4 ms·

Everything you just said is also true about water.

by fingerlocks 3y ago

forgetfreeman 3y ago
It's also true of lead. Care to eat a brick of it and report your findings?
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  All of your logic on this topic is leaving out the fact that our world is powered by a lot of chemicals, and without them, a lot of people would be dead. There’s a reason the population has grown so much in the last two centuries. We’ve gotten really good at making food, housing, and other things that keep people alive, and those all involve chemicals that have not gone through double blind randomized controlled trials and, in fact, have severe negative health outcomes if a human is exposed to too much of them. It is not exaggeration to say that of the worlds 8 billion people, at least half of them would not be here without fertilizers and pesticides. Those are things that have, at times, caused environmental issues that harm people also. If we were to take off of the market overnight every chemical that was not proven to have no possible negative effect, we would lose billions of people. Literally. The reason we are phasing out PFAs rather than simply immediately prohibiting them is that they are useful in a lot of applications that are important and we need time to replace them, and barring certain egregious incidents like 3M dumping a bunch of it in the river, there just is no known harm. So we fine them quite a lot for the egregious incidents. Good. This is the problem with the socialist mind virus, they act like everything has no upside so you can just prohibit whatever you don’t like and the world will be better off for it. That’s why you think counter-arguments are just pedantry. They aren’t, it’s just that you’re thinking about it is not in depth.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    Let's be clear here. Exposure to specific PFAS are associated with a variety of health effects, including altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, and cancer. And while eliminating the firefighting uses of these compounds (as an example) would cause some issues, 3M, after significant evidence of broad toxicity was discovered, went on to expand the market for these compounds from domestic cookware to , among other things, children's clothing and food packaging materials. Comprehensive toxicological studies haven't been performed on every single compound in the family because the market has been flooded with over 12,000 individual compounds. That is a startlingly large number that given 3M's prior bad faith decision-making around this family of products immediately brings to mind the designer drug industry's habit of burying regulators in compounds tweaked to get around regulatory bans. In industries that actually perform comprehensive testing before releasing a compound into the wild it costs on average between eight and fifteen million dollars to perform a full suite of toxicological tests. So if the onus to test is placed on regulators that's roughly one hundred and twenty billion dollars out of public coffers and several decades of lab time, to confirm 3M, Dupont, Chemours, et al haven't poisoned the planet. So if I understand your position correctly you're claiming that since we have absolutely no evidence that any of these compounds are safe at any exposure level (as you said, no toxicology has been done on most of these) and despite prior bad faith acts by the companies involved, we should continue to extend the benefit of the doubt? I think not, and your own choice to install water filtration equipment into your own home suggest you aren't as convinced as you'd have us believe here. To be clear my proposal is that going forward manufacturers be required to perform the same pre-clinical trials that pharma companies have to perform before they can apply to move to human trials. Retroactive testing of existing compounds is absolutely a nice stretch goal because I think we can all agree if something harmful to our families is making it's way into the ecosystem we'd like to know about it sooner or later. I am utterly untroubled by the notion that these additional requirements might impact shareholder value and see no particular reason why taxpayers should be expected to foot the bill for 3Ms shareholders.
    - mattmaroon 3y ago
      Right, your proposal is dumb. Most chemicals (including the ones we’re discussing) aren’t medicine. You wouldn’t give them to people to see how much it hurts them, that would be unethical. We do that with medicine because it might help them, so there’s a potential benefit both to the individual who is the test subject and to society. We’ve no reason to believe ingesting PFAs is of any benefit so what you’re proposing would be cruel. It would be akin to running tests on prisoners or dissenters like they do in totalitarian regimes. And if you did give people the level of these chemicals that 99.99% of the population is exposed to, you’d see no real effects, because no real effects is what we see in people who aren’t exposed to really high levels of it. We see some very weak correlations that almost certainly have other underlying causes and literally nothing else. Which, again, is not to say the effects aren’t there. It’s just that they’re very small if they exist, and it’s really hard with no control group to be sure of anything with very weak correlations. “Associated with” doesn’t mean anything at all. I can find a correlation between any two things if I look for it. That’s all this is. (And again, I’m not talking about the people who worked in factories with it or lived where large amounts were dumped into the environment, etc., that is what they got fined for and they deserve it.) If what you’re proposing is we make every chemical go through clinical trials, that’s going to kill a lot of people both directly (lots of chemicals have little to no harmful effects if not ingested but are deadly if you do so) and indirectly (lots of people are only alive because of chemicals that would be yanked.) This has nothing to do with shareholders, it’s a simple societal cost benefit analysis and you’re just dismissing any benefits and underestimating the cost. You completely misunderstood my point based on your paraphrasing. Which is fine, that’s the internet for you.

Everything you just said is also true about water.

forgetfreeman 3y ago

It's also true of lead. Care to eat a brick of it and report your findings?

mattmaroon 3y ago
All of your logic on this topic is leaving out the fact that our world is powered by a lot of chemicals, and without them, a lot of people would be dead. There’s a reason the population has grown so much in the last two centuries. We’ve gotten really good at making food, housing, and other things that keep people alive, and those all involve chemicals that have not gone through double blind randomized controlled trials and, in fact, have severe negative health outcomes if a human is exposed to too much of them. It is not exaggeration to say that of the worlds 8 billion people, at least half of them would not be here without fertilizers and pesticides. Those are things that have, at times, caused environmental issues that harm people also. If we were to take off of the market overnight every chemical that was not proven to have no possible negative effect, we would lose billions of people. Literally. The reason we are phasing out PFAs rather than simply immediately prohibiting them is that they are useful in a lot of applications that are important and we need time to replace them, and barring certain egregious incidents like 3M dumping a bunch of it in the river, there just is no known harm. So we fine them quite a lot for the egregious incidents. Good. This is the problem with the socialist mind virus, they act like everything has no upside so you can just prohibit whatever you don’t like and the world will be better off for it. That’s why you think counter-arguments are just pedantry. They aren’t, it’s just that you’re thinking about it is not in depth.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  Let's be clear here. Exposure to specific PFAS are associated with a variety of health effects, including altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, and cancer. And while eliminating the firefighting uses of these compounds (as an example) would cause some issues, 3M, after significant evidence of broad toxicity was discovered, went on to expand the market for these compounds from domestic cookware to , among other things, children's clothing and food packaging materials. Comprehensive toxicological studies haven't been performed on every single compound in the family because the market has been flooded with over 12,000 individual compounds. That is a startlingly large number that given 3M's prior bad faith decision-making around this family of products immediately brings to mind the designer drug industry's habit of burying regulators in compounds tweaked to get around regulatory bans. In industries that actually perform comprehensive testing before releasing a compound into the wild it costs on average between eight and fifteen million dollars to perform a full suite of toxicological tests. So if the onus to test is placed on regulators that's roughly one hundred and twenty billion dollars out of public coffers and several decades of lab time, to confirm 3M, Dupont, Chemours, et al haven't poisoned the planet. So if I understand your position correctly you're claiming that since we have absolutely no evidence that any of these compounds are safe at any exposure level (as you said, no toxicology has been done on most of these) and despite prior bad faith acts by the companies involved, we should continue to extend the benefit of the doubt? I think not, and your own choice to install water filtration equipment into your own home suggest you aren't as convinced as you'd have us believe here. To be clear my proposal is that going forward manufacturers be required to perform the same pre-clinical trials that pharma companies have to perform before they can apply to move to human trials. Retroactive testing of existing compounds is absolutely a nice stretch goal because I think we can all agree if something harmful to our families is making it's way into the ecosystem we'd like to know about it sooner or later. I am utterly untroubled by the notion that these additional requirements might impact shareholder value and see no particular reason why taxpayers should be expected to foot the bill for 3Ms shareholders.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    Right, your proposal is dumb. Most chemicals (including the ones we’re discussing) aren’t medicine. You wouldn’t give them to people to see how much it hurts them, that would be unethical. We do that with medicine because it might help them, so there’s a potential benefit both to the individual who is the test subject and to society. We’ve no reason to believe ingesting PFAs is of any benefit so what you’re proposing would be cruel. It would be akin to running tests on prisoners or dissenters like they do in totalitarian regimes. And if you did give people the level of these chemicals that 99.99% of the population is exposed to, you’d see no real effects, because no real effects is what we see in people who aren’t exposed to really high levels of it. We see some very weak correlations that almost certainly have other underlying causes and literally nothing else. Which, again, is not to say the effects aren’t there. It’s just that they’re very small if they exist, and it’s really hard with no control group to be sure of anything with very weak correlations. “Associated with” doesn’t mean anything at all. I can find a correlation between any two things if I look for it. That’s all this is. (And again, I’m not talking about the people who worked in factories with it or lived where large amounts were dumped into the environment, etc., that is what they got fined for and they deserve it.) If what you’re proposing is we make every chemical go through clinical trials, that’s going to kill a lot of people both directly (lots of chemicals have little to no harmful effects if not ingested but are deadly if you do so) and indirectly (lots of people are only alive because of chemicals that would be yanked.) This has nothing to do with shareholders, it’s a simple societal cost benefit analysis and you’re just dismissing any benefits and underestimating the cost. You completely misunderstood my point based on your paraphrasing. Which is fine, that’s the internet for you.