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Comment by alxmdev | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't help that there are mountains of cash at stake. Suppose scientists determined that 5G networks are harmful to people's health, what then? Are people gonna stop using cellphones? Are companies like T-Mobile and Verizon gonna just fold? Will governments pass legislation to ban this equipment? If there's truth to this, it won't come out full force for decades, like it was with smoking cigarettes.

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>Suppose scientists determined that 5G networks are harmful to people's health, what then? Are people gonna stop using cellphones? Are companies like T-Mobile and Verizon gonna just fold?

Eh, they can just not roll out 5G?

How confident are you in that statement, given the vested interests involved and their track record for greed and dishonesty?

The scientists in Australia determined that the Adani coal mine was unsafe or at the least uncertain but their findings were ignored and discredited because it would be a huge loss of profits in one company. The company was recently exposed demanding a list of names of each of the researchers so they could trawl over their social media profiles to discredit them.

And Google could have decided to "just stay out of China" and avoid all the PR scandals.

But in the real world humans are too greedy for their own good. The first carriers to adopt 5G stand to make billions in extra revenue by charging people more for it or getting them to use more data for the same cost/GB.

You’ve got the incentives wrong here: if 5G was harmful, then telecom executives would not roll it out, because they and their families could not avoid it if they did.

This is similar to why smog and particulate air pollution got improved: because car and energy executives have to breathe air too.

You are right. This is also why the threat of global warming was nipped in the bud by thoughtful energy company executives. Their children have to live on earth too.

This is a fair shot and a strong counterexample.

> This is similar to why smog and particulate air pollution got improved:

Pretty sure it was do to legislation not the good will of executives. Greed is a hell of a drug.

- https://www.marketplace.org/2014/07/14/la-smog-battle-agains...

Perfect can be the enemy of good.

At least on the east coast, smog was improved considerably when the coal plants were finally allowed to update to newer tech.

The owners had wanted to update their plants for several years, but the EPA was preventing them from doing that unless they met an unrealistic target. So the plants continued to unnecessarily spew pollution because of the standoff. The EPA was finally overruled and the updates got the coal plants to about 95% of what the EPA wanted.

I'm 99% sure it wasn't energy executives that lobbied for the clean air act and on second read I feel like you might be being sarcastic

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