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Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

Their net income per year is $5b. This plus the ear plugs settlement is a disaster for them.

for those wondering: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/product-liability/3m-ea...

> The federal district judge [...] has ordered the parties to begin mediation in an attempt to facilitate a settlement and avoid overwhelming the federal judicial system

I didn't realize even judges go out of their way to try to make parties settle out of court.

They definitely do. I know a judge personally and he's very proud of his 'settlement rate', the fraction of all cases he sees that end up being settled without a judgment rendered.

What's the motivation for them? Is it risk avoidance?

Trials burn a large chunk of the judge's time. The more cases settled out of court, the faster the judge can move through cases, and the less delay between bringing a case and the case being resolved.

That's absurd, and tantamount to a judge not doing their job, which is to oversee the proper discovery and application of precedent. I'd even make the contention that this fundamentally deprives people of their right to due process, and if it is the case that the judiciary cannot handle case loads, we need to start talking about the structural reasons resulting in that.

> That's absurd

No, it isn't.

> and tantamount to a judge not doing their job

No, it isn't.

> ... which is to oversee the proper discovery and application of precedent.

That is an extremely limited and narrow view of a judge's job. That's part of their job, but very far from all of it.

> I'd even make the contention that this fundamentally deprives people of their right to due process

No, it doesn't. People are encouraged to settle; they aren't forced to. If you insist on a trial, you can get one.

> and if it is the case that the judiciary cannot handle case loads

It takes a long time to bring a case to trial. I think that at least part of the bottleneck is the judges' time, but I cannot prove that.

> we need to start talking about the structural reasons resulting in that.

I would agree with that.

>It takes a long time to bring a case to trial. I think that at least part of the bottleneck is the judges' time, but I cannot prove that.

By and large, it takes as long as it does, especially based on cases between actors with drastically different resource pools from which to pool to acquire legal representation, because of fundamental limitations on the ability of information to be unambiguously extracted by a legal team (defendants team in finding docs that match criteria for discovery), the plaintiffs team (to comb through the discovered docs for meaning; thos is where malicious compliance or poorly worded queries can be disasterous for the amount of work it takes to sift through paper), transformed (arranged into a cross ref'able set of docs to be used in further proceedings), and loaded (brought before a jury).

The work of a trial is simple given good faith on the parts of all parties. I wager that happens much less frequently than we'd all like to believe.

When the prime arbiters of the judiciary start resorting to "just bypass us" there is a terrible, terrible problem here.

Efficiency.

Wow, the forbes cookie UI minigame is the hardest one I've played so far.

How do I get this cookie ui minigame?

chromium-browser --temp-profile or the equivalent for your distro to get a fresh browser without any extensions. You'll enjoy glorious game after that.

Them? The employees? The executives have *nothing* to worry about.

Or them, meaning us? These fines will find their way to the market and we will be the ones paying.

This is simply the pseudo cost of doing business for these multi-nationals.

There are loads of valuable businesses inside 3M, it will continue operating no matter what, so probably not all employees will be affected by a bankruptcy. The responsible executives have probably already taken their profits and bailed. Focusing on that might feel good, but it's not what needs to happen.

What needs to happen is that shareholder value is eradicated. Pension funds, banks, hedge funds, retail investors, they should all lose their money. Every last cent of it. Only if shareholder value is eradicated will shareholders start demanding executives follow procedures that prevent disasters like this from happening.

Holding the executives responsible is fun, but we all know the next executive is gonna be ruthless and try and get away with it anyway.

Putting executives in jail will be a much better deterrent than what we're doing currently. Fines aren't even a slap on the wrists. It's a cost of doing business. A cost the company does not pay, the market does.

Not to mention that 3M in a conglomerate and doesn't only make PFAS. This likely wiped out all of their PFAS related profits decades back.

Which is good. You can't poison half the planet knowingly for generations, dump the stuff you know is toxic into the rivers for decades, and then expect to walk off with a tiny slap on the wrist.

I mean thats how it often ends up, but extremely happy its not happening now. Maybe they will make sure form now on they don't do this highly amoral and criminal stuff, and maybe other companies will notice too. Jail time for CEO at that time would be a bonus, but we are not there yet.

For comparison, DuPont alone saw around $1 billion in annual profits from its PFOA products back in 2016.[0] It's unlikely that 3M saw its PFOA/PFAS profits wiped out by this settlement alone, although you might very well get there if some of the estimates of the company's liability--up to $30bn--are anywhere close to accurate. There are dozens of additional cases out there, and likely many more to follow. Even though many will probably get dismissed, the ongoing litigation costs alone are going to be a pain. Then there's political pressure, damage to 3M's brand, and more. It's all going to add up to a truly massive number.

Not sure if it'll do much to dissuade any companies from embarking on the next massive environmental fuckup, but one can hope.

0. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...

1. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/pfas-project/companies-face-bi...

For comparison, DuPont alone saw around $1 billion in annual profits from its PFOA products back in 2016.[0]

That claim seems suspect. Dupont booked around 4 billion in profits in 2016[1]. If the claim was true, it would mean PFOA made up around a quarter of their business. However, if you look at their net sales/profit by business segment[2] along with segment descriptions[3], there's basically no way that PFOA made up a quarter of their profits. They make too much other stuff for that to be the case.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/540512/net-income-of-dup...

[2] https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...

[3] https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...

They have liability insurance that covers a portion of this.

Does insurance cover things you knew were bad? Like, can I use my car in a bank robbery and after it being totaled by cop bullets and crashing into a pole get insurance to pay for it?

Depends on the insurance contract. But also, insurance is more likely to cover liability for your acts, even if knowing, than to cover your self-inflicted damages.

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