181–190 of 263 posts
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I stand corrected. They did a great job and no one in East Palestine is sick
Correct. There is no one in East Palestine who got sick from this. There's many derailments throughout the country and chemical spills of other sorts have happened many times.
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> There are thousands of derailments every year. The bigger problem is not the derailment [...] I think that's a problem worth discussing as well. Obama passed legislation to upgrade trains braking systems to make them a lot safer, which was then weakened by lobbying, which was then repealed by Trump, then the rail companies spent billions in stock buybacks and tried to tighten the screws on their labour force even f…
The way to put the screws to the rail companies isn’t to regulate better brakes - just have the NTSB have a policy of shutting down any line that has a derailment for months or longer. The companies will solve it themselves.
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>and even several states in the windshed to the northeast (PA, NY, VT) My understanding is that contemporaneous weather radar[0] put the plume southeast at the time of the burn. [0] https://www.wdtn.com/news/ohio/east-palestine-train-derailme...
That is good info, thanks for sharing. Here is the model that NOAA created - and which has not been officially released to the public yet: https://twitter.com/FalconryFinance/status/16258723275684208...
On the journalism side, the source seems to be extremely alarmist,[0] so I doubt much skepticism was practiced there.
On the NOAA side, it would be interesting to see the full set of assumptions behind this model. I would presume the vast majority of emissions would occur during the burn itself (February 6th, afternoon), but this model seems to assume a significant (undiminished?) outflow at midnight on February 8th.
"Garbage in, garbage out."
[0] https://twitter.com/FalconryFinance/status/16258752974837637...
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The thing that really protects them is refusal to use anti-trust law to break these large uncompetetive monopolies up. A signal is when these companies begin to engage in massive stock repurchase programs.
Stock buybacks are economically equivalent to paying dividends, but they’re less costly from a tax perspective. Are dividends also to be banned? If so, what is even the purpose of a company, and who would possibly invest in a it knowing that it can’t pay any returns?
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The way to put the screws to the rail companies isn’t to regulate better brakes - just have the NTSB have a policy of shutting down any line that has a derailment for months or longer. The companies will solve it themselves.
The rail companies are "too big to fail" since they are core national logistics.
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The length of the siding shouldn't prevent you from using it. It should just require the main track to be signalled stopped for other traffic in either direction while you are occupying it during the set out procedure. If the train is long enough, this could be quite a long time if you have to dump and then rebuild working pressure in the brake system.
There’s also the possibility that mechanical parts will seize up (especially in the case of overheated bearings) and will be unable to get moving again if you stop.
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> There is no one in East Palestine who got sick from this. You're saying this a decade or two early, don't you think? Cancer rates are a trailing indicator. I'm not going to try to address the normalization of deviance implicit in the rest of your comment, because what would be the point?
My first job (1983) was as a bench tech, at a defense contractor (microwave spy stuff/TEMPEST). We all had these little bottles on our benches, with a funny silver lid that acted a bit like a "birdbath"[0]. You pumped it a couple of times, and the contents would come up, into a shallow bowl. You'd then take a long "Q-Tip" swab, dip it in the liquid, and use that to clean flux off the PCB you were fixing. They also ha…
Even in 1990 or so when I first came across it (also for cleaning PC boards), it was known to be hazardous.
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The thing that really protects them is refusal to use anti-trust law to break these large uncompetetive monopolies up. A signal is when these companies begin to engage in massive stock repurchase programs.
Stock buybacks are economically equivalent to paying dividends, but they’re less costly from a tax perspective. Are dividends also to be banned? If so, what is even the purpose of a company, and who would possibly invest in a it knowing that it can’t pay any returns?
Okay.. what's the chain of logic here?
> but they’re less costly from a tax perspective.
Sure.. but they also interfere with the "public ownership" ideal, which is the specific principle I was commenting about in the original.
> Are dividends also to be banned?
No.. just buybacks. I think you can still have dividends, even though there's some abstract idea that they're equivalent.
> If so, what is even the purpose of a company
The question is.. "what even is the purpose of public ownership." If you want to operate privately, I believe all of these questions become moot.
> and who would possibly invest in a it knowing that it can’t pay any returns?
The public. Which is what we want. Or, again, stay private.
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The Ohio governor has not declared it a federal disaster area. This prevents certain aid from being used, but apparently FEMA is helping out. There seems to be a lot of confusion about who asked for what.
That's not what was reported in the news. Sounds more like when the Ohio governor requested federal assistance he was given the cold shoulder. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-admin-turns-down-ohio...
Debunked my own point along with that one. I'll take it :)
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https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/why-train-derailm... Most derailments are in train yards. Few cause injuries, fewer cause deaths, and only a handful involve hazardous substances. I don't say that to downplay the mess in OH/PA, but just to make sure the base-rate is understood. And if you want to compare to europe it looks like US freight rail volume is at least 6x as large. Also no idea if/how they count "…
A couple months ago I watched an amateur train nerd on youtube cover a derailment that dumped a load of bitumin/tar into a river and destroyed a bridge. This kind of thing happens pretty commonly. No national news covered it, only a couple of local news stations, at least from what I could find on youtube/googling. It's confusing to me why this specific incident got so much attention.
And this got the attention it did because it’s far more severe then one load of tar/bitumen in a river - and far more toxic made potentially worse from the choice to. Burn it off to clear the tracks faster