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Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

reuters.com

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Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#161

Post by dev_tty01 »

onlypositive wrote: post #106
ankit219 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't capping the total payouts in damages. The bankruptcy filing itself said that parent company would cover the cost to ensure everyone gets the money. Bankruptcy was a process to ensure every victim gets equal amount. The term for this process is misleading, and the mental image is very much of a company which is getting out of paying their victims. In this case, filing for bankruptcy created fairness among…

I'd rather see J&J go out of business entirely.

I get the sentiment, but if I stop and think about it, I don't understand the math. I'm not intending to criticize since I struggle with this myself.

Try on this hypothetical. Imagine that ten people in a giant company called ACME made some decisions that led to 50,000 people getting hurt. ACME also employs 100,000 hard working people, representing perhaps 0.3-0.4 million family members dependent upon that income. Imagine further that ACME's other products have dramatically improved the lives of hundreds of millions of other people.

Given that scenario, does the ethical math really work for ACME to be completely destroyed? It is easy to see how the 10 decision makers should be punished. It is also easy to see how the people who were hurt should be compensated in some way. Destroying ACME entirely will harm lots of other people so it is not clear how to justify that. It is a very frustrating domain because we think of these companies as monoliths, but they are really just a large collection of mostly very decent people.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#162

Post by M95D »

nl wrote: post #20
FireBeyond wrote: post #5

Apropos of anything else, J&J's handling of this has been despicable. Creating an entity specifically to pick up all of the related liabilities, picking up those liabilities and then (exact count may be wrong, but it's very close) literally filing for bankruptcy within the space of three days. The Texas two-step, as it's called. > In 2021, the company spun off its liabilities into a new entity called LTL Management u…

Having read the Matt Levine piece linked below ( https://archive.is/KcL2P ) I think that J&J did the right thing by attempting to use bankruptcy to organize payments. It was not avoiding liability at all. The court that dismissed the claim in general agreed with J&J's process, but said it was too early. Some key quote from Levine: > Juries in the US don’t like it when companies make products that kill people, and the…

As I understand it, using this scheme, the company is avoiding punishment for their wrongdoings when it could be larger than they're willing to pay. They bankrupt some minor part of their budget instead of bankrupting the entire company.

When a serial killer gets the electric chair, most people consider that a fair punishment. No? So tell me, if a judge wanted to apply capital punishment to a company, which is not even a living thing, it's just money and stamped papers. How could it do that, when the company can use this scheme to escape?

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#163

Post by scarface_74 »

autoexec wrote: post #143
nl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having read the Matt Levine piece linked below ( https://archive.is/KcL2P ) I think that J&J did the right thing by attempting to use bankruptcy to organize payments. It was not avoiding liability at all. The court that dismissed the claim in general agreed with J&J's process, but said it was too early. Some key quote from Levine: > Juries in the US don’t like it when companies make products that kill people, and the…

> The basic idea of bankruptcy is that if you have a company with $1,000 of assets and $2,000 of liabilities, you can’t pay back everyone everything you owe them. You could just pay back the first creditors who show up and ask for their money back, until the $1,000 is gone, and then give the remaining creditors zero, but that seems unfair I'm entirely unconvinced that J&J couldn't pay back everything they owe, to eve…

> I'm entirely unconvinced that J&J couldn't pay back everything they owe, to everyone they owe it to, without bankruptcy and the fact that they were able to avoid all of those individual lawsuits is already J&J getting off the hook unfairly and avoiding their full liability.

The amount that can be awarded by a jury is uncapped, there is absolutely no way of knowing whether J&J could pay all claimants.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#165

Post by fn-mote »

blitzar wrote: post #111
codelord wrote: post #103

As someone who did a PhD and published and read many papers (in ML) I believe vast majority of papers in ML are misleading. If in fact every paper that claims a better performance over state of the art was true we would have solved AI by now. You see all sorts of problems when you dig deeper into the technical details of peer reviewed publications (even in top tier conferences) including misleading baselines, statist…

We need a Journal of Medicore Results, or a Journal of Tried it and it Didn't Work. As with social media and society in general, only the most inflated of headlines gets attention causing the gold rush of hyped up results. Nothing can be published without the hype and hyperbole, which then sets the benchmark for the next round of hype.

> We need a Journal of Medicore Results, or a Journal of Tried it and it Didn't Work.

Publication in this journal would be used as evidence against lawsuits.

Cigarette companies paid for studies designed to produce no conclusive evidence.

I don't see this as a route to progress. What if all you did wrong was follow the wrong process? The bacteria grows better at 10C than 30C. This journal would be full of results by fools and charlatans. The inclusion criteria would have to be much more complex for it to be useful.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#166

Post by thfuran »

iancarroll wrote: post #80
jjallen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think companies can just avoid all of their liabilities two days before something bad happens and protect all of their assets? Bankruptcy law is hundreds of years old and is designed to protect creditors actually. That’s why there is a separate court to handle things and involved independent outsiders and judges that oversee things. It works and is used every time there is a financial crisis and thousan…

It is a pretty well-documented strategy that has been done several times: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_two-step_bankruptcy Not sure why you are treating it as an absurd concept.

It is an absurd concept, but that unfortunately doesn't mean it's implausible.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#167

Post by Tyrek »

M95D wrote: post #162
nl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having read the Matt Levine piece linked below ( https://archive.is/KcL2P ) I think that J&J did the right thing by attempting to use bankruptcy to organize payments. It was not avoiding liability at all. The court that dismissed the claim in general agreed with J&J's process, but said it was too early. Some key quote from Levine: > Juries in the US don’t like it when companies make products that kill people, and the…

As I understand it, using this scheme, the company is avoiding punishment for their wrongdoings when it could be larger than they're willing to pay. They bankrupt some minor part of their budget instead of bankrupting the entire company. When a serial killer gets the electric chair, most people consider that a fair punishment. No? So tell me, if a judge wanted to apply capital punishment to a company, which is not ev…

Your understanding is wrong, which leads to a flawed analogy.

> The point here, the bankruptcy court concluded, was not to keep J&J from having to pay talc claims; the entire value of J&J’s consumer business was still on the line for those claims.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#168

Post by [deleted] »

ralph84 wrote: post #12
NovaDudely wrote: post #2

This will be an interesting one to follow. J&J may have a case but could also just be a case of supressing bad news. The original study had a very small sample size (33 people), which one could argue would be small enough to dismiss. Are there any larger follow up studies?

This is also interesting: > Moline published an article in 2019 studying 33 patients who said their only exposure to asbestos came from talc products, and Emory, Kradin and Maddox followed up with a 2020 study of 75 similar patients. > All four doctors have provided expert testimony in lawsuits against J&J, and their research has been cited in lawsuits where they have not testified, according to the complaints. > LTL…

[deleted]

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#169

Post by aaomidi »

somenits wrote: post #158
FireBeyond wrote: post #5

Apropos of anything else, J&J's handling of this has been despicable. Creating an entity specifically to pick up all of the related liabilities, picking up those liabilities and then (exact count may be wrong, but it's very close) literally filing for bankruptcy within the space of three days. The Texas two-step, as it's called. > In 2021, the company spun off its liabilities into a new entity called LTL Management u…

This is the top-voted comment but as many of the other replies have pointed out, it's totally wrong outrage-bait. J&J, the parent company, is still ultimately liable for the full amount. The bankruptcy process just allows the courts to manage all of the claims together under the authority of one judge, instead of having different courts in every state issue incompatible damages awards in a race to judgment.

So they can pay off a single judge?

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#170

Post by poolopolopolo »

codelord wrote: post #103

As someone who did a PhD and published and read many papers (in ML) I believe vast majority of papers in ML are misleading. If in fact every paper that claims a better performance over state of the art was true we would have solved AI by now. You see all sorts of problems when you dig deeper into the technical details of peer reviewed publications (even in top tier conferences) including misleading baselines, statist…

There is saying (at least in spanish): "You are owner of your silence and slave of your words".

Maybe you need your moderate your claiming before publishing something that could cause several damage to someone (That is why most news websites use potential words when publishing something: reported/may/thought/potentially/etc...).

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