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Fister Roboto posted:Considering that my position is that the response should be more cautious and the EPA isn't going far enough, I think it's fairly disingenuous to equate that with anti-vaxers. I'm also not rejecting all data and expertise. All I said was that I had none of my own to support my argument, which was intended as a good faith admission of the weakness of my argument. Antivaxxers say the government should be more cautious and isn't going far enough to prevent the harm caused by vaccinations. You can change the post Main Paineframe quoted into a pretty typical antivaxxer screed by changing the name of the agency you don't trust from EPA to FDA. Yes they are wrong and it's relatively easy to find out that they are wrong, but the usual sources explaining why they're wrong rely on information from government agencies (compare "EPA contaminant thresholds are wrong") and/or companies with an interest in selling the vaccine (compare "Norfolk Southern is lying about contamination").
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Feb 15, 2023 08:13
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edit: nah, not worth it.
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Feb 15, 2023 08:13
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“The government” isn’t a single entity and folks need to stop treating it as one.
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Feb 15, 2023 08:15
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I'll snip relevant bits of your post:selec posted:I don’t distrust all experts, but I’m definitely wary of a government that has repeatedly allowed what should be things it does well to turn into disasters. It seems foolish to trust experts, when they tell me not to believe what I’m seeing. I'm also interested in how you can "pretty easily [discern] who's bullshitting and who's not." Are you a water quality expert yourself? Or is this again a matter of listening only to whoever shares your own personal beliefs, regardless of expertise or data?
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Feb 15, 2023 08:21
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Is it controversial that the EPA is often wrong and the thresholds it sets are sometimes dangerously high and deeply influenced by business interests? The EPA isn't the pope. Regulations aside, the sensors and how they are deployed and interpreted, and by whom, are sources of additional error. Environmental and occupational health studies are replete with examples of the EPA's insufficiencies. If anything there needs to be a much greater margin for known unknowns and unknown unknowns about chemicals whose effects we are still learning each day. On this particular accident though I think it is going to be more immediately useful to ask if the recommendations issued by NTSB on the 2012 Paulsboro incident were ever followed. mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 08:22
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It's worth noting that there are lots of government and non-government agencies around the world that have done studies and standards regarding vinyl chloride and various other chemicals involved in this. If your argument is that the capitalist hellhole of the US has made the EPA untrustworthy to determine how much is safe, it would be great to show levels published by some more reputable organization. Even without seeing the raw levels being detected, just pointing out the difference would do a lot to show how what's safe to the EPA might not be otherwise. By contrast, if your argument is that you think the EPA or someone else in the stream is cooking the data and submitting false levels, that wouldn't prove anything, but then you should probably make that accusation clear and unambiguous. Even if you don't have data, clear concerns and specific questions are really helpful to differentiate earnest worries from general senses of conspiratorial malaise.
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Feb 15, 2023 08:25
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Fritz the Horse posted:I'll snip relevant bits of your post: The people are environmental scientists who use the states own water quality data to make the point that the policies we are enacting make the problems worse, what do you feel is conspiratorial about “these scientists that aren’t on the payroll of Big Pig poo poo Runoff are probably more trustworthy on water quality than the guy the insane right wing governor hired”? Like that seems like a reasonable judgment call to make, especially on days where entire towns reek of pig poo poo. Like, compare this with the debate over the harms of smoking, do you trust the guy the state of Tennessee hired who says it’s fine, or the doctors writing reports on cancer trends? One has a vested interest in keeping their job. The other one is using data to show a problem. That’s what I mean by discernment. Look at who’s paying them, what they’re saying, and what you can see for yourself. You are right that I do believe if you’re going to be in a high ranking state or federal position you are necessarily (and oftentimes unknowingly) corrupted by capital, it’s the water we all swim in and it takes some amount of either crisis-based awakening (see that quote about being let down by an institution you believed you could rely on from above) or self-radicalization to be able to taste the water. You gotta get screwed or learn about the screwing methods that have been devised before you can see the tool that does the screwing, usually both kinds of radicalization happen simultaneous or overlapping. I believe the people I believe because they spend their weekends canoeing and doing cleanup projects on our doomed rivers. The guys telling me pig poo poo isn’t a problem, from their social media accounts, spend their weekends cheering on horrific policies and posting bland food pics. Maybe it’s just aesthetic but I don’t think there’s a conspiracy of water quality scientists trying to make it sound worse than it is, because they wouldn’t all also be complaining about how little they are paid if they were getting rich selling us on how hosed we are. selec fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 08:31
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mawarannahr posted:Is it controversial that the EPA is often wrong and the thresholds it sets are sometimes dangerously high and deeply influenced by business interests? The EPA isn't the pope. Regulations aside, the sensors and how they are deployed and interpreted, and by whom, are sources of additional error. Environmental and occupational health studies are replete with examples of the EPA's insufficiencies. If anything there needs to be a much greater margin for known unknowns and unknown unknowns about chemicals whose effects we are still learning each day. if you're referencing the collection of articles you hastily googled and were posting in CSPAM as a gotcha then I'll pre-empt that by saying nobody is likely to spend the hour or two to respond to you point by point, but as an example to demonstrate you have no idea what you're on about, you fundamentally misunderstand the geochemistry of arsenic and why it is often found at dangerous levels in the water supply of rural (often Hispanic, Native American) communities especially in the US Southwest
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Feb 15, 2023 08:32
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selec posted:I believe the people I believe because they spend their weekends canoeing and doing cleanup projects on our doomed rivers... Maybe it’s just aesthetic but I don’t think there’s a conspiracy of water quality scientists trying to make it sound worse than it is, because they wouldn’t all also be complaining about how little they are paid if they were getting rich selling us on how hosed we are. you realize you are literally describing me, yeah? edit: as in, I am a water quality scientist (see: my posting on this issue) and I work for a tribe because I care about the environment and issues of tribal sovereignty etc even though the salary is a massive cut compared to what I could make elsewhere. Somehow I feel like you mostly want to find "experts" who tell you what you want to hear. Fritz the Horse fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 08:39
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Fritz the Horse posted:you realize you are literally describing me, yeah? No, I don’t have a posters.xls. So are you gonna respond to any of that or are we kinda done here? Edit: do you really think the scientists who work at the state schools and disagree with our state water policy are lying? Like…not sure where you’re going here, what am I to make of somebody not in my state, not working on these issues in my state, sort of sideways casting doubt on people who might be their own sort of colleagues in a sense because I’ve decided that there’s too much money in politics and it ruins the ability to respond to the material needs of the citizens? What am I supposed to do with this information from a stranger on the internet, rather than continue to trust people I’ve done river cleanups with and follow on Twitter? selec fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 08:42
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Fritz the Horse posted:ibut as an example to demonstrate you have no idea what you're on about, you fundamentally misunderstand the geochemistry of arsenic and why it is often found at dangerous levels in the water supply of rural (often Hispanic, Native American) communities especially in the US Southwest Please explain because I'm not following this claim. You are not demonstrating a misunderstanding on my part; you are just saying you are. What is the purpose of bringing up posts on a different subforum anyway? A reference to anything I have ever said about arsenic would be appreciated. e: I'm not even referencing anything in my post except the NTSB report. You're bringing up some articles I linked hours ago elsewhere in a different context that doesn't have anything to do with what I posted ITT  (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 08:46
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mawarannahr posted:Is it controversial that the EPA is often wrong and the thresholds it sets are sometimes dangerously high and deeply influenced by business interests? The EPA isn't the pope. Regulations aside, the sensors and how they are deployed and interpreted, and by whom, are sources of additional error. Environmental and occupational health studies are replete with examples of the EPA's insufficiencies. If anything there needs to be a much greater margin for known unknowns and unknown unknowns about chemicals whose effects we are still learning each day. Exactly how often is the EPA “often wrong”? Which incidents are counting and which incidents are you discounting and why? What criteria are you using to determine that the EPA is wrong? What is your definition of “dangerously high?” How do current standards differ from standards set by OSHA, NIOSH or similar international standards? What is your definition of “deeply influenced by business interests”? Which sensors are you referring to specifically? What kinds of errors are you referring to, and how are you measuring the relevance of those errors? In what ways are the sensors being misinterpreted and how much can this misinterpretation alter the results? How much can the overall calculated error alter observed results? How are you determining if the answer to the last question is enough to disregard any sensor readings? How many environmental and occupational health studies show examples of the shortcomings of the EPA? What are their titles and who performed them? How many studies show the EPA having mixed success, correcting past short comings or even being outright successful? What is your definition of “greater margin” specifically and how did you develop it? Why couldn’t you give us a specific standard to compare against what we’re seeing in Ohio?
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Feb 15, 2023 08:53
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mawarannahr posted:Is it controversial that the EPA is often wrong and the thresholds it sets are sometimes dangerously high and deeply influenced by business interests? The EPA isn't the pope. Regulations aside, the sensors and how they are deployed and interpreted, and by whom, are sources of additional error. Environmental and occupational health studies are replete with examples of the EPA's insufficiencies. If anything there needs to be a much greater margin for known unknowns and unknown unknowns about chemicals whose effects we are still learning each day. The issue is whether or not the EPA is generally good enough, transparent enough, and objectively structured enough to be worth paying attention to as an authority in these matters (which I think it is, with emphasis on the "enough") and what the generally poor considerations are behind arguments that it can't be trusted or must be broadly disregarded. Eventually the picture that emerges with the 'disregard' angle trends to be that: it's not really about rational concerns about substandard protocol or outcomes created from years of destructive pressures and attempts at institutional capture, which are real and very important to be concerned about, it's about ideologically fixated rejection at convenience. very selective reasoning related to ingroup intolerances and it leads to 'toss the baby out with the bathwater' conclusions, each permitting complete disregard of expertise and data from the institution. The comparison to antivaxxers is (unfortunately, I guess) a very valid comparison, because we observed a much more popular ideological movement that applied mirrorable general initial principles of rejection to our institutions of health and disease control, and its general trend towards sensationalist or conspiratorial thinking. An individual could tell me they have different reasonings that don't carry them as far down the same road, but it broadly represents the same trend outcome. I have obligated familiarity with the cloistered and stolid absolutist right-wing legal and academic circles that successfully networked into the legal profession and have been absolute successes in modeling the supreme, several state supremes, and a circuit court in service of their ideological outcomes, which typically involve absolutist hardlining on government endorsement and funding of religious institutions, control over reproductive processes and the absolute banishment of anything they consider abortion, grossly expanded gun freedoms, etc. These are generally circles of hardliner conservative catholics who use things like prayer groups and other ingroup systems to qualify people who fit into the culture of Correct Motivations. they have mirror hardliners in the protestant evangelical community who use the same ingroup selection techniques, but that mirror group is hardly as successful or cohesive right now. We're talking like the leonard leo style federalist rebirthers, fully networked into legal academics and everything on up one of the things that keeps very well in their ideological cohesion is a similar declaration, on legal profession lines, of which babies to throw out with the bathwater, and it doesn't really represent an issue of how trustable those regulatory organizations are, it's that those regulatory organizations work in concert with The Adversary, and not the chosen path. They follow almost identical processes in deciding when a system is no longer generally good enough, transparent enough, objectively structured enough, etc, and they gave the same treatment to the bar association, which was no longer "enough" when it issued conclusions in opposition to how they desire to view their own appointments. When multiple of their own anti abortion aims got them in a shared ideological familiarity and candor with organizations that ended up listed as hategroups by the SPLC, the SPLC was now to be completely disregarded. Disease control wants masks and social distancing and poo poo? Well they also said that guns don't make americans safe, so, they clearly are to be disregarded too as this offends our mission, etc it basically leaves us at a condition of needing to be able to dive into and clearly discuss where the EPA is clearly institutionally wrong and where it has demonstrated it can't be trusted. The argument could be made, but it has to be argument with evidence not exactly derived with general axiom or broad gesturing at failures like flint which are very complicated and have intimate crossovers with things like state sovereign issues and other regulatory bodies writ large,and that probably requires stepping back from a lot of the preliminary conclusions here. I think I would broadly be arguing on the general workability of the EPA as model and institution, though, based off of what I know so far.
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Feb 15, 2023 09:14
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selec posted:No, I don’t have a posters.xls. So are you gonna respond to any of that or are we kinda done here? You're creating narrower and narrower definitions for the experts you trust. When I commented I was part of your definition, you narrowed it further. I at no point cast doubt on the people you're describing, that's a dichotomy and opposition you've created. You're really just reinforcing your earlier post that you only are interested in information from... people you agree with. edit: like, I offered personal information about what I do professionally and you did a "ah, well, nevertheless!" lol Fritz the Horse fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 09:18
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The irony here is that the left-wing should absolutely pattern their messaging, strategy and tactics after the right wing, but once again the focus on which ones is completely wrong. "Distrust all government and institutions by impulse" is only going to work in ACHIEVING anything if your target audience is completely hypocritical and will blindly support government and institutions that they like. Left-wing target audiences aren't and this won't work towards making them such.
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Feb 15, 2023 09:18
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DarkCrawler posted:The irony here is that the left-wing should absolutely pattern their messaging, strategy and tactics after the right wing, but once again the focus on which ones is completely wrong. "Distrust all government and institutions by impulse" is only going to work in ACHIEVING anything if your target audience is completely hypocritical and will blindly support government and institutions that they like. Left-wing target audiences aren't and this won't work towards making them such. the other irony being that the outcome is thoroughly in concert with desired right-wing outcomes anyway. They expressly attempt to habituate distrust of regulatory bodies like the EPA and they are more than happy to have elements of their own destabilizations be used as part of the argument to disregard environmental or health regulators. It's entirely in the playbook of regulatory capture alongside FUD used inbetween international powers.
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Feb 15, 2023 09:23
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selec posted:I don’t distrust all experts, but I’m definitely wary of a government that has repeatedly allowed what should be things it does well to turn into disasters. Our military runs around overseas losing wars, FEMA completely screws over disaster victims in situations like Katrina, the entire months-long debacle of messaging around COVID, it just goes on and on. It seems foolish to trust experts, when they tell me not to believe what I’m seeing. Why do you think that the government wouldn't be doing some of these same things if we were a communist society? Do you think that selfish interests of the government would occur at a significantly lower rate? I'm definitely not a fan of capitalism, but issues such as the ones you're describing wouldn't be magically solved by implementing communism. TBH, I would recommend you start advocating for libertarianism. It seems more in line with the views you have been posting this past page or two. Kalit fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 10:29
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DarkCrawler posted:The irony here is that the left-wing should absolutely pattern their messaging, strategy and tactics after the right wing, but once again the focus on which ones is completely wrong. "Distrust all government and institutions by impulse" is only going to work in ACHIEVING anything if your target audience is completely hypocritical and will blindly support government and institutions that they like. Left-wing target audiences aren't and this won't work towards making them such. In a broader sense, the biggest success right wingers have had in lying loudly and often to the rubes has been the creation of a massive base of conspiracy addled lunatics who are too focused raging on a constantly shifting "other"(mostly people they were suspicious of already) to notice the people picking their pockets. It's not exactly novel to wonder "what if we used this for good!" but funnily enough it never turns out to be for the good of the rubes or the people the rubes already disliked before you got there. That of course is before you account for how that strategy led to said conspiracy addled lunatics who really don't believe in any truth or principles any more, so they're prone to go follow anyone else who speaks the right language, like a Q figure, flashy narcissist, some true believers who don't know how the initial con worked. Or how it's turned out to work best on the olds while building increasing backlash with everyone else so that the only long-term victory condition is quickly trending to open oligarchy. It's winning if you if your win condition is stripping the most copper out of the walls before you die, but that doesn't feel very leftist. It's winning if your win condition is a sustainable empire over people who hate you for it too, but that only sounds leftist if you get your definition of leftism from right-wing talk shows.
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Feb 15, 2023 10:53
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:
I know this is back a fair bit, but I've been curious about the sheer scale of the air and water over the areas that people are claiming lethal contamination. So I roughly measured the radius of the red circle in that tweet on google earth and did some sums. If 1cm of rain fell over the red circle it would deliver 20 billion tonnes of water, and the air alone would weigh trillions of tonnes. What was the mass of the chemical spill again?
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Feb 15, 2023 10:54
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The Artificial Kid posted:I know this is back a fair bit, but I've been curious about the sheer scale of the air and water over the areas that people are claiming lethal contamination. So I roughly measured the radius of the red circle in that tweet on google earth and did some sums. If 1cm of rain fell over the red circle it would deliver 20 billion tonnes of water, and the air alone would weigh trillions of tonnes. What was the mass of the chemical spill again? Good news, everyone in the red circle can be informed that they have been administered a homeopathic dilution of 0.0000151% chloroethene oxidation byproduct to naturally immunize yourself against organochloride toxicity
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Feb 15, 2023 11:42
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I guess my question for Fritz is how do you treat the water you use for drinking/cooking/bathing in your own home, and does this exceed the standards for water set by the applicable regulators? If so, why?
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Feb 15, 2023 12:42
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nine-gear crow posted:2016 was probably the worst year for that because it just seemed like one flowed into the other so it felt like loving EVERYONE died in 2016 starting with Alan Rickman at the start of January and then ending with Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds at the end of December. Yeah, it started with the devastating one-two punch of Bowie and Prince and then just kept going. And it was always people I actually liked. Couldn't get a Ted Nugent, Kid Rock or Dick Cheney up in that mix. E: Eric Cantonese posted:I try not to get hung up on celebrity deaths, but Prince and David Bowie passing away in 2016 got to me. Beaten. Also, the "left" don't have to resort to lying - or even hyperbole or exaggeration - since most of the time they have the truth and the facts on their side. They just have to have the courage to actually articulate it aggressively and occasionally stop worrying about manners or which FOX News host is gonna have a meltdown over it. Or, probably more to the point, they have to actually believe it in the first place and many don't. Think Campaign Obama.
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Feb 15, 2023 13:58
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Kavros posted:the other irony being that the outcome is thoroughly in concert with desired right-wing outcomes anyway. They expressly attempt to habituate distrust of regulatory bodies like the EPA and they are more than happy to have elements of their own destabilizations be used as part of the argument to disregard environmental or health regulators. It's entirely in the playbook of regulatory capture alongside FUD used inbetween international powers. This seems to set up a dichotomy where the only thing that can be done is trust the government and hope it isn't too captured. Hopefully all those companies holding the bag still exist mawarannahr posted:Please explain because I'm not following this claim. You are not demonstrating a misunderstanding on my part; you are just saying you are. What is the purpose of bringing up posts on a different subforum anyway? I trust the government. I've always trusted the government. selec posted:No, I don’t have a posters.xls. So are you gonna respond to any of that or are we kinda done here? My job for 7 years was weighing experts against each other. Doctors explaining why complex medical issues must be treated vs doctors saying "it's fine, everyone has discomfort sometimes" It's very hard. Keep doing what you are doing. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 14:13
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There's two questions being asked here, is the EPA completely free of political influence, and is their data trustworthy. These are not the same question. For the former, of course it isn't, it is a political body like anything that is paid for with taxes. The EPA makes questionable decisions due to lobbying at times, like any regulatory body. I personally was surprised to hear that they took MEK off the HAPS list several years back. So changes they make are within all rights to question. However, in this case we aren't talking about a ppm limit this way or thay, we're talking about total falsification of data. You can't just run your cursor over the data cell for vinyl chloride and say it's this instead of that, the machines that are used to test the water are specifically designed to prevent that. So did the water testing company literally photoshop their results differently for a bribe? It's not *impossible* but what is being implied is an extremely unlikely conspiracy compared to the reality of the breakdown of the chemicals. As for the limit for this, the water reports that are on the CDC's website says that they are coming in under the tracable limit of 0.22 ug/L. In ppm that is 0.00022 ppm. That's just not a very high number, looking at the absolute values of the material. slurm posted:I guess my question for Fritz is how do you treat the water you use for drinking/cooking/bathing in your own home, and does this exceed the standards for water set by the applicable regulators? If so, why? I'm going to assume you mean a Brita and not that you're accusing Fritz of allowing their area to have tainted water while they have a treatment apparatus in their basement because that would be an extremely hosed up thing to say. In which case most domestic water filtration devices are just for taste. CuddleCryptid fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 14:18
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In other news from @byKateSmith, 170 contributers to NYT have signed on to a letter condemning the paper's coverage of trans issues. https://nytletter.com/ quote:For the attention of Philip B. Corbett, associate managing editor for standards at The New York Times. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 14:47
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Fritz the Horse posted:What would be the EPA "going far enough?" Ordering evacuation until... what threshhold has been reached? I'd like to bring this question back up, because it's been asked a few different ways during this discussion and always gets glossed over, presumably because the answer can't easily be found on Twitter. If you (the general "you") don't trust the EPA, that's your prerogative, but short of declaring the entirety of East Palestine a superfund site and ordering a permanent evacuation, you're going to need to trust *someone*. What is that point where it's safe to return? Who is collecting air, soil, and water samples that you are willing to trust? What is the threshold for each of these contaminants that need to be reached before it's safe for humans and animals? Do we need to burn the local crops and slaughter livestock to prevent contaminants getting into the food supply? How can a resident be sure their well water is safe upon their return? If the EPA's ppm limits can't be relied upon, whose can? I'm not saying any specific poster here needs to have an answer to that. I'm not your debate coach. But without it don't be surprised when your general unease gets met with comparisons to antivax nuts.
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Feb 15, 2023 14:53
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Baronash posted:Who is collecting air, soil, and water samples that you are willing to trust? This is a good question. There should probably be an independent body testing. Maybe we can get the UN involved. At minimum the government could push for better regulation to mitigate further disaster. I saw one suggestion that the railroad should fund medical care for locals incase we get cancer clusters from this anyway. But the government seems happy to wash its hands of this even though we haven't improved any of the conditions that led to it. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 14:56
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Harold Fjord posted:This seems to set up a dichotomy where the only thing that can be done is trust the government and hope it isn't too captured. Not even remotely. There's an extraordinary quantity of international scientific collaboration with other countries, participation in transparency and anticorruption measures between different nations, novel *and* joint work with academic institutions you can contrast a government organization's findings against, so there are substantial ways to assess where the EPA is operating sufficiently as a regulatory body, and whether or not its operations and output are trustworthy enough with their data, transparency, and regulatory obligations that their assessments are valuable, in what ways its mission is being subject to regulatory pressures that result in distortion, and so on. These are always subject to influence by legislative outcomes, judicial outcomes, elections, and you can generally keep track of prevailing trends and concerns in those regards. If someone doesn't believe this is the case through an argument (essentially) that the US is a completely sham democracy where the elections don't matter and the outcome of regulatory bodies is therefore already determined by the actual powers-that-be and there's no substantive electoral influence on the outcome derived from people's participation in voting, then this isn't about the EPA and never was, as the assessment of the EPA's work is effectively fit to logical outcomes of that belief.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:02
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A big part of my concern is that the government is being very clear that there is little interest in applying regulatory pressure to prevent or mitigate further such incidents. I don't trust the government to do the right things because it's outright telling me it doesn't want to.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:07
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Harold Fjord posted:A big part of my concern is that the government is being very clear that there is little interest in applying regulatory pressure to prevent further such incidents. That's where it acquires motive to downplay this one. There's an oceanic difference between downplaying an issue and falsifying data.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:08
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Ok. I didn't say the government falsified data. Though I'm still not going to be surprised when we get a cancer cluster and the railroads contractor disappears in a puff of smoke.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:11
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Harold Fjord posted:Ok. I didn't say the government falsified data. Though I'm still not going to be surprised when we get a cancer cluster and the railroads contractor disappears in a puff of smoke. That is effective what you are saying, though, because your insinuations are impossible without falsification of data.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:13
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There are other entities which could be said falsifier. I helpfully identified the one I most distrust in the post!
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Feb 15, 2023 15:15
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Harold Fjord posted:A big part of my concern is that the government is being very clear that there is little interest in applying regulatory pressure to prevent further such incidents. That's where it acquires motive to downplay this one. Well, the concern with that is that if that kind of motive analysis is meant to work as a fundamental part of an argument that the EPA's reporting on the west palestine event could have represented either 1. willfully engineered institutional insufficient hazard analysis of any of several types, or 2. a coverup of *any* kind either one, there's several additional layers to add to that before you can use the EPA crisis response as an example of why not to consider the EPA's data or management of the emergency trustworthy. And it probably requires an immodest/impractical number of people involved in an actual conspiracy to do so. I think the more plausible concerns that have been discussed about the event don't include this, but were instead about the media coverage being considered strangely low, or that the intentional detonation/burning of the contaminants was a bad decision, but as I understand it this was based off of emergency response coordination between the department of defense, the ohio national guard, and Norfolk Southern themselves. Someone would have to break a story with details indicating that the EPA is or will be negligently creating hazard exposure with how they clear re-entry or limit future evacuation.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:24
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Fister Roboto posted:Considering that my position is that the response should be more cautious and the EPA isn't going far enough, I think it's fairly disingenuous to equate that with anti-vaxers. I'm also not rejecting all data and expertise. All I said was that I had none of my own to support my argument, which was intended as a good faith admission of the weakness of my argument. A common early antivaxxer argument against the COVID vaccines was that the FDA had approved them too quickly, and that a bad vaccine could have dire consequences, so people should exercise extra caution and ignore the FDA's approval. That's practically identical to your argument that the EPA lifted the evacuation order too early, and that a too-early return could have dire consequences, so people should exercise extra caution and ignore the EPA's all-clear. selec posted:Conspiracy theories are borne of institutional mistrust. Somebody smarter than me said a hallmark of modernity is being let down by an institution you thought you could depend on. I feel like that’s a good read. The people of Flint would be conspiracy theorists to disregard water testing data. The state didn't manipulate tests or set up wildly excessive lead thresholds, it just ignored them, and in fact water testing played a crucial role in informing people of exactly how badly the Flint water was exceeding existing safety limits. State agencies were giving them the runaround, but the people of Flint didn't simply throw out all data and evidence in favor of an appeal to their gut feeling - rather than that, data and evidence were key to mobilizing people behind Flint's residents.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:26
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Harold Fjord posted:A big part of my concern is that the government is being very clear that there is little interest in applying regulatory pressure to prevent or mitigate further such incidents. I don't trust the government to do the right things because it's outright telling me it doesn't want to. I think it's more than fair to tar and feather Buttigieg and nearly everyone else involved with regulating transportation. However that is bleeding into the separate issue of the immediate actions that fall under a separate regulatory agency whose own failings don't justify assuming the treatment and measuring of chemicals is hosed. Especially when that specific situation is in line with other guidelines outside their influence. Nothing that the EPA has done, nor any of the data provided, seems to be out of line with any other guidelines. As such, in this instance, it seems more reasonable to view the clean up to date as successful as could be in the given situation. People having lingering or temporary reactions after the fact should be looked into, but seems to be due to some other lurking variable than the air and water still being totally bent over the barrel by vinyl chloride.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:29
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Main Paineframe posted:A common early antivaxxer argument against the COVID vaccines was that the FDA had approved them too quickly, and that a bad vaccine could have dire consequences, so people should exercise extra caution and ignore the FDA's approval. This is a pretty unreasonable comparison due to the type and scale of harms risked by ignoring the government body. Ignoring the EPA and staying away isn't like catching covid at the height of the pandemic. No one is endangering themselves and others through excess caution here. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 15:30
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Gyges posted:People having lingering or temporary reactions after the fact should be looked into, but seems to be due to some other lurking variable than the air and water still being totally bent over the barrel by vinyl chloride. To repeat for the sake of clarity, there is no vinyl chloride in the water. That's what the tests in question showed; the amount that could be there is below the 0.2 ug/L (0.0002 ppm) testing limit. Vinyl chloride hydrolyzes in water, and by now it's entirely gone. The question of damages is entirely about what people were exposed to within the first day or two. Harold Fjord posted:This is a pretty unreasonable comparison due to the type and scale of harms risked by ignoring the government body. Ignoring the EPA and staying away isn't like catching covid at the height of the pandemic. No one is endangering themselves and others through excess caution here. And that is a personal decision that those people can make. But that doesn't change the analytical data that says that it's unnecessary. CuddleCryptid fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 15:34
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Gyges posted:Nothing that the EPA has done, nor any of the data provided, seems to be out of line with any other guidelines. As such, in this instance, it seems more reasonable to view the clean up to date as successful as could be in the given situation. People having lingering or temporary reactions after the fact should be looked into, but seems to be due to some other lurking variable than the air and water still being totally bent over the barrel by vinyl chloride. What I'm glad to have found out so far is that the decision to move immediately to a controlled release burn turns out to have been the best option they had available for hazard control, and was taken. The AEGL hazard assessment zone (https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/OHIOGOVERNOR/2023/02/06/file_attachments/2401518/map.jpg) also appears to have been accurate to the best of our current knowledge, the evacuation zone was put far outside these boundaries, and prevailing weather conditions moved a lot of the toxic release generally away from most houses. I'm sure there will be a lot to read in the coming days about how to even assess contamination issues regarding the chemicals created when the cargo was burned, and I'm more or less hoping for the best.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:38
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A big part of my skepticism is having this horrible death cloud and now it's just apparently gone and everything is fine. That's how we end up with "were you downwind of east Palestine ohio in 2023? call me now!" lawyer ads on TV in 20 years. If this modeling is accurate, maybe the town is safe. Would suck to get sick in buffalo and not be able to hold the Railroad accountable. Mayor Pete, do something! https://imgbb.com/v3k3X22 Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 15:45
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