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Not sure if adding sovereign immunity to the situation would help. Managers take shortcuts to get ahead in a lot of situations; consider, for instance, Chernoby

Not sure if adding sovereign immunity to the situation would help. Managers take shortcuts to get ahead in a lot of situations; consider, for instance, Chernobyl. It’s one of the reasons I think the “prioritizing profits” narrative rings hollow. Any profits they would have preserved by not-stopping for the first hotbox detector? Already burned by the costs of the closure and the response so far. If anything, chasing profits better would have prevented this.

Macha 4y ago
It's more so chasing short term profits. How many of the executives and decision makers responsible for the issues of the rail workers have moved on and don't need to deal with the consequences of this? Sure, it sucks for the final set of shareholders and execs holding the bill, but capitalism rewarded all their predecessors.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> Not sure if adding sovereign immunity to the situation would help. It would help me rationalise why no decisions maker ever goes to jail after their decisions kill people, even when they are private companies
Spooky23 4y ago
Remember the profit gets realized upfront and benefits the leadership. The disaster is the future guy‘a problem.
- iinnPP 4y ago
  Surely related to another story on HN right now about long term and short term estimates. Like these powerful people can't look through history at what comes when the line is finally crossed for enough people.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Yup. It also goes to a lot of an irrational opposition to labor. People who make decisions like this don’t like the inconvenience of someone questioning her decisions.
sophacles 4y ago
I dunno, that seems to ignore the fact that norfolk southern, the operator of this train, a profitable company for quite a while now, literally lobbied to reduce the hazardous materials safety requirements because they weren't making enough profits. It also seems to ignore that the same company participated in claiming that the workers' often stated concerns for safety were just people being greedy and that they would lose some profit if they implemented safer conditions.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> chasing profits better would have prevented this No. Chasing profits is the reason the train did not stop after the hot box detection. It would have been late.
wolrah 4y ago
> It’s one of the reasons I think the “prioritizing profits” narrative rings hollow. Any profits they would have preserved by not-stopping for the first hotbox detector? Already burned by the costs of the closure and the response so far. If anything, chasing profits better would have prevented this. It's not about this incident, it's about all the other times they did the same thing and got away with it. Every train that didn't stop in a similar situation and didn't cause a major problem was a win to the company. Whatever stopping a train costs, they saved that amount every single time they didn't do it, and if they did this regularly that number probably adds up. There's a concept in risk management called the swiss cheese model[1] where you think of your layers of protection like a stack of swiss cheese slices. Every individual layer has its holes, but as you stack them up the number of paths through the whole stack gets smaller and smaller. In a sufficiently protected system, causing a major problem should require multiple layers to fail or be bypassed. The trick of course is that this also generally means that when commercial pressure and/or individual laziness leads to one or more of the layers being bypassed it won't usually cause an immediate problem because other layers are still covering most of the holes, but the safety margin might now be a single layer instead of three so one more failure can cause a catastrophe. Layers of protection cost money so it's not exactly rocket surgery to understand why those focused on profits, especially those who are primarily interested in short term profits, constantly apply pressure to bypass or shortcut those layers as much as people feel they can get away with. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Macha 4y ago

It's more so chasing short term profits. How many of the executives and decision makers responsible for the issues of the rail workers have moved on and don't need to deal with the consequences of this? Sure, it sucks for the final set of shareholders and execs holding the bill, but capitalism rewarded all their predecessors.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> Not sure if adding sovereign immunity to the situation would help. It would help me rationalise why no decisions maker ever goes to jail after their decisions kill people, even when they are private companies

Spooky23 4y ago

Remember the profit gets realized upfront and benefits the leadership. The disaster is the future guy‘a problem.

iinnPP 4y ago
Surely related to another story on HN right now about long term and short term estimates. Like these powerful people can't look through history at what comes when the line is finally crossed for enough people.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Yup. It also goes to a lot of an irrational opposition to labor. People who make decisions like this don’t like the inconvenience of someone questioning her decisions.

sophacles 4y ago

I dunno, that seems to ignore the fact that norfolk southern, the operator of this train, a profitable company for quite a while now, literally lobbied to reduce the hazardous materials safety requirements because they weren't making enough profits. It also seems to ignore that the same company participated in claiming that the workers' often stated concerns for safety were just people being greedy and that they would lose some profit if they implemented safer conditions.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

> chasing profits better would have prevented this No. Chasing profits is the reason the train did not stop after the hot box detection. It would have been late.

wolrah 4y ago

> It’s one of the reasons I think the “prioritizing profits” narrative rings hollow. Any profits they would have preserved by not-stopping for the first hotbox detector? Already burned by the costs of the closure and the response so far. If anything, chasing profits better would have prevented this. It's not about this incident, it's about all the other times they did the same thing and got away with it. Every train that didn't stop in a similar situation and didn't cause a major problem was a win to the company. Whatever stopping a train costs, they saved that amount every single time they didn't do it, and if they did this regularly that number probably adds up. There's a concept in risk management called the swiss cheese model[1] where you think of your layers of protection like a stack of swiss cheese slices. Every individual layer has its holes, but as you stack them up the number of paths through the whole stack gets smaller and smaller. In a sufficiently protected system, causing a major problem should require multiple layers to fail or be bypassed. The trick of course is that this also generally means that when commercial pressure and/or individual laziness leads to one or more of the layers being bypassed it won't usually cause an immediate problem because other layers are still covering most of the holes, but the safety margin might now be a single layer instead of three so one more failure can cause a catastrophe. Layers of protection cost money so it's not exactly rocket surgery to understand why those focused on profits, especially those who are primarily interested in short term profits, constantly apply pressure to bypass or shortcut those layers as much as people feel they can get away with. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model