U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated

Save lives?: X

Increase safety?: X

Make more money?: YES

The USCSB makes life safer for everyone in this country, especially people that work around potentially dangerous chemicals and pressurized equipment.

I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't actually save any money or make anyone much more money. It's just a result of mindlessly fetishizing the past and misattributing past periods of rapid industrial growth to lack of regulation. The real cause was rapid population growth at the time, war, and extremely rapid adoption of bedrock industrial age technologies like electricity.

Today we have a fully deployed modern infrastructure and slow to negative population growth. Cutting regulation won't change that.

How are so confident in causality here?

It's always a matter of time before a facility explodes for preventable reasons and costs the company billions in property damage and lawsuits. This decision to stop learning from mistakes and spreading awareness will hurt profits in the long run, not make more money. It'll also be harder to find people willing to work around chemicals if they can't trust the safety measures.

Yeah it turns out when Europe is a giant crater and the rest of world hasn't figured out electricity quite yet that your massive industrial capacity can be a bit of a boon. Especially when you loan out a bunch of money to Europe so they can buy all your stuff! Wow! Having over 50% of the world's industrial capacity when the world just spent 7 years on fire and everyone needs new everything means it's a bit of a seller's market!

The population thing is pretty elementary. If population is flat to declining, then growth is demand constrained.

There are some areas where you could uncap growth by cutting regulation, but they're not this. The #1 one I'm aware of is housing construction in high cost metros.

I see your point, but not totally buying it. The US innovates for a global population, one that’s still growing.

The best way to infer causality is through experimentation. If regulation does go away, we’ll measure and learn if it actually worked.

I don't really buy this since China has industrialized rapidly without much population growth at all. They have built infrastructure like high speed rail that we are unable to build in the US, so I also don't buy the "fully deployed modern infrastructure" line.

[flagged]

I forsee a lot of high skilled labor exiting high risk fields over the next few years. Many of the high end blue-collar jobs of north America are very low end in south America due to the relative risks involved e.g. mine workers.

It feels that way, but this legislation is ideologically consistent with reducing regulations which constrain companies and force them to take the externalities of their actions into account.

The amount of pent up hate and vitriol coming out now is incredible. People hated each other so much and more or less kept it somewhat in check for so many decades?

Yeah but their starting point was different again - they already had the population, and were able to piggy back on technological progress from other countries by borrowing or stealing it. The other thing they have is an authoritarian government; a country can achieve a lot in a short time when it can freely sideline the concerns and needs of its citizens.

The CSB is not a regulatory agency. It doesn't enforce anything against companies. It investigates major disasters and publishes recommendations.

It's like the NTSB but for industries that use hazardous chemicals.

Bizarre as it sounds, I think a lot of people can hate on demand. Media starts beating the drum, and a proportion of the population go from apathetic to pretty damn frothy surprisingly fast.

I'm not a China defender, but sidelining the concerns and needs of its citizens isn't why China is able to do things like high speed rail or build high density infrastructure in general. Lots there view having their property taken by the government and relocated as a good thing, because it almost always happens way above market rates. There are exceptions, of course, but my impression is that it is not the norm. Feel free to correct me. This isn't a defense of China in general, but it is totally possible to have good public transit in the United States.

And mind you that China isn't unique in bootstrapping its industrial revolution by mass theft of IP. If I were you, I'd look into the stunts us Americans pulled during our industrialization. The sad fact of the matter is that the government of this country no longer works for its own people, and that's why so many things are far below par. For many things, we _could_, but simply _don't_.

Funny as it sounds, the real problem (or at least one of them) is that no one cares about long run profits anymore.

I still think it's ideologically consistent with insulating companies from externalities. Without official investigations, companies can assert their own interpretations of events. Boeing did this with the NTSB recently:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/boeing-punished-by-ntsb-fo...

>We’ll measure and learn if it actually worked.

I don't believe that will happen, and I base that belief on all my decades of watching American politics. Bureaucrats may do this (I personally work with ones who do), but politicians generally do not. And the current administration definitely does not care about actual numbers.

Just the knowledge about chemical risks is a threat to profits.

Yep, all these baby booomers lucked the fuck out being born in an era where the entire world needed the US after WW2. But over time the rest of the world slowly recovered and suddenly US goods became overpriced.

I blame much of the current US economy on the shenanigans of baby boomers and their parents. Who after having a booming economy for 3 decades, needed to quickly financial engineer themselves out of their infinite growth pension hole.

So what did they do? They started offshoring to compensate for the big mismatch in domestic debt financing and actual domestic wealth creation.

While they were doing they, they put the pedal to the metal on wealth inequality as those already with excessive wealth could leverage themselves to the tits to buy up the competition.

The problem is, alot of this is the net result at the macro scale and there were many independent decisions that led to everything.

Ok but the NTSB's response was to refer to DOJ because NTSB has no teeth.

California can just keep doing its thing and the rest of the country benefits from their regulations. Prop 65 is to thank for all the Harbor Freight stores no longer reeking of outgassing plastics.

50 employees with a budget of $14.4 million doesn’t even qualify as a rounding error in the federal budget. Don’t pretend this has anything remotely to do with “government waste”.

Why do profits, and the stock market, continue going up then? I've heard this nonsense about corporate short termism for decades, and the long term just never seems to arrive.

Supreme Court will just strip us of our state regulations by invoking the commerce clause.

You say "force them" like that's actually going to happen. Historically, companies are terrible at auditing themselves.

> It'll also be harder to find people willing to work around chemicals if they can't trust the safety measures.

Don't worry, they're counting on us all being so desperate we'll take those jobs, anyway.

A low number is a good reason not to spend resources auditing it. But why would it be a good reason to keep something around you found you don’t need?

The stock market tracks short term profits; most stock buyers are also short-termers. Profits that could have been had but were not, due to shortsighted decisions, are hard to measure and don't usually make the news. Similar for companies that slowly hollow out, or get killed by newer companies still in their market-building phases before they start turning the screws.

I have a background in NLP (pre-LLM) and like to study extremist rhetoric, and, while I don't think you're being reductionist, it's a little more removed than that. I'd replace with "hate" with "problems and stress". Once you can attribute that stress to a group... that's when the hate develops. There are certain global powers who have recognized this and weaponized it. Agreeing with the most extreme of both sides, loudly, is the modern standard for propaganda.

If there's one thing California needs to learn from these past 6 months, it's that you can simply ignore what the courts say. When you're rich and powerful, you can literally just say "I do not consent" when legal consequences are presented to you.

If we keep blowing up the economy this way they’ll only be able to afford to rent the libs.

I don't think that anyone has demonstrated that we don't need it.

> costs the company billions in property damage and lawsuits.

The reality: the company makes a new company (that's identical to the old company in assets and operations) and says "we had nothing to do with the old company" and they're left off with zero consequences while the old company (that has no assets but holds legal liability) goes bankrupt and pays nothing.

There's also a new and improved method that avoids even this small amount of effort. Alex Jones introduced it. When you're found liable for a billion dollars in damages, just say, "I won't pay it. Fuck you." And there's absolutely nothing they can do.

The legal system means absolutely nothing now.

No. But rather than telling us the merits they appear to be telling us it’s so small it’s not worth doing so.

It wasn't socially acceptable to express your hatred, and there are a lot of people who just needed someone to stoke the flames of their biases to the point of hate and violence.

We've watched it become socially acceptable to not keep your biases unchecked and there is a multi-billion dollar media apparatus that pumps 24/7 propaganda into people's minds.

In the past, the stuff we've seen mainstreamed today stayed relatively niche on AM radio and in klan meetings.

2 things.

First, generally when people lives are good, they tend to blow the small problems out of proportion. This is pretty much how US got to where it is.

Secondly, if you look at the history of politics, conservatives have always been the ones to weaponize politics as a form of moral judgement. So nothing is really new.

Think you might like to read "Adrift: America in 100 Charts" by Scott Galloway. He covers the impact of babyboomers on America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Galloway_(professor)#Bib...

Reagan cut regulation, and manufacturing still left, quick as ever.

I assume that is due to larger trends. Population growth has slowed considerably and there's more competition than ever. Worldwide fertility rates have dropped from 4.7 to 2.3 in the last 75 years, and in that time the U.S. share of world GDP dropped from about 50% to 25%.

My two cents: We may be already be in uncharted economic territory with regards to shrinking workforces, retirees, pollution, etc. How much of our economy is dependent on growth? We may find out. Places like Japan, Korea and Europe are leading the way. Ponzi schemes won't work forever. The world is getting smaller and older. And evening out. There's less room for arbitrage. Innovation is coming from all directions. Technology can still increase productivity. But it could also put masses of people out of work, leaving not enough demand for the latest and greatest. That, and a pie that is no longer growing, could cause a lot of social friction.

Bankruptcy. The people who profited the most will not see any consequences.

That's the beauty of our system: companies are at fault, not people, and companies can be destroyed and remade at will.

In a hazard investigation you don’t want the investigators to have teeth. It’s not about finding wrongdoing it’s about determining what happened and how to avoid it in the future. If a company takes negligent actions referring to DOJ should be enough.

It's not just hard to measure, it's unfalsifiable nonsense.

> In a hazard investigation you don’t want the investigators to have teeth.

Did I say I want the NTSB to have teeth?

> Without official investigations, companies can assert their own interpretations of events.

They can do this with investigations too. Just as Boeing did. NTSB can't do anything about it. The "punishment" was a referral to DOJ who can.

I always liked the bit where they often compensate folks not directly financially but rather with a generous share in what they are building. Eg. the building containing your one bedroom apartment gets torn down by developers and as compensation they offer you a three bedroom apartment in the new building.

Definitely plays an interesting role in combating/moderating NIMBYism.

Actually it doesn't sound bizarre; you are probably correct. Some people can switch to extreme emotions quickly and easily.

everyone pivotted to ai from their pivot to the metaverse which was a pivot to blockchain

China went from a few tens of millions of modern people to over a billion modern people. Look at it that way. They weren’t new people but they were economically speaking.

The US is all modern people with little population growth. We have no giant wave of latent demand.

In my personal experience with in-laws in China you're correct (got fully compensated + given a nicer house). Another family, when they were laid off from their government jobs, were given the option of cash or office space and storage for like 30yrs to run their own business...

Nothing really to disagree with here tbh; I didn't mean to say that authoritarianism was the reason for everything they've achieved, but rather that it greases the wheels so to speak.

I was really just responding to the discussion that ensued when an earlier commenter said that poor regulation was not the reason the US modernised rapidly but rather population growth and post war economics, and another responded with China as a counter example to that, my point being that China's situation was much different than the US so it's not really a useful comparison.

I am neither a defender of China, nor the US ;-)

Then they weren't necessary in the first place. 50 federal employees can hardly perform the work of 5 of the private sector. Don't pretend that government employees are the least efficient, least qualified, and least motivated to change anything in the world.

Consolidation.

If I make short term profits off doing the wrong things I have more money to buy up my competition that incurs the cost now. By the time something bad happens there will only be a small bump down on the market.

Antitrust is important.

You can just watch it happen. Companies cut quality and ruin their reputation, or shrink from new markets due to fear of cannibalizing themselves, among other ways to sacrifice long term profit. There's a reasonable debate about how predominant it is in the economy, but not about whether it happens.