A wake up call, you say? As in, no one could have seen this coming? Not even all the railroad workers and unions who said this was bound to happen due to the absurdity of the schedules and requirements forced on them by their employers?
This is the most obvious outcome of the US government stepping in to break the railroad worker's strike, it was just a matter of when - not if. We're lucky it didn't happen in downtown Pittsburgh.
The worst part is that the costs of these entirely foreseeable and preventable catastrophes will be nationalized. Meanwhile the railroads will forgo necessary maintenance and infrastructure investments, continue to blame individual employees for the events, and reap record profits year over year. Mission accomplished.
The worst part of this disaster in particular is the entirely local effects including cancer, pain, suffering, and death caused by the release of these chemicals. But yes, the worst part of this pattern of behavior from the US leadership is that catastrophes like this will continue to happen all over.
It is kind of interesting that the media seems to be softballing this. Usually their MO for this kind of disaster is hype, hype, hype, and sensationalism. Under most models of how the media works, this ought to be front page day & night, and if anything should be getting overestimated rather than under. Any internal mental model of how the media works that fails to integrate this should be getting challenged, and I'm still not sure how to do it myself. I can just see there's definitely a strong data point here.
Have you factored in corporatism? Most large news media organizations
in the US are owned by, or carry water for large corporations, and will never bring adequate coverage to stories that show labor in a favorable light, or show the malfeasance of corporations - unless it's corporation vs corporation.
Hard news needs to be treated as a public service, as in a government agency with the same rights and abilities as federal agents. Hard news needs to have review authority above that of the local state government.
The natural state of human affairs is crony corruption, plain and simple; currently we allow multiple corrupt states (local, county, state, each corporation's internal affairs, etc...). We should just admit our natural corruption and observe that only one can be king, and that king already exists: our federal government. The Federal government ought to make it their primary mission, as the ruling top dog in our corrupt society, do destroy all other corrupt operations stealing from them.
We are an immature, petty civilization. Let's admit our immaturity, and perhaps mature a bit as a result.
Kicker: there is no "liberal" or "conservative" media - there is only billionaire owned media dispensing what they deem the public's mind should be filled.
> Our media barely report, and then under report the seriousness
The national media isn't very good at representing issues outside of major cities. Events like this are largely unimportant to people living in the places they sell their stories to. In a way, you're not asking the media to change, you're asking Americans to care about those areas at all.
The Chinese balloons weren’t in a large metropolitan area. more likely explanation is that this story has a pro-labor narrative, and that’s not what media companies are paid to push.
News reading Americans rather read about “Is it China or aliens?”, the war in Ukraine, earthquake in Middle East and the Super Bowl than small-town Ohio.
In what way is a fiery train derailment and cows dropping dead all over the region not a good story for clicks and attention? I guess the balloon feels a bit more whimsical but it feels like the more boring story.
In this instance, the simplest explanation really does seem to be financial conflict of interest.
”China conducts surveillance on US” is still not particularly exciting or novel news either way. Train derailment poisons an entire town is definitely the more eye-catching headline.
>”China conducts surveillance on US” is still not particularly exciting or novel news either way
1. ”China conducts surveillance on US” gets plenty of clicks/attention. Just look at tiktok, and before that huawei/ZTE.
2. In this case specifically it's not just "China conducts surveillance on US", it's also arguably violating the territorial integrity of the US. For americans that's strikes much closer to home than shadowy hackers hacking from china.
> ”China conducts surveillance on US” gets plenty of clicks/attention.
Does it? As far as I can tell, the “TikTok spies on people” stories have all been met with “yeah, so does Facebook”. This is across pretty much the entire political spectrum. It seems to me that only the political/media class actually find it significant.
While it’s obviously too early to have non-anecdotal data on this, my instincts tell me very few people actually care or find it surprising that China “violated the territorial integrity of the U.S.” as if we’re not constantly flying drones over other world powers. It’s just standard operating procedure at this point.
The balloon story is being propped up by UFO conspiracy theorists and let's not pretend it's anything but that. They are absolutely going nuts over every "unknown object" being shot down. Every single mention on it here on HN is filled with people talking about it.
They gonna care when the crops and livestock we depend on from that area quit producing. And prices go up even more.
This was insanely horrid the toll it is going to take on that region and the Country.
I mean, no we are not aware of a connection to any metropolitan area. Which is the point. If the lack of derailment coverage was just pro-metropolitan bias you wouldn’t expect Billings, MT to be receiving the entire attention of the media right now.
I’m not sure this is relevant to the original discussion. Pro-metropolitan bias doesn’t explain the difference between how the 2 stories are being treated. Media’s class-alignment with railroad execs and politicians responsible for the disaster is a more reasonable explanation.
I would say they're equally plausible. It's kind of gross that folks are so ready to deny that there's an over focus on metropolitan issues (I say that as someone that lives in a metro and has lived in a pretty rural area before). The immediate dismissal from folks does lend more credence to the idea that it's a societal bias.
I mean, I'm not denying that there's a metropolitan bias in the media, just that it doesn't explain why 2 stories that both happened in relatively rural locations got reported on differently.
These sorts of accidents do not happen that often relative to the quantity of freight that moves. Put any economic system underneath the rail (or trucks) you want, accidents will still happen, as the demand for dangerous goods doesn't just evaporate.
It requires attention to detail combined with political will to improve safety.
"Norfolk Southern, the railway company responsible for an apocalyptic plume of gas rose over East Palestine, Ohio, has offered a $25,000 donation to assist the area’s nearly 5,000 residents who were ordered to evacuate their homes, or face death"
Personally, I think $25,000 per person displaced would be a good start to making restitution. Anyone forced to move should receive at least triple the market rate price of their home/farm/etc. before the accident.
Serious financial implications are the only thing that will cause behavior shift in large organizations.
> Norfolk Southern, the railway company responsible for an apocalyptic plume of gas rose over East Palestine, Ohio, has offered a $25,000 donation to assist the area’s nearly 5,000 residents
I think OP's point is that since no heads will roll for this, despite it being known that this would happen sooner or later, it will keep happening in other local areas.
If Northern Southern were to feel this incident in their pocket book, they might stop lobbying to gut safety regulations... However, it's very clear that neither legislative, judicial, executive or media positions give a flying fuck to stop this; in fact, they'll go to extreme lengths such as breaking strikes and media coordination to keep the status quo.
So it will happen again, and again, until one day it actually does fuck up a major city - and even then, the people responsible will probably be insulated from consequences.
There were no hospitalizations reported and the chemicals released are not really carcinogens. The risk from this particular chemical spill was acute injury, but fortunately that was avoided.
Vinyl chloride breaks down quickly into hydrochloric acid in the atmosphere. Including when it is burned (and the low amount phosphene given off when burning).
So immediately following the crash the area was dangerous, but it is already mostly safe again by now.
To be clear, the timescale on which it breaks down is several days. So you're probably right that there's very little vinyl chloride still around in the environment.
That amount of vinyl chloride can cause a lot of problems to the surrounding populace in several days.
Also, it doesn't break down just into HCl. It also breaks down into formaldehyde. Which is both acutely toxic and also a carcinogen, and is quite a bit more stable in the environment.
Ten train cars worth of formaldehyde averaged over the entire atmosphere would be nothing to worry about, I agree.
Let's say that two train cars worth sank into the ground before breaking down. Now there's two train cars worth of formaldehyde in the groundwater in a localized area.
It's not obvious to me that this is a safe situation. There are plenty of plausible scenarios that could be reality, that would be a very unsafe situation for local residents.
Thus is should be treated as though it is that worst-case bad scenario unless shown otherwise, rather than wand-waving "oh it's probably fine". These are people's lives that are at stake.
> The amount that came from ten cars, spread into the atmosphere, is virtually nothing.
Erm, on what basis do you make that claim?
Ten train cars of dioxin spread over a square mile is a lot. Spread over 100 square miles? Probably still a lot, like the place in missouri that dumped it on all their roads to keep the dust down. That's probably that same order of "10 cars over 10x10 square miles", of a sufficiently nasty thing.
10 cars = safe is a number that needs context and validation and it will depend on the particular chemical.
Dioxin is an example of why saying "10 train cars is fine" is an oversimplification, 10 train cars of dioxin is a problem even if it's spread out over a couple square miles.
Maybe 10 train cars of formaldehyde is fine, maybe not, but, this is something that should be assessed and not dismissed out of hand, even during discourse. Random internet commentators probably don't really know if it's fine. And despite the people on-site saying measurements are fine... animals are getting sick, which is the classic warning sign with chemical spills that things are not fine.
Although there is indeed dioxin formed during the combustion apparently. Bear in mind too that this isn't a controlled incinerator, there could be various things produced at different temps etc.
Vinyl chloride will form some dioxin upon combustion.
When left to break down in the environment, after several days vinyl chloride will break down into a combination of formaldehyde and hydrochloric acid. The latter of which won't be harmful, but the former will be.
Yes please read the links you just posted. Exposure to high concentrations for a long time (eg, if you spent a career in a vinyl chloride production facility pre-OSHA) is associated with a measurable increase in cancer rate. It’s not going to be a reasonable concern in this instance.
In this instance, the risks to be worried about is far more than just cancer. And it isn't exactly comparable to a career in a vinyl chloride factory because factories don't typically have these production chemicals ablaze and mixed with whatever else was in the train wreckage, seeping into the surrounding earth, water and air. Before even speculating on the undetermined adverse health effects of this event in the long term, the immediate impact of this environmental disaster should warrant a mandatory evacuation and corporate accountability.
You can get dioxins when burning vinyl chloride polymers (“poly vinyl chloride”), but not the vinyl chloride monomer, if my chemistry degree serves me correctly.
Yes, I disagree with the professor. I think you will get very little dioxin contamination from burning vinyl chloride monomer in atmospheric conditions.
For starters, you could acknowledge that a train explosion is already well outside normal lab conditions for vinyl chloride. Don't pretend you know what compounds were formed in this accident. Modeling this incident as a low exposure (see: your dismissal of the carcinogenic nature of vinyl chloride) to the pure substance is absurd.
Put your life where your mouth is and go live there.
Would you please stop posting flamebait/unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and if you keep doing it then we're going to have to ban you again.
Yes, it's such an obvious thing that it has been used in plots for movies/books for a long long time. Maybe the particular thing that causes the derailment or the specific thing that released is slightly different, but it's not like nobody has ever thought this as idea. In fact, some version of the plot that proves the idea is so believable is that they stage an accident and tell people it is hazardous to get people to evacuate to not see what's really going on.
The fact that someone could say this was unforeseen with a straight face should immediately put them in the nominees for whatever acting award show of your choice.
They should still absolutely pay for everything, using a very liberal assessment of a model used to predict any plausible expenses for the next 1000 years converted to 2023 dollars.
Today. Because it has to stop being the next person's problem.
.5% above inflation for this one year. What about the past 50 years while their employee pay has flatlined and scheduling deteriorated to the point that employees cannot have a life outside work?
The employees are reported to have received a 14% raise recently. The record profits were 7% higher than 2021 with inflation for the same period at 6.5%. All of this is in the linked article.
I am not defending the actions. I have noted a problem with the term "record profits" and engage where possible to limit what I see as a problem with that language.
I'm not arguing any of your points outside of the use of the term record profits without any hard numbers. The reasoning being that record profits is the goal and normal as far as I'm concerned. A 0.5% increases should be clearly labeled due to the loaded nature of the term( In my opinion.)
Yes...? A wake up call is for people who don't realize something is a big deal. In quite literally every wake up call situation, someone thinks it's obvious. "Wake up" meaning "it's been in front of you this whole time, and you can't see it". The article is not targeting railroad workers, its for lawmakers, constituents, or anyone who will listen and Isn't thinking about it
The point being made above is, I believe, that the wake-up call was two months ago during the rail strike.
It is all too clear to those who were paying attention during the strike how hard the Biden admin tried to suppress any public understanding about the actual concerns of the rail workers.
>>railroads will forgo necessary maintenance and infrastructure investments, continue to blame individual employees for the events, and reap record profits year over year
Yup.
What is worse is that, from what I've read, this could have been prevented by simply observing the train earlier in its journey. The cause is initially thought to be a problem with one of the wheelsets, and there was apparently a video of it going through a town 20 miles earlier shedding a shower of sparks. Simply rigging up a series of cameras on the train for the engineer/driver to observe, and they could have stopped in time to drop the failing car for repair.
Instead, they drove on blindly, straight to the inevitable wreck.
Of course, what will then happen is that rail crews will be pressured to ignore "minor" problems seen on the videos, and then get blamed when the inevitable happens.
They did observe it actually - they have "hotbox cameras" that watch for hot axles. They are often miscalibrated or erroneous so they ignored it and let it proceed to the next camera, which also confirmed it, but by that point it was too late. The brakes are no longer sufficient to stop trains that long/heavy and the derailleurs can no longer derail trains this long/heavy safely. So by the second camera it was too late.
Like yeah you could pull the lever every time you see a potentially hot axle but that would send the trolley headed straight into norfolk southern's profit margin. It's really unforeseeable and there's definitely not a union that has been screaming about safety issues and was just slapped down a few months ago in bipartisan fashion, nothing that can be done about this says only nation where this happens regularly. Thoughts and prayers. /s
Like, the people of ohio have made it real clear that being open for business is what they want politically. They definitely don't want the unions to score a win, even if it might increase the risk of their kids dying it's obviously worth it because people keep voting this way. There is a firm 50% of congress that is a guaranteed "fuck unions and fuck anything that threatens industry, we want jobs and we want em now" and the rest of the legislature is divided anyway. What do you do if you're democrats? Deathmatch SCOTUS over people who don't even want you to, and get your regulatory authority taken away entirely because the founders never said anything about trains in the constitution?
Like, just name a single ohio republican who wouldn't have leapt on the "biden favors unions over america and christmas" two months ago. Complete loser of an issue politically, people want their amazon packages and any hint of a return to the supply-chain chaos of 2020 is gonna make people lose their shit. This is how people actually vote, dead kids sounds bad but threaten my amazon packages and people will line the fuck up to get you out of office. They aren't actually motivated by the dead kids in the same way, it's more of an abstract, purely theoretical motivation, like loving your neighbor, or caring for the least among us. "Revealed preference" is the economic term for it.
Anyway, we have to get back to ongoing coverage of the war on LGBT, that's what plays with the voters in Ohio. Sorry about your kids, thoughts and prayers.
(and fyi if anything as of a couple days ago biden/buttigieg (omg its MAYOR PETE FROM WEST BEND INDIANA!!!) were looking at further loosening of safety regulations and brake requirements... as is every single republican.)
While I agree that the republicans are definitely openly union-hostile and anti-worker and pro-corparatist, I think you are letting the democrat politicians off the hook. They are absolutely also pro-corporatist (neoliberal), anti-union (despite outward "support", there's been nothing really proposed or done to help unions out), probably at least worker-agnostic, and just not working for the little guy.
In the US, there is no pro-workers, pro-union, fight against big corporations party in the US. There is no trustbusting party, there is no worker collectives party, there is no 35 hour workweek party. So maybe republicans can shut the fuck up about "Demoncrats are socialism" for like a minute.
But that won't happen because these are the same people who blame Biden for a 10 cent increase in gas prices that he had no control over, as made obvious when it dropped immediately after the election despite Biden still being the president. Also, if gas going up by 10 cents is enough for you to throw away any principle, or friendliness, or anything just to vote for the same guys you've always voted for, maybe consider that you are not doing very well in the world and the people you've been voting for this whole time and are largely the ones who have held power over the past fifty years have MAYBE been fucking you over?
Oh, absolutely, nothing here was meant to make Biden/Buttigieg look good. It's notionally their job to fight for all americans even if they don't vote for them. On the other hand republicans would have been 100% uniformly against any sort of a "union win" two months ago, and Democrats are divided themselves as a caucus. It's a case of "of the remaining 50% who can be swayed on an issue, how many support this" and two months ago, before the accident, nobody would have agreed it's a good expenditure of political capital to even bring it up.
Imagine what would have happened with a rail strike during midterms. Like just imagine. That slight-republican-lean in the house would have been more like 60-70% and who knows about keeping the senate. And they certainly aren't busting norfolk southern's balls on safety regulations either.
Again, like, people just want their fucking amazon packages to show up, and any sort of a sense that we're backsliding into further supply chain issues is going to turn people out like crazy, and up until it affected them personally nobody really cared about this issue as an abstract point, not enough to vote on.
(and what if a rail strike does cause that supply chain whiplash to resume, while inflation is already high etc?)
Now, of course, diving into further loosening of brakes/safety requirements is incredibly tone-deaf at this moment, and I think perhaps that was a case of Biden/Buttigieg not understanding that the ground shifted out from underneath them... but they were gonna!
Biden is a very keen politician in many ways, and rule #1 is don't create drama where none exists. People want deregulation, people want rail jobs, people don't like the unions, they don't want transportation disruptions to resume. Biden read that room correctly. The revealed preference of the american public is that reliable amazon packages are more important than dead kids.
And it could very well all still blow over too. America shrugs its shoulders about dead kids all the time, we run on dunkin and dead kids here. It's not the first time that moral quandary has come up, and it won't be the last.
But there's just not enough political capital to have a knock-down drag-out deathmatch over every single Right Thing To Do for people who don't even want him to do it. Every single thing Biden does goes to SCOTUS and every time it's a question of whether the court is just going to nuke that regulatory power entirely. Like the EPA. Two months ago was this the fight that the american voter in ohio thought was worth having? If anything two months ago they would have been behind him busting the union's balls on this - go back and look at some polling and I bet they are.
This is what people keep voting for, they can say whatever they want but this is the revealed preference, fighting the War On LGBT is just a lot more important to the heartland than some dead kids you don't even know. You can't drag people kicking and screaming on every single issue. Biden's got things he needs to do too. America wants the trains to run on time so they get their fucking amazon packages.
It's not, per se. It's due to rail lines preferring to run longer trains with lower staffing, and the long trains are less safe and operate much closer and even past the physical safety limits of the train hardware and rail infrastructure.
These are relatively recent changes, not something that's been this way for a long time. It's part of the changeover to "precision scheduled railroad" as the rail lines like to call it.
Rail workers being overworked is just another aspect of the this change. The rail companies don't want to maintain FTEs and have cut that to the point where people can't even get unpaid days off scheduled, and are being asked to run schedules without concern to sleep etc. And that has led to some other accidents already.
But the core of the issue is this change to precision-scheduled-railroad, and the longer trains / reduced staffing that go along with it.
> Rail companies laid off more than 20,000 rail workers during a year period in 2018-2019, representing the biggest layoffs in rail since the Great Recession, and the nation’s rail force has dipped below 200,000 – the lowest level ever, and down from 1 million at its peak. “They have cut the hell out of the workforce, and there are big plans to cut it further,” Kaminkow said. “Just because the rail companies are profitable doesn’t mean they’re healthy.”
No, the rail company is perfectly healthy and thriving. The workers aren't, but as long as the trains move, the workers could be ground under the wheels for all that Wall St cares.
I doubt it. From what I understand, on top of squeezing the workers, railroad companies have been underinvesting in the infrastructure. I don't see how they would accept to spend billions in R&D (to my knowledge there is no fully automated train yet) and track/signals upgrades.
Fully automated freight rail is not possible with the infrastructure and technology we currently have unless the rail companies accept insane risk.
For example, if one of the locomotive engines stops working and the train must stop, you need to keep the brake lines pressurized. For some archaic reason they fail open instead of closed, so you have to keep the engines running at all times. Otherwise, you need to send a guy out to manually apply the emergency brakes. This was part of the cause of the Lac-Mégantic disaster.
So it's not impossible, but there's zero chance that NS or CSX would ever invest $MM to upgrade the brakes on all their trains to let them run automated. But the real crux of it is that they'd be responsible for any disaster, and their go-to strategy is to just blame whoever happened to be in the cab that night.
I think most of it is legacy. Trains have been around for a long time, and changing something on tens of thousands of locomotives and millions of train cars would be very expensive and complicated. Most systems now have a reserve tank on each car that holds a certain pressure, and the braking signal is sent by reducing the pressure from the main unit. But it's still not nearly as safe as automotive air breaks that fail closed, since eventually all the air will leak out of the tanks.
There are tons of automated metro lines, and the EU standard for rail signalling, ETCS, is capable of Automatic Train Control and has heavy doses in automation in it already, especially used on high speed lines (where the driver can't really do much anyways due to the speeds involved)
However, without full grade separation, this is extremely risky because humans are stupid. It's also very expensive, especially if retrofitting on existing track without interrupting traffic.
Trains have been getting longer in recent years, increasing the amount of time people have to wait at train crossings. Seems likely that people will respond by taking more chances at beating the train and some percentage will lose their bet that they'll get across in time.
I should have been more specific. I am aware of some automatic metro systems but in my opinion the challenges they overcame are very different from the challenges freight or even long distance passenger trains would have to overcome.
Which is only slightly less hard than full self-driving vehicles. The traffic/rail conditions may be simpler by comparison, but the added complexity of the vehicles in question more than makes up for it.
There is another thread about this, and for some reason it's no longer on the front page, despite having lots of upvotes and comments. Are people flagging it?
I believe dang has explained there's an additional nuance to ranking where something that gets a lot of engagement quickly is actually penalized. I assume to try and tamp down on flame wars.
Well I haven't been on reddit so I can't say what's being said there, but I would say that the reason people are getting so upset over this is because we don't believe anything meaningful will happen to punish those responsible or prevent it from happening again. Norfolk Southern spent $10b on stock buybacks last year, and so far they have only given $25k to the local red cross and are trying to buy people off with $1k to sign an NDA. It's a cover up.
Frankly I wouldn't care if the tankers were filled with water - they fucked up and should be punished in a way that hurts them.
That's true, but lying and fear mongering is not a good means to an end.
People on reddit were advising Ohioans to take their family and choice valuables and immediately leave the state. To head west to avoid "chemical fallout". Totally detached insanity.
Like I said, the disaster was was bad. It shouldn't ever happen. But eastern Ohio is absolutely not an exclusion zone now. By now the site is already mostly clear.
Why are you talking about reddit though? If everyone there is so wrong, why bring it up on a totally different website? No one here is making those claims, and most of the comments in both of these threads are about the points I mentioned.
Because I'm speaking to why the previous post was removed, and why this one likely will be too (its velocity is already crazy compared to other posts).
Someone is funding a social media blitz to amp up public fear about this event to 11. I am telling HN, use your head not your knee jerk.
Preventable accidents that result in explosions, any amount of unneeded pollution, fear and anxiety, among others is worthy of this attention. Further, it is being noted that safety regulations were ignored. There's also the fact that people have come to expect the people responsible will face no consequence and will instead probably receive a raise for a "job well done."
There is lots to be upset about. Not everyone lives on the internet to know events happen as they happen.
What you are suggesting is nothing more than a conspiracy theory and I hate that term. Provide some bloody evidence, anything other than "my gut."
Yes, I have the same feeling. It doesn’t seem organic to me at all. There were no larger outrage in comments than under any standard outrage posts. But still, this pops up continuously with such a speed all the time, that the comments under it seems like totally underwhelming. And nothing new happened for the past almost one week.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
> There has 100% been a campaign by some group to make this disaster out to be way worse than it is. It's been all over reddit the last few days with scientifically thin, but fear mongering heavy videos/comments.
That’s not a campaign, that’s just Reddit as normal.
Reddit takes something that is directionally correct (chemical spill is bad) and then turns it into a competition for the most extreme and exaggerated takes.
I took a quick glance at the first front page thread I could find on the topic. One of the top threads was a pseudo-scientific explanation that exposure to even trace amounts of the chemical results in death, implying that large swaths of the state were going to be dead soon. It’s amazing how Reddit turned into one giant conspiracy theory website.
As an outsider, with no knowledge of (burning) chemicals, it's hard to judge the situation, though. It looks bad and sounds bad, so why should it not be bad? Reddit is making it sound like a cover-up and conspiracy by the newspapers and powers that be, but isn't really offering any metrics or related studies – only anecdotes.
From a policy perspective, what do you think the right amount of accidents like this one is?
Assuming you had a mandate to regulate this industry, what would you consider an appropriate metric for hazardous material incidents that you would try to regulate the industry towards?
My issue is that there is a group trying to use the accident as political leverage, which is totally fine, except that they are being completely dishonest about the magnitude of the disaster.
That's almost certainly why the original post got pulled, there is a focused campaign on blowing up this event to "great 21st century national tragedy" when in reality there are hundreds of environmental disasters on this scale annually, and you don't hear about it because the actual environmental impact isn't that large and it's not a politically charged event.
I want you to hear your argument from the outside. Maybe that will help you understand why people seem to be disagreeing with you.
What I'm reading: This is a disaster, but it's not as bad as what some people are saying online. We shouldn't really worry about it, because releasing this small amount of this chemical isn't really as bad of a problem as a nuclear power plant melting down. This disaster isn't special, it's just one of many, and it upsets me that people are treating it like it's special.
That's how your arguments seem to be structured, and to be honest, I don't really understand what you're trying to get at. That would be why the person who you're responding to asked how many accidents like this are acceptable. Because you seem to be hand-waving and saying, this isn't that bad. It's very confusing.
You forgot to include "the people who are responsible for the train derailment and the people who decided to release the chemicals into the atmosphere told us there is nothing to worry about, so you should believe them."
People on reddit were talking about abandoning their home to head out west in order to avoid the "fallout" of the disaster. Uproot your family and say goodbye to home, it's now lost.
The group pushing this is stoking maximum fear and panic, and it's just not warranted. So the heart of my argument is "There is a lot of misinformation being peddled around this disaster, be vigilant." There are real people who will make real decisions based on what they know. It's best they know the truth, rather than be a pawn in some political game.
Also the original reason I replied was to point out that the post was almost certainly removed because it tripped bot alarms.
You seem to understand a lot about how much "velocity" impacts HN front page. You posted many times indicating this is some kind of operation and used single person comments from Reddit as your proof. That's obviously not proof of anything. It also got on fire here, and nobody made such a claim about moving away.
One thing to note however is that your replies are clearly upsetting people who believe this is a problem. You don't get to decide what real problems are, we all do. You have also oddly suggested this is an operation. Given the direction of your posts, one could conclude you are engaged in a counter operation. Further, you note your own success in the manner twice in this very topic.
Can you perhaps share insight using some facts you are basing your claims on so we can see what you see?
If the policy goal is zero accidents, and that policy goal isn't being reached, then this is a political discussion.
Using the negative consequences of current policy as political leverage to advocate for a different policy is what the political system is for.
We're talking about a fairly major chemical spill that appears to have killed all the pets in a small town and is likely to have ongoing health consequences, and was likely brought about by a negligent approach to running a multi-billion dollar industrial enterprise.
The only thing I would be confused about is why all the other disasters of this scale (which, I would argue, there actually aren't hundreds of) aren't also becoming well-publicized inputs into our political discussion.
Posts that rise quickly and generate many comments in a short period of time on HN tend to fall quickly as well, as posts that follow such a pattern are typically inflammatory in nature.
Record profits: The link provides a 7% increase in profits, 14% raise for employees, and a 68% increase in fuel cost.
I'm by no means defending anything that occurred, quite the opposite. I just wish we could start using values that are adjusted for actual inflation for the relevant industry, with a percentage in brackets, such as: Record profits(0.5% above inflation)
Yeah. If their fuel costs were $1 and their profit is $1 million, a 68% increase in fuel cost makes no difference.
It's like the food companies in Canada that defend their price gouging by claiming their profit margins haven't changed. It's true, but if revenue is 2x what it was last year, the rich families that own those businesses are getting 2x the profit while trying to blame higher costs for the increased prices the average person is seeing.
I said if revenue was 2x with the profit margin being the same, the profits would be double. If your margin is 20%, would you rather have $10 in revenue ($2 profit) or $20 in revenue ($4 profit)?
So if their costs go up 20%, they increase prices by 20% to compensate, and they maintain the same margin, the profits are higher.
LNG burns well, but isn't awfully bad for the environment. It's far better than the vinyl chloride that happened in Ohio last week.
Simple safety precautions could be used to avoid accidents with LNG - for example auto-igniter devices to ensure that any LNG leak turns into a fire not an explosion would massively limit damage.
I'm all for stopping the use of fossil fuels, but the dangers involved in shipping them is only a tiny proportion of my reason.
Yes; the Nord Stream attack released 100-400K tons of gas in one go; for comparison, the energy sector releases about 135 million tons of methane per year from oil and gas, and cattle emits about 70-odd million. A relative drop in the ocean, I guess (I didn't know the figures offhand).
Yep, but I think the GP meant that it burns well and the result of that combustion isn’t too harmful. It would, i think, produce carbon dioxide and water but someone who studied chemistry at any level can confirm (I hated the subject)
Worse than CO2? Yes. Worse than pretty much any kind of refrigerant? No, not even close. The lower bound on those is probably 100x worse and increasing from there.
I live close to East Palestine, less than an hour in PA, and downstream as far as the air is concerned half of the time, but upstream from the water. Also, I used to work right outside of East Palestine, years ago, before I switched careers and hopped around the country, coming back home recently.
The amount of emotion and just ignorance surrounding this incident on social media, and especially reddit, just leaves me in contempt reaching the level of contempt I have for politicians that enabled the rail companies. Even disgusting takes of schadenfreude, that it's Ohio, that they deserved it.
Yeah, it's bad. No, it's not that bad. You have people silencing others for explaining the chemical processes involved. A bunch of partisan bickering, total ignorance, and hysterical comparisons to Chernobyl or Love Canal.
No, the deregulation was bi-partisan. Yeah, maybe the media doesn't focus on it as much because most are poor there, and in the surrounding area. Yes, coverage and response would probably be different if a train derailed outside of "flyover country." If only we had a semblance of journalism that could make the case, and the connections, to the recent use of legal force by the feds to prevent the rail strike with pitiful concessions, and deregulation over the last six years, and the rail companies, a shared blame.
It's a bad situation, but unless there's some really nasty stuff I haven't heard about in the tankers outside of the VC, which they burned off, we're talking about acid rain. Which isn't exactly new for the area and surrounding, let's be honest. The half-life in contact with water is negligible. And after that degradation, we're talking about something with less acidity than vinegar. It's not Chernobyl. Even still, change and consequences would be nice.
Pipelines are even safer but not viable for all substances that need transport. But for those where a pipeline is viable, moving transport off of trains and into pipes is a good path. Going to guess in this particular case, a pipeline delivering vinyl chloride doesn't make sense, as the capital costs would be too high given the sparse endpoints. Petroleum products on the other hand are a pretty good match for pipelines where they exist.
Does anyone know how long it takes for a NHTSA report here? Obviously the internet suffers from both post hoc ergo propter hoc, confirmation bias, and no consideration of the counterfactual.
there are hundreds of Automated Obstacle Detection Vehicle that go out from every station, and computer imaging detects any faults or debris on the tracks.
The people who are responsible for having made these decisions are going to have nothing happen to them, and continue to push for things like this while more and more innocent people suffer.
I am as capitalist and libertarian as they come, but it seems like no one anywhe is being held accountable.
Congratulations, you're seeing the results of capitalism and libertarianism in action. It's more profitable to cut safety and government obviously shouldn't step in to mandate it, as that would be too much intervention in the market, no?
Yes, because a rail strike would have sent the economy into a depression. You think that's what the public wants? The government is a representation of the public and we get exactly what we voted for.
You should also note that one party in government voted to give the workers what they wanted, which would have removed the need for a strike in the first place, only to be blocked by the other party. Not all are equally to blame here.
No, they are the effects of neolibral politics since Reagan: cut regulations and allow the free market to fly free.
Yes the current administration squashed the rail workers strike, but governments only act in a way they feel will get them the most votes. The US public, with their moronic obsession with communism, are to blame for anything their politicians do. They voted them in.
Both/and. It's a product of neoliberalism, the philosophy that policy-making should happen on the market, and the government's purpose is to protect those markets from any non-market activities (like unionization). You can argue that "real" free market libertarianism wouldn't prevent strikes, but I think most right minarchists would agree that breaking strikes falls under protection of property rights.
In a case like this effective regulation is much more practical, and many libertarians would agree. The purists maintain that the legal liability that should follow an accident like this should be sufficient incentive to cause railroad companies to self regulate to avoid it. That seems either not to be the case or railroad companies like this one are not subject to enough liability to deter them from taking excessive risks.
The loudest and most obnoxious of them also tend to be the most extreme. Those with a more nuanced view tend to avoid the label over time as there's no good way to use it to express a desire for less authoritarian government while also rejecting the views of the loud mouth extreme. And perhaps that's a good thing as it gets those with a more moderate view to try to work on those changes that are viable instead of demanding the theoretical perfect.
The problem I have with the liability theory is that you can't undo dead with any amount of money and it's easily possible to create a liability far in excess of what the person or economic entity can ever cover. Plus, not everyone is able to accurately estimate their potential liability for an action, which also can end up creating a liability far in excess of both what they're able to compensate and beyond what they ever conceived to be possible.
Or, how about, what regulation would prevent it, while still allowing critical goods to flow?
My point is NOT that there's nothing to be done, it's that these sorts of accidents require attention to detail to prevent. There's no blanket easy political fix.
> Or, how about, what regulation would prevent it, while still allowing critical goods to flow?
Personal liability for the beneficial owners would go a long way. Don't let the people making the poor decisions hide behind corporate liability shields. Make them risk their personal wealth.
Alternatively, levy massive fines that wipe out profits when a company cuts corners to the point of negligence. Make it unprofitable to be reckless. For example, I think Norfolk makes something like $3 billion per year, so fine them at least $3 billion for a preventable incident like this.
The FRA does already levy fines for safety violations, though yeah they could be raised.
Hot bearings / axles can happen even with proper car maintenance and there are usually wayside sensors to detect such incidents before they cause a derailment. It will become clearer what went wrong on this patch of rail when the NTSB report comes out, though perhaps it's time the FRA mandated hotbox detectors at dense intervals closer to towns. A surveillance camera saw the hot axle fire 20 miles out of the derailment: https://www.wsj.com/articles/miles-before-ohio-derailment-tr...
If the consequences were them losing all profit for a year and/or the CEO going to jail, you better bet there won't be any derailments, no matter what excuses there are this time around.
The Biden admin steps in and cancels pipelines - the safest and most efficient means of transporting product. Next best is ships - but that is out due to Jones Act.
So, safest and least expensive 2 options are out due to government doing the bidding of special interests like unions.
Of course not - It's a small volume chemical. And blaming the Jones Act (as bad as it is) for a shipmnet from Illinois to Pennsylvania takes a certain kind of logic. OP is going to lose it when he realizes he can't blame "unions" for gutting the rail safety regulations that Obama added in 2015..
“The mission of the FRA is safety and not focusing on what is convenient or inexpensive or provides the most cost savings for the rail industry,” said Sarah Feinberg, the FRA administrator at the time, about the new rule. “When I focus on safety, I land on ECP. It’s a very black-and-white issue for me.”
Soon after the rule’s enactment, the railroad industry took the matter to Congress and found allies in Senate Republicans, after an election cycle that saw rail industry donors dump $6 million into GOP campaign coffers.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) — the Senate’s third largest recipient of rail industry campaign cash — pushed to repeal the electronic braking rule outright, before settling for a measure requiring additional research and a new cost-benefit analysis of the technology. Under former President Donald Trump, the braking upgrades quickly became another casualty of his administration’s slash-and-burn approach to regulatory policy.
While the Obama administration had estimated that the rule could save more than $1 billion by averting accidents, the Trump administration rolled out new figures that cut the estimated benefits by a third.
The AAR lobbying group concurred that “the costs of the ECP rule substantially outweigh its benefits,” and claimed the mandate would cost them about $3 billion — or roughly 2 weeks of their operating revenue in a typical year. The FRA estimated the brake requirement would cost about half a billion.
Trump’s Transportation Department ultimately rescinded the brake rule in late 2017.
Thune praised the decision in a statement arguing that “sound science and careful study” had won the day.
But a 2018 investigation from the Associated Press revealed that the Trump Transportation Department had flubbed its calculations. By excluding the most common type of train derailments, the government’s analysis omitted at least $117 million in estimated future damages when it revised the rule’s potential benefits to justify its repeal.
The agency acknowledged the error and issued a technical correction to its analysis, but said that the expense was still too great to reinstate the ECP brake rule.
It's a bit more nuanced than that, not that you'll find that anywhere in comments sections on the internet.
Rail workers wanted to strike. There's a law allowing Congress to prevent that to avoid a catastrophic disruption to the economy - and it would be catastrophic. They voted to prevent a strike and Biden signed it. This was IMO a smart move, deliberately tanking the economy would have been good for nobody.
There was a separate vote to force the companies to agree to some of the workers' safety and working conditions demands, which Republicans blocked.
I don't really think it's supposed to be "good for anyone". It's not supposed to be comfortable and civilized and concessionary. It's not supposed to preserve the status quo because the position of the striker is that the status quo is bad and un-preservable.
It's supposed to hurt. That's the only lever workers have in these systems.
Unfortunately, a rail strike would have put something like an estimated 3 million people out of work immediately, and would have cut off food and water supplies to millions of people. That's why there's a law preventing strikes that extend beyond the industry to have negative effects on the whole nation.
I understand why there is a law in place to make it illegal to strike.
But your logic would suggest to me that what instead would be needed is a law or set of laws preventing the situation from getting so bad that it would come to such a thing.
If it hurts so much for the system to break, then why is it allowed to rot? A strike isn't supposed to hurt "the company", it's supposed to hurt so that people with power are forced to take action to make it stop hurting.
All I'm suggesting is that a class analysis of this situation has a lot more explanatory power than an aesthetic party alignment one. Because if it can never hurt, then it is purely aesthetics.
Ah yes, both sides are to blame because the difference is only aesthetic, despite one voting to give workers what they wanted, being blocked by the other party.
Seriously, Democrats basically went to the table with "you can't strike because that will ruin the economy but we will give you the vast majority of what you want", the labor unions agreed, and then Republicans prevented it. And your takeaway is that the Democrats are equally culpable?
I'll suggest that Democrats are equally culpable. Because if the Republicans couldn't have prevented it, the Democrats would have. These clowns all take turns pretending to care. People are getting sick of it.
Neither the companies nor the workers have any incentive to care about the effects of the strike on the broader nation. That's exactly why there's a law in place that allows the government to intervene and set terms for both sides.
When it is clear that the interests of the workers and the interests of the company aren't being decided evenly, it is time to repeal those laws. Until Democrats start unilaterally proposing new legislation to repeal those laws they have to share the blame. They contributed to this mess.
Maybe if people actually saw how much of their life would stop working if rail workers went on strike, maybe they would more support keeping things working well, with reasonable work life balances and less stress.
An alternative used in people transport is that they just stop charging people or checking tickets. It doesn't disrupt transport, just cash flow to the employers / shareholders.
So if people disagree with another person they go to Reddit?
Everyone weighs the value of information differently and has vastly different information to use in making decisions. Additionally there are various weights applied based on impact to individuals, community, and society as a whole. Pretending you are right, or that I am right, isn't valid. Everyone gets their opinion and everyone believes they are right.
Yes and no. The existence of The Railway Labor Act puts railroad labour at a massive disadvantage in bargaining agreements. The multi-year process to even get to a strike allows the railroad companies to "starve out" the strike effort. And then knowing that the government would never allow the strike to occur allows them to negotiate in bad faith the entire time.
One could imagine an alternate universe where the "end of the line" outcome of The Railway Labor Act was the government immediately nationalizing the railroad company in question due to it's failing to provide a crucial service to the national infrastructure. We can argue the effectiveness/realism of the outcome all day long, but as a thought experiment you cannot deny that the collective bargaining process would go entirely differently.
If you think that separating the two wasn't an intentional move to allow for one to pass but not the other, I've got a bridge to sell you. Congress combines unrelated items all the time, if they had to vote to prevent the strike, the compliance with some of their demands should have been rolled into the same vote if they cared about it being passed.
Okay, say you're Joe Biden, or some prominent Democrat in office.
Republicans come to you and say: either we pass this bill without safety provisions, or we will gleefully destroy the entire economy and the public will blame you for it.
You start by having the balls to say no. Then you hold a till-they-drop press conference explaining exactly why you're saying no and who is actually to blame for what is about to happen.
If the American people still decide to blame you and elect one of the saboteurs instead, well, they get what they deserve.
...I have learned that I have an above average capacity for spite, though.
> If the American people still decide to blame you and elect one of the saboteurs instead, well, they get what they deserve.
Have you been paying attention since 2010? That is exactly what is happening. Republicans break government, say government is broken, then win elections with votes from people who are harmed by government disfunction.
That's been the case since long before 2010, and democrats still manage to win elections, so I don't think your theory holds outside of certain areas of the country that likely have other systemic reasons for republicans being elected.
Besides which, I can't say we aren't getting what we deserve.
It really shouldn't be THAT hard to hold press conferences and/or put out media releases that actually contain the text of the legislation and the specific areas of objection.
Section J, paragraph 2 indicates "blah foo bar".
The people seeking to pass this bill are trying to "bar" your "blah foo", and I don't believe "bar" should be "blah foo'd". "Bar" should be "bazzed", and I'm doing everything I can to 'baz' 'bars' whenever possible.
I realize that sometimes legislative language is dense or difficult, but that shouldn't be a reason to gloss over it.
I got hung up on the Clinton Health Care act in the early 90s. Right wing radio folks got me hung up on it - I was convinced it was evil. I bought a copy to review in detail. It was complex, but I found that many of the radio talking points I'd eaten up were, in fact, misrepresentations or distortions. But... I had to read the text myself to get to that point - it took a while to digest.
Yeah but the problem is that half of the country explicitly DOESN'T get their information from anyone but Fox news, or worse like newsmax, or more specifically, Tucker Carlson and friends who officially claim their shows, on the "Fox News" channel, can not be considered reality by anyone "reasonable" so they aren't legally liable for the horseshit they spew.
Half the country will see "Democrats are the reason the nation is on fire right now" and believe it without an uncritical thought, and go back to facebook to repost memes about furry kids using litter boxes at school, or LBGTQ people trying to groom your kids to be child porn stars, and also uncritically believe that as well.
Half of the country reads below a high school level. You really think they will accurately be able to understand a legalese filled and often purposely confusing, 10 page document that usually has dense references to other legalese filled documents?
...and they'll still believe that even if the country isn't on fire because Fox News will make up a fire and tell them it is because of the left anyway. Fox News indoctrinating people isn't a variable that Biden's actions actually changes in any meaningful way.
Refuse to play their bullshit game and do the right thing instead.
I'm saying that even if it does, electing the people who caused it gives the people what they want and deserve.
Repubicans do not play fair and they do not care about anything but their own power. You have two options: play their game, which means they win, or refuse to play their game and call them out on their bullshit, which means they might win, but if they do then it will be because the public has been shown the truth and just doesn't care.
Obama made the mistake of playing their game a lot in his first term: assuming that republicans actually give a shit about the country and pre-emptively offering reasonable compromise. The republicans, of course, refused to compromise at all and still claimed he was a socialist tyrant.
What I'm saying is, do not negotiate with terrorists.
The point of strikes is to cause economic disruption. Congress preventing them from exercising that power means there's no way for them to get their demands met. The Republicans wouldn't have been able to block it if the rail workers were allowed to express their power.
Let me know when you volunteer to lose your job, run out of food, and have no drinking water because the freight has stopped running. That's reality for the vast majority of Americans.
I wish the workers had gotten a better deal, but I'm damn happy the strike didn't happen, because the damage would have been enormous.
I mean, better that in the short term than the long term of luck being the determining factor in having a few hundreds of thousands of tons of poison being dumped into my city or not.
I'd rather have to suffer an extended period of hardship than the status quo of "Your corporate overlords own your soul and any attempt to claw back what little power you can to try and balance this stupidity will be made a literal fucking crime"
Every single employee who gains a little power to use in negotiations with their employer should be fought for, by all of us. Fucking solidarity.
Sure, I'd volunteer. What, you're too weak to do so? I guarantee that there many who are in a worse position than you who would gladly flight. And for those who can't, it is your responsibility to.
> deliberately tanking the economy would have been good for nobody.
While that's true, why don't the employers and/or state meet the workers' demands to prevent this catastrophy? A strike is usually only done as a reaction, that is, when negotiations failed and demands aren't being met.
Whose fault is that? Are the rail workers being unreasonable with their demands?
That's exactly what it is. I didn't intend to sugar coat it.
There are certain functions that are so critical that people who work there are not allowed to strike and disrupt the economy. Railroads are one of them. Democrats tried to get them the best deal possible while also preventing an enormous economic recession which would have been the inevitable result of a freight shutdown.
I personally think those critical functions should be nationalized under government control, rather than having private companies reap the benefits of their special control, but that's a conversation for another time.
At some point people just quit and go work for McDonalds. Unless you literally force them at gunpoint to work the rails, you eventually have no rail workers.
So far the working conditions haven't got that bad for enough to be noticeable, but at some point you'll have no new employees and the old ones will quit or die off.
This is also why Republicans fight so hard against safety nets, nationalized healthcare, unions, worker rights, etc. The more desperate and struggling people there are, the more workers for these horrific, anti-work life balance jobs there are. The Fed purposely pushes for an economy with a set minimum of jobless people, purposely encouraging desperate out of work people who will take anything to put food on their plate.
I also think Democrats are happy to let them be the bad guys, while they make a lot of noise and token efforts to make things better, but never enough to hurt profits.
The consequence of an illegal strike is that the workers in question may lose their jobs. This happened to a rather large number of air traffic controllers in 1981 and the union in question was decertified. They didn't just lose their jobs, most were barred from federal service (i.e. working for the federal government) for life.
> There's a law allowing Congress to prevent that to avoid a catastrophic disruption to the economy - and it would be catastrophic. They voted to prevent a strike and Biden signed it. This was IMO a smart move, deliberately tanking the economy would have been good for nobody
Except that's exactly the point of a strike. And I think catastrophic is an overestimation if we were to shut down the rails for a week, maybe it would've instead gone towards equalizing the disconnect of wealth.
If pausing our rail network for a few days results in such serious consequences, then we should probably be treating these workers as essential, with significant training, requirements for them to have adequate time off, and basically any other benefit we can. Their jobs should be so well compensated, with such cushiness, that they are never stressed on normal days, have the opportunity to pay ample attention and time to anything that needs to be paid attention to, and everyone in the country should be trying to get one of these jobs. If railroads are that essential to the country, they should be nationalized completely, and the workers treated like rockstars.
Let me don my nightmare goggles for a moment and ask: What are the odds that this was a domestic terrorist attack caused by a group of maligned workers who were angry about the rail strike bill?
Unlikely. Trains derail all the time. Poor maintenance, old tracks, mistakes by operators, random breakage. Just unlucky that this one had a lot of toxic cargo.
I thought that too but it turns out the axles were glowing hot and the signals from detectors built to prevent this thing were either malfunctioning or ignored. Keywords: ohio derailment hot box detector
Hey Bill, looks like these detectors are reporting an issue. If I wasn't so overworked and underpaid, I might notice it.
Yeah John, I don't notice anything either, on account of me being forced to work and having no autonomy in this industry. Would be a shame if something bad happened as a result.
These kind of safety whistleblowers (literally) are totally unprotected.
If Bill were to have put the train into emergency, checked everything, let it cool off, and then resumed travel, there would have been no disaster but Bill would likely have been yelled at at best or written up at worst for delaying a train, causing disruption throughout the system.
From 1990, the first year the BTS began tracking derailments and injuries on a yearly basis, to 2021, there have been 54,539 accidents in which a train derailed. That’s an average of 1,704 derailments per year.
I agree, so much hate for innocent mega-corps in these threads. It has to be the evil workers at fault. If you think using objectivism, it makes perfect sense.
Suspicious? If it makes you suspect anything, it should be the suspicion that the rail workers were right about it being dangerous to overwork rail workers.
Imagine a truck driver complains about being worked too hard, then a week later he falls asleep at the wheel and crashes his truck. Is there a connection??? Gee, I wonder.
I've hit this in software. Someone - not me - gives an estimate, a deadline is created, then... when I say the deadline can't be met... I'm 'negative' or 'confrontational' or 'not a team player'. When the deadline isn't met, I've been singled out as the 'cause' because I was trying to 'prove a point' or related language. Doesn't happen every day, but has happened more than a few times, and has happened to colleagues I've heard recount similar stories.
But yeah, in that example - totally the driver's fault. He's willing to break company property just to try to get himself some more sleep every week, without even considering the shareholders who've already taken out margin loans against their stock. Can you imagine how crappy it will be for them if next quarter comes in below analyst estimates?
This is the most obvious outcome of the US government stepping in to break the railroad worker's strike, it was just a matter of when - not if. We're lucky it didn't happen in downtown Pittsburgh.
The worst part is that the costs of these entirely foreseeable and preventable catastrophes will be nationalized. Meanwhile the railroads will forgo necessary maintenance and infrastructure investments, continue to blame individual employees for the events, and reap record profits year over year. Mission accomplished.