If you want more context on PFAS, I recommend this Veritasium video [0]. It expanded on my usual thought of "PFAS = bad," explaining why non-stick cookware is probably fine while other forms of PFAS are problematic. The video also covers the environmental damage caused by PFAS manufacturing.
skiers have been putting teflon wax on their skis for decades now
it's in the snow, ground, and water-supply
forever
horsawlarway 1 hours ago [-]
It's not like this is going unnoticed either, though.
The International Ski Federation (FIS) now bans fluorinated wax in all their competitions, and this wax is explicitly called out alongside cookware in much of the legislation that's going around in places like CA/CO for PFAS bans.
usefulcat 2 hours ago [-]
According to the linked Veritasium video, Teflon is not directly problematic, it’s the chemicals used to manufacture Teflon that are the problem.
j4coh 11 minutes ago [-]
Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong or at least incomplete. I empathise, it’s hard to make definitive statements like that, but maybe at some point it’s better not to if you’re not sure and more about entertainment than anything else.
schiffern 1 hours ago [-]
"Teflon" ski wax (fluoro-wax) contains PFOA impurities, which is that same problematic chemical. It's expensive to remove so most manufacturers don't bother.
It’s also applied to skis by heating it, which breaks down the polymers.
lm28469 4 hours ago [-]
You forgot rain. Maybe one day people will remember we're just sharing one small planet, the air, the water, the food supplies, ... all the shit you dump/burn ends up in your food or water eventually
alright2565 3 hours ago [-]
What is the physical process that leads to PFAS ending up in the rain?
Why cant we have parallel lines that intersect. Geometry.
alright2565 2 hours ago [-]
That article's only citation is a review paper, and it doesn't answer my question or substantiate your claim. It only covers how much PFAS is found in rainwater, and not how it got there.
The sources cited includes https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2020.116685, which is paywalled, but the snippet of the conclusion that is shown indicates that a possible major cause is industrial emissions:
> As local sources were determined to be significant, the results imply that local action can have an impact on PFAS contamination in precipitation. A three-way ANOVA model determined that functional group, chain length, and location were significant predictors of PFAS concentrations
If you can get the full text I'd be very interested in reading about it.
titzer 41 minutes ago [-]
There's a journal paper (i.e. already reviewed and accepted) linked at the bottom:
That paper alone has 61 references. There are plenty of papers to go read.
vel0city 42 minutes ago [-]
Sure, its probably at its highest concentrations right where its being manufactured or used heavily, but in the end its migrating just about everywhere.
> n Figure 1B, the levels of PFOS in rainwater are shown to often exceed the US EPA drinking water health advisory for PFOS, except for two studies conducted in remote regions (in Tibet and Antarctica).
I don't think there are a lot of industrial emissions in Antarctica.
pengaru 4 hours ago [-]
> all the shit you dump/burn ends up in your food or water eventually
but most that shit doesn't survive the journey intact, being out in the elements and bombarded by the sun isn't kind to most things
hence the focus on "forever chemicals"
lm28469 4 hours ago [-]
But still a lot of things do, pesticides following the rain cycles is a good example. We're killing the biodiversity and ourselves with it. We already almost entirely rely on synthetically amending fields with petrol byproducts to feed ourselves, tomorrow we might have to manually pollinate crops when insects won't be enough to do the job.
PFAS are a problem, co2 is a problem, but we have dozens of other very big problems that are partially, if not entirely, obscured
> We already almost entirely rely on synthetically amending fields with petrol byproducts to feed ourselves
elaborate please
Zigurd 4 hours ago [-]
Future archaeologists will wonder that we first fouled our nest from edge to edge with lead in gasoline, and then there's that radioactive layer, and following immediately after the forever chemicals layer.
pengaru 4 hours ago [-]
The anthropocene, aka the petroradiata layer
SirMaster 50 minutes ago [-]
But you can filter out PFAS from water...
cyanydeez 19 minutes ago [-]
you can filter anything out of water...you're just arguing end users should bare the cost of billion dollar corporations doing whatever they want.
The filtration at the levels we're talking about would add thousands of dollars to every household everywhere, all at once.
Talk about something that just is a bit more than, "but you can filter it".
throwhuppla 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nielsbot 3 hours ago [-]
curious what point you're highlighting here
naldb 3 hours ago [-]
That the way the parent comment is written evokes fear unnecessarily.
There are no definite provable effects of exposure of PFAS - in fact our current knowledge of them is so bad that if you use google and find a list of effects on the body from exposure of PFAS the list is endless and full of things that are unrelated, which is obviously impossible and nonsense.
regularjack 3 hours ago [-]
They just seem like facts to me. If the reader reacts with fear, that's because they interpreted those facts as things that induce fear.
naldb 3 hours ago [-]
Most people have an irrational fear of one or many things, that doesn’t mean those fears have to be entertained.
I don't think most people understand that the damage from PFAS is generational and cumulative. You can isolate zebrafish, expose the first generation, and you'll see abnormalities generations later even those those fish were never exposed. That is their legacy - it's civilization-level harm.
ninininino 2 hours ago [-]
I've been struggling to understand why people care more about Gaza, Ukraine, BLM, or trans bathrooms than issues like PFAS proliferation and ultimately came to the conclusion that people really just don't care about hypothetical future generations as much as the present. You can point and say "look, this action doesn't affect you much and just makes a 0.01% difference, but it will effect 100,000 future generations of life on this planet and can never be reversed" and people will still say "wow that's sad, but there are people starving in Country A" and be much more concerned.
I guess it's us that are the weird ones.
stronglikedan 2 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
Liquix 2 hours ago [-]
A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa. Think of that the next time you start a conversation.
- Dale Carnegie
graemep 2 hours ago [-]
People do care about climate change and lots of other long term things.
People care about things that there are campaigns about, that get media coverage. They also avoid thinking about things that they think cannot be changed. These are correlated: if there is a campaign to change something people think it cannot be changed.
cyanydeez 15 minutes ago [-]
Well, people do care about PFAS, global warming, environmental degradation...it's just htey've decided the solution is _depopulation_. They're fighting over the very carrying capacity of an earth that no ones going to fix.
So, like, you realy think israel, russia, america, china, india are all flirting heavily with fascism because of their religion, nationalism, isolationism? Or is it more likely they're trying to isolate themselves from humanity to reduce the overall social costs.
Biollionaires out there building their bunkers, and here we are...
Justice-as-a-Service... The Enterprise subscription tier has a get-out-of-jail feature.
jmyeet 5 hours ago [-]
Let's compare to Purdue and the Sacklers, shall we?
Purdue owns a huge piece of the responsibility for the opioid epidemic. They created OxyContin and lied about it's addictiveness. They are probably responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at this point. The Sacklers were heavily involved in all aspects of this and became billionaires because of it.
Nobody has been criminally charged. The government tried to give them a Jeffrey Epstein level pass by essentially allowing them to pay a few billion dollars over 20 years, which essentially amounted to interest off their ill-gotten gains. Last I heard an appeals court said no, you can't do that and release liability. This really was a slap on the wrist.
Now compare this to what China does [1][2][3].
Remember how all those people went to jail for mortgage fraud after 2008? Oh wait... And now? We just sell pardons [4]. This sort of thing used to cause a scandal (eg [5]).
I agree there can be better accountability but China is not a shining example of anti-corruption, there it is used to destroy your political enemies and to increase your political power. Here the issue is probably that the political parties shield their rich donors.
cluckindan 27 minutes ago [-]
Heroin was originally advertised by Bayer as a safe and nonaddictive treatment for morphine dependency.
gruez 4 hours ago [-]
>Nobody has been criminally charged. The government tried to give them a Jeffrey Epstein level pass by essentially allowing them to pay a few billion dollars over 20 years
Doesn't that settlement only cover civil claims? It doesn't grant them immunity over any criminal claims. It's more correct to say that they didn't bother prosecuting them criminally (possibly because it's hard to do so), and got a civil settlement instead because the evidentiary standards are lower.
> which essentially amounted to interest off their ill-gotten gains.
They offered to pay $6B of $11B gains. Maybe you think they should have been fined $100 trillion or whatever for all the harm they caused, but that money doesn't exist, and moreover it's unclear whether a long drawn out legal battle would result in more money than the settlement they offered.
> They offered to pay $6B of $11B gains. Maybe you think they should have been fined $100 trillion or whatever for all the harm they caused, but that money doesn't exist, and moreover it's unclear whether a long drawn out legal battle would result in more money than the settlement they offered.
Paying $6B out of $11B earned from literally killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Meanwhile Alex Jones receives a $1.5B judgement (against ~$10 mil in assets) for just harassing people that were killed?
Even involuntary manslaughter comes with years of jail time. Recklessly killing a single human being. Willfully destroying thousands? Nah, just give us some of the money you earned and we're square.
How does this make sense? This is an extreme injustice no matter how you look at it. The Sacklers deserve far, far worse.
gruez 2 hours ago [-]
>Meanwhile Alex Jones receives a $1.5B judgement (against ~$10 mil in assets)
You answered your own question. $10M doesn't buy a lot of lawyering. $11B Does. Moreover Alex Jones was dumb and did his misdeeds in a way that makes it a slam dunk to sue him in court. The linked article above mentions why suing the Sacklers is much tougher:
>How are you going to get the Sacklers to give up all their money? You could sue them, sure, of course. The entity that is most obvious liable for the opioid crisis is Purdue, the company, which is very bankrupt, but you can probably find some causes of action to sue the Sacklers. For one thing, some Sacklers were executives or board members of Purdue, so you could sue them personally for their own actions running Purdue. (But not all of them were.) For another thing, there are arguments under the bankruptcy code that they should not have been able to extract $11 billion from the company while it was facing all this opioid liability, that the dividends they got were “fraudulent transfers” and can be clawed back by the company.
>There are problems with all of this. There are a lot of Sacklers. They can hire good lawyers. Some of them live abroad. Much of their money is in trusts that a US court might not be able to get access to. If you sued all of them, it would be expensive and time-consuming and you might not get much money. You might! And you might at least make life very unpleasant for them, which has its own virtues.
Finally, the supreme court votes show how divided the justices were. Contrary to the popular expectation that Republicans are pro-business, they were actually the ones voting against the settlement. The justices voting against the settlement were Trump, HW Bush, W Bush, Trump, and Biden appointees; justices voting for the settlement were Trump, W Bush, Obama, and Obama appointees.
more_corn 5 hours ago [-]
3M knowingly poisoned every single person in the world for decades.
Let them burn, and salt the earth where they fall. These fuckers don’t deserve a second chance.
How could they have done it better? Acknowledge the science when the problem was discovered in the 70s, publish the findings, let the scientific community study the problem and let people make informed decisions about the dangers. Had they done that PFAs might still be in use in very controlled circumstances. They certainly wouldn’t be used as waterproofing on our paper plates.
doug_durham 3 hours ago [-]
Poisoned? You need to do more research. The regulations put in place since the early 2000's have already reduced exposure by 70 to 80%. The levels are subclinical. The chemicals persist in the environment indefinitely because they are chemically inert. The interactions with biological systems are more mechanical than chemical. It's not a great situation to be in, but it is unlikely to cause large amounts of long term harm.
SirMaster 39 minutes ago [-]
So when the chemicals get into our biological bodies, they hurt us mechanically, not chemically?
cluckindan 24 minutes ago [-]
Yes. They repel water, fats and oils. Having waterproof kidneys or a fatproof liver isn’t great for normal functioning of said organs.
coryrc 5 hours ago [-]
> Let them burn
Who is "them"? The scientists at the time? The managers at the time? The managers now? The stockholders who have already sold and made their profits?
Zigurd 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't one of the answers found in the dubious concept of corporate personhood?
hobs 5 hours ago [-]
If we can have a murder investigation and assign partial blame for people that are just there while the crime is being committed, why cant we do it for something that harms the entire human race?
Just because we don't have a great framework for something today doesn't mean we should not have it, just that incentives have been against it up to this point.
coryrc 2 hours ago [-]
We won't get there by just saying "they" should be punished; most people can agree on that. Be specific on who and how.
bilbo0s 3 hours ago [-]
>If we can have a murder investigation and assign partial blame for people that are just there while the crime is being committed, why cant we do it for something that harms the entire human race?
Check the bank balance of the people being convicted for being present when a crime is committed.
Compare it to the bank balance of the people who harm the entire human race.
titzer 2 hours ago [-]
> Compare it to the bank balance of the people who harm the entire human race.
Yet another reason why we don't need billionaires. No one should have enough money that they can just pay their way through crime after crime.
hobs 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, see my second sentence - throwing up your hands and claiming inaction isn't the way to solve anything. Saying "but the billionaires don't want it!!" sure, let me pre-give up so its super easy for them to keep winning.
lm28469 4 hours ago [-]
All of them, and their descendants if needs be, make it clear it should not happen. The bourgeoisie only understands rolling heads, no matter how harsh the punishment is it'll never make up nor equal what they're inflicting us
naldb 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 hours ago [-]
A recent article in The Atlantic said that one scientist would know it's harmful to humans and another would know it's in all human blood and 3M made sure they'd never meet.
So the scientist who knew it was harmful didn't know it was everywhere and the scientist who knew it was everywhere didn't know it was harmful.
Point is that it's possible to silo scientists in this way so they can't see the big picture.
2 hours ago [-]
TheRealNGenius 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
calvinmorrison 5 hours ago [-]
limited liability corporations are the root of all evil.
khaki54 5 hours ago [-]
without Limited Liability Companies, a civil matter as simple as a copyright lawsuit could permenently bankrupt a small business and take the owners house and all their assets.
I don't agree with companies wantonly externalizing their costs onto the environment or the populace such as Dow or 3M poisoning the entire planet. Criminal liability never goes away for serious crimes, whether sole-proprietership, LLC, or Corp. We need to actually start jailing people though
Zigurd 4 hours ago [-]
If you are a part owner of a restaurant that's an LLC, and the restaurant engages in wage theft, which is rampant in that business, in many states the corporate veil can be pierced to recover stolen wages. "Limited" doesn't mean "none."
calvinmorrison 4 hours ago [-]
no reason to have a veil at all. Delete!
ruined 4 hours ago [-]
tort and copyright would be different if LLCs didn't exist
lm28469 5 hours ago [-]
> copyright
Another thing we should flush down the drain to begin with
jMyles 4 hours ago [-]
No flushing is necessary; it is conceptually fading on the internet whether the state acknowledges it or not.
It'll be great if some solemn elder-statesmen step up and read the writing on the wall instead of throwing more tantrums, but I think it's beyond obvious now that the internet will not abide copyright.
calvinmorrison 4 hours ago [-]
> could permenently bankrupt a small business and take the owners house and all their assets.
A small business, which practically is comprised of - in the US in most cases 1 employee, or maybe 1-3 employees, most likely related.
That person, who you say did a copyright issues, but maybe I say, accidentally used a chopsaw on someones hand... they're liable.
some fake paper does not reduce liability.
5 hours ago [-]
Nasrudith 5 hours ago [-]
Why do you want to arrest grandma for owning Enron stock?
ruined 4 hours ago [-]
if LLCs didn't exist, clearly the stock market would operate differently
would Enron have been Enron if it wasn't an LLC?
jMyles 4 hours ago [-]
Clearly the system by which "grandma" owns a small part of a criminal organization is flawed.
Whether criminal liability needs to flow to individual owners I don't know, but I'm sure someone has done the thinking here about how to make this less insane.
calvinmorrison 4 hours ago [-]
I certainly do. The stock market would have fewer bubbles if risks were born by the owners!
yapyap 5 hours ago [-]
I’m sure they’ll get off legally (just donate to the sitting president) but for the people affected by their practices they will be hard pressed to turn their legacy around.
myrmidon 5 hours ago [-]
I think it is incorrect to blame this on a currently corrupt president.
Counter-hypothesis: This is a systemic issue. Decisionmakers and shareholders that cause harm face very little consequences if their behavior does not violate the letter of the law.
Compare the leaded gas debacle: US lead industry suppressed knowledge about harmful effects, and even directly targeted researchers with smear-campaigns and lawfare for decades, but faced no real legal consequences once everything came to light.
im3w1l 4 hours ago [-]
I think it's even more systemic. The public knows about the harm and they are ok with it. They think the benefits outweigh the risks.
myrmidon 4 hours ago [-]
This sounds bleak, but I'm pretty sure that any improvement (more justice/corporate responsibility) would at least not be free: It would also have chilling effects on research/innovation from perceived legal risk and higher costs (because the customer always pays in the end, which also applies to indirectly legally prescribed risk mitigation).
It is plausible to me that the public is "close to correct" in its current stance, and I would at least not dismiss that notion out of hand!
pengaru 3 hours ago [-]
The public is driven by convenience, and it's extremely convenient to prefer believing purported long-term harms are fake news, when that belief enables enjoying practically every other short-term convenience available to them
tristor 3 hours ago [-]
The only way to escape PFAS is to go to a different planet. 3M and Dow have poisoned the entire world. It's shocking how much effort and money I have had to invest to try to mitigate this problem as much as possible in my own home, not because the alternatives are expensive, but because of how pervasive PFAS use is and how it contaminates everything. Every single decision-maker involved should have been jailed.
randycupertino 2 hours ago [-]
There's the PFAS blood cleaning startup but is unvalidated and also we'll all just get more replacement exposure from routine activities of living soooo imo almost feels futile regardless: https://www.wired.com/story/this-startup-promises-to-clean-y...
leobg 2 hours ago [-]
What have you done in your own home? I’d be curious to know.
tristor 1 hours ago [-]
> What have you done in your own home? I’d be curious to know.
I've gotten rid of anything in my kitchen that I can that contains PFAS or is produced with PFAS or PFOAs. I use cast iron or stainless steel cookware, glass and silicone only for things that cannot be made of stainless steel. I've more or less eliminated plastics as much as possible from the kitchen. Unfortunately, I can't necessarily do that with food packaging, but even there when I have an option I will change brands or stores to buy things without plastic packaging, or paper packaging coated in PFAS/Teflon. Similarly to avoid PFAS and other chemicals in the production of plastics, as well as microplastics, I almost exclusively buy clothing made entirely from natural fibers.
Beyond that, I have a whole home water filtration system, and after that whole home filtration system I additionally run an undersink 5-stage RO system, both of which are NSF/ANSI certified (53 for the filter system and 58 for the RO system) to remove PFAS and PFOAs. I also go out of my way to find and buy products that don't contain added PFAS, because unfortunately PFAS are in many basic everyday household products like dishwasher detergent, rinse aid, laundry detergent, fabric softener,
and the like. If you dig into this you will be disturbed at how many things have PFAS intentionally added to them, and then you will be even more disturbed to find out how many things contain PFAS incidentally, mostly due to contaminated water supplies.
Even with all of this effort, and more I'm not detailing in this comment, I am exposed to PFAS in the food supply and water supply daily, and in a myriad of other ways. It's impossible to avoid, even with a major budget and being extremely conscious of this issue. There is no way to get away from it. The entire world is contaminated. I don't even know how much my mitigations have any helpful effect towards my health, because it's so difficult to mitigate.
IlikeKitties 5 hours ago [-]
So, what is anyone gonna do about? Do YOU want to sacrifice your life to play supermario bros against the Managers and CEOs responsible for that? Are they even alive anymore?
throwhuppla 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 19:11:11 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
[0]: https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY
it's in the snow, ground, and water-supply
forever
The International Ski Federation (FIS) now bans fluorinated wax in all their competitions, and this wax is explicitly called out alongside cookware in much of the legislation that's going around in places like CA/CO for PFAS bans.
https://skiracing.com/future-without-fluoros-a-complete-guid...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Why cant we have parallel lines that intersect. Geometry.
The sources cited includes https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2020.116685, which is paywalled, but the snippet of the conclusion that is shown indicates that a possible major cause is industrial emissions:
> As local sources were determined to be significant, the results imply that local action can have an impact on PFAS contamination in precipitation. A three-way ANOVA model determined that functional group, chain length, and location were significant predictors of PFAS concentrations
If you can get the full text I'd be very interested in reading about it.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
That paper alone has 61 references. There are plenty of papers to go read.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
> n Figure 1B, the levels of PFOS in rainwater are shown to often exceed the US EPA drinking water health advisory for PFOS, except for two studies conducted in remote regions (in Tibet and Antarctica).
I don't think there are a lot of industrial emissions in Antarctica.
but most that shit doesn't survive the journey intact, being out in the elements and bombarded by the sun isn't kind to most things
hence the focus on "forever chemicals"
PFAS are a problem, co2 is a problem, but we have dozens of other very big problems that are partially, if not entirely, obscured
https://usrtk.org/healthwire/banned-pesticides-found-in-clou...
elaborate please
The filtration at the levels we're talking about would add thousands of dollars to every household everywhere, all at once.
Talk about something that just is a bit more than, "but you can filter it".
There are no definite provable effects of exposure of PFAS - in fact our current knowledge of them is so bad that if you use google and find a list of effects on the body from exposure of PFAS the list is endless and full of things that are unrelated, which is obviously impossible and nonsense.
The media loves to instil fear to get clicks.
I guess it's us that are the weird ones.
- Dale Carnegie
People care about things that there are campaigns about, that get media coverage. They also avoid thinking about things that they think cannot be changed. These are correlated: if there is a campaign to change something people think it cannot be changed.
So, like, you realy think israel, russia, america, china, india are all flirting heavily with fascism because of their religion, nationalism, isolationism? Or is it more likely they're trying to isolate themselves from humanity to reduce the overall social costs.
Biollionaires out there building their bunkers, and here we are...
Purdue owns a huge piece of the responsibility for the opioid epidemic. They created OxyContin and lied about it's addictiveness. They are probably responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at this point. The Sacklers were heavily involved in all aspects of this and became billionaires because of it.
Nobody has been criminally charged. The government tried to give them a Jeffrey Epstein level pass by essentially allowing them to pay a few billion dollars over 20 years, which essentially amounted to interest off their ill-gotten gains. Last I heard an appeals court said no, you can't do that and release liability. This really was a slap on the wrist.
Now compare this to what China does [1][2][3].
Remember how all those people went to jail for mortgage fraud after 2008? Oh wait... And now? We just sell pardons [4]. This sort of thing used to cause a scandal (eg [5]).
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder...
[3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45728459
[4]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/trumps-flurry-pardons-include-camp...
[5]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-shadow-of-marc-rich
Doesn't that settlement only cover civil claims? It doesn't grant them immunity over any criminal claims. It's more correct to say that they didn't bother prosecuting them criminally (possibly because it's hard to do so), and got a civil settlement instead because the evidentiary standards are lower.
> which essentially amounted to interest off their ill-gotten gains.
They offered to pay $6B of $11B gains. Maybe you think they should have been fined $100 trillion or whatever for all the harm they caused, but that money doesn't exist, and moreover it's unclear whether a long drawn out legal battle would result in more money than the settlement they offered.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-27/purdue...
Paying $6B out of $11B earned from literally killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Meanwhile Alex Jones receives a $1.5B judgement (against ~$10 mil in assets) for just harassing people that were killed?
Even involuntary manslaughter comes with years of jail time. Recklessly killing a single human being. Willfully destroying thousands? Nah, just give us some of the money you earned and we're square.
How does this make sense? This is an extreme injustice no matter how you look at it. The Sacklers deserve far, far worse.
You answered your own question. $10M doesn't buy a lot of lawyering. $11B Does. Moreover Alex Jones was dumb and did his misdeeds in a way that makes it a slam dunk to sue him in court. The linked article above mentions why suing the Sacklers is much tougher:
>How are you going to get the Sacklers to give up all their money? You could sue them, sure, of course. The entity that is most obvious liable for the opioid crisis is Purdue, the company, which is very bankrupt, but you can probably find some causes of action to sue the Sacklers. For one thing, some Sacklers were executives or board members of Purdue, so you could sue them personally for their own actions running Purdue. (But not all of them were.) For another thing, there are arguments under the bankruptcy code that they should not have been able to extract $11 billion from the company while it was facing all this opioid liability, that the dividends they got were “fraudulent transfers” and can be clawed back by the company.
>There are problems with all of this. There are a lot of Sacklers. They can hire good lawyers. Some of them live abroad. Much of their money is in trusts that a US court might not be able to get access to. If you sued all of them, it would be expensive and time-consuming and you might not get much money. You might! And you might at least make life very unpleasant for them, which has its own virtues.
Finally, the supreme court votes show how divided the justices were. Contrary to the popular expectation that Republicans are pro-business, they were actually the ones voting against the settlement. The justices voting against the settlement were Trump, HW Bush, W Bush, Trump, and Biden appointees; justices voting for the settlement were Trump, W Bush, Obama, and Obama appointees.
Let them burn, and salt the earth where they fall. These fuckers don’t deserve a second chance.
How could they have done it better? Acknowledge the science when the problem was discovered in the 70s, publish the findings, let the scientific community study the problem and let people make informed decisions about the dangers. Had they done that PFAs might still be in use in very controlled circumstances. They certainly wouldn’t be used as waterproofing on our paper plates.
Who is "them"? The scientists at the time? The managers at the time? The managers now? The stockholders who have already sold and made their profits?
Just because we don't have a great framework for something today doesn't mean we should not have it, just that incentives have been against it up to this point.
Check the bank balance of the people being convicted for being present when a crime is committed.
Compare it to the bank balance of the people who harm the entire human race.
Yet another reason why we don't need billionaires. No one should have enough money that they can just pay their way through crime after crime.
So the scientist who knew it was harmful didn't know it was everywhere and the scientist who knew it was everywhere didn't know it was harmful.
Point is that it's possible to silo scientists in this way so they can't see the big picture.
I don't agree with companies wantonly externalizing their costs onto the environment or the populace such as Dow or 3M poisoning the entire planet. Criminal liability never goes away for serious crimes, whether sole-proprietership, LLC, or Corp. We need to actually start jailing people though
Another thing we should flush down the drain to begin with
It'll be great if some solemn elder-statesmen step up and read the writing on the wall instead of throwing more tantrums, but I think it's beyond obvious now that the internet will not abide copyright.
A small business, which practically is comprised of - in the US in most cases 1 employee, or maybe 1-3 employees, most likely related.
That person, who you say did a copyright issues, but maybe I say, accidentally used a chopsaw on someones hand... they're liable.
some fake paper does not reduce liability.
would Enron have been Enron if it wasn't an LLC?
Whether criminal liability needs to flow to individual owners I don't know, but I'm sure someone has done the thinking here about how to make this less insane.
Counter-hypothesis: This is a systemic issue. Decisionmakers and shareholders that cause harm face very little consequences if their behavior does not violate the letter of the law.
Compare the leaded gas debacle: US lead industry suppressed knowledge about harmful effects, and even directly targeted researchers with smear-campaigns and lawfare for decades, but faced no real legal consequences once everything came to light.
It is plausible to me that the public is "close to correct" in its current stance, and I would at least not dismiss that notion out of hand!
I've gotten rid of anything in my kitchen that I can that contains PFAS or is produced with PFAS or PFOAs. I use cast iron or stainless steel cookware, glass and silicone only for things that cannot be made of stainless steel. I've more or less eliminated plastics as much as possible from the kitchen. Unfortunately, I can't necessarily do that with food packaging, but even there when I have an option I will change brands or stores to buy things without plastic packaging, or paper packaging coated in PFAS/Teflon. Similarly to avoid PFAS and other chemicals in the production of plastics, as well as microplastics, I almost exclusively buy clothing made entirely from natural fibers.
Beyond that, I have a whole home water filtration system, and after that whole home filtration system I additionally run an undersink 5-stage RO system, both of which are NSF/ANSI certified (53 for the filter system and 58 for the RO system) to remove PFAS and PFOAs. I also go out of my way to find and buy products that don't contain added PFAS, because unfortunately PFAS are in many basic everyday household products like dishwasher detergent, rinse aid, laundry detergent, fabric softener, and the like. If you dig into this you will be disturbed at how many things have PFAS intentionally added to them, and then you will be even more disturbed to find out how many things contain PFAS incidentally, mostly due to contaminated water supplies.
Even with all of this effort, and more I'm not detailing in this comment, I am exposed to PFAS in the food supply and water supply daily, and in a myriad of other ways. It's impossible to avoid, even with a major budget and being extremely conscious of this issue. There is no way to get away from it. The entire world is contaminated. I don't even know how much my mitigations have any helpful effect towards my health, because it's so difficult to mitigate.