3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
minnesotareformer.com
minnesotareformer.com
We've detected PFOAs in rainwater/clouds, in the artic, etc (See https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765)
They are going to lead to further health problems down the road.
(Also because fossil fuel people kept financing fake science for decades and are actively participating in culture wars around it)
A doctor could say an infection has a chance of death if left untreated. If the person lives they'd say the doctor was "wrong", and "the doctor gave me a month to live."
At this point most probable estimates are so bad it's besides the point, but I'd think the lower odds yet especially cataclysmic projections are worth attention.
I don’t think the vast, vast majority of people actually care that much. It’s a vocal minority on all sides. Most people just want to pay their bills, have food/clothing/shelter covered, and try to muddle through this life thing.
I would posit that the vast, vast majority of people have little say or impact as it pertains to climate change, they just don’t have the means or mental bandwidth to effect change.
I've lived here all my life, but I do wonder at what point I'll need to move. I actually had lunch with a couple old colleagues this week and interestingly, we're all lifelong Texans and talked about leaving the state. Currently it's more about politics, but we also talked about future climate as a concern. Once my parents and aunts/uncles are gone, I don't know that there will be much to hold me in place.
I think the fight over the metric system is instructive - Im not aware of any huge lobbying effort to defeat it, but it became a culture war anyway, and now we have a strange mixed system in the US.
To be fair one of the reasons his ideas were rejected is because he wrote a book portraying the pope as an idiot. Heliocentrism/his books were banned earlier but a few years later one of his friends and supporters during the initial trial was elected pope. So there was a non insignificant chance that the Catholic church would have accepted heliocentrism a few hundred years sooner had he managed to be a bit more subtle and no alienate him.
Also I'm not trying to downplay the anti scientific attitude which was quite prevalent back in those days (when science couldn't be balanced with religious truths etc. otherwise I don't think it was that bad) but one of the main issues with his theory is that he couldn't really prove it conclusively (e.g. the issue with stellar parallax).
e.g. While the Roman inquisition did ban his theory and books but first they organized a public debate between Galileo and one of their lawyers which which was primarily based on scientific rather than religous arguments
Reminds me of criminal punishment in medieval times. Incarceration was a complete economic non-start so the penalties were brutal as a deterrent.
The people responsible for the misconduct at the time need to face criminal prosecution, and their personal wealth has to be first on the line for damage reparations.
A fine for dangerous driving that is crushing to a day laborer is unnoticeable to someone wealthy. And whereas that laborer, to challenge a ticket, would need to take time off from work costing them further - the wealthy person may have a standing relationship with a law firm, and that law firm might send a clerk or paralegal to challenge the ticket in court...and do so gratis.
half-lives of long-chain PFAS were longer than those of short-chain compounds, reaching almost 3 years in some cases. Some studies estimated the average half-lives for PFHxS at 2.86 years and L-PFOS (a specific form of perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, C8) at 2.91 years. In comparison, the short-chain PFPeS had an estimated average half-life of 0.63 years, and perfluoroheptane sulfonic acid (PFHpS, C7) concentrations were 1.46 years. The shortest estimated half-lives were for perfluorobutanoic acid (PFBA, C4) at 0.12 years and perfluoroheptanoic acid (PFHpA, C7) at 0.17 years.
There's also a study from Europe showing vastly different half-lives based on soil temperature (colder temps -> longer half life), but I cannot locate the paper at the moment.
US EPA. (2014). Emerging Contaminants Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) and Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA), https://www.wqa.org/Portals/0/Government%20Relations/factshe... arch2014.pdf
Congress long figured out how to kill off regulation that is publicly popular: strangle the agency budget-wise, not appoint new department leaders, etc. Adding ever-increasing paperwork is also popular.
OSHA has the lowest number of inspectors in ~45 years. The agency is about 50 years old. https://www.nelp.org/news-releases/number-federal-workplace-...
It has one inspector for every 77,000 workers and its budget amounts to $4/worker: https://www.afge.org/article/aflcio-osha-budget-amounts-to-3...
The EPA's inspections have fallen to half the number of ten years ago https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/02/0...
The number of ATF inspections has been falling for decades and the ATF apparently is allowing gun shops even with multiple violations to go unpunished https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2021/0...
The poultry industry pushed and got greater self-regulation around 2013 to increase line speeds: https://awionline.org/awi-quarterly/2013-fall/usda-refuses-d...
The Trump administration passed widespread overhauls of the meat packing industry letting them self-regulate to increase production https://www.govexec.com/management/2020/03/federal-pork-insp...
In ten years the number of food inspections the FDA conducts have fallen to one fifth the rate in 2010: https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/05/fda-food-safe...
Foreign drug manufacturing site inspections plummeted with the pandemic and have yet to recover, too.
The IRS budget has been slashed, mostly for auditing - despite audits of the 0.1% wealthiest resulting in an average of $90,000 per audit recovered: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/irs...
The de minimis for shipments into the US was raised from $200 to $800 in 2016 which has allowed for a massive increase in goods to be imported that are not subject to any inspection or taxes https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/de-minim...
More is not always better.
Worker deaths in America are down—on average, from about 38 worker deaths a day in 1970 to 13 a day in 2020.
Worker injuries and illnesses are down—from 10.9 incidents per 100 workers in 1972 to 2.7 per 100 in 2020.
What if one or both political parties spoke out about campaign finance corruption? What if they refuses corporate donations, and made direct appeals to their voters to chip in (YouTuber style). I'm trying very hard to not be partisan here, but why doesn't either party take a stand? Don't they share responsibility for accepting the money?
Chlorine gas or Phosgene are deadly, your stomach is full of HCl.
VX has phosphorus yet your body is full of it and that's part of the basis of how it handles energy and genes.
There are perfectly safe compounds that contain F.
The problem here is that we have report over report on the effects of those molecules, some coming from the companies making them. And yet somehow the people trying to raise awareness to those facts would be the propagandists? The propagandists are more the ones spreading misinformation, misleading others or hiding information.
PFAS are per/poly fluoro alkyl compounds meaning that they have many fluorine atoms on an alkyl chain. None of the compounds you listed have that which makes me wonder what you are trying to achieve commenting on something you know so little about.
ciprofloxacin has one fluorine, on an aromatic ring Prozac has three on a single carbon Flonaze has a single fluorine on a methyl Paxlovid has a CF3 like Prozac
And nearly all of those reports have little or no actual evidence of harm. Lots of people are making a lot of noise about the potential harms of PFASs, but most of it is just vague scaremongering with only the most scant basis in science.
The issue raised by the parent comment is highly pertinent. He isn't the one categorising organofluorine drugs as PFASs - it's the definitions proposed by researchers and regulators that are. Some reports about PFAS are based on a narrow definition, but many others lump together a vast and diverse range of substances that happen to have a C-F bond somewhere. It's very difficult to have an informed debate about something when there is in fact no agreed definition of what we're talking about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Global_... there is this interesting quote:
Most industrialized nations have average PFOA blood serum levels ranging from 2 to 8 parts per billion;[57] the highest consumer sub-population identified was in Korea—with about 60 parts per billion.[52] In Peru,[58] Vietnam,[59] and Afghanistan[60] blood serum levels have been recorded to be below one part per billion.
Might be unrelated (or not), but cancer rates have been exploding the last decades. Example via Google-Fu:
> Cancer cases in under-50s worldwide up nearly 80% in three decades, study finds
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/05/cancer-cases...
For reasons that are really quite well-understood. PFASs are not known to be significantly carcinogenic, particularly not at the miniscule levels most people are exposed to. We willingly fill ourselves with things that are definitely very carcinogenic - processed meat, alcohol, tobacco smoke, diesel fumes, etc etc ad nauseum.
Exposure to some of these carcinogens has been static or declining in some western countries, which has led to static or declining age-adjusted cancer incidence rates. They have vastly increased in the middle-income countries that are home to most of the world's population. The life of the average Chinese or Indian person has been transformed beyond all recognition in recent decades (for better and for worse) by urbanisation and industrialisation.
There isn't some unseen and unrecognised carcinogen that is sweeping the world and wreaking havoc; the global poor are just getting rich enough to develop the kind of lifestyle-related cancers that we're accustomed to in the west, while also getting rich enough to be diagnosed rather than just getting sick and dying.
Look at the source cited by that article - the growth in cancer rates is completely dominated by rapidly-growing economies in the global south.
As long as you can cash out your options before the reckoning, maybe even spin a division out to go bankrupt, there are just too many people who’ll chase the larger number. You need the guy who gets that internal memo to think that if he doesn’t report it to the EPA, he’ll spend the rest of his life wondering whether the knock on the door is the FBI.
At some point, you’re doing enough harm knowingly at scale that monetary damages and prison are insufficient.
In this case, force 3M to pay for everything, if they refuse or can't the government sells of the company to pay for the cost. I'm not a fan of the death sentence, but I have no problem killing of evil companies.
What I don't get is how people can make these decisions. You're informed that your product is dangerous, but you really like money so screw it.... What kind of person does that? That has to be a mental problem.
- The entire entity would be taken on ownership by the government agency at play. No existing stakeholders would be paid anything for this and operations would continue, assuming the operation is worth salvaging of course, with the corrections made needed.
- The entity would then be either sold in-whole or carved up into pieces to other large businesses. Shareholders, stakeholders, or investors are not made whole: instead, the revenue from these sales is used to repay or remediate the damage caused by the company.
- Top level leadership is, if it's felt is required, charged for neglecting their duties as leaders and fined, jailed, or otherwise punished.
- In the end the original entity is dissolved entirely, any remaining assets are sold in a process similar to the above, and the name is added to a "dead corporation" list and cannot be used at any time in the future.
Most shareholders didn't know PFAs were harmful, yet you're proposing they bear the punishment. Meanwhile, the people who did know that PFAs were harmful, walk away with years of salary with raises due to their increased performance due to killing people, and potentially even the profits from sale of stock before their murders were discovered.
The entire problem here is that people, not corporations, make decisions, and people, not corporations, need to be held responsible for their own decisions. When people decide to hide information like this for their own benefit, those people need to be held responsible.
We should not trust government agencies as they have zero accountability either. It is even worse.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsona...
https://www.lawsuit-information-center.com/2-billion-verdict...
$200,000 per victim for knowingly being given cancer. Obscene. I think China executing people is much closer to justice than our system.
Certainly a good system. If the hardest punishment is a fine, it becomes a fee for rich people.
Jail and financial annihilation are basically the only ways to try to counterbalance the massive upside you can get from sociopathic behavior like this.
We need to start treating this more like fraud, but perpetrated as a form of violence.
Im generally against death sentences for heat of the moment situations. Think: murder.
But in a situation where you’ve had legal teams working with you, where you’ve been planning this out, and where you know what the damage to this is etc., you’re basically a massive threat to society.
The active planning, intent, and maliciousness is something that should be made an example out of.
Death sentences for crimes where the person doing the crime likely didn’t even get a chance to think about the consequences is useless. Death sentences and removal of all assets from corporate executives that have caused a significant amount of damage would have a deterrence effect.
So I think life in prison with no possibility of parole plus removal of all assets is ideal.
But I think this should only apply to the CEO and the board not everyone up and down the chain at least in the US where we have a “right to work”.
I don’t know if the law will allow an effective removal of all assets. I’m thinking of trust fund babies and such…
Edit: at least in the US, I think there is a possibility of a pardon or commutation by POTUS. I think we need to abolish that as well or at least it should be that if you pardon or commute the sentence for one person for a crime, it automatically makes the same change (pardon/commutation) for everyone convicted of that crime.
Civil asset forfeiture. The money itself is complicit in the criminal act.
I don’t need to see them tortured beforehand, as it serves little to no purpose (in my opinion).
"Plush mansion, good company, etc" vs "left to rot in a hole" type of thing.
There is no such thing as life long incarceration. They always get out early
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_England_a...
Why? If you knowingly decide to poison thousands of people, that makes you a mass murderer. Since when are we so lenient about those?
I agree in principle that IF your country has the death sentence, there is no reason why it should not be applied in such cases as well. But I think death sentences are problematic. Put them in jail and bar them from ever running a company again. That should be enough.
But realize that list for whatever action would be done would be... very long. Monsanto, bunch of Wall street guys (if you trace actions to real consequences), this and probably many more. I think life sentence in maximum security prison in US would be actually worse.
Also, you soon hit grey area, say defense industry and its bribing of government to start wars that killed millions... where do you draw the line? One's man patriot is another's murderer
until then i'll just view it as a tool of the government to sate public bloodlust with regards to heinous crimes with the very thing they seek to punish : murder.
the very embodiment of "well, that's the best we can do." when confronted with the idea of correcting the loss of a life -- two losses to make the original victim feel less alone. Not a great correction.
In your opinion. In the opinion of many others, there is no crime that deserves death, hence the widespread abolition of the death penalty in developed countries. We used to execute people for stealing cattle and I imagine that many people at the time though that it was an entirely right and proper punishment.
A jurisdiction that uses the death penalty with any real frequency will at some point inevitably execute an innocent man. What is the appropriate punishment for those who supported the laws that caused his death?
Unless you can show that someone adulterated the product with the specific intent of causing death, it isn't. Causing someone to die through negligence, recklessness or indifference is manslaughter, not murder.
If I intend to enrich myself my taking all the money in an armored car and the deaths of the security guards I'll have to shoot my way through is just some side effect to me, not my intent by neither my concern, that's still murder.
This may be something that doesn't resonate with people who are not parents, but: if your government is willing to tolerate intentional, casual murder of children at scale, what's the point of having it in the first place? And let's remember: a government isn't imposed by the heavens. It's just another agreement between people, at scale.
Retribution might make us feel better, but it doesn't solve anything. It's shutting the stable doors after the horse has bolted. We don't need a special judicial exception for the mass murder of children: we need that to not happen in the first place. At that scale, it's not one person: it's an institutional failing. We need those institutional failings to not happen: talk of punishment, except to the extent it has a deterrent effect (which I'm generally sceptical of), is a distraction.
Aviation rarely blames pilots for plane crashes, even when it's clearly their fault (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot#By_pilots_in_...): they do things like a two-in-cockpit policy. Aeroplanes are among the safest places in the world. That attitude seems a better one to mimic.
What does it truly mean, to say “never again”?
Same in this case, I feel there's a difference between deaths of children as a result of lack of care or attention, vs. knowingly letting it happen because of personal gains.
> In the years 1999–2015 the study found 65 cases of pilot suicide (compared to 195 pilot errors) and six cases of passengers who jumped from aircraft. There were 18 cases of homicide-suicide, totaling 732 deaths; of these events, 13 were perpetrated by pilots.
Pragmatically, I don't see a difference. I couldn't give a shit about the perpetrators: they have lost the right to factor into my moral calculus. I care about the children not dying.
I mean, I ultimately don't really want even more people to die over this. Rather, I want things like this to not happen. Ever. Death penalty sounds like a big step in this direction, in a world where white-collar crime isn't just not punished proportionally to the scale of damage, it's barely punished at all. I suppose it is a red herring, an idea of putting a band-aid on a much larger problem.
I'll note however, that pilot suicide is a qualitatively different scenario than executive knowingly causing death of some people, somewhere, because it's easy enough to do it and profit off it. There's only so much you can do about the former - at some point, it's down to an individual, their emotional state, and a moment. However, in the latter case, the process is much more sober, takes more time, and it's doubtful the perpetrator is themselves suicidal.
(The death penalty is bad for other reasons, and I don't feel this warrants an exception. But that's a different, and well-trodden, argument.)
> There's only so much you can do about the former - at some point, it's down to an individual, their emotional state, and a moment.
And yet, it is successfully averted by two-in-cockpit policies (excluding possibly China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735: investigations are still ongoing, so I'm not sure what went on there). If we can prevent this, we can prevent that.
So thanks for that bucket of cold water :).
--
Maybe we should make a list of topics where people frequently miss the point in this way? Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions though this is probably not in scope for Wikipedia.
A different list I believe I could use is one that's listing some working mitigations to tough problems. Like, checklists are effective at this-and-this in medicine[link set 1], and this-and-that in aviation [link set 2]. "Two-in-cockpit" policies are effective at helping in this-and-that in aviation, to such-and-such degree [link set 3], etc. The motivation here is that it seems that some industries figured out ways to reduce the severity of various tough problems, and there may be an opportunity for cross-pollination, or staging those techniques into an even better mitigation.
RE the Moloch link, I'm not in the right mood to respond to the reply under that comment, nor do I have energy for this right now. I mostly disagree, but I note one point - it's true, at least for me, that realizing a problem is one of coordination at scale (and therefore likely systemic) makes me feel despair. The realization itself is a mood killer - I find myself recoiling from it, and thinking along the lines of "please let it not be a Moloch thing, please let it be something solvable, something that can be approached directly". I would love to know of a way to feel encouraged, instead of instantly demotivated, by this kind of problems.
EDIT:
Another one to your list of common point-misses: 4) what's the base rate, and 5) what's the effect size?
Prompted by 'userbinator remembering that one, and asking the important question. Paraphrasing, "if those chemicals are so very bad for us, and have been everywhere for decades, then where are the ill effects?".
It's like with dietetics and cancer scares. Consuming/not consuming red meat/coffee/artificial sweetener/whatever can give you cancer! How much of an increase? 10%? Over what base rate? 0.00001? In that case, it's affecting your lifespan less than worrying about it is.
The problem isn't some kind of game theory issue. The problem is the cultural phenomenon where people believe cruelty is a virtue. The solution is kindness, like people have been saying for thousands of years. (Also reorganising society somewhat.)
In Scott Alexander's terminology: we can build a garden, and keep Moloch out of it, because we are the only ones in our vicinity capable of being powerful agents of Moloch, and we can just… decide not to do that. So many societies have managed that over the years: it's just historical coincidence they didn't end up with industrial metallurgy, lots of boats, and a penchant for proselytism. But now, we don't have any other societies that could come from across the sea and influence us: we're globalised.
Our fate is in our hands, if we can step back from isolationist ethics and be kind (and stop trying to take over the world).
This is especially common for industries like mining which are guaranteed to require significant cleanup:
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/29/1127520991/west-virginia-coal...
https://www.propublica.org/article/west-virginia-coal-blackj...
Hasn’t that ship sailed recently? They were sued for damages and cleanup costs from PFAS and won, resulting in them not be liable?
(a) Sometimes the wrong people get convicted. In this context, irreversible punishments suck.
(b) “We’re going to kill you because killing people is wrong” is a weird look.
(b) It's not. Killing people that are evil is fine. Killing babies is wrong. You are intentionally simplifying the moral argument here to "killing people is wrong."
Maybe don't make prisons so awful that they constitute torture? That's very much a thing that we know how to do.
>Killing people that are evil is fine.
Who gets to decide what is evil? What happens when the definition of evil changes? Practically every genocide in history has been justified by that logic - they are evil, therefore we are justified in killing them. Other than vengeance, there is little benefit to state-sanctioned killing for the purposes of punishment; all state-sanctioned killing carries the risk of justifying other kinds of state-sanctioned killing, by removing the simple and clear moral foundation of what a legitimate state can or cannot do.
There are many examples of accused murderers who received fair trials, were convicted, and yet were still innocent.
Musk is totally ok to use materials mined by enslaved children of Madagascar. Or abuse his employees. Or fire people who try to organize a union. Or do plenty of other shady or illegal stuff.
That kind of person.
Normal people can't get away with things like this, because the decisions would haunt our dreams.
Two great books to start with:
- The Science of Evil: https://www.amazon.com/Science-Evil-Empathy-Origins-Cruelty/...
- The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscious: https://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Whisperer-Science-Without-...
Regular people make, logically, truly horrifying decisions constantly.
I bought some wine for a friends get-together. That's pretty normal.
But in doing so, I chose to have wine rather than vaccinate some children.
I chose having a drink over the lives of deprived children. Am I not a monster?
The average person's dinner involved a tremendous amount of sheer pain and suffering, but it's satisfying to their taste buds, so they are fine with it, and will find ways to rationalize it.
Most everyone is a psychopath at some level, capable of discarding empathy or rationalizing evil when it serves their own interests. The only difference with the CEOs is that they're doing it for money, not for taste. It's quite easy to imagine someone moving the goalposts for what is worth causing suffering for.
No executives were actually executed. Only two people were executed, a farmer producing the protein powder with melamine and the manager of a workshop processing it. Sanlu executives got away with prison sentences.
You can think that, but you'd be wrong. Everyone who commits a crime thinks they're gonna be the one to get away with it.
It's a very popular opinion among certain kinds of people, but history and even present day has shown, time and again - You can't slaughter your way to a peaceful law-abiding society.
Fear of escape and second life as an evil business exec? Eye for an eye morality? Understanding death to be a greater deterrent than life in a cage? (How do you reconcile that with the popularity of "death-by-cop"?)
Even low level criminals mentally distinguish themselves from the “really bad people.” In prison, the people who hurt children are reviled by the other criminals. When we impose the death penalty for certain conduct, we create a powerful social norm. The point is to help the majority of people who aren’t evil, but are flawed and fallible, stay on the right side of the line.
I’m not enthusiastic about that and would be fine jailing these guys for life, but if it’s something the state does I want guys in expensive suits to know it’s not just poor people.
I'm also somewhat skeptical on the idea that the death penalty _should_ cost more than life in prison (assuming that sentence carries at least 20 years for the remainder of that person's life.) It would seem to me that there is a fairly obvious problem there that needs to get worked out if it's actually true (has anyone looked closely at the studies that assert this claim? Obviously there's additional time in court, but it would seem preposterous that this would necessarily lead to an increase such that paying for someone's housing and supervision for 20+ years is cheaper than additional court time.) Obviously there are other factors like how the government allows itself to get overcharged by the company that manufactures the lethal injection for some strange reason (is it actually all that strange to anyone?) And then what is the actual reason for all the time prisoners spend on death row, this would seem to just be the state shooting itself in the foot on statistics for the costs for capital punishment?
Anyway, I'm generally for the death penalty in matters where there is a clear connection between one entity and an intentional large-scale loss of human life. Proving the intention and the connection are the hard parts, for sure. But the clear benefit to the death penalty is that it's a permanent act that would-be criminals would naturally try to avoid, potentially avoiding them becoming criminals at all. If you have a study that somehow refutes this theory, that would-be criminals, especially white collar criminals similar to officials at 3M here, don't consider punishments as a deterrence at all, I might revise my opinion.
I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding it's all the extra judicial processes that end up costing a lot. The cost of the poison used to kill the person (or bullet, or however it's done) it's probably just a rounding error in comparison.
(I'm against the death penalty, but if you're gonna have it, why invent these macabre Rube Goldberg contraptions for killing people? Just put the person up against a wall and shoot him, FFS.)
I would wager you're probably correct. One substantial cost for the death penalty seems to be just paying a public defender for that whole time because the average person on death row cannot afford their own representation. This would not be the case, however, for company executives in the context we're discussing here at least. I'm also curious if these studies accurately pull together all the costs for life imprisonment, such as the guard staff, infirmary staff, cost of food consumed, cost of clothing, etc. There are probably other costs associated with imprisonment that I'm not even aware of because I've been fortunate enough to avoid prison so far.
> ([...] why invent these macabre Rube Goldberg contraptions for killing people? Just put the person up against a wall and shoot him, FFS.)
On this, we agree. Frankly, I'm fine without the death penalty too, though I'm not certain that it's a fair and just punishment in every case, and I would assume the potential for capital punishment would be a major deterrence for people looking into committing "white collar" life-ending crimes.
China does not care so much about mistakes, they care about the deterrent effect.
Different ideologies on law enforcement.
Agreed, this has been studied over and over, generally punishment doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work is because most crimes are not planned or deliberate, especially not something like murder.
However, in cases like this, with 3M, it is deliberate. Sure they try to hide it, but they also know that the chances of anyone in management getting personally punished is practically zero. The company might get a fine and some executive will take an early retirement, if he hasn't already once the information comes to light. This is not a crime made in desperation, this is a cold blood calculation where the costs are weighed against potential profit. I don't know, but I could imagine a deterrence would work differently in these scenarios.
Most studies citing the inefficacy of the death penalty are flawed and simply at odds with reality, in which evidence points to the opposite of what the studies theorize.
Thank you for confirming my talking point.
Boeing killed 500 people, they knew the plane was faulty, and they suffered no consequence.
Untill a CEO of a major corp or a bank thats 'too big to fail' spends a few years behind bars, this whole discussion is just some sort of fantasy revenge fap.
The problem with our relying on prison and financial punishments with corporate malfeasance is that a) rich people can "play the game" enough to get absurdly preferential treatment in the prison system, and b) the financial penalties are never truly scaled up to the life-ruining penalties most regular people might experience.
In the formula case, I'd rather see the executives condemned to physically serving the families of those affected, and having every asset they own liquefied and split between them.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
https://web.archive.org/web/20091125173132/http://www.nydail...
Are you saying that’s fake?
To be sure, a dairy farmer (Zhang Yujun) and milk salesman (Geng Jinping) were executed[1]. At the highest corporate levels, Sanlu general manager (Tian Wenhua) initially got life in prison...except she'll be released next year after 15 years.
No executives were executed in this scandal.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Qiqihar_school_gymnasiu...
We had those a couple hundred years ago, then the monarchies lost their teeth and capitalism and democracy got all mixed up together.
We used to do this. Companies getting their charters revoked used to be something that wasn't uncommon.
Unless you make the punishments for this an existential threat, it's just a cost of doing business.
It doesn't matter how much people complain about these companies. Their existence is a necessary evil because of how the global economy is structured.
Or even just forcing them to break up into more, smaller companies.
people on HN regularly confuse state capitalism with socialism and I can't wrap my head around on why.
the two systems couldn't be more different and actually the USSR was not socialist, Stalin was not socialist, that's the biggest fabrication in modern human history.
Wanna find what socialism actually looks like? Look at the kibbutzim in Israel.
In a capitalist systems at least there are incentives to get businesses to create better systems over time, that doesn't exist in any other system.
turns out they had a pretty marginal role in it, compared to the grand total, except maybe the first generation of nuclear weapons USSR produced, that were sealed off and very hard, if not impossible, to defuse.
Anyway communism and socialism are not exactly the same thing, you can't put them together in the same basket and can't generalize. Communism in Italy was not the same as communism in Cuba which was not the same as communism in East Germany which was not the same as communism in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Congo etc
> In a capitalist systems at least there are incentives to get businesses to create better systems over time
I would gladly see some proof that one does produce the incentive (and the incentive produces a radical change for the better) while the other doesn't.
My opinion is that socialism does not scale too well when the community becomes too big, but capitalism produces inherently more distortions and inequalities that need to be addressed in a never ending vice cycle of crisis that hit hard the poor and virtually spares the wealthy.
Anyway my comment was more on the line of "socialism is not what people usually think it is or associate it with in the USA (or the west)"
America called it a socialist system because it wanted to defame and demonize socialism. The Soviet Union called their government socialist because that was a popular and celebrated term in Europe, despite totalitarian control having nothing to do with true, democratic socialism (where workers are also the owners and have democratic control over their workplace and government).
As Noam Chomsky pointed out, it was state capitalism run by a fascist regime, fascists that when they ruled non so-caledd socialist countries, the west, but I should more correctly say the USA and the UK, admired because in their view (and the propaganda) they defeated socialism and communism. In truth the people of the Soviet Union had no control over the means of production or control over their lives and were essentially slaves. It would be the same as if Stalin came to power in America, created a fascist police state, used coercive force to protect criminal banks, evicted people unjustly from their homes, suppressed protests and broke up unions, then lavished massive subsidies on big companies, gave tax breaks to the rich, allowed large corporations to pay nothing in taxes while cutting programs to help the poor, rigged all their elections with the aid of corporate media, and then proudly called this a "free-market capitalist and democratic system that represents the will of the people."
In other words, just because politicians often appropriate popular words for their own twisted means, that doesn't make what they say true.
To me, an Italian that looks at the American politics from afar, sounds not dissimilar to Trump's manifesto and some parts not too far from what we associate the USA with here, today.
But relatively compared to the west they were absolute swine and had no accountability towards their population.
The proof is in the very article we are discussing here. This would never happen in north korea or former soviet union.
You are trying to come up with some redefinition of terms. We all know what communism is, we know what socialism is, we know what capitalism is, we even know what social democratic nations look like (Grew up in one) we also know that most western countries are mixed economies.
I am not sure why you are trying to make up some argument there.
But it all boils down to accountability. In a system where the government is in control of the market it has less incentives as there is nothing that punishes them where as in a system where the companies is accountable to their citizens and then citizens are backed by the government there is a much better incentive structure. Furthermore in market driven systems the companies have an incentive in improving their product on all it's axis as that improves not only their bottom line but also their ability to compete with others.
Noan Chomsky lived in academia his whole life and never had to actually be accountable to any of the many wrong things he claimed.
Yep, exactly, they had a marginal role.
> This would never happen in north korea or former soviet union
Those are not socialist countries though, just plain old dictatorships. It would also not happen in Pinochet's Chile or Franco's Spain or any other fascist dictatorship supported by the US.
> We all know what communism is, we know what socialism is
My point: I don't think most on HN do.
> I am not sure why you are trying to make up some argument there.
Because socialism is not what the first comment was implying it is. And socialism doesn't mean State capitalism USSR style.
What is the role of the Arab countries in the World's pollution?
Are they not capitalist?
What is the role of the capitalistic countries such as the USA in the World's pollution?
Are they not capitalist too???
The argument presented is a fallacy, not supported by facts and it does not even present the argument correctly.
To be perfectly clear
> you live in a capitalist society not some socialist nightmare. Giving it to the government would be much much much worse.
That whole sentence is one big straw man.
- The opposite of capitalist society is not "some socialist nightmare"
- a capitalist society is not the opposite of a nightmare
- socialist doesn't mean "giving it to the government"
- giving it to the government is not proven to be worse, it is in fact the opposite, we are specifically commenting on "3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public". Because the public, the government, is the one in charge of not letting these kinds of things happen. This story is proof against the private sector, not the opposite, which, again, is a "No true Scotsman" at this point.
To be even more clear, no government would kill its people to profit and even if they did, sooner or later the people would overthrown it.
But a private company will without doubt do it, using every trick in the book to cover up their responsibilities, because they do not respond to the people.
We have tons of evidence in support of the thesis.
And that's why we have laws to avoid it and agencies devoted to controlling that nothing like that happens.
Unfortunately they can be powerless against corporations with huge budgets and reach.
> Noan Chomsky lived in academia
This is called ad hominem. Noam Chomsky is a highly respected researcher, you should disprove his works, which are public and available to everyone BTW, if you really believe he's wrong, not attack the person.
North Korea is communist. Soviet Union was communist.
Claiming otherwise is disingenuous.
Socialism means the government owning the means of production and the more you want the government to control it the more socialist you are so yes it was.
The only strawman is the one you are making. No country is purely capitalist or purely communist but the west is more capitalist than it's not, north korea is more socialist and communist than it's not.
The opposite of a capitalist society is exactly that which is why people often flee from those countries and towards more capitalist countries.
And yes socialist means leaving the means of production to government. The more the government interfere the more socialist. Most people understand this concept.
"To be even more clear, no government would kill its people to profit and even if they did, sooner or later the people would overthrown it."
Ahh yeah you tell that to the Kulags who got killed by Stalin.
No it's called a fact. Noam Chomskys contribution have been to academia nothing else.
FWIW: Communism != Socialism
This is a straw man.
They were not less productive, they were less pollution intensive.
One does not imply the other.
Iraq is surely less productive than us, the west, and yet they are one of the most polluted countries in the World.
> Claiming otherwise is disingenuous.
North Korea is not communists, it claims to be, but it's not. Just like the USA claim to be a democracy of the people but are an oligopoly run but white, wealthy, anglo-saxon men, and technically was born as a republic, not a democracy, the founding fathers abhorred democracy.
Communism means a lot of things, a dictatorship run by the son of the former ruler, called the Prince, by means of dynasty, with absolute and undisputable power, is not communist.
USSR was not communist, they never established the ground rules that define what a communist nation is.
One cannot simply claim to be communist and do nothing of the things that being communist imply.
As two professors of Economics (Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick) at the University of Massachusetts put it
the 20th century's great ideological schism actually pitted the private capitalism of the West against the "state capitalism" of the USSR. "The struggle between communism and capitalism never happened," says Wolff. "The Soviets didn't establish communism. They thought about it, but never did it."
Under a true communist system, says Resnick, the workers would control all aspects of production and decide how any surpluses are used. But in the wake of the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks imposed a layer of state managers to operate industry in the name of the people. That system, which Resnick and Wolff call "state capitalism," actually ceded decisions about the use of profits to government officials.
> The opposite of a capitalist society is exactly
a non capitalistic society. that's all we can derive from this sentence. but, as the story teaches us, people have confused free market capitalism (which is not really free market BTW, far from it, it's more like a monopolistic or oligopolistic market) with capitalism and state capitalism (the opposite of the free market) with communism.
We live in impure systems, USA just plainly refuse to even mention the name "socialism" but it doesn't mean they've built a better system, just different, with different warts, that are less evident because they're actually are the ruling country of the World and their propaganda is the strongest one. But if WW2 went differently, Germany could be at the same spot and nobody would notice any difference. Starting from the fact that many prominent nazis went to work for the USA, first and foremost, Wernher von Braun. The man who made a decisive contribution (together with "The Huntsville Germans") to win the space race for the USA.
> And yes socialist means leaving the means of production to government
Nope, it wants the the people (not the government) to own the means of production and nope it does not want the government more involved, it wants the people more involved because everything is fairly and equally shared, including the decisions.
More government and more layers is exactly why scholars say that the USSR was not communist: socialism wanted to abolish social classes, social differences and hierarchical structures of government and power.
> Ahh yeah you tell that to the Kulags who got killed by Stalin.
that's another straw man.
they have been overthrown when they lost support of the people.
the fact that many were killed, doesn't mean that the majority was against it.
USA have caused the death of supposedly (estimates are hard, but usually not far from the truth) tens of millions of people in their modern history (post WW1) and yet people are still with them.
An article from Washington Post "Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests" [1] while according to The Wilson Center "18 million people passed through the work camps. While approximately 1.6 million died, a large number were released and reintegrated into Soviet society." [2]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/15/war-on-terro...
[2] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/death-and-redemption-the-...
You don't need every single 3M factory to make those chemicals. So make a new company that only makes these chemicals.
I work in healthtech and it is fascinating how seriously everyone takes HIPAA because it includes provisions for personal liability. Every instance of exposed data costs you personally $1000 or so.
All other regulations seem to be seen as “Ehhhh how close can we push it to reasonably claim we did the things?”. But with hipaa it’s different. The conversation is always “How much extra can we do to make sure nothing could possibly leak?”
Makes me wish GDPR and friends had the same teeth. Turns out even small teeth work great when they’re personal.
I discovered that every one of my client organisations is exempt, because of course they are.
Powerful people don’t go to jail, that’s for the common people.
Exemptions were put in place for all government agencies, and charities. Turns out they many health-related business are actually technically non-profits. So your health data can leak and they just shrug their shoulders and move on as if nothing had happened.
Doing illegal stuff and lobbying your best to get away with it has become so normal nowadays that maybe an appeal to the honor of the people involved does not cut it.
I think it is good that people and companies should think about what will be seen as a crime against humanity afterwards. I'd say anything that goes against the universal declaration of human rights now is a good start, even if there are national loopholes right now. Actors that know now that they are e.g. poisioning the environment/people or actively prevent a solution to climate crisis with millions of starving people on the other side of the scale, know today that what they do is wrong. They just think they will get away with it.
The question is about spirit of the law VS letter of the law. Just because all you did was legal doesn't mean you are innocent or right. Just because you did something illegal doesn't mean you are wrong (e.g. it was illegal to hide a jew in the Third Reich).
So some of the things individual actors so is already illegal under international law and/or a violation of human rights. And I think we would all profit from the faint possibility of that ever becoming a thing.
Make the company pay for externalities. If it bankrupts them, they deserve it.
"We tested it on animals, and none of them survived. But that's OK! 'cause when we wrote the report up, we lied!"
It does not matter. Du Pont was doing it decades ago but they showed that they can go forward with a slap on the wrist.
We need some proper unbiased studies of the long term chronic effects of PFCs, paid for by the EPA or some other branch of the US federal government, without any influence from environmental groups or chemical manufacturing companies.
This one is particularly readable and as credible as they get: https://bmjoncology.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000049
Somehow we seem to be unwilling to do it.
Not that you can tell based on the product listing or packaging, but they do publish a handy data sheet [2] that lists “< 3% fluorochemical urethane”. Unfortunately it doesn’t list any personal protection or toxicology advice for that ingredient as “ingredient may be below threshold for labelling”.
[1] Scotchgard Fabric Water Shield https://a.co/d/0E2DGjL [2] https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/mediawebserver?mwsId=SSSSSuUn_...
We ought to mirror this law onto IRL products and companies
Knowingly committing crimes against humanity on a grand scale should be prosecuted and their fortunes seized.
Chemical companies like Hoechst gave up on Germany due to its anti-scientific, emotional stance on chemistry.
Yet the same people in Germany complains nowadays that the country is having issues supplying itself with pharmaceuticals.
States Newsroom, 50 F St NW, Ste 460, Washington, DC
I've preached about this in other comments (e.g. boeing 737 max), and looks like many folks here agree - we need personal liability in order to stop these kinds of things.