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Comment by epakai | Hacker News Reader

Frankly getting tired of hearing about how I haven't heard about it, and nobody wants me to hear about it. If you want to write about news, write about it. If you want to point out instances of news media not covering this story where they might have covered other stories go for it, cite instances. All I've been convinced of so far is some people have an axe to grind, and part of their narrative is how the media or the government doesn't want me to know about a thing I know about.

edit: please downvote my trash, the same as this article. Go find better reporting on this event to shove in front of everybody's eyeballs. (post title has since changed, see article for relevance)

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The issue is that PSR trains have been resulting in these crashes for a while. If you want to look at the data for yourself: https://railroads.dot.gov/accident-and-incident-reporting/tr... Select "Class 1 Railroad". That's nearly half a billion dollars in damage since 2018 to ecosystems and small towns that are hamstrung on dollar amounts like that. The fact that you're just hearing about this kind of stuff is the problem that people are trying to communicate.

The problems that underly these kinds of PSR accidents aren't lost on people either. PSR trains were a way of scaling down an industry of people. That's to say, it's a labor movement problem; more cynically put, mutli-billion dollar companies are passing their error rates off on ecosystems and relatively unwealthy areas. It's not some tin-foil hat secret that American media generally does not cover these kinds of areas or things.

Instead of responding in rage, respond in empathy, or you could use the old tactic of just ignoring it until it goes away. It's not like you'll suffer social penalties for any of those options; after all, you just did the ASCII version of dropping trou in response to outrage over a social and ecological crisis and suffered zero penalties.

Then maybe this isn't about you, specifically?

How are the mainstream media dealing with it?

> How are the mainstream media dealing with it?

Apparently CNN reported on this 8 days ago[0] (when it happened). Fox is running coverage live as we speak[1]. If there is any evidence of a cover-up, it has yet to be presented.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/05/us/east-palestine-ohio-train-...

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-train-derailment-prompts-wat...

So the live coverage from Fox is 8 days late, right?

no, it's 8 contiguous days of coverage.

Thanks for the correction!

Fox has reports on it from a few days ago too: https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/ohio-mayor-norfolk-sou...

It's more likely that nobody really cared about this until it went viral on Twitter and TikTok, when people felt a social obligation to show support. It's not bad to recognize the issue, but our willingness to shoot the messenger has prevented us from being able to learn anything in the first place. How many people would have learned about this sooner if they watched the "mainstream media" they so vehemently claim is covering it up?

I don't really care either way, it's just food for thought.

Thanks for the reply!

May I ask why "you don't care", though?

Mostly because of the Flint thing in my other comment, but also because I spent an inordinate amount of my childhood on 4chan listening to people peddle their own coverup theories.

So, it's not the actual disaster that you don't care about but the "you have not heard about this" part of the news?

The disaster is terrible, but I'm completely ambivalent towards the "underground" narrative and overall response to the story.

Other apathetic here. There's a certain amount of background cosmic dice rolls and related instances of suffering all the time. Plane crashes, house fires, robberies, lottery winners etc. Its all just noise. Like a log of lightening strikes. There's nothing interesting to be learned looking at individual instances, and those instances don't really affect your life. The next illogical step in the process is to figure out who or what to blame, but why? You think if they nailed this derailment down to a single thing that went wrong this time, there would never be any more derailment accidents? If the answer is no, then why care so much about where to pin blame?

Derailments of this type have been increasing a lot over the past few years due to premature automation of rail lines and increased length of freight trains. Ultimately this is a story about cutting costs at the expense of lives and the environment.

https://railroads.dot.gov/accident-and-incident-reporting/tr...

My take is that the world is a massive place with countless atrocities and bad things happening. It is impossible for a single human to actually "care" for all these issues besides sweet nothings "thoughts and prayers" and maybe a donation of a 100$.

Instead, I orient myself to my local circle, strata, whatever you want to call it to something I can care for and manage. I recently funded a few tickets for my local highschool for a science trip for instance. I give money to a local shelter I like to stop by and say hey to. I do a lot of things for a circle I've deemed mine to care about.

So it sounds mean or rude not to care, but it's what everyone is doing. No one just wants to admit it. Champion a few causes that you can handle and let your taxes take care of what you can't.

Nothing on the NY Times front page as 11:09 EST 02-13-2023

> How are the mainstream media dealing with it?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/toxic-chemicals-train-derailed-ohi...

Tinfoil hat spin: the “no one is talking about it” angle is being propagated by foreign psy-ops as a distraction from the balloon stories. The “look, we found balloons too” angle floated like a lead aerostat.

The general population pays closer attention to the derailment story because a cover-up is intimated by a “grassroots” perspective, and the balloon story floats away into thin air.

Pretty sure this is a way fucking bigger deal than a bunch of balloons.

I say this earnestly: I trust that the military has interest in making sure our national security is protected. I don't harbor suspicions of intentional negligence with these balloons.

I totally believe that our civilian federal government and executive agencies have no capacity to deal with massive environmental crises like the one in Ohio, or Flint, or in CA with PG&E or many other places. Our system is too weak, and the companies too powerful, the problems too costly to be dealt with without significant pushback.

The companies have progressively made the system weak through lobbying and regulatory capture

Because literally nobody cares about the balloons aside from the laughingstock the US military became after they let the first one float across the entire United States before finally shooting it down.

Not sure if true but I read that we couldn't shoot it down where it was. It was in an odd elevation, too high for some equipment, too low for others.

Supposedly we shot it down after it lost elevation on the coast.

These chemicals will have a major impact on the environment and people around the wreckage. People in the town are already reporting illness.

People 1.5 miles away from the wreck are having their dogs die in their yard while letting them out to pee.

The balloon is just bullshit, but this isn't.

It should also be noted that they just fixed the train tracks and just covered up the spill, instead of doing a proper cleanup.

The person who wrote this article doesn't owe you anything. And they certainly didn't beg you to read this.

If they want to make false claims and not back them up then my two-cents is more than they deserve. This article does nothing to reinforce the headline. It's just a clickbait summary that leads to myself and others flaming the article rather than the kind of discussion that's worthwhile on HN.

This feels like a reply in bad faith. The point that the parent comment is making is that the title of the article isn't convincing, it's just making a provocative statement with no backing.

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