141–150 of 204 posts
Reminder that the US Chemical Safety Board does great investigations into these kinds of accidents. Here’s a famous one from 2007 involving methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (a gasoline additive) at T2 Laboratories in Jacksonville Florida. The CSB has a long record of producing great investigative videos without any partisan or legal bias, as the one shown here demonstrates: https://www.csb.gov/t2-laborato…
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> Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in? Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases. There's a neutralizing chemical that could have been injected to stop the exothermic reaction in its tracks. They didn't have it on site. A "response team" (likely a contractor that responds to chemical emergencies) did, but by the time they sh…
>Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases. And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation. >Chemical A is found to be cancerous Chemical A is assumed to be cancerous by the state of California, you mean?
Do you have a supposed motive?
Any evidence?
Whilst it's a bit of a meme, isn't it just true that a lot of stuff is carcinogenic.
I had wondered the whole time why they didn’t just pierce it with an AM rifle. Would that not have been better than a random partial failure via a crack? Genuinely open question. I don’t know anything about stuff.
If you shoot and pierce a vessel that is pressurised, especially if it’s near its pressure limit anyway, it will explode. Even if it’s just filled with an inert gas. Actually even just making a hole by any means will significantly increase the chances of an explosion. This because the smallest crack can start a chain reaction where the material at the leading edge of the crack is bearing too much stress and the bonds…
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>Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases. And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation. >Chemical A is found to be cancerous Chemical A is assumed to be cancerous by the state of California, you mean?
Are you alleging that California claims stuff to be carcinogenic without evidence? Do you have a supposed motive? Any evidence? Whilst it's a bit of a meme, isn't it just true that a lot of stuff is carcinogenic.
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> And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation. I'll bet a ton of that regulation is insufficient, and/or paid for, or even written by, the industry to make it harder for competitors or to allow them to increase their profits by cutting corners. Regulation isn't some on/off switch that always makes things better or worse. What matters is what those regulations are and who they serve.
Yep and I bet if I reviewed every bit of it line by line I couldnt convince many people to remove any of it. Because Regulation might not be an on/off switch but Deregulation is a complete hard no for most people.
If what you mean by "Deregulation" is "different/better regulation" most people will happily support it. For example, most people would love to have the government just automatically mail them their tax refunds with the paperwork they need to verify it was correct. Standing in their way are companies who have been spending a lot of money on bribes to make sure filing our taxes is as expensive and difficult as possible (https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-sp...)
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Yep and I bet if I reviewed every bit of it line by line I couldnt convince many people to remove any of it. Because Regulation might not be an on/off switch but Deregulation is a complete hard no for most people.
I'd agree that deregulation is a complete hard no for most people, but that's because removing bad/watered down regulation isn't enough. Calling for "deregulation" is like saying "defund the police". A very small number of radicals claim to actually want that, but most people think that something better has to fill the void. Bad regulation needs to be replaced by good regulation. If what you mean by "Deregulation" is…
But once you convince someone that the legislation exists and the penalties exist for supplying fixed line broadband services, the next goal posts slide into place, and they reflexively defend the idea that the government would fine people more for overbuilding the national carrier to a greater extent than importing several kilos of cocaine. They parrot absolutely bonkers shit like "Internet is a natural monopoly" when they literally have to fine people to make it a monopoly.
Most people defend the status quo with extreme vigor. And most people aren't even slightly qualified to analyse the status quo. The supplied alternative doesnt matter. Some person they dont know, doing something they are ambivalent about might find their profession easier. Thats completely verboten.
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That's the deep dive that I want to see. A breakdown of the policy failures that lead to this situation. Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas? Why is this chemical allowed in an area that is considered light manufacturing?
> Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas? Because the tank was there first and morons came later on and said they wanted to build housing, the land was cheap and no zoning was in place to prevent someone from building housing there. Zoning saves lives.
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In California, this is absolutely not the case. Regulations are strict, chemical emissions are heavily restricted and proper disposal of chemicals via specialized companies at great expense. Chemical companies have no need of formulating new versions because everything causes cancer under prop 65. They absolutely have numerous permits for chemicals, your claim that they don't denies reality. This case probably fell t…
The plant was built after the houses but likely well before we had anything resembling modern safety regulations regarding such things. It was presumably grandfathered in for no reason other than that arbitrarily putting someone out of business after the fact is generally frowned upon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291 That company (GKN Aerospace) was recently fined $900k by California for various violati…
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The plant was built after the houses but likely well before we had anything resembling modern safety regulations regarding such things. It was presumably grandfathered in for no reason other than that arbitrarily putting someone out of business after the fact is generally frowned upon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291 That company (GKN Aerospace) was recently fined $900k by California for various violati…
The answer to grandfathering things in is not to give them an indefinite examption from the rules; instead, give them, say, a 10 year period of exemption, giving the owner enough time to fix the defect and to spread the expense of doing so over time. It's not perfect, but eventually everything ends up being fixed.
I think this is an example where it might have been reasonable for the taxpayers to foot a bill to facilitate their relocation 20 or 30 years ago.