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Texas Republicans have decided on a platform that includes abolishing minimum wage, cancelling climate research, banning the teaching of evolution at schools, and repealing the voting rights act, among other things, but hilariously (or depressingly) the one thing on this laundry list that people are angry about is their plan to "rehabilitate" homosexuals, a practice that many say is harmful.
BBC News has more: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27774102
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Texas Republicans Adopt Extremely Controversial Platform
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Q: How many IBM 370's does it take to execute a job?
A: Four, three to hold it down, and one to rip its head off.
(Score: 1) by Qzukk on Tuesday June 10 2014, @04:30AM
Of course, in an ideal world the manufacturer would resist cutting corners that caused the facility to explode and kill everyone. Bad for business, don'tcha know?
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday June 10 2014, @04:54AM
I can't imagine that the plant owner decided to cut corners just hoping that the plant won't blow up. You can't make much money on those corners, especially when you pay (or not pay) for them once but carry the risk forever.
Quite frequently accidents occur because some workers (not the plant owners!) decide to cut corners. I don't know what happened at these fertilizer factories, but there are many other incidents that we can learn from. In Chernobyl it was the plant manager who approved an unsafe test without asking the manufacturer, and then had all the safeties disabled (or else they would stop his test automatically.) He had no financial reason to proceed with the test. In Japan it was some workers who were loading radioactive materials by the bucket [wikipedia.org] because they, and their manager, and a manager above that, failed to read instructions. They got no money for making a reactor out of a water tank. Later, also in Japan, the plant at Fukushima was damaged because of poor disaster planning [npr.org] - perhaps in small part because of corner-cutting, but primarily because the managers in charge refused to think out of the box. TEPCO, a huge company, could easily build a better diesel backup - but it was never done not in order to save money, but for bureaucratic reasons alone. TEPCO, as a public company, had no owner, and its management is hired to run the company safely, not to cut corners.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday June 10 2014, @02:20PM
Everyone knows manufacturing is dangerous. The issue in Texas is that despite that knowledge, they allow residential zoning right up to that danger rather than providing a buffer zone.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday June 10 2014, @02:34PM
If they still allow that, after those explosions, then they need to have their heads checked by a professional. However if they allowed it earlier ... how could one move the factory or a residential neighborhood?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday June 10 2014, @04:08PM
It's more of an induced negligence. When the owner() reward cost cutting but not safety and drive a constant message of faster! faster! and sometimes even faster and cheaper or someone will have to go!, it's only natural that someone will cut one too many corners.
At Chernobyl, plant management pressed for the test to be completed by the under-qualified (under-trained) evening shift because the upper management (safely far away) would start chopping heads if it didn't happen. The evening crew pressed forward so it wouldn't be their heads. Training costs money and not kissing upper management's feet costs jobs.
In Japan, they should have paused to formalize a procedure or at least do a safety calculation, but time is money and managers who cost too much monbey don't get promoted...
It's a natural result of human nature, the hierarchical structure of most organizations and garbled communications. Sometimes you need an outside force to put the brakes on it, such as evil government regulations.