It's staggering that as the richest and most powerful nation ever to exist, we've put ourselves in a position where we can't safely transport chemicals, we won't provide comprehensive information about contamination to those affected, we either can't or aren't able to put any kind of comprehensive cleanup plan in place, and we can't find trustworthy parties to enact that cleanup.
This isn't just a politics problem - the entire investor and management class at the railroads has been gambling with lives for years and the incinerator company's clearly doing the same thing, and we can't even agree as a country that that's bad, because we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poisoned an entire town because it helped their bottom line" or "the incinerator company that's also trying to poison an entire town is not within its rights to do so."
The cult of the MBA has gutted this country and we've let it do so because we gave up any sense of actual civic or national pride or any sense of society or mutual obligation and can't get through a conversation about how we'd like society to be without someone saying it's going to cost money and is therefore a nonstarter or that we've got no right to tell them they can't render the land they happen to live on toxic for the next thousand years or wipe out a species they don't like.
I had a bit of a melt down yesterday while a company all hands meeting was taking place. This guy spoke for 15 minutes and said not one thing that wasn't just a business buzz word, there wasn't a bit of substance, and I realized and cried out to my wife "This fuckhead has no idea what's going on or what this company even does the only thing he knows is how to be an MBA"
As soon as something swaps hands from the person or people who built it because they understood the problem it solved to people who only see it as an engine for profit it begins to die, and we've set up systems to make the death long and agonizing while the MBAs bleed it dry.
That is the core tenet of the MBA — that managing one kind of enterprise is just the same as managing any other; there is no need for domain knowledge, and it's probably actually counterproductive.
This is why I quit being a TPM - at one point I just started making up bogus words and every PM (non-technical) with an MBA immediately jumped at the opportunity to use a cool new word. The day that did it for me, aside from the company failing to realize any pivot towards actual revenue was "well, at this point our best case outcome is to be revenue-neutral but ideally by Q4 with the current POC we'll be revenue-positive and able to reneg on prior action items". Just say, what we're doing right now isn't working and we're not making money...
I think he's saying they're eating it up. I haven't bothered paying attention to business-type's face's in all hands when a business person presents, but I imagine they glow up at corpspeak. Those with more technical specialties are more likely to have a neutral reaction, or more realistically a pokerface.
Persuasion basically. They can take any situation and make most of the room feel good and confident in the business. Good politicians do this too. It doesn't work on everyone, but it works well enough.
The twelve occurrences of "we" in your comment imply agency and consent where little to none existed.
"We", which is to say a majority of residents and citizens of the US, constituting the working class, had these things imposed on us by others who have systematically and successfully manufactured the appearance of consent over a period of decades, the ongoing results being consistently undermining the working class and incepting a kind of learned helplessness that justice can never be found.
The "cult of the MBA" is apt, although a more appropriate appellation might be the "cult of Mammon".
This makes it sound like the wealthy colluded against the masses, which I don't think is accurate. It's a coordination trap: each individual is doing what's in their individual best interest, but the result is collectively bad for everyone. The solution is to change the incentives, e.g. laws that make it more profitable to clean up pollution than to pollute, but it seems unattainable because a feedback loop has concentrated power in the hands of the people who are most insulated from the problems, which is sort of the opposite of the intended outcome of democracy.
Class warfare doesn't imply collusion. It's just people acting in their own self interest in a system where some incentives are aligned along a class system. The dichotomy between conspiracy theory and and innocent coincidence is false.
The point of class warfare is that no, it's not collectively bad for everyone. It's good for whoever wins the class war (see: the quote above).
By far what terrifies the average person in the shareholder class the most is having to live the life of an average worker. The revealed preference they have is that, yes, they would rather live as rich in a world with the issues that entails than as an average worker in a more equitable world. And from a selfish perspective that's a perfectly rational position.
When shareholders or whole owners decide to do something immoral for profit - or even to prevent bankruptcy - what that actually reveals is that they would rather hurt whoever it is they are hurting than live their life in your shoes. This is the essence of the idea of class warfare.
They colluded to enrich themselves without end. Seeking monopoly rents and pushing infrastructure, social and environmental costs on to others to increase the margin.
We allow the rewarding of truly psychotic behaviours, there is a reason why most executives seem to exhibit these traits.
There's events like Davos and the Bilderberg meetings where the rich and powerful literally do get together and define their agenda.
But for the most part, yeah they don't need to be centrally coordinated and probably aren't, because they are very good at identifying their interests and have the resources to work towards it.
I would hold a more charitable view towards this all, however, if it wasn't for the fact that the media, their sponsors, and the politicians are intentionally using wedge issues to disrupt and divide the masses.
Look at the board of trustees from your very link. They are all highly placed execs in multinationals and political world leaders getting together to discuss Stakeholder Capitalism - ie; how to make capitalism palatable enough so that revolution does not take place.
They dress it up to make it sound like they're only interested in being ethical, but it's really about how to ensure that their position in society is maintained.
I'm not saying they will be sitting in dingy, cigar smoke filled rooms discussing how to crush the working class, but I am saying this is far more coordination than you will get from a mixture of people from the general population.
Yet somehow, "we" as the people not consenting still put up with it because we're too busy to make ends meet, of if we do, picking the next toy to distract us from reality with.
And when it comes to freedom of speech or gun laws, it's suddenly all about "muh freedom" and that we need all this in case the government turns rogue to defend ourselves. Which is absolutely true but at the same time, how much more messed up do things need to get to actually get us on the streets in masses and protest this madness? Probably as long as there is some third would country doing worse than us left somewhere on this planet, we can paint over this cognitive dissonance with some good old "at least we're not $county"
> we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poisoned an entire town because it helped their bottom line" or "the incinerator company that's also trying to poison an entire town is not within its rights to do so."
If a private entity can unilaterally impose itself upon another, that's the opposite of a free market, or at least of a free market that has any respect for property rights.
Instead, what you're seeing is a corporatist system, in which the regulatory machinery has been co-opted by private interests - which is exactly what we'd expect to happen in a democracy. See "regulatory capture".
If this were truly a free market, then when those Ohio residents had their property rights imposed upon, they'd be able to recover the full costs of those impositions through the legal system. The fact that the residents aren't able to do so doesn't reveal a problem with markets. It shows that the government isn't protecting the people's property rights, either due to failures in the legal system, or through a regulatory scheme that's been perverted to protect the corporations rather than the rest of us.
> If this were truly a free market, then when those Ohio residents had their property rights imposed upon, they'd be able to recover the full costs of those impositions through the legal system.
“You’re free to poison me, but you’ll have to pay for it” doesn’t sound like a particularly well functioning system either. I think I would rather try to work out a political and regulatory system that resists capture.
I am currently listening to this podcast called City of the rails. Couple of episodes talk about the power of these rail companies. How they treat their employees, how they have insane power over politicians etc.
Did you know these companies have their own police force, with practically zero accountability? They do whatever they please.
>Railroad workers formed an association to agitate for government action. The Department of Labor proposed its own plan in response, eventually compromising with the workers to produce the Railroad Retirement Act of 1934.
That's supposed to show the power of rail companies?
Perhaps not very advantageous power for the retirement benefits but I think it still shows the immense influence of the industry. I'm not aware of other private companies which are exempt from paying into Social Security and have an entire federal agency dedicated to managing their separate system.
Well it seems like they are better off than on social security
>At the end of fiscal year 2018, the average annuity paid to career rail employees was $3,525 per month, the average annuity paid for all retired rail employees was $2,815 per month, and the average retirement benefit under Social Security was $1,415 per month
At some point the capacity atrophies from disuse. Right now, if the EPA wanted to find an incinerator that didn't have a clear history of poor-quality operations, could they? If the owner of those chemicals wanted to ship their chemicals in the safest manner possible, could they? How could they verify that the chemicals would be treated with care and concern?
This is not free market, but a captured regulated market. Companies bet that the government will cover over their mistakes. In an actual free market where the company and the people making the decisions would be held accountable for the damages done to 3rd parties, this would not happen. The need to insure would motivate people to find cost effective ways to make it safe. Consequential failure is a big motivator.
I work for a place that is regulated by the city and insurance. I find the city to be unhelpful, unresponsive, and largely useless in helping us. They just want the fees paid. The insurance companies, however, will send out inspectors that work with us to right anything that might be unsafe, explain their concerns, and generally are looking to have a good profitable relationship with us.
There was one company that did not do good inspections. We stopped working with them and now work with a different company. I have no such option for working with the government as we are quite locally based.
Also, the city owned sewage treatment facilities are major polluters. Government control often leads to pollution (see various authoritarian governments, our military, various municipalities,...)
As for the sense of mutual obligation, it has withered, but my bet is that it is the theoretical outsourcing of it to government which has undermined it. Without that failing crutch, we would have to work together and look out for each other, bringing to the table immense social pressure for those outside social norms. That has its own downside, but it is much more flexible and resistant to corruption than the monopolistic government power structure.
One danger is, of course, rich outsiders who can take over large tracts of land with money. But in our current system, they buy up politicians who use eminent domain to take the choice away from the owners and the people at large. In a private ownership system, they would have to convince everyone to sell which is way harder to do.
This is an incredibly utopian view of the free market that has never existed in any implementation of the laissez faire free market philosophy. Competition yields winners, and those winners buy out the losers, leading to monopolization and wealth consolidation.
You've identified the problem, the railroads are a captured market, but it's because most regulatory bodies are operated by former agents of those industries or those taking large amounts of money from those industries. These industries DO get bailed out, because they have captured the regulatory mechanism. Their wealth consolidation allows them that power, especially in the post Citizens United world we live in.
The things you view as failings of the government are corporate successes in the never ending squeeze of year after year growth.
The power structures inside these corporations are squarely authoritarian in their design. You have no real agency within your workplace. The most freedom I've ever experienced in my work history has been working for government agencies, specifically public education, doing IT work. This idea that, in the absence of government intervention, we (citizens) would have the agency to do the right thing in these moments completely ignores the massive amount of leverage the corporation has over its workers. Since these corporations are top down, hierarchical, and authoritarian in their organization, the only will the workers have is that of those at the top. In this case, the executives and shareholders who historically have shown to not be interested in taking a loss for the sake of safety.
You mention that, under the utopian vision of the free market, we would go to another vendor. So who would we decide to transport with? The rail systems are regionalized and to get from one part of the country to the other you have to make trilateral or quadrilateral deals with these companies. In other words you are forced to use all of them on some leg of the journey. This regionalization means that there is an oligopoly on the rail system. How are you going to create a "competing" rail system in any of these regions when these companies own all the rails?
> In this case, the executives and shareholders who historically have shown to not be interested in taking a loss for the sake of safety.
If an executive is making a choice between profit and safety, then the regulatory regime has failed.
The only way capitalism can work is if risk and reward go together. If a company can profit from taking a risk, but does not suffer the true cost of a failure, then they will be incentivized to take irresponsible risks. The best example of this is 2008, where financiers gambled themselves into oblivion, but got bailed out when it went bad.
The maximum fine a rail company can face is $225k, even when loss of life occurs. Unfortunately, the regulatory regime you describe has been captured for roughly the past 80 years.
The reality is that the legal system makes it so difficult and expensive for claimants to recoup the harms they suffer. Causality is hard to prove and the claimants are up against corporations which have teams of lawyers and a court system which has made tort cases have a high burden of proof. This can make it difficult for claimants to win, even if they have a strong case. Plus, tort law is a complex area of law, and it can be difficult for claimants to understand their rights and to navigate the legal system.
It is even worse. It has been captured from for the past 120 years or so. The railroad companies tried to manage their own collusion, but repeatedly failed. So they helped farmers to get Congress to regulate the railroads with the ICC. Very shortly, the railroads had their people doing the regulation which very effectively managed the rates to eliminate discounts and other means of competition. With the end of such competition and stabilization provided by the government, it is easy for a big entity to take over and thrive.
They even got it to take control of the trucking industry for decades, mandating such things as being able to only have the truck full in one direction.
A government run legal system is just as ineffective as any of the other government run systems. The hope is nimble, private arbitration. Trust needs to be built up and reputations paid attention to.
> The best example of this is 2008, where financiers gambled themselves into oblivion, but got bailed out when it went bad.
This is an interesting example, but I think you need to go further in saying that the post 2008 financial system was even more irresponsible than it was before
The utopian vision is that the entity with a monopoly on violence would ever produce impartial, socially good outcomes. Who are these regulators that would do a good job and who are these politicians that would be okay with them doing that? The politician's incentive is to get repeatedly elected which means money from donors and promising voters blah-blah-blah though those voters rarely hold them to account for their promised visions failing to materialize.
The vision of a society dedicated to free association of people should be a guiding star. The history of companies, even with a largely captured government, is that they tend to continually change, often growing smaller. Many of the big names in business nowadays did not even exist 50 years ago. Many of the big names of previous eras have long gone away. Competition yields temporary winners, but in a dynamically changing world open to all to be a competitor, they do not stay winners forever. Rockefeller kept trying to buy out all the refineries, but people can't making more. Eventually, he gave up. Cornering a market is very hard if government is not putting up barriers to entry.
As for authoritarian companies, more freedom for the working class to form their own businesses is the response. Our current government makes that very hard with a few exceptions, such as the seemingly entirely unregulated lawn businesses which is filled with small independents. Get rid of the government overhead, allow people to just do stuff for others as the others wish and get paid as mutually agreed, and then there would be competitive pressure on companies to change their approaches.
And, if not, make their replacements. Make democratically run companies. They exist and if that is what workers want, then they might thrive.
As for rail systems, there are certainly other means of transportation. That can serve as a temporary work around for a bad rail operator. Meanwhile, if there is sufficient need, one could construct new rail routes to go around the old ones if need be. It would start small, doing the most profitable portions and then work out from there as needed. Just the threat of that would probably lead to sensible negotiations.
Of course, to address the government supported oligopoly, one could also use eminent domain to take the rail tracks and then give them to the local communities in some kind of newly formed, broadly and locally owned companies. One would need to come up with ways of dispersing government property fairly anyway and one could also, at that time, redistribute any critical privately held infrastructure which had been supported unfairly by the government.
> This is not free market, but a captured regulated market
Agreed that market capture is a problem, but regulation is absolutely necessary for a free market to function well; these two things are not antonyms.
Regulation is needed to set up the rules of the game: everyone conforms to these rules, and if anyone breaks the rules, here are the consequences. Above this, companies can and should determine their own higher standards (e.g. you looking for honest insurance inspectors).
When something goes wrong, one of a few things is possible. Maybe the regulation was too lax, and risky even when followed. Maybe a company wasn't following the existing rules. Maybe the rules allow for small amounts of risk, and this is one of those accepted incidents.
In this case, it seems clear that the impact was not small, and can't/shouldn't have been an acceptable outcome. As such, one of two things should happen:
* Rules should change to mitigate the chances of other similar events.
* The rules were sufficient but ignored, in which case some severe penalties need to be applied.
You're right that government can't do everything perfectly, and private businesses are definitely the main drivers of a good free market. The government absolutely must provide clear rules to those businesses on what the society will accept, and severely punish non-compliance with those rules.
Something I've noticed over time about libertarian ideology is that it lacks a comprehensive theory of power - it asserts that governments have power, and that power is coercive, and coercion is wrong, but has a massive blind spot to the fact that Cigna also has power and uses that power to coerce, and would do so whether or not there was a government. It's shockingly utopian in that way.
It turns out there's different types of coercion that don't involve guns and yet still have the effect of forcing someone to act in ways they otherwise would prefer not to. This is what I'm talking about when I say the philosophy lacks a comprehensive theory of power.
Most, if not all, of the coercion of a single company in this economy is coming from the government.
For the trains, remember that there was going to be a worker's strike. If that was a real threat, the rail companies, left on their own, would probably have compromised. But they knew the government would stop it which is what the government did. They used the guns of government. Without that backing, the workers had power.
As for Cigna, that is all balled up in the health system which is quite the mess in this country. Certainly, we have horrible private actors doing absurd things. But it is not because it is a free market. The health industry is heavily regulated and heavily funded by the government. I think 60% of health care is covered by the government funds. We have protectionist policies for drug companies. We have restrictive licensing on medical personnel whose main purpose is to restrict supply to keep competition down. There are even places where the addition of a single ambulance has to be approved by everyone else who owns ambulances in the area.
I think it would be fantastic if people could get a couple of weeks training to go around and be little helpers for in home care of a low-level nature. Instead, it takes years of going through expensive coursework, usually of limited value, designed to keep the poor from helping one another. That is government imposing that, admittedly at the behest of the well-heeled.
As for other kinds of power, there are all sorts of powers people have over each other. I act differently and constrained in various groups of people I am around. Larger or more meaningful groups have more power. But the main lever of power that I have is the ability to walk away. Consumers do not have go with that company. Workers do not have to work with that company. Investors do not need to invest in that company. But we do have to obey the laws and pay taxes to the government.
They don't have to have them when they can donate to politicians, lobby and buy advertisements as they see fit.
The problem with corporations in American politics and law stems from corporate personhood.
We may need to revisit the concept of limited liability. When planes fall out of the sky due to cost savings in product development or automated cars crash into trucks due to beta software marketed to the public as "fully self-driving," or unwise securitized lending threatens the financial sector, responsible executives should be held personally liable, not given golden parachutes or a slap on the wrist.
I sympathize with you completely, but I just want to point out that there's no simple solution.
At the end of the day, nothing is perfectly safe and everything is a tradeoff. In a capitalist society, corporations are always going to try to maximize profit because that's how the incentives are structured, and it's always going to be the job of government to set safety regulations. Safety regulations that aren't so onerous that they simply shut down the economy (e.g. you can't ever transport chemicals ever) but also aren't so lax that people are getting killed in accidents all the time (do whatever you want, railroads!).
The job of developing safety regulations to achieve the right balance is not only incredibly difficult by itself, but it becomes even more difficult in a messy democratic process.
Because if it were done entirely technocratically, you could assign a monetary value to each human life and try to model the safety tradeoffs and come up with "objective" standards that would nevertheless only be so-so because a lot of the estimation is necessarily guesstimation, and figuring out what to do about black swan disasters is almost an unsolvable problem.
But we also live in a democracy where many voters are horrified by the idea of putting a dollar value on someone's life for that kind of economic/safety modeling, and some of them just want more jobs because their community is disintegrating economically so damn the regulations, and some of them just want to protect the environment so damn the unemployed. (And then add another 20 different viewpoints and perspectives, because those aren't the only ones.) So we kind of muddle along somewhere in the middle because that's what democracy does.
Your comment is just vague talking points. I see literally no one justifying poisoning the environment and the town by saying this is an acceptable cost of the free market.
Blaming MBAs for this instead of the JDs that are writing and enforcing the laws is also silly.
Finally, almost everyone from the federal down to the local is running unsustainable deficits, so there is clearly a lack of forethought in spending. I would argue we have the opposite problem you are suggesting. Everyone's happy to spend money thoughtlessly because it's someone else's money.
Yeah we're so fucked. We live on our phones and have either checked out or turn it into us-them mentality. Neither political administration did what they should have. We can't fix it, so we finger-point or throw up our hands in despair. And most people who haven't given up are simply too dense to understand how they're getting played by their little echo chamber, or what a strategy to fix it would even look like. Let's just wait till the boomers die, and then demographics shift, then corporate capture will fix itself, right??
Yes, I agree with that, and that's a bit of what I'm trying to point out - discussions of "politics" in situations like this tend to devolve to regulatory capture and the relative merits of Team Blue or Team Red, but the core problem is that there's basically one political philosophy in this country and it's got nothing whatsoever to say about one's actual moral responsibility to society, except maybe to argue the premise of the question.
Power is collective, no one can unilaterally fix issues like this but many have campaigned and attempted to enact positive environmental policy (and that unfortunately _does_ tend to be right vs left)
Mainly because too many intelligent people go into private business because it is so lucrative.
Ultimately we need to decide how we want to run our country.
Do we want to be run by mega corporations manufacturing consent through the media with vapid bimbo politicians providing a rubber stamp or do we want to take back the power for the masses of private citizens and elect effective politicians who will answer to voters who want not to be dependent on the will of megacorps for their every need.
> "What to do about late-stage capitalism?" is actually an explicitly political question.
Its also an explicitly political (in the “ideologically partisan” not merely “concerning government”) framing of the question, that makes ideologically-based assumptions about reality, the current situation, and the answer to the question. (If the answer was something within the scope of “capitalism”, the thing being addressed would not be “late-stage capitalism”.)
Heck, even the presumption that the thing described is something that calls for something to be done about it is ideological.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, you're correct.
I'm unabashedly on the "we must do something about late-stage capitalism, a thing that exists" political team, but you're absolutely not wrong that this is a political viewpoint, explicitly.
Reminds me of the railroad tunnel accident in Atlas Srugged by Ayn Rand. That happened for exactly the same reason. Only that the greedy railroad boss Dagny Taggart took the accident seriously and tried to fix it. We live in a world where having people like Taggart, Rearden, or Galt at the top would be an improvement. Just think about that... (How is it that Ayn Rand is always so right? </sarcasm>)
Why do you think it's the "Cult of the MBA" (aggressive business leaders have always existed) and not the fact that there will be no meaningful pushback from the US Government, regardless of which political party is in power.
It's nice to think that business leaders had a civic duty in the past and that "they changed" but to be frank, I think you can blame a shift towards "neoliberalism" by both parties and the lack of regulation and "teeth" that came from it.
America is so rich and powerful precisely BECAUSE it maximizes efficiency and capital. Gutting all of those jobs and making it so that they only have 30 seconds to inspect each car (which is pretty much impossible to do due diligence) makes it so that they can rake in a ton of cash.
Sure, accidents will go up. Small little towns will find themselves doused in carcinogens or burned to the ground (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...). Politicians will use it for photo ops. Yet a small group of key individuals will amass a ton of capital and, therefore, power. They can then use that to create more businesses and ventures that will be just as ruthless and driven to succeed at all costs.
I don't think it's "gutting" America. On the contrary, I think it's the heart of America, and what makes it so powerful and hegemonic. You don't make a scientific and cultural powerhouse omelette without breaking a few eggs.
I bet you also think that cutting executive salaries would somehow make major corporations like McDonalds be able to pay all of their workers a living wage. I would encourage you to do the math on that -- it literally never works out.
>I bet you also think that cutting executive salaries would somehow make major corporations like McDonalds be able to pay all of their workers a living wage. I would encourage you to do the math on that -- it literally never works out.
Hmmm, in Denmark McDonald's manages to pay their workers ~$22 an hour[1], with 6 weeks of vacation, and paid sick leave without substantially increasing prices[2], and remaining profitable.
In a similar sense, can you reasonably object to being eaten by a man-eating tiger?
We create corporations who's utmost responsibility is feduciary in nature, we make capital the lifeblood of our society, and then act shocked and horrified when capital trumps human life, and corporate interests hold similar priorities?
Seriously. How did anyone think gutting the workforce and the ability to do safety inspections in a reasonable manner would turn out in any other way? How did the regulatory agencies think this was acceptable? The quote by Cixin is the only explanation.
That disaster I cited in Quebec was many years ago, yet a scathing report was released that effectively nothing has been done to meaningfully/substantially regulate the railways. An entire town was wiped from the map. What business is it of theirs if they are ground to dust by industry? Ultimately we are all meat for the machine :)
> American is so rich and powerful precisely BECAUSE it maximizes efficiency and capital.
> I bet you also think that cutting executive salaries would somehow make major corporations like McDonalds be able to pay all of their workers a living wage. I would encourage you to do the math on that -- it literally never works out.
So what you're saying is that capital's big brain move is exploitation of the worker a.k.a maximizing efficiency? Why's the reasoning that the mom and pop store shouldn't be opened if it can't "afford" to pay it's workers a living wage but when corporations like McDonald's do it it's hailed as maximizing efficiency and capital.
You said it yourself: "paying workers a living wage literally never works out".
Not only is that not true (as pointed out by another comment regarding McDonald's in Denmark) you're admitting that part (at least some of) the "efficiency" is really just theft from the worker.
I find it hard to believe that that's what you're stating, trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, so what am I missing here?
> I bet you also think that cutting executive salaries would somehow make major corporations like McDonalds be able to pay all of their workers a living wage. I would encourage you to do the math on that -- it literally never works out.
Ignoring the "franchising" model which explicitly breaks the local/corporate link of profits and costs...
- McD had a 12B in profits in 2022.
- McD had ~2M in employees at franchises
- McD employees make ~$12 an hour. Thats 24k a year at full-time.
- I couldn't find just the executive salaries.
If you took those profits and distributed them to employees, thats a 25% increase.
You're citing gross profits, when what you actually want to look at is net income, no? For 2022 that was about 6 billion.
So now we're talking about a 12.5% increase in wages, in exchange for the entirety of the net profits.'
The best part is that it is common practice not to give people full-time hours so that they don't qualify for benefits. So I imagine of those 2M employees, a huge amount aren't exactly getting a living wage even after that 12.5% increase.
> The best part is that it is common practice not to give people full-time hours so that they don't qualify for benefits
Gross profits are fine. We’ll leave the 25%. If people aren’t working full time (which was assumed in the calculation) then that means it’s >25% increase in salary. Seems pretty life changing to those employees tbh. Imagine a 25%-50% raise? Life changing to someone who is intentionally denied work so they can be denied benefits.
Interesting point. Though, the average and certainly median american is not rich (somewhat poor even), and has worse quality of life and life expectancy than lots of the rest of world. US is behind Cuba, Guam, Chile: https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
> Yet a small group of key individuals will amass a ton of capital and, therefore, power. They can then use that to create more businesses and ventures that will be just as ruthless and driven to succeed at all costs.
I'm really not sure if that is a good thing. What are those costs? Are we talking Amazon workers wearing diapers because the walk to the bathroom is too much inefficiency? People getting layed off when they have cancer and also losing their health insurance at the same time? Further, those new businesses, would they perhaps also mostly benefit that same small group of people?
What I would like to hear from our government is a clear plan backed by dozens of scientists along the lines of:
- soil testing procedures for the next X years where the test-results will be published publicly with no redactions,
- downstream water tests to the same effect for whichever news sets of chemicals are necessary (water tests usually only test for 8-10 chemicals) for the next X years.
- Cancer rate statistics for the next X years (many of these cancers take over a decade to show), perhaps people in the area should get free screenings
- full post-moterm on procedure that addresses all the concerns around skipped safety checks
- A publicly available "Whistle-blowing channel" for any rail workers asked to skip safety checks where they can report their employer anonymously and earn rewards up to $1,000,000 for deliberately violating safety rules (a recording/video of a manager doing so would be conclusive proof).
If you want the US government to do something, you need to be clear about how the politicians and/or their capital-owning companions (e.g. the railroads) will profit from your plan.
Nice plan.
Typically what we get is a whole bunch of uncertainty and half measures. Then when an individual starts questioning or accusing, they're labelled as a conspiracy theorist. They may also be accused of having some strong political affiliations that are considered to be reprehensible.
Why should this site be treated special? There are many sites that need cleanup due to corporate indifference/skirting the law/rules/regulation. Conservatives have moved regulations from a government oversight/enforcement model to a corporate enforcement/oversight model so what you are asking for isn't really doable/authorized with the current regulations.
Burning random manufactured stuff makes dioxins. It would be astonishing if there weren't dioxins in the soil before the accident and some more after it.
This being the rural United States, burn barrels for household waste were a thing for most of a century and spewed dioxin and a lot of other stuff all over the place. You can find lots of studies for background levels of dioxin.
It isn't a binary "Is there dioxin?" There certainly is. The question is, is it elevated above background? Is it elevated about established safe levels? If you run it through that nearby incinerator, will the dispersed plume raise land above acceptable levels?
The EPA has experience with dioxin sites and incineration. They bought a town of 800 people, demolished everything, hauled all the surface dirt to a site-built incinerator and over the course of a year incinerated everything and built a mound out of it. The locals were vocally aggrieved that the incineration was done near them. Its now a nice park for bicycle riding on flat land by a river.
> Incineration at temperatures above 1200°C is considered the most effective way of destroying dioxins.
Though "Thermal desorption, which operates at lower temperature range to vaporize dioxins, is also commonly used." Which wouldn't be good in terms of distribution of the dioxins into the air and throughout the environment, unless they concentrate and destroy the liberated dioxins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_desorption ).
So regardless of the history of clean air violations, the important thing for dioxins in particular are the heat of this incinerator, whether that heat is evenly distributed throughout the burn mass, and whether the incineration is fully enclosed until it is finished.
In this case, fire will release toxic hydrogen chloride and carbon monoxide and trace levels of phosgene, besides the usual carbon dioxide.[0]
Large spills of vinyl chloride have been deliberately burned in the past, as the byproducts of burning are judged less hazardous than vinyl chloride itself.
Since carbon monoxide is released by gas stoves and car exhaust, it's really worth specifying the quantity for that component. OSHA allows up to 50 ppm for long term occupational exposure.
You can't be sure. But nor can you collect it and transport it for proper incineration. What's not burned will evaporate eventually, with deleterious effects.
Yes, for those unfamiliar, the city used to contract to have waste oil sprayed on the unpaved streets to keep the dust down. (Hush Children of Summer, it was the 1960s and 70s, it seemed like a good idea at the time.) In 1972 their contractor sprayed dioxin contaminated oil, possibly unbeknownst to him and the people who paid him to take the waste oil, but he wasn't being all that careful. Again its the 1970s, the EPA was two years old, the Crying Indian ad had just come out, trying to get people to carry a litter bag in their 8mpg car instead of chucking their beer cans and bottles out the window was the big thing. You wouldn't walk barefoot in a park because of all the pull tabs discarded on the ground. Dioxin is not known to cause problems in humans at this point, though animal studies suggest it could be a thing. No one has studied it.
Meanwhile, 10 years pass, the EPA has connected the oil hauler to contamination problems in a number of sites. They take samples at Times Beach and the next day a 500 year flood covers the town. Dioxin is now listed as a human carcinogen, and the towns streets contain 50% of the dioxin contamination in the entire state. The EPA uses the newly passed federal Superfund to buy out all the residents. The town is sealed off from humans, but apparently that river can flood and carry things downstream.
10 more years pass… The EPA decides on incineration, build an incinerated, purify everything with fire. Problems solved. It's now 1997. 25 years from contamination to cleanup.
Bonus Context for Diligent Readers:
Low level dioxin exposure has since been concluded to not be a health hazard. No one in Times Beach showed signs of dioxin poisoning. The decision maker for destroying the town now says with current knowledge he would not have ordered that. There was actually no disaster.
Incineration is how you get rid of dioxins in soil. It's the only way!
But mostly I am baffled by the public response to this incident. The thing about America is there are zillions of highly polluted sites in this country, we make more of them all the time, it takes us either decades or forever to clean them up, dioxins are a very common contaminant, and there are already hundreds of communities waiting in line for EPA actions to clean them up. So the idea that EPA actions will promptly remediate this site is somewhat ridiculous. If there are high levels of dioxins, and so far there is no evidence of that, relocating the people out of this town is the only action that can be timely taken.
Example: a site contaminated by high levels of vinyl chloride, the same junk that was spilled in Ohio, in the center of Oakland, California, has been polluted since 1960, identified since 1995, on the "national priorities list" i.e. Superfund, but no meaningful remediation has taken place and no responsible party has even been nominated yet.
The logic you used, if I may summarize: "There's lots of accidents, some of them have been ignored for decades, why care about this one?"
Frankly because it's high time people cared about what's happening to their environment and cities. Norfolk Southern is banking on the fact that rural areas and places like Oakland won't get national attention because they don't carry a lot of homogeneous national favor. Most of these derailments happen in rural areas that are cash strapped, just like the city of Oakland. Places that will be dependent on the company to come out and clean up their mess. Places that won't have funds unless aided by the EPA to check that the company actually cleaned up, and thoroughly. Places that don't have the national umph to make the NTSB to force the railroads into safer behavior.
What you've failed to see here is that the Venn diagram of disasters that happen and get ignored in Oakland are a circle with places like Ohio. We all lose if a company can ignore devastating parts of Oakland or Ohio.
The difference with this situation is that the responsible parties still exist while we're aware of the problem. They are who should be paying for the complete cost of cleanup, remediation, and damages to bystanders and property. Letting them slip out of the full liability with token or estimated damages, resume fraudulently transferring profits to shareholders, and putting the site in the back of the publicly funded queue is exactly what we don't want to happen.
It's a terrible dynamic to rely on post-facto financial enforcement on business people that are mentally incapable of understanding what they've done wrong (as opposed to say proactive regulation that would have prevented this entirely preventable derailment, and separately prevented the deliberate chemical release), but it's all we've got right now.
Baffled == I am once again disappointed in the typical American's habit of ignoring systemic problems until they arrive literally in their own backyards.
That's fair enough, but it's very weird to start criticizing people when they actually start to acknowledge the problem. Surely that's the time to start applauding them?
Maybe you do and you are very engaged in pollution sites.. but I would be surprised.
Everyone responds to local events more than remote ones. I don't care if the other side of the US has wildfires nearly as much as when the wildfires are close enough for me to smell them.
>Hey guys, don't worry, we got ourselves a McKinsey consultant on the job! Well...not on the job per se, since he's got more important stuff to do, but like...he's gonna give some interviews as he begins his 2024 presidential campaign.
Incredible. The elegance of the fact that we've got a literal management consultant in charge of this stuff should not be lost on anyone.
The secretary of transportation really did initially respond to this incident, that was getting "a lot of attention" with, exact quote:
"Look, rail safety is something that has evolved a lot over the years, but there's clearly more that needs to be done because while this horrible situation has gotten a particularly high amount of attention, there are roughly 1,000 cases a year of a train derailing,"
Look it up from any source that pleases you, this is an unedited clip. I searched for "pete buttigieg ohio train" on youtube and that was the top result. I recall seeing it about a week ago and somewhat not being able to believe it myself at the time. Alas.
I hope calling "deep fake" on things that are a bummer won't become a thing.
The only response I see there is hand waving the issue. Instead of talking about how this derailment is different from the other 999 that happen a year. A large percentage of derailments happen in train yards, in a controlled situation / enviroment.
Pete just hand waves the issue because the people affected didn't vote for the _right_ people.
Ah yes, accusing me of the very thing I am complaining about. chefs kiss
In case it isn't clear; I do not care one iota about the personal life or political affiliation of the secretary of transportation. Just competency.
Try and muster up some of that curiosity and note that upon pointing out that there seems to be none on display I get gaslit to infinity that the clip is fake and none of this is a big deal anyway. And maybe take pause and thank your lucky stars you and your loved ones don't live in Ohio.
We've bannned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop. (Edit: by the latter I meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34031967, not the GP comment here).
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> I hope calling "deep fake" on things that are a bummer won't become a thing.
It absolutely will. The technology is already powerful enough that Joe Random is able to deep-fake realistic porn, ChatGPT can write realistic sounding speeches (I personally tried "Barack Obama glorifying cannabis"), and iirc there's also an AI that can do speech synthesis for people where there is a good enough corpus of text and speech.
Given that this is the state of publicly available tooling, you can bet that at least Western secret services have had access to way more refined tech for years, not to mention the required training data.
In this case it was easily verifiable from multiple mainstream sources -- if instead of making that minor effort it becomes fashionable to just say "deep fake" about everything that we don't like (say a former and future presidential candidate for the democratic party looking like a complete political hack) facetiously we are doomed as a species I think.
For recent videos yes, it's easy-ish to verify their authenticity... but for material claimed to be older, particularly when combined with a SEO spam campaign?
Additionally, more and more people don't trust mass media in general which just makes the problem worse. There is nothing left any more that serves as a trustable institution for them.
Well technically only they know for sure what they meant, but I had the same reaction to the video that (I assume) they did, and they went out of their way to offer a plausible explanation for the audio distortions (packet loss).
There's also no apparent reason to doubt its authenticity, given that Yahoo Finance is a reasonably credible source and the content wasn't particularly outrageous.
I think we're just so used to higher-quality audio/video from the last decade in particular; I recently pulled some videos off of my old LG Env2 from high school [to archive the Fall Out Boy/All Time Low concert at The Rave (2010-ish)] that are hilariously poor quality - but it was the best we had at the time haha.
> The new plan is “horrifying”, said Kyla Bennett, a former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official now with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
But as a former EPA official, what does she suggest instead? Is there some other kind of chemical process to remove dioxins.
On one hand, incineration is the only reasonable method of destroying these kind of compounds. Properly run incineration plants burn the waste so hot that everything is atomized which is exactly what you want. Break the molecular bonds to break down those toxic compounds.
On the other hand, I understand the negative reactions. Burning trash has never seemed pleasant, and in this case particularly I can see how it might sound to a person in that community; the government again trying to 'solve' the problem by lighting it on fire. Is that their solution to everything? Bridge is in disrepair? Incinerate the bridge. Bear on the loose? Incinerate the bear. An orphan got lost in the park? Incinerate the orphan. Is fire their solution to everything? Well in this case, fire really is the solution. But public perception is a reality that needs to be considered.
Anyway, this whole affair is being made much worse by politicians listening to the experts and being tone deaf to public perception. A little bit more performative care would go a long way to making the public feel as though their problems aren't being brushed under the rug. Biden should have visited that town weeks ago.
> Break the molecular bonds to break down those toxic compounds.
The problem is that there is less than zero trust that the government will do anything other than the equivalent of piling it in the middle of the city and chucking a match at it. This situation is the result of myriad failures ranging from complex to "basic safety", a result of greed, and there's zero reason to assume the followup response will be any different.
Benefit of the doubt is hard-earned and easily lost.
>The problem is that there is less than zero trust that the government will do anything other than the equivalent of piling it in the middle of the city and chucking a match at it. This situation is the result of myriad failures ranging from complex to "basic safety", a result of greed, and there's zero reason to assume the followup response will be any different.
Can't you make this argument for any sort of cleanup effort? If so, what should we do? Not do any sort of cleanup?
There’s only 4,700 people. If this is really an imminent threat just evacuate the people, create an exclusion zone, and bypass with new rail around the exclusion zone. The evacuated people can be compensated obviously.
EPA can figure out the best way to tackle when exclusion is set up. Incineration sounds about as intelligent as shooting/bombing/nuking the dirt.
> ... the EPA has resisted calls to test for [dioxins], and the agency removed from its website the results of its in-depth soil analyses, so it’s unclear which chemicals are in the soil.
Menwhile, EPA Administrator Michael Regan says "trust the science" and drink the water.
The main environmental groups do seem to be all consumed with climate change issues. You do not any other kind of reporting in the press. And environmental activist have always driven change through the media, so it is a good metric to see where their focus is. Without raising consciousness about issues, little gets done. They don't even talk about recycling anymore.
Please ask around acquaintances who live in Ohio, friends of friends, how well informed they were/are about these events and at what point they got looped in. You can find that out first hand, I believe in you.
The knee-jerk smearing of journalism has really reached a boil with this event. I have seen this "nobody is reporting on it" comment, without exception, in every comment section of the dozen stories I've seen on the topic, and I barely even read the news.
It's a conservative trope. They're hoping to paint us libruls opposed to chemical spills as hypocrites. They don't have a response do the specific points so they attack the reaction. It's lazy but that's conservatives (in the modern political sense of the term).
Most major news outlets were reporting on the derailment shortly after, and yet I see this narrative continually being pushed that nobody reported on it. Yes, we should blame people for pushing such an easily debunked conspiracy theory. The reality is that we live in the social media era, and nobody knew or cared about the derailment until some people screamed about a black cloud on a viral TikTok clip.
People should be held to a bare minimum expectation to inform themselves properly before acting as if our government and media are horrendously corrupt.
Examples of articles on mainstream sites reporting on the derailment soon after the event (some articles showed up on the front pages as well):
I see this trope on most conservative news outlets and it's honestly outrageous.
The answer is simple: the environmental activists have always been there, but not a lot of people listened, a lot of people actually mocked them, not a lot of news outlets told their story and finally, not enough money went into PACs to actually make a difference. It is indeed sickening. Maybe in the future, we won't be voting for freedom loving regulation hating corrupt morons.
Yeah, nobody is reporting on it so here we are talking about it on a techy forum. What does nobody mean to you? It has been in my news feeds every day since it happened, and has only increased as the severity has increased.
Reporting doesn’t mean anyone is being called to account. There’s more action on banning TikTok than there is on actual accountability for the causes of this disaster.
Is the disaster over? Are the investigations over? We don't even know what the total cost is going to be from this disaster, so how can we apply fines to the company that will cover those costs? Sure, we can start forcing heads to roll if that's what you want, but how many heads? Oh, right, investigations are not over yet.
How would environmental activist or their actions being reported in media cause further action than it currently is, when it’s being reported and demonstrated against every day?
Environmental activists have always worked in partner with the media. Raising awareness about issues is how things get done. So, media coverage is a good metric to use for overall focus. When is the last time you heard of an environmental group addressing anything other than climate change? Like regular soot pollution or recycling? Hardly anything gets recycled.
Aside from this article and thousands of others like it? If this is the railroad and government's best effort at suppressing news, they're failing miserably.
You didn't hear that Erin Brockovich is on it? The media has been reporting about her, specifically, for well over a week. And she's not the only one talking about it, and more importantly holding town hall events with East Palestine residents: https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/special-reports/train-dera...
This seems to be par for the course for the "new" Ohio. Because there are/were some MAGA people in high office, I would not be surprise if the penalties for protesters are sever.
Also being the new Ohio, maybe the State Gov has no issues ignoring EPA regs :(
But businesses would not be able to survive if they were to behave. Having the people pay for a wee bit of clean up on the corps behalf is an acceptable trade off for the privilege of having the corps be profitable to bring us all of the things. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs /s
Yes, the sarcasm is dripping, but it is not far off from the beliefs of some legislative types. Whether they are MAGA or not is not relevant. We've seen this long before MAGA was a thing.
EPA is a captured entity and not doing anything about it. They trusted Norfolk Southern's own tests rather than doing their own. They're following the corporate line on this and not doing anything about it, similar to everyone else involved whose in a position of power.
This is how the EPA works and they do it that way because that is what the law says. EPA does not show up and test soil, they order responsible parties to test the soil.
That's a major gap, there's no third party oversight, and they have all kinds of incentives to fudge the testing in their favor, including how they collect the samples, what's done in the labs, etc.
If criminal investigative agencies have been caught faking DNA results in criminal cases (SBI lab in NC) because there was a conflict of interest between prosecuting cases and the defendent, you certainly can't trust corporations.
Conservatives have gutted enforcement agency regulations and replaced them with corporate self enforcement/self governance. Don't like it? Push for tougher corporate regulation and rewriting the statutes to give power back to the enforcement agencies (that were originally created as a response to events like this happening over and over and over).
The EPA levies millions of dollars in fines against auto shops that do as much as list a few unapproved parts on eBay. They don’t investigate squat.
The idea the EPA needs to follow some vetted and lengthy process with responsible experts is completely false. They have chosen to downplay this on purpose and the actions they are taking are are 100% political.
It's a problem for most government institutions we rely on to protect us. There is a revolving door between them and the companies they're supposed to keep in check/regulate when it comes to those in high positions.
This accident was reported within minutes of it happening, at least on NBC News. For the several days, it dominated coverage of CNN and Fox News. Fox News is currently spending several hours each day covering this train crash.
The LAT, WaPo, NYT, Chicago Tribune, and Cleveland Plains-Dealer have all discussed the crash and the toxicity of the chemicals involved and their potential effects on humans and the local environment.
What sort of "news suppression" do you think is going on?
Have you ever heard the saying 'be the change you want'? You know there aren't like only 30 environmental activist permits given out in the world, right? There might not even be a permitting process, you can start today.
Or do you mean you want someone else doing hard work with no reward on a subject that is currently personal to you? Ah yeah, the 1960s are over friend. But if you regularly and consistently have donated to environmental orgs in the past give them a call, they do listen to people in their movements.
The only outside activist that retains credibility and remains pretty steadfast in her mission is Erin Brockovich.
All the others pick and choose their causes based on political opportunism. Indeed where are all the environmental organizations that would typically be pillorying Corp america or an uncaring government? Where are their vocal marches and demands for rectification and justice?
It’s a lot of crickets…
Grass roots may create enough noise by 1000 horns to force the hand of the big media and a foot-dragging, uninterested fed government.
The media is covering it, but it seems like concern for CO2 has crowded out some of the more mundane environmental issues. The business lobby have turned most of the environmentalists into paid coporate shills who think if only everyone buys an EV, the planet will "heal".
My guess is the EPA is as complicit in the mess as the railroad. NS plays ball, takes the short-term heat, and they get to keep making profits as soon as the news cycle refocuses.
This isn't just a politics problem - the entire investor and management class at the railroads has been gambling with lives for years and the incinerator company's clearly doing the same thing, and we can't even agree as a country that that's bad, because we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poisoned an entire town because it helped their bottom line" or "the incinerator company that's also trying to poison an entire town is not within its rights to do so."
The cult of the MBA has gutted this country and we've let it do so because we gave up any sense of actual civic or national pride or any sense of society or mutual obligation and can't get through a conversation about how we'd like society to be without someone saying it's going to cost money and is therefore a nonstarter or that we've got no right to tell them they can't render the land they happen to live on toxic for the next thousand years or wipe out a species they don't like.