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It's becoming more clear that in the US health and safety are taking a back seat to corporate profits. It's shameful to read safety equipment that could have p

by htag 4y ago

It's becoming more clear that in the US health and safety are taking a back seat to corporate profits. It's shameful to read safety equipment that could have prevented this derailment was lobbied against by the railway industry.

lettergram 4y ago
<Insert “always has been” meme> By definition the EPA, FDA, etc give corporations protections from events, not the other way around. For instance, even if a company is provably causing me harm, say through a drug injury, I can’t sue the company for false advertising — FDA approved. How about the EPA? Same deal, I can’t sue a company for causing me injuries due to carbon dioxide, so long as they follow EPA regulations. Historically, before all these agencies you could sue for any injury that caused harm (ie the law).
- sqeaky 4y ago
  You present a view preposterously one-sided. The FDA fines and sues companies not following the rules. They set a floor for behavior and mitigate frivolous lawsuits. This help companies and society, this is better for both. This isn't a pie we are dividing, this is complex system we are building together. The current system isn't perfect but things are clearly better with than without. Businesses know what they can and can't be sued for and overall less bad shit happens to the populace. It isn't like I have the ability to sue people dumping CO2 into the air. Because lawsuits need more than someone polluting, they need someone to break a rule or cause direct harm and for the victim to know who to sue and have money to do it with We could theoretically make these systems better by making the rules better and sometimes we even do.
jerkstate 4y ago
I read a quote that electronically controlled brakes could have prevented this, but haven’t heard a good explanation of why (based on the initial NTSB reporting that the cause was a failed wheel bearing) - I looked up the ex-government person who the quote was attributed to and they now seem to work in private industry selling electronic control systems for trains. Not to definitively say the safety equipment mentioned that was lobbied against would not have prevented this disaster, but do you know more about it?
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  So the traditional brakes use a stream of air to actuate the brakes down the line, the 'signal' in these brakes travels at roughly 1,000ft/second. The train in Ohio was 151 cars long and over 9,000 feet long, so from the moment the conductor tries to emergency brake, it would take over 9 seconds for the cars at the tail of the train to even begin braking vs. electronically controlled ones which brake instantaneously. The ECP wikipedia gets into a lot of the details, but by evenly braking instead of the first cars braking and getting "pushed" by the back ones, you limit the risk of derailment by some amount. The counterfactual of "what would have happened" with them is hard to answer with any certainty, but much less kinetic energy in the system and more even braking could have only helped.
krolden 4y ago
No offense but this was clear since the 70s, if not earlier.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Where humans and heavy machinery interact, there have always been financial incentives to capital to look the other way over safety concerns. There's some really great footage from GM plants in the 30's from a film they made "Master Hands"[0] that shows workers handling red-hot cranks with hand tools in massive forges and other working conditions that would get them immediately shut down by OSHA today. Those regulations came out of the labor movements of the New Deal and the war/post-war. I think the most damning thing is that cases of black lung are actually on the rise in Appalachia in the 21st century because companies have managed to slacken worker protections for coal miners. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8rCNaASlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8rCNaASlc
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Tangentially, from what I hear, proffesional blacksmiths prefer to work without gloves, accepting the risk of burns compared to the better grip it gives them. Where it becomes an issue, is indeed when you are not your own master, and the risk and profit being borne by different people cause warped incentives...

by htag 4y ago

lettergram 4y ago

<Insert “always has been” meme> By definition the EPA, FDA, etc give corporations protections from events, not the other way around. For instance, even if a company is provably causing me harm, say through a drug injury, I can’t sue the company for false advertising — FDA approved. How about the EPA? Same deal, I can’t sue a company for causing me injuries due to carbon dioxide, so long as they follow EPA regulations. Historically, before all these agencies you could sue for any injury that caused harm (ie the law).

sqeaky 4y ago
You present a view preposterously one-sided. The FDA fines and sues companies not following the rules. They set a floor for behavior and mitigate frivolous lawsuits. This help companies and society, this is better for both. This isn't a pie we are dividing, this is complex system we are building together. The current system isn't perfect but things are clearly better with than without. Businesses know what they can and can't be sued for and overall less bad shit happens to the populace. It isn't like I have the ability to sue people dumping CO2 into the air. Because lawsuits need more than someone polluting, they need someone to break a rule or cause direct harm and for the victim to know who to sue and have money to do it with We could theoretically make these systems better by making the rules better and sometimes we even do.

jerkstate 4y ago

I read a quote that electronically controlled brakes could have prevented this, but haven’t heard a good explanation of why (based on the initial NTSB reporting that the cause was a failed wheel bearing) - I looked up the ex-government person who the quote was attributed to and they now seem to work in private industry selling electronic control systems for trains. Not to definitively say the safety equipment mentioned that was lobbied against would not have prevented this disaster, but do you know more about it?

mikeyouse 4y ago
So the traditional brakes use a stream of air to actuate the brakes down the line, the 'signal' in these brakes travels at roughly 1,000ft/second. The train in Ohio was 151 cars long and over 9,000 feet long, so from the moment the conductor tries to emergency brake, it would take over 9 seconds for the cars at the tail of the train to even begin braking vs. electronically controlled ones which brake instantaneously. The ECP wikipedia gets into a lot of the details, but by evenly braking instead of the first cars braking and getting "pushed" by the back ones, you limit the risk of derailment by some amount. The counterfactual of "what would have happened" with them is hard to answer with any certainty, but much less kinetic energy in the system and more even braking could have only helped.

krolden 4y ago

No offense but this was clear since the 70s, if not earlier.

hotpotamus 4y ago
Where humans and heavy machinery interact, there have always been financial incentives to capital to look the other way over safety concerns. There's some really great footage from GM plants in the 30's from a film they made "Master Hands"[0] that shows workers handling red-hot cranks with hand tools in massive forges and other working conditions that would get them immediately shut down by OSHA today. Those regulations came out of the labor movements of the New Deal and the war/post-war. I think the most damning thing is that cases of black lung are actually on the rise in Appalachia in the 21st century because companies have managed to slacken worker protections for coal miners. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8rCNaASlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8rCNaASlc
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Tangentially, from what I hear, proffesional blacksmiths prefer to work without gloves, accepting the risk of burns compared to the better grip it gives them. Where it becomes an issue, is indeed when you are not your own master, and the risk and profit being borne by different people cause warped incentives...