Comment by vrganj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vrganj | Hacker News Reader

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> I don’t pick and choose to punish one of the dealers more harshly than the others because that one dealer had some internal research that cast doubt as to the likelihood that he would, at some time in the future, achieve a workable solution to a healthier/safer crack substitute that he currently publicly claimed to be working on.

What if they did so purposefully to undercut funding for crack rehab, with the express purpose to keep people addicted?

> People seem to be conflating “this company didn’t publish everything it thought about everything” (a standard we don’t hold companies to in general) with “…and the topic was climate change, so off with the company…”

It's because the topic is an existential threat to human survival that the company was knowingly worsening and manipulating people about. It's not "a standard we don't hold companies to in general", it's an unprecedented scale of harm. At some point the small claims court isn't enough, no matter how commonly it is used. Sometimes the infraction calls for the Nuremberg Trials instead.

Is what a scientist at Exxon wrote in 1988 more relevant than what hundreds of fossil fuel extraction, refining, transportation, and retailing companies are doing today and tomorrow?

An existential threat to human survival demands action to stop all of them not selectively or preferentially only the ones who knew a little more than others 38 years ago.

Doing the latter is not only nearly totally ineffective (as they’d be instantly replaced by others taking market share) but also ensures that companies take great pains to never do in-house research on things that might be harmful.

They are doing what they are doing today because we've been letting them get away with it for decades.

I've already agreed, yes, we need to obviously ban the practice of fuel extraction itself. But we also need to punish the organizations that have led us here and who's impunity set the precedent for the others to follow.

The fact they've been knowingly misleading us because they prioritized their profits over human survival needs to be addressed on top of the banning of future extraction.

These are not two mutually conflicting policies we need to choose from. We can and should address both.

> companies take great pains to never do in-house research on things that might be harmful

This is counter to how companies work, they are driven by market forces to do research to maintain their edge over the competition - they structurally need to do research because of what it can tell them about future market conditions, regulatory and attitude shifts etc etc so they can adapt their own practices. This is true for companies in harmful industries just as much as for any other. You can't just not do R&D in a competitive market.

But you can fund research in other labs/companies and then bring in-house the research you like to commercialize and leave research results you don’t like with companies like “Exxoff Research 37” if having negative research results becomes a liability.

You can then even truthfully claim to be funding basic research that doesn’t directly benefit your commercial interests.

If you hire a contract killer, you will still be punished for it, even though you didn't do any killing yourself.

I don't see why the same can't apply here.

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