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‘Forever chemical’ bans face hard truth: Many can’t be replaced
(www.japantimes.co.jp)
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Asbestos. You know how long they knew that was killing people? Lead, they knew that was toxic, kept using it. Business, under capitalism, is designed to find the cheapest path to pull in more money. Regardless of the consequences. Changing might not even mean all that much more, in cost. They would still act like they can't at all, because any back slide looks bad on their charts. They have no financial obligation to the environment and or people. Change that and they'd become innovators overnight.
My favorite was white phosphorus, which caused Phossy Jaw in the employees making the matches. Switching to red phosphorus would mean a 1% increase in cost or reduction in profits (wasn't sure which based on the article). Doing so would mean your employees' bones wouldn't dissolve. It took regulation to force them to switch.
Then there's the Radium Girls.
Asbestos is genuinely a wonderful material. It's heat-proof, it's a wonderful insulator, it's one of the best filters for gas masks, it's wonderful for use in brake pads and clutches, etc.
It's just a damn shame it causes cancer in living things.
No country claiming to be communist has banned asbestos btw
Criticizing capitalism doesn't imply communism or socialism. You can just criticize capitalism without suggesting an alternative.
Your jump to communism It's like saying "I guess I have to kill myself, because some parts of life are hard." There are other directions one could take.
Reread my comment. Nowhere did I mention communism but rather countries claiming to be so. I would argue they aren't communist at all, only state capitalist but that's a tiring discussion to have.
It was not in defence of capitalism but rather to ammend the criticism to include countries pretending to be not capitalist.
I can see how my one-sentence-wording fails to get this point across though and looks like your average "bUt cOmmUniSM bAd" comment whenever capitalism is mentioned.
Ok, but why bring up either communism or countries claiming to be communist? Going up on this thread, I don't see any references to it. Did I miss something?
The comment made me look up which nations banned asbestos and also which didn't.
Obviously the US hasn't - what a surprise - unlike the majority of developed nations who have outlawed it.
Then I was curious about whether former "communist" countries banned asbestos. After all, capitalist businesses - mentioned in the comment - didn't quite exist in those, everything was state-owned. The entire profit motive was gone.
And with the exception of individual products containing asbestos, such as sprayed asbestos being banned in the GDR a century before its capitalist counterpart, none of them implemented a general ban. From quick research, the first general bans started appearing in the early 90s.
Since these nations regularly tout(ed) themselves as being far more "progressive" than capitalistic one's I felt it necessary to highlight this discrepancy.
So that's roughly the reason I made the original comment. Although looking back it seems tangentially related to the original at best.
So you do associate anti-capitalism with communism. That means my original criticism of your post was valid.
I don't hold it against you. Usually, the next thing out of someones mouth after they criticize capitalism is communism or socialism. It's pretty easy to make that leap.
Yes, I do associate communism with anti-capitalism.
I consider it to be only a subset of anti-capitalism though, making up a portion but not all of it.
I guess what I intended to say was: The criticism of OP can be applied to every country on the globe, regardless of whether they consider themselves capitalist or not.