I think the headline conflates a bunch of things to make clickbait. It does seems there are accurate and correct complaints about EPA violations, etc at the Bo

I think the headline conflates a bunch of things to make clickbait. It does seems there are accurate and correct complaints about EPA violations, etc at the Boca chica site, and there are also accusations of mercury (and presumably other materials) being detected. My reading of the article, and the plain text reading of the spacex statement mean I don’t think there’s sufficient factual basis to go from the known EPA violations to “put mercury in the water”. The regulatory violations seem objectively true, but those regulations are in place because historically that lack of guards led to terrible dumping. So the regulations mean such stuff is detected early and punished if it does happen. However it’s important to realize that the violations in the actual complaint are not “spacex dumped stuff” they are “spacex did not get the required approvals or let us do the testing”. They’re important issues, and need to be addressed, but the issues are very explicitly not “we have reason to believe that there were issues”. I think a more practical comparison for us normies would be “you had a competent electrician rewire your house or a plumber do significant work without getting a permit or inspection”. In reality for most cases people aren’t trying to have their house catch fire or fill with .. stuff .. but legally you’re required to get permits and inspections. Those permits and inspections exist to prevent/deter the kinds of people who do try to do substandard work, but you can’t write a law that says “the only people subject to this law are the ones trying to violate it”, so everyone has to do stuff that for most people isn’t necessary. Alternatively it’s illegal to drive a car without functioning brakes, so in many countries your have to have your car checked annually. Most people aren’t going to drive an unsafe car, but to protect “most” from some, everyone has to get a WOF(or similar). So my reading of the article is the EPA complaint currently is just “they didn’t follow the approval and testing parts of the regulatory requirements”, nothing more. The article then brings in a bunch of other allegations that aren’t in the actual EPA complaint to try and put those accusations on the level as the actual complaint, because yay clicks! It’s quite possible those other allegations are true (because that’s pretty standard corporate behavior - prior corp behaviour is why the EPA and similar exist), but equally they could be false (there’s no additional pollutants), false (the pollutants are there, but from old dumping), false (the pollutants are there but from a different company), etc Musk is a shitty person, and corporate behavior when awful chemicals are involved is often garbage, but misrepresenting things merely provides ammunition when groups are actually doing illegal stuff to say “look, this is the same lies and BS they wrote here” so I really wish it would stop. If people want to shit on space Karen they should focus on the awful shit we know he does, there’s no need to invent stuff.