Oddbean new post about login | logout ProPublica just came out with another amazing piece of journalism, this one on the efforts by the capitalist firm Philips Respironics to hide the harms caused by its products. Philips makes CPAP ventilator machines designed to be worn while asleep, creating positive air pressure to help people with sleep apnea. Back in 2010, Philips added a foam to its CPAP machines to reduce rattling that kept users awake at night. The foam Philips chose degrades, releasing toxic carcinogens directly into the mouths, throats, and lungs of users. Philips knew about this *right away.* It spent years hiding reports that it was legally obligated to share with US governmental regulators. It waited over a *decade* to issue a recall. Thousands of people are sick; hundreds have died. Go ahead and read the whole thing, if you have the stomach for it. It’s a typically excellent piece of investigative reporting by ProPublica: https://www.propublica.org/article/philips-kept-warnings-about-dangerous-cpaps-secret-profits-soared 1/ #thread
The story is, unfortunately, sickeningly familiar to anyone who pays attention to capitalist malfeasance. The story usually goes: A firm makes a decision to alter a product to be more competitive. (In this case, Philips was racing with competitors to create a quieter CPAP machine.) The decision turns out to be bad and harm customers. The firm, rather than protecting customers at its own cost, forges ahead and hides the harm, lies about it, denies it, until the weight of evidence is insurmountable and the firm belatedly takes steps to remedy the problem while fighting torts against it. We could be talking about Philips or the Ford Pinto; we could be talking about cigarettes or fossil fuels. They all know; they know virtually from the first moment that they’re harming customers; they do it anyway. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ 2/
My daytime job happens to be scrubbing PCBA bill of materials for EU and US environmental regulations. I clear parts to be used against tens of thousands of regulated substances, which are on dozens of lists such as RoHS, REACH, SVHS, PFAS, Prop65. Your Communist indoctrination is showing, you behaviors is irrational. You need mental health treatment ASAP.