[randerson]

It's always a matter of time before a facility explodes for preventable reasons and costs the company billions in property damage and lawsuits. This decision to stop learning from mistakes and spreading awareness will hurt profits in the long run, not make more money. It'll also be harder to find people willing to work around chemicals if they can't trust the safety measures.

[andrewflnr]

Funny as it sounds, the real problem (or at least one of them) is that no one cares about long run profits anymore.

[fallingknife]

Why do profits, and the stock market, continue going up then? I've heard this nonsense about corporate short termism for decades, and the long term just never seems to arrive.

[andrewflnr]

The stock market tracks short term profits; most stock buyers are also short-termers. Profits that could have been had but were not, due to shortsighted decisions, are hard to measure and don't usually make the news. Similar for companies that slowly hollow out, or get killed by newer companies still in their market-building phases before they start turning the screws.

[fallingknife]

It's not just hard to measure, it's unfalsifiable nonsense.

[andrewflnr]

You can just watch it happen. Companies cut quality and ruin their reputation, or shrink from new markets due to fear of cannibalizing themselves, among other ways to sacrifice long term profit. There's a reasonable debate about how predominant it is in the economy, but not about whether it happens.

[pixl97]

Consolidation.

If I make short term profits off doing the wrong things I have more money to buy up my competition that incurs the cost now. By the time something bad happens there will only be a small bump down on the market.

Antitrust is important.

[blitzar]

everyone pivotted to ai from their pivot to the metaverse which was a pivot to blockchain

[lumost]

I forsee a lot of high skilled labor exiting high risk fields over the next few years. Many of the high end blue-collar jobs of north America are very low end in south America due to the relative risks involved e.g. mine workers.

[heavyset_go]

> It'll also be harder to find people willing to work around chemicals if they can't trust the safety measures.

Don't worry, they're counting on us all being so desperate we'll take those jobs, anyway.

[wvenable]

Bankruptcy. The people who profited the most will not see any consequences.

That's the beauty of our system: companies are at fault, not people, and companies can be destroyed and remade at will.

[forgotoldacc]

> costs the company billions in property damage and lawsuits.

The reality: the company makes a new company (that's identical to the old company in assets and operations) and says "we had nothing to do with the old company" and they're left off with zero consequences while the old company (that has no assets but holds legal liability) goes bankrupt and pays nothing.

There's also a new and improved method that avoids even this small amount of effort. Alex Jones introduced it. When you're found liable for a billion dollars in damages, just say, "I won't pay it. Fuck you." And there's absolutely nothing they can do.

The legal system means absolutely nothing now.