3M May Escape Toxic Chemical, PFAS Manufacturing Legacy • Hacker News Board

Re: 3M May Escape Toxic Chemical, PFAS Manufacturing Legacy

#111

Post by tristor » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 1:20 AM UTC

Bjartr wrote: post #101

cyanydeez wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can filter anything out of water...you're just arguing end users should bare the cost of billion dollar corporations doing whatever they want. The filtration at the levels we're talking about would add thousands of dollars to every household everywhere, all at once. Talk about something that just is a bit more than, "but you can filter it".

Not saying it's a good approach to solving the problem, but surely you'd want to do the filtering at the water utility level. It would be a lot more cost effective that way.

It probably can't be effectively filtered at utility scale. There are only a small number of effective filtration methods and they basically coalesce to either distillation or reverse osmosis, neither of which is effective at utility scale. The other side of that is that both methods concentrate contaminates when removing them, and distillation puts some contaminates into the air, which means neither is a panacea even at residential scale.

The largest reverse osmosis plant in the world produces 165MGD of water, which is less than is required for any of the top 10 largest US cities, while primarily being used purely for desalination (SWRO). At the levels of filtration and membrane size required for removal of PFAS, it would nearly be impossible to cost effectively filter 200MGD+ of water for a major city.

Re: 3M May Escape Toxic Chemical, PFAS Manufacturing Legacy

#112

Post by kjreact » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 10:25 PM UTC

j4coh wrote: post #106

kjreact wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a bold statement to make that “Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong”. Can you list some of these many wrong statements that they make?

Why leave off “or incomplete” when people can see it directly above what you misquoted? But sure, plenty of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779199 . You can search on Google for Veritasium wrong (or misleading, incomplete, etc.) if you’d like more examples.

How am I misquoting you? If you meant to say that Veritasium is frequently incomplete then just say that. No need to add the frequently wrong part at all. You’re implying something much stronger than what you intended; just to sway people’s opinion. But I didn’t need to write this because as you say people can just read your bias.

Re: 3M May Escape Toxic Chemical, PFAS Manufacturing Legacy

#113

Post by kjreact » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 12:13 PM UTC

j4coh wrote: post #106

kjreact wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a bold statement to make that “Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong”. Can you list some of these many wrong statements that they make?

Why leave off “or incomplete” when people can see it directly above what you misquoted? But sure, plenty of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779199 . You can search on Google for Veritasium wrong (or misleading, incomplete, etc.) if you’d like more examples.

The YouTube video in your link refers to a single Veritasium video regarding their coverage of Waymo autonomous driving. But I feel the entire video is invalidated by the fact that Veritasium clearly mentions that their video is sponsored by Waymo. As a viewer I already know that there will be bias because of this declaration. Veritasium isn’t hiding it, so what’s the issue?

On HN I’d hope to read insightful comments instead of ones making strong statements without justification and asking others to Google for examples. If you’re too lazy to type out them out it’s probably better not to post at all; this is not Reddit.

Re: 3M May Escape Toxic Chemical, PFAS Manufacturing Legacy

#114

Post by j4coh » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

kjreact wrote: post #112

j4coh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why leave off “or incomplete” when people can see it directly above what you misquoted? But sure, plenty of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779199 . You can search on Google for Veritasium wrong (or misleading, incomplete, etc.) if you’d like more examples.

How am I misquoting you? If you meant to say that Veritasium is frequently incomplete then just say that. No need to add the frequently wrong part at all. You’re implying something much stronger than what you intended; just to sway people’s opinion. But I didn’t need to write this because as you say people can just read your bias.

You've misquoted by turning "Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong or at least incomplete" into "Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong" in order to lecture me that saying only that he's frequently wrong is overstating things, and that I should have said incomplete. Which I did - in the non-misquoted version. But of course, you don't need my participation to have debates with imaginary versions of people in your head so I'll leave you to it.

Re: 3M May Escape Toxic Chemical, PFAS Manufacturing Legacy

#115

Post by j4coh » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 7:44 AM UTC

kjreact wrote: post #113

j4coh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why leave off “or incomplete” when people can see it directly above what you misquoted? But sure, plenty of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779199 . You can search on Google for Veritasium wrong (or misleading, incomplete, etc.) if you’d like more examples.

The YouTube video in your link refers to a single Veritasium video regarding their coverage of Waymo autonomous driving. But I feel the entire video is invalidated by the fact that Veritasium clearly mentions that their video is sponsored by Waymo. As a viewer I already know that there will be bias because of this declaration. Veritasium isn’t hiding it, so what’s the issue? On HN I’d hope to read insightful comments…

The video was just one example from the linked thread, which was why I linked to the thread not the video. I don't see the benefit of copying all that text here when it's already there, I'm sorry to have to say. You're certainly welcome to believe that there's a good excuse every time he's incomplete or wrong, although I personally don't. I think it's because it's first and foremost entertainment content.