Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

I'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.

Nationalize the railroads, 100%.

Considering what happened the last time the railroads were nationalized, I doubt that's a very good idea.

Which was what, exactly?

Essentially, the US government undermaintained the railroads (the modern public transit scourge of "deferred maintenance" practiced a hundred years ago). It ran the railroads with a more or less single-minded mindset to supplying war goods, and after the war was over, kept a heavy touch on the railroads which made them unable to adapt to the increasing competition from heavily-subsidized highways and airlines, which combined with the headache of "deferred maintenance" meant that railroads suffered from about 1920 to 1980. (It wasn't until the failure of Penn Central that things really started getting better.)

According to the wikipedia article, Conrail actually inherited a terrible maintenance situation when the railroads bankrupted and were nationalized. Conrail then proceeded to manage maintenance and got things profitable.

It was doing just fine when Reagan decided to privatize for some reason.

Nationalizing actually fixed the situation so I don't kmow where you got the impression that it made things worse

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrail

I'm talking about nationalization during WW1. Conrail didn't nationalize all the railroads (which did happen during WW1), just the bankrupt Penn Central.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Railroad_Admin...

This one? Maybe I missed it in my brief skim but I don't see anything negative

Yeah. The Wikipedia page isn't all that great on this topic; I'm going off of my recollections from the book American Railroads, although it's been a few decades since I last read it.

If you know of any material that's available on the internet I would be glad to read it

I apologize, because I don't know of any off the top of my head.

Unfortunately 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.

A 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.

If 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.

You 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.

Jeremy 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...

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Dismantle-NHS-Easy-Steps/dp/178...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/25/boris-...

Merely pointing out that a theory for attacking the system exists is not equivalent to attacking the system; you have to assume malicious intent. There is no way to differentiate merely scarce resources from supposedly adversarial depletion. This market is fixed. Abject failure is indistinguishable from success, in any form. You are merely saying, “I assume you are malicious,” which is a premise—not a conclusion. The same phenomenon exists with the Piven-Cloward opponents. There’s no ‘name-calling’ here. The point stands on itself.

To prove malicious intent without doubt would require me to have access to the minds of the perpetrators of a plan. I don't have such access, I do have access to their intentions through an agenda document and their further actions afterwards in government, such a plan would not be presented as malicious so I can only derive its intents from their agenda and actions to the results in reality.

The results in reality is a system that has not coped with its usage, one such example is presented in the op-ed article I shared on [2] which states that McKinsey was commissioned to provide a report which they concluded there would be less need of nurses, which was false, that report was used to reduce the budget for nurses which as a result caused further reduction in force of nurses as they quit because of lower pay. I can only derive that it's malicious since the report is wrong and no action was taken to correct the government's actions when reality hit. The same op-ed links to another analysis with this exact question [0].

> “In other words we didn’t have enough nurses before to provide a high quality service? Ah!” said John Humphrys in shocked tones - as if this was a revelation the BBC’s flagship news programme had never heard before.

> But the BBC failed to ask the key question – why were all the warning signs about nurse shortages, ignored?

> After all, NHS chiefs and ministers had been warned clearly for years that there would be a shortage of nurses, as a result of David Cameron’s coalition government cutting training places for nurses and doctors from 2010 onwards. From 2010 through to 2013 the numbers of nursing places commissioned at universities in England were cut by 12.7% – resulting in 2500 fewer places. In 2012 experts warned that this would result in a “disaster” in two or three years. In all, the 2010 cutbacks (reversed only relatively recently) meant that around 8000 fewer nurses were coming into the system.

Can you point me to any counterpoint to this where the government's actions align to a non-malicious plan to actually help the system, as misaligned as that plan might be? Because every action I can find points to a plan where the system is put under further struggle without giving a good reason why it is sensible to, for example, train less nurses when they were advised by NHS chiefs and specialists they will require more. You can't say that ignoring your chief specialists is not malicious.

[0] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/nhs-staff-shortage-s...

I 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.

wait 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.

Which 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.

The 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.

What 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.

I 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.

Hearsay: in Germany if US vehicle kills a pig, uncle sam is on the line for 6 generations of what hat pig could produce ...

Well, 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.

Are you talking about Ethylhexyl acrylate? Not very toxic outside of high dose acute exposures.

> Not very toxic outside of high dose acute exposures

Such as when your well is contaminated...

Surely you would volunteer to drink low doses in all your drinking water for the rest of your life then?

If 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.

I 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.

I was a chemistry major and spent a lot of time handling vocs in lab

Fines 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.

the federal government can step in and nationalize the railroad at any point as it has done in the past (woodrow wilson era iirc)

Oh I'm aware, this is more a general idea for "too big to fail" companies in general. Our infrastructure is rotten and often privatized. No one has the funds and ability to hold companies like this accountable except for the federal government.

Look at Steven Donzinger. He reported on toxic spills by Chevron in Nicaragua that poisoned indigenous water supplies. Chevron hired a private prosecutor and found a judge in their favor to force him into house arrest(for over a year) for not supplying a document.

Large corporations have the cards stacked in their favor.

It's almost like we shouldn't allow companies to grow so large, and that a company being larger than most countries doesn't provide any benefit to the consumer.

"Can" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I do not find it a credible threat, and doubt any of these companies do either. Perhaps one could argue that the 2008-2009 TARP handling of some banks or automobile manufacturers was a "light nationalization", as the US took control of _some_ stock of the affected companies. (This stock was later sold off for a profit.) But other than that, and _maybe_ the creation of the TSA in 2001, there isn't a nationalization in my living memory.

The nationalization of railroads under Wilson lasted from December 1917 to March 1920. During this time, operation (including expansion and maintenance) of all railroads was organized by the federal government. When the nationalization was repealed in 1920, the US paid rail companies for lost profits.

This 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.

This 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

"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"

Losses speak louder than words.

This doesn't really make sense. If the company owes more in fines than it's worth, existing shareholders get nothing and the company belongs to its creditors. If it owes large amounts to the government, those claims convert into ownership too.

Rather than converting the liquid operating budget into paid fines, it converts the shares retained by the company.

A company this big doesn't need to sell shares to get operating capital. This should apply to any company that does stock buybacks to inflate stock price, rather than reinvesting into their company, employees, etc.

Depending on the details, this is the same as charging a fine in money or it's worse.

Say the company is worth $1B and has 10M shares that are trading at $100 each. Now there's an accident that will lead to a $100M fine. This get priced in, the value of the company is now $900M, and the stock goes to $90/share. Whether they send $100M to the government in cash or by issuing 11M shares, either way the stock price stays at $90 and investors are equally affected.

On the other hand, if the amount of the fine is higher than the value of the company you'd much rather be a creditor than a shareholder, since in bankruptcy the stock goes to zero.

That creates an incentive structure for regulators to fine valuable companies and to do no harm to their long term value. It’s the opposite incentive structure you want in regulators.

I 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.

I 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”.

I 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.

I 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.

It'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.

Why 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?

software engineers? no. actual engineers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malpractice

Maybe we should start holding software engineers liable. Will push a lot of tech bro imposters out of this industry.

Why 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.

There 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com