Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
So I read the free preview of Nate’s guest post on Aella’s Substack. If you can believe it, I think that she and the people close to her are confused as to why people respond to her with disgust. Maybe she isn’t stinky. Maybe she isn’t riddled with STDs. Maybe she adheres to the highest standards of Bayesian data hygiene. None of that had anything to do with the why the Sankey diagram went viral.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I'm currently reading a deposition where the head of safety at the facility freely admitted that he had never actually looked at 29 CFR 1910.119.
I also really appreciate the one victim's mother who hired her own lawyer seperate from the ones representing the other plaintiffs just so he could ask if they knew that one victim in particular and to berate them especially hard for their failures.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I just finished the United States Chemical Safety Board Final Report on the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery Exploision. I vaguely remember as a kid when this happened, but I had never realized it was the same company that caused the massive oil spill just a few years later.
The report hits all the standard beats for this genre, penny-pinching management, shoddy maintenance, "procedures" that exist only on paper and which may or may not even work, but all of it is cranked-up to 11 for 300 pages.
One of my favorite anecdotes is that at one point the call came down from London for all facilities to cut fixed costs by 25%. Most BP refineries realized that this was insane and didn't do it, but Texas City really did cut 25% and ended up running the facility into the ground.
It sounds like the internet stuff started leaking out into her real life a bit too much, and that triggered an existential crisis.
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