An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners • Hacker News Board

Re: An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners

#51

Post by robviren » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 4:41 AM UTC

whyenot wrote: post #25

gnu8 wrote: post #3

It's clear that no one should be working in a mine without at minimum an N95 mask and probably a PAPR (powered air purifying respirator). I wonder if there is any reason at all, other than preserving corporate profit margins, that the coal industry has failed to adopt simple and well understood industrial hygiene practices. Clean coal indeed.

That's a good point -- why aren't mining companies buying PAPRs for their workers? PAPRs are designed for difficult conditions like hot and damp, and at least in my experience, the constant flow of air over your face cools you down and is a lot more comfortable than a traditional respirator. Mining is a relatively well paid profession. Yes, PAPRs are expensive ($1,500), and depending on how often they need to be chan…

PAPRs also suck to wear. I agree it makes sense to force the issue given the obvious benefit of not being unable to breath at 40, but a short sighted view along with tough guy attitude can go against common sense without robust regulation. I had to wear those in nuclear environments and they limit vision significantly and beep constantly if you bend over and choke the hose at all.

Re: An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners

#52

Post by sergiotapia » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 4:42 AM UTC

adanto6840 wrote: post #8

gnu8 wrote: post #3

It's clear that no one should be working in a mine without at minimum an N95 mask and probably a PAPR (powered air purifying respirator). I wonder if there is any reason at all, other than preserving corporate profit margins, that the coal industry has failed to adopt simple and well understood industrial hygiene practices. Clean coal indeed.

Surely it's cheaper to provide this kind of protection (I assumed it would be OSHA-mandated honestly) than it is to pay for the healthcare and/or lawsuits that follow? I admittedly haven't read the article yet, but it's surprising to me that black lung / industrial air quality isn't something that OSHA (or similar) is tasked with ensuring ample worker protections for.

"Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

Apply this through the OSHA lense, and voila.

Re: An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners

#53

Post by mindslight » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 4:50 AM UTC

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #35

mindslight wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm, the entire point of a simple metric (money) is so that complex processes don't have to be understood top-down to be managed. From first principles, the more technologically complex a society gets, the more you would expect its priorities to be weighed with money. Now please, don't take this as an endorsement that we should let externalities go unchecked, or even that governance should shirk basic understanding o…

I can't think of a single instance, from the last 200 years, where money alone has achieved the appropriate constraint of a process, product or industry. All the significant milestones in health and safety have been from hard won regulation and money - not just taxation, but penalties and fines. Usually accompanied by enormous effort and spending from industry to lie, cheat and avoid said regulation being enacted, or…

I had hoped I included enough of a "disclaimer" referencing the pitfalls to avoid this comment. Alas.

Re: An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners

#54

Post by adrianN » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 4:50 AM UTC

stdplaceholder wrote: post #38

fromthestart wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean coal refers to scrubbing pollutants and possibly CO2 from emissions. It isn't necessarily bullshit.

There is no thermodynamically possible way to generate power from burning coal while also removing the primary product of the reaction from the effluent. Clean coal is, necessarily, 100% bullshit.

I think the idea is not to turn the CO2 back into carbon and oxygen, but to store it somewhere other than the atmosphere. That is not thermodynamically impossible.

Re: An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners

#55

Post by gumby » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 5:14 AM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #48

gumby wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't think of a single instance, from the last 200 years, where money alone has achieved the appropriate constraint of a process, product or industry. Money upset the mobile phone business which was a lazy cartel controlled by carriers, who functioned as monopsony customers of phone manufacturers. Europe's market was more dynamic than the the US and Japan due to regulation but still the phones weren't amazing. T…

How did money upset it without tech disruption?

It was a tech disruption. NeedMoreTea said a significant disruption requires "regulation and money" and while I agree in the general case, the iPhone is an example that shows that "requires" is overstating it.

An existence proof that it "pure" capitalism can cause positive disruptive change, even if that's a rare case. And I write "pure" in scare quotes because Apple did benefit from a raft of laws and regulations (police, building codes, court system, patents, etc) -- but not to a greater or lesser degree than the other participants in the phone ecosystem.

Re: An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners

#56

Post by ThrowMeDown01 » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 6:53 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #23

Gibbon1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've forgotten that regulations on industry is not a market distortion but a market correction (when done correctly). My argument is we've replaced a rich set of social controls with a single unitary one; money. And then wonder why we're constantly dealing with mal-externalities. If you consider that human societies are complex and industrial ones even more so, the idea that you can manage that with a single contr…

Try to “charge” people in any other resource, and they’ll just convert the extra profits they make from the operation into that currency and then pay you in it. For example: stores that require people to wait in line to get a limited-availability thing on a first-come-first-served basis. Rich people just pay someone to wait in line for them. Entrepreneurs serve these rich people by putting a bunch of people in the li…

There is an incredible number of norms you and most everybody else adheres to every single day. Some of them even obviously ridiculous and without any objective basis, like "don't wear white socks and sandals". Nobody charges you money, not even if you ignore such norms. And yet you comply - and the corset of cultural norms is far tighter than you realize (unless you start thinking about it, but even then it's hard to see from the inside how many rules you actually follow, by now quite voluntarily).

The human world outside "money" is far larger and the bonds also far stronger than inside of it, I would claim. It's just that one is mostly subconscious and the other one very often requires conscious attention, so guess which one you always notice.

Re: An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners

#57

Post by aaron695 » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:11 AM UTC

We need to stop concentrating on individual causes and acknowledge all pollutants in the air we breathe in of certain sizes cause cancer.

Be it mines or cigarettes or campfires or sitting at roadside dinning.

The lie nicotine and chemicals from cigarettes caused cancer might have saved millions. But it's stopping the progress of savings the next millions.

Re: An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners

#58

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:16 AM UTC

ThrowMeDown01 wrote: post #56

derefr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to “charge” people in any other resource, and they’ll just convert the extra profits they make from the operation into that currency and then pay you in it. For example: stores that require people to wait in line to get a limited-availability thing on a first-come-first-served basis. Rich people just pay someone to wait in line for them. Entrepreneurs serve these rich people by putting a bunch of people in the li…

There is an incredible number of norms you and most everybody else adheres to every single day. Some of them even obviously ridiculous and without any objective basis, like "don't wear white socks and sandals". Nobody charges you money, not even if you ignore such norms. And yet you comply - and the corset of cultural norms is far tighter than you realize (unless you start thinking about it, but even then it's hard t…

The rules you mention are very localized, and granular on sub-social level. Me & my friends across the country may follow similar rules, but my next-door neighbours will follow different rules.

Alas, money is always an overriding concern. Your adherence to local cultural regulations may or may not buy you good karma, but that karma is not redeemable beyond your current social group. You won't pay for supplies out of it, and you won't build your house with it. But you can do that with money, regardless of where you are. So money tends to displace everything else out of sheer utility. Of course it can't substitute for every social interaction, but then you also don't want to run scarcity economy on karma.

Re: An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners

#59

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:22 AM UTC

Gibbon1 wrote: post #18

munk-a wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in the modern political stage we've forgotten that regulations on industry is not a market distortion but a market correction (when done correctly). Regulations exist to incorporate the costs of externalities into the cost of doing business. This sort of a market correction only receives criticism on an inter-industry level (and possibly with regards to imports if the cost is only applied domestically) becaus…

> we've forgotten that regulations on industry is not a market distortion but a market correction (when done correctly). My argument is we've replaced a rich set of social controls with a single unitary one; money. And then wonder why we're constantly dealing with mal-externalities. If you consider that human societies are complex and industrial ones even more so, the idea that you can manage that with a single contr…

As others have pointed out, this is not wrong. It can be argued, and I (currently) believe it to be true, that industrial societies only happened because of money. The scale at which humans operate seems to be related to the scalability of their monetary system.

Reputation/social karma as a currency is hyper-localized and isn't able to cover all your needs; without modern technology, it doesn't even scale beyond Dunbar number-sized villages. Barter is O(n!) with respect to amount of things you might need, so it doesn't scale well with progress of technology. The abstraction of money was the (in retrospect) obvious solution.

Re: An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners

#60

Post by Geojim » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 7:34 AM UTC

I file this one under memories are short, and dust masks are a pain in the arse. Sure labour laws are wanting for your Appalachian thin seam coal miner, but the union strong Australian industry had had a similar revelation, albeit with reportable cases in the tens, not thousands).

Dust masks are totally effective. The main problem is convincing miners to wear them, all shift, in the heat, and the humidity. The only effective motivator I've seen for the industry are miners getting sick.

In my fifteen years of underground coal I've seen it go from crews where none wore dust masks, to everyone wears them, and it's not like black lung or silicosis are new to mining. And what's interesting is most wear them purely out of self concern, the minority due to workplace health and safety rules.