Amateur UAV Pilot Exposes Texas River of Blood

Presto Vivace writes "Carlton Purvis of Security Management News reports that a tip from an amateur UAV enthusiast 'is what led Texas authorities to open a major criminal investigation into the waste practices of a Dallas meat packing plant.' The photo shows a river of blood."

Comments

Hmmm

[koan]

After reading that article I get the feeling there will be a law passed about "model aircraft" using cameras soon.

Re:Hmmm

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Hey! Kids!

Bring a straw!

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the government can use drones. For the "good" of the people.

Re:Hmmm

[Potor]

Restricted airspace above meatpacking plants and CAFOs?

I could see that coming.

Re:Hmmm

[baldass_newbie]

Bet you a nickel the police would need a warrant before such surveillance.
In fact, I kind of hope they do, public benefit notwithstanding.

Re:Hmmm

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It would fit a general trend...

Re:Hmmm

[martin-boundary]

They can never get rid of the flies, though. What we need is better miniaturization so we can put cameras on flies. (Or better teleportation, so we can make flies that can carry cameras...)

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should the police require a warrant for this? You do not own the sky over your land...

Re:Hmmm

[__aaltlg1547]

The general rule is if it can be observed from off your property it's fair game. No warrant needed.

Re:Hmmm

[WorBlux]

Exactly and flowing water is public (state) property anyways.

Re:Hmmm

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There has been some haggling(largely unsuccessful; because what wouldn't we do to Win The War On Drugs?) about exactly how much specialized gear you are allowed to 'observe' with before it becomes surveillance in gross violation of reasonable expectations.

Thermal imaging has attracted a number of court cases: cops in vehicles or aircraft go hunting for anomalously high longwave IR emissions that suggest a building may be being used as a grow-op. It can certainly be argued that IR radiates away from your house just the same that visible light does; but it doesn't do so well under the 'what a member of the public might observe from the street' test.

I'm assuming that cheaper drones, fancy terahertz imaging technology, laser mics, and other sci-fi stuff will continue to nibble at the question of what standard, exactly, 'observation' constitutes... Is it "absolutely anything I infer without physical trespass" or does it have some relation to what the 'ordinary man' could be expected to notice?

Re:Hmmm

[element-o.p.]

Ummm...no, not exactly, at least not yet. The FAA allows the "amateur" use of drones, provided they are flown at no more than 400 feet above the ground (AGL), and if they are not used for any type of commercial activity. They are supposed to finalize rules for commercial use of drones in the National Airspace System some time this year, although I've heard rumors that the rules may be delayed a bit.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Sarcasm.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

That wasn't a UAV that just whooshed over your head...

Re:Hmmm

[shutdown -p now]

All they need to do is classify any drone as "munition", then BATFA can have some fun.

Re:Hmmm

[AvitarX]

a) whoosh
b) a response to a post about a hypothetical future.

Re:Hmmm

[GPierce]

I should have saved a link, but somewhere in the last month or so I recall a story that described how spying on factory farms had been defined in law as a form of terrorism. I didn't pay enough attention because lately everything is being redefined as some kind of terrorism. As I vaguely remember it, the offense involved trespassing on private property. Unfortunately you will have to check this out for yourselves if you are interested.

Re:Hmmm

[element-o.p.]

That wasn't a joke going over my head...it was only an illegally operated amateur-operated drone!

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

On what planet is pig blood harmful to a river?

Re:Hmmm

[nedlohs]

this one.

Re:Hmmm

[MechaStreisand]

Perhaps this link is what you were thinking of (mentioned by another poster above you - credit goes to him).

Re:Hmmm

[dead_cthulhu]

Methinks I need to work on my reading skills. I was starting to wonder what British film awards had to do with any of this.

Re:Hmmm

[mindcandy]

The technical arguments are here (older case) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States

At the time, the dissent was based on "through the wall" versus "off the wall". Heat (it was argued in the dissent) was "off the wall" insofar as it was passively emitted. Use of technologies that go "through the wall" (your aforementioned terahertz imaging, et.al.) would seem to run afoul even of the dissenting justices in the above case.

Re:Hmmm

[shutdown -p now]

Actually, it's me who needs to work on my writing skills, since it should, of course, have been BATFE.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Bet you a nickel the police would need a warrant before such surveillance.

IANAL, but I bet they don't.

The US courts have consistently ruled that you warrants aren't necessary to look for things that are publicly visible. For example, a cop can look through the windows of a car any time you're pulled over, but looking inside the trunk or under a seat requires a warrant. If you can see something from 1000 feet up in the air, I suspect most judges will agree that meets any reasonable definition of "publicly visible."

Re:Hmmm

[PPH]

The same one where fish shitting in it is .... oh, wait.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

A river of blood is probably not subtle enough to need a warrant to see where it originates from.
(After a quick Google) Hey there is a band named River of Blood imagine that.

Re:Hmmm

[Runaway1956]

There is nothing to "like" about any of this. I'm not going to "defend" the meat packers. But, one thing I noted while watching the video, is that it is a 99 year old plant.

I'll give them just one small benefit of the doubt. It's POSSIBLE that they didn't know they were discharging blood into the creek. Old plant, old plumbing systems, plus the fact that regulations a hundred years ago were pretty lax, makes it possible that a crappy old pipe was just never dug up or disconnected.

But, the fact that the company is turning away people who are officially required to investigate the mess unless they have a search warrant suggests that they probably knew all along.

Side note from personal experience:
A couple years ago, one of our illegal aliens who grew up in some jungle village dumped a barrel of waste oil outside one of our doors. The oil was soon discovered in an ephemeral creek, and traced back to our plant. I thought my backward employers were pretty stupid - but at least they didn't block officials from the city coming in to look around, or require that they come back with search warrants.
Two lessons to be learned here. Number one, don't hire illegal aliens from jungle villages. Number two, when you do screw up, cooperate with investigators. Unless, of course, it is your policy to conduct business in an illegal manner.

Re:Hmmm

[PPH]

It would be fun to fly one over some of the forests that the conservation funds have bought up (and closed to the public). Suddenly, logging turns out to be 'wise land management'.

Re:Hmmm

[AK Marc]

You have a right to privacy that extends to angles and views that you could reasonable expect viewing from. Someone who climbs a tree to look in your window that isn't visble from the street has breached your privacy, even if the tree is across the street and not on your property (unless you routinely see others climbing the tree and knew it was a likely viewing point). So the police peering into your home from that vantage point are similarly peeping without a warrant, much like at a traffic stop, they can look in the car, but not open the doors and stick their heads in to look in the car. They already know it takes a warrant to look in a car (just looking includes sticking their head in the drivers side door that is left open and looking around, except for a small and legally defined area around the driver's seat). Warrants take too long, so instead they arrest them for anything, dangerous driving or whatever they make up, then they get hours to search the car as slowly and thoroughly as they wish, no warrant needed.

And depending on where you are, you do own the sky above your land. The land and the projection of that to the core of the earth and up to the edge of the atmosphere you own though the government gets a right of way above for planes and such, obviously.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

The one on which that pig blood is full of god-only-knows what growth hormones, bacterium, etc.

Re:Hmmm

[NatasRevol]

You don't live in the west, do you?

You might want to look up water rights. They're often worth more than land.

Re:Hmmm

[stephanruby]

Bet you a nickel the police would need a warrant before such surveillance.

Yes, that's how police helicopter pilots fly in general, they take off in their helicopter and they shut their eyes for fear of seeing anything without a warrant.

Re:Hmmm

[TheLink]

Nowadays is it reasonable to expect viewing from Google Maps (and streetview etc)? :).
http://g.co/maps/zqf5u

Re:Hmmm

[JWSmythe]

    The other provision is, you must maintain line of sight with the aircraft. It's the same restrictions as put on remote control aircraft.

    I do recall something about needing to have manual control override. I.e., a remote control. I'm not sure if that is a FAA rule, or just a guideline for responsible behavior.

Re:Hmmm

[dead_cthulhu]

Meh. At least it was obvious what to which agency you were referring once I stopped transposing letters in my head.

Re:Hmmm

[recharged95]

Or in actual terms by the FAA, that "the civilian user" shall follow guidelines set by a specificed industry authority, aka the AMA, which sets AGL to 400 feet.

Putting real laws in place has been in discussion with Congress for the last year (main decisions where in June of '11), but has been put off 2 times already. It keeps getting delayed.

What I see is likely restriction of autonomous flight (with the right to shoot down), and the status quo for controlled flight. Not much will change aside from full autonomous modes.

Re:Hmmm

[JWSmythe]

    Nope.

    The police do this all the time, with real aircraft.

    They'll frequently use helicopters with FLIR, to identify marajuana grow houses. They use hot lights, which require extra cooling. Some vent to the outside, which leaves an obvious odor. Others use additional air conditioning. In either case, the room is warmer than other rooms, or surrounding houses. They usually find target homes by checking for homes that use more power. That information is apparently "public record", although I've never found how to get them.

    Extra power consumption, with a hot room or plume of heat from an extra air conditioner, is enough probable cause for a warrant. They usually look for other tidbits, like flashy cars, neighbor complaints, resident utilities paid by cash or individuals with prior investigations, charges, or convictions.

    Of course, the legality varies by jurisdiction. Contact a local attorney for clarification of the laws in your area. and ... IANAL, just observant.

Re:Hmmm

[veganboyjosh]

What's the difference between a remote controlled aircraft (like a model plane) and a drone?

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Drone implies an autopilot or some autonomous system. Its an R/C plane with one of these, for example.

http://diydrones.com

Re:Hmmm

[Dunbal]

Why? Rivers are not private property. Just like beaches, you can't own one. You can own all the land around it, but you can't own the river.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not entirely true. There's an FAA advisory circular that states these rules.
My understanding is that the advisory circular essentially amounts to a law.

Re:Hmmm

[rsilvergun]

Any gopher guts left?

Re:Hmmm

[Jeremi]

On what planet is pig blood harmful to a river?

Fertilizer runoff is a major problem in rivers.

Pig blood is essentially fertilizer.

Re:Hmmm

[Dunbal]

You don't get water rights automatically with property. You have to buy them separately. Plus water rights apply to the origin point of springs or gallons per minute from a body of water, not entire rivers.

Re:Hmmm

[Dunbal]

No, munitions are classified as "fireworks". At least Patriot missiles are.

Re:Hmmm

[Dunbal]

He's not spying on the factory farm, he's spying on the river.

Re:Hmmm

[darth dickinson]

    Extra power consumption, with a hot room or plume of heat from an extra air conditioner, is enough probable cause for a warrant.

Now this has me legitimately concerned. I have a home networking lab that I use to validate various network configs for training, and for customers. A rack of routers, switches, and servers pulls quite the electrical draw, and generates quite a bit of heat. Not as much as grow lights, I'd imagine, but still...

Re:Hmmm

[Dunbal]

Blood from one pig? Not at all. Blood from thousands of pigs per day, every day? You alter the whole ecosystem.

Re:Hmmm

[RMingin]

Holy shit. As soon as you look, it's immediately apparent. The creek above the plant is white where there's turbulence, and green where there isn't. At the plant, it becomes maroon. Down where that creek flows into a larger one, you can see a clear tail of the maroon water flowing into the larger green creek.

So even if they had to slap the "UAV" guy on the wrist and throw out the info, anyone looking at Google could have made an 'anonymous' complaint afterwards.

Re:Hmmm

[gmhowell]

Ahh, one of slashdot's libertardian, mouth-breathing trolls is back.

Re:Hmmm

[ozmanjusri]

No, don't!

They'll turn all sparkly and you'll have to shoot them for the good of humanity and quality television programming.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Just Wow. Its even visible in the gmaps image!

Re:Hmmm

[ozmanjusri]

So if drones are outlawed, only the drones will have drones?

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

From the end of the article:

""From where I sit overseas, the lack of regulations in the USA just seems like madness. You're falling behind over there," he said."

Re:Hmmm

[JWSmythe]

    I learned a good bit of that from a local detective. We'd shoot the shit sometimes, and he told me a lot about work. Nothing specific to active cases, but a lot of methodology, inter-agency politics, etc. All in all, if more people had nice casual conversations with the police like we used to have, people would have more respect for the police. At least for the good ones.

    I guess the question would be, do you run 24/7, and do you have so much equipment that you require supplemental air conditioning running all the time? Is your power bill at least a couple hundred dollars higher than would be typical for a house in your area with similar square footage?

    It's possible that you'd get their attention. The police work a lot on hunches too. If you're a nice clean cut guy, living within your means, no huge cash transactions and shady personal relationships, it's doubtful you'd be checked out. I only met with a couple of those qualifications. Oh my gosh, at the time, I knew pot smokers, although I wasn't one myself. My employer (at the time) was looked at by the FBI a couple times. I was fully aware of it, and knew there was nothing to it. Oddly enough, several years later, he was brought up on drug charges, but those were related to pharmaceuticals. I didn't know about it til I ran across a news story about it.

Re:Hmmm

[afidel]

Not without a warrant they don't. See Kyllo v US, and since it's a supreme court the rules do NOT vary by jurisdiction (at least for definitions that include the whole of the US and incorporated territories).

Re:Hmmm

[JWSmythe]

AC got it right.

A UAV/drone is generally something that can fly without the assistance of a pilot.

A R/C aircraft is controlled by a pilot on the ground.

The UAV/drone in the sense of a self-controlled R/C aircraft, would be say a helicopter that will hover by itself, or an aircraft that will fly to provided waypoints, or fly home (back to you) if the R/C control is lost.

They may simply fly with a bit of computer assist, so they are easier to operate than a regular R/C aircraft, such as automatically going to straight & level flight, because the operator may simply need eyes above. It's silly for law enforcement to get 100+ hours practicing (and crashing) R/C airplanes, when they can get R/C's (drones, if you will), that will go straight up with a camera, and turn in the direction requested, to get a better view.

Some news outlets are mixing the terms, where their "drone" is simply an R/C aircraft, frequently with a camera. It's the same ugly trend, where anything related to any sort of computer technology suddenly had "cyber" and "e-" prepended to it. Expect it to be used by the media any time a R/C aircraft is used for anything but flying around in a circle above a father/son pair on a weekend.

The media works on a 5th grade reading level, and I'm fairly sure some "journalists" have the mental function of a 10 year old.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Nowadays is it reasonable to expect viewing from Google Maps (and streetview etc)? :).
http://g.co/maps/zqf5u

Does anyone else here think its totally f'd that this is just NOW being found? This has been easily visible on Google maps for how long? If this was anywhere near my neighborhood, or the places I find interesting (Dallas, TX is regrettably not on either list), I would have found it and realized something horrible was going on even before getting out my handy dandy UAV to go scoop out the area.

Re:Hmmm

[veganboyjosh]

Thanks. Figured there was some media misuse of the term, but that's helpful.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2637263&cid=38814895

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

But, but, but, what do you mean they can't pollute the commons, leaving a trail a mile wide and get away with it?

Re:Hmmm

[Chrisq]

A river of blood is probably not subtle enough to need a warrant to see where it originates from. (After a quick Google) Hey there is a band named River of Blood imagine that.

Enoch Powell would be spinning in his grave.

Re:Hmmm

[darth dickinson]

Eh, at the end of the day I'm not truly worried, like you said... I don't fit the rest of the profile. The equipment sits in the garage, probably not the best place for equipment in a hot Alabama summer :)

I have actually noticed a spike in the power bill, but it's less than $50 extra a month. Plus with my neighbors practically right on top of me (we live in one of those lovely "garden home" communities) I think any shady dealings would be found out pretty quick :)

Re:Hmmm

[gmhowell]

But, but, but, what do you mean they can't pollute the commons, leaving a trail a mile wide and get away with it?

Some_woman, are you back also?

Re:Hmmm

[Maritz]

The market with its legions of perfectly informed and conscientious consumers will sort it out, provided there is pretty much no government. Makes perfect sense really... :)

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry. They won't get angry when they break in and doesn't find anything. They'll just plant some smaller amount of drugs and lock you up for possession.

Re:Hmmm

[Maritz]

I'll give them just one small benefit of the doubt. It's POSSIBLE that they didn't know they were discharging blood into the creek. Old plant, old plumbing systems, plus the fact that regulations a hundred years ago were pretty lax, makes it possible that a crappy old pipe was just never dug up or disconnected.

"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

I agree it's possible, and it's also possible that even if they did know they still wouldn't care.

Re:Hmmm

[Captain Hook]

I don't think the white upstream of the plant is turbulence, those look like sand/gravel bars in the stream to me, you can see the same structures downstream of the plant.

But you are right, even google earth clearly shows pollution changing the colour of the water and the point where it flows into a larger river and mixes in.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, and the whole point here is that what the "ordinary man" might be expected to notice is changing as technology becomes cheaper and readily available.

Re:Hmmm

[delinear]

I guess the question would be, do you run 24/7, and do you have so much equipment that you require supplemental air conditioning running all the time? Is your power bill at least a couple hundred dollars higher than would be typical for a house in your area with similar square footage?

That probably describes the computer situation of 90% of the self respecting geeks here, myself included :)

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be they might knock on your door someday, my bicycle repair man had that problem, he had a old mac with the PSU running very hot and loud, it apparently matched the conditions in which weed grows, and they knocked on his door asking him what it all was about.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

UK reporting in. I can confirm that excess heat / power consumption can be used for probable cause for a raid over here. I seem to recall a recent and rather embarrassing case where the heat was generated by an heated animal cages - rabbits or guinea pigs or something, held in a garage. Can't find a source for this at the moment though.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Until you add one of these puppies....

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

ooops .... http://www.attopilotinternational.com/

Re:Hmmm

[Bill_the_Engineer]

In my state the water has to be navigable before it is considered state property.

Re:Hmmm

[rtb61]

Search warrant, WTF? These kind of premises that require a licence to operate under any normal sane regulatory conditions, that licence allows immediate health and pollution inspection at any time with out warning. Kind of pointless to have government health officer who can't inspect a plant for health code violations.

Re:Hmmm

[demonlapin]

Poor choice of words by WorBlux. The streambed is public, even if the water isn't.

Re:Hmmm

[Stuarticus]

As a Scotsman I resent this shameful waste of black pudding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding

Re:Hmmm

[yt8znu35]

Exactly. But get rid of the reportER as well as the reportEE. Just link RC aircraft with the word terrorism (again), and Congress will pass a law limiting the hobby. Then get rid of the EPA and TCEQ for killing jobs or similar nonsense. The whole charade should play well in TX.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeap I was going to post, he missed two of the requirements (my hackerspace is building a UAV)

1. Under 400 feet (or file your flight plan with local airspace authority) and avoid all class A, B, C zones (the important one is C; A and B generally don't go below 10,000 and 3,000 feet, respectively)
2. Operator maintain line of sight
3. Operator has override switch and ability to control craft manually

Re:Hmmm

[synapse7]

The use of the word drone makes it easier to lobby for regulation.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

actually you might want to look up water rights, water rights are not the same as water property.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

In Texas, all rivers and streams fed from rivers, are publical property. Some land owners don't like that, but as long as you are on the river or within a couple feet (don't remember exact distinace any more) or the river's shore line, you are perfectly within the rights granted by the state. Many hunters use this access to do just that - hunt.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

hehe

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with the faux google maps link?

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be an *oh snap* mod.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to "defend" the meat packers.

Homophobe.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

If a model plane is pilot-flown but flown beyond line-of-sight using a realtime camera on the plane (FPV) to pilot the plane, that is also not a model aircraft but a UAS/UAV/'drone'

Dave

Re:Hmmm

[somersault]

Indeed. Where once he might have been able to figure out for himself that a packet of peanuts may contain nuts, now it is printed right there on the packet in small letters.

No, I'm not quite sure what I'm getting at either, but the "ordinary man" is hardly the most observant of people.

Re:Hmmm

[AvitarX]

I thought you established they were legal.

Re:Hmmm

[Fast Thick Pants]

What's with the faux google maps link?

Yeah, maps.google.com.my? What the hell's that? Is com.my some sort of nasty Malaysian phishing farm pretending to be a messed-up semi-TLD like co.uk? Or did Google buy Malaysia?

Re:Hmmm

[JWSmythe]

    Your climate is pretty similar to ours here in Florida. You probably want to move the gear inside. I had a Catalyst 5000 switch, that didn't like being left in the garage for a year. It got some surface corrosion on it, and when I got around to firing it up for someone, I couldn't get on the console ports again. So it made a nice paperweight.

    BTW, the 5500's and 6500's are really nice switches, and you can get them cheap on eBay. But if you're learning for the CCNA, it's a bit beyond what you'll need. They're really nice if you need a high port density, or a really solid switching platform.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has been shortening their map links for a while. You prefer the ones that are 240 characters long?

Re:Hmmm

[JWSmythe]

    Ya.. That's exactly why my room was hot.. A 15k BTU portable A/C made it very comfortable in there. Where I am now, we have most of our gear by the main return for the A/C, so it manages the extra heat load very nicely. I'm going to be adding a small server room here, but that has it's own dedicated A/C duct and return. :) I don't know why they built the house with that single room like that, but I can't complain. No windows, solid block construction all the way around, two 20A circuits, and dedicated A/C.. I couldn't ask for much more. I'm going to drop cat6 to all the rooms we might have computers in, and put a Catalyst 6500 with GigE line cards in. It looks like I'll be spending some quality time with the attic in the near future.

Re:Hmmm

[Gilmoure]

You can't take the sky from me.

Re:Hmmm

[frank_adrian314159]

I guess the question would be, do you run 24/7, and do you have so much equipment that you require supplemental air conditioning running all the time? Is your power bill at least a couple hundred dollars higher than would be typical for a house in your area with similar square footage?

So I guess if you run a grow operation whose power consumption is hidden by that of your server farm, it's all copacetic, right?

Re:Hmmm

[operagost]

So you like allowing police to observe your house from the air without a warrant?

Re:Hmmm

[idontgno]

Two word: Bubbly Creek

Re:Hmmm

[silentbrad]

Not if it was more than 400 feet above ground level.

Re:Hmmm

[plopez]

He'll probably be persecuted[*] under the "Oprah" law. The law that says you cannot say negative things about the meat industry in TX. The time has come to either become a vegetarian or to only buy locally grow free range meat.

[*] Yes, I mean persecuted. And yes I know the difference between "persecuted" and "prosecuted".

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Texas and you're right to correct NatasRevol's silly "You don't live in the west, do you?" posting. A little more detail about publicly navigable waterways. I've been on both sides of the issue. You can't step onto land at all, unless it's to avoid an obstacle like a dam or a tree and then it's only to pass that obstacle. Otherwise, one step onto land and you could be trespassing.

Re:Hmmm

[LordLimecat]

But, the fact that the company is turning away people who are officially required to investigate the mess unless they have a search warrant suggests that they probably knew all along.

Not necessarily. If a cop shows up at your house and asks to take a peek around for kicks and giggles, are you likely to let him in?

If the same happened at your office, do you suppose your company would let them in, or politely decline?

Re:Hmmm

[Runaway1956]

In my post, to which you have responded, I stated that illegally dumped waste oil was traced back to our property. When some dude from the city came to the receptionist's window, she talked to the boss on the intercom, the boss came out, shook hands, listened to the problem, then walked around the property with the dude to see how bad the problem was.

We had nothing to hide, except an idiot of an employee. And, we would have been more than happy to allow the city to crucify that employee. Unfortunately, crucifixions seem to have gone out with the Romans.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Peanuts aren't nuts*, though.

So the warning is useful.

*Neither are they peas.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah I recall that it came about because of someone discussing madcow on Oprah, which brings up another thought madcow and alzheimers are nearly identical in symptoms with a autopsy required to decide so if only 1% of alzhiemers were actually madcow (bovine spongiform)

Re:Hmmm

[Fnord666]

Warrants take too long, so instead they arrest them for anything, dangerous driving or whatever they make up, then they get hours to search the car as slowly and thoroughly as they wish, no warrant needed.

They're not searching the car, they are conducting an inventory of its contents in conjunction with impound proceedings. Searching would be illegal without a warrant and probable cause.

Re:Hmmm

[orgelspieler]

I'm not really sure what you're calling apparent. The creek is pretty much the same color before and after the meat plant. Pretty clearly just silt. The clay in this area is a very dark iron-rich red color, so it's not surprising at all. There's quite a few drainage ditches that feed into the Trinity River, and several of them have the same maroon color. Look at Lemmon Lake. It's all that color. Surely you don't think there's a lake full of blood. I guess this is Bible-thumper territory; maybe there's a Revelations re-enactment center somewhere nearby.

Re:Hmmm

[orgelspieler]

Well, the Houston Chronicle reports that they found a pipe dumping the blood, and blood in the river, so I guess there's something going on there. But still, I don't find a dark discharge into a river particularly damning. This is a 99 year old plant. That pipe has probably been there for ages. Hell, the people running the place might not even know about it.

Re:Hmmm

[GameboyRMH]

What? Are we looking at the same creek? It clearly changes from dark green to dark red as it passes behind the meat plant, and if you keep following it you can even see the dark red creek flowing into a wider dark green river later on. It's possible that it is just silt but the fact that the silt starts right behind the meat plant is worth investigating.

Re:Hmmm

[somersault]

I know, but as far as nut allergies are concerned, both peanuts and tree nuts are pretty bad, and I've never heard of a distinction being made on those warnings.

Re:Hmmm

[JWSmythe]

    Well... I guess you could try. It would at least mask one level of tests. They'll get you for driving in a bad neighborhood with bushels of pot in the trunk of your new Mercedes. :) Actually the way it usually works is, someone down the chain gets busted for misdemeanor possession, tells the police where he bought it, and then that dealer says "Oh ya, I buy from Frank. Here's his phone number and address."

    The weakest link in any sort of security is always people. The stoner was willing to point out his dealer, to avoid up to a year in jail. The street dealer was willing to inform on you to avoid years for possession with intent to distribute. And you? Well, you were the grower, and don't have a lot of bigger fish to exchange for reduced/dropped charges.

    And not only do they get the pot, but everything related to it can become forfeit. In my jurisdiction that includes the home, cars, bank accounts, and contents of them all. And lets not forget, your wife/girlfriend/significant other are accessories to the crime. Nothing breaks up a relationship like losing everything and jail time.

Re:Hmmm

[Chris Burke]

Oh man. And here I am, the D&D geek, who always thought a Black Pudding was a horrific, semi-sentient puddle of highly acidic ooze.

Turns out the reality is much worse.

Re:Hmmm

[Psychofreak]

In Ohio it is "Mean high water" or something similar. If you own floodplain (like I do), then it is public access. as long as they are not hunting (fishing is the point), not littering, and not stealing your stuff (burning your firewood, happens to my neighbor all the time) there is nothing you can do.

There is a group who kayak through and pull up on my property all the time. Normally it is not a problem, they pack up and take everything with.

They are not permitted to access from anywhere though, they have to go to a bridge access (public road meeting public right of way) or some other access point. They are not permitted to walk down my driveway to get to the river.

Phil

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but this was blood... Obviously the case must be thrown out of court...

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I would never let any police enter my home, or office if i had one, without a search-warrant... Even if i knew i did not have anything to hide...

If you allow them to enter anything they can see can be used against you and keeping track of all possible laws are impossible...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

Watch it... quite informative...

Re:Hmmm

[rusty0101]

A 10 year old who's been sent back a grade a couple or three times.

Re:Hmmm

[mhajicek]

What about line of site by camera? Imagine a string of a dozen drones, each maintaining line of sight with the one ahead and the one behind, and you only have to directly observe the closes one.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone with some experience in the either field I can say that you should feel confident that the amount of power and heat used by the average multi PC home network in one room is nowhere near the same as having a pair 1000 watt lights running in 18 or 12 hour cycles every day. The power bill is also very different. If you're worried your home network will draw the DEA take off the tinfoil hat.

Re:Hmmm

[JWSmythe]

    I believe it's suppose to be line of sight of the operator. If the operator on the ground can't see it directly, [s]he is in violation.

    It makes good sense too. Once the drone is out of sight, anything could go wrong, and the operator couldn't make any sort of corrections. In your example of a string of drones, if one element of that chain were to fail, the operator would then not have visual controls.

    This is usually assisted by the fact that most R/C aircraft controls have a very short range. When the receiver no longer receives input from the controls, it shuts the motor down and (hopefully) lands gracefully. R/C aircraft are generally rather small, so your little aircraft would easily disappear at much over a few hundred feet anyways.

    When the aircraft is almost out of sight, some operators make for a standard rate turn, count the seconds, and hopefully it's coming back. If not, they're going for a nice hike to the last place they saw it. If I could fly for say a mile, and a crosswind started pushing it off course at say 500', I may have no idea where in the next 4,780 feet it finally "landed". If that were into a road, that would be a rather bad thing.

Re:Hmmm

[barrettb05]

It says in the full article I read, that the company has been open for 90 years, perhaps the current owner was unaware where the pipe lead to.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe someone should pop by to look at Lemmon Lake? Little Lemmon Lake and the rivers nearby sure aren't the same colour as Lemmon Lake.

Re:Hmmm

[bugger41]

that was funny as hell yeah you know only government officials will be Allowed to operate anything like that considering their organizing them now and plan to turn them on the American people and a serious crap pops off with the Inevitable happens to the economy just another means to hurt us all into interment camps and then quietly exterminate us. That part I'm not joking about.

Re:Hmmm

[bugger41]

damn this thing is I got a guy that lives right down the street from that builds those damn things for this area I wonder how much he's willing to talk about it?

Re:Hmmm

[bugger41]

you guys are going back and forth about apples and oranges They have a weaponized the damn things they I Are planning to turn on us and get out in the near future are looking for an excuse so far they've only put tazers on them wired and unwired from what I understand being an amateur ballistics fan the only thing I can Deduct from the wired version of that we have to be a slug type device with energy already stored in some sort of nasty means of penetrating your flesh this is the only way they could deliver A electrified blow to the target meaning and a good stiff wind could cost you your site or even death. Much as I'd like to laugh it's not very funny.

Re:Hmmm

[bugger41]

the unwired version I meant sorry and the creepiest thing is is they got us to sign up for it then leading us by the nose for some time now.

Re:Hmmm

[bugger41]

what's the big deal the city of St. Louis dumps raw sewage by the millions of gallons into the Mississippi River every time there's a severe thunderstorm and the damnedest thing of it is what you get past St. Louis there's no more dams to contain it so there's no possible way of cleaning up the spills when they take place And this is a municipality. This is worse than them hit Hypocritie up on Wall Street The St. Louis sewer systems have needed revamp for years now and now that they've been hit by the economy any attempts they were making to correct it are going to come to a screeching halt.

Re:Hmmm

[JWSmythe]

... they I Are planning ...

I'm not quite sure if your tinfoil hat is screwed on too tight, or if you just confessed to planning some sort of attack.

    As far as an "unwired taser". Sure, it's theoretically possible to have a taser without wires. Have you ever tossed a charged capacitor to someone? If not, talk to a seasoned mechanic who worked on cars made before 1974, when distributors had a big capacitor in them. That was an old prank that was done frequently to new techs.

    Now, launching unwired tasers from a UAV has substantial problems, like targeting. UAVs are small, and therefore unstable. Even launching a AC130 style bombardment into a crowd would stun a small portion of the group.

    Weaponized UAVs do exist. The military has them. It's well known and documented. That is, documented by the military for public release, and reports are available in the news media. Just look for information on the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and the AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. That's how the military weaponizes UAVs. They aren't interested in stunning a few people. When they want a threat eliminated, they eliminate it.

Re:Hmmm

[bugger41]

None of this will matter when the bottom drops out of the dollar and the peso soars past it in value for the first time in history because they regulated how much US notes can be circulated in Mexico and against the regulations that come with the US dollar that should be no problem so the war on drugs will come to a screeching halt at L. have to peddle their wares elsewhere because the US dollar will be worthless to Them

somebody get slayer on the line, stat

[Anonymous Coward]

they could go with a whole concept-record thing.

Is a UAV necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Columbia+Meat&hl=en&ll=32.751275,-96.787695&spn=0.001405,0.002068&sll=32.802955,-96.769923&sspn=0.47903,0.576782&vpsrc=6&t=h&z=19

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[hedwards]

Comparing the images you can't tell that it's blood in the Google Maps image, but in the image from the UAV, you can at least see that it's red. Red silt in that part of the country looks rather at odds with the geographic features there.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[xaoslaad]

Only in that it is what brought attention to it. Had someone realized it on Google Maps first, then it would have worked just as well...

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[BitwiseX]

Comparing the images you can't tell that it's blood in the Google Maps image, but in the image from the UAV, you can at least see that it's red. Red silt in that part of the country looks rather at odds with the geographic features there.

I color calibrate my monitor with a Huey, and I'd say it does look maroon to me, but at any rate it very clear begins right in the middle of Columbia Packing's property.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[icebike]

A better link: http://g.co/maps/8vdr9

No, you can't tell its blood, but you can see a color difference upstream vs downstream even in Google Maps.
The creek is generally green upstream, and dark ruddy brown below the plant.

If you zoom in closer on Google Earth you can see this color shift very well.: 32.749052 -96.789131
Also the historical imagery on Google Earth does not show this if you step back to 2009, when water levels were much higher
or 2008 when they were similarly low.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course! Otherwise people won't buy into the "importance of UAV's for the safety of our citizens" also "the importance of banning all non-government UAV for the privacy of our citizens".

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[3dr]

The grove of trees behind the plant is where it appears to source from. The creek upstream (left) looks normal, and downstream of the trees looks bloodied. The Trinity river isn't far away, and at the mouth of the creek it is very red.

No UAV needed for this one. Had anyone looked in Google's imagery and known that location was a meat packing plant, the conclusion would be simple.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously this is pure speculation, but the Google Maps view of the area seems to indicate the soil in the immediate vicinity of the plant has a definite reddish tone not visible in other nearby areas. Is it possible the abattoir waste is being washed into the septic field? Not quite sure what the appropriate disposal methods would be but this may be a case of a company being negligent and exceeding the capacity of their waste management system rather than dumping directly into the river. Although from the looks of it, it doesn't make much difference as far as the river is concerned.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[quantaman]

Looking at the google map it's not exactly an unpopulated area. There's a ballpark, a dam with a bridge not far downstream, and it's within a block of a sizable suburban development.

How was this not common knowledge? One would expect there to be kids swarming all over that creek (hopefully not swimming). I'd expect this was somewhat common knowledge in the community and nobody thought it was a problem, or thought to report it.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it could be a good idea to check the surrounding of your local meat processing plant in google map to know if they don't have the same problem.

Go environment!!

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Nethemas the Great]

Well, how about any of these reasons:

• Most or at least a large majority work at the plant. Rat out your employer, lose your job...
• People figured that the blood in the creek wasn't a problem, maybe even thought it was approved the by the appropriate regulating agency
• People thought that that was a shame about the creek but don't trust/want the government nosing around

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Svartalf]

Sorry, gotta call BS on that one. It's not the same color as the "red silt" that predominates in the area. I'm a local resident and I know that there's nothing that color in the soil or water normally to make it- that's friggin' blood or a chemical contaminant emanating from the packing plant.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Svartalf]

Yep. Very simple indeed.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Svartalf]

Yep, looking at the sat imagery...there's little doubt about it. What's more of an epic fail is that a State Rep's office is right across the street. Special.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Qzukk]

If you follow the creek back a little ways towards the packing plant, just south of the power line there's a round something in the field near the trees where the creek turns dark, here. It's pretty large (as wide as the truck that left the tire tracks around it)... I wonder what it could be? I looked around at the other fields near there but didn't see anything like that.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[idbeholda]

Not sure about you, but to me, the off-crimson hue of the "mud" seems to more than suggest blood is present.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[countertrolling]

I color calibrate my monitor with a Huey...

For real?

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

That looks like a storm drain, perhaps part of the municipal system, maybe the factory ran their own blood pipe into the closest storm sewer pipes and that happens to be where it's draining into the river.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[MaskedSlacker]

In other words, I can see this from my apartment on the opposite side of the planet. No warrant needed.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

how about the discharge from Darling International Inc. http://goo.gl/bLQqs

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[wisty]

Or, kids don't swim in creeks anymore these days.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Hognoxious]

Brown is not a color that CRTs or LCDs are capable of doing

Shit is brown, your post is shit and I can see it.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[afidel]

It's doubtful it's Keyhole (satellite) imagery, while Keyhole is pretty damn powerful the fact that the last few zoom levels are visible means it's aerial quad imaging taken from an airplane. Basically if you're in an area where quad images aren't available Google will use Keyhole images but the last 2-3 zoom levels will show "no image data available".

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[delinear]

The giant pig-blood-and-hormone fueled pike probably scared them all away.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Svartalf]

You're missing the point... The color, even with your argument, isn't possible for the area like people keep trying to dismiss. I live in the DFW area (Tagline...) and that color isn't IN the soil or typically in the streams around the Trinity. It's a chemical contaminant or blood like I said originally. Trying to paint it any other way is to be promulgating a lie for the sake of playing "devils advocate"...

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Svartalf]

FOMHLMAO! Thank you for saying what I try not to in a discussion like this.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare this to Bing maps... http://binged.it/yNEGJG

Nathan

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but you're full of shit. Had you bothered to read my post you would have seen that I had stated that I saw no reason in the image for the silt to be red. Also you would have noticed in my post that the color is not clearly red on all screens.

Furthermore Google Maps does not use color profiled images AFAIK so there's absolutely no reason to assume that they are.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Ihmhi]

The giant pig-blood-and-hormone fueled pike probably scared them all away.

Armok help us, Dwarf Fortress is becoming real.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's doubtful it's Keyhole (satellite) imagery, while Keyhole is pretty damn powerful the fact that the last few zoom levels are visible means it's aerial quad imaging taken from an airplane. Basically if you're in an area where quad images aren't available Google will use Keyhole images but the last 2-3 zoom levels will show "no image data available".

Sadly, Google labels all those image as satellite, which means people have really wrong ideas about what a satellite can do.

Re:Is a UAV necessary?

[scottv67]

>Brown is not a color that CRTs or LCDs are capable of doing

What? Can you provide a little more detail on why you think CRTs or LCDs can not display the color brown?

If libertarians had there way

[geekoid]

we would have no recourse.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

*their

Pollution is destruction of property, destruction of property is a civil or possibly criminal crime.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[stevens]

Not true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riparian_water_rights

Re:If libertarians had there way

[rrohbeck]

*their

Pollution is destruction of property, destruction of property is a civil or possibly criminal crime.

Unless the owner of the property is the commons.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

No recourse... to what ? Hobbyists flying UAVs? Seeing the same things you could see from any manned aircraft? Reporting things they don't like to the police?

Call me a libertarian kook, if you must, but I can't see why you should have any "recourse" to any of these. They all seem perfectly normal.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[clarkkent09]

To the extent that dumping blood into a river is harmful to others they are entitled to compensation. If you think libertarians are in favor of "liberty" to harm others, then your understanding of libertarianism is as bad as your spelling.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[clarkkent09]

If the property in question is privately owned (as all property should be) then there is no problem. The owner will sue the meat packing company. If the owner is everybody (i.e nobody) then people will treat it carelessly like almost all property was treated in former communist countries.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you trying to ruin a perfectly good straw man argument? It's an election year. Logic and truth have nothing to do with it.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

To the extent that dumping blood into a river is harmful to others they are entitled to compensation.

under what law? is there a law against merely being harmed? maybe if i owned the river i could sue over some arbitrary loss in the value of my property, but in that case i could sue almost anybody. shit, coal plants put mercury in my river! fuck them, i'm suing.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

ya, if you don't view things the way this person does, it's YOU who the idiot is.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Since each typical polluter only causes a tiny amount of damage to the environment, and therefore only a small amount of damage to each individual, the recourse of individual against the collective effect of all polluters (which is non-trivial, by the way) is massively limited. Unless of course the public were to organize to protect their rights. Maybe the organization could even hold elections for leaders that would (ostensibly) represent the interests of the constituents. What do libertarians have to say about such a collective organization of individuals?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

You can sue almost anybody now for almost anything. If you pick your battles well, then you'll win more often than you lose. This happens to be one of those cases where you are likely to win.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Privately owned rivers. That's a Super idea, Clark. Would that work for the oceans as well?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Miseph]

So if everybody owns the land, we are enslaved, but if individuals own all the land we are not... right. Freedom is slavery, up is down, libertarianism isn't batshit insane stupidity. I'm not sure how I really feel about this little game.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[clarkkent09]

Since we are talking about environment, compare the amount of pollution (and for that matter individual liberty) in capitalist countries and in socialist countries. So yes, if land is privately owned there is more liberty than if the land is owned by the state.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Nimey]

Also the air.

Libertarian naivete would be cute if it weren't dangerous.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Nimey]

The organization would have to collect taxes! Theft! Socialism! Slavery!

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Since we are talking about environment, compare the amount of pollution (and for that matter individual liberty) in capitalist countries and in socialist countries.

You mean like China compared to Sweden? Now I'm confused...can you provide any citations that show one ideological system pollutes more than another?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[clarkkent09]

Sweden is a capitalist country with privately owned companies and mostly free market economy (although an extensive welfare state, that btw it increasingly cannot afford, makes many uneducated people call it socialist). It is also relatively clean.

China, for the last 50 years or so has been a socialist country (as in public ownership of industry - the definition of socialism) and it is extremely polluted. Recently it is becoming somewhat more free market oriented although still almost all of the biggest companies and the the biggest polluters are publicly owned. So what is your point?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[trout007]

Here is a great essay called, "Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution" by Murray Rothbard.
http://mises.org/rothbard/lawproperty.pdf

In the libertarian theory unused property comes into ownership through homesteading which basically mean you have to start using unused land. The same theory exists with air/water pollution, noise, and radio waves.

So if an airport is build far away from people it homesteads the right to make the noise associated with running an airport. Anyone that decided to move nearby has to accept that level of noise. If people still move in then the level of noise the airport makes cannot be increased say by landing a new jet that is louder than previous aircraft. This is because it is a nuisance to the other property owners. This is the same reason an airport couldn't be built in a populated area without violating peoples property rights.

If a coal plant is built in a remote area where it's exhaust cannot be detected by surrounding property owners they have gained a right to pollute that air. If someone moves into that area they do so with the knowledge that the coal plant pollutes there. But if people move in anyway they can't sue to stop the pollution. But they can sue if the plant increases the pollution.

The same with a river. If before anyone owned property downstream on the river a meat packing plant moved there and polluted the river they would have homesteaded the right to pollute that river. That isn't very likely. There were most likely owners of property on the river before any industry. Therefore anyone that polluted the river would be violating everyone downstream property rights and they could sue for damages.You can have a class action lawsuit by all plaintiffs against a single polluter.

In reality a libertarian system would have a much cleaner environment because anyone could sue for damages. The EPA exists to protect businesses from lawsuits. It sets a legal limit where companies can pollute to where they face no threat of lawsuit. Also they don't get sued for damages but are fined by the government which leaves the property owners that had their property damaged with no recourse.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Improv]

Most libertarians I know think that business owners should be free to, say, only serve white people.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[clarkkent09]

Ideally people who cause pollution would pay up compensation based on the amount of harm caused to each individual. That is just a fair guiding principle. It is true, as you say, that sometimes it is impractical to work out the exact amount of damages. Like with just about everything in law, some pragmatism is required.

The problem you mention comes up in tort law all the time. If you drop fireworks which then explode and startle an old lady a block away who stumbles into a ladder causing a worker to drop a can of paint onto somebody's head causing them a large hospital bill. Who should pay it? It is almost always complicated but the only answer is to figure out the general principles and do the best we can in each case. Libertarianism doesn't provide a clear cut answer to every question, but then neither does anything else.

Since tort law doesn't handle pollution problem perfectly, why do you think that a better answer is to pass regulation? Working out the details of that regulation will be just as complicated, and quite often can cause more harm than good. Who will write up the rules regulating each industry? Your elected representatives don't understand every industry and every type of pollution in every situation, not even one percent of it. In practice it is only the industry itself that has the knowledge to do so and what tends to happen is that regulation is written by the biggest players with most lobbying power in order to benefit themselves against competition, increase cost of entry etc.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[BetterSense]

Grandparent is being snide, but actually asks a legitimate question.

Parent mocks, but Libertarians would be perfectly fine with such an organization...as long as it was supported by voluntary contributions, by selling a product, or some other means besides taking money from people by force.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

So what is your point?

LOL here's the point, Clark: are you or aren't you able to substantiate your dubious claim that one ideological system pollutes more than another? If you can't/won't, then you're probably one of those unfortunate folks who has elevated ideology to the same level as religious dogma.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[clarkkent09]

Or by charging for a service such as contract enforcement through courts. Given that every transaction involves a contract that could be a fair amount of money, enough to finance a government as our constitution envisioned it, and it would not involve force - you would be free not to pay it, but your contract would not be enforceable in court. There are many other ways too.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[hairyfeet]

Oh please! China is about as communist as my left buttock, in fact other than a few hippie communes in the northwest in the 60s I don't think anyone has ever tried to have an actual communist state. What China was and to a point is, which was one of the reasons for the great Sino/Soviet split when the USSR divorced itself from his example was a variation on Stalinism, which is where a handful at the top live like Gods while the people do without. I know its hard after being pounded with propaganda to this very day (notice how anything the right doesn't like like healthcare for the poor is labeled 'socialist' like that is the same as kiddie fiddler?) but its easy enough to tell the difference as i sincerely doubt "the people' were asking for The Holodomor, the great purges, or to eat bark in NK while dear leader's fatass kid ate all the cookies. As for why China is so polluted its because they don't care how the worker's live (which again is the opposite of how Karl Marx designed communism) as long as they can roll around in cash while building up their military. it reminds me of old Joe and his 'five year plans" as by the end of those he had built some seriously pollution monsters, the only non Chinese city in the top 10 most polluted is an old Joe era chemical factory town in Russia.

As for TFA here is a perfect example of why the FDA and EPA need real teeth instead of letting the right gut what little regulations we have because its pretty obvious without the threat of millions in fines and a loss of their business most corps won't give a fuck about anything but the bottom line. of course the bitch is it never seems to fail that no matter how many times we think we've closed the loopholes the little bastards just get smarter, look at how many superfund sites we ended up stuck with because they set up some shell corp to take the fall. I'm seeing the same thing happen in my own state with the NG frakking and wildcatters as they've set up shell corps that rent everything from the tools to the office furniture to be the "face' company that just gets burned if bills pile up or they get hit with fines and then they can just start another shell corp, rent the gear again, and they are right back in business. We really need to make a law so these CxOs are held responsible for the damage their companies cause so they can't just 'pull an Enron' and walk away with the cash while we get stuck with the bills.

For a good example playing out now look how the airlines are gonna end up dumping their retirement accounts onto the US taxpayer while the CxOs bail with golden parachutes. they got to gamble with the funds and when things went pop they get to say "tough shit buh bye" and cash out, its completely fucked and rewards sociopaths and if we don't do something about it we'll have no choice but to become socialist because the majority of those with company run retirement accounts are libel to find nothing but a picture of the CEO snorting coke off some 19 year old hooker in their nest eggs they've worked their whole lives for.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Nethemas the Great]

Hmm. Bloody Libertarians, all "we the people" and "all praise to our founding fathers, their God guided hands, and their immaculate document." What'd we do with that document? We discovered that it dealt with damn near nothing of the problems the nation was and would face. So, we amended the hell out of it because it was anything but complete and still we had/have innumerable problems as society and its issues evolve. Our history--well before we established any kind of oversight--was fraught with a great deal of problems. Limiting thing to just water ways still includes and is certainly not limited to farmers damming up streams for irrigation to the detriment of their neighbors farther down. Mercury dumped without care into waterways for the extraction of gold. Manufacturing dumping whatever waste they saw fit into waterways to the point rivers actually caught ablaze. Septic systems amounting to little better than a pipe running from the house to the river (pond, lake, etc.). Collapse of fish populations due to pollution and over fishing. The list goes on...

Re:If libertarians had there way

[ColdWetDog]

In reality a libertarian system would have a much cleaner environment because anyone could sue for damages. The EPA exists to protect businesses from lawsuits. It sets a legal limit where companies can pollute to where they face no threat of lawsuit. Also they don't get sued for damages but are fined by the government which leaves the property owners that had their property damaged with no recourse.

Right. Because I want to spend the rest of my life (and income) suing various and sundry large corporations or interests that want to pollute or otherwise disturb the environment surrounding my own property.

I like arguing with people, but not that much.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[trout007]

Did you ever get a letter in the mail letting you know you were a part of a class action lawsuit? I get about 2 a year. It would be a good use of all of our lawyers.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Nethemas the Great]

In favor of? No. At least not in spirit. Most people are not consciously and intentionally evil, just thoughtless, inconsiderate, and generally self-serving. However, in practice the outcome is the same

.

Tell me, with out government overseers who the hell would have the pockets to fight and enforce justice? I can tell you that not one of those people living near that meat packing plant. Tell me, if someone in Minnesota dumps industrial waste into the Mississippi river, who would protect the residents of Baton Rouge from the resultant carcinogenic drinking water? What pockets would pay for justice? How would its residents make Acme Inc. stop?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Qzukk]

We're already seeing where things are heading this way just with water. People are pumping antifreeze up from their water wells, and the oil/gas companies pumping god knows what down there insist it isn't their fault. How do you figure out who to sue? When you can't even force the companies to tell you what they're pumping down, how can you prove that what you're pumping up came from them and not some long closed auto shop that for all anyone knows dumped barrels of whatever in the yard decades ago and it just now got down to the water table?

Why does the government have to provide water to the people of Dimock, PA? Oh wait, that's right, the government said that Cabot didn't have to fix the problem, they just had to give them some water for a few years. Imagine, if only the government hadn't been there to make Cabot do anything at all!

The air? How would you even begin to figure out who caused the pollution that gave you lung cancer? It's bad enough WITH government "regulation" where companies have to "self-report" their "accidental" benzene releases.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Working out the details of that regulation will be just as complicated

Except that in one case it basically requires a supreme court decision to make it binding in all cases after all the details are worked out from scratch hundreds of different times in hundreds of different cases around the country, and in the other case it's done once and applies to everyone.

The libertarians' great fear is that the second case might be done wrong and have to be undone or redone from scratch, which is apparently worse than the dozens and dozens of times it's done irreversibly wrong in courts across the country.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Or by charging for a service such as contract enforcement through courts. Given that every transaction involves a contract that could be a fair amount of money, enough to finance a government as our constitution envisioned it, and it would not involve force - you would be free not to pay it, but your contract would not be enforceable in court. There are many other ways too.

The US constitution didn't envision anything, the founding fathers did. Guess what? The founding fathers would NOT have considered a privatized judiciary to be a good idea.

But don't let that get you down, the entire US legislature and most of the judiciary have been effectively privatized already - so by and large we are already living in this Libertarian Utopia you speak of!

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Qzukk]

But they can sue if the plant increases the pollution.

Only if it knocks on the door and says "Hi! I'm increased pollution from the coal plant next door".

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Nethemas the Great]

It's really bloody obvious and simple. That minuscule damage and similarly small redress each company/person must pay is most certainly insufficient to motivate them to stop polluting. This of course assumes that someone was even able to successfully wage a successful legal action against them in the first place. The expense of which would generally out weight the amount won in compensation. The only way in which to prevent damaging pollution is to make that pollution illegal and provide a reasonable means by which to monitor for violators. Libertarians call it "regulation" and big-brother. The reality is that it is but an extension of the framework that deals other acts considered immoral by society like theft, murder, rape, etc..

Just because government is corruptible, just because government doesn't always get it right doesn't mean that you throw the baby out with the bath water. You think corporations run roughshod over citizens now with government being the instrument they puppet to get their way. What do you think will happen when there is no one to stand in the way but Mr. Joe Public, and his $40,000/year income from which he must pay for a lawyer?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[magarity]

Why not? Any business trying that wouldn't last long as most customers wouldn't want to support them for moral reasons. Why do you think the "Jim Crow" laws were created? Because the racists who wanted segregation were in fear of going out of business due to non-segregated competition.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[AK Marc]

Sue for what? Can I sue if someone expels their exhaust (CO2) onto my property? How about if they distribute it on their property, and the wind carries it to mine? Do I get to determine what I don't want on my property and force them to obey (i.e. no cigarette smoking where I can smell it)? Or do I have to run my rights past a panel of libertarians to determine whether I'm worthy of having my rights doled out by them to stop the person polluting? In general, libertarianism fails completely when it comes to pollution, especially if those most affected have no nearby land (say someone decides DDT is a good thing to saturate their land in and does so until 1000 miles away in the ocean, the concentrations get high enough to start killing turtle eggs and such. Who can sue? The closest people to the pollution don't care that much and had no loss from the DDT runoff, and the turtles don't own land, so under libertarianism, they have no rights, so who gets to sue? Or is that not pollution in libertarian speak, since another human wasn't identifiably harmed by the DDT initially released?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[AngryDeuce]

My question concerning these types of situations and the whole libertarian "pollution is a civil matter and the polluter is liable for damages" method of dealing with pollution is; What if the polluter does not have the money or assets to clean up the mess they made?

Say I buy a corporation with a plant that handles toxic chemicals. It turns out these chemicals have been leaching into the groundwater for decades. I get sued by the property owners all around me and all the people that draw off that groundwater. I go to court and fight it out. I lose the case, and now owe $5 billion dollars in damages. The corporation files bankruptcy, but that's fine with me, because I walk away scot-free.

So, who ends up on the hook cleaning up the contamination? My corporation went the way of Enron, so it's not me or my corporation. Wouldn't the public then be on the hook for cleaning up the mess? What measures would the public be able to take in order to prevent a similar situation from happening again? Libertarians generally don't want regulations that would prevent this type of behavior before it occurs, so how do we actually prevent something like this from happening? Once it's happened, it's too late. We've all been drinking the poison, bathing in it, washing our clothes in it...

I've been reading about different environmental disasters here in the United States lately, things like Love Canal, Times Beach, Missouri, and the Valley of the Drums, and I wonder how the libertarian principles would have corrected those situations. The Superfund law gives the EPA the power to identify and work towards cleaning these sites up, but most libertarians I talk to think the EPA should be abolished due to the whole "regulations" thing. That being said, if we get rid of the EPA, how would sites like this be handled, and who would pay for it?

I'm not trying to be facetious; this is an honest question, because, while I totally agree with some tenets of libertarianism, such as legalization of drugs and ending the nation-building all over the world bullshit, I don't see how the free market alone could deal with situations like these. These problems, due to their severity, seem to extend beyond the ability of any one private entity to deal with. The people living around these areas certainly couldn't have done anything about it, these sites cost billions to clean up, and there's over a thousand Superfund sites in the U.S., as of November, 2010.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

If the priority is to minimize pollution.. almost certainly. Because the private owner has a good reason to keep pollution out. It ruins the value of the property. So any pollution that occurs will accrue revenue to the property owner and any pollution that doesn't, the owner has an incentive to pursue and get them to stop.

Of course.. private ownership has other issues.. But then public ownership does too, mainly that the publicly owned resource gets consumed until it has little value left. Hence.. depleting fish stocks, containminated water tables, falling air quality..

Re:If libertarians had there way

[pete6677]

There's no evidence of this.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[clarkkent09]

The only way in which to prevent damaging pollution is to make that pollution illegal and provide a reasonable means by which to monitor for violators.

And what on earth makes you think that this is simple? There are infinite ways to pollute infinite variety of things, and in many cases it is not even clear how or if at all harmful that pollution is. So how much should a fine be for a company that dumps blood into a river? What if they didn't dump blood but coffee? Should it be more or less? Should a company be fined more if an accident at a factory releases 100 cu.ft. of Hydrocyanic Acid than if it releases a million cu.ft of methane? Can you imagine the magnitude of all that regulation and all the potential for mistakes, injustice and corruption?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[dragonsomnolent]

Dude, China, communist? Sorry it's free market there, for quite a while. Totalitarian regime, sure, but in communism there is no private ownership of much of anything (a la Cuba). Buddy of mine just spend 2 years over there helping set up an American company to open plants there. It's complex, but essentially they had to buy stock in an existing Chinese (privately owned) company, and after a while were allowed to buy it completely. Sure, there were some tight regulations regarding the transfer of money and who owned what throughout the course of the buyout, but they were private businesses, doing business. China isn't very communist

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

In reality a libertarian system would have a much cleaner environment because anyone could sue for damages.

Wouldn't you need some sort of legislative infrastructure to establish what you can sue for and what you can't? Can I sue you because I think you're too ugly and that offends me?

And wouldn't you need some sort of judicial infrastructure to be able to sue? Or do you just get some of your neighbors together as a kind of kangaroo court?

And wouldn't you need some sort of enforcement to enforce the court's verdict?

And isn't all of that antipathetical to libertarian theory?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Nethemas the Great]

Tell me Trout, do you have the money to pay for a crack team of lawyers that are a match for or better than those of the corporation doing the polluting? Do you even have the money to pay for an average lawyer and expenses related to filing a suit against said corporation. What would such a lawsuit do to you financially--especially if you lost and were forced to pay for the legal defense of the corporation? Tell me, how about your job, are they flexible enough with your schedule to let you go off for weeks/months to wage these legal campaigns?

The EPA exists to protect citizens for whom collectively pooled their resources to pay them to ensure they never have damages in the first place. Businesses in exchange are provided a uniform and known standard that permits them to operate with confidence provided they adhere to that standard.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[clarkkent09]

What are you talking about? A government that raises funds by providing a service wouldn't be any more or less privatized than a government that raises money by force. It would be less immoral though.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Nethemas the Great]

Can you pay for the proof of that destruction in court?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[trout007]

I think you may be confusing libertarianism with anarchism. Libertarian philosophy recognizes the need for a government to provide courts and police. The main purpose of these is to protect you liberty and property rights.

You could sue for anything but you have to prove damages. I may not be a handsome man but if you sue me in court you would have to prove damages to a jury.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[trout007]

Like I mentioned before. I've been a party to lawsuits against many multinational companies. They were all class action lawsuits. A team of lawyers figured out that a big company was screwing a bunch of consumers and figured they could make a lot of money suing the company.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Because you couldn't, of course, hire an agent to work on your behalf in these matters. No, you, of course, spend all your time planting food, husbanding animals, raising barns, and knitting clothes. Because you need stuff to eat, storage, and stuff that'll protect you from the weather to survive. No time to go to the office and hammer out code, or design some new gadget. That's frivolous stuff and anyway, if you wanted a computer you'd mine up all the various ores and minerals you'd need, build all the machinery by hand yourself, and then assemble the finished computer. Because.. yeah.. none of this stuff can be farmed out to other people.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Say this organization buys up all land and leases it on very generous terms, but with certain clauses about profit sharing...

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Johann Lau]

what's your point? it's hard, it's not perfect, so let's not even try? do you have the faintest idea how many ways there are to kill, steal or defraud?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[clarkkent09]

Well in all disasters you mention there already were regulations in place that you claim "prevent" disasters and yet they didn't. The question can equally well be asked the other way, how does the government regulation solve that problem?

To effectively prevent those disasters laws have to be written regulating just about every aspect of every industry. Even with enough environmental regulation to fill a large building that we have now, I can easily find a dozen ways to pollute that are perfectly legal and another dozen ways that are not but nobody would know that since nobody can really understand the enormous maze of complex regulations that are nevertheless very far from complete.

Like I said in another thread, what exactly is the fine for a company that dumps blood into a river? If there is such a thing, then is there one for coffee? How about soda? Is the fine more for dumping a hundred tons of Coke into a river than a hundred tons of blood, or a hundred liters of sulfuric acid?

  In addition to enormous complexity, regulating every industry introduces a whole bunch of other problems:

Since the legislators cannot possibly understand all these issues, typical procedure is that industry groups themselves write anti-pollution legislation which then they lobby to pass into law. Industry writes legislation specifically to reduce potential tort liability which otherwise might give them greater incentive to behave than the regulation itself. The regulation gets written by the large players with the most lobbying power in order to increase costs to their smaller competitors (for example 2 bathrooms being mandatory for any food production, unnecessarily introducing 1000s of dollars extra costs for any say small marmalade maker in a normal small warehouse with one bathroom). Also, the regulation incentivizes companies to just barely meet the minimum standards, which they themselves set. Also, it impedes innovation, often goes too far and introduces unnecessary extra costs to business which reduces competitiveness internationally (in China they don't give a shit about pollution), harms job creation etc etc.

It is a difficult problem and it is not at all clear that your solution is any better than mine and yet you act as it obviously is.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

So any pollution that occurs will accrue revenue to the property owner and any pollution that doesn't, the owner has an incentive to pursue and get them to stop.

LOL, so if the ocean is privately owned, and the owner of the ocean can profit from polluting it, pollution will be minimized. Got it.

Are you by any chance a proponent of bitcoins?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got plenty of those letters. I've never gotten any money -- even in a case where I lost over $600 -- but the lawyers sending me those letters sure did. In some cases they were shareholder lawsuits for companies that didn't do anything out of line, so those lawyers not only didn't give me anything but took money out of my investments to pay themselves. If we rely on those kinds of lawyers be the protection for the environment, we may as well set everything on fire.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[wisty]

The exact word he used was "socialism". Chinese heavy industry is typically state owned. Actually, a lot of countries are quite socialist, they just don't say it.

And his point was, state owned industries can be quite environmentally unfriendly, which is true. Just look at what happened to the Aral Sea in the former USSR.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Privately owned air? Are you stupid, or do you just enjoy pretending that anyone who disagrees with you is stupid? I could see how that would make it easy to dismiss their arguments and pat yourself on the back when you're through.

  You can't own an ocean, or the air. Various Libertarian theories of property exist, but none I'm aware of could ever be stretched to such a tyrannical abuse. I personally favor the Mutualist scheme of property, which would actually release vast amounts of officially (as in governmentally) sanctioned private property as patently illegitimate; it certainly would not lock up the fucking air.

  The correct Libertarian solution to this sort of problem involves removing the government-imposed limits on liability for incidental and environmental damage, which create the perverse incentives to ignore the damage you're doing in the first place. (This is the opposite of the "tort reform" bullshit that conservatives are fed by their corporate-sponsored talking heads.) Well, if your company can be utterly cleaned out by lawsuits from the townsfolk the very minute they prove you're dumping shit in their water, you damn well better not do it in the first place, huh?

  What's more, you'll need insurance out the ass to safeguard yourself if the townsfolk so much as think you're dumping shit in their water. Do you know what the difference is between government inspectors and insurance company inspectors? Government inspectors don't lose their jobs if they're corrupt and let you pollute, in large part because their higher-ups don't have to dig into their own pockets to pay out a colossal sum of money if you do. Insurance companies hate paying out when they don't have to, and so they make sure they hire inspectors who don't play that nicey-nice bullshit that permitted that oil spill to coat the Gulf of Mexico.

  Now, provided you're the owner and sole occupant of all the land affected by your pollution, and it never spreads elsewhere, then you won't have to worry about the locals suing you, but your property's resale value will be fucked, and your employees may get sick (lawsuits!), and your insurance company will likely jack up your rates pretty bad unless you clean your shit up, in order to cover the eventuality that your sloppy practices do spread the pollution beyond your property line, so it's still a fairly bad idea. Government oversight doesn't help you here, though, since not only are the inspectors likely to be lazy and/or corrupt, but there's no pressure on the government when there are no voters shouting into phones that their river just caught fire.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Nethemas the Great]

It's a big and complicated job that's near impossible to not make a mistake so lets not try. Lets leave the peasants to fend for themselves with corporations free to hurt whoever they feel like because a peasant would have a snowball's chance in hell of being able to afford justice in court. Brilliant, simply brilliant.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Improv]

That might be move believable if we didn't have countless counterexamples of towns with most of their businesses with "NO COLOUREDS" in their windows.

Of course, if it wern't a concern, the legislation wouldn't be necessary and would be just like a law saying that people need to breathe. :)

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds great. Unlike what you think you're alluding to, the organization you're discussing wouldn't have any ability to pass a new law, or strike down an old one. They would have no choice but to play within the set rules.

And if that group sucks, you can quit being part of it by just quitting being a part of it. No need to leave the damn country, may not even be a need to pack up your stuff if you were smart enough to live somewhere with an HOA equivalent of such an organization.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

> a libertarian system would have a much cleaner environment because anyone could sue for damages.

How'd this be handled?
http://bangordailynews.com/2012/01/24/environment/report-suggests-songbirds-bats-at-risk-of-mercury-poisoning/?ref=latest

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Nethemas the Great]

What if a team of lawyers doesn't figure they can make a lot of money? Not every offender can be matched in such an easy straight line to specific damages to specific parties. Link a specific polluter of the drinking water to a person's cancer that showed up 10, 20 years later. Even if you could, perhaps the company is no longer in business. But why should they have to be exposed in the first place why not regulate and enforce those standards to prevent the pollution that led to the person's cancer. Even if the person wins a major settlement, (while battling cancer) that money isn't going to make things right. They still have cancer.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[ChrisMaple]

Oceans are pretty big, and an ocean wouldn't be owned by a single entity, any more than a whole continent is (I'm not counting governments, I mean property owners). Furthermore, certain aspects of areas might be owned: shipping rights, fishing rights, mining rights. If an adjoiner's polluted water is killing fish in the area where I have fishing rights, I sue him.

Food is valuable, and fish is high quality food. The economic power of a large, well-organized fishing company should be enough to force a polluter to behave better.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[AngryDeuce]

Well, two of those disasters I mentioned, Love Canal and Valley of the Drums, were what led to the Superfund bill that gave the EPA the authority to deal with those issues. Prior to that it was pretty much up in the air, and the severity of those disasters and the problems in dealing with those issues were the driving motivations for that bill. The third, Times Beach, was an ongoing case that occurred before the Superfund bill but was not dealt with until after.

At any rate, it seems to me that there have not been any disasters near the scope of the three cases I mentioned since that time (outside of some oil spills, but there are regulations in place dealing with cleanup). Not to say that there hasn't been pollution or environmental issues, obviously, but most companies aren't throwing drums of toxic waste around, either. Maybe they're related, maybe they're not.

I'll grant that regulating industry isn't as easy as allowing the justice system to just react on a case by case basis individually, but that solution has it's problems as well. For instance, what about people of limited means that can't necessarily afford to shoulder the burden of suing a multibillion dollar company in civil court? It's not like we're talking one homeowner suing his neighbor. Simply being a large enough company and having the resources to drag a court case out for years and years would mean that the average Joe is going to have a hard time fighting this case. After all, it's a civil matter, so you've pretty much got to hope there's a lawyer out there willing to take your case for a cut of the potential settlement. Depending on the resources of the Defendant, many lawyers would probably elect not to take the case at all based purely on the fact that they do not want to invest the time and energy into a case that they may possibly lose. It seems to me that this would ultimately have a sort of chilling effect on these lawsuits being brought to court at all.

What about the resultant complexity of 50 different states worth of legal precedent in lieu of a federal regulation? If I win a case in Florida against a company that polluted the groundwater with benzene, does that mean that a company in Texas can technically dump benzene since the precedent only applies in Florida state law? Are we going to have to basically litigate every possible type of pollution in all 50 states to replace the EPA? And how does that deal with pollutants that cross state lines? Say in Texas you can dump benzene, benzene travels down river and ends up in Oklahoma, where dumping benzene is illegal. Am I going to jail? Am I liable for the pollution in Oklahoma if it originated in Texas where the law hadn't gotten around to ruling on whether dumping benzene was a liability to me? Or is Oklahoma going to have to sue Texas itself, who in turn will then have to sue me?

As for encouraging lobbying, I consider that a non-issue as I think that direct lobbying should be totally prohibited anyway. It's nothing but bribery with another name. Yeah, I know, anyone can petition the government, yadda yadda yadda....I don't believe that our Founding Father's would have intended for the law to allow people to give our representatives cash rewards in exchange for voting a certain way. It certainly doesn't seem like an idea they would have supported based on what I've read of some of their writings, but I admit that I do not know for certain, obviously. Either way, I find it abhorrent.

I also consider the China argument a non-issue as well. If they wish to live in a polluted hell-hole that is their right (although I suspect the vast majority of Chinese citizens aren't given the choice in the first place, so there's that), but it seems to me that most people here don't want that, and we have a choice. Is the economy more important than clean air, water, and earth? I admit, there may be some regulations that are considered a little extreme, and I fully support going through regulations line by line and getting rid of the stupid shi

Re:If libertarians had there way

[ChrisMaple]

The only way in which to prevent damaging pollution is to make that pollution illegal and provide a reasonable means by which to monitor for violators.

No, that's not the only way, it might even not be the best way. Another way is an angry mob lynching the offender and burning down his business. Another way is buying surrounding property and preventing access to the offending business. Another way is to buy out the offending business and run it properly. Another way is to identify everyone who works at the offending company, ostracize them and insult them at every opportunity, refuse to sell them food. Another way is to provide similar pressures to their customers or suppliers. Another way is to get the local power company to shut off power. Another way is to provide superior competition to the business, and run them into bankruptcy. Another way is to write them lot's of letters saying "Pollution is wasteful. Here's a better way to run your business." Another way is to get hired by the business and fix it from within.

See? Lot's of other ways.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Which means those lawyers aren't going to be interested in cleaning up your neighborhood. But that's okay, because the market has spoken.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[ChrisMaple]

Small claims court is where the individual gains an advantage. Lawyers are to some degree forbidden and "loser pays legal fees" doesn't apply and couldn't be overwhelming if it did. A thousand people each suing in small claims court inflicts "death by 1000 cuts" on the violator. And if you can't drum up a flurry of people to sue the violator, then perhaps the seriousness of the problem exists only between your ears.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Serving only white people != harming non-white people, under any sane definition of "harm". (If declining to serve someone "harms" them, then I'm always harming everyone in innumerable ways, simply by not running a restaurant, a movie theater, etc.)

And I still can't comprehend the thinking that forcing bigots to blend in is preferable to letting them show their colors so the rest of us know who to ostracize...

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Nethemas the Great]

Small claims is just that "small" as in usually capped somewhere around $5000. How is that going to pay for medical bills, replace a house, etc.. But beyond that and even if you could round up a thousand others. You're still talking in the low millions and hardly anything that would make a dent in profits let along hurt the company enough to make them care to spend the money necessary to mend their ways. Either way, why should remediation be where things are addressed? Why should we not be trying to prevent the harm in the first place? You know "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" type thing... Personally I'd rather my rivers not smell of refuse and burn in flames. I'd rather not get cancer from my drinking water, and asthma from the air I breath even if I can win millions in court.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[ppanon]

All of that doesn't matter if it takes 10 years for the problem to be detected, proven, and lain at your door. By that time you can make out like a bandit, and wind up living off an untouchable multi-million dollar bank account sunning yourself in the Caymans or Barbados.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[ppanon]

Really, you know that many well-organized fishing companies with deep-enough pockets to take on BP in a decade-long lawsuit with multi-million dollar lawyer's fees when their source of income just got wiped out?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a market economy of sorts. But I think as your own anecdote shows, it's anything but a free market.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but in that case you're no better with the government, anyway. The proof is that the Caymans are full of such jerks today.

  At the very least in the Libertarian situation, you'd be able to collect from the insurance company. What's more, in such an environment, that insurance company would likely employ some serious fucking bill collectors to track the guy down. Also, the "untouchable" status of a bank account is largely due to governmental protections which would be inoperative.
  Another noteworthy thing is that he'd never be able to run another business again if he skated on his obligations once; in a hypothetical Libertarian society, contractual obligations will necessarily become the very lifeblood of all industry and someone who violates their agreements would essentially be a criminal, a leper that no other business would touch. Banks, attached to the same trust network for their own livelihood, would be under immense pressure to reveal the holdings of such crooked individuals.

  The thing about doing away with government is that it changes the world in hundreds of different, small ways.

  He might get away with it in the end, true, but hey, we're not aiming for a utopia. Bad stuff will still happen, we just want to make it happen less often and be harder to get away with when it does happen.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Hognoxious]

In any case, isn't it a bit late, after you've got cancer and your kids were born with only one eye?

But no, prevention just sounds so ... unfree, doesn't it...

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

I would agree with this definition, but not the spin. Most libertarians would also say that a business owner should be free to *not* serve white people.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Maritz]

Maybe I could buy the space that the planet is going to pass through..? Then I'd temporarily own everything on the planet, or at least be due some rent.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Genda]

Blood my friend is a bio-hazard. If those pigs had accidentally been infected with something (and if the handling of these animals is reflected by the way their wastes are being handled the sky really is the limit here), then that pathogenic waste just hit a couple million people. The reason that the laws are not being enforced is that corporations have lobbied our representatives to GUT agencies involved with regulation and a means to cut government spending, so now we have supermarkets selling rotten food because theirs only one government inspector for an entire national region. You may be right about people being clever about polluting, to that I would simply say, take the economic incentive to pollute out of the equation. Make the cost of poisoning air, water or employees so gawd aweful that no sane executive would even consider doing it.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[delinear]

It's still not a fair comparison. China is currently going through its industrial revolution - it's polluting in the same way western capitalist countries polluted during their industrial revolutions (okay it's magnified by the larger population and the fact that industry can now do this on a much bigger scale, but neither of those things are due to their type of government). A fairer comparison would be, say, one of the socialist European countries (e.g. France for the time being, I guess) and capitalist USA, where the USA is hands down the worst polluter.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[delinear]

By that definition there's no such thing as a free market. Every nation on earth has at least some tricks up their sleeves to give their own native companies an edge over countries from competing nations.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Tim4444]

We see in practice that this sort of damage is extremely difficult to prove, takes years to resolve in court, and is too easily written off as part of the 'cost of doing business' in most cases. In the meantime the damage is still being done to the environment and to the health of the people living in it. In West Virginia, many people affected by the coal industry are dying before they see any resolution in court. If you have acid rain falling on your head, how do you know which of the thousands of factories are responsible? Does everyone affected by the acid rain have to sew every factory operator. In such a system, the only people who win are the lawyers.

What's needed is a system that prevents the damage from being done in the first place. You could certainly argue that court awarded damages could be made high enough to deter bad practices, but that would just encourage frivolous lawsuits and every more acrimony about "environmental activists" undermining profits.

Just to play devil's advocate, if Libertarians really believe the courts could address environmental abuse, why aren't they supporting reforms to the existing court system? It seems to me that every time an issue like this comes up they're almost invariably on the side of pollutersm railing against 'activist judges' and 'environMENTALists.' They give me little hope that such a system would work any better in the great Libertarian utopia.

I'd like to offer an example of responsible environmental protection. I went on a whale watching cruise out of Boston a couple years back and they mentioned that shipping lanes had recently been rerouted to bypass whale feeding areas. Research showed that the whales only gather in certain areas. Rerouting the shipping lanes is yet another case of 'big' government and environmentalists interfering in business, but the fact is that fewer ships hitting whales means less damage to vessels and fewer disruptions to shipping. It's a win-win: safer whales and smoother more effective business operations. This sort of win-win arrangement could never have happened if someone had to go to the courts and try to prove damage. Who's the victim that could even present the lawsuit in this case? Businesses would never make the change on their own - even if the shipping lanes were managed privately - because no company or trade association would ever justify the cost of an "environmental study" to determine the best routes. Maybe they'd do it to pay lip service to good stewardships or as part of a "green" pr campaign, but never because they actually intend to do it properly or take the results seriously.

The fact is that for many years the US had a very Libertarian approach to the environment and many other areas. Regulation and other government interferance only came about because under those laissez-faire policies we had the biggest abuse of the environment the Nation has ever seen. The existing systems have done far better and the question should be how to make them better, not whether or not we should return to an era of policies that clearly didn't work. In some cases, the current system has motivated individual landowners to implement environmental solutions themselves. There was a case a while back of ranchers setting up turtle crossings under roads to keep the government from stepping in and marking the lands as protected. If individuals can solve the problem better than the government - show what they've done and allow independent confirmation of the results - then so much the better for everyone. You can't tell me though that the same results would have been acheived with a glut of lawsuits and fines.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it's simple. Let's say we live in a libertarian utopia and everything is private, even schools. What do you suppose happens when schools begin to be segregated? What if it's a particularly good school? What if the majority in a certain area is full of racist jerks? Should the minorities that live there that are not racist jerks have to live with it or move? There are many problems to think about. Libertarianism isn't always the answer.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[KozmoStevnNaut]

In the libertarian theory unused property comes into ownership through homesteading which basically mean you have to start using unused land. The same theory exists with air/water pollution, noise, and radio waves.

So let me get this straight, if I use ALL of the available radio spectrum before anyone else has a chance, by default I will have the right to use it as I see fit and no one can do anything about it?

And you don't see any problems with this "first come, first serve, fuck everyone else" philosophy?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[delinear]

How did they take money out if the companies didn't do anything out of line? If it's a frivolous lawsuit without real grounds doesn't the person who instigates get stuck with the costs? If you think you have a real case (i.e. the loss of $600) then my understanding is that you can always opt out of the class action and bring your own private action.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[delinear]

If songbirds and bats can't afford to hire lawyers individually, they'd have to get together and raise a class action, obviously.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[trout007]

Yes. If you managed to set up transmitters that were used for something that covered the entire country in every frequency before anyone else one else was able to do it you could own it all. Or more likely you would set up a transmitter in a city to provide a service such as a radio station and you would own that frequency for the range of your signal. It would protect you fom someone operating on the same frequency where it would interfere with your transmitter.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[KevinIsOwn]

Because.. yeah.. none of this stuff can be farmed out to other people.

What a brilliant idea! We could all get together and pay a small fee for a group of people to go after those polluters. It needs a good name though... How about the Environmental Protection Agency? That sounds like a good name. And we could pay for it out of our tax dollars so there are no free riders! Perfect!

Re:If libertarians had there way

[supercrisp]

It depends on what you mean by "isn't very communist." In the 90s they were calling it "communism with Chinese characteristics." I'd say, based on my time there and my continuing reading on China, that it's much more communist than not. But "communist" and "socialist" are thrown around so much in English-language media that they have almost no meaning anymore.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[zigfreed]

The EPA exists to protect businesses from lawsuits.

No. Environmental services companies exist to protect businesses from lawsuits caused by EPA noncompliance. In addition, the EPA is yet another underfunded government regulatory agency, so they don't have the resources to patrol the discharges of every industrial and commercial company in the area (but they did sell them the permit, if they have one).

The legal limit just protects them from the EPA. If someone suffered harm from the discharge, the harmed could sue. I would expect a reasonable judge would get the company for all they're worth. Most people avoid doing things that would be obviously bad for them so people swimming in concentrated industrial discharge are few or already earned a darwin award.

So if libertarians had their way, Gamber's ruin would cause a greater imbalance in the distribution of wealth: the people with fewer resources would not have the government (EPA) to protect them, and the people with more resources could buy people that can fix their problems.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[N!k0N]

...but there's no pressure on the government when there are no voters shouting into phones that their river just caught fire.

though it may take a few occurrences before people take notice ... e.g. the Cuyahoga River ...

Re:If libertarians had there way

[KozmoStevnNaut]

So if I use my control over the radio waves to broadcast nothing but random gibberish and nothing of any value whatsoever, that's perfectly fine? (Not that different from radio stations today, I admit)

So if I happen to cause interference to something susceptible to radio waves, that's perfectly fine if I was there first? And there would be nothing anyone could do about it except leave?

And you don't see how this favors the rich and wealthy to a ridiculous degree?

Never mind radio waves, let's say I set up a factory that pollutes to an insane degree, but creates all the fancy technological gubbins that people crave, iPhones and flat screen televisions and whatnot. Products which I sell at half the price of the competition because I don't have to worry about regulations or the environment.

Who's going to fight for the animals and the environment? Can birds band together and form class-action lawsuits?

Re:If libertarians had there way

[domatic]

The monied and powerful would just hang abusive contracts on everything. You'd need to sign a multipage contract in very small print just to walk into a grocery store or buy gasoline. By the time they got done, anybody who isn't rich and powerful will have had to sign most their ability to seek recourse away just to go about everyday life.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[ColdWetDog]

Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[MarkvW]

To the extent that dumping blood into a river is harmful to others they are entitled to compensation. If you think libertarians are in favor of "liberty" to harm others, then your understanding of libertarianism is as bad as your spelling.

So the libertarians would entitle the victim to "compensation?" What about regulation to prevent the crap in the first place?

I want a government that will protect me from noxious substances.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[hairyfeet]

Thanks, and notice i got modded down for daring to go against libertarian groupthink that "the free hand will save us!" but if any of them would bother to read their history they would know that the Chinese leadership looked upon Stalin as one of the greatest "leaders" you could possibly have and when he died and they had De-Stalinization and the cutting down of his cult of personality that was a large reason for the Sino/Soviet split since the leaders of China modeled themselves after Comrade Stalin. This is also why traditionally the NK government and China has gotten along because they too in "dear leader' modeled themselves after Stalin, and Stalin was about as far from worker control as one could possibly get and in fact executed anybody who dared to point out that Stalinism was nothing like Leninism/Marxism as envisioned by those two groups.

While I agree that a lot of what is happening to China, India, and the entire BRIC block can be seen as simply catching up to the west there are sadly those that still believe the Cold War propaganda that these countries are communist when nothing could be further from the truth. They are totalitarian regimes no different than any other dictator run country, some are run "well" as far as output like China, some are run poorly like Zimbabwe under Mugabe, but they have more in common with each other than the worker controlled system dreamed of by Marx and Lenin. No intention to Godwin but it would be like saying Germany in the 40s was socialist since they had that in their name, or that NK right now is democratic since that is in the countries title. Just because a country calls themself something doesn't make that true, anymore than the USA is capitalist when i'd say its more of an oligarchy.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

you would be free not to pay it, but your contract would not be enforceable in court.

So, everyone's entitled to equal protection under the law, as long as they pay an enforcement fee? Brilliant!

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, are you reading what you are writing? The result of what you are describing would be anything BUT a clenaer environment. "Poluting is OK until somebody notices" is a terrible idea, many contaminates aren't noticable without testing equipment yet can still cause harm to humans. The point of the EPA is to protect people BEFORE they get hurt. Most individuals don't have the means to go around testing the environment to see if a company is screwing with the air/water/food/etc, hense we have an agency that does this for us before it ever becomes a problem. The only thing you would be doing with that kind of thinking is teaching companies to hide their garbage.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[MickLinux]

Actually, it's worse than that. The government outsiders who know most about fighting abuse in any industry are the industry insiders themselves. Likewise, the industry outsiders who know most about working in an industry are the government regulatory insiders.

As a result, employees shift back and forth all the time between the two, especially between the worst offenders and the government. After that, crony capitalism becomes a natural result.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way in which to prevent damaging pollution is to make that pollution illegal and provide a reasonable means by which to monitor for violators.

No, that's not the only way, it might even not be the best way. Another way is an angry mob lynching the offender and burning down his business. Another way is buying surrounding property and preventing access to the offending business. Another way is to buy out the offending business and run it properly. Another way is to identify everyone who works at the offending company, ostracize them and insult them at every opportunity, refuse to sell them food. Another way is to provide similar pressures to their customers or suppliers. Another way is to get the local power company to shut off power. Another way is to provide superior competition to the business, and run them into bankruptcy. Another way is to write them lot's of letters saying "Pollution is wasteful. Here's a better way to run your business." Another way is to get hired by the business and fix it from within.

See? Lot's of other ways.

I don't see. None of the things you suggest would to anything to prevent pollution. They all appear to be attempts to stop further pollution after the fact. But let's test the efficacy of a couple of your suggestions anyway:
______________________________________________________

Dear ChrisMaple,

Spewing out a bunch of strawman arguments in response to a post on slashdot wastes valuable bits & bytes & bandwidths on the internets, and pollutes valuable screen real estate. Please stop, or I will reply "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries" to all of your posts here. Also, NO SOUP FOR YOU!

Best,

A/C

Re:If libertarians had there way

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the answer is quite simple. Under libertarianism they would have just exterminated the whales in the first place. No whales, no collisions. Problem Solved!

Re:If libertarians had there way

[AngryDeuce]

This is especially true of the SEC and Wall Street. They regularly trade people back and forth, and even hobnob socially, in the open. This would be akin to DEA agents and high ranking Cartel members getting together, but for some reason it's condoned at our highest levels. Well, I shouldn't say "for some reason" since we all know what the reason is, it's to rob us fucking blind.

Here is a great article that details the close relationships between the SEC and Wall Street. If you can read this and not want to go down there and get your pound of flesh out of these cocksuckers, you're a far better man than I...

Re:If libertarians had there way

[AK Marc]

Our current system does by regulation, where regulation attempts to force internalization of external costs. But when we try for other things, like CO2, people rant about internalizing costs causing bad stuff.

Re:If libertarians had there way

[ExploHD]

and the courts aren't burdened enough?

Google Skyview

[pgward]

Remember how many people were caught "in the act" on Google Street View. Imagine Google Sky View! Every sunroof, every light well, every rooftop garden!

Re:Google Skyview

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the 'Bad idea' mod?

Re:Google Skyview

[z0idberg]

Can't tell if serious.....

maps.google.com ???

Not surprising

[atari2600a]

Most slaughterhouses in the US pay no attention to federal humane slaughtering & biohazard laws, what I find most surprising is they just *threw away* the wastewater-- that stuff makes perfect additive for fertilizer!

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Mad cow. There is no way to fix that once it gets into the ground.

Re:Not surprising

[BluBrick]

You can't make it into fertilizer, but it's acceptable to sluice it away down the creek for other animals to drink? Poor justification.

Re:Not surprising

[dbc]

Most slaughterhouses in the US pay no attention to federal humane slaughtering & biohazard laws,

Citation needed.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pig blood (RTFA).
Also, while traces of prions can be found in blood, blood does not transmit BSE:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10404873

Good luck finding animals outdoors these days - prion diseases are usually transmitted by including brains in animal feed, not direct contact.

Re:Not surprising

[0xdeadbeef]

Citation needed.

No, I'll allow it. Conventional wisdom dictates this is true, and therefore the onus is on the doubter to demonstrate its falsehood.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

As a fertilizer, it is called Blood meal (go figure?). You can go buy a box of it down at Home Despot or Blow's.

Re:Not surprising

[anilg]

Conventional wisdom dictates this is true [citation needed].

Re:Not surprising

[stephanruby]

May be they're on Atkins and they were trying to grow the fishes, not the plants.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit guys, I'm not good at this wikipedia thing. I keep clicking but it won't let me add a citation.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

and that 'protein-enhanced' shampoo your wife uses? yep, slaughterhouse blood and cow placenta

Re:Not surprising

[milkasing]

This is something I have been reading about for years. Google water violations with major meat processors and you will get your sources. You will find several articles over the years for them For example, these are some I tried
Swift beef water violations
Tyson chicken water violations
Cargill water violations.
IBP Pork water violation (not sure which ones predate the time they were bought over by Tyson though)

$10 says there's decapitated skeletons underwater

[Jmanamj]

Now someone needs to pilot a UAV into the home of the company's CEO to expose his life-prolonging Voodoo practices.

Big brother?

[Anonymous Coward]

So spying on others is bad... But only if it's the government doing it. Got it.

What would be the libertarian solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lately I've fancied myself a libertarian but I'm struggling with how something like this would be addressed under a libertarian model. A libertarian would be supportive of personal liability (responsibility) but not of regulation. If there isn't a regulation preventing this sort of thing, then how would a company such as this be held liable?

Re:What would be the libertarian solution?

[icebike]

Pretty sure there are regulations against polluting a stream. 1580 feet downstream of this is a navigable river.
So your huge philosophical troll-bait is moot.

Re:What would be the libertarian solution?

[towermac]

Don't hurt yourself too much. Pure libertarianism is about as viable as pure communism. Both have the laudable goal of freeing the common man from oppression.

I wonder if it isn't the common man's lot to always be oppressed to some extent; and money and power will always be worth, well, money and power.

Re:What would be the libertarian solution?

[AvitarX]

A court system.

Those that are damaged sue.

Re:What would be the libertarian solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Under the Libertarian model, the harm done to others by this slaughterhouse will be instantly and automatically undone the moment it is recognized, mediated by completely impartial and omniscient courts and lawyers who cost nothing to hire. The slaughterhouse always has sufficient cash reserve (or at least dissolution value and insurance coverage) to compensate for all the damage it has ever caused, and the damage is always completely reversible, in direct defiance of various laws of physics and biology. Human nature is modified so that everyone recognizes their own responsibility instantly and does not try to evade it. Life is good.

Then you wake up and realize that Libertarianism is great in theory, but completely untenable in the real world.

Re:What would be the libertarian solution?

[SuperKendall]

Well for one thing under a pure libertarian model everyone is armed and if enough people are mad they go in guns a blazin'

Hypothetically speaking.

Re:What would be the libertarian solution?

[AK Marc]

What if your "damage" is having to travel 2 miles to a cleaner portion of the stream to swim/fish? The damage to individuals is small. The "potential" damage is insanely massive and not collectable in court. Say mad cow was in the blood, and that flows 200 miles and a cow there drinks it and there's a mad cow breakout in the US 7 years later and 100s or 1000s of ranchers lose milllions from the damage to the exports? It would be impossible to track it back to this. So there is no way to sue pollution out of existance. In many cases, it's cheaper to pollute and get sued than to not pollute in the first place. By the time the suits build up and see court, the original owners are long gone after an IPO and such, so it's owned by people with no knowledge or control over the pollution issue. Libertarianism only ever stands a chance when combined with socialism, which drives libertarins crazy.

Re:What would be the libertarian solution?

[AvitarX]

1) Somebody owns it, if it's the company itself you may not be allowed to fish there anyway.
2) Lower fish population everywhere makes it more peoples' problem, you can form a class.
3) Lack of corporate protection means that liability extends to the owners
4) All polluters are liable, no damage caps and no allowable levels like we have now
5) I don't agree with it, it's just how the libertarians want to handle it.
6) Libertarians (honest ones) like lawsuits, though most libertarian identified people do not, I think it's interesting.

The legal system is supposed to take-up where regulation does not exist (in libertarianism), I think that is even less efficient than government regulation (slower, prevention is the best medicine, and even people have limits to their liability in accumulated wealth.

Re:What would be the libertarian solution?

[Tanman]

Then you wake up and realize that Libertarianism is great in theory, but completely untenable in the real world.

Kind of like communism, democracy, socialism -- in truth, all 'styles' of government end up being a hybrid that can function In The Real World. Even in America, the bastion of democracy, we really live in a semi-socialist republic, but the basic ideals are /based/ on democracy.

LIbertarianism is no different -- it would not be a /pure/ libertarian government, but rather a government based on the tenant that the rules apply to everyone, and that individuals still have rights.

Re:What would be the libertarian solution?

[AK Marc]

even people have limits to their liability in accumulated wealth.

The core idea of libertarianism is that those with wealth have more rights. The more you have, the more any individual act may harm you, so you get to sue for more (in addition to having more resources to sue). And you have two classes of people in libertarian-land, those who own land and live on the land they own, and those who don't own land, and the rights of them differ greatly. Like you pointed out to libertariansm requiring lots of active lawsuits to keep the peace, but most self-identified libertarians being against that, I find that as well with the issue of rights being tied to wealth. They push ideas that give more rights to the rich land owners while claiming "more fair" and such.

Re:What would be the libertarian solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the 'real world' has no less than 3 government agencies policing this behavior and yet, there's still blood in the river.

Re:What would be the libertarian solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you wake up and realize that Libertarianism is great in theory, but completely untenable in the real world.

All "isms" are great on paper, put people in the mix and this is where it gets complicated.

Re:$10 says there's decapitated skeletons underwat

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw that X-Files episode, too.

The Fly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you not see the Movie? Teleportation and Flies Never ends well!

Re:The Fly?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? It jkust makes the flies large enough to carry the Sony handycam...

Kids....

[wbr1]

...get the charcoal and the rope swing. We's gonna have us a party.

Could be useful technology.

[erik umenhofer]

Can this technology notify me when it discovers Wonka's river of chocolate?

Re:Could be useful technology.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can this technology notify me when it discovers Wonka's river of chocolate?

that's indoors, you'd need a warrant

General Trend (mod parent up, Informative)

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for that link. I'm not a "PETA-freak", by any stretch of the imagination, but as a photographer, and just as a citizen who believes in the 1st Amendment, those are some of the scariest links I've read since NDAA. I'm glad I don't live in any of the mentioned states, but I have certainly photographed farms without written permission (I have a fondness for pastoral scenes with hay bales). I'd gladly contribute to any effort to get these ridiculous laws thrown out as unconstitutional.

Re:General Trend (mod parent up, Informative)

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Honestly, even if you have no interest in animals, photography, or the First Amendment, those sorts of proposals should probably still make you nervous.

If the chaps who handle the most-likely-to-carry-cool-zoonotic-diseases part of your food supply are so proud of their processes that they want independently documenting them to be a felony, how good can you reasonably trust them to be?

Re:General Trend (mod parent up, Informative)

[Maritz]

It's a shame they went to PETA for a quote. They're the animal advocacy equivalent of foaming dog fever.

A significant overreaction

[93 Escort Wagon]

That creek is just flowing with the blood of their enemies.

Re:A significant overreaction

[MartinSchou]

Any idea where we might here the lamentations of their women?

Re:A significant overreaction

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'd guess the sound of that was drowned out by the helicopter.

It's really potent stuff.

[davidbrit2]

We made a toaster dance with it.

Re:It's really potent stuff.

[need4mospd]

And a bathtub tried to eat his friend's baby.

Whoa, whoa, WHOA...

[fahrbot-bot]

Isn't this really something for the Free Market to decide? I mean, the Government and all its "rules" - talking about public "health" and "safety" - are just going to get in the way of the Job Creators at this Dallas meat packing plant...

Re:Whoa, whoa, WHOA...

[KingAlanI]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_Law

Re:Whoa, whoa, WHOA...

[fahrbot-bot]

Thanks. I hadn't heard of that term. Though...

I am pretty pissed at how stupid some people seem to be in believing the crap the Republicans are spewing. Skipping all the anti-Obama/Democrat campaign crap, how about: Gingrich *not* a Washington insider - seriously? Gingrich defending the sanctity of marriage - seriously? Romney *just* pays the taxes he's obligated to pay - after he and Bain Capital (and other similar firms) lobbied to defeat the law designed to end the 15% tax cap for carried interest - seriously? Ya, the Democrats are not perfect either, but seriously?

Switching gears... How about 30 Major U.S. Companies Spent More on Lobbying than Taxes.

Sorry, stupidity and hypocrisy bug me.

Re:Whoa, whoa, WHOA...

[KingAlanI]

well it's now clear that you were sarcastic instead of actually that dumb. :)

Re:Whoa, whoa, WHOA...

[fahrbot-bot]

Thanks again. Ya sarcasm is fun. Though I'm now worried as that post is now moderated as +3 Insightful, unless the moderators are being ironic or sarcastic.

Re:Whoa, whoa, WHOA...

[KingAlanI]

some gave you flamebait/troll, likely thinking you were being serious

This is a tragedy

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of all the starving vampires!

Re:This is a tragedy

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of all the starving hampires!

FTFY

Not surprising

[Sponge Bath]

I can see how they can do this undetected for so long, the Trinity around Dallas is little better than an open sewer. It's nasty and smells really bad.

Take a close look at the Google images...

[Frosty Piss]

In the GOOGLE MAP where the creek joins the river, it's pretty obvious.

I'm wondering how this could have been going on for so long, long enough for Google to have images (so obviously it's not a one time or sporadic event) event, without anyone noticing, does no one boat up that river? Fish on it? No nearby land owners?

Odd...

Plain view doctrine

[mindcandy]

The Horton test applies here.

1. they would be lawfully present (it's a public waterway).
2. they lawfully accessed the evidence (saw it in plain view with the unaided eye**).
3. the incriminating nature was immediately apparent (river of blood).

** When it comes to fancy technology, the current precedent is Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001) although it was a close (5-4) decision, the premise being the police used "technology not generally available to the public".

Re:Plain view doctrine

[bugger41]

I see the subject you guys are trying to cover maybe you should think outside the box and stop worrying about current events as it were. And start thinking about long-term I have been advised of the US dollar will be like a German mark was when there because they crashed at a single egg cost 80 billion marks I don't exactly remember the timeframe but I'm sure you can Google it .anyway maybe you should focus on how you're going to get Washington to listen to you about saving yours and your children's future and not disgracing us on the world wide financial failure. One of the solutions is for instance them going in and confiscating all the billionaires captains of financial and industry properties and assets and all those who benefited from the thievery on Wall Street and seizing control of the Federal Reserve is sending the Rothschilds packing back across the pond. Buying as much gold precious metals and mining venture assets with our newly acquired which was ours in the first place Wealth and finally backing the dollar again with real assets instead of the fictitious gold that supposed to be in our Mints and coffers that's there today how bout we demand this instead of the old thievery Ponzi scheme they call inflation would sell us all down the river concerning our future about we concern ourselves with that and believe me a bunch of Toys for grown folks won't matter to you so much when the police come knocking on your door telling you your house that you worked hard for is no longer yours even if you own it because they have to confiscate your property to pay for their mistakes.

Columbia Packing CEO sez:

[Anonymous Coward]

That'll do, pig. That'll do.

What a waste.

[oldmac31310]

Such a shame wasting all of that pig blood. They could have made lovely black pudding.

Re:What a waste.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really Dwight?

It all depends on who you are.

[techno-vampire]

When you're the owner of a slaughterhouse, turning a river red with blood is pollution. When your name is Moses, it's Divine Judgement.

Heads are gonna roll...

[tompaulco]

Heads are gonna roll. They dumped pig blood in a river. Pig blood that could have been sold to somebody! That is literally money down the drain. Someone's neck is going to be on the chopping block for sure.

Re:Heads are gonna roll...

[Lohrno]

Egad! First blood, now heads!

Also points to it being a bad idea

[SuperKendall]

Now that he's made himself an enemy.

Pretty sure there's a movie in there somewhere.

Recourse against what?

[SuperKendall]

we would have no recourse.

As others have noted, that simply is not true. You cannot bring harm to others under a libertarian model.

Now for the real question - what harm is being done here?

If this is pigs blood, why is this a problem? This is wholly natural material; indeed normally you'd make fertilizer out of this so it would be destined to end up on the landscape anyway. What effect does this have beyond making the downstream waters more nutrient rich for fish and plant life?

Streams are really good about cleaning themselves out pretty quickly, just a few thousand feet downstream from this it might not be apparent anything is wrong. All kinds of animals die or piss in the river but that's cleaned out quickly as well.

Re:Recourse against what?

[Ironchew]

If this is pigs blood, why is this a problem?

Animal cruelty aside, it's a public health hazard. Blood is one of the best substrates available for growing pathogens.

Re:Recourse against what?

[Anonymous Coward]

> As others have noted, that simply is not true. You cannot bring harm to others under a libertarian model.

Just like coins always flip fairly by landing, and staying, on their edge.

Bullwinkle, that trick never works.

Re:Recourse against what?

[WuphonsReach]

If this is pigs blood, why is this a problem? This is wholly natural material; indeed normally you'd make fertilizer out of this so it would be destined to end up on the landscape anyway. What effect does this have beyond making the downstream waters more nutrient rich for fish and plant life?

Most things are fine in moderation, but at the point where you're dumping enough of it into the river to be seen from a few hundred feet up, you've gone well past "minor issue" into "this is probably causing major problems".

Local concentrations of anything that aren't a normal part of the environment (pigs generally don't bleed themselves into the river, especially not a few hundred at a time) is problematic for the species that live in that environment.

Re:Recourse against what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If this is pigs blood, why is this a problem?"

Because as we know, in their natural state, rivers are simply geographical conduits for pig's blood.
This has to rank as one of the stupidest things I've ever read. It's why libertarians are so easy to dismiss - they don't care until they're the ones who have to drink the water.

The understanding is perfect

[dbIII]

If you think libertarians are in favor of "liberty" to harm others, then your understanding of libertarianism is as bad as your spelling.

Take one look at how they want to treat their employees and you get to see exactly how little they care about others. While wrapping up in the flag is a reasonable attempt at hiding a colonial English Aristocrat slaveowner's philosophy it doesn't fool everybody. Washington fought against the attitude that is called "Libertarian" today.

Antifreeze?

[pipelayerification]

I did a little looking around and can't find any instance of anyone pumping antifreeze up from their well. Perhaps you could provide a citation. When I read the panicked articles about hydraulic fracturing and its possible side affects I notice lots rhetoric and very few facts. If you know anything about geology you will recognize that it would be almost impossible for contamination to reach the ground water being consumed by humans from the depths that gas companies are working at. Their have been instances of faulty drilling techniques being employed (bad casing cement seals) that have allowed drilling fluids to leak up the well bore and into surface waters. On the other hand, there has never been a documented case of fraccing causing contamination to consumable ground water to my knowledge. As for methane in the wells, the gas of any individual well is easily 'fingerprinted' with a gas chromatograph. If the gas coming out of a water well has the same makeup as the gas coming out of a nearby gas well then contamination is a given (doesn't happen very often, can only find about 15 cases out of 10s of thousands of gas and oil wells and it is usually pinned on faulty cement around well casing not fraccing). Methane is a naturally occurring substance (from decomposition) and is present to some extent in almost all water wells. Sometimes people aren't even aware of its presence until something makes them think to look (such as a gas company deciding to drill a well near their home).

Re:Antifreeze?

[Qzukk]

I did a little looking around and can't find any instance of anyone pumping antifreeze up from their well.

Try harder:

glycols, including ethylene glycol

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/19/dimock-pennsylvania-epa-_n_1217422.html

Their have been instances of faulty drilling techniques being employed (bad casing cement seals) that have allowed drilling fluids to leak up the well bore and into surface waters.

This was apparently found to be the case for Cabot's wells in Dimock: http://www.lhup.edu/rmyers3/marcellus.htm (among others).

Re:Antifreeze?

[Genda]

It won't help, browsers are so smart they conform to your search habits so this twit will only see the kind of mind-numbing tripe that has already stunted his perception of reality. Have him go to the LIBRARY, and use an unpolluted search environment. Then look up the purely insane laws that Dick Chaney got shoved through for his fracking buddies at Halliburton. Better yet, go get the HBO emmy award winning documentary on fracking "Gasland". There are people out there who have no problem crashing your economy to get wealthy, what makes you think there aren't people who will poison your water for the same reason?

I have a profound confusion for folks who think that government is evil, but corporation and business are magically devoid of human frailty. Human beings are amazing, on the one hand they are loving, compassionate, generous and noble. On the other hand they are some of the lowest scum sucking primates with a pulse. This would suggest that all human enterprise requires some level of monitoring, management and regulation, to prevent what is worst in people from crapping all over the scenery and one another. That goes for governments, and you better believe that goes for corporations. We need to build a strong cage of regulation with the room and freedom to grow and thrive, but HARSH penalties for committing wanton acts of abuse on people or the environment. Why is this not obvious?

Re:Antifreeze?

[pipelayerification]

I really appreciate your rational point by point rebuttal. Perhaps you should go to the library and try finding a book called The Road to Serfdom by Hayek. Where I live, Gasland is considered environmentalist propaganda. Just because it won an Emmy (maybe even more so) doesn't make it factual or even right. Certainly no one has ever considered Hollywood biased in any way. Not to say that there aren't people who will ruin the environment given the chance but most of these sources are extremely one sided (Gasland, Huffpo, NY Times). If you read or watch the news they provide it is always fear, fear, fear. Usually very short on truth or fact. Please point me to any information that indicates that fraccing has polluted consumable ground water (not faulty well design, which is where you righteous indignation should be pointed) . The facts just don't back up the accusations and insinuation. I harbor no animosity towards government or corporations, after all they are each just groups of people just like you or me. The only problem I have is the idea that one is more responsible than the other. You can vote in a publicly traded company just as easily as you can vote for your government (at least in this country). The only difference seems to be that the vote you cast in a corporations seems to actually count. Our government has become much less representative of the people that are voting for them (as was seen in the health care battle) and more representative of the corporations that they are supposedly regulating. I find it unreasonable to think that more regulation from the government that is controlled by the people being regulated will solve anything. You cant have it both ways. As for my perception of reality, I live and work in a gas producing state so my reality might be just a little bit different than the guy who watched a movie about it. Twit

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3rd world nation

[WindBourne]

Why is America becoming more and more like a 3rd world nation?

Re:3rd world nation

[DigiShaman]

We're not. In fact, America has improved progressively with each passing generation. It's your own perception that has changed. That's because newer surveillance and reporting technologies illuminate wrongdoing in ways normally you haven't been accustomed to before.

As people, we respond more to visual stimuli regardless of the fact worse has been reported before in just words alone.

Re:3rd world nation

[u38cg]

Can I suggest reading The Jungle and The Grapes of Wrath before slinging around comments like that?

Re:3rd world nation

[WindBourne]

I worked at Monfort's beet in the 80's, and at Northern Pumps hereford farms in the 70's (contrary to some opinions, Americans LIKE to work). What do you want to know about slaughter houses? Allowing the blood to run like this is NOT normal. In fact, even back then, the companies were not allowed to simply drain this off. And in Monforts, we found numerous uses for it, including blutworst, BAPs, etc.

So, what part of my comment was wrong? America is increasingly becoming like a 3rd world nation. We HAD the PREMIER food inspection system in the world. Then in the mid-80's, it was gutted by reagan. Now, have citizens dying because of that decisions by the American neo-cons.

Re:3rd world nation

[WindBourne]

Actually, back in the 80's, blood was not allowed to be dumped like this (look at your peers comment where I replied). I suspect that it still is not, but companies simply ignore the law.

Re:3rd world nation

[Hatta]

Sure. Just try owning a house and raising a family on one salary like your parents did.

Re:3rd world nation

[DigiShaman]

Both yes and no.

Yes; because everything they had post WW2 we have today and then some. For an equivalent median household income today, you can get a better car, more square footage, food, electricity and all other items available in that time period.

No; because the average American has been exposed to excessive consumerism on items not necessary. Specifically with regards to not needed upgrades and entertainment expenses. All sorts of stuff they didn't' have then we can do without today. We've just adapted our lives to accept this as the new "normal" and thus raise our expectations higher than it really needs to be. Also, the crime rate in lower income housing areas makes it virtually impossible to live a post WW2 lifestyle. Another issue is that of culture. How many parents are involved in their child's life today compared to a post WW2 family? I content that family values have dropped which is at the root of our youth crime rate. It basically has led us into a destructive positive feed-back cycle from a cultural standpoint.

Re:3rd world nation

[Hatta]

Another issue is that of culture. How many parents are involved in their child's life today compared to a post WW2 family? I content that family values have dropped which is at the root of our youth crime rate. It basically has led us into a destructive positive feed-back cycle from a cultural standpoint.

If the loss of family values are responsible for the youth crime rate, we need to divest ourselves of family values as quickly as possible. The trend in youth crime has been decreasing since the mid 90s.

The really funny part is that you just committed the same error you accused me of making. That is, mistaking your own increased perception of a problem for an actual increase in incidence. In both cases if you care to dig up data you'll see that I'm right.

Re:3rd world nation

[DigiShaman]

Touché

Yup, you're correct. Both homicides and voilent crimes have dropped about 2000 and remained steady more or less.

Flash mobs initiated through text messaging technology, social media, and instant real-time media definitely warp a sense of perspective. Including my own.

Re:3rd world nation

[claar]

Sure. Just try owning a house and raising a family on one salary like your parents did.

I am, thanks! Mortgage, 4 kids, one salary well below the median for our town -- and debt free other than the mortgage.

You can still make it work, and I'd say you can be as or more comfortable than your parents were thanks to technological, medical, municipal, and other life improvements.

No, you can't have two iPhones with data plans, an HD DVR cable subscription, a house you can't afford, and two car payments. But comfortable and raising a family on one salary? Quite possible.

Re:3rd world nation

[Hatta]

Thanks for the acknowledgement. I suspect it's mostly because people are staying inside using the internets instead of getting into trouble. We've even avoided the typical increase in (blue collar) crime seen during recessions.

Re:3rd world nation

[Anonymous Coward]

Touché

It's ok; we don't expect most of the points that you make to be, you know, factual.

Re:$10 says there's decapitated skeletons underwat

[Anonymous Coward]

Season 2 episode 24! Gotta love X-Files.

-Brian

It's in a stream

[SuperKendall]

Animal cruelty aside

We all know where delicious bacon comes from, and have to live with that or not.

it's a public health hazard. Blood is one of the best substrates available for growing pathogens.

It's in a stream out in nature. Not in rusting barrels dumped in a ditch somehwere. As I said moving water is inherently cleansing - in fact I'm not sure there's anything that would be better to do with it.

I am totally open to it being a problem. I just would like to see proof, but all I see here in this whole set of responses is the assumption it is bad.

It would not take much blood to color the water to look awful either, so we don't even know what concentration we are talking about here.

Re:It's in a stream

[Nimey]

I am totally open to it being a problem.

No you're not. Your political interest is in it /not/ being a problem, and you're making that very clear with your arguments that are remarkably similar to AGW and evolution denialism in shape and tone.

Re:It's in a stream

[scot4875]

We all know where delicious bacon comes from, and have to live with that or not.

Yes, but some of us grasp basic ethics and see no reason for there not to be humane treatment of our sources of bacon, while others of us do not. It's always been pretty clear that libertarians kind of fail on the empathy scale, and your inability to grasp that there could be degrees of acceptability to *how* our food is treated is a perfect example of this.

Of course, this has nothing to do with a river of blood, which is, again, a perfect example of libertarianism failing.

--Jeremy

Re:It's in a stream

[SuperKendall]

Yes, but some of us grasp basic ethics and see no reason for there not to be humane treatment of our sources of bacon

I buy from local farmers when I can.

But I also recognize the sheer quantity of pork consumed precludes humane treatment of all pigs. That's just how it is.

I don't feel great about it but obviously I'm willing to live with that fact since I still eat non-locally farmed pork.

Good idea for a movie

[CaroKann]

There is a good horror/sci-fi/suspense movie here somewhere.

Great, what is the concentration then

[SuperKendall]

Most things are fine in moderation, but at the point where you're dumping enough of it into the river to be seen from a few hundred feet up, you've gone well past "minor issue" into "this is probably causing major problems".

Man I sure am gad you know exactly what the concentration of blood is!

Have you never seen how much even a drop of blood can color water? What I am wondering is, how much blood are we really talking about here?

I also have seen nothing that states categorically what problems this would cause outside the immediate area outside the plant. I'm not even saying there are none; I just want to see some proof there are any to be had. Way to easy to get freaked out over colored water without all the pertinent information.

Try it and see

[SuperKendall]

Bullwinkle, that trick never works.

How do you know?

We know practical communism does not work, because it's been tried enough times and in enough ways we know failure is the end state every time.

By practical libertarianism - well where has that even been attempted? I am not aware of anywhere in particular that makes that claim.

Re:Try it and see

[KozmoStevnNaut]

We know practical communism does not work, because it's been tried enough times and in enough ways we know failure is the end state every time.

Name one actual communist state that wasn't brought down by outside politically-disagreeing forces.

If you say USSR, you've already failed. That was fascism and tyrannical dictatorship under a thin, mostly-transparent veneer of pretend communism. As were (and are) most other so-called communist states. A rule of thumb is that any nation with the word "democratic" or "people's" or "republic" in the name is nothing but a fascist dictatorship.

Instead, look at Allende's Chile. He was a marxist, not a "communist" and while Chile wasn't exactly perfect under his rule, it actually worked pretty fucking well. At least, until the CIA etc. undermined it all and instigated a coup.

Re:Try it and see

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't "practical libertarianism" basically the starting point of any civilisation? People band together for safety and to benefit from trade, everyone has their own property and there is limited law and nothing in the way of healthcare or taxation. Actually libertarianism is the very first system that is rejected out of hand by every civilisation. If it was as wonderful as libertarians claim, surely at least one great civilisation would have arisen on the back of it? The fact is that the only people who argue for libertarianism are the ones who believe they are well off enough that they'd gain an advantage at the expense of others under said system. The call for libertarianism is really the call for the bad old days of the landed rich with their own private justice and the enslaved serfs doing all the work - fine if that's what you want but at least have the decency to admit it.

Re:Plain view doctrine, nosy neighbors

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to gain more knowledge of law, but this whole story seems to be a typical "press hype" .This does and should invoke fears of non-police intrusion. The police or FBI could invoke some sort of other law, or they simply do not tell a judge how they obtained there leads from a nosy neighbor, or some jackoff who thinks he/she is some how the neighborhood undercover squad..

Re:Plain view doctrine, nosy neighbors

[afidel]

In general legally obtained evidence provided by someone not acting as an agent of the government is admissible without a warrant. Think tv footage of an incident or cctv footage. If your neighbor can view it from their property without violating any laws then them reporting it to the police is a ok. The police will generally use that information to obtain a warrant to seize further physical evidence but that isn't strictly necessary if they can prove their case without it.

Protecting the Public

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad they shut Megaupload down but let this plant keep running.

Socialism in China

[Anonymous Coward]

Socialism as defined by socialists rather than market totalitarians* is worker control. The workers are not in control in China. China is run by a bunch of crooks -- as is the US.

* = the correct term for American "libertarians"

All that organic waste!

[twebb72]

I'm willing to bet its a boost to the local eco system than a pollutant.
All those crazy bacteria that kill people probably die off relatively quick.
Thoughts?

The past provey you wrong again and again

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason so many anti pollution law were done, is because:
1) it cost too much for private people to sue every single firm/private person polluting,
2) clean environment is an externality and thus not worth respecting for a firm
3) the local homeowner are in most case not able to move away easily, or even "vote with their wallet" by not buying the stuff the firm sell or organize petition to do bad PR, because most of the time those most polluting firm DO NOT sell directly to consumer.
4) You sue, firm fold due to lack of money after a long long defense against you, and leave pollution behind you have no recourse.
5) polution is not stopping at at border , and is cumulative

And other factors I may even forget. The sum of it all, make it certain that your libertarian ideal would be a NIGHTMARE for all concerned except the polluter. Indeed one can argue that before even the anti pollution laws were in, the nightmare was already there , with most firm not caring a bit where and when they were polluting or even selling construction land to people unaware of the ticking bomb the firm had left underground.



Libertarian usually live in a woo-woo land about as much as communist : in their assumption there is always something fundemmentally wrong about human nature and cost to individuals.

This proves my point:

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

People from the US, even in the south, don't know how to prepare, cook and eat a cow. /That's not blood. That's wasted Morcilla. //http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding ///It's absolutely delicious, and would have never been wasted like that in here (Argentina)

Re:This proves my point:

[scot4875]

Here in the US we really only have the stomachs to consume human blood, and then only if it's been turned into wine or juice and served with a cracker.

--Jeremy

Who needs the government to create a police state?

[Shivetya]

Its obvious we are more than willing to create it for them. Ratting out people who offend you is a story as old as history, the problem being is that you can find someone who will take offense for any action you can imagine.

Evolution in Action

This is why we have the FDA / etc.

[Buxaroo]

I like stories like these. They remind me of why we need the FDA and other regulatory bodies to keep corporations and companies from polluting our water and food (if they let the blood drain like that, who the fuck knows what they do with the pork products they make there?) This sorta reminds me of that story a few months back where McDonalds got rid of their egg producer after finding out that a whistleblower shot all of those videos of the facilities that produce the eggs. Either way, who knows how long this has been happening at that place? Maybe their storage been sprung a leak, but I seriously doubt it. ps, remind me not to eat any pork products from Texas in the next few months :D

Re:This is why we have the FDA / etc.

[ErikZ]

We have an FDA. They've inspected the plant.

They missed the "River of Blood".

So, why do we need the FDA again?

Re:This is why we have the FDA / etc.

[scot4875]

If we don't have an FDA, then we don't even have a guy to go in and miss the river of blood. Even if they're incompetent and miss a bunch of stuff, it's better than nothing. Just like in football: even though you may not have a running game, you have to keep it on the ground every once in a while just to keep the defense slightly honest.

--Jeremy

20 minute response + 2 months of... what?

[chrissigler]

It's kind of a side note, but according to TFA...

the pilot said investigators were dispatched within 20 minutes, starting a two-month investigation that led to the execution of a search warrant on Thursday

So, people were there within 20 minutes, but it took two months to investigate. What exactly took two months? Red tape?

1. Step 1: Arrive at creek.
2. Step 2: See creek is red.
3. Step 3: Walk up the creek.
4. Step 4: Arrive at meat packing plant.
5. Step 5: Have a beer.

I'm not sure how winding that creek is, but I could see it possibly taking two hours, not two months.

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Purple

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel like I could... like I could... TAKE ON THE WORLD!

Bing Birds Eye Maps

[Dareth]

For a better view, search Columbia Packing Company using Bing Maps in "Bird's Eye View". It shows the creek in better detail than Google, but no visible blood.

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not reliable

[Anonymous Coward]

The video is from fox news. Once this story breaks on in news channels that have at least a small amount of reputation for the truth, I may actually look into it.

Yo dawg,

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard you like drones...

Water laws are extremely complex.

[Medievalist]

Most Eastern US states use some form of riparian law, which is what you are referring to. Groundwater is public property and may not be owned by individuals, although ownership and regulatory powers are split by the high and low water marks (local cops have police rights between those two points in some cases, go figure). In my state I personally can own the land under my creek because it's not a navigable watercourse, my property line extends completely past it, and I'm living in one of the original 13 colonies. I cannot own the water itself and I cannot appreciably change the character of the water except by using it to nourish animals living physically on my land or by harnessing it for industrial power (which changes the speed and temperature by withdrawing energy). I can dump blood in it if I want, but not enough to turn it red or make it taste funny on anyone else's property.

However, most Western US states are decidedly NOT using Eastern-style riparian law, and people literally murder each other over ownership of "water rights" - which are assigned on a first-come first-serve basis by the government, in a way that is intended to favor wealthy landowners and large corporations, because in the USA capital investment is required to efficiently exploit scarce resources, and water is a scarce resource in the western US. In the West you absolutely can withdraw water and use it up if you own the right to do so by "prior apportionment".

Wikipedia has a somewhat half-assed discussion here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riparian_water_rights#United_States

Sorry about the run-on sentences.

I came for the river of blood...

[toxonix]

I can't see much detail in that poor photograph. Need more images of this river of blood. There should be a large drain which spews shit and bones into a pink mire from which ghastly fumes and vapors emanate. Mordor looks like a nice vacation spot compared to a pig farm.

This is what deregulation creates

[plopez]

I know this may be falme bait but it is true. The "Free Market", if such a beast can ever exist[*] cannot solve this problem because there is no incentive to solve it. It's cheaper to flaunt the law, endanger people's health, and the health of the environment.

[*] There is debate among Economists on this topic.

They are already moving to make it illegal...

[sugarmatic]

http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/et-tu-minnesota-another-law-proposes-making-factory-farm-photography-illegal.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/us/14video.html
http://animalrights.about.com/b/2011/03/23/bills-to-ban-undercover-factory-farming-videos-moving-ahead-in-iowa-and-florida.htm
http://www.dvafoto.com/2011/03/two-us-states-move-to-outlaw-unauthorized-photos-of-farming-operations/
http://www.silha.umn.edu/news/Summer2011/StatesConsiderBanningUndercoverRecordingatAgriculturalOperations.html
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/03/in-the-past-decade-modern/

FAA UAV Proposal?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article tries to make the new UAV licensing proceeding through the FAA is a good thing. But last I heard there was a lot of concern in the model airplane community that the proposed rules would effectively kill model aircraft, creating so many hoops to jump through that your average person wouldn't have a chance.

I am a real environmentalist, unlike you

[SuperKendall]

No you're not. Your political interest is in it /not/ being a problem

Where did you get that from? I am not involved at all in the meat industry. I don't live near the plant.

I am truly open to finding out, is this a problem or not. But I am a REAL environmentalist. That means complaining about things that are REAL ISSUES. Why waste anger and shouting on something if it's not actually a problem? While you are yelling about this someone else is ACTUALLY polluting somewhere.

So either show me one way or the other this is an actual issue, or get off your high horse when all you are doing is expressing outrage to no end or purpose.

If you truly care for the environment try to learn what actually works to help as opposed to whining at everything that looks slightly wrong. Learn to think before you act, and you'll have far greater impact.

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