[testybesty2]

Every time I read articles like this I lose faith in capitalism a little bit.

The oil industry knew about about green house gases for decades, the tobacco industry knew about lung cancer, and the sugar industry tried to blame fat in foods. And now this?

It's hard to dispute that capitalism has given us some amazing goodies (Disney, iPhone, instant noodles), but on balance I think it might be a net negative.

It feels like the incentives are all wrong. How can we trust the solutions they give us, when the solutions are pushed through for profit?

[pasttense01]

But for all these things is there any evidence that industry knew things which the government did not? I think for all these things you will find government funded research had already discovered the problems by the time industry funded research did. So the overwhelming issue is that government failed to fix the problems that the government funded research found.

[UtopiaPunk]

The incentive is just profit. The idealized version of capitalism is that companies that solve problems or make the world better are rewarded by people buying their product or service. Sometimes that happens, but a lot of the time there's more money in making sugary drinks or weapons of war or snake oil. Additionally, a lot of "costs" are hidden from producers, like the consequences of dumping pollution in the river, or the cost of cheap plastic garbage taking up space in a landfill, so market forces are inadequate. And finally, a big cost to companies is labor, so they are always trying to find ways to cheapen human worth, exploiting illegal aliens who won't bring cases to trial, fighting unions, using prisoners for their labor, moving production to countries with weak labor protections to take advantage of child labor, and in the past slavery.

The incentive is just profit. A lot of the time, there's a lot of profit to be made from human suffering. That's why I'm an anti-capitalist.

[zaroth]

On balance, capitalism is the most net positive feedback system ever created by humanity.

The incentives here included studying and improving a product’s safety. To the point where they were constructing model test homes to conduct controlled experiments.

Cooking inside is messy. Mostly from the burnt particles of food & grease that fill the air. Installing and using a vent helps.

The vent above my gas stove is powerful enough there’s a relay which opens a baffle to let in outside air into the HVAC return air ducts, which automatically activates when I turn on the vent, to ensure negative pressure isn’t potentially backdrafting a chimney. This was required by the State building codes for installing gas stoves, which were developed based on AGA research.

[hellisothers]

Tell me more about your vent system, we’re remodeling the kitchen and the main improvement we’re excited about is the biggest hood/vent we can jam in here to deal with the smoke from all the amazing cooking. Two concerns are chimney backdraft and choking the airflow because of no inlet.

[zaroth]

It’s call “make-up air”.

Usually installed in the return air duct if you have a furnace, they put in a ~6” duct running from the air return to the outside world, with an electric baffle.

Two wires (like thermostat control wire) are run from vent to the baffle. All the big vents have a place where you can plug in to sense when the vent is turned on. Fancier models will have slower speeds that don’t trigger the baffle to open, and only open it at higher speeds.

I got a really powerful range hood. It has 3 speeds but I wish it had a fourth even slower/quieter one because even on minimum it’s pretty loud. So for example if I’m baking in the gas oven, I’d love to have a lower setting that could just ventilate a little without being loud.

[midoridensha]

>It's hard to dispute that capitalism has given us some amazing goodies (Disney, iPhone, instant noodles), but on balance I think it might be a net negative.

A net negative compared to what? Feudalism? Stalinism? Capitalism certainly has real problems as seen here, but I haven't seen a real-world system that's proven to work any better; all the alternatives have been much worse. Usually, when people complain about capitalism and how they want something else, they can't seem to define what they really want, or what they want is some fairy-tale system that doesn't actually exist and probably wouldn't work if it were tried in the real world. The alternatives that have been tried have been disastrous.