So wait, J&J have already put aside 9 billion dollars for potential liability for the talc baby powder cancer claims and have stopped selling talc baby powder in North America, but yet they are suing researchers who made the issue known and constantly parroting that they aren’t admitting any wrongdoing. Nice.
JJ. But they also released some very specific details such as the name of people exposed and proof of exposure from other sources than talcum powder that was ignored. JJ would be quite liable if they even get a single detail intentionally wrong. I would tend to believe they released accurate details.
Yeh, sure. Let’s trust the corporation that is discontinuing the sale of talc based baby powder world wide, and is wanting to settle for $9 billion.
Either JNJ are actually doing the right thing here… or they are cutting losses, protecting themselves, looking after shareholders, whatever.
Maybe it’s cheaper than trying to recover from such a PR disaster.
Maybe turns out that cornstarch is cheaper/easier for baby powder, and $9b gets rid of a problem, solves marketing issues of cornstarch, and has long-term savings.
Maybe I’m wrong and paranoid.
But I don’t trust JNJ
To put that in perspective for folks, if money was seconds, 9000 seconds is ~2.5 hours , 9 million seconds is ~104 days, 9 billion seconds is ~285 years.
This is not the only shitty thing J&J has done, not by a longshot.
All you need to know is how they pushed opioids on a generation of young people for nearly a decade without repercussions. How can you expect an entity like that to ever tell the truth against their own self interests?
It's not clear from the news articles whether any pictures were even sent, let alone paid for.
The police determining there's no crime doesn't tell us that either.
For all we know, the whole thing is a dead cat to distract from other, more serious (or genuine) scandals that might be going on. Or to keep them out of the news cycle altogether.
Even if the allegations are true, and he's paid a ridiculous sum for some illicit filth, he really only has to explain his behaviour to his wife and family.
I was with you untill that last paragraph. If he solicited explicit photos from a minor, he has a lot more explaining to do than just to his wife and family.
They’re trying to bundle their bad pr while it seems like it can’t get any worse. They’re under fire from John and Hank Green and their fans for extending a patent in a way that is estimated to kill 6 million people.
This will probably settle out of court, the lawyers will get 1/2 the settlement and the thousands of employees involved will a few hundred bucks each. If that.
Senkaku islands, there’s pretty regular posturing from both sides over the ownership of a couple barren rocks since they have implications for territorial waters.
Japan, just like China, has disputes over several groups of “islands” with several of their neighbors (at least Russia, South Korea, China and Taiwan). A very small number of these islands are inhabited. But many are more or less just rocks that formed from underwater volcanoes. (Japan grows by a few more islands regularly due to those.)
The islands this is about are claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan. They hold strategic significance, but it’s mostly about suspected resources at the bottom of the sea.
I always find the most revealing map to give you an immediate view of the situation, to be that one the BBC made long ago, and keeps posting whenever this issue is brought back because of another incident. In blue, every country different claims. In red, China’s claim. https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/736f7d99-a393-40e7-a5ca-690c31b0255a.webp
So an adult man possibly spent his legally earned wages buying legal homemade porn from another consenting adult man. How is this an outrage, Hew can do what he wants with his own money.
So big tech invests billions, and the EU is going to take the lead how exactly?
The scheme includes bringing together creators, media companies and others to create an industrial ecosystem, setting up regulatory sandboxes to help companies test out the metaverse and rolling out skills development programmes as well virtual public services.
They want to carve out a piece of the metaverse for European companies is basically the message. We’ve learned in the past 30 years that large firms dominate different aspects of tech space. Take a look at what they’ve done in aircraft manufacturing - they’ve elbowed into the space that Americans were dominating. Now there’s just 2 - Boeing and Airbus which is theirs. They are going to seek to replicate that, learning from the mistakes in tech in the past.
Boeing and Airbus bought up every competitor to create a duopoly, and Boeing’s 737 MAX issues have hurt them recently
I just don’t see how the EU regulating the metaverse will result in a competitive advantage over the billions that Meta for e.g. have invested in their headsets and software
They bought up the small ones because they were failing. That industry requires huge economies of scale and the smaller ones couldn’t cope. EU created Airbus out of the scrap pieces of dying European aircraft manufacturers and injected capital into it and gave it a captive market. In metaverse they are starting to behave this way - currently Threads isn’t allowed to operate in Europe. They are going to create regulatory barriers around it. Allow European alternatives to grow - i.e. Mastodon, etc. And provide any kind of support - regulatory, capital, incentives, etc. European governments have used their might to create industry giants so that their countries remain relevant and that wealth creation and innovation remains rooted in their countries. It will be the same in this case.
Well that’s just IT. They don’t have a significant presence in the tech space and they are trying to create barriers to develop home grown companies. (To answer your question SAP and some anti-virus companies top of my head but there isn’t a lot.)
Creating barriers isn’t a great way to go about it. Protectionist efforts just get returned with tit for tat exchanges in the exact same way that has happened with aerospace.
Boeing didn’t want competition in the US domestic market. They thought they could squeeze out Bombardier, but weren’t expecting that to come around and have the A220 get sold to Airbus (who are now doing really well with the A220, since the A220 is legitimately a really nice plane).
reuters.com
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