23 ms·

3M executives convinced a scientist forever chemicals in human blood were safe

• thelastgallon 2y ago
  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.75.4.344 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-gift-of-god-that-has-poisoned-american-kids-for-100-years 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37917235 Tobacco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Indoor_Air_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Indoor_Air_Research
• Log_out_ 2y ago
  Would a artificial kidney implant makecomercial sense? As in filtering out heavy metals, PFOS, microplastics abd toxins?
  • infecto 2y ago
    I have thought about donating plasma for this very reason.
  • garyfirestorm 2y ago
    kaas? kidneys as a subscription service /s ? choose your toxins
    • merb 2y ago
      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.
      • mmsc 2y ago
        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-mambo https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6283942-the-repossession... 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo_Men https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo_Men
        • zxexz 2y ago
          Also, the plot of the wonderful 2008 rock opera, “Repo! The Genetic Opera”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo!_The_Genetic_Opera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo!_The_Genetic_Opera
    • 2y ago
• DueDilligence 2y ago
  [dead]
• lightedman 2y ago
  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.
  • londons_explore 2y ago
    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
  • ambicapter 2y ago
    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.
    • chrisjj 2y ago
      Plus you chose.
• MrVandemar 2y ago
  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.
  • cced 2y ago
    Unless you’re an executive, you’re an NPC.
    • MrVandemar 2y ago
      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?
      • b3ing 2y ago
        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
      • smallmancontrov 2y ago
        > 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.
        • deleted 2y ago
• fnordian_slip 2y ago
  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.
  • cduzz 2y ago
    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.
    • semireg 2y ago
      I was not familiar. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
  • chrisjj 2y ago
    > doesn't want to create liabilities for the company. Except s/create/expose/.
• jongjong 2y ago
  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.
  • seec 2y ago
    She wasn’t lying and they knew that. From their point of view she was the saboteur and they are objectively right. If you want to create conflict, you better have integrity and leave instead of continuing to use the resources of the group for your crusade. Yet she stayed there and waited literally decades to create outrage about something that has yet to be proven problematic in the long run. They even alerted the EPA pretty quickly so it is clear to anyone reading between the lines the one acting the most in bad faith is actually her.
• freitzkriesler2 2y ago
  Those 3M execs should be punished by having pfos injected directly into their blood. Endocrine disruptors as far as the eye can see.
  • quantified 2y ago
    Seems evil, basically.
  • GuB-42 2y ago
    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.
    • endgame 2y ago
      This literally happened with tetraethyl lead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr 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.
      • Aerbil313 2y ago
        And after Chernobyl, Turkiye Minister of Industry drank tea produced from the affected Black Sea region of Turkiye, on TV. https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahit_Aral https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahit_Aral
• jyriand 2y ago
  This title is unreadable.
  • smileybarry 2y ago
    Might be one of the rare cases where adding a “that” is actually necessary.
    • alchemist1e9 2y ago
      That would definitely help a lot.
  • coldtea 2y ago
    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
    • Arthur_ODC 2y ago
      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.
    • spixy 2y ago
      except you dont convince a scientists to sign off you can force a scientists to sign off...
      • nikau 2y ago
        I'm sure a brown paper bag of cash can be convincing
      • charlieok 2y ago
        This got me curious enough to skim the article looking for the answer to whether 3M "convinced" her. It looks like the answer is: * They kept relevant information from her, including studies they'd done on the subject before * They sidelined her research efforts and made her feel unwelcome there * She grew to dread the subject and avoided staying involved with it * "when friends asked Hansen about PFAS, she would change the subject. Still, she repeatedly told [her husband] — and herself — that the chemicals were safe." I guess you could read that as saying 3M "convinced" her if you really wanted to, but I'd have looked for a different way to describe it. It helps to remember that article authors don't usually get to write the headline.
• davidmurdoch 2y ago
  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.
  • bombcar 2y ago
    A "corporate death penalty" needs to be enacted, where a company can be seized and dismantled for egregious crimes.
    • smrtinsert 2y ago
      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.
      • thereddaikon 2y ago
        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.
    • mrighele 2y ago
      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.
      • tivert 2y ago
        >> 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
• indymike 2y ago
  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.
  • bombcar 2y ago
    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.
    • dylan604 2y ago
      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.
      • bombcar 2y ago
        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"?
        • dylan604 2y ago
          I've found myself being on the downside. One job in particular was especially egregious in how "pitch meetings" were simply where the art director let people toss out ideas only to dismiss each one and at the end toss out their idea. Suddenly everyone in the room loved the idea. It was obvious the art director just wanted to be able to say that they were open and listened to ideas from the plebes. After the third one of these meetings where I started asking for more details from the brilliant pitch, it was clear that I was no longer a fit. Eventually, the glitch was fixed so to speak.
• naikrovek 2y ago
  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."
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• viknesh 2y ago
  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?
  • sambull 2y ago
    Newspapers, Radio and Television stations also right?
    • yoyohello13 2y ago
      Yes, all "Push" based advertising is harmful.
  • iamacyborg 2y ago
    Social media apps are probably mostly okay, but the recommendation and feed algorithms are likely problematic.
  • throwaway83853 2y ago
    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
  • mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Addictive gambling like applications and loot boxes in gaming cause some people to kill themselves.
  • digging 2y ago
    Push notifications are certainly one.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• hcurtiss 2y ago
  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.
  • e40 2y ago
    Then please point out the studies that show they are safe for the human body.
    • CamperBob2 2y ago
      That's not how it works.
    • toolz 2y ago
      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.
      • vitalredundancy 2y ago
        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.
• ryukoposting 2y ago
  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_Minnesota_Groundwater https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_Contamination_of_Minnesot...
  • riley_dog 2y ago
    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.
• MrVandemar 2y ago
  [flagged]
• bArray 2y ago
  > 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-should-you-be-concerned/ 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.
  • callalex 2y ago
    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.
• Savageman 2y ago
  These 'forever chemicals' are slowly regulated/banned across in many countries. Is anyone aware of some kind of map/data on the subject?
• dariosalvi78 2y ago
  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.
  • delusional 2y ago
    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.
    • advael 2y ago
      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
  • dade_ 2y ago
    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.
• deleted 2y ago
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• drbig 2y ago
  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.
• m_a_g 2y ago
  PFAS are everywhere, but my understanding was that not every PFAS substance is unsafe for humans. (Maybe it's just wishful thinking?)
  • piskov 2y ago
    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
    • hcurtiss 2y ago
      These strike me as ideological, not scientific, positions.
  • timr 2y ago
    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.
    • tedivm 2y ago
      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#Toxicology 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.
• ImAnAmateur 2y ago
  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?
  • idunnoman1222 2y ago
    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)
• 486sx33 2y ago
  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 ?
  • ortusdux 2y ago
    So, metallic sodium and chlorine gas are bad, because they can burn or dissolve your tissue But! Sodium chloride is A-ok?
  • Aloisius 2y ago
    They are excreted via urine and faeces. They're considered potentially bio-accumulative because the process is slow. The biological half-life of PFOA, for instance, is 2-3 years.
• advael 2y ago
  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
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• neilv 2y ago
  > 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.)
  • ambicapter 2y ago
    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.
• mlindner 2y ago
  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.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • lelandfe 2y ago
    Oh man, it would be great if the research 3M was trying to squash for decades just showed that these chemicals that build up in our bodies and get passed to our newborns were good for us. It would be even more great if the EPA was wrong about PFOS and PFOA being “likely to cause cancer.” We'll have answers eventually, but some clues are out there.[0] I don't think the smart money is on this being a panic raised by luddites, though. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3855514/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3855514/
    • mlindner 2y ago
      The study you linked was about exposure from the environment where the chemicals were basically flushed into local drinking water systems and relatively high levels in people's blood streams. What everyone is freaking out about is them somehow getting something from the end product plastics. These are two different things.
      • lelandfe 2y ago
        > the chemicals were basically flushed into local drinking water systems and relatively high levels in people's blood streams. What everyone is freaking out about is them somehow getting something from the end product plastics. These are two different things TFA itself talks about such dumping events at length ("at least 45% of U.S. tap water is estimated to contain one or more forever chemicals"), Dark Waters is about such events, the EPA's standards were brought about as a result of such events...?
• hui-zheng 2y ago
  Is that what's going to happen with those models underpinning the Carbon Credit Market in the next few years?
• 2dvisio 2y ago
  I live in the UK and PFOAs have showed up in testing around the area we live in. At 14.5ng/l, they already exceed the safety level in US and EU, 10ng/l. However the threshold level in water in the UK is 100ng/l so :politician-shrugging: