[flagged]
Found the shill, folks. Thanks for your terrible take, friend. This lady is negative about Apple because they literally poisoned her.
US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
201–210 of 331 posts
Re: US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really hard to "catch" these things in the moment. I work in chemical plants and there are tons of huge releases of extremely toxic gases all the time, which I can often smell from my apartment. I know what they are by smell because I manufacture them myself. Proper continuous monitoring for a broad range of chemicals would cost about $1 million per monitoring station and we'd need to build them along the perime…
You at all concerned about your exposure to random chemicals?
Moving from the plant areas to downtown houston has brought a massive improvement in my health. I suspect that 4 years of living next to the plant has caused long-term damage ... but it's extremely difficult to prove anything, especially when there is no data at all that supports an assertion that my apartment was exposed to any leaks at all - not a single one of those near-daily emissions events was caught by the air quality monitoring stations, only a few were voluntarily reported to the EPA, and all of the emissions are permitted by the EPA / TCEQ either on an ongoing basis or one-off "forgiveness" basis after voluntary pro-active reporting.
In one unit that I personally worked in and was responsible for, an intern was analyzing our procedures for emptying our tanks of waste products and realized that we had been "illegally" venting (without a permit) a lot of vapor from a waste tank every couple weeks when the liquid was full and needed to be emptied into trucks for proper disposal. We told the state regulatory authority that we realized we were out of compliance, and asked for permission to continue doing it this way until we had time to fix it. We got permission to continue doing what we were doing for another 2 years, with options for additional extensions. So the "illegal" emissions became "legal" overnight once we reported ourselves, and there were no consequences for the 10+ years of "illegal" emissions. This is very typical - in general if a company "self-reports", they do not face any punishments, but will face some small punishments if the regulatory agencies are the ones who find the problem. This encourages companies to be upfront about acknowledging, reporting, and (eventually) fixing their own problems.
One woman I know worked in a facility that produced a chemical known to cause issues with pregnancies, and suffered 4 miscarriages while trying for a baby before she simply refused to go out into the plant she ran at all during her fifth pregnancy, which she successfully brought to term. It's still not cut-and-dry that the chemicals caused her miscarriages, and there's no hard "evidence" that she was even exposed to those chemicals at all, or in concentrations above EPA limits.
Unless a pipe bursts suddenly and coats you with a chemical and sends you to a hospital, it's very difficult to prove that you were ever really "exposed" to the chemical. Even if you do get an obvious harmful exposure, it's difficult to assign any long-term consequences to that particular exposure.
Re: US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
The agenda of making companies operate in a safe and sane way? Sign me up!
The agenda of injecting completely unsubstantiated claims into the story and trying to pass them off as fact, such as the claim that Apple hid many more violations before the inspectors could get to them. No basis in fact, just pure ragebait conjecture. Her agenda is about getting clicks and followers first. She’s not making companies operate safer, she’s just editorializing a public report from the agency that actua…
>Apple hid many more violations before the inspectors could get to them
Yeah, that one claim is definitely hard to take seriously. Companies usually try to look their worst when they know an inspection is due.
Re: US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
#204[flagged]
Found the shill, folks. Thanks for your terrible take, friend. This lady is negative about Apple because they literally poisoned her.
As far as I can tell, their original complaints[0] were about the Apple office they worked at, not about an Apple facility near their apartment. It is quite incredible that they've identified Apple as poisoning them by multiple different methods at different places.
Re: US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
#205[flagged]
> In early 2015, Apple started stealth semiconductor fabrication activities in a facility located at 3250 Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara California, less than two hundred feet from thousands of homes. The factory intentionally vented its exhaust of solvent vapors and toxic gases straight from the roof and into the ambient outdoor air, with little or no abatement. The factory was only one story while the apartments we…
> There is no defending Apple here. These decisions are made by multiple people who should all be in prison.
Bingo.
There's this curious willingness from the HN community to jump in and defend the whole of a corporation when a single part makes a mistake. We've seen them come out in droves when rational people criticize the App Store, the Butterfly keyboard, inhumane working environments or unsafe centralized services. It's absolutely bizarre that these same apologists feel the need to justify genuine bureaucratic failure. They really want to champion Apple on the basis that they violate zoning laws and endanger their neighbors?
Sometimes this site needs to grow a pair and accept that their favorite business has to follow the law. I know it's a lot to ask from latte addicts that work in management, but I'm done accepting justifications for Apple's behavior that end without blame.
Re: US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
#206I wonder why this post was flagged.
Me too. Plus, since this is the 'first' article about it on HN, all the others are being closed as duplicates. I feel like this deserves more attention.
HN is almost my ideal link aggregator, my only nitpick is that flagging is too easy, there's no transparency or accountability. It's not the 90's anymore, we can't solely rely on honor these days.
Re: US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
#207Re: US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
#208https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Gj%C3%B8vik Helpful context on the validity of this heavily editorialized site. Seems like Apple definitely is not in the right here but very unclear if it has anything to do with this persons claims. If you follow her history of forming complaints it is hard to take her serious as most of her complaints get dropped and these are complaints filed against different agencies.
She also filed a 650 page complaint which so irritated the legal system that new case law was formed to bound the permissible lengths.
It seems she originally got fired by Apple, where she was a product manager, for leaking NDAed info. It also seems she's been on an anti-apple tear since.
Personally, I worked as an engineer in Apple for several years, and it was by far the most ethically run and conscientiously run place I've ever seen, so her sequence of Apple complaints originates in a non core division, so is not like the engineering core world I was in, but sets off my "wait, what?" sense honed from experience.
Re: US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
#209Why is it so hard for companies to just do the right thing? Like it isn't a lack of resources for Apple, it isn't a lack of education or safety awareness. It's wilfull disregarding of the health of innocent strangers. People need to go to jail for this.
I worked as an engineer in Apple for several years in a core division, and there was extensive training, and not perfunctory, about being ethical and doing the right thing. It was a very serious core principle.
Because of that, this case really looks like a mistake, not willful disregard, when I consider all we were trained in earnest back then. It seems the EPA found no violation, and Apple learned someone had failed to change filters as frequently as needed.
Re: US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
the coincidence between the author and the "atleast" date simply means there's not enough evidence before that date. Dealing with EPA and other pollution control agencies will tell you very much they dont want to get into these situations because it makes them look bad. It likely was happening way before this and the EPA could likely pinpoint the exact date based on simple log entries, but they won't stick their neck…
What do you mean they don’t want to? Their job is to report the facts in a legally consistent manner, not imagine what might have happened.
it's not imagination to look at log books and say "well, they weren't reporting things here that they were reporting there".
Thats not imagination. However, they're simply following up the "corroboration" part. Because someone identified a problem, _now_ they have to be a detective.
I'd posit, _it is their job_ to find incriminating evidence and thus enforcement. In many places, they are not doing this. They are purely reactive.
Thats my point; has nothing to do with imagination.