Kansas Crimson

I saw some stuff about how the railroad companies have been pushing the gummint for loooser regulations, but without taking the time to verify, I didn't post about it.

It also might be worth mentioning, tho, that the last time we were talking about the railroad companies, it was in the context of workers trying to strike to get things like sick days. That may be related too.

What stage of capitalism is this?

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/cpi-re ... APhUFb2jgy

the Joe Biden kind

up to 2nd/3rd on my news feed

https://grist.org/accountability/derail ... xic-cargo/

'This is absurd': Train cars that derailed in Ohio were labeled non-hazardous

…Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, Republican Governor Mike DeWine said he learned that the train cars were marked as non-hazardous, and thus officials weren’t notified that the train would be crossing through the state.

The governor called on Congress to look into the regulations that would allow a train carrying multiple cars with hazardous substances to be labeled non-hazardous.

“Frankly, if this is true, this is absurd and we need to look at this,” DeWine said. “We should know when we have trains carrying hazardous materials that are going through the state of Ohio.”

DeWine also said that prior to the decision to release the chemicals, he was presented with “two bad options.”

One was to do nothing and risk that a train car full of vinyl chloride would explode, which would have been “catastrophic,” resulting in shrapnel flying out in a one-mile radius. The second option won, and officials conducted a controlled burn of the chemicals…

edit:

…The derailment did not result in any immediate human fatalities, but residents are now reporting deaths of pets, chickens, and foxes. Given the spill’s proximity to the Ohio River Basin, which touches 14 states in the region, concerns of surrounding pollution have popped up in middle Tennessee, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Ohio, and West Virginia.
…
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources confirmed 3,500 dead fish in waterways as well as deceased hellbender salamanders, an endangered species in the state…

hellbenders are probably the most fascinating amphibians in the US

that’s a bit frightening

I would think that it's cheaper to fix the rails and get product moving faster.

My initial thought was no way that’s real, it’s gotta be some deep fake

but it’s ironically from 3 years ago too

https://time.com/6255560/water-sanitati ... erailment/

… East Palestine joins a long list of other places in the United States facing major threats to clean water. In October 2022, a campaign called “Imagine a Day Without Water” asked Americans to stand with those who lack adequate drinking water, sanitation, or both. In one of the richest countries on Earth, the tally of those who live even without basic indoor plumbing might surprise you: more than 2 million...

jhawks99 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 16, 2023 10:24 am I would think that it's cheaper to fix the rails and get product moving faster.

This is where I have seen "evil capitalists" in action. About, oh, 10ish years ago a train derailed right outside my office. Tracks were fixed... But apparently not very well.

On July 4th the next year there was another derailment in the exact same spot. Union Pacific "needed" to get trains moving as quickly as possible so they built upon the pile of rubble caused by the derailment and made a little hill of it, and laid down tracks.

A few days later they finally started digging through the rubble - and there was a car with dead people inside.

jfc

My local TU chapter is pressing county commissioners to reject a plan by the railroad to haul like 10 trains a day worth of oil down our tracks, which follow right along the Fraser and upper Colorado Rivers.

We’ve been persuading them with the usual “save our rivers” talk, plus gotcha questions like, “so what’s your mitigation plan for an oil spill?”

Apparently Utah is really pushing for it as an economic boost for themselves, but downstream CO counties have already opposed it.

this recent news outta Ohio has given us leverage in our favor. If a derailment this bad can happen in the flat ass Midwest, just imagine the hazards of going thru western canyons that regularly experience rock slides and avalanches and such.

And the crazy part is, an oil spill might be comparatively less hazardous. I dunno much about vinyl chloride, or what happens when you burn millions of gallons of it, but we could still be in for a lot of consequences yet.

don’t look to Utah to be proactive

the Great Salt Lake is on pace to represent a major human health and ecological disaster in ~5 years?

let’s not work on getting more water into the lake, but instead here’s 20 million to initiate more studies

jhawks99 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 16, 2023 10:24 am I would think that it's cheaper to fix the rails and get product moving faster.

wheres that build back better infrastructure bill

checks in the mail

https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-d ... -epa-lying

Nice to finally see a Republican care about pollution. Should we tell him that his beloved oil companies have been poisoning us like this for decades? Maybe we can invent some alternative facts and tell them it would piss off liberals if they went after Big Oil.

mike lee is a pos

ousdahl wrote: ↑Wed Feb 15, 2023 2:58 pm What stage of capitalism is this?

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/cpi-re ... APhUFb2jgy

Ah, the good old days when to save money, you'd have cereal or eggs for lunch or dinner. Now companies get a whiff of record profits and continue to jack their prices up.

Record consumption for many of these products too.

BasketballJayhawk wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2023 9:39 am Record consumption for many of these products too.

https://www.agriculture.com/news/busine ... ce-gouging