Re: The questions about CVS and tobacco: I’m a reporter at Forbes and I talked to the CEO and two other top executives about the decision. My story is below. They said that they were doing it for ethical reasons, but also for business ones. They’re taking a revenue hit for the purpose of securing future growth, but that is definitely a risk.
This really doesn’t compare directly to the questions about atrazine. The real question is not how much revenue a company is losing but how much profit. CVS Caremark has small margins. They didn’t lower their earnings guidance. A drug company, in contrast, has huge ones; a $2 billion loss in sales goes right to the bottom line. FWIW, I loved the New Yorker story on Hayes.
Actually, it’s the result of you repeating yourself and not responding to any points you disagree with. You might refute a point and cite some evidence rather than namecall, but perhaps I misunderstood the point of your participation in conversation. Posture on.
absolutely agree. Aside from the scale of the risk from walking willingly away from a legal source of revenue, which is possible. The only reason I brought CVS is was to show it was possible, and only then to refute the notion that nobody walks away from 2 billion.
Sure. Just keep in mind that what the makers claim about glyphosate herbicides is logically inconsistent.
They say “it’s not dangerous to the environment because it’s immediately deactivated by contact with soil or rainfall” but in the same breath tell you “glyphosate runoff kills fish”. They say it “has a dramatic effect on any weed” but then later in the same propaganda page it says " will eradicate almost all weeds". They say it will both bond to soil and deactivate (into AMPA, which has the same mild toxicity as glyphosate) within two weeks, yet research found glyphosate contained in plants grown in treated soil a year or more after treatment.
Moving on to independent personal observation, if the city sprays roundup on a patch of poke weed next to my creek, it will slightly yellow the leaves after a couple of weeks without killing the poke, but it’ll keep killing fish for days. I trust my eyes more than corporations or governments.
So it seems to me that the vendors are lying, or at least being actively misleading; the question is how much are they lying? Are they hiding something more? And can you trust a liar’s product around your loved ones and property? Personally, I don’t - although I realize others may scoff at these vague concerns as FUD-peddling, and it’s certainly a fair criticism.
But from where I’m standing, glyphosate is expensive, unnecessary and not reliably effective anyway. I don’t think anybody really needs it; it’s mostly just a way to avoid hiring poor people to pull the weeds. I’d rather employ some of the local poor if I couldn’t find time to pull the weeds myself. There’s fifty or more guys standing on streetcorners looking for work not two miles from where I live.
Edit: Full disclosure, I was given a propane flamethrower for my birthday a year or so ago, so that’s what I actually use for weeds too tough to pull. It’s not any more cost-effective than roundup, and doesn’t employ anyone local… but it sure adds excitement to gardening.
