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Leaked audio reveals US rail workers were told to skip inspections

316 points by detaro 4y ago

falcolas 4y ago
When a company values profits above all else, the only thing that can save us from that company’s gross negligence is fines strong enough to eliminate those very same profits (and ideally the company’s budget for bribing politicians too).
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Should be on a case by case basis. If eliminating profits causes 11 other people in the company to lose their jobs, is it worth it?
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  Not even fines to the company will stop it. You have to go directly after the people who are making decisions for the company. Executives seem to have a pretty good time tanking companies to line their pockets and then leave before the company has to deal with the fallout.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    I really wish I could refute this. The protections incorporation provides for executives seem a bit too strong in cases like these.
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      Which protections are these? I thought that incorporation didn't give any protections for maliciousness, it's just that DAs rarely go after executives because any particular blame is so distributed throughout the corporation that it would make any case difficult to prosecute.
      - genocidicbunny 4y ago
        The diffusion of responsibility is one of those protections. There should definitely be some strict liability for certain corporate malfeasance, where it doesn't too much matter who specifically did the deed, the executive/C-level is responsible and takes the fall (and maybe throw the BoD in there too). Then prosecution comes down to 'Did your company do X? If yes, you're guilty.'
        a_cardboard_box 4y ago
        Not only would that be effective in disincentivizing the malfeasance, it has the added benefit of limiting the scale of corporations to what execs can effectively manage.
        ocdtrekkie 4y ago
        Exactly. If the CEO goes to prison if the company commits X crime, the CEO has a strong incentive to ensure the business is not doing that. If the CEO's only concern is shareholder profit, crime usually pays pretty well.
        ticviking 4y ago
        The idea that a 10000 year jail sentence must be served by every share holder disturbed in proportion to how much they owe would make “shareholder value” mean “not making me check into jail to serve my 2 days of the sentence for my 1 share” which might change corporate behavior a bit. Especially if insuring shareholders income against that risk becomes a line item in the budget.
        ocdtrekkie 4y ago
        I think shareholders might be too detached from decisionmaking for that to make sense. It'd definitely have a huge negative impact on stock values, but I'm not sure it would prevent corporate malfeasance.
        4y ago
  - kingTug 4y ago
    I always wonder what will come first: laws to jail negligent execs for the next disaster, or an ambitious legislator with a magic solution to jail negligent execs for the current disaster.
    - RajT88 4y ago
      Neither. There's a web of power and influence invisible to people who aren't part of the system. Politicians who could create this legislation don't get reelected if they aren't participants; their election war chest evaporates. This is how monied interests managed to design the system to work.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      Where by "magic" you mean an ex post facto law? I'm all for going after execs for their crimes, but let's try to keep that particular part of the constitution in tact.
      - neltnerb 4y ago
        The article describes some pretty blatant negligence, though I suppose suggesting that a legislator might get involved implies ex-post facto lawmaking. Maybe the responsibility is too diffuse. But these "no one could have predicted this" kind of Therac-25 situations with multiple people responsible are exactly where that boss -- the one getting paid the big bucks (for the risk they take! for the difficult decisions they have to make! for the complex structures they have to oversee!) -- to actually take responsibility for the decisions inherent in the incentive structure they created in the workplace that they have total control over.
        gruez 4y ago
        > The article describes some pretty blatant negligence Is it? The article tries strongly to imply that the whistleblower is right and the manager is wrong, but that's never conclusively established. With the same facts presented in the article, I can paint a different story of the whistleblower trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill, and how he was obviously wrong everyone else seems to think it's fine.
  - blue039 4y ago
    It is interesting that we can use RICO go to after mob bosses even when they have layers and layers of indirection to protect them. But with CEOs it seems RICO doesn't apply.
    - ticviking 4y ago
      CEOs generally aren’t racketeering so they can’t usually be hit with that
      - blue039 4y ago
        The main driver of RICO, however, wasn't to stop racketeering. It provided the provisions for the FBI to pursue mob bosses for hits they ordered. Prior to RICO it was very difficult to throw a mob boss in jail for such things. All we need to do is extract that portion of the bill. However, I suspect the answer is like usual. Congress does not represent the people and their corporate owners would not be pleased. Larry Fink would probably have a millenia worth of consecutive life sentences alone. We might spur innovation in healthcare technology just making him serve the time he owes.
    - ydlr 4y ago
      The reason for that is there are only a tiny number of crimes that qualify as RICO predicates. We need to expand RICO to include more types of criminal activity.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
    Exactly, fining companies doesn't do anything. Fine and jail the PEOPLE doing these crimes.
    - somenameforme 4y ago
      There's always plausible deniability so that if anybody does take the fall it's probably going to be some mid level suit that was 'just following orders.' I'd rather that liability starts with the CEO and Chairman. You need to make sure executives cannot simply hide behind fallguys. You then create a top-down incentive for these people to genuinely make sure everything is on the up and up. The biggest problem is that this probably creates a strict cap on how large a single corporation can grow, which sounds much more like a feature than a bug.
      - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
        This is all well and good to say, but impossible to implement within our current system. That's what's so depressing about it. And by 'impossible' I grant its theoretically possible, just not in practical terms. Of course the other side of the coin is that even if it was implemented, then prosecutors, and hence government, would now have this new power over CEOs and it wouldn't be long before some corrupt politician got in office and used it corruptly.
        eunoia 4y ago
        Sarbanes-Oxley would seem to imply that it’s possible to enact new laws that enforce consequences for fraud among top level executives? In theory at least I guess. Maybe someone else can comment on how it actually works in practice.
        Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
        Its not enough for the laws to exist, they must also be enforced.
      - gruez 4y ago
  - gumby 4y ago
    > You have to go directly after the people who are making decisions for the company. Usually in this case the person really making the decision doesn't take the blame; that just flows downhill.
  - lost_tourist 4y ago
    Yeah, it's one thing when you make some billionaires lose money, it's another thing when you potentially give thousands of people cancer because you polluted their land and air with carcinogens.
- voytec 4y ago
  Cost of fines would be transferred to customers. What can hurt is jail.
  - eastbound 4y ago
    HSBC leaders never went to jail for being the bank of trafficking $2bn of drugs. As in, they recognized the deed, and signed off with the DoJ a deal with no executive would be sent to prison. Truth be told, CIA needed the drug sales to fund ISIS before it was cool, but I digress. Anyway, if you expect corporations to be held responsible in penal courts…
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Breach the corporate veil. Throw any share holders in jail for varying times.
  - jakzurr 4y ago
    A most appropriate use for prisons in the US. Finally.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    If a company can just pass fines on to the consumer and not suffer badly for it, competition in their market is totally fucked. Which, sure, is probably true in many industries, but it's not supposed to be the case that any given business can just pass extra costs to consumers. If they could, they should already have been charging higher prices.
    - techdragon 4y ago
      Railroad companies basically don’t have competition. Check out a track ownership map and see how little overlap there is, if you need to use the railroad to move stuff odds are you have one choice, and when it goes further than their track, sometimes you’ll have to truck it from one rail yard to another company’s rail yard because there’s so little interaction between railroads.
      - 4y ago
- deepsun 4y ago
  Not always. It's not law enforcement that keeps everyone from committing crimes, because you cannot put a policeman watching everyone. Way more efficient way is self-policing, that's the main difference of developed cultures IMO.
- haliskerbas 4y ago
  That's kind of the definition of a company in our current system. It's working as designed.
- sebazzz 4y ago
  That's why companies cannot be allowed to run a nuclear power plant. A place where negligence has no place.
  - abfan1127 4y ago
    can you point out a human organization not susceptible to negligence?
    - jraph 4y ago
      There's a question of motivation. A public service ought to be motivated to deliver a good service. It won't be motivated by taking shortcuts. A private company seeks profit and cannot afford to lose money, contrary to a public service which can be not profitable. Offering a good service it a means to be profitable but that's not the end goal, even if many people actually want to do good work. Of course there's a big if. IF the government throws enough money at it. This IF is unfortunately too often "IF only". If not, we are back to shortcuts.
      - stickfigure 4y ago
        The service I get from AAA's DMV services is far superior to the service I get from the DMV itself.
      - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
        bureaucrats and civil servants get paid regardless of how shit they do their jobs because the government puts a gun to your head to pay their wages and consume whatever service they provide (also applies to some "private" companies)
  - notch898a 4y ago
    They should be run by an entity devoid of negligence, like the US government.
  - quorgs 4y ago
    Can't disagree but The Ministry of Medium Machine-Building Industry of the USSR wasn't exactly driven by profit motive and we still got Chernobyl.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  We're not only not going to fine them, but we're going to make special laws to protect them from the threat of their employees getting sick days.
- groot2581 4y ago
  This only works if execs have the company's best interests at heart, which they don't. They reap the benefits when things go well but jump ship as the company files bankruptcy when things go south. You need Unions. Blue collar workers care about safety and can pressure execs into doing the safe thing when the incentives aren't there higher up.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Also labour protections when reasonable action is taken to stop unsafe acts. If someone got fired for stopping unsafe thing they should get big enough payout. Probably years worth of wages.
    - notch898a 4y ago
      That exists. https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/mou/2012-07-16 https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/mou/2012-07-16 Note regarding "refusing to work under certain conditions:" https://www.osha.gov/workers/right-to-refuse https://www.osha.gov/workers/right-to-refuse I used to work in interstate freight (barge, not train). They make it crystal clear any employee has the right to stop work and are protected. The rail workers could have stopped working under their dangerous conditions, they just negligently kept going. The big bad railroad is to blame, but so are the employees.
      - vsareto 4y ago
        The regulation was vague, so now you have a situation where two sides are interpreting things differently: >She said: “The regulation at the time stated that a wheel bearing was bad when it had ‘visible seepage’. But that was very vague, and the bosses used that vagueness to their advantage. For me, it was whenever oil was visible on the bearing. For my bosses, they wanted actual droplets and proof it would leak on the ground. That's probably why we have an audio leak story, because the company may have some ground to stand on because of this vagueness.
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    > You need Unions. The railway has unions. They even wanted to strike at the end of last year over working conditions, but Congress and Biden quickly passed a law in December to prevent it.
- pasquinelli 4y ago
  just nationalize it
  - gruez 4y ago
    Because the US government never did anything negligent/shady right?
- boringg 4y ago
  Fines?! No, executives doing jail time is the only solution.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  As another HN poster posted fines need to be 1-10% per incident of controlling stock put into trust of the relevant enforcement agency unable to be sold or diluted for 10 years. Can't get your act together then eventually overship/control/adult supervision goes to the government.
brainzap 4y ago
I have some Atlas Shrugged vibes
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  The part where federal bureaucrats ordered a train to unsafely transit a tunnel and caused a massive explosion?
- throwway120385 4y ago
  Her whole deal in that book was that regulations are bad and that they are used as a cudgel by established players. Here we have an example of what happens when regulations are rolled back -- the profit motive takes over, eliminates safety measures, and eventually creates superfund sites. One of Rand's examples of a bad regulation in the book was limits on car length, which was a regulation that was removed. She assumes that the natural competence of capitalists can only shine through if regulation is completely eliminated. That regulation of the industry prevents competence. But I don't think it's a matter of all regulation being bad. And I think it's a matter of having the right regulation with adequate enforcement. These things require competent people to make decisions. In the end competence isn't a matter of being a capitalist or of deregulating or of being utterly selfish about everything. It's entirely a result of being honest and reflective and trying to seek solutions to the problems people face. So she completely misses the mark. And here's an example of how removing regulations causes exactly the kinds of problems she decries in the book--peoples' lives being ruined by totally preventable rail brought on by incompetence and lack of resources. In fact the selfishness of the management and capitalist class in this case has lead directly to the accident. So clearly selfishness is not a virtue for the people in Palestine Ohio.
  - readthenotes1 4y ago
    Some people underestimate the lengths to which people will go to satisfy their greed. Sloth drives productivity improvements and greed drives capitalism. Fortunately, we only have to regulate down greed for capitalism to work...
  - altairprime 4y ago
nathanaldensr 4y ago
This appears to be a single manager for a single railroad--not Norfolk Southern--getting caught. While egregious and likely indicative of what we all suspect--corner-cutting industry-wide--it doesn't appear related to East Palestine at all. Saying "US rail workers" feels like clickbait.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  The "a few bad apples spoils the bunch" defense. Not gonna work.
  - jacobjjacob 4y ago
    Folks misinterpret that statement and use it as a defense. In reality it’s an offense- one bad apple might be a rot that can infest their colleagues and the whole system. It’s at least as likely as not that whistleblower incidents like these represent a deeper issue. To stretch the metaphor, if you find a rotten apple in your bunch, it’s unlikely it was the only one.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- xnyan 4y ago
  One of the biggest points of railway workers in the recent fight over contracts was safety concerns largely due to overwork and understaffing. According to both the government and the railway industry, the number of workers threating labor action over this was large enough to bring down rail transport in the US. Perhaps they could have done a better job supporting their argument, but the general claim that railway workers generally believe safety standards are inadequate seems solid to me.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    From the article I got the sense that the disagreement is about "how many eyes" are watching out over the trains. As a layman it seems like "the more the better" but there's gotta be a balance. Obviously the union is going to argue for having 100 people per train if they could (because that's directly connected to the unions power and money) while the train company is going to try to automate it down to 0. So just because the union doesn't think it's enough isn't a meaningful indicator.
emehex 4y ago
With all these new text-to-speech AI models... how can we trust any recordings like this anymore?
- phailhaus 4y ago
  Faked audio is still easily detectable.
  - maximus-decimus 4y ago
    I don't know, they sound exactly like the real thing to me : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep-f7uBd8Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep-f7uBd8Gc
    - phailhaus 4y ago
      It's easy to fool humans. The point is that it is still really easy to detect voice-generated AI computationally. See also: photoshop.
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  It's the job of the regulators to investigate audio like this and ensure its provenance, and speak to the people involved under penalty of perjury. The ability to forge audio isn't new, it's just more accessible.
- falcolas 4y ago
  This has been a potential attack since recording devices were invented. It was just done by talented people or people with mixing tools.
- zokier 4y ago
  you don't need text-to-speech AI model to fake recording, you just need random guy and a microphone.
dboreham 4y ago
I can put an airtag in my suitcase and track it all over the world but railroad operators can't pit bearing temperature sensors on their tank cars full of methlamine?
- bombcar 4y ago
  If something can go out of spec 99 times out of 100 and nothing "bad" happens, you may not want a thing that makes you stop when it's out of spec. It's not a good look, but that's often why it is done. Same reason that militaries have strict non wartime limits on lots of their equipment, they know it can run past the norm but they also know there are risks involved, and you don't want to risk it until it's necessary.
  - notabee 4y ago
    This concept of normalization of deviance gets posted on here a lot, but I'm going to post a link again anyway. https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety-messages/safetymessage-normalizationofdeviance-2014-11-03b.pdf https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety-messages/saf...
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Exactly, it's the inverse of the boy-who-cried-wolf problem, and it's not entirely simple to solve.
      - wittenbunk 4y ago
        Its not the inverse. Boy who cried wolf and normalization of deviance are both about false positives.
- extrapickles 4y ago
  They don’t need to even do that, just occasionally send the train past a thermal camera and look for wheels that are warmer than average.
pasttense01 4y ago
A key point is the date, 2016. This was 7 years ago. Just because there were issues then doesn't mean there are issues now: "In late 2016, Stephanie Griffin, a former Union Pacific carman, went to her manager with concerns that she was getting pushback for tagging – or reporting for repair – railcars. Her manager told her it was OK to skip inspections."
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  > Just because there were issues then doesn't mean there are issues now It's going to take me an hour to find my eyes. If anything, the issue is probably worse now. If an industry can get away with something, they'll keep doing it and more.
- sbaiddn 4y ago
  Its gotten worse. The industry has been greatly increasing workload on fewer employees. Just a few months ago Biden forced a contract on rail workers who were complaining, among other things, how they're stretched thin to an unsafe amount. Most of Congress backed the administration and rail companies
xyzelement 4y ago
I can't read the article again due to paywall but when I read it the first time, the idea I got is not that they were "told to skip inspect" but a disagreement between employees and management on the level of oil seepage that was required in order to consider the train car in need of repair.
- noughtme 4y ago
  “The regulation at the time stated that a wheel bearing was bad when it had ‘visible seepage’. But that was very vague, and the bosses used that vagueness to their advantage. For me, it was whenever oil was visible on the bearing. For my bosses, they wanted actual droplets and proof it would leak on the ground.
el_don_almighty 4y ago
What if ISO 9001 certification also created individual criminal liability for conformance? Individual criminal liability would drive accountability down to the people who are actually responsible for the necessary actions. The criminal threat empowers individuals, creating a drive for clear understanding of their roles, deliverables, and artifacts of completion. This accountability works successfully in the aviation industry but comes at a high cost. Could it work in other industries and could newer technologies lower the cost of implementation? Easier workflow management tools? What would happen in your company if you or your team members were at risk of criminal investigation for compliance to your ISO 9001 procedures & documentation? Could you do it? Would you stay? Would you want more money? Isn't it essentially commercial fraud if the organization IS NOT meeting their documented procedures?
- aplusbi 4y ago
  I feel like this would end up with a bunch of interns in prison for the crimes of executives. It would be too easy to find a scapegoat.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  > What if ISO 9001 certification also created individual criminal liability for conformance? I worked at an ISO-13485 certified company, and actually had "criminal liability for conformance" for some work I did there, due to the FDA's regulations. I can say, for certain, that it does not matter if you raise issues for legal obligations with even one of the largest medical device manufacturers in the USA. I had some HR issues there with my boss which edged into the region of not doing our jobs properly for important quality inspections. He did eventually get fired, but not for risking the lives of patients but he was instead fired for missing some milestone obligations on an important project. I was turned into a pariah with management for trying to fix this particular issue, and later I quit my management position there in order to live a life of simplicity as a solo-contributor of software for my remaining days. I say that you absolutely cannot push the liability down to the worker level, it has to be on management and on the executives of a company. It would be much easier for workers to raise safety and HR issues at a company if they knew that their medical coverage and salary were safe, such as with universal healthcare or UBI...
roughly 4y ago
Pete Buttigieg got pilloried last time he ran for president for a) not having enough experience and b) for being ex-McKinsey, which sank him on the left. He’s got an opportunity now to take one of the worst examples of wall-streetism to the woodshed over spilling a bunch of toxic chemicals in a residential neighborhood because of penny-pinching, which seems like it should be the easiest political slam-dunk in the world for a Democrat in 2023 - it’ll be interesting to see if he actually does so.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  I think its too late to recover from this. If he was going to act it should have been before the Republicans did. Pete and the Dems seem like they are just trying to move on from this as quick as possible but I don't get them, you can't just move on when so many people are looking at this disaster.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - roughly 4y ago
    There’s still an opportunity when the report comes out. I agree, though, I don’t think they’re going to. I suspect it has to do with the feds breaking the train worker strike a couple months ago, which was already a pretty severe political own-goal - I think you’re right, they’re hoping people stop talking about trains.
    - nebula8804 4y ago
      The consensus among "progressive media" seems to be that they don't want to set a precedent where they do actionable change after a crisis. This could hurt them with their donors in future incidents so their strategy is to somehow get people move on from this. Maybe it will be continued media blackout or something dumb will be coming that will take up the news cycle(eg. Chinese Balloons). It is infuriating especially after they were given a lifeline by their voters in the midterms. Its a never ending clown show with both the left and the right.
jschveibinz 4y ago
From an article on the train derailment in Oregon a few years back: https://www.opb.org/news/series/oil-trains/how-inspectors-missed-broken-bolts-mosier/ https://www.opb.org/news/series/oil-trains/how-inspectors-mi... “Those unseen, broken bolts in Mosier, Oregon, expose a significant flaw in the current system for railroad inspections. Yet, federal and state regulators, as well as the railroads, all say current rules are adequate. Minimum federal requirements allow railroads considerable leeway for how they inspect their own track, while government checks are few and far between. As Mosier showed, the system can allow potentially dangerous defects to go unaddressed for months.” According to the article, inspection and detection is done from a slow-moving vehicle. It’s a visual inspection…in the 21st century. There are all sorts of rather simple technology solutions to employ, e.g. barcodes/QR codes to mark when a part has been replaced (or needs to be replaced based on age), image detection to look for anomalies, radar or sonics to look for flaws, etc. If nothing else, to at least augment a visual detection? And another thing: our infrastructure is 100 years old, for Pete’s sake. We need people to stand up and say “enough is enough” already. We have to rebuild our infrastructure and use our latest technologies. The civil engineers have been saying this for 30 years, and the politicians don’t listen because it’s not something to get them re-elected.
- Animats 4y ago
  Automated track inspection systems exist and are in use.[1][2] Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern even have some of their inspection systems. They're much faster than driving along at 10MPH trying to see the problem visually. There are even inspection systems that are built into a freight car, so you just couple it into a train and get back a track report. Maybe they don't like using them. Because they're going to log every track flaw. [1] https://www.ensco.com/rail/track-component-imaging-system-tcis https://www.ensco.com/rail/track-component-imaging-system-tc... [2] https://www.ensco.com/sites/default/files/2022-08/ENSCO-Track-Inspection-Products-Services-Booklet-2022-6905.pdf https://www.ensco.com/sites/default/files/2022-08/ENSCO-Trac...
- corbulo 4y ago
  >slow moving vehicle When train lengths are miles long, how else could you practically do it? The industry is clearly structured around anti-inspection. Inspecting 3 miles worth of traincars just so one single train can leave is kind of crazy to think about. It's a difficult problem to definitively solve unless you want to spend shitpiles of money to innovate new inspection hardware/software. Shortening trains seems like an obvious solution, but do we have the capacity for that? When was the last new freight railroad laid in the US? What are the logistical problems?
Reptur 4y ago
If companies are people, companies should go to prison for intentionally endangering Americans and the result of that causing Americans to become ill / get cancer. The company should be taken over by the government and sold to pay out to all those that were harmed as well as clean & rebuild everything affected.
- landoftheice 4y ago
  [dead]
boringg 4y ago
Someone better be going to jail and it better be high level director who is calling the shots.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  Only rogue engineers get punished.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
photochemsyn 4y ago
This is yet another reason why the German model of having half the executive board seats selected by the employees of the corporation should be adopted in the United States. Employees see these kinds of problems and can pass them on up to their board representatives to ensure they get addressed before disasters happen.
- sumedh 4y ago
  Why didnt that work in Volkswagon?
  - senectus1 4y ago
    because democracy is fundamentally broken, isn't it obvious? We keep voting for people that give us what we want, not what we need.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    In the long run, it may have worked - VW is now a decent competitor with Tesla on EVs.
  - vfclists 4y ago
    The kind of people that develop advanced software are not that kind that unionize. The focus of unions have generally been blue collar workers, not to mention and the group that could do that would have been a small close knit group.
Havoc 4y ago
Ah the Boeing management style. That explains things
ok_dad 4y ago
This is why you need UBI, universal healthcare, etc. If a worker could say "FUCK YOU" and walk off the job at a moment's notice without risking their family, then safety concerns like this become a non-issue because, IMO, most people want to do the right thing when in comes to safety like this, and even if half your staff is willing to take a payment to kill other people with derailment risks, the other half will happily report them. Edit: My assumption here, which I think is reasonable, is that you cannot solve this problem by laws alone, because (as evidenced by this article) companies and management do not care about that. All replies saying we need more laws might also be a part of the solution, but is not the whole thing.
- gxt 4y ago
  No. Ignoring problems is not a solution.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - enumjorge 4y ago
    I read this less as ignoring a problem, and more like empowering people at lower levels of an organization to do the right thing, a check-and-balances of sorts.
    - gxt 4y ago
      Walking out is not the right thing, and it is not empowerment. It is utter disregard for those who remain, it robs them of your expertise and care. US has OSHA, USCSB, municipal ad., state ad., and federal ad. AND multiple members of Congress per state. Before walking out there all these people AND MORE to contact, make aware, request help from.
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        The freedom to walk is the freedom from retribution, which is what gives the employee the ability to refuse orders, blow the whistle, and get fired if they have to. Fear of losing a job is a powerful tool for employers to use in order to force employees to do things that go against their sense of ethics and morality.
jtlienwis 4y ago
When they said there were thousands of derailments each year in the U.S. i found a source on the internet that said the total for all derailments in Japan in 2020 was a grand total of 6.
- SllX 4y ago
  I went spelunking and I found this: https://www.yahoo.com/now/many-train-derailments-us-2023-162348009.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/many-train-derailments-us-2023-162... Basically we’re averaging 1,704 derailments a year between 1990 and 2021, and likely very few of them are significant since last year per the article there were 4 deaths. So, question: what is the legal definition of a derailment and does it differ between here and Japan?
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    When trains are mainly used for transporting goods, derailment is unlikely to cause deaths. Not the case for Japan, and that's probably half of the explanation for why it's different.
tootie 4y ago
This is bad but it's also from 2016. There's not nearly enough dots to connect to say it had anything to do with the recent derailment.
- sbaiddn 4y ago
  It demonstrates the working environment and management culture in the industry. In short management doesn't care. That said, "visible seepage" is infuriatingly vague. Any seal will "seep" to some extent. Oil seals can have "visible seepage" and still have life left in them. A healthy industry would have clear internal standards that clarifies bad rules like this and enforcement.
  - tootie 4y ago
    It's not irrelevant but it's not a smoking gun. We don't even know an inspection would have caught anything for this train.
    - sbaiddn 4y ago
      No, not a smoking gun. Just evidence of a degraded culture
5etho 4y ago
I hope reddit/antiwork don't leak on HN. We all agree with that, it's just not the right place.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Make the CEO criminally responsible for everything under his or her watch. They are getting paid crazy amounts of money for not much risk currently. I bet even with the threat of criminal liabilities, a lot of people would still be willing to be CEO for $100 million.
TheDudeMan 4y ago
> "a manager ... explaining to a former carman that they should stop tagging railcars for broken bearings. The manager says doing so delays other cargo." This sort of thing should result in jail time.
phendrenad2 4y ago
The Great Filter (explanation for the Fermi Paradox) is real, and we're starting to hit it. Once society hit a certain level of development it had to start cutting corners to ensure continued advancement, and it's working against our advancement now. Soon advancement and corner-cutting-caused failures will balance out, and we'll be in equilibrium, able to make no progress.
- decremental 4y ago
  Thermodynamics strikes again.
- vfclists 4y ago
  Utter nonsense. What do you mean by development? Technological or political? It is clear that the railway problem has always been a political problem of corrupt legislators, but the true political problem is basically a bunch of obese Americans who are too busy sitting in front the telly stuffing themselves with popcorn, pizza and beer to get of their arses, call, write and demonstrate outside their congressmen's offices to get they change they need. You know what - they truly NEED those changes. That is not development. That is moral retrogression. Political change requires commitment, focus, discipline and persistence, and these are sorely lacking in the American citizen.
  - everforward 4y ago
    Technological development. There's an alternate theory that the rate of technological change requires vastly more regulation over a much wider range of functions, meanwhile the population has vastly increased diluting the level of control that any individual has. That combination of requiring more input while diluting individual input causes apathy. As an illustrative example, there are ~10x more words in the tax code and regulations today (~10 million) than there were in 1950 (~1 million) and about double the population. As a citizen today, I have to do ~10x as much work to understand the tax code and I have about half as much influence over it (assuming that complexity scales linearly with word count, which I somewhat doubt). Go back to 1900 and there was about 1/4 the people and the tax code was ~0.5% the length it is today. I'm not surprised that more people are apathetic when it takes an order of magnitude more effort to get half the influence.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Corpos gonna corpo. But it is ok everyone, hypercapitalism is clearly the best solution to everything.

316 points by detaro 4y ago

When a company values profits above all else, the only thing that can save us from that company’s gross negligence is fines strong enough to eliminate those very same profits (and ideally the company’s budget for bribing politicians too).

InCityDreams 4y ago
Should be on a case by case basis. If eliminating profits causes 11 other people in the company to lose their jobs, is it worth it?
bluefirebrand 4y ago
Not even fines to the company will stop it. You have to go directly after the people who are making decisions for the company. Executives seem to have a pretty good time tanking companies to line their pockets and then leave before the company has to deal with the fallout.
- falcolas 4y ago
  I really wish I could refute this. The protections incorporation provides for executives seem a bit too strong in cases like these.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    Which protections are these? I thought that incorporation didn't give any protections for maliciousness, it's just that DAs rarely go after executives because any particular blame is so distributed throughout the corporation that it would make any case difficult to prosecute.
    - genocidicbunny 4y ago
      The diffusion of responsibility is one of those protections. There should definitely be some strict liability for certain corporate malfeasance, where it doesn't too much matter who specifically did the deed, the executive/C-level is responsible and takes the fall (and maybe throw the BoD in there too). Then prosecution comes down to 'Did your company do X? If yes, you're guilty.'
      - a_cardboard_box 4y ago
        Not only would that be effective in disincentivizing the malfeasance, it has the added benefit of limiting the scale of corporations to what execs can effectively manage.
      - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
        Exactly. If the CEO goes to prison if the company commits X crime, the CEO has a strong incentive to ensure the business is not doing that. If the CEO's only concern is shareholder profit, crime usually pays pretty well.
        ticviking 4y ago
        The idea that a 10000 year jail sentence must be served by every share holder disturbed in proportion to how much they owe would make “shareholder value” mean “not making me check into jail to serve my 2 days of the sentence for my 1 share” which might change corporate behavior a bit. Especially if insuring shareholders income against that risk becomes a line item in the budget.
        ocdtrekkie 4y ago
        I think shareholders might be too detached from decisionmaking for that to make sense. It'd definitely have a huge negative impact on stock values, but I'm not sure it would prevent corporate malfeasance.
        4y ago
- kingTug 4y ago
  I always wonder what will come first: laws to jail negligent execs for the next disaster, or an ambitious legislator with a magic solution to jail negligent execs for the current disaster.
  - RajT88 4y ago
    Neither. There's a web of power and influence invisible to people who aren't part of the system. Politicians who could create this legislation don't get reelected if they aren't participants; their election war chest evaporates. This is how monied interests managed to design the system to work.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    Where by "magic" you mean an ex post facto law? I'm all for going after execs for their crimes, but let's try to keep that particular part of the constitution in tact.
    - neltnerb 4y ago
      The article describes some pretty blatant negligence, though I suppose suggesting that a legislator might get involved implies ex-post facto lawmaking. Maybe the responsibility is too diffuse. But these "no one could have predicted this" kind of Therac-25 situations with multiple people responsible are exactly where that boss -- the one getting paid the big bucks (for the risk they take! for the difficult decisions they have to make! for the complex structures they have to oversee!) -- to actually take responsibility for the decisions inherent in the incentive structure they created in the workplace that they have total control over.
      - gruez 4y ago
        > The article describes some pretty blatant negligence Is it? The article tries strongly to imply that the whistleblower is right and the manager is wrong, but that's never conclusively established. With the same facts presented in the article, I can paint a different story of the whistleblower trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill, and how he was obviously wrong everyone else seems to think it's fine.
- blue039 4y ago
  It is interesting that we can use RICO go to after mob bosses even when they have layers and layers of indirection to protect them. But with CEOs it seems RICO doesn't apply.
  - ticviking 4y ago
    CEOs generally aren’t racketeering so they can’t usually be hit with that
    - blue039 4y ago
      The main driver of RICO, however, wasn't to stop racketeering. It provided the provisions for the FBI to pursue mob bosses for hits they ordered. Prior to RICO it was very difficult to throw a mob boss in jail for such things. All we need to do is extract that portion of the bill. However, I suspect the answer is like usual. Congress does not represent the people and their corporate owners would not be pleased. Larry Fink would probably have a millenia worth of consecutive life sentences alone. We might spur innovation in healthcare technology just making him serve the time he owes.
  - ydlr 4y ago
    The reason for that is there are only a tiny number of crimes that qualify as RICO predicates. We need to expand RICO to include more types of criminal activity.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  Exactly, fining companies doesn't do anything. Fine and jail the PEOPLE doing these crimes.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    There's always plausible deniability so that if anybody does take the fall it's probably going to be some mid level suit that was 'just following orders.' I'd rather that liability starts with the CEO and Chairman. You need to make sure executives cannot simply hide behind fallguys. You then create a top-down incentive for these people to genuinely make sure everything is on the up and up. The biggest problem is that this probably creates a strict cap on how large a single corporation can grow, which sounds much more like a feature than a bug.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
      This is all well and good to say, but impossible to implement within our current system. That's what's so depressing about it. And by 'impossible' I grant its theoretically possible, just not in practical terms. Of course the other side of the coin is that even if it was implemented, then prosecutors, and hence government, would now have this new power over CEOs and it wouldn't be long before some corrupt politician got in office and used it corruptly.
      - eunoia 4y ago
        Sarbanes-Oxley would seem to imply that it’s possible to enact new laws that enforce consequences for fraud among top level executives? In theory at least I guess. Maybe someone else can comment on how it actually works in practice.
        Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
        Its not enough for the laws to exist, they must also be enforced.
    - gruez 4y ago
- gumby 4y ago
  > You have to go directly after the people who are making decisions for the company. Usually in this case the person really making the decision doesn't take the blame; that just flows downhill.
- lost_tourist 4y ago
  Yeah, it's one thing when you make some billionaires lose money, it's another thing when you potentially give thousands of people cancer because you polluted their land and air with carcinogens.
voytec 4y ago
Cost of fines would be transferred to customers. What can hurt is jail.
- eastbound 4y ago
  HSBC leaders never went to jail for being the bank of trafficking $2bn of drugs. As in, they recognized the deed, and signed off with the DoJ a deal with no executive would be sent to prison. Truth be told, CIA needed the drug sales to fund ISIS before it was cool, but I digress. Anyway, if you expect corporations to be held responsible in penal courts…
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Breach the corporate veil. Throw any share holders in jail for varying times.
- jakzurr 4y ago
  A most appropriate use for prisons in the US. Finally.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  If a company can just pass fines on to the consumer and not suffer badly for it, competition in their market is totally fucked. Which, sure, is probably true in many industries, but it's not supposed to be the case that any given business can just pass extra costs to consumers. If they could, they should already have been charging higher prices.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    Railroad companies basically don’t have competition. Check out a track ownership map and see how little overlap there is, if you need to use the railroad to move stuff odds are you have one choice, and when it goes further than their track, sometimes you’ll have to truck it from one rail yard to another company’s rail yard because there’s so little interaction between railroads.
    - 4y ago
deepsun 4y ago
Not always. It's not law enforcement that keeps everyone from committing crimes, because you cannot put a policeman watching everyone. Way more efficient way is self-policing, that's the main difference of developed cultures IMO.
haliskerbas 4y ago
That's kind of the definition of a company in our current system. It's working as designed.
sebazzz 4y ago
That's why companies cannot be allowed to run a nuclear power plant. A place where negligence has no place.
- abfan1127 4y ago
  can you point out a human organization not susceptible to negligence?
  - jraph 4y ago
    There's a question of motivation. A public service ought to be motivated to deliver a good service. It won't be motivated by taking shortcuts. A private company seeks profit and cannot afford to lose money, contrary to a public service which can be not profitable. Offering a good service it a means to be profitable but that's not the end goal, even if many people actually want to do good work. Of course there's a big if. IF the government throws enough money at it. This IF is unfortunately too often "IF only". If not, we are back to shortcuts.
    - stickfigure 4y ago
      The service I get from AAA's DMV services is far superior to the service I get from the DMV itself.
    - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
      bureaucrats and civil servants get paid regardless of how shit they do their jobs because the government puts a gun to your head to pay their wages and consume whatever service they provide (also applies to some "private" companies)
- notch898a 4y ago
  They should be run by an entity devoid of negligence, like the US government.
- quorgs 4y ago
  Can't disagree but The Ministry of Medium Machine-Building Industry of the USSR wasn't exactly driven by profit motive and we still got Chernobyl.
pessimizer 4y ago
We're not only not going to fine them, but we're going to make special laws to protect them from the threat of their employees getting sick days.
groot2581 4y ago
This only works if execs have the company's best interests at heart, which they don't. They reap the benefits when things go well but jump ship as the company files bankruptcy when things go south. You need Unions. Blue collar workers care about safety and can pressure execs into doing the safe thing when the incentives aren't there higher up.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Also labour protections when reasonable action is taken to stop unsafe acts. If someone got fired for stopping unsafe thing they should get big enough payout. Probably years worth of wages.
  - notch898a 4y ago
    That exists. https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/mou/2012-07-16 https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/mou/2012-07-16 Note regarding "refusing to work under certain conditions:" https://www.osha.gov/workers/right-to-refuse https://www.osha.gov/workers/right-to-refuse I used to work in interstate freight (barge, not train). They make it crystal clear any employee has the right to stop work and are protected. The rail workers could have stopped working under their dangerous conditions, they just negligently kept going. The big bad railroad is to blame, but so are the employees.
    - vsareto 4y ago
      The regulation was vague, so now you have a situation where two sides are interpreting things differently: >She said: “The regulation at the time stated that a wheel bearing was bad when it had ‘visible seepage’. But that was very vague, and the bosses used that vagueness to their advantage. For me, it was whenever oil was visible on the bearing. For my bosses, they wanted actual droplets and proof it would leak on the ground. That's probably why we have an audio leak story, because the company may have some ground to stand on because of this vagueness.
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  > You need Unions. The railway has unions. They even wanted to strike at the end of last year over working conditions, but Congress and Biden quickly passed a law in December to prevent it.
pasquinelli 4y ago
just nationalize it
- gruez 4y ago
  Because the US government never did anything negligent/shady right?
boringg 4y ago
Fines?! No, executives doing jail time is the only solution.
ROTMetro 4y ago
As another HN poster posted fines need to be 1-10% per incident of controlling stock put into trust of the relevant enforcement agency unable to be sold or diluted for 10 years. Can't get your act together then eventually overship/control/adult supervision goes to the government.

brainzap 4y ago

I have some Atlas Shrugged vibes

bpodgursky 4y ago
The part where federal bureaucrats ordered a train to unsafely transit a tunnel and caused a massive explosion?
throwway120385 4y ago
Her whole deal in that book was that regulations are bad and that they are used as a cudgel by established players. Here we have an example of what happens when regulations are rolled back -- the profit motive takes over, eliminates safety measures, and eventually creates superfund sites. One of Rand's examples of a bad regulation in the book was limits on car length, which was a regulation that was removed. She assumes that the natural competence of capitalists can only shine through if regulation is completely eliminated. That regulation of the industry prevents competence. But I don't think it's a matter of all regulation being bad. And I think it's a matter of having the right regulation with adequate enforcement. These things require competent people to make decisions. In the end competence isn't a matter of being a capitalist or of deregulating or of being utterly selfish about everything. It's entirely a result of being honest and reflective and trying to seek solutions to the problems people face. So she completely misses the mark. And here's an example of how removing regulations causes exactly the kinds of problems she decries in the book--peoples' lives being ruined by totally preventable rail brought on by incompetence and lack of resources. In fact the selfishness of the management and capitalist class in this case has lead directly to the accident. So clearly selfishness is not a virtue for the people in Palestine Ohio.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  Some people underestimate the lengths to which people will go to satisfy their greed. Sloth drives productivity improvements and greed drives capitalism. Fortunately, we only have to regulate down greed for capitalism to work...
- altairprime 4y ago

nathanaldensr 4y ago

This appears to be a single manager for a single railroad--not Norfolk Southern--getting caught. While egregious and likely indicative of what we all suspect--corner-cutting industry-wide--it doesn't appear related to East Palestine at all. Saying "US rail workers" feels like clickbait.

theGnuMe 4y ago
The "a few bad apples spoils the bunch" defense. Not gonna work.
- jacobjjacob 4y ago
  Folks misinterpret that statement and use it as a defense. In reality it’s an offense- one bad apple might be a rot that can infest their colleagues and the whole system. It’s at least as likely as not that whistleblower incidents like these represent a deeper issue. To stretch the metaphor, if you find a rotten apple in your bunch, it’s unlikely it was the only one.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
xnyan 4y ago
One of the biggest points of railway workers in the recent fight over contracts was safety concerns largely due to overwork and understaffing. According to both the government and the railway industry, the number of workers threating labor action over this was large enough to bring down rail transport in the US. Perhaps they could have done a better job supporting their argument, but the general claim that railway workers generally believe safety standards are inadequate seems solid to me.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  From the article I got the sense that the disagreement is about "how many eyes" are watching out over the trains. As a layman it seems like "the more the better" but there's gotta be a balance. Obviously the union is going to argue for having 100 people per train if they could (because that's directly connected to the unions power and money) while the train company is going to try to automate it down to 0. So just because the union doesn't think it's enough isn't a meaningful indicator.

emehex 4y ago

With all these new text-to-speech AI models... how can we trust any recordings like this anymore?

phailhaus 4y ago
Faked audio is still easily detectable.
- maximus-decimus 4y ago
  I don't know, they sound exactly like the real thing to me : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep-f7uBd8Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep-f7uBd8Gc
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    It's easy to fool humans. The point is that it is still really easy to detect voice-generated AI computationally. See also: photoshop.
bastawhiz 4y ago
It's the job of the regulators to investigate audio like this and ensure its provenance, and speak to the people involved under penalty of perjury. The ability to forge audio isn't new, it's just more accessible.
falcolas 4y ago
This has been a potential attack since recording devices were invented. It was just done by talented people or people with mixing tools.
zokier 4y ago
you don't need text-to-speech AI model to fake recording, you just need random guy and a microphone.

dboreham 4y ago

I can put an airtag in my suitcase and track it all over the world but railroad operators can't pit bearing temperature sensors on their tank cars full of methlamine?

bombcar 4y ago
If something can go out of spec 99 times out of 100 and nothing "bad" happens, you may not want a thing that makes you stop when it's out of spec. It's not a good look, but that's often why it is done. Same reason that militaries have strict non wartime limits on lots of their equipment, they know it can run past the norm but they also know there are risks involved, and you don't want to risk it until it's necessary.
- notabee 4y ago
  This concept of normalization of deviance gets posted on here a lot, but I'm going to post a link again anyway. https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety-messages/safetymessage-normalizationofdeviance-2014-11-03b.pdf https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety-messages/saf...
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Exactly, it's the inverse of the boy-who-cried-wolf problem, and it's not entirely simple to solve.
    - wittenbunk 4y ago
      Its not the inverse. Boy who cried wolf and normalization of deviance are both about false positives.
extrapickles 4y ago
They don’t need to even do that, just occasionally send the train past a thermal camera and look for wheels that are warmer than average.

pasttense01 4y ago

A key point is the date, 2016. This was 7 years ago. Just because there were issues then doesn't mean there are issues now: "In late 2016, Stephanie Griffin, a former Union Pacific carman, went to her manager with concerns that she was getting pushback for tagging – or reporting for repair – railcars. Her manager told her it was OK to skip inspections."

JustSomeNobody 4y ago
> Just because there were issues then doesn't mean there are issues now It's going to take me an hour to find my eyes. If anything, the issue is probably worse now. If an industry can get away with something, they'll keep doing it and more.
sbaiddn 4y ago
Its gotten worse. The industry has been greatly increasing workload on fewer employees. Just a few months ago Biden forced a contract on rail workers who were complaining, among other things, how they're stretched thin to an unsafe amount. Most of Congress backed the administration and rail companies

xyzelement 4y ago

I can't read the article again due to paywall but when I read it the first time, the idea I got is not that they were "told to skip inspect" but a disagreement between employees and management on the level of oil seepage that was required in order to consider the train car in need of repair.

noughtme 4y ago
“The regulation at the time stated that a wheel bearing was bad when it had ‘visible seepage’. But that was very vague, and the bosses used that vagueness to their advantage. For me, it was whenever oil was visible on the bearing. For my bosses, they wanted actual droplets and proof it would leak on the ground.

el_don_almighty 4y ago

What if ISO 9001 certification also created individual criminal liability for conformance? Individual criminal liability would drive accountability down to the people who are actually responsible for the necessary actions. The criminal threat empowers individuals, creating a drive for clear understanding of their roles, deliverables, and artifacts of completion. This accountability works successfully in the aviation industry but comes at a high cost. Could it work in other industries and could newer technologies lower the cost of implementation? Easier workflow management tools? What would happen in your company if you or your team members were at risk of criminal investigation for compliance to your ISO 9001 procedures & documentation? Could you do it? Would you stay? Would you want more money? Isn't it essentially commercial fraud if the organization IS NOT meeting their documented procedures?

aplusbi 4y ago
I feel like this would end up with a bunch of interns in prison for the crimes of executives. It would be too easy to find a scapegoat.
ok_dad 4y ago
> What if ISO 9001 certification also created individual criminal liability for conformance? I worked at an ISO-13485 certified company, and actually had "criminal liability for conformance" for some work I did there, due to the FDA's regulations. I can say, for certain, that it does not matter if you raise issues for legal obligations with even one of the largest medical device manufacturers in the USA. I had some HR issues there with my boss which edged into the region of not doing our jobs properly for important quality inspections. He did eventually get fired, but not for risking the lives of patients but he was instead fired for missing some milestone obligations on an important project. I was turned into a pariah with management for trying to fix this particular issue, and later I quit my management position there in order to live a life of simplicity as a solo-contributor of software for my remaining days. I say that you absolutely cannot push the liability down to the worker level, it has to be on management and on the executives of a company. It would be much easier for workers to raise safety and HR issues at a company if they knew that their medical coverage and salary were safe, such as with universal healthcare or UBI...

roughly 4y ago

Pete Buttigieg got pilloried last time he ran for president for a) not having enough experience and b) for being ex-McKinsey, which sank him on the left. He’s got an opportunity now to take one of the worst examples of wall-streetism to the woodshed over spilling a bunch of toxic chemicals in a residential neighborhood because of penny-pinching, which seems like it should be the easiest political slam-dunk in the world for a Democrat in 2023 - it’ll be interesting to see if he actually does so.

nebula8804 4y ago
I think its too late to recover from this. If he was going to act it should have been before the Republicans did. Pete and the Dems seem like they are just trying to move on from this as quick as possible but I don't get them, you can't just move on when so many people are looking at this disaster.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- roughly 4y ago
  There’s still an opportunity when the report comes out. I agree, though, I don’t think they’re going to. I suspect it has to do with the feds breaking the train worker strike a couple months ago, which was already a pretty severe political own-goal - I think you’re right, they’re hoping people stop talking about trains.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    The consensus among "progressive media" seems to be that they don't want to set a precedent where they do actionable change after a crisis. This could hurt them with their donors in future incidents so their strategy is to somehow get people move on from this. Maybe it will be continued media blackout or something dumb will be coming that will take up the news cycle(eg. Chinese Balloons). It is infuriating especially after they were given a lifeline by their voters in the midterms. Its a never ending clown show with both the left and the right.

jschveibinz 4y ago

From an article on the train derailment in Oregon a few years back: https://www.opb.org/news/series/oil-trains/how-inspectors-missed-broken-bolts-mosier/ https://www.opb.org/news/series/oil-trains/how-inspectors-mi... “Those unseen, broken bolts in Mosier, Oregon, expose a significant flaw in the current system for railroad inspections. Yet, federal and state regulators, as well as the railroads, all say current rules are adequate. Minimum federal requirements allow railroads considerable leeway for how they inspect their own track, while government checks are few and far between. As Mosier showed, the system can allow potentially dangerous defects to go unaddressed for months.” According to the article, inspection and detection is done from a slow-moving vehicle. It’s a visual inspection…in the 21st century. There are all sorts of rather simple technology solutions to employ, e.g. barcodes/QR codes to mark when a part has been replaced (or needs to be replaced based on age), image detection to look for anomalies, radar or sonics to look for flaws, etc. If nothing else, to at least augment a visual detection? And another thing: our infrastructure is 100 years old, for Pete’s sake. We need people to stand up and say “enough is enough” already. We have to rebuild our infrastructure and use our latest technologies. The civil engineers have been saying this for 30 years, and the politicians don’t listen because it’s not something to get them re-elected.

Animats 4y ago
Automated track inspection systems exist and are in use.[1][2] Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern even have some of their inspection systems. They're much faster than driving along at 10MPH trying to see the problem visually. There are even inspection systems that are built into a freight car, so you just couple it into a train and get back a track report. Maybe they don't like using them. Because they're going to log every track flaw. [1] https://www.ensco.com/rail/track-component-imaging-system-tcis https://www.ensco.com/rail/track-component-imaging-system-tc... [2] https://www.ensco.com/sites/default/files/2022-08/ENSCO-Track-Inspection-Products-Services-Booklet-2022-6905.pdf https://www.ensco.com/sites/default/files/2022-08/ENSCO-Trac...
corbulo 4y ago
>slow moving vehicle When train lengths are miles long, how else could you practically do it? The industry is clearly structured around anti-inspection. Inspecting 3 miles worth of traincars just so one single train can leave is kind of crazy to think about. It's a difficult problem to definitively solve unless you want to spend shitpiles of money to innovate new inspection hardware/software. Shortening trains seems like an obvious solution, but do we have the capacity for that? When was the last new freight railroad laid in the US? What are the logistical problems?

Reptur 4y ago

If companies are people, companies should go to prison for intentionally endangering Americans and the result of that causing Americans to become ill / get cancer. The company should be taken over by the government and sold to pay out to all those that were harmed as well as clean & rebuild everything affected.

landoftheice 4y ago
[dead]

boringg 4y ago

Someone better be going to jail and it better be high level director who is calling the shots.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Only rogue engineers get punished.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

photochemsyn 4y ago

This is yet another reason why the German model of having half the executive board seats selected by the employees of the corporation should be adopted in the United States. Employees see these kinds of problems and can pass them on up to their board representatives to ensure they get addressed before disasters happen.

sumedh 4y ago
Why didnt that work in Volkswagon?
- senectus1 4y ago
  because democracy is fundamentally broken, isn't it obvious? We keep voting for people that give us what we want, not what we need.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  In the long run, it may have worked - VW is now a decent competitor with Tesla on EVs.
- vfclists 4y ago
  The kind of people that develop advanced software are not that kind that unionize. The focus of unions have generally been blue collar workers, not to mention and the group that could do that would have been a small close knit group.

Havoc 4y ago

Ah the Boeing management style. That explains things

ok_dad 4y ago

This is why you need UBI, universal healthcare, etc. If a worker could say "FUCK YOU" and walk off the job at a moment's notice without risking their family, then safety concerns like this become a non-issue because, IMO, most people want to do the right thing when in comes to safety like this, and even if half your staff is willing to take a payment to kill other people with derailment risks, the other half will happily report them. Edit: My assumption here, which I think is reasonable, is that you cannot solve this problem by laws alone, because (as evidenced by this article) companies and management do not care about that. All replies saying we need more laws might also be a part of the solution, but is not the whole thing.

gxt 4y ago
No. Ignoring problems is not a solution.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- enumjorge 4y ago
  I read this less as ignoring a problem, and more like empowering people at lower levels of an organization to do the right thing, a check-and-balances of sorts.
  - gxt 4y ago
    Walking out is not the right thing, and it is not empowerment. It is utter disregard for those who remain, it robs them of your expertise and care. US has OSHA, USCSB, municipal ad., state ad., and federal ad. AND multiple members of Congress per state. Before walking out there all these people AND MORE to contact, make aware, request help from.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      The freedom to walk is the freedom from retribution, which is what gives the employee the ability to refuse orders, blow the whistle, and get fired if they have to. Fear of losing a job is a powerful tool for employers to use in order to force employees to do things that go against their sense of ethics and morality.

jtlienwis 4y ago

When they said there were thousands of derailments each year in the U.S. i found a source on the internet that said the total for all derailments in Japan in 2020 was a grand total of 6.

SllX 4y ago
I went spelunking and I found this: https://www.yahoo.com/now/many-train-derailments-us-2023-162348009.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/many-train-derailments-us-2023-162... Basically we’re averaging 1,704 derailments a year between 1990 and 2021, and likely very few of them are significant since last year per the article there were 4 deaths. So, question: what is the legal definition of a derailment and does it differ between here and Japan?
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  When trains are mainly used for transporting goods, derailment is unlikely to cause deaths. Not the case for Japan, and that's probably half of the explanation for why it's different.

tootie 4y ago

This is bad but it's also from 2016. There's not nearly enough dots to connect to say it had anything to do with the recent derailment.

sbaiddn 4y ago
It demonstrates the working environment and management culture in the industry. In short management doesn't care. That said, "visible seepage" is infuriatingly vague. Any seal will "seep" to some extent. Oil seals can have "visible seepage" and still have life left in them. A healthy industry would have clear internal standards that clarifies bad rules like this and enforcement.
- tootie 4y ago
  It's not irrelevant but it's not a smoking gun. We don't even know an inspection would have caught anything for this train.
  - sbaiddn 4y ago
    No, not a smoking gun. Just evidence of a degraded culture

5etho 4y ago

I hope reddit/antiwork don't leak on HN. We all agree with that, it's just not the right place.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

Make the CEO criminally responsible for everything under his or her watch. They are getting paid crazy amounts of money for not much risk currently. I bet even with the threat of criminal liabilities, a lot of people would still be willing to be CEO for $100 million.

TheDudeMan 4y ago

> "a manager ... explaining to a former carman that they should stop tagging railcars for broken bearings. The manager says doing so delays other cargo." This sort of thing should result in jail time.

phendrenad2 4y ago

The Great Filter (explanation for the Fermi Paradox) is real, and we're starting to hit it. Once society hit a certain level of development it had to start cutting corners to ensure continued advancement, and it's working against our advancement now. Soon advancement and corner-cutting-caused failures will balance out, and we'll be in equilibrium, able to make no progress.

decremental 4y ago
Thermodynamics strikes again.
vfclists 4y ago
Utter nonsense. What do you mean by development? Technological or political? It is clear that the railway problem has always been a political problem of corrupt legislators, but the true political problem is basically a bunch of obese Americans who are too busy sitting in front the telly stuffing themselves with popcorn, pizza and beer to get of their arses, call, write and demonstrate outside their congressmen's offices to get they change they need. You know what - they truly NEED those changes. That is not development. That is moral retrogression. Political change requires commitment, focus, discipline and persistence, and these are sorely lacking in the American citizen.
- everforward 4y ago
  Technological development. There's an alternate theory that the rate of technological change requires vastly more regulation over a much wider range of functions, meanwhile the population has vastly increased diluting the level of control that any individual has. That combination of requiring more input while diluting individual input causes apathy. As an illustrative example, there are ~10x more words in the tax code and regulations today (~10 million) than there were in 1950 (~1 million) and about double the population. As a citizen today, I have to do ~10x as much work to understand the tax code and I have about half as much influence over it (assuming that complexity scales linearly with word count, which I somewhat doubt). Go back to 1900 and there was about 1/4 the people and the tax code was ~0.5% the length it is today. I'm not surprised that more people are apathetic when it takes an order of magnitude more effort to get half the influence.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

Corpos gonna corpo. But it is ok everyone, hypercapitalism is clearly the best solution to everything.