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Comment by flyingfences | Hacker News Reader

It's been one of the dominant news items in Flanders for the past year, to the extent that I'm surprised I haven't seen it mentioned in the English-speaking media until now. Entire towns have been placed under emergency health orders: don't eat the garden vegetables or chicken eggs, don't even drink the well water. For a long time after the contamination was discovered, 3M was denying responsibility, saying it wasn't coming from their factory, and thus they wouldn't pay for remediation, even when it was totally obvious.

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There is some news about it but it tends to be pretty local. The US is gigantic. Where I live there is tons of PFAS in the ground from air force fire fighting practice at a nearby airport. In the past few years its only recently got attention after being detected in ground water samples.

How were they denying it? That somehow PFAs were magically springing out of the ground that just so happened to be next to a factory of their’s?

There can’t be that many factories pumping out these chemicals in that area.

> How were they denying it?

"It's not us", "we have no idea", "our tests show we're clean" works for a shockingly long time in modern Western societies - the government has to prove that it is indeed 3M or whoever else who causes the pollution, and government agencies usually tend to take time until an investigation is complete. And even then, offenders can file a lawsuit... and until that lawsuit is finished and unappealable, it can take many years if not decades. And during that time, everyone claiming that a specific company is an offender is under severe risk of a defamation lawsuit.

We definitely need reforms both in staffing of regulatory agencies as well as in defamation lawsuits in cases of environment or labor offenses.

The companies can also try to do creative things through bankruptcy courts to avoid any negative consequences, like Johnson & Johnson is doing right now:

> J&J, which also makes products such as Tylenol and Band-Aid, assigned legal liability for the complaints to the spinoff company, which immediately filed for bankruptcy — a maneuver dubbed the "Texas two-step."

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/25/1083061992/johnson-johnson-wi...

FWIW this is the exact kind of thing that the plebs are told that bankruptcy courts will see right through - as an individual you have to be very worried about "piecing the corporate veil" of an LLC or corporation, to the extent that setting up an LLC doesn't actually make sense for many business activities. Yet a large company can pay enough lawyers and buy a corrupt Texas law to openly abuse the dynamic with impunity. It's bad enough that large entities can set up such fine-grained liability shields a priori while common individuals effectively cannot, but allowing them to be created a posteri is a slap in the face.

(This is an American perspective, but) I wonder how much a punitive strict liability regime could help with such stonewalling. Say after an environmental problem is discovered and publicized, the clock starts ticking on a hefty amount of penalty per day (irrespective of remediation costs and other tortious damages) for whomever is eventually found responsible for causing it. So the strategy of deny deny deny would end up accruing a very large penalty for willful pollution that could have been stopped earlier if the offender had chosen to act in good faith.

They are in an industrial park in the outskirts of Antwerp, the second-largest port in Europe. There was a chance it could have come from someone else. But theirs was the factory specifically making the stuff in bulk, so the chance it wasn't them was very, very small.

Lawyers did their jobs and sought alternative explanation where possible, exhausting the explanations until it wasn't reasonable or plausible. 3M is a huge corporation, and corporations run on algorithms coded as laws, regulations, and company rules, which are executed by employees.

It's not surprising or even noteworthy for 3M to deny culpability until they can't. Not that it's good or right or ethical, but corporations are rule based non human entities that shouldn't be viewed as equivalent to or extensions of humans. They often behave inhumanely and despicably because the rules allow them to do so. That's a failure of the rules and system in which they operate. Bad actors, like the Sackler family, can direct a corporation down a legitimately evil path, but usually the negative externalities aren't the fault of companies.

If 3M takes responsibility and cleans it up, or puts resources into figuring out how, I would see that as a good thing. If they shuffle things around, draw out the resolution, screw people over, then they'd be joining Nestlé and their ilk.

We need better corporate models and incentives. "What we can get away with" is not a great lower limit on behavior, but since it's what we have, we should assume that and account for it when regulating business.

> corporations are rule based non human entities that shouldn't be viewed as equivalent to or extensions of humans.

Thanks for this phrasing. Any books, essays or videos that you would recommend on this perspective? How about the Citizens United ruling in the U.S.?

> We need better corporate models and incentives. "What we can get away with" is not a great lower limit on behavior, but since it's what we have, we should assume that and account for it when regulating business.

What are some best practices or successful case studies for this approach? Could smart contracts and DAOs be regulated?

> Could smart contracts and DAOs be regulated?

They already are: contracts and companies have legal definitions and processes. If you shoehorn a blockchain in the middle it doesn't change that.

The law generally doesn't get involved in informal agreements, like smart contracts and DAOs usually are, but then you don't get much recourse if you get screwed over (unless it's outright fraudulent or otherwise illegal). Which, a lot of the time is the point of making it a DAO only and not having any actual legal entity.

There are also lots of cases where blatantly illegal activity is gotten away with right out in the open because law enforcement don't even know to look, or how to look. Ponzi schemes, pump and dump shitcoins, fake bids on nfts, and so on. We don't need new laws, we need educated enforcement. If I steal a million dollar painting, a million dollar lottery ticket, a million dollars cash, or a million dollars in bitcoin, the laws are there to protect the victim and require repayment and jail time and so on.

NFTs have some particularly egregious examples of scams and schemes by A-list famous people, and nothing gets done because everyone involved in the transactions are frothing at the mouth crazy over "web 3, omg."

As far as smart contracts go, basic control logic has to be built and a library of modules made available and a system cultivated by which users and developers can test and validate everything. Reversible transactions and failsafe mechanisms have to be the foundation of any investment so that when errors inevitably occur, someone in charge can unfuck things. A board of directors could be given individual keys in a multi-signature scheme, or so on.

Once or twice a month we're seeing crypto thefts in the 7+ figures and it's always because of obscure flaws in the code that could be avoided by developing on tested, verifiable, and validated code. That means a level of rigor only currently seen in international banking, nasa missions, and so on.

The big problem with crypto investing right now is "I wrote this smart contract last weekend at a hackathon, let's invest millions of dollars!"

Decentralization doesn't mean everything has to or should be decentralized - sometimes its enough that the overarching system is not under the thumb of an arbitrary authority. Centralized entities within the bitcoin or ethereun ecosystem will be the first crypto banks and exchanges, and you'll eventually be able to code legal requirements directly into contracts (and vice versa, once the ruling class starts to include people educated in cryptocurrency.)

Right, but all of this is orthogonal to the law. If you want a company that's run using a DAO, you can have one. If your smart contract doesn't contain stipulations disallowed in contact law, you can use it. Stealing and fraud is always illegal, regardless of the vehicle used, and still applies even if there isn't a legal contract. Sure, the police don't know enough to do a good job, but that doesn't make hacking and theft legal, just likelier to be gotten away with then a bank robbery.

Of course, few people actually use crypto as an adjunct to legal system: some specifically don't want the legal processes (and protections) to kick in, and some just want to have used pure crypto for it's own sake even when a existing systems would have sufficed.

Found an Oxford Press book on "Regulating Blockchain", https://global.oup.com/academic/product/regulating-blockchai...

Intro (PDF), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247150

To clarify this a bit. Belgium is a chemical production powerhouse, the port of Antwerp is brimming with chemical plants so "plausible" deniability.

> How were they denying it?

They ask the government to prove that it's all because of them, and nobody but them.

Then challenge and obstruct every step of that process.

We don't have magical Stark Trek tricorders, which beep when you stand next to the poisoned river, and beep louder when you point them at the PFAS factory. We have tests that take time to run, that can infer facts about the world - but we need to justify performing them, and then need to reason and argue that their results mean what they mean.

Link to proof of… any of this? I searched around (not just in English language sites) and all I could find was some news reports from November of 2021 that a study was being conducted. Link to the town health orders?

>Only now have measures been taken, as people living within a radius of 15km from Zwijndrecht being advised not to consume eggs laid in their own or anyone’s else’s gardens, whilst pregnant women and children also have to watch out for vegetables from one’s own garden.[0]

[0] https://www.brusselstimes.com/175561/3m-zwijndrecht-oosterwe...

This may not be the story the parent poster is referring to but here's an area near me under similar circumstances. As far as I'm aware of, this has happened in other places in the country. I've heard of similar contamination near military bases in Hawaii and also in Okinawa Japan.

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2022/mar/18/cdc-study-show...

Edit: I just realized the question was about a different comment. Leaving this here because I still think it's somewhat relevant and interesting. Apologies.

for example: https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20210622_94694594

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