Who would have thought that if you pile soil up in a tall pile as high and steep as you can, right next to a huge pit, then occasionally it might fall back into the pit...
The people on the right at that time (UK 1966) didn't hang as they were of an effectively protected capitalist caste with no regulation to hold them to account.
If you scroll down the wiki link you can see that the changes to the Mines and Quarries Act ultimately lead to things such as the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act (1974) which provided some teeth with which to bite the owners that cut corners, paid off inspectors, etc.
Swings and roundabouts though, a little while later came the Miners' Strike of 1984-1985 which was easily one of the most bitter industrial disputes Britain has ever seen.
a turning point in British history. Miners left their pits to fight the attempt of the Thatcher government to close the collieries, break the miners’ union and the labour movement in general, and open the way to a free market economy in which deregulated financial capitalism would be set free by the Big Bang of 1986. The full force of the police, the courts and the media were mobilised to defeat the miners, culminating with the battle of Orgreave on 18 June 1984. Thousands of miners were arrested, fined, imprisoned or sacked, some never to work again.
In retrospect, it was a battle that didn't matter. There were no profits to be had on either side - mining is best done mostly by machines, and will always be undercut by places with cheap labour and lax environmental regulations. The UK would never be able to compete. And besides, by the 80's it was already becoming clear that coal wasn't the future.
The UK and the US aren't really big players, the single largest market for mining stocks is the Toronto TSX by a long shot - many loosely commonwealth trans national companies (Australia, Canada, South Africa, etc) with Russian, Chinese, Brazilian partners, etc.
Machines play a big part - Western Australia mines almost a billion tonner of iron ore alone per annum with a tiny population, but cheap labour and lax environmental regs don't play nearly as great a part as you might think.
Long term stability on 20 to 50 year time scales is pretty desirable on projects with forward capital investments of 300+ million dollars, high skill levels and good wages improve success rates, the larger mining companies have been trending more and more toward being accountable with respect to populations affected and post operation rennovation .. although that's a shift from don't care and never so .. <shrug>
From a political "how society works" PoV the mining strikes and Thatcher push backs weren't about the coal either .. it was a reflection on how the new neoliberal 80s Tories intended to deal with those not aligned with their vision.
There were other directions to turn labour forces of the 80s toward, but the vision as such for that time was propert development pyramids, fintech, and all that jazz. Better to be a barrow boy in The City than a gay dancing coal miner.
So offer the mine to the miners, if they each put up GBP nx100k capital. See if they really want the risk of loss/mortgage/debt in return for a job. Perhaps they know something beneficial that management doesn't? Workers can be capitalists if they know the business and want to take a risk. Get the responses, end of story.
Yet it led to a huge (literal) battle? It was all political: an attack on the gov by the communist miners' union, backed by the Labour Party. It was never about economics, which were obviously terminal. Everybody knew that, on both sides.
Anyone who knows that an industry is uneconomic, but wants the gov to own and run the industry, just to lose taxpayer money and pay wages to his union is a communist.
(The barrier for gov ownership is slightly lower than a capitalist, because the gov has to pay transitory unemployment benefit to those put out of work, and it was still not economic).
Actually, that person is not just a small-c communist interested in the community, but a big-C Marxist, who wants the gov to lose money for his selfish reasons.
Are you perhaps, tentatively, obliquely, hinting, in a roundabout fashion, with elliptical prose, that Arthur Scargill was not a communist..... fascinating.
Have you ever done any manual work for a living? Worked with any miners in trade unions? Met any actual communists? Maybe worked in Rio Tinto as a labour negotiator?
Some of that might help you sound more grounded an less disconnected from the world as it is.
Scargill was a commnist in his youth, he veered elsewhere on the left later in life - but more to the point here, Scargill was not the trade union, he was a single human being.
Not all miners in trade unions are communist, far from it; and not all actual communists are miners (likely very few), we're in a world of Venn diagrams here and broad reductionist brush strokes don't achieve much beyond polarisation
Are you talking about profitable RIO mines? Then there is an argument to be had about how those profits are split between shareholders, workers (incl managers), and the national gov in royalties. Off-topic and this margin too small ... etc.
But that was not the case in the British coal industry in the 1980s. Only a handful of marginal mines survived into the 2000s. The last coal-fired power stations will close this year.
No profits, no discussion (except the offer I mentioned above, which is the only true test of whether it is really profitable, on a risk-adjusted basis, judged by those with the most information).
maybe the particular case you state is accurate - no idea here. But a summary report after the COP 28 event in December stated clearly that there will be no policy action to stop coal extraction and use. It is my understanding that very large "modern" economies in various parts of the world are absolutely continuing.
Profit and loss can be gamed. Old generals always fight the previous wars.
> Anyone who knows that an industry is uneconomic, but wants the gov to own and run the industry, just to lose taxpayer money and pay wages to his union is a communist
Doesn't this also apply to public transport, roads, waste collection, education, and most other public goods?
> The people on the right at that time (UK 1966) didn't hang as they were of an effectively protected capitalist caste with no regulation to hold them to account.
Which people are you referring to? Since the National Coal Board was running the mine, I wouldn't have expected capitalists to be to blame, and the Labour party were in power at the time of the disaster. I'm not very familiar with this, so may be missing something.
> Since the National Coal Board was running the mine, I wouldn't have expected capitalists to be to blame, and the Labour party were in power at the time of the disaster.
Look at what people and organisations do and not what they call themselves;
Coal reserves were nationalised during the war in 1942 and placed under the control of the Coal Commission, but the mining industry remained in private hands.
So UK centralised control of divying up resources, mine owners running the operations (and the usual UK historic overlap between capitalists and Peers with seats in the house of Lords, etc.)
Straight out of the gate, the NCB was headed up by Lord Hyndley [1] as chairman (director of the Bank of England between 1931-1945, managing director of Powell Duffryn Ltd, collieries, 1931-1946).
NCB actions in the early days were to maximise returns using public funds for improvements that benefitted private owners with little improvement in safety or working conditons:
the NCB spent more than £550 million on major improvements and new sinkings, much of it to mechanise the coal-getting process underground and by 1957 Britain's collieries were producing cheaper coal than anywhere in Europe.
The next chairman was nominally a socialist, trade unionists, man of the people etc. but that rapidly proved to be on paper and for show - born from merchants and placed as an official in the Allied Workers union more as a representative of shopkeepers than shopworkers, he proved to be the ideal paper tiger to head the NCB
Alfred Robens, later elevated to Baron Robens of Woldingham, loved the trappings of power and oversaw policy implementations that originated from mine owners and government policy before his tenure; substantial cuts in the mining industry and neglect of spoil heaps, things that lead directly to the Aberfan disaster.
And that was the the first two tenures of the NCB - nominally running coal for "the benefit of the people", actually running coal to maximise throughput and profits for owners.
Those responsible, then, include all the mine owners with a footprint in the House of Lords, all the various enablers on the committees that set policy for the NCB ala Yes, Minister, the founding chairman, and the second chairman who was parachuted with gifts into an established front.
Thanks for providing more detail, I'm happy to agree that some of the characters were very dubious, but I think you're misreading some parts regarding whether the NCB owned the mines:
> Coal reserves were nationalised during the war in 1942 and placed under the control of the Coal Commission, but the mining industry remained in private hands.
This quote is in the background section of the Wikipedia article - the NCB was formed 4 years later and "took over the United Kingdom's collieries on 'vesting day', 1 January 1947" as described.
The legislation (in particular the first subsections of each of [1] and [2]) support this, the previous owners were compensated, but did not own the coal mines after the vesting day.
> I think you're misreading some parts regarding whether the NCB owned the mines
Fair point, I'm Australian and very second hand to the fine detail.
On the flip side, I'm > 60 and have been around mining most of my life, working in, geophysical exploration and mapping, global mineral intelligence for markets, etc. and I remain deeply skeptical about underlying realities of control versus appearances.
The UK NCB, from many snippets of conversations with various UK people on both sides of politics, (including some off record comments from Alistair McAlpine, Thatcher's political party treasurer) funneled a great deal of money by various means back to the usual suspects .. the former owners of the coal fields .. now cashed up "coal experts" that continued to profit by providing "services" and "advice" to the NCB.
I think we can agree that the actions of the NCB in prioritising resource extraction over mine safety led to several mine disasters including this big one at hand.
I'm claiming that while the NCB was on paper some kind of peoples ownership of coal, it was still essentially being run from behind the scenes by the same class of people that once owned the coal, who still profited from the policy decisions they pushed through, etc. etc.
I admit I missed the detail about the transfer of ownership but I'm unsurprised, it's a not uncommon pattern and one that has been roundly satirised in UK media such as Private Eye and Yes, Minister.
I still lay the blame for such disasters at the feet of those on committees making actual policy and decisions for the NCB .. and from what I can read that does trace back to Lords, bankers, and their proxies.
The government outsourced managing Aberfan and most other mines to a National Coal Board. The tribunal who investigated the disaster was very critical of said board, but it wasn't the done thing in those days to go after senior officials.
Indeed, the disaster was one of the main inputs that led to the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the act under which senior officials nowadays can be (and sometimes are) prosecuted for negligence leading to deaths.
I find comments like this not very helpful. I mean, sure tall things fall, but you have presumably competent people working with these things, people that understand risks and do this all their life. Certainly people that know more than you and me. Somehow, they failed on this, and there's lessons to learn here, but smug "hurr-durr, don't stack things tall" is not it.
> you have presumably competent people working with these things, people that understand risks and do this all their life.
I don't know if you are Turkish, but unfortunately this statement is not a given in Turkey, mostly because of corruption, nepotism, and a general lack of respect for knowledge and experience.
I personally know some of the people who built this mine.
I'm not sure about Turkey, but everywhere it's common to fire the guy that is worried about security and doesn't want to cut corners. Even if they are competent, some people must choose eating or safety.
When you consider the costs of "doing it the right way", the reasoning becomes much more complex no matter how competent people are. In addition to all the corruption, we also culturally tend to be more risk-tolerant when it comes to safety IMO.
This is a rude and uncharitable (bordering on disingenuous) paraphrase of the post you're replying to. The fact that you tossed in an extraneous "hurr-durr" of your own seems to indicate that you feel particularly incapable of responding to what was actually said.
What should I be responding to more exactly? Someone saying platitudes while being smug? Yes, I am incapable of responding because there is nothing to respond _to_.
Other than rage comments of political and corporate incompetence, is there a sounder explanation of inadequate preparation and response in Türkiye? The vast majority of Turks I meet/see don’t seem to care about fully understanding their problems and putting in appropriate work. But I don’t understand why this is.
My pet theory: The daily agenda is dizzying. There is also always several existential/deeper issue looming around/inside. So we can't have time to discuss small daily things, that actually affect quality of life! It has been like this for decades, maybe more than that. It is sad really. Countries also have an attention span, and we can't pick long-term important stuff over immediate stuff.
Because millennials (and later) think the vertical aspect ratio is so cool and refuse to flip the phone to record video. The vast majority of video is landscape oriented, so the default players all have that aspect. People seem to very against black mattes to fit differing aspect ratio content than the frame, so some creative type came up with this.
Okay, for the pedantics, broadcast news is a landscape format. So if someone provides content that was recorded in portrait, something must be done to it. The black bars from matting the content is still despised, primarily by the same crowd that is shooting portrait video.
media critical thinking -- all news is a representation in language and pictures, therefore inevitably contains contrary, noisy or misleading content (same with the perception of the users). Since news is a social phenomenon, there is a chain of gather, produce, disseminate, consume involving many people over time.
From an Economist Magazine view, somehow bills have to be paid, whether through government and taxation, private expenditure, for-profit basis or others.. Generative AI decisions will arrive from command-and-control basis in most cases.
Generative AI in News is very likely, for something that is simple like saving money on background screens for newscasts, less wholesome like replacing newscasters and journalists with machine inputs, or at a meta-level like propaganda in content and editing. In the leading economies of the world, this will happen.
Solutions are partly market, partly political.. not very personal -- one person boycotting will not change outcomes -- IMHO.
There's nothing good about portrait oriented video, so it's fitting. /s
i feel like i'm conversing with a fence post. what are your brilliant ideas to solve the problem? all i'm reading here are complaints. don't be that person.
the final orientation of the video cannot be changed. it is a spec with hard defined parameters by a standardization body. the easiest thing is to just fit it into the frame with the empty space filled with mattes. lots of people do not like that, so other things have been used to fill the space. just like shooting video in portrait, trends have been established and this is the current trend. you don't like it? stop shooting video in portrait and sending it to the news where it's going to be played back in a landscape format. you are the square peg in a round hole.
A huge proportion of video is viewed on phones, in which case vertical orientation is far more comfortable and convenient. It used to be the case the landscape was the "correct" format, but that has rapidly changed with the change in how video is watched.
This could be a remnant of the switchover from SD to HD resolution in home TVs. The nicer TVs that could use the new resolutions also suffered from burn in, so you wanted something in the margins for the content still in SD.
There also appears to be a significant shift between the images where the after image is up and to the right of the before image. But it might also be a distortion issue that isn't even across the image. The optical illusion, plus the changes in the mine due to mining make the comparison difficult.
One of the posts here says they were working on the surface though. That does not strike me as survivable. I find it hard to imagine anything remains to be found.
Apparently the nine in question were working underground, there is probably no realistic chance of survival if massive amounts of earth are covering the entrances.
Those Chilean miners were down there for quite some time. But ye the outlook is not good. I guess there is a fundamental difference in how these mines collapsed. Unless any pocket would have some "earth radio", undamaged telephone line or something I don't see how the rescuers even would begin knowing where to look.
There's a high probability they weren't even on site and had a coworker clock in for them, or something like that. They might still be enjoying the wedding of a 3rd grade cousin somewhere in the countryside, oblivious to what has happened ;-)
At least that's what my turkish coworker told me last week
What is a "leach heap" in an open-pit gold mine? Is it cyanide waste?
- "Gold cyanidation (also known as the cyanide process or the MacArthur–Forrest process) is a hydrometallurgical technique for extracting gold from low-grade ore by converting the gold to a water-soluble coordination complex. It is the most commonly used leaching process for gold extraction.[1] [...] Production of reagents for mineral processing to recover gold represents more than 70% of cyanide consumption globally."
[late edit]: The Hurriyet news article linked in the OP confirms this,
- "Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar stated that even if the miners are reached, the entire soil mass will still be removed from the area, addressing concerns about possible environmental damage due to the cyanide-tainted waste soil used in the gold extraction process."
[edit 2]: A Turkish-language source cited in Wikipedia suggests there's a risk of this waste contaminating the Euphrates river. This mine does appear to be located right next to that river, and uphill of it.
> The ultimate cost of this landslide is likely to be many multiples of the money saved on mining operations through inadequate construction and/or operation of the leach heap.
Ah, but who are the people who profited from cutting corners, and who are the people who will bear the cost of the cleanup? If these are not the exact same set of people, then it was a net profit to collapse this mine and kill these men. The profiteering will continue apace, because the system incentivizes it.
The article does mention that some people were arrested, but that seems to be for direct negligence, not systematic negligence. If the highest-ranking person who sees consequences from this is merely a single VP, then it sounds like the rest of the executive parasites might be in the clear.
> Ah, but who are the people who profited from cutting corners, and who are the people who will bear the cost of the cleanup? If these are not the exact same set of people, then it was a net profit to collapse this mine and kill these men. The profiteering will continue apace, because the system incentivizes it.
It’s a mine. The cost of the cleanup refers to what it will cost to remove the collapsed dirt and get back to the layers at which they were mining.
So to answer your question: The cost is borne by the mine operators if they want to resume mining.
> The article does mention that some people were arrested, but that seems to be for direct negligence, not systematic negligence. If the highest-ranking person who sees consequences from this is merely a single VP, then it sounds like the rest of the executive parasites might be in the clear.
Kind of wild that a country throws people into jail before an investigation can even be performed, yet people are out for blood and demanding that, what, the entire company leadership is thrown in jail? Everyone who might possibly be involved?
There are countries where governments will use their power to throw large numbers of people in jail to seek revenge for problems, but they aren’t the workers’ paradise you imagine. They’re just terribly oppressive regimes. It’s also unlikely that these situations would only result in executives going to jail, because the people on the front lines (who are not entirely free from involvement in decision making) tend to get blamed too.
Reactionary jailing feeds people’s revenge fantasies, but it’s actually a really terrible and scary way to have to live for everyone.
There are a lot of extremely cynical assumptions in this comment.
> The cost is borne by the mine operators if they want to resume mining.
In my country the tradition is:
1. Mine operators get a mining permit by swearing they'll clean up all the pollution and restore the site to its original condition once the mine is exhausted.
2. Mine operates for years, paying out $$$ to bosses and shareholders
3. Mine gets exhausted or becomes uneconomic to operate, company declares bankruptcy, tax payer has to fund the cleanup
That's a serious problem, but in this particular case it's unlikely to happen. This mine is currently in use, so presumably there's still left in the ground to extract. Therefore the mine owners are still incentivized to clean up the landslide. Moreover, let's not forget this landslide happened entirely inside the of the confines of an open pit mine. The land is already fucked. The landslide was unlikely to have made it worse.
There's a lot of issues with how mining is done, and how owners are held to account, but kneejerk calls for immediate punishment and/or commenting is entirely not constructive.
Sounds like the USA. The oil and gas industry has an extra twist in #3 which would read:
3. Producing field get exhausted or becomes uneconomic to operate, company sells field to smaller less-capitalized operator who reworks some wells in an effort to pay back their investment.
4. Smaller operator eventually sells to a mom-and-pop operator who operates a series of stripper wells in the field. Once production from these wells decline to the point where this under-capitalized operator can no longer profit the field is abandoned and tax payers are left to fund the cleanup.
All of this can take decades before abandonment and any technological advance during that time could make the field more attractive to large operators who would then buy these fields from the mom-and-pops and mid-size operators so they could squeeze even more profits before cycling back into the later steps of the loop.
Over a long enough time period you have a Texas which is dotted with tens of thousands of orphaned or abandoned wells. Many of these wells leak oil, natural gas, or brines into shallow surface aquifers when the old production strings inevitably rust away. The problem is worse when new tech maintains production in an area since wells that were abandoned years or decades ago but never plugged are effectively open to atmospheric pressure and when a technique like hydraulic fracturing is used downhole, it repressurizes formations and can force fluids up thru unplugged wellbores to the surface where, if controls are not in place, fluid spills are inevitable.
When that happens in an area that had been abandoned the operator responsible for the increased pressure would argue that cleanup is not their responsibility since the previous owner was responsible (had paid a bond to the state) for the plugging and abandonment of the leaking well.
It's more complicated than this but you get the idea. It's never their problem and the wrong people tend to get stuck with remediation expenses.
For all the HN folks, they had a very big arsenic pool near and it was used for gold mining. It will probably affect life around there because of very close river called Firat river.
79 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 97.2 ms ] threadA 5 year old on the beach could tell you that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster
Holy shit.
And the senior officials got off with a slap on the wrist. That reads like a complete failure of the government.
Why did the right people not hang for that?
If you scroll down the wiki link you can see that the changes to the Mines and Quarries Act ultimately lead to things such as the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act (1974) which provided some teeth with which to bite the owners that cut corners, paid off inspectors, etc.
Swings and roundabouts though, a little while later came the Miners' Strike of 1984-1985 which was easily one of the most bitter industrial disputes Britain has ever seen.
https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/miners-strike-1984-5-oral-histo...https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/27/40-yea...
All part of the delicate balance between those many hordes wanting good wages and working conditions and those few that want all the profits.
The UK and the US aren't really big players, the single largest market for mining stocks is the Toronto TSX by a long shot - many loosely commonwealth trans national companies (Australia, Canada, South Africa, etc) with Russian, Chinese, Brazilian partners, etc.
Machines play a big part - Western Australia mines almost a billion tonner of iron ore alone per annum with a tiny population, but cheap labour and lax environmental regs don't play nearly as great a part as you might think.
Long term stability on 20 to 50 year time scales is pretty desirable on projects with forward capital investments of 300+ million dollars, high skill levels and good wages improve success rates, the larger mining companies have been trending more and more toward being accountable with respect to populations affected and post operation rennovation .. although that's a shift from don't care and never so .. <shrug>
From a political "how society works" PoV the mining strikes and Thatcher push backs weren't about the coal either .. it was a reflection on how the new neoliberal 80s Tories intended to deal with those not aligned with their vision.
There were other directions to turn labour forces of the 80s toward, but the vision as such for that time was propert development pyramids, fintech, and all that jazz. Better to be a barrow boy in The City than a gay dancing coal miner.
Yet it led to a huge (literal) battle? It was all political: an attack on the gov by the communist miners' union, backed by the Labour Party. It was never about economics, which were obviously terminal. Everybody knew that, on both sides.
Get a grip.
Break free of whatever bicameral Red V. Blue blinkered global view you have - there are more shades across the world than Joe McCathy dreamed of.
(The barrier for gov ownership is slightly lower than a capitalist, because the gov has to pay transitory unemployment benefit to those put out of work, and it was still not economic).
Actually, that person is not just a small-c communist interested in the community, but a big-C Marxist, who wants the gov to lose money for his selfish reasons.
Are you perhaps, tentatively, obliquely, hinting, in a roundabout fashion, with elliptical prose, that Arthur Scargill was not a communist..... fascinating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Scargill#Socialist_Labo...
Have you ever done any manual work for a living? Worked with any miners in trade unions? Met any actual communists? Maybe worked in Rio Tinto as a labour negotiator?
Some of that might help you sound more grounded an less disconnected from the world as it is.
Scargill was a commnist in his youth, he veered elsewhere on the left later in life - but more to the point here, Scargill was not the trade union, he was a single human being.
Not all miners in trade unions are communist, far from it; and not all actual communists are miners (likely very few), we're in a world of Venn diagrams here and broad reductionist brush strokes don't achieve much beyond polarisation
But that was not the case in the British coal industry in the 1980s. Only a handful of marginal mines survived into the 2000s. The last coal-fired power stations will close this year.
No profits, no discussion (except the offer I mentioned above, which is the only true test of whether it is really profitable, on a risk-adjusted basis, judged by those with the most information).
Profit and loss can be gamed. Old generals always fight the previous wars.
Doesn't this also apply to public transport, roads, waste collection, education, and most other public goods?
Which people are you referring to? Since the National Coal Board was running the mine, I wouldn't have expected capitalists to be to blame, and the Labour party were in power at the time of the disaster. I'm not very familiar with this, so may be missing something.
Look at what people and organisations do and not what they call themselves;
So UK centralised control of divying up resources, mine owners running the operations (and the usual UK historic overlap between capitalists and Peers with seats in the house of Lords, etc.)Straight out of the gate, the NCB was headed up by Lord Hyndley [1] as chairman (director of the Bank of England between 1931-1945, managing director of Powell Duffryn Ltd, collieries, 1931-1946).
NCB actions in the early days were to maximise returns using public funds for improvements that benefitted private owners with little improvement in safety or working conditons:
The next chairman was nominally a socialist, trade unionists, man of the people etc. but that rapidly proved to be on paper and for show - born from merchants and placed as an official in the Allied Workers union more as a representative of shopkeepers than shopworkers, he proved to be the ideal paper tiger to head the NCBAlfred Robens, later elevated to Baron Robens of Woldingham, loved the trappings of power and oversaw policy implementations that originated from mine owners and government policy before his tenure; substantial cuts in the mining industry and neglect of spoil heaps, things that lead directly to the Aberfan disaster.
And that was the the first two tenures of the NCB - nominally running coal for "the benefit of the people", actually running coal to maximise throughput and profits for owners.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hindley,_1st_Viscount_Hyn...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Robens,_Baron_Robens_of...
Those responsible, then, include all the mine owners with a footprint in the House of Lords, all the various enablers on the committees that set policy for the NCB ala Yes, Minister, the founding chairman, and the second chairman who was parachuted with gifts into an established front.
> Coal reserves were nationalised during the war in 1942 and placed under the control of the Coal Commission, but the mining industry remained in private hands.
This quote is in the background section of the Wikipedia article - the NCB was formed 4 years later and "took over the United Kingdom's collieries on 'vesting day', 1 January 1947" as described.
The legislation (in particular the first subsections of each of [1] and [2]) support this, the previous owners were compensated, but did not own the coal mines after the vesting day.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/9-10/59/section/5/...
[2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/9-10/59/schedule/F...
Fair point, I'm Australian and very second hand to the fine detail.
On the flip side, I'm > 60 and have been around mining most of my life, working in, geophysical exploration and mapping, global mineral intelligence for markets, etc. and I remain deeply skeptical about underlying realities of control versus appearances.
The UK NCB, from many snippets of conversations with various UK people on both sides of politics, (including some off record comments from Alistair McAlpine, Thatcher's political party treasurer) funneled a great deal of money by various means back to the usual suspects .. the former owners of the coal fields .. now cashed up "coal experts" that continued to profit by providing "services" and "advice" to the NCB.
I think we can agree that the actions of the NCB in prioritising resource extraction over mine safety led to several mine disasters including this big one at hand.
I'm claiming that while the NCB was on paper some kind of peoples ownership of coal, it was still essentially being run from behind the scenes by the same class of people that once owned the coal, who still profited from the policy decisions they pushed through, etc. etc.
I admit I missed the detail about the transfer of ownership but I'm unsurprised, it's a not uncommon pattern and one that has been roundly satirised in UK media such as Private Eye and Yes, Minister.
I still lay the blame for such disasters at the feet of those on committees making actual policy and decisions for the NCB .. and from what I can read that does trace back to Lords, bankers, and their proxies.
Indeed, the disaster was one of the main inputs that led to the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the act under which senior officials nowadays can be (and sometimes are) prosecuted for negligence leading to deaths.
I don't know if you are Turkish, but unfortunately this statement is not a given in Turkey, mostly because of corruption, nepotism, and a general lack of respect for knowledge and experience.
I personally know some of the people who built this mine.
This is a rude and uncharitable (bordering on disingenuous) paraphrase of the post you're replying to. The fact that you tossed in an extraneous "hurr-durr" of your own seems to indicate that you feel particularly incapable of responding to what was actually said.
So the more general question is where group differences originate, and you would like to discuss this on HN. I‘ll go grab the popcorn.
[1] https://www.veryansintv.com/veryansin-tv-aylarca-haykirdi-ik... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6jJjDjylPg
Then how fast it is. Utterly terrifying.
Why is this difficult to understand?
I'm not so sure, by hours created and viewed in recent years that may no longer be true with TikTok / Reels / Stories / Shorts.
From an Economist Magazine view, somehow bills have to be paid, whether through government and taxation, private expenditure, for-profit basis or others.. Generative AI decisions will arrive from command-and-control basis in most cases.
Generative AI in News is very likely, for something that is simple like saving money on background screens for newscasts, less wholesome like replacing newscasters and journalists with machine inputs, or at a meta-level like propaganda in content and editing. In the leading economies of the world, this will happen.
Solutions are partly market, partly political.. not very personal -- one person boycotting will not change outcomes -- IMHO.
i feel like i'm conversing with a fence post. what are your brilliant ideas to solve the problem? all i'm reading here are complaints. don't be that person.
the final orientation of the video cannot be changed. it is a spec with hard defined parameters by a standardization body. the easiest thing is to just fit it into the frame with the empty space filled with mattes. lots of people do not like that, so other things have been used to fill the space. just like shooting video in portrait, trends have been established and this is the current trend. you don't like it? stop shooting video in portrait and sending it to the news where it's going to be played back in a landscape format. you are the square peg in a round hole.
The new image looks like the pit is to the left and the old image looks like the left side is a huge pile.
It just looked so much like a pit when I saw it at first that I couldn’t get that thought out of my mind.
https://ramblemaps.com/why-does-sunlight-come-from-north
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68287504
My feelings go out to the nine missing people.
At least that's what my turkish coworker told me last week
- "Gold cyanidation (also known as the cyanide process or the MacArthur–Forrest process) is a hydrometallurgical technique for extracting gold from low-grade ore by converting the gold to a water-soluble coordination complex. It is the most commonly used leaching process for gold extraction.[1] [...] Production of reagents for mineral processing to recover gold represents more than 70% of cyanide consumption globally."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_cyanidation
[late edit]: The Hurriyet news article linked in the OP confirms this,
- "Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar stated that even if the miners are reached, the entire soil mass will still be removed from the area, addressing concerns about possible environmental damage due to the cyanide-tainted waste soil used in the gold extraction process."
https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/35-mln-cubic-meters-of-soi...
[edit 2]: A Turkish-language source cited in Wikipedia suggests there's a risk of this waste contaminating the Euphrates river. This mine does appear to be located right next to that river, and uphill of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çöpler_mine_disaster#Aftermath
https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B025'33.6%22N+38%C2%...
[edit 3]: Here's a long-form Turkish journalism (published in English) discussing this question:
https://www.duvarenglish.com/experts-warn-of-severe-cyanide-... ("Experts warn of severe cyanide exposure to Euphrates as mine located in water basin")
Why are some people just knee-jerk 'insert thing here' deniers? What is that?
Ah, but who are the people who profited from cutting corners, and who are the people who will bear the cost of the cleanup? If these are not the exact same set of people, then it was a net profit to collapse this mine and kill these men. The profiteering will continue apace, because the system incentivizes it.
The article does mention that some people were arrested, but that seems to be for direct negligence, not systematic negligence. If the highest-ranking person who sees consequences from this is merely a single VP, then it sounds like the rest of the executive parasites might be in the clear.
It’s a mine. The cost of the cleanup refers to what it will cost to remove the collapsed dirt and get back to the layers at which they were mining.
So to answer your question: The cost is borne by the mine operators if they want to resume mining.
> The article does mention that some people were arrested, but that seems to be for direct negligence, not systematic negligence. If the highest-ranking person who sees consequences from this is merely a single VP, then it sounds like the rest of the executive parasites might be in the clear.
Kind of wild that a country throws people into jail before an investigation can even be performed, yet people are out for blood and demanding that, what, the entire company leadership is thrown in jail? Everyone who might possibly be involved?
There are countries where governments will use their power to throw large numbers of people in jail to seek revenge for problems, but they aren’t the workers’ paradise you imagine. They’re just terribly oppressive regimes. It’s also unlikely that these situations would only result in executives going to jail, because the people on the front lines (who are not entirely free from involvement in decision making) tend to get blamed too.
Reactionary jailing feeds people’s revenge fantasies, but it’s actually a really terrible and scary way to have to live for everyone.
There are a lot of extremely cynical assumptions in this comment.
In my country the tradition is:
1. Mine operators get a mining permit by swearing they'll clean up all the pollution and restore the site to its original condition once the mine is exhausted.
2. Mine operates for years, paying out $$$ to bosses and shareholders
3. Mine gets exhausted or becomes uneconomic to operate, company declares bankruptcy, tax payer has to fund the cleanup
There's a lot of issues with how mining is done, and how owners are held to account, but kneejerk calls for immediate punishment and/or commenting is entirely not constructive.
3. Producing field get exhausted or becomes uneconomic to operate, company sells field to smaller less-capitalized operator who reworks some wells in an effort to pay back their investment.
4. Smaller operator eventually sells to a mom-and-pop operator who operates a series of stripper wells in the field. Once production from these wells decline to the point where this under-capitalized operator can no longer profit the field is abandoned and tax payers are left to fund the cleanup.
All of this can take decades before abandonment and any technological advance during that time could make the field more attractive to large operators who would then buy these fields from the mom-and-pops and mid-size operators so they could squeeze even more profits before cycling back into the later steps of the loop.
Over a long enough time period you have a Texas which is dotted with tens of thousands of orphaned or abandoned wells. Many of these wells leak oil, natural gas, or brines into shallow surface aquifers when the old production strings inevitably rust away. The problem is worse when new tech maintains production in an area since wells that were abandoned years or decades ago but never plugged are effectively open to atmospheric pressure and when a technique like hydraulic fracturing is used downhole, it repressurizes formations and can force fluids up thru unplugged wellbores to the surface where, if controls are not in place, fluid spills are inevitable.
When that happens in an area that had been abandoned the operator responsible for the increased pressure would argue that cleanup is not their responsibility since the previous owner was responsible (had paid a bond to the state) for the plugging and abandonment of the leaking well.
It's more complicated than this but you get the idea. It's never their problem and the wrong people tend to get stuck with remediation expenses.