Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern • Hacker News Board

Re: Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern

#191

Post by quacked » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC

kiliantics wrote: post #173

quacked wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was young, I assumed the 401k had been around forever. But it was introduced in 1978! We're nearing the end of the 50-year period that the guys who invented it would really need to get staggeringly rich off of the concept, and now that they're getting ready to die everyone's overreliance on the system they set up is causing total gridlock in American life. You can't do ANYTHING that threatens the stock market.…

I have a very similar outlook. It's pretty clear to me that things are moving faster and faster in society and likely not towards anything very good. So it seems naive to expect the old models to continue working. My "retirement plan" therefore is something between conventional wisdom and prepping. Put some money into savings for emergencies and the remaining possibility that stocks may have some growth in future, bu…

I'm glad to hear you say that. There are a lot of people out there who are kind of thinking the same thing. The only thing I really worry about is that if the time does come and we really need to use our paltry reserves of food, land, ammunition, etc. whether or not we have the ability to do the real civilizational dirty work--forming strategic alliances, committing violence when necessary, avoiding starvation through back-breaking farming work that actually yields harvests, etc.

Like, I've got some acreage, the skills to warm my old house through the winter on the woods, and enough knowledge to garden through the summer. But what about food in spring and fall? What if a band of 200 raiders from the city walks down the groomed road my driveway is off of and decides they want to live on my patch?

And even if civilization doesn't fall, do you really "own" land when your ownership claims are validated by paid police and the people who don't own land not thinking to come and take your land? I wouldn't say civilization "fell" between 1900 and 1930, but surely those Russian landowners assumed they "owned" their land before the Bolsheviks started peacefully discussing their ideas with the Tsarist government.

You start thinking about this stuff and realizing that these problems have been solved over and over again, since before writing. All of the stuff in history that seems so antiquated (like needing elaborate gift-giving rituals when meeting neighboring foreign nobility) suddenly seems clever and meaningful when it's juxtaposed against the context of starvation, enslavement, death by the plague, and no electricity.

Re: Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern

#192

Post by paulmd » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 6:03 PM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #64

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industries like airlines and railroad have the problem where you can't cut the corners that can be tastefully and carefully cut because once upon a time someone went overboard, hands were wrung, and a law or rule was made. So then when you're squeezed you cut some corner no sane person would cut with predictable results. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that the railroad had implemented the XKCD 28hr day or something…

Slightly OT, but the XKCD 28 hour week is terrific. I've twice tan a test week using it, and I was more refreshed, and got more work done, than any other week. I also enjoyed more sunshine too. I'm sure that it's not for everybody, but it is a terrific solution to _some_ lifestyle issues. Not to mention the drop in peak resource usage (electric, roads, etc) if people were to stagger it in three shifts.

I used to run the 28 hour week in grad school and really enjoyed it personally as well.

The problem is keeping contact with everyone else when your schedule is rolling all across the calendar. I gotta pick the car up at 3 and call the dentist after they open at 10, and I have a class monday-wednesday-friday at 10am. 28 hour week would work a lot better in a city where everything is open 24h than a rural area where the grocery store closes at 8.

Re: Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern

#193

Post by ClumsyPilot » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 6:03 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #183

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel like the investigation into Boeing Max disaster was stern and everyone responsible was punished?

I guess it depends what you're comparing it to. Boeing paid 2.5 bn and shareholders were likely unhappy compare that to an amtrak train derailment where someone literally falls asleep killing people and he wasn't even fired. Don't get me started on police union investigations... https://nypost.com/2014/10/28/engineer-fell-asleep-before-de...

> Boeing paid 2.5 bn

That's like $6 million per person they've killed, very cheap. In UK NHS paid over $45 million for non-lethal medical mistake. [1]

> someone literally falls asleep killing people and he wasn't even fired

If some accident has ever killed >50 people, it can never be the fault of one person on minimum wage.

People fuck up, that's a fact of life, that's why we have co-pilots in planes, FAA was suppose to check Boeing's design, and one person going crazy can't launch the nukes.

The article you linked details numerous failures by the company. You should assign responsibility up to decision makers that made tragedy inevitable, not down to pawns that happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-surrey-64352268

Re: Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern

#194

Post by soco » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #92

88913527 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I disagree with you, but me and many others are planning our retirements accounts around assumptions of 8-9% growth. Stock market returns and real economic productivity aren't the same thing, but I think it would be deeply challenging for us to change course. Low growth creates a lot of new issues which are debatably worse than the axles-on-fire problem, but this is a conterfactual argument.

>> many others are planning our retirements accounts around assumptions of 8-9% growth. Another aspect of retirement should be figuring out how to lower the cost of living. Unfortunately the notion that housing should be a sort of investment goes directly against that. It can't be affordable and also be a good investment.

Your own house is not an "investment" as such, it's part of your life support after retiring. It doesn't really matter what value it has on the market, if it supports you over those years without needing too much maintenance. And after you expire, you won't care anyway what residual value it had.

Re: Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern

#195

Post by bombcar » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 6:32 PM UTC

YPCrumble wrote: post #187

bombcar wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cube law thing - you can work out how much "air" there is for everything to spread into, and how much "stuff" there is but basically, the further away you get the rapidly it goes down in hazard. The western wildfires were absolutely mind-glowingly immense in ways we don't really deal with normally. Five tank cars is 30,000 gallons * 5 = 150,000 gallons, roughly 600 cubic meters. Safe exposure is 0.1 part per m…

This is a great answer, thank you. However this assumed the atmosphere is 45 km high and it seems very unlikely that these gases are light enough to go that high. If you assume the gases only go 1km in the air wouldn’t that assume a radius roughly 40x your initial estimate, or at least 1800 km to be within the 1 ppm threshold.

That's why I did a little bit of a sleight of hand - worked out how many cubic meters it would need to be to disperse, and then converted that to square meters (so assumed a depth of one meter).

If I had done a sphere (half a sphere to be precise) you'd get a half-dome only 1.5 km across.

Re: Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern

#196

Post by colpabar » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 6:38 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #188

cptskippy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kidding yourself if you think the op was suggesting we abandon capitalism. This absolutist mindset has to stop. We can acknowledge our current system is flawed without suggested we abandon it entirely for something else. The reality is that our regulation of our system could be better. Your binary thinking is lazy and closes you off to the possibility that we could improve our system.

[flagged]

What an absurd comment. The only purpose? That seems like quite a jump. I read it as a dumb comment pointing out a funny name for the current state of things.

Also, is the world really so simple that anything that isn't capitalism is a dictatorship?

Re: Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern

#197

Post by quacked » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC

nebula8804 wrote: post #180

quacked wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are bang on. The question comes down to whether or not you can produce something in exchange for fuel, textiles, shelter, food, medicine, law, and the protection of violent men. If you can't, you have to rely on stashed currency. In the current system, stashing currency slows down the market returns of the people who designed and own the system, so every single facet of life is designed to making stashing currenc…

There has got to be another way at beating the system but as it stands how does one get over the fact that inflation would wipe away the value of the currency you are holding? Some argue that bitcoin is the answer but who knows really.

My personal feeling is that current currency system is fatally flawed and set up deliberately to not be stable. The plan for continuing market gains is to import consumers, import low-wage labor, and continue to consolidate production into hyper-corporations. I think that eventually something is going to happen that the system really can't account for (famine, plague, war, etc.) and it will be broken down and built "anew", with new norms for behavior and lifestyle expectations.

There's no way to beat a game by its own rules when the rules are set up specifically to allow certain parties to take advantage of the game. Apologies for sounding like a high school libertarian, but I can't think of any simpler way to say it than that.

Re: Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern

#198

Post by cptskippy » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC

goalieca wrote: post #181

cptskippy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kidding yourself if you think the op was suggesting we abandon capitalism. This absolutist mindset has to stop. We can acknowledge our current system is flawed without suggested we abandon it entirely for something else. The reality is that our regulation of our system could be better. Your binary thinking is lazy and closes you off to the possibility that we could improve our system.

I gave two counter-examples of different economic systems. It’s clear capitalism isn’t the problem if you think about why those other systems failed.

If you think about what you just said, it makes no sense:

> I've given two examples of different economic systems that I've deemed failures that prove our specific implementation of an economic system isn't problematic.

That's like saying:

> In my opinion bikes and trains are failures that prove my gas guzzling SUV is the best vehicle in the world and there's absolutely no room for improvement in any way.

Re: Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern

#199

Post by quacked » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 7:22 PM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #190

brightball wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the push back on financial advice by guys like Dave Ramsey is shocking. You tell people to save, avoid debt, don’t buy new cars, etc and people react with almost anger at the suggestion.

I think there's pushback because it's kind of a "just buy more money" solution. On the whole, the problem isn't that people are buying $70k trucks and escalades that's keeping them poor. It's not having enough income. The difference personally between $70k and $90k is massive and the difference between $90k and $120k is massive. That's the difference between underfunding my retirement and no savings and still being f…

This was a very well-written response to the parent commenter and to my own attitude to which the parent commenter was responding.

> The middle-class lifestyle as we have come to know it basically requires you be in the top 10% of income earners in your local economy.

Absolutely true. I've found that to not worry about any of (health, retirement, surprise bills, vehicles, housing) you need about $100k/year post-tax, and that's in a heartland state with "low" COL.

> The problem isn't people, and if your system requires magical rational-actors who will wageslave for 50 years without the occasional vacation or other nicety and die penniless in retirement after cutting social security, then your system is going to fail.

Amusingly, this is one of the reasons I'm not too worried about the inevitability of the system crashing. The current system is bound for failure. It's practically designed to fail. Once it fails, something will have to take its place. I think there's just enough civilizational inertia that the US isn't headed for total anarchy, as is always a risk for less-developed places when the currency and the food importation falls through.

Re: Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern

#200

Post by ClumsyPilot » Mon, Feb 13, 2023, 8:46 PM UTC

Steltek wrote: post #182

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past 30 Years Berlin had housing go up in value 10x but population went up 1%. Look it up The current financial system created the housing criss.

In my town, population went down but children-per-family decreased even more, effectively raising the number of households/family-units that needed separate homes. A raw population count is not always what it seems.

If we take that view, we need population to fall by 40% just for house prices to not grow?