawing my own conclusions about the financial system based on what I've read. I'm also almost embarrassed to reveal my reading list, as it reveals me as a dilettante, with an undergraduate-sophomore understanding of economics. However, I am very happy and presently financially secure with a good life, so at least my choices about spending aren't completely stupid.
I would say these are the sources from which I draw a lot of my opinions about the financial system:
- Max Dama on Automated Trading (57-page PDF written by a quantitative trader)
- Out-Sourced Profits: The Cornerstone of Successful Subcontracting by Dr. J. L. Hart-Smith (memo written by a Boeing employee about why Boeing was failing to make money and simultaneously driving down quality in the airliner industry)
- The Big Short by Michael Lewis
- Hipsters on Food Stamps Parts I-III by The Last Psychiatrist (blogger whose blog, "The Last Psychiatrist", is my favorite source of writing and whose advice I orient most of my life and behavior around. Many of his other articles touch on the credit-based financial system)
- WTF Happened in 1971? (Website showing trends in American life after the gold standard was abandoned in 1971, it's not necessarily well-researched and they draw a lot of conclusions that more experienced researchers would contradict)
- Wikipedia (some great reads on the history of the joint-stock corporation, dollar, credit card, 401k, home loan, auto loan, credit score, etc.)
There's a lot of other things I've read, but they're not explicitly about the financial system. I feel very strongly about the structure of civilization and the process of creating engineered goods, and I find that most of my complaints about problems with those two things in modern times resolve back to "the people incentivizing work to happen in modern civilization are amoral, corrupt, and actively destroying the historical incentives that people had to work towards ends that could be described as 'common good'". This leads to my constant sniping about the credit system and 401ks.
I think in general the accepted wisdom is that long-term returns of the entire market are "somehow" roughly equal to the actual value created - which ends up being roughly equal to GDP growth (after inflation is factored out).
Which means it has been astronomical during the last 100 years as the last century was the "rise of America".
That quandary has always existed and been exploited. See outsourced manufacturing and waste disposal to poorer countries with less expensive regulations.
With apologies to Patrick McKenzie: the optimal amount of dead kids is non-zero, and I think the revealed preference of america as a whole is that we are comfortable with quite a lot of dead kids if it brings political stability and a modicum of personal comfort.
School shootings, policing, our medical system, our political system itself (the uneven distribution of power between states), all of these suffer from the fundamental problem that we've got a system that's a solid 3/10 and we have no institutional interest in improving that. And yeah those systems grind up some dead kids every day and we shrug and move on. Thoughts and prayers is the meme, right?
Nobody wants to mess with the rail system because it will make the amazon packages stop. Let alone if there's a feeling (or a reality) of tipping back into the supply-chain issues of 2020 again. Can you imagine the reaction to a rail strike during midterm elections? People would legitimately have flipped their shit and voted in some completely vile motherfuckers who promised to at least make the amazon packages keep coming. So the union had to eat shit, and now your kids have to eat shit, because the union wasn't wrong about what they were saying, but it was all a complete political loser two months ago. Name a single ohio republican who wouldn't have leapt on the "biden picks the union over america and christmas".
And it works - people keep voting for this, based on actual revealed preference through voting patterns, people feel it's way more important to keep fighting the war on egghead intellectuals, this year's installement of the war on LGBT, and the war on climate science than to fret about some dead kids. Biden's doing a good job of understanding what america really wants - which is my god damn amazon packages to show up.
America is open for business, people want Norfolk Southern jobs and Duke Coal jobs and whatever else, and we're far too scared to make even those small leaps let alone reforming our whole healthcare system or retirement or redistributing power between states to something a little more sane. Those are truly big changes and we're not even willing to handle the little stuff. Jumping to the next thing is always scary, whether it's a job or anything else, even if the train is on fire it's the train on fire we know. Everyone has lingered too long in a job that was failing or with a partner that wasn't going to work out, but it's safe.
And America is the same way, by geographic and political coincidence we are essentially immune to external geopolitical pressure so there's nothing that's going to push us down. Which has allowed us to ignore underlying problems that would have pushed down other countries. A system that's designed to gridlock is fundamentally broken, people say "when you're not in power you'll appreciate it!" no actually I want someone always to be in the driver seat and empowered to make decisions, and we can go from there to making the political system actually represent what people want. Excessive checks-and-balances and a division between the executive branch and the legislature and not inherently positive things with no downsides, the PM being the leader of the ruling party is an overall positive feature of parliamentary systems.
The underlying problem is that this is not an issue the heartland of america wants to address, and the american system has (by historical circumstance and coincidences of fate) distributed a disproportionate amount of power to the heartland. The heartland wants to fight LGBT and thumb their nose at egghead intellectuals who want you to buy smaller cars to fight climate change, and they certainly don't want the unions to "win". That is what actually motivates people's votes. Again, name an ohio republican who would have "supported Biden and the unions" two months ago during midterms. It's fucking hard to make a system work when a group that has at least 49% of the power at all times is intent on being a deadweight or outright contrarian, if someone is willing to let your kids die to make bigger gains in midterms, and people keep voting from them, what exactly do you do about that? And not just on the trains either, it's all across american society.
But pulling the lever and diverting the trolley would decrease the political power of some farmers in Iowa, and deep down America is just not comfortable with that. "States should be equally represented" because haphazard admission of states across 200 years is a sacrosanct political bond even if it leads to 30% of the population controlling a supermajority of the political power. And if they do dumb shit with it oh well, shikata ga nai. The rest of the country has tried, we really have. What more can be done, could be done, that the heartland would possibly accept? The war on intellectuals and sexual freedom is just way more personally compelling than some dead kids who you probably didn't even know anyway. People just want their amazon packages to show up.
More kids will die next week, they always do. Shikata gai nai - thoughts and prayers. Nothing that can be done, says only country where this happens regularly.
>> many others are planning our retirements accounts around assumptions of 8-9% growth.
Another aspect of retirement should be figuring out how to lower the cost of living. Unfortunately the notion that housing should be a sort of investment goes directly against that. It can't be affordable and also be a good investment.
There is one way to be both without causing disaster - defeat the devil of depreciation.
If you "invest" in your home/property by making it more durable and better you can have it go up in value and down in costs without needing infinite appreciation of land and structure.
For example, if you can spend $20k (random amount) and forever cut your heating bill in half, that's an investment that will continue to pay dividends "forever".
If housing is being constructed at the rate of X per month. And population is increasing at X*2 per month. Nothing else matters. House prices will go up overall. Basic supply and demand.
In my town, population went down but children-per-family decreased even more, effectively raising the number of households/family-units that needed separate homes. A raw population count is not always what it seems.
Yeah, I was pointing out you can have an "investment" even if all the other supply issues are solved (enough houses are built to satisfy demand, etc, real appreciation is basically zero).
Your own house is not an "investment" as such, it's part of your life support after retiring. It doesn't really matter what value it has on the market, if it supports you over those years without needing too much maintenance. And after you expire, you won't care anyway what residual value it had.
Industries like airlines and railroad have the problem where you can't cut the corners that can be tastefully and carefully cut because once upon a time someone went overboard, hands were wrung, and a law or rule was made. So then when you're squeezed you cut some corner no sane person would cut with predictable results.
It wouldn't surprise me to hear that the railroad had implemented the XKCD 28hr day or something dumb like that because that was their only way to squeeze more man hours out of the month without violating the law or violating their union contracts.
it's hard to find good news coverage of the actual details of the dispute, but it seems to be fairly basic staff reductions intended to increase margin (already historically massive)
the keyword to search is "precision scheduled railroading" as that's the management term
notably, workers are forbidden from calling in sick, and are complaining about scheduling that disregards sleep, reduced maintenance, and dangerously increased train length. railroads have laid off about 30% of staff in the last few years, and unions have struggled to achieve rules as basic as forbidding single-person crews.
PSR is worth some controversy but the big problem here was ordering the train to proceed after a hot-box detector found a hot axle (saying that if it’s really a problem the next one will detect it, which it did, but it was too late to stop).
Those were line level employees, not fat cat MBAs. It'll be real interesting to see what sort of incentives those people were and weren't subject to.
You don't just order a train that might be on fire to keep going unless your equipment is chronically faulty or you are really, really, really sure it won't be your ass. Sounds like a "when everyone is responsible nobody is" situation.
Slightly OT, but the XKCD 28 hour week is terrific. I've twice tan a test week using it, and I was more refreshed, and got more work done, than any other week. I also enjoyed more sunshine too.
I'm sure that it's not for everybody, but it is a terrific solution to _some_ lifestyle issues. Not to mention the drop in peak resource usage (electric, roads, etc) if people were to stagger it in three shifts.
I used to run the 28 hour week in grad school and really enjoyed it personally as well.
The problem is keeping contact with everyone else when your schedule is rolling all across the calendar. I gotta pick the car up at 3 and call the dentist after they open at 10, and I have a class monday-wednesday-friday at 10am. 28 hour week would work a lot better in a city where everything is open 24h than a rural area where the grocery store closes at 8.
While I don’t disagree, The assumption you’re making is that high margins would increase spending/investment versus being cash flow for shareholders (or some similar non infrastructure investment). I don’t necessarily believe this is the best or most likely assumption given modern management priorities.
Not sure if adding sovereign immunity to the situation would help. Managers take shortcuts to get ahead in a lot of situations; consider, for instance, Chernobyl.
It’s one of the reasons I think the “prioritizing profits” narrative rings hollow. Any profits they would have preserved by not-stopping for the first hotbox detector? Already burned by the costs of the closure and the response so far. If anything, chasing profits better would have prevented this.
I dunno, that seems to ignore the fact that norfolk southern, the operator of this train, a profitable company for quite a while now, literally lobbied to reduce the hazardous materials safety requirements because they weren't making enough profits.
It also seems to ignore that the same company participated in claiming that the workers' often stated concerns for safety were just people being greedy and that they would lose some profit if they implemented safer conditions.
> It’s one of the reasons I think the “prioritizing profits” narrative rings hollow. Any profits they would have preserved by not-stopping for the first hotbox detector? Already burned by the costs of the closure and the response so far. If anything, chasing profits better would have prevented this.
It's not about this incident, it's about all the other times they did the same thing and got away with it. Every train that didn't stop in a similar situation and didn't cause a major problem was a win to the company. Whatever stopping a train costs, they saved that amount every single time they didn't do it, and if they did this regularly that number probably adds up.
There's a concept in risk management called the swiss cheese model[1] where you think of your layers of protection like a stack of swiss cheese slices. Every individual layer has its holes, but as you stack them up the number of paths through the whole stack gets smaller and smaller. In a sufficiently protected system, causing a major problem should require multiple layers to fail or be bypassed.
The trick of course is that this also generally means that when commercial pressure and/or individual laziness leads to one or more of the layers being bypassed it won't usually cause an immediate problem because other layers are still covering most of the holes, but the safety margin might now be a single layer instead of three so one more failure can cause a catastrophe.
Layers of protection cost money so it's not exactly rocket surgery to understand why those focused on profits, especially those who are primarily interested in short term profits, constantly apply pressure to bypass or shortcut those layers as much as people feel they can get away with.
It's more so chasing short term profits. How many of the executives and decision makers responsible for the issues of the rail workers have moved on and don't need to deal with the consequences of this? Sure, it sucks for the final set of shareholders and execs holding the bill, but capitalism rewarded all their predecessors.
If it's state controlled and an accident happens and there is a govt investigation, do you think it'll be more stern than one on a private company? Do you think enforcement of rules is stricter when enforced in house?
I don't see the reasoning as to why state run services would be somehow safer. The state should set out the rules and enforce strictly
That's like $6 million per person they've killed, very cheap. In UK NHS paid over $45 million for non-lethal medical mistake. [1]
> someone literally falls asleep killing people and he wasn't even fired
If some accident has ever killed >50 people, it can never be the fault of one person on minimum wage.
People fuck up, that's a fact of life, that's why we have co-pilots in planes, FAA was suppose to check Boeing's design, and one person going crazy can't launch the nukes.
The article you linked details numerous failures by the company. You should assign responsibility up to decision makers that made tragedy inevitable, not down to pawns that happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
> If it's state controlled and an accident happens and there is a govt investigation, do you think it'll be more stern than one on a private company? Do you think enforcement of rules is stricter when enforced in house?
At least it's easier to hold public officials accountable - you can get rid of them by voting - than to hold companies accountable.
>”At least it's easier to hold public officials accountable - you can get rid of them by voting - than to hold companies accountable.”
I disagree because most of the public officials who would be accountable are appointed to these positions, not directly elected. The representatives we elect - mayor, house representative, senator, etc. - all have a good degree of distance from direct accountability.
Plus, I feel like regular partisan politics and gerrymandering also make accountability much harder to achieve.
Those are solvable problems if we care to fix them. In what way can we fix corporate decision making when we have no say in how they operate except through the same government you're already saying we can't hold accountable?
Ah, you see, it's easy—you just have to have a few hundred million dollars, so you can buy a bunch of shares in the company. Then they might actually listen to you. /s
Postmaster General Louis Dejoy was joking only a week ago that he'd like to see the Postal Regulatory Committee disappear. He's spent his ~3 years in charge cutting USPS to the bone. Government control does not necessarily mean oversight.
>Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds.
I really don't think government owning the company is going to help.
This is after they bought ten billion dollars of their own stocks last year. It’s unbelievable. They really couldn’t shell out a bit more, at least just for good PR?
Honestly suspect some middle manager approved it and that's the highest they can go "immediately without approval" because $25k sounds like what you'd normally allocate for a single personal injury (someone getting hit on the head by a crossing guard or whatnot) and they didn't think what it would look like, nor pause to run it up the chain.
"For an overheating alert, the protocol calls for the train to stop and for the conductor to touch a waxy stick to the suspected defect to see if it melts the wax"
I chuckled to myself a little at the thought of a conductor trying to get through flames to be close enough to touch the waxy stick to the flaming axle.
> There were multiple sightings of axles on fire before the accident
In Germany, we have these hot-box detectors as well - and if they trigger, the train is automatically stopped by dispatch. Wonder what happened in this case.
When there are human links in the safety chain, those links can fail. Here's some possible things that could have gone wrong:
1. The hotbox detectors have been malfunctioning or are miscalibrated and giving false alarms, so dispatch has started ignoring them.
2. The same but conductors have begun ignoring dispatch.
3. Dispatch missed the signal from the hotbox.
4. Conductor missed the call from dispatch, or dispatch was handling another issue elsewhere.
You need things like positive train control [2673] designed to be fail-safe and without inappropriate overrides - the hotbox triggers, train doesn't stop, automatically the PTC trips and puts the train into emergency. You need to design it so that ignoring the problem results in total economic shutdown of whatever it is; many systems are setup so that ignoring the problem results in the numbers being met (until something catastrophic happens).
Here's something for your daily dose of "that's strange:" In 2021 residents of East Palestine, Ohio were extras in filming a train derailment scene for the movie "White Noise"(2022).
"Ratner, 37, is in a traffic jam scene, sitting in a line of cars trying to evacuate after a freight train collided with a tanker truck, triggering an explosion that fills the air with dangerous toxins."
Derailment can be a result of sabotage. The location is near major food and water sources. So while not exactly a conspiracy yet, it seems important to understand exactly what occurred in this derailment.
Also a lack of proper physical safety measures. Known safety improvements that were recently blocked[0] specifically the requirement to run hazards/flammable liquids with ECP Brakes which reducing stopping distance by >50% and also prevent cars from building pressure in between better braking cars and derailing.
That's what makes it such a great target. The decaying state of our infrastructure makes it easy to sabotage in subtle ways and then blame it on negligence.
Just out of curiosity, what sort of response are you expecting here? "I know the difference between reality and fantasy! The space aliens explained it all to me years ago."
None really - it was a joke. Claiming that the bush administration was lying about iraq having weapons of mass destruction would have been called a conspiracy theory, yet in time, we learned it was true.
I agree with you. I updated my original comment because I screwed up the wording.
I don’t know. Someone who was an extra could have easily been inspired by the movie to carry out this sabotage just a year later. It doesn’t take much to derail a train, I could go derail a train right now if I wanted to. You just need key bits of knowledge. Quick visit to a hardware store.
Wow. A disaster scene being filmed for a big-budget movie, and when the same disaster actually happens in the same place, it's largely overlooked - that's exactly the kind of thing that would happen in the book.
White Noise is way older than 2021. I read the book last century. I guess it's a coincidence that this was filmed a bit before an actual airborne toxic event, but I wouldn't think too much about it.
What is very frustrating is that health effects can be slow as in 20-30 years. By then the people who committed the crime are long gone or will claim the statute has expired.
Another thing that is done is just sell the company and then the new owner claims that was the predecessor and that the new company no longer have any liability. Ala Union Carbide or even Monsanto. In fact one company recently said they only by the assets not the liabilities which is absurd (might have been Bayer).
I think the recent example is Johnson & Johnson were they bundled all their asbestos liabilities into a subsidiary which is now bankrupt. Roughly something like that, Matt Levine from Bloomberg had a good write up on it.
My brother lives less than 15 miles downwind from the site of the disaster. He's young, just graduated from trade school, found a welding job in the area and brought his wife and one year-old daughter. In 50 years I'm sure we'll consider this whole region a superfund site and hand out pennies to the people whose lives were completely upended as a result.
It's a travesty how this has been handled. Massively rich corporations deflecting blame, lying to the public, and trying to cover up their own malfeasance in the pursuit of relentless greed. Profits over people, as usual.
I was watching the Ohio governor guarantee the safety of the water and environment there and was just thinking to myself
"This guy will end up eating these words" as well as "this is why i dont like politicians".
He kept quoting the EPA, even after the interviewer mentioned the EPA certificiations didnt consider all the chemicals released. He still kept drilling the science says its fine. As if health science understanding and discoveries arent paved in blood at this point.
If i lived int he region i would probably be considering moving.
> It's a travesty how this has been handled. Massively rich corporations deflecting blame, lying to the public, and trying to cover up their own malfeasance in the pursuit of relentless greed. Profits over people, as usual.
Do you have any evidence of this being mishandled, or is this just parroting the reddit narrative?
I am not one of those supporters, I think. But there is a disconnect here (and I was guilty of it for many years): when regular people think of regulations, they think about sensible rules that protect them, the workers, or the environment.
When lobbyists, industry, and politicians think of regulations, they tend to think mostly about how to protect the established industry from startups. By adding sufficient red tape in places where it's not really required, they can effectively create moats for existing oligopolies.
In this case, the bad regulation that shouldn’t have happened was when Congress stepped in and broke a strike. Perhaps if the union was allowed to freely negotiate with a strike, this wouldn’t have happened?
Well you know how they always say "the market will regulate itself"? The issue they like to forget is that you or a family member may be part of the first 346 dead from the Boeing Max disaster or you live in Palestine, Ohio before the market regulates itself.
I mean you could argue that part of this was exactly the result of government intervention is one of the strikes that railway workers were working for was better safety rules and more time off and then Congress forced the strike to end.
most people against regulation are not against it because they think fewer rules is inherently better. this is a strawman. the strongest argument against regulation is that bad regulation can make a situation worse. the government preventing a strike is a bad regulation.
Reminding me of my younger days, during my lolbertarian phase where I thought people would do the right thing and have safety procedures in place because "market forces" would shut them down if people died. To be that naive again...
The immediate aftermath of a catastrophic failure of the regulatory state seems like an odd moment to take smug shots at opponents of the regulatory state.
What deregulation are you referring to? And are you just extrapolating or did it directly cause this? I’m not seeing that in the article I read (which is not a his one because it’s unreadable on mobile for me)
Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.
Amid the lobbying blitz against stronger transportation safety regulations, Norfolk Southern paid executives millions and spent billions on stock buybacks — all while the company shed thousands of employees despite warnings that understaffing is intensifying safety risks. Norfolk Southern officials also fought off a shareholder initiative that could have required company executives to “assess, review, and mitigate risks of hazardous material transportation.”
... the Obama administration in 2014 proposed improving safety regulations for trains carrying petroleum and other hazardous materials. However, after industry pressure, the final measure ended up narrowly focused on the transport of crude oil and exempting trains carrying many other combustible materials, including the chemical involved in this weekend’s disaster.
Then came 2017: After rail industry donors delivered more than $6 million to GOP campaigns, the Trump administration — backed by rail lobbyists and Senate Republicans — rescinded part of that rule aimed at making better braking systems widespread on the nation’s rails.
Specifically, regulators killed provisions requiring rail cars carrying hazardous flammable materials to be equipped with electronic braking systems to stop trains more quickly than conventional air brakes. Norfolk Southern had previously touted the new technology — known as Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes — for its “potential to reduce train stopping distances by as much as 60 percent over conventional air brake systems.”
But the company’s lobby group nonetheless pressed for the rule’s repeal, telling regulators that it would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.”
That argument won out with Trump officials — and the Biden administration has not moved to reinstate the brake rule or expand the kinds of trains subjected to tougher safety regulations.
“Would ECP brakes have reduced the severity of this accident? Yes,” Steven Ditmeyer, a former senior official at the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), told The Lever. “The railroads will test new features. But once they are told they have to do it… they don’t want to spend the money.”
Norfolk Southern did not answer questions about its efforts to weaken safety mandates. The company also did not answer questions about what kind of braking system was operating on the train that derailed in Ohio.
If a car ran off a cliff you’d say “I see the advocates for using the brakes are strangely absent” and if a car got hit by a train sitting on the tracks you’d say “I see the advocates for using the accelerator are strangely absent.” Nobody is against regulation and nobody is for it. It’s like saying people are pro water or anti water.
I really would like to know what you're talking about in your analogy because it has about nothing to do with the reality we're facing.
Remember the hyper liberal president Joe Biden, you know the one the more right media claims to be completely communist. Yea, that one that stopped the railroad workers from striking due to bad work conditions.
And do you remember the railroad workers that want to strike because every factor around safety is being cut putting them in a dangerous work environment? Single engineers running trains? Inspection times being cut? The ones not allowed to take sick days?
Saying nobody is against regulation is a lie. The owners of these companies seeking as much profit as possible are a testament to that.
> Residents are concerned about long-term effects of low-grade exposure.
> “There’s all that smoke and all those chemicals in there,” said Mason Shields, who lives in East Palestine and visited an aid center outside the evacuation zone. “I’m wondering if it’s even going to be safe for people to return within the next week or month or however long.”
Generally speaking, I read the news because I want to learn facts about a topic.
If I wanted to read the thoughts of some random person who is feeling anxious about something they’re ignorant about, I would go on social media.
Peoples' feelings and sentiments about things that are happening are also facts, and none too unimportant, since feelings and sentiments are often the basis for their decisions or their government's decisions, which results in new facts.
Yes, we want factual reporting, but that people have emotions and fears is also a fact, that has influence on future events.
> If I wanted to read the thoughts of some random person who is feeling anxious about something they’re ignorant about, I would go on social media.
It's one thing to ask random Joe on the streets if he's fine with immigration. That's pretty pointless.
But asking someone directly affected from a natural disaster or industrial accident by living right next to it? That's the kind of journalism that is needed, because it points out the answers that experts absolutely must provide.
Because it doesn't affect random Joe on the street in his daily life, nor do other nationwide topics (think market economy, wars, natural disasters on the other side of the planet).
Sure it does. Joe may be in a social class that competes with immigrants in the labor market, or the housing market. He may perceive that the safety in his neighborhood has changed with an influx of people he perceives to be immigrants.
Doesn't mean he's right but he's got questions and believes he's impacted. That's my point, it's analogous to living in the town w the accident.
How much should people care about this who live in various radiuses? I.e., within 200 miles, is there zero cause for concern? Or is the type of thing that will do something like remove five years of life on average for people within five miles, one year within 100 miles, one month within 300 miles, etc.?
I know nothing about this field but I remember when California had really bad wildfires, when it was happening (in 2020 or 2021? It all blends together) there were charts showing air quality levels across the US. I'm in NY and I visibly saw different colored clouds when the "smoke clouds" made their way over here. I have no idea if the same thing applies to this train's chemicals but that is a case where there was a coast to coast impact on something that travels in the air.
It's a cube law thing - you can work out how much "air" there is for everything to spread into, and how much "stuff" there is but basically, the further away you get the rapidly it goes down in hazard.
The western wildfires were absolutely mind-glowingly immense in ways we don't really deal with normally.
Five tank cars is 30,000 gallons * 5 = 150,000 gallons, roughly 600 cubic meters.
Safe exposure is 0.1 part per million, so 600 cubic meters * 10 million circle (assume the stuff never gets more than a meter off the ground, spherical cows and all that) = 45 kilometer radius circle. Obviously it's much more concentrated near the epicenter but let's assume it dispersed equally.
So 200 kilometers should be well outside the danger zone UNLESS a cloud of it doesn't disperse and instead heads in your direction.
This is a great answer, thank you. However this assumed the atmosphere is 45 km high and it seems very unlikely that these gases are light enough to go that high. If you assume the gases only go 1km in the air wouldn’t that assume a radius roughly 40x your initial estimate, or at least 1800 km to be within the 1 ppm threshold.
That's why I did a little bit of a sleight of hand - worked out how many cubic meters it would need to be to disperse, and then converted that to square meters (so assumed a depth of one meter).
If I had done a sphere (half a sphere to be precise) you'd get a half-dome only 1.5 km across.
We should all be concerned no matter the radius. This will happen elsewhere if nothing is done to address the issues. And right now, far too many people are silent on this.
Agreed. We should not wait to be concerned. Those who are in the immediate radius should be immediately concerned but the rest of us need to be warry.
I want to believe a burning river will get movement on this stuff but with the political climate I could see that being shrugged off since it's happened before so no big deal.
It's all quite insane. We are shortening our live expectancy as a nation in a measurable ways with proven solutions but instead we just shrug it off and do nothing.
Reddit (and now HN) is the only source that shows this on the front page - I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise. Corporate news outlets have kept it from the front page.
Call me cynical but that explains why the media suddenly seems to care now but didn't seem to care earlier when it was a "developing story" they could have slung more eyeball grabbing ($$) fear porn into.
People on the parts of the internet HN stays far away from were sharing pictures of the crash and fireball for a few days before anyone gave a crap. Then someone arrests a reporter and suddenly the media has a bone to pick.
I'm not going to beat around the bush here: You are lying.
The charges were trespassing and disorderly conduct. The reporter was in the middle of a live report when the governor began a speech and the police asked him to be quiet before arresting him. The governor apologized and offered a one on one interview after the reporter's release.
Well, I provided an archived link to an ABC article to back up my claim, and you have provided nothing to back up yours. You also rudely implied that I don’t know how to consume news media. Why should I, or anyone else, believe you?
edit: and why did you create a new account to make this claim?
Yeah I wonder for how many seconds it was there, since you can't even count it in hours, but "UFO" is still there as the biggest news in world as you can see in my screenshot and also by visiting the page.
For instance if I would not be BANNED from posting links on HN I'd post also this which I find more interesting news affecting everyone than some dumb made up baloons which are on par with Iraqi WMD
But aparently I'm ALWAYS posting too fast only when it comes to posts, but have no such problems with comments, it's sad how low can go HN in shadowbanning users without transparently communicating why is one banned from something.
I'm skeptical that it's a deliberate conspiracy, and this is not a scientific test, but I just checked the following news sites, and not one of them had any related hits for "Ohio" listed on their main pages:
BBC America
Reuters
CNN
Fox News
The New York Times
The Seattle Times
MSNBC
CNBC
Seems a little weird for sure. All of those sources have coverage AFAIK, but one has to dig to see it. I imagine algorithmic content promotion is at least partly a factor. I.e. if people aren't clicking on news about that story as much, it probably falls off the main page. So perhaps it's more like paid corporate Wikipedia shills, except it's click farms to promote other content and get the embarrassing news off of the front page?
That having been said, I know of at least two topics the American press is likely to deliberately downplay or avoid reporting on - solo suicides and certain types of civil unrest - so while I strongly dislike conspiracy theories in general and think it's unlikely in this case, I can't rule out the possibility that this is another one of those topics.
I just loaded up CNN and saw 20 stories before having enough. The worst example being a celebrity pregnancy. I did not note anything about this story. I viewed the mobile website and desktop version.
I can think of a billion things going on right now that are vastly more important than anything about a celebrity pregnancy.
It would actually be interesting to take a vacation to the media bubble of someone who thinks that there is not a huge problem there. Painting in broad strokes, the distrust is there for the "first, distrust corporations" left and the "first, distrust the media and big government" right. I don't imagine there are many people wholly outside those camps, at least not on something like this.
I think it is mostly all together, "distrust big corporations that are obviously corrupting the government and media". Big corporations that have large political clout and donations to media and then use that to cover for nefarious actions that would normally be illegal and horrifically unethical. When you have corporations writing your laws, they will cover for themselves, even when it is at the cost of human life and voter constituencies.
Money means far too much. We can fix a lot of problems by any of the following:
- Making marketing illegal and imprisonment for violators starting at CEO and working down
- Taking opinion out of the news and imprisoning violators starting at CEO and working down
- Having corporatations/government agencies which break laws face criminal consequences starting at CEO/Top rank and working down.
- Removal of costs for education and imprisoning any people cheating the system, starting at the top and working down.
- A global food program for rice(?) and bean(?) that ensures no belly is ever without at least some nutrients.
-A global housing program to ensure every person is able to be sheltered and stable.
In this instant case(assuming what I have read is true and if not, notice the point tackling that) we have some heads of some departments going to jail, whoever actually caused the strike to end can go to jail, the people in charge of basically doing a chemical terrorist attack can all go to jail as well.
The people suffering could just temporarily move to new shelter and avoid chemicals.
But frankly, none of that would be needed because people in power would finally have a single reason to give a single shit. We wouldn't be here discussing such an absurdity for the nth day in a row.
Just imagine for a moment dying because of this incident... Be that person today, because before you know it, you will be that person by force.
Some of the best reporting on this with actual data is coming from social media (as usual), versus from official sources. Here is someone reviewing the manifest of chemicals and number of spilled train cars: https://www.tiktok.com/@nickdrom/video/7199486059212868910
This is a good summary of the situation. One thing the speaker left out is that hydrochloric acid is heavier than air, so while the reaction does result in a bunch of hydrochloric acid, it should react with things in the local environment very quickly to make a hot mess of the immediate environment but not to spread out into the larger ecosystem.
Honestly that's the type of data that would help calm the situation a bit.
Five cars of vinyl chloride, three cars of diethylene glycol, and two cars of oil are the problem children at this point. At least the quantities involved aren't too large, it wasn't a whole train of vinyl chloride.
Still preventable though and things aren't getting any safer from here if the railroads have anything to say about it. And the local wildlife getting sick is still concerning... if the measurements say everything is fine and the local wildlife is dying, you aren't measuring what needs to be measured.
> Primary forms of chemical weapons include nerve agents, blister agents, choking agents, and blood agents... Blood agents interfere with the body’s ability to use and transfer oxygen through the bloodstream. Blood agents are generally inhaled and then absorbed into the bloodstream. Common forms of blood agents include Hydrogen Chloride and Cyanogen Chloride.
Hydrogen chloride does not interfere with transporting oxygen. I think someone made a typo and mean hydrogen cyanide (cyanogen chloride does interfere with oxygen transport).
Hydrogen chloride is found in pool chemicals, toilet bowl cleaner. Pretty sure we don't use chemical weapons to clean our toilets.
Another example of people not taking into account the full life cycle of the products they purchase. Vinyl chloride was one of the main toxic chemicals dumped in this derailment and it is used to make PVC. You might want to think twice about using vinyl siding, windows, flooring, etc..
Let me rephrase that: "A toxic cloud was leaked, for all we know caused by subpar safety standards on the other side of the globe, which involved the same chemical that was used to produce my PVC flooring."
Based on this reasoning, which flooring (or other construction materials) are acceptable?
It should, but UFO UFO UFO! I've lost faith in intelligence of HN users after they downvoted into oblivion anyone sceptical about COVID "vaccines" and pushed official safe and effective propaganda. It's same with this baloon smokescreen, notice how nobody talks about Nord Stream 2 sabotage by US, which was like 1 day affair, while they entertrain us with this UFO nonsense for days already.
> notice how nobody talks about Nord Stream 2 sabotage by US, which was like 1 day affair
This was discussed thoroughly when the incident happened and the recent news were just some allegations by a reporter, without actual new evidence. Doesn't seem like the balloon story is a distraction, especially since it's rather US-focused, unlike the Nordstream incident.
> This was discussed thoroughly when the incident happened
Ah yeah, right, I guess that's also when investigation was finished within hours since the sabotage happened.
For US it's distraction from Ohio toxic air as bonus. What I would be more affraid - non-existent UFO on par with Iraqi WMD or toxic air? That's tough one...
Vinyl chloride. I'm surprised they decided to burn it instead of attempting to contain and recover it, because it surely would've been worth something?
1. Rail companies slashed their workforce for short-term profits and share buybacks, cheered on by Wall Street [1]. Rail workers do not get paid sick leave because of those cuts, prompting Congress to step in an kneecap industrial action aimed at improving safety and working conditions [2];
2. Obama era rules were proposed for safer brakes (that would've prevented this incident). After lobbying by rail companies, those rules were weakened. The Trump administration scrapped them entirely. The Biden administration and Secretary of Transportation Buttigieg declined to reinstate those rules, let alone make them as tough as originally intended [3];
3. There are legitimate concerns that this has poisoned the water supply (eg [1]). There are other reports of animals left in East Palestine during evacuation have died;
4. One of the chemicals released (and burned) is vinyl chloride, which becomes hydrochloric acid in contact with water (including moiture in the air).
5. The EPA is doing air testing (eg [5]). Note the company contracted to do the test results: Tetra Tech. This is the same company the US government sued (and some individuals went to prison for) fraud ie falsifying testing to make things appear safer [6].
6. When a reporter starting asking questions at a news conference about the derailment, such as whether efficiency practices like PSR contributed to the accident, he was arrested [7];
7. There seems to be little media coverage for what could be an environmental catastrophe.
8. All this while just last week, Biden in the State of the Union address said "Corporations ought to do the right thing" [8]. The only way they will is if you, the government, make them or they sufficiently fear the consequences of not doign the right thing. Why would they when the entire political establishment defends corporate interests (eg against rail workers)?
Fines and possibly some payout after a decade of litigation are just the cost of doing business. The leaders responsible for this should end up in jail.
You're missing out the cherry on top: corporate media blackout about the whole incident. It might go even deeper than that, but I don't need to cross into conspiracy theories to make my point. And no, just because npr and cnn had an article about it on page 20 is not proof that there isn't a blackout.
Also, I can't help but wonder how many headlines this would have cause if it happened during Trump. For the party that says to be taking the high road, the democrats sure do lack a spine. Democrat supporters own 80% of the media consumed by Americans, they could have warned the people of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
So what is your point? No failure and no one to blame?
If anything there's some good questions around train safety, outdated infrastructure and the remedial response. Why was it decided to burn up? Couldn't a clean up, then burn be attempted?
If it happened in Venezuela would it be a failure of communism? If it happened in Iran would it be a failure of theocracy? Of f-ing course not.
When you start talking about big organizations with tons of legacy rule-making and policy there tends to be a lot of misalignment of incentives that pops up over the years. It doesn't really matter the societal structure.
I'm betting this is a classic "when everyone is responsible nobody is" type of failure you tend to get in organizations that have double and triple redundant rules to prevent failure but no realistic way to do your job without shirking some of your responsibility.
Do these accidents happen regularly in capitalist countries such as Sweden, Norway and Germany? If not then perhaps the problem is not capitalism but America's regulatory system.
> Do these accidents happen regularly in capitalist countries such as Sweden, Norway and Germany
Don't know about those countries but I was in the general geographic area when this accident in Rouen happened, in 2019 [1]. The same as in this case, the main media (i.e. the Paris newspapers) pretty much ignored it, buried it in their 20th page or something, that's when they weren't calling really concerned people out as "paranoids". Luckily for me I was just a tourist in Normandy back then, so I got out of the area pretty fast.
Almost forgot it, Buffett himself was one of the major shareholders in Lubrizol. He even had the audacity to call it just an "unfortunate story" a couple of years later [2]. So, yes, I pretty much regard this as a failure of capitalism.
Later edit: This job [3] of picking up dead fish after an environmental disaster should have been done by a government-run agency. That way they would have correctly assessed the damages, the most likely causes, the compensations for those affected, the measures to be taken so that a similar thing doesn't happen in the future. Instead it looks like a private company has been employed to clear up the mess, in pure capitalistic fashion.
There were multiple sightings of axles on fire before the accident: https://www.post-gazette.com/news/transportation/2023/02/10/...