link :
TheConversation.Com
… and there was a very interesting episode on NPR radio about a great man in this story :
Clair Cameron Patterson
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson
He Triumphs against corporations’ greed in the end 👍.
Bayer also sold medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS to Asia and Latin America when outlawed in the USA in the 80s. Why in all fuck their corporate charter wasn’t permanently suspended and the company sold off is BEYOND me.
Yes, fitting word, but not the best since it has a double meaning (sexual).
And all current politicians, and most Lemmy users, and certainly all reddit users are brain damaged as a result.
…“we could improve our machining tolerances and stop using ancient sand casting techniques where the cores float and move. Or hell we could just ignore those low quality crudes from Venezuela”…
“Nah! Dumb consumers are best for capitalism. Give them lead.”
All airplanes are still using leaded fuels, so if you live near the end of a runway… depending on the average education level of the area, you likely have the cheapest real estate in the region.
This is a heartbeat of history; people who can profit off of the suffering of others will do so remorselessly.
So many other stories you can look up. Obvious shit like climate change or smoking, where it’s well-known how unrepentantly evil the industry has been in suppressing the science and research they KNEW indict their product.
For an equally-tragic but less-well-known story, you could look into the Radon Girls. That’s a heartbreaking saga of corporate malfeasance where the bad guys basically got away with it.
If you like podcasts, this is narratively similar to the content in two of my favorites. You’re Wrong About and Well There’s Your Problem. The former is more about cultural moments and moral panics, the latter is oriented towards the arrogance and carelessness of engineers (though sometimes is just historical stories).
I’m reasonably sure it’s Radium Girls, but yes: tragic, and totally on brand for capitalism.
SciShow did a piece (partially) about this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXEFQH5UXHQ
And Veritasium did a deeper dive a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA
The whole situation is thoroughly fucked up, but hey, as long as people are making money amirite? 😑
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=LXEFQH5UXHQ
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
ideally, I was hoping (but I failed) to put the spotlight on the positives :
1- Now we don’t have lead in gasoline (except for airplane & sport races) ,
2- Put the emphasis on one hero on this story which I name in the body of the post,
3- See how people can triumph over greed.
Man, that The Conversation article is just listing individual events and it still reads like a crime scene. Obviously, because it was a crime, but deep down I had still a tiny bit of hope that the companies were not quite as blunt about it.
