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EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

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Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#201

Post by terr-dav »

cakeface wrote: post #184
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I suspect your question is rhetorical but I, and quite a few other Marxists, would say yes. Dividends, stock buybacks and other types of profit should be banned.

My issue is with the concentrated control of where the surplus value goes, I see the existence of dividends & stock buybacks as more of a side-effect of the system than a core-problem.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#202

Post by jhallenworld »

The problem is that the EPA has no credibility. They demonstrably lied after 9/11 about the air quality in Manhattan. Maybe you could say that it was a necessary lie to encourage people to clean up, join the rescue effort, get back to work, etc. But now why should I trust the EPA to not lie about Palestine? All of the same arguments for a good lie apply. The people in charge today are only going to worry about the immediate short term risk, and definitely will not care about long term risk- by the time you get cancer, they will have been long out of power.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#203

Post by pixl97 »

thearn4 wrote: post #112
Rimintil wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than introducing FUD about the cleanup costs, why would you believe there is overstatement on the impact of the disaster? What metric has you doubting the impact statement? What are your qualifications to make this assessment?

I'm thinking about what I've read on social media (twitter, reddit, etc) about the event. The posts getting the most engagement/traction are convinced this is larger than Chernobyl. However, relevant authorities do not seem to agree with this. But I have no environmental sciences credentials to speak of.

Someone would think this is larger than Chernobyl if they were critically uninformed on just how big and stupid Chernobyl was. Burning the contents of the train cars will destroy a lot of the dangerous chemical compounds you originally had. A vast amount of the danger by weight is gone. The biggest issue is determining the dioxin output.

With a nuclear fire that is not the case. When things go out of control you make even more radioactive stuff, and you can't even clean up the mess in the first place without dying and killing all of the equipment that is working on it. It is just an unimaginable disaster that most of us can't fully comprehend.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#204

Post by jcrawfordor »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #175
kunwon1 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read that the governor of the state isn't requesting much in the way of federal assistance, and hasn't yet declared a state of emergency, which may or may not be a prerequisite for such federal action. That being said, it seems to me that the entire situation is being used as a political football, which makes things murky. What everyone seems to agree on is that the residents on the ground are not getting the…

What types of assistance would require action at a federal scale? it seems like a pretty manageable problem at the state level. It seems like there is a huge outcry that "something must be done" without really examining what that something would be or reviewing what is already being done . Do people have shelter or need it ? Do people have access to medical care or need more? Are safety tests being conducted or not?…

Money. Most states have very little funding for emergency recovery, so it's routine to use a federal emergency declaration to authorize federal funding. In general with civil emergencies, the state has the authority but the feds have the money.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#205

Post by bombcar »

katbyte wrote: post #182
bombcar wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fine them millions per derailment. Increasing with each one.

This can work but they can fight fines, or eat it as cost of business. Much harder to argue against a safety-shutdown.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#206

Post by pixl97 »

phpisthebest wrote: post #195
ng12 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the overt issue is that both state and fed gov completely bungled their response. Their absurd, stubborn silence, even after the issue has been lighting up social media for a week, gives the impression they know it's deadly but don't care -- whether or not that's the truth.

That is the "conspiracy" non-conspiracy minded people like myself agree they bungled their response but that just confirms my long held position that the government is completely incompetent and we look to them for guidance, or solutions to a given problem at our own peril. As the famous axiom goes... "Government: If you think you have problems now, wait until you see our solutions." Their bungling of the response is…

Eh, the problem here is you're taking 'government' as a single entity, but it's not at all.

If it were up to the singular 'government' there would have been better brakes on the trains and the company would have been following the law on transporting the chemicals. All the issues at hand were well known about for years.

The problem here is very little government but instead for profit corporations going "How can I squeeze more blood out of this penny" and look for ways to get out of the regulations that prevent disasters in the first place.

Really no one does a 'great' job of dealing with disasters, hence why they are disasters. The best regulations/forms of government prevent the damned disaster based on the inevitable outcome of human greed in the first place.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#207

Post by twobitshifter »

thechao wrote: post #26

Has anyone seen a good analysis on what went wrong? I found a USAToday article with a partial fragment saying that one of the wheels had a failed bearing, and this was the proximal cause of the derailment. It seems to me that (as pointed out in the article) the mean-time-to-failure increases with the length of the train; perhaps nonlinearly? I think the failure rate of bearings is proportional to the length of the tr…

The hotbox detector could have seen the bearing overheating and been ignored, or have malfunctioned or just not been sensitive enough to detect the problem when the train passed. It’s old tech that should have caught this in most cases. The even older tech solution would be adding a caboose on trains carrying hazardous materials. Maybe you don’t need a caboose today but someone watching cameras in a cube could do the same thing.

ECP does not seem like a solution, and addressing how hazardous chemicals are moved is something that needs to be done.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#208

Post by puffoflogic »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #157
thechao wrote: post #26

Has anyone seen a good analysis on what went wrong? I found a USAToday article with a partial fragment saying that one of the wheels had a failed bearing, and this was the proximal cause of the derailment. It seems to me that (as pointed out in the article) the mean-time-to-failure increases with the length of the train; perhaps nonlinearly? I think the failure rate of bearings is proportional to the length of the tr…

They shipped the wheelset to DC for inspection but we haven't seen the report from that inspection yet. They are also going to inspect the actual site, but are waiting until the site is decontaminated. So we might get a good ruling on the bearing in the coming weeks but based on other reports that I have read (and I quite enjoy the industrial disaster genre of podcast/video) it will probably be a year or two before t…

> are waiting until the site is decontaminated

Right. It's all completely harmless and there's no risk to any residents, but the site is also too contaminated for investigators to make even a very brief visit. Makes sense to me.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#209

Post by pixl97 »

danhor wrote: post #172
fr0sty wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some light googling gives me 390B kilometer-tonnes[1] in Europe and 1.6T ton-miles[2] in the US for 2019. So that is 6x the freight movement. The US rail network also >2x longer than Europe[3] (360,000km vs 151,000km). [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/198443/us-class-i-freigh... [3] https://www.floridarail.com/news/6-key-differences-between-a.…

Cursory googling throws out various different numbers for the rail length with english wikipedia saying that they're both roughly equal size at 210 vs 220 Mm ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran... ) with old UIC data, the German one citing the cia world factbook which specifies 230Mm for the European union and 300Mm for the US ( https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/railways/ ). I hi…

>So the question is does the rate of derailments scale with the number of individual cars or with the number of trains?

You have to take in a much larger number of factors than that.

The railroad industry is currently pushing their new just in time paradigm which has been leading to attempted strikes in the US (Uncle Joe says no) by the railroad workers. The railroad operators are pushing for longer trains, less engineers per train, and less inspection time per car while also playing computerized shipping optimizations that put the number of 'hazards' on a train just below the regulated minimum number of cars so they don't have to declare it.

It's just ironic that this incident that got national news happened so quickly after the railroad co's got their no right to strike validated. It looks like it could very well be their undoing.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#210

Post by triceratops »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #163
akira2501 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If buybacks and dividends are the same thing, then why even allow both to exist? Just eliminate buybacks and enjoy the higher tax revenue. And maybe also accompany it with a tax cut on dividends to even things out slightly. We want companies to become more efficient and increase productivity, but we also want society to benefit from that in the form of higher tax revenue. Eliminating buybacks accomplishes both.

Buybacks juice earnings per share. Stock valuation uses P/E ratio as an input. Meaning buybacks disproportionately benefit upper management, whose compensation is tied to the stock price. There's a principal agent problem here. Management may elect to do a buyback even if it's not in the company's best interest. Dividends don't have that problem.

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