Court approves 3M multi-billion dollar settlement over PFAS in drinking water

Same CEO during a deposition: "I have no idea what my company even does! Do we make soup or something?"

The executive level shouldn’t be able to defer all of the accountability to employees lower down the ladder (e.g blaming it on an intern or whatever usual CYA excuse is rolled out). It’s one thing for an employee to go rogue, but totally another thing for leadership to either brush it under the rug or to create the environment for such behaviour in the first place.

How ignorant do you have to be to still say that in 2024? We literally spent the last century conducting worldwide social experiments to show exactly the opposite. At this point objecting to capitalism itself (I’m not talking more or less regulation within a capitalist system) is like being a flat-earther.

Leftist westerners loved my home country—as an object of their virtuous pity—when it was socialist. You’d see commercials begging for $1/day to feed people. Thanks to capitalism the country has changed completely in the last two decades. Vietnam and China both abandoned communism for capitalism and their prosperity soared.

This is a ridiculous claim. Do we have the same amount of total wealth as we did a hundred or a thousand years ago, and the only difference is how it's distributed?

(Not defending the Sacklers, fuck that family)

My goal is not punishment as much as it is compensation. I want a world where if someone has a billion dollars, it's because they made good decisions and have proven to be good in the long term. Currently that is not the case, if someone has a billion dollars it might be because they made greedy short term decisions and then bailed and deployed their golden parachute and left others to clean up their mess.

I also think it's about liability. I like not being personally liable for mistakes I make a work, but I don't get paid millions of dollars either. I think once enough money is involved people should no longer be able to disconnect financial liability from their personal money.

I also proposed it as a conservative high number, because if this ever were to happen, you know talking heads would be screaming about it, but regular people are going to scoff when they learn the only threat is to take away wealth in excess of 20 million.

I am not taking the side you think I am, you simply are reading things into what I said that aren’t there.

I am sure 3M did awful things. I am sure high levels of the stuff are dangerous, certain occupations were exposed to it at dangerous levels, the company willingly ignored that. I’m sure they deserve this fine. Fines of this magnitude hit corporations where they live in the way that jailing a COO cannot.

I just think “mass harm” is not proven. Perhaps some simply define that differently than I do, I don’t consider the relatively tiny amounts of factory workers impacted to be mass harm. Awful, sure. But the hysteria about this, and what I think most people are talking about when they use that term, is the level all of us are exposed to via drinking water, food packaging, etc. There’s simply no proof (or even solid evidence) of mass harm by that definition, just hysteria. Proof may arrive one day, I do not know. As you point out, it may take years or even decades. (Though it has been around nearly a century, and in large quantities for some time.)

The word “linked” is always common in bunk science. When you see that frequently on any topic, you can be sure there’s hysteria.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect every chemical manufactured (they all can end up in water systems) to be clinically tested. Those chemicals are too important to modern life to yank them all. There are too many.

It’s not that simple.

There's a perverse incentive to carry on with grossly detrimental products, because an admission that they are detrimental could bring on claims of liability. The penalties have to be harsh enough to overcome that reluctance.

Students loans, famously, can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, and follow you your entire life.

Should we have one set of law for the capital class and another for mere peasants?

There a orders of magnitude more candidates for CEOs positions than there are jobs, so it's not like we would run out of people to do the job if we increased the responsibilities.

If a company doesn't have liability for upper management, then where's their incentive to not instruct employees to behave illegally?

It would certainly make megacorps non-viable, but I don't see why that is undesirable. If the average company size is scaled down to the level where such liability is actually manageable, it would also largely solve the problem with monopolies, so it's a win-win.

Will this change investor behavior and industry culture? Yes, and that is not only a net good but absolutely necessary.

If you want capitalism as a financial system then holding the capitalists liable for wrongdoing that benefits them is the only way you avoid turning the planet into a hellscape.

Now a lot of folks come to doctors with very vague problems - ie 'chest pain' is probably the worst since it can be from nothing to killer (and it really often is). Also you need to keep constantly full mental model of all the other problems of patient (allergies, injuries, degenerative diseases of literally everything in the body), plus all their medication and how it interacts with those problems and whatever new treatment you are applying. Old folks are generally worst in sense that they are just breaking down altogether including their mind, so everything is potentially a problem, but then you sometimes have very little time to decide.

Its just not possible to not make mistakes, and its only matter of time before they become fatal. But doctors will never admit this to strangers, even close ones they often keep avoiding this topic. I grok them - idealists who want to save lives, but reality ain't some MSF hospital in middle of warzone where you save 50 lives a day and people celebrate you like a national hero, its small churning of all above, tons of bureaucracy and regulations and various financial pressures, so they do their best just like rest of us, and like rest of us mistakes (even if just misunderstandings with bad consequences) do happen.

That’s outside my circle of competence. It’s just interesting to note the predictable drumbeat of calls for jail time, even in cases where we forgot to make it illegal.