Leaked audio reveals US rail workers were told to skip inspections | Hacker News Reader

Leaked audio reveals US rail workers were told to skip inspections

theguardian.com

316 pointsdetaro206 comments

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.

> 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.

I don't buy this argument. What your logic seems to be is that if UBI was in place, then if the worker gets blacklisted or whatever, he can still draw upon UBI to not become homeless, but is that really enough? Suppose you have a middle class lifestyle financed by UBI plus your rail worker job, and you saw something shady happening. Would you really risk getting blacklisted from the industry and thereby downgrading your lifestyle to subsistence level, just so you can blow the whistle?

If people have UBI to cover their most basic needs they could actually have savings and they could use that to maintain their standard of living while they find other work. These rail workers are not highly skilled positions. The article states that they get no formal training at all. Even if no railroad company in the country will hire someone as retaliation quitting (which is a big assumption) they could easily work in some other industry.

>If people have UBI to cover their most basic needs they could actually have savings and they could use that to maintain their standard of living while they find other work.

This assumes that people will plow their UBI into savings, which is a doubtful assumption given how we see very well paid professionals live paycheck to paycheck due to lifestyle inflation.

Not every professional

It only needs to be one person to whistleblow

That becomes more likely if they don't have to depend on the job to keep a roof over their head and their family doesn't have to be homeless

If I rephrase the argument, you are saying we should not have UBI to provide the lower class with a safety net because some people are bad with their finances?

It could be good to question why some people are bad with their finances, or experience lifestyle inflation. I am going to bet it has less to do with having a safety net or access to more money, and more to do with societal pressure, culture, and mental health.

Railroad workers do get a lot of on the job training though. Or at least used to, wouldn't surprise me if they cut back on. But most rail road jobs are highly skilled jobs, the problem is, those skills don't really transfer well. Kind of like a joke I used to hear Marines make when I was in the Navy. The marines just prepare you to be homeless, because a lot of jobs in the Marine Corp don't really transfer out well (unless your aviation side). Which is where UBI will really help, not just with railroad workers, but workers in general. Need to change industry for X reason? Well you have UBI to assist so you don't eat shit in doing so.

I don't know, I think we should consider the other half of the problem.

Do you think, if workers were promoted (or given authority) on the basis of a job well done, that this would happen? Right now, in nearly all industries, and even in parts of tech, you become a manager, by being manager-like. That means playing politics and going to business school. Deeper understanding or appreciation of the job isn't really necessary. All that's necessary is the ability to "manage" people, which is of course an important skill, but there's this idea that you can helicopter "leaders" in who don't really need to know the job at hand. It breeds contempt for the folks actually doing the work, and their concerns about the job and their craft.

While I agree, if seems to me that the proper remediation for this situation would be robust whistleblower protections and swift retribution from authorities when a worker says "FUCK THAT" after being told to waive safety inspections or ignore issues and run a train anyway. Including hefty fines against the companies and criminal penalties against not only the managers pushing such approaches, but the executives complicit in it as well.

What if whistleblower protections require the accused company – if the complaint has merit – put in escrow enough money to pay the employee's current salary tacked to inflation or CoL until they reach Social Security retirement age?

It would ensure that a legitimate whistleblower would continue to collect a paycheck if they find themselves blacklisted by similar companies.

I mean the lack of escrow isn't the bigger problem here - governments take assets (e.g. taxes) all the time with the threat of literally murdering you if you try to stop them. They will get their money from the company one way or another. The problem is actual accountability and real actions.

yes and no. companies find ways to weasel out of laws 5 years down the road all the time. the money would need to be put in escrow at the time of the whistle being blown, or the worker would risk bankruptcy or other legal shenanigans putting it beyond their reach.

> ... or the worker would risk bankruptcy or other legal shenanigans putting it beyond their reach.

Seems like that would happen anyway? eg it sounds like these companies are mostly going to do their utmost to fight against the legal proceedings. play every legal/bastard tactic they can, discredit the whistleblower, likely hire 3rd parties to disrupt things, etc.

Having the money in escrow doesn't seem like a guarantee the whistleblower would end up getting it either.

> If the complaint has merit

What defines this? And what level of whistleblowing would be realistic to invoke the penalty?

My “employer mishandles their MSDS sheets” is a bit different in a small machine shop than “rail workers are told to fudge safety reports” in a national rail carrier that transports hazardous materials.

No need for UBI, atleast not to solve this specific kind of problem.

This only requires a solution similar to what the EPA has for illegal refrigerant release, a massive penalty in the 10s or 100s of thousands which gets shared with the whistleblower.

The various definitions and fines can be defined by the regulatory body.

That’s highly specific which is good, and a provides a financial incentive if you blow the whistle, it doesn’t create a “whistleblowing market” that I think the original commenter’s idea does. I’m skeptical of any law that defines itself in generalities and motivates a “report on your neighbors, company, etc… behavior by creating a financial incentive to do it. That is a law that would be ripe for abuse.

Gotta say, I don't hate this idea.

The problem is that at some point you become reliant on a certain level of income.

And it would be kinda strange if working nightshifts on rail work would pay the same as UBI.

You don't need it to do so indefinitely. You only need it to pay enough to keep you afloat while you either find another job, or get the previous job to relent, take you back, and agree with you—or downsize your lifestyle.

This is, however, why UBI needs to be high enough to actually cover all the basic necessities of life, and not just be something like $500/month.

>This is, however, why UBI needs to be high enough to actually cover all the basic necessities of life, and not just be something like $500/month

$500/month seems pretty doable if you're only eating rice and beans and live in dorm room style accommodations in south dakota, and don't spend money on anything else. Sure, eating rice and beans isn't great, but eating beef is arguably not a necessity. Nor is living in your own unit in a desirable location, or having money for entertainment.

Or just move to "South Dakota" which is really the Philippines where you get a maid to watch any kid(s), a woman of whatever sort of arrangement you desire, your own flat in a rural but peaceful village, and 3 squares a day. I'd live it up off $500 with no responsibilities, sounds like paradise.

I would be very surprised if you could find rent in South Dakota , that you have room and power to cook rice at 500 a month. Outside of a family member or close friend owning land, and letting you live rent free, 500 ain’t gonna do it.

>I would be very surprised if you could find rent in South Dakota , that you have room and power to cook rice at 500 a month

Using dorm room style accommodations would significantly reduce costs compared to typical estimates using rent for a bachelor apartment. Plopping down the building in the middle of a corn field (as opposed to some sort of high cost urban center) reduces costs even further.

It's not possible.

Rail workers get paid pretty well. If you're making $100,000/yr and supporting a middle class family, you can't have UBI that matches that income level.

Getting $40,000/yr might be enough for a single person, but even then it's a huge change in lifestyle and often impossible to adjust (mortgage, car payments, etc).

In situations like this, the point isn't to have a UBI that matches the income level of an upper-middle-class job.

It's to have something to decrease your burn rate, so you don't have to worry about being homeless next week.

Sure, but there isn't much difference between "I have to stay at my job or end up homeless" or "I have to stay at my job or else I can't afford my mortgage and will have to sell my cars and my kids can't go to summer camp".

Clearly the 2nd one is better, but it's still a very serious decision that has consequences most people would avoid.

How long do you think it takes to find a job as a railroad track laborer?

Exactly, pay enough so that no one has to work. Then we can all buy the goods and services we like without toiling.

> most people want to do the right thing when in comes to safety like this

not in my experience working in blue collar labor, union or not.

also, a bad assumption in general. this is not a good argument for "UBI, nationalized healthcare, etc"

laws/regulation with teeth (punitive fines) are the solution here.

Social safety nets also help with technology. Let's say ChatGPT makes a lot of money and puts a lot of people out of work. Normally the government should tax it and provide safety nets for those workers. Otherwise you have social distress and that's not good for anybody. Technology progress worries me the most because now it has the potential to spread very fast and people simply do not have time to adapt.

Other avenues I suppose would be raising wages so people don't live paycheck to paycheck and decoupling healtcare from employment. But it all leads to the same thing, not having the world end when you suddenly find yourself without a job.

UBI is a utopia where the powerful state serves the people, while simultaneously keeping other states in check. Same for healthcare: it's not the greedy employers who support this, it's the state itself, its ruthless need to subdue and control anything within its reach.

No. Ignoring problems is not a solution.

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.

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.

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.

It's about having the option. Mutual assured destruction.

Yeah buddy that’s quite the stretch.

First, there’s this thing called banks. You can put money into them and save it for later, so you don’t have to depend on a political party handing stuff out.

But sure, not everyone likes to save, that’s their freedom and their choice. Well guess what, they’re part of a rail union, they can already walk off the job.

Actually, no they can't already walk off the job. You may remember that the president essentially imposed a settlement some months ago.

Could you please be a tad less vitriolic? All this comment makes clear is that there’s absolutely zero point engaging with you because anyone that does is going to become your new outlet for…whatever this is…which is somehow justified by your feelings about UBI? We’re all adults. Act like it.

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).

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.

I really wish I could refute this. The protections incorporation provides for executives seem a bit too strong in cases like these.

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.

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.'

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.

A more realistic approach is to take away personhood rights that these corporations rely on. A 10 year ban on political donations and lobbying would be a good starting point. Then prison for the C-levels if they violate those terms which are directly under their control.

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.

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.

If nothing else it would make jail nicer in that case.

Yes and the less you know the better for you when it eventually goes to court.

We had one of these cases recently in my country.

CEO of one of the biggest X in the country goes to trial for lying/not informing correctly about Y gross malfeasance. Walks free after years of investigation, because didn't know about it.

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.

In the Coast Guard and Navy it doesn't matter if the Captain didn't know what was going on, its their job to know what was going on and they're always the ones held responsible one way or another.

This is because if you are in the military your subordinates are bound by UCMJ to follow all lawful orders. The officers are granted complete authority over the subordinates but bear the responsibility for all the actions of those under their command. There is no civilian equivalent for this kind of relationship between authority and responsibility(though law enforcement should be using the same model).

Holding both companies and management responsible can be tricky as well. IIRC Exxon-Mobil had an aggressive policy of destroying records from projects as soon as they were legally able to prevent them from being used against the company in litigation or investigations. In this case, having poorly structured laws or regulations encouraged the company solve the problem of liability, rather than one of accountability.

> it's just that DAs rarely go after executives

I think after taking down Enron and Arthur Andersen and lot of people lost their jobs, which does not look good on TV. Politicians on both sides stopped supporting taking down execs/companys. So now the new normal is to push for fines.

I think what you're describing is the difficulty in "piercing the veil" of an LLC to hold individuals accountable. You can search that legal principle and learn more about how an LLC structure shields individuals from repercussions for their actions.

I remember a nice Obama quote "the buck stops with me".

If you get the big pay check for leadership it is your responsibility when shit goes bad. Sadly about the worst consequence a failed CEO has is that he/she doesn't get invited to play golf for a few years.

Exactly, fining companies doesn't do anything. Fine and jail the PEOPLE doing these crimes.

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.

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.

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.

Its not enough for the laws to exist, they must also be enforced.

>I'd rather that liability starts with the CEO and Chairman. You need to make sure executives cannot simply hide behind fallguys.

Why can't you appoint a fall guy as the "CEO", and then have a COO or whatever that actually runs the day to day?

Even c-levels, including the CEO, can be fired by the board, which is why I think accountability should include such.

Okay, then you have a whole c-suite of fall guys, and the real CEO is actually called "VP of global operations" or whatever.

I prefer jail time for companies. The entire operation has to shut down for a set period of time. No money going in or out. No one can work. No one can open their laptop. No one can go in the office. No one can discuss business. No new contracts signed.

If corporations have the same rights as humans, make them suffer the same consequences.

So all of the employees get fired en masse, but the rich CEO, managers and shareholders actually responsible for malfeasance get an extended vacation?

Yeah... that'll show them.

The effective outcome of corporate jailtime is that the company is instantly destroyed. There are no companies that would survive being shit down for years. Shareholders would be left with nothing.

And if people would be out of jobs - good. It would stop people from working for companies that don't provide transparency into the legality of their operations.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

CEOs generally aren’t racketeering so they can’t usually be hit with that

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Yep. This happens all the time in other unionized industries. Manager: "Do [unsafe thing that is against policy / the law, or even that is simply physically impossible]". Worker: "Yeeeeah, I'll be looping my union rep into this conversation". Manager: "On second thought, never mind".

I'd guess the problem's that the railroad workers' union is toothless.

[EDIT] Downvotes why? Disbelief? This comes second-hand from friends in various unionized workplaces, it's damn common. Without strong unions they'd 100% for-sure have been forced to choose between doing something unsafe, and losing their jobs, many times—and that's with managers already knowing unions are a factor, I assume the rate of attempts to get workers to do unsafe things (including setting various metrics or policy such that it's impossible to meet expectations while maintaining proper safety) is higher at non-union workplaces, or those with weak unions.

Upvoted since this is indeed common

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.

That exists.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

A lot of people forget or don’t know about how the Railroads have a very different system of laws about several of the things that basically everyone else has to deal with.

Starting with social security, railroad employees have a different social security system and other related law regarding retirement benefits.

Second there’s the labour laws, much of which is older and more Byzantine than “normal” labour laws because of the historical context behind the era when they were introduced, and having been introduced in such a way that they managed to isolate themselves from other kinds of workers. You can really see this in the complex series of steps necessary for a railroad union strike, compared to other workers it’s just crazy, but each step of that complicated process had at least some justification from greed and backhanding to genuine concerns regarding the crucial role the railroad has in the fabric of the nation.

That sort of “crucial role” or justification has been at the heart of how the railroads got to the present state. The railroads were at one point in the 19th century, arguably more powerful than the federal government, to the point where in some places you had to clarify that “The President” didn’t mean the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad if you wanted to refer to the President of the United States. This level of power is obviously long gone, but it represents the level of power they once had, power which has translated into over a century of “special cases” carved out for railways in law at all levels of society across the USA.

The railroad unions can’t just threaten to stop work like others can, because the government has a right of refusal on their ability to strike, which basically acts as a muzzle on widespread union action and allows the railroads to squeeze the shit out of employees… if you haven’t, look at what the unions were trying to strike for last year… and then think about if employees willing to put up with that, will be the sort of people to take a stand and blow the whistle on bad workplace practices… railroad unions just don’t have the same level of power as normal unions, they do have power, just not “tactical” power, the kind you use to fight the small things like individual safety breaches by having everyone in the workplace threaten to walk out.

Cost of fines would be transferred to customers. What can hurt is jail.

A most appropriate use for prisons in the US. Finally.

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.

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.

Trucking between railyards may happen. It is by far not the norm, though. They interchange traffic all the time. "So little interaction" is either ignorance or propaganda.

And, you only truck things that are already in trailers or containers. You don't truck things that are in boxcars or tank cars - the cost of unloading into a trailer just to truck it to a different railroad would be insane.

And, trucks carry, what, 70% of freight in this country? That's the railroads' competition. It's not other railroads. (That said, competition between railroads is not the constraint on railroads passing the cost of fines onto their customers.)

I think you’re focusing on my mistake estimating the size of my supporting point. The existence of trucking between rail yards was meant as a surprising fact to highlight the fact that the railroad companies don’t go out of their way to maximise their level of interconnection. If they interconnected to a higher level, the sort needed for meaningful competition, then you’ll never truck between rail yards because someone would be competing for that money since loading and unloading containers costs money, any practical solution that avoids it would have margin (the loading and unloading costs plus the trucking mileage costs) to work with where some profit could be found…

And obviously the primary competitor to shipping via train is trucks, I deliberately ignored it because there’s a huge class of rail freight that can’t really use trucks (non-perishable bulk commodities like coal, potash, construction gravel for cement, bauxite and other minerals) and this is slowly becoming a larger component of their bottom line because they aren’t incentivised to compete with each other, let alone the trucking industry… they are all in their own individual races to the bottom by way of profit maximising efforts like precision scheduled railroading and a general aversion to capital spending inherent in their focus on business metrics such as the “operating ratio” which is quickly undermined by capital expenditure on things like new locomotives and rolling stock. Most of the “parallel running” (two companies can ship from A to B) rail lines where they had to compete with other companies were dumped as not productive enough long ago… (or never built back in the days when it was cheaper, or got rationalised away as part of the government restructuring on the east coast… because railroad history is a whole different subject)

Breach the corporate veil. Throw any share holders in jail for varying times.

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…

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.

That's why companies cannot be allowed to run a nuclear power plant. A place where negligence has no place.

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.

We got Chernobyl because there wasn't transparency. The flaw that caused the explosion was known to the USSR but it was covered up and a correction to existing reactors in production was not implemented until after it became impossible to ignore. The same would be happening to production reactors here in the US if it weren't for the strict government regulations that ensured that no western reactors could be built the way Chernobyl was (no containment building, graphite moderation etc.). This regulation is forcing transparency in design.

That's true, but money saving did result in the lack of a proper containment building.

https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-plant-ow...

They should be run by an entity devoid of negligence, like the US government.

can you point out a human organization not susceptible to negligence?

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.

The service I get from AAA's DMV services is far superior to the service I get from the DMV itself.

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)

Fines?! No, executives doing jail time is the only solution.

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?

That's kind of the definition of a company in our current system. It's working as designed.

just nationalize it

Because the US government never did anything negligent/shady right?

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.

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.

Why didnt that work in Volkswagon?

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.

In the long run, it may have worked - VW is now a decent competitor with Tesla on EVs.

because democracy is fundamentally broken, isn't it obvious? We keep voting for people that give us what we want, not what we need.

From an article on the train derailment in Oregon a few years back:

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.

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-tc...

[2] https://www.ensco.com/sites/default/files/2022-08/ENSCO-Trac...

>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?

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.

He'll take them out behind the woodshed, give them a stern talking to, and then give them a handshake and a "Thanks for this truly productive discussion, see you at our usual watering-hole tonight?"

Maybe a few weak regulations will be improved and Democrats will loudly proclaiming how hard they are "cracking down" on unsafe practices.

There will be no real change unless the political winds (i.e., voters) demand it so strongly that Democrats have no other choice. Both parties are beholden to corporate money and interests.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't know Petey's ex-McKinsey! I know McKinsey people, Ive been to their parties. Rubbed shoulders.

Not impressed. Last time I was with them, in a room of 100 people, two were cool. One joined when his company got bought out. The other one was his wife. None of them struck me as particularly above average, except for ego and ambition.

Minus one for Pete.

> in a room of 100 people, two were cool.

You talked to all the 100 people? Did you also tell them that you were at the party to be impressed?

You have to talk to someone to gauge them? You never study their behavior, how they comport themselves around others?

Adolescents with daddy's keys to daddy's merc. is how Id describe them.

The sort of argument-by-anecdote that makes Hacker News such an interesting, informative, civilized forum to read these days - thanks for your contribution

Thanks :) I figured it was more personable than yet another rehashing of all of McKinsey's scandals. After all who cares if they masterminded Pursue Pharma to get an entire region addicted to smack?

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?

> 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...

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.

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.

I went spelunking and I found this: 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?

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.

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?

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.

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/saf...

Exactly, it's the inverse of the boy-who-cried-wolf problem, and it's not entirely simple to solve.

Its not the inverse. Boy who cried wolf and normalization of deviance are both about false positives.

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.

In general, this is actually done: there are defect detectors that are installed along tracks that monitor for several conditions as trains pass over/through them. Once the train has passed, a voice radio message is sent to the train crew.

Here's an example of one working: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7BGg82uQ1U

I'm not sure whether similar equipment was a factor in the East Palestine incident.

It is very odd to me that states do this very thing for trucking, but apparently do not do it for rail.

They did. It was ignored. IIRC, the exact wording from dispatch was "If it's still alerting at the next sensor it's a problem."

I'm astonished that they treat those alarms like I treated the check-engine light as a poor kid who reasoned that the car seems to still be running fine.

Thanks for the clarification.

Here's a page on several of the automatic checks that exist for railways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defect_detector

The same reason airlines don't put airtags onto passengers suitcases: it costs a lot of money for thousands of units, plus labour and time cost - money which could be going to someones bonus (or shareholders). Also, they don't really care if your luggage gets lost, just like rail companies don't really care about this specific derailment - as long as they are making more money from the "efficiencies"

The don't want to. It increases the amount of time those cars are not hauling freight.

Nothing stops this train.

Nothing.

Sounds like the tagline for the next Hollywood blockbuster.

You kid, but the movie Unstoppable, about a runaway train, is based on a real life scenario. There are some interesting trivia details at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477080/trivia/?ref_=tt_ql_3.

Of course there is a movie ha ha. Thanks for that link. I guess it is part of the "Unstoppable" genre of movies huh? We have an unstoppable train, unstoppable bus, what else? An unstoppable car, truck, or plane?

[1]:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111257/

Speed 2 has the "unstoppable" boat.

pff movie from the nineties, you kids get off my lawn

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089941/

> "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.

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

Only rogue engineers get punished.

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.

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.

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.

Thermodynamics strikes again.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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

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.

you don't need text-to-speech AI model to fake recording, you just need random guy and a microphone.

This has been a potential attack since recording devices were invented. It was just done by talented people or people with mixing tools.

Faked audio is still easily detectable.

I don't know, they sound exactly like the real thing to me : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep-f7uBd8Gc

It's easy to fool humans. The point is that it is still really easy to detect voice-generated AI computationally. See also: photoshop.

I hope reddit/antiwork don't leak on HN.

We all agree with that, it's just not the right place.

I have some Atlas Shrugged vibes

The part where federal bureaucrats ordered a train to unsafely transit a tunnel and caused a massive explosion?

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.

Rand was right that the looters will wield regulation as a tool for looting, but she was wrong that deregulation would prevent that. Modern looters are able to exploit both regulation and deregulation for personal profit at the expense of others, and her ideology doesn’t offer useful guidance for that scenario.

Rand is often quoted by the looters, in fact.

A system that crosses its fingers and hopes "people will do the right thing" will always fail. These systems are games that will be played. If you can make more money by making one of these dangerous moves, someone will do it. And if there aren't laws against it, someone will always do it even if the established players won't. (not to say laws perfectly prevent all crime, but the rate is much higher without them)

Just look at crypto, speedrunning the history of finance and rediscovering all the fraud you can commit when there are no regulations, and at massive scales affecting millions of people. Just because established banks learned their lessons hasn't meant new players would, so a world without regulation will continuously experience these tragedies.

Thats a very culturally specific issue. If you have a low-trust culture you're absolutely correct.

If you have a different kind of culture, such as in Japan, thats incorrect.

Finance is a great example sector in your favor because it is so heavily internationalized(therefore basically no one feels patriotic/nationalistic about their work) and greedy. National industries like freight would be much more likely to embrace cultural features of their country.

Eh I don't know. People are people and when pressed they're going to respond the same way. Look at Germany and the Volkswagen emissions scandal that happened a few years ago.

German engineering excellence, yeah right.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-34324772

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

I think that scenario is actually the opposite of the train regulatory environment. Cars have been really overregulated for years(how many major car brands are new in the last 50 years?).

I've worked on post-2000 cars; it's not far fetched to me to believe that emission standards became unrealistic. The whole industry was in on that scandal.

Whats unusual to me looking back now is how much the press cared about that vs. east palestine/train regs.

You can't rely on "culture" because that's completely unquantifiable and squishy. Given enough time, culture will change. At what point do you go "okay, this culture requires us to update our laws"?

Regulations in this case are just a way to deal with the bad system we have for holding people accountable for externalities. I would focus on fixing that rather than a highly complex and bureaucratic regulatory regime for every industry. It should be made unprofitable to toxic wasteland an entire city.

There's a saying that regulations are written in blood. While not always true, it's clear that they come about for good reason.

Hmm, the problem is that the feedback loop is not tight. I wonder if there is some property of markets which someone has written about which expresses this.

It's a classic TornadoGuard problem https://xkcd.com/937/

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...

Ah the Boeing management style. That explains things

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.

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.

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.

No, not a smoking gun. Just evidence of a degraded culture

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

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."

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This is a classic example of the fallacy of the middle. In general, there are often two sides to an issue. But the correct balance is almost never directly in the middle.

You present the union and the management as equal players, both with radical views, and the truth as somewhere near the midpoint. Except the unions are trying to fight to keep two people per train, not have 100.

> Efforts to require at least two-person crews, including via regulation, lack a safety justification; ignore the decades of safe and successful use of single-person crews at some U.S. freight railroads and in passenger and freight rail systems throughout the world; upend meaningful collective bargaining, and undermine the rail industry's ability to compete against less climate-friendly forms of transportation.

https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/AAR-Crew-Size...

> This is a classic example of the fallacy of the middle. In general, there are often two sides to an issue. But the correct balance is almost never directly in the middle.

What gave you the impression that the parent post thinks the right answer is "in the middle"? He was simply pointing out that both parties have an incentive to say the "right" amount is lower/higher, and therefore just because one party says the amount needs to be changed, doesn't mean it actually needs to be changed.

The "a few bad apples spoils the bunch" defense. Not gonna work.

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.

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