I think this is pretty consistent with the old school 1950s views of the current administration. Companies can prioritize profits over people again. Yeah, dump in the rivers, dump in the woods, just drive around in circles dumping in an empty lot. You don’t need masks- give everyone cancer and blow some shit up, maybe get some acid burns. Super-fund sites? When was the last one we had anyway- we need more of ‘em- lots more! Let’s let the kids eat the lead paint and complain of the smells wafting into their cars from the chemical, paper, etc. plants on road trips, just like the olden days!
> I think this is pretty consistent with the old school 1950s views of the current administration.
The effects are functionally the same, but I think the ideology and rhetoric behind then and now have changed.
There really isn't a purportedly "principled" system of logic behind these decisions, in the past these decisions would be dressed in principled rhetoric no matter how heinous they realistically were.
They aren't even bothering to dress it up in rhetoric that says there is something noble behind these decisions.
The 1950’s were when the US set up many of the post war institutions that are being dismantled now. Maybe you mean the 1850’s? (Though I’d guess the government was probably more forward looking back then too.)
The principle is the rate of profit is falling, competing countries are rising, and they want to unleash the private sector in the hopes of raising GDP growth significantly enough to retain hegemony. This won't work, because they're fucking stupid, and they'll damage the health of the population and the productivity of the land and waters going forward, but there is a logic to it.
I agree, I'm commenting on the outward justifications that are used to placate the public.
In the past, a mountain of ideology and rhetoric would justify these decisions to the common person in an effort manufacture consent. They aren't even bothering to do that.
It's more like the current administration and the billionaires behind them are acting like private equity. Now that they have control of the government, they'll dismantle anything they can and set us on a path to destruction to squeeze out every bit of value they can for themselves.
Those most responsible are either betting they won't be around long enough to deal with the smouldering wreckage or planning to ditch before the country hits rock bottom.
In a kind of ironic way, if those people hadn't been so goddamn stupid maybe the government institutions they created and expanded wouldn't all be reputationally bankrupt and subject to dismantling by populist billionares.
looking at this at a different angle, some companies do practice health and safety AND there are egregious acts of pollution.. consider this next part .. many practices in the early 1900s would be outrageous today and even bad actor companies have changed since then, as a given. It is IMHO both the avoidable, known acts today AND the unknown, under-counted actions of today that will be so painfully obvious at some time decades from now. A legal environment where cost cutting in the cost centers of environmental compliance are openly prioritized, includes disasters of knowns and the unknowns.
In closing, I do not think it is like the 1950s in that basic science has identified and amplified many fundamental advances since then, materials science is sci-fi now compared to then, but it is similar in the economic-first and actively thumbing the nose at all things green and eco regarding the market.
The ideology of "infinite growth" is driving on bare metall by now, every movement proofing more and more, that it has used it all up, the momentum, the resources, the people who belief in its tale.
The building up backlash is going to be horrific and i hope it will not lead to decomplexification movements ala pol pot or islamism.
CSB investigations still represent an objective source of truth which competes with the PR that companies put out absolving themselves of blame in the event of any mishap. Removing the CSB frees up companies to "self-regulate" and blast out bogus framings.
Nuance is not always a good thing. This type of nuance doesn’t forward the discussion in any way and, in this case, muddies the waters and leads to some odd implications.
Sure, we can say there is no objective source of truth and chastise the author for using that word, but the term objective in this case has meaning that the author is trying to articulate… most likely that there is some overtly unbiased information source, in opposition to the information sourced from the company which has obvious incentives.
Additionally, by stating that the CSB provides an ‘alternative source’ of truth, as a correction to an originally described objective one, you are (possibly inadvertently) claiming that the company is also providing a different source of truth, rhetorically raising the value of the information the company provides while lowering the value of the CSB information.
Don’t be the person who adds nuance for the sake of nuance.
> Sure, we can say there is no objective source of truth and chastise the author for using that word
I regret my imprecise use of language which has taken us down this tiresome metaphysical subthread. I should have merely emphasized that the CSB presents an alternative point of view to that of the company. It was not essential to my point that the CSB be unassailable.
Ah, I was being a bit sarcastic in my response to monkeyelite, I believe I understood what you wrote and was trying to get at the vacuity of their response to you.
I derailed this conversation to make a meta point, and it wasn’t your fault at all.
> there is some overtly unbiased information source, in opposition to the information sourced from the company which has obvious incentives.
Yes I don’t believe in unbiased sources. I believe in multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth.
> you are (possibly inadvertently) claiming that the company is also providing a different source of truth
Correct. And I don’t buy the dichotomy you are framing of biased companies vs unbiased government.
> Don’t be the person who adds nuance for the sake of nuance.
The term “objective truth” was just thrown around. Might as well just say it’s an “absolutely good”. The level of discourse in these threads is science = good, agency with science in name = science. Cuts against agency = bad.
What are the costs and benefits to this organization? It appears some sub threads have identified a possible overlap with other agency’s responsibility. It would be interesting to know the extent that is true.
> Yes I don’t believe in unbiased sources. I believe in multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth.
Sure, I agree with what you’ve stated here.
> Correct. And I don’t buy the dichotomy you are framing of biased companies vs unbiased government.
I reread what I wrote and still don’t see that I framed the conversation in this way. What I did frame was the motivation of the company (which I implied to be profit) versus the motive of the government (that of public interest). These are both biased and the effect of the bias could be anticipated: companies would slant their published information with a focus on the effects of profits, whereas the government’s overt bias would slant its information output towards safety (in the case of the CSB) without much concern for profit.
> The term “objective truth” was just thrown around. Might as well just say it’s an “absolutely good”. The level of discourse in these threads is science = good, agency with science in name = science. Cuts against agency = bad.
Sure, we both agree the author is biased towards the government, but you’ve missed the thrust of what I wrote entirely: your nuance added absolutely no value to the discussion, it didn’t make a point or refute anything the author said.
You believe in multiple sources to verify truth. Then why are you arguing against one of these sources? Why are you (effectively) saying that we should just trust a single source of truth - the companies who have explicit financial incentives to deceive?
> Yes I don’t believe in unbiased sources. I believe in multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth.
It is just metaphysics. I like it also, but it is impractical. I find it useful to train my mind to see things from different angles, but it is useless to talk about concrete things.
Can you find examples of a biased reports on CSB's youtube channel? If not, it is a good example of uselessness of metaphysics. If you are declaring all their reports biased, while being unable to show the bias, it is just empty words.
I would call it having a baseline understanding of organizations and media.
> Can you find examples of a biased reports on CSB's youtube channel?
Yes? Can you not?
The top video in this thread, “safety pays off“ highlights their successes and does not discuss their failures or costs. So yes that video was designed to make their organization appear in the best light possible.
No. If I heard a proposal to remove them I would want to hear the reasons why or why not rather than assuming that they are an absolute good for society.
> The top video in this thread, “safety pays off“ highlights their successes and does not discuss their failures or costs. So yes that video was designed to make their organization appear in the best light possible.
Oh, yes, you are right, it is a bias. But this bias tells us nothing about objectivity of CSB investigations and recommendations. It tells us nothing about the objectivity you had objected to.
So you would prefer that only one agency speak with one voice on a subject? Sounds very counter to the "multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth" principle you espoused. In practice, government agencies often have disagreements in areas of overlap and hash it out before making a public recommendation, or settling on a course of action.
> So you would prefer that only one agency speak with one voice on a subject?
It’s generally better to know what each groups bias is and compensate than to pretend there are unbiased groups. That rhetorical move tends to be the most malicious and deceiving.
> Yes I don’t believe in unbiased sources. I believe in multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth.
Do you believe in priors? Or do you evaluate each perspective at its face value?
> Correct. And I don’t buy the dichotomy you are framing of biased companies vs unbiased government.
That's not the dichotomy here. It's a biased government acting on behalf of biased companies.
> The term “objective truth” was just thrown around. Might as well just say it’s an “absolutely good”. The level of discourse in these threads is science = good, agency with science in name = science. Cuts against agency = bad.
The only discourse you personally have contributed is "both sides."
> What are the costs and benefits to this organization? It appears some sub threads have identified a possible overlap with other agency’s responsibility. It would be interesting to know the extent that is true.
Sounds like you are intentionally giving benefit of doubt to well-known bad faith actors. This makes you incredibly naive at best, or biased sealioner at worst.
Going this way we should ban the word "objective", because no knowledge can be objective, because you need a thinking subject to process raw data to create knowledge.
Going this way we'll risk to end up in a world, where there is no truth and no falsehoods. All we'll have is something in between. It would take just one small step to say that any two opinions are equal in their utility.
You know, it is like Kremlin propaganda targets idea of "independent media", pointing out that any media is not truly independent, it depends on someone or something. It gets its funding from somewhere, it is subject of some laws and of abuses of law. It needs to take into an account interests of sponsors and from those who wield power. The core message for Russians is: Kremlin propaganda can be bad, but no worse than anything else. Or it can be reworded as: anything is propaganda. Therefore you can relax and just watch news of state television, because you'll never know the truth no matter how hard you tried.
It seems to me, that you are going in the same rough direction by rejecting objectiveness.
> Going this way we should ban the word "objective", because no knowledge can be objective, because you need a thinking subject to process raw data to create knowledge.
That’s a good observation. Generally when talking about humans in a political context and organizations in general it’s a misnomer.
Oh, it is all about dumb people who cannot navigate the current informational landscape. Or about people who relies on informational processing disabilities of others. It doesn't mean that smart people should reject the notions of truth and false.
I didn’t say anything about truth not existing. I said all organizations are presenting a perspective. It may contain truth, but it’s not an objective view.
Brilliant people make absolutely stupid decisions all the time - thinking you're not going to is the trap. It's not possible you could get caught in bullshit you _want_ to believe and _know_ is right, yeah?
I'm going to explain my views on this in a full. It is a lot of text, but I hope it is ok.
People don't have an innate ability to distinguish truths from lies, they need to learn this skill. Before Internet and LLMs they were relying on authorities to dictate what was truth and what was falsehoods. Those authorities included newspapers and other media, but there were also courts, government officials, politicians and others. There were no easy way to spread misinformation wide, so people were shielded from them. The system worked to some extent.
Now, however, people are swimming in an ocean of lies. They haven't magically acquired skills needed to navigate in this environment. Their own judgments about truthfulness are no better then coin flips. The results are obvious: people experience learned helplessness[1], they avoid making judgments altogether. People instead are picking some "authority" and stick to it. In USA politics, for example, there are two authorities Democrats and Republicans, so it comes to choosing your side. It allows people to avoid psychological burden of making a judgement (they are afraid of failing again). Consequently, people never feel that they were mistaken, because even if they are, it is not their fault, but the fault of an authority. At the same time they see other people who firmly believe in opposite views. Here comes "post truth world". Truth is no longer universal, you can choose any "truth" you like.
However, it is possible to avoid learned helplessness, all you need is to be better than a coin flip at predicting in advance which statements are true and which are false. You need an ability to avoid traps at least in cases when you make an effort. I make an effort when I feel it is important. Moreover in the most cases I do not need to make an effort, because all previous efforts trained my skills that works by themselves. I just see symptoms and guess, and my guessed are often correct.
I think, I need to add one more important ability to have: one needs to get rid of an irresistible urge to have an opinion. It is ok to have no opinion on some topic, to keep yourself in undecided state. Moreover it is a preferred state, if you are not 100% sure or if the topic is not important enough to you to invest time to do some research and to keep an eye on it.
In light of this I do not see the world to be "post truth". I see the most of people seeing the world as a "post truth world", but it is just their rough approximation of the world, their model of it. My model-approximation is not the real thing either, I don't know a lot of truths and keep myself undecided. Yes, I make mistaken judgements also. But the probability of my mistake goes down when I make an effort to avoid it. I feel myself in control. I don't experience learned helplessness. I know that the Truth exists and oftentimes I could reach it, if I wanted to.
So your sarcastic tone is misplaced. I know my limitations and I strive to know them more.
That's technically true but underplays the extent to which company self-enforcement PR is malicious nonsense at odds with reality. Companies are amoral piles of money which will do anything to become larger piles of money, and will resolutely resist any interpretation of events which harms their narrow self-interest.
> I don’t know any group who intentionally acts against their interests.
I do. I know a group of people that would happily let you shatter every window in their home if you also agreed to burn down the house of their brown-skinned neighbor next door. The same group of people that would cheerfully let you grope their own daughter's genitals if it meant that trans people suffered far worse. The same group of people who would gleefully give up their rights to due process if it meant that people who talk differently from them can be sent to prison camps en masse. The same group of people who cheer at the idea of letting the poor and sick die alone on the street, even as you do everything you can to keep them poor and sick themselves. This group will take any bargain against their own interests as long as others are suffering worse, and they will brag and cheer about it the whole time. And there are tens of millions of them.
Altruism is very real thing, with very real examples of behavior influenced by altruism. Moreover it altruism is not just something that people do, because they are culturally programmed to believe, that altruism exists. Examples of altruistic behavior are known for many species, including those, that cannot pass complex concepts from one generation to the next by telling fairy tales to their offspring.
Economics tends to use model where every agent is a total egoistic rationalist, and likely it is one of the reasons why the society tolerate totally egoistic corporations. You claimed in other comment that you believe that everything is biased? Don't you think that economics biased you toward egoism?
> Don't you think that economics biased you toward egoism?
Yes. Economists and critics often do not recognize intangible rewards and incentives.
> Altruism is very real thing, with very real examples of behavior influenced by altruism.
Now do second order reasoning. I didn’t say nobody ever does anything for anybody else. I said organizations do not generally act and support information which is not in their interests.
Minor nit - the word "generally" was not in "I don’t know any group who intentionally acts against their interests" which makes it a weaker (and more easily defended) claim than your original.
People who donate money or time to charity. Volunteer firefighters. There's a massive list, really. Overall, kindness is a very common trait. Why else would we have so many countries with welfare programs, even for classes of citizens the majority will never belong to?
I don't necessarily think that goes against what the parent commenter is saying. The CSB does apparently do investigations and root cause analysis of chemical accidents and spills - in my mind they sound analogous to the NTSB and how they investigate aviation accidents.
So, by that analogy, I think the NTSB is amazing and has done crucial, instrumental work that makes flying safer (as the saying goes, aviation regulations are written in blood). So I think getting rid of the CSB sounds colossally stupid, and I think it's elimination could lead to a willingness by companies to be more careless when it comes to chemical safety.
To be honest, I’d never heard of them until now. Industry runs on Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), which are privately produced. The thing is, the hazards for chemicals at least are highly standardized. The nature of e.g. ammonium perchlorate doesn’t change much depending on where it comes from. No one needs to write their own MSDS.
Safety operationally is regulated by OSHA, based on the MSDS among other things. It isn’t entirely clear where the CSB fits in. There aren’t many surprises in chemistry and OSHA is aggressive.
The safety protocols are pretty straightforward forward and strict, there isn’t much novelty in chemical disasters. Chemical disasters are virtually always for stupid reasons covered by other regulatory organizations.
MSDS is just a small part of process safety. CSB deals with the very largest industrial accidents. These are at plants where millions of pounds of chemical flow through any pipe every day.
The examples you mention about MSDS sounds relevant to a large building/warehouse, but we’re talking about massive industrial complexes nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila.
At that scale, there are still plenty of surprises. Like, “oh shit, I didn’t realize the new version of the lubricating oil the manufacturer recommends for our massive pumps have a different additive that reacts with an impurity in our process stream which catalyzes an exothermic reaction”.
I highly recommend a very short book named “What Went Wrong” by Trevor Kletz. It’s surprisingly entertaining and walks you through basic things that have caused disasters at countless chemical plants over and over again.
I learned about the CSB listening to the Causality podcast[0]. The various chemical plant mishaps described there make me think there's ample need for the CSB.
> I think it's elimination could lead to a willingness by companies to be more careless when it comes to chemical safety
And that's the point, is it not? Create a wider space for companies to "innovate" within, at the expense of those harmed by company actions but without the resources to seek redress.
I think if the goal is to “de-regulate”, there are other agencies that could be shut down instead. CSB provides all companies with the know-how to choose to prevent giant disasters. Shutting down this agency may be motivated by a desire to reduce regulation but it’s really counterproductive.
Someone who is against regulation might still support the work of CSB because it assists the operations of any de-regulated industries.
Hmmm, 1950s attitudes, hmm. What if we consider the hypothesis that the animus towards the CSB is for the absolute stupidest reasons possible? Here are the 3 current CSB board members [1-3].
In the mid-twentieth century corporate management's focus was more broad:
> This view was shared not only by scholars but, surprisingly, by many corporate executives. In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”
> Even the law bent, at least a bit, toward this “social” view of corporate purpose. When the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld corporate charitable donations in its 1956 A.P. Smith Manufacturing Co. decision, it rested its judgment less on any benefit that would accrue to the company than on the belief that corporations had responsibilities beyond those owed to shareholders; corporations needed, the court held, to “acknowledge and discharge social as well as private responsibilities as members of the communities within which they operate.”
The fact that people do not know this history, and think that corporation and capitalism was 'always' about only making money, limits the options under discussions for fixing some of the social ills we are experiencing currently. Yes: corporations need to (at least) break even to survive, and ideally have some sort of return, but there are degrees to which they have to push to accomplish this.
Some of the highest levels of economic growth (and its distribution to all) was done during times when shareholder primacy was not the main goal—though there were other factors, which may or may not be replicable, that helped with that growth:
>In the mid-twentieth century corporate management's focus was more broad:
I think part of the reason for this decline in thinking was that government regulators came into the picture and so they became the "public" that needed pleasing and over time they all got bought or otherwise captured via revolving door and other mechanisms.
>The fact that people do not know this history, and think that corporation and capitalism was 'always' about only making money,
There's no incentive for anyone who stands to advance their ideology by point out the abuse of corporations to inject such nuance.
This is SOP for policy extremists. They'll never show you any potential middle ground, they want you to skip over it toward the solution they're peddling.
> The US saw how China rose to dominate manufacturing, and would like to go back to being a manufacturing power again.
If that were the case, the US would be dumping trillions into spinning up manufacturing like China did.
The US has the power to do this, they did it during WWII, and like it or not, this current era requires heavy strategic investments that may not produce returns for decades, if at all. It's what China is doing and if the US were trying to compete, they'd do the same. We were getting somewhat close to this with the CHIPS Act, but that's on the chopping block[1], too.
Truth is US capital is happy to sell off manufacturing capability to cash in on cheap labor, and there is no monetary incentive to re-shore manufacturing capacity unless the government provides serious incentives or does it themselves.
I don't believe the actions being taken are really conducive to manufacturing greatness, or indeed technological greatness in any sense. I'd lump elimination of this board with elimination of obscure aviation safety committees normal people would never know about: actions that don't bear scrutiny at face value.
i.e. perhaps the whole point is that breaking these things will do damage and lower the status and functionality of the United States, making it actively worse by a considerable amount and sabotaging key structural parts normal people wouldn't even know were there.
In short, it's possible that it being bad is the point.
My understanding from folks outside the U.S. is that they desire U.S. products because they trust the safety more. I'm not sure everyone quite understands that by gutting [regulations], they trash part of their international advantage.
I'm no expert, but even if they somehow managed to get manufacturing back, slashing your competitive advantages and just taking the market position of "China 2: This time it's more expensive" doesn't strike me as a winner for exports.
They're gonna be sorely disappointed if they thing de-regulation is the path to bringing back some pre-lapsarian golden age of American manufacturing that didn't actually exist
Bringing manufacturing back is a stated goal of this administration.
Nevermind that you're not going to convince an American to work for Chinese wages in a sweatshop. Ignore that.
But the intended outcome of everything Dump is doing is to de-emphasize advanced education, bring back all basic manufacturing, and restore the "traditional" American values (white, straight, Christian). It's an absolutely stupid idea, but he's been pretty clear about it.
You have to check out their incredible safety investigation videos on youtube. I don't know how well-organized or efficient they are but clearly their role needs to be played by someone - and as a taxpayer I appreciate that they are doing it in a way that educates and informs.
Well, yes, pretty much. It's an observed pattern among authoritarian states that actual facts are frequently in opposition to the authority, therefore, actual facts must be eliminated.
It's a silver lining in disguise, really. Such countries tend to collapse relatively quickly because it turns out facts are important for running a country - look at the USSR's fake food supply. Relatively quickly could still be a decade, though.
China has been the exception that authoritarian states collapse quickly. It's what the western powers were banking on would happen after they had success with USSR. It didn't pan out the way they thought. Not even close.
China is much more dispersed (because of it's size and some localisation/liberalisation) and they seem to understand at some level that reality exists and can't just be wished away.
It's an open question if they'll retain that with Xi now President for life.
Authoritarianism works... as long as leaders are effective.
The reason democracy historically wins out in the long run is not because it always picks better leaders, but because it picks fewer really bad ones. And checks/balances those it does.
For all his faults as a leader, Xi has also come down hard on actual corruption and malfeasance.
> China has been the exception that authoritarian states collapse quickly.
China has been centralized / autocratic for centuries (if not millennia), and the current system is probably not that different than the Emperor's throne.
And what's stopping the American people from voting smart people with engineering degrees to power instead of lying loud mouth conmen?
Maybe because modern American mainstream culture has people worshiping the "clever" conman who got rich quick by gaming the system and scamming others, as opposed to hard working nerd who put in the long time and effort for an honest enrichment.
Democratic societies get the leaders they deserve as they are a mirror of the people themselves.
> And what's stopping the American people from voting smart people with engineering degrees to power instead of lying loud mouth conmen?
The fact that people vote at all.
Running for office is a risky endeavour: you have to take time off from your job to actually run, with a decent chance of not winning. How many employers would be willing to give you a leave of absence to do this? Further, if you happen to lose your seat you are now unemployed: who is going to hire someone who has not been in the field for x years?
Law is probably one field where one can hop in and out easily, so it's why we have so many lawyers go into politics: the practice of the field doesn't change too quickly, so one can always join a firm. Similarly if you are a "businessman" you can give yourself time off from your own business (let someone else manage/CEO) since you're the boss.
Whereas in an engineering or technical field, you basically have to end your career in it. Or you perhaps stop being a day-to-day participant and go into a more generic 'management' role where it is easier to hop around companies in case you need to enter/leave politics depending on how many votes go your way.
Whereas in the CCP, (AIUI) you basically go into the 'management track' and get appointed to various positions with-in the party. You never "leave" your career as you move up the party leadership chain.
> Law is probably one field where one can hop in and out easily, so it's why we have so many lawyers go into politics
Only in USA, the rest of the world doesn't see lawyers flock to politics. It seems more like there is some corruption that makes lawyers mingle so much with politicians and they scratch each others backs, otherwise why would it be so much more lawyers in politics in USA than any other country?
People hate lawyers, they wouldn't vote on them if they didn't have to, but when the parties mostly show you lawyers to vote for then people don't have much of a choice. In the rest of the world were they do have that choice lawyers doesn't get voted in that much.
> Only in USA, the rest of the world doesn't see lawyers flock to politics.
Some data that suggests otherwise:
> On the question of what to study, there’s also a clear answer: nearly a third of both the officials and MEPs hold a law degree at undergraduate or postgraduate level. Non-science subjects such as business, humanities, political science and humanities are all prominent in the data with just 5 percent of MEPs and 2 percent of officials having a medical or health sciences qualification (Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is one of the few exceptions, having trained as a medical doctor and taken a master’s degree in public health.)
>Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is one of the few exceptions, having trained as a medical doctor and taken a master’s degree in public health
That's the worst example one could pick. Ursula comes from a family of influential EU politicians and has been groomed since childhood to take high ranking jobs in politics. It's doesn't matter what her education is when she's the EU equivalent of CCP royalty. That woman hasn't worked a job a day in her life, but spent all her life being a career politician and a regulatory arm of lobbyists and activist.
> Ursula comes from a family of influential EU politicians and has been groomed since childhood to take high ranking jobs in politics.
Do we say such things if a dentist encourages their child to become a dentist? Or an MD towards being an MD? An accountant to account? A programmer to a programmer?
> That woman hasn't worked a job a day in her life […]
Being a politician (or in the government bureaucracy) is a job. It is a career. There is domain of knowledge in governance that one must learn to be effective just like there is in any other human endeavour.
>Do we say such things if a dentist encourages their child to become a dentist? Or an MD towards being an MD? An accountant to account? A programmer to a programmer?
Depends if meritocracy was involved, which in her case it wasn't, or if your parents use their connections to get/buy you in power.
You're mixing up encouragement with cronyism, which I find in bad faith.
>Being a politician (or in the government bureaucracy) is a job. It is a career. There is domain of knowledge in governance that one must learn to be effective just like there is in any other human endeavour.
The point was that China's leaders have advanced degrees not related to politics, not whether being a politician is a job or not.
As a U.S. citizen, I tend to think of our system of government as only loosely democratic. There are many, many dials and knobs that prevent voters from having too much impact on policy. The Electoral college means losers of the popular vote have been president several times. The Senate is quite unrepresentative, Wyoming (pop. 587k) and California (pop. 39,431k) have the same number of votes. The House is gerrymandered quite heavily, the two-party system has an immense amount of control over which candidates (and policies) are viable, and our campaign finance system ensures both parties pander to donors.
Honest question: Why should I trust an index on democracy made by "The Economist Group", a London based private entity owned by the Agnelli Family, Rothschild, Cadbury and Schroder, groups with a history of union busting and other anti labor, anti democratic actions?
You don't have to and shouldn't—not without further evidence. Nevertheless, that group has taken the effort and it seems considerable work went into preparing it—that the analysis is done yearly showing trends over time, etc.
The fact that the figures are on the table so to speak they can now be tested by other researchers.
I'd not seen this analysis before and found it fascinating (I spent an inordinate amount of time studying the figures).
> Democratic societies get the leaders they deserve as they are a mirror of the people themselves.
Don't confuse things being soiled by capitalism as democracy somehow is the bad part. There are plenty of examples of democracies that haven't succumbed to capitalism as badly as the US has.
Which are those? Other than Nordic EU countries, most other capitalist countries on the planet are doing worse than the US when you look at stuff like youth unemployment, housing affordability or birth rates, all things that show economic outlook.
Capitalism is bad sure, but so far it's the least bad system we ever had and the US is one of the least bad implementations. Capitalism got a lot of countries out of extreme poverty.
Look at South Korea if you want to see true dystopian capitalism.
I should have been more specific but I thought it obvious. I was referring to China nowadays, specifically the time since Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms which he
instigated shorthly thereafter.
I suggest you read this link about Chinese leaders/leadership, especially the section headed Change from Charismatic Revolutionaries to Technocrats especially paragraph/bullet points four and five:
specifically some modern form of feudalism I guess
where the new nobles (as in large companies because in US companies are people) can mostly do whatever they want and the rest of the population is struggling enough to just "get by" to find time to change anything
but given that Trump put since deniers and anti-vaccers into power it's probably a much more "dump" reason
How does a massive chemical accident, or explosion that destroys a manufacturing facility, creating huge civil liability, "save money?" Or why they wouldn't want to learn from the mishaps of others to avoid massively costly accidents themselves.
TFA says the chemical industry supports the mission and role of the CSB. It's trivially cheap in the scope of the whole industry, so they could just support it themselves.
The CSB isn't a regulator. They don't write rules or impose fines. They investigate accidents, identify causes, and things that could have been done to prevent the accidents.
> The President’s Budget proposes $0 for CSB’s FY 2026 budget with the expectation that CSB begins closing down during FY 2025. CSB’s emergency fund of $844,145 will be appropriated to cover costs associated with closing down the agency. Exact closing costs will be determined upon consultation with OMB and Congress.
They basically do NTSB aircraft crash investigations for large scale chemical accidents. Critically they don’t assign fines or act proactively like EPA or OSHA, it’s a neutral investigation.
No - "The CSB investigates industrial chemical accidents—not to assign blame, but to figure out why they happened and how to prevent them. No other federal agency does this kind of root cause analysis focused purely on safety improvement. OSHA and the EPA enforce rules, but they don’t specialize in deep, systems-based investigations like the CSB does."
> The Senate legislative history states: "The principal role of the new chemical safety board is to investigate accidents to determine the conditions and circumstances which led up to the event and to identify the cause or causes so that similar events might be prevented." Congress gave the CSB a unique statutory mission and provided in law that no other agency or executive branch official may direct the activities of the board.
Definitely worth watching! No matter if you’re technical or not. Top notch productions, beautiful even.
I think a huge, huge amount of the government is wasteful but the CSB is doing incredible work. Some of the smartest chemical engineers go on to work there later in their career. Due to the average age of the knowledge-holders, this isn’t an agency that you can shut down and easily restart. Young engineers don’t make good investigators - you need a super keen sense of industry to walk into a place where you don’t know anyone and put all the clues together correctly.
The CSB produces very neutral but incredibly detailed reports. Please note that the CSB is not an enforcement agency - they don’t assign fault or levee fines or bring any charges or write any regulation.
All they do is figure out why every major industrial disaster occurred and communicate that to other companies so that they have the know-how to prevent if from happening again if they so choose. The CSB’s reports are invaluable to the operations of so many companies and plants.
Some of the top comments on a 1-year old video with 3.5 million views:
> I can't believe that a government agency makes some of my favorite YouTube videos. I've been watching these for years now
> Finally, a good use of my taxes
> I work in the petrochemical industry, with polymerizable substances that are quite similar to butadiene. The findings hit home. I will share this video tomorrow with all my colleagues in the plant management, who I am sure will appreciate it.
> An amazing service, thank you. When I worked at a copper mine in Yukon I would always replay your videos when it was my turn to give the safety brief and they were ALWAYS well received. Your videos save lives
> USCSB is the only US government agency I have subscription notifications on for. You all have done fantastic work for these 25 years.
> CONGRATULATIONS on 25 years to the CSB! A quarter century of excellence in safety education and investigations. I have learned so much about industrial processes and the safety measures utilized (sometimes not successfully) by industry thanks to the brilliant videos produced by the CSB. Thank you for your hard work, CSB!
> This is hands down the most positive comment section on YouTube. I, and everyone else it seems, love this channel. I’ve learned so much
> Thank you CSB for all that you do. As an engineer and new supervisor at a production facility, I utilize your videos all the time to help teach the operators the dangers that we have lurking. You improve and save lives all over due to your work. Please, keep it up.
> Love the analysis and insights to these industrial disasters that the USCSB provides. Hope you stay well funded to continue commissioning these mini documentaries.
== I think a huge, huge amount of the government is wasteful but the CSB is doing incredible work==
It feels like there is some type of reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia that goes on with government spending and programs.
Those close to the subject matter typically view government spending in their area of expertise as necessary, even “incredible” as you state. When it comes to spending in an area they are not an expert, it suddenly becomes “wasteful.”
It often gets framed as a "government problem", but private enterprise is not immune to these problems either. It's almost like it's a natural result of any organization that is too large for direct accountability and uses funds that they have no personal stake in.
boring and/or utterly fascinating, depending on the viewer -- safety engineering, whether that's airplanes, submarines, chemical plants, or whatever, is totally fascinating. Making something work is difficult, making it work safely, even more so.
I think we will soon have to confront serious, real world proof that an unregulated free market is not ultimately self-regulating. Control systems without upper bounds (e.g. shareholder value / profit maximization) are prone to feedback loops and oscillations. And an oscillating system cannot be judged in its entirety during an upward cycle alone (20th century).
Going one level of abstraction higher: there is no evidence that demand/supply dynamics alone will regulate a society over larger populations and time scales. Even the phrase "invisible hand" appears only once in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, somewhere around page 500, and that refers not to the market at large, but to the emergence of protectionist behaviours among suppliers within a country.
Laws and regulations are part of the free market system. As rules approach zero, competition approaches war.
I'm pretty sure we've actually known this since time immemorial. Property, contract, etc. are all legal constructs. Talking about free markets (or whatever approximation to "free" is meant by that) without laws and regulations doesn't make any sense.
We already have real-world proof of this which is why regulations were slowly (and bloodily) introduced in the first place.
It's the same tragedy of the commons we see with vaccinations. Vaccinations work, so we then forget why we had them in the first place, so then we think "well... what if we just stop?"
I love the USCSB videos and in couple incidents I likely protected myself and others from an accident due to risk awareness I had as a result of their videos. (e.g. most recently the realization that few micron tungsten powder might be significantly pyrophoric at elevated temperature-- which it is).
I'm also a fan of their written reports, which are much more informative than the videos but less well known.
But contrary to other posters here I'm less convinced that it's so obviously cost effective: $14.4 million dollars a year isn't much compared to the staggering waste in other federal programs. But it certainly sounds like a lot compared to only investigating 180 incidents over 27 years-- 6 incidents a year (which is also the figure for 2022 so it's not just a product of a slow ramp though some years have less or more).
So it's something like more than a million dollars an incident which seems not so efficient.
It's also a small enough scale that it ought to be pretty reasonable to fund it through the industries directly.
That said, OSHA's budget is more like $700 million a year... and I'd rather see CSB's funding just come out of that. If public money is to be spent supporting industries, I'd rather more go to investigations and education than on a regulatory empire.
I hope someone is keeping a list of all these crazy rollbacks so the next democrat administration (assuming there is one dun-dun-dun etc) can be held accountable for not rolling back the rollbacks.
Even if they do I'm worried that this kind of sabotage of progress will become the new norm, with each subsequent administration undoing everything the previous one did as standard, and going even further to appease the extremists.
I know this has always happened to some degree with executive orders (the was a great tradition of presidents signing all sorts of crazy stuff just so the next guy would have to undo it and look bad) but it seems nuclear now (sometimes literally)
It is highly surprising that the narrative in the US has morphed the expenses on public institutions of enormous importance, into wastage, something that has to be cut or eliminated.
Why is it that no one is pointing out the contribution of these institutions to the US and the world?
The US, has a society, has grown so materialistic, that they fail to see anything beyond money.
Somethings cannot be measured by money. In fact, when it comes to public governance, money is the least useful thing.
Nothing surprising there. The US-led social media finally achived its biggest success. It made weaponized ignorance viable at an enormous scale.
Not just in the US but all over the world. The fight now is anybody with some critical thought ability vs willfully and violently ignorant. The former is getting fewer in the numbers and the latter is out for blood. We need to be very efficient to disarm and passivize the violent ignorants otherwise they will slowly kill us and the humanity.
I'm no American and I am from a country (Turkey, but I moved out) that has some similarities to both Asian and Western style corruption.
> "What is this govt. going to give me for free for me to vote for it"
The exact line of thinking has caused its own Trump case in Turkey. It is similar for the Eastern Europe. Many voted for Trump for petty small interests and very short term gains too. For all of them, social media was a huge boost to explode small gains into bigger narratives.
What? They didn't say big government or respect for it did this. In fact, they're arguing for a strong government and that violent ignorance is dismantling valuable public systems.
Are you being sarcastic? To say India doesn't have violent ignorance in the same breath of... The obscene wealth inequality, social castes, sexual inequality, etc of that country...
It isn't the narrative. It's what a small band of institutional hackers want to do to the country. If anything the narrative is to not care about anything.
Every organization is dysfunctional, the only question is whether its more functional than the alternative. This applies to private enterprises (metaverse anyone?) as well as the government.
After 50+ years of budget cuts, what makes us think that the solution is more budget cuts?
> After 50+ years of budget cuts, what makes us think that the solution is more budget cuts?
What 50+ years of budget cuts? US federal expenditure per capita has been steadily rising for decades, with a gargantuan explosion during Covid and steeply climbing thereafter.
The US political establishment, particularly at rhetoric federal level, has become a “whims of the in charge” bureaucracy that can’t fulfill itself to the point that every day Americans feel their impact - positive or negative.
No, when it comes to spending taxpayer money, the onus is on the one who wants to spend more to show that it would lead to better outcomes. Federal expenditure per capita is nearly $20k/yr now, more than triple what it was 50 years ago in real terms. And that's not counting state and local expenditure. I haven't seen any evidence that if we paid even more, life would be better.
Admittedly, I'd never heard of the CSB until this article but their mission - from their "About Us" page - seems important:
"The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating chemical incidents to determine the cause or probable cause."
Out of curiosity, I looked up the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment in 2023 and can't find their investigation on their site in either the active or completed investigation sections. Looking elsewhere, I'm only finding FEMA's concerns about cancer clusters, nothing from the CSB. Can anyone else find it?
Only if you assume the respective movements can be taken at face value. If this and MAHA are actually for the purpose of destroying functional things, in the manner that missile strikes are for destroying functional things, then none of this is at odds with anything else: the purpose is just more aligned with the result than with the claimed intentions.
I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't actually save any money or make anyone much more money. It's just a result of mindlessly fetishizing the past and misattributing past periods of rapid industrial growth to lack of regulation. The real cause was rapid population growth at the time, war, and extremely rapid adoption of bedrock industrial age technologies like electricity.
Today we have a fully deployed modern infrastructure and slow to negative population growth. Cutting regulation won't change that.
Yeah it turns out when Europe is a giant crater and the rest of world hasn't figured out electricity quite yet that your massive industrial capacity can be a bit of a boon. Especially when you loan out a bunch of money to Europe so they can buy all your stuff! Wow! Having over 50% of the world's industrial capacity when the world just spent 7 years on fire and everyone needs new everything means it's a bit of a seller's market!
Yep, all these baby booomers lucked the fuck out being born in an era where the entire world needed the US after WW2. But over time the rest of the world slowly recovered and suddenly US goods became overpriced.
I blame much of the current US economy on the shenanigans of baby boomers and their parents. Who after having a booming economy for 3 decades, needed to quickly financial engineer themselves out of their infinite growth pension hole.
So what did they do? They started offshoring to compensate for the big mismatch in domestic debt financing and actual domestic wealth creation.
While they were doing they, they put the pedal to the metal on wealth inequality as those already with excessive wealth could leverage themselves to the tits to buy up the competition.
The problem is, alot of this is the net result at the macro scale and there were many independent decisions that led to everything.
I don't really buy this since China has industrialized rapidly without much population growth at all. They have built infrastructure like high speed rail that we are unable to build in the US, so I also don't buy the "fully deployed modern infrastructure" line.
Yeah but their starting point was different again - they already had the population, and were able to piggy back on technological progress from other countries by borrowing or stealing it. The other thing they have is an authoritarian government; a country can achieve a lot in a short time when it can freely sideline the concerns and needs of its citizens.
I'm not a China defender, but sidelining the concerns and needs of its citizens isn't why China is able to do things like high speed rail or build high density infrastructure in general. Lots there view having their property taken by the government and relocated as a good thing, because it almost always happens way above market rates. There are exceptions, of course, but my impression is that it is not the norm. Feel free to correct me. This isn't a defense of China in general, but it is totally possible to have good public transit in the United States.
And mind you that China isn't unique in bootstrapping its industrial revolution by mass theft of IP. If I were you, I'd look into the stunts us Americans pulled during our industrialization. The sad fact of the matter is that the government of this country no longer works for its own people, and that's why so many things are far below par. For many things, we _could_, but simply _don't_.
In my personal experience with in-laws in China you're correct (got fully compensated + given a nicer house). Another family, when they were laid off from their government jobs, were given the option of cash or office space and storage for like 30yrs to run their own business...
Nothing really to disagree with here tbh; I didn't mean to say that authoritarianism was the reason for everything they've achieved, but rather that it greases the wheels so to speak.
I was really just responding to the discussion that ensued when an earlier commenter said that poor regulation was not the reason the US modernised rapidly but rather population growth and post war economics, and another responded with China as a counter example to that, my point being that China's situation was much different than the US so it's not really a useful comparison.
I always liked the bit where they often compensate folks not directly financially but rather with a generous share in what they are building. Eg. the building containing your one bedroom apartment gets torn down by developers and as compensation they offer you a three bedroom apartment in the new building.
Definitely plays an interesting role in combating/moderating NIMBYism.
China went from a few tens of millions of modern people to over a billion modern people. Look at it that way. They weren’t new people but they were economically speaking.
The US is all modern people with little population growth. We have no giant wave of latent demand.
The population thing is pretty elementary. If population is flat to declining, then growth is demand constrained.
There are some areas where you could uncap growth by cutting regulation, but they're not this. The #1 one I'm aware of is housing construction in high cost metros.
Reagan cut regulation, and manufacturing still left, quick as ever.
I assume that is due to larger trends. Population growth has slowed considerably and there's more competition than ever. Worldwide fertility rates have dropped from 4.7 to 2.3 in the last 75 years, and in that time the U.S. share of world GDP dropped from about 50% to 25%.
My two cents: We may be already be in uncharted economic territory with regards to shrinking workforces, retirees, pollution, etc. How much of our economy is dependent on growth? We may find out. Places like Japan, Korea and Europe are leading the way. Ponzi schemes won't work forever. The world is getting smaller and older. And evening out. There's less room for arbitrage. Innovation is coming from all directions. Technology can still increase productivity. But it could also put masses of people out of work, leaving not enough demand for the latest and greatest. That, and a pie that is no longer growing, could cause a lot of social friction.
I don't believe that will happen, and I base that belief on all my decades of watching American politics. Bureaucrats may do this (I personally work with ones who do), but politicians generally do not. And the current administration definitely does not care about actual numbers.
It's always a matter of time before a facility explodes for preventable reasons and costs the company billions in property damage and lawsuits. This decision to stop learning from mistakes and spreading awareness will hurt profits in the long run, not make more money. It'll also be harder to find people willing to work around chemicals if they can't trust the safety measures.
Why do profits, and the stock market, continue going up then? I've heard this nonsense about corporate short termism for decades, and the long term just never seems to arrive.
The stock market tracks short term profits; most stock buyers are also short-termers. Profits that could have been had but were not, due to shortsighted decisions, are hard to measure and don't usually make the news. Similar for companies that slowly hollow out, or get killed by newer companies still in their market-building phases before they start turning the screws.
You can just watch it happen. Companies cut quality and ruin their reputation, or shrink from new markets due to fear of cannibalizing themselves, among other ways to sacrifice long term profit. There's a reasonable debate about how predominant it is in the economy, but not about whether it happens.
If I make short term profits off doing the wrong things I have more money to buy up my competition that incurs the cost now. By the time something bad happens there will only be a small bump down on the market.
I forsee a lot of high skilled labor exiting high risk fields over the next few years. Many of the high end blue-collar jobs of north America are very low end in south America due to the relative risks involved e.g. mine workers.
> costs the company billions in property damage and lawsuits.
The reality: the company makes a new company (that's identical to the old company in assets and operations) and says "we had nothing to do with the old company" and they're left off with zero consequences while the old company (that has no assets but holds legal liability) goes bankrupt and pays nothing.
There's also a new and improved method that avoids even this small amount of effort. Alex Jones introduced it. When you're found liable for a billion dollars in damages, just say, "I won't pay it. Fuck you." And there's absolutely nothing they can do.
California can just keep doing its thing and the rest of the country benefits from their regulations. Prop 65 is to thank for all the Harbor Freight stores no longer reeking of outgassing plastics.
If there's one thing California needs to learn from these past 6 months, it's that you can simply ignore what the courts say. When you're rich and powerful, you can literally just say "I do not consent" when legal consequences are presented to you.
It feels that way, but this legislation is ideologically consistent with reducing regulations which constrain companies and force them to take the externalities of their actions into account.
I still think it's ideologically consistent with insulating companies from externalities. Without official investigations, companies can assert their own interpretations of events. Boeing did this with the NTSB recently:
In a hazard investigation you don’t want the investigators to have teeth. It’s not about finding wrongdoing it’s about determining what happened and how to avoid it in the future. If a company takes negligent actions referring to DOJ should be enough.
50 employees with a budget of $14.4 million doesn’t even qualify as a rounding error in the federal budget. Don’t pretend this has anything remotely to do with “government waste”.
Then they weren't necessary in the first place. 50 federal employees can hardly perform the work of 5 of the private sector. Don't pretend that government employees are the least efficient, least qualified, and least motivated to change anything in the world.
The amount of pent up hate and vitriol coming out now is incredible. People hated each other so much and more or less kept it somewhat in check for so many decades?
Bizarre as it sounds, I think a lot of people can hate on demand. Media starts beating the drum, and a proportion of the population go from apathetic to pretty damn frothy surprisingly fast.
I have a background in NLP (pre-LLM) and like to study extremist rhetoric, and, while I don't think you're being reductionist, it's a little more removed than that. I'd replace with "hate" with "problems and stress". Once you can attribute that stress to a group... that's when the hate develops. There are certain global powers who have recognized this and weaponized it. Agreeing with the most extreme of both sides, loudly, is the modern standard for propaganda.
It wasn't socially acceptable to express your hatred, and there are a lot of people who just needed someone to stoke the flames of their biases to the point of hate and violence.
We've watched it become socially acceptable to not keep your biases unchecked and there is a multi-billion dollar media apparatus that pumps 24/7 propaganda into people's minds.
In the past, the stuff we've seen mainstreamed today stayed relatively niche on AM radio and in klan meetings.
First, generally when people lives are good, they tend to blow the small problems out of proportion. This is pretty much how US got to where it is.
Secondly, if you look at the history of politics, conservatives have always been the ones to weaponize politics as a form of moral judgement. So nothing is really new.
The article mentions redundancy but doesn't specify what organization is claimed to make CSB redundant. I'm guessing it's the NIH since, to be fair, Vance announced an investigation into the East Palestine chemical spill five days ago: https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/nih-long-term-health-research...
The people in charge KNOW what the CSB does, that's why they want it gone
The CSB makes it known how much your employer is willing to kill you over saving like ten bucks.
Chemistry industry executives don't like that.
Do you HONESTLY believe that these people who have spent the past 60 years crying about how much the EPA makes their business "harder" (literally 1% more expensive) don't know exactly how the EPA protects the public from them?
They don't care that their actions literally kill people. They don't care.
Dupont did not care at all that they were dumping PFOAs that they confirmed were acutely and chronically toxic to mammals upstream of a small town's drinking water.
They do not care. Executives don't make money for caring.
We're getting reset to modern Europe: there is no equivalent to the US CSB in any major European country. France's BEA-RI is not independent, and the CSB is not EPA or OSHA. I'm always amazed how little commenters know about the US, and deeply saddened by how much less they know about others.
There's simply no balancing the budget without both raising taxes and cutting social services.
We should, of course, be efficient with our money. Any dollar we can save is a good thing but until I hear someone talk about raising taxes and cutting social spending I'm not going to take serious the idea that we're trying to balance the budget.
They are cutting social spending and healthcare spending. It wont offset tax cuts for the rich, but the cruelty is the point and watching people suffer is fun to republicans.
Social security, Medicare, and Medicaid are ~60% of the federal budget.
Interest payments are another ~15% and there's no way to reduce those.
You could cut literally every penny of the rest of the budget, including all of defense, all of transportation, all of education, and every single program being discussed here. We'd still have a deficit.
So unless a politician is going to propose a way to spend less on those three programs, then they're not talking seriously about reducing our deficit.
I would leave the funding as long as they make MORE videos than one a year. With all the AI tools coming out they should be able to produce much fantastic content. I can't count the number of times I've referred our site EHS managers throughout the years to their Youtube.
Or, I guess, cut the funding, and next Dupont or Deridder or Bhopal, we will just shrug and hope the company responsible for the incident is transparent and forthcoming in their internal investigation /s
It's pretty important for anyone working around chemicals. I work around truck racks and pump houses and giant fuel tanks all day, and I'm rather glad I don't need to worry about being blown 100 feet in the air in an explosion and leave my family behind like my great uncle did. The reason I don't worry is because, partly due to the CSB, we're pretty good at knowing how to work around explosive liquids safely.
Everyone gets hung up on money and they don't pay attention to value. The CSB annual budget is less than some of the contracts I work on, automating fuel farms on military bases. They're good value for money.
When something happens, the real cause of the problem is often due to a combination of the entity (the company/person/whatever that had the "something" happen), as well as external factors. Those external factors can include rules/guidance—or the lack of rules/guidance—from multiple agencies.
If a regulatory agency is also doing investigations, they may choose to focus less on their own 'failings' (that is, their agency's rules/guidance or lack of rules/guidance), and focus more on others' failings. Or, they may choose to focus less on other agencies' failings for political reasons.
Having a third party, with no regulatory ability, helps to reduce the appearance of bias, and increase trust in the industry that the third party investigates.
I think this is pretty consistent with the old school 1950s views of the current administration. Companies can prioritize profits over people again. Yeah, dump in the rivers, dump in the woods, just drive around in circles dumping in an empty lot. You don’t need masks- give everyone cancer and blow some shit up, maybe get some acid burns. Super-fund sites? When was the last one we had anyway- we need more of ‘em- lots more! Let’s let the kids eat the lead paint and complain of the smells wafting into their cars from the chemical, paper, etc. plants on road trips, just like the olden days!
> I think this is pretty consistent with the old school 1950s views of the current administration.
The effects are functionally the same, but I think the ideology and rhetoric behind then and now have changed.
There really isn't a purportedly "principled" system of logic behind these decisions, in the past these decisions would be dressed in principled rhetoric no matter how heinous they realistically were.
They aren't even bothering to dress it up in rhetoric that says there is something noble behind these decisions.
The 1950’s were when the US set up many of the post war institutions that are being dismantled now. Maybe you mean the 1850’s? (Though I’d guess the government was probably more forward looking back then too.)
The principle is the rate of profit is falling, competing countries are rising, and they want to unleash the private sector in the hopes of raising GDP growth significantly enough to retain hegemony. This won't work, because they're fucking stupid, and they'll damage the health of the population and the productivity of the land and waters going forward, but there is a logic to it.
I agree, I'm commenting on the outward justifications that are used to placate the public.
In the past, a mountain of ideology and rhetoric would justify these decisions to the common person in an effort manufacture consent. They aren't even bothering to do that.
It's more like the current administration and the billionaires behind them are acting like private equity. Now that they have control of the government, they'll dismantle anything they can and set us on a path to destruction to squeeze out every bit of value they can for themselves.
Those most responsible are either betting they won't be around long enough to deal with the smouldering wreckage or planning to ditch before the country hits rock bottom.
Remember when putting lead into atmosphere made entire gnerations stupid by lowering IQs? Maybe that is the goal.
In a kind of ironic way, if those people hadn't been so goddamn stupid maybe the government institutions they created and expanded wouldn't all be reputationally bankrupt and subject to dismantling by populist billionares.
looking at this at a different angle, some companies do practice health and safety AND there are egregious acts of pollution.. consider this next part .. many practices in the early 1900s would be outrageous today and even bad actor companies have changed since then, as a given. It is IMHO both the avoidable, known acts today AND the unknown, under-counted actions of today that will be so painfully obvious at some time decades from now. A legal environment where cost cutting in the cost centers of environmental compliance are openly prioritized, includes disasters of knowns and the unknowns.
In closing, I do not think it is like the 1950s in that basic science has identified and amplified many fundamental advances since then, materials science is sci-fi now compared to then, but it is similar in the economic-first and actively thumbing the nose at all things green and eco regarding the market.
The ideology of "infinite growth" is driving on bare metall by now, every movement proofing more and more, that it has used it all up, the momentum, the resources, the people who belief in its tale.
The building up backlash is going to be horrific and i hope it will not lead to decomplexification movements ala pol pot or islamism.
Is THIS not the decomplexification movement?
I wrote elsewhere:
> Please note that the CSB is not an enforcement agency - they don’t assign fault or levee fines or bring any charges or write any regulation.
CSB investigations still represent an objective source of truth which competes with the PR that companies put out absolving themselves of blame in the event of any mishap. Removing the CSB frees up companies to "self-regulate" and blast out bogus framings.
Do OSHA and the EPA not have dual jurisdiction with the CSB on these matters?
> an objective source of truth
An alternative source with different incentives and culture, not an objective one.
Nuance is not always a good thing. This type of nuance doesn’t forward the discussion in any way and, in this case, muddies the waters and leads to some odd implications. Sure, we can say there is no objective source of truth and chastise the author for using that word, but the term objective in this case has meaning that the author is trying to articulate… most likely that there is some overtly unbiased information source, in opposition to the information sourced from the company which has obvious incentives.
Additionally, by stating that the CSB provides an ‘alternative source’ of truth, as a correction to an originally described objective one, you are (possibly inadvertently) claiming that the company is also providing a different source of truth, rhetorically raising the value of the information the company provides while lowering the value of the CSB information.
Don’t be the person who adds nuance for the sake of nuance.
> Sure, we can say there is no objective source of truth and chastise the author for using that word
I regret my imprecise use of language which has taken us down this tiresome metaphysical subthread. I should have merely emphasized that the CSB presents an alternative point of view to that of the company. It was not essential to my point that the CSB be unassailable.
Ah, I was being a bit sarcastic in my response to monkeyelite, I believe I understood what you wrote and was trying to get at the vacuity of their response to you.
I derailed this conversation to make a meta point, and it wasn’t your fault at all.
> there is some overtly unbiased information source, in opposition to the information sourced from the company which has obvious incentives.
Yes I don’t believe in unbiased sources. I believe in multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth.
> you are (possibly inadvertently) claiming that the company is also providing a different source of truth
Correct. And I don’t buy the dichotomy you are framing of biased companies vs unbiased government.
> Don’t be the person who adds nuance for the sake of nuance.
The term “objective truth” was just thrown around. Might as well just say it’s an “absolutely good”. The level of discourse in these threads is science = good, agency with science in name = science. Cuts against agency = bad.
What are the costs and benefits to this organization? It appears some sub threads have identified a possible overlap with other agency’s responsibility. It would be interesting to know the extent that is true.
> Yes I don’t believe in unbiased sources. I believe in multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth.
Sure, I agree with what you’ve stated here.
> Correct. And I don’t buy the dichotomy you are framing of biased companies vs unbiased government.
I reread what I wrote and still don’t see that I framed the conversation in this way. What I did frame was the motivation of the company (which I implied to be profit) versus the motive of the government (that of public interest). These are both biased and the effect of the bias could be anticipated: companies would slant their published information with a focus on the effects of profits, whereas the government’s overt bias would slant its information output towards safety (in the case of the CSB) without much concern for profit.
> The term “objective truth” was just thrown around. Might as well just say it’s an “absolutely good”. The level of discourse in these threads is science = good, agency with science in name = science. Cuts against agency = bad.
Sure, we both agree the author is biased towards the government, but you’ve missed the thrust of what I wrote entirely: your nuance added absolutely no value to the discussion, it didn’t make a point or refute anything the author said.
You believe in multiple sources to verify truth. Then why are you arguing against one of these sources? Why are you (effectively) saying that we should just trust a single source of truth - the companies who have explicit financial incentives to deceive?
He didn't say that he was against anything. He just nitpicked over impartial vs different bias and everyone jumped down his throat over it.
> Yes I don’t believe in unbiased sources. I believe in multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth.
It is just metaphysics. I like it also, but it is impractical. I find it useful to train my mind to see things from different angles, but it is useless to talk about concrete things.
Can you find examples of a biased reports on CSB's youtube channel? If not, it is a good example of uselessness of metaphysics. If you are declaring all their reports biased, while being unable to show the bias, it is just empty words.
> It is just metaphysics
I would call it having a baseline understanding of organizations and media.
> Can you find examples of a biased reports on CSB's youtube channel?
Yes? Can you not?
The top video in this thread, “safety pays off“ highlights their successes and does not discuss their failures or costs. So yes that video was designed to make their organization appear in the best light possible.
So you would subtract their failures from their successes and make some sort of calculation about its usefulness from that?
The world doesn't work like that. Objectively, it doesn't.
No. If I heard a proposal to remove them I would want to hear the reasons why or why not rather than assuming that they are an absolute good for society.
> The top video in this thread, “safety pays off“ highlights their successes and does not discuss their failures or costs. So yes that video was designed to make their organization appear in the best light possible.
Oh, yes, you are right, it is a bias. But this bias tells us nothing about objectivity of CSB investigations and recommendations. It tells us nothing about the objectivity you had objected to.
Is your position that they create unbiased reports? Just straight up truth making machine?
Re: overlap with other agency's responsibility
So you would prefer that only one agency speak with one voice on a subject? Sounds very counter to the "multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth" principle you espoused. In practice, government agencies often have disagreements in areas of overlap and hash it out before making a public recommendation, or settling on a course of action.
> So you would prefer that only one agency speak with one voice on a subject?
It’s generally better to know what each groups bias is and compensate than to pretend there are unbiased groups. That rhetorical move tends to be the most malicious and deceiving.
> Yes I don’t believe in unbiased sources. I believe in multiple perspectives revealing aspects of the truth.
Do you believe in priors? Or do you evaluate each perspective at its face value?
> Correct. And I don’t buy the dichotomy you are framing of biased companies vs unbiased government.
That's not the dichotomy here. It's a biased government acting on behalf of biased companies.
> The term “objective truth” was just thrown around. Might as well just say it’s an “absolutely good”. The level of discourse in these threads is science = good, agency with science in name = science. Cuts against agency = bad.
The only discourse you personally have contributed is "both sides."
> What are the costs and benefits to this organization? It appears some sub threads have identified a possible overlap with other agency’s responsibility. It would be interesting to know the extent that is true.
Sounds like you are intentionally giving benefit of doubt to well-known bad faith actors. This makes you incredibly naive at best, or biased sealioner at worst.
> Sounds like you are intentionally giving benefit of doubt to well-known bad faith actors.
Sounds like you are reasoning with emotional labels and not information.
Going this way we should ban the word "objective", because no knowledge can be objective, because you need a thinking subject to process raw data to create knowledge.
Going this way we'll risk to end up in a world, where there is no truth and no falsehoods. All we'll have is something in between. It would take just one small step to say that any two opinions are equal in their utility.
You know, it is like Kremlin propaganda targets idea of "independent media", pointing out that any media is not truly independent, it depends on someone or something. It gets its funding from somewhere, it is subject of some laws and of abuses of law. It needs to take into an account interests of sponsors and from those who wield power. The core message for Russians is: Kremlin propaganda can be bad, but no worse than anything else. Or it can be reworded as: anything is propaganda. Therefore you can relax and just watch news of state television, because you'll never know the truth no matter how hard you tried.
It seems to me, that you are going in the same rough direction by rejecting objectiveness.
> Going this way we should ban the word "objective", because no knowledge can be objective, because you need a thinking subject to process raw data to create knowledge.
That’s a good observation. Generally when talking about humans in a political context and organizations in general it’s a misnomer.
There are other contexts where it’s not.
We are living in a post-truth world, and more specifically, a post truth country in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/informed-societies/post...
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14214
Oh, it is all about dumb people who cannot navigate the current informational landscape. Or about people who relies on informational processing disabilities of others. It doesn't mean that smart people should reject the notions of truth and false.
I didn’t say anything about truth not existing. I said all organizations are presenting a perspective. It may contain truth, but it’s not an objective view.
Brilliant people make absolutely stupid decisions all the time - thinking you're not going to is the trap. It's not possible you could get caught in bullshit you _want_ to believe and _know_ is right, yeah?
You and everybody else buddy.
I'm going to explain my views on this in a full. It is a lot of text, but I hope it is ok.
People don't have an innate ability to distinguish truths from lies, they need to learn this skill. Before Internet and LLMs they were relying on authorities to dictate what was truth and what was falsehoods. Those authorities included newspapers and other media, but there were also courts, government officials, politicians and others. There were no easy way to spread misinformation wide, so people were shielded from them. The system worked to some extent.
Now, however, people are swimming in an ocean of lies. They haven't magically acquired skills needed to navigate in this environment. Their own judgments about truthfulness are no better then coin flips. The results are obvious: people experience learned helplessness[1], they avoid making judgments altogether. People instead are picking some "authority" and stick to it. In USA politics, for example, there are two authorities Democrats and Republicans, so it comes to choosing your side. It allows people to avoid psychological burden of making a judgement (they are afraid of failing again). Consequently, people never feel that they were mistaken, because even if they are, it is not their fault, but the fault of an authority. At the same time they see other people who firmly believe in opposite views. Here comes "post truth world". Truth is no longer universal, you can choose any "truth" you like.
However, it is possible to avoid learned helplessness, all you need is to be better than a coin flip at predicting in advance which statements are true and which are false. You need an ability to avoid traps at least in cases when you make an effort. I make an effort when I feel it is important. Moreover in the most cases I do not need to make an effort, because all previous efforts trained my skills that works by themselves. I just see symptoms and guess, and my guessed are often correct.
I think, I need to add one more important ability to have: one needs to get rid of an irresistible urge to have an opinion. It is ok to have no opinion on some topic, to keep yourself in undecided state. Moreover it is a preferred state, if you are not 100% sure or if the topic is not important enough to you to invest time to do some research and to keep an eye on it.
In light of this I do not see the world to be "post truth". I see the most of people seeing the world as a "post truth world", but it is just their rough approximation of the world, their model of it. My model-approximation is not the real thing either, I don't know a lot of truths and keep myself undecided. Yes, I make mistaken judgements also. But the probability of my mistake goes down when I make an effort to avoid it. I feel myself in control. I don't experience learned helplessness. I know that the Truth exists and oftentimes I could reach it, if I wanted to.
So your sarcastic tone is misplaced. I know my limitations and I strive to know them more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
"Your overconfidence will be your undoing."
That's technically true but underplays the extent to which company self-enforcement PR is malicious nonsense at odds with reality. Companies are amoral piles of money which will do anything to become larger piles of money, and will resolutely resist any interpretation of events which harms their narrow self-interest.
> and will resolutely resist any interpretation of events which harms their narrow self-interest.
I don’t know any group who intentionally acts against their interests.
> I don’t know any group who intentionally acts against their interests.
I do. I know a group of people that would happily let you shatter every window in their home if you also agreed to burn down the house of their brown-skinned neighbor next door. The same group of people that would cheerfully let you grope their own daughter's genitals if it meant that trans people suffered far worse. The same group of people who would gleefully give up their rights to due process if it meant that people who talk differently from them can be sent to prison camps en masse. The same group of people who cheer at the idea of letting the poor and sick die alone on the street, even as you do everything you can to keep them poor and sick themselves. This group will take any bargain against their own interests as long as others are suffering worse, and they will brag and cheer about it the whole time. And there are tens of millions of them.
Altruism is very real thing, with very real examples of behavior influenced by altruism. Moreover it altruism is not just something that people do, because they are culturally programmed to believe, that altruism exists. Examples of altruistic behavior are known for many species, including those, that cannot pass complex concepts from one generation to the next by telling fairy tales to their offspring.
Economics tends to use model where every agent is a total egoistic rationalist, and likely it is one of the reasons why the society tolerate totally egoistic corporations. You claimed in other comment that you believe that everything is biased? Don't you think that economics biased you toward egoism?
> Don't you think that economics biased you toward egoism?
Yes. Economists and critics often do not recognize intangible rewards and incentives.
> Altruism is very real thing, with very real examples of behavior influenced by altruism.
Now do second order reasoning. I didn’t say nobody ever does anything for anybody else. I said organizations do not generally act and support information which is not in their interests.
Minor nit - the word "generally" was not in "I don’t know any group who intentionally acts against their interests" which makes it a weaker (and more easily defended) claim than your original.
> I said organizations do not generally act and support information which is not in their interests.
I can agree with this statement, but not with your original claim.
People who donate money or time to charity. Volunteer firefighters. There's a massive list, really. Overall, kindness is a very common trait. Why else would we have so many countries with welfare programs, even for classes of citizens the majority will never belong to?
Do you have any articles about firefighters voting to close or downsize the fire house?
Voters?
I don't necessarily think that goes against what the parent commenter is saying. The CSB does apparently do investigations and root cause analysis of chemical accidents and spills - in my mind they sound analogous to the NTSB and how they investigate aviation accidents.
So, by that analogy, I think the NTSB is amazing and has done crucial, instrumental work that makes flying safer (as the saying goes, aviation regulations are written in blood). So I think getting rid of the CSB sounds colossally stupid, and I think it's elimination could lead to a willingness by companies to be more careless when it comes to chemical safety.
To be honest, I’d never heard of them until now. Industry runs on Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), which are privately produced. The thing is, the hazards for chemicals at least are highly standardized. The nature of e.g. ammonium perchlorate doesn’t change much depending on where it comes from. No one needs to write their own MSDS.
Safety operationally is regulated by OSHA, based on the MSDS among other things. It isn’t entirely clear where the CSB fits in. There aren’t many surprises in chemistry and OSHA is aggressive.
The safety protocols are pretty straightforward forward and strict, there isn’t much novelty in chemical disasters. Chemical disasters are virtually always for stupid reasons covered by other regulatory organizations.
MSDS is just a small part of process safety. CSB deals with the very largest industrial accidents. These are at plants where millions of pounds of chemical flow through any pipe every day.
The examples you mention about MSDS sounds relevant to a large building/warehouse, but we’re talking about massive industrial complexes nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila.
At that scale, there are still plenty of surprises. Like, “oh shit, I didn’t realize the new version of the lubricating oil the manufacturer recommends for our massive pumps have a different additive that reacts with an impurity in our process stream which catalyzes an exothermic reaction”.
I highly recommend a very short book named “What Went Wrong” by Trevor Kletz. It’s surprisingly entertaining and walks you through basic things that have caused disasters at countless chemical plants over and over again.
I learned about the CSB listening to the Causality podcast[0]. The various chemical plant mishaps described there make me think there's ample need for the CSB.
[0] https://engineered.network/causality/
> I think it's elimination could lead to a willingness by companies to be more careless when it comes to chemical safety
And that's the point, is it not? Create a wider space for companies to "innovate" within, at the expense of those harmed by company actions but without the resources to seek redress.
What knowledge are you trying to impart with this fact?
Do CSB recommendations inform policy? Do CSB recommendations get implemented? Do CSB recommendations when implemented increase safety?
I think if the goal is to “de-regulate”, there are other agencies that could be shut down instead. CSB provides all companies with the know-how to choose to prevent giant disasters. Shutting down this agency may be motivated by a desire to reduce regulation but it’s really counterproductive.
Someone who is against regulation might still support the work of CSB because it assists the operations of any de-regulated industries.
> the old school 1950s views
Hmmm, 1950s attitudes, hmm. What if we consider the hypothesis that the animus towards the CSB is for the absolute stupidest reasons possible? Here are the 3 current CSB board members [1-3].
[1] https://www.csb.gov/members/board-member-catherine-sandoval-...
[2] https://www.csb.gov/members/board-member-sylvia-e-johnson-ph...
[3] https://www.csb.gov/members/board-member-steve-owens-/
LOL Super-fund site? You mean private equity opportunity for a housing development!
> I think this is pretty consistent with the old school 1950s views of the current administration. Companies can prioritize profits over people again.
This is not from the 1950s, but from the 1970s, most famously (though others piled on after Friedman's (in)famous NYT letter):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
In the mid-twentieth century corporate management's focus was more broad:
> This view was shared not only by scholars but, surprisingly, by many corporate executives. In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”
> Even the law bent, at least a bit, toward this “social” view of corporate purpose. When the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld corporate charitable donations in its 1956 A.P. Smith Manufacturing Co. decision, it rested its judgment less on any benefit that would accrue to the company than on the belief that corporations had responsibilities beyond those owed to shareholders; corporations needed, the court held, to “acknowledge and discharge social as well as private responsibilities as members of the communities within which they operate.”
* https://www2.law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-hi...
The fact that people do not know this history, and think that corporation and capitalism was 'always' about only making money, limits the options under discussions for fixing some of the social ills we are experiencing currently. Yes: corporations need to (at least) break even to survive, and ideally have some sort of return, but there are degrees to which they have to push to accomplish this.
* https://beatricecherrier.wordpress.com/2025/06/18/beyond-pro...
Some of the highest levels of economic growth (and its distribution to all) was done during times when shareholder primacy was not the main goal—though there were other factors, which may or may not be replicable, that helped with that growth:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
>In the mid-twentieth century corporate management's focus was more broad:
I think part of the reason for this decline in thinking was that government regulators came into the picture and so they became the "public" that needed pleasing and over time they all got bought or otherwise captured via revolving door and other mechanisms.
>The fact that people do not know this history, and think that corporation and capitalism was 'always' about only making money,
There's no incentive for anyone who stands to advance their ideology by point out the abuse of corporations to inject such nuance.
This is SOP for policy extremists. They'll never show you any potential middle ground, they want you to skip over it toward the solution they're peddling.
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> The US saw how China rose to dominate manufacturing, and would like to go back to being a manufacturing power again.
If that were the case, the US would be dumping trillions into spinning up manufacturing like China did.
The US has the power to do this, they did it during WWII, and like it or not, this current era requires heavy strategic investments that may not produce returns for decades, if at all. It's what China is doing and if the US were trying to compete, they'd do the same. We were getting somewhat close to this with the CHIPS Act, but that's on the chopping block[1], too.
Truth is US capital is happy to sell off manufacturing capability to cash in on cheap labor, and there is no monetary incentive to re-shore manufacturing capacity unless the government provides serious incentives or does it themselves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act#Subseque...
I don't believe the actions being taken are really conducive to manufacturing greatness, or indeed technological greatness in any sense. I'd lump elimination of this board with elimination of obscure aviation safety committees normal people would never know about: actions that don't bear scrutiny at face value.
i.e. perhaps the whole point is that breaking these things will do damage and lower the status and functionality of the United States, making it actively worse by a considerable amount and sabotaging key structural parts normal people wouldn't even know were there.
In short, it's possible that it being bad is the point.
Strangely enough, I'm not seeing anyone lining up to take $3/hr jobs sewing t-shirts for sale to China.
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My understanding from folks outside the U.S. is that they desire U.S. products because they trust the safety more. I'm not sure everyone quite understands that by gutting [regulations], they trash part of their international advantage.
I'm no expert, but even if they somehow managed to get manufacturing back, slashing your competitive advantages and just taking the market position of "China 2: This time it's more expensive" doesn't strike me as a winner for exports.
Biden actually tried that and bringing the country forward at the same time. It didn't pass and Republicans decried it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal
Now they're going back 70 years instead of moving forward. Big brains there.
They're gonna be sorely disappointed if they thing de-regulation is the path to bringing back some pre-lapsarian golden age of American manufacturing that didn't actually exist
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You're being down voted but you're right.
Bringing manufacturing back is a stated goal of this administration.
Nevermind that you're not going to convince an American to work for Chinese wages in a sweatshop. Ignore that.
But the intended outcome of everything Dump is doing is to de-emphasize advanced education, bring back all basic manufacturing, and restore the "traditional" American values (white, straight, Christian). It's an absolutely stupid idea, but he's been pretty clear about it.
You have to check out their incredible safety investigation videos on youtube. I don't know how well-organized or efficient they are but clearly their role needs to be played by someone - and as a taxpayer I appreciate that they are doing it in a way that educates and informs.
They just put out an ad for themselves: https://youtu.be/2z7h5BOZ2Hk?si=n539-vOz-NhtDncT Pretty good value proposition.
> ?si=n539-vOz-NhtDncT
Meta: the si parameter is a form of tracking, as is pp. Considering trimming them from any copy-paste if you can.
Woops, fair point. Here's the trimmed version: https://youtu.be/2z7h5BOZ2Hk
Those videos are possibly my favorite thing on YouTube.
I can't think of another use of my tax dollars that I get as much direct pleasure from.
> I don't know how well-organized or efficient they are
They're 50 employees with an annual budget of $14.4 million. The cost/benefit ratio here is very good.
For that trivial amount this has to be anti-tech anti-science thinking at work.
What's this administration trying do, return the US to the Third World or the Dark Ages? Madness.
Well, yes, pretty much. It's an observed pattern among authoritarian states that actual facts are frequently in opposition to the authority, therefore, actual facts must be eliminated.
It's a silver lining in disguise, really. Such countries tend to collapse relatively quickly because it turns out facts are important for running a country - look at the USSR's fake food supply. Relatively quickly could still be a decade, though.
China has been the exception that authoritarian states collapse quickly. It's what the western powers were banking on would happen after they had success with USSR. It didn't pan out the way they thought. Not even close.
China is much more dispersed (because of it's size and some localisation/liberalisation) and they seem to understand at some level that reality exists and can't just be wished away.
It's an open question if they'll retain that with Xi now President for life.
Authoritarianism works... as long as leaders are effective.
The reason democracy historically wins out in the long run is not because it always picks better leaders, but because it picks fewer really bad ones. And checks/balances those it does.
For all his faults as a leader, Xi has also come down hard on actual corruption and malfeasance.
Imagine Trump in charge of China.
> they seem to understand at some level that reality exists and can't just be wished away.
US and EU seem to have forgotten that, at least when you look at the decisions of their leadership.
> China has been the exception that authoritarian states collapse quickly.
China has been centralized / autocratic for centuries (if not millennia), and the current system is probably not that different than the Emperor's throne.
"China has been the exception that authoritarian states collapse quickly."
Why? Because if you check the CVs of most of Politburo members they have degrees in science and engineering. QED!
As I replied to boringg, I should have been more specific. I was referring to China nowadays—since Mao's death and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms.
See section Change from Charismatic Revolutionaries to Technocrats especially bullet points four and five in this link on Chinese leadership: https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat8/4sub1/item2247.html.
And what's stopping the American people from voting smart people with engineering degrees to power instead of lying loud mouth conmen?
Maybe because modern American mainstream culture has people worshiping the "clever" conman who got rich quick by gaming the system and scamming others, as opposed to hard working nerd who put in the long time and effort for an honest enrichment.
Democratic societies get the leaders they deserve as they are a mirror of the people themselves.
> And what's stopping the American people from voting smart people with engineering degrees to power instead of lying loud mouth conmen?
The fact that people vote at all.
Running for office is a risky endeavour: you have to take time off from your job to actually run, with a decent chance of not winning. How many employers would be willing to give you a leave of absence to do this? Further, if you happen to lose your seat you are now unemployed: who is going to hire someone who has not been in the field for x years?
Law is probably one field where one can hop in and out easily, so it's why we have so many lawyers go into politics: the practice of the field doesn't change too quickly, so one can always join a firm. Similarly if you are a "businessman" you can give yourself time off from your own business (let someone else manage/CEO) since you're the boss.
Whereas in an engineering or technical field, you basically have to end your career in it. Or you perhaps stop being a day-to-day participant and go into a more generic 'management' role where it is easier to hop around companies in case you need to enter/leave politics depending on how many votes go your way.
Whereas in the CCP, (AIUI) you basically go into the 'management track' and get appointed to various positions with-in the party. You never "leave" your career as you move up the party leadership chain.
> Law is probably one field where one can hop in and out easily, so it's why we have so many lawyers go into politics
Only in USA, the rest of the world doesn't see lawyers flock to politics. It seems more like there is some corruption that makes lawyers mingle so much with politicians and they scratch each others backs, otherwise why would it be so much more lawyers in politics in USA than any other country?
People hate lawyers, they wouldn't vote on them if they didn't have to, but when the parties mostly show you lawyers to vote for then people don't have much of a choice. In the rest of the world were they do have that choice lawyers doesn't get voted in that much.
> Only in USA, the rest of the world doesn't see lawyers flock to politics.
Some data that suggests otherwise:
> On the question of what to study, there’s also a clear answer: nearly a third of both the officials and MEPs hold a law degree at undergraduate or postgraduate level. Non-science subjects such as business, humanities, political science and humanities are all prominent in the data with just 5 percent of MEPs and 2 percent of officials having a medical or health sciences qualification (Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is one of the few exceptions, having trained as a medical doctor and taken a master’s degree in public health.)
* https://www.politico.eu/article/what-to-study-to-join-the-eu...
Would be interested in a global survey on this: does it differ any (if at all) for various regions/countries/cultures around the world.
>Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is one of the few exceptions, having trained as a medical doctor and taken a master’s degree in public health
That's the worst example one could pick. Ursula comes from a family of influential EU politicians and has been groomed since childhood to take high ranking jobs in politics. It's doesn't matter what her education is when she's the EU equivalent of CCP royalty. That woman hasn't worked a job a day in her life, but spent all her life being a career politician and a regulatory arm of lobbyists and activist.
> Ursula comes from a family of influential EU politicians and has been groomed since childhood to take high ranking jobs in politics.
Do we say such things if a dentist encourages their child to become a dentist? Or an MD towards being an MD? An accountant to account? A programmer to a programmer?
> That woman hasn't worked a job a day in her life […]
Being a politician (or in the government bureaucracy) is a job. It is a career. There is domain of knowledge in governance that one must learn to be effective just like there is in any other human endeavour.
>Do we say such things if a dentist encourages their child to become a dentist? Or an MD towards being an MD? An accountant to account? A programmer to a programmer?
Depends if meritocracy was involved, which in her case it wasn't, or if your parents use their connections to get/buy you in power.
You're mixing up encouragement with cronyism, which I find in bad faith.
>Being a politician (or in the government bureaucracy) is a job. It is a career. There is domain of knowledge in governance that one must learn to be effective just like there is in any other human endeavour.
The point was that China's leaders have advanced degrees not related to politics, not whether being a politician is a job or not.
It's not lawyers that flock to politics but most politicians have law backgrounds because that's what you need to know to become a politician
> Law is probably one field where one can hop in and out easily
This is one factor that explains why lawyers take so many vacations and seem so generally relaxed.
As a U.S. citizen, I tend to think of our system of government as only loosely democratic. There are many, many dials and knobs that prevent voters from having too much impact on policy. The Electoral college means losers of the popular vote have been president several times. The Senate is quite unrepresentative, Wyoming (pop. 587k) and California (pop. 39,431k) have the same number of votes. The House is gerrymandered quite heavily, the two-party system has an immense amount of control over which candidates (and policies) are viable, and our campaign finance system ensures both parties pander to donors.
> As a U.S. citizen, I tend to think of our system of government as only loosely democratic.
One metric:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
Honest question: Why should I trust an index on democracy made by "The Economist Group", a London based private entity owned by the Agnelli Family, Rothschild, Cadbury and Schroder, groups with a history of union busting and other anti labor, anti democratic actions?
You don't have to and shouldn't—not without further evidence. Nevertheless, that group has taken the effort and it seems considerable work went into preparing it—that the analysis is done yearly showing trends over time, etc.
The fact that the figures are on the table so to speak they can now be tested by other researchers.
I'd not seen this analysis before and found it fascinating (I spent an inordinate amount of time studying the figures).
> Why should I trust […]
Why should you trust anything? "Do your own research."
From §See also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_indices
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy-Dictatorship_Index
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Ranking
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallagher_index
* Maybe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
> Democratic societies get the leaders they deserve as they are a mirror of the people themselves.
Don't confuse things being soiled by capitalism as democracy somehow is the bad part. There are plenty of examples of democracies that haven't succumbed to capitalism as badly as the US has.
Which are those? Other than Nordic EU countries, most other capitalist countries on the planet are doing worse than the US when you look at stuff like youth unemployment, housing affordability or birth rates, all things that show economic outlook.
Capitalism is bad sure, but so far it's the least bad system we ever had and the US is one of the least bad implementations. Capitalism got a lot of countries out of extreme poverty.
Look at South Korea if you want to see true dystopian capitalism.
Isn't it the only system we ever had, besides dictatorship? (Feudalism: a hierarchy of dictators; soviet-type communism: just a plain dictatorship)
Some do many don’t collapse. How long were Mao, Saddam, Stalin in power? Could pull a longer list…
I should have been more specific but I thought it obvious. I was referring to China nowadays, specifically the time since Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms which he instigated shorthly thereafter.
I suggest you read this link about Chinese leaders/leadership, especially the section headed Change from Charismatic Revolutionaries to Technocrats especially paragraph/bullet points four and five:
https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat8/4sub1/item2247.html
what I would like to say:
yes,
specifically some modern form of feudalism I guess
where the new nobles (as in large companies because in US companies are people) can mostly do whatever they want and the rest of the population is struggling enough to just "get by" to find time to change anything
but given that Trump put since deniers and anti-vaccers into power it's probably a much more "dump" reason
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Why would they want to fund a group that calls them out for taking deadly shortcuts to save money?
How does a massive chemical accident, or explosion that destroys a manufacturing facility, creating huge civil liability, "save money?" Or why they wouldn't want to learn from the mishaps of others to avoid massively costly accidents themselves.
TFA says the chemical industry supports the mission and role of the CSB. It's trivially cheap in the scope of the whole industry, so they could just support it themselves.
The CSB isn't a regulator. They don't write rules or impose fines. They investigate accidents, identify causes, and things that could have been done to prevent the accidents.
That's how the FDA works, so, should we just shut them down?
If it was up to drug companies, I'm guessing they would be supportive.
If if by "we" you mean me personally, I think it's a bad idea.
There are chemicals that are routinely used but aren't considered foods or drugs
They're literally shutting down the FDA as we speak so yes?
Source:
Direct from the CSB:
> The President’s Budget proposes $0 for CSB’s FY 2026 budget with the expectation that CSB begins closing down during FY 2025. CSB’s emergency fund of $844,145 will be appropriated to cover costs associated with closing down the agency. Exact closing costs will be determined upon consultation with OMB and Congress.
Source: https://www.csb.gov/assets/1/6/csb_cj_2026.pdf
https://themortgagepoint.com/2025/06/23/senate-parliamentari...
This claims the EPA and OSHA already perform the same duties, is that actually true?
In practice it’s got a very distinct role.
They basically do NTSB aircraft crash investigations for large scale chemical accidents. Critically they don’t assign fines or act proactively like EPA or OSHA, it’s a neutral investigation.
No - "The CSB investigates industrial chemical accidents—not to assign blame, but to figure out why they happened and how to prevent them. No other federal agency does this kind of root cause analysis focused purely on safety improvement. OSHA and the EPA enforce rules, but they don’t specialize in deep, systems-based investigations like the CSB does."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Chemical_Safety_Board
> The Senate legislative history states: "The principal role of the new chemical safety board is to investigate accidents to determine the conditions and circumstances which led up to the event and to identify the cause or causes so that similar events might be prevented." Congress gave the CSB a unique statutory mission and provided in law that no other agency or executive branch official may direct the activities of the board.
Their YouTube channel is equal parts fascinating, terrifying, and boring: https://youtube.com/@uscsb
Definitely worth watching! No matter if you’re technical or not. Top notch productions, beautiful even.
I think a huge, huge amount of the government is wasteful but the CSB is doing incredible work. Some of the smartest chemical engineers go on to work there later in their career. Due to the average age of the knowledge-holders, this isn’t an agency that you can shut down and easily restart. Young engineers don’t make good investigators - you need a super keen sense of industry to walk into a place where you don’t know anyone and put all the clues together correctly.
The CSB produces very neutral but incredibly detailed reports. Please note that the CSB is not an enforcement agency - they don’t assign fault or levee fines or bring any charges or write any regulation.
All they do is figure out why every major industrial disaster occurred and communicate that to other companies so that they have the know-how to prevent if from happening again if they so choose. The CSB’s reports are invaluable to the operations of so many companies and plants.
Some of the top comments on a 1-year old video with 3.5 million views:
> I can't believe that a government agency makes some of my favorite YouTube videos. I've been watching these for years now
> Finally, a good use of my taxes
> I work in the petrochemical industry, with polymerizable substances that are quite similar to butadiene. The findings hit home. I will share this video tomorrow with all my colleagues in the plant management, who I am sure will appreciate it.
> An amazing service, thank you. When I worked at a copper mine in Yukon I would always replay your videos when it was my turn to give the safety brief and they were ALWAYS well received. Your videos save lives
> USCSB is the only US government agency I have subscription notifications on for. You all have done fantastic work for these 25 years.
> CONGRATULATIONS on 25 years to the CSB! A quarter century of excellence in safety education and investigations. I have learned so much about industrial processes and the safety measures utilized (sometimes not successfully) by industry thanks to the brilliant videos produced by the CSB. Thank you for your hard work, CSB!
> This is hands down the most positive comment section on YouTube. I, and everyone else it seems, love this channel. I’ve learned so much
> Thank you CSB for all that you do. As an engineer and new supervisor at a production facility, I utilize your videos all the time to help teach the operators the dangers that we have lurking. You improve and save lives all over due to your work. Please, keep it up.
> Love the analysis and insights to these industrial disasters that the USCSB provides. Hope you stay well funded to continue commissioning these mini documentaries.
== I think a huge, huge amount of the government is wasteful but the CSB is doing incredible work==
It feels like there is some type of reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia that goes on with government spending and programs.
Those close to the subject matter typically view government spending in their area of expertise as necessary, even “incredible” as you state. When it comes to spending in an area they are not an expert, it suddenly becomes “wasteful.”
I mean, I also now work at a public university and can nearly taste the waste in projects I’m directly involved in.
It often gets framed as a "government problem", but private enterprise is not immune to these problems either. It's almost like it's a natural result of any organization that is too large for direct accountability and uses funds that they have no personal stake in.
boring and/or utterly fascinating, depending on the viewer -- safety engineering, whether that's airplanes, submarines, chemical plants, or whatever, is totally fascinating. Making something work is difficult, making it work safely, even more so.
I think we will soon have to confront serious, real world proof that an unregulated free market is not ultimately self-regulating. Control systems without upper bounds (e.g. shareholder value / profit maximization) are prone to feedback loops and oscillations. And an oscillating system cannot be judged in its entirety during an upward cycle alone (20th century).
Going one level of abstraction higher: there is no evidence that demand/supply dynamics alone will regulate a society over larger populations and time scales. Even the phrase "invisible hand" appears only once in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, somewhere around page 500, and that refers not to the market at large, but to the emergence of protectionist behaviours among suppliers within a country.
Laws and regulations are part of the free market system. As rules approach zero, competition approaches war.
Laws and regulations are part of the free market system.
I thought we've known since well before the 1952 Cuyahoga River fire that sparked the formation of the EPA.
Although TBF, there's never been a lot of demand for literal burning rivers.
I'm pretty sure we've actually known this since time immemorial. Property, contract, etc. are all legal constructs. Talking about free markets (or whatever approximation to "free" is meant by that) without laws and regulations doesn't make any sense.
We already have real-world proof of this which is why regulations were slowly (and bloodily) introduced in the first place.
It's the same tragedy of the commons we see with vaccinations. Vaccinations work, so we then forget why we had them in the first place, so then we think "well... what if we just stop?"
I love the USCSB videos and in couple incidents I likely protected myself and others from an accident due to risk awareness I had as a result of their videos. (e.g. most recently the realization that few micron tungsten powder might be significantly pyrophoric at elevated temperature-- which it is).
I'm also a fan of their written reports, which are much more informative than the videos but less well known.
But contrary to other posters here I'm less convinced that it's so obviously cost effective: $14.4 million dollars a year isn't much compared to the staggering waste in other federal programs. But it certainly sounds like a lot compared to only investigating 180 incidents over 27 years-- 6 incidents a year (which is also the figure for 2022 so it's not just a product of a slow ramp though some years have less or more).
So it's something like more than a million dollars an incident which seems not so efficient.
It's also a small enough scale that it ought to be pretty reasonable to fund it through the industries directly.
That said, OSHA's budget is more like $700 million a year... and I'd rather see CSB's funding just come out of that. If public money is to be spent supporting industries, I'd rather more go to investigations and education than on a regulatory empire.
In the name of efficiency, we should just ignite the vinyl chloride in the freight trains before they even leave the station.
I hope someone is keeping a list of all these crazy rollbacks so the next democrat administration (assuming there is one dun-dun-dun etc) can be held accountable for not rolling back the rollbacks.
Even if they do I'm worried that this kind of sabotage of progress will become the new norm, with each subsequent administration undoing everything the previous one did as standard, and going even further to appease the extremists.
I know this has always happened to some degree with executive orders (the was a great tradition of presidents signing all sorts of crazy stuff just so the next guy would have to undo it and look bad) but it seems nuclear now (sometimes literally)
Certified doge moment.
Waiting for all of the people who said that doge would lead to increased efficiency (or at the very least a smaller deficit) to say they're wrong.
Oh good, we can save money to pay for like, 1/5000 of another parade no one will attend. So much fiscal responsibility.
This is horrible news. The USCSB does incredible work.
It is highly surprising that the narrative in the US has morphed the expenses on public institutions of enormous importance, into wastage, something that has to be cut or eliminated.
Why is it that no one is pointing out the contribution of these institutions to the US and the world?
The US, has a society, has grown so materialistic, that they fail to see anything beyond money.
Somethings cannot be measured by money. In fact, when it comes to public governance, money is the least useful thing.
Nothing surprising there. The US-led social media finally achived its biggest success. It made weaponized ignorance viable at an enormous scale.
Not just in the US but all over the world. The fight now is anybody with some critical thought ability vs willfully and violently ignorant. The former is getting fewer in the numbers and the latter is out for blood. We need to be very efficient to disarm and passivize the violent ignorants otherwise they will slowly kill us and the humanity.
> all over the world
Not in India. Here, there is no concept of Big Govt. The concept is "What is this govt. going to give me for free for me to vote for it"
Its the other end of the complimentary spectrum.
I'm no American and I am from a country (Turkey, but I moved out) that has some similarities to both Asian and Western style corruption.
> "What is this govt. going to give me for free for me to vote for it"
The exact line of thinking has caused its own Trump case in Turkey. It is similar for the Eastern Europe. Many voted for Trump for petty small interests and very short term gains too. For all of them, social media was a huge boost to explode small gains into bigger narratives.
In India, The lower level bureaucracy lives off people and higher level bureaucracy lives off state.
In US, the bureaucracy lives off entirely on State. That is why it feels less corrupt.
$36 Trillion in debt but fights are on one million dollar budgets.
What? They didn't say big government or respect for it did this. In fact, they're arguing for a strong government and that violent ignorance is dismantling valuable public systems.
Are you being sarcastic? To say India doesn't have violent ignorance in the same breath of... The obscene wealth inequality, social castes, sexual inequality, etc of that country...
> the narrative in the US
It isn't the narrative. It's what a small band of institutional hackers want to do to the country. If anything the narrative is to not care about anything.
> The US, has a society, has grown so materialistic, that they fail to see anything beyond money.
And which society are you contrasting this with?
Europe and many developing countries still have national programs in various important sectors like Health, Education and mental health.
A lot of the worlds govts spend a lot through public institutions.
Expense of what... 10c per taxpayer?
I can only assume Trump administration is incompetent, corrupt and negligent.
> public institutions of enormous importance
A case of the baby getting thrown out with the bathwater, I suppose. And make no mistake: there was enough dirty bathwater to go around.
Every organization is dysfunctional, the only question is whether its more functional than the alternative. This applies to private enterprises (metaverse anyone?) as well as the government.
After 50+ years of budget cuts, what makes us think that the solution is more budget cuts?
> After 50+ years of budget cuts, what makes us think that the solution is more budget cuts?
What 50+ years of budget cuts? US federal expenditure per capita has been steadily rising for decades, with a gargantuan explosion during Covid and steeply climbing thereafter.
The US political establishment, particularly at rhetoric federal level, has become a “whims of the in charge” bureaucracy that can’t fulfill itself to the point that every day Americans feel their impact - positive or negative.
Or, like good design, a decent bureaucracy is invisible.
== And make no mistake: there was enough dirty bathwater to go around==
Any evidence to share?
Okay, I won't make a mistake if you show me the evidence.
No, when it comes to spending taxpayer money, the onus is on the one who wants to spend more to show that it would lead to better outcomes. Federal expenditure per capita is nearly $20k/yr now, more than triple what it was 50 years ago in real terms. And that's not counting state and local expenditure. I haven't seen any evidence that if we paid even more, life would be better.
obviously, we need to drain the swamp to get rid of the dirty bathwater that we're now dumping there
Some waste is expected in govt. It happens even in private enterprises. That is down to human nature and other factors.
However, where is the critical thinking and debate on what actually the institution does, what can be improved and what can be changed?
Its all become X uses Y billion USD a year, so we have to make ti Y/2 to save the universe.
Admittedly, I'd never heard of the CSB until this article but their mission - from their "About Us" page - seems important:
"The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating chemical incidents to determine the cause or probable cause."
Out of curiosity, I looked up the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment in 2023 and can't find their investigation on their site in either the active or completed investigation sections. Looking elsewhere, I'm only finding FEMA's concerns about cancer clusters, nothing from the CSB. Can anyone else find it?
Train Derailment is for FRA / NTSB.
CSB is for manufacturing / processing incidents.
Got it. Found the EPA reporting on the trail derailment too.
It looks like the distinction is whether the potential source is stationary or not.
Which reinforces the "duplication" point. Remove the distinction for the EPA and you have the need covered.
Politics is complicated and often has competing goals, but this seems at odds with the equally loud MAHA movement.
Only if you assume the respective movements can be taken at face value. If this and MAHA are actually for the purpose of destroying functional things, in the manner that missile strikes are for destroying functional things, then none of this is at odds with anything else: the purpose is just more aligned with the result than with the claimed intentions.
Save lives?: X
Increase safety?: X
Make more money?: YES
The USCSB makes life safer for everyone in this country, especially people that work around potentially dangerous chemicals and pressurized equipment.
I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't actually save any money or make anyone much more money. It's just a result of mindlessly fetishizing the past and misattributing past periods of rapid industrial growth to lack of regulation. The real cause was rapid population growth at the time, war, and extremely rapid adoption of bedrock industrial age technologies like electricity.
Today we have a fully deployed modern infrastructure and slow to negative population growth. Cutting regulation won't change that.
Yeah it turns out when Europe is a giant crater and the rest of world hasn't figured out electricity quite yet that your massive industrial capacity can be a bit of a boon. Especially when you loan out a bunch of money to Europe so they can buy all your stuff! Wow! Having over 50% of the world's industrial capacity when the world just spent 7 years on fire and everyone needs new everything means it's a bit of a seller's market!
Yep, all these baby booomers lucked the fuck out being born in an era where the entire world needed the US after WW2. But over time the rest of the world slowly recovered and suddenly US goods became overpriced.
I blame much of the current US economy on the shenanigans of baby boomers and their parents. Who after having a booming economy for 3 decades, needed to quickly financial engineer themselves out of their infinite growth pension hole.
So what did they do? They started offshoring to compensate for the big mismatch in domestic debt financing and actual domestic wealth creation.
While they were doing they, they put the pedal to the metal on wealth inequality as those already with excessive wealth could leverage themselves to the tits to buy up the competition.
The problem is, alot of this is the net result at the macro scale and there were many independent decisions that led to everything.
Think you might like to read "Adrift: America in 100 Charts" by Scott Galloway. He covers the impact of babyboomers on America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Galloway_(professor)#Bib...
I don't really buy this since China has industrialized rapidly without much population growth at all. They have built infrastructure like high speed rail that we are unable to build in the US, so I also don't buy the "fully deployed modern infrastructure" line.
Yeah but their starting point was different again - they already had the population, and were able to piggy back on technological progress from other countries by borrowing or stealing it. The other thing they have is an authoritarian government; a country can achieve a lot in a short time when it can freely sideline the concerns and needs of its citizens.
I'm not a China defender, but sidelining the concerns and needs of its citizens isn't why China is able to do things like high speed rail or build high density infrastructure in general. Lots there view having their property taken by the government and relocated as a good thing, because it almost always happens way above market rates. There are exceptions, of course, but my impression is that it is not the norm. Feel free to correct me. This isn't a defense of China in general, but it is totally possible to have good public transit in the United States.
And mind you that China isn't unique in bootstrapping its industrial revolution by mass theft of IP. If I were you, I'd look into the stunts us Americans pulled during our industrialization. The sad fact of the matter is that the government of this country no longer works for its own people, and that's why so many things are far below par. For many things, we _could_, but simply _don't_.
In my personal experience with in-laws in China you're correct (got fully compensated + given a nicer house). Another family, when they were laid off from their government jobs, were given the option of cash or office space and storage for like 30yrs to run their own business...
Nothing really to disagree with here tbh; I didn't mean to say that authoritarianism was the reason for everything they've achieved, but rather that it greases the wheels so to speak.
I was really just responding to the discussion that ensued when an earlier commenter said that poor regulation was not the reason the US modernised rapidly but rather population growth and post war economics, and another responded with China as a counter example to that, my point being that China's situation was much different than the US so it's not really a useful comparison.
I am neither a defender of China, nor the US ;-)
I always liked the bit where they often compensate folks not directly financially but rather with a generous share in what they are building. Eg. the building containing your one bedroom apartment gets torn down by developers and as compensation they offer you a three bedroom apartment in the new building.
Definitely plays an interesting role in combating/moderating NIMBYism.
China went from a few tens of millions of modern people to over a billion modern people. Look at it that way. They weren’t new people but they were economically speaking.
The US is all modern people with little population growth. We have no giant wave of latent demand.
How are so confident in causality here?
The population thing is pretty elementary. If population is flat to declining, then growth is demand constrained.
There are some areas where you could uncap growth by cutting regulation, but they're not this. The #1 one I'm aware of is housing construction in high cost metros.
I see your point, but not totally buying it. The US innovates for a global population, one that’s still growing.
The best way to infer causality is through experimentation. If regulation does go away, we’ll measure and learn if it actually worked.
Reagan cut regulation, and manufacturing still left, quick as ever.
I assume that is due to larger trends. Population growth has slowed considerably and there's more competition than ever. Worldwide fertility rates have dropped from 4.7 to 2.3 in the last 75 years, and in that time the U.S. share of world GDP dropped from about 50% to 25%.
My two cents: We may be already be in uncharted economic territory with regards to shrinking workforces, retirees, pollution, etc. How much of our economy is dependent on growth? We may find out. Places like Japan, Korea and Europe are leading the way. Ponzi schemes won't work forever. The world is getting smaller and older. And evening out. There's less room for arbitrage. Innovation is coming from all directions. Technology can still increase productivity. But it could also put masses of people out of work, leaving not enough demand for the latest and greatest. That, and a pie that is no longer growing, could cause a lot of social friction.
>We’ll measure and learn if it actually worked.
I don't believe that will happen, and I base that belief on all my decades of watching American politics. Bureaucrats may do this (I personally work with ones who do), but politicians generally do not. And the current administration definitely does not care about actual numbers.
It's always a matter of time before a facility explodes for preventable reasons and costs the company billions in property damage and lawsuits. This decision to stop learning from mistakes and spreading awareness will hurt profits in the long run, not make more money. It'll also be harder to find people willing to work around chemicals if they can't trust the safety measures.
Funny as it sounds, the real problem (or at least one of them) is that no one cares about long run profits anymore.
Why do profits, and the stock market, continue going up then? I've heard this nonsense about corporate short termism for decades, and the long term just never seems to arrive.
The stock market tracks short term profits; most stock buyers are also short-termers. Profits that could have been had but were not, due to shortsighted decisions, are hard to measure and don't usually make the news. Similar for companies that slowly hollow out, or get killed by newer companies still in their market-building phases before they start turning the screws.
It's not just hard to measure, it's unfalsifiable nonsense.
You can just watch it happen. Companies cut quality and ruin their reputation, or shrink from new markets due to fear of cannibalizing themselves, among other ways to sacrifice long term profit. There's a reasonable debate about how predominant it is in the economy, but not about whether it happens.
Consolidation.
If I make short term profits off doing the wrong things I have more money to buy up my competition that incurs the cost now. By the time something bad happens there will only be a small bump down on the market.
Antitrust is important.
everyone pivotted to ai from their pivot to the metaverse which was a pivot to blockchain
I forsee a lot of high skilled labor exiting high risk fields over the next few years. Many of the high end blue-collar jobs of north America are very low end in south America due to the relative risks involved e.g. mine workers.
> It'll also be harder to find people willing to work around chemicals if they can't trust the safety measures.
Don't worry, they're counting on us all being so desperate we'll take those jobs, anyway.
Bankruptcy. The people who profited the most will not see any consequences.
That's the beauty of our system: companies are at fault, not people, and companies can be destroyed and remade at will.
> costs the company billions in property damage and lawsuits.
The reality: the company makes a new company (that's identical to the old company in assets and operations) and says "we had nothing to do with the old company" and they're left off with zero consequences while the old company (that has no assets but holds legal liability) goes bankrupt and pays nothing.
There's also a new and improved method that avoids even this small amount of effort. Alex Jones introduced it. When you're found liable for a billion dollars in damages, just say, "I won't pay it. Fuck you." And there's absolutely nothing they can do.
The legal system means absolutely nothing now.
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California can just keep doing its thing and the rest of the country benefits from their regulations. Prop 65 is to thank for all the Harbor Freight stores no longer reeking of outgassing plastics.
Supreme Court will just strip us of our state regulations by invoking the commerce clause.
If there's one thing California needs to learn from these past 6 months, it's that you can simply ignore what the courts say. When you're rich and powerful, you can literally just say "I do not consent" when legal consequences are presented to you.
If we keep blowing up the economy this way they’ll only be able to afford to rent the libs.
It feels that way, but this legislation is ideologically consistent with reducing regulations which constrain companies and force them to take the externalities of their actions into account.
The CSB is not a regulatory agency. It doesn't enforce anything against companies. It investigates major disasters and publishes recommendations.
It's like the NTSB but for industries that use hazardous chemicals.
I still think it's ideologically consistent with insulating companies from externalities. Without official investigations, companies can assert their own interpretations of events. Boeing did this with the NTSB recently:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/boeing-punished-by-ntsb-fo...
Ok but the NTSB's response was to refer to DOJ because NTSB has no teeth.
In a hazard investigation you don’t want the investigators to have teeth. It’s not about finding wrongdoing it’s about determining what happened and how to avoid it in the future. If a company takes negligent actions referring to DOJ should be enough.
> In a hazard investigation you don’t want the investigators to have teeth.
Did I say I want the NTSB to have teeth?
> Without official investigations, companies can assert their own interpretations of events.
They can do this with investigations too. Just as Boeing did. NTSB can't do anything about it. The "punishment" was a referral to DOJ who can.
Just the knowledge about chemical risks is a threat to profits.
You say "force them" like that's actually going to happen. Historically, companies are terrible at auditing themselves.
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50 employees with a budget of $14.4 million doesn’t even qualify as a rounding error in the federal budget. Don’t pretend this has anything remotely to do with “government waste”.
A low number is a good reason not to spend resources auditing it. But why would it be a good reason to keep something around you found you don’t need?
I don't think that anyone has demonstrated that we don't need it.
No. But rather than telling us the merits they appear to be telling us it’s so small it’s not worth doing so.
Then they weren't necessary in the first place. 50 federal employees can hardly perform the work of 5 of the private sector. Don't pretend that government employees are the least efficient, least qualified, and least motivated to change anything in the world.
The amount of pent up hate and vitriol coming out now is incredible. People hated each other so much and more or less kept it somewhat in check for so many decades?
Bizarre as it sounds, I think a lot of people can hate on demand. Media starts beating the drum, and a proportion of the population go from apathetic to pretty damn frothy surprisingly fast.
Actually it doesn't sound bizarre; you are probably correct. Some people can switch to extreme emotions quickly and easily.
I have a background in NLP (pre-LLM) and like to study extremist rhetoric, and, while I don't think you're being reductionist, it's a little more removed than that. I'd replace with "hate" with "problems and stress". Once you can attribute that stress to a group... that's when the hate develops. There are certain global powers who have recognized this and weaponized it. Agreeing with the most extreme of both sides, loudly, is the modern standard for propaganda.
It wasn't socially acceptable to express your hatred, and there are a lot of people who just needed someone to stoke the flames of their biases to the point of hate and violence.
We've watched it become socially acceptable to not keep your biases unchecked and there is a multi-billion dollar media apparatus that pumps 24/7 propaganda into people's minds.
In the past, the stuff we've seen mainstreamed today stayed relatively niche on AM radio and in klan meetings.
2 things.
First, generally when people lives are good, they tend to blow the small problems out of proportion. This is pretty much how US got to where it is.
Secondly, if you look at the history of politics, conservatives have always been the ones to weaponize politics as a form of moral judgement. So nothing is really new.
Waiting for when smoking is allowed on planes again...
Oh, required, surely.
The article mentions redundancy but doesn't specify what organization is claimed to make CSB redundant. I'm guessing it's the NIH since, to be fair, Vance announced an investigation into the East Palestine chemical spill five days ago: https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/nih-long-term-health-research...
Chesterton's Fence moment
No not really.
The people in charge KNOW what the CSB does, that's why they want it gone
The CSB makes it known how much your employer is willing to kill you over saving like ten bucks.
Chemistry industry executives don't like that.
Do you HONESTLY believe that these people who have spent the past 60 years crying about how much the EPA makes their business "harder" (literally 1% more expensive) don't know exactly how the EPA protects the public from them?
They don't care that their actions literally kill people. They don't care.
Dupont did not care at all that they were dumping PFOAs that they confirmed were acutely and chronically toxic to mammals upstream of a small town's drinking water.
They do not care. Executives don't make money for caring.
> the CSB is an independent federal agency
Keyword: "independent".
They investigate before talking. They narrate the fact instead of reading the official narrative. Those pesky wokes must go.
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Interesting conservative take. Why change or try anything new? Everything must have been made for some reason.
Randomly knocking out bricks of your house so you can sell them for 50c each to help pay the mortgage is not innovation.
Saying this thing is here so it must be important is not governance or wisdom.
Just say why it’s a good idea.
That is not the lesson of chestertons fence. What you describe is cargo cult.
Chesterton fence says "stop! think".
What doge and Trump are doing is destroying stuff they don't understand.
How do you know that?
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Hot take:
The United states of america MAGA movement wants to compete with taliban in turning their countries 500 or even 900 years back.
Who will win? Not really sure. Its a touch and go situation and it can turn any either way and emerge as the winner
We're getting reset to modern Europe: there is no equivalent to the US CSB in any major European country. France's BEA-RI is not independent, and the CSB is not EPA or OSHA. I'm always amazed how little commenters know about the US, and deeply saddened by how much less they know about others.
make AMERICA the FIRST world country with the most third world disasters
what will they do next, revoke the patriot act?! how unpatriotic!
Much more cutting is required to balance the budget.
There's simply no balancing the budget without both raising taxes and cutting social services.
We should, of course, be efficient with our money. Any dollar we can save is a good thing but until I hear someone talk about raising taxes and cutting social spending I'm not going to take serious the idea that we're trying to balance the budget.
They are cutting social spending and healthcare spending. It wont offset tax cuts for the rich, but the cruelty is the point and watching people suffer is fun to republicans.
What social spending do you want to cut?
Social security, Medicare, and Medicaid are ~60% of the federal budget.
Interest payments are another ~15% and there's no way to reduce those.
You could cut literally every penny of the rest of the budget, including all of defense, all of transportation, all of education, and every single program being discussed here. We'd still have a deficit.
So unless a politician is going to propose a way to spend less on those three programs, then they're not talking seriously about reducing our deficit.
Penny wise but pound foolish.
Lol did you see the proposed budget? Balancing it was never the intention.
This administration has zero plans to balance the budget. Anyone who ever thought so was, and is, frankly, an idiot.
But there's always money for a war.
What advantages can we take with this !?
I would leave the funding as long as they make MORE videos than one a year. With all the AI tools coming out they should be able to produce much fantastic content. I can't count the number of times I've referred our site EHS managers throughout the years to their Youtube.
Or, I guess, cut the funding, and next Dupont or Deridder or Bhopal, we will just shrug and hope the company responsible for the incident is transparent and forthcoming in their internal investigation /s
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It's pretty important for anyone working around chemicals. I work around truck racks and pump houses and giant fuel tanks all day, and I'm rather glad I don't need to worry about being blown 100 feet in the air in an explosion and leave my family behind like my great uncle did. The reason I don't worry is because, partly due to the CSB, we're pretty good at knowing how to work around explosive liquids safely.
Everyone gets hung up on money and they don't pay attention to value. The CSB annual budget is less than some of the contracts I work on, automating fuel farms on military bases. They're good value for money.
The stated motivation is that the bureaucratic structure is redundant, so ideally the good work they do will be continued in another agency.
Yeah, I'm not holding my breath. It's just people's lives at stake, I figure it'll go on the backburner.
When something happens, the real cause of the problem is often due to a combination of the entity (the company/person/whatever that had the "something" happen), as well as external factors. Those external factors can include rules/guidance—or the lack of rules/guidance—from multiple agencies.
If a regulatory agency is also doing investigations, they may choose to focus less on their own 'failings' (that is, their agency's rules/guidance or lack of rules/guidance), and focus more on others' failings. Or, they may choose to focus less on other agencies' failings for political reasons.
Having a third party, with no regulatory ability, helps to reduce the appearance of bias, and increase trust in the industry that the third party investigates.