Just finished watching Dark Waters, which is about the DuPont PFOAs in Teflon case. It's an insane story and hard to believe they can get away with intentionally and knowingly poisoning nearly every living thing for decades, and when caught are allowed to not just still exist as a company, but continue to poison us.
PFOA/PFOS propaganda is wild. They're very useful substances. Yes, acute exposures cause harm, but the same can be said of salt. Though with modern instrumentation we can measure presence in parts per trillion, I have seen no evidence at all that likely bioaccumulative pathways have resulted in harm to humans. Even the opening of this article levers "we found it" with "EPA regulates it in drinking water" as self-evident that it's some kind of super poison. But it's not. Frankly, it's not always even clear what "it" is as there are thousands of different compounds, many of which people consume daily (e.g., flonase, prozac, etc). The health alarm around these substances is just astounding to me.
Then please point out the studies that show they are safe for the human body.
I would enjoy seeing the studies that show they are harmful in the doses that humans are exposed to as well, I don't know much of anything about this subject.
the studies are described in the article
What Hansen didn’t know was that 3M had already conducted animal studies — two decades earlier. They had shown PFOS to be toxic, yet the results remained secret, even to many at the company. In one early experiment, conducted in the late ’70s, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about 10 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could kill a monkey within weeks. (Based on this result, the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.) This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest, but it was still relatively low — roughly comparable to the dose of aspirin in a standard tablet.
the only propaganda about PFOS was made by 3M, telling us these chemicals were safe, when they knew they weren't.
Like countless substances both natural and synthetic, they appear safe enough if you don't eat a substantial amount of them. How do the quantities involved in the studies compare to the levels we end up consuming? Nobody ever seems to address that.
since these chemicals accumulate in the body, if we're absorbing them from the environment they could reach toxic levels. but what if we don't measure toxicity just by death, but by worsening health? if i or my child has some mysterious ailment, how do we know it's not from PFOS chemicals, or many of the other synthetic chemicals industries have been pumping into our air, water, and earth for decades?
to wit: lead dropped the average iq of the americans since 1940: https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-sh...
how do we measure this kind of toxicity, except well after the damage is already done? if we know something is toxic, why don't we stop using it?
Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities.
Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto. Sometimes that kind of throw-the-baby-out reaction is justified, as in the leaded-gasoline example, while sometimes it's not.
this is some real bad faith arguing saying my point is semantically identical to the unabomber manifesto. i really don't think it's close to that, since i'm not arguing for any kind of primitivism, nor for killing people to get there. and if you agree that this throw-the-baby-out reaction is justified sometime, maybe this is actually one of those cases?
the point of the article, and what i think you're ignoring, is the decades of cover-up by the corporate producers of these chemicals to protect their profits. that's not a good look if they're convinced their products are worth the damage
Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities.
We mostly don't take things in the large-enough quantities to make them poisonous. We cook on teflon for entire lifetimes, scraping food off of it, throwing out the pans when we visibly see the coating coming off.
Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto.
No, they don't. But suggestions of regulation or political change somehow always get compared to terrorism.
Not all of them accumulate, only those with a certain range of molecular weights and chemical signatures.
This sounds like the study on the residual coffee material injected in rats that obliged California to say coffee causes cancer.
In exactly what way does it sound like that? Did coffee companies find out that about a asprin's weight of coffee grounds would kill a monkey, and suppress that information?
Or is it because just because that you think it's not important that a study found that some aspect of coffee could cause cancer in rats, and you also don't care about studies about PFOAs, so they're the same?
In that everything is poisonous at the right dose.
That's not how it works.
Ironic, just about every time I see industry propaganda that defends some toxic chemical, they use two tactics. First, compare it to something else everybody uses and considers harmless. Second, repeat over and over again there's no studies that show it's harmful at very very low doses.
You managed to do both.
That's because these are generally valid arguments. The phrase "the dose makes the poison" did not just occur in someone's head for no reason.
There's a couple things to note about "forever chemicals":
They're around "forever" because they are extremely unreactive. The concentrations the public is concerned about are ridiculous. With such small concentrations, huge timescales for the cause-effect chain to take place and countless confounding factors in between it's basically impossible to make the bold claims the general public makes.
That being said: Workers are exposed to much higher concentrations and they should have been protected from it. New chemicals shouldn't be used as widely as they do by simply assuming they're safe. There are uses (like cosmetics etc) were no risk is really warranted so they should be more restricted with what they use.
At the end of the day though, when you ban something you need to really understand and take into consideration what kind of damage you'll do to people by banning a substance and all the products that depend on it vs. what kind of damage the substance will do. You can't pretend that you can just ban a whole class of really important compounds without any societal side effects.
And that's coming from someone who's really concerned about dangerous chemicals. If you know chemistry, and look around you, you can tell there's a lot more dangerous issues than PFAS that aren't being tackled and nobody seems to care about. Primarily how nobody seems to check what's really included in tons of "cheap" (in terms of manufacturing, not always of price) imported cosmetics, personal hygiene products and parapharmaceuticals.
People are buying protein powders and supplements of unknown producers, raw materials and manufacturing methods by the kilos, plastic cooking utensils from the internet and boil/oven bake them with their food, buy sketchy adhesives for their PVC water pipes, and then complain about some 1ppt concentration of inert chemicals in their drinking water. I understand how the public is easily swayed on things that are technical, and I am happy with people being aware of potential dangers, but the focus is really misplaced on something that looks new, scary, unsolvable and interesting instead of tackling the old, boring but important and serious issues we come across every day.
The phrase "the dose makes the poison" did not just occur in someone's head for no reason.
What dose of PFOA/PFAS is harmful instead of harmless?
What dose of any substance is harmful instead of harmless? Is this a philosophical question or a practical one? If it's a practical one, we don't know, because if there are any effects they're too weak to infer with certainty. Unlike for example those of benzene in your sunscreen or acne products, or flame retardants in your furniture.
They must work for one of these companies. The last 6 months of their post history is a majority of just showing up when an article like this appears and defending PFAS and other types of chemicals or poisons.
Your statements do not have the effect you intended. I am now interested in studying the pro-PFOS pollution propaganda and its sources.
Yes, acute exposures cause harm, but the same can be said of salt.
Experience has taught me that anytime someone pulls the "well, technically, water can poison you in large enough doses" card, an intellectually dishonest conversation is about to follow. This one is no exception: the "well, technically..." card is played, followed by repeated statements of "...ergo, I don't see what the big deal is", and a hefty sprinkling of some whataboutism for seasoning.
It seems like once a week I get reminded how critical making sure that employees are safe to speak their mind, *especially* when the company's revenue or profits are concerned with what they want to say. So many times I've seen horrific situations be diffused when someone said something, and management didn't retaliate or try to silence the employee.
Yet every time we hear about a protest or other action by employees to make their employer behave in an ethical way the prevailing opinion on this site is that work isn't the place to have those discussions, and that people who do should expect to be fired.
the prevailing opinion on this site is that work isn't the place to have those discussions, and that people who do should expect to be fired.
I think this often repeated myth of the HN hive mind¹ is both wrong and harmful². Yes, there are several people on these discussions who fit into the mould you describe, but there are also many who think that position is crazy and dehumanising and say so.
Literally every time I see someone on HN complaining the website has a prevailing opinion, I could think of counter-examples. I think we (people) may have a tendency to focus on the negative opinions that boil our blood and become blind to the voices in support.
¹ Not your words, but it encompasses the sentiment.
² It perpetuates a stereotype and prevents people with different views from joining the site or its discussion, narrowing the amount of differing views.
I don’t think you’re being fair, and I do think this often repeated myth of the HN hive mind¹
I think it's totally fair to call the top comment (most upvoted) the "prevailing opinion".
That said, I suspect it's a side-effect of HN's voting ethos (don't down vote because you disagree, which is lopsided because its opposite - people upvoting because they agree - happens disproportionately, generally the comment that activates the most would-be voters wins, unemotional comments that confirm boring old truths rarely do, unlike the incendiary ones about how $GROUP is ruining the tech workplace.
I would disagree. As a counterexample, if there are two contradictory comments with high upvotes, the one that is most upvoted isn't necessarily the prevailing opinion.
I disagree with you - close to 100% of people who open the comments will read the top comment. Less than 100% will read the next highest top-level comment - the reply/rebuttal to the top comment gets more eyeballs than the #2 top-level comment.
There are some comment threads I close after reading only part of the first thread, for various reasons.
Ignore those people and carry on.
Most of the time when that happens, its more performative stuff focused on political or general events.
There wasn't a consensus like that when the OpenAI circus was going on iirc.
The number of "we can't do that, it murders kittens on live TV" types of discussions I've seen surprise me, both that something got as far as it did, and that it was shut down with a simple comment.
I've personally derailed some projects just by honestly asking "hey, isn't this illegal" in a group of well meaning people.
Somehow, people don't even notice.
"What are the security implications for this?" does a similar thing. People don't like it and eventually you either take the hint or people stop inviting you to meetings.
On the positive note, it works in so far as once it's said, the folks in charge can't hide under the blanket of ignorance. But it doesn't work in that it you're seen as the problem rather than asking "why the heck do we keep suggesting illegal things"?
I loved working in a HIPAA regulated field- "we literally can't do that without breaking the law" would actually work to make people remember that security is important. That said I lucked out in that one of the two cofounders actually understood why this was important (and he gave me permission to revoke all access to sensitive data from the other cofounder).
The number of times a group has created/approved something that immediately has a flaw found by the first person it is shown that is not in the group is something that I'd love to see hard numbers. It has to be very high. It's like group think takes over and nobody can think critically about it, and all sorts of things slip through. It's even more embarrassing when you do have subject matter experts already employed within the company that were either not discussed with or worse ignored.
The most common example is from marketing where there is something that nobody notices until the internet noticed, or when a foreign company releases internationalized copy by someone that is not a native speaker so that the translation is nonsensical jibberish.
I think a major part of it is a form of "institutional blindness" where the people who do see it don't mention anything wrong because there's only downside to doing so; the first person who can't be "retaliated" against goes "what the fuck is this"?
That won't work because the incentives are misaligned. What we need is much better whistleblower programs. Programs where people are paid out $MM and witness protection if there are lose level of risks. These programs can easily pay for themselves by pulling back ill gotten gains to pay for awards and program costs. It should go without saying that it also needs to be a major crime to stop people from filing frivolously. But as Upton Sinclair has said, it is hard for a person to do what is right when their family's livelihood is at stake. People knew about Enron, Theranons, Volkswagon, etc. This sounds even more pertinent with the stuff going on right now around Boeing. I haven't researched that enough to know what is fact and what is conspiracy but it is hard to know what lengths people will go to when the stakes are high enough.
What we need is much better whistleblower programs.
Unfortunately, not many organizations will have the aligned incentives. If businesses that conduct potentially dangerous operations, were required to get an insurance, then insurance companies would have incentive to pay money to the whistleblower vs paying out a much larger claim down the line.
What we need is much better whistleblower programs. Programs where people are paid out $MM and witness protection if there are lose level of risks.
If you need this, your culture is beyond lost and your management team will sabotage it to ensure they maintain autocratic control.
Enron, Theranons, Volkswagon... Boeing
Every one of these companies either was or had become quite autocratic and bureaucratic.
hard to know what lengths people will go to when the stakes are high enough.
It's pretty easy to see it in action, and all it takes to beat it is a call from the CEO or someone above the manager of an employee that seems to be holding back in a meeting or in a email. "Fran, you seemed to be holding back. You are the kind of person that I count on to let me know what is really happening. Why were you holding back?" usually results in "My boss will fire me if I tell anyone"... And what comes after this is exactly what the CEO needs to know.
So how do you convince companies that they should be responsible to their communities and the world at large instead of focusing on shareholder profits?
Corporations are created by and controlled by governments. Maybe stricter laws and heightened enforcement?
what is fact and what is conspiracy
Conspiracy is criminal collaboration. It is not "falsehood."
diffused
You mean defused? "Diffused" kind of turns the meaning of your sentence around.
3M reported to the EPA that PFOS was found in blood within a year of the employee's findings confirming its existence.
Would a artificial kidney implant makecomercial sense? As in filtering out heavy metals, PFOS, microplastics abd toxins?
kaas? kidneys as a subscription service /s ? choose your toxins
I like the idea. „Hey I have a life treating condition and it might help if x is filtered out in my kidney, is that possible? Of course that will make an additional 5€/month , but since we would loose one of our valued customers we will give you 30% of for the first six months“
Somebody know some bio engineers, I’m hiring.
This is the basis of the book "The Repossession Mambo" [0] and the (slightly less good) film "Repo Men" [1].
They're about what happens when you can no longer pay for your artificial body parts (the repo man comes and reclaims their property).
0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6283942-the-repossession...
Also, the plot of the wonderful 2008 rock opera, “Repo! The Genetic Opera”.
Dialysis is kidney as a service.
Bioaccumulatrion of PFOAs mainly occurs in the liver, kidneys, and blood [0]
Maybe filtering blood would help other tissue by proxy, allowing the blood to hold more? but from what I understand PFOA doesn't just hang around in those organs inert, it binds to proteins which is why it can cause problems.
Also consider that we probably accumulate most of this through ingestion, since it's in pretty much all food and water, but to differing concentrations. So we are constantly consuming this stuff in tiny quantities, but it's always there. People worry about things like teflon in non-stick pans and other products, but that's a product of PFOAs, i.e they were manufactured using them, they are not themselves PFOAs and do not readily break down into them just by handling them (you have to heat your pan to >250c roughly to get it to start vaporising the teflon into an aerosolised PFOA. So while the firefighting foam story is awful, most products are not themselves toxic, the real danger is in what the manufacturing processes has already released into the environment and is now part of the global food chain (particularly in sea food).
In other words, it doesn't matter what you buy or use (personally at least), and we are all eating and drinking it. Any kind of blood filtering would be a continuous process, and it's not clear how effective it would be considering one of the primary routes to exposure is through ingestion, and how it readily binds to and disrupts various tissues in the body.
I suspect anything that would help substantially reverse the process in the human body would need to be more active, e.g a drug that interacted with the PFOA either to render it harmless or reduce it's "elimination half life" (currently thought to be 3 years) to allow it to be released faster than we accumulate it.
</armchair biochemist analysis>
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Human_d...
If we know what it binds to, could we just manufacture a lot of that and bind and destroy as much out of the environment as we could?
Possibly, but I suspect it wont be that simple, and that the challenge will be finding something that not only interacts with the containment in a useful way, but does not further interact with the human body in a toxic or disruptive way.
Because most of the harmful effects of PFOAs seem to be due to it being an endocrine disruptor, which means it messes with any hormonal system. I'm wondering if there would be a higher probability for chemicals we identify to bind to it to also be some kind of endocrine disruptor or have a hormonal interaction due to the close chemical relationships... then again, if it's similarly disruptive but at least reduces the half life and allows the body to release it, then perhaps that doesn't matter long term. i.e a little bit more poison to allow your body to release all of the poison.
I'm totally unqualified to answer this question, biochemistry is extremely complex, just pointing out it's probably not that simple.
[edit]
Sorry I misread your comment as applying to the body. For the environment it's a different type of problem, the only known way to remove them is expensive indiscriminate filtering of water (i.e not specific to PFOA), reverse osmosis (basically using a huge amount of pressure). To actually destroy them is particularly difficult, short of shooting it into the Sun, but there has been progress there too:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/18/pfas-for...
What could go wrong?
Unsure about whether it'll be commercial viable, but the easy prediction is that it's going to make the problem worse.
I could see that, actually. When the one percent can just escape the consequences of forever chemicals, there's no longer a need to actually do anything against them in their eyes. Just as with climate change, where a lot of them hope they are insulated from the worst fallout by having homes all over the world, so that they can avoid political instability caused by mass migration after draughts and the like.
Sure, so would tiny little mechanical elves that go into your blood and scoop up all the nasties. Maybe AI could design some for us!
We don't even have enough kidneys as-is.
I have thought about donating plasma for this very reason.
Kidneys are insanely complex organs.
Kidneys are one of the highest in demand artificial organs. Unfortunately the complexities of "artificial" kidneys are manied.
The smallest dialysis machine is about the size of a laser printer. Many folks become confined to their dialysis schedule, and kidney disease, dialysis or no, has many side effects and can be very painful.
Surely we could start by not letting people get away with these crimes?
Not everything needs to be implanted. A process similar to haemodialysis intended to filter microplastics would be what we need.
You also can't just have a catch all "filtering of toxins" like that. There are many molecules and proteins in your serum that need to be there and any sort of aggressive filtration will be a problem.
Commercial sense? Yeah, especially if it contains all those things.
And it will have to be periodically replaced!
They lie to Us.
They spy on us.
They poison us.
Why does 3M still exist? Their company charter should be revoked. Their assets should be stripped and sold. Every employee fired. Everyone complicit should be in a prison cell. Every single one of them.
Unless you’re an executive, you’re an NPC.
What is the point of a president? What is the point of a prime-minister? What is the point of a King, or Queen, or Emperor, or "People's Commitee" if there is no-one with the power to say "enough"? No-one with the power to say "no more"?
People make me fucking sick to my teeth. I bust my guts trying to make things a little better, and I earn very little and get back nothing. Then you realise every effort is undermined by an avalanche of shit from people actively trying to make things worse.
Fuckfuckfuck.
Why bother even trying? Why bother even being alive?
I bust my guts trying to make things a little better
Don't.
I earn very little and get back nothing.
Exactly. You need to be more mercenary.
Why bother even trying?
For things you care about. Your family, your self, maaaybe some close friends. If you're going to invest in a project, make sure you own it or have significant equity.
The world is chock full of vampires looking to exploit helpers. Don't let them get you.
The world is chock full of vampires looking to exploit helpers. Don't let them get you.
More importantly, don't let this dissuade anyone from helping. Some caution is needed yes, but cynicism is the greater foe. A life of public service is a life well spent.
Why bother even trying?
Because you helped somebody.
If the world is drowning, and all your work amounts to a millimetre off the water level of one city, what good have you done? A millimetre might make the difference between a submerged nostril, and not. The difference between the water flooding a building's walls, and it not. Nobody can determine the absolute level of badness in the world, but we can make local, relative changes to it. All big things are made of small things.
You can never know whether you have helped anyone. That does not mean you haven't.
We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning, since the world’s been turning.
Doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to do good. It’s good for you, if nothing else. But you have to let go of the idea that you control more than the tiniest fraction of it.
Most people with lots of power or money never want to lose any of it. They see it as if destiny has given them a right over others, so they feel superior
What is the point of a president? What is the point of a prime-minister?
To play charades, when they are real we call them dictators /s?
Indirection, responsibility splitting, and accountability factoring are enormously effective organizational tools that allow formal influence to be wielded within organizations through informal means that are legally impossible to prosecute in practical timeframes, and give broad cover to bad faith actors. We have adversarially evolved organizational behaviors that are possibly not solvable through purely legal means applied to post facto acts deliberately obscured through nerfed information retention policies, and the very structuring of responsibility, accountability, processes, policies, influence and so on might be fair game for some manner of more formal scrutiny.
Indirection, responsibility splitting, and accountability factoring are enormously effective organizational tools that ... are legally impossible to prosecute in practical timeframes, and give broad cover to bad faith actors.
It's not just at the organizational level, it's at the societal level in democratic politics, too.
Just take deregulated modern capitalism, broadly. It has all kinds of clearly-observed bad or unfair outcomes for lots of groups (to various degrees, pretty much anyone not in the ownership class), but its structure is so slippery that the ownership class and its lackeys have been able to use the characteristics you outlined stymie positive change.
For instance, there is market incentive for corporations to behave badly, but then that bad behavior is defended by pointing to those market incentives and making the bad-faith argument that, due the markets decentralization, the complainer is complicit unless they took the impossible action of being totally independent from the market we've used to organize our economy. That confuses the situation so much that a lot of people just tune out.
c0v-19 vaxcne made by aztrasenca, fiser, moedrna , johnson & johson are also same p0ison ...is it time for a revoluson ?
The world is run by the rich, for the rich. Why would they hold themselves accountable?
Because 3M does some of the best products on the market in their particular niche.
Adhesives, abrasives, protection equipment (ironic, heh), etc... You are probably using many 3M products personally, and whoever worked on your house, car, etc... even more so. If everyone complicit should be in prison, make the entire world in prison. Remove all 3M products from the market and everyone life will be a little worse.
Does it mean 3M shouldn't respond to all the environmental damage, of course not, but there are many products 3M makes that are not particularly bad for the environment.
Also, what would happen without 3M? There are needs to be fulfilled, other companies will take over (maybe directly by buying sold 3M assets), but there is no reason to believe they won't be as bad as 3M, especially if it is a company located in a country that doesn't care that much about the environment. China will probably love the idea.
Yes, they lie, spy and poison us, so work on the lying, spying and poisoning part on a company that can be controlled in some way instead of throwing off everything and have the problem move elsewhere.
This title is unreadable.
I thought the rule was to keep the title the same as the article? The title is: "Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe"
That’s 115 characters. 80 is the max
Toxic Gaslighting of 3M Employee: "Forever Chemicals are Safe"
Better?
Might be one of the rare cases where adding a “that” is actually necessary.
That would definitely help a lot.
Yes. I think it’s a garden path sentence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
“3M Execs convinced a Scientist…” ok
“3M Execs convinced a Scientist PFOS Found”… ok, the PFOS found the scientist?
“3M Execs convinced a Scientist PFOS found in Human Blood”… PFOS found a scientist in human blood?
The problem is that there are gramatically valid ways to parse partial versions of the sentence, which you have to reparse as you go through the sentence.
Thanks for the lucky 10k moment
Sounds like
executives from the company 3M
convinced a scientist (presumanly to sign off)
that PFOS (chemicals used for certain non-stick properties in domestic and industrial products)
that seem to leak into human blood when using said products
are safe
That's what I immediately understood the title to mean... Is this not what the title is saying? I'm confused as to why people are having trouble understanding it.
HN's automatic title worsener strikes again.
Apparently the theory is that the word "How" in titles is always meaningless clickbait so HN automatically removes it. I don't believe this actually improves things.
Not to mention the overuse of the term "gaslighting". What used to mean a serious systematic method of making someone question reality is now simply "lied", apparently.
What's interesting is thinking about what (if any) parallels of "PFOS" exist in the tech industry - collective delusions of products that aren't harmful. I would vote for most social media apps, maybe?
Newspapers, Radio and Television stations also right?
Yes, all "Push" based advertising is harmful.
I think targeted content is the worst offender. It is responsible for creating the filter bubbles many live in.
There have been stories about how "sane" individuals were slowly radicalized because they only saw a particular perspective of the real world
Addictive gambling like applications and loot boxes in gaming cause some people to kill themselves.
Social media apps are probably mostly okay, but the recommendation and feed algorithms are likely problematic.
Push notifications are certainly one.
I don't understand why these companies even do these analyses . It has been proven over and over again that they are pointless, whatever the outcomes, the results are going to be ignored in the name of profits. I think that these companies should be obliged to subsidise independent, reviewable and verifiable research, for example from Universities or government run labs.
I get, secrecy, and I am OK if some details, for example about production and formulas, may be made available only under NDAs, but that's as much as that. The rest, especially health effects, should be under public scrutiny.
As the article says, there are actually laws that require internal research that shows a product may be harmful to be made available to the EPA. That just doesn't do anything if the company either lies, or the EPA doesn't end up taking it seriously. As is often the case, the mechanism is there. The politics are not.
Bad mechanism design. Publication bias is bad even in academia, but within a corporate context there are overwhelming incentives to bury research that shows harms. Making safety requirements that work, for anything, requires independent auditors and researchers, and allowing the value of corporate secrecy to override laws ensuring safety mean that safety will never be a priority in a meaningful sense. A requirement about internal research is nearly useless, mostly enabling issuing some trifling fines way after the fact of something going horribly wrong
The media frequently reports when the results are ignored because that is salacious. But we don't know the denominator and I think it is likely higher than you think.
They are not ignored every time and many modern corporations are sensitive to reputational risk.
In this case the answer is in the article: a rogue manager who knew what the results would be ordered the tests and then immediately retired.
Keep asking the same question until you get the answer you want to hear. It's common behaviour in all organizations. That faint hope that a more convenient answer is found so we can proceed BAU.
What I don't understand is why all these people that knew better that works d there didn't do more. Very cult like following, where faith in the organization's mission allows for the mental gymnastics described in this article. A few tech and specifically AI companies come to mind and it is disconcerting.
PFAS are everywhere, but my understanding was that not every PFAS substance is unsafe for humans. (Maybe it's just wishful thinking?)
You are correct.
With regard to toxicity, PFAS is a term so broad that it is meaningless. It covers everything from Teflon (which is perhaps the most chemically inert substance ever created) fluorine-containing acids like PFOA, which are water soluble and bioavailable, and tend to accumulate in the environment.
Because of this, you'll see all sorts of silly claims on every thread related to this topic, claiming that (for example) fry pans are toxic. This is silly, and driven by a poor understanding of chemistry, as well as some unfortunate hack scientists who continue to promote the idea that "alkyl-fluorine-containing = toxic", which isn't supported by evidence.
You can see this hyperbole in the sibling comment, where the quote "man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body" is asserted as some kind of fact. Even if you're predisposed to believe this (extremely general) statement is true, this isn't a claim that you can really defend with an evidence-based argument.
Are you really claiming that perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) is safe? I'm not going to quote the whole "toxicology" section of wikipedia on that chemical but strongly recommend you read it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Toxicol...
PFOA was explicitly banned in the US in 2014, after being phased out the year before, due to it's toxicity. Teflon changed their manufacturing process so it's made with polytetrafluoroethylene instead. So yes, pans made with teflon before 2014 absolutely due contain a toxic chemical.
Manufactured with a toxic chemical
It’s also in the article
“The real issue is this stuff accumulates,” the professor said. “No chemical is totally innocuous, and it seems inconceivable that anything that accumulates would not eventually become toxic.”
man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body
In the middle of this testing, Johnson suddenly announced that he would be taking early retirement. [...] Johnson had always guided her research, and he hadn’t told Hansen what she should do next.
Though it's implied that Johnson's leaving is connected to the PFOS revelation, I don't see the article indicating whether Johnson had told Hansen anything more about it.
(Such as discussions behind closed doors, ultimatums, his own disillusionment/despair, etc.)
Regardless, he knew
At the time, Johnson said, he didn’t think PFOS caused significant health problems. Still, he told me, “it was obviously bad,” because man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body. He said that he argued against using fluorochemicals in toothpaste and diapers. Contractors working for 3M had shaved rabbits, he said, and smeared them with the company’s fluorochemicals to see if PFOS showed up in their bodies. “They’d send me the livers and, yup, there it was,” he told me. “I killed a lot of rabbits.” But he considered his efforts largely futile. “These idiots were already putting it in food packaging,” he said.
Johnson told me, with seeming pride, that one reason he didn’t do more was that he was a “loyal soldier,” committed to protecting 3M from liability. Some of his assignments had come directly from company lawyers, he added, and he couldn’t discuss them with me. “I didn’t even report it to my boss, or anybody,” he said. “There are some things you take to your grave.” At one point, he also told me that, if he were asked to testify in a PFOS-related lawsuit, he would probably be of little help. “I’m an old man, and so I think they would find that I got extremely forgetful all of a sudden,” he said, and chuckled.
Out the windows of IHOP, I watched a light dusting of snow fall on the parking lot. In Johnson’s telling, a tacit rule prevailed at 3M: Not all questions needed to be asked, or answered. His realization that PFOS was in the general public’s blood “wasn’t something anyone cared to hear,” he said. He wasn’t, for instance, putting his research on posters and expecting a warm reception. Over the years, he tried to convince several executives to stop making PFOS altogether, he told me, but they had good reason not to. “These people were selling fluorochemicals,” he said. He retired as the second-highest-ranked scientist in his division, but he claimed that important business decisions were out of his control. “It wasn’t for me to jump up and start saying, ‘This is bullshit!’” he said, and he was “not really too interested in getting my butt fired.” And so his portion of 3M’s secret stayed in a compartment, both known and not known.
I'm wondering whether:
* Johnson thought Hansen knew everything she needed to know;
* Johnson had been incentived/threatened not to say anything;
* Johnson told Hansen something more (possibly NDA-violating), but either Hansen didn't tell the journalist, or the journalist didn't write it; or
* Johnson was too troubled (emotionally, or physical health problems triggered by the stress) to think of where this left Hansen.
I don't know, if you have knowledge of something that is harmful to literally the entire world and you don't do anything about it I think you need to go straight to jail. And all the money you made in the process of not caring about the entire world should be clawed back from you and your heirs.
Those 3M execs should be punished by having pfos injected directly into their blood.
Endocrine disruptors as far as the eye can see.
Which they would probably accept if they could get away with just that.
The 3M CEO is a 61 year old man, which is typical for high level execs. According to most studies PFOS particularly affect children, and the damage is over long term repeated exposure over a lifetime, not high dose, one time exposure like a PFOS injection would be, and that's to someone who is at 2/3 of his life. Furthermore, endocrine disruptors seem to exhibit an unusual dose response curve, where lower doses may be worse than higher doses.
In fact, getting a PFOS injection at a well calculated dose could be the kind of stunt a CEO could pull. Sending the message "see, I put my life on the line to show you that PFOS are safe" (CEOs are usually not risk adverse), completely misrepresenting the real risk profile. Similar stunts have happened on occasion.
This literally happened with tetraethyl lead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems.
Seems evil, basically.
This leaves me wondering how many biomedical implants might have things like this in them which might be leaching into our bloodstream and thus bodies over time.
Generally for biomedical stuff, you don't need to prove it is 100% safe, but merely that it is safer than not using the implant/device/alternative treatments
At least for a biomedical implant, you're probably benefiting more from the implant than from the long-term accumulation of these chemicals. Sucks to be a healthy person who gets the accumulation for free, though.
Long read, but definitely worth it imho.
It's fascinating how that famous Upton Sinclair quote about it being "difficult to convince a person of something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it" (paraphrased) plays out with two different people in different ways. One who has convinced herself for a long time that it's not dangerous to humans, the other who sees himself as a "loyal soldier", and doesn't want to create liabilities for the company.
I find this sort of trade-off exercise really fascinating.
There are tons of examples of situations where risk is very different depending on how long or how much/often something happens.
It seems like business schools, who train many of the people who ultimately make these decisions, do a "right shit job" of discussing the actual potential outcomes at scale / over long periods of time. Maybe that's intentional; "hey, you'll have a new job by then" and maybe it's not.
The more I think about it, the more I think all this is an example of the Gervais principal at work.
I was not familiar.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Related anecdote: I know someone who used to work in Oakdale, Minnesota, a town that 3M literally used as a PFAS dumping ground. I'm not saying it's normal for a kid to die of cancer at the local high school, I'm just saying it happens more often there than anywhere else I've ever heard of.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_Contamination_of_Minnesot...
Oakdale is more than just a town in Minnesota. It's a first ring suburb of St Paul, the capital of the state. Also, it wasn't limited to Oakdale. It covered a huge swatch of the east metro.
Source: I live about 12 miles west of there.
The people involved in that practice should be jailed for murder.
Her father was one of the company’s star engineers and was even inducted into its hall of fame in 1979; he had helped to create Scotch-Brite scouring pads and Coban wrap, a soft alternative to sticky bandages. Once, he molded some fibers into cups, thinking that they might make a good bra. They turned out to be miserably uncomfortable, so he and his colleagues placed them over their mouths, giving the company the inspiration for its signature N95 mask.
Just a little reminder about forever chemicals in N95 masks: https://www.eenews.net/articles/pfas-are-in-face-masks-shoul...
One of these days, once all the people involved have profited and died, we will then know the true impact of the COVID lockdowns.
The way this is phrased implies that PFAS materials are used as an essential ingredient in face masks which is just completely false. The reality is that things like bearings in assembly line machines are lubricated with PFAS materials. As a result detectable traces end up in the final product. This can be argued about literally any item that goes through a factory, including food, textiles, toys, medical equipment, etc. Literally everything. It makes no sense to single out masks as if they are unique unless you are pushing a specific agenda.
So, what next? Without the ability to identify a hazard, I cannot make a meaningful change. This is very clearly not saying "all plastics" but instead "this plastic". That's a start... but how can I tell?
How can you tell which plastics have been fluorinated for your benefit? They are a bit off colour and have a different a bit greasy feel. Or did you mean how can you tell if the factory that packaged what you are eating right now use synthetic fluorinated oils as lubricants? (They all do)
So, PFOS PFOA PF* is bad, because it cannot be excreted by the body (except to your children, if you’re female and pregnant?) and is bio accumulative
But! Fluoride and tritium are A-ok ?
So, metallic sodium and chlorine gas are bad, because they can burn or dissolve your tissue
But! Sodium chloride is A-ok?
This is nothing new. This strategy, developed by Big Tobacco is used over and over again.
Steps:
(1) Say it is beneficial to health (there are always doctors in ads)
(2) When 1 is disproven, deny it (make it a lifestyle thing, expand into more demographics, there was a recent comment/post how there was an ad guy who convinced women to smoke with the right marketing)
(3) Also deny that workers who are exposed more are getting sick, they didn't follow proper procedures, etc. Its the workers fault!
(4) Keep the controversy alive (this will run for 3 - 5 decades), the science is not settled, etc.
(5) If we don't have this, it will stop industrial/economic progress.
(6) It is unfair to ban this until definitive proof exists.Further tests and studies required.
This playbook is used by all industries.
This is a really good summary of some of the strategies employed by Lead: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.75.4....
Bureau of Mines released its preliminary findings on the possible dangers of leaded gasoline to the general public. The New York Times headline summed up the report: "No Peril to Public Seen in Ethyl Gas/ Bureau of Mines Reports after Long Experiments with Motor Exhausts/ More Deaths Unlikely."
"Dr. Henry F. Vaughan, president of the American Public Health Association, said that such evidence did not exist. "Certainly in a study of the statistics in our large cities there is nothing which would warrant a health commissioner in saying that you could not sell ethyl gasoline," he pointed out. Vaughan acknowledged that there should be further tests and studies of the problem but that "so far as the present situation is concerned, as a health administrator I feel that it is entirely negative." Emery Hayhurst also argued this point at the Surgeon General's Conference, maintaining that the widespread use of leaded gasoline for 27 months "should have sufficed to bring out some mishaps and poisonings, suspected to have been caused by tetraethyl lead.'"
Lead is a gift of God: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2023/jan/12/the-gi...
How gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37917235
Tobacco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Indoor_Air_Research
well, that's fucking terrifying.
and i truly hate executives. "profit above health. profit above morality. profit above society. profit above nature. profit above everything."
Honest question, people keep hyping about these "forever chemicals" but the hype seems to be around the fact that they're "forever" rather than what the effects actually are. I hear tons of people talking about them, but never any discussion of anyone actually harmed. It kind of reminds me of the conspiracy around Glyphosate and the efforts to demonize Monsanto, eventually resulting in the company being sold to non-US company Bayer, even though no human damage was ever proven. This seems to be a repeated pattern in recent years toward old and storied US companies.
They just seem to really heavily play into people's luddite-based fears and lack of understanding.
This is a very good read. Reminds me some of my own experiences working in a toxic environment. Though in my case it wasn't about chemicals but the product I worked on was intentionally being run into the ground for political reasons that are still somewhat obscure to me.
It's a horrible experience; the constant gaslighting grinds you down.
I can especially relate to the idea of being paid to do something that nobody in the company actually wants you to do. The better you are at your job, the more they hate you.
I wouldn't be surprised if they actually wanted her to fail. I bet if she had lied and started reporting that there were no PFOS and made up some BS that the old methods of testing were arcane and her new (intentionally flawed) method is better, they would have given her a huge raise and she would have been made employee of the year.
That's the kind of stuff that happened at my previous employer. All the liars and saboteurs at that company ended up being promoted within the company or hired by other companies with big salaries to help them run projects into the ground; which they did diligently.
It's amazing that as long as it isn't "easy to get on camera" corporations can do harm for decades with no penalty. Just imagine if instead your Teflon frying pan were to emit a cloud of yellow gas that makes your throat bleed just a tiny bit every time you use the pan - would have been addressed back in the '70s.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The corporate veil needs to be not only eliminated, but reversed
If a corporation is a collection of people driven by a charter, and that corporation commits a crime, the people who drove that decisions have two forms of protection from liability. One, criminal liability is in effect treated as diffuse and it is near impossible to charge any person for a crime. Two, assets not associated with the company are protected from liability involving the company's actions
This is madness. When a collective of any kind commits a crime, this is conspiracy. If someone is a voting shareholder or board member or top-level executive of a company that did a crime, they should automatically be liable. Executives should be resigning out of fear of being held responsible when given an unjust order. In the current environment, everyone involved is heavily tilted toward continuing to harm people for profit, because no consequences besides being lambasted in the media (If someone dares do journalism, in an environment where oligarchs punish and discourage exposes by buying up news orgs and socially discrediting all criticism as "cancel culture", and seemingly will outright murder whistleblowers in their own organizations), but heavy consequences can be inflicted on them by the explicitly authoritarian hierarchies within the corporations themselves and the outsized influence on your entire career prospects that defying someone in a position of power in a concentrated industry (which is at this point most if not all industries) can have should you choose your ethics over their marching orders
Not only should no one have this much power, ever, for any reason, but we have cleanly separated power from responsibility of any kind. This has never been conducive to a functional society, and it will continue to get worse as long as this structure remains intact
These 'forever chemicals' are slowly regulated/banned across in many countries. Is anyone aware of some kind of map/data on the subject?
A "corporate death penalty" needs to be enacted, where a company can be seized and dismantled for egregious crimes.
By the time the company get sentenced, the people involved have already left with a nice bonus, and found a nice new job, there is no incentive for avoiding it.
You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later.
That's not sufficient though. The people who did the bad acts need to be punished, but the owners who profited from the bad acts need to be punished too. If you don't do that, you just create situations like Amazon: set a sounds-good internal policy but have internal incentives for employees to violate it (e.g. exploit 3rd party seller data to unfairly compete with them) and lax enforcement, then fire the employees as scapegoats when caught to deflect blame when the violations become a PR or legal problem. So some harsh action needs to be taken against the owners and the shareholders.
A "corporate death penalty" doesn't really work, because shareholders can always sell. You don't want the guy responsible to profit, while some innocent schmuck gets punished because he happened to be holding the bag when the music stopped. You need action against the shareholders who were owners at the time of the bad acts.
Instead, since we have computers with big disks now, there needs to be a registry that tracks the historical beneficial owners of a company's stock. Then when something worthy of a "corporate death penalty" happens, those people are tracked down, fined, and any profits they enjoyed get clawed back. If they go bankrupt, tough: as owners, they should have proposed or voted for shareholder proposals to keep the management under control.
Of course there would be some finer details to work out (e.g. breaking the veil on shell corporations, policies to deal with straw ownership, letting other shareholders off the hook if some small group (e.g. founders) have complete voting control of the company), but I think the idea is workable if you don't consciously let clever-assholes exploit loopholes
Over half of the stock market is held in the retirement accounts of everyday people. This is just a tax in a roundabout way. I don't have a solution, they all suck. But I'm not convinced this is any better.
That's true but misleading. If you ranked every American by the value of the stocks they owned, the bottom 93% - the everyday people - would be splitting a paltry 10% of the total value. The bottom 50% hold only 1% of the market.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-9...
Most business equity isn't even publicly traded; a complete accounting would show even greater inequality.
Even if 90% of the punishment ends up distributed across the richest 7% of Americans, I’m not sure what that would do to discourage corporate misconduct. A doctor with $10 million of stock in her accounts still has no individual say in what those companies do.
That doctor has many things they can do:
1. Make and vote on shareholder proposals.
2. Refuse to own stock in any company that does not take sufficient action to "discourage corporate misconduct."
3. Etc.
And if a policy like mine were ever implemented, it's not like rugged individuals would only be able to take rugged individual action. The legal risk would reduce returns, and sophisticated mutual fund managers would have incentive to choose stocks that don't have those risks or vote their fund shares to make corporate policy changes to eliminate them.
Would you, personally, accept punishment if (when) your government is found to have done something wrong? After all, you can vote.
I get the feeling behind the desire, but this is why I don't think it's good.
You wrote up-thread:
And sure; but is it possible to determine when this incentive was created? If it is, can't it be stopped the moment it happens? If not, then the shareholders can't reasonably be blamed.
Unless the shareholders are the incentive, in which case sure.
That's fundamentally different. Everyone has to be citizen of some country or other, and it's difficult to change citizenships, but no one is forced to own stock in any particular company.
That example was meant as an illustration of using scapegoats to deflect consequences, and why the consequences have to bubble up beyond an individual doing a bad act on behalf of the corporation. I'm not sure what you mean by "the shareholders are the incentive."
My mental model for how this would work legally with shareholders would be modeled more on torts like negligence than on criminal law. So it wouldn't be necessary to determine exactly why the bad act was done to go after the shareholders, just that there was harm done on such-and-such date.
People are de-facto forced to hold stock in states that have no defined retirement benefit that can be lived off. The 401k in the USA is a good example.
I don’t think punishing stock holders makes any more sense than punishing all of Germany after WW1 did. You need to cut the head off the snake, not nibble at the tail. A hypothetical corporate death penalty should start at the top, then cascade down some amount of “tiers” down the executive chain. Executives tend to be the ones with the biggest stock rewards and the ones lining up unethical incentives in the first place.
The US has a defined benefit pension called Social Security. It is relatively generous compared to retirement pensions in other countries. A defined contribution plan like 401k is in addition to this pension; most developed countries also have something similar. In this regard there is nothing unique about the US.
E.g. if a shareholder says "you need to make more profit or I will close the company", they are a direct incentive to cut corners.
Matt Levine's common refrain [1] of "everything is securities fraud" is useful here. If as a stockholder you suffer damages to your investment because a company did illegal things and hid it, you can sue for those damages if you argue that you invested in this company because you were assured they were not doing illegal things.
These lawsuits have been decently successful as far as I can tell from what stories make it to the media.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
So the government reaches through the company to take money from shareholders, and then the shareholders sue to take it back from the company? Seems like you just get to the current system with extra steps.
As a passive investor, you generally hope that active investors, who have very large stakes in a company's stock, and who care about their own returns, will steer company boards responsibly.
It seems to mostly work, if it didn't, there'd be waaaaaay more fraud in the SP&500. It's noteworthy that the overwhelming part of bad corporate behavior is stuff that doesn't get seriously punished.
It would work only to the extent that it discouraged most corporate conduct.
And how many people own no stock, and how many people own the other 50%?
That argument relies the same bullshit conceptual framework that's used to excuse so much capitalist dysfunction: since some of the ownership is spread very widely and very thinly. all ownership gets to dodge responsibility. It's still murder if somehow you arrange it so a million people pulled the trigger.
Edit: IMHO, the 401k was a genius stroke of manipulation and propaganda. It's convinced so many people to neglect or even argue against their own core interests in the off chance their account could be worth a few bucks more.
Lots of Countries/Government have gotten away with it, though.
Going there is a derail. And it doesn't even work because my analogy relied on the relationship between private groups/individuals and the legal system, which is quite different than the relationship between a country/government and the legal system.
The poster has a point though in that the government is the Ur-legal-fiction. What ends up being a problem with any subsequently spawned legal fictions will necessarily be an issue with Government.
That being said, you're absolutely correct, and I don't think that it is on you to solve the Government level issue, and there is nothing about the Government level issue stopping us from slapping some additional constraints on legal fictions it spawns. The devil, however, is in the implementation details; many of which tend to cross increasingly hairy and controversial lines.
Things like limits on freedom from compelled speech for corporations with regard to privately funded research. Revocation of trade secrets (therein tend to lay the fertile ground for corruption). Mandatory recordkeeping practices that start violating the human dignity of everyone to be free from constant scrutiny, as it is only with complete comms records that one could actually piece together the facts of what happened; which still runs into the issue of criminals gonna crime; so what you effectively do is partition your population into two groups. Those that aspire to comply, and those deadset on success even at the risk of non-compliance.
These are not low-stakes social changes we're talking about here. This fundamentally refactors just about everything about our ways of life, from lowest employee to the hoghest level exec, to every small business owner.
Something like 60% of Americans own atleast some stock
People letting some other entity control their dollars with an expectation to grow by itself is flawed. These people are handing their money over so the corporations use it to their advantage by introducing these toxic products to begin with.
If “every day people” lose their money because they handed it over to someone else—that’s on no one but themselves.
People need to be investing in local businesses instead and take FULL responsibility for an investment that they actually understand.
I hate to say this, but the OP is right. Nothing will change until we stop supporting the problem. I think the best course of action is to stop supporting corporate culture. People really do need to stop working for all corporations. We need to stop blaming them, we are supporting them with our energy, time and money.
Find a job at a local honest establishment, or create your own service.
Make it a priority to stop supplying these establishments with power.
Use your skills in a place where you have direct control over the outcome of your work.
Anything less is just you trying to convince yourself that you can carry on blaming others for the problem you/we created/are creating.
When corporations are unable to find people to work for them, something will shift.
Most people don't actually care? They (myself included) just trying to make some money.
That would be ideal. But I'll bet people won't do this though. I wouldn't. I don't have time to do the due diligence. So the downside is that you have a lot more "dead" capital that isn't doing anything productive and is slowly losing value due to inflation. Dead capital means it's harder to fundraise, to borrow money for your mortgage, etc etc.
Now I'm not saying that's necessarily /worse/...but we should be clear about what the real downside is.
If someone with the resources of a retail investor can do enough due diligence on every company of an ideally very diversified portfolio to determine which companies are committing crimes, someone with the resources of the US government can do so for every company and prosecute them. If the government can't figure out that a crime is being committed, how could we expect the average citizen to do so? There's just no point in making it their responsibility except as an excuse to say it was their fault.
Wouldn't the investment funds be motivated to avoid investing in these companies, the same way they are motivated to avoid investing in companies likely to crash? So reducing funding (via share price) of a company at risk of the death penalty would select for safer/better companies.
Pushing the externalities back into the company is exactly the thing we want - and the fewer companies that conduct themselves like this, the better off we all are.
But they aren't. A small probability of huge return makes likely crash a non-problem.
The stock market represents a tiny and shrinking sliver of the overall economy. https://businessreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/why-your-favo.... In many cases there is no distributed class of shareholders, just a concentrated set of owners, so both this and the argument it was responding to about wiping out shareholders are irrelevant.
For companies that are publicly traded, if you were to wipe out the shareholders, that would disproportionately hurt financial institutions that pick and choose stocks and concentrate their holdings and exert influence on the corporate policy over passive investments from the average Joe's retirement fund. To the extent that it's "just a tax", it's a tax that's progressively higher on the people more likely to be at fault.
As an example of how important equity holdings of retirement accounts are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalPERS
The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) is an agency in the California executive branch that "manages pension and health benefits for more than 1.5 million California public employees, retirees, and their families". . . . CalPERS manages the largest public pension fund in the United States, with more than $469 billion in assets under management as of June 30, 2021.
Same as a bank? If you lie to investors and get yourself nuked, the owners or what passes for owners get wiped out, which is normal. The people who really qualify as victims are those who were harmed and didn't benefit from the fraud, which is everyone else.
Sure, some people would lose money but didn't intend to cause harm. Those are victims of the fraud. Their shares of the criminal company still get wiped out and they get in line to get bankruptcy proceedings.
Is there another way that makes sense?
Conveniently, the great majority of those everyday people also own (via diversified retirement funds) vaguely-comparable amounts of the stocks of SleazeCo's competitors. So - when the feds ship SleazeCo off to the forced-liquidation slaughterhouse, the stocks of those competitors will rise, reducing the harm to the little folks.
Plus - reduced mass poisoning will improve the long-term prospects for the whole economy, also helping the investments of all those everyday retirees.
why does where the ill gotten gains of these crimes ends up matter?
You could always tailor this so the penalization only applies to private equity and throw in a lookback. That would encourage companies to go public (which, IMO, is a good thing) and would encourage private equity to be responsible.
You could still kill a public company that violates the public trust, you just don't have to penalize shareholders in that case because they are likely to not have the same level of information/control as a private equity holder/owner would.
Only where culpable. Else it risks the major impediment of weaponisation.
Good luck finding the beneficial owners.
The simplest solutions are best: target the corporate officers. C-suite execs are richly compensated on the basis of their social connections. The Boeing CEO, for example, will be walking away from the dumpster fire with almost $100M.
Introducing some additional risk would add minimal costs relatively speaking.
Personally I'm for a "captialistic death penalty", where if you've done something sufficiently bad, you get sentenced to work the night shift at McDonalds for the rest of your life.
It's about destroying monopoly power. If you allow an entity to reach this size there's no incentive for it to follow the rules. Getting the executives would be a nice bonus, but I'm not going to stand ceremoniously when there's more important structural changes to be made.
What if we could keep them, but make them work for the good of us all?
I'd like to see them 'multi-nationalized' - not for one nation, but for the world.
All the major offenders, all the companies who have wreaked havoc on us: Fossil fuel shitheads who sponsored climate doubt, arms manufacturers who lobbied us into illegal wars, social media companies responsible for polluting the minds of our most vulnerable, advertisers who greenwash and whitewash crimes.
It's only a fantasy, for now - we can't even prevent our tax dollars from arming mass murderers. We need to do something though. I'm sick of paying for the privilege of being gaslit, and tired of subsidizing the strip-mining of the planet.
Switch the major offenders and monopolies by force to a co-op model, and let's see if we can't turn the fate of the planet around.
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Le Guin
What if we could tame these gigantic, bloodthirsty monsters that casually wander into big cities and just start stomping skyscrapers down for shits and giggles? Think of how wonderful it would be to have one of those creatures under my control!!!
Nothing would make such a kaiju safer than putting it beyond the reach of even sovereign nations. And when it's under the direction of some weird-assed UN committee no one's heard of, that has Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and China put in charge, think of all the wonderfully progressive things that will happen then!
I mean, the kaiju are kind of a great example - weren't they fought by everyone coming together to build giant monsters of their own but with humans making the decisions?
Er, not what I had in mind, but there's probably some useful energy behind that pessimism.
Then what did you have in mind? Did you just not play the tape to the end to come to the same conclusion of how this new co-op would be run/organized?
There are many examples of successful coops to choose from [0]. Seems a bit early to try and pin down all the details. I'm not an expert.
What I know for certain is that the current system can't continue.
Try playing the tape that's currently in the player to the end. It's not very pretty: Ask any climate scientist. Ask any historian, any ecologist.
Even (or especially) the billionaires know the current trajectory is not great; they're building apocalypse bunkers at a record pace.
Seems a lot of people expect someone to come along and offer a perfect solution out of the box, and somehow not get taken out by the people who like things just as they are. I don't think that's reasonable. There needs to be a critical mass of people pushing for radical change, or we're pretty much fucked.
0 - https://ica.coop/en/media/news/new-ranking-worlds-300-larges...
Quite the opposite - taxes are the only things that arm countries.
That’s not true: for example the US government (CIA) in the past century has also been funded through shady drug deals. This isn’t fringe conspiracy stuff either, they freely admit to past activities and have shown no willingness to change.
It should be the people hold responsible
You sort of need to do both. The issue at hand with a corporate death penalty is shareholders. If a company being "killed" zeroes out the value for shareholders, the stock value will have to price in the likelihood of complete loss due to malfeasance, which will start making companies on the level a safer buy.
This means companies doing more to prevent illegal behavior become worth more and companies have a financial reason to prevent crime greatly exceeding mere fines.
If the level has been reached to discuss corporate death penalty, then the corporation employees should loose any protections the corporation normally provides.
A company is nothing more than a group of people, working towards a single goal, no? If that's a case, breaking up the group itself also seems futile.
We can probably assume that some people who belong to the group are both unessential and innocent of the crimes of the group. The janitor at one of Dupont's buildings isn't to blame for this, at least under most theories of culpability. But there is a core subset of people who are, and whether they are punished individually or not, at the very minimum, they shouldn't be allowed to participate in business (any business) again. Otherwise, they run off and get C-level jobs (or really, vp/director-level jobs and up), and perform more of the same stunts.
Not that it matters, the companies that commit these sorts of crimes are always large enough that their political sway would protect them even if there were laws on the books that could theoretically dismantle them. And certainly, all such companies collectively have more than enough mojo to prevent the passage of such a law.
If the janitor knew, but withheld the publically valuable information out of fear, they should still get some amount of punishment.
Making bad decisions under duress is understandable but it’s still a serious issue to withhold this information.
The execs need no less than life in prison.
These days no one seems to talk with janitors … there’s an infinitesimally small chance any of them had any information to withhold in the first place.
Leadership in the know should be banned for life, but the corporation would likely have to continue (split or not), otherwise you're giving the entire machine a reason to oppose accountability and correction.
The only way you fix this is hold executives criminally liable. Fines don't work and never have. If people started going to jail over it then they would change their behavior. Everything in life is about incentive structures.
Won't happen, as corporations themselves control the law.
Cynicism is a great way to ensure that nothing ever happens.
I’m fairly sure that the president can dissolve a company at will.
Seems .. iffy but I remember reading it and being both shocked and excited that it was possible. I want to say that it was intended for things where the SEC and FTC would be involved today.
Maybe I dreamt it. Or maybe it was revoked via an early constitutional amendment that I’m not familiar with.
Ok I was dumb for thinking of it this way and I really wish I remember what I read.
Take some of their IP and make it public. That'll do it.
A billion dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool? No more dollars.
This is needed when ever a company too big to fail needs to be bailed out. It would remove the bad CEO and top management by chopping up a company and selling it off. By keeping them around, bad CEOs, governments are rewarding bad behavior. Until politicians can no longer be bought, donations and super packs, this will continue to happen since rewarding bad behavior is a two-way street.
It has already been solved. Just sentence the company executives personally like in China.
No, a corporate death penalty is not sufficiently preventative. The people making these decisions are sociopaths. In order to provide a proper safe guard against future bad behavior target the behavior by attacking the person.
More specifically hold the executives, as well as their primary staff, personally liable for the decisions they make. Criminal liability can be a factor, but what really hurts the sociopaths is civil restitution. Take money from their personal coffers to be redistributed to persons harmed while simultaneously destroying their reputations in the public.
Do not punish the company, as this only punishes the remaining employees. Furthermore, nobody else is as typically well suited for applying corrective actions as the companies inflicting the original harms. If application of corrective actions financially destroys a given company then let that be your corporate death penalty.
The C-levels need to be criminally liable, that will fix it. It will fix many things. In this case the people who were in charge should get the chair if the state has it or 100000x life in max with the other rapists and serial killers. It won’t happen again. Boeing comes to mind too.
At least then the enormous money matches a little bit the effort.
US (and others, but US is famous for it) peeps are for tougher on crime, but not for actual corporate mass murderers. If I bomb a plane with 200 people, I will never see the light of day; the Boeing CEO gets a bonus package.
We need this, plus criminal liability for the C-suite, and possibly for the BoD.
The C-suite gets paid millions to set the direction of the company. They shouldn't be able to "get out of jail free" by throwing a mid-level engineer under the bus. At least not without some strong evidence the scapegoat was acting in bad faith own their own. Similar for the BoD.
Why? So all the workers who had nothing to do with this decision can be unemployed the next day? All you'll achieve is a cascade of negative effects and a hit to GDP
It's much better to go after the individuals responsible for it
That penalty exists, and e.g. Purdue Pharma was subject to it. But of course, Purdue also shows why it's complicated:
* When you dismantle a company, you have to figure out what to do with its assets. You could just burn them all down I guess, but if the company did something wrong that we want compensation for, it usually makes more sense to try and maximize the value you can get.
* A large manufacturing company is going to have factories, distributor contracts, etc. with no liquid secondary market. The value-maximizing play is most likely going to be selling the package to an existing company or setting up a new one, rather than holding a piecemeal fire sale.
* But if you have a new company/division with all of the old company's assets, doesn't that mean you've just renamed the old company? Kinda, yeah. You could disrupt the sameness by firing all the employees and hiring new ones - but that's going to hurt the value of the assets too, and it's not clear what the point would be of punishing the employees for executive misconduct.
You could achieve that by properly fining company's when they are responsible.
In theory their insurance costs would go up and fiduciary duty would compel executives to act properly.
Most countries have the equivalent of corporate manslaughter which in theory should send executives to prison for the behaviour of their subordinates.
The problem with both is that the powers at be don't prosecute very often.
Executives often weasel out in court by simply saying "I didn't know"... when it is 100% their job to know.
This is fines with extra steps. That’s the point. Talk of a “corporate death penalty” is a red herring.
The article mentions the $62bn “researchers estimated…that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to,” which “exceeds the current market value of 3M.” A $62bn fine would cleanly end 3M.
You know what 3M would love instead of a $62bn fine? A “corporate death penalty.” Unprecedented and thus practically infinitely appealed in the legal system, riddled with ambiguity, and a political football they can play with for years.
I wonder if we as individuals are ready to accept punishment for our own externalities, though.
Worse things have happened. Union Carbide still exists. And they literally killed 16000 people in India and injured hundreds of thousands more out of negligence.
We need all new laws and enforcement against these companies, that can retroactively “pierce the veil” and go after the individuals and their assets. It’s not enough that just the company (which is just a legally established entity) goes away. Consequences are what deter future crimes.