Plan to incinerate soil from Ohio train derailment is ‘horrifying’, says expert
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This isn't just a politics problem - the entire investor and management class at the railroads has been gambling with lives for years and the incinerator company's clearly doing the same thing, and we can't even agree as a country that that's bad, because we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poisoned an entire town because it helped their bottom line" or "the incinerator company that's also trying to poison an entire town is not within its rights to do so."
The cult of the MBA has gutted this country and we've let it do so because we gave up any sense of actual civic or national pride or any sense of society or mutual obligation and can't get through a conversation about how we'd like society to be without someone saying it's going to cost money and is therefore a nonstarter or that we've got no right to tell them they can't render the land they happen to live on toxic for the next thousand years or wipe out a species they don't like.
As soon as something swaps hands from the person or people who built it because they understood the problem it solved to people who only see it as an engine for profit it begins to die, and we've set up systems to make the death long and agonizing while the MBAs bleed it dry.
"We", which is to say a majority of residents and citizens of the US, constituting the working class, had these things imposed on us by others who have systematically and successfully manufactured the appearance of consent over a period of decades, the ongoing results being consistently undermining the working class and incepting a kind of learned helplessness that justice can never be found.
The "cult of the MBA" is apt, although a more appropriate appellation might be the "cult of Mammon".
I agree with all of what you've said, although I think folks have been more willing contributors to the process than you suggest.
We allow the rewarding of truly psychotic behaviours, there is a reason why most executives seem to exhibit these traits.
But for the most part, yeah they don't need to be centrally coordinated and probably aren't, because they are very good at identifying their interests and have the resources to work towards it.
I would hold a more charitable view towards this all, however, if it wasn't for the fact that the media, their sponsors, and the politicians are intentionally using wedge issues to disrupt and divide the masses.
Here's the website for the latest davos meeting: https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-m...
What type of "wealthy colluded against the masses" is happening there?
They dress it up to make it sound like they're only interested in being ethical, but it's really about how to ensure that their position in society is maintained.
I'm not saying they will be sitting in dingy, cigar smoke filled rooms discussing how to crush the working class, but I am saying this is far more coordination than you will get from a mixture of people from the general population.
The point of class warfare is that no, it's not collectively bad for everyone. It's good for whoever wins the class war (see: the quote above).
By far what terrifies the average person in the shareholder class the most is having to live the life of an average worker. The revealed preference they have is that, yes, they would rather live as rich in a world with the issues that entails than as an average worker in a more equitable world. And from a selfish perspective that's a perfectly rational position.
When shareholders or whole owners decide to do something immoral for profit - or even to prevent bankruptcy - what that actually reveals is that they would rather hurt whoever it is they are hurting than live their life in your shoes. This is the essence of the idea of class warfare.
And when it comes to freedom of speech or gun laws, it's suddenly all about "muh freedom" and that we need all this in case the government turns rogue to defend ourselves. Which is absolutely true but at the same time, how much more messed up do things need to get to actually get us on the streets in masses and protest this madness? Probably as long as there is some third would country doing worse than us left somewhere on this planet, we can paint over this cognitive dissonance with some good old "at least we're not $county"
I work for a place that is regulated by the city and insurance. I find the city to be unhelpful, unresponsive, and largely useless in helping us. They just want the fees paid. The insurance companies, however, will send out inspectors that work with us to right anything that might be unsafe, explain their concerns, and generally are looking to have a good profitable relationship with us.
There was one company that did not do good inspections. We stopped working with them and now work with a different company. I have no such option for working with the government as we are quite locally based.
Also, the city owned sewage treatment facilities are major polluters. Government control often leads to pollution (see various authoritarian governments, our military, various municipalities,...)
As for the sense of mutual obligation, it has withered, but my bet is that it is the theoretical outsourcing of it to government which has undermined it. Without that failing crutch, we would have to work together and look out for each other, bringing to the table immense social pressure for those outside social norms. That has its own downside, but it is much more flexible and resistant to corruption than the monopolistic government power structure.
One danger is, of course, rich outsiders who can take over large tracts of land with money. But in our current system, they buy up politicians who use eminent domain to take the choice away from the owners and the people at large. In a private ownership system, they would have to convince everyone to sell which is way harder to do.
You've identified the problem, the railroads are a captured market, but it's because most regulatory bodies are operated by former agents of those industries or those taking large amounts of money from those industries. These industries DO get bailed out, because they have captured the regulatory mechanism. Their wealth consolidation allows them that power, especially in the post Citizens United world we live in.
The things you view as failings of the government are corporate successes in the never ending squeeze of year after year growth.
The power structures inside these corporations are squarely authoritarian in their design. You have no real agency within your workplace. The most freedom I've ever experienced in my work history has been working for government agencies, specifically public education, doing IT work. This idea that, in the absence of government intervention, we (citizens) would have the agency to do the right thing in these moments completely ignores the massive amount of leverage the corporation has over its workers. Since these corporations are top down, hierarchical, and authoritarian in their organization, the only will the workers have is that of those at the top. In this case, the executives and shareholders who historically have shown to not be interested in taking a loss for the sake of safety.
You mention that, under the utopian vision of the free market, we would go to another vendor. So who would we decide to transport with? The rail systems are regionalized and to get from one part of the country to the other you have to make trilateral or quadrilateral deals with these companies. In other words you are forced to use all of them on some leg of the journey. This regionalization means that there is an oligopoly on the rail system. How are you going to create a "competing" rail system in any of these regions when these companies own all the rails?
If an executive is making a choice between profit and safety, then the regulatory regime has failed.
The only way capitalism can work is if risk and reward go together. If a company can profit from taking a risk, but does not suffer the true cost of a failure, then they will be incentivized to take irresponsible risks. The best example of this is 2008, where financiers gambled themselves into oblivion, but got bailed out when it went bad.
This is an interesting example, but I think you need to go further in saying that the post 2008 financial system was even more irresponsible than it was before
The reality is that the legal system makes it so difficult and expensive for claimants to recoup the harms they suffer. Causality is hard to prove and the claimants are up against corporations which have teams of lawyers and a court system which has made tort cases have a high burden of proof. This can make it difficult for claimants to win, even if they have a strong case. Plus, tort law is a complex area of law, and it can be difficult for claimants to understand their rights and to navigate the legal system.
They even got it to take control of the trucking industry for decades, mandating such things as being able to only have the truck full in one direction.
A government run legal system is just as ineffective as any of the other government run systems. The hope is nimble, private arbitration. Trust needs to be built up and reputations paid attention to.
The vision of a society dedicated to free association of people should be a guiding star. The history of companies, even with a largely captured government, is that they tend to continually change, often growing smaller. Many of the big names in business nowadays did not even exist 50 years ago. Many of the big names of previous eras have long gone away. Competition yields temporary winners, but in a dynamically changing world open to all to be a competitor, they do not stay winners forever. Rockefeller kept trying to buy out all the refineries, but people can't making more. Eventually, he gave up. Cornering a market is very hard if government is not putting up barriers to entry.
As for authoritarian companies, more freedom for the working class to form their own businesses is the response. Our current government makes that very hard with a few exceptions, such as the seemingly entirely unregulated lawn businesses which is filled with small independents. Get rid of the government overhead, allow people to just do stuff for others as the others wish and get paid as mutually agreed, and then there would be competitive pressure on companies to change their approaches.
And, if not, make their replacements. Make democratically run companies. They exist and if that is what workers want, then they might thrive.
As for rail systems, there are certainly other means of transportation. That can serve as a temporary work around for a bad rail operator. Meanwhile, if there is sufficient need, one could construct new rail routes to go around the old ones if need be. It would start small, doing the most profitable portions and then work out from there as needed. Just the threat of that would probably lead to sensible negotiations.
Of course, to address the government supported oligopoly, one could also use eminent domain to take the rail tracks and then give them to the local communities in some kind of newly formed, broadly and locally owned companies. One would need to come up with ways of dispersing government property fairly anyway and one could also, at that time, redistribute any critical privately held infrastructure which had been supported unfairly by the government.
Same as in communism. So probably not.
For the trains, remember that there was going to be a worker's strike. If that was a real threat, the rail companies, left on their own, would probably have compromised. But they knew the government would stop it which is what the government did. They used the guns of government. Without that backing, the workers had power.
As for Cigna, that is all balled up in the health system which is quite the mess in this country. Certainly, we have horrible private actors doing absurd things. But it is not because it is a free market. The health industry is heavily regulated and heavily funded by the government. I think 60% of health care is covered by the government funds. We have protectionist policies for drug companies. We have restrictive licensing on medical personnel whose main purpose is to restrict supply to keep competition down. There are even places where the addition of a single ambulance has to be approved by everyone else who owns ambulances in the area.
I think it would be fantastic if people could get a couple of weeks training to go around and be little helpers for in home care of a low-level nature. Instead, it takes years of going through expensive coursework, usually of limited value, designed to keep the poor from helping one another. That is government imposing that, admittedly at the behest of the well-heeled.
As for other kinds of power, there are all sorts of powers people have over each other. I act differently and constrained in various groups of people I am around. Larger or more meaningful groups have more power. But the main lever of power that I have is the ability to walk away. Consumers do not have go with that company. Workers do not have to work with that company. Investors do not need to invest in that company. But we do have to obey the laws and pay taxes to the government.
The power of free association is very powerful.
The problem with corporations in American politics and law stems from corporate personhood.
We may need to revisit the concept of limited liability. When planes fall out of the sky due to cost savings in product development or automated cars crash into trucks due to beta software marketed to the public as "fully self-driving," or unwise securitized lending threatens the financial sector, responsible executives should be held personally liable, not given golden parachutes or a slap on the wrist.
Agreed that market capture is a problem, but regulation is absolutely necessary for a free market to function well; these two things are not antonyms.
Regulation is needed to set up the rules of the game: everyone conforms to these rules, and if anyone breaks the rules, here are the consequences. Above this, companies can and should determine their own higher standards (e.g. you looking for honest insurance inspectors).
When something goes wrong, one of a few things is possible. Maybe the regulation was too lax, and risky even when followed. Maybe a company wasn't following the existing rules. Maybe the rules allow for small amounts of risk, and this is one of those accepted incidents.
In this case, it seems clear that the impact was not small, and can't/shouldn't have been an acceptable outcome. As such, one of two things should happen:
* Rules should change to mitigate the chances of other similar events. * The rules were sufficient but ignored, in which case some severe penalties need to be applied.
You're right that government can't do everything perfectly, and private businesses are definitely the main drivers of a good free market. The government absolutely must provide clear rules to those businesses on what the society will accept, and severely punish non-compliance with those rules.
"What to do about late-stage capitalism?" is actually an explicitly political question.
Ultimately we need to decide how we want to run our country.
Do we want to be run by mega corporations manufacturing consent through the media with vapid bimbo politicians providing a rubber stamp or do we want to take back the power for the masses of private citizens and elect effective politicians who will answer to voters who want not to be dependent on the will of megacorps for their every need.
Its also an explicitly political (in the “ideologically partisan” not merely “concerning government”) framing of the question, that makes ideologically-based assumptions about reality, the current situation, and the answer to the question. (If the answer was something within the scope of “capitalism”, the thing being addressed would not be “late-stage capitalism”.)
Heck, even the presumption that the thing described is something that calls for something to be done about it is ideological.
I'm unabashedly on the "we must do something about late-stage capitalism, a thing that exists" political team, but you're absolutely not wrong that this is a political viewpoint, explicitly.
Did you know these companies have their own police force, with practically zero accountability? They do whatever they please.
It is depressing, to put it mildly
>At the end of fiscal year 2018, the average annuity paid to career rail employees was $3,525 per month, the average annuity paid for all retired rail employees was $2,815 per month, and the average retirement benefit under Social Security was $1,415 per month
>Railroad workers formed an association to agitate for government action. The Department of Labor proposed its own plan in response, eventually compromising with the workers to produce the Railroad Retirement Act of 1934.
That's supposed to show the power of rail companies?
America is so rich and powerful precisely BECAUSE it maximizes efficiency and capital. Gutting all of those jobs and making it so that they only have 30 seconds to inspect each car (which is pretty much impossible to do due diligence) makes it so that they can rake in a ton of cash.
Sure, accidents will go up. Small little towns will find themselves doused in carcinogens or burned to the ground (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...). Politicians will use it for photo ops. Yet a small group of key individuals will amass a ton of capital and, therefore, power. They can then use that to create more businesses and ventures that will be just as ruthless and driven to succeed at all costs.
I don't think it's "gutting" America. On the contrary, I think it's the heart of America, and what makes it so powerful and hegemonic. You don't make a scientific and cultural powerhouse omelette without breaking a few eggs.
I bet you also think that cutting executive salaries would somehow make major corporations like McDonalds be able to pay all of their workers a living wage. I would encourage you to do the math on that -- it literally never works out.
"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make"
I mean, Abe was the only corrupt politician/business leader who suffered the true "cost of doing business", hopefully he start a trend.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7216658-if-i-destroy-you-wh...
In a similar sense, can you reasonably object to being eaten by a man-eating tiger?
We create corporations who's utmost responsibility is feduciary in nature, we make capital the lifeblood of our society, and then act shocked and horrified when capital trumps human life, and corporate interests hold similar priorities?
Seriously. How did anyone think gutting the workforce and the ability to do safety inspections in a reasonable manner would turn out in any other way? How did the regulatory agencies think this was acceptable? The quote by Cixin is the only explanation.
That disaster I cited in Quebec was many years ago, yet a scathing report was released that effectively nothing has been done to meaningfully/substantially regulate the railways. An entire town was wiped from the map. What business is it of theirs if they are ground to dust by industry? Ultimately we are all meat for the machine :)
Ignoring the "franchising" model which explicitly breaks the local/corporate link of profits and costs...
- McD had a 12B in profits in 2022. - McD had ~2M in employees at franchises - McD employees make ~$12 an hour. Thats 24k a year at full-time. - I couldn't find just the executive salaries.
If you took those profits and distributed them to employees, thats a 25% increase.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MCD/mcdonalds/gros...
So now we're talking about a 12.5% increase in wages, in exchange for the entirety of the net profits.'
The best part is that it is common practice not to give people full-time hours so that they don't qualify for benefits. So I imagine of those 2M employees, a huge amount aren't exactly getting a living wage even after that 12.5% increase.
No, for one thing net income is after taxes, if that had been paid out in wages the taxes wouldn't have been assessed.
Gross profits are fine. We’ll leave the 25%. If people aren’t working full time (which was assumed in the calculation) then that means it’s >25% increase in salary. Seems pretty life changing to those employees tbh. Imagine a 25%-50% raise? Life changing to someone who is intentionally denied work so they can be denied benefits.
Hmmm, in Denmark McDonald's manages to pay their workers ~$22 an hour[1], with 6 weeks of vacation, and paid sick leave without substantially increasing prices[2], and remaining profitable.
1: https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...
> I bet you also think that cutting executive salaries would somehow make major corporations like McDonalds be able to pay all of their workers a living wage. I would encourage you to do the math on that -- it literally never works out.
So what you're saying is that capital's big brain move is exploitation of the worker a.k.a maximizing efficiency? Why's the reasoning that the mom and pop store shouldn't be opened if it can't "afford" to pay it's workers a living wage but when corporations like McDonald's do it it's hailed as maximizing efficiency and capital.
You said it yourself: "paying workers a living wage literally never works out".
Not only is that not true (as pointed out by another comment regarding McDonald's in Denmark) you're admitting that part (at least some of) the "efficiency" is really just theft from the worker.
I find it hard to believe that that's what you're stating, trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, so what am I missing here?
> Yet a small group of key individuals will amass a ton of capital and, therefore, power. They can then use that to create more businesses and ventures that will be just as ruthless and driven to succeed at all costs.
I'm really not sure if that is a good thing. What are those costs? Are we talking Amazon workers wearing diapers because the walk to the bathroom is too much inefficiency? People getting layed off when they have cancer and also losing their health insurance at the same time? Further, those new businesses, would they perhaps also mostly benefit that same small group of people?
At the end of the day, nothing is perfectly safe and everything is a tradeoff. In a capitalist society, corporations are always going to try to maximize profit because that's how the incentives are structured, and it's always going to be the job of government to set safety regulations. Safety regulations that aren't so onerous that they simply shut down the economy (e.g. you can't ever transport chemicals ever) but also aren't so lax that people are getting killed in accidents all the time (do whatever you want, railroads!).
The job of developing safety regulations to achieve the right balance is not only incredibly difficult by itself, but it becomes even more difficult in a messy democratic process.
Because if it were done entirely technocratically, you could assign a monetary value to each human life and try to model the safety tradeoffs and come up with "objective" standards that would nevertheless only be so-so because a lot of the estimation is necessarily guesstimation, and figuring out what to do about black swan disasters is almost an unsolvable problem.
But we also live in a democracy where many voters are horrified by the idea of putting a dollar value on someone's life for that kind of economic/safety modeling, and some of them just want more jobs because their community is disintegrating economically so damn the regulations, and some of them just want to protect the environment so damn the unemployed. (And then add another 20 different viewpoints and perspectives, because those aren't the only ones.) So we kind of muddle along somewhere in the middle because that's what democracy does.
US is around $70k.
Vatican City around $21k, pretty much all of which is tourism and not even “production” per se.
Blaming MBAs for this instead of the JDs that are writing and enforcing the laws is also silly.
Finally, almost everyone from the federal down to the local is running unsustainable deficits, so there is clearly a lack of forethought in spending. I would argue we have the opposite problem you are suggesting. Everyone's happy to spend money thoughtlessly because it's someone else's money.
If a private entity can unilaterally impose itself upon another, that's the opposite of a free market, or at least of a free market that has any respect for property rights.
Instead, what you're seeing is a corporatist system, in which the regulatory machinery has been co-opted by private interests - which is exactly what we'd expect to happen in a democracy. See "regulatory capture".
If this were truly a free market, then when those Ohio residents had their property rights imposed upon, they'd be able to recover the full costs of those impositions through the legal system. The fact that the residents aren't able to do so doesn't reveal a problem with markets. It shows that the government isn't protecting the people's property rights, either due to failures in the legal system, or through a regulatory scheme that's been perverted to protect the corporations rather than the rest of us.
In short, point the finger at your leaders.
“You’re free to poison me, but you’ll have to pay for it” doesn’t sound like a particularly well functioning system either. I think I would rather try to work out a political and regulatory system that resists capture.
It's nice to think that business leaders had a civic duty in the past and that "they changed" but to be frank, I think you can blame a shift towards "neoliberalism" by both parties and the lack of regulation and "teeth" that came from it.
- soil testing procedures for the next X years where the test-results will be published publicly with no redactions,
- downstream water tests to the same effect for whichever news sets of chemicals are necessary (water tests usually only test for 8-10 chemicals) for the next X years.
- Cancer rate statistics for the next X years (many of these cancers take over a decade to show), perhaps people in the area should get free screenings
- full post-moterm on procedure that addresses all the concerns around skipped safety checks
- A publicly available "Whistle-blowing channel" for any rail workers asked to skip safety checks where they can report their employer anonymously and earn rewards up to $1,000,000 for deliberately violating safety rules (a recording/video of a manager doing so would be conclusive proof).
The impression I've gotten is that they don't want to work together.
This being the rural United States, burn barrels for household waste were a thing for most of a century and spewed dioxin and a lot of other stuff all over the place. You can find lots of studies for background levels of dioxin.
It isn't a binary "Is there dioxin?" There certainly is. The question is, is it elevated above background? Is it elevated about established safe levels? If you run it through that nearby incinerator, will the dispersed plume raise land above acceptable levels?
The EPA has experience with dioxin sites and incineration. They bought a town of 800 people, demolished everything, hauled all the surface dirt to a site-built incinerator and over the course of a year incinerated everything and built a mound out of it. The locals were vocally aggrieved that the incineration was done near them. Its now a nice park for bicycle riding on flat land by a river.
Meanwhile, 10 years pass, the EPA has connected the oil hauler to contamination problems in a number of sites. They take samples at Times Beach and the next day a 500 year flood covers the town. Dioxin is now listed as a human carcinogen, and the towns streets contain 50% of the dioxin contamination in the entire state. The EPA uses the newly passed federal Superfund to buy out all the residents. The town is sealed off from humans, but apparently that river can flood and carry things downstream.
10 more years pass… The EPA decides on incineration, build an incinerated, purify everything with fire. Problems solved. It's now 1997. 25 years from contamination to cleanup.
Bonus Context for Diligent Readers:
Low level dioxin exposure has since been concluded to not be a health hazard. No one in Times Beach showed signs of dioxin poisoning. The decision maker for destroying the town now says with current knowledge he would not have ordered that. There was actually no disaster.
Large spills of vinyl chloride have been deliberately burned in the past, as the byproducts of burning are judged less hazardous than vinyl chloride itself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_chloride#Fire_and_explos...
> Incineration at temperatures above 1200°C is considered the most effective way of destroying dioxins.
Though "Thermal desorption, which operates at lower temperature range to vaporize dioxins, is also commonly used." Which wouldn't be good in terms of distribution of the dioxins into the air and throughout the environment, unless they concentrate and destroy the liberated dioxins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_desorption ).
So regardless of the history of clean air violations, the important thing for dioxins in particular are the heat of this incinerator, whether that heat is evenly distributed throughout the burn mass, and whether the incineration is fully enclosed until it is finished.
But mostly I am baffled by the public response to this incident. The thing about America is there are zillions of highly polluted sites in this country, we make more of them all the time, it takes us either decades or forever to clean them up, dioxins are a very common contaminant, and there are already hundreds of communities waiting in line for EPA actions to clean them up. So the idea that EPA actions will promptly remediate this site is somewhat ridiculous. If there are high levels of dioxins, and so far there is no evidence of that, relocating the people out of this town is the only action that can be timely taken.
Example: a site contaminated by high levels of vinyl chloride, the same junk that was spilled in Ohio, in the center of Oakland, California, has been polluted since 1960, identified since 1995, on the "national priorities list" i.e. Superfund, but no meaningful remediation has taken place and no responsible party has even been nominated yet.
You saw the smoke column, yes? It looked like a mushroom cloud. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out why people have gotten spooked.
Do you write your congress critters about them?
Maybe you do and you are very engaged in pollution sites.. but I would be surprised.
Everyone responds to local events more than remote ones. I don't care if the other side of the US has wildfires nearly as much as when the wildfires are close enough for me to smell them.
People are self interested.
It's a terrible dynamic to rely on post-facto financial enforcement on business people that are mentally incapable of understanding what they've done wrong (as opposed to say proactive regulation that would have prevented this entirely preventable derailment, and separately prevented the deliberate chemical release), but it's all we've got right now.
Isn't this like being baffled that George Floyd's murder launched all of those protests when police have been killing black people for decades?
Instead of being baffled, take heart that such problems are finally receiving the attention they deserve!
Frankly because it's high time people cared about what's happening to their environment and cities. Norfolk Southern is banking on the fact that rural areas and places like Oakland won't get national attention because they don't carry a lot of homogeneous national favor. Most of these derailments happen in rural areas that are cash strapped, just like the city of Oakland. Places that will be dependent on the company to come out and clean up their mess. Places that won't have funds unless aided by the EPA to check that the company actually cleaned up, and thoroughly. Places that don't have the national umph to make the NTSB to force the railroads into safer behavior.
What you've failed to see here is that the Venn diagram of disasters that happen and get ignored in Oakland are a circle with places like Ohio. We all lose if a company can ignore devastating parts of Oakland or Ohio.
The secretary of transportation really did initially respond to this incident, that was getting "a lot of attention" with, exact quote:
"Look, rail safety is something that has evolved a lot over the years, but there's clearly more that needs to be done because while this horrible situation has gotten a particularly high amount of attention, there are roughly 1,000 cases a year of a train derailing,"
I hope calling "deep fake" on things that are a bummer won't become a thing.
Pete just hand waves the issue because the people affected didn't vote for the _right_ people.
- This isn't happening
- It isn't a big deal it happens all the time
- He probably didn't say that it isn't a big deal that happens all the time, it reeks of a deep fake
- He didn't say it is a deep fake, just that it reeks like one, but isn't
There's also no apparent reason to doubt its authenticity, given that Yahoo Finance is a reasonably credible source and the content wasn't particularly outrageous.
- The only outrageous thing about that video are the audio distortions which were probably not caused by a deep fake, as we helpfully explained to you
Thanks for clearing it up! My bad.
It absolutely will. The technology is already powerful enough that Joe Random is able to deep-fake realistic porn, ChatGPT can write realistic sounding speeches (I personally tried "Barack Obama glorifying cannabis"), and iirc there's also an AI that can do speech synthesis for people where there is a good enough corpus of text and speech.
Given that this is the state of publicly available tooling, you can bet that at least Western secret services have had access to way more refined tech for years, not to mention the required training data.
In this case it was easily verifiable from multiple mainstream sources -- if instead of making that minor effort it becomes fashionable to just say "deep fake" about everything that we don't like (say a former and future presidential candidate for the democratic party looking like a complete political hack) facetiously we are doomed as a species I think.
Additionally, more and more people don't trust mass media in general which just makes the problem worse. There is nothing left any more that serves as a trustable institution for them.
Incredible. The elegance of the fact that we've got a literal management consultant in charge of this stuff should not be lost on anyone.
But as a former EPA official, what does she suggest instead? Is there some other kind of chemical process to remove dioxins.
On the other hand, I understand the negative reactions. Burning trash has never seemed pleasant, and in this case particularly I can see how it might sound to a person in that community; the government again trying to 'solve' the problem by lighting it on fire. Is that their solution to everything? Bridge is in disrepair? Incinerate the bridge. Bear on the loose? Incinerate the bear. An orphan got lost in the park? Incinerate the orphan. Is fire their solution to everything? Well in this case, fire really is the solution. But public perception is a reality that needs to be considered.
Anyway, this whole affair is being made much worse by politicians listening to the experts and being tone deaf to public perception. A little bit more performative care would go a long way to making the public feel as though their problems aren't being brushed under the rug. Biden should have visited that town weeks ago.
The problem is that there is less than zero trust that the government will do anything other than the equivalent of piling it in the middle of the city and chucking a match at it. This situation is the result of myriad failures ranging from complex to "basic safety", a result of greed, and there's zero reason to assume the followup response will be any different.
Benefit of the doubt is hard-earned and easily lost.
Can't you make this argument for any sort of cleanup effort? If so, what should we do? Not do any sort of cleanup?
EPA can figure out the best way to tackle when exclusion is set up. Incineration sounds about as intelligent as shooting/bombing/nuking the dirt.
Menwhile, EPA Administrator Michael Regan says "trust the science" and drink the water.
Thank god it is not radioactive waste. /s
How much did we spend on Afghanistan and Iraq?
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/
Somewhere around 8T. 800 James Webb telescopes!
Of course, this all {some president's} fault!