“Not only did we measure significant concentrations of PFAS in these containers, we can estimate the PFAS that were leaching off creating a direct path of exposure,” said study coauthor Graham Peaslee, PhD, professor of physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Notre Dame.”
I’m glad the EPA tried but have to wonder why congress can’t do their jobs.
If you learn to see the world the way capital sees it, it makes some sense.
If you tell a chemical company that it can't make X but it doesn't have a factory to make X, they are not going to be so sore about it.
If they've borrowed from the bank to make a factory that makes X and then you tell them they have to shut it down they are going to be a lot more upset. The EPA can't discharge their bank loan, for one thing.
there was a ban on the most wasteful uses of CFC, but the main effect was that people quit building new CFC factories, it took almost two decades to shut those factories down.
In the case of CFCs the dangers were hypothetical in the 1970s. It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1980s that the ozone hole was documented and the chemistry of how it happens really understood. (I was doing a student project analyzing satellite observations of chemical species in the atmosphere around this time.)
It is also telling that the aerosol spray can ban was in 1978 and Dupont’s patents for CFCs ran out in 1979. Dupont was a CFC advocate up until 1986 when they had patents for HCFCs, at that point they thought a ban was a great idea.
We’ve been through a regulatory treadmill since then where now the first generation of HCFCs are known to be powerful global warming gases and those are getting banned so these are being replaced by newer patented substances. Asthma inhalers that would have been cheap have been expensive because they’ve either getting filled with new F-gases or are dry power inhalers, either way they are still under patent.
Someone has to be the advocate for the thing the government is trying to regulate/ban, we have an adversarial court/justice/law system in this country. Of course the party with the most to lose is going to be the one on the side of against it and of course that party is going to stop advocating when they no longer have that interest.
It's a good thing that people with something to lose can influence the government and make their voices heard. It's the job of the regulators to take that information and correctly weigh it against the interests of the people they represent. The problem is and has always been the regulators.
You're painting Dupont as the bad guy for advocating for themselves while giving a pass (passively) to the people who are supposed to be advocating for us.
They can, but like many of us, they’ll go down kicking and screaming due to sunk cost. The difference is that they’re operating at the scope of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So they’re willing to kick and scream accordingly.
Seems like a good lens through which to view California politics, which is often dominated for better and worse by special interests like the trial lawyers, firefighters, etc…
Congress can't do much of anything. Their ability to pass anything more important than naming a post office is essentially nil. They can't even perform the basic operation of keeping the government open, except by heroic last-minute effort.
Congress' rules were designed to protect minority opinions, and they're easily taken advantage of to prevent anything from happening at all. A fair number of Congresspeople were elected with the specific goal of locking Congress up, and they're pretty effective at it.
In Parliamentary system this is somewhat equivalent to "hung parliament" and usually results in re-elections. Governments must prove minimum support to pass legislations before they can claim to be "in charge"
We deliberately designed it this way, to prevent one party from having too much control.
Instead, we have no control. The legislature is effectively useless. The executive branch continues on, under not-always-clear authority. The judicial branch can easily throw a wrench into that authority, often more for political reasons than legalistic ones.
Don't be hand wavey though, there's only one political party doing this bullshit, and they've been open about their strategy and goal since at least Obama, and possibly even as far back as Newt Gringrich.
And they seemed to have no problem "getting things done" when the task was to ram through a supreme court justice right before an election after spending a year saying you cannot approve a supreme court justice "during an election year"
> I’m glad the EPA tried but have to wonder why congress can’t do their jobs.
There is a certain large percentage of the population who vote in people who actively want to eliminate all oversight/regulations. How do you do that? Make the regulators look like they're not doing their jobs and say, "See? We just need to get rid of it all! They're wasting YOUR tax dollars!"
The natural outcome of the non delegation theory is that every member of congress needs to work at the mint printing money as that power can not be delegated to anyone else, federal prisons must close because there is no way we have enough representatives to run them.
Yes Congress did give the EPA authority to evaluate the evidence and promulgate rules but they did not give them the authority to violate the law. This is but the latest example of of the EPA being correctly guardrailed by the courts. I only wished that the courts could directly penalize the person at the EPA who knowingly exceeded their authority. Admittedly it was for a worthy cause but they or the Congress needs to remedy this through lawful channels.
“does not count as a significant new use since Inhance has been using this process since 1983”
> They're subversives pushing for a fascist dictatorship.
Like you, I used too feel like one side had bad faith motives and just wanted to break stuff and hurt people. It was a really miserable outlook to have.
Fortunately through life, I ended up meeting a lot of people and being exposed to a lot of political and philosophical diversity, and I learned that it isn't true at all. There are some small number who do want to destroy things, but even they mostly only want that to get to a better place in the long term, (and they see the collapse or destruction as necessary and inevitable to get there).
I encourage you to meet people on the other side and really get to know them. It probably won't change your political opinions, but it will correct an erroneous pessimism about people's motives. The world becomes a much better place when you stop operating in defense mode and operate in discovery mode instead, so it's definitely worth it.
I think you're missing the point that it's not grandma down the street that's got the bad faith motives. You can make as many politically opposing friends as you want that isn't going to prove that the people paid 6 figure salaries while still being paid insane amounts through lobbying are making sound logical decisions based on what's best for the people.
Thanks that's fair criticism. There's definitely a big difference between Grandma down the street and John congressman the political animal.
Though even among politicians I've found the same patterns. There are a higher percentage of partisans than in the general population, but they still have the same underlying motives. In my experience they tend to be more jaded, and tend to overly trust others or under trust based on the color of jersey they are wearing, but they mostly have good motives*
*Excepting corrupt people, which motives don't matter because their selfishness takes priority
> why congress can’t do their jobs.
> Maybe because the primary interest of half the elected representatives is to make sure it doesn't. They're subversives pushing for a fascist dictatorship.
I don't think it is that simple or a helpful analysis. Moreover, there's also a paradox there - we are talking about banning something here, which would be the outcome of either the-majority-have-ruled or a decree by a "dictator".
Project 2025 and everyone still supporting Trump, for starters.
Don't be obtuse. Mitch McConnell openly stated that their goal during Obama's presidency was to prevent him from doing anything.
Meanwhile, during Trump's presidency, democrats spent the whole time compromising to get things done, to keep the government open when they could, to keep things alive. Fucks sake, the ACA itself is one big compromise, it's an explicitly republican designed system!
But no, we are supposed to play pretend and "both sides" bullshit that democrats are somehow just awful, meanwhile the republicans bitch about border security for months, and democrats come out with a BIPARTISAN border security bill, in what is absolutely a PR defeat for them, to admit that the border could use more effort and money and security, which it does, and then that bill gets absolutely shut down, explicitly because the republicans did not want biden to get "a win".
So the border is a huge issue for millions of Americans, they cry and cry and cry that they are suffering and are just about to call in the National Guard because it's an absolute army of illegals coming across the border they say, but when Biden offers them a gimmy to fix it, to provide them everything they've asked for, they'd rather just continue suffering.
They are actively removing basic women's rights. But that's not "a facist dictatorship" if someone specifically saying they will be a dictator for a day if they are elected is elected!
Probably going to be flame city in this thread, but I think it’s worth asking: is it possible that even with collateral damage (killing women and children because of hallucinations) that AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI. But AI is really just another name for math, so maybe it’s not a useful conversation. Militaries use advanced tech and that’s nothing new.
This is a bizarre take. I've seen it multiple times, in multiple threads now. Somehow your only options are "kill women and children" in large amounts or carpet bomb. I feel like there are dozens, if not hundreds of other options if anyone gave a damn.
Ultimately, it's a calculus of "us vs them" and which lives are valued or devalued.
Relatedly, are police justified when they shoot at a house with 500 rounds, killing the suspect and their entire family that happened to be in the general vicinity? Is the math "one law enforcement > n lives as long as one was a (potential) badguy"?
If you wanted to do this with minimal civilian casualties, then you bring the ground forces in, block by block, and you clear things the old-fashioned way. You take casualties, but those are casualties who signed up to be "warfighters".
Now this IS inflamatory: I think we have a lot of warfighters and cops who are just plain cowards, that's the mentality. Why have a class of trained and armed people who are so afraid of dying that they'd rather kill anything and everything in their path than potentially be injured or killed?
I thought the ethos of the warfighter and law enforcement was "act as a shield, act as a bulwark, save lives, give my life so that others may be free, etc etc". Nowadays its "nah I'm not going in that school, there's badguys with guns and I might die, just stay outside".
That leads to a failure of imagination where somehow "blow up a building with innocent people as long as you got your target" seems somehow justified because you didn't risk a 'good guy' life. Cowardice.
In thinking through my response (as rational people do), I think I was a bit too inflammatory. I still agree with myself in principle but it's not quite fair to label people who want to live while doing their job as cowards. It's one of those two wrongs don't make a right. The innocents deserve to live, as do the warfighters. Being a warfighter (conscription aside) is a choice though - being 'collateral' is not. It would be great if those with the power to take a life put even this much thought into it.
> AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI
No. It's just a tool. People still configure the parameters and ultimately make decisions. Likewise modern missile do not make conflicts more or less ethical just because they require advanced physics.
The people mentioned in the article say that they spent about 20 seconds on each target and basically just rubber stamped them. In that case, I don't think people are ultimately making the decisions in a traditional sense.
Netanyahu has always been saying that they will kill every single last Hamas member, no matter the cost.
I mean, is anyone who paid attention surprised by this Lavender system? It's doing exactly what they said they were doing: kill everyone suspected of Hamas affiliation, no matter the cost.
We can have interesting ethical discussions about the AI aspect, but I feel that's not really what this is about.
I think that depends on what the alternative is. It seems to me that the problem is that there's no way for Israel to wipe out Hamas without massive collateral damage. However, instead of giving up on wiping out Hamas, they just decided that they are OK with the collateral damage.
I think the concern is that the AI is making life or death judgements against people. Some may of course be lawful combatants under the rules that govern such things, but the fact that an AI is drawing these conclusions that humans act on is the shocking part.
I doubt an artillery system using machine learning to correct its trajectory and get better accuracy would be controversial, since the AI in that case is just controlling the path of a shell that an operator has determined needs to hit a target decided upon by humans.
We need to consider what are the other options in that situation, my thinking is that due to Hamas being fully embedded in the civilian population, the only other "reasonable" method is to carpet bomb... After reading the article I much prefer the AI method.
Both of these options are war crimes. I think only talking about these two options presents a false dichotomy. There are many more options that could have been considered. For example, Israel could have accepted the hostage swap and then picked Hamas operatives slowly but surely given their superior military and intelligence. Israel however prefered killing lots of civilians as "collateral damage" in order to kill a few Hamas operatives and they didn't even manage to rescue hostages. The crime lies in the blatant disregard for civilian life in Gaza.
No the AI was the scapegoat for IDF deciding to "target" low-level enemies, then bombing them with bunker-buster 2000lb bombs that leveled entire buildings and city blocks around those targets.
The AI did something, but the IDF used it to justify effectively committing a genocide.
Weird, I feel like I read the opposite thing just last night; that historically, prior quakes didn’t cause tsmc to slow production significantly. Because earthquakes are expected there are safeguards in place.
Right. Urbanism is a primary driver of racial strife and violence. Look at crime stats. Cities make people violent. Nature makes people calmer and less likely to commit violent acts.
How do you feel about mopeds? You obviously hate cars, and seem to like bikes. Where is the equilibrium for you? Are pedal driven mopeds tolerable? Vespas? Sincere curiosity.
Check the GitHub profile of anybody that commits. Is there a photo of the person? Can you see a commit history and repos that help validate who they seem to be.
In this instance, noticing the people emailing to pressure you have fake looking names that start with adjacent letters and the same domain name.
Yes, it would have prevented this attack. It isn’t totally sufficient but it’s quick and easy and would have prevented this attack.
“Most people don’t want …”
I get it. I think the issue is that pushing junk code from malicious contributors into your project causes more hassle in the long run. If you just want to code and make stuff work, you should probably be careful who you pull from. It’s not just for the benefit of others, it’s first and foremost to protect the code base and the time and sanity of other contributors.
"Sorry, we had to kill open source software because bad people exist" -Microsoft laughing all the way to the bank.
The more paranoid walls you put up the more actual contributors getting into the movement say "eh, screw this, who wants to code anyway".
This isn't just a problems with OSS, this is a fundamental issue the internet as a whole is experiencing and no one has good answers that don't have terrible trade offs of their own.
