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Sad, but hardly surprising. It sometimes seems like every company in this position did similar things. Tobacco, Oil, CFCs, Leaded gasoline etc... I'm sure I cou

by fhood 8y ago

Sad, but hardly surprising. It sometimes seems like every company in this position did similar things. Tobacco, Oil, CFCs, Leaded gasoline etc... I'm sure I could come up with others if I looked. This is why I don't understand many of the arguments against federal regulation. I know regulation hurts the economy and makes doing business harder. I understand. But most corporations will not self-regulate even when people's lives are at stake.

neffy 8y ago
Cui bono. Regulations can legitimately protect the public, or they can originate from well organised companies and other groups wanting anti-competitive practices to protect their own position. So somewhat problematically arguments against regulation either tend to originate from people and companies who want to benefit from its absence, and typically don't care, or don't want to care, about the larger cost of their actions; or from people and companies trying to compete against the former. Aiding and abetting all this, are theoretical (and incorrect) arguments from economics about self-regulating systems, which in the case of economics, and apparently only in economics, are devoid of features such as positive and negative feedback loops.
kungtotte 8y ago
I don't think it's a given that it hurts the economy. Someone has to research, develop, and manufacture the non-toxic alternatives. How is that money not part of the economy? Also, it doesn't make business that much harder unless you built your business on being shady. See: the recent GDPR kerfuffle. For some it was just business as usual on May 26th.
- sbjs 8y ago
  The more established, bigger, unethical companies will crush the "our products don't poison you!" competitors out of existence before they even get started. They will maintain their poison-happy monopolies. So without regulation protecting anti-poison competition, there will be no money in these alternatives, and the economy will remain unbalanced and literally deadly.
  - rootlocus 8y ago
    > They will maintain their poison-happy monopolies. They will because people will still buy their crap. There are plenty of lazy, misinformed, ignorant people who would do anything to keep happy-poisoning themselves, including fighting legislation meant to protect them.
    - sbjs 8y ago
      Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/641/ https://xkcd.com/641/
  - simias 8y ago
    >The more established, bigger, unethical companies will crush the "our products don't poison you!" competitors out of existence before they even get started. And then they'll eat their babies. More realistically though they'll try to buy these companies to get their talent and patents. So in the end you banned the poisonous stuff, people who innovated made a lot of money and everybody's better off. Maybe my hypothesis is overly optimistic but yours is comically grim. Do you think that we shouldn't have banned asbestos or leaded paints? That's exactly the kind of completely dogmatic rant I complained about in my sibling comment. "Things don't work perfectly all the time so let's do absolutely nothing".
  - ataturk 8y ago
    They just buy off the regulators.
  - hammock 8y ago
    For those interested, in the outdoors industry (where fluorinated compounds are pervasive in waterproof coatings), there are a couple companies doing good: Patagonia has switched to shorter-chain PFCs for many of its coatings (C6 instead of C8). They are also actively investing in research for alternative chemicals with adequate performance. Nikwax, which sells re-waterproofing products, never uses fluorinated compounds and is a good brand to look for at the store.
    - selimthegrim 8y ago
- simias 8y ago
  HN is quite open intellectually and it's probably the only large online community I know where unpopular opinions will mostly not be buried in downvotes on sight, at least as long as they're well argued. I value that dearly. That being said it's also rather obvious that all these years later it's still more "startup news" than "hacker news", I find that there's rather strong USA-style libertarian dogma expressing itself in many discussions and shortcuts like "regulations = bad" that are meant to be self-evident and therefore not argued are annoyingly common. It's not the fact that I disagree with the point of view that annoys me, it's the somewhat condescending tone and lack of argumentation that accompanies it that's rather frustrating. Interestingly that whole cryptocurrency epic we're witnessing is quite educative from that point of view, it makes the dogmatic "government = bad" position rather precarious and forces a more nuanced approach from either side.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Well, it is a somewhat loaded question when a tree is not part of the economy until it is cut down, a fish until it is caught etc.
poke111 8y ago
The problem is that getting the right regulations in place is really difficult. The dynamics that make this so are explained nicely in this piece: https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/01/welcome-machine-kevin-d-williamson/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/01/welcome-machine-kevin...
SpecialistEMT 8y ago
Is there a list of companies that put profit above customer's health/safety?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Is there a list of companies that doesn't? I'd expect that list to be much shorter.
  - SpecialistEMT 8y ago
    yeah i guess i meant a list of companies that fucked up big time - like bayer with HIV contaminated transfusions for hemophiliacs etc.
- mark-r 8y ago
  I think it's called the Fortune 500.
  - gcb0 8y ago
    and you are not wrong https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22health+concerns%22+consumers+%22american+corporation%22&oq=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22health+concerns%22+consumers+%22american+corporation%22&gs_l=mobile-heirloom-serp.3 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22heal...
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      > No results found for site:wikipedia.org "health concerns" consumers "american corporation". How does that search demonstrate anything?
      - gcb0 8y ago
        I get hundreds of pages here. first is Johnson & Johnson, for example
andrewmcwatters 8y ago
Eh, I'm not entirely sure people knew about these things when they occurred. I mean, people generally don't want to explicitly kill other people even for a profit. For instance, with your reference to leaded gasoline, or "ethyl" gasoline, its creator, Thomas Midgley Jr., inhaled the stuff in a press conference to prove it was safe. Lead poisoned.
- nielsbot 8y ago
  But in this case (as with the cigarette and oil companies) there was knowledge within the company that these things are dangerous/poisonous.
- ataturk 8y ago
  I disagree. The "defense" industry has a rather macabre ethical framework. They definitely do kill people for profit. They also have a verifiable history of working to foment wars using various means such as the revolving door relationships with intelligence agencies. These are not benign groups working for the betterment of mankind.
geezer 8y ago
Regulations are generally bad because they can be gamed. They produce a huge population of rent seeking parasites who work for the government to make regulation complex so only they can understand it, then move to private sector to help the business game the broken system they themselves created. All you need to keep businesses honest is to let individuals/localities/states sue the hell out of the businesses if they are harmed by the business. The only place regulations make sense is where harm is at a very large (country/planet) scale, where there is no coming back from, such as climate change.
- TomGullen 8y ago
  > Regulations are generally bad because they can be gamed. That's a downside, but not at all a reason to write all regulations off. I'd hate to live in a self regulating society where disputes are resolved by legal action. I'm guessing you're pro legal regulation in this dystopia?
- Spooky23 8y ago
  That's a cynical and nonsensical position. All you need to do to refute this is look at the history of fraud, incompetence and other abuse in the Bitcoin/*coin marketplace. Adam Smith's invisible hand drives price competition in the marketplace, but it doesn't govern conduct. Punting the need for regulation to the courts is just robbing justice from the public at large. Instead of having a rule that can be easily enforced and understood through the regulatory process, you're going to organically create rules via litigation and precedent. But in the process you're raising the bar in terms of cost and preventing entities without the resources to litigate from realizing justice.
CWuestefeld 8y ago
The regulations frequently don't help, and because people have come to rely on them, even wind up harming the situation. That seems to be the case in this very example. TFA kicks off with "News that the Environmental Protection Agency pressured the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to suppress a study showing PFAS chemicals to be even more dangerous than previously thought". Also look at the water problems in Flint, MI, where governmental empire building led to a lot of health problems. It's sometimes the government's own refusal to self-regulate that causes the problems. So it's wrong to believe that corporations are necessarily the culprits, and we can count on government to save us. Yes, we need some regulations, especially when we're talking about tragedy-of-the-commons destruction of public resources. But don't go into it with a naive idea of "corporations evil, the government will save us".
complexmango 8y ago
Regulations are written by large corporations to protect themselves. It’s the reason why the SEC never caught Maddoff (who ran the SEC!!!), or literally ANY of the 2007/08 bad actors. Or why the EPA sat quiet on the 3M situation other than small slap on the wrist fines. The only way around the corruption in the system is the open flow of information, which has only just been picking up steam. The amateur and crowd sourced expert/investigator is our best hope to find the truth in these situations.

by fhood 8y ago

neffy 8y ago

Cui bono. Regulations can legitimately protect the public, or they can originate from well organised companies and other groups wanting anti-competitive practices to protect their own position. So somewhat problematically arguments against regulation either tend to originate from people and companies who want to benefit from its absence, and typically don't care, or don't want to care, about the larger cost of their actions; or from people and companies trying to compete against the former. Aiding and abetting all this, are theoretical (and incorrect) arguments from economics about self-regulating systems, which in the case of economics, and apparently only in economics, are devoid of features such as positive and negative feedback loops.

kungtotte 8y ago

I don't think it's a given that it hurts the economy. Someone has to research, develop, and manufacture the non-toxic alternatives. How is that money not part of the economy? Also, it doesn't make business that much harder unless you built your business on being shady. See: the recent GDPR kerfuffle. For some it was just business as usual on May 26th.

sbjs 8y ago
The more established, bigger, unethical companies will crush the "our products don't poison you!" competitors out of existence before they even get started. They will maintain their poison-happy monopolies. So without regulation protecting anti-poison competition, there will be no money in these alternatives, and the economy will remain unbalanced and literally deadly.
- rootlocus 8y ago
  > They will maintain their poison-happy monopolies. They will because people will still buy their crap. There are plenty of lazy, misinformed, ignorant people who would do anything to keep happy-poisoning themselves, including fighting legislation meant to protect them.
  - sbjs 8y ago
    Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/641/ https://xkcd.com/641/
- simias 8y ago
  >The more established, bigger, unethical companies will crush the "our products don't poison you!" competitors out of existence before they even get started. And then they'll eat their babies. More realistically though they'll try to buy these companies to get their talent and patents. So in the end you banned the poisonous stuff, people who innovated made a lot of money and everybody's better off. Maybe my hypothesis is overly optimistic but yours is comically grim. Do you think that we shouldn't have banned asbestos or leaded paints? That's exactly the kind of completely dogmatic rant I complained about in my sibling comment. "Things don't work perfectly all the time so let's do absolutely nothing".
- ataturk 8y ago
  They just buy off the regulators.
- hammock 8y ago
  For those interested, in the outdoors industry (where fluorinated compounds are pervasive in waterproof coatings), there are a couple companies doing good: Patagonia has switched to shorter-chain PFCs for many of its coatings (C6 instead of C8). They are also actively investing in research for alternative chemicals with adequate performance. Nikwax, which sells re-waterproofing products, never uses fluorinated compounds and is a good brand to look for at the store.
  - selimthegrim 8y ago
simias 8y ago
HN is quite open intellectually and it's probably the only large online community I know where unpopular opinions will mostly not be buried in downvotes on sight, at least as long as they're well argued. I value that dearly. That being said it's also rather obvious that all these years later it's still more "startup news" than "hacker news", I find that there's rather strong USA-style libertarian dogma expressing itself in many discussions and shortcuts like "regulations = bad" that are meant to be self-evident and therefore not argued are annoyingly common. It's not the fact that I disagree with the point of view that annoys me, it's the somewhat condescending tone and lack of argumentation that accompanies it that's rather frustrating. Interestingly that whole cryptocurrency epic we're witnessing is quite educative from that point of view, it makes the dogmatic "government = bad" position rather precarious and forces a more nuanced approach from either side.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Well, it is a somewhat loaded question when a tree is not part of the economy until it is cut down, a fish until it is caught etc.

poke111 8y ago

The problem is that getting the right regulations in place is really difficult. The dynamics that make this so are explained nicely in this piece: https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/01/welcome-machine-kevin-d-williamson/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/01/welcome-machine-kevin...

SpecialistEMT 8y ago

Is there a list of companies that put profit above customer's health/safety?

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Is there a list of companies that doesn't? I'd expect that list to be much shorter.
- SpecialistEMT 8y ago
  yeah i guess i meant a list of companies that fucked up big time - like bayer with HIV contaminated transfusions for hemophiliacs etc.
mark-r 8y ago
I think it's called the Fortune 500.
- gcb0 8y ago
  and you are not wrong https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22health+concerns%22+consumers+%22american+corporation%22&oq=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22health+concerns%22+consumers+%22american+corporation%22&gs_l=mobile-heirloom-serp.3 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22heal...
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    > No results found for site:wikipedia.org "health concerns" consumers "american corporation". How does that search demonstrate anything?
    - gcb0 8y ago
      I get hundreds of pages here. first is Johnson & Johnson, for example

andrewmcwatters 8y ago

Eh, I'm not entirely sure people knew about these things when they occurred. I mean, people generally don't want to explicitly kill other people even for a profit. For instance, with your reference to leaded gasoline, or "ethyl" gasoline, its creator, Thomas Midgley Jr., inhaled the stuff in a press conference to prove it was safe. Lead poisoned.

nielsbot 8y ago
But in this case (as with the cigarette and oil companies) there was knowledge within the company that these things are dangerous/poisonous.
ataturk 8y ago
I disagree. The "defense" industry has a rather macabre ethical framework. They definitely do kill people for profit. They also have a verifiable history of working to foment wars using various means such as the revolving door relationships with intelligence agencies. These are not benign groups working for the betterment of mankind.

geezer 8y ago

Regulations are generally bad because they can be gamed. They produce a huge population of rent seeking parasites who work for the government to make regulation complex so only they can understand it, then move to private sector to help the business game the broken system they themselves created. All you need to keep businesses honest is to let individuals/localities/states sue the hell out of the businesses if they are harmed by the business. The only place regulations make sense is where harm is at a very large (country/planet) scale, where there is no coming back from, such as climate change.

TomGullen 8y ago
> Regulations are generally bad because they can be gamed. That's a downside, but not at all a reason to write all regulations off. I'd hate to live in a self regulating society where disputes are resolved by legal action. I'm guessing you're pro legal regulation in this dystopia?
Spooky23 8y ago
That's a cynical and nonsensical position. All you need to do to refute this is look at the history of fraud, incompetence and other abuse in the Bitcoin/*coin marketplace. Adam Smith's invisible hand drives price competition in the marketplace, but it doesn't govern conduct. Punting the need for regulation to the courts is just robbing justice from the public at large. Instead of having a rule that can be easily enforced and understood through the regulatory process, you're going to organically create rules via litigation and precedent. But in the process you're raising the bar in terms of cost and preventing entities without the resources to litigate from realizing justice.

CWuestefeld 8y ago

The regulations frequently don't help, and because people have come to rely on them, even wind up harming the situation. That seems to be the case in this very example. TFA kicks off with "News that the Environmental Protection Agency pressured the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to suppress a study showing PFAS chemicals to be even more dangerous than previously thought". Also look at the water problems in Flint, MI, where governmental empire building led to a lot of health problems. It's sometimes the government's own refusal to self-regulate that causes the problems. So it's wrong to believe that corporations are necessarily the culprits, and we can count on government to save us. Yes, we need some regulations, especially when we're talking about tragedy-of-the-commons destruction of public resources. But don't go into it with a naive idea of "corporations evil, the government will save us".

complexmango 8y ago

Regulations are written by large corporations to protect themselves. It’s the reason why the SEC never caught Maddoff (who ran the SEC!!!), or literally ANY of the 2007/08 bad actors. Or why the EPA sat quiet on the 3M situation other than small slap on the wrist fines. The only way around the corruption in the system is the open flow of information, which has only just been picking up steam. The amateur and crowd sourced expert/investigator is our best hope to find the truth in these situations.