3M sells about 1.3 billion USD of the stuff yearly at about 16% margin, so figure about 200 million USD in profit per year. 12 billion represents about 60 current profit-years of production.They invented the stuff in the 30s but have been churning it out in quantity since the 50s. 12 billion isn't a speeding ticket but it also isn't even all the profit they made on it.
In addition to that, is their obligation to pay their profits or to make whole a world soaked in forever chemicals? Because the latter would be way more than 12 billion.
2) that period exceeds the lifespan of not only those responsible, but also any kids they might have conceived in extreme old age, and people can just… choose not work for (or invest in) a company that's been stuck with a long-term obligation.
I can see how it would be possible to make criminal liability stick on all members of a chain of command, corporate or otherwise, responsible for some decision. I can't see how setting a multi-lifetime punishment could possibly work.
When you sign up for student loans, you are aware (or at least should be) that they can't be discharged in bankruptcy. They aren't dischargable in bankruptcy because if they were, far fewer would be made, and far fewer non-rich people would go to college, and we don't want that. Nothing would perpetuate class divisions more than restricting education to those with money. Nobody would ever get a student loan for an anthropology degree again.
I don't necessarily agree with this system, as an 18 yr old probably does not have the life experience to make such large financial decisions, and I think perhaps far fewer people should go to college for things of no economic value, but the system has logic to it. It's meant to benefit the "peasants". Rich people don't need student loans and can pay for their kids' degrees.
Fines aren't the same. A company only has so much money. Many of the owners of the company are pensions funds, etc., that are held by the middle class. You can't reasonably squeeze money from everyone who had an ETF that contained 3M. You need to allow corporations to file bankruptcy to have a healthy economy, in fact, America's bankruptcy laws are (according to some economists) one of the reasons we have such a strong economy.
What you can do is liquidate the company and set up a non-profit fund with that money with explicit mandate to do the clean-up. Let the non-profit invest said money ethically to fund its operations.
Ideally, of course, the initial capital should also include the personal wealth of all the top management personally responsible for this.
> Many of the owners of the company are pensions funds, etc., that are held by the middle class. You can't reasonably squeeze money from everyone who had an ETF that contained 3M.
And why not? Do you not see how this kind of system is deliberately engineered to produce pushback under just such a pretense by, effectively, diluting and spreading responsibility wide enough across society? OTOH if we stop taking the "ohnoes, it will hurt all those middle class investors" argument seriously, it would actually encourage people to invest ethically instead of just blindly giving their money to whichever random sociopath offers the highest return.
(And yes, I do have considerable personal investments of my own.)
Because the biggest voting block in many democracies is the pensioners, so this being possible is a good way to lose elections.
> Do you not see how this kind of system is deliberately engineered to produce pushback under just such a pretense by, effectively, diluting and spreading responsibility wide enough across society? OTOH if we stop taking the "ohnoes, it will hurt all those middle class investors" argument seriously, it would actually encourage people to invest ethically instead of just blindly giving their money to whichever random sociopath offers the highest return.
Everything I have seen in my life leads me to think that people are pretty blind to risks when you dangle the possibility of a large return in front of them. Ponzi schemes, Brexit, lotteries, wars, unrestricted AI — at every scale, people will enthusiastically go for all of them in the name of some hoped-for benefit and call you names if you point out the risks they're taking.
> Because the biggest voting block in many democracies is the pensioners, so this being possible is a good way to lose elections
Imagine you would write ‘white people are the biggest voting block’ - this would be questionable as a justification for bad policy, right?
So kids are brutally held responsible for their bad decision, but pensioners aren’t.
It has become so normal to denigrate and mistreat the younger generation you don’t even consciously notice it any more. It’s a form of discrimination just like any other
I'm familiar with this video (and the book behind it). I don't know how fix it, but we can at least talk about how things should be before we can start discussing how to get there.
And here's the thing. If the overall arrangement continues to be broken - increasingly so, in fact - for new generations, and meanwhile they are repeatedly told that there's no way to fix it through the existing political system, at some point they will just get fed up and say, "fuck you and your system then", and it'll be torches and pitchforks time, elections be damned. Which is unlikely to actually improve matters on the whole - it rarely does - but it will certainly hurt all those older people with investments (and really just about anything of substantial value, including real estate) a great deal more than anything I talked about earlier.
So it is very much in their - in our! - interest to find some way forward that does not involve this kind of activity before the anger grows beyond the point where it can be contained. I would rather give up some of what I have to keep the rest of it. And then there's the very real risk of physical violence; the guys on the very top of this pyramid can afford private security and private jets as the ultimate escape hatch (and they're already digging bunkers for themselves elsewhere in droves), but I sure don't.
1) That's a reason to change the student loan rules where you live.
2) When a corporation goes bankrupt, it can get dissolved. This is the corporate equivalent of the death penalty, which you may approve of, but it still isn't going to help: all the assets get sold, and all the investor groups (a) know that (b) can get the stuff cheap because it's a fire-sale, and (c) know the exact size and shape of the market opportunity created by the dissolution. And there's a workforce right there, who were all laid off and are looking for work, who have exactly the skills you need and are already conveniently located and familiar with the equipment.
The debt doesn't get fully paid off, there's just nobody to do the paying.
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying. Are you saying that 60 years of profit on a product that's been churned out in quantity for 70 years is a small fine?
Do you see the company struggling to stay afloat, breaking up, selling parts to competition just to survive? For poisoning half of planet and killing god knows how many, yes thats a (bit bigger) speeding ticket, nothing more.
The fine was the 1/3 of yearly revenue, in 2023 their revenue was $32.68B, net income was -$7B (that’s a negative seven billion).
Im not sure of the payment timeline or if they have insurance, but it seems likely this will wipe out a few years of profitability and may force the sale of business units.
That said, I do think personal culpability is probably a better incentive and more ethically reasonable depending on the circumstances. Though that’d have to be criminal neglect, using laws we probably already have. In other words, this is a civil penalty, not the same as a criminal case with higher burdens of proof and motives need to be established.
They've already recognized most of the loss, so most of the impact on profits is in the past. From the Q2 2023 10-Q:
During the first six months of 2023, as a result of ongoing review and recent developments in ongoing environmental matters and litigation (including the proposed PWS Settlement), the Company increased its accrual for PFAS-related other environmental liabilities by $10.3 billion and made related payments of $38 million. As of June 30, 2023, the Company had recorded liabilities of $10.9 billion for “other environmental liabilities.” These amounts are reflected in the consolidated balance sheet within other current liabilities ($0.3 billion) and other liabilities ($10.6 billion). The accruals represent the Company’s estimate of the probable loss in connection with the environmental matters and PFAS-related matters and litigation described above. The Company is not able to estimate a possible loss or range of possible loss in excess of the established accruals at this time.
The system self corrects by companies moving to a different supplier. If 3M has to increase prices (they will) to offset the settlement costs, then other suppliers will be comparatively cheaper. 3M share price and profit will decrease which incentivizes the board and or shareholders to encourage safer (read: legal) business practices.
The people affected by these "corrections" are the workers that would be laid off due to decreasing revenue,... In order to maintain the expected profits that result in dividend payments to shareholders.
So, one could make the case that the workers get punished by the board of directors' bad decisions.
That clearly doesn't work. The fines are often less than the profits made. And the individuals and shareholders have already made a fortune by the time the payments come due, and can just move on to the next company and do the same thing there.
How does your model account for the probability that cheaper competitors are simply bad actors who have not yet been caught?
In fact, without something like criminal penalties, why would the board encourage safer/legal business practices? Seems like they might equally say, well that was a good run now find us another dastardly product that can bring our prices back down to our competitors.
> Otherwise you’re effectively making companies illegal.
It's more like making illegal behaviour by companies to be illegal.
There's a disconnect where behaviour that would result in jail time for people, doesn't result in jail time if performed by companies and that seems wrong to me. If an individual poisons a water supply, they're not going to be getting just a fine.
Don't underestimate the appeal of a 7 digit salary and the position of power you get with it.
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.
That doesn't appear to be well enforced as otherwise companies wouldn't be able to get away (or at least maybe receive a fine at some point) with illegal activity. If a company is illegally dumping chemicals into the water, then there has to have been at least one instance where a higher up instructed employees to do so.
In some (not all of course) of these discussions, the CEOs/other decision making executives have said things that were fairly explicitly "dangerous"/illegal. I'm not talking about "hold ceo responsible for something s/he wasn't aware of", I'm talking "hold them responsible when they instructed something even though they knew people would die" (eg see Ford Pinto).
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.
If you develop or sell something that has even a remote potential to kill someone, it's your responsibility to apply a cautionary principle and gather enough evidence that the probability of that outcome is negligible. Otherwise that IS gross negligence.
I’ve thought about this a fair bit. The idea of companies being a firewall for liability to protect individuals seems…off? Companies don’t make decisions, individuals do. Certainly there is some utility to the idea of limiting liability, but our current system seems to me to afford too much benefit to those running corporations.
It feels off because it makes no sense and is a completely biased system towards a small group of people. Ultimately this is just more class divide. Corporate entities and the legal protection they provide are accessible to only the wealthy and elite. They are another mechanism behind which the wealthy can run afoul of the law and the entity absorbs the negative repercussions while passing through all of the profits.
This just isn't true though. Do you mean to say thay legal remedies are more accessible to the rich? Every single small business owner benefits from the liability protections of corporations. If my business burns down and it's not fraud or something then I am not personally liable, nor should I be.
Your business burning down isn't the same as you, as (I assume) ceo of your company, acting knowingly in a way that causes death and illness to other people. This thread is about the fact that limited liability shouldn't protect you from the second scenario. Your comment is off topic.
> Corporate entities and the legal protection they provide are accessible to only the wealthy and elite.
This is the part of the previous comment to which I was responding, giving just one example of how it's not the case. Limited Liability corporations protect business owners of all wealth levels. Just correcting a patently false claim.
I understand your concern about thread topic, but it's just not really applicable to my point above.
I don't think so, I think it was topical just perhaps not in favour of your view.
The person they were replying to and to which their point related to, was very much narrowing down and exaggerating corporate entities to a "small group of people" of the "wealthy and elite".
While these larger corporations limit larger amounts of liability, most people can create a business and have it as a company, giving them limited liability. Yes, large corporations have the money and resources to better limit their liability than a smaller corporation.
They weren't disagreeing with that person, but providing a more balanced view in which liability limitations benefit companies of all sizes, not just larger ones.
Why would anyone believe that legal remedies are not more accessible to the rich? That's the foundation of the cash bail system, among many, many other differences.
In general, it's not a protection from gross negligence and/or fraud.
The problem is that in cases like these it's extremely difficult to prove such a thing, especially considering it's over many decades and potentially dozens of people.
There's also a bit of practical concerns where criminal prosecutions don't want to pick cases that are tough to win as it'll be resource intense to pursue them.
Of course like the Volkswagen situation you reference (in Germany) where the corporation operates may impact criminal prosecution.
Right, they aren't the only manufacturer. There are a dozen major ones. People always miss this about competitive markets. They are already charging the highest price they believe they can.
Are you talking about the _responsibility_ that is the justification for paychecks in the millions? It seems to end somewhere before jail sentences for most execs...
What makes you think the system isn't working as intended? What would 'correct' even look like? Occasional human sacrifice to appease the masses as is being called for on here?
That kind of thing is called an "unlimited company", which exists, but is rare and puts off investments (but apparently makes borrowing easier?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlimited_company
Random "unsophisticated investors" (e.g. me) are supposed to get some degree of protection from catastrophic mistakes we can't be expected to recognise heading our way, in order to encourage us to participate in the stock market without having to worry we might inadvertently be taking on some fractional responsibility for a debt exceeding our net worth.
Likewise, governments don't like it when pension funds are bankrupted because of what they invested in.
Limited liability and other contraptions are just tools capital and feudalists use to avoid liability. In fact these should be reveresed. In fact most of these should be tried as RICO cases
Feudalists avoid liability by conscripting peasants and ordering them to fight their creditors' peasants, or handing out literal piracy (privateer) licenses, or steal money from monasteries after denouncing the Pope or accusing the specific holy order in question of practicing witchcraft.
RICO came after 159 years of US experience with all the benefits of limited liability and in the midst of the Cold War where the US was fighting for the freedom to keep government out of the way of business, so selecting that as your magic legal phrase is about as sensible as trying to fight Covid lockdown restrictions by putting a printout of Magna Carta in a shop window.
The people benefiting from any behavior ranging from deceptive to criminal should be at least partially held liable (at minimum to not receive any profit whatsoever from those misdeeds).
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.
You need to be very careful with how you phrase that and what exactly you mean — as (for example) 3M and Boeing pay taxes and make stuff broadly useful across society, the set of people benefiting from misbehaviour which these companies are deemed responsible for is… basically everyone.
Even in a more narrow case with no complications (even narrower than SBF, because he distributed money to good causes who can't pay it back), you're including the defence lawyers.
I'm (caveat: not a lawyer) more in favour of specifically criminal behaviour being handled by "piercing the corporate veil", putting the penalty directly on the humans who actually did the crime without letting them hide behind corporate personhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
But of course, it can be hard to prove who knew what, so sometimes "follow the money" is easier. And yes, I also agree with you that there are misaligned incentives in capitalism that lead to bad outcomes and we should work to improve that — just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
To clarify, I am only talking about direct financial benefit (capitalist ownership). But it has to be backdated to the owners at the time range when wrongdoing occurred. That way you can go after people who sold (for profit) their stock before the wrongdoing was discovered.
Financially punish the capitalists who benefit from crimes and the executives that are currently getting away with crimes won't continue to get away with anything. (Laws and regulations will change rapidly when money is on the line)
Punishing only the people responsible for the crimes is a losing strategy. You have to eliminate the demand for that behavior. Because there an endless supply of morally corruptible people to take the fall so that capitalists can gain.
Less than you would think (in case we talk about manslaughter / kill by negligence, outright murder may be a slightly different topic).
Literally every seasoned doctor has what they call a 'small cemetery' of their failures. Got this from a GP, you don't need to be a surgeon for this to apply. In fact GPs have probably highest chance of saving/not saving lives due to volume of cases and potential severity of those, even if they don't do any invasive medicine themselves.
Actually I heard the opposite... I was a premed student and I did and internship at a hospital and one of the doctors said it's actually fairly difficult to kill someone by accident, ie you have to mess up very badly or the patient must already be gravely ill for an accident to result in death. Still, the comment implies that doctors do in fact make mistakes and it was one of the experiences I had in that internship that made me decided to switch majors.
Its just a number game. You see say 15 patients per day, so maybe 3000 a year. Even if you have a tiny 1% chance of overlooking something, thats 30 cases a year, easily. In a career, that jumps to 1000 cases minimally.
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.
Cool! Seize the assets and auction them to companies who don't do crime. Maybe a bigger fuck you would be to revoke all thier intellectual property. Seize the assets under asset forfeiture and release them into the public domain.
> What is the actual evidence that justifies a complete ban, in your view?
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.
This HN comment section is fascinating from a sociological point of view, most of the debate here comes down to whether an individual believes the burden of proof lies in proving safety vs proving danger when releasing a product with unknown risks and externalities.
I’m more worried about the fact that it was allowed for so long. Sure, we’re doing the right thing by quitting PFAS and starting major cleanup efforts.
But the system existed where people were incredibly negligent for years, knew they were hurting people, made boatloads of money, and retired. That same system exists in many oil-and-gas industries, drug marketing, and more. There are dozens of examples where this has happened in recent years, and that’s just the ones at large enough scale to be prosecuted.
It’s still happening to this day. How do we start treating intentional negligence that leads to mass suffering and death as seriously as murder? It is individuals making these decisions, and they need to be held personally liable.
The corporate veil is useful, and shouldn’t go away completely. But when an individual makes a decision that had a high probability of doing major harm, they should at least stop and raise the issue to a government agency, to limit their liability. If they do not take appropriate precautions, like getting explicit approval from government authorities, then they should be personally liable for the negligence.
Is there a told-you-so list somewhere that catalogues these ongoing negligences? I'd love to see a comprehensive of the things that are known now, but not well-known yet.
I suspect we're going to find plenty of food items to put on this list.
Are we planning to jail or bankrupt the peddlers of sugar water? Sugar itself? Refined flour? Non-nutritive sweeteners? Fast food? Fast casual? Buffets? Potato chips? Chocolate? Beer? Wine? (Stop me when we get to some pseudo-vice that you sometimes enjoy.)
At some point, I think you have to say "society decided at the time that selling Coke, Pepsi, fast food, potato chips, and wine was okay, and the people who sold that aren't subject to retroactive punishments for selling something that we pretty much knew was damaging to health of millions of people, but they chose to eat it anyway..."
> But the system existed where people were incredibly negligent for years, knew they were hurting people, made boatloads of money, and retired.... It is individuals making these decisions, and they need to be held personally liable.
Maybe people who have more than, say, 20 million dollars should be personally liable. This seems like a very conservative middle ground, because, as you say, these people have sometimes knowingly made decisions they knew would result in deaths. Taking away only some of their money is the least of punishments, and they would still be left rich and very comfortable.
This should apply to almost anyone. I get that regular people deserve some protection from liability for just doing their job, but at some point society is paying you so much money that you owe us a little personal responsibility in return.
Maybe it could be structured such that when a company is sued and loses, the company can then sue past employees who made the wrong decisions. Again, this liability would not be able to reduce an individual's wealth to less than 20 million, so employees don't have to worry about being completely ruined, but people shouldn't be able to control society warping amounts of wealth when the source of that wealth was incorrect and possibly corrupt decisions.
Let's try including some responsibility with the merit.
Corporate negligence that results in significant damage to environment or public health must be criminalized with most severe punishment going to higher level decision makers, including some accountability for their superiors. If CEO knew and acted against public interests, then Board must be held accountable. If board knew and acted against public interests, then majority shareholders who voted for this board must be at least fined.
Not just that the CEO or board "knew" because that is a hard thing to prove. Better to have it be "reasonably should have known". If this is a thing that the company is doing and has been doing for a long time then the senior managers should know about it and are therefore liable and responsible. Such a rule would also incentivize managers from 'looking the other way' at wrong-doing because the saying 'I didn't know' won't matter.
This is very important. Each time there is a leak of a bunch of personal data companies whip out the "we have not found any evidence of the leak being ours" or something to that tune, which incentivizes them not look for evidence.
It often feels like the only requirement to be an executive at a large corporation is the ability to create plausible deniability via willful ignorance.
Ironically enough, the government has been moving in the opposite direction - No fault compensation schemes like NCVIA, anti-lawsuits bills like PLCAA, limits on torts.
I do wonder why? Must be Big Business (in the NCVIA case, Big Pharma), right?
I agree with the sentiment here, education is needed and finance / bribery is a good example. At a certain point though, you have to wonder what is wrong with society where "Don't kill a bunch of people through negligence" becomes something that needs to be educated.
perhaps it relates to a concept of LD50 in chemical testing.. that is, run tests and show a distribution of content and application, that results in "greater than fifty percent" fatality or "less than fifty percent" overall mortality.. continue to evaluate through the entire market system..
No action or formulation is one hundred percent pure and beneficial, though many actions or formulations are certainly one hundred percent fatal, now or over time. This is true in products created by companies, and markets push towards maximum profitability, not maximum safety.
The thought experiment of that there is a button and if you press it then you get $1M, but also a person you don't know somewhere far away dies. Turns out lots of people will press that button all day long. "Reduce worker safety conditions" PRESS!, "Dump cancer-causing waste in river" PRESS!, etc.
The buck can and should stop with the executive level anyway. They are paid extremely handsomely, in huge disproportion to the rest of the staff at their company, in part because fucking up at this level means you won’t see the C level again for a long time. It’s the ultimate accountability in the organization.
The accountability piece rarely happens now, unless you happen to defraud other investors, yet the compensation for the job continues to grow wildly out of proportion.
Hard disagree. High level executives are ultimately responsible for everything that happens, and must suffer the consequences - I really want to see C-levels regularly being sent to jail for the crimes comitted by the companies they led - but the low-level employees that actually performed the dangerous/illegal/immoral acts aren't magically innocent because someone higher up ordered them so ("just following orders" is not a valid defence).
Example at Boeing: the CEO and all related high level execs that fostered a culture of bean counting and cutting corners to save costs are guilty and liable for deaths. The actual people that designed a deadly system, those who approved it; similarly, those that forgot to put in bolts holding critical stuff together... they are guilty too. They knowingly endangered human lives.
I think we both agree, you just went into more detail on it.
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.
…this liability would not be able to reduce an individual's wealth to less than 20 million…
Why? $20 million is a LOT of money. We shouldn’t allow greedy sociopaths to accumulate even that much wealth at the expense of the rest of us.
The Sackler family is a good example. Why should they walk away with even $20 million (let alone the $11 billion they kept after negotiating a $4.5 billion settlement). It’s crazy.
You think that if someone makes $20 million, then the money has been taken away from someone else? I see this sentiment on TikTok and Reddit alot, and it makes no sense.
If it doesn't make sense then you apparently haven't come to terms with the fact that capitalism is a zero sum endeavor. We're getting off topic though quibbling over where to plant the goalposts.
> If it doesn't make sense then you apparently haven't come to terms with the fact that capitalism is a zero sum endeavor
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.
"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."
You're welcome to that delusion but you're cheerleading a system that among it's many flaws is predicated on continuous growth that's based on a closed system with finite resources to draw from. Three guesses how that ends.
lol. people have been predicting the end to natural resources like oil, gas, minerals, and ores for over 100 years now, but they keep getting cheaper showing that they are more abundant now than ever. go read about the Simon and Ehrlich wager where Ehrlich just got humiliated.
Now who's ignorant? You're confusing the fruits of the combination of technological advancements in extraction and exploitation of the 3rd world with endless abundance. 150 years ago oil wells were routinely dug with nothing more complicated than a pick axe and some dynamite. You think companies invested in the complexity and cost of off shore drilling (as an example) in spite of simpler more cost effective methods being available? Pull your head out.
you apparently haven't come to terms with the fact that capitalism is a zero sum endeavor
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?
It is still a zero-sum endeavor because all this new wealth didn't materialize out of thin air. It was created by people, and specifically by people doing productive work with their hands and their brains - which does not describe the suits on top, no matter how much they try to convince us otherwise. The reason why the latter end up with most of this newly produced wealth in their pockets is simply because they have access to a wide assortment of mechanisms to collect economic rent from the people who actually produce - this is the zero-sum part. The notion that, without the suits, the wealth wouldn't have been produced at all is nonsense.
Sounds like you haven’t came to terms with it being zero sum either.
Zero-sum: adj, of, relating to, or being a situation (such as a game or relationship) in which a gain for one side entails a corresponding loss for the other side.
GDP can still increase, but doesn’t disprove capitalism isn’t zero-sum. If you haven’t been paying attention we are currently living in a period of the most wealth inequality in recent history.
Did the conversation slip into geologic timescales or something? Unless you're advancing the argument that modern day corporate structures bear some kind of significant relationship to feudalism the phrase was recent history. I'm fairly certain reasonable people wouldn't classify, for example, the War of the Roses as recent events.
This is a ridiculous response. Have we extracted more natural resources than we had a hundred or a thousand years ago? Are the biomes that our species utilize for foodstuffs more or less healthy than they were a century ago?
We’re talking about people who, via a corporate shield, are polluting, or peddling drugs, or whatever else. The wealth they’re accumulating is at the expense of society at large.
If you want to make a billion dollars, fine, just do it without fucking over the rest of us.
> Maybe people who have more than, say, 20 million dollars should be personally liable. This seems like a very conservative middle ground, because, as you say, these people have sometimes knowingly made decisions they knew would result in deaths. Taking away only some of their money is the least of punishments, and they would still be left rich and very comfortable.
Monetary punishment is not enough, and in fact I would say any kind of punishment is not useful enough. We need to switch our thinking to focus on preventative measures.
In this case all of the money ever made from PFAS will never be enough to clean up the pollution or care for all of the human health side effects. You could make all of the employees and execs very uncomfortable, claw back every single penny ever made and it still wont be enough by a long shot. In some cases It's easy to do a huge amount of damage for (relatively) far less personal gain.
Some of the world's regulatory systems already at least attempt to work from a preventative perspective such as drug approval processes for humans. As more of society wises up to the fact that the environment is an extension of us, it shouldn't be that hard to convince people to take preventative strategies towards caring for it.
I agree, and prevention can't be a one time thing. In the 1930's if you were against using coal to produce electricity you would have been labeled crazy. Seems like what is needed is constant re-assessment to determine if new harms have been noted, along with ongoing research and testing to look for toxins, environmental effects, etc. As you state, preventive strategies. For example, ConsumerLab.com is testing herbal supplements, not just once, but regularly for lead, potentcy and more. This is something that should have already been ongoing for decades, not just started as a business in the last few years. Another example is national security as it relates to imported products. If we're not testing imported foods and other products (kids toys) reliably for lead and other poisons then a hostile country could poison your population before you know about it. Impaired people = impaired soldiers. Managing this in a cost effective way is difficult, but it seems possible.
Reassessment is needed for sure. To classify the other strategies you are describing I think I would call them "increased focus", which would be a positive move for sure. But the draw back of this approach is it's more of the same, it's reactive, it has to chase industry, and it's effectiveness is dependent on available resources not being outpaced by industry (unlikely).
An alternative regulatory system that doesn't need to chase industry would require industry to come to them by law when for example they want to release a new class of chemical into the environment. For all of it's flaws, I'm basically talking about something like the FDA, but hopefully less corrupt.
>Again, this liability would not be able to reduce an individual's wealth to less than 20 million
$20,000 I might accept, but that's ridiculous.
Edit: Really, I don't think any kind of limit is a good idea. We already have bankruptcy law and different sorts of fines or penalties being or not being dischargeable under forms of bankruptcy. Sticking to that framework seems best.
Are you a programmer? Would you accept having most of your money, retirement, possessions, and wealth taken away if it is discovered you made a mistake and there's a serious big in your code?
I'm not talking about just criminal negligence, I'm taking about honest mistakes too. If you want to be ultra rich, more than 20 million, then you have to be competent enough to not make big mistakes. For everyone else, they get to keep their retirement, etc. That's why I said 20 million.
And I'm thinking about more than punishment. It's about compensation. A CEO should be compensated for making good long term decisions, and if it turns out they have not make good decisions, they should retroactively lose compensation, but not be left in ruin over honest mistakes.
As for criminal cases, apply criminal penalties, which are beyond what I was suggesting.
Yes, but a once society crossed that boundary then it will be on you and your lawyer to prove that it wasn't criminal negligence, just the regular old kind
My issue with your argument is in what world is a net worth of $20 million not "ultra rich." The median net worth of an individual near retirement age is $400,000. Under 35 it's a tenth of that.
I don't really have an opinion about statutory fines for executives in situations like this, but the idea that reducing someone's net worth to a measly 50x that of what most people have is somehow punitive is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.
It's an arbitrary number, but I believe it should be fairly high in this idea I propose. (And this is all pie in the sky theory crafting anyway.)
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.
Not really. Sovereign countries can block 100% of China imports any time they want. That your lack understanding of trade policy is no excuse for such a reductionist claim. One can also imagine that people might personally refuse to import deadly products or products that harm their children's future environment. There are plenty of reasons this might not just be the race to the bottom you imagine and profess. Do the harder work next time instead of wasting everyone's attention on such worthless replies.
The government can also ban chemicals at any time, for import or domestic production. The issue is they didn’t, at the time, but 3M or similar was supposed to have “known better”.
Massive retrospective penalties for “should have known better” non-crimes will just result in an off-shoring to markets where these penalties do not apply.
Oil and gas companies knew that their product would cause large scale global climate impacts half a century ago. They suppressed that information, and then proceeded to go the extra step and create the current "climate change isn't real" worldview through a carefully planned and executed influence campaign.
It's a remarkably effective strategy that appears all over different industries, including tech. Keep an eye out for large political battles, and wishy-washy scientific studies funded by the industry that profits off the issue at hand.
If someone is looking for sources, this article goes into great detail though it is extremely long but worth the read. Other publications have posted similar stories.
Other people besides oil companies knew 50 years ago too, so this is hardly relevant. Nothing would have changed if they had made this public. Hell, we all know now and still aren't doing much. This whole conspiracy theory is just cope from people who won't admit that it is us and our oil consumption that is the problem and the companies are just there to give us what we want.
We aren't doing nearly as much as we should be, but we're certainly doing something - and at time spans like 50 years, said "something" can compound quite significantly. Even if we've ultimately had the same discussion about climate that we ended up having today, but several decades earlier, that would already be a fairly big improvement in the current state of affairs.
You also completely ignore the other, and arguably more important, part where those companies didn't just bury the research - no, they knowingly developed highly effective agitprop, often intentionally disguised as science, to blunt the public reaction when the story eventually broke for the general public. They have straight up bought politicians to peddle said agitprop, too.
It's the difference between your car's brakes failing and you plowing through a crosswalk and tragically killing a pedestrian, and being a serial killer.
Intentionality is key, and ExxonMobil is a highly profitable psychopath in this regard.
If Dave Calhoun legitimately feared he'd be set on fire in public, he'd probably actually pay attention to the shit he's creating instead of being sure that worst case scenario he'd retire with a few tens of millions of USD more.
There is not strong evidence that the levels of PFAs most people are exposed to cause any health issues at all. It is, of course, concerning. Nobody likes the idea of materials building up in their bodies.
But we can't say they knew they were hurting many people, because we still don't.
Yet a drug—that people willingly and optionally take as opposed to this—must be proven NOT to create harm before it is allowed in the wild. Your argument sounds like it is in bad faith.
I think that that was the implication. We should elevate the standard for new chemicals that might enter our body through the environment to a similar standard we already have for drugs (chemicals we deliberately put into our body.)
You are conflating very different things. Go into any Whole Foods and there is an entire aisle of pills that are not proven to not create harm, in fact, some of them most certainly do.
Pharmaceuticals play by a different set of rules than other chemicals because humans are particularly gullible when it comes to health claims. "Snake oil salesman" is a common term for a reason. We don't let big pharma make certain claims without ample test data for a whole host of obvious reasons.
In this context we were talking about punishing people for "harming" without having proven that they've really harmed at all. This would be more like locking up all the Chinese restaurant owners for using MSG.
That really feels like a bad-faith and misinformed comparison.
Can you please at least do a very basic amount of research before you take sides on this? Perhaps watch a documentary (e.g. the devil we know) or read at least 1 wikipedia article -- it was clear from the outset that workers at these factories were giving birth to children with birth-defects for example. [1]
These companies had engineers who were actively concerned about its health effects, circulating internal memos to that effect [1], but just because there wasn't a finalized published study are able to claim "well.... it's not proooooven technically for 100% sure to be bad for you in small doses..."
Of course small doses of anything can take a decade to be proven harmful to newborn children. These are now being linked to ADHD, that's something that takes years of very intentional research to find (because how old does a kid have to be to get that diagnosis).
Documentaries are not research. I have read countless actual papers on this. You can find them online.
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.
Well clearly it's been proven to the satisfaction of the court, whatever your "personal research" says.
It's also been proven to an independent science council:
The C8 Science Panel, which was funded by DuPont as part of a lawsuit settlement, conducted extensive epidemiological analysis on human health outcomes from exposure to PFOA, a type of PFAS. This panel, composed of independent scientists, found links to several health harms, including two types of cancer and pregnancy-related issues, after studying blood samples from nearly 70,000 residents in the mid-Ohio River Valley. This area was significantly exposed due to its proximity to a DuPont Teflon factory (EWG).
More papers come out every year finding stronger links. I wonder what your horse in this race is, my friend?
You simply do not understand my argument and perhaps it is my failing for that. In any case, I can’t make it any clearer than I already have so I’ll stop trying.
Every single western society takes a different approach to drugs that people directly ingest and industrial chemicals that might build up in peoples’ bodies. The calculus seems to be that people would rather have better non-stick pans and are okay with a few more people dying from them. You might disagree with that, but OP is just stating what’s apparently common sense. That’s the exact opposite of “bad faith.”
My girlfriend is simultaneously outraged that there are PFAs in the water supply and has entire sets of pans that are disintegrating Teflon that she even puts in the dishwasher. When I point out the irony she shrugs.
That is definitely not the bar for drugs, or most drugs would not be allowed to be sold.
The FDA requires that drugs provably and consistently have an effect, and that side effects are generally well known and not excessively bad so as to outweigh the benefits.
Drugs without known side effects are the worst in the eyes of the FDA (except those with no redeeming properties whatsoever anyway), because it doesn’t allow for manageable prescribing.
If they were proven to be safe, they wouldn’t require a prescription and would be sold over the counter. Though even that bar isn’t really required, or St. John’s Wort, Tylenol, etc. wouldn’t be allowed to be sold.
We can be reasonably certain that very high exposure is harmful, yes. Only a small percent of the population achieved that level of exposure, thankfully.
Things we know: high concentrations are catastrophically harmful, it persists in the environment indefinitely, and this shit is bio accumulative. That should be the end of any discussion about product safety.
All of your logic on this topic is leaving out the fact that our world is powered by a lot of chemicals, and without them, a lot of people would be dead. There’s a reason the population has grown so much in the last two centuries. We’ve gotten really good at making food, housing, and other things that keep people alive, and those all involve chemicals that have not gone through double blind randomized controlled trials and, in fact, have severe negative health outcomes if a human is exposed to too much of them.
It is not exaggeration to say that of the worlds 8 billion people, at least half of them would not be here without fertilizers and pesticides. Those are things that have, at times, caused environmental issues that harm people also.
If we were to take off of the market overnight every chemical that was not proven to have no possible negative effect, we would lose billions of people. Literally.
The reason we are phasing out PFAs rather than simply immediately prohibiting them is that they are useful in a lot of applications that are important and we need time to replace them, and barring certain egregious incidents like 3M dumping a bunch of it in the river, there just is no known harm. So we fine them quite a lot for the egregious incidents. Good.
This is the problem with the socialist mind virus, they act like everything has no upside so you can just prohibit whatever you don’t like and the world will be better off for it. That’s why you think counter-arguments are just pedantry. They aren’t, it’s just that you’re thinking about it is not in depth.
Let's be clear here. Exposure to specific PFAS are associated with a variety of health effects, including altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, and cancer. And while eliminating the firefighting uses of these compounds (as an example) would cause some issues, 3M, after significant evidence of broad toxicity was discovered, went on to expand the market for these compounds from domestic cookware to , among other things, children's clothing and food packaging materials.
Comprehensive toxicological studies haven't been performed on every single compound in the family because the market has been flooded with over 12,000 individual compounds. That is a startlingly large number that given 3M's prior bad faith decision-making around this family of products immediately brings to mind the designer drug industry's habit of burying regulators in compounds tweaked to get around regulatory bans.
In industries that actually perform comprehensive testing before releasing a compound into the wild it costs on average between eight and fifteen million dollars to perform a full suite of toxicological tests. So if the onus to test is placed on regulators that's roughly one hundred and twenty billion dollars out of public coffers and several decades of lab time, to confirm 3M, Dupont, Chemours, et al haven't poisoned the planet.
So if I understand your position correctly you're claiming that since we have absolutely no evidence that any of these compounds are safe at any exposure level (as you said, no toxicology has been done on most of these) and despite prior bad faith acts by the companies involved, we should continue to extend the benefit of the doubt? I think not, and your own choice to install water filtration equipment into your own home suggest you aren't as convinced as you'd have us believe here.
To be clear my proposal is that going forward manufacturers be required to perform the same pre-clinical trials that pharma companies have to perform before they can apply to move to human trials. Retroactive testing of existing compounds is absolutely a nice stretch goal because I think we can all agree if something harmful to our families is making it's way into the ecosystem we'd like to know about it sooner or later. I am utterly untroubled by the notion that these additional requirements might impact shareholder value and see no particular reason why taxpayers should be expected to foot the bill for 3Ms shareholders.
Right, your proposal is dumb. Most chemicals (including the ones we’re discussing) aren’t medicine. You wouldn’t give them to people to see how much it hurts them, that would be unethical. We do that with medicine because it might help them, so there’s a potential benefit both to the individual who is the test subject and to society. We’ve no reason to believe ingesting PFAs is of any benefit so what you’re proposing would be cruel. It would be akin to running tests on prisoners or dissenters like they do in totalitarian regimes.
And if you did give people the level of these chemicals that 99.99% of the population is exposed to, you’d see no real effects, because no real effects is what we see in people who aren’t exposed to really high levels of it. We see some very weak correlations that almost certainly have other underlying causes and literally nothing else. Which, again, is not to say the effects aren’t there. It’s just that they’re very small if they exist, and it’s really hard with no control group to be sure of anything with very weak correlations.
“Associated with” doesn’t mean anything at all. I can find a correlation between any two things if I look for it. That’s all this is. (And again, I’m not talking about the people who worked in factories with it or lived where large amounts were dumped into the environment, etc., that is what they got fined for and they deserve it.)
If what you’re proposing is we make every chemical go through clinical trials, that’s going to kill a lot of people both directly (lots of chemicals have little to no harmful effects if not ingested but are deadly if you do so) and indirectly (lots of people are only alive because of chemicals that would be yanked.)
This has nothing to do with shareholders, it’s a simple societal cost benefit analysis and you’re just dismissing any benefits and underestimating the cost.
You completely misunderstood my point based on your paraphrasing. Which is fine, that’s the internet for you.
That’s exactly why it’s bad, we don’t require businesses to prove X chemical/compound is safe before we start using it for whatever, no, we use it and just hope that it’s safe.
The problem is, there are very many chemicals, those chemicals in many ways power our modern world, and they can all end up in drinking water or ingested by some other means. If you took every chemical off of the market that didn’t go through a randomized controlled double blind study, billions of people would die. Literally. How many people are fed thanks to fertilizers and pesticides that we know would be actively harmful if you consume them in quantity? Or at least don’t know would be unharmful.
It’s not practical to ban everything that we don’t know can be ingested safely. It’s just not even an intelligent idea. It’s merely a response to hysteria.
These chemicals were suspected to be harmful but allowed to be used anyway. This is not an innocent mistake. Same playbook as the tobacco industry. Throw the book at them, they deserve it.
I am not suggesting that we ban all chemicals not properly studied, but we can do a lot to at least get a sense of what X chemical may be capable of doing to us if ingested.
I don’t think it would’ve been incredibly difficult or burdensome to think that a chemical that can with stand 900+ degrees celsius won’t be metabolized and broken down very well inside the body, the next obvious supposition would be well is the body going to be able to eliminate it in some way or will it just stay there? What happens if it stays there, that doesn’t sound very good? These are all basic questions 3M chemists could’ve asked themselves before they created this mess, or may be they did and no one paid attention.
> There is not strong evidence that the levels of PFAs most people are exposed to cause any health issues at all. It is, of course, concerning. Nobody likes the idea of materials building up in their bodies.
I mean the research is still relatively new and ongoing [1][4] where “most of the hundreds of PFAS currently in commerce have limited or no toxicity data” [5]. And in 2022 the EPA posted “…updated advisory levels, which are based on new science and consider lifetime exposure, indicate that some negative health effects may occur with concentrations of PFOA or PFOS in water that are near zero.” [2]. On top of that there are lots of PFAs which cannot be individually tested for — In 2019 the EPA “can now measure 29 chemicals”[6] out of “thousands of PFAS chemicals” [7] — which means many of those tests are only checking for a small subset of this class of chemical (though the older and more widely used ones have been prioritized for testing).
Also where do you get your control group from for low level exposure? It takes time to bioaccumulate and most people are already exposed to some degree —“Nearly all people in the United States have measurable amounts of PFAS in their blood” [4] — through many different sources — “There are thousands of PFAS chemicals, and they are found in many different consumer, commercial, and industrial products. This makes it challenging to study and assess the potential human health and environmental risks.” [7].
When the food industry intentionally sabotages health and nutrition science for their own gain, they should be liable. Their actions are responsible for the early deaths and sicknesses of millions of people.
I think the key thing is people doing things that aren't yet illegal, but probably should be.
I think we should simply backdate fines and punishments in this case. Ie. if you were doing something harmful to people or the environment but it was technically legal to do at the time you did it, you should still get punished (although a smaller punishment, especially if you can reasonably argue you didn't know).
> they should at least stop and raise the issue to a government agency, to limit their liability.
Many countries have a revolving door between industry and government oversight.
New Zealand consistently scores well, having low corruption. Currently we have a government that has a very interesting relationship with the tobacco industry, with freight/roading, gambling and with horse and dog racing.
We unfortunately see it far too often - corporate crimes that are punished with simple fines that become the cost of doing business. But we all know it's not justice. Justice would be criminal charges against the people within the corporation that actually did the crime.
We're long overdue for some change here.
Are there are any politicians or bills (past or present) that have floated the idea of exposing shareholder skin in the corporate game? If these people were threatened with serious prison time, capital punishment, or even worse - being forced to drive a used Kia the rest of their lives (materialists couldn't bear the shame), we'd see far less harm being done.
Another option would be easier corporate death — all shares instantly voided.
The government could decide what to do with the company, fold it, or sell it for scraps.
Yes, there might be motivation for the government to “kill” companies for profits, but there is exactly the same (and proved many times!) issue with putting people in prison, so I don’t see why companies should get a special exception, they are “people” as well, or so I’m told.
I think you're on the right track here.. corporate death, shares voided, assets frozen in perpetuity, buildings, land, machinery. Everything frozen forever to stand as a warning to the next executive or employee before doing something like this.
You can even start with corporate jail. No business operations of any kind allowed for weeks/months, be that preforming services for clients, servicing debts, contracts or payroll. And if that results in an existential threat to the company or a lot of lawsuits for failing to perform their obligations, then that would be the just results of the company's decisions.
It would be as existentially threatening and crippling to a company as it currently is to the average member of society.
If powerful or opportunistic criminals were at risk of being criminally charged by the government, they're then utterly incentivized to influence and control said government.
And that has already happened since forever, which is why you have to ask if there are politicians threatening this. It's all already tied together.
Unfortunately, I think there is a lot of overlap between shareholders and politicians. The people making the laws have an incentive not to expose shareholders to personal liability.
We just need to impart fear on the executives to not make harmful decisions. The first step is an independent investigation to let their names be known to the public. The system should then be able to self-correct.
To all the comments wanting some kind of personal accountability or justice, let's just point out that the government won't even ban stuff like this quickly. Companies are given time to phase it out. Just making a hard ban effective immediately is seen as too harsh, yet it is the most obvious thing to do and you're asking for much more.
That's also a function of lack of strong evidence of harm. We're not even sure that people exposed to high levels of PFAs are suffering harm, let alone the other 99% of us. There's no mesothelioma-level smoking gun here even for firefighters, factory workers, etc., let alone those of us who are only exposed to it via drinking water.
It's a mass hysteria, and while I'm certainly not saying it's benign, I've read the studies, and they remind me of the nutritional ones from the 90's we've all since abandoned where they just throw a bunch of claims at the wall, show a bunch of weak correlations in completely uncontrolled studies, and say "more research is needed".
Your comment also reminds me of the late 80s and early 90s when tobacco companies pumped massive amounts of cash into cancer research to muddy the water around the harms being caused by their products.
Very different. The evidence was much stronger there. The correlations were so high as to be impossible to ignore. (It also helped that smoking was so prevalent across race/class/age etc that it practically controlled for all the other variables inherently, which is true of drinking water exposure to PFAs too.)
There were conditions like emphysema that were basically unheard of in non-smokers (or people who worked in certain occupations that involved a lot of combustion byproducts) and common in smokers.
The correlations here (at the levels most of us are exposed to) are incredibly weak. Don’t take my word for them, look them up.
This is more like the link between aspartame and cancer. There’s no smoking gun, no high correlations. If you look up the symptoms “linked” to it, there are hundreds at least.
Not all correlations are equal.
But, I install R/O filters in my house because I am not certain it is not harmful and why take the chance? I’m just not certain it is harmful and I would need to be to support jailing people or banning the chemicals immediately and entirely.
Above all, you should not be able to dump things in the environment which doesn't break down. They also accumulate in your body and is not possible to remove quickly. Moreover, they knew since the 70s [1] that it was probably harmful, but kept making it anyways pretending it was safe. There needs to be corporate responsibility for the cleanup, which may well bankrupt the compnay, and personal criminal responsibility for those who made the decision.
Doesn't it? I think we all agree performative behaviors have taken center stage over the last couple decades (see also: online influencers, prepper culture, and the shitstorm over "woke" culture). Quibbling over bullshit minutia with no specific larger goal in mind, especially in public forums, is just another manifestation.
Or your original point was half assed and you’re just angry you can’t actually make a better one?
I don’t think PFAs are some essential vitamin or minerals.
But some quantifiable risk information is essential to actually making a useful analysis. Like other types of substances we’ve done nearly the same thing to ourselves over, like dioxins, PCBs, etc.
Most if them might just be as bad as silicones, some of them might be worse, some of them better. And it’s weird that none of that is allowed to be discussed.
I think you have an overly broad or ungenerous (is this what the cranky kids call “bad faith”?) definition of “performative”?
“Bullshit minutia” is pretty subjective. If my hippy friend says “the govment should ban chemicals in foods”, arguing about what “chemicals” mean is not bullshit it’s critical information for a fact based argument. If anything ignoring facts and logical minutia could be called performative, since then your words matter less than your saying <anything> that tickles feelings.
Also leaded gas, also asbestos. Leaded gas left a trace in the Earth's crust about which future archeologists will remark of our fallen civilization "Oh yeah, this kind of explains the PFAS layer, too."
There is always a time where a harmful substance is introduced, suspicions develop, and data is inconclusive. As I mentioned, that may be where we are with PFAs.
But for each of these there are dozens of examples where people are hysterical about some new substance, correlations are shown, and it turns out to be nothing. We could be there with low level exposure to PFAs too.
With asbestos, like with cigarettes, there was a form of cancer that almost only appears in people exposed to it. That’s a solid smoking gin that’s totally absent here.
So it's okay to expose people to whatever might kill them and only do something decades later when proof overwhelms companies and politicians trying their best to do nothing in the name of profit?
Sorry, that's not what I meant.
What I mean is: You are predicting that the overwhelming proof will ever exist.
This prediction may turn out to be true, but why should I believe your prediction over that of anyone else's? Do you have some insider knowledge or expertise that you can share?
Edit: Also, what do you give the odds of your prediction, by severity of outcome? I want to see how the odds you provide stack up against the economic and thus social consequences of under-regulation or over-regulation.
I hear what you're saying but foundationally this is a bullshit argument. The entire debate evaporates if you simply shift the burden of proof where it belongs and state that Things must comprehensively prove their safety before being released onto the market or otherwise into the wild.
That profit pays your paycheck, at least a little, and is part of your retirement. And the product is part of the product you and everyone else decided they wanted to own.
They knew and they carried on to the detriment of all of humanity. The penalties we have are insufficient. Perdue pharma got away with mass murder.
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.
They knew what? The really important question (do these chemicals in the levels we see in the body of average Joe cause harm?) is still unknown. Yet half the population is ready to tar and feather 3M execs due to the hysteria. (Never mind that a dozen other chemical companies are still on the hook too.)
Purdue pharma might not be off the hook yet (didn’t the judgment that protected them from criminal liability get reversed? I admit I don’t know as much about that case.) and did commit mass murder, but this isn’t that. We don’t know that any sizable number of people have even been harmed by these yet, that’s my point. What does one evil corporation have to do with an entirely related other one? Are we supposed to just jail the execs of any corporation who we think may have done something wrong just because of Purdue Pharma?
We know PFAs and the like are in most people in low levels. We know there are a bunch of very weak correlations with various health defects with no indication of causality.
The penalty was harsh. That’s a whopping figure even for a mega corp. I just don’t see the case for jail time here like I do with the Sacklers.
Who were the top level executives while this was going on? Why don't these articles ever lay blame properly? And what are the consequences for those individuals? And what is being done to ensure it doesn't happen again?
I would like to see 3M forced to pay the DNR of Minnesota and Wisconsin a similar amount for making the St. Croix and Mississippi rivers polluted enough that we can't eat the fish again (like the 1980s/90s before the mercury settled out).
There is some evidence (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9228135/) that PFAS causes trans-generational dysfunction. Even if we somehow get it out of our environment - which we will never do - the damage already done can stay with us indefinity. They not only poisoned several generations, they poisoned future ones as well. There is no amount of money that can be be paid here.
Having read the article it's really not clear this it supports that analysis, "As expected, environmentally relevant PFAS levels did not affect survival."
In particular, although the high levels of exposure (of one or more PFOS/PFOA) showed effects, there was reverse correlation at low levels. Of course this is in Zebra fish so I'd hesitate to guess the relevance for mammal or human populations. It does seem to most directly affect lipid metabolism including steroids, and is multi-generational.
I'd be most worried where the chemical (waste) byproducts were used as fire suppressants rather than the small quantities found elsewhere. Those concentrations (hundreds of ppt) are much more worrying. People who sprayed their clothes, couches, tires with scotchguard were probably also already exposed to 100s of times higher lifetime doses than they will ever see through environmental sources at <10ppt (still above proposed limits).
I’m not even sure what a true “settlement” would look like in a case like this. Usually a settlement serves to at least partially repair the damage to the plaintiff. In this case the damage can’t be repaired at all. If there was a crime committed people need to go to jail in such cases. Unequal application of justice: someone steals a donut and ends up in jail, yet, another person person dumps tons of toxic sludge in a river and they get to “settle” using the money that’s not even their own.
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[ 1603 ms ] story [ 4429 ms ] threadIn addition to that, is their obligation to pay their profits or to make whole a world soaked in forever chemicals? Because the latter would be way more than 12 billion.
1) bankruptcy is a thing, and
2) that period exceeds the lifespan of not only those responsible, but also any kids they might have conceived in extreme old age, and people can just… choose not work for (or invest in) a company that's been stuck with a long-term obligation.
I can see how it would be possible to make criminal liability stick on all members of a chain of command, corporate or otherwise, responsible for some decision. I can't see how setting a multi-lifetime punishment could possibly work.
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?
I don't necessarily agree with this system, as an 18 yr old probably does not have the life experience to make such large financial decisions, and I think perhaps far fewer people should go to college for things of no economic value, but the system has logic to it. It's meant to benefit the "peasants". Rich people don't need student loans and can pay for their kids' degrees.
Fines aren't the same. A company only has so much money. Many of the owners of the company are pensions funds, etc., that are held by the middle class. You can't reasonably squeeze money from everyone who had an ETF that contained 3M. You need to allow corporations to file bankruptcy to have a healthy economy, in fact, America's bankruptcy laws are (according to some economists) one of the reasons we have such a strong economy.
Ideally, of course, the initial capital should also include the personal wealth of all the top management personally responsible for this.
> Many of the owners of the company are pensions funds, etc., that are held by the middle class. You can't reasonably squeeze money from everyone who had an ETF that contained 3M.
And why not? Do you not see how this kind of system is deliberately engineered to produce pushback under just such a pretense by, effectively, diluting and spreading responsibility wide enough across society? OTOH if we stop taking the "ohnoes, it will hurt all those middle class investors" argument seriously, it would actually encourage people to invest ethically instead of just blindly giving their money to whichever random sociopath offers the highest return.
(And yes, I do have considerable personal investments of my own.)
Because the biggest voting block in many democracies is the pensioners, so this being possible is a good way to lose elections.
> Do you not see how this kind of system is deliberately engineered to produce pushback under just such a pretense by, effectively, diluting and spreading responsibility wide enough across society? OTOH if we stop taking the "ohnoes, it will hurt all those middle class investors" argument seriously, it would actually encourage people to invest ethically instead of just blindly giving their money to whichever random sociopath offers the highest return.
Everything I have seen in my life leads me to think that people are pretty blind to risks when you dangle the possibility of a large return in front of them. Ponzi schemes, Brexit, lotteries, wars, unrestricted AI — at every scale, people will enthusiastically go for all of them in the name of some hoped-for benefit and call you names if you point out the risks they're taking.
Imagine you would write ‘white people are the biggest voting block’ - this would be questionable as a justification for bad policy, right?
So kids are brutally held responsible for their bad decision, but pensioners aren’t.
It has become so normal to denigrate and mistreat the younger generation you don’t even consciously notice it any more. It’s a form of discrimination just like any other
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch" — Probably not Franklin
"[d]emocracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried." — Churchill
The Rules for Rulers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&t=1025s&pp=ygUNa...
If you can fix this, please go into politics, the world would be much better if someone can actually resolve this kind of issue.
And here's the thing. If the overall arrangement continues to be broken - increasingly so, in fact - for new generations, and meanwhile they are repeatedly told that there's no way to fix it through the existing political system, at some point they will just get fed up and say, "fuck you and your system then", and it'll be torches and pitchforks time, elections be damned. Which is unlikely to actually improve matters on the whole - it rarely does - but it will certainly hurt all those older people with investments (and really just about anything of substantial value, including real estate) a great deal more than anything I talked about earlier.
So it is very much in their - in our! - interest to find some way forward that does not involve this kind of activity before the anger grows beyond the point where it can be contained. I would rather give up some of what I have to keep the rest of it. And then there's the very real risk of physical violence; the guys on the very top of this pyramid can afford private security and private jets as the ultimate escape hatch (and they're already digging bunkers for themselves elsewhere in droves), but I sure don't.
2) When a corporation goes bankrupt, it can get dissolved. This is the corporate equivalent of the death penalty, which you may approve of, but it still isn't going to help: all the assets get sold, and all the investor groups (a) know that (b) can get the stuff cheap because it's a fire-sale, and (c) know the exact size and shape of the market opportunity created by the dissolution. And there's a workforce right there, who were all laid off and are looking for work, who have exactly the skills you need and are already conveniently located and familiar with the equipment.
The debt doesn't get fully paid off, there's just nobody to do the paying.
They literally said "it isn't even all the profit they made".
That seems pretty clear.
That seems pretty unwarranted. :(
Surely they should be getting fined more than how much they profited?
Preferably (at a minimum) several times the amount, so they (and others) aren't keen to do it again.
Im not sure of the payment timeline or if they have insurance, but it seems likely this will wipe out a few years of profitability and may force the sale of business units.
That said, I do think personal culpability is probably a better incentive and more ethically reasonable depending on the circumstances. Though that’d have to be criminal neglect, using laws we probably already have. In other words, this is a civil penalty, not the same as a criminal case with higher burdens of proof and motives need to be established.
As the OP said, The original people responsible made bank and retired. The original shareholders cashed out. this does not encourage anything.
So, one could make the case that the workers get punished by the board of directors' bad decisions.
In fact, without something like criminal penalties, why would the board encourage safer/legal business practices? Seems like they might equally say, well that was a good run now find us another dastardly product that can bring our prices back down to our competitors.
Otherwise you’re effectively making companies illegal.
It's more like making illegal behaviour by companies to be illegal.
There's a disconnect where behaviour that would result in jail time for people, doesn't result in jail time if performed by companies and that seems wrong to me. If an individual poisons a water supply, they're not going to be getting just a fine.
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.
This is the part of the previous comment to which I was responding, giving just one example of how it's not the case. Limited Liability corporations protect business owners of all wealth levels. Just correcting a patently false claim.
I understand your concern about thread topic, but it's just not really applicable to my point above.
The person they were replying to and to which their point related to, was very much narrowing down and exaggerating corporate entities to a "small group of people" of the "wealthy and elite".
While these larger corporations limit larger amounts of liability, most people can create a business and have it as a company, giving them limited liability. Yes, large corporations have the money and resources to better limit their liability than a smaller corporation.
They weren't disagreeing with that person, but providing a more balanced view in which liability limitations benefit companies of all sizes, not just larger ones.
The problem is that in cases like these it's extremely difficult to prove such a thing, especially considering it's over many decades and potentially dozens of people.
There's also a bit of practical concerns where criminal prosecutions don't want to pick cases that are tough to win as it'll be resource intense to pursue them.
Of course like the Volkswagen situation you reference (in Germany) where the corporation operates may impact criminal prosecution.
Random "unsophisticated investors" (e.g. me) are supposed to get some degree of protection from catastrophic mistakes we can't be expected to recognise heading our way, in order to encourage us to participate in the stock market without having to worry we might inadvertently be taking on some fractional responsibility for a debt exceeding our net worth.
Likewise, governments don't like it when pension funds are bankrupted because of what they invested in.
RICO came after 159 years of US experience with all the benefits of limited liability and in the midst of the Cold War where the US was fighting for the freedom to keep government out of the way of business, so selecting that as your magic legal phrase is about as sensible as trying to fight Covid lockdown restrictions by putting a printout of Magna Carta in a shop window.
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.
Even in a more narrow case with no complications (even narrower than SBF, because he distributed money to good causes who can't pay it back), you're including the defence lawyers.
I'm (caveat: not a lawyer) more in favour of specifically criminal behaviour being handled by "piercing the corporate veil", putting the penalty directly on the humans who actually did the crime without letting them hide behind corporate personhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
But of course, it can be hard to prove who knew what, so sometimes "follow the money" is easier. And yes, I also agree with you that there are misaligned incentives in capitalism that lead to bad outcomes and we should work to improve that — just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Financially punish the capitalists who benefit from crimes and the executives that are currently getting away with crimes won't continue to get away with anything. (Laws and regulations will change rapidly when money is on the line)
Punishing only the people responsible for the crimes is a losing strategy. You have to eliminate the demand for that behavior. Because there an endless supply of morally corruptible people to take the fall so that capitalists can gain.
Doctors are even more useful, but they do end up in prison if they commit murder
Literally every seasoned doctor has what they call a 'small cemetery' of their failures. Got this from a GP, you don't need to be a surgeon for this to apply. In fact GPs have probably highest chance of saving/not saving lives due to volume of cases and potential severity of those, even if they don't do any invasive medicine themselves.
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.
Like one of the dozen other companies that manufacture PFAS, which continue to be totally legal in America.
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.
But the system existed where people were incredibly negligent for years, knew they were hurting people, made boatloads of money, and retired. That same system exists in many oil-and-gas industries, drug marketing, and more. There are dozens of examples where this has happened in recent years, and that’s just the ones at large enough scale to be prosecuted.
It’s still happening to this day. How do we start treating intentional negligence that leads to mass suffering and death as seriously as murder? It is individuals making these decisions, and they need to be held personally liable.
The corporate veil is useful, and shouldn’t go away completely. But when an individual makes a decision that had a high probability of doing major harm, they should at least stop and raise the issue to a government agency, to limit their liability. If they do not take appropriate precautions, like getting explicit approval from government authorities, then they should be personally liable for the negligence.
Are we planning to jail or bankrupt the peddlers of sugar water? Sugar itself? Refined flour? Non-nutritive sweeteners? Fast food? Fast casual? Buffets? Potato chips? Chocolate? Beer? Wine? (Stop me when we get to some pseudo-vice that you sometimes enjoy.)
At some point, I think you have to say "society decided at the time that selling Coke, Pepsi, fast food, potato chips, and wine was okay, and the people who sold that aren't subject to retroactive punishments for selling something that we pretty much knew was damaging to health of millions of people, but they chose to eat it anyway..."
Maybe people who have more than, say, 20 million dollars should be personally liable. This seems like a very conservative middle ground, because, as you say, these people have sometimes knowingly made decisions they knew would result in deaths. Taking away only some of their money is the least of punishments, and they would still be left rich and very comfortable.
This should apply to almost anyone. I get that regular people deserve some protection from liability for just doing their job, but at some point society is paying you so much money that you owe us a little personal responsibility in return.
Maybe it could be structured such that when a company is sued and loses, the company can then sue past employees who made the wrong decisions. Again, this liability would not be able to reduce an individual's wealth to less than 20 million, so employees don't have to worry about being completely ruined, but people shouldn't be able to control society warping amounts of wealth when the source of that wealth was incorrect and possibly corrupt decisions.
Let's try including some responsibility with the merit.
Same CEO during a deposition: "I have no idea what my company even does! Do we make soup or something?"
I do wonder why? Must be Big Business (in the NCVIA case, Big Pharma), right?
Executives just “letting” it happen is a crime, they have to explicitly ensure employees are educated and told not to do it.
Source: I worked in finance where we had tons of such useless courses.
No action or formulation is one hundred percent pure and beneficial, though many actions or formulations are certainly one hundred percent fatal, now or over time. This is true in products created by companies, and markets push towards maximum profitability, not maximum safety.
The accountability piece rarely happens now, unless you happen to defraud other investors, yet the compensation for the job continues to grow wildly out of proportion.
Example at Boeing: the CEO and all related high level execs that fostered a culture of bean counting and cutting corners to save costs are guilty and liable for deaths. The actual people that designed a deadly system, those who approved it; similarly, those that forgot to put in bolts holding critical stuff together... they are guilty too. They knowingly endangered human lives.
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.
Why? $20 million is a LOT of money. We shouldn’t allow greedy sociopaths to accumulate even that much wealth at the expense of the rest of us.
The Sackler family is a good example. Why should they walk away with even $20 million (let alone the $11 billion they kept after negotiating a $4.5 billion settlement). It’s crazy.
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.
The violence is abstracted now that capitalism has matured so we only see it as numbers but death is most definitely zero-sum.
You're welcome to that delusion but you're cheerleading a system that among it's many flaws is predicated on continuous growth that's based on a closed system with finite resources to draw from. Three guesses how that ends.
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?
Zero-sum: adj, of, relating to, or being a situation (such as a game or relationship) in which a gain for one side entails a corresponding loss for the other side.
GDP can still increase, but doesn’t disprove capitalism isn’t zero-sum. If you haven’t been paying attention we are currently living in a period of the most wealth inequality in recent history.
Th feudal period would like a word with you.
(Not defending the Sacklers, fuck that family)
If you want to make a billion dollars, fine, just do it without fucking over the rest of us.
Monetary punishment is not enough, and in fact I would say any kind of punishment is not useful enough. We need to switch our thinking to focus on preventative measures.
In this case all of the money ever made from PFAS will never be enough to clean up the pollution or care for all of the human health side effects. You could make all of the employees and execs very uncomfortable, claw back every single penny ever made and it still wont be enough by a long shot. In some cases It's easy to do a huge amount of damage for (relatively) far less personal gain.
Some of the world's regulatory systems already at least attempt to work from a preventative perspective such as drug approval processes for humans. As more of society wises up to the fact that the environment is an extension of us, it shouldn't be that hard to convince people to take preventative strategies towards caring for it.
An alternative regulatory system that doesn't need to chase industry would require industry to come to them by law when for example they want to release a new class of chemical into the environment. For all of it's flaws, I'm basically talking about something like the FDA, but hopefully less corrupt.
$20,000 I might accept, but that's ridiculous.
Edit: Really, I don't think any kind of limit is a good idea. We already have bankruptcy law and different sorts of fines or penalties being or not being dischargeable under forms of bankruptcy. Sticking to that framework seems best.
I'm not talking about just criminal negligence, I'm taking about honest mistakes too. If you want to be ultra rich, more than 20 million, then you have to be competent enough to not make big mistakes. For everyone else, they get to keep their retirement, etc. That's why I said 20 million.
And I'm thinking about more than punishment. It's about compensation. A CEO should be compensated for making good long term decisions, and if it turns out they have not make good decisions, they should retroactively lose compensation, but not be left in ruin over honest mistakes.
As for criminal cases, apply criminal penalties, which are beyond what I was suggesting.
But that was the topic of the discussion. Actually, the context was gross negligence rather then mere negligence, let alone just ordinary mistakes.
I don't really have an opinion about statutory fines for executives in situations like this, but the idea that reducing someone's net worth to a measly 50x that of what most people have is somehow punitive is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.
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.
Massive retrospective penalties for “should have known better” non-crimes will just result in an off-shoring to markets where these penalties do not apply.
It's a remarkably effective strategy that appears all over different industries, including tech. Keep an eye out for large political battles, and wishy-washy scientific studies funded by the industry that profits off the issue at hand.
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b...
Ground water and soil contamination is just one source of exposure. EWG has created an interactive map of the US which tracks this.
https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/
You also completely ignore the other, and arguably more important, part where those companies didn't just bury the research - no, they knowingly developed highly effective agitprop, often intentionally disguised as science, to blunt the public reaction when the story eventually broke for the general public. They have straight up bought politicians to peddle said agitprop, too.
Intentionality is key, and ExxonMobil is a highly profitable psychopath in this regard.
I think a combustion of very public corporal and capital punishment is the only answer here.
If Dave Calhoun legitimately feared he'd be set on fire in public, he'd probably actually pay attention to the shit he's creating instead of being sure that worst case scenario he'd retire with a few tens of millions of USD more.
But we can't say they knew they were hurting many people, because we still don't.
This isn’t how we regulate chemicals in America. Perhaps it should be.
What sort of test suite would THAT look like?
Pharmaceuticals play by a different set of rules than other chemicals because humans are particularly gullible when it comes to health claims. "Snake oil salesman" is a common term for a reason. We don't let big pharma make certain claims without ample test data for a whole host of obvious reasons.
In this context we were talking about punishing people for "harming" without having proven that they've really harmed at all. This would be more like locking up all the Chinese restaurant owners for using MSG.
Your argument sounds like it is in bad logic.
Can you please at least do a very basic amount of research before you take sides on this? Perhaps watch a documentary (e.g. the devil we know) or read at least 1 wikipedia article -- it was clear from the outset that workers at these factories were giving birth to children with birth-defects for example. [1]
These companies had engineers who were actively concerned about its health effects, circulating internal memos to that effect [1], but just because there wasn't a finalized published study are able to claim "well.... it's not proooooven technically for 100% sure to be bad for you in small doses..."
Of course small doses of anything can take a decade to be proven harmful to newborn children. These are now being linked to ADHD, that's something that takes years of very intentional research to find (because how old does a kid have to be to get that diagnosis).
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/05/425451/makers-pfas-forever...
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.
Well clearly it's been proven to the satisfaction of the court, whatever your "personal research" says.
It's also been proven to an independent science council:
The C8 Science Panel, which was funded by DuPont as part of a lawsuit settlement, conducted extensive epidemiological analysis on human health outcomes from exposure to PFOA, a type of PFAS. This panel, composed of independent scientists, found links to several health harms, including two types of cancer and pregnancy-related issues, after studying blood samples from nearly 70,000 residents in the mid-Ohio River Valley. This area was significantly exposed due to its proximity to a DuPont Teflon factory (EWG).
More papers come out every year finding stronger links. I wonder what your horse in this race is, my friend?
[1] https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/science-pfas-rebuttal...
The FDA requires that drugs provably and consistently have an effect, and that side effects are generally well known and not excessively bad so as to outweigh the benefits.
Drugs without known side effects are the worst in the eyes of the FDA (except those with no redeeming properties whatsoever anyway), because it doesn’t allow for manageable prescribing.
If they were proven to be safe, they wouldn’t require a prescription and would be sold over the counter. Though even that bar isn’t really required, or St. John’s Wort, Tylenol, etc. wouldn’t be allowed to be sold.
It is not exaggeration to say that of the worlds 8 billion people, at least half of them would not be here without fertilizers and pesticides. Those are things that have, at times, caused environmental issues that harm people also.
If we were to take off of the market overnight every chemical that was not proven to have no possible negative effect, we would lose billions of people. Literally.
The reason we are phasing out PFAs rather than simply immediately prohibiting them is that they are useful in a lot of applications that are important and we need time to replace them, and barring certain egregious incidents like 3M dumping a bunch of it in the river, there just is no known harm. So we fine them quite a lot for the egregious incidents. Good.
This is the problem with the socialist mind virus, they act like everything has no upside so you can just prohibit whatever you don’t like and the world will be better off for it. That’s why you think counter-arguments are just pedantry. They aren’t, it’s just that you’re thinking about it is not in depth.
Comprehensive toxicological studies haven't been performed on every single compound in the family because the market has been flooded with over 12,000 individual compounds. That is a startlingly large number that given 3M's prior bad faith decision-making around this family of products immediately brings to mind the designer drug industry's habit of burying regulators in compounds tweaked to get around regulatory bans.
In industries that actually perform comprehensive testing before releasing a compound into the wild it costs on average between eight and fifteen million dollars to perform a full suite of toxicological tests. So if the onus to test is placed on regulators that's roughly one hundred and twenty billion dollars out of public coffers and several decades of lab time, to confirm 3M, Dupont, Chemours, et al haven't poisoned the planet.
So if I understand your position correctly you're claiming that since we have absolutely no evidence that any of these compounds are safe at any exposure level (as you said, no toxicology has been done on most of these) and despite prior bad faith acts by the companies involved, we should continue to extend the benefit of the doubt? I think not, and your own choice to install water filtration equipment into your own home suggest you aren't as convinced as you'd have us believe here.
To be clear my proposal is that going forward manufacturers be required to perform the same pre-clinical trials that pharma companies have to perform before they can apply to move to human trials. Retroactive testing of existing compounds is absolutely a nice stretch goal because I think we can all agree if something harmful to our families is making it's way into the ecosystem we'd like to know about it sooner or later. I am utterly untroubled by the notion that these additional requirements might impact shareholder value and see no particular reason why taxpayers should be expected to foot the bill for 3Ms shareholders.
And if you did give people the level of these chemicals that 99.99% of the population is exposed to, you’d see no real effects, because no real effects is what we see in people who aren’t exposed to really high levels of it. We see some very weak correlations that almost certainly have other underlying causes and literally nothing else. Which, again, is not to say the effects aren’t there. It’s just that they’re very small if they exist, and it’s really hard with no control group to be sure of anything with very weak correlations.
“Associated with” doesn’t mean anything at all. I can find a correlation between any two things if I look for it. That’s all this is. (And again, I’m not talking about the people who worked in factories with it or lived where large amounts were dumped into the environment, etc., that is what they got fined for and they deserve it.)
If what you’re proposing is we make every chemical go through clinical trials, that’s going to kill a lot of people both directly (lots of chemicals have little to no harmful effects if not ingested but are deadly if you do so) and indirectly (lots of people are only alive because of chemicals that would be yanked.)
This has nothing to do with shareholders, it’s a simple societal cost benefit analysis and you’re just dismissing any benefits and underestimating the cost.
You completely misunderstood my point based on your paraphrasing. Which is fine, that’s the internet for you.
It’s not practical to ban everything that we don’t know can be ingested safely. It’s just not even an intelligent idea. It’s merely a response to hysteria.
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-p...
I don’t think it would’ve been incredibly difficult or burdensome to think that a chemical that can with stand 900+ degrees celsius won’t be metabolized and broken down very well inside the body, the next obvious supposition would be well is the body going to be able to eliminate it in some way or will it just stay there? What happens if it stays there, that doesn’t sound very good? These are all basic questions 3M chemists could’ve asked themselves before they created this mess, or may be they did and no one paid attention.
I mean the research is still relatively new and ongoing [1][4] where “most of the hundreds of PFAS currently in commerce have limited or no toxicity data” [5]. And in 2022 the EPA posted “…updated advisory levels, which are based on new science and consider lifetime exposure, indicate that some negative health effects may occur with concentrations of PFOA or PFOS in water that are near zero.” [2]. On top of that there are lots of PFAs which cannot be individually tested for — In 2019 the EPA “can now measure 29 chemicals”[6] out of “thousands of PFAS chemicals” [7] — which means many of those tests are only checking for a small subset of this class of chemical (though the older and more widely used ones have been prioritized for testing).
Also where do you get your control group from for low level exposure? It takes time to bioaccumulate and most people are already exposed to some degree —“Nearly all people in the United States have measurable amounts of PFAS in their blood” [4] — through many different sources — “There are thousands of PFAS chemicals, and they are found in many different consumer, commercial, and industrial products. This makes it challenging to study and assess the potential human health and environmental risks.” [7].
Some other interesting links/articles:
- https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/
- https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/i...
- https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-ant...
- https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b...
- https://cen.acs.org/environment/persistent-pollutants/US-EPA...
- https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-anno...
Sources:
1: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/index.html
2: https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pf...
4: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/resources/pfas-information-fo...
5: https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t...
6: mikeiz404 ↗ > But we can't say they knew they were hurting many people, because we still don't.
I’d highly recommend reading this article. It’s quite long but worth the read.
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
I think we should simply backdate fines and punishments in this case. Ie. if you were doing something harmful to people or the environment but it was technically legal to do at the time you did it, you should still get punished (although a smaller punishment, especially if you can reasonably argue you didn't know).
Many countries have a revolving door between industry and government oversight.
New Zealand consistently scores well, having low corruption. Currently we have a government that has a very interesting relationship with the tobacco industry, with freight/roading, gambling and with horse and dog racing.
I’m sure there are many more.
We're long overdue for some change here.
Are there are any politicians or bills (past or present) that have floated the idea of exposing shareholder skin in the corporate game? If these people were threatened with serious prison time, capital punishment, or even worse - being forced to drive a used Kia the rest of their lives (materialists couldn't bear the shame), we'd see far less harm being done.
The government could decide what to do with the company, fold it, or sell it for scraps.
Yes, there might be motivation for the government to “kill” companies for profits, but there is exactly the same (and proved many times!) issue with putting people in prison, so I don’t see why companies should get a special exception, they are “people” as well, or so I’m told.
It would be as existentially threatening and crippling to a company as it currently is to the average member of society.
And that has already happened since forever, which is why you have to ask if there are politicians threatening this. It's all already tied together.
It's a mass hysteria, and while I'm certainly not saying it's benign, I've read the studies, and they remind me of the nutritional ones from the 90's we've all since abandoned where they just throw a bunch of claims at the wall, show a bunch of weak correlations in completely uncontrolled studies, and say "more research is needed".
There were conditions like emphysema that were basically unheard of in non-smokers (or people who worked in certain occupations that involved a lot of combustion byproducts) and common in smokers.
The correlations here (at the levels most of us are exposed to) are incredibly weak. Don’t take my word for them, look them up.
This is more like the link between aspartame and cancer. There’s no smoking gun, no high correlations. If you look up the symptoms “linked” to it, there are hundreds at least.
Not all correlations are equal.
But, I install R/O filters in my house because I am not certain it is not harmful and why take the chance? I’m just not certain it is harmful and I would need to be to support jailing people or banning the chemicals immediately and entirely.
1. https://qz.com/1643554/3m-knew-pfas-was-contaminating-us-foo...
It’s not that simple.
No silicates?
I don’t think PFAs are some essential vitamin or minerals.
But some quantifiable risk information is essential to actually making a useful analysis. Like other types of substances we’ve done nearly the same thing to ourselves over, like dioxins, PCBs, etc.
Most if them might just be as bad as silicones, some of them might be worse, some of them better. And it’s weird that none of that is allowed to be discussed.
You’re the one being performative here.
“Bullshit minutia” is pretty subjective. If my hippy friend says “the govment should ban chemicals in foods”, arguing about what “chemicals” mean is not bullshit it’s critical information for a fact based argument. If anything ignoring facts and logical minutia could be called performative, since then your words matter less than your saying <anything> that tickles feelings.
But for each of these there are dozens of examples where people are hysterical about some new substance, correlations are shown, and it turns out to be nothing. We could be there with low level exposure to PFAs too.
With asbestos, like with cigarettes, there was a form of cancer that almost only appears in people exposed to it. That’s a solid smoking gin that’s totally absent here.
This prediction may turn out to be true, but why should I believe your prediction over that of anyone else's? Do you have some insider knowledge or expertise that you can share?
Edit: Also, what do you give the odds of your prediction, by severity of outcome? I want to see how the odds you provide stack up against the economic and thus social consequences of under-regulation or over-regulation.
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.
Purdue pharma might not be off the hook yet (didn’t the judgment that protected them from criminal liability get reversed? I admit I don’t know as much about that case.) and did commit mass murder, but this isn’t that. We don’t know that any sizable number of people have even been harmed by these yet, that’s my point. What does one evil corporation have to do with an entirely related other one? Are we supposed to just jail the execs of any corporation who we think may have done something wrong just because of Purdue Pharma?
We know PFAs and the like are in most people in low levels. We know there are a bunch of very weak correlations with various health defects with no indication of causality.
The penalty was harsh. That’s a whopping figure even for a mega corp. I just don’t see the case for jail time here like I do with the Sacklers.
And I'm not just talking about privacy breaches, I'm talking about conscious, willful abuse.
In particular, although the high levels of exposure (of one or more PFOS/PFOA) showed effects, there was reverse correlation at low levels. Of course this is in Zebra fish so I'd hesitate to guess the relevance for mammal or human populations. It does seem to most directly affect lipid metabolism including steroids, and is multi-generational.
I'd be most worried where the chemical (waste) byproducts were used as fire suppressants rather than the small quantities found elsewhere. Those concentrations (hundreds of ppt) are much more worrying. People who sprayed their clothes, couches, tires with scotchguard were probably also already exposed to 100s of times higher lifetime doses than they will ever see through environmental sources at <10ppt (still above proposed limits).
https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/