To what end? The severity of capital punishment barely effects civilian crime numbers.
Instead - and i have spent all of 10 seconds thinking this through - what about we just pay people to snitch on a business/employer if its knowingly doing such things. Perhaps in % of the settlement and/or potential fall out costs.
That'd change behavior as well as catch issues soon enough to prevent them.
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.
Suggesting the death penalty when these crimes kill people is not advocating for a new type of punishment.
Treating a burglary as more severe than a multi million dollar pension fraud seems backward by any metric beyond the social status of the criminals involved.
> They have developmental effects, immune effects. Thyroid, liver, hormonal systems. Some cause cancer, kidney cancer, obesity. They bind to proteins in your blood, and they change how systems in your bodies work.
Is there any evidence that the amounts found in humans using non stick pans, for example, and not those drinking water downstream from an industrial source of “forever chemicals”, have any of these effects?
Plus DuPont Chemicals dumped forever chemicals like PFOS directly into swimming lakes, rivers, and the ground where it also ended up in communities ground water.
There's an excellent film with, and produced by, Mark Ruffalo ("Avengers").
"Dark Waters" about the environmental lawyer who exposed the whole fowl conspiracy by DuPont Chemicals, 3M, and other industrial chemical companies and the knowingly poisoning of the (American) people for decades (and still continuing). Most recommended !
The "interview" format is a bit difficult to read.
Assuming they did keep it a secret, we had so many other hazards that were (and still are) in common use: lead, mercury, tobacco, chlordane, asbestos, etc... So even if true; even if you accept this as some conspiracy, it would seem to pale in comparison to the list I just gave. We seemingly survived and thrived with with substances far worse than a little plastic running around in our bloodstream, yet this remains the topic of the day and it makes me wonder how real the outrage is (proportionate to other hazards) or if this is just liberal minded "see the big companies are out to get us and this is just the current example". It would be far more persuasive imho to just argue the later point independently, because the plastic (using the term loosely) topic comes up so frequently that to some of us it is just repetitive and not really constructive.
>or if this is just liberal minded "see the big companies are out to get us and this is just the current example".
Of course, as opposed to the objective minded "there is no conspiracy ever, when it is repeatedly demonstrated that corporations will poison, experiment on and destroy human lives if it favors their bottom line and they think they can get away with it, this is not to be interpreted as a pattern or structural issue, it's just coincidences and 'bad' individual actors all the way down".
It seems you and I now have something in common inside our bodies: PFOS. I've finally found a point of connection between us.
Out of curiosity as to why 3M would insert this commonality into me to help us share a sense of solidarity, I looked up some safety-related research papers. I came across a 3M technical paper by Seacat et al. (2002)[1], which claims that under their experimental conditions, no harmful effects were observed up to a certain dose.
Seeing this perfectly illustrates just how much science and technology are dictated by the institutions they are affiliated with.
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?
No, we as a civilization are ultimately responsible for giving bad actors power, and indeed often glorifying those actors. There are evolutionary reasons why it is so, but that's absolutely not to say that these things just happen and a species with a very different psychology couldn't avoid the same trap.
Perhaps the centralization of governance and the asymmetric power of government over the people is the problem.
If a village of 20 people found out one of their members had been poisoning them for years, knowingly, to attain status as the mage/technocrat/leader, I suspect their punishment would be severe.
Instead, any one person or small group of people feels powerless against a seemingly infinite bureaucracy and a justice system that would sooner punish "vigilantes" than hold powerful people to account for their malice and damage to society.
You give more agency to the modern individual than I do, I think.
As a society we tend to reward sociopaths with power, which leads to stuff like forever chemicals. But society providing neither checks-and-balances nor even a credible thread of punishment after the fact is also part of the issue. Even sociopaths are influenced by the threat of punishment
Exactly. It's a pretty small number of people who are this terrible. Thinking of it in evolutionary terms creates a sense of fatalism. If you look globally since the invention of agriculture, it's very clear that a) humans are extremely flexible, and b) culture matters hugely to how societies turn out.
Culture is something we inherit, but it's something we can change. If we want things to be less fucked up for the next generation, we can do that. As many before us have.
No previous era of cruelty has threatened the existence of life itself. Corporate greed is the most hideous, horrific, inhumane era of human culture that has ever been.
In the real world, two out of these four people vote to protect the poisoner because poison is a conspiracy against the freedom to feed children anything you want.
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.
yup, this actually changed the way I look at capitalism now. This shows how much companies hold power over government and it takes a long time for public to hold companies accountable.
"Better", as in, capable as a civilization of avoiding doing things that are incredibly harmful according to their own morals. Capable of defeating their own Moloch, if you will.
Even looking only at different cultures, saying nothing of nature, the degree to which people are willing to cooperate or defect against the group varies widely. The level of trust varies widely.
People aren't motivated solely by the risk of being caught. Some people tell themselves that everyone else must be trying to cheat, so it's okay for them to cheat. But this type of thinking isn't a law of nature, it's just a human flaw.
The amount of cheating is not a fundamental constant. Given that people are social animals and that we tend to be stronger as a group, in fact you'd expect that prosocial behavior is good for the species. If fucked up is to mean anything, poisoning the environment with forever chemicals ought to make the fucking cut, if you'll pardon my French.
If there's more than enough grapes for everyone and one person takes more than their fair share, then, on the whole, it's fine. There's enough to go round.
If everyone tries to take more than their fair share, then the whole system falls apart.
When there are this many people, and this much visibility of the hustle, just seeing others prosper by cheating means a not insubstantial number of people will be in the "well I want grapes, and likely need to cheat to make sure I get my fair share" camp.
Instead - and i have spent all of 10 seconds thinking this through - what about we just pay people to snitch on a business/employer if its knowingly doing such things. Perhaps in % of the settlement and/or potential fall out costs.
That'd change behavior as well as catch issues soon enough to prevent them.
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.
The satisfaction of revenge and the entertainment value of watching it televised.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/albert-camus-reflect...
Public stonings, where you can bid on the rocks? Cut a thief’s hand off?
Treating a burglary as more severe than a multi million dollar pension fraud seems backward by any metric beyond the social status of the criminals involved.
Knowingly poison the population in search of profit? Nothing! No consequences!
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/traffic-stop-led-poli...
Is there any evidence that the amounts found in humans using non stick pans, for example, and not those drinking water downstream from an industrial source of “forever chemicals”, have any of these effects?
Second, yes, the pans are dangerous if you “abuse” them. By getting them to hot, using a mental utensil, or just using it after it has aged too much.
Assuming they did keep it a secret, we had so many other hazards that were (and still are) in common use: lead, mercury, tobacco, chlordane, asbestos, etc... So even if true; even if you accept this as some conspiracy, it would seem to pale in comparison to the list I just gave. We seemingly survived and thrived with with substances far worse than a little plastic running around in our bloodstream, yet this remains the topic of the day and it makes me wonder how real the outrage is (proportionate to other hazards) or if this is just liberal minded "see the big companies are out to get us and this is just the current example". It would be far more persuasive imho to just argue the later point independently, because the plastic (using the term loosely) topic comes up so frequently that to some of us it is just repetitive and not really constructive.
Of course, as opposed to the objective minded "there is no conspiracy ever, when it is repeatedly demonstrated that corporations will poison, experiment on and destroy human lives if it favors their bottom line and they think they can get away with it, this is not to be interpreted as a pattern or structural issue, it's just coincidences and 'bad' individual actors all the way down".
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-07-31/pfizer-pays-us75m-ove...
https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/No_More_Bhopals_Env...
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o681
Their questioning whether the outage surrounding a specific hazard is proportionate to its known danger does not mean they believe no hazards exist.
Out of curiosity as to why 3M would insert this commonality into me to help us share a sense of solidarity, I looked up some safety-related research papers. I came across a 3M technical paper by Seacat et al. (2002)[1], which claims that under their experimental conditions, no harmful effects were observed up to a certain dose.
Seeing this perfectly illustrates just how much science and technology are dictated by the institutions they are affiliated with.
[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12075127/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/10/health/pfas-pesticides-indust...
We really are one fucked up species. But can evolution even produce anything better? Anything that's not so prone to coordination problems?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
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?
If a village of 20 people found out one of their members had been poisoning them for years, knowingly, to attain status as the mage/technocrat/leader, I suspect their punishment would be severe.
Instead, any one person or small group of people feels powerless against a seemingly infinite bureaucracy and a justice system that would sooner punish "vigilantes" than hold powerful people to account for their malice and damage to society.
You give more agency to the modern individual than I do, I think.
Culture is something we inherit, but it's something we can change. If we want things to be less fucked up for the next generation, we can do that. As many before us have.
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.
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.
People aren't motivated solely by the risk of being caught. Some people tell themselves that everyone else must be trying to cheat, so it's okay for them to cheat. But this type of thinking isn't a law of nature, it's just a human flaw.
The amount of cheating is not a fundamental constant. Given that people are social animals and that we tend to be stronger as a group, in fact you'd expect that prosocial behavior is good for the species. If fucked up is to mean anything, poisoning the environment with forever chemicals ought to make the fucking cut, if you'll pardon my French.
If there's more than enough grapes for everyone and one person takes more than their fair share, then, on the whole, it's fine. There's enough to go round.
If everyone tries to take more than their fair share, then the whole system falls apart.
When there are this many people, and this much visibility of the hustle, just seeing others prosper by cheating means a not insubstantial number of people will be in the "well I want grapes, and likely need to cheat to make sure I get my fair share" camp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua
Nothing changes even if we know about these chemicals