Amateur UAV Pilot Exposes Texas River of Blood 388
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."
Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
After reading that article I get the feeling there will be a law passed about "model aircraft" using cameras soon.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Restricted airspace above meatpacking plants and CAFOs?
I could see that coming.
Re:If libertarians had there way (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
General Trend (mod parent up, Informative) (Score:3, Insightful)
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:If libertarians had there way (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Whoa, whoa, WHOA... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:General Trend (mod parent up, Informative) (Score:5, Insightful)
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:If libertarians had there way (Score:4, Insightful)
Also the air.
Libertarian naivete would be cute if it weren't dangerous.
Re:Hmmm (Score:0, Insightful)
On what planet is pig blood harmful to a river?
Re:What would be the libertarian solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:If libertarians had there way (Score:2, Insightful)
Most libertarians I know think that business owners should be free to, say, only serve white people.
Re:If libertarians had there way (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If libertarians had there way (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Most slaughterhouses in the US pay no attention to federal humane slaughtering & biohazard laws,
Citation needed.
Re:If libertarians had there way (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [businessweek.com]? 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" [hbs.edu] their "accidental" benzene releases.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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:If libertarians had there way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If libertarians had there way (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org], Times Beach, Missouri [wikipedia.org], and the Valley of the Drums [wikipedia.org], and I wonder how the libertarian principles would have corrected those situations. The Superfund [wikipedia.org] 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. [wikipedia.org], as of November, 2010.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
On what planet is pig blood harmful to a river?
Fertilizer runoff [scientificamerican.com] is a major problem in rivers.
Pig blood is essentially fertilizer [the-organic-gardener.com].
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If libertarians had there way (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
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.