In fairness, the train crash had bipartisan support.

No the train brake regulations were cut by Trump.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/02/donald-trump-east-pa...

And Biden killed the strikes.

Both parties hate the non-rich. One just hates it more and is way more obvious about it.

Claiming politicans hate the vast majority of people is so insane I can't believe I'm seeing it here.

Political parties aren't people so assigning feelings to them is of questionable value, but no more so than calling someone insane for doing so.

The underlying fact is that the Republican and Democratic Party are both constituted to represent their donors and that certain parties (rich individuals being the largest such party) enjoy the benefit of giving bi-partisan patronage.

Calling an argument “insane” isn’t a constructive comment.

Perhaps you could explain why you don’t think that’s a reasonable interpretation..?

Claiming otherwise is being blindfolded. When I look at American politics, I can't see any justification other than the desire to help 1% and the apathy towards people who live paycheck-to-paycheck (or worse). We saw it in 70s, 2008, COVID, Student Loan Forgiveness cancellation, increasing rent/housing costs, and now seeing it, and will always see it. "Hate" is a strong word of course but the spirit is absolutely true.

It probably is an exaggeration, and assigning emotion is futile and counterproductive; however, I think it's far less contentious to note that, however they might actually personally feel, both parties regularly vote for laws and actions that harm the vast majority of people i.e. the non-rich.

Thanks for calling me insane.

Anyway https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

And those regulations were opposed by the unions that Biden crushed by forcing them back to work.

It's a class conflict, not a partisan one.

Its understood that those regulations wouldn’t have saved the train in Palestine. That’s one problem with the discourse on the left. I don’t favor regulation for the sake of regulation - nor cutting it for its own sake. There obviously needs to be a rational best-effort cost-benefit analysis. Not cheap politics.

You really think people are that stupid? Biden and the Democrats had their chance either way. They chose to crush the unions, so the burden of proof is on them. However, since this is politics, nobody is going to listen because it's too damn late.

It was bipartisan. Republicans also agreed to crush the strike. You can go look at the vote in congress if you think the republicans were standing up for railroad unions.

> There obviously needs to be a rational best-effort cost-benefit analysis.

You don't seriously think there haven't been many? The problem is that train companies, governments, and people who care about the environment classify and price costs and benefits differently, and government was paid to adopt train company calculus.

It's not that nobody ever thought of figuring out the costs or the benefits of this major, well-known proposed change.

Biden could reinstate them by EO, just like how Trump cut them. He hasn't though. There is a bipartisan consensus that the safety of the rail system is less important than rail company profits.

> Biden could reinstate them by EO, just like how Trump cut them. He hasn't though.

He probably just hadn't noticed. It couldn't be that he allowed to rules changes to continue because some money flows towards him, his friends, or his party and his party's friends depended on maintaining those changes. Biden put a famously competent and experienced person in charge of Transportation and he didn't notice the change, so how could you expect Biden to?

The secretary of transportation is far too high up the chain to know about the minutia of train brake regulations. There is a whole federal agency that deals with train regulations which is one of the 10 agencies that report to the sec of transportation.

" There is a bipartisan consensus that the safety of the rail system is less important than rail company profits."

Any of us can buy railroad stocks and become - in your mind - wealthy. Perhaps the more important value being protected was, if the railroads stop working, many of us stop eating. Same reason we subsidized food production, fuel, etc. Our societies have grown too much to be able to go back to life without them, without huge numbers of deaths as we adjust.

Cannot cut something back if the brakes were never mass produced.

Was there actual evidence that Trump's changes had any affect on the derailments? From what I heard they had no effect. And last I checked , Biden has been president for 2 years. If they were vitally important, wouldn't the transportation dept worked to add them back?

This has been directly refuted by NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy. The brake rule in question would not have applied to that train either way.

https://twitter.com/JenniferHomendy/status/16263793610278584...

You're contributing to misinformation by repeating these false claims.

It seems reasonably likely they would have also been cut if Clinton had been president, due to the review requirement that was built into the regulations themselves.

The 2015 law that required ECP brakes also required before they went into effect the government ask the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to review the safety assumptions that the regulations had been based on and report whether or not those assumptions were correct, and revise or rescind the regulations accordingly.

NAS completed that report in early 2017 and it said that it was unable to conclude that ECP brakes were safer. There simply had not been enough actual tests to generate the data needed to reach a conclusion.

Given that NAS report it is hard to see how any administration could have justified not rescinding the regulation.

Unlikely they would have been cut under Clinton. And I don't think the required review you are talking about is concerned with safety. It's money. The review that is required is actually a financial review that decides if the cost of the safety regs in question exceed the cost of potential accidents. This analysis had already been done. However, the Trump admin had the calculation done again, I would assume after putting their own people in place and they found that the regulation was too costly. Big errors were made in their calculation but they claimed that even after fixing the errors, it was too costly. So they rolled back the regs.

That being said, the regs in question only applied to certain hazard levels and the train that crashed did not meet that level because it didn't have enough cars with hazardous materials.

I'm talking about the report that was required under Section 7311(b) of the FAST Act, Public Law 114-94 [1]:

  (b) Emergency Braking Application Testing.--
    (1) In general.--The Secretary shall enter into an agreement 
        with the National Academy of Sciences to--
                    (A) complete testing of ECP brake systems during 
                emergency braking application, including more than 1 
                scenario involving the uncoupling of a train with 70 or 
                more DOT-117 specification or DOT-117R specification 
                tank cars; and
                    (B) transmit, not later than 18 months after the 
                date of enactment of this Act, to the Committee on 
                Transportation and Infrastructure of the House of 
                Representatives and the Committee on Commerce, Science, 
                and Transportation of the Senate a report on the results 
                of the testing.

and the review required under 7311(c):

  (c) Evidence-Based Approach.--
            (1) Analysis.--The Secretary shall--
                    (A) not later than 90 days after the report date, 
                fully incorporate the results of the evaluation under 
                subsection (a) and the testing under subsection (b) and 
                update the regulatory impact analysis of the final rule 
                described in subsection (b)(2)(A) of the costs, 
                benefits, and effects of the applicable ECP brake system 
                requirements;
                    (B) as soon as practicable after completion of the 
                updated analysis under subparagraph (A), solicit public 
                comment in the Federal Register on the analysis for a 
                period of not more than 30 days; and
                    (C) not later than 60 days after the end of the 
                public comment period under subparagraph (B), post the 
                final updated regulatory impact analysis on the 
                Department of Transportation's Internet Web site.
            (2) Determination.--Not later than 2 years after the date of 
        enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall--
                    (A) determine, based on whether the final regulatory 
                impact analysis described in paragraph (1)(C) 
                demonstrates that the benefits, including safety 
                benefits, of the applicable ECP brake system 
                requirements exceed the costs of such requirements, 
                whether the applicable ECP brake system requirements are 
                justified;
                    (B) if the applicable ECP brake system requirements 
                are justified, publish in the Federal Register the 
                determination and reasons for such determination; and
                    (C) if the Secretary does not publish the 
                determination under subparagraph (B), repeal the 
                applicable ECP brake system requirements.

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-114publ94/html/PLAW...

This isn't a good thread to discuss train brake regulations since it is about bank regulations. That said, I don't believe train brakes would have had much effect on a ~50 car derailment. This is based on NTSB estimates[1].

[1]: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2017_casselton_BM...

The history is more complicated than that.

Obama originall proposed rules for widening the definition of hazardous trains and reqeuiring upgraded brakes. This rule didn't get enacted. It was weakened after a lot of lobbying eg trains carrying oil and gas were no longer "hazardous".

Trump did remove this rule in 2018.

But we're in 2023 now when Biden was sworn in over 2 years ago. Did Biden or Buttigieg re-institute these rules? No.

This problem is beyond politics. Both parties serve corporate interests. Republicans just go a little further on the deregulation train (pun intended). Look at Biden and Congress united behind hobbling the rail workers strike. Those rail workers were wanting to strike in part due to safety issues.

Buttigieg is a McKinsey alum. He's part of the system that creates this problem. Don't think this is just a few bad apples. It isn't. It's a systemic problem.

>No the train brake regulations were cut by Trump.

That's a proven lie that the democrats are running with because they need to blame the other party for their incompetence.

Would not have applied to this train even if it were true. https://www.factcheck.org/2023/02/ntsb-chair-contradicts-pos...

Here are some of Bess Levin's articles on Vanity.

Looks pretty biased to me, not to mention clueless to the inner working of NTSB, so it is safe to say that she "parrots" narratives.

https://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/bess-levin#intcid=inl...

Bipartisan support from two parties who are usually in the hands of Big [name the industry] doesn't negate it in the slightest. Sure one is more outwardly against any regulation that can negatively affect the ultra rich.

Deregulation sometimes has bipartisan support.

One difference is that when things start breaking, Democrats are willing to reconsider de/regulation, while GOP blames the government (even if there had not been inspections for years) and doubles down.

Some Dems voted to repeal Glass-Steagall, but more voted to keep it. The GOP votes was far more lopsided in favor of repeal.

Almost like there is little difference between the major parties on economic issues.

0) Make narrow banking illegal

1) Hold interest rates near zero, inflating the fuck out of the economy

2) Use government to destroy market value of distant maturing bonds by holding real interest rates deeply negative and then rapidly inverting it. Force people to seek ever more risky investments and long term low interest MBS securities just to barely not even break even.

3) Suck all the liquidity out of the market by using fed to raise interest rates sharply

4) Banks fail

5) "There wasn't enough government intervention, we need more!"

I don't know why even engage with the first comment. You know it's disgenuine, and they are unwilling to change their view point. They aren't logical so pointing out logic doesn't change anything. Literally NPCs

A bank failed, and then only because they were doing unwise things with their holdings. Where are all the other failed banks as a result of the long-standing fiscal policy?

If the bar you're setting is looking for failed banks exacerbated by fed policies, look no further than the great depression.

Now we could move the goal posts to something else, but the question you ask is not hard to find examples of.

> doing unwise things

In retrospect anything that causes a failure is going to be characterized as "unwise." You could say the wisest thing would be to create a 100% reserve ratio by passing through deposits to the central bank, yet it's impossible to get a banking license to do that. We're left with various shades of unwise.

The problem with blaming the government for this failure is that only one bank seems to have been affected. Since we are talking about sector wide regulations and policies rather than anything that targeted this specific institution, it is evidence strongly in favor of the problem being with the bank, not with the environment. Were this is a problem with law or interest rates or something like that, we would expect to see a lot more collateral damage.

Instead, the only thing we see is a single bank that failed due to voluntarily tying up too much of their capital in instruments that cannot be easily liquidated.

1000 people are forced to roll a 10,000 sided dice. They roll a '1' and they die.

At the end one person is dead.

Clearly since that one person followed the sector wide regulation and polices rather than anything that targeted that specific person, it is evidence strongly in favor of the problem being with that person, not the dice game. Were this a problem with the game or the dice or something like that, we would expect to see a lot more damage.

Instead, the only thing we see is one person who lost the dice game voluntarily rolling the dice at the improper starting position and velocity that cannot be easily rolled to the correct number.

Clearly this isn't the same, but the logic you've used doesn't parse and in any case the full fault is unlikely to be fully the fault of government nor the bank. And it remains to be seen if the dice game is over...

Yes, it clearly isn't the same. In the first place, we are not talking about randomness. Your example is facile and your copy and paste sarcasm is both unwelcome and against the rules. I'm done here.

I see so we're yet again moving the goalposts you set and now moving on to additional criteria like whether chance was involved. On the contrary, I would say quite a bit of uncertainty was involved, especially since a lowest uncertainty option was outlawed.

I do appreciate you choosing to check out after making it clear you're acting in bad faith.

It's okay for banks and trains to crash. If you have more than $250k in a single bank, you should have insurance on that cash.

If a train spills chemicals, they should be liable for a satisfactory resolution, including buying a property that was polluted, or paying for the cleanup and any depreciation of the property.

They should also be responsible for resurrecting people who died and compensating them for the time they missed, and unpolluting hopelessly polluted sites before they were hopelessly polluted.

At the end of the parable of Job, God gives Job all new sons and daughters to replace the sons and daughters that were crushed during the game with Satan. I never considered that as a thing that made Job whole. In case of devastating and prevetable disaster, the train companies will just declare bankruptcy and the owners will start new train companies, or they'll nationalize themselves and sell to the government at an inflated price.

edit: these companies were all formed by groups of insiders that were handed state property for free; they have typical post-Soviet oligarch origin stories.

Republicans are cancer. Democrats are low fat cancer.

The train workers were striking to protest safety conditions. Biden ordered them back to work.

Do you really think far away rich people are working to make things better for you?

Is this the approved MSDNC narrative?