Category: Safety

Today in Amazon Rat-F%$#ery

2 Comments

A brief rundown of poor Amazon behavior, first despite triple digit temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, and the Kent, Washington warehouse continued operations in brutal heat with no air conditioning. 

Next, and more significantly, Amazon is demanding stock warrants to carry some merchants’ products in their store, which in addition to being something that Glass-Steagall USED to ban is a pretty big slam dunk example of anti-competitive behavior:

Suppliers that want to land Amazon.com Inc. as a client for their goods and services can find that its business comes with a catch: the right for Amazon to buy big stakes in their companies at potentially steep discounts to market value.

The technology-and-retail giant has struck at least a dozen deals with publicly traded companies in which it gets rights, called warrants, to buy the vendors’ stock in the future at what could be below-market prices, according to corporate filings and interviews with people involved with the deals.

Amazon over the past decade also has done more than 75 such deals with privately held companies, according to a person familiar with the matter. In all, the tech titan’s stakes and potential stakes amount to billions of dollars across companies that provide everything from call-center services to natural gas, and in some cases position Amazon among the top shareholders in those businesses.

The unusual arrangements offer another window into how Amazon uses its market heft to increase its wealth and clout. The company has been under growing scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers over its competitive practices, including with companies it partners with.

………

Amazon routinely leverages its size and power to force terms that benefit itself, including by getting partners in one business to sign on to its other services; learning about up-and-coming technology companies through its venture-capital fund; or creating top selling Amazon branded goods that compete with small sellers on its site. It has aggressively competed to wrest market share from rivals, which Amazon says results in better deals for shoppers.

In its supplier deals that include warrants, Amazon throws its weight around to exact lucrative terms, knowing many companies won’t refuse, according to former Amazon executives who worked on the deals.

An Amazon spokeswoman said the warrants it obtains in commercial agreements are typically tied to milestones that Amazon has to meet, such as large purchases from the supplier. The company declined to comment on specific deals, or say how many warrants it has exercised or the amount of money it has made from such agreements. The spokeswoman said it has warrant deals in fewer than 1% of the commercial agreements it enters into.

Grocery distributor SpartanNash Co. last year amended a contract with Amazon to deliver groceries to its Amazon Fresh arm. The Grand Rapids, Mich.-based company had been supplying Amazon with food since 2016, but this time Amazon added a condition: if it bought $8 billion worth of groceries over seven years, it could get warrants to purchase around 15% of SpartanNash’s stock at a price potentially lower than the market. Amazon also said it wanted to be notified of any takeover offers for SpartanNash and have a 10-day window to offer a counterbid.

………

Amazon has been doing such deals with vendors for about a decade but has aggressively increased the practice in the past few years, said former Amazon executives and lawyers who worked on structuring the deals. In its latest quarterly report, the company valued its warrants at $2.8 billion, more than five times the level three years ago. Amazon doesn’t disclose the value of stakes it owns as a result of exercising its warrants.

A broader measure of its warrants and the stakes it holds in companies through warrants, direct investment or other ways increased 10 times to $8.4 billion in that period, according to Amazon’s quarterly filings.

………

Like stock options, warrants let the holder buy a company’s shares at a set price during a set period. If the stock surpasses that strike price, the warrant holder can buy shares at a below-market price.

Corporate executives in a range of industries and lawyers said Amazon’s push to get warrants as part of vendor deals is highly unusual. Warrant deals have more commonly been used by investors who back companies in financial trouble, in deals deemed high risk.

Amazon is using its market dominance to steal from the share-holders, but that’s OK with the corrupt stooges that Robert Bork unleashed on antitrust law.

………

In talks with Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings Inc., Amazon broached a 10-year leasing deal, with similar terms. This time Amazon demanded warrants that would amount to up to 20% of Atlas’s equity over five years—with an option for 10% more later—depending on how much business it gave Atlas. Amazon also wanted the right to elect a director to Atlas’s board, after meeting certain milestones.

People involved on both sides said that warrants were a condition of Amazon partnering with Atlas. “There was definitely a sense that if it wasn’t agreed to there wouldn’t be a deal,” said one of the people. Atlas executives didn’t want to pass up the revenue opportunity from Amazon and viewed giving up the warrants as the price of doing business with Amazon, said the person.

………

Former Amazon executives said they avoided doing anything during supplier negotiations, such as putting its ultimatums in writing, that would give fodder to critics who have said Amazon abuses its power. One of the former executives said that most companies complied with its demands over warrants. Several former Amazon executives who worked on such deals said in interviews that they found them to be unfair and one-sided, saying the companies weren’t in a position to refuse and that most of the upside went to Amazon.

This is extortion and demanding kick-backs, and while it is likely legal, it really shouldn’t be.

This sort of behavior is baked into its DNA, as we can see by their dealing with the press as well, with intimidation and lies being the rule rather than the exception:

It was a slow news day at Gizmodo, the tech website where Dell Cameron worked. Without a story of his own to report he decided to aggregate—a journalism term for rewriting and crediting—a day-old Tampa ABC-affiliate’s TV piece on how Amazon’s Ring home surveillance security system was being marketed to dozens of Florida police departments.

A day later, an email from an Amazon spokesperson popped into Cameron’s inbox. The brief email claimed that the Tampa-based reporter, Adam Walser, was “correcting his story” and suggested that Cameron would need to do so as well. In her mail, the spokesperson challenged the accuracy of the station’s entire report. “It is inaccurate that AWS or Amazon is marketing Amazon Rekognition to law enforcement, either individually or in combination with Ring,” she wrote.

Cameron checked, and he didn’t see a correction on the Tampa story. Before making any change to his post, Cameron decided to reach out to Walser and double-check. “I read him the exact email that they sent me,” Cameron says. Walser was puzzled, according to Cameron. “He said ‘That’s just not true, we’re not issuing a correction. I don’t know what they’re talking about.’” Cameron wrote back to the Amazon spokesperson relaying what he’d been told, and mentioning that Gizmodo was planning their own potential follow-up story that was “likely to include that Amazon attempted to obtain a correction from Gizmodo by falsely claiming the ABC station was planning to issue one.”

The Amazon spokesperson doubled down, insisting that a correction had indeed happened. She accused Cameron of being “up in arms” and “threatening” by mentioning the possibility that Gizmodo would publish a piece about being misled by Amazon. “I do not appreciate being called… a liar,” she added in a follow-up email.

………

“I do not believe for a second that this person is naive or didn’t understand what a correction is,” Cameron told me recently, almost two years after the interaction. “They got a job in the PR department at one of the most powerful companies in the world. I think they were trying to trick me into correcting a story and didn’t expect me to go back and contact the reporter.”

It’s not unusual for communications teams for corporations, non-profits, and the government all alike to be withholding in their interactions with the press and to try to spin things in the best possible light. It’s rarer that companies try to mislead and intimidate the press into falling into the lines that they want. But of the dozen journalists I spoke with for this story, most of whom declined to be identified out of concern for professional repercussions, all recalled times Amazon’s press team had engaged in manipulative and sometimes deceitful behavior. According to these writers and editors, and my own experience reporting on the company, Amazon’s comms team readily employs these rarer, bare-knuckle PR tactics. The ultimate result isn’t just that reporters have a harder time writing stories. Some may be deterred from writing on the company at all. And if those that do are deceived and unduly influenced, then by extension the public is as well.

Aside from Cameron, at least two reporters recalled moments when they felt Amazon’s press team had outright lied to them. Almost all of the journalists told me they found that Amazon press relations was either the most or among the most clawing and deceptive corporate communications team that they had dealt with in their work.

“Amazon is the only company I’ve dealt with that has directly lied to me,” said one tech writer, recalling instances when Amazon boasted of warehouse safety guidelines in ways that journalists who had spoken with rank-and-file employees had found not to be true.

“They’d often lie about things we had proof of,” said another reporter, citing times they had visual evidence contradicting the communications teams’ claims. “There will be videos of these big walkouts and they’ll say only a few workers participated.”

………

“I do think that the broader effort is to disincentivize you from telling the truth. They want you to feel like it’s going to be a world of pain if you do your job,” one veteran tech reporter said. “Even if corrections aren’t needed, it’s still a headache and a waste of time for reporters and editors and lets them know that they’re probably scheduling another headache for themselves the next time that they decide to write about Amazon.”

Another reporter at a smaller outlet with less resources described a similar chilling effect after the company pressured him after a critical story. “It just eats up so much of time, going back and forth with our attorneys,” the reporter said, describing how the trouble had made him hesitant to cover Amazon again. “You think twice about it. Is it really worth it? Maybe you have a good story but it won’t change how they do business. It’s kind of a scary thing.”

Amazon tried a similar tactic this September on Reveal—a non-profit investigative news shop that often releases its stories in partnership with newspapers, broadcasters, and other outlets—after it published an award winning series from a team led by reporter Will Evans about the company’s efforts to mislead the public about warehouse injury rates. “Yesterday we published an investigation into Amazon’s massive misinformation campaign. Naturally, we’re now the *subject* of their misinformation campaign,” wrote Andy Donohue, Reveal’s deputy director of projects.

………

But others noted Amazon is willing to go to bold lengths compared to other companies they’ve reported on. Amazon has a broader reputation for fostering a cutthroat corporate culture, which seems to be reflected in the company’s external communications. Ahead of April’s high profile unionization vote at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama facility, Amazon fallaciously tweeted claims that its hard-pressed drivers and warehouse pickers didn’t actually have to pee in bottles, and chided lawmakers like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who had spoken out about the company’s labor conditions. Recode reported that the tweets were directly driven by Jeff Bezos, the company’s CEO and one of the world’s most wealthy men.

While that suggests the company’s aggressive PR efforts flow from the very top, there are other executives with a role in overseeing public relations and related portfolios. While the most high profile may be vice president of global corporate affairs Jay Carney, the former Time magazine reporter and Obama White House press secretary, two former Amazon communications staffers and another employee with knowledge of Amazon’s communications team told me that Drew Herdener, the vice president of communications, usually calls shots internally.

………

Amazon’s tactics seem to be well known among reporters. Beyond the dozen with personal experience I spoke with for this story, many others who had not themselves faced an Amazon harangue were aware of the company’s aggressive approach. Indeed, hints of Amazon’s press strategies have leaked out over the years. In 2019, a Twitter glitch notified users when they were put on other users’ private lists. Caroline Haskins, a reporter at BuzzFeed who had broken a series of stories on Amazon Ring, noticed that Morgan Culbertson, an Amazon PR person, had added her to a list called “Haters.”

The goal is to have these tactics, “Well known among reporters.”  The technical term for this is, “Chilling Effect.”

Even reporters who have never written a story about Amazon are leery of writing one.

………

It was not the first time I had been yelled at by a press flack—that’s not uncommon. Nor was it the first time I had been asked for a correction. But it was the first and only time a press flack tried to aggressively antagonize and intimidate me into stripping a quote out of a published story from an established expert.

That expert, Stacy Mitchell—the co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a research group that advocates for small businesses—has seen the impacts of Amazon’s PR wrath firsthand. When I spoke with her for this story, Mitchell said that she’s had editors “tone-down and remove stuff to reduce the blowback from Amazon” or “at least brace themselves,” when preparing to publish op-eds she’s written.

See Effect, Chilling.

………

“I’ve heard about Amazon’s bullying from many journalists,” Mitchell says. “I sometimes ask reporters about it, and sometimes they bring it up off-handedly.”

………

Even accepting that less than ideal reality, Amazon seems to be doing something that goes beyond mere spin. Facebook, Google, or other tech giants’ softer pressure and prodding certainly don’t come with the best of intentions. But employing aggressive, intimidation tactics and playing word games that severely contort the truth clearly goes beyond the line, wherever it is.

I am not surprised.  The company was founded by a contemptible sociopath, and the company (Corporations are people, my friend) is a contemptible sociopath as well.

Amazon is Evil, Part 12⁹

No Comments

I am not at all surprised that, Amazon’s warehouses have an 80% higher injury rate than the industry norm.

This is completely not a surprise:

Employees at US Amazon warehouses are injured at a higher rate than those doing similar jobs at other companies’ warehouses, a new report has found.

A union-backed study of safety data found Amazon workers had 5.9 serious injuries per 100 people – almost 80% higher than the rest of the industry.

The study’s organisers blamed Amazon’s “obsession with speed” as a main cause of the problem.

It is the latest in a string of controversies around worker safety. 

………

This new study comes from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of labour unions. It analysed workplace safety data reported to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration from 2017 to 2020.

It found that “workers at Amazon warehouses are not only injured more frequently than in non-Amazon warehouses, they are also injured more severely”. 

………

And compared to its largest retail competitor Walmart, Amazon’s overall injury rate was more than double, at 6.5 per 100 employees compared with three.

An independent analysis of the same data by The Washington Post reached similar conclusions.

The Post conducted its own analysis of the OSHA data, and came to the same conclusions.

The Washington Postis owned by Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, so this qualifies as a statement against its own interest..

The SOC characterised the report as an “epidemic of workplace injuries”.

………

But technology news site Motherboard has this week published an Amazon warehouse pamphlet issued under the “working well” branding, which tells workers they should think of themselves as “industrial athletes”.

“Just like an athlete who trains for an event, industrial athletes need to prepare their bodies to be able to perform their best at work,” it warns.

“Some positions will walk up to 13 miles a day… [others] will have a total of 20,000lb (9,072kg) lifted before they complete their shift,” it said.

The pamphlet, from a Tulsa warehouse, also offers tips on health and fitness. It encourages exercise on days off, a good diet to fuel the 400 calories an hour the company expects employees to burn, and tips on buying shoes to fit swollen feet from the active working environment.

Amazon told Motherboard that the pamphlet had been created in error and removed – though the employee who gave it to the publication said it was available on-site for months.

So, it appears that Amazon thinks that its employees should be Olympians, and sets metrics accordingly.

Your Amazon order is literally being paid for with the blood of its employees.

It’s time to find another online marketplace.

Boeing F%$#s Up Again

No Comments

Boeing will be delaying delivery of new 787s because of new safety issues.

Once again, Boeing’s MBA driven culture has led to it cutting corners, and the FAA has called foul.

It appeared that faith based safety procedures are not looked upon favorably by the regulatory authorities:

Boeing Co. has halted deliveries of its 787 Dreamliners, adding fresh delays for customers following a recent five-month suspension in handing over the aircraft due to production problems, people familiar with the matter said.

Federal air-safety regulators have requested more information about Boeing’s proposed solution to address the previously identified quality lapses, these people said.

………

A Boeing spokesman said the company was working in a timely and transparent manner to provide regulators with more information related to undelivered 787s. The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday confirmed that Boeing had halted Dreamliner deliveries, saying that the plane maker needs to demonstrate that its proposed inspection method complies with federal-safety regulations.

There are statistical methods to validate these procedures, it’s just that Boeing couldn’t be bothered to take the time, because there were union members to be laid off.

………

The FAA launched a review of Boeing’s Dreamliner production last year and has increased scrutiny of its 737 MAX manufacturing operations following earlier factory slip-ups.

As part of its Dreamliner scrutiny, the agency has recently requested more information about the plane maker’s proposed method for addressing quality issues using a system that would allow for targeted checks of newly produced aircraft, rather than broader inspections of more areas, people familiar with the matter said. Boeing’s proposed method is based on a statistical analysis of data.

Until Boeing can satisfy the FAA’s requests, the agency is requiring Boeing to perform the broader inspections, which are more time-consuming and labor-intensive, these people said.

Many of the 787 quality lapses involve tiny gaps where sections of the jet’s fuselage, or body of the plane, join together. Problems have emerged in other places, too, including the vertical fin and horizontal stabilizer at the tail. Such gaps could lead to eventual premature fatigue of certain portions of the aircraft, potentially requiring extensive repairs during routine, long-term maintenance.

This is a problem with composite structures.  Unlike aluminum, things need to fit exactly, since you there is very little flexing to accommodate tolerance stack-up.

You have to get these shims right, or you get point loads, which are death to composites.

………

Boeing has reduced output of the Dreamliner to five a month after shuttering assembly at its Everett, Wash., plant near Seattle and focusing production at North Charleston, S.C. It had built up a backlog of around 100 finished planes by the end of April, and had hoped to deliver most of them by the end of the year.

Yes, the South Carolina plant, which (by their own admission) they opened just to punish and weaken the union, which has poor training, poor morale, and poor safety procedures.

The management at Boeing does not know how to make airliners, and holds the people who do in deep disdain, and it shows.

When do the crashes start?  

My bad, they already have.

This Ain’t Rocket Science

2 Comments

Specifically, supplying oxygen to fighter pilots has been a known quantity for well over 50 years, but somehow or other, Lockheed-Martin has been able unable to make this work on the F-35.

NASA has done a study, and found that the Joint Strike Fighter has problems not shared with other aircraft using onboard oxygen generate systems.

The F-35 office had declared this a tempest in a tea pot, which is typical for them:

Between 2011 and 2017, more than a dozen U.S. Air Force F-35 pilots reported experiencing oxygen-deprivation symptoms. NASA has obtained new information that may help solve the mystery behind these physiological episodes and wants to study the issue more deeply. But the F-35 Joint Program Office is disputing the findings.

The recently released—but not widely circulated—report from the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) pinpoints a lag time between the pilot’s breathing pattern and the aircraft’s life-support system, due to differences between mask pressure and line pressure. It is the first independent review focused on the hypoxia-like episodes reported by pilots in the Lockheed Martin F-35 for more than a decade.

………

The NESC’s work builds on a 2017 report that assessed pilots’ physiological episodes in other fighter aircraft (AW&ST March 28-April 10, 2016, p. 23). That study was driven by a congressional mandate to the U.S. Navy to conduct an independent review of the episodes in Boeing F/A-18 and T-45 aircraft going back to 2009. But the mandate did not cover the F-35. The new report is part of a larger pilot-breathing assessment that includes F/A-18 and F-15D data using CRU-103 or CRU-60 breathing gear. 

………

But the F-35 data set, the first of its kind, was subsequently embargoed by the Air Force, and the NASA team had to wait about a year for the service to release pilot–breathing data for independent analysis. F-35 pilots admitted in interviews with the NESC that information about breathing problems had been suppressed over concerns about protecting the program.

Bottom line:  The Pentagon wants its over-priced and under-performing mistake jet, and if a few pilots have to experience suffocation, it’s a small price to pay.

Boeing Still Can’t Make Planes

No Comments

The FAA will audit Boeing following the discovery of a serious manufacturing flaw.

The short version of this is that Boeing has systematically dismantled procedures to allow employees to report safety issues on the shop floor to senior management, because the management fetishist MBA culture that was imported from McDonnell Douglas when they acquired the firm.

Since McDonnell took over Boeing with Boeing’s money, they have systematically dismantled every advantage that Boeing once they came on board:

Boeing Co. is facing an audit to determine why changes in its manufacturing practices on the 737 Max led to a hazard that went unnoticed for almost two years.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees Boeing and has meted out multiple civil penalties against the planemaker in recent years, said in a statement Thursday that it is also investigating the origin of the manufacturing flaw.

“These initiatives are part of our commitment to continually evaluating and improving our oversight of all aspects of aviation safety, recognizing that catching errors at the earliest possible point enhances what is already the world’s safest form of transportation,” the agency said.

………

The flaws in the electrical components raise new questions about Boeing’s ability to monitor safety issues within the company. The lack of a robust internal safety review and oversight system was cited repeatedly by multiple reviews of the 737 Max crashes.

Until recent months, Boeing didn’t have what is known as a Safety Management System, which requires an organization to conduct more robust risk analyses of design features, open channels for employees to raise concerns and involve senior management.

………

The changes to how certain electrical components were installed on the 737 Max occurred in 2019. At the time, Boeing concluded it was such a minor change that it didn’t require FAA approval, the agency said in a statement. Similarly, Boeing employees who are deputized to act on behalf of the federal regulator also didn’t approve of the changes.

………

The electrical problem was deemed serious enough that the agency said it was waiving the normal period for public comment and would require the repairs as soon as Boeing completes a bulletin detailing them.

Boeing is being run by finance guys, and their business model is tor burn the the company down for the insurance money.

28 Years

No Comments

Former president of Peanut Corporation of America, Stewart Parnell, was sentenced to 28 years in prison for knowing shipping salmonella contaminated peanuts around the country:

Former peanut company executive Stewart Parnell was hit with a virtual life prison term Monday for his 2014 conviction on crimes related to a salmonella outbreak blamed for killing nine and sickening hundreds.

A federal judge in Georgia sentenced the 61-year-old former head of Peanut Corporation of America to 28 years behind bars, imposing potentially the toughest punishment in U.S. history for a producer in a food-borne illness case.

U.S. District Judge W. Louis Sands also sentenced the former executive’s brother, Michael Parnell, 56, to serve a 20-year prison term. The relative and co-defendant was a broker who provided food manufacturing giant Kellogg’s with peanut paste from his brother’s company.

Mary Wilkerson, 41, a former quality control manager at the now-defunct peanut firm, drew a five-year prison term for her conviction on obstruction in the tragedy.

Sands also ordered both Parnells to surrender, rejecting defense arguments that the two should be allowed to remain free on bond pending appeals. The judge deemed them potential flight risks.

………

The case stemmed from Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention findings that traced a national salmonella outbreak to the Parnell company’s peanut roasting plant in Blakely, Ga. The outbreak sickened 714 people in 46 states and may have contributed to nine deaths, the CDC reported.

The illnesses began in January 2009 and ultimately prompted one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history.

A federal jury convicted Parnell last September on 71 criminal counts, including conspiracy, obstruction of justice and introduction of adulterated food. The verdict came after prosecutors presented evidence that Parnell and the co-defendants knowingly shipped salmonella-tainted peanut butter from the Georgia facility to Kellogg’s and other customers — who in turn used it in products ranging from packaged crackers to pet food.

How about some similar sentences for corrupt bankers?

TransCanada Appears to be the Washington Generals of Pipeline Construction

No Comments

Clearly, there was an Earth Shattering Kaboom

Yes, another one of their pipelines has demonstrated that it functions better as a pyrotechnic display than they are as transmission device for fossil fuels:

The cause of a natural-gas pipeline rupture near Emerson which forced two Manitoba families to evacuate their home remains under investigation.

 A spokeswoman with TransCanada, which operates the pipeline just south of the Canada-U.S. border in Kittson County, Minn., said Monday the company continues to conduct “a detailed investigation to determine the cause of the incident.”

 The rupture occurred Saturday night around 8:30 p.m., sending flames shooting up into the air.

 The nearby local volunteer fire department in Emerson was called out to the fire, said Emerson fire chief Jeff French.

 “You could see it from miles away,” French said, describing flames six to 10 metres high and three to five metres wide near the site of the explosion.

 Two homes on the Canadian side of the border were evacuated and residents were allowed back inside by 11 p.m. Saturday.

Yep, another pipeline blew up.

Of particular interest is the sidebar for the article, which details a pattern of problematic safety failures:

1. Otterburne, January 25, 2014

 A natural gas pipeline operated by TransCanada ruptured, sending a massive fireball into the sky during the winter of 2014 in Otterburne, a small community about 60 kilometres outside of Winnipeg. The explosion would force Manitoba Hydro to shut down natural gas flows to thousands of customers in the area, leaving some residents without heat for day. A pre-existing crack present for over 50 years was the culprit in a gas line explosion, a Transportation Safety Board of Canada investigation found.

 2. Brookdale, April 14, 2002

 A TransCanada Pipelines gas line ruptured, exploded and caught fire two kilometres west of the village of Brookdale, northeast of Brandon. The explosion created two craters — one at each end of the ruptured section of pipe — and burned for nearly four hours.

 About 100 people were evacuated within a four-kilometre radius of the blast, but there were no injuries.

 The investigation found that, similar to the Rapid City blast, stress corrosion cracking was found to have caused the explosion. It was unusual in this case as the affected pipe was coated with asphalt and buried in non-corrosive soil. It was discovered that the combination of the pipe’s coating separating from the surface, a fluctuating water table, the presence of anaerobic bacteria and other factors all combined to create a corrosive environment.

 3. St. Norbert, April 15, 1996

 At a spot where a TransCanada gas pipeline crosses the La Salle River, gas escaped from a crack in the pipe, caught fire and an explosion destroyed a nearby home. The explosion also left a 13.5-metre-wide crater on the bottom of the river and damaged hydro lines and trees on both sides of the river. No one was injured.

 The investigation found “environmental assisted cracking” to be the cause. A shift in the river slope led the pipe to move and stress out a crack in the pipe that may have been present since the pipeline was laid in 1962.

 4. Rapid City, July 29, 1995

 A TransCanada Pipelines gas line ruptured and caught fire near Rapid City, north of Brandon. An adjacent gas pipe also ruptured and caught fire which damaged a third line.

 The incident left a 51-metres wide crater that was five metres deep. One TransCanada employee suffered minor cuts and bruises.

 The investigation found the first rupture was caused by stress corrosion cracking, the slow growth of small cracks in an environment capable of corroding a pipe. The second rupture was partly the result of a delay in shutting down the flow of gas to the first pipe.

Note that this is just in Manitoba, and in 2 of the 4 cases, cracks in the line were unobserved for decades, and in a 3rd case, the rupture was mismanaged.

As Charlie Pierce observes, , “Pretty plainly, TransCanada puts its pipelines in the ground and then you’re on your own, rube. At this point, I wouldn’t buy a bucket from these clowns, let alone a continent-spanning death funnel.”

I will note that pipelines for bitumen, the vaguely oil like crap that comes from the tar sands, is nowhere nearly as well understood as that of oil or gas, so it would be problematic even for a pipeline operator that was able to find its ass with both hands.

Good. Now How About Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon Too?

No Comments

In response to his knowingly shipping Salmonella tainted peanut butter, prosecutors are asking for a life sentence for former president and CEO of Peanut Corporation of America:

Stewart Parnell–the former Peanut Corporation of America owner that was convicted last year for knowingly shipping Salmonella-contaminated peanut butter from his Georgia plant–may be sentenced to life in prison if prosecutors have their way. The U.S. Probation Office concluded that the scope of Parnell’s crimes–including conspiracy, obstruction of justice and wire fraud– “results in a life sentence Guidelines range.”

 After a two month trial, Parnell was found guilty of knowingly shipping the contaminated products to food processors across the U.S. This is reportedly the first federal felony conviction of its kind in relation to food safety, making it an unprecedented case.

In 2008 and 2009, the peanut butter outbreak spread throughout 46 states, ultimately leading the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to announce one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history. Nine people died and more than 700 fell ill. Parnell nor any co-defendants were ever charged in relation to any consumer illnesses or deaths resulting from the tainted peanut butter.

 ………

 Parnell–age 61–is scheduled to be sentenced on September 21 by a federal judge in Albany, GA. Although prosecutors are recommending a life sentence, the judge is free to impose a lighter sentence.

 A 17 to 21 year sentence was recommended for brother Michael Parnell. Mary Wilkerson–the plant quality control manager–may get 8 to 10 years in prison based on prosecutors’ recommendation.

Here is a suggestion for the judge: Imagine that Mr. Parnell is a black man caught dealing crack, and that he had 3 priors, all of them non-violent drug offenses.

 That should be good for about 60 years.

Or, perhaps you could imagine that he is a black man accused of selling loose cigarettes in New York City. 

That carries the death penalty these days.

Yeah, I am So Confident in the Safety of the Keystone XL Pipeline

No Comments

Up in Alberta, land of the Tar Sands, a brand new bitumen pipeline has just ruptured, causing a major oil spill:

One of the largest leaks in Alberta history has spilled about five million litres of emulsion from a Nexen Energy pipeline at the company’s Long Lake oilsands facility south of Fort McMurray.

The leak was discovered Wednesday afternoon.

Nexen said in a statement its emergency response plan has been activated and personnel were onsite. The leak has been stabilized, the company said.

The spill covered an area of about 16,000 square metres, mostly within the pipeline corridor, the company said. Emulsion is a mixture of bitumen, water and sand.

BTW, that high tech brand new (1 year in operation) pipeline?

The warning system failed as well:

Nexen’s “failsafe” system didn’t detect massive pipeline spill: http://t.co/ULEnxlmQEN pic.twitter.com/DmChECTUX7

— Anna Mehler Paperny (@amp6) July 17, 2015

This is what happens when the private industries capture the government that is supposed to regulate it.

Get Ready to Eat Tainted Meat from China

No Comments

The WTO has just ruled that country of origin labels on meat are a violation of trade agreements:

Today’s ruling by a World Trade Organization (WTO) compliance panel against U.S. country-of-origin meat labeling (COOL) policies sets up a no-win dynamic, and the Obama administration should appeal the ruling, Public Citizen said.

If the administration were to weaken COOL, U.S. consumers would lose access to critical information about where their meat comes from at a time when consumer interest in such information is at an all-time high and opposition would only grow to the administration’s beleaguered trade agenda. If the administration again were to seek to comply with the WTO by strengthening COOL, then Mexico and Canada – the two countries that challenged the policy – likely would continue their case, even though cattle imports from Canada have increased since the 2013 strengthening of the policy.

The ruling further complicates the Obama administration’s stalled efforts to obtain Fast Track trade authority for two major agreements, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. Both of these pacts would expose the United States to more such challenges against U.S. consumer, environmental and other policies.

What Public Citizen does not get is that, “More such challenges against U.S. consumer, environmental and other policies,” is a feature, not a bug.

It is a goal of the neoliberal policy makers who create such deals to create a regulation free world.

They see it as leading to the Garden of Eden.

Me, I think that it’s more likely to lead to Lord of the Flies.

Pilots Refusing to Fly F-22 “Super Jet”

No Comments

In all the discussions of the relative merits of the F-22 Raptor vs. the F-35 Lightning II, one of the assumptions is that the F-22 actually works the way it’s supposed.

It appears that it doesn’t, and it’s bad enough that pilots are refusing to fly it:

While I was unable to attend this (30 April) morning’s briefing at Joint Base Langley-Eustis down in Hampton, Virginia, press reports from the event indicate that the US Air Force is admitting that a “small number” of Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor pilots are refusing to fly the jet.

“Obviously it’s a very sensitive thing because we are trying to ensure that the community fully understands all that we’re doing to try to get to a solution,” says Air Combat Command chief Gen Mike Hostage as quoted by the Associated Press.

The USAF has not found the root cause of 11 hypoxia-like cases since the Raptor fleet returned to flight in September after a near five-month stand-down. The F-22 fleet has flown about 12,000 times since then.

What’s more, there is currently no clear indication as to what is causing the problem: (paid subscription required)

The U.S. Air Force is narrowing its focus on new combinations of factors as it explores hypoxia events that claimed the life of one F-22 pilot and plagued the fleet for more than a year.

Service officials remain frustrated, that a “smoking gun” for the cause is still elusive despite an extraordinary effort to enlist scientists, the medical profession and fighter experts in a quest for answers.

The Lockheed Martin F-22 is the Air Force’s premier, twin-engine, stealthy fighter. It cost more than $200 million per copy to produce, including R&D. It entered service in 2005, and the 188th and final unit was delivered on May 2.

The problem came to light after a November 2010 crash that claimed the life of a pilot. The fleet was grounded for four months last year as officials scrambled to find a cause; flights resumed in September. Since then, Air Combat Command (ACC) officials say there have been 11 hypoxic events. The unknown nature of the incidents has rattled the service. “There is no startling similarity [in the incidents] other than . . . hypoxic-like indications,” says Gen. Mike Hostage, ACC commander.

………

Additionally, pilots are wearing a pulse oximeter to monitor oxygen-saturation levels during flight ; if it dips below 85%, they are required to return to base immediately (the data are downloaded after landing and not dispatched in real time).

Lyon acknowledges an impact on the training hours that pilots can achieve. Hostage adds that the incidents have prompted some pilots to decline flying the Raptor , though he says these incidents are the exception. He notes that any guidance, such as returning to base with a low oxygen-saturation level, can be waived in the event of an operational requirement for F-22 use.

In the meantime, the Air Force acknowledged first to Aviation Week that F-22s have been deployed to the Middle East. The aircraft are operating out of Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates.

So, they don’t know what is causing this, they have to require pilots to wear a blood oxygen sensor, and they are (finally) deploying some of them overseas.

My guess would be that they won’t be deploying to the 65,000 foot ceiling.

And the French Are Probably the Best in the World at Nuclear Safety

No Comments

But they just had an explosion at their nuclear reprocessing facility in Marcoule:

One person has been killed and four injured, one seriously, in a blast at the Marcoule nuclear site in France.

There was no risk of a radioactive leak after the blast, caused by a fire near a furnace in the Centraco radioactive waste storage site, said officials.

The owner of the southern French plant, national electricity provider EDF, said it had been “an industrial accident, not a nuclear accident”.

The cause of the blast was not yet known, said the company.

This has not been a good year for nuclear power, but the idea of dismissing the recent problems with nuclear power (Japan, Virginia, and now France) as some sort of Black Swan event is not rational.

The problems, at least those in Japan and Virginia, the jury is out on Marcoule, are an artifact of old, under-designed nuclear facilities, not simply a triple witching day for nukes.

No Comments

Never doubt the ability of Democrats to completely f%$# up the basic business of government. Remember the food safety bill that the Senate recently passed? Well it’s <a href=” />unconstitutional because it is a revenue bill that originated in the Senate, when the Constitution explicitly requires all revenue bills to originate in the house:

In what amounts to an epic constitutionality #fail, Senate Democrats may have blown their chances to see their food safety bill signed into law.

The U.S. constitution requires that any revenue-raising bill must originate in the House of Representatives. To honor this provision, the Senate often finds a discarded old House bill, strips it bare, and uses it as a “shell” and passes it back to the House.

They somehow forgot to do that this time.

Now House and Senate Democratic leaders are scrambling to figure out some procedural hocus-pocus that will allow them each to pass identical pieces of legislation before they leave for the holidays.

So our choice today is between the forces of evil and the gang that can’t shoot straight.

In China, He Would Already Would Be Dead

No Comments

As would be the regulators and judges that Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship has assiduously cultivated over the years.*

They would have been tried, convicted, and had a bullet in the base of their skull.

As it is, the Upper Big Branch Mine, where 25 miners have died and 4 are still missing, has a long history of repeated violations, 1,342 since 2005, and 50 just last month is a case of a wealthy business owner buying off the local Mandarins, and then having a very public disaster.

This is classically a situation where the Chinese legal machinery rolls into action and does a few executions for PR.

They’ve done it to corrupt brokers, and it appears that in this case, the model would be to execute Blankenship, the judge, and a few bureaucrats in the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

All in all it would make the world a better place, particularly in the case of Blankenship, whose company has left a trail of avoidable mining disasters behind it.

And then the meds kick in, and I remember that I oppose the death penalty.

*He quite literally bought a West Virginia Supreme Court justice some years back.

It’s Been a Weird Year for the Auto Industry

No Comments

Play them off, Jon Stewart

With the recall of more than 6½ million to repair a sticky accelerator pedal, Toyota’s sales fell by 47% from December, and 16% year over year, which was enough for both Ford and GM outsell to outsell the Japanese car firm.

Of course, we now know that it’s not just accelerator pedals, but also the brakes on its Prius hybrid, where it appears to be a software issue that creates unsteady breaking in the interplay between regenerative and mechanical braking.

It may not be any consolation to the Toyoda family, but Ford just rolled out a software update for its hybrid vehicles:

Ford Motor Co. announced Thursday that it will ask owners of its Ford Fusion Hybrid and Mercury Milan Hybrids sedan to bring their car into their Ford dealer to replace software that operates the car’s braking system.

While the cars maintain full braking ability, Ford said, drivers may occasionally experience a strange feeling in the brakes under certain circumstances.

So the latest problems may be an artifact of the move to “drive by wire” technologies for hybrid vehicles, you pretty much have to, because managing the battery/engine balance cannot be done manually by the driver.

In any case, the juxtaposxition of glitches in software and automotive hardware, it seems appropriate to invoke the proven to be false by Snopes joke:

At a computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release (by Mr. Welch himself) stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

  1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.
  2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
  3. Occasionally, executing a manoeuver such as a left-turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, and you would have to reinstall the engine.
  4. When your car died on the freeway for no reason, you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
  5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought ‘Car95’ or ‘CarNT’, and then added more seats.
  6. Apple would make a car powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five per cent of the roads.
  7. Oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single ‘general car default’ warning light.
  8. New seats would force every-one to have the same size butt.
  9. The airbag would say ‘Are you sure?’ before going off.
  10. Occasionally, for no reason, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed the radio antenna.
  11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of road maps from Rand-McNally (a subsidiary of GM), even though they neither need them nor want them. Trying to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50 per cent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
  12. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
  13. You would press the ‘start’ button to shut off the engine.

Everything old is weird again.

Were they Boinking Each Other?

No Comments

Have you heard about Northwest flight 188?

They missed Minneapolis. They overflew it, then turned, and returned to land at the airport, and the plane was promptly swarmed by cops.

The facts that we know are that the flight lost contact with air traffic controllers for over an hour, that they over-flew Minneapolis by about 150 miles, and landed over an hour late.

Well, at first they said that they had a “heated discussion,” and now they have provided further detail, saying that, “they became distracted during an extended discussion of crew scheduling that included their use of personal laptops.”

Seriously, this is nuts. They were out of contact with ATC for over an hour and missed Minneapolis by 150 miles.

This is not a discussion of “crew scheduling”.

Maybe one of them is sleeping with the other’s wife, maybe they are sleeping with each other, or maybe they were playing a MMORPG like World of Warcraft, or doing a Doom death match over a null modem cable.

It could also be that they just dozed off, the airlines are doing their best to work these guys to death…But a “heated discussion of crew scheduling”?

Yeah, and my dog ate my homework.

Just Go Read Michael Moore

No Comments

Basically, after years of no support for their unions, and bankruptcy laws that do nothing to reign in executive compensation, pilot salaries have become so low that pilots frequently have to work 2nd jobs, and no small number are on food stamps.

You get what you pay for, and right now, we are paying for lots of airliners crashing by not paying pilots enough.

Here’s a sample:

I told the guys that I have a whole section in my new movie about how pilots are treated (using pilots as only one example of how people’s wages have been slashed and the middle class decimated). In the movie I interview a pilot for a major airline who made $17,000 last year. For four months he was eligible — and received — food stamps. Another pilot in the film has a second job as a dog walker.

“I have a second job!,” the two pilots said in unison. One is a substitute teacher. The other works in a coffee shop. You know, maybe it’s just me, but the two occupations whose workers shouldn’t be humpin’ a second job are brain surgeons and airline pilots. Call me crazy.

There has been an aggressive war on the wages of people who actually do useful stuff, as opposed to bosses and investors, since the Carter administration, and this is not a good thing.