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Comment by navi0 | Hacker News Reader

“ Fermilab irradiated these samples with the electron beam and shipped them back to 3M.

3M sampled both the headspace—the air at the top of the container—and the liquid to verify that the PFAS of concern had been destroyed without releasing hazardous products to the air.”

I think this is what we call fox guarding the henhouse. 3M has EVERY incentive to declare this whiz bang treatment effective because of the legal liability and financial incentives involved.

I’d want independent test results and a full accounting of the byproducts of this treatment before putting any faith in it.

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>3M has EVERY incentive to declare this whiz bang treatment effective because of the legal liability and financial incentives involved.

That sounds entirely incorrect. It seems to me that they'd want to avoid a second round of public flogging and lawsuits when it's later discovered that they falsified efforts to remediate their original catastrophe.

I'm not too sure about that. When profit is the main goal, guaranteed savings(not doing the necessary spending to actually clean up) in the short term often take priority over possible long term avoidance of fines and lawsuits.

In the short term, actually cleaning up and only appearing to clean up probably give the same return in terms of PR and so on, but the former is cheaper.

Not to say I condone them misleading the public, not at all.

I don't think they're doing any cleanup in the first place, so they can't save money by skimping.

> When profit is the main goal, guaranteed savings(not doing the necessary spending to actually clean up) in the short term often take priority over possible long term avoidance of fines and lawsuits.

The interest rate is the mediator between the short term and the long term. Lower interest rates mean that the long term is comparatively more important.

Why? As long as the fine is a fraction of the profits, it's just the cost of doing business.

> Why? As long as the fine is a fraction of the profits, it's just the cost of doing business.

Yes, a problem

Times are changing. It is upto us, but firms are grappling with the concept of social license

Clearly in democracies care must be taken not end up in endless fights with stakeholders

But even in China the authorities care about social attitudes

How would they profit from falsifying lab reports on research into methods for remediation of pfas contamination?

They say there is a solution to the problem so regulators let them pollute more and make more money. Eventually we all figure out they lied and it doesn't work or they don't use it and then they get a tiny fine. Business as usual.

Huh? You could say that about any cost at all. Yet, companies are constantly on the look out for ways of cutting costs. Use less material, use less labour, pay lower fines, find a way to optimize taxes, etc.

The next round of flogging and lawsuits will come long after most of the people involved are gone, having already received their accolades and bonuses for "solving" the problem.

Incentives for a corporation are not the same as the incentives for the people, and the corporation's decisions are made by people who follow their own incentives.

Yes, but it's the job of people who have fiduciary duties to the shareholders to design the incentives in such a way that they align.

That's eg why top executives get so many shares (or call options on shares).

Yeah, it's their job. What's your point? Are they actually doing it? Signs point to no.

But maybe the real problem is that most of today's shareholders will be gone by then, too. They benefit from juicing the stock and selling high, leaving the cost for some other sucker down the road. They have no incentive to find uncomfortable truths either. I think short-term ownership is one of the roots of a lot of today's economic ills.

> Yeah, it's their job. What's your point? Are they actually doing it? Signs point to no.

The share price today already reflects the long term outlook for the stock.

If you can 'juice' the stock and sell it high, that's a job well done.

> I think short-term ownership is one of the roots of a lot of today's economic ills.

Why? A change in ownership doesn't affect how stock are valuated. If it's eg widely know that a company is going down in five years (because eg their industry is declared illegal), the price will already drop today. It's just a standard backwards induction argument.

Btw, with the stratospheric rise of passive index investing, truly long term ownership has never really been more widespread than today.

And yet, stock prices can swing very rapidly as new info comes out, or as circumstances change. Almost like, despite everyone's best effort, they're at best a very crude approximation of future value.

Current stock prices are our best predictor of future stock prices. You are right that they are still a predictor with a lot of variance.

Stock prices should change as new information comes in, yes. I don't see any contradiction here with what I wrote earlier.

You don't see the contradiction with

> The share price today already reflects the long term outlook for the stock.

as an excuse for artificially inflating the stock price? In a context where we're specifically expecting new-but-honestly-predictable information to push it down later?

There can only be predictable news-that-pushes-the-shareprice-lower, if all the people who trade the stock are idiots.

You just need eg a few short-sellers who anticipate those predictable news. They can make a killing by selling the stock at the higher price now and buying it back at the lower price later.

If enough people take this opportunity to make easy money, that brings the share price down today as if the news had already dropped.

So, how do you want to 'artificially' inflate the stock price? Especially how do you want to do it in a way that doesn't require everyone in the market to be idiots only?

If this story was true, we would never see large swings in stock price, because they would already be priced in. But we do. Stock price is simply not an accurate enough predictor to create the incentives we want.

(The most obvious reason this is nonsense is that sometimes the future fall is only predictable to people inside the company. Short sellers don't help here. We need another incentive for those people to do the right thing.)

This same duty was there already for decades and it didn’t prevent them from destroying the environment. I don’t think it’s the gotcha argument you think it is. In the end their growth was bigger than any lawsuit.

What's a "gotcha argument"?

If the growth was bigger than the lawsuit, then from the corporations point of view, the earlier executives made the right decisions.

We were talking about aligning interests of executives and long term shareholders. You seem to be talking about aligning interests of those shareholders and interests of the environment or so?

That's an important topic, too, but it's not the same.

3M has misled and twisted the truth regarding PFAS before. I trust their word as much as I trust BP's when they come up with excuses for oil spills.

It doesn't matter either way. There are multiple problems with PFAS - one of which is how toxic it is to the body, and how long it stays in the body.

"We can destroy it with electron beams" doesn't mean shit when kids are getting a huge dose of PFAS from their happy meal french fries.

Those very same french fries may stop containing PFAS sometime in the future. However, the kids who loaded up on PFAS early in life may never be able to get the stuff out of their bodies. :(

Maybe we can send kids under electron beam.

3M, an entire company built because people couldn't figure out how to cook with butter anymore.

the F in PFAS is for fluorine

if it wasn't in the liquid and wasn't in the air... where did it go?

Yeah.

"The fact that we were working with 3M, a world expert in PFAS"

Lol, lmao even. Wonder how they became an expert.

World expert in creating pollution

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