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Glad to see this, and if Norfolk Southern goes bankrupt, all assets go to the cleanup and high level execs are changed or are forced to pay the difference. Als
by jmclnx 4y ago
Glad to see this, and if Norfolk Southern goes bankrupt, all assets go to the cleanup and high level execs are changed or are forced to pay the difference.
Also, with this being in Ohio, I hope people in Ohio realize how valuable the EPA is and stop voting for people who want to cut every Gov Program except for Defense.
- xadhominemx 4y agoI think you’re overestimating the cost of this cleanup by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. Vinyl chloride is not particularly toxic, has low environmental persistence, and does not bioaccumulate.
- spaceguillotine 4y agowait for the civil suits for all the animal die offs for ag industry, and medical bills from exposure... then tell us how cheap it will be. I hope they end up in Jail.
- xadhominemx 4y agoWhich animal die offs? Like I said, vinyl chloride has very poor environmental and biological persistence. Any die off of livestock that was going to happen would have happened 2 weeks ago.
- digdugdirk 4y agoThe medical costs alone should be an eye popping number. Its going to be interesting to see the interplay between infrastructure/healthcare/environmental regulations with this completely preventable, entirely foreseeable accident over the coming years.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoWhat medical costs? The town has ~4000 residents. If they pay for several doctors visits and checkups, we are talking about a couple million dollars. They could cover health insurance for the entire town for a similar cost per year. Replacing the train is likely to be more expensive. The real cost will probably be environmental testing and remediation. Even if there isn't an big impact, it will take a lot of money to collect the data to prove it.
- digdugdirk 4y agoI was thinking lifetime costs. Every future case of cancer is going to be looked at and traced back, whether it's known to be directly attributable to the event or not. This is just a huge (un)natural experiment.
- InCityDreams 4y agoHearsay: in Germany if US vehicle kills a pig, uncle sam is on the line for 6 generations of what hat pig could produce ...
- HarryHirsch 4y agoWell, yes. But there was also several tank cars of acrylic ester that were breached and whose contents are now on the way into the groundwater. Anyone whose water is from a private well is not to be envied.
- xadhominemx 4y agoAre you talking about Ethylhexyl acrylate? Not very toxic outside of high dose acute exposures.
- jacquesm 4y ago> Not very toxic outside of high dose acute exposures Such as when your well is contaminated...
- thatguy0900 4y agoSurely you would volunteer to drink low doses in all your drinking water for the rest of your life then?
- xadhominemx 4y agoIf I drank private well water in east Palestine I would make sure that contamination was closely monitored and drink bottled water for a while. Drinking water from the tap? Yes I would do that.
- HarryHirsch 4y agoI take you have never handled acrylic esters - the stuff smells distressing, it's likely a sensitizer, and from its reactivity it just can't be good for you.
- xadhominemx 4y agoI was a chemistry major and spent a lot of time handling vocs in lab
- mushbino 4y agoI'm really hoping the residents and rail workers realize they need to come together for this common cause. Unfortunately, busting the rail strike as both parties did only contributes to this problem in a major way. Nobody is coming to save us. These issues can only be resolved with people coming together in collective action. As a side note, i hope they go bankrupt and we expropriate them. Railroads are too important to leave largely to the private sector. Our rail infrastructure compared to really any developed nation is abysmally sad.
- kflfpfp 4y ago[flagged]
- a_JIT_pie 4y agoA big reason Amtrak is so shit is due to private rail industry taking priority on our shitty track infrastructure.
- User23 4y agoIt used to be any railroad that wanted to carry US Mail, so all of them, was required to hitch at least one passenger car onto their trains. The railroad executives insisted that this was so burdensome it would put them out of business so the law was changed. But before that change you could take a train to literally anywhere in the USA where freight trains go, which is basically everywhere including many small towns. E.B. White wrote a marvelous essay on the subject called The Railroad.
- Meerax 4y agoOur rail infrastructure is abysmal. Nationalizing it is perhaps not the way to go, but a serious change needs to happen. Speaking as a former Ohioan who grew up in the Ohio river valley.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoName a country with good rail that hasn't nationalized it (hint, you can't).
- it_citizen 4y agoUnfortunately they rarely cut programs immediately. It would be too easy to see the consequences. Instead: 1) freeze or reduce the budget 2) put incompetent people in charge with crazy mission statements 3) wait a bit for the program to fail and skilled employees to leave 4) point at how inefficient and useless the government program is 5) replace it by private sector and contractors It is a classic move and not just in the US.
- piva00 4y agoA classic example of this strategy being used in the past 10-20 years outside of the US is the UK's NHS. It's been slowly crippled, putting more and more pressure in the system, and eventually the solution to be proposed when the system finally collapses through malicious maladministration will be to privatise it.
- the_optimist 4y agoIf this idea were completely backwards, there would be no way to tell the difference from what you’ve suggested. In fact, there isn’t even a basic counterexample that holds without predominant confounding factors. In other words, unfortunately, this is theory is a non-falsifiable conspiracy theory. Edit: It is rather validating when poking a pet theory produces a negative yet non-substantive response. Sure, go on believing in fairies and yeti. Best of luck to your children.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoYou might have got more traction had you provided at least one alternative explanation, or at least provided more detail as to why you believe the given explanation to be non-falsifiable. It seems obvious to me that it would be falsifiable by looking at a statement like "putting more and more pressure on the system" and seeing if that has actually been happening.
- piva00 4y agoJeremy Hunt co-authored this in 2005 [0]. Look at the bits about denationalising the NHS. I'd like to see your rebuttal to this book, genuinely [1]. Edit: also this op-ed contains some more examples of the process going on [2]. Please, refrain from name-calling and instead point exactly where I'm wrong on what you so called a "conspiracy theory". It's a baseless comment and you haven't provided me anything to look further. [0] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ebr.2005.05417eab.006/full/html https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ebr.2005... [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Dismantle-NHS-Easy-Steps/dp/1785350455 https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Dismantle-NHS-Easy-Steps/dp/178... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/25/boris-johnson-conservatives-nhs-funding https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/25/boris-...
- MSFT_Edging 4y agoFines need to start being paid in company stock, its the only thing companies are beholden to. Everything else is just a price to wreck havoc. The more the company purposefully puts people in danger, the more nationally owned they are. Especially when it comes to infrastructure like this. "Sorry, you've been nationalized due to your continued efforts in proving you cannot be trusted". Fines large enough to matter would arguably hurt infrastructure and safety. Start taking shares.
- ROTMetro 4y agoThis is a great idea. And I like the idea of fines being X% shares outstanding, not X dollars as that proportionally penalizes shareholders for not being good corporate owners. It's a win in so many ways.
- gretch 4y agoThis probably doesn’t do the thing you want it to do 1) if there is a demand to have something, it usually raises price of that thing. You could interpret this as a forced buyback, which may raise prices of shares (and thus reward bad behavior) 2) what does the govt do with the stock after it has the stock? It doesn’t have a system for processing it, as it does with USD Also, why shouldn’t you penalize shareholders? In the future they’ll think twice about investing in companies that cut corners to juice short term gains
- shanebellone 4y ago"Also, why shouldn’t you penalize shareholders? In the future they’ll think twice about investing in companies that cut corners to juice short term gains" +1 Losses speak louder than words.
- riffic 4y agothe federal government can step in and nationalize the railroad at any point as it has done in the past (woodrow wilson era iirc)
- jimkleiber 4y agoI wonder if expanding our definition of defense would help...EPA defends the air and water and other public sources from things that will harm the environment and us. Literally has "protection" in the name. Maybe we think it's only protecting the "environment" and that we are separate from the environment.
- gretch 4y agoI think the left usually has very weak messaging (as opposed to the right which has strong messaging but is sometimes just blatantly false). Maybe you could call voters to action by saying we need to “protect our -lands-“ (stronger ring than air or water) or even better, “protect our -people- from having to live in a toxic environment”.
- dahfizz 4y agoI find the current situation really ironic. In my experience, conservatives care way more about the environment than anyone. They are the people who live, hunt, hike, farm, fish in the woods. The average conservative farmer/hillbilly has a much more personal connection with "the environment" than the average urban liberal. But all things environment became associated with the left, so republicans have to reject it as a matter of course. I think we need one good advertising campaign to seriously change people's minds. Something like, "Be a good steward of God's green earth". If we spoke their language, it would click.
- jimkleiber 4y agoI agree with both of you. I talked with a friend about this a while back and it seemed that so much of the language about climate change focused on evoking fear of apocalypse, and overlooked so many other emotions related to the environment. I wondered what it'd look like if instead of showing photos of ducks in oil, we talked about what pristine nature looks like, feels like smells like. Crystal clear waters, creeks one can drink from, etc. Maybe the combination. Something pulling on other emotions besides just terror.
- irrational 4y agoWhy defense? If someone seriously attacked the USA, Ohio would be one of the last places they would go for. It would be the Democrat states like CA and NY that would be hit first. You would think they would be in favor of having less defense so those liberals in CA can be taken out.
- suresk 4y agoThere is no credible threat of invasion of the mainland US, even with a much smaller military, so the difference in threat to CA/NY vs Ohio is pretty small. And, at any rate, Defense budget support is more due to economic implications of bases/contractors in the states/districts of people in congress and military worship/nationalism in the US than it is any sort of logical assessment of threats.
- xwdv 4y agoWhy would high level execs be forced to pay a difference? They are ultimately just employees. Does a senior software engineer get forced to pay a difference when a critical error results in damages to an end user?
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoIt's much more complex than "EPA good". The EPA wasn't looking like they were gonna do much until the situation was so fucked, or at least fucked looking, that there were potential political brownie points to be earned crapping on their inaction at which point they cleaned up their act and did something. Environmental protection has been a very mixed bag for middle America over the past ~60yr. This disaster is doing anything but endearing the EPA to the people of Ohio or Middle America generally. I think at best it's a lateral move.