How the Disaster of "Forever Chemicals" Was Kept Secret

Actually, I think there is a misunderstanding about the dangerousness of non stick pans.

PTFE (the actual pan coating) is a PFAS, but is not known to be a health hazard. It is environmentally challenging, as it does not decompose, but when people think of the toxicity, they think of the other PFAS that are needed to synthesize PTFE that often end up in the environment and get trapped in small quantities under the PTFE coatings of the pan sometimes (or used to) which can bioaccumulate and be toxic once ingested (which can happen if you damage the coating); or they think of the PFAS fumes that get released when overheating pans (they cannot bioaccumulate but are toxic enough that they can make you dizzy and kill pets). Supposedly, PTFE could also be manufactured differently in a safe way (probably still not environmentally friendly but at least non toxic), but figuring that out is hard especially given the economic stakes (some companies will claim without proof it is, other will try to dismiss it if it happens).

It's hard to find unbiased information about PFAS, both industries selling PFAs and selling alternatives are fighting hard on the Internet.

RCTs are really not that complicated or expensive.

It's pretty reasonable to ask for that level of evidence for things that are this important.

There’s a lot of misinformation around health subjects. Asking for evidence is very reasonable.

most structure and wildland fire has moved away from pfas based foams. not everywhere and not for aiports, but most other places.

It has been said that a person cannot serve two masters.

The incentive system in the West right now is structured such that corporate executives gain a great reward from serving their company, and little punishment from failing to serve humanity. If society is to flourish, humanity must be structurally prioritized.

Due to regulatory capture and general corruption, I don't think an approach that merely tries to punish corporations financially will ever work. If you have executive powers and commit or permit a crime against humanity in the name of your company, then you have declared your allegiance. A functioning society would punish this in the most serious way possible. Great power, great responsibility and all that.

I’m no proponent of capital punishment, but to take the question seriously: as an extreme measure to disincentivize extreme externalities that would otherwise never be priced in. In the status quo, captains of industry have something close to a call option on the social utility of their products. They capture much of the upside (they get paid when people enjoy their goretex jackets), but are pretty free to socialize tail risks (relative to the harm, they have little to lose from poisoning thousands. Maybe a lawsuit. Maybe they have to sell the third house.) A society could decide that this is not a desirable incentive structure.

There’s a pirates-and-emperors aspect to this: such measures are taken in some societies to disincentivize O(1) violent crimes. Why (really, why? It’s worth thinking about!) are they rarely taken for O(n) crimes?

> To what end?

The satisfaction of revenge and the entertainment value of watching it televised.

You mean like whistleblowers?

To the end of hindering people from literally poisoning all of hunanity??

x% of the money distributed to shareholders for how long this was going on taken from current revenue, not benefits. That should also push shareholders to do the right choices in who they support.

Simply to assuage public indignation

No punishment can undo the crime. So we might has well end the criminal and save the money that clothe and feed them otherwise.

But the larger point is that we should abolish the notion of 'limited liability' about corporations. That'll strike fear into the heart of executives, knowing that the law can come after both them and all their moneys and possessions. Suddenly the thought of 'oh, what if I fuck up?' pop up in their heads. They'll imagine their families begging on the streets for basic sustenance. That, if nothing else, will get them to behave like a normal person.

The vast majority of "civilian crimes" are crimes of passion, desperation, or being actually mentally incapable of reasoning about consequences.

That is not what these crimes are nor who commits them. These people actually tend to speak with lawyers prior to committing their crimes, and their lawyers will report something between "not technically illegal" to "probably illegal and the penalty is [something you really don't care about at all]"

We can, should, and in fact already do have whistleblowers as well. But all you're doing is (slightly) raising the chances that you get reported. There are still many, many corruptible steps from that to being investigated, then from being investigated to being convicted, then from being convicted to being punished.

In fact, as we've already established, the actual "punishment" is frequently not a punishment at all. It's just the cost of doing business.

Consider these responses to an executive asking their lawyer for guidance on a legally ambiguous but clearly antisocial decision (where most of these decisions land):

Response 1: "Not clearly illegal, we could argue it in court, and if we lose the penalty is a couple million dollars."

Response 2: "Not clearly illegal, we could argue it in court, and if we lose the penalty is you going to prison for the rest of your life."

Don’t forget OxyContin, which ruined entire families being marketed as “safe” pain relief.

Steal some mail and buy a few hundred gift cards and you'll be tracked down and arrested [0]. Fine, they did break the law after all.

Knowingly poison the population in search of profit? Nothing! No consequences!

[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/traffic-stop-led-poli...

That, alas, would violate Wilhoit's law.

What's the argument for that? That seems rather arbitrary.

No, these are really fucked up people, to leap from that to "the species" and from that to "evolution" which humans had no clue about even hundreds of years ago... is just avoiding confronting that and them. It's half of the the reason for why these things happen and get worse, a sort of global bystander effect. We feel okay to in public dismiss this.

If you were one in a group of 4 people, and one of them fed poison to a child to remove a stain from their shoe, or just for a laugh, or for 2 cents, and someone got upset, would you talk about the species or evolution first thing? What habit did we normalise here?

I’ve long suspected it’ll take us _almost_ going extinct to actually take this stuff seriously.

There are too few of us who understand asymmetric risk, and too many in power who are willing to roll the dice for the entire species for profit.

Realistically, it will have to get much, much, worse before it gets any better.

IMO this is part of the natural evolutionary cycle.

Asbestos too. And glyphosates which have devastated insect populations. Veritasium did great documentaries on both of those crises

glyphosate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ

asbestos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx139eTxoc

It took decades for the science to finally flow freely since both of these industries heavily targeted the scientific institutions themselves. Who knows what other pesticides and chemical companies are following the same playbook that we won't get to know about for decades.

The only species I can think of that coordinate better than humans do are ants, bees, and naked mole rats.

We're our own moral judges. Biology doesn't have an ethical opinion.

cheater detection and self-correction is important in systems. i am not sure "fucked-up" is a meaningful way to look at species-level things.

Oh, evolution certainly can. The bad ones always get killed off.

…gambling, social media…

there is reason why every civilization rise and fails.

The people making the final decisions on their usage have the money to avoid 99% of it themselves and figure they will be dead before it would really matter to them. The rest are either ignorant or put their livelihood at risk oppossing a massive corporation.

But money

The originally submitted link is a transcript of a podcast. I really respect the fact that they write these, as I prefer to read over listening. The URL I posted is linked in the original submission as the original story, which is even better for reading IMO.

Here's a link to the audio form of the podcast, also linked in the original submission. It's on Apple Podcasts too, if you prefer.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/32mnc87hQT9uigtMwy3l6j

Corporate death penalty. I'm on board with that.

The commenter you replied to literally provided a list of items that are known to be extremely hazardous.

Their questioning whether the outage surrounding a specific hazard is proportionate to its known danger does not mean they believe no hazards exist.

Its not specifically a PFA, but it s a cancer producing chemical which we still approve to spray on our land and foods.