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Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

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Re: Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

#471

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

eastbound wrote: post #459
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing on the ontology of capital: once enough capital (billions, trillions) is gathered in one single control point there is a phase transition: from a means towards an end (build X, destroy Y) it becomes a manner of escaping reality: with enough (crony or not) capital you can keep afloat a business no matter how bad it is, how badly run, how useless or how dangerous the products. Not that 'there is no skin in th…

Whereas with government, you can keep afloat a government no matter how bad it is, how badly run, how useless or how dangerous it is. Except, as opposed to a company, it can’t crash like Enron or be threatened by competition. It doesn’t even need to fight to stay afloat.

By control point you can understand a corporation or a government, no need for false dichotomies: in the age of capital there is no beyond.

Enron was a weak company, nowhere near the escape reality velocity: at peak, in 2000, they had a market capitalization of $60 billion, at the same time Microsoft was at $600 billion [1].

Also, any company worth their capital knows very well that "competition is for losers" [2] and dreams of the ultimate consolidation [3].

[1] The Largest Public Companies by Market Cap (2000–2022), https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/largest-companies-from-2...

[2] Competition Is for Losers, https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k

[3] The Consolidation Curve, https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve

Re: Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

#472

Post by onetimeusename »

nabla9 wrote: post #330
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tad of Yes, Minister wisdom [1]: "The Four Stage Strategy: Stage 1. Nothing is going to happen. Stage 2. Something may happen, but we should do nothing about it. Stage 3. Maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do. Stage 4. Maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now." [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXIetP5iak

Legislation passed under President Obama required trains carrying hazardous flammable materials to have ECP brakes. The law was rescinded in 2017 by the Trump administration.

Would ECP brakes have stopped this, a serious question? I don't know if the severity of this warrants blame on a lack of ECP braking. There is a study done[1] that compared different pneumatic vs electronic signal brakes and ECP brakes could have potentially reduced the number of cars in a derailment but I don't know if it's a significant decrease in cars that are derailed, 50 cars derailed. It does not seem that way to me. But I could be wrong.

[1]: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2017_casselton_BM...

Re: Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

#473

Post by olivermarks »

danaris wrote: post #441
rodgerd wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that there are, in general, significant differences in positions on these things, this seems like a bad example to choose: after all, US rail workers went on strike over the safety, long hours, and being expected to work injured or sick, and President Biden signed off on laws making their strikes illegal. Unfortunately, at least in the English-speaking world, many nominal workers' parties have largely b…

Honestly, I agree with you on this; however, the grandparent didn't say "Democratic or Republican politicians," which is very much the source of the problem you describe. Their wording was "conservatives or the left", which I think it is fair to say includes the people who identify with those political orientations—and I think you'd have a hard time seriously arguing that "the left" in America, to the extent that it…

I think the grandparent was really referring to extremities at the tips of the two wings - the cargo culting 'democratic socialist' movement the DNC pays lip service to, and the extremes of nationalist'USA first' 'patriots' the RNC pays lip service to and the DNC's coastal media corp friends love to endlessly frightened their viewers about.

Re: Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

#474

Post by themitigating »

kevviiinn wrote: post #65
themitigating wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People are upset because it's another case of the government completely failing to do their jobs of keeping regular people safe, " Even though this is a private company you only blamed the government?

Part of the government's responsibility is to regulate

Not according to republicans

Re: Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

#475

Post by olivermarks »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #446
briantakita wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate Change & the war on CO2 has sucked the oxygen out of the room wrt pollution with dangerous chemicals. Many in the environmental community are optimizing a single metric, CO2 emissions, & not focusing on the myriad of chemicals that cause widespread ecological damage. That coupled with the ongoing doomsday hysteria over CO2, it is easy to lose focus on pressing issues & the complexities in dealing with these o…

I'd be really interested in why climate change is a hysteria and not well-founded fear. Well founded studies say we are currently on track to reach 4°C higher average temperature by 2100, and a plausible rise in sea levels of that would be around 40 meters. Completely ignoring all other effects, this would be a catastrophe on a level we can hardly achieve otherwise. And 2100 isn't an end date, it would be kind of nic…

'Climate change' is a hysteria because there is so much money involved in green tech. anyone with an ounce of common sense is an environmentalist, but there have been so many predictions of impending doom (which is your fault, repent and atone for your sins) that the genuinely important issues tend to get buried in the tsunamai of doomy junk science that is drip fed to Guardian readers and anyone else who will listen.

There is a real danger of the $$ cult of climate change $$ undermining important environmental issues.

Re: Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

#476

Post by XorNot »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #347
rootusrootus wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> labelled conspiracy wingnut, as someone who maintains justified suspicion If your suspicions were justified then by definition you wouldn't be a conspiracy wingnut. But most of the wingnuts think everything is a conspiracy, which makes them no more useful than a broken clock.

was I a conspiracy wingnut for thinking the war in Iraq was fought on dubious grounds? Don't have time to go down the rabbit hole. Let's just apply Mark Twain's quote and replace "read the newspaper" with "watch/read corporate news". He's still right. “If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do, you're misinformed.”

Was the clock broken when it told me it 6.30 the other day?

Re: Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

#477

Post by shadowgovt »

yunwal wrote: post #465
shadowgovt wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question, yes, but then the question needs an answer. "Just asking questions" with no follow-up is just signal-jamming. Follow-up on the question in Flint found both elevated lead levels in kids and a mechanism by which the changed purification process released previously-fixated lead in pipes. In contrast, this is a big scary smoke cloud of a well-understood volatile compound that we've spilled into the ecosystem in…

> In contrast, this is a big scary smoke cloud of a well-understood volatile compound that we've spilled into the ecosystem in the past In past events, vinyl chloride was not burned, and minimal amounts of it went unrecovered. We also know that hydrogen chloride is a byproduct of burning vinyl chloride, and when combined with water, makes hydrochloric acid, which is not good to come into contact with, and has killed…

> We also have seen some evidence that animals nearby are dropping dead and humans feeling sick.

This is precisely the kind of decontextualized data that leads to inaccurate conclusions. Without data on normal animal die-off rates, there's no reason to believe finding dead animals is unusual in this part of town.

And of course people feel sick; they've been told they were exposed to a scary chemical. It's going to be very hard to separate psychosomatic effect from physiological effect.

(The dead fish are probably directly causal. Swimming in hydrochloric acid will do that. But they can also directly sample the water to figure out if the HCL levels are dangerous for human consumption or contact, and I've seen no reporting to suggest that is the case; fish are way more sensitive to water quality than humans).

> The correct thing to do is not dismiss concerns, but to put in place measures to stop corner-cutting

No argument there. Independent of this specific accident, we know there's a pattern of accident rate increase that indicates a culture of lax safety standsrds (and I completely believe the rail workers who have told us they are heavily incentivized to cut those corners). That should stop.

> and provide guidance to residents of East Palestine that isn't just "don't worry about it".

Unfortunately, that is the only guidance in the absence of other data. Otherwise, proving "everything is fine" is proving a negative. Is the question "is their risk higher than last month?" Yes. "How much higher?" Pretty much not very much if they didn't get sick by now. "What should we do?" They're doing it in the form of burning off the carcinogen and checking low-lying areas for any escaped volatiles.

What else is there? For an average citizen, they may as well go pray to whatever god they believe in; it's as useful a preventative as anything else they could do.

Re: Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

#478

Post by XorNot »

dendrite9 wrote: post #252
anotherman554 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I've been seeing content on Tiktok where even 100 miles away they're seeing small dead fish which is apparently according to the folks making the videos a massive red flag." I wouldn't bother watching a Tiktok video unless the video maker is an environmental professional. Otherwise this is just the blind leading the blind. Here's a legal definition of environmental professional used by developers when they do a envi…

There are plenty of other people who you might expect to give a reasonable update on how nature (in general) is dealing with something like a chemical spill. Gardeners, birders, fishers, even some walkers or runners are outside regularly and tend to have a feel for what is going on in the environment around them. There are people I trust when they say the fish are hiding in the afternoon because the river is too hot…

Tiktok is unverified with no reputation attached to it. People can and do fake things happening on Tiktok for views all the time. The parent comment claims "people have been showing" without linking any of the video evidence, which if it exists which makes this 3rd hand rumor already.

Re: Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

#479

Post by dang »

Related:

Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783940 - Feb 2023 (300 comments)

Ask HN: Any HNers have air quality sensors near-ish 'East Palistine, Ohio'? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783664 - Feb 2023 (11 comments)

Ohio vinyl chloride accident summary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34781184 - Feb 2023 (7 comments)

Ohio catastrophe is ‘wake-up call’ to dangers of deadly train derailments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773513 - Feb 2023 (230 comments)

Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34772687 - Feb 2023 (212 comments)

Health concerns mounting as animals become sick after train derailment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758525 - Feb 2023 (128 comments)

Re: Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

#480

Post by pmezard »

WalterBright wrote: post #468
gnulinux wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything involving government really. This is the decades old "starve the beast" [1] mindset. Let's make sure government is absolutely ineffective at every step of the way, and then later point out how ineffective the government is and propose an even more ineffective, under-resourced government. It's a vicious cycle, and a self-fulfilled prophecy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

With an all-powerful government running things, you get Chernobyl.

With an all-powerful company running things, you get Bhopal.
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