U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated
ishn.com
ishn.com
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.
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.
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.
The building up backlash is going to be horrific and i hope it will not lead to decomplexification movements ala pol pot or islamism.
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.
> 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.
An alternative source with different incentives and culture, not an objective one.
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.
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.
I derailed this conversation to make a meta point, and it wasn’t your fault at all.
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.
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.
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.
The world doesn't work like that. Objectively, it doesn't.
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.
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.
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 reasoning with emotional labels and not information.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/informed-societies/post...
You and everybody else buddy.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I can agree with this statement, but not with your original claim.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do CSB recommendations inform policy? Do CSB recommendations get implemented? Do CSB recommendations when implemented increase safety?
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].
[1] https://www.csb.gov/members/board-member-catherine-sandoval-...
[2] https://www.csb.gov/members/board-member-sylvia-e-johnson-ph...
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_...
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.
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.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.
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.
Now they're going back 70 years instead of moving forward. Big brains there.
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.
Meta: the si parameter is a form of tracking, as is pp. Considering trimming them from any copy-paste if you can.
I can't think of another use of my tax dollars that I get as much direct pleasure from.
They're 50 employees with an annual budget of $14.4 million. The cost/benefit ratio here is very good.
What's this administration trying do, return the US to the Third World or the Dark Ages? Madness.
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.
It's an open question if they'll retain that with Xi now President for life.
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.
US and EU seem to have forgotten that, at least when you look at the decisions of their leadership.
China has been centralized / autocratic for centuries (if not millennia), and the current system is probably not that different than the Emperor's throne.
Why? Because if you check the CVs of most of Politburo members they have degrees in science and engineering. QED!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is one factor that explains why lawyers take so many vacations and seem so generally relaxed.
One metric:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
> 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.
> The President’s Budget proposes $0 for CSB’s FY 2026 budget
https://themortgagepoint.com/2025/06/23/senate-parliamentari...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.”
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> "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 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.
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.
And which society are you contrasting this with?
A lot of the worlds govts spend a lot through public institutions.
I can only assume Trump administration is incompetent, corrupt and negligent.
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.
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.
Any evidence to share?
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.
"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?
CSB is for manufacturing / processing incidents.
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.
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.
Today we have a fully deployed modern infrastructure and slow to negative population growth. Cutting regulation won't change that.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Galloway_(professor)#Bib...
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_.
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 ;-)
Definitely plays an interesting role in combating/moderating NIMBYism.
The US is all modern people with little population growth. We have no giant wave of latent demand.
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.
The best way to infer causality is through experimentation. If regulation does go away, we’ll measure and learn if it actually worked.
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.
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.
Don't worry, they're counting on us all being so desperate we'll take those jobs, anyway.
That's the beauty of our system: companies are at fault, not people, and companies can be destroyed and remade at will.
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.
It's like the NTSB but for industries that use hazardous chemicals.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/boeing-punished-by-ntsb-fo...
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.
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 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.
Keyword: "independent".
They investigate before talking. They narrate the fact instead of reading the official narrative. Those pesky wokes must go.
Just say why it’s a good idea.
Chesterton fence says "stop! think".
What doge and Trump are doing is destroying stuff they don't understand.
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 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.
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.
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