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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

Quite simply, any conclusion of this saga that doesn't end with 3M and fellow companies utterly erased and their assets sold off to more responsible stewards to pay for remediation and cleanup efforts, including piercing the corporate veil for a lot of the owners, is a miscarriage of justice. You cannot be allowed, as a private entity, to knowingly pollute.... everything, and still be allowed to conduct business. You have made it abundantly clear that you will harm others for profit, and we should be aggressively destroying any company that does so.

You have no natural right to a profit at other's expense, and we should stop pretending that these companies are following the rule of the law with these settlements. No part of any law says you have to let malicious companies continue to operate because they are big and have a lot of money. Bankruptcy is an important and necessary part of a healthy market.

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> You have no natural right to a profit at other's expense

Another thing is that the stock market doesn't work here. It promotes shortsighted trading without an eye for long term side effects. In principle shareholders should be accountable too. If you owned stocks of a company that caused damage during the period when that damage occurred, you should be accountable and at least you should not be able to profit from it. The stock market should be retrofitted with an accountability system. This is the only way shareholders will start caring about our future.

Most individual shareholders (especially those who just buy index funds) have neither knowledge of corporate wrongdoings nor, in practice, power to prevent them. A better model would be holding accountable the particular individuals with power and responsibility, such as in the Volkswagen emissions case where Germany criminally prosecuted executives involved in the fraud.

I don't care. If you want to get %5 yearly gains from stocks, then fucking educate yourself on your investments. If that's too much effort for the average person, maybe we shouldn't design our economy around requiring the average person to basically gamble with their income to hopefully have a nest egg for retirement.

Why kick the can. Index funds are operated by someone, right?

Projecting your wants onto power aside, why would this ever happen? What would drive our government to do that?

If there's no incentive, it's empty desire or based on some fantasy that government would suddenly operate in terms of what's best for society rather than a serious consideration of how power works. Why look to government to do that?

Are examples of government pollution controls effective, or examples of greenwashing? For instance a lot of the Quebec forests that burned already contributed to those CO2 offsets by having someone say they wouldn't burn them, and yet...

Governments are implementing accounting mechanisms for CO2 emissions too, e.g. CO2 certificates, CO2 tax. So why not think of other accounting systems that can help make people accountable for their actions?

Plus, I like to think that IT can save the world :)

The problems caused by power and hierarchy aren't solved by dreaming up rules for them to follow

The issue is not the public stock corporation, it is the entire class of limited liability entities.

It allows a one sided bet. Things go well, I’m rich. They go very very badly all I can loose is my investment.

>Another thing is that the stock market doesn't work here. It promotes shortsighted trading without an eye for long term side effects.

You assert this without elaboration. What makes you think that? Maybe the average wall st trading firm doesn't care, but institutional investors (eg. pension funds, university endowments, family offices, sovereign wealth funds) would very much care if their holdings go up in smoke a few decades from now.

>>would very much care if their holdings go up in smoke a few decades from now.

Nope

Any fund has nearly constant review of their holdings (and certainly scheduled periodic reviews), which would highlight issues with any of their holdings. Moreover, there are many hedging strategies. It isn't like companies with these kinds of externalized risks go poof in a minute. The problems, especially legal liability, become evident over the course of years, and the funds can an do adjust to not take the losses. Anything less would be a breach of their fiduciary duty to their shareholders/investors.

I feel like it's kinda obvious that the burden of proof is not on me here, so I'm not going to explain it further, sorry.

It is very obvious to me that it is on you.

> You have made it abundantly clear that you will harm others for profit ... Bankruptcy is an important and necessary part of a healthy market

You mean like Big Tobacco? They survived their lies and cover-ups, and are still around and doing well.

I’ve started to wonder whether pollution is the right word and whether we should say it how it is: plain old-fashioned, ugly “theft”. If someone takes something from you without your permission - including the ability to fish for your supper or drink from your spring, then that fulfills to me the definition of theft. And the penalties should be commensurate.

If you wanna go down that road, "ecocide" or "genocide" may be more appropriate terms. The latter word is more difficult to argue, but one could make a point that there's a mismatch between who benefits more from climate change and pollution (the global north) and who suffers from it (the global south). That's one of the many good points Nabil Hassein makes in the talk "Computing, Climate Change, and all our Relationships" which i can only recommend.

Thank you, yes. These monstrous organizations should ripped apart, absolutely gutted, and their leaders imprisoned.

Counter argument: selling off products to smaller businesses creates more limited liability. I.e less to lose more to gain by being bad stewards. A bigger company in fear of hurting their brand has incentive to be good.

Ah yeah that's been working so well. Meanwhile, trading on brand value has been the go-to profit making strategy of nearly every business for at least twenty years running now.

>smaller businesses creates more limited liability. I.e less to lose more to gain by being bad stewards.

Nonsense. A thousand small CEOs have limited liability to not lose their sole home if they do bad things that harm everyone and get shut down. A single Giant CEO has limited liability to go back to his six mansions in his chauffeured lamborgini that picked him up from his private plane.

I feel like that the same for the fracking companies -- the small no-name companies have more of an incentive to do a poor job because they are under more pressure to make money or go bankrupt and not clean up the sites. Whereas the bigger companies have a brand to worry about and also they will use their muscles to force regulation on their competitors.

Not saying its good or bad - just how it seems. Companies out of the limelight and too small to notice have more leeway to cheat.

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