Behind the Baltimore bridge collapse is a familiar story of a corporation cutting corners
Behind the Baltimore bridge collapse is a familiar story of a corporation cutting corners
The Dali disaster is what profit-driven economics looks like
Corporations cut corners because the fines they're issued by the government don't go far enough. They get a slap on the wrist and work it out in the wash.
It feels like I’m always writing the same thing but : Cost of doing business.
Paraphrasing what I said and almost typed. I felt it obvious because I too say it constantly.
Corporations cut corners because the fines they're issued by the government don't go far enough.
But in the example for the shipping company the example is that the company used a minimum amount of crew. Using a minimum amount of crew isn't something they'd get fined for.
If the regulation wasn't enough or if tugs should've been used then it's strange to claim that the fine isn't high enough. As the regulations were followed.
We've already seen reports that laws on the books for disasters like the Titanic to limit liability of the corporations...
They spend all their profits on lobbying lawmakers to always cut them a break.
Why don't we treat stuff like this like car collisions? The owner of the ship should be on the hook for the entire bridge cost plus loss of life.
Because corporate personhood is different than person personhood?
I always find it interesting to take corporate fines, translate them to a % of gross income and then apply it to my salary to put it in perspective.
Here’s the best part, a basic 1st offense traffic ticket is usually way more expensive. (I assume a ticket would be around $250 not counting the increased insurance rates.)
It gets a little weird with the web of ownership, use case, contract details and people involved.
Ok it can get really weird… hear me out.
Basically in most cases the vessel owner is only liable up to value of the vessel itself. It’s something that like much of the maritime industry came about from practices in the 19th century and vessel ownership back then. Unfortunately, the vessel is likely worth no where near as much as taking out a fucking bridge. Also in any given scenario a vessel could be owned by the captain, owned by a corp, leased by a corp to a captain, leased by a corp to another corp etc. weird ownership scenarios like those are commonplace in shipping.
In certain circumstances a company can be on the hook but the other big wrinkle is determining who is liable in the first place like the vessel crew, or port crew (but for instance if someone from on shore is working on the vessel at the time they are considered acting crewmembers). This is compounded with the whole mechanical error issue and how supposedly the vessel was having maintenance work done before hand, but then lost power twice? Insurance inspectors are going bonkers at this point.
Point is this is a way wackier scenario to deal with compared to your average fender bender. But in a way kinda has to be, not because of lobbying or corporate malfeasance but because of the complex nature of maritime law, shipping, and insurance.
Thanks for such an interesting perspective. That's pretty complex, but also it makes sense now that I think about it.
Lobbyists.
They will be. Although, much like with car collisions, it'll be insurance that's on the hook.
Before that they have to figure who actually owns the ship. Which may or may not be easy.
On Wednesday, Maryland State Police recovered the bodies of Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera inside a pick-up truck submerged 50 feet beneath the Patapsco River.
Fuck, i have nightmares about this kind of shit. Poor guys
In the early 2000's I was working at a saw mill in northwestern Ontario that was a 200 km (120 mile) round trip from home, on a 2 lane highway that zig-zagged through the Canadian shield. There were often lakes on one side and steep ravines on the other, and we often had to dodge moose in the winter (who were kneeling in the middle of the highway licking salt off the road).
One of my crew taught me a valuable lesson then ... that the minute you put the vehicle into drive you also unlock your electric doors, so that if you do end up in the water there is a chance you can get out of the vehicle.
I still do it to this day.
That fucked me all up when I rolled a car.
I was upside down and the emergency fuel pump shutoff had already triggered, but I was freaking out because I couldn’t open the door.
I tried punching out the glass and that didn’t work so finally I thought I had better shut this car off before it catches on fire.
Then I reached up to turn the key off and heard the doors unlock.
Shit that’s good advice. My car does the auto lock shit and I bet if the electronics got fried when we went into the water I’d be screwed
50 is an interesting number, considereding it's only about 35 feet deep under the bridge. I wonder if they were swept down stream a significant way
This kind of feels like it was written by a large language model. There's lots of content. But there's no through line. No cohesive narrative tying it all together.
Ironic when they're trying to talk about Corporations Cutting Corners, eh?
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. Lots of paragraphs that start with "[person/thing] is [context/role]". I wonder whether it's actually human written, but they poorly integrated too many individual perspectives into the article. Building a narrative from fragments in this way takes a lot of skill to pull off, perhaps they were too ambitious (or too cautious — I've seen this pitfall when the writer is too tentative in making their own argument on a spicy topic)
It shows us again that we must have strong regulations and that the Market™ is a belief.
The Market is real. An invisible hand guiding it is a belief.
The growth is the god, the market is the Messiah and the invisible hand is a dogma.
All are just beliefs.
For the invisible hand, it's a dogma as at the beginning it meant the complete opposite of what it means since the 1960s.
That's weird. I heard the bridge collapsed because the mayor is a black guy.