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3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public

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Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public

#171

Post by seanmcdirmid »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #6
acdha wrote: post #5

I increasingly think we need personal criminal liability for everyone in the management chain before this will end. As long as you can cash out your options before the reckoning, maybe even spin a division out to go bankrupt, there are just too many people who’ll chase the larger number. You need the guy who gets that internal memo to think that if he doesn’t report it to the EPA, he’ll spend the rest of his life won…

In China, there was a case of baby formula execs (Edit: pointed out to me further down thread that the execs were only jailed for 5-15 years with Sanlu's general manager receiving a life sentence, and the people executed very those directly responsible for tainting the product mentioned) knowingly selling product that was harmful and led to tens of thousands of hospitalizations and a handful of deaths. They were exec…

Uhm, if it wasn’t for New Zealand, this scandal may have never even come to light. It was being buried before sanlu’s NZ JV partner heard about it and was horrified. Also they found two people to execute, and I wouldn’t be very confident that they actually had much to do with it, Chinese justice will find and convict sacrificial pawns as needed.

Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public

#172

Post by TeMPOraL »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #166
TeMPOraL wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with you. I suppose I missed one important part in my comment - intent . A surviving pilot may not be blamed for a plane crash and associated deaths for merely being at fault . But I bet the story would be different if they did this intentionally , or intentionally allowed it to happen - we'd be talking murder / terrorism charges. Same in this case, I feel there's a difference between deaths of childre…

> A surviving pilot may not be blamed for a plane crash and associated deaths for merely being at fault . > In the years 1999–2015 the study found 65 cases of pilot suicide (compared to 195 pilot errors) and six cases of passengers who jumped from aircraft. There were 18 cases of homicide-suicide, totaling 732 deaths; of these events, 13 were perpetrated by pilots. Pragmatically, I don't see a difference. I couldn't…

Fair enough.

I mean, I ultimately don't really want even more people to die over this. Rather, I want things like this to not happen. Ever. Death penalty sounds like a big step in this direction, in a world where white-collar crime isn't just not punished proportionally to the scale of damage, it's barely punished at all. I suppose it is a red herring, an idea of putting a band-aid on a much larger problem.

I'll note however, that pilot suicide is a qualitatively different scenario than executive knowingly causing death of some people, somewhere, because it's easy enough to do it and profit off it. There's only so much you can do about the former - at some point, it's down to an individual, their emotional state, and a moment. However, in the latter case, the process is much more sober, takes more time, and it's doubtful the perpetrator is themselves suicidal.

Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public

#173

Post by joenathanone »

monkburger wrote: post #3

This is what happens when the EPA's rules state chemical companies, can more or less, police themselves. We've detected PFOAs in rainwater/clouds, in the artic, etc (See https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765 ) They are going to lead to further health problems down the road.

This can lead to bio-death of the planet.

Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public

#174

Post by gosub100 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #159
gosub100 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree wholeheartedly. What if one or both political parties spoke out about campaign finance corruption? What if they refuses corporate donations, and made direct appeals to their voters to chip in (YouTuber style). I'm trying very hard to not be partisan here, but why doesn't either party take a stand? Don't they share responsibility for accepting the money?

Why would they take a stand against their own interests?

because their interests are, ostensibly, with their constituents.

Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public

#176

Post by wizzwizz4 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #172
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A surviving pilot may not be blamed for a plane crash and associated deaths for merely being at fault . > In the years 1999–2015 the study found 65 cases of pilot suicide (compared to 195 pilot errors) and six cases of passengers who jumped from aircraft. There were 18 cases of homicide-suicide, totaling 732 deaths; of these events, 13 were perpetrated by pilots. Pragmatically, I don't see a difference. I couldn't…

Fair enough. I mean, I ultimately don't really want even more people to die over this. Rather, I want things like this to not happen. Ever. Death penalty sounds like a big step in this direction, in a world where white-collar crime isn't just not punished proportionally to the scale of damage, it's barely punished at all . I suppose it is a red herring, an idea of putting a band-aid on a much larger problem. I'll not…

In arguing against the death penalty for this, I was also missing the point: the criminal justice system is not the place for prevention, only retrospective (attempted) remedies. We should be thinking about how to restructure the system that makes white-collar mass murder (corporate homicide) possible.

(The death penalty is bad for other reasons, and I don't feel this warrants an exception. But that's a different, and well-trodden, argument.)

> There's only so much you can do about the former - at some point, it's down to an individual, their emotional state, and a moment.

And yet, it is successfully averted by two-in-cockpit policies (excluding possibly China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735: investigations are still ongoing, so I'm not sure what went on there). If we can prevent this, we can prevent that.

Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public

#177

Post by ta988 »

hcurtiss wrote: post #108

Purdy was improperly conflating their ability to detect the substance with "harm," and the environmental propagandists have been running with it for a long time. What "harm" precisely did he identify? The article doesn't say. Maybe a carcinogen? Maybe not? There's been a concerted effort to make PFOS/PFAS an environmental super-villain, but it's hard to substantiate when we volitionally ingest many flourinated pharma…

The fact that there is a specific atom in a product doesn't have anything to do with its dangers.

Chlorine gas or Phosgene are deadly, your stomach is full of HCl.

VX has phosphorus yet your body is full of it and that's part of the basis of how it handles energy and genes.

There are perfectly safe compounds that contain F.

The problem here is that we have report over report on the effects of those molecules, some coming from the companies making them. And yet somehow the people trying to raise awareness to those facts would be the propagandists? The propagandists are more the ones spreading misinformation, misleading others or hiding information.

PFAS are per/poly fluoro alkyl compounds meaning that they have many fluorine atoms on an alkyl chain. None of the compounds you listed have that which makes me wonder what you are trying to achieve commenting on something you know so little about.

ciprofloxacin has one fluorine, on an aromatic ring Prozac has three on a single carbon Flonaze has a single fluorine on a methyl Paxlovid has a CF3 like Prozac

Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public

#178

Post by qwebfdzsh »

hotpotamus wrote: post #164
acdha wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one always makes me sad – imagine how different our world would have been if, say, they’d gone to Carter and offered to go public with the data in exchange for help decarbonizing. He’d have gotten his French-style civilian nuclear power program, they’d probably have been able to successfully shift into emerging green industries with their enormous resources, and we wouldn’t have an expensively cultivated anti-sc…

The anti-science political movement was in effect long before Carter. He tried to switch to the metric system and was opposed on cultural grounds as one example. But look back to Darwin and Galileo and you’ll see a long standing pattern. Sadly, at this point it looks like it will doom us.

> Galileo

To be fair one of the reasons his ideas were rejected is because he wrote a book portraying the pope as an idiot. Heliocentrism/his books were banned earlier but a few years later one of his friends and supporters during the initial trial was elected pope. So there was a non insignificant chance that the Catholic church would have accepted heliocentrism a few hundred years sooner had he managed to be a bit more subtle and no alienate him.

Also I'm not trying to downplay the anti scientific attitude which was quite prevalent back in those days (when science couldn't be balanced with religious truths etc. otherwise I don't think it was that bad) but one of the main issues with his theory is that he couldn't really prove it conclusively (e.g. the issue with stellar parallax).

e.g. While the Roman inquisition did ban his theory and books but first they organized a public debate between Galileo and one of their lawyers which which was primarily based on scientific rather than religous arguments

Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public

#179

Post by TeMPOraL »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #176
TeMPOraL wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I mean, I ultimately don't really want even more people to die over this. Rather, I want things like this to not happen. Ever. Death penalty sounds like a big step in this direction, in a world where white-collar crime isn't just not punished proportionally to the scale of damage, it's barely punished at all . I suppose it is a red herring, an idea of putting a band-aid on a much larger problem. I'll not…

In arguing against the death penalty for this, I was also missing the point: the criminal justice system is not the place for prevention , only retrospective (attempted) remedies. We should be thinking about how to restructure the system that makes white-collar mass murder (corporate homicide) possible. (The death penalty is bad for other reasons, and I don't feel this warrants an exception. But that's a different, a…

It's ironic. Elsewhere today[0], I wrote about the problems where the correct take kind of ruins the mood of the argument, which is why the discourse keeps spinning in circles. With you spelling out the missing point, I realized this has happened to me here: of course this is a hard, systemic issue. But talking about death penalty let me conveniently forget about it for a moment, and feel like there's a simple solution. Which of course there is not.

So thanks for that bucket of cold water :).

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38674263

Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public

#180

Post by wizzwizz4 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #179
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In arguing against the death penalty for this, I was also missing the point: the criminal justice system is not the place for prevention , only retrospective (attempted) remedies. We should be thinking about how to restructure the system that makes white-collar mass murder (corporate homicide) possible. (The death penalty is bad for other reasons, and I don't feel this warrants an exception. But that's a different, a…

It's ironic. Elsewhere today[0], I wrote about the problems where the correct take kind of ruins the mood of the argument, which is why the discourse keeps spinning in circles. With you spelling out the missing point, I realized this has happened to me here: of course this is a hard, systemic issue. But talking about death penalty let me conveniently forget about it for a moment, and feel like there's a simple soluti…

That was you? I wouldn't have made the observation had I not read that comment!

Maybe we should make a list of topics where people frequently miss the point in this way? Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions though this is probably not in scope for Wikipedia.

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