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Sadly, we live in a society where those executives would use that impunity as carte blanche to spend no money improving (in the best-case scenario,) or even mor

Sadly, we live in a society where those executives would use that impunity as carte blanche to spend no money improving (in the best-case scenario,) or even more likely, keep cutting safety expenditures until the body counts get high enough for it to start damaging sales. If we’ve already given them a free pass, they will exploit it to the greatest possible extent to increase profit.

ETH_start 2y ago
What evidence exists for this characterization?
- rgbrgb 2y ago
  The way health insurance companies optimize for denials in the US.
  - ETH_start 2y ago
    What evidence is there that they do that? That would be a very one-dimensional competitive strategy, given a competing insurance company could wipe them out by simply being more reasonable in handling insurance claims and taking all of their market share.
    - Mil0dV 2y ago
      If there is objective, complete data available to all consumers, who are not influenced by all sorts of other means to choose. Right now it's a race to the bottom - who can get away with the worst service. So they're motivated to be able to prevent bad press etc. The whole system is broken. Just take a look at the 41 countries with higher life expectancy.
      - ETH_start 2y ago
        There is no evidence that this what's happening, and the famous RAND health insurance study showed that health outcomes have almost no relationship with the healthcare system, so you'll need to look elsewhere for explanations for the U.S.'s relatively poor standing in life expectancy rankings.
- chefandy 2y ago
  Let’s see… of the top of my head… - Air Pollution - Water Pollution - Disposable Packaging - Health Insurance - Steward Hospitals - Marketing Junk Food, Candy and Sodas directly to children - Tobacco - Boeing - Finance - Pharmaceutical Opiates - Oral Phenylepherin to replace pseudoephedrine despite knowing a) it wasn’t effective, and b) posed a risk to people with common medical conditions. - Social Media engagement maximization - Data Brokerage - Mining Safety - Construction site safety - Styrofoam Food and Bev Containers - ITC terminal in Deerfield Park (read about the decades of them spewing thousands of pounds benzene into the air before the whole fucking thing blew up, using their influence to avoid addressing any of it, and how they didn’t have automatic valves, spill detection, fire detection, sprinklers… in 2019.) - Grocery store and restaurant chains disallowing cashiers from wearing masks during the first pandemic wave, well after we knew the necessity, because it made customers uncomfortable. - Boar’s Head Liverwurst And, you know, plenty more. As someone that grew up playing in an unmarked, illegal, not-access-controlled toxic waste dump in a residential area owned by a huge international chemical conglomerate— and just had some cancer taken out of me last year— I’m pretty familiar with various ways corporations are willing to sacrifice health and safety to bump up their profit margin. I guess ignoring that kids were obviously playing in a swamp of toluene, PCBs, waste firefighting chemicals, and all sorts of other things on a plot not even within sight of the factory in the middle of a bunch of small farms was just the cost of doing business. As was my friend who, when he was in vocational high school, was welding a metal ladder above storage tank in a chemical factory across the state. The plant manager assured the school the tanks were empty, triple rinsed and dry, but they exploded, blowing the roof off the factory taking my friend with it. They were apparently full of waste chemicals and IIRC, the manager admitted to knowing that in court. He said he remembers waking up briefly in the factory parking lot where he landed, and then the next thing he remembers was waking up in extreme pain wearing the compression gear he’d have to wear into his mid twenties to keep his grafted skin on. Briefly looking into the topic will show how common this sort of malfeasance is in manufacturing. The burden of proof is on people saying that they won’t act like the rest of American industry tasked with safety.
  - ETH_start 2y ago
    If you don't have laws against dumping in the commons, yes people will dump. I don't think anyone would dispute that notion. But if the laws account for the external cost of non-market activity like dumping pollution in the commons, then by all indications markets produce rapid increases, improvements in quality of life. Just look back over the last 200 years, per capita GDP has grown 30 fold, life expectancy has rapidly grown, infant mortality has decreased from 40% to less than 1%. I can go on and on. All of this is really owing to rising productivity and lower poverty, and that in turn is a result of the primarily market-based process of people meeting each other's needs through profit-motivated investment, bargain hunting, and information dispersal through decentralized human networks (which produce firm and product reputations). As for masks, the scientific gold standard in scientific reviews, the Cochrane Library, did a meta-review on masks and COVID, and the author of the study concluded: "it's more likely than not that they don't work" https://edition.cnn.com/videos/health/2023/09/09/smr-author-of-mask-study-on-effectiveness.cnn https://edition.cnn.com/videos/health/2023/09/09/smr-author-... The potential harm of extensive masking is not well-studied. They may contribute to the increased social isolation and lower frequency of exercise that led to a massive spike in obesity in children during the COVID hysteria era. And they are harmful to the development of the doctor-patient relationship: https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879648/ https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879648/ Which does not portend well for other kinds of human relationships.
- 8note 2y ago
  talking specifically with car companies, you can look at volkswagon faking their emissions tests, and the rise of the light truck, which reduces road safety for the sake of cost cutting
  - ETH_start 2y ago
    The emissions test faking is an anecdote, not an indication that this is the average behavior of companies or the dominant behavior that determines their overall impact in society. As for the growing prevalence of the light truck, that is a harmful market dynamic stemming from the interaction of consumer incentives and poor public road use policy. The design of rules governing use of public roads is not within the domain of the market.
ajmurmann 2y ago
Like with Cruise. One freak accident and they practically decided to go out of business. Oh wait...
- chefandy 2y ago
  If that’s the only data point you look at in American industry, it would be pretty encouraging. I mean, surely they’d have done the same if they were a branch of a large publicly traded company with a big high-production product pipeline…

ETH_start 2y ago

What evidence exists for this characterization?

rgbrgb 2y ago
The way health insurance companies optimize for denials in the US.
- ETH_start 2y ago
  What evidence is there that they do that? That would be a very one-dimensional competitive strategy, given a competing insurance company could wipe them out by simply being more reasonable in handling insurance claims and taking all of their market share.
  - Mil0dV 2y ago
    If there is objective, complete data available to all consumers, who are not influenced by all sorts of other means to choose. Right now it's a race to the bottom - who can get away with the worst service. So they're motivated to be able to prevent bad press etc. The whole system is broken. Just take a look at the 41 countries with higher life expectancy.
    - ETH_start 2y ago
      There is no evidence that this what's happening, and the famous RAND health insurance study showed that health outcomes have almost no relationship with the healthcare system, so you'll need to look elsewhere for explanations for the U.S.'s relatively poor standing in life expectancy rankings.
chefandy 2y ago
Let’s see… of the top of my head… - Air Pollution - Water Pollution - Disposable Packaging - Health Insurance - Steward Hospitals - Marketing Junk Food, Candy and Sodas directly to children - Tobacco - Boeing - Finance - Pharmaceutical Opiates - Oral Phenylepherin to replace pseudoephedrine despite knowing a) it wasn’t effective, and b) posed a risk to people with common medical conditions. - Social Media engagement maximization - Data Brokerage - Mining Safety - Construction site safety - Styrofoam Food and Bev Containers - ITC terminal in Deerfield Park (read about the decades of them spewing thousands of pounds benzene into the air before the whole fucking thing blew up, using their influence to avoid addressing any of it, and how they didn’t have automatic valves, spill detection, fire detection, sprinklers… in 2019.) - Grocery store and restaurant chains disallowing cashiers from wearing masks during the first pandemic wave, well after we knew the necessity, because it made customers uncomfortable. - Boar’s Head Liverwurst And, you know, plenty more. As someone that grew up playing in an unmarked, illegal, not-access-controlled toxic waste dump in a residential area owned by a huge international chemical conglomerate— and just had some cancer taken out of me last year— I’m pretty familiar with various ways corporations are willing to sacrifice health and safety to bump up their profit margin. I guess ignoring that kids were obviously playing in a swamp of toluene, PCBs, waste firefighting chemicals, and all sorts of other things on a plot not even within sight of the factory in the middle of a bunch of small farms was just the cost of doing business. As was my friend who, when he was in vocational high school, was welding a metal ladder above storage tank in a chemical factory across the state. The plant manager assured the school the tanks were empty, triple rinsed and dry, but they exploded, blowing the roof off the factory taking my friend with it. They were apparently full of waste chemicals and IIRC, the manager admitted to knowing that in court. He said he remembers waking up briefly in the factory parking lot where he landed, and then the next thing he remembers was waking up in extreme pain wearing the compression gear he’d have to wear into his mid twenties to keep his grafted skin on. Briefly looking into the topic will show how common this sort of malfeasance is in manufacturing. The burden of proof is on people saying that they won’t act like the rest of American industry tasked with safety.
- ETH_start 2y ago
  If you don't have laws against dumping in the commons, yes people will dump. I don't think anyone would dispute that notion. But if the laws account for the external cost of non-market activity like dumping pollution in the commons, then by all indications markets produce rapid increases, improvements in quality of life. Just look back over the last 200 years, per capita GDP has grown 30 fold, life expectancy has rapidly grown, infant mortality has decreased from 40% to less than 1%. I can go on and on. All of this is really owing to rising productivity and lower poverty, and that in turn is a result of the primarily market-based process of people meeting each other's needs through profit-motivated investment, bargain hunting, and information dispersal through decentralized human networks (which produce firm and product reputations). As for masks, the scientific gold standard in scientific reviews, the Cochrane Library, did a meta-review on masks and COVID, and the author of the study concluded: "it's more likely than not that they don't work" https://edition.cnn.com/videos/health/2023/09/09/smr-author-of-mask-study-on-effectiveness.cnn https://edition.cnn.com/videos/health/2023/09/09/smr-author-... The potential harm of extensive masking is not well-studied. They may contribute to the increased social isolation and lower frequency of exercise that led to a massive spike in obesity in children during the COVID hysteria era. And they are harmful to the development of the doctor-patient relationship: https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879648/ https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879648/ Which does not portend well for other kinds of human relationships.
8note 2y ago
talking specifically with car companies, you can look at volkswagon faking their emissions tests, and the rise of the light truck, which reduces road safety for the sake of cost cutting
- ETH_start 2y ago
  The emissions test faking is an anecdote, not an indication that this is the average behavior of companies or the dominant behavior that determines their overall impact in society. As for the growing prevalence of the light truck, that is a harmful market dynamic stemming from the interaction of consumer incentives and poor public road use policy. The design of rules governing use of public roads is not within the domain of the market.

ajmurmann 2y ago

Like with Cruise. One freak accident and they practically decided to go out of business. Oh wait...

chefandy 2y ago
If that’s the only data point you look at in American industry, it would be pretty encouraging. I mean, surely they’d have done the same if they were a branch of a large publicly traded company with a big high-production product pipeline…