Thread: Spot the trend

Lead

The makers of leaded gasoline systematically suppressed information about the severe health hazards of their product for decades, even though they knew from the mid-1920s on that leaded gasoline was a public health risk. For years these manufacturers wildly exaggerated the benefits of leaded gasoline while downplaying or outright denying its dangers by funding junk research to support their claims.

Moreover, 14 years after the federal government banned lead from gasoline sold in the US, the American company, Ethyl, and the British company, Octel, are still selling leaded gasoline throughout the developing world and Eastern Europe, despite lead's clearly established dangers, particularly to children. (Ninety-three percent of all gasoline sold today in Africa contains lead.)

Cigarettes

The document “Smoking and Health Proposal,” discusses a possible aggressive PR campaign on health issues. One of the explicit objectives was

to set aside in the minds of millions the false conviction that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases; a conviction based on fanatical assumptions, fallacious rumours, unsupported claims and the unscientific statements and conjectures of publicity-seeking opportunists

Climate change

A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists offers the most comprehensive documentation to date of how ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry's disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.
"ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer," said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists' Director of Strategy & Policy. "A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years."

You don't have to buy into the theory wholesale, but isn't it worth considering? Becasue it kind of makes more sense than the alternative. The scientific community has ZERO track record of massive frauds and cover ups. The manufacturing industry has a long and undisputed track record of deliberately falsifying scientific research and conducting deliberate frauds and cover ups.

Dr. Knuckles,

I am sure that by now you have realized that conservatives are mostly dumb, and that they will fight like crazy for the idea that they are privy to the world of wealth that corporate fat cats represent.

The scientific community is full of bright, naive and guileless idealists. Once people like this start to threaten the bottom line, they will experience the dark alley muggings that blue collar types are experienced with.

I never understood why unleaded gas cost more. The lead was put in there. Why charge people more money to not add an additive?

Originally Posted by Blueneck

I never understood why unleaded gas cost more. The lead was put in there. Why charge people more money to not add an additive?

Prices are largely determined by what people are willing to pay for something. If people have the impression that they are doing a good by buying unleaded gas (and indeed they are), then they will be willing to pay more for it.

Originally Posted by cueca100

Prices are largely determined by what people are willing to pay for something. If people have the impression that they are doing a good by buying unleaded gas (and indeed they are), then they will be willing to pay more for it.

People weren't willing to pay more, they didn't have a choice. And many people pointed to the boogyman government "Oh look they are picking on the poor oil companies, forcing them to remove the lead from the gas and now the cost has gone up..." :sarcasticfainting:

Originally Posted by cueca100

I am sure that by now you have realized that conservatives are mostly dumb...

Nice. I'm sure you will convince many to change their opinions with that kind of logic...okebrain:

Well it wasn't the bleeding hearts and lesbians demanding that the big bad government and 'activist courts' leave the poor innocent corporations alone and stop being such hysterical chicken littles about a little deadly poison in our blood streams for absolutely no purpose other than it was hugely profitable.

Why would they not do the same thing this time around. Show me a scientist denying human effects on climate and I'll show you 3 dozen studies from the 80's denying any link between cigarettes and cancer with the same guy's name all over it.

The problem is a group of hard working, aplolitical geniuses who have devoted their lives to science make a finding, then their results get badly repeated and rehashed by a bunch of pot smoking dildos with tie-dye t shirts and save the whales buttons and all Conservatives America wide who hate the entire Sean Penn, no more guns, give peace a chance crowd with an abiding passion dismiss all the serious people because they are blinded by their hatred for Al Gore's politics. They hate him and his politics so much that they simply dismiss anything that anyone else who might have abrain says about the topic out of raw hatred for the morons going door to door asking for old egg cartons to turn into art.

Then the hard working a-political geniuses go to work and are called liberal activists, nut jobs, chicken littles, liars, corrupt and the end of freedom as we know it because Right wing media group them in with someone's nutty aunt in North Dakota who loves owls so much she wants to fuck them.

If some total brain dead idiot is talking about global wamring and getting it all wrong, blame that person, not the literally hundreds of thousands of people whose work she wouldn't understand even if she had read it.

What REALLY gets up my nose are those whose only comment is "Global warming is a religion" and then will not debated the science.

To me it about the same level as a five year old calling me a "poopie head"

I am Spam

Spam I am

You make no sales with your assault.

Originally Posted by Blueneck

I never understood why unleaded gas cost more. The lead was put in there. Why charge people more money to not add an additive?

It was the law of supply and demand, when unleaded first came out there weren't alot of cars that needed as more came into the market the prices equalized until it was the other way around and then leaded went out altogether.