I drive through Dalton anytime I visit Chattanooga (a cool hipster city on the border of Georgia and Tennessee). The scale of manufacturing there is wild. There are so many factories.
Dalton makes something like 70-80% of the carpet in the world. They've had carpet factories there since I was a kid, but they're starting to expand into lots of other industries.
They've begun massively ramping up on solar panel production, for instance.
It used to be the only city between Chattanooga and Cobb County (in the Atlanta metro), but now factories have sprung up throughout the I-75 corridor from Acworth to Calhoun. And they're putting them up at breakneck pace.
You can easily see all the factories on a satellite view.
Just look at the I-75 corridor [1].
The folks working in these factories are making good money. They're able to afford 2,000 square foot homes in the rural towns they live in.
This little city is doing $10B in GDP. It's impressive if you've ever driven through there.
I live in Chattanooga; it's wild to me that the City of Dalton maintain$ thousands of acres of public land simply to spray above-surface "treated" [PFS-containing] effluent "water," primarily generated by their carpeters. Why doesn't (e.g.) Shaw Manufacturing do this, directly (they do all the usual tax offsetting to not just answer "they pay taxes!" IMHO).
This "treatment land" is literally adjacent to a river, which flows into Alabama... and becomes multiple other MSA's drinking supply. This interstate conflict is what first brought PFAs to national attention. Thank god it doesn't flow to my watersource, but that's naïve thinking it doesn't carryover in the winds, waters, fauna.
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>The scale of manufacturing there is wild.
It's primarily due to two things: lack of regulations (see: PFAs), subpar compensation (our "right to work" Southern Pride). There are practically no local IT jobs (handful of poorly-compensated churners), and most of the tech-elite around here work from home (25gbps fiber, asynch, to your door).
Volkswagon has silo'd their third-shift as we brace for the inevitable economy we deserve.
I forgot about Dalton. Used to pass it occasionally growing up if we were heading up north to visit family. I knew they were big on carpet, but I did not know they produced such high volumes of carpet there
I feel for the people living there and being affected by the pollution. The long term effects of chemical pollution are ugly.
But the CEO in the intro just seems like an odd choice. PFAS were known to cause issues for a long time, if you continued to use them for years then it is in your back too.
Being "surprised" this might eventually affect your own product line just seems naive. You might have trusted 3M but just blindly trusting a supplier is not an excuse at some point.
"I feel for the people living there and being affected by the pollution."
Isn't it all of us with carpets in our homes that are affected? (Albeit to a lesser degree—but also we are at the least partners in this if our buying carpets are destroying these other people's communities.)
I think “to a lesser degree” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The degrees of exposure are many orders of magnitude wide. Occupational exposure in a factory is far greater than living downstream from a polluter which is far greater still than being a far away consumer of the polluter’s products.
Your carpet doesn’t contain enough PFAS to create dangerous runoff and contaminate groundwater or entire rivers, but a town that manufactures most of the world’s mass produced carpeting is going to generate industrial amounts of pollution in a concentrated area.
You should probably be more worried about the flame retardants in the rebond carpet pad. Better these days, but older installed stuff had non-trivial PPM.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10237242/
Our review of industry documents shows that companies knew PFAS was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested” by 1970, forty years before the public health community.
I don't see any mention there of the dosage at which these toxic effects occur. That would be necessary to determine if the amount found in the environment is a concern or not.
>The toxicity of PFAS to humans has been linked to several health-related issues such as breast cancer,80 infertility,81 vitamin D deficiency,82 increased cholesterol,83 diabetes,84 altered metabolism,85 thyroid toxicity,86 atherosclerosis,87 osteoporosis,88 and cardiovascular diseases.61 Individually, various PFAS and their associated health-related issues are summarised in Table 1.
That's silly. The fact that it is toxic makes it a concern, and the fact that it is a concern means that if you're selling it you should find out yourself about the specifics.
It's like saying that you're not responsible for stealing a wallet because you didn't know exactly how much was in it.
A lot of things are toxic at high doses, yet have essentially no effect at low doses. The linear no-threshold model is a simplification that rarely matches reality.
Silly? There are plenty of substances that are toxic at high dose and innocuous, or even necessary, at low dose. Examples of the latter are vitamins A and B6.
The question of responsibility is of course not what we were talking about, but rather whether the statement "PFAS were known to cause issues" was in fact true. Too often we see possibility of harm being deliberately conflated with actually causing harm. Is it too much to ask for some honesty here?
The chemical differences between PFAS and vitamin A and B6 are beyond vast.
Comparing them betrays a complete ignorance of the molecular properties that, in combination with biological system processes, make A and B6 healthy at small doses and poisonous at large doses on one hand, and those that makes PFAS linearly poisonous at any given doses on the other. (And yes, you can be exposed to small amounts of toxins and be fine. That doesn’t change the toxicity of a given substance.)
Struggling to see how this could be anything but a bad faith argument.
It really feels along the lines of "prove lead is actually harmful rather than potentially harmful" with all the knowledge and evidence we currently have.
I guess a little bit of background is helpful, which most people don’t realize, about carpet production. A lot (a LOT) of carpet is some variant of polyester since it’s just a really nice durability + cost + stain resistance mix (although the latter is one of its big weaknesses comparatively, important to note). Thus there is significant demand for stain guard options.
Compounded on top of that is because although you can dye the polyester before it is extruded, this is the firm minority of carpet produced. Maybe a quarter or less? Usually you will dye it before spinning it into yarn or before tufting it (weaving it into the backing basically). However, it is often cheaper especially for solid carpet to essentially dunk the whole finished carpet into a vat for dyeing, or run it through a glorified conveyor belt to do much the same. I’d hazard a decent guess that the latter two methods are the worst offenders for pollution for obvious reasons. What’s a bit of a pity then is that it seems to me that this isn’t really inevitable (although if we stop entirely that’s a perfect recipe for some other country to undercut us even if they inherit the long term dangers too).
With that said, the CRI (Carpet and Rug Institute) is almost the epitome of what you’d imagine an industry group to be. And 3M/DuPont are, well, you know. So I’m sure the article doesn’t really exaggerate there.
Finally I’d say that the upshot for all of us should be that regulation and pressure work. There was a calculation made whether intentionally or not, explicitly or implicitly, that if this came out to be bad then the big chemical companies could be blamed (and could further be reliably counted on to have engaged in outright unethical activity that makes blaming them a somewhat valid strategy too).
Source: sold carpet for a few years and was actually curious about the industry unlike many of my peers
No one dunks finished carpet in dye.
The dye house dyes the fiber, pre construction.
https://youtu.be/FG2-af0xYOA
The treatments like stain master are/were the problem, not the dye.
Carpet is a wonderful product, even polys. It’s good we’re having a conversation about it, but vinyl flooring has far out passed carpet , and it is full of awful carcinogens, made in china, not disclosed, secret recipes. But , it can be unstable and release into your home / office / work place
I grew up in Dalton and went to school with the children of these carpet company leaders (many of whom are now senior members of those same companies). My parents still live there.
It doesn’t surprise me that Dalton Utilities operated poorly and appears to have been in cahoots with the carpet companies to cover up the risk. Dalton is a place where education isn’t always valued but relationships are. Plus, carpet is the back bone of the economy there — issues with carpet impact the community heavily, making it difficult for anyone to stand in its way.
There’s a real sense of fear and helplessness in the community there as this information comes out.
It’s a lesson in the dangers of unregulated capitalism, but it only matters if we’re paying attention. There’s a role for government to support and protect citizens from companies whether it’s PFAs or AI.
With the on-going elimination of the EPA at the US federal level, this could be the future for many States. And States with a strong State level "EPA" will be at the mercy of up-river states that pollute their own waterways.
It's so convenient that all these people waited until retirement to speak out, but they also said they weren't doing anything wrong? Zero morals by anyone in this story.
It is easy to be ethically and morally responsible, after one becomes rich, after one is retired. Until then, it is enough to follow the law just enough to not get fined. Actually, even that is a tall ask these days - fines are just cost of doing business.
It sucks that it is this way, but society seems to have largely accepted it
Fine are the cost of doing business... FOR COMPANIES.
For individuals: arrest, jail, prison, and horrifically crippling fines are normal.
An individual kills 1 person, and its 15y to life. But if youre an 'insurance company' and make policies in abeyance of insurance and arbitrarily deny 30% of claims getting many killed (Luigi says hi), thats perfectly fine. Youre a business leader making lots of money.
You steal $100 from the till at $shitretailjob and company calls cops and has you arrested. BUT if they fraudulently change timesheets and steal $100 from you, wellllll thats a civil matter.
Or, a company made 1B dollars but spent $990M, they only owe taxes on 10M$. But if I make $100k and spent $90k, I still pay taxes on 100k, not 10K.
This country should be called the Corporate States of America. That fiction has more rights than I or any other non-billionaire average human will ever have.
China is definitely different in this particular aspect. The balance of powers in "state vs corporations" is completely different from the US. And China is seeing massive benefits from this particular aspect of its country, it's closely related to their ascension vs. the decline of the US in particular.
Before people turn to Reddit-style downvoting and flagging, this isn't a vouch for China as a country on the whole. It has plenty of other problems that certain Western countries don't have. I'm simply talking about the specific topic at hand.
Yea, when the communist party thinks an industry should change it changes in the way the communist party says. Of course it is often not without side-effects.
Can you enumerate some of these benefits? They famously arrested Jack Ma for not bending to the CCP enough. I don’t think that’s really a benefit (e.g. if the equivalent in the US was Democrats arresting any CEOa politically against them).
They're countless. Can you not think of any major issues as of 2026 directly caused by the enormous power that megacorporations hold in the US? I struggle to believe you can't. If you can, then it should be easy to see that at least some of them would not happen in China because of the opposite balance of power.
Just to give one example, look up the crackdown on Alibaba and platform monopolies. You also mentioned Jack Ma. The Ant Group IPO he was pushing, was likely to be a bad thing for most of Chinese society.
How did Netflix do making a business decision that defied the wishes of the Ellison family? With Trump 47 there are literally pages of this sort of stuff.
Other notable non-Trumpist example is Joseph Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest. He refused to comply with a request for phone records without a warrant. The reaction was a drop in Federal business and a prosecution for insider trading.
That was over 20 years ago? And there were half a dozen Qwest executives who were profiting from insider trading on inflated revenues that started in 1999, long before the NSA incident in 2001. I remember it clearly because I had the misfortune of being a shareholder in that dog.
I can call these hypocrisies to light. I do so on the off chance that we gain enough support to start reversing end-stage capitalism.
Im not going to list factoids of what rank we are or arent. Its honestly irrelevant. Im stuck here, since I have no familial claim of citizenship elsewhere.
So, yeah. I speak out here and in person, about these abuses.
Eventually, we'll do better. Takes time. Probably longer than I have alive.
> Companies committing fraud do get caught and the penalties are often larger than the fraud brought in.
The problem is, we don't send companies to prison for wrongdoing. It's always just a fine, so breaking the law boils down to a cost x risk / benefit analysis.
Why is it always a fine? Let's invent a prison for companies. Revoke the corporate charter, order it to cease operations, and freeze all trading of the company's shares for N years. Maybe that would be enough for corporate leadership, the board, and shareholders to take wrongdoing seriously.
But also, what if you have those ideas and thoughts from the beginning and during the entire time, yet also build your life on those systems you despise, then you use your "won" resources to fight against them, isn't that at least better than the alternatives?
We built our modern society on the principle that profit must be prioritized over morality, they're just conforming to systematic incentives. Those who sell their souls to the devil don't get to act shocked when they wind up in hell.
> Those who sell their souls to the devil don't get to act shocked when they wind up in hell.
Which is everyone, since everyone has their pension invested in a giant pool made of of unethical companies that we can't fine, ban or let fail because it would destroy people's retirements who will then vote in an angry way to reverse this, or it will destroy some upstream national important industries that are very well regulated, or lobby very well, like Purdue pharma.
It's a collective fault, not that of only a handful of people.
I feel like this supposes a better world where most people are educated, rational, and calm investors with the time, money, and energy to actively manage a diversified portfolio.
Or I guess you could get there by abolishing the stock market as it exists, which seems more likely.
I served in an executive role for a non-Federal government organization. Think a senior director, not a political position.
My stock holdings had to be disclosed, and were and still are publicly viewable. They audit them and explore potential conflicts. When I was promoted, I had to justify and certify potential conflicts due to long existing stock holdings of myself and my son, which were subject to monitoring and I was not allowed to participate in certain activities without counsel approval. Even that was only permissible because I asked for specific permission due to the hardship I would face from tax liability. If I hadn’t asked for that permission I could’ve been subjected to a civil penalty or even criminal prosecution.
That’s required for public confidence. The federal rules are stricter. A Federal official can be subject to a fine for displaying a political lawn sign at their home. Their supplemental retirement plan obscures the corporate affiliations of their investments.
Unfortunately, you’re displaying the nihilist, uninformed perspective which put fascists in power. By saying the president is corrupt, but so is everybody else you’re implicitly supporting and endorsing the behavior. That’s what they want.
>That’s required for public confidence. The federal rules are stricter.
You're trying to hide behind a bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, which is how the likes on Nancy Pelosi can constantly beat the stock market by a wide margin, and yet not raise any legal eyebrows.
Not putting you in the same basket as her, just saying that just because there are rules in place, doesn't mean they have the desired preventing effect you talk about, because it's the enforcement that's lacking. Just because the policies keep YOU honest, doesn't mean they apply to everyone else.
>Unfortunately, you’re displaying the nihilist, uninformed perspective which put fascists in power. By saying the president is corrupt, but so is everybody else you’re implicitly supporting and endorsing the behavior. That’s what they want.
You're soo offtopic that it's laughable. Sure buddy, everyone with a different opinion than you is a fascist, only you have the right answer to everything from within your bubble.
Why do you think that special forces officer was arrested for insider trading but not Trump's friends? Now tell us again, how there's no legal double standards, and your legal mumbo jumbo prevents insider trading.
It's actually not convenient at all. Consider this: animal study to human study fail all the time.
In another world, there could have been NO impact at all to human beings and PFAS could be just another random chemical the body doesn't clear but doesn't actually do anything and sits there inert.
I know everyone's pissed about this but the thyroid/other connections stuff happens 10 years later as a result and these are idiot business people playing in waters they don't understand (and neither did medicine at that time). You could say, "you can't take the risk." For me these questions are maybe we need to take a deeper/closer look at what are permissible risks and at what point.
But you could use the same logic to not make any advancement ever. No antibiotics because it will cause resistence. No chemo because it will cause damage and death. People want there to be a Dr. Eggman or Hitler in this story because it's turned out to be so impactful. Like Aesbestos which solved for fire, just poorly - carpet was solving for comfort, sound deadening, and emotional well being. We just can't necessarily quantify that as easily.
It's fantastic that science continually grows in understanding and can attribute once thought "inert" chemicals to problems. "How evil children playing with matches" are though, is asking the wrong question. These people were stupid enough to say - "there's cancer in rats, lets just keep going".
True, but if you contaminate water, and people, with chemicals not supposed to be there; I feel the burden should be on you to prove the chemicals are not harmful.
> you could use the same logic to not make any advancement ever
No you couldn't - the measures taken to prevent contamination were inadequate, they could've innovated while also following the rules. And if not, no business is owed a viable business model, certainly a random strangers heath isn't worth the price of profiting from easy-to-clean carpets.
> We just can't necessarily quantify that as easily.
Quantify what?
> can attribute once thought "inert" chemicals to problems
we (or America) have a whole system of classifying chemicals as safe for human consumption or not. Whatever was thought about PFAS, I don't believe they had been proven safe enough to dump into drinking water?
>But you could use the same logic to not make any advancement ever. No antibiotics because it will cause resistance. No chemo because it will cause damage and death.
I understand the argument you are making, and I'm no fan of govt/regulations, but you will notice that often basic testing of toxicity/side effects is missing or the system is gamed.
One example I recently came across: antidepressant drugs are tested on people for around 12 weeks and then labeled safe if there are no side effects or reversible side effects. To summarize: profits overrides and safety concerns.
Better to not be a hypocrite and continue abusing your hard exploited capital?
It's the banality of evil over and over again. Can't really blame the individual, with some extreme exceptions, otherwise by calling people out as you are doing you are participating in perpetuating the problem without contributing with anything new.
It would be tremendously interesting, I think, to learn all of the Chemistry involved in carpet manufacturing, both historical and current-day, both for carpets which are manufactured domestically and those manufactured abroad (different regulatory frameworks = probable different and/or subtly different chemical processes)...
Now, that sounds really boring and potentially a waste of time, right?
Well, yes, and no, and yes!
Well it's complicated!
I would speculate (being horrendously undereducated on the subject!) that there probably exist a set of chemical processes which could create Carpets without any harmful environmental waste or residual chemicals which subsequently require disposal.
What these would be or could be, I as-of-yet do not know...
It's a subject that needs research... a lot of research... lots and lots of research!
But, while it might sound like a really boring, uninteresting, "there's nothing to see here" kind of goal, keep in mind this quote from the article:
>"Mohawk logged more than $3.4 billion in net sales. Shaw Industries reported $4.2 billion."
Yup, the global carpet market is worth... (wait for it!)... "Billion$"!
So -- an interesting problem for present and future Scientists/Chemists! Crack it (in whole or in part!) and your solution or partial solution could be worth Billion$!
I mean, I'd put that up against a Clay Millennium Prize for solving a complex Math problem, I'd put that against a Nobel Prize or Fields Medal or Dirac Medal or Feynman Prize!
Yup, solve The Carpet Chemistry Problem(tm) (let's give it a name!) -- and your share of Billion$ (as Carl Sagan would say!) could be yours! :-)
(I now will humbly submit this post for the obligatory yes-I-know-they-are-coming downvotes! :-) )
In this society, appearance, convenience, and justifying one's existence with unnecessary, destructive labor are more important than the ecosystems which support them. Humans are the invasive, destructive species.
Also(I'm absolutely not taking corporate side here), she says, "I feel like, I don’t know, almost like there’s a blanket over me, smothering me that I can’t get out from under." because of PFAS levels but then look at the corporate products/chemicals she covers her body in daily, and accepts money from others to do the same. If you are going to be outraged, at least be consistent about it.
That's wild to me that that is how you know the risks of cigarettes. I forget just how many people rely on corporate authority to "warn" them of everything. That puts many of my peers in a constant state of fear. I put the word warn in quotes because it is only to insulate themselves against future lawsuits and revenue loss.
I just used it as an obvious example. I knew cigarettes caused cancer at some point growing up. I'm concerned of course about the abundance of products that I don't know about—wishing as a community we did more to label those.
Anthropocentric thought is a problem and it shows. How about as a community not needing corporations to tell you how to exist while they destroy ecosystems around us? Maybe if they label everything, that'll make it alllllllll okay.
Ultimately it's because we've (as people) let corporations have too much of influence in politics and daily life. As such they will continue to sociopathically enshittify everything around them without compunction because the only guiding axis is "line must go up". Everyone can be absolve themselves from any wrong doing with the banal "I was just following orders" when the orders were to make the line increase at any cost.
We need a corporate death penalty. Probably combined with something that will put the fear of God in anyone who thinks only along the axis of profit.
If by we you mean the US this would require a dramatic change in the culture.
Just look how USAmericans view the regulations and rules that are imposed on businesses in the EU - what you propose would require a much harsher regulation than in the EU currently and even the current regulations seem extreme to Americans and proposing regulations like that would probably be political suicide
You mean that because people take issue with the fact that the EU implements everything in almost the worst and most intrusive way possible? Sorry, you forgot to accept my view conversation cookie and I don’t want to be personally liable because you didn’t, so this response will be cut off in order to
I think this proves my point.
The kind of regulations that GP proposed are just not realistic in US culture unless something changes dramatically.
I agree that cookie banners shouldn’t exist - but too many companies love to collect and sell my personal data so that is their current workaround. I would love for the EU regulation to clamp down on this as well but it’s a never ending process.
The banners were devised by the adtech conoanies as a way they though could bypass the GDPR, in the most anti-user way possible. But "allow all" was easy.
Its also likely those banners arent even legal to begin with.
This whole cookie banner law is an example of horrible co panies will act in order to subvert the letter and spirit of laws.
Clearly. It is definitely just about a pop-up and not anything else that was alluded to! How astute! You’re from the EU though I suspect that you’ve never even read that law in detail.
When complaining about poor regulations you chose a cookie popup as an example. You couldn’t think of anything less trivial? If that’s what your mind reaches for when you think of “poor regulations” you’ll have to forgive me for assuming you have nothing of substance to add to the discussion.
Your substance has been “I don’t know what I’m talking about, so you must not know what you are”. Impressive. I’d suggest reading more and assuming less.
Those cookie banners aren't required for conversations -- a persistent session cookie would be enough (if you don't want to make the user sign in every time). The cookie banner implementation is a burden companies choose to place on themselves (and then to burden their users).
I think it's a chicken and egg problem around politics not necessarily a "cultural issue", which rings like victim blaming, it's politically suicidal only because the way that lobbying works and how we structure campaign financing. We only really have pro-business-does-no-wrong+blue bits or business-does-no-wrong+red bits, we don't have any effective other voices.
Again, harsher regulation is only "harsher" if it's purely reductive or increases the burden right. Indoor synthetic fiber carpets might not be the best example here, but something like health insurance is more easy to grok.
For the sake of the article though I'll try with carpets. If we issued regulations that said "no more companies making indoor carpeting that pollutes our environments and poisoned people" then used those resources elsewhere like encouraging sheep farming and carpet making, you would be to mitigate the pollution while not depriving people of their floor coverings.
It's pretty much a solved problem. All highly developed countries still have some manufacturing - some more, some less - and they comply with today's strict environmental regulations.
Many things could be manufactured more cleanly, but then the capitalist class will have slightly less obscene wealth by their stealing of profits and pushing of the cost onto society.
The problem is with the manufacturers being evil, selfish environmental nightmares.
Stuff has to be made somewhere. This argument is essentially predicated on the idea that it's okay for some places to be polluted and for some people to have to deal with it but not for other places and people. What you're really saying is "When people talk about how they want manufacturing back, they conveniently forget the pollution impacts people who live here instead of China and India, where it's totally okay."
Domestic manufacturing has a lot of advantages from the standpoint of total pollution. I guarantee you that even with lax American environmental rules, the pollution caused by a factory in Georgia is still lower and less hazardous to workers and the surrounding community than if the same factory were in India. Furthermore, our government is at least theoretically capable of adding better protections for workers and communities, while our government is going to have a hard time enforcing pollution rules overseas.
I don't think you are racist or xenophobic. I just think that when people make this argument they don't think about the fact that this stuff is still getting manufactured somewhere if it's not made here, and basically the complaint is that Americans are having to deal with the consequences rather than people in other countries.
When people extol the virtues of manufacturing, I’m always reminded of the poll where 80% of Americans say that the country would benefit from a bigger manufacturing base but only 25% are interested in actually working in manufacturing. This isn’t an American thing btw - I’ve had arguments with brits and others who argue passionately that the country has been destroyed by the relative decline in manufacturing but when I ask “so you’d prefer to work in a factory?” it provokes fairly confused responses like “no but other people would”….
Whether I intend to work a factory job or not I can still decide that unemployment in the U.S., especially unemployment of blue-collar workers, would be better served by local industry than allowing for homelessness or a dependency on welfare. Never mind that there might also be national security issues addressed by local manufacture.
The opposite, expecting everyone in the country to aspire to white-collar professions, is to me much more clearly an elitist (or at least irrational) position to have.
>The opposite, expecting everyone in the country to aspire to white-collar professions, is to me much more clearly an elitist (or at least irrational) position to have.
This, when you have everyone go to college and then they'll be shocked to be unemployed or work for peanuts since there's an oversupply of college grads and not much demand.
Here in Austria people working in construction cam earn way better than SW engineers because the former have an oversupply and the latter a shortage.
If you need a mobile app or a Java app, the're dime a dozen developers but if you need a plumber, lock smith, facade, roof specialist, well good luck.
The days when a college degree were an instant ticket to a well paid job for life are over.
I have worked enough blue-collar jobs to know that there exist people for whom technical work is a non-starter. Not that they are somehow dim and incapable of learning engineering, but "work" that is not done through labor, that does not show in a tangible way a day's effort… is anathema to them.
Still it's supply and demand issue. The west has had 20-30 years of grooming the youth that going to college is the right path to middle class lifestyle and blue collar jobs are for losers who are too stupid to study. You can't be shocked when the supply demand reverses. South Park even had an episode mocking this, with plumbers being the new tech bros, and tech bros being unemployed.
> but "work" that is not done through labor, that does not show in a tangible way a day's effort… is anathema to them
Same applies within white collar jobs too. Some engineers want to work in hardware, firmware, mechanical jobs, because the output is tangible, instead of pushing JSONs to the cloud, even if that's not more complicated than the other.
Dalton has been the worldwide leader in carpet manufacturing since before I was born. Multiple generations of people have worked in those factories. They earn good money and can afford big houses and savings.
You should talk to the people of Dalton. They're really proud of it. The first thing they tell you is they're from the "carpet capital of the world". Without fail they will mention that to you. It's so ingrained that it's part of their identity.
I don't think they'd be happy to lose their jobs for knowledge work or anything else.
I see no issue with that statement. Without blue collar work what are the job prospect for those who can't become an AI engineer or a quant in London other than live on the dole or become homeless crack addict?
> I’m always reminded of the poll where 80% of Americans say that the country would benefit from a bigger manufacturing base but only 25% are interested in actually working in manufacturing.
This is a silly statistic that manipulative people drag out to imply the answer that they want. If you asked people who work in factories right at this second, 75% of them would say that they didn't want to work in a factory. If you ask people who work any job, and ask if they would rather not be working, 75% would say yes.
It kind of goes with the weird idea that illegal immigrants actually love to clean toilets and work in fields for slave wages.
> when I ask “so you’d prefer to work in a factory?”
...to your upper-middle class friends who make six figures.
Have you ever worked in a factory? I find the people most enthusiastic about manufacturing are the ones least likely to have stood at a station in a factory performing manufacturing "work" - the vast majority of which is mind-numbingly boring and repetitive yet with minimal opportunities for passing the time with idle social interaction or chit-chat. Of all the non-professional work I've done, it was easily the least enjoyable. Even if it paid a bit less and demanded more physically, unskilled construction work was enjoyable in comparison. Even kitchen portering provided more stimulation - at least there was plenty of social interaction. This romanticization of factory work is weird.
I find it funny how you are describing it and acting like it is bad. In most of the topics dealing with WFH and return to office, a large number of the comment were along this vain:
"I really hate going into the office because I don't want to have to socialize with my coworkers, I just want to be able to do my work and be done with my day."
What acting have I been doing? Feels like a weasely way of accusing me of lying when I said I hated my experience of factory work. If you have had a different experience of factory work, let’s hear it. And preferably without the presumption - particularly the weird idea that being antisocial or asocial is the norm for human existence.
If you have more factory jobs the workforce has to come from either immigrants or the cushy white collar or service jobs that Americans mostly work today right? Because our unemployment rate isn’t low enough that we can just take people who aren’t working and get them working in factories.
Japan has had to heavily import workers to keep its factories and service jobs staffed, and the Japanese hate immigration more than MAGA does. The other solution is automation, which is how China plans to deal with its demographic cliff, I guess we could import factory robots from China.
The Civil war never banned slavery. It only banned private citizens from owning people. The government (state and federal) kept sole right to still own people.
The only gate is found guilty of a crime. Technically, that can even be for a speeding ticket. And when they can keep prosecuting for a laundry list, they effectively guarantee a win against whomever they want.
Stuff is made in response to demand. That can feel like an inevitability especially if you look at the failure of interdiction of drug trafficking. But that's no excuse to give up on harm reduction and demand shaping. Cigarette smoking hasn't disappeared, but the costs it imposes on healthcare has been reduced successfully. The same can be done to reduce the freeriding on ecological damage.
It is supposed to get better over time though. I mean at least that's the sales pitch. Globalization was supposed to lift all boats. If you remember the air quality in Beijing used to be the absolute worst but it has allegedly improved a lot recently.
I don't know where the flaw in the logic was but I think the idea was first you have to become wealthier and with more money comes a better quality of life.
I had a question which most of the article just barely touched on: a lot of attention goes to how much PFAS is detected in people’s blood, but I wanted to know (A) what the harms are, and (B) how strong the evidence is for each one, since afaik they aren’t and probably can’t do randomized trials where they just spray a bunch of Scotchgard in the mouths of half the test subjects.
Using an AI answer as a jumping off point, it looks like the possible harms are:
• Other cancers (breast, prostate, etc.) — (Inconclusive)
Obviously, this isn’t verified research, but I wanted to know what the concrete risks actually were since at this moment, it seems like most of us are probably stuck with the PFAS already in our environment and bodies.
I fail to see the harm done, I explicitly called it out as not verified. I just thought someone else might want to see the list of what actual harms are somewhat proven - instead of this vague sense of dread we’re told to have about “forever chemicals.”
I drive through Dalton anytime I visit Chattanooga (a cool hipster city on the border of Georgia and Tennessee). The scale of manufacturing there is wild. There are so many factories.
Dalton makes something like 70-80% of the carpet in the world. They've had carpet factories there since I was a kid, but they're starting to expand into lots of other industries.
They've begun massively ramping up on solar panel production, for instance.
It used to be the only city between Chattanooga and Cobb County (in the Atlanta metro), but now factories have sprung up throughout the I-75 corridor from Acworth to Calhoun. And they're putting them up at breakneck pace.
You can easily see all the factories on a satellite view. Just look at the I-75 corridor [1].
The folks working in these factories are making good money. They're able to afford 2,000 square foot homes in the rural towns they live in.
This little city is doing $10B in GDP. It's impressive if you've ever driven through there.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@34.6185909,-84.9776839,50698m/d...
> This little city is doing $10B in GDP. It's impressive if you've ever driven through there.
And all they had to do to accomplish this, apparently, was make their environment toxic. What a bargain.
Ain't American capitalism grand? Truly a way to organize a species.
I live in Chattanooga; it's wild to me that the City of Dalton maintain$ thousands of acres of public land simply to spray above-surface "treated" [PFS-containing] effluent "water," primarily generated by their carpeters. Why doesn't (e.g.) Shaw Manufacturing do this, directly (they do all the usual tax offsetting to not just answer "they pay taxes!" IMHO).
This "treatment land" is literally adjacent to a river, which flows into Alabama... and becomes multiple other MSA's drinking supply. This interstate conflict is what first brought PFAs to national attention. Thank god it doesn't flow to my watersource, but that's naïve thinking it doesn't carryover in the winds, waters, fauna.
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>The scale of manufacturing there is wild.
It's primarily due to two things: lack of regulations (see: PFAs), subpar compensation (our "right to work" Southern Pride). There are practically no local IT jobs (handful of poorly-compensated churners), and most of the tech-elite around here work from home (25gbps fiber, asynch, to your door).
Volkswagon has silo'd their third-shift as we brace for the inevitable economy we deserve.
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I forgot about Dalton. Used to pass it occasionally growing up if we were heading up north to visit family. I knew they were big on carpet, but I did not know they produced such high volumes of carpet there
I feel for the people living there and being affected by the pollution. The long term effects of chemical pollution are ugly.
But the CEO in the intro just seems like an odd choice. PFAS were known to cause issues for a long time, if you continued to use them for years then it is in your back too.
Being "surprised" this might eventually affect your own product line just seems naive. You might have trusted 3M but just blindly trusting a supplier is not an excuse at some point.
"I feel for the people living there and being affected by the pollution."
Isn't it all of us with carpets in our homes that are affected? (Albeit to a lesser degree—but also we are at the least partners in this if our buying carpets are destroying these other people's communities.)
I think “to a lesser degree” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The degrees of exposure are many orders of magnitude wide. Occupational exposure in a factory is far greater than living downstream from a polluter which is far greater still than being a far away consumer of the polluter’s products.
Your carpet doesn’t contain enough PFAS to create dangerous runoff and contaminate groundwater or entire rivers, but a town that manufactures most of the world’s mass produced carpeting is going to generate industrial amounts of pollution in a concentrated area.
You should probably be more worried about the flame retardants in the rebond carpet pad. Better these days, but older installed stuff had non-trivial PPM.
> PFAS were known to cause issues for a long time
Has this actually been confirmed, or is this just the precautionary principle in action?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10237242/ Our review of industry documents shows that companies knew PFAS was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested” by 1970, forty years before the public health community.
I don't see any mention there of the dosage at which these toxic effects occur. That would be necessary to determine if the amount found in the environment is a concern or not.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S20462...
See table 1
>The toxicity of PFAS to humans has been linked to several health-related issues such as breast cancer,80 infertility,81 vitamin D deficiency,82 increased cholesterol,83 diabetes,84 altered metabolism,85 thyroid toxicity,86 atherosclerosis,87 osteoporosis,88 and cardiovascular diseases.61 Individually, various PFAS and their associated health-related issues are summarised in Table 1.
That's silly. The fact that it is toxic makes it a concern, and the fact that it is a concern means that if you're selling it you should find out yourself about the specifics.
It's like saying that you're not responsible for stealing a wallet because you didn't know exactly how much was in it.
A lot of things are toxic at high doses, yet have essentially no effect at low doses. The linear no-threshold model is a simplification that rarely matches reality.
Silly? There are plenty of substances that are toxic at high dose and innocuous, or even necessary, at low dose. Examples of the latter are vitamins A and B6.
The question of responsibility is of course not what we were talking about, but rather whether the statement "PFAS were known to cause issues" was in fact true. Too often we see possibility of harm being deliberately conflated with actually causing harm. Is it too much to ask for some honesty here?
For most people, if you're taking any position with nuance, your not actually serious about the problem and therefore part of the problem.
The chemical differences between PFAS and vitamin A and B6 are beyond vast.
Comparing them betrays a complete ignorance of the molecular properties that, in combination with biological system processes, make A and B6 healthy at small doses and poisonous at large doses on one hand, and those that makes PFAS linearly poisonous at any given doses on the other. (And yes, you can be exposed to small amounts of toxins and be fine. That doesn’t change the toxicity of a given substance.)
Struggling to see how this could be anything but a bad faith argument.
It really feels along the lines of "prove lead is actually harmful rather than potentially harmful" with all the knowledge and evidence we currently have.
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I guess a little bit of background is helpful, which most people don’t realize, about carpet production. A lot (a LOT) of carpet is some variant of polyester since it’s just a really nice durability + cost + stain resistance mix (although the latter is one of its big weaknesses comparatively, important to note). Thus there is significant demand for stain guard options.
Compounded on top of that is because although you can dye the polyester before it is extruded, this is the firm minority of carpet produced. Maybe a quarter or less? Usually you will dye it before spinning it into yarn or before tufting it (weaving it into the backing basically). However, it is often cheaper especially for solid carpet to essentially dunk the whole finished carpet into a vat for dyeing, or run it through a glorified conveyor belt to do much the same. I’d hazard a decent guess that the latter two methods are the worst offenders for pollution for obvious reasons. What’s a bit of a pity then is that it seems to me that this isn’t really inevitable (although if we stop entirely that’s a perfect recipe for some other country to undercut us even if they inherit the long term dangers too).
With that said, the CRI (Carpet and Rug Institute) is almost the epitome of what you’d imagine an industry group to be. And 3M/DuPont are, well, you know. So I’m sure the article doesn’t really exaggerate there.
Finally I’d say that the upshot for all of us should be that regulation and pressure work. There was a calculation made whether intentionally or not, explicitly or implicitly, that if this came out to be bad then the big chemical companies could be blamed (and could further be reliably counted on to have engaged in outright unethical activity that makes blaming them a somewhat valid strategy too).
Source: sold carpet for a few years and was actually curious about the industry unlike many of my peers
No one dunks finished carpet in dye. The dye house dyes the fiber, pre construction. https://youtu.be/FG2-af0xYOA
The treatments like stain master are/were the problem, not the dye.
Carpet is a wonderful product, even polys. It’s good we’re having a conversation about it, but vinyl flooring has far out passed carpet , and it is full of awful carcinogens, made in china, not disclosed, secret recipes. But , it can be unstable and release into your home / office / work place
That video is AI-generated
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I grew up in Dalton and went to school with the children of these carpet company leaders (many of whom are now senior members of those same companies). My parents still live there.
It doesn’t surprise me that Dalton Utilities operated poorly and appears to have been in cahoots with the carpet companies to cover up the risk. Dalton is a place where education isn’t always valued but relationships are. Plus, carpet is the back bone of the economy there — issues with carpet impact the community heavily, making it difficult for anyone to stand in its way.
There’s a real sense of fear and helplessness in the community there as this information comes out.
It’s a lesson in the dangers of unregulated capitalism, but it only matters if we’re paying attention. There’s a role for government to support and protect citizens from companies whether it’s PFAs or AI.
If you really want to get a feel for Dalton in the 90s, you should read this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1990/02/19/...
Doesn't even mention microplastics. Clothing, car tires, and carpet have to be right up there with the top sources.
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Out houses are full of plastic and chemicals. The paint is latex, the carpet is polyester, the wood finish is polyurethane, etc.
With the on-going elimination of the EPA at the US federal level, this could be the future for many States. And States with a strong State level "EPA" will be at the mercy of up-river states that pollute their own waterways.
Carpet has been made for millennia. Scotchguard is new and toxic. So just make the carpets without the stain protection junk.
Frankly the carpet factories will do more business as people will want to replace their carpets more frequently.
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It's so convenient that all these people waited until retirement to speak out, but they also said they weren't doing anything wrong? Zero morals by anyone in this story.
Please don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It is easy to be ethically and morally responsible, after one becomes rich, after one is retired. Until then, it is enough to follow the law just enough to not get fined. Actually, even that is a tall ask these days - fines are just cost of doing business.
It sucks that it is this way, but society seems to have largely accepted it
Fine are the cost of doing business... FOR COMPANIES.
For individuals: arrest, jail, prison, and horrifically crippling fines are normal.
An individual kills 1 person, and its 15y to life. But if youre an 'insurance company' and make policies in abeyance of insurance and arbitrarily deny 30% of claims getting many killed (Luigi says hi), thats perfectly fine. Youre a business leader making lots of money.
You steal $100 from the till at $shitretailjob and company calls cops and has you arrested. BUT if they fraudulently change timesheets and steal $100 from you, wellllll thats a civil matter.
Or, a company made 1B dollars but spent $990M, they only owe taxes on 10M$. But if I make $100k and spent $90k, I still pay taxes on 100k, not 10K.
This country should be called the Corporate States of America. That fiction has more rights than I or any other non-billionaire average human will ever have.
> This country should be called the Corporate States of America.
Who knows a country in which is different, let me know, please, honestly.
China is definitely different in this particular aspect. The balance of powers in "state vs corporations" is completely different from the US. And China is seeing massive benefits from this particular aspect of its country, it's closely related to their ascension vs. the decline of the US in particular.
Before people turn to Reddit-style downvoting and flagging, this isn't a vouch for China as a country on the whole. It has plenty of other problems that certain Western countries don't have. I'm simply talking about the specific topic at hand.
China's problems with PFAS are substantially worse than the US.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398603137_Global_in...
I'm sure they are, as I imagine they produce magnitudes more of it. Doesn't change anything about the balance of powers though.
The difference is that when China actually cracks down things change relatively quickly. In 10 years this group [1] will be lower than in the US
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj.s771
Yea, when the communist party thinks an industry should change it changes in the way the communist party says. Of course it is often not without side-effects.
China is tightening regulations and trying to clean up their country.
Trump is waging war on the EPA.
Can you enumerate some of these benefits? They famously arrested Jack Ma for not bending to the CCP enough. I don’t think that’s really a benefit (e.g. if the equivalent in the US was Democrats arresting any CEOa politically against them).
They're countless. Can you not think of any major issues as of 2026 directly caused by the enormous power that megacorporations hold in the US? I struggle to believe you can't. If you can, then it should be easy to see that at least some of them would not happen in China because of the opposite balance of power.
Just to give one example, look up the crackdown on Alibaba and platform monopolies. You also mentioned Jack Ma. The Ant Group IPO he was pushing, was likely to be a bad thing for most of Chinese society.
How did Netflix do making a business decision that defied the wishes of the Ellison family? With Trump 47 there are literally pages of this sort of stuff.
Other notable non-Trumpist example is Joseph Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest. He refused to comply with a request for phone records without a warrant. The reaction was a drop in Federal business and a prosecution for insider trading.
That was over 20 years ago? And there were half a dozen Qwest executives who were profiting from insider trading on inflated revenues that started in 1999, long before the NSA incident in 2001. I remember it clearly because I had the misfortune of being a shareholder in that dog.
China, Germany, any country in Scandinavia, Poland, Japan… it is a long list
I can call these hypocrisies to light. I do so on the off chance that we gain enough support to start reversing end-stage capitalism.
Im not going to list factoids of what rank we are or arent. Its honestly irrelevant. Im stuck here, since I have no familial claim of citizenship elsewhere.
So, yeah. I speak out here and in person, about these abuses.
Eventually, we'll do better. Takes time. Probably longer than I have alive.
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> Companies committing fraud do get caught and the penalties are often larger than the fraud brought in.
The problem is, we don't send companies to prison for wrongdoing. It's always just a fine, so breaking the law boils down to a cost x risk / benefit analysis.
Why is it always a fine? Let's invent a prison for companies. Revoke the corporate charter, order it to cease operations, and freeze all trading of the company's shares for N years. Maybe that would be enough for corporate leadership, the board, and shareholders to take wrongdoing seriously.
But also, what if you have those ideas and thoughts from the beginning and during the entire time, yet also build your life on those systems you despise, then you use your "won" resources to fight against them, isn't that at least better than the alternatives?
We built our modern society on the principle that profit must be prioritized over morality, they're just conforming to systematic incentives. Those who sell their souls to the devil don't get to act shocked when they wind up in hell.
> Those who sell their souls to the devil don't get to act shocked when they wind up in hell.
Which is everyone, since everyone has their pension invested in a giant pool made of of unethical companies that we can't fine, ban or let fail because it would destroy people's retirements who will then vote in an angry way to reverse this, or it will destroy some upstream national important industries that are very well regulated, or lobby very well, like Purdue pharma.
It's a collective fault, not that of only a handful of people.
I feel like this supposes a better world where most people are educated, rational, and calm investors with the time, money, and energy to actively manage a diversified portfolio.
Or I guess you could get there by abolishing the stock market as it exists, which seems more likely.
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I served in an executive role for a non-Federal government organization. Think a senior director, not a political position.
My stock holdings had to be disclosed, and were and still are publicly viewable. They audit them and explore potential conflicts. When I was promoted, I had to justify and certify potential conflicts due to long existing stock holdings of myself and my son, which were subject to monitoring and I was not allowed to participate in certain activities without counsel approval. Even that was only permissible because I asked for specific permission due to the hardship I would face from tax liability. If I hadn’t asked for that permission I could’ve been subjected to a civil penalty or even criminal prosecution.
That’s required for public confidence. The federal rules are stricter. A Federal official can be subject to a fine for displaying a political lawn sign at their home. Their supplemental retirement plan obscures the corporate affiliations of their investments.
Unfortunately, you’re displaying the nihilist, uninformed perspective which put fascists in power. By saying the president is corrupt, but so is everybody else you’re implicitly supporting and endorsing the behavior. That’s what they want.
Choose to educate yourself with better sources.
>That’s required for public confidence. The federal rules are stricter.
You're trying to hide behind a bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, which is how the likes on Nancy Pelosi can constantly beat the stock market by a wide margin, and yet not raise any legal eyebrows.
Not putting you in the same basket as her, just saying that just because there are rules in place, doesn't mean they have the desired preventing effect you talk about, because it's the enforcement that's lacking. Just because the policies keep YOU honest, doesn't mean they apply to everyone else.
>Unfortunately, you’re displaying the nihilist, uninformed perspective which put fascists in power. By saying the president is corrupt, but so is everybody else you’re implicitly supporting and endorsing the behavior. That’s what they want.
You're soo offtopic that it's laughable. Sure buddy, everyone with a different opinion than you is a fascist, only you have the right answer to everything from within your bubble.
Why do you think that special forces officer was arrested for insider trading but not Trump's friends? Now tell us again, how there's no legal double standards, and your legal mumbo jumbo prevents insider trading.
It’s really simple. The president is a criminal backed by an authoritarian political party whose members of Congress refuse to do their jobs.
That’s the difference between a Spiro Agnew or a Richard Nixon. Crooks, but without the same type of cronyism.
It's actually not convenient at all. Consider this: animal study to human study fail all the time.
In another world, there could have been NO impact at all to human beings and PFAS could be just another random chemical the body doesn't clear but doesn't actually do anything and sits there inert.
I know everyone's pissed about this but the thyroid/other connections stuff happens 10 years later as a result and these are idiot business people playing in waters they don't understand (and neither did medicine at that time). You could say, "you can't take the risk." For me these questions are maybe we need to take a deeper/closer look at what are permissible risks and at what point.
But you could use the same logic to not make any advancement ever. No antibiotics because it will cause resistence. No chemo because it will cause damage and death. People want there to be a Dr. Eggman or Hitler in this story because it's turned out to be so impactful. Like Aesbestos which solved for fire, just poorly - carpet was solving for comfort, sound deadening, and emotional well being. We just can't necessarily quantify that as easily.
It's fantastic that science continually grows in understanding and can attribute once thought "inert" chemicals to problems. "How evil children playing with matches" are though, is asking the wrong question. These people were stupid enough to say - "there's cancer in rats, lets just keep going".
> there could have been NO impact at all
True, but if you contaminate water, and people, with chemicals not supposed to be there; I feel the burden should be on you to prove the chemicals are not harmful.
> you could use the same logic to not make any advancement ever
No you couldn't - the measures taken to prevent contamination were inadequate, they could've innovated while also following the rules. And if not, no business is owed a viable business model, certainly a random strangers heath isn't worth the price of profiting from easy-to-clean carpets.
> We just can't necessarily quantify that as easily.
Quantify what?
> can attribute once thought "inert" chemicals to problems
we (or America) have a whole system of classifying chemicals as safe for human consumption or not. Whatever was thought about PFAS, I don't believe they had been proven safe enough to dump into drinking water?
>But you could use the same logic to not make any advancement ever. No antibiotics because it will cause resistance. No chemo because it will cause damage and death.
I understand the argument you are making, and I'm no fan of govt/regulations, but you will notice that often basic testing of toxicity/side effects is missing or the system is gamed.
One example I recently came across: antidepressant drugs are tested on people for around 12 weeks and then labeled safe if there are no side effects or reversible side effects. To summarize: profits overrides and safety concerns.
> “That’s not a logo,” fumed Shaw, CEO of the world’s largest carpet company, one attendee later recalled. “That’s a target.”
Do people really speak like that?
Better to not be a hypocrite and continue abusing your hard exploited capital?
It's the banality of evil over and over again. Can't really blame the individual, with some extreme exceptions, otherwise by calling people out as you are doing you are participating in perpetuating the problem without contributing with anything new.
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Intergenerational rage like this is not OK on HN, and dehumanizing language towards anyone is clearly against the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It would be tremendously interesting, I think, to learn all of the Chemistry involved in carpet manufacturing, both historical and current-day, both for carpets which are manufactured domestically and those manufactured abroad (different regulatory frameworks = probable different and/or subtly different chemical processes)...
Now, that sounds really boring and potentially a waste of time, right?
Well, yes, and no, and yes!
Well it's complicated!
I would speculate (being horrendously undereducated on the subject!) that there probably exist a set of chemical processes which could create Carpets without any harmful environmental waste or residual chemicals which subsequently require disposal.
What these would be or could be, I as-of-yet do not know...
It's a subject that needs research... a lot of research... lots and lots of research!
But, while it might sound like a really boring, uninteresting, "there's nothing to see here" kind of goal, keep in mind this quote from the article:
>"Mohawk logged more than $3.4 billion in net sales. Shaw Industries reported $4.2 billion."
Yup, the global carpet market is worth... (wait for it!)... "Billion$"!
So -- an interesting problem for present and future Scientists/Chemists! Crack it (in whole or in part!) and your solution or partial solution could be worth Billion$!
I mean, I'd put that up against a Clay Millennium Prize for solving a complex Math problem, I'd put that against a Nobel Prize or Fields Medal or Dirac Medal or Feynman Prize!
Yup, solve The Carpet Chemistry Problem(tm) (let's give it a name!) -- and your share of Billion$ (as Carl Sagan would say!) could be yours! :-)
(I now will humbly submit this post for the obligatory yes-I-know-they-are-coming downvotes! :-) )
In this society, appearance, convenience, and justifying one's existence with unnecessary, destructive labor are more important than the ecosystems which support them. Humans are the invasive, destructive species.
Also(I'm absolutely not taking corporate side here), she says, "I feel like, I don’t know, almost like there’s a blanket over me, smothering me that I can’t get out from under." because of PFAS levels but then look at the corporate products/chemicals she covers her body in daily, and accepts money from others to do the same. If you are going to be outraged, at least be consistent about it.
"If you are going to be outraged, at least be consistent about it."
I (and others) need to be educated about it first. I know, for example, the risks of cigarettes because it is on every pack in the U.S.
That's wild to me that that is how you know the risks of cigarettes. I forget just how many people rely on corporate authority to "warn" them of everything. That puts many of my peers in a constant state of fear. I put the word warn in quotes because it is only to insulate themselves against future lawsuits and revenue loss.
I just used it as an obvious example. I knew cigarettes caused cancer at some point growing up. I'm concerned of course about the abundance of products that I don't know about—wishing as a community we did more to label those.
Anthropocentric thought is a problem and it shows. How about as a community not needing corporations to tell you how to exist while they destroy ecosystems around us? Maybe if they label everything, that'll make it alllllllll okay.
Ultimately it's because we've (as people) let corporations have too much of influence in politics and daily life. As such they will continue to sociopathically enshittify everything around them without compunction because the only guiding axis is "line must go up". Everyone can be absolve themselves from any wrong doing with the banal "I was just following orders" when the orders were to make the line increase at any cost.
We need a corporate death penalty. Probably combined with something that will put the fear of God in anyone who thinks only along the axis of profit.
EDIT: grammer
If by we you mean the US this would require a dramatic change in the culture. Just look how USAmericans view the regulations and rules that are imposed on businesses in the EU - what you propose would require a much harsher regulation than in the EU currently and even the current regulations seem extreme to Americans and proposing regulations like that would probably be political suicide
You mean that because people take issue with the fact that the EU implements everything in almost the worst and most intrusive way possible? Sorry, you forgot to accept my view conversation cookie and I don’t want to be personally liable because you didn’t, so this response will be cut off in order to
I think this proves my point. The kind of regulations that GP proposed are just not realistic in US culture unless something changes dramatically.
I agree that cookie banners shouldn’t exist - but too many companies love to collect and sell my personal data so that is their current workaround. I would love for the EU regulation to clamp down on this as well but it’s a never ending process.
The banners were NEVER required.
The banners were devised by the adtech conoanies as a way they though could bypass the GDPR, in the most anti-user way possible. But "allow all" was easy.
Its also likely those banners arent even legal to begin with.
This whole cookie banner law is an example of horrible co panies will act in order to subvert the letter and spirit of laws.
Case in point. Americans can’t even get over a cookie popup. Can you imagine what we’d do if regulations led to stained carpets?
Clearly. It is definitely just about a pop-up and not anything else that was alluded to! How astute! You’re from the EU though I suspect that you’ve never even read that law in detail.
When complaining about poor regulations you chose a cookie popup as an example. You couldn’t think of anything less trivial? If that’s what your mind reaches for when you think of “poor regulations” you’ll have to forgive me for assuming you have nothing of substance to add to the discussion.
Your substance has been “I don’t know what I’m talking about, so you must not know what you are”. Impressive. I’d suggest reading more and assuming less.
Those cookie banners aren't required for conversations -- a persistent session cookie would be enough (if you don't want to make the user sign in every time). The cookie banner implementation is a burden companies choose to place on themselves (and then to burden their users).
I both agree and disagree, but the banner itself is, and isn’t really the point.
I think it's a chicken and egg problem around politics not necessarily a "cultural issue", which rings like victim blaming, it's politically suicidal only because the way that lobbying works and how we structure campaign financing. We only really have pro-business-does-no-wrong+blue bits or business-does-no-wrong+red bits, we don't have any effective other voices.
Again, harsher regulation is only "harsher" if it's purely reductive or increases the burden right. Indoor synthetic fiber carpets might not be the best example here, but something like health insurance is more easy to grok.
For the sake of the article though I'll try with carpets. If we issued regulations that said "no more companies making indoor carpeting that pollutes our environments and poisoned people" then used those resources elsewhere like encouraging sheep farming and carpet making, you would be to mitigate the pollution while not depriving people of their floor coverings.
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When people talk about how they want manufacturing back they conveniently forget the pollution.
It's pretty much a solved problem. All highly developed countries still have some manufacturing - some more, some less - and they comply with today's strict environmental regulations.
Many things could be manufactured more cleanly, but then we’d have to pay what they really cost instead of the subsidized prices we pay now.
Many things could be manufactured more cleanly, but then the capitalist class will have slightly less obscene wealth by their stealing of profits and pushing of the cost onto society.
The problem is with the manufacturers being evil, selfish environmental nightmares.
Stuff has to be made somewhere. This argument is essentially predicated on the idea that it's okay for some places to be polluted and for some people to have to deal with it but not for other places and people. What you're really saying is "When people talk about how they want manufacturing back, they conveniently forget the pollution impacts people who live here instead of China and India, where it's totally okay."
Domestic manufacturing has a lot of advantages from the standpoint of total pollution. I guarantee you that even with lax American environmental rules, the pollution caused by a factory in Georgia is still lower and less hazardous to workers and the surrounding community than if the same factory were in India. Furthermore, our government is at least theoretically capable of adding better protections for workers and communities, while our government is going to have a hard time enforcing pollution rules overseas.
I don't think you are racist or xenophobic. I just think that when people make this argument they don't think about the fact that this stuff is still getting manufactured somewhere if it's not made here, and basically the complaint is that Americans are having to deal with the consequences rather than people in other countries.
When people extol the virtues of manufacturing, I’m always reminded of the poll where 80% of Americans say that the country would benefit from a bigger manufacturing base but only 25% are interested in actually working in manufacturing. This isn’t an American thing btw - I’ve had arguments with brits and others who argue passionately that the country has been destroyed by the relative decline in manufacturing but when I ask “so you’d prefer to work in a factory?” it provokes fairly confused responses like “no but other people would”….
https://fortune.com/2025/04/15/americans-want-factory-jobs-r...
I don't see a contradiction.
Whether I intend to work a factory job or not I can still decide that unemployment in the U.S., especially unemployment of blue-collar workers, would be better served by local industry than allowing for homelessness or a dependency on welfare. Never mind that there might also be national security issues addressed by local manufacture.
The opposite, expecting everyone in the country to aspire to white-collar professions, is to me much more clearly an elitist (or at least irrational) position to have.
>The opposite, expecting everyone in the country to aspire to white-collar professions, is to me much more clearly an elitist (or at least irrational) position to have.
This, when you have everyone go to college and then they'll be shocked to be unemployed or work for peanuts since there's an oversupply of college grads and not much demand.
Here in Austria people working in construction cam earn way better than SW engineers because the former have an oversupply and the latter a shortage.
If you need a mobile app or a Java app, the're dime a dozen developers but if you need a plumber, lock smith, facade, roof specialist, well good luck.
The days when a college degree were an instant ticket to a well paid job for life are over.
It's not even an issue of job scarcity.
I have worked enough blue-collar jobs to know that there exist people for whom technical work is a non-starter. Not that they are somehow dim and incapable of learning engineering, but "work" that is not done through labor, that does not show in a tangible way a day's effort… is anathema to them.
>It's not even an issue of job scarcity.
Still it's supply and demand issue. The west has had 20-30 years of grooming the youth that going to college is the right path to middle class lifestyle and blue collar jobs are for losers who are too stupid to study. You can't be shocked when the supply demand reverses. South Park even had an episode mocking this, with plumbers being the new tech bros, and tech bros being unemployed.
> but "work" that is not done through labor, that does not show in a tangible way a day's effort… is anathema to them
Same applies within white collar jobs too. Some engineers want to work in hardware, firmware, mechanical jobs, because the output is tangible, instead of pushing JSONs to the cloud, even if that's not more complicated than the other.
"Some engineers want to work in hardware, firmware, mechanical jobs, because the output is tangible…"
Ha ha, the giddy feeling a software engineer feels when they write a few lines of assembly on a Motorola 68HC11 and get an LED to turn on…
Dalton has been the worldwide leader in carpet manufacturing since before I was born. Multiple generations of people have worked in those factories. They earn good money and can afford big houses and savings.
You should talk to the people of Dalton. They're really proud of it. The first thing they tell you is they're from the "carpet capital of the world". Without fail they will mention that to you. It's so ingrained that it's part of their identity.
I don't think they'd be happy to lose their jobs for knowledge work or anything else.
Yeah that's all well and good but eventually these people retire and figure out their bodies are too broken to enjoy retirement.
>“no but other people would”
I see no issue with that statement. Without blue collar work what are the job prospect for those who can't become an AI engineer or a quant in London other than live on the dole or become homeless crack addict?
> I’m always reminded of the poll where 80% of Americans say that the country would benefit from a bigger manufacturing base but only 25% are interested in actually working in manufacturing.
This is a silly statistic that manipulative people drag out to imply the answer that they want. If you asked people who work in factories right at this second, 75% of them would say that they didn't want to work in a factory. If you ask people who work any job, and ask if they would rather not be working, 75% would say yes.
It kind of goes with the weird idea that illegal immigrants actually love to clean toilets and work in fields for slave wages.
> when I ask “so you’d prefer to work in a factory?”
...to your upper-middle class friends who make six figures.
You know nothing of my friends.
Have you ever worked in a factory? I find the people most enthusiastic about manufacturing are the ones least likely to have stood at a station in a factory performing manufacturing "work" - the vast majority of which is mind-numbingly boring and repetitive yet with minimal opportunities for passing the time with idle social interaction or chit-chat. Of all the non-professional work I've done, it was easily the least enjoyable. Even if it paid a bit less and demanded more physically, unskilled construction work was enjoyable in comparison. Even kitchen portering provided more stimulation - at least there was plenty of social interaction. This romanticization of factory work is weird.
I find it funny how you are describing it and acting like it is bad. In most of the topics dealing with WFH and return to office, a large number of the comment were along this vain:
"I really hate going into the office because I don't want to have to socialize with my coworkers, I just want to be able to do my work and be done with my day."
What acting have I been doing? Feels like a weasely way of accusing me of lying when I said I hated my experience of factory work. If you have had a different experience of factory work, let’s hear it. And preferably without the presumption - particularly the weird idea that being antisocial or asocial is the norm for human existence.
If you have more factory jobs the workforce has to come from either immigrants or the cushy white collar or service jobs that Americans mostly work today right? Because our unemployment rate isn’t low enough that we can just take people who aren’t working and get them working in factories.
Japan has had to heavily import workers to keep its factories and service jobs staffed, and the Japanese hate immigration more than MAGA does. The other solution is automation, which is how China plans to deal with its demographic cliff, I guess we could import factory robots from China.
America is pretty good at creating an underclass they can force into less desirable jobs using the prison industrial complex.
The word for that is "slavery".
The Civil war never banned slavery. It only banned private citizens from owning people. The government (state and federal) kept sole right to still own people.
The only gate is found guilty of a crime. Technically, that can even be for a speeding ticket. And when they can keep prosecuting for a laundry list, they effectively guarantee a win against whomever they want.
Stuff is made in response to demand. That can feel like an inevitability especially if you look at the failure of interdiction of drug trafficking. But that's no excuse to give up on harm reduction and demand shaping. Cigarette smoking hasn't disappeared, but the costs it imposes on healthcare has been reduced successfully. The same can be done to reduce the freeriding on ecological damage.
It is supposed to get better over time though. I mean at least that's the sales pitch. Globalization was supposed to lift all boats. If you remember the air quality in Beijing used to be the absolute worst but it has allegedly improved a lot recently.
I don't know where the flaw in the logic was but I think the idea was first you have to become wealthier and with more money comes a better quality of life.
Globalization does lift all boats. We get cheap stuff without having to make it, and they get jobs and pollution.
It got better in Beijing because they moved factories to more rural areas, not because manufacturing is any less dirty.
Dalton has been the world's top carpet manufacturer since the 1950s. It's not "back". It never left.
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Today!
The cars you drive every day are much worse for everybody than these dupont chemicals.
I had a question which most of the article just barely touched on: a lot of attention goes to how much PFAS is detected in people’s blood, but I wanted to know (A) what the harms are, and (B) how strong the evidence is for each one, since afaik they aren’t and probably can’t do randomized trials where they just spray a bunch of Scotchgard in the mouths of half the test subjects.
Using an AI answer as a jumping off point, it looks like the possible harms are:
• Higher cholesterol — (Strong)
• Reduced vaccine antibody response — (Strong)
• Pregnancy‑induced hypertension / preeclampsia — (Strong)
• Lower birth weight / impaired fetal growth — (Strong)
• Kidney cancer (PFOA) — (Contested)
• Testicular cancer (PFOA) — (Limited)
• Thyroid disease — (Limited)
• Liver enzyme changes / fatty liver risk — (Limited)
• Immune issues beyond vaccines (asthma, infections) — (Emerging)
• Diabetes / metabolic effects — (Emerging)
• Neurodevelopmental / behavioral effects — (Emerging)
• Other cancers (breast, prostate, etc.) — (Inconclusive)
Obviously, this isn’t verified research, but I wanted to know what the concrete risks actually were since at this moment, it seems like most of us are probably stuck with the PFAS already in our environment and bodies.
It's a bit like asking about the health risks of sodium chloride
Please don’t dump ai slop here.
I fail to see the harm done, I explicitly called it out as not verified. I just thought someone else might want to see the list of what actual harms are somewhat proven - instead of this vague sense of dread we’re told to have about “forever chemicals.”
Well what you returned is not exactly that it is dubious ai slop that is just as vague
Shouldn't it be vague? When nobody is or can do double-blind randomized trials, none of this is proven, it's just various strengths of correlation.