U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated

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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?

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 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...

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

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”.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.