Politics is complicated and often has competing goals, but this seems at odds with the equally loud MAHA movement.
U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
161–170 of 257 posts
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think this is pretty consistent with the old school 1950s views of the current administration. The effects are functionally the same, but I think the ideology and rhetoric behind then and now have changed. There really isn't a purportedly "principled" system of logic behind these decisions, in the past these decisions would be dressed in principled rhetoric no matter how heinous they realistically were. They aren…
The principle is the rate of profit is falling, competing countries are rising, and they want to unleash the private sector in the hopes of raising GDP growth significantly enough to retain hegemony. This won't work, because they're fucking stupid, and they'll damage the health of the population and the productivity of the land and waters going forward, but there is a logic to it.
Remember when putting lead into atmosphere made entire gnerations stupid by lowering IQs? Maybe that is the goal.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny as it sounds, the real problem (or at least one of them) is that no one cares about long run profits anymore.
Why do profits, and the stock market, continue going up then? I've heard this nonsense about corporate short termism for decades, and the long term just never seems to arrive.
everyone pivotted to ai from their pivot to the metaverse which was a pivot to blockchain
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#164Much more cutting is required to balance the budget.
There's simply no balancing the budget without both raising taxes and cutting social services. We should, of course, be efficient with our money. Any dollar we can save is a good thing but until I hear someone talk about raising taxes and cutting social spending I'm not going to take serious the idea that we're trying to balance the budget.
They are cutting social spending and healthcare spending. It wont offset tax cuts for the rich, but the cruelty is the point and watching people suffer is fun to republicans.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#165make AMERICA the FIRST world country with the most third world disasters
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't actually save any money or make anyone much more money. It's just a result of mindlessly fetishizing the past and misattributing past periods of rapid industrial growth to lack of regulation. The real cause was rapid population growth at the time, war, and extremely rapid adoption of bedrock industrial age technologies like electricity. Today we have a fully deployed modern inf…
I don't really buy this since China has industrialized rapidly without much population growth at all. They have built infrastructure like high speed rail that we are unable to build in the US, so I also don't buy the "fully deployed modern infrastructure" line.
China went from a few tens of millions of modern people to over a billion modern people. Look at it that way. They weren’t new people but they were economically speaking.
The US is all modern people with little population growth. We have no giant wave of latent demand.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#167I think this is pretty consistent with the old school 1950s views of the current administration. Companies can prioritize profits over people again. Yeah, dump in the rivers, dump in the woods, just drive around in circles dumping in an empty lot. You don’t need masks- give everyone cancer and blow some shit up, maybe get some acid burns. Super-fund sites? When was the last one we had anyway- we need more of ‘em- lot…
> I think this is pretty consistent with the old school 1950s views of the current administration. The effects are functionally the same, but I think the ideology and rhetoric behind then and now have changed. There really isn't a purportedly "principled" system of logic behind these decisions, in the past these decisions would be dressed in principled rhetoric no matter how heinous they realistically were. They aren…
The ideology of "infinite growth" is driving on bare metall by now, every movement proofing more and more, that it has used it all up, the momentum, the resources, the people who belief in its tale.
The building up backlash is going to be horrific and i hope it will not lead to decomplexification movements ala pol pot or islamism.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#168[flagged]
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Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#169You have to check out their incredible safety investigation videos on youtube. I don't know how well-organized or efficient they are but clearly their role needs to be played by someone - and as a taxpayer I appreciate that they are doing it in a way that educates and informs.
> I don't know how well-organized or efficient they are They're 50 employees with an annual budget of $14.4 million. The cost/benefit ratio here is very good.
For that trivial amount this has to be anti-tech anti-science thinking at work.
What's this administration trying do, return the US to the Third World or the Dark Ages? Madness.
Re: U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
#170I love the USCSB videos and in couple incidents I likely protected myself and others from an accident due to risk awareness I had as a result of their videos. (e.g. most recently the realization that few micron tungsten powder might be significantly pyrophoric at elevated temperature-- which it is).
I'm also a fan of their written reports, which are much more informative than the videos but less well known.
But contrary to other posters here I'm less convinced that it's so obviously cost effective: $14.4 million dollars a year isn't much compared to the staggering waste in other federal programs. But it certainly sounds like a lot compared to only investigating 180 incidents over 27 years-- 6 incidents a year (which is also the figure for 2022 so it's not just a product of a slow ramp though some years have less or more).
So it's something like more than a million dollars an incident which seems not so efficient.
It's also a small enough scale that it ought to be pretty reasonable to fund it through the industries directly.
That said, OSHA's budget is more like $700 million a year... and I'd rather see CSB's funding just come out of that. If public money is to be spent supporting industries, I'd rather more go to investigations and education than on a regulatory empire.