Certified doge moment.
Waiting for all of the people who said that doge would lead to increased efficiency (or at the very least a smaller deficit) to say they're wrong.
U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
131–140 of 257 posts
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going this way we should ban the word "objective", because no knowledge can be objective, because you need a thinking subject to process raw data to create knowledge. Going this way we'll risk to end up in a world, where there is no truth and no falsehoods. All we'll have is something in between. It would take just one small step to say that any two opinions are equal in their utility. You know, it is like Kremlin pr…
We are living in a post-truth world, and more specifically, a post truth country in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/informed-societies/post... https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14214
Oh, it is all about dumb people who cannot navigate the current informational landscape. Or about people who relies on informational processing disabilities of others. It doesn't mean that smart people should reject the notions of truth and false.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#133Admittedly, I'd never heard of the CSB until this article but their mission - from their "About Us" page - seems important:
"The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating chemical incidents to determine the cause or probable cause."
Out of curiosity, I looked up the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment in 2023 and can't find their investigation on their site in either the active or completed investigation sections. Looking elsewhere, I'm only finding FEMA's concerns about cancer clusters, nothing from the CSB. Can anyone else find it?
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#134It is highly surprising that the narrative in the US has morphed the expenses on public institutions of enormous importance, into wastage , something that has to be cut or eliminated. Why is it that no one is pointing out the contribution of these institutions to the US and the world? The US, has a society, has grown so materialistic, that they fail to see anything beyond money. Somethings cannot be measured by money…
> The US, has a society, has grown so materialistic, that they fail to see anything beyond money. And which society are you contrasting this with?
Europe and many developing countries still have national programs in various important sectors like Health, Education and mental health.
A lot of the worlds govts spend a lot through public institutions.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
The population thing is pretty elementary. If population is flat to declining, then growth is demand constrained. There are some areas where you could uncap growth by cutting regulation, but they're not this. The #1 one I'm aware of is housing construction in high cost metros.
I see your point, but not totally buying it. The US innovates for a global population, one that’s still growing. The best way to infer causality is through experimentation. If regulation does go away, we’ll measure and learn if it actually worked.
Reagan cut regulation, and manufacturing still left, quick as ever.
I assume that is due to larger trends. Population growth has slowed considerably and there's more competition than ever. Worldwide fertility rates have dropped from 4.7 to 2.3 in the last 75 years, and in that time the U.S. share of world GDP dropped from about 50% to 25%.
My two cents: We may be already be in uncharted economic territory with regards to shrinking workforces, retirees, pollution, etc. How much of our economy is dependent on growth? We may find out. Places like Japan, Korea and Europe are leading the way. Ponzi schemes won't work forever. The world is getting smaller and older. And evening out. There's less room for arbitrage. Innovation is coming from all directions. Technology can still increase productivity. But it could also put masses of people out of work, leaving not enough demand for the latest and greatest. That, and a pie that is no longer growing, could cause a lot of social friction.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#136Save lives?: X Increase safety?: X Make more money?: YES The USCSB makes life safer for everyone in this country, especially people that work around potentially dangerous chemicals and pressurized equipment.
It's always a matter of time before a facility explodes for preventable reasons and costs the company billions in property damage and lawsuits. This decision to stop learning from mistakes and spreading awareness will hurt profits in the long run, not make more money. It'll also be harder to find people willing to work around chemicals if they can't trust the safety measures.
Bankruptcy. The people who profited the most will not see any consequences.
That's the beauty of our system: companies are at fault, not people, and companies can be destroyed and remade at will.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#137Much more cutting is required to balance the budget.
Penny wise but pound foolish.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote elsewhere: > Please note that the CSB is not an enforcement agency - they don’t assign fault or levee fines or bring any charges or write any regulation.
I don't necessarily think that goes against what the parent commenter is saying. The CSB does apparently do investigations and root cause analysis of chemical accidents and spills - in my mind they sound analogous to the NTSB and how they investigate aviation accidents. So, by that analogy, I think the NTSB is amazing and has done crucial, instrumental work that makes flying safer (as the saying goes, aviation regula…
To be honest, I’d never heard of them until now. Industry runs on Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), which are privately produced. The thing is, the hazards for chemicals at least are highly standardized. The nature of e.g. ammonium perchlorate doesn’t change much depending on where it comes from. No one needs to write their own MSDS.
Safety operationally is regulated by OSHA, based on the MSDS among other things. It isn’t entirely clear where the CSB fits in. There aren’t many surprises in chemistry and OSHA is aggressive.
The safety protocols are pretty straightforward forward and strict, there isn’t much novelty in chemical disasters. Chemical disasters are virtually always for stupid reasons covered by other regulatory organizations.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't necessarily think that goes against what the parent commenter is saying. The CSB does apparently do investigations and root cause analysis of chemical accidents and spills - in my mind they sound analogous to the NTSB and how they investigate aviation accidents. So, by that analogy, I think the NTSB is amazing and has done crucial, instrumental work that makes flying safer (as the saying goes, aviation regula…
To be honest, I’d never heard of them until now. Industry runs on Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), which are privately produced. The thing is, the hazards for chemicals at least are highly standardized. The nature of e.g. ammonium perchlorate doesn’t change much depending on where it comes from. No one needs to write their own MSDS. Safety operationally is regulated by OSHA, based on the MSDS among other things. I…
MSDS is just a small part of process safety. CSB deals with the very largest industrial accidents. These are at plants where millions of pounds of chemical flow through any pipe every day.
The examples you mention about MSDS sounds relevant to a large building/warehouse, but we’re talking about massive industrial complexes nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila.
At that scale, there are still plenty of surprises. Like, “oh shit, I didn’t realize the new version of the lubricating oil the manufacturer recommends for our massive pumps have a different additive that reacts with an impurity in our process stream which catalyzes an exothermic reaction”.
I highly recommend a very short book named “What Went Wrong” by Trevor Kletz. It’s surprisingly entertaining and walks you through basic things that have caused disasters at countless chemical plants over and over again.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuance is not always a good thing. This type of nuance doesn’t forward the discussion in any way and, in this case, muddies the waters and leads to some odd implications. Sure, we can say there is no objective source of truth and chastise the author for using that word, but the term objective in this case has meaning that the author is trying to articulate… most likely that there is some overtly unbiased information…
> there is some overtly unbiased information source, in opposition to the information sourced from the company which has obvious incentives. Yes I don’t believe in unbiased sources. I believe in multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth. > you are (possibly inadvertently) claiming that the company is also providing a different source of truth Correct. And I don’t buy the dichotomy you are framing of biased…
Re: overlap with other agency's responsibility
So you would prefer that only one agency speak with one voice on a subject? Sounds very counter to the "multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth" principle you espoused. In practice, government agencies often have disagreements in areas of overlap and hash it out before making a public recommendation, or settling on a course of action.