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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

#211

Post by acdha »

paiute wrote: post #154
mrweasel wrote: post #31

Earlier 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…

I think this is naive. Selling off a large company like this is not smart, think about it for a minute. First, who owns 3M (I own a handful of shares for example). Average shareholders will get screwed. Then think about who will buy their assets (IP and manufacturing). Will it be foreign companies? What will the contracts for medical supplies look like for like? Companies that discover they are doing harm will be inc…

What J&J tried is called the Texas two-step: they fold the liability into a subsidiary, which relocates to another state and declares bankruptcy. This has failed for that specific case but that is not a given.

This is especially common for industries like mining which are guaranteed to require significant cleanup:

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/29/1127520991/west-virginia-coal...

https://www.propublica.org/article/west-virginia-coal-blackj...

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

#212

Post by acdha »

pdonis wrote: post #58
acdha wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a table of prosecutions with links like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20091125173132/http://www.nydail... Are you saying that’s fake?

No, he's saying that the people who were executed were not company executives.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. I missed that.

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

#213

Post by hotpotamus »

acdha wrote: post #210
hotpotamus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not saying it wasn’t there – Scopes, for example – but pumping many billions of dollars into it really amped it up, especially when it turned opposition to science into a Republican primary filter. While the southern realignment was unfolding, science denial was visible in both parties (e.g. William Proxmire, D-WI) but that was not as pronounced in the age of the space race and the science-dependent Cold War. Tha…

Well said; I was thinking of Scopes when I said Darwin. It’s hard to really get a feel for history that I didn’t live through and I’m talking about things a bit before my time which began in the Reagan era. I mostly look at the work of Carl Sagan and I get the feeling he really got going in the 70’s and 80’s. Agreed that it seems like tobacco companies wrote the original playbook for weaponizing disinformation for commercial purposes, but it’s fair to say that America’s issues with science denial preceded that as well.

I think the fight over the metric system is instructive - Im not aware of any huge lobbying effort to defeat it, but it became a culture war anyway, and now we have a strange mixed system in the US.

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

#214

Post by genmud »

gosub100 wrote: post #174
wahnfrieden wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they take a stand against their own interests?

because their interests are, ostensibly, with their constituents.

You must be new to politics, lol. I am not sure if modern politicians even pretend to represent their constituents these days. Special interests first, party second, constituents only during an election, but only if you have a close race.

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

#215

Post by ornornor »

monkburger wrote: post #203
29athrowaway wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand correctly, those chemicals don't go away unless destroyed with highly sophisticated and expensive methods. They will continue to accumulate in concentration and cause more impact over time.

They do go away, but it depends on numerous factors. In humans, if you have polymorphisms in various genes relating to GSH detoxification, the half life could increase. (in theory) half-lives of long-chain PFAS were longer than those of short-chain compounds, reaching almost 3 years in some cases. Some studies estimated the average half-lives for PFHxS at 2.86 years and L-PFOS (a specific form of perfluorooctane sulf…

Does this mean that if we stopped producing any new forever chemicals today, it would take more or less three years for organisms to expel them from their systems? Are they destroyed or simply taken out of the organisms and ready to be reabsorbed by the same or another organism for ever?

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

#216

Post by hotpotamus »

thedragonline wrote: post #209
dgfitz wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason people think climate change is overblown is because it challenges them to think about changing their way of life ie directly goes against their interests… I don’t think the vast, vast majority of people actually care that much. It’s a vocal minority on all sides. Most people just want to pay their bills, have food/clothing/shelter covered, and try to muddle through this life thing. I would posit that the…

Anecdata: I tell a relative that climate is going to get hotter and more variable and that said relative should be concerned that an unaffordable electricity bill may be in the cards (Houston anyone?). Relative's response: the governing authorities won't let that happen. Me:

It was sitting around in the Texas blackout in February 2021 that really got me to think about the scale of the disaster on our hands. I realized that there was nothing the government could do other than wait for the state to thaw, and it was pretty unnerving to think about. I also remember how incredibly ironic I thought it would be if global warming meant I died of hypothermia in South Texas (a fate that a few sadly did succumb to; I really was a bit scared since I've never actually had to live at such low temperatures and never without heating). I'm generally much more worried about heatstroke.

I've lived here all my life, but I do wonder at what point I'll need to move. I actually had lunch with a couple old colleagues this week and interestingly, we're all lifelong Texans and talked about leaving the state. Currently it's more about politics, but we also talked about future climate as a concern. Once my parents and aunts/uncles are gone, I don't know that there will be much to hold me in place.

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

#217

Post by Nasrudith »

atoav wrote: post #156
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…

Exactly. And maybe we should make sure that crimes against humanity that go unpunished today can (and will) be punished in the future. Some climate activist kids on tiktok call this "Nuremberg 2046". Doing illegal stuff and lobbying your best to get away with it has become so normal nowadays that maybe an appeal to the honor of the people involved does not cut it.

You would need to be very careful when defining "crimes against humanity" to not be post-facto law. It is like the maxim of it being better to let a hundred guilty go free than punish one innocent: if being innocent is no defense then why would anyone bother to be innocent?

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

#218

Post by ornornor »

mrweasel wrote: post #31
toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> In this case, force 3M to pay for everything

Hasn’t that ship sailed recently? They were sued for damages and cleanup costs from PFAS and won, resulting in them not be liable?

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

#219

Post by Nasrudith »

Teever wrote: post #130
jmaygarden wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would investors know if something is kept secret?

What about the situation with 3M now? We know that they kept this is a secret, so shareholders should either sell or be criminally liable.

That depends upon someone willing to buy when it comes with criminal liabilities. Lets not recreate sin-eaters.

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

#220

Post by RajT88 »

xvector wrote: post #59
RajT88 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The death penalty as a deterrent does not work in our society. Nobody thinks they will actually be executed, and it is kind of a fair assumption since there are so many automatic appeals in the process due to fear of making a mistake. This is before the monied interests buy the best lawyers for their defense. China does not care so much about mistakes, they care about the deterrent effect. Different ideologies on law…

The death penalty works extraordinarily well in plenty of countries. Singapore, for example, has a marked decrease in drug crime post-death-penalty - interviews with dealers, mules, and criminals cite the death penalty as the reason they avoid Singapore. Most studies citing the inefficacy of the death penalty are flawed and simply at odds with reality, in which evidence points to the opposite of what the studies theo…

> The death penalty works extraordinarily well in plenty of countries. Singapore, for example, has a marked decrease in drug crime post-death-penalty - interviews with dealers, mules, and criminals cite the death penalty as the reason they avoid Singapore.

Thank you for confirming my talking point.

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