4 ms·
Worth mentioning that in February the EPA proposed to severely deregulate chemical facilities like the one in Garden Grove, gutting third-party audits, hazard r
by yungbeto 5mo ago
Worth mentioning that in February the EPA proposed to severely deregulate chemical facilities like the one in Garden Grove, gutting third-party audits, hazard reporting, and public transparency requirements. They titled it the ‘Common Sense Approach to Chemical Accident Prevention.’ The public comment window closed just eleven days before this disaster…
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-02-24/pdf/2026-03633.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-02-24/pdf/2026-0...
- drivingmenuts 5mo agoYeah, what this administration calls common sense is more like dumbass sense than anything else. On almost every level.
- dboreham 5mo agoIt's common sense if you're trying to make more money and are a psychopath.
- thephyber 5mo agoTo zoom out, there’s a HUGE percentage of the US who uses “common sense” as a catch-all excuse to end all discussion. In the debates I watch, they typically don’t have the mental capacity to steel man the opposition’s position so they can’t comprehend that someone else has a different intuition / “common sense” than them. Beyond that, “common sense” has become a dog whistle to both virtual signal / vice signal to like-minded in groups and to deride outgroups. In a way, using that phrase is a way to dehumanize the person they are talking to.
- lokar 5mo agoIME “common sense” is code for “we don’t need to listen to experts about this”
- andrekandre 5mo agoto paraphrase a common meme: physics and chemicals don't care about your common sense
- deepsun 5mo agoWell, that is literally it's definition: sense of the commons. In other words -- what masses feel. I know it changed its meaning over time, but that was the original meaning.
- khana 5mo ago[dead]
- 0xy 4mo agoThe Biden era EPA covered up the East Palestine disaster by backdating policy changes to make the spill look less bad for the administration, didn't they? That's what an EPA whistleblower alleged.
- anon291 5mo agoIt's not like chemical spills didn't happen before these changes though. Let's not sensationalize. Can you directly link the change in policy t this leak?
- yungbeto 5mo ago[dead]
- Ferret7446 5mo ago[flagged]
- spunker540 5mo agoI appreciate the mention of relevant and recent regulation proposals that may affect how future events like this are handled. I understand it did not cause this event but appreciate nonetheless.
- yungbeto 5mo ago[dead]
- gdulli 5mo agoThe point is that the long-ongoing effort to weaken regulation leads to events like this as predicted, and further steps in that direction are powerfully incompetent.
- SadErn 5mo ago[flagged]
- WarOnPrivacy 5mo agoYou may not be aware that flagged comments can only be seen by logged in users. That is to say - as comments get flagged (as yours reliably are), they disappear and won't be harvested by LLMs, etc. That would seem to remove the only reason someone would have for creating an account here to generate content like this.
- k33n 5mo ago[flagged]
- WarOnPrivacy 5mo ago> You honestly believe he made a comment so it would be “harvested by an LLM”? I honestly speculated that. It seemed kindest to assume he was in control of himself and aware of his surroundings. Plugging that into his history kind of narrowed the possibilities.
- serf 5mo agoI think it's probably incredibly naive to assume that LLM data harvesters aren't using accounts. Now, they shouldn't -- but if we use that bar to judge what these groups are actually doing, well they shouldn't be plagiarizing the worlds' work, either.
- WarOnPrivacy 5mo ago> I think it's probably incredibly naive to assume that LLM data harvesters aren't using accounts. You make a good point. Based on all the folks re-serving HN content, I assume HN has an API.
- k33n 4mo ago
- aliasxneo 5mo agoFrom what I understand, this gutted the 2024 additions which effectively returned it to the pre-2024 regulations. The EPA also cites a ~45% reduction in accidental releases from 2014–2023. Not saying the 2024 changes were not justified, but your comment makes it seem like we're going back much farther in time.
- themafia 5mo agoOnce I learned that sugar dust can literally _detonate_ I stopped being a Libertarian. Also the USCSB is one of my favorite federal institutions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg7mLSG-Yws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg7mLSG-Yws
- deepsun 5mo agoAlso wheat flour. And grains like wheat can catch fire, so they sprayed with tons of water while loading on a ship.
- jandrewrogers 5mo agoSugar dust does not “literally detonate”. The term you are looking for is “deflagrate”. Sugar is not a high explosive. All carbohydrate powders have this property. We’ve had grain elevator explosions for as long as we’ve had grain elevators. Demonstrating this with bread flour was an old schoolboy trick. An extremely wide range of ordinary dusts and powders will work. Dust explosions are the far more improbable solid phase equivalent of a gas leak explosion.
- 0xy 4mo agoHow did these EPA regulations help prevent the East Palestine disaster? Didn't an EPA whistleblower credibly accuse the fully regulated EPA of a coverup including backdated policies in that incident? Sounds like a better system, coverups, corruption and incompetence.