Put them in jail. Make the company pay for externalities. If it bankrupts them, they deserve it.
Sell your MMM stock.
3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
191–200 of 245 posts
Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Death sentence is probably a bit much, but if management takes actions that they know will kill or maim I don't see a reason why punishment shouldn't be the same as if you went out and hit someone with a hammer. In this case, force 3M to pay for everything, if they refuse or can't the government sells of the company to pay for the cost. I'm not a fan of the death sentence, but I have no problem killing of evil compan…
At least six babies were killed; that's mass murder. It was done in cold blood, planned out ahead of time. The death penalty was the only fitting sentence.
>that's mass murder.
Unless you can show that someone adulterated the product with the specific intent of causing death, it isn't. Causing someone to die through negligence, recklessness or indifference is manslaughter, not murder.
Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
you live in a capitalist society not some socialist nightmare. Giving it to the government would be much much much worse.
They didn’t say to let the government run it. Make the patents/trade secrets public domain and sell off the physical assets in open auctions. Someone would buy up the profitable manufacturing lines that aren’t known to be as harmful.
What would that help? 3M create way more value than not.
Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
The death penalty is never a fitting sentence. Prosecutors and judges can make mistakes. Executing someone is something you can never undo.
There are plenty of crimes that deserve death. We don’t impose it because we’re unsure about culpability. But if you did it, you do indeed deserve to die.
>There are plenty of crimes that deserve death.
In your opinion. In the opinion of many others, there is no crime that deserves death, hence the widespread abolition of the death penalty in developed countries. We used to execute people for stealing cattle and I imagine that many people at the time though that it was an entirely right and proper punishment.
A jurisdiction that uses the death penalty with any real frequency will at some point inevitably execute an innocent man. What is the appropriate punishment for those who supported the laws that caused his death?
Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> despite saying they're "harmful", they've been everywhere for all these decades that a lot of other measures of quality of life have been increasing? Might be unrelated (or not), but cancer rates have been exploding the last decades. Example via Google-Fu: > Cancer cases in under-50s worldwide up nearly 80% in three decades, study finds https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/05/cancer-cases...
Controlled by age?
And just as importantly, is it controlled for changes in diagnostic criteria, improvements in testing and pre-screening? In the past decades, we got better at classifying and discriminating between cancers and other illnesses and causes of death.
Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
Your definition of PFAS is not a universal definition, nor is it any indication of toxicity. To alleviate your own ignorance, you might read the article I linked, and the paper behind it (linked in the article).
The really wide definition seems to be mostly from economic organizations from what I could find. Which makes me question their interests here.
Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
#197It’s crazy that 3M is still selling “fabric protectors” today [1] that rely on PFAS.
Not that you can tell based on the product listing or packaging, but they do publish a handy data sheet [2] that lists “[1] Scotchgard Fabric Water Shield https://a.co/d/0E2DGjL [2] https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/mediawebserver?mwsId=SSSSSuUn_...
Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feels weird to get into a high-school debate about capital punishment here, but in essence: (a) Sometimes the wrong people get convicted. In this context, irreversible punishments suck. (b) “We’re going to kill you because killing people is wrong” is a weird look.
(a) Sometimes the wrong people get put in prison or solitary confinement for life too, which is effectively decades-long torture. It is arbitrary to draw the line at the death penalty, which generally causes less suffering. (Read statements from prisoners in lifelong solitary confinement.) (b) It's not. Killing people that are evil is fine. Killing babies is wrong. You are intentionally simplifying the moral argument…
>which is effectively decades-long torture
Maybe don't make prisons so awful that they constitute torture? That's very much a thing that we know how to do.
>Killing people that are evil is fine.
Who gets to decide what is evil? What happens when the definition of evil changes? Practically every genocide in history has been justified by that logic - they are evil, therefore we are justified in killing them. Other than vengeance, there is little benefit to state-sanctioned killing for the purposes of punishment; all state-sanctioned killing carries the risk of justifying other kinds of state-sanctioned killing, by removing the simple and clear moral foundation of what a legitimate state can or cannot do.
Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Killing innocent people is wrong, killing murderers is good. Therefore we should give accused murderers fair trials before executing them.
> Therefore we should give accused murderers fair trials before executing them. There are many examples of accused murderers who received fair trials, were convicted, and yet were still innocent.
Corporate crimes tend to be well documented. Even the communist Chinese can get these sort of convictions right. They did good work killing those bastards.
Re: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are those laws effective at stopping any of those things from happening?
They would be if the punishment was severe enough. Heck, businesses might even become afraid to collect personal information if there was a risk of serious bodily harm and financial penalties for letting it loose.
They might also re-evaluate their risk profile and invest more into securing their systems (for existing tech&laws, an analogy for the IRL product companies). The lawyers and peanut counters are often involved in the decision making around these things.