Isn’t this a thing for all providers? YouTube definitely spies on what you look at and Netflix knows as well. Or is this just because a TV actually doesn’t provide the content, just the view? And is there’s a difference if you have a streaming device like Roku?
Content providers knowing when I watch their content is not concerning to me. They're on the other side of a transaction with me; they have as much a right to store the details of the transaction as I do. Even Blockbuster had that information.
What's concerning is when third parties start snooping on transactions that they are not involved in.
Any new regulation the EPA introduces results in litigation. Some of the previously introduced PFAS regulations weren't done in accordance with how the Safe Drinking Water Act says they should be (regulations were introduced without the necessary public consultation), so they're applying to partially vacate the previous ruling. Notably, they're _not_ applying to vacate the regulation of PFAS chemicals where they say the process was followed correctly.
So, the legal reasoning might be to cut their losses litigating to defend rulings they think they'll lose due to the administrative error. I also suspect that being seen to roll back some regulations likely gives Lee Zeldin (the EPA admin) some political room to maneuver. He's historically be associated with anti-PFAS efforts (in Congress he represented a district with contamination problems and he voted for anti-PFAS legislation), but he's also part of an administration with a strong anti-regulation agenda, so he needs to walk a fine line.
> So, the legal reasoning might be to cut their losses litigating to defend rulings they think they'll lose due to the administrative error.
But they didn't start proper administrative procedures to reestablish the regulations, proving that these regulations are being removed on principle, whatever that is, while the "administrative error" is just an excuse.
There's a lot of outrage inducing judicial rulings that boil down to poor rule following. The main question winds up being: do we get to a good end point eventually or do these rulings look like steps backwards?
If you view all this through the lens of the goal of administration being to weaken the US both internally and as a world power, it all comes much more clearly into focus.
Then it can be seen as no longer a disparate collection of seemingly random political, social, and economic moves, but rather as a directed, intentional movement.
> If you view all this through the lens of the goal of administration being to weaken the US both internally and as a world power, it all comes much more clearly into focus.
And why would they want to do that?
Bonus challenge: Without relying on antisemetic tropes
Take a look at the administration's first term and all the involvement and ties (financial, political, etc.) there are to Russia (and Russian-related objectives like Ukraine). It sounds bonkers, but the more you dig in and see how closely tied the relationships have been, and then see how totally soft Trump has been towards Putin/Russia - including direct actions towards Ukraine like removing the long-term diplomats, stopping weapons sales and aid, and recently killing USAID (whose #1 beneficiary was Ukraine) - it all coalesces into a single coherent view.
just purely as a thought experiment and devil's advocacy: to create new avenues of growth and control for the oligarchy. The fall of the Soviet Union, for example, turned out to be a boon for them and they were able to replace the politburo with their own fiefdoms. By destroying the US goverment functions they will be able to privatize the profits (for their companies) and socialize the costs (pollution and shitty water) for the rest of the population. The price of clean water will go up and the people that can afford it will buy whatever anti-PFAS tech they're selling (providing growth for their companies), and the poor well...who cares. They will obtain greater leverage with the US government because they will be seen as saviors since the government will have no competent agencies left, including the military. And the government will helplessly cede more and more power over to them.
Some people are genuine psychopaths who derive satisfaction from destroying things or by hurting people who don't want them to destroy things.
Others are driven to destroy because they believe that there's some sort of higher purpose to this destruction, either religious or political in nature.
Stricter (but not looser) standards can be imposed on state level. Canada has no binding national drinking water law, they leave it to territories/provinces to decide how to implement guidelines.
What if instead we could all collectively agree that access to some amounts of fresh, running water is a fundamental human need? We figure a number, and the first N units are free. Additional units cost money, and perhaps you have two or three usage tiers where heavy users are disincentivized through additional cost.
You calculate the figures such that the higher usage tiers subsidize the costs of the basic needs users.
The answer is likely that the treatment is expensive, and most people aren't drinking tap water anyway.
My town completed it's pfas filtering system and water bill costs increased about 25% to cover it. I don't know one person in this town though who doesn't drink filtered water.
That being said, I do still support the filtering.
Is this a regional thing? AFAIK everywhere I’ve lived most people drink tap water. Certainly they cook or make coffee/tea with it. But I’ve been lucky enough to live in places with pretty good tap water.
That's from a non-representative online poll for people already searching the internet for information about whether or not their tap water was safe to drink.
> Those are findings from a recent survey of 2,800 visitors to EWG’s landmark Tap Water Database, updated in late 2021 [...] Although EWG ran the survey for only a few days, responses came from 2,800 people in about 1,580 unique ZIP codes in all 50 states and D.C., and even some from Canada and Mexico.
Here's an article, also from 2021, based on an academic study which suggests "Nearly 60 million Americans don't drink their tap water", which (US population being 331.9M in 2021) would still leave over 80% who do.
This is the reason. My city is struggling to fix its water supply that was broken over a decade ago (our water supply comes from a temporary system) since FEMA sent our funds to other things under the first trump admin.
They don't want to put the cost on the consumer, but there is no other choice. If our government was smart (it's not) they would make these rules and fund the changes.
Most people low and middle class people I have met my whole life drink unfiltered tap water unless there is a reason not to (safety or particularly foul taste). you might be in a bit of bubble. Not that it matter though as most bottled water is just bottled tap water anyway.
The reasoning is the same as every other Republican policy. They want rich people to get richer. If companies can freely poison everyone, profits go up. Mission accomplished. As for people getting sick and dying, they either don’t care, or they want people to get sick and die.
Also known as the, "I got mine. F*** you." philosophy. Maximize exploitation in the short run because by the time the long run comes around, they'll already be dead.
It doesn't speak well of their feelings about their own children, but, well, there isn't a lot speaking that well of them in general.
Ironically, PFAS levels have been found to be higher in wealthy people. People with money own more furniture and clothing with stain resistant treatments, for example.
I'm not convinced that this is the correct answer. These policies also affect wealthy individuals and wealthy individuals want to be healthy (I assume).
An examination of the individuals in the EPA pushing this change might reveal something. Perhaps it's ideological? I don't know, I'm at a complete loss.
>These policies also affect wealthy individuals and wealthy individuals want to be healthy (I assume).
They get to move to whatever enclave they want and buy expensive RO filters.
Or, they don't believe in science broadly and believe they won't be impacted. If scientists are so smart, why aren't they rich like me and exploiting everyone and everything to the maximum potential profit??
This debate style is pretty frustrating to me. Use a talking point for the other side and act like it is why the reason it the decision is made. It really does not lend itself to getting to the root of issues and finding what compromise is.
In my opinion this added nothing to the conversation when in theory the op asked for a real answer.
I understand this may look dismissive or blamey, but sometimes (actually a shocking amount) there aren’t equal merits to both sides…
I’ve looked into this a lot and there isn’t any strong argument I’ve seen that this is good for humanity, and let’s not pretend every political action is a sincere attempt to improve the world for all equally.
If you look into all the abuse heaped upon the man who discovered leaded gasoline was bad it helps give context on just how far some people will go for their own profits.
There is also a social water cooler like aspect. Historically brakes were only provided to those that smoke so people took up smoking so they could get a brake. Some companies still follow this asinine ideology and do not provide brakes to non-smokers.
Well, the facts are that this administration will always, without fail, without a single exception, do the opposite of what has been shown to be good for the US people. This isn't a property of authoritarianism either, no other authoritarian state is so uniformly across the board against science, medicine, and technology.
If you have any other suggestion than the reason they do this is something related to money, please be my guest and volunteer. Because otherwise it is the most baffling and self destructive policy making that has ever been documented in the history of humankind.
The populist wave is global and its causes are complex. But in the case of the US on top of it all, our populists happen to be clowns and morons.
I think the reasonable mind struggles to deal with the current obvious stupidity even within a populist frame, and hunts for a hidden explanation. It’s a lot scarier to believe that the world’s biggest economy and military and nuclear arsenal are somehow in the hands of not just authoritarians, but crooks and morons.
But it’s true. Britain did it too, it happens.
So why do they do it? To play out some idiotic meme-driven culture war, reduced through these people’s small minds to caricature. They don’t think about second order effects, they lack the sophistication for that.
It seems like the PFAS rules were set in prior administrations [1]. In fact, even in the article you've linked above, the text states:
> retaining its maximum contaminant levels for PFOA and PFOS but pulling back on its use of a hazard index and regulatory determinations for additional PFAS
Key word being "retaining," indicating the maximum contaminant levels were already in place prior to the change mentioned here. Putting aside allegations of "political bias," can you point to a source which clearly indicates the PFA limits were put in place by the current administration? Would like to learn if I'm wrong.
Trump's first term. February of 2019. Andrew Wheeler's EPA.
You'll also notice that the document lays out planned action dates bleeding generously into Biden's term, and for which Biden later took credit in the document you shared. This is shameful, and sadly normal presidential behavior, taking credit for their predecessor's wins.
If you'd truly like to learn if you're wrong, it's recommended to seek information that disproves your hypothesis rather than proves it. Both this and the previous article I shared were very easy to find and within the first 2 or 3 results.
Trumps first term and his second term are entirely different beasts. His first term, although widely regarded as bad, still had mostly competent people across the board running things. This term is absolute lunacy, with tv show hosts cosplaying as government officials.
> If you'd truly like to learn if you're wrong, it's recommended to seek information that disproves your hypothesis rather than proves it. Both this and the previous article I shared were very easy to find and within the first 2 or 3 results.
Firstly, this is a completely unnecessary comment. My searches were specifically regarding finding the enactment of specific PFA limits. I will acknowledge to not spending that much time looking at it, as you claimed to already have a source and I was curious to see what it was.
But to the point, this document does not outline or set limits on PFAS in drinking water. It's an action plan for measuring and creating limits, but does not itself enforce anything. In fact, every subsequent search I've done has shown that the 2024 Final Rule was the first point at which any limits were put into action.
Quoting directly, the document states that one of the steps being taken is:
> Initiating steps to evaluate the need for a maximum contaminant level (MCL) for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS);
In other words, it outlines a plan for the research that is used to 1) determine if MCL should be set, and 2) what, if any, it should be set to. Notably, it does it not itself set that limit or come to a conclusion about what it should be.
Further, this research appears to be a continuation of research released in 2016 [1], which was the first time that a guideline (but not a mandate) was set. This would, of course, be prior to Trump's first administration. This is suggested in the document itself, where it outlines that this document is part of a series of actions beginning in 2015/2016, as well as callouts to specific research in the 2016 article linked below.
So the facts seem to show that:
1) The first guideline was set in 2016. It was not a law at this time.
2) Research continued to identify next steps for setting a standard, which were codified and shared in the 2019 article you linked
3) The 2024 Final Rule put a MCL into action for PFAS.
Take from that chain of events what you will, but the initial accusations of "political bias" seem unfounded here.
You've lost sight of the comment I responded to, in which the poster asserts, in so many words, that there can be no explanation for easing any restrictions other than for profit and authoritarianism, etc. Right? Clearly there is an explanation if you search for a few minutes. So I stand by my allegations of bias against that comment specifically.
Here, you've read and revised the approach to the issue. This last comment does not warrant any allegation of bias, and I make none about it.
The bigger picture is that both parties are interested in clean drinking water. I guess that's obvious to me, and I'm shocked that's not obvious to everyone. Look how many people on this thread actually believe that the Trump administration is literally trying to poison them. That's not crazy to you? It is to me.
Fair, but I'd like to clarify that in my comment I had asked specifically for any sources indicating that the PFA limits were put in place by the prior administration, since you had made the claim:
> Trump's EPA created these PFAS rules
Your response was what I perceived to be a snarky comment that if only I had bothered to look, I'd have found the evidence, followed by a link that didn't say what was suggested.
> Look how many people on this thread actually believe that the Trump administration is literally trying to poison them. That's not crazy to you?
The claims made all over the place are insane to me. Yes, I doubt the Trump administration is actually trying to kill me. The world is not as polarizing and extreme as people on the internet want to make it sound like it is. Most people are far more docile in the real world, but the collective hive of the internet exacerbates tension. I have no clue what side of the political aisle you're on, but my guess is we probably agree about more things than we disagree about, if we could detach bullshit labels from it all.
But FWIW, the allegation that I wasn't bothering to learn or see if I'm wrong just raised tension further. I was genuinely trying to determine if the claim was true, the evidence I had found suggested it wasn't, and it seems like it in fact wasn't quite true, but perhaps that wasn't the point you were trying to make anyway.
All fine. My hope is that we can all turn down the tension and hostility a level or two. Might be the only hope we have.
The actual rules went into enforcement in the very early part of Biden's term. They have to go back and forth with Congress, and since it involves the military, drafts would be secret or classified.
You can see, per Congress's orders, Trump's EPA would have authored the rules before Biden's term. They were ordered by the PFAS Action Act of 2019.
So while the rules weren't officially enforced during Trump's term, we can deduce that they were drafted and in motion under Andrew Wheeler's EPA, the same one Biden left in office into 2021!
That is to say, Trump's EPA guy wrote them and saw them into enforcement.
That all really is available from the citation I gave. The date is there. You can Google Wheeler's term. You can see when the rules went into effect. You for sure know rules take time to write.
You really didn't think to ask these questions? Honestly, I don't believe you.
You weren't trying to find that you were wrong like I recommended. You were trying to find that the citation by itself could be dead ended to disprove my point if you simply ceased your search.
Think about it for a few minutes and really be honest with yourself. I'm right, not just about you. That's just normal human behavior.
That's okay, but I don't think it's snarky to assume you're also human.
Giving municipalities more time and money to enact change aligns just fine with what I think most people would call good faith. You just can't please some people, I guess.
It's not out of the realm of possibility that one side of a issue is not acting in good faith. If that's the case, compromise isn't really a viable option; trying to work with someone within a system doesn't work if they literally don't support the system itself. Obviously not everyone agrees that's what's happening here, but not everyone agrees with your premise that there's guaranteed to be some reasonable compromise to every possible issue either.
In some ways, you're kind of arguing the same thing but in reverse by claiming that the comment you're responding to isn't being made in good faith. You're certainly entitled to hold that opinion, but only because of the exact same logic that entitles the parent commenter to hold the opinion that they express in the first place (and for what it's worth, I don't think it's actually being made in bad faith; not everyone will agree about where to draw the line, but at least to me it seems like we're long past the point of giving the benefit of the doubt on policies like the one described in TFA).
I think it is just venting, rather than debate. Realistically we’re locked in for about a year and a half of full Republican control of every branch of government before literally anything at all can be changed (and even then the main achievable goal for the midterms would be for Democrats to take the House, right? Which gives them at least some ability to do some oversight, but is pretty limited).
Im sorry if you’re naive about life but the Republican Party has shown nothing but contempt for life in general. Ideological coherency is not something they have cared about, hence debating them as if their arguments has any weight whatsoever is not useful.
Whenever they propose something, just ask yourself which lobbyist stands something to gain. That will be a sufficient explanation.
The media would have a much harder time collecting ad dollars if they didn't use strawman arguments and misrepresentation to lock in an audience.
Ask a liberal about conservatives or a conservative about liberals and they have abso-fucking-lutely no idea what the ideals of the other side are. None whatsoever. Thanks silo'd media.
What are the current ideals of so-called conservatives? Being a libertarian who can entertain both left and right approaches to problems, I thought I had a decent handle on where they were coming from. But then they seemingly went bat-shit insane during Covid. I try to appeal to what I thought were some of the underlying values (eg belief in institutions, America as a force for good in the world, individual liberty, slow and measured change), and always get written off like I just don't understand or something. But never any explanation for what I'm actually missing. The best I've been able to come up with is that they've set aside actually living those values in favor of thinking that we need some massive societal cataclysm to get back to a place where those values have more of a draw, but that's clearly not itself conservative.
What's up to debate here? It's crystal clear: they removed important health regulations so that a few companies could make slightly more money not having to clean up after themselves. What's not to hate there?
It is frustrating. Rolling back forever chemical regulations is analogous to reintroducing leaded gasoline. Should we be expected to debate and weigh the pros and cons of leaded gasoline? Some things require nuance, but some things are clearly and unambiguously bad. PFAS have well known health risks, they're persistent, bio-accumulative, and linked to cancers and endocrine disruption. We should err on the side of caution. An angry reaction against this is justified. It's insanity.
That’s the argument—yes. Consumers are supposed to educate themselves about all the industries in their backyard before buying a house to make sure that none of them have ever dumped PFAS in the last 100 years. And also they need to move to a place where it doesn’t rain, because PFAS is also in the water cycle. If nobody does that then the free market has spoken.
The problem is people are so trained that there must be both sides to every issue and you must steel man every other debater when sometimes the guy is coming at you with a knife.
There's no two sides to deregulating every business to poison us all, its just profit over people in the most direct and obvious way. There's no complex plan, there's no 4d chess, its just a transparent power grab for ideologues that really have either no interest in the outcomes of their terrible agenda because it ends in power for them or are literally in the pockets of those who desire the end of America.
> The problem is people are so trained that there must be both sides to every issue
Other people are culture warrior and intentionally poison the well (pun nit originally intended) so their side doesn't look bad, because the discussion has devolved into an ideological spat and not about the topic at hand
This nonsense meta comment is pretty frustrating to me. Use a counter argument rather than wringing your hands and whining with no apparent critique other than “I don’t like that this person is being mean”
Take one step backwards. Do cockroaches debate with the boot heel that comes to squish them? The billionaires are not “debating” anything with the “little people”
I don't get the environmental poison stuff. These rich people and their families breathe the same air and drink the same water as everyone else. Why would they poison themselves and their families with environmental pollution?
Also, there's likely to be a few years between the policy being enacted and people having health issues, so the chances are that the people pushing for this won't be around to catch the blame.
An insurance company CEO was famously shot in broad day light just before he went into a meeting to celebrate his accomplishment of denying people healthcare for his company's profits. Nobody felt bad except other CEOs and the people they directly pay because everyone has a story of the insurance company putting profit over people. They did not get rich by treating more people.
USA HealthCare insurance companies are the _Death Panels_, run by CEO, accounts, and investors, that work to maximize profit over keeping people health. They pay _specialist_ to contradict the actual practicing doctors on why some procedure or medicine is needed.
A firm's sole responsibility is to increase profit and a maximize returns for shareholders. [0]
Then you'd be wrong. Insurance companies are limited to the amount they can collect without paying back out.
It's a fixed percentage. That means the more expensive treatment gets, the higher they can raise rates, and the more revenue they get from that fixed percentage.
They did cover it up. But there was no evidence that they used PFAS in order to make people sick, which is what the original commenter said. There's a massive difference.
What does their perspective have to do with whether the distinction is real or not?
It's a matter of logic and also a matter of what is most likely to be true. The language used is obviously in relation to the rather important legal dichotomy between those two things; victims of PFAS toxicity and their opinions are irrelevant. What does matter is what the executives and people making the decisions at the corporations knew, thought, and intended by doing certain things, like covering up studies that demonstrated the harms, continuing to ship products they suspected were harmful, or suing whistleblowers to keep them quiet about putative harms. The original commenter was insinuating (I've quoted it throughout this thread) that the corporations were intentionally poisoning people, as if making them sick was itself a motive for shipping these products. Whether that is true or not is to be determined from the mental state of the executives I just talked about. There is no evidence I've ever seen that any of the corporations, like Dupont or Marlboro, ever intended to poison people and give them diseases for some underlying profit motive. To suggest they had was, as I said, lazy thinking and a caricature.
That certainly doesn't mean those corporations weren't negligent. But, as has been my point this entire time, intention is everything - intention is literally the entire difference between a murder charge and a manslaughter charge. It's not trivial at all. And imputing intention to cause harm (ie., the opposite of using Occam's Razor) because you dislike a corporation or person is just sloppy thinking.
> But there was no evidence that they used PFAS in order to make people sick, which is what the original commenter said
No, the said
> If companies can freely poison everyone, profits go up
Which has played out again and again in history. It's a lot cheaper to dump industrial solvents out the back door than pay for proper disposal, and if there's no legal repercussions stopping it, someone can just do it and watch profits go up.
If I run a business that produces pollution through a pair of smokestacks, and I know that the pollution is harmful and will give a few of the surrounding residents lung cancer, is that the same thing as intending that they will get the cancer? Or would it be reasonable for me to see the harm as an unfortunate externality that I wish could be avoided but can't be given whatever technological limitations there are currently.
So no, it's not 'exactly that'. You guys hate corporations so much that you are going a step beyond mere negligence and pretending that they are actually out to harm people as the very raison d'etre for their products, as opposed to the harm being a byproduct of their business. I'm not saying PFAS should be legal (they definitely shouldn't be); I'm saying it's lazy thinking that lacks evidence to suggest the harm itself is somehow the motivation, which is what the original commenter suggested.
Do you guys also think all the old asbestos manufacturers hoped/intended that their miners and others working with their sheeting would get mesothelioma?
Sorry I don’t know who you’re grouping me with, but I don’t hate corporations. I hate people intentionally harming others for their own profit.
> Do you guys also think all the old asbestos manufacturers hoped/intended that their miners and others working with their sheeting would get mesothelioma?
Again, not speaking for a group here since I’m just some guy. But I think when evidence started to appear that “holy crap this is killing people like crazy”, then choosing to allow it to continue - yes is equivalent to killing people intentionally.
I don’t consider “disguising your killing through statistics” to be a reasonable defense. If I have 100 miners that I’ve hired in a room, and I know that 10 of them will die as a direct result of my actions, such as not taking precautionary safety measures… It doesn’t matter which 10 it is, I’ve still chosen to kill 10 of those people.
I'm not sure why you keep spinning this as a valid response to anything.
This is the full quote of the parent:
> As for people getting sick and dying, they either don’t care, or they want people to get sick and die.
Lets break it down. Lets say some of your actions are causing harm, there's basically three options:
1. you don't know this is happening
2. you know, but continue because you don't care, and you can make money not caring
3. you know, and somehow this is beneficial to you, unlikely but possible
(The default option, which is always available, is to stop operations, which they have obviously also not done.)
Since DuPont obviously knew this was causing harm, #1 is out, so #2 and #3 remain. This is just deduction by elimination, not a value judgement.
No amount of spinning this argument is going to change this. I think your last line here makes it obvious who's straw-manning.
I wonder if you misunderstood what the commenter was saying. It isn’t that the goal of the companies is to make people sick as you suggest, it’s that the goal of the companies is to increase profits, and they don’t want concerns over people’s health to be a constraint on that goal.
Do you own shares in companies which are in the chemical manufacturing business? Or are you somehow otherwise invested in having ultra-lax environmental regulations? Genuine question.
The other explanation for not wanting to call a spade a spade is in the category of actually hating other people and wishing them to die a prolonged, painful death.
I own no shares, nor do I work in any industry that would be affected by this. I'm fully against PFAS and related chemicals being used in consumer/cooking products or being released in the environment. They should be outlawed and not used, end of story.
Now that that's out of the way, I don't think corporations are actively trying to make consumers sick so they can recoup the profits through their investments in the healthcare sector (or whatever insane conspiracy theory you guys are suggesting here).
This is the part I've been referring to from the original comment.
Also, once again, you should be careful how you use intention here. Even in the case where they knew about the harms or the risk, you can't impute intention without more evidence. Without that evidence, you should stick to negligence, since that's what it would be and indeed that is what separates a simple negligence claim from criminal negligence (intention).
If you say they intended to harm people or the environment, that's very different from saying their negligence or coverup resulted in harm to people/the environment. Intention is a subjective state of mind of the executives/board/'The company', and while it can be imputed in certain circumstances, it's a high bar. Dumping toxic waste somewhere because you think nobody will ever notice (which they did, in remote bodies of water), and then having some campers come along and jump into the water for a swim (which also happened), doesn't mean they intended to harm those campers or indeed that they intended to harm anyone. It was negligent but not obviously intentional. This really isn't hard to understand. It's also why there were never any criminal charges, not because the execs were long gone. In the US, corporations can be held criminally liable regardless of whether the original execs are still there or not.
> you can't impute intention without more evidence
If I’m aware that eating too much chocolate will kill my dog.
But it’s annoying for me to get up and walk to the trash can.
So I just throw the chocolate scraps to my dog to avoid inconveniencing myself.
Is this the same as wanting my dog to die? Being completely unbothered by the fact that I’m killing my dog sounds about equivalent to wanting it to die. I’m choosing to harm it to avoid a small inconvenience.
Maybe I would prefer it not to die, but I’m actively making a choice to do something that kills it, so really there’s not such a difference.
I mean, if we're talking about intention then yes there's a huge difference, that's the entire point.
But more to the point, your example is (as I'm sure you know) laughably simplistic. Cigarettes and PFAS play a probability game: the stats guys come to you and say, 'Hey boss, so if we sell 100,000 units of this product, there's a 20% chance than 5 people will be genetically susceptible to this particular novel molecule we're using, and 1 of them has a 10% chance of going on to develop bone cancer within 25 years. Should we sell it anyway?'
If you put it that way it isn't so obvious what the answer is. Most products have the potential to cause harm to some segment of the population. It's absolutely true that cigarettes and PFAS are two examples where the harms are much more rigorously established (especially with cigarettes, going back half a century), but the point stands: it's not a matter of chucking a chocolate bar at your dog. Again, you could plug the actual numbers in for the potential harms of PFAS and I don't think you'd be able to say that Dupont 'intended' to harm anybody, notwithstanding that they were clearly negligent.
PFAS were first determined to be harmful by internal industry scientists in the early 1960s, with documented evidence showing animal toxicity (including liver damage) and warnings of human health risks by the late 1960s and 1970s.
Whether I have a reasonable explanation for this change or not doesn't change the fact that that comment was a simplistic caricature. I never claimed to know the full answer. But I am nearly certain it doesn't begin with those evil corporations literally trying to make people sick. Merchants of Doubt, which is a great book related to this subject, is full of stories about how cigarette and PFAS corporations like Dupont pulled all sorts of shady shit to cover up the harms their products caused consumers. At no point has it ever been suggested, either in that book or anywhere else that I'm aware of, that corporations did it on purpose to make people ill so they could what, make money through the healthcare industry? Touch grass.
You clearly misunderstood what "if companies can freely poison everyone, profits go up" meant. It's not that the rich are poisoning people for its own sake and laughing manically to themselves. It's that removing regulations and lowering safety standards allows companies to recoup the money they were legally required to spend on upholding them, hence increasing their profits at the cost of public health. Which, I hope you'll concede, is a morally terrible thing to do.
That's not the same thing as literally trying to make people sick, as the original commenter said and as I was replying to initially. Being negligent is not the same thing as being malicious; intent matters. Even if I try to cover up a harm, that doesn't mean the harm itself was my intention. If you guys can't understand the nuance there then I dunno what to tell you.
It's not negligence. Negligence is when you don't test product safety and ship an unsafe product without knowing it. You can reasonably argue this was the case in the early days of cigarettes.
If you continue to ship a product after you know it is harmful you are deliberately causing harm.
Not sure how telling me to read a satirical work of fiction, by an avowed Socialist by the way, is particularly helpful here. I'm a fan of Orwell, but I don't think he'd have such a simplistic view of the actual (as opposed to fictional) world either.
if someone thinks Animal Farm is a "simplistic work of fiction" that teaches nothing due to its author being an "avowed Socialist", that's a pretty poor "fan" of Orwell. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism no matter what the purported ideology is.
You told me to go read a satirical work of fiction to understand why real life executives might make certain decisions. This is like telling me to read Lord of the Rings to understand, by analogy, what insert politician you hate here is thinking and how it's informing his use of policy.
Fiction is fiction. I prefer non-fiction for informing what I think about other (actual) people and their decision making processes.
Animal Farm uses metaphor to make statements and observations about non-ficticious events.
a non-fiction version of Animal Farm might be: "Authoritarianism is bad. Consider the case of the Russian Revolution leading to the rise and rule of Stalin. Imagine it's like the story of a farm taken over by authoritarian pigs: <insert existing Animal Farm text here>"
the word "fiction" here is doing work for your argument that it's not qualified to do.
the US Government is making the decisions they are in order to crush the population into submission. This is the simplest and most consistent explanation with many historical parallels and an approach (known as fascism) that is described by a tremendous amount of written literature, both academic and non-academic, fiction and non-fiction. The actions of politicians must be observed and the net effect of these actions forms the basis of the rationale.
> the US Government is making the decisions they are in order to crush the population into submission.
Now we have what you're really trying to get at here: some tinfoil hat conspiratorialising where the US government is out to mind control/'crush' its population (or something). At least if you aren't telling me to read a subversive Socialist novel instead of just saying it outright it saves us both the time of trying to figure out what you really mean. I get it, big oppressive authoritarian government bad.
Look, I'm not a fan of much that the Trump admin is doing (certainly not this), I've never voted for him (I haven't lived in America in 20 years), and I'm fully aware of the US government's long history of pulling dodgy shit vis-a-vis medical research (pretending to treat syphilis in black people, anyone?) Nevertheless, I don't see everything that happens in the world, whether it involving US law or even ethically questionable administrations), as necessarily emanating from farsighted and ingeniously devious governmental planning. If anything, the last 10 years have demonstrated that federal governments are less competent and more inept than we ever thought they could be in the modern Big Brother world.
this all just says you're not really reading much about what's going on right now, or you're only reading right wing news sources
there is broad consensus among academics and journalists who study/cover authoritarianism that that's exactly what this is. it has a predictable path. this includes that individual authoritarians don't have to understand what they're doing at all. Trump does what he does due to deep narcissism and other personality disorders, he can't even spell "fascism". He's an obvious ignoramus. Bur the effect is, authoritarianism. The administration's next moves can be predicted and understood based on the study of this phenomenon.
Someone making decisions “in order to crush the population into submission” definitely does have to understand what he’s doing. That’s what “in order to” means. Indeed, the public has to understand it too; how else will someone with a PFAS-weakened immune system know who they’re supposed to submit to?
The reason is that we have a culture war in an attention economy. When truly caring about America's citizens and future is a pretty low priority for our leaders.
If you are ambitious and inclined toward the Team Red side, then doing or saying things which Team Red's Fans won't much mind - but which will anger Team Blue's Fans - is a game that never stops paying off. The Blue Fans never stop getting angry, the clicks-pay-the-bills press on both sides never stops giving you free publicity, and the Red Fans never get tired of watching you anger the Blue Fans.
Back in 2016, playing that game was Trump's #1 tactic for going from being a bizarre joke candidate to the Oval Office.
It's a response to municipality associations' requests. People appear to have forgotten that Trump's EPA created these rules in his first term. Here is a summary directly from the organization pushing for this.
This is probably a big part of it. Environmentalists are not their voters. Basically attacking everything "leftists" are for, whether it's a good idea or not.
It used to be that environmental conservation was a part of conservative ideology, but MAGA isn't anything like what conservatism used to be in the US.
Are PFAS's a by-product of stuff like teflon and plastic production and the like? I know big oil is evil but I'm not sure that they're the boogieman in this case.
In this specific case, no they aren't the main villain. They are more the catalyst that turned the republican party into the anti-environment party (and thus anti-clean water).
The EPA regulating PFAS means it can also regulate the effects of fracking.
That's the context to understand how Republicans went from the Nixon party who created the EPA to today's party that hates all parts of the EPA.
Many european, asian and african countries benefited handsomely from exploiting other human beings and many of these countries have better environmental protection laws. So I don't think this is the reason.
The buyer doesn’t know which company is responsible and which company’s suppliers are responsible etc. This is why we need legislation and enforcement.
Imagine another scenario. You are my neighbour. I spill some poison on the ground. Your child gets ill. Am I at fault?
The companies who care will fund 3rd party certification orgs that will check whether the standards are met. They do it already for car safety, responsible raw materials sourcing, recycled content etc.
If it is a feature the customers care about they will market it. But frankly customers just want a better price today.
A number of markets have few competitors which means it's beyond easy for all the companies to externalize everything.
Further, some products have deep supply chains that are easy to mix. Consider copper as an example. A responsible company will want to use recycled copper as much as possible because it's cheaper. However, can anyone realistically validate that none of that copper came from stolen cables or bad mining practices?
No, you're falling for the efficiency market fallacy. Demand does not always create supply. Markets are not some type of super-classical computer, they are bound by the same stickiness as any NP-hard problem.
How do you suggest this is implemented for mains water supply? Should miles and miles of new water pipe be laid down for every new water supply company on the area and the customer is given a key from Water Corp to turn on their Water Corp supply valve and Water 4 U Corp sends a guy to turn off their valve?
Have you ever even paid a water bill in your life or spent a few seconds thinking about how water is actually supplied?
First you need to create a market. Aka have multiple players. The network will be one(many) companies that will be bidding usage to wholesale companies. This(these) network companies will be using the proceedings to improve the network.
The wholesale companies will then have their own pricing strategy for the end customer. But they will be paying both the network operators and the local gov.
Since water is municipal resource, the players should be paying the muni/city/state for the resource they are utilizing. The proceedings will be used by the muni to maintain the water availability.
Are we just not teaching The Jungle, Silent Spring, etc… in school anymore?
Also, please enlighten me on where I can shop around for alternative tap water.
I’m being petty, and understand the linked article is more fear-mongery than what the actual situation is, but simply eliminating all regulation is not the solution, as history has shown.
The market isn't free, so it cannot decide - even Adam Smith was pretty freaking clear about this. And I don't mean we need less regulation, I mean companies have complete control over laws, whether or not there's an even playing field, and about their transparency to customers - there's no market at all.
Look to a better source for some nuance. You may still disagree, and the court might as well, but there is more complexity here than "Trump bad, Zeldin worse, poison everyone".
While the reason is not stated, Occam's razor demands we look for the simplest explanation that ties together all actions of this administration.
And that seems to be dismantling the US as a military and technological superpower - a self-inflicted Morgenthau plan, if you will. We are left to speculate why a US government would want to dismantle the US, and who would benefit.
The reason is stated! The source article links to the request they sent to the court, explaining in detail why the EPA is doing this. Perhaps you think they’re not being honest, but Occam’s Razor doesn’t demand that we should spin grand unifying theories of government behavior in preference to evaluating the stated motivations of individual actions.
Gödel wrote his teorem to test David Hilbert’s endeavor, Logic and the Foundation of Mathematics[0], to unify mathematics. Gödel proved that it is impossible to do.
Wouldn’t it be possible that not all brains can do it all, but some can specialize in certain problems. But when combined with everyone else’s we can approach general intelligence?
Putting harder cases to the end of the queue gives less time to them. This may result in judges speeding the process by giving a case less consideration and thus increasing the chance of a mistake. This may result in postponing the case for another day because too little time remains today, so delaying it further.
OTOH simple cases are likely the majority of cases. Putting them first lets the majority of, well, users of the judiciary system get served faster.
> My rough understanding is that this is similar to async/await in .NET?
The biggest difference is that C# async/await code is rewritten by the compiler to be able to be async. This means that you see artifacts in the stack that weren’t there when you wrote the code.
There are no rewrites with virtual threads and the code is presented on the stack just as you write it.
They solve the same problem but in very different ways.
> They solve the same problem but in very different ways.
Yes. Async/await is stackless, which leads to the “coloured functions” problem (because it can only suspend function calls one-by-one). Threads are stackful (the whole stack can be suspended at once), which avoids the issue.
There is overlap but they really don't solve the same problem. Cooperative threading has its own advantages and patterns that won't be served by virtual threads.
If you need to be explicit about thread contexts because you're using a thread that's bound to some other runtime (say, a GL Context) or you simply want to use a single thread for synchronization like is common in UI programming with a Main/UI Thread, async/await does quite well. The async/await sugar ends up being a better devx than thread locking and implicit threading just doesn't cut it.
In Java they're working on a structured concurrency library to bridge this gap, but IMO, it'll end up looking like async/await with all its ups and downs but with less sugar.
You can use virtual threads running on a single OS thread and that will work but then everything will be on that one thread. You'll have synchronization but you'll also always be blocking on that one thread as well.
Async/await is able to achieve good UX around explicitly defining what goes on your Main thread and what goes elsewhere. Its trivial to mix UI thread and background thread code by bouncing between synchronization contexts as needed.
When the threading model is implicit its impossible to have this control.
What do you mean? It implements the Future/Task interface and you can definitely use that. In fact you can’t tell the difference from a virtual thread vs a platform one, and it’s available everywhere. I for one thinks it’s much easier to use than the async/await pattern as I don’t need any special syntax to use it.
