What actually happens is that wociety bans things based on the phobias of rich people aged 50-65. Statistics and research are irrelevant.
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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This makes me hate wociety
...leaving it.
<3
Depends. How much would it cost the corporations?
I think a 1% chance of permanent health effects manifesting years later is already plenty to get something banned.
Asbestos, leaded gas, plastics, forever chemicals, alcohol, and cigarettes are still used extensively and are far from getting banned by society.
Literally everything you mentioned has at least had its ban discussed, and most of those have been banned or at least restricted in some part of the world.
Discussing a ban and imposing restrictions in some jurisdictions is not what I would describe as "banned by society" especially when the deleterious health effects affect everyone exposed regardless of jurisdiction.
Also one jurisdiction banning something doesn't mean it just isn't available. I can go on eBay right now and buy asbestos brake pads even though they're technically getting phased out in my country. Airplanes the world over continue to use leaded gas and plastic bottles are available (almost) everywhere. That doesn't seem very "banned by society" to me.
What the hell is the context of this question???
Well they say any landing you walk away from is a good landing, but clearly bad landings are considered disastrous enough that flying while drunk is banned.
I think you drastically overestimating 99% vs 1% at scale. For example look at the Chicago Tylenol case. Atleast 7 people died. 31 million packages of Tylenol were recalled, the entire line of powder filled capsules was eliminated, nationwide redesign of medication packages was done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders
The question was about "how bad" though, and deaths are pretty bad. We wouldn't ban restaurants if 99% served delicious food and 1% served slop.
Really? If 1% of customers of a restaurant got food poisoning... Well that's exactly why we have a health department and food inspectors
Now if by slop you just mean "not delicious" people would probably stop going and stop recommending. Some places may be able eat that loss(pun intended) but many would go out of business. Related, sorta, there have studies that one aspect of McDonald's that added to its huge success is consistently being same basically everywhere. Yeah there's some regional differences but you can eat a big Mac basically everywhere. And they are basically the same.
Hey, im so confused why you think my question is an opinion.
No, I don't think it was an opinion. My point is in a lot of cases something really bad would never hit 1%. Like commercial airlines, most do several hundreds of flights a day(just a guess but for the large ones seems reasonable across all airports). If one airline had say 3 crashes in a year I can't imagine them still being active.
Population of us in 2024 was 340,000,000. If it effected 1% that would be 3.4 million people. That's like 1/2 of the holocaust victims.
I believe most companies would be done at 0.01% if that. Only company I can think of with that body count is nestle... I don't even think Raytheon has killed that many.
I submit Phillip Morris for consideration.
Possible but back when smoking was much more common (not like 2010s, I mean like 1930s when a pack was included in mre kits given to soldiers in ww2 and the Flintstones cartoon had sponsored segments where Fred and barney had "smoke breaks" and talked about the "smooth and delicious taste" of I think it was camel cigarettes ) There were many more companies making cigarettes. It was only really consolidated in I think the 80s due to lawsuits for causing cancer, false advertising, lying to congress etc. Most of the companies couldn't afford all the fines and were bought out.
Thank you for your answer, as opposed to many of the ones I've gotten you seem more grounded.
How about if something weren't immediately disastrous, but we find out that the outcomes are heinous after a long period of time? Examples of this that come to mind are smoking, leaded petrol, PFAS, DDT (and now various other industrial pesticides) and in my opinion food that has been engineered to be addictive.
Well considering war and genocide exist..
Extremely bad. As in like people are dying emasse. It also wouldn't be an immediate decision either, there would need to be research into whether A was leading to B and then on-top of that getting either society as a whole to ban it, or getting the legal framework to ban it in place which also takes quite a bit.
Without the legal framework banning it, if its something that would allow for personal gain, narcissists will use it regardless of the cause. Heck if its too bad of an outcome, anarchists or world-ender doomers could intentionally do it with the hope that said bad outcome occurs.
It depends on the society you're talking about, how newsworthy the bad outcomes are considered, and whether or not everyone has unconsciously made a decision to ignore the risks of the thing because we're all used to it like we are with cars and fossil fuels.
Not exactly the same thing between the positive and negative outcomes, but we still use nuclear processes for energy generation and medical treatments even though our nuclear bombs can level cities.
So, yeah, it'd have to be worse than potentially killing 9 million people with ease (and potentially everyone in the resulting MAD race).
Realistically if something threatens the bank accounts of the elites it'll be banned regardless of its societal or individual benefits.