> They have developmental effects, immune effects. Thyroid, liver, hormonal systems. Some cause cancer, kidney cancer, obesity. They bind to proteins in your blood, and they change how systems in your bodies work.
Is there any evidence that the amounts found in humans using non stick pans, for example, and not those drinking water downstream from an industrial source of “forever chemicals”, have any of these effects?
Plus DuPont Chemicals dumped forever chemicals like PFOS directly into swimming lakes, rivers, and the ground where it also ended up in communities ground water.
It’s not just from industrial sources. Many flame retardants are “forever chemicals” & are often wantonly dumped by fire departments, Air Force bases, etc.
Or do some research yourself and at least post evidence that you think requires a higher amount of PFAS than you believe is reasonable.
Imagine making the same argument about lead. Leaded gasoline was suspected environmental toxin since like the 1920’s (!!). The EPA now says there is no safe minimum level of lead in the blood. Am I going to hear the same argument there?
// rant …
Chemical is known to be an endocrine disruptor. Maybe endocrine isn’t that important.
Chemical is known to cause birth defects. Maybe the levels used in the study are higher than observed in nature.
Chemical is proven to spread everywhere in the food chain. Maybe it’s inert. Well maybe at that level of concentration it’s harmless. Well maybe humans will adapt to its presence.
It’s like talking to someone who thinks the Grand Canyon was formed over 40 days and nights of the Great Flood. No matter what argument you present, it’s not good enough. There’s always a loophole. Maybe rocks used to be softer so they would erode faster, blah blah blah.
Actually, I think there is a misunderstanding about the dangerousness of non stick pans.
PTFE (the actual pan coating) is a PFAS, but is not known to be a health hazard. It is environmentally challenging, as it does not decompose, but when people think of the toxicity, they think of the other PFAS that are needed to synthesize PTFE that often end up in the environment and get trapped in small quantities under the PTFE coatings of the pan sometimes (or used to) which can bioaccumulate and be toxic once ingested (which can happen if you damage the coating); or they think of the PFAS fumes that get released when overheating pans (they cannot bioaccumulate but are toxic enough that they can make you dizzy and kill pets). Supposedly, PTFE could also be manufactured differently in a safe way (probably still not environmentally friendly but at least non toxic), but figuring that out is hard especially given the economic stakes (some companies will claim without proof it is, other will try to dismiss it if it happens).
It's hard to find unbiased information about PFAS, both industries selling PFAs and selling alternatives are fighting hard on the Internet.
To what end? The severity of capital punishment barely effects civilian crime numbers.
Instead - and i have spent all of 10 seconds thinking this through - what about we just pay people to snitch on a business/employer if its knowingly doing such things. Perhaps in % of the settlement and/or potential fall out costs.
That'd change behavior as well as catch issues soon enough to prevent them.
It has been said that a person cannot serve two masters.
The incentive system in the West right now is structured such that corporate executives gain a great reward from serving their company, and little punishment from failing to serve humanity. If society is to flourish, humanity must be structurally prioritized.
Due to regulatory capture and general corruption, I don't think an approach that merely tries to punish corporations financially will ever work. If you have executive powers and commit or permit a crime against humanity in the name of your company, then you have declared your allegiance. A functioning society would punish this in the most serious way possible. Great power, great responsibility and all that.
We used to reward people for serving humanity by making them feel good about public service and being a citizen and neighbour. That was a thing people around me had growing up and many of my family dedicated their life to public service professions (teaching, city administration, etc.) on that basis. And this was common among the middle class generally. You could have a reasonable lifelong profession and a good retirement doing this.
Cynicism has washed that away. And people openly disparage public servants and get resentful of people who still manage to pull a living in this way.
I’m no proponent of capital punishment, but to take the question seriously: as an extreme measure to disincentivize extreme externalities that would otherwise never be priced in. In the status quo, captains of industry have something close to a call option on the social utility of their products. They capture much of the upside (they get paid when people enjoy their goretex jackets), but are pretty free to socialize tail risks (relative to the harm, they have little to lose from poisoning thousands. Maybe a lawsuit. Maybe they have to sell the third house.) A society could decide that this is not a desirable incentive structure.
There’s a pirates-and-emperors aspect to this: such measures are taken in some societies to disincentivize O(1) violent crimes. Why (really, why? It’s worth thinking about!) are they rarely taken for O(n) crimes?
Suggesting the death penalty when these crimes kill people is not advocating for a new type of punishment.
Treating a burglary as more severe than a multi million dollar pension fraud seems backward by any metric beyond the social status of the criminals involved.
x% of the money distributed to shareholders for how long this was going on taken from current revenue, not benefits.
That should also push shareholders to do the right choices in who they support.
No punishment can undo the crime. So we might has well end the criminal and save the money that clothe and feed them otherwise.
But the larger point is that we should abolish the notion of 'limited liability' about corporations. That'll strike fear into the heart of executives, knowing that the law can come after both them and all their moneys and possessions. Suddenly the thought of 'oh, what if I fuck up?' pop up in their heads. They'll imagine their families begging on the streets for basic sustenance. That, if nothing else, will get them to behave like a normal person.
The vast majority of "civilian crimes" are crimes of passion, desperation, or being actually mentally incapable of reasoning about consequences.
That is not what these crimes are nor who commits them. These people actually tend to speak with lawyers prior to committing their crimes, and their lawyers will report something between "not technically illegal" to "probably illegal and the penalty is [something you really don't care about at all]"
We can, should, and in fact already do have whistleblowers as well. But all you're doing is (slightly) raising the chances that you get reported. There are still many, many corruptible steps from that to being investigated, then from being investigated to being convicted, then from being convicted to being punished.
In fact, as we've already established, the actual "punishment" is frequently not a punishment at all. It's just the cost of doing business.
Consider these responses to an executive asking their lawyer for guidance on a legally ambiguous but clearly antisocial decision (where most of these decisions land):
Response 1: "Not clearly illegal, we could argue it in court, and if we lose the penalty is a couple million dollars."
Response 2: "Not clearly illegal, we could argue it in court, and if we lose the penalty is you going to prison for the rest of your life."
At the very least the people responsible need to be treated like the dangerous psychopaths that they are and be imprisoned for the rest of their lives for the safety of the public. These people don't care about anything except getting more wealth and power for themselves and we have the ability to place limits on the kinds of behaviors that will get them what they want. Right now we're just rewarding them no matter how many people they mass poison or murder.
Because our civilization relies on governance and corrupt and degraded government can fail and collapse countries and even civilizations, leading to immeasurable levels of harm to all of humanity.
It is a form of mass scale murder once you add up all the collective harm.
The originally submitted link is a transcript of a podcast. I really respect the fact that they write these, as I prefer to read over listening. The URL I posted is linked in the original submission as the original story, which is even better for reading IMO.
Here's a link to the audio form of the podcast, also linked in the original submission. It's on Apple Podcasts too, if you prefer.
A team of New York University researchers estimated in 2018 that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to as much as $62 billion in a single year. This exceeds the current market value of 3M.
Seems as good a reason as any to nationalize it, have the shareholders forfeit their chips at a steep loss, and ensure its remnant facilities only produce socially positive, safe products.
No, these are really fucked up people, to leap from that to "the species" and from that to "evolution" which humans had no clue about even hundreds of years ago... is just avoiding confronting that and them. It's half of the the reason for why these things happen and get worse, a sort of global bystander effect. We feel okay to in public dismiss this.
If you were one in a group of 4 people, and one of them fed poison to a child to remove a stain from their shoe, or just for a laugh, or for 2 cents, and someone got upset, would you talk about the species or evolution first thing? What habit did we normalise here?
No, we as a civilization are ultimately responsible for giving bad actors power, and indeed often glorifying those actors. There are evolutionary reasons why it is so, but that's absolutely not to say that these things just happen and a species with a very different psychology couldn't avoid the same trap.
As a society we tend to reward sociopaths with power, which leads to stuff like forever chemicals. But society providing neither checks-and-balances nor even a credible thread of punishment after the fact is also part of the issue. Even sociopaths are influenced by the threat of punishment
Perhaps the centralization of governance and the asymmetric power of government over the people is the problem.
If a village of 20 people found out one of their members had been poisoning them for years, knowingly, to attain status as the mage/technocrat/leader, I suspect their punishment would be severe.
Instead, any one person or small group of people feels powerless against a seemingly infinite bureaucracy and a justice system that would sooner punish "vigilantes" than hold powerful people to account for their malice and damage to society.
You give more agency to the modern individual than I do, I think.
Exactly. It's a pretty small number of people who are this terrible. Thinking of it in evolutionary terms creates a sense of fatalism. If you look globally since the invention of agriculture, it's very clear that a) humans are extremely flexible, and b) culture matters hugely to how societies turn out.
Culture is something we inherit, but it's something we can change. If we want things to be less fucked up for the next generation, we can do that. As many before us have.
No previous era of cruelty has threatened the existence of life itself. Corporate greed is the most hideous, horrific, inhumane era of human culture that has ever been.
In the real world, two out of these four people vote to protect the poisoner because poison is a conspiracy against the freedom to feed children anything you want.
The only thing that allowed them to be this 'fucked up' is allowing the creation of corperations which can make your companies actions not directly responsible to you. If boards of directors were able to be jailed for their companies actions, we would not be in anywhere near this situation. Corperation law has a lot to answer fdor.
It took decades for the science to finally flow freely since both of these industries heavily targeted the scientific institutions themselves. Who knows what other pesticides and chemical companies are following the same playbook that we won't get to know about for decades.
yup, this actually changed the way I look at capitalism now. This shows how much companies hold power over government and it takes a long time for public to hold companies accountable.
One of the more depressing things to me is the "forever chemical" debacle. Even though we've banned PFAS in pizza boxes, food packaging, firefighting foam, and many consumer products, we're stuck in an endless cycle of the industry coming up with new chemicals that only differ slightly in their chemical structure and making all the same safety claims about them that they know will soon be disproven. It's no bother to them as they can continue to play this game indefinitely and advertise that they don't use those forever chemicals
There's no way to fix it until we start punishing white collar crime the way we punish blue collar crime. Bad actors are bad actors
"Better", as in, capable as a civilization of avoiding doing things that are incredibly harmful according to their own morals. Capable of defeating their own Moloch, if you will.
Even looking only at different cultures, saying nothing of nature, the degree to which people are willing to cooperate or defect against the group varies widely. The level of trust varies widely.
People aren't motivated solely by the risk of being caught. Some people tell themselves that everyone else must be trying to cheat, so it's okay for them to cheat. But this type of thinking isn't a law of nature, it's just a human flaw.
The amount of cheating is not a fundamental constant. Given that people are social animals and that we tend to be stronger as a group, in fact you'd expect that prosocial behavior is good for the species. If fucked up is to mean anything, poisoning the environment with forever chemicals ought to make the fucking cut, if you'll pardon my French.
If there's more than enough grapes for everyone and one person takes more than their fair share, then, on the whole, it's fine. There's enough to go round.
If everyone tries to take more than their fair share, then the whole system falls apart.
When there are this many people, and this much visibility of the hustle, just seeing others prosper by cheating means a not insubstantial number of people will be in the "well I want grapes, and likely need to cheat to make sure I get my fair share" camp.
The people making the final decisions on their usage have the money to avoid 99% of it themselves and figure they will be dead before it would really matter to them. The rest are either ignorant or put their livelihood at risk oppossing a massive corporation.
There's an excellent film with, and produced by, Mark Ruffalo ("Avengers").
"Dark Waters" about the environmental lawyer who exposed the whole fowl conspiracy by DuPont Chemicals, 3M, and other industrial chemical companies and the knowingly poisoning of the (American) people for decades (and still continuing). Most recommended !
It seems you and I now have something in common inside our bodies: PFOS. I've finally found a point of connection between us.
Out of curiosity as to why 3M would insert this commonality into me to help us share a sense of solidarity, I looked up some safety-related research papers. I came across a 3M technical paper by Seacat et al. (2002)[1], which claims that under their experimental conditions, no harmful effects were observed up to a certain dose.
Seeing this perfectly illustrates just how much science and technology are dictated by the institutions they are affiliated with.
And so, you run up against a phenomenon every bit as natural as the forever durability as PFAS: Markets can respond to uncomfortable truths. Organizations of real humans? Not so much.
The "interview" format is a bit difficult to read.
Assuming they did keep it a secret, we had so many other hazards that were (and still are) in common use: lead, mercury, tobacco, chlordane, asbestos, etc... So even if true; even if you accept this as some conspiracy, it would seem to pale in comparison to the list I just gave. We seemingly survived and thrived with with substances far worse than a little plastic running around in our bloodstream, yet this remains the topic of the day and it makes me wonder how real the outrage is (proportionate to other hazards) or if this is just liberal minded "see the big companies are out to get us and this is just the current example". It would be far more persuasive imho to just argue the later point independently, because the plastic (using the term loosely) topic comes up so frequently that to some of us it is just repetitive and not really constructive.
> lead, mercury, tobacco, chlordane, asbestos, etc... far worse …
Lead, mercury - this is exactly the level of harm being asserted.
The claim that these are “far worse” is doing a lot of work here.
> assuming they did keep it a secret
So now this comment is denying the facts in the reporting? I was taking you seriously until I realized that you are claiming the whole narrative is false from the start.
>or if this is just liberal minded "see the big companies are out to get us and this is just the current example".
Of course, as opposed to the objective minded "there is no conspiracy ever, when it is repeatedly demonstrated that corporations will poison, experiment on and destroy human lives if it favors their bottom line and they think they can get away with it, this is not to be interpreted as a pattern or structural issue, it's just coincidences and 'bad' individual actors all the way down".
Also, we are in the middle of insect biodiversity freefall. Summary: A global meta-analysis covering 166 surveys at 1,676 sites between 1925 and 2018 estimated terrestrial insect abundance fell about 0.9% per year on average—roughly 9% per decade, 24–25% over 30 years, or about 50% over 75 yearshttps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax9931
> They have developmental effects, immune effects. Thyroid, liver, hormonal systems. Some cause cancer, kidney cancer, obesity. They bind to proteins in your blood, and they change how systems in your bodies work.
Is there any evidence that the amounts found in humans using non stick pans, for example, and not those drinking water downstream from an industrial source of “forever chemicals”, have any of these effects?
Plus DuPont Chemicals dumped forever chemicals like PFOS directly into swimming lakes, rivers, and the ground where it also ended up in communities ground water.
It’s not just from industrial sources. Many flame retardants are “forever chemicals” & are often wantonly dumped by fire departments, Air Force bases, etc.
most structure and wildland fire has moved away from pfas based foams. not everywhere and not for aiports, but most other places.
What is the point of your comment? Are you trying to forgive these institutions on everyone’s behalf for irresponsible dumping?
First, what happens to plant workers and surrounding communities matters.
Second, yes, the pans are dangerous if you “abuse” them. By getting them to hot, using a mental utensil, or just using it after it has aged too much.
> Is there any evidence …
This is frustrating.
At some point you have to admit you’re in denial.
Or do some research yourself and at least post evidence that you think requires a higher amount of PFAS than you believe is reasonable.
Imagine making the same argument about lead. Leaded gasoline was suspected environmental toxin since like the 1920’s (!!). The EPA now says there is no safe minimum level of lead in the blood. Am I going to hear the same argument there?
// rant …
Chemical is known to be an endocrine disruptor. Maybe endocrine isn’t that important.
Chemical is known to cause birth defects. Maybe the levels used in the study are higher than observed in nature.
Chemical is proven to spread everywhere in the food chain. Maybe it’s inert. Well maybe at that level of concentration it’s harmless. Well maybe humans will adapt to its presence.
It’s like talking to someone who thinks the Grand Canyon was formed over 40 days and nights of the Great Flood. No matter what argument you present, it’s not good enough. There’s always a loophole. Maybe rocks used to be softer so they would erode faster, blah blah blah.
Actually, I think there is a misunderstanding about the dangerousness of non stick pans.
PTFE (the actual pan coating) is a PFAS, but is not known to be a health hazard. It is environmentally challenging, as it does not decompose, but when people think of the toxicity, they think of the other PFAS that are needed to synthesize PTFE that often end up in the environment and get trapped in small quantities under the PTFE coatings of the pan sometimes (or used to) which can bioaccumulate and be toxic once ingested (which can happen if you damage the coating); or they think of the PFAS fumes that get released when overheating pans (they cannot bioaccumulate but are toxic enough that they can make you dizzy and kill pets). Supposedly, PTFE could also be manufactured differently in a safe way (probably still not environmentally friendly but at least non toxic), but figuring that out is hard especially given the economic stakes (some companies will claim without proof it is, other will try to dismiss it if it happens).
It's hard to find unbiased information about PFAS, both industries selling PFAs and selling alternatives are fighting hard on the Internet.
RCTs are really not that complicated or expensive.
It's pretty reasonable to ask for that level of evidence for things that are this important.
There’s a lot of misinformation around health subjects. Asking for evidence is very reasonable.
Crimes on this scale warrant capital punishment.
To what end? The severity of capital punishment barely effects civilian crime numbers.
Instead - and i have spent all of 10 seconds thinking this through - what about we just pay people to snitch on a business/employer if its knowingly doing such things. Perhaps in % of the settlement and/or potential fall out costs.
That'd change behavior as well as catch issues soon enough to prevent them.
It has been said that a person cannot serve two masters.
The incentive system in the West right now is structured such that corporate executives gain a great reward from serving their company, and little punishment from failing to serve humanity. If society is to flourish, humanity must be structurally prioritized.
Due to regulatory capture and general corruption, I don't think an approach that merely tries to punish corporations financially will ever work. If you have executive powers and commit or permit a crime against humanity in the name of your company, then you have declared your allegiance. A functioning society would punish this in the most serious way possible. Great power, great responsibility and all that.
We used to reward people for serving humanity by making them feel good about public service and being a citizen and neighbour. That was a thing people around me had growing up and many of my family dedicated their life to public service professions (teaching, city administration, etc.) on that basis. And this was common among the middle class generally. You could have a reasonable lifelong profession and a good retirement doing this.
Cynicism has washed that away. And people openly disparage public servants and get resentful of people who still manage to pull a living in this way.
I’m no proponent of capital punishment, but to take the question seriously: as an extreme measure to disincentivize extreme externalities that would otherwise never be priced in. In the status quo, captains of industry have something close to a call option on the social utility of their products. They capture much of the upside (they get paid when people enjoy their goretex jackets), but are pretty free to socialize tail risks (relative to the harm, they have little to lose from poisoning thousands. Maybe a lawsuit. Maybe they have to sell the third house.) A society could decide that this is not a desirable incentive structure.
There’s a pirates-and-emperors aspect to this: such measures are taken in some societies to disincentivize O(1) violent crimes. Why (really, why? It’s worth thinking about!) are they rarely taken for O(n) crimes?
> To what end?
The satisfaction of revenge and the entertainment value of watching it televised.
I enjoy Camus’ take on this.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/albert-camus-reflect...
And where does that end?
Public stonings, where you can bid on the rocks? Cut a thief’s hand off?
Suggesting the death penalty when these crimes kill people is not advocating for a new type of punishment.
Treating a burglary as more severe than a multi million dollar pension fraud seems backward by any metric beyond the social status of the criminals involved.
Well we all know now that the greatest crime is owning zines
Murder is bad.
This kind of harm is murder.
You mean like whistleblowers?
To the end of hindering people from literally poisoning all of hunanity??
x% of the money distributed to shareholders for how long this was going on taken from current revenue, not benefits. That should also push shareholders to do the right choices in who they support.
No that does not work the ones who benefited just sell the shares before the fines are imposed and the ones who buy would be the ones you punish then.
the value of the shares would drop anyway for the first group.
They would sell before the shares started dropping
See who owns Thames Water now and compare with who held it 15-20 years ago
Simply to assuage public indignation
No punishment can undo the crime. So we might has well end the criminal and save the money that clothe and feed them otherwise.
But the larger point is that we should abolish the notion of 'limited liability' about corporations. That'll strike fear into the heart of executives, knowing that the law can come after both them and all their moneys and possessions. Suddenly the thought of 'oh, what if I fuck up?' pop up in their heads. They'll imagine their families begging on the streets for basic sustenance. That, if nothing else, will get them to behave like a normal person.
The vast majority of "civilian crimes" are crimes of passion, desperation, or being actually mentally incapable of reasoning about consequences.
That is not what these crimes are nor who commits them. These people actually tend to speak with lawyers prior to committing their crimes, and their lawyers will report something between "not technically illegal" to "probably illegal and the penalty is [something you really don't care about at all]"
We can, should, and in fact already do have whistleblowers as well. But all you're doing is (slightly) raising the chances that you get reported. There are still many, many corruptible steps from that to being investigated, then from being investigated to being convicted, then from being convicted to being punished.
In fact, as we've already established, the actual "punishment" is frequently not a punishment at all. It's just the cost of doing business.
Consider these responses to an executive asking their lawyer for guidance on a legally ambiguous but clearly antisocial decision (where most of these decisions land):
Response 1: "Not clearly illegal, we could argue it in court, and if we lose the penalty is a couple million dollars."
Response 2: "Not clearly illegal, we could argue it in court, and if we lose the penalty is you going to prison for the rest of your life."
Yes, but that'll never happen in the USA, the ultra-wealthy are a protected class under conservative, and sometimes democrat, rule.
Same thing goes for the oil industry and CO2 emissions, which we've known about for 5 decades.
Don’t forget OxyContin, which ruined entire families being marketed as “safe” pain relief.
Easy, Rambo. How about we start with any punishment.
Imagine if we policed white collar crime anywhere near as much as blue collar crime
Steal some mail and buy a few hundred gift cards and you'll be tracked down and arrested [0]. Fine, they did break the law after all.
Knowingly poison the population in search of profit? Nothing! No consequences!
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/traffic-stop-led-poli...
That, alas, would violate Wilhoit's law.
We can’t even execute heinous murderers effectively. What makes you think this would be any better?
At the very least the people responsible need to be treated like the dangerous psychopaths that they are and be imprisoned for the rest of their lives for the safety of the public. These people don't care about anything except getting more wealth and power for themselves and we have the ability to place limits on the kinds of behaviors that will get them what they want. Right now we're just rewarding them no matter how many people they mass poison or murder.
Capital punishment should be reserved exclusively for, and as the only, punishment for public corruption and abuse of power.
What's the argument for that? That seems rather arbitrary.
Because our civilization relies on governance and corrupt and degraded government can fail and collapse countries and even civilizations, leading to immeasurable levels of harm to all of humanity.
It is a form of mass scale murder once you add up all the collective harm.
But is that the only way to produce harm of that scale?
No, but the majority of people would be fine with killing other types of mass murderers.
Oh, yeah, I was mostly curious why GP said this was the only allowable use of capital punishment.
The Veritasium documentary on this is very informative:
https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY
https://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas...
They should really consider adding an audio version, even if AI generated.
The originally submitted link is a transcript of a podcast. I really respect the fact that they write these, as I prefer to read over listening. The URL I posted is linked in the original submission as the original story, which is even better for reading IMO.
Here's a link to the audio form of the podcast, also linked in the original submission. It's on Apple Podcasts too, if you prefer.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/32mnc87hQT9uigtMwy3l6j
A team of New York University researchers estimated in 2018 that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to as much as $62 billion in a single year. This exceeds the current market value of 3M.
Seems as good a reason as any to nationalize it, have the shareholders forfeit their chips at a steep loss, and ensure its remnant facilities only produce socially positive, safe products.
So like with climate change the ones responsible knew for decades but preferred the profit.
And tobacco. And leaded gasoline. And...
We really are one fucked up species. But can evolution even produce anything better? Anything that's not so prone to coordination problems?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
No, these are really fucked up people, to leap from that to "the species" and from that to "evolution" which humans had no clue about even hundreds of years ago... is just avoiding confronting that and them. It's half of the the reason for why these things happen and get worse, a sort of global bystander effect. We feel okay to in public dismiss this.
If you were one in a group of 4 people, and one of them fed poison to a child to remove a stain from their shoe, or just for a laugh, or for 2 cents, and someone got upset, would you talk about the species or evolution first thing? What habit did we normalise here?
No, we as a civilization are ultimately responsible for giving bad actors power, and indeed often glorifying those actors. There are evolutionary reasons why it is so, but that's absolutely not to say that these things just happen and a species with a very different psychology couldn't avoid the same trap.
As a society we tend to reward sociopaths with power, which leads to stuff like forever chemicals. But society providing neither checks-and-balances nor even a credible thread of punishment after the fact is also part of the issue. Even sociopaths are influenced by the threat of punishment
Perhaps the centralization of governance and the asymmetric power of government over the people is the problem.
If a village of 20 people found out one of their members had been poisoning them for years, knowingly, to attain status as the mage/technocrat/leader, I suspect their punishment would be severe.
Instead, any one person or small group of people feels powerless against a seemingly infinite bureaucracy and a justice system that would sooner punish "vigilantes" than hold powerful people to account for their malice and damage to society.
You give more agency to the modern individual than I do, I think.
Exactly. It's a pretty small number of people who are this terrible. Thinking of it in evolutionary terms creates a sense of fatalism. If you look globally since the invention of agriculture, it's very clear that a) humans are extremely flexible, and b) culture matters hugely to how societies turn out.
Culture is something we inherit, but it's something we can change. If we want things to be less fucked up for the next generation, we can do that. As many before us have.
Nah, it's the species. Corporate greed is near the bottom of the list among the accolades of human cruelty.
No previous era of cruelty has threatened the existence of life itself. Corporate greed is the most hideous, horrific, inhumane era of human culture that has ever been.
these people were simply handed money and power to not do anything about it
I blame governments for not providing a way for whistleblowers to put the companies in a bind to actually do something
the best way to stop these is to force them to do something, not have them voluntarily admit wrongdoing etc.
it's like the whole "well the other ones are doing it too!" which can only be solved with aggressive regulation.
I don't think even today this stuff is being taken seriously enough.
In the real world, two out of these four people vote to protect the poisoner because poison is a conspiracy against the freedom to feed children anything you want.
The only thing that allowed them to be this 'fucked up' is allowing the creation of corperations which can make your companies actions not directly responsible to you. If boards of directors were able to be jailed for their companies actions, we would not be in anywhere near this situation. Corperation law has a lot to answer fdor.
I’ve long suspected it’ll take us _almost_ going extinct to actually take this stuff seriously.
There are too few of us who understand asymmetric risk, and too many in power who are willing to roll the dice for the entire species for profit.
Realistically, it will have to get much, much, worse before it gets any better.
IMO this is part of the natural evolutionary cycle.
Asbestos too. And glyphosates which have devastated insect populations. Veritasium did great documentaries on both of those crises
glyphosate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
asbestos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx139eTxoc
It took decades for the science to finally flow freely since both of these industries heavily targeted the scientific institutions themselves. Who knows what other pesticides and chemical companies are following the same playbook that we won't get to know about for decades.
yup, this actually changed the way I look at capitalism now. This shows how much companies hold power over government and it takes a long time for public to hold companies accountable.
One of the more depressing things to me is the "forever chemical" debacle. Even though we've banned PFAS in pizza boxes, food packaging, firefighting foam, and many consumer products, we're stuck in an endless cycle of the industry coming up with new chemicals that only differ slightly in their chemical structure and making all the same safety claims about them that they know will soon be disproven. It's no bother to them as they can continue to play this game indefinitely and advertise that they don't use those forever chemicals
There's no way to fix it until we start punishing white collar crime the way we punish blue collar crime. Bad actors are bad actors
The only species I can think of that coordinate better than humans do are ants, bees, and naked mole rats.
We're our own moral judges. Biology doesn't have an ethical opinion.
"Better", as in, capable as a civilization of avoiding doing things that are incredibly harmful according to their own morals. Capable of defeating their own Moloch, if you will.
cheater detection and self-correction is important in systems. i am not sure "fucked-up" is a meaningful way to look at species-level things.
Even looking only at different cultures, saying nothing of nature, the degree to which people are willing to cooperate or defect against the group varies widely. The level of trust varies widely.
People aren't motivated solely by the risk of being caught. Some people tell themselves that everyone else must be trying to cheat, so it's okay for them to cheat. But this type of thinking isn't a law of nature, it's just a human flaw.
The amount of cheating is not a fundamental constant. Given that people are social animals and that we tend to be stronger as a group, in fact you'd expect that prosocial behavior is good for the species. If fucked up is to mean anything, poisoning the environment with forever chemicals ought to make the fucking cut, if you'll pardon my French.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_(biology)
As the saying goes, the optimal amount of cheating is not zero.
I'm saying it's variable, not that cheating can disappear completely.
In other words, utopia is fictional, but that doesn't mean the real world couldn't be better.
Yes, and our cheater detection is entirely broken, given that we prefer to give power to cheaters, as long as the cheater is smart enough.
yeah, sometimes cheaters winning is a net benefit or at least acceptable. although, i don't think those cases above are, heh.
It's just a bunch of grapes.
If there's more than enough grapes for everyone and one person takes more than their fair share, then, on the whole, it's fine. There's enough to go round.
If everyone tries to take more than their fair share, then the whole system falls apart.
When there are this many people, and this much visibility of the hustle, just seeing others prosper by cheating means a not insubstantial number of people will be in the "well I want grapes, and likely need to cheat to make sure I get my fair share" camp.
Oh, evolution certainly can. The bad ones always get killed off.
Bad's a matter of perspective, as a quick review of Wikipedia's parasite articles will reveal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua
It’s not a matter of perspective to evolution, it’s a real binary between whether you can survive or not.
We’re free to pollute the planet as we like, but it’s up in the air whether we can survive nature’s response to our actions
…gambling, social media…
there is reason why every civilization rise and fails.
I don't understand it though. These chemicals poison their own families right?
The people making the final decisions on their usage have the money to avoid 99% of it themselves and figure they will be dead before it would really matter to them. The rest are either ignorant or put their livelihood at risk oppossing a massive corporation.
But money
Just look up "firefighting foam military base". I know someone that had major thyroid issues due to this.
There's an excellent film with, and produced by, Mark Ruffalo ("Avengers"). "Dark Waters" about the environmental lawyer who exposed the whole fowl conspiracy by DuPont Chemicals, 3M, and other industrial chemical companies and the knowingly poisoning of the (American) people for decades (and still continuing). Most recommended !
Just watch the Veritasium documentary, its full of horrible truths and real information and not dramatised.
https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY
Want to know the real way to reduce forever chemicals? Donate blood !
It seems you and I now have something in common inside our bodies: PFOS. I've finally found a point of connection between us.
Out of curiosity as to why 3M would insert this commonality into me to help us share a sense of solidarity, I looked up some safety-related research papers. I came across a 3M technical paper by Seacat et al. (2002)[1], which claims that under their experimental conditions, no harmful effects were observed up to a certain dose.
Seeing this perfectly illustrates just how much science and technology are dictated by the institutions they are affiliated with.
[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12075127/
> 2002 research
And from the article: at that point 3M execs had known this class of chemicals was toxic for 3 decades.
And so, you run up against a phenomenon every bit as natural as the forever durability as PFAS: Markets can respond to uncomfortable truths. Organizations of real humans? Not so much.
The "interview" format is a bit difficult to read.
Assuming they did keep it a secret, we had so many other hazards that were (and still are) in common use: lead, mercury, tobacco, chlordane, asbestos, etc... So even if true; even if you accept this as some conspiracy, it would seem to pale in comparison to the list I just gave. We seemingly survived and thrived with with substances far worse than a little plastic running around in our bloodstream, yet this remains the topic of the day and it makes me wonder how real the outrage is (proportionate to other hazards) or if this is just liberal minded "see the big companies are out to get us and this is just the current example". It would be far more persuasive imho to just argue the later point independently, because the plastic (using the term loosely) topic comes up so frequently that to some of us it is just repetitive and not really constructive.
> lead, mercury, tobacco, chlordane, asbestos, etc... far worse …
Lead, mercury - this is exactly the level of harm being asserted.
The claim that these are “far worse” is doing a lot of work here.
> assuming they did keep it a secret
So now this comment is denying the facts in the reporting? I was taking you seriously until I realized that you are claiming the whole narrative is false from the start.
>or if this is just liberal minded "see the big companies are out to get us and this is just the current example".
Of course, as opposed to the objective minded "there is no conspiracy ever, when it is repeatedly demonstrated that corporations will poison, experiment on and destroy human lives if it favors their bottom line and they think they can get away with it, this is not to be interpreted as a pattern or structural issue, it's just coincidences and 'bad' individual actors all the way down".
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-07-31/pfizer-pays-us75m-ove...
https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/No_More_Bhopals_Env...
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o681
The commenter you replied to literally provided a list of items that are known to be extremely hazardous.
Their questioning whether the outage surrounding a specific hazard is proportionate to its known danger does not mean they believe no hazards exist.
Obviously the big companies look after us.
Buckle up, the second Trump administration / Lee Zeldin's EPA approved 5 new PFAS / "forever chemicals" for use as pesticides to be sprayed on crops
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/10/health/pfas-pesticides-indust...
And yet, here we are just pouring glyphosate on public lands by the tons…
Nothing changes even if we know about these chemicals
Glyphosate isn't a forever chemical, is it?
Its not specifically a PFA, but it s a cancer producing chemical which we still approve to spray on our land and foods.
Also, we are in the middle of insect biodiversity freefall. Summary: A global meta-analysis covering 166 surveys at 1,676 sites between 1925 and 2018 estimated terrestrial insect abundance fell about 0.9% per year on average—roughly 9% per decade, 24–25% over 30 years, or about 50% over 75 years https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax9931
I’m dismissing this as “whataboutism”.
This is a MAHA scam. These chemicals are fine.