[doubloon]

China is just adopting western ideas. Socialize the cost and privatize the profit. The western solution which is to make criminals of business people doesnt work well enough. Epa superfund sites go unfixed for decades. Governments should just print money and hire cleanup companies. Its like a massive jobs program for when AI takes normal jobs.

[Workaccount2]

Profit min-maxing precedes the west by a few millennia.

Ignoring morals to lower costs is so plainly obvious as a way to increase profits that it is almost an insult to insinuate that any one group of people didn't think of it themselves.

[droopyEyelids]

Any parent can see that "outsourcing externalities" is the default way of thinking of all humans.

Accounting for your externalities is something you have learn, and there is no guarantee individuals or societies learn it.

[NicoJuicy]

95% of all plastic from rivers comes from these 10, none are in the west:

Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.

https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2017/11/06/jus...

[rmah]

Are those rivers, by any chance, the rivers along which most people live? Weird that.

[bart_spoon]

Do 95% of the world's river-adjacent population live along those rivers? That's the question to be asking.