Sorry, I missed this reply - will run thru them very quickly as I see fallacies are so easily addressed.
PG&E: Over 100 plaintiffs, through approximately 20 law firms, have sued Pacific Gas and Electric and/or its parent, PG&E Corporation, in the Superior Courts of California in over 70 separate lawsuits. -Wikipedia (I assume you are referring to the explosion in 2010.)
What's your point here? Sympathy for PG&E? Really? People die because of negligence of this company, and your answer is "Well, look at all the shit they have to go through now." No, they were sued in 1996 for leaking chemicals into groundwater of a tiny town and lost, forced to pay out some $300 million. This doesn't stop business from doing it again. To them, it's simply a cost of doing business.
Let me repeat. Companies factor in fines as a cost of doing business. PG&E remains *VERY* profitable. $300 million dollars to them is to simply lay off a few thousand full-time employees - no big sweat for execs. These are people who love calculating risk and inevitably with large energy companies, quite a few decisions that weigh profits vs. the chance of indirectly killing people they.
Do you feel comfortable with people making those gambles? What if I mentioned some of them are Ayn Randian Objectivist A-holes who strongly believe Ayn Rand's stated gospel that average people lives aren't worth more than dirt, sufficiently exploitable? What an self-contradicting intellectual dilemma does that put you in?
Massey Energy: The claim you're probably making is that not following regulations is what lead to the explosion, and that if they'd just followed the regulations, everything would have been fine.
Again, I never ever say such things. I said that 9 safety violations were found to have directly *LEAD* to the deaths. Disasters really can happen when you follow the rules - but the likelihood of accidentally driving off a cliff if you are not legally drunk, driving illegally fast, or an unsafe car is considerably less so.
BP: Same as above. Regulations encourage faith in regulatory agency, faith and reason are contradictory, etc etc blah blah. And if environmentalists allowed us to drill in Alaska or closer to shore, BP would not have had to drill to such dangerous depths. Not that that means BP should have gotten off the hook. They chose to do what they did and still rightly had to pay damages and cleanup costs, as far as I know.
You think if Exxon were allowed to drill for oil in Alaska, BP would kindly discontinue their offshore drilling? How nice.
Faith and reason are contradictory. Why do you have such faith in objectivism when you can't even connect your ideology to basic common sense?
Monsanto/Agent Orange: Agent Orange was being used to give us an advantage in the Vietnam War by defoliating the trees that enemy guerrillas were hiding in. I don't think it was known at the time that it was poisonous. Monsanto (And Dow Chemical) simply manufactured it. Our army used it. But litigation was brought up against Monsanto anyway.
Of course it was known to be poisonous. Funny, if you want to talk true justice in terms of dollars, you'd think that a company that "negligently" produced a chemical that has maimed half a million people would be put placed out of business rather than making $12 billion a year. Hmm.
The Radium Girls: They sued U.S. Radium. There was wide media coverage over it. U.S. Radium's reputation was probably destroyed. Sounds like justice was done to me.
You're being funny. They DIED before they received any settlement money. Even if they lived, they'd have lived with incredibly uncomfortable disfigurements that no amount of money would've corrected.
Sorry, I missed this reply - will run thru them very quickly as I see fallacies are so easily addressed.
What's your point here? Sympathy for PG&E? Really? People die because of negligence of this company, and your answer is "Well, look at all the shit they have to go through now." No, they were sued in 1996 for leaking chemicals into groundwater of a tiny town and lost, forced to pay out some $300 million. This doesn't stop business from doing it again. To them, it's simply a cost of doing business.
Let me repeat. Companies factor in fines as a cost of doing business. PG&E remains *VERY* profitable. $300 million dollars to them is to simply lay off a few thousand full-time employees - no big sweat for execs. These are people who love calculating risk and inevitably with large energy companies, quite a few decisions that weigh profits vs. the chance of indirectly killing people they.
Do you feel comfortable with people making those gambles? What if I mentioned some of them are Ayn Randian Objectivist A-holes who strongly believe Ayn Rand's stated gospel that average people lives aren't worth more than dirt, sufficiently exploitable? What an self-contradicting intellectual dilemma does that put you in?
Again, I never ever say such things. I said that 9 safety violations were found to have directly *LEAD* to the deaths. Disasters really can happen when you follow the rules - but the likelihood of accidentally driving off a cliff if you are not legally drunk, driving illegally fast, or an unsafe car is considerably less so.
You think if Exxon were allowed to drill for oil in Alaska, BP would kindly discontinue their offshore drilling? How nice.
Faith and reason are contradictory. Why do you have such faith in objectivism when you can't even connect your ideology to basic common sense?
Of course it was known to be poisonous. Funny, if you want to talk true justice in terms of dollars, you'd think that a company that "negligently" produced a chemical that has maimed half a million people would be put placed out of business rather than making $12 billion a year. Hmm.
You're being funny. They DIED before they received any settlement money. Even if they lived, they'd have lived with incredibly uncomfortable disfigurements that no amount of money would've corrected.
But no, they all died.