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 wondering whether the knock on the door is the FBI.
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 is a huge problem across the board; industry and congress have been steadily stripping federal agencies of staff/budget, authority, etc.
Congress long figured out how to kill off regulation that is publicly popular: strangle the agency budget-wise, not appoint new department leaders, etc. Adding ever-increasing paperwork is also popular.
OSHA has the lowest number of inspectors in ~45 years. The agency is about 50 years old. https://www.nelp.org/news-releases/number-federal-workplace-...
It has one inspector for every 77,000 workers and its budget amounts to $4/worker: https://www.afge.org/article/aflcio-osha-budget-amounts-to-3...
The EPA's inspections have fallen to half the number of ten years ago https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/02/0...
The number of ATF inspections has been falling for decades and the ATF apparently is allowing gun shops even with multiple violations to go unpunished https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2021/0...
The poultry industry pushed and got greater self-regulation around 2013 to increase line speeds: https://awionline.org/awi-quarterly/2013-fall/usda-refuses-d...
The Trump administration passed widespread overhauls of the meat packing industry letting them self-regulate to increase production https://www.govexec.com/management/2020/03/federal-pork-insp...
In ten years the number of food inspections the FDA conducts have fallen to one fifth the rate in 2010: https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/05/fda-food-safe...
Foreign drug manufacturing site inspections plummeted with the pandemic and have yet to recover, too.
The IRS budget has been slashed, mostly for auditing - despite audits of the 0.1% wealthiest resulting in an average of $90,000 per audit recovered: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/irs...
The de minimis for shipments into the US was raised from $200 to $800 in 2016 which has allowed for a massive increase in goods to be imported that are not subject to any inspection or taxes https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/de-minim...
We need regulation of the regulations! /s
I get the joke, but what we need is a constitutional amendment overriding Citizens United, reigning in the absurdity of "corporations have free speech rights and thus they can spend whatever they want on political campaigns and PACs, and without even reporting it."
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.
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.
thats a defeatist attitude. "Oh the windows are already broken, let's spray paint the walls."
"wait and vote and wait" is the defeatist attitude. "oh my window is smashed, let's put a new one up. oh my window is smashed, let's put a new one up. nothing else to be done about it." you got played by respecting ideals over materialism.
sounds like idealism more than a material analysis
OSHA may have the lowest # of inspectors in ~45 years, but the rate of worker deaths is also at just about its lowest over that same time period - so not sure the # of inspectors is really relevant.
More is not always better.
Worker deaths in America are down—on average, from about 38 worker deaths a day in 1970 to 13 a day in 2020.
Worker injuries and illnesses are down—from 10.9 incidents per 100 workers in 1972 to 2.7 per 100 in 2020.
I mean, we lost all our manufacturing in that time period. We have far more service jobs (e.g. not inherently dangerous) in the economy now compared to 1970.
I agree - which is why less inspectors seem reasonable to m, there are a smaller number of dangerous jobs, less inspectors needed, AND imo, most importantly, the ever-present threat of a very expensive jury award keeps some companies on the straight-and-narrow.
No reason the ATF needs to exist though, the taxes and stuff like explosives enforcement should be separate.
I think the exon-mobile report on global warming is one of the most accurate models for predicting global warming, and that was written before this was a big political issue. I think having companies produce the research to hang themself with in the future is unstable though.
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-science political movement causing problems in other areas.
I spent half a decade working with climate data from institutions around the world. There are dragons in those datasets and it is really frustrating to watch denialism at large and have to deal with it personally.
I wish more people were aware of how damaging bad science is, even when it is well intentioned. Environmental studies are often littered with double counting and creative data framing. One faked study does more to convince people global warming is over blown than 100 rigorous studies showing that it isn't.
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, not because some dataset has been poorly interpreted in a study they haven't read.
(Also because fossil fuel people kept financing fake science for decades and are actively participating in culture wars around it)
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 vast, vast majority of people have little say or impact as it pertains to climate change, they just don’t have the means or mental bandwidth to effect change.
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: <internally sighing and filled with despair>
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.
Some environmental advocates' rhetoric focused on the lower probability but much higher damage outcomes, e.g. Gore's Inconvenient Truth. Language like "up to 20 feet" etc to focus on the higher range.
A doctor could say an infection has a chance of death if left untreated. If the person lives they'd say the doctor was "wrong", and "the doctor gave me a month to live."
At this point most probable estimates are so bad it's besides the point, but I'd think the lower odds yet especially cataclysmic projections are worth attention.
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. That changed between the tobacco and fossil fuel companies’ enormous lobbying efforts, and you’ll recognize many of the same “experts” trotted out to explain why environmentalism, public health, or anything else which affects those companies’ bottom lines.
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.
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
This kind of self regulation can probably work and be cost effective if you ruthlessly destroy any company found in violation rather than some fine and an apology.
Reminds me of criminal punishment in medieval times. Incarceration was a complete economic non-start so the penalties were brutal as a deterrent.
The problem of punishing corporations, is that the people that benefited from misconduct are possibly gone from the company already, and you might be punishing current employees who might even be unaware.
The people responsible for the misconduct at the time need to face criminal prosecution, and their personal wealth has to be first on the line for damage reparations.
It’s not about punishment. That’s the core of my comment. Make it so horrible for the shareholders and owners.
Can do both. Destroy the company, but also go after those responsible. Anyone who knew about the situation but didn't make their supervisor(s) aware is personally liable for damages. Anyone on the board or C-Suite that was aware and either did nothing or didn't notify regulators is also personally liable. In both cases if anyone died as a result the companies actions they should be tried for manslaughter.
Unless you scale fines with income/wealth, fines are just a way of letting the rich do what they please. On the off chance they're caught - and don't get let off the hook because of how 'respectable' they are - it's so little money to them, it's not a discouragement at all.
A fine for dangerous driving that is crushing to a day laborer is unnoticeable to someone wealthy. And whereas that laborer, to challenge a ticket, would need to take time off from work costing them further - the wealthy person may have a standing relationship with a law firm, and that law firm might send a clerk or paralegal to challenge the ticket in court...and do so gratis.
That’s why Finland has “day fines” - after a threshold, fines are x days of your last years income. 5 or 6 figure fines are not uncommon.
I wonder if that makes the weight of the consequence less abstract? “I sped and now I’m working for free for a day.”
Corporate capital punishment, the company gets seized it's patents and copyrights made public domain, and any other assets it has sold to the highest bidder and those profits used to compensate the victims.
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 sulfonic acid, C8) at 2.91 years. In comparison, the short-chain PFPeS had an estimated average half-life of 0.63 years, and perfluoroheptane sulfonic acid (PFHpS, C7) concentrations were 1.46 years. The shortest estimated half-lives were for perfluorobutanoic acid (PFBA, C4) at 0.12 years and perfluoroheptanoic acid (PFHpA, C7) at 0.17 years.
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?
Environmental half lives are a different animal. I vaguely recall some obs studies that estimate a half life of PFOA to be 90 (water), 114 days for PFOS, their half-life in water is greater than 90 years for PFOA and greater than 41 years for PFOS, according to a 2014 publication from the EPA.
There's also a study from Europe showing vastly different half-lives based on soil temperature (colder temps -> longer half life), but I cannot locate the paper at the moment.
US EPA. (2014). Emerging Contaminants Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) and Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA), https://www.wqa.org/Portals/0/Government%20Relations/factshe... arch2014.pdf
This can lead to bio-death of the planet.
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 pharmaceuticals daily (e.g., Cipro, Prozac, Flonaze, Pavloxid, etc.). It's been amusing watching the alarmist "science" press floundering with the "right" definition of PFAS that lets you hang 3M but still keep the life-changing drugs that require them. https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2022/is-there-a-right-d...
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
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.
>The problem here is that we have report over report on the effects of those molecules, some coming from the companies making them.
And nearly all of those reports have little or no actual evidence of harm. Lots of people are making a lot of noise about the potential harms of PFASs, but most of it is just vague scaremongering with only the most scant basis in science.
The issue raised by the parent comment is highly pertinent. He isn't the one categorising organofluorine drugs as PFASs - it's the definitions proposed by researchers and regulators that are. Some reports about PFAS are based on a narrow definition, but many others lump together a vast and diverse range of substances that happen to have a C-F bond somewhere. It's very difficult to have an informed debate about something when there is in fact no agreed definition of what we're talking about.
Did you read this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...
There's even a movie about it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAOuhyunhY
Link from article on what purdy talks about bioaccumulation, but not at toxic levels, with some concerns that it could biomagnify in the food chain. The article blows this up and claims they knew all the harms then. Just bullshit. https://www.ag.state.mn.us/Office/Cases/3M/docs/PTX/PTX1533....
I'm going to be the controversial one here and point out that 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?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Global_... there is this interesting quote:
Most industrialized nations have average PFOA blood serum levels ranging from 2 to 8 parts per billion;[57] the highest consumer sub-population identified was in Korea—with about 60 parts per billion.[52] In Peru,[58] Vietnam,[59] and Afghanistan[60] blood serum levels have been recorded to be below one part per billion.
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.
>cancer rates have been exploding the last decades
For reasons that are really quite well-understood. PFASs are not known to be significantly carcinogenic, particularly not at the miniscule levels most people are exposed to. We willingly fill ourselves with things that are definitely very carcinogenic - processed meat, alcohol, tobacco smoke, diesel fumes, etc etc ad nauseum.
Exposure to some of these carcinogens has been static or declining in some western countries, which has led to static or declining age-adjusted cancer incidence rates. They have vastly increased in the middle-income countries that are home to most of the world's population. The life of the average Chinese or Indian person has been transformed beyond all recognition in recent decades (for better and for worse) by urbanisation and industrialisation.
There isn't some unseen and unrecognised carcinogen that is sweeping the world and wreaking havoc; the global poor are just getting rich enough to develop the kind of lifestyle-related cancers that we're accustomed to in the west, while also getting rich enough to be diagnosed rather than just getting sick and dying.
Look at the source cited by that article - the growth in cancer rates is completely dominated by rapidly-growing economies in the global south.
Funny, you quoted the same one as me in another thread. That is a really good paper. Worth pasting on a top level thread.
Given we have a recent law regarding data breaches, notifications, and penalties for not...
We ought to mirror this law onto IRL products and companies
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.
This is a completely disingenuous take on the case. There isn't a single explanation of how its dangerous only thats its found in many different species and claims its toxic. If this shallow type of analysis is enough for otherwise technical people on this forum then we have a much bigger problem than 3M.
People really want to believe these companies are Disney super villains. No evidence required. And no accounting for all the benefits that derive from these chemicals. Americans are really bad at risk assessment and toxicology. I suspect it will be our ultimate undoing when the Chinese come along with superior weapons that withstand higher heat thresholds or less corrosion.
Europeans, especially Germans suffer from the same problem.
Chemical companies like Hoechst gave up on Germany due to its anti-scientific, emotional stance on chemistry.
Yet the same people in Germany complains nowadays that the country is having issues supplying itself with pharmaceuticals.
Ever wonder if things like this lead to companies intentionally avoiding environmental research? We need to find some way to align our interests, this seems like a dead end path. We are unintentionally incentivizing the disruption of environmental research.
It's not about the research itself, it's about what happened after the discovery of danger. If their research discovers harm and they discontinue the product promptly, that should be a mitigating factor. If their research discovers harm and they continue, that should be a severely compounding punishment. That promotes research because it mitigates company risk.
Management is also incentivized to sell research that aligns with their own agenda to the board, rather than research that says maybe what they've been hired to burn money on for the last couple years wasn't the right direction at all.
Minnesota Reformer is the best local news source I've seen.
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Put them in jail.
Make the company pay for externalities. If it bankrupts them, they deserve it.
Sell your MMM stock.
How much of the rise in cancer cases over the past 100 years can be traced back specifically to PFCs? What other harms can chronic low-dose exposure cause?
We need some proper unbiased studies of the long term chronic effects of PFCs, paid for by the EPA or some other branch of the US federal government, without any influence from environmental groups or chemical manufacturing companies.
You have proper studies of cancer increases. No mention of PFCs.
This one is particularly readable and as credible as they get: https://bmjoncology.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000049
It’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 “< 3% fluorochemical urethane”. Unfortunately it doesn’t list any personal protection or toxicology advice for that ingredient as “ingredient may be below threshold for labelling”.
[1] Scotchgard Fabric Water Shield https://a.co/d/0E2DGjL [2] https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/mediawebserver?mwsId=SSSSSuUn_...
I agree with other the comments that executives should be criminally liable for negligence like this, and anyone else who doesn’t relay the message to the decision makers.
Knowingly committing crimes against humanity on a grand scale should be prosecuted and their fortunes seized.
I honestly don't think there is any incentive for large corporation to care too much about things like this and, on the contrary, they are incentivized to do more! The fine they get is basically cost of doing business and since our attention is engineered to be short, the negative PR won't last long enough to have a huge impact. Unless we see a "too big to fail" company actually fail because something like this, we won't see any change in their behvaiour!
3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public
It does not matter. Du Pont was doing it decades ago but they showed that they can go forward with a slap on the wrist.
We have the laws and mechanism to "piercing the corporate veil" and lock these guys up.
Somehow we seem to be unwilling to do it.
I'm shocked. /s
I've preached about this in other comments (e.g. boeing 737 max), and looks like many folks here agree - we need personal liability in order to stop these kinds of things.
When I was in university around 2001/2002 my partner's close friend was an intern in 3M's legal department. At the time she noted that she was helping to ensure that 3M was never legally liable for teflon and related products.
A 1970 study of fish had to be abandoned “to avoid severe stream pollution” and because all the fish died. After being exposed to a chemical, the fish couldn’t stay upright and kept crashing into the fish tank and dying.
"We tested it on animals, and none of them survived. But that's OK! 'cause when we wrote the report up, we lied!"
Sounds like Pfizer and mRNA shots. Seems to b a pattern.
Related, recommended documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7689910/
You can execute or incarcerate managerial offenders, but I suspect their greatest fear would be the imposition of complete and lasting impoverishment for them and their families.
Isn't everything harmful, even distilled water?
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 executed. Perhaps this type of incentive will lead to less harmful outcomes vs limited liability and the corporate veil.
At some point, you’re doing enough harm knowingly at scale that monetary damages and prison are insufficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
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 companies.
What I don't get is how people can make these decisions. You're informed that your product is dangerous, but you really like money so screw it.... What kind of person does that? That has to be a mental problem.
I don’t think death sentence is actually a bit much here.
Im generally against death sentences for heat of the moment situations. Think: murder.
But in a situation where you’ve had legal teams working with you, where you’ve been planning this out, and where you know what the damage to this is etc., you’re basically a massive threat to society.
The active planning, intent, and maliciousness is something that should be made an example out of.
Death sentences for crimes where the person doing the crime likely didn’t even get a chance to think about the consequences is useless. Death sentences and removal of all assets from corporate executives that have caused a significant amount of damage would have a deterrence effect.
For me, the death penalty contains traces of mercy and life-long incarceration does not. You take away someone’s freedom for the rest of their life instead of putting them out of their misery.
TBH I'm not much interested in `Punishment`, so long incarceration does not interest me personally.
You suggest vile acts should be permitted without consequence?
Consequences and punishment are different concepts, I support the death penalty in the case of egregious acts primarily from the perspective of cost and efficiency of removing an unacceptable risk to society.
I don’t need to see them tortured beforehand, as it serves little to no purpose (in my opinion).
Basically this.
I agree with you on death penalty but the parent also says removal of all assets.
So I think life in prison with no possibility of parole plus removal of all assets is ideal.
But I think this should only apply to the CEO and the board not everyone up and down the chain at least in the US where we have a “right to work”.
I don’t know if the law will allow an effective removal of all assets. I’m thinking of trust fund babies and such…
Edit: at least in the US, I think there is a possibility of a pardon or commutation by POTUS. I think we need to abolish that as well or at least it should be that if you pardon or commute the sentence for one person for a crime, it automatically makes the same change (pardon/commutation) for everyone convicted of that crime.
Couple that with impossibility to be ignorant of what happens inside of a company, because if not, top level management has a big incentive to have a buffer to keep them purposedly unknowing of this kind of doings.
Civil asset forfeiture. The money itself is complicit in the criminal act.
Then why not make the death penalty an option for the condemned? They could choose between life in prison or an execution in a form of their choosing if they wish to be put out of their misery.
“It’s your choice, but the daily beatings will continue until you consent to your own execution.”
There is no such thing as life long incarceration. They always get out early
Maybe not in your jurisdiction...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_England_a...
The quality of that extended life is probably something that needs to be accounted for too.
"Plush mansion, good company, etc" vs "left to rot in a hole" type of thing.
Murder can also be premeditated. In many cases, proof of premeditation is required for "Murder One".
I have to disagree if someone knowingly poisoned my baby then if death penalty isn’t imposed I’m going to attempt to get revenge myself. The death penalty was probably effective at calming the entire country from rage.
I think, as a general principle, justice should not be based around appeasing a potential lynch mob.
There's lynch mob, and then there's righteous rage at acts so heinous that lack of punishment would call into question the legitimacy of the entire social structure.
This may be something that doesn't resonate with people who are not parents, but: if your government is willing to tolerate intentional, casual murder of children at scale, what's the point of having it in the first place? And let's remember: a government isn't imposed by the heavens. It's just another agreement between people, at scale.
I don't think that's restricted to parents: I've felt that way since I was ten years old. That doesn't mean we have to kill the perpetrators: just remove them.
Retribution might make us feel better, but it doesn't solve anything. It's shutting the stable doors after the horse has bolted. We don't need a special judicial exception for the mass murder of children: we need that to not happen in the first place. At that scale, it's not one person: it's an institutional failing. We need those institutional failings to not happen: talk of punishment, except to the extent it has a deterrent effect (which I'm generally sceptical of), is a distraction.
Aviation rarely blames pilots for plane crashes, even when it's clearly their fault (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot#By_pilots_in_...): they do things like a two-in-cockpit policy. Aeroplanes are among the safest places in the world. That attitude seems a better one to mimic.
What does it truly mean, to say “never again”?
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 children as a result of lack of care or attention, vs. knowingly letting it happen because of personal gains.
Pragmatically, I don't see a difference. I couldn't give a shit about the perpetrators: they have lost the right to factor into my moral calculus. I care about the children not dying.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
I'm up for it, though off the top of my head, I'm not sure how to make it the right size - short enough to be useful, but longer than "1) learn about feedback loops, 2) think in dynamic systems, not static ones, 3) meditate on “Meditations on Moloch”".
A different list I believe I could use is one that's listing some working mitigations to tough problems. Like, checklists are effective at this-and-this in medicine[link set 1], and this-and-that in aviation [link set 2]. "Two-in-cockpit" policies are effective at helping in this-and-that in aviation, to such-and-such degree [link set 3], etc. The motivation here is that it seems that some industries figured out ways to reduce the severity of various tough problems, and there may be an opportunity for cross-pollination, or staging those techniques into an even better mitigation.
RE the Moloch link, I'm not in the right mood to respond to the reply under that comment, nor do I have energy for this right now. I mostly disagree, but I note one point - it's true, at least for me, that realizing a problem is one of coordination at scale (and therefore likely systemic) makes me feel despair. The realization itself is a mood killer - I find myself recoiling from it, and thinking along the lines of "please let it not be a Moloch thing, please let it be something solvable, something that can be approached directly". I would love to know of a way to feel encouraged, instead of instantly demotivated, by this kind of problems.
EDIT:
Another one to your list of common point-misses: 4) what's the base rate, and 5) what's the effect size?
Prompted by 'userbinator remembering that one, and asking the important question. Paraphrasing, "if those chemicals are so very bad for us, and have been everywhere for decades, then where are the ill effects?".
It's like with dietetics and cancer scares. Consuming/not consuming red meat/coffee/artificial sweetener/whatever can give you cancer! How much of an increase? 10%? Over what base rate? 0.00001? In that case, it's affecting your lifespan less than worrying about it is.
Moloch things are solvable. They're a relatively recent issue. The despairing tone of Scott Alexander's essay only applies because it assumes we've got an unlimited number of people – but we've got an unknown, finite, and small number of people. That puts the game closer in nature to the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, where you don't even need superrationality for the best decision to be "cooperate / cooperate".
The problem isn't some kind of game theory issue. The problem is the cultural phenomenon where people believe cruelty is a virtue. The solution is kindness, like people have been saying for thousands of years. (Also reorganising society somewhat.)
In Scott Alexander's terminology: we can build a garden, and keep Moloch out of it, because we are the only ones in our vicinity capable of being powerful agents of Moloch, and we can just… decide not to do that. So many societies have managed that over the years: it's just historical coincidence they didn't end up with industrial metallurgy, lots of boats, and a penchant for proselytism. But now, we don't have any other societies that could come from across the sea and influence us: we're globalised.
Our fate is in our hands, if we can step back from isolationist ethics and be kind (and stop trying to take over the world).
If there's never any real justice, some sort of correction needs to occur.
I read once about a corporate death penalty that I think should really be made into law: where a corporate entity commits something so heinous that a fine or what have you is simply not enough. I cannot find the link but the process would go about such as:
- The entire entity would be taken on ownership by the government agency at play. No existing stakeholders would be paid anything for this and operations would continue, assuming the operation is worth salvaging of course, with the corrections made needed.
- The entity would then be either sold in-whole or carved up into pieces to other large businesses. Shareholders, stakeholders, or investors are not made whole: instead, the revenue from these sales is used to repay or remediate the damage caused by the company.
- Top level leadership is, if it's felt is required, charged for neglecting their duties as leaders and fined, jailed, or otherwise punished.
- In the end the original entity is dissolved entirely, any remaining assets are sold in a process similar to the above, and the name is added to a "dead corporation" list and cannot be used at any time in the future.
Sounds like a gift to short sellers.
Nationalising the corporation would delist it from an exchange, preventing stock sales.
Meaning short sellers never have to buy it back.
That seems like the correct incentive, no? If the shorts believe a company is (e.g.) poisoning 100,000 people in a large suburb, shouldn't they profit massively if the government agrees and seizes it?
Wouldn’t this reduce the share price, effectively baking in the externality risk?
It would reduce the share price of companies that shareholders thought were at high risk of committing a major crime, and create an incentive for companies that care about their share price to make it very clear that they weren't going to do crime and e.g. have policies to prevent it.
Allowing fraud is a gift to speculators just as much. And criminals.
It should be. The entire job of short sellers is to be incentivized to ferret out bad companies.
We should not trust government agencies as they have zero accountability either. It is even worse.
Death sentence is absolutely not too much. It's an extraordinarily effective deterrent (see Singapore), and I don't know where the narrative comes from that it's not. Some people simply need to die.
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.
Killing innocent people is wrong, killing murderers is good. 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.
As 'xvector points out, the alternative punishment - like long sentences in high-security facilities - can, in practice, be much, much worse. This is a theory vs. practice thing - theory could say that "there's always a chance", but actual numbers will say that the country is just making convicts - guilty and innocent alike - spend decades being tortured.
It's far more likely that we can fix prisons than we can fix the judicial system to guarantee that only the guilty are convicted.
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.
(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 here to "killing people is wrong."
>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.
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.
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?
I don’t support it because it’s irrevocable, but that’s the reason to oppose it. Some crimes do deserve it, even if we don’t impose it every time.
>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.
They knew what they were doing would kill people and did it anyway with that knowledge. The fact that their motivation was profit instead of the deaths doesn't make it not murder.
If I intend to enrich myself my taking all the money in an armored car and the deaths of the security guards I'll have to shoot my way through is just some side effect to me, not my intent by neither my concern, that's still murder.
i'll get behind the death penalty once we get that 100% accurate justice system i've been waiting on.
until then i'll just view it as a tool of the government to sate public bloodlust with regards to heinous crimes with the very thing they seek to punish : murder.
the very embodiment of "well, that's the best we can do." when confronted with the idea of correcting the loss of a life -- two losses to make the original victim feel less alone. Not a great correction.
Why? If you knowingly decide to poison thousands of people, that makes you a mass murderer. Since when are we so lenient about those?
Most countries in the world have abolished the death penalty, for good reason.
How is that working out for you?
... but they're in suits! (nah joking burn them in hell, they are all bunch of power hungry sociopaths, normal folks wouldn't survive a day among such C-suites due to being decent human beings).
But realize that list for whatever action would be done would be... very long. Monsanto, bunch of Wall street guys (if you trace actions to real consequences), this and probably many more. I think life sentence in maximum security prison in US would be actually worse.
Also, you soon hit grey area, say defense industry and its bribing of government to start wars that killed millions... where do you draw the line? One's man patriot is another's murderer
You can start by the most obvious cases. For the rest long term prison will work as an intermediate as well as complete bankruptcy of said individual.
Some places don't execute mass murderers either. There are plenty of arguments around this. For example, based on the crime rates in places with death sentences, I'm not sure it provides as strong a disincentive you think it does.
Because undoing a death sentence if it turns out the culpit was one level higher in the corporate chain is pretty hard.
I agree in principle that IF your country has the death sentence, there is no reason why it should not be applied in such cases as well. But I think death sentences are problematic. Put them in jail and bar them from ever running a company again. That should be enough.
What kind of person? Regular millionaire/billionaire who know that they easily can get away with such decision using their wealth and/or power.
Musk is totally ok to use materials mined by enslaved children of Madagascar. Or abuse his employees. Or fire people who try to organize a union. Or do plenty of other shady or illegal stuff.
That kind of person.
Let me rephrase then: What is wrong in the brain of these people? They have to live on the planet too, they have friend and family, people they care... No?
Normal people can't get away with things like this, because the decisions would haunt our dreams.
You could apply the same argument to normal people. Normal people eat meat, which causes incredible, extreme amounts of torture and suffering to over 70 billion land animals per year.
The average person's dinner involved a tremendous amount of sheer pain and suffering, but it's satisfying to their taste buds, so they are fine with it, and will find ways to rationalize it.
Most everyone is a psychopath at some level, capable of discarding empathy or rationalizing evil when it serves their own interests. The only difference with the CEOs is that they're doing it for money, not for taste. It's quite easy to imagine someone moving the goalposts for what is worth causing suffering for.
I dove into the science of psychopathy a few years ago after a family incident where my father imploded his life and much of the family's through self-destructive activities and there is actually a bunch of smart people studying the neuroscience of pyschopaths.
Two great books to start with:
- The Science of Evil: https://www.amazon.com/Science-Evil-Empathy-Origins-Cruelty/...
- The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscious: https://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Whisperer-Science-Without-...
Which is why abnormal people are drawn to this kind of power.
I'm not sure.
Regular people make, logically, truly horrifying decisions constantly.
I bought some wine for a friends get-together. That's pretty normal.
But in doing so, I chose to have wine rather than vaccinate some children.
I chose having a drink over the lives of deprived children. Am I not a monster?
Unfortunately the companies manage to wriggle out of all liability by saying they are bankrupt or transferring to a new company structure.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsona...
https://www.lawsuit-information-center.com/2-billion-verdict...
$200,000 per victim for knowingly being given cancer. Obscene. I think China executing people is much closer to justice than our system.
Something like a real solution is to create a way to reintroduce personal liability for executive teams in cases like this where extraordinary harm is done. Human beings need to have their own assets and personal well being at risk, otherwise the incentives for perpetrating mass pollution are too lucrative.
Jail and financial annihilation are basically the only ways to try to counterbalance the massive upside you can get from sociopathic behavior like this.
We need to start treating this more like fraud, but perpetrated as a form of violence.
So if I want to legally murder people I can do it if I create corporation and create a plausible deniable way of killing them? Cool.
Certainly a good system. If the hardest punishment is a fine, it becomes a fee for rich people.
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 incentivized to bury, lie, and hide. It’s not that simple,
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...
You can't "sell the company". Any company you sell with an immediate and complete change of management is very likely completely dead in the water. Institutional knowledge is very important.
Hasn’t that ship sailed recently? They were sued for damages and cleanup costs from PFAS and won, resulting in them not be liable?
I dunno, if there's no money left, the execs can live in a cell where they are fed the various tainted products, but not told which.
Yeah, I’m generally opposed to the death penalty on the grounds of not being able to undo mistakes but if we’re going to have it on the books, I’d have a hard time saying that shouldn’t be an option. We’ve charged plenty of people for killing a single person, and the numbers for food safety can be a lot more than that.
Why advocate for killing criminals when it's far cheaper to cage them for life?
Fear of escape and second life as an evil business exec? Eye for an eye morality? Understanding death to be a greater deterrent than life in a cage? (How do you reconcile that with the popularity of "death-by-cop"?)
They might get back out and are a known quantity. The premium is for assurance. Death at the hands of the state and your fellow citizens should be an absolute last resort, but still an option depending on severity of offense and when determination of guilt is ironclad. I understand the position of people who don’t believe in the death penalty, but I don’t agree with them. There are terrible humans amongst us. Everyone makes the world a better place: some by entering it, some by leaving it.
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 enforcement.
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 theorize.
Thank you for confirming my talking point.
Agreed, this has been studied over and over, generally punishment doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work is because most crimes are not planned or deliberate, especially not something like murder.
However, in cases like this, with 3M, it is deliberate. Sure they try to hide it, but they also know that the chances of anyone in management getting personally punished is practically zero. The company might get a fine and some executive will take an early retirement, if he hasn't already once the information comes to light. This is not a crime made in desperation, this is a cold blood calculation where the costs are weighed against potential profit. I don't know, but I could imagine a deterrence would work differently in these scenarios.
For me, it's about ensuring some kind of deterrence. Life in prison without the possibility for parole can be too soft when the crime is the intentional negligence leading to the deaths of thousands, if the punishment is life in a low security prison with access to TV/internet. If you have the connections to ensure you end up in a nice little apartment in Club Fed, you might not think as hard about the consequences as if the punishment was potentially death.
I'm also somewhat skeptical on the idea that the death penalty _should_ cost more than life in prison (assuming that sentence carries at least 20 years for the remainder of that person's life.) It would seem to me that there is a fairly obvious problem there that needs to get worked out if it's actually true (has anyone looked closely at the studies that assert this claim? Obviously there's additional time in court, but it would seem preposterous that this would necessarily lead to an increase such that paying for someone's housing and supervision for 20+ years is cheaper than additional court time.) Obviously there are other factors like how the government allows itself to get overcharged by the company that manufactures the lethal injection for some strange reason (is it actually all that strange to anyone?) And then what is the actual reason for all the time prisoners spend on death row, this would seem to just be the state shooting itself in the foot on statistics for the costs for capital punishment?
Anyway, I'm generally for the death penalty in matters where there is a clear connection between one entity and an intentional large-scale loss of human life. Proving the intention and the connection are the hard parts, for sure. But the clear benefit to the death penalty is that it's a permanent act that would-be criminals would naturally try to avoid, potentially avoiding them becoming criminals at all. If you have a study that somehow refutes this theory, that would-be criminals, especially white collar criminals similar to officials at 3M here, don't consider punishments as a deterrence at all, I might revise my opinion.
I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding it's all the extra judicial processes that end up costing a lot. The cost of the poison used to kill the person (or bullet, or however it's done) it's probably just a rounding error in comparison.
(I'm against the death penalty, but if you're gonna have it, why invent these macabre Rube Goldberg contraptions for killing people? Just put the person up against a wall and shoot him, FFS.)
I would wager you're probably correct. One substantial cost for the death penalty seems to be just paying a public defender for that whole time because the average person on death row cannot afford their own representation. This would not be the case, however, for company executives in the context we're discussing here at least. I'm also curious if these studies accurately pull together all the costs for life imprisonment, such as the guard staff, infirmary staff, cost of food consumed, cost of clothing, etc. There are probably other costs associated with imprisonment that I'm not even aware of because I've been fortunate enough to avoid prison so far.
On this, we agree. Frankly, I'm fine without the death penalty too, though I'm not certain that it's a fair and just punishment in every case, and I would assume the potential for capital punishment would be a major deterrence for people looking into committing "white collar" life-ending crimes.
If killing criminals is more expensive than caging them, that’s an implementation detail. It’s not something to make long term planning decisions based on. If improving the economics of executions were a significant concern, it’s really straightforward to address.
That, plus there's no possible way to make executions more expensive than life imprisonment, unless the country is making incarceration profitable by using convicts as slave labor or selling their organs.
It's not about expense, it's about the fact that they do not deserve to live. Plenty of countries can economically work with the death sentence today, simply because it is part of their societies and law.
The point of the criminal justice system is to create strong social norms and taboos. Not deterrence—not to create the fear of getting caught—but rather that internal feeling that compels people to avoid wrongdoing because they don’t want to be seen as “bad people.”
Even low level criminals mentally distinguish themselves from the “really bad people.” In prison, the people who hurt children are reviled by the other criminals. When we impose the death penalty for certain conduct, we create a powerful social norm. The point is to help the majority of people who aren’t evil, but are flawed and fallible, stay on the right side of the line.
I’m generally in that camp too but there are cases where there’s no question of culpability or reform, and that’s where I’m the least inclined to argue against deterrence. I think people overstate that in general because a lot of crimes are impulse, but this kind of stuff is carefully planned over many years and I think if there is a deterrent effect you’d find it strongest there.
I’m not enthusiastic about that and would be fine jailing these guys for life, but if it’s something the state does I want guys in expensive suits to know it’s not just poor people.
It can be cheaper to kill them. One appeal allowed, to be finished within one year of the sentencing. Then, simply use a bullet rather than expensive medical death.
The death penalty only makes sense for white collar crime, and it makes a lot of sense in this setting. Theres very little you can do to disincentivize people from engaging in crimes of irrationality or desperation, but I think if you threaten someone who is well off already with death for stealing, or failing to report accurately to the EPA/FDA etc. The number of cases will rapidly go to zero.
China uses the death penalty this way. North Korea has an even stricter system. I don’t think the number of cases have rapidly gone to zero. It seems to breed endogenous corruption and a mafioso approach to internal affairs. You have to deal with lack of proportionality—no matter where you draw the line, once you’ve crossed it there’s no reason not to keep going.
You can think that, but you'd be wrong. Everyone who commits a crime thinks they're gonna be the one to get away with it.
It's a very popular opinion among certain kinds of people, but history and even present day has shown, time and again - You can't slaughter your way to a peaceful law-abiding society.
That's barbaric. White collar crime is a policy choice. Economies require a certain amount of slack in order to function. If an economy had a zero tolerance policy for white collar crime than nothing would ever get done, because differentiating between fraud, incompetence, and bad luck is extremely difficult in all but the most straightforward of cases. If we wanted to de-incentivize white collar crime we have so many options that are (a) more humane, (b) more effective, and (c) less controversial. We could start prosecuting more cases of fraud, or improve regulations, or increase incentives for whisteblowing, or reform corporate governance, or any of a million other ideas.
This is false. The executives were not harmed. Even the article you posted states that.
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.
You’re correct and I’m mistaken. The execs were only jailed for 5-15 years, Sanlu's general manager received a life sentence, and the farmer and salesperson who were directly involved with the knowing adulteration of the product were executed. I’ll update my top comment accordingly.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
You’re on the right track. Maybe we can get a bipartisan coalition to push through the death penalty for corporate execs and drug kingpins.
Eddie Izzard has a great skit about mass murderers that I think of when this topic is discussed. We as a society know (or rather, have ideas on) how to handle people who kill 1-20 people just fine, but above that (hundreds of thousands or millions of people), we’re at a loss. “Well done, you must get up very early in the morning.” Feels very similar to these cases where people in positions of power cause enormous aggregate harm and we have no idea how to address it proportionally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk_pHZmn5QM
There is a saying in my country: if you steal a phone - you go to jail. If you steal a factory or powerplant - you go to the parliament.
Reminds me of a saying in the US, “The best way to rob a bank is to own one”.
Why is the discussing of death penalty vs prison relevant, when western evecutives never go to prison?
Boeing killed 500 people, they knew the plane was faulty, and they suffered no consequence.
Untill a CEO of a major corp or a bank thats 'too big to fail' spends a few years behind bars, this whole discussion is just some sort of fantasy revenge fap.
Capital punishment is already legal in 27 states and at the federal level. It’s really about pushing the Overton window to where it is acceptable for corporate harm beyond a certain threshold. Certainly not revenge porn, simply proportionality. Otherwise, malfeasance of this scale will be with us in perpetuity with little to no consequences for those perpetrating it with no remorse. There is a need for genuine limited liability, but also the ability to forcibly pierce that protection for bad faith actors.
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.
To be sure, a dairy farmer (Zhang Yujun) and milk salesman (Geng Jinping) were executed[1]. At the highest corporate levels, Sanlu general manager (Tian Wenhua) initially got life in prison...except she'll be released next year after 15 years.
No executives were executed in this scandal.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
That's a crude simplification of due diligence in China based on one example. Here's a more recent example where children died and parents were threatened by government workers into silence (otherwise they wouldn't be able to see and bury their bodies).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Qiqihar_school_gymnasiu...
We need death sentences for corporations. Chapter 86 bankruptcy has a certain ring to it. Forced liquidation of assets. No insider trading (no auction participation by people materially involved in the convicted company who have interests in related companies).
We had those a couple hundred years ago, then the monarchies lost their teeth and capitalism and democracy got all mixed up together.
A lot of super evil people are just casually suicidal. They had deep unsatisfaction with their life, and they don’t really care if they die because of it. So they don’t care about committing crimes and hurting others, and if you put a loaded gun in their face and threaten to pull the trigger, they won’t grovel and beg. They have nothing to lose, their life was shit and their evil crimes gave them some sort of satisfaction, but if it’s over, it’s over.
The question isn't "do they deserve to die," it's "is our legal system fallible enough to screw it up," and it has many times.
The problem with our relying on prison and financial punishments with corporate malfeasance is that a) rich people can "play the game" enough to get absurdly preferential treatment in the prison system, and b) the financial penalties are never truly scaled up to the life-ruining penalties most regular people might experience.
In the formula case, I'd rather see the executives condemned to physically serving the families of those affected, and having every asset they own liquefied and split between them.
That’s not what happened though, is it? Execs got away relatively lightly.
No executives were actually executed. Only two people were executed, a farmer producing the protein powder with melamine and the manager of a workshop processing it. Sanlu executives got away with prison sentences.
If companies are people, companies should be able to get the death penalty.
We used to do this. Companies getting their charters revoked used to be something that wasn't uncommon.
Unless you make the punishments for this an existential threat, it's just a cost of doing business.
How exactly do you get rid of 3M? They make so many chemicals necessary for modern consumer products that they are an irrevocable part of the global economy. There is no substitute for 3M. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually supply Intel, AMD, and other high-tech companies with chemicals necessary for photo-lithography. This is before we even get to what they supply to the military-industrial complex. Even if they don't make the end products I am certain they produce the necessary chemical precursors for so many industries that there would be no way to do anything about whatever crimes they have committed against nature.
It doesn't matter how much people complain about these companies. Their existence is a necessary evil because of how the global economy is structured.
Government acquisition, divestiture, and all IP entering the public domain?
Or even just forcing them to break up into more, smaller companies.
you live in a capitalist society not some socialist nightmare. Giving it to the government would be much much much worse.
except we live in a capitalistic nightmare, the solution proposed is textbook free market and socialism would have not created this nightmare to begin with.
people on HN regularly confuse state capitalism with socialism and I can't wrap my head around on why.
the two systems couldn't be more different and actually the USSR was not socialist, Stalin was not socialist, that's the biggest fabrication in modern human history.
Wanna find what socialism actually looks like? Look at the kibbutzim in Israel.
I would suggest you read up on the history of both communism and socialism and their relationship with pollution and their environment.
In a capitalist systems at least there are incentives to get businesses to create better systems over time, that doesn't exist in any other system.
turns out they had a pretty marginal role in it, compared to the grand total, except maybe the first generation of nuclear weapons USSR produced, that were sealed off and very hard, if not impossible, to defuse.
Anyway communism and socialism are not exactly the same thing, you can't put them together in the same basket and can't generalize. Communism in Italy was not the same as communism in Cuba which was not the same as communism in East Germany which was not the same as communism in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Congo etc
I would gladly see some proof that one does produce the incentive (and the incentive produces a radical change for the better) while the other doesn't.
My opinion is that socialism does not scale too well when the community becomes too big, but capitalism produces inherently more distortions and inequalities that need to be addressed in a never ending vice cycle of crisis that hit hard the poor and virtually spares the wealthy.
Anyway my comment was more on the line of "socialism is not what people usually think it is or associate it with in the USA (or the west)"
America called it a socialist system because it wanted to defame and demonize socialism. The Soviet Union called their government socialist because that was a popular and celebrated term in Europe, despite totalitarian control having nothing to do with true, democratic socialism (where workers are also the owners and have democratic control over their workplace and government).
As Noam Chomsky pointed out, it was state capitalism run by a fascist regime, fascists that when they ruled non so-caledd socialist countries, the west, but I should more correctly say the USA and the UK, admired because in their view (and the propaganda) they defeated socialism and communism. In truth the people of the Soviet Union had no control over the means of production or control over their lives and were essentially slaves. It would be the same as if Stalin came to power in America, created a fascist police state, used coercive force to protect criminal banks, evicted people unjustly from their homes, suppressed protests and broke up unions, then lavished massive subsidies on big companies, gave tax breaks to the rich, allowed large corporations to pay nothing in taxes while cutting programs to help the poor, rigged all their elections with the aid of corporate media, and then proudly called this a "free-market capitalist and democratic system that represents the will of the people."
In other words, just because politicians often appropriate popular words for their own twisted means, that doesn't make what they say true.
To me, an Italian that looks at the American politics from afar, sounds not dissimilar to Trump's manifesto and some parts not too far from what we associate the USA with here, today.
They had a marginal role compared to the west only in so far as they didn't produce as much as we did in the west.
But relatively compared to the west they were absolute swine and had no accountability towards their population.
The proof is in the very article we are discussing here. This would never happen in north korea or former soviet union.
You are trying to come up with some redefinition of terms. We all know what communism is, we know what socialism is, we know what capitalism is, we even know what social democratic nations look like (Grew up in one) we also know that most western countries are mixed economies.
I am not sure why you are trying to make up some argument there.
But it all boils down to accountability. In a system where the government is in control of the market it has less incentives as there is nothing that punishes them where as in a system where the companies is accountable to their citizens and then citizens are backed by the government there is a much better incentive structure. Furthermore in market driven systems the companies have an incentive in improving their product on all it's axis as that improves not only their bottom line but also their ability to compete with others.
Noan Chomsky lived in academia his whole life and never had to actually be accountable to any of the many wrong things he claimed.
Yep, exactly, they had a marginal role.
Those are not socialist countries though, just plain old dictatorships. It would also not happen in Pinochet's Chile or Franco's Spain or any other fascist dictatorship supported by the US.
My point: I don't think most on HN do.
Because socialism is not what the first comment was implying it is. And socialism doesn't mean State capitalism USSR style.
What is the role of the Arab countries in the World's pollution?
Are they not capitalist?
What is the role of the capitalistic countries such as the USA in the World's pollution?
Are they not capitalist too???
The argument presented is a fallacy, not supported by facts and it does not even present the argument correctly.
To be perfectly clear
> you live in a capitalist society not some socialist nightmare. Giving it to the government would be much much much worse.
That whole sentence is one big straw man.
- The opposite of capitalist society is not "some socialist nightmare"
- a capitalist society is not the opposite of a nightmare
- socialist doesn't mean "giving it to the government"
- giving it to the government is not proven to be worse, it is in fact the opposite, we are specifically commenting on "3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public". Because the public, the government, is the one in charge of not letting these kinds of things happen. This story is proof against the private sector, not the opposite, which, again, is a "No true Scotsman" at this point.
To be even more clear, no government would kill its people to profit and even if they did, sooner or later the people would overthrown it.
But a private company will without doubt do it, using every trick in the book to cover up their responsibilities, because they do not respond to the people.
We have tons of evidence in support of the thesis.
And that's why we have laws to avoid it and agencies devoted to controlling that nothing like that happens.
Unfortunately they can be powerless against corporations with huge budgets and reach.
This is called ad hominem. Noam Chomsky is a highly respected researcher, you should disprove his works, which are public and available to everyone BTW, if you really believe he's wrong, not attack the person.
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.
Split it up, and disown the ultimate beneficiaries?
You don't need every single 3M factory to make those chemicals. So make a new company that only makes these chemicals.
Investors as well.
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’s a very good point. At the least, the stock price should go to zero. I guess your point is that they are artificially keeping the company out of bankruptcy/receivership.
No the argument I'm making is that the shareholders are funding a criminal enterprise and therefore should face RICO charges.
That depends upon someone willing to buy when it comes with criminal liabilities. Lets not recreate sin-eaters.
Up to and including capital punishment. If something like this causes deaths for example, it should be treated like murder.
"I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one"
thats a good one. They are people when it suits them.
Isn't that what happened at Enron?
Yeah, treat it like we would murder versus manslaughter based on proof of intent. If you knew the risks and did it anyway, we should treat that like we do someone shooting a gun in populated place.
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?
What the Nazis did was totally legal in the Third Reich, back when they did it. They made sure of that. Yet it was totally clear just how against the humanity it was afterwards. Should the victors have let them go at the Nuremberg trials? No, so they used international law and saw this as a starting point for the universal declaration of human rights.
I think it is good that people and companies should think about what will be seen as a crime against humanity afterwards. I'd say anything that goes against the universal declaration of human rights now is a good start, even if there are national loopholes right now. Actors that know now that they are e.g. poisioning the environment/people or actively prevent a solution to climate crisis with millions of starving people on the other side of the scale, know today that what they do is wrong. They just think they will get away with it.
The question is about spirit of the law VS letter of the law. Just because all you did was legal doesn't mean you are innocent or right. Just because you did something illegal doesn't mean you are wrong (e.g. it was illegal to hide a jew in the Third Reich).
So some of the things individual actors so is already illegal under international law and/or a violation of human rights. And I think we would all profit from the faint possibility of that ever becoming a thing.
I work in healthtech and it is fascinating how seriously everyone takes HIPAA because it includes provisions for personal liability. Every instance of exposed data costs you personally $1000 or so.
All other regulations seem to be seen as “Ehhhh how close can we push it to reasonably claim we did the things?”. But with hipaa it’s different. The conversation is always “How much extra can we do to make sure nothing could possibly leak?”
Makes me wish GDPR and friends had the same teeth. Turns out even small teeth work great when they’re personal.
Here in Australia they updated the Privacy Act with personal liability for directors.
I discovered that every one of my client organisations is exempt, because of course they are.
Powerful people don’t go to jail, that’s for the common people.
Exemptions were put in place for all government agencies, and charities. Turns out they many health-related business are actually technically non-profits. So your health data can leak and they just shrug their shoulders and move on as if nothing had happened.
Maybe get Bayer to buy you… I’m looking at you, Monsanto.