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Comment by loxias | Hacker News Reader

The prowess of materials science in companies like 3M and Dupont never ceases to amaze me. Just when I think I've seen it all with fiberglass tape and kapton tape...

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Their "prowess" saw DuPont give cigarettes laced with new toxic chemicals they made to their employees to test the chemicals effects.

Every human on earth has Dupont chemicals in their blood that will never go away, but accumulate over the course of our lives. These are "forever chemicals" that never break down. When you die you pass them on. They are in the animals you eat, in the beverages and water you drink, they are in the vegetables you eat. Your descendants a millennium from now will be eating them still, plus all the new ones produced between now and then.

This is the result of American capitalism and the worlds most corrupt banana republic legislature where bribery is so bad they made it legal.

Those absolutely evil bottom dwellers at Dupont you admire so much produce hundreds of toxic chemicals, and your bribed government allows them to produce and market these chemicals and spread them around the world without consequence.

Fuck Dupont and Fuck 3M. They are poisoning the planet.

https://www.netflix.com/title/81192027

That Netflix link is not available everywhere and also quite time-consuming to review. Obviously it is also a dramatic piece rather than a (semi-)scientific. I had a brief look at the PFAS wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_subst...), which is what that Netflix movie seems to be about, but it's also quite wordy and the claims you make can not be found on there as-is. Maybe you want to consider adding a better source.

https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/dark-waters-chemica...

Basically, the US government allows companies to sell new chemicals they invent, completely unregulated. You could make a toxin today that kills everyone who touches it 10 years after they ingest it, and you would be free to market and sell this product. The chemical is presumed safe until evidence to the contrary comes to the knowledge of the govt.

That's how Dupont poisoned people all over the world. They sold unregulated chemicals they invented that nobody but them knew about.

One report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) found PFAS in the blood of 97% of Americans... The number of new PFAS chemicals appear to be increasing, and exposure is difficult to assess. - https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/pfc/index.cfm

There is now REACH in EU.

https://echa.europa.eu/regulations/reach/understanding-reach

Not sure if you'll consider this a more scientific source, but John Oliver also did a piece about PFAS: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9W74aeuqsiU.

The list of issues that the wiki article claims are "high certainty" is also quite concerning to me: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_sub...

At the very least, seems that the production is being ramped down - quick skim of the article yielded this quote: "Their [PFASs'] production has been regulated or phased out by manufacturers, such as 3M, DuPont, Daikin, and Miteni in the US, Japan, and Europe."

John Oliver is a comedian, so also not a very good source. It's written for entertainment rather than being informative.

I think it can be both entertaining and informative, but it definitely feels like they try too hard to be funny at times. Do you have an example where the information they stated in the show was factually incorrect about PFAS?

Oliver is often correct at some core level but wrong on the details to play to the audience. Or "lies by omission" where a false narrative is produced without actually saying anything false.

That's not true, John Olivers show is extremely well researched. Sometimes his lack of references make it hard to use him as a source, but you can use the show as a starting point and validate his claims from there. They hold up very well.

The intercept brought a lot of this to light: https://theintercept.com/search/?s=pfas

Your post comes across as being written by someone who is unhinged rather than someone trying to make a convincing argument.

> This is the result of American capitalism and the worlds most corrupt banana republic legislature where bribery is so bad they made it legal.

And things like that just sound silly and trying to string a bunch of buzz words together.

What about that did you not understand? You have a corrupt government, where no law gets passed without input from corporations via their lobbyists. They have this access because they pay bribes for the privilege. That's banana republic levels of corruption.

The reason this is relevant is because your FDA and EPA are both captured organisations, which is what allows Dupont and these other environmental terrorists to go about their business unhindered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

The US government is very far from "the most corrupt" legislature in the world.

I agree it's quite corrupt, though.

When you use corruption in the sense of committing corrupt illegal acts, the US looks fairly clean. But if you define it in the general sense and include lobbying and sacrificing the public interest for private interests as corrupt, then in terms of the dollar values, US legislative systems are some of the most corrupt anywhere.

Maybe so, but if so, only because the USA has the biggest economy in the world.

Whatever the reason, the statement holds up.

Can you name another country where you can bribe legislators and get away with it?

"Most corrupt" definitely fits.

That's true in many, many countries. To pick one: Pakistan.

The US government is not corrupt though. There is some small amount of corruption but largely works correctly.

DuPont is now also the owner of Union Carbide whose carelessness caused one of the biggest industrial disasters in Bhopal in '84, killing over 3k people, and causing lasting injuries for many 10s of thousands. IIRC, some IITs even disallowed DuPont from participating in their campus-placements for this reason.

India's craven political dispensation accepted the pittance of damages paid by UC, but it barely covered anything. Such disgrace.

(like I said..) I'm impressed with the prowess of the MATERIALS SCIENCE in companies like 3M and DuPont, certainly not the business ethics.

Please don't conflate admiration for the fascinating engineering work with endorsement of an entire company's impact on the world!

3M certainly do good some science, they just had(?) a terrible engineering ethics problem.

The issue is that when you remove social and environmental ethical constraints, a lot of companies would become impressive in a technological, financial or managerial sense. But if you include them and measure 3M's, Dupont's etc. performance in a strong regulatory environment with good compliance, they earn decidedly unimpressive overall scores and can be seen as bunch of greedy, clever, selfish parasites, gaming the system.

That's why narrow statements praising one aspect of their performance paints half a picture. Like calling a war criminal an effective tactician - technically correct, but against the big picture, so what?

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