On Sunday, March 15, 2015 at 2:51:16 PM UTC-4, bob haller wrote:
On Sunday, March 15, 2015 at 2:42:26 PM UTC-4, trader_4 wrote:
On Sunday, March 15, 2015 at 2:16:43 PM UTC-4, bob haller wrote:
Heres my belief........

Nestle beneful knows there dog food is hazardous but is attempting to cover it up.....

GM knew cobalt ignition switches were hazardous but covered it up.

lumber liquidators knew some of their products were hazardous but tried to cover it up.

both car makers and takata knew the airbags were hazardous but covered it up.

.toyota knew their vehicles had runaway acceleration troubles but covered it up.

all of these were finally made public after people died and manufacturers LIED

when companies are only concered with the bottom line and reputation means nothing. it makes covering it up or trying to the best fiancial decision.


The only flaw in that argument is that reputation means everything to
the bottom line. Destroying the Purina consumer brand would be about as
dumb a thing as one could do. Even if they only cared about the bottom line,
the smartest thing they could do would be to quickly correct whatever could
be causing the problem. If they changed the formulation to add something,
just go back to the previous one. If they changed suppliers, go back to
the previous ones, etc. On the other hand, if they really don't know
and it's something that's entered via the long list of things that goes
into their product, then you can't fix it until you find it.

I'd also note that the FDA has known of this, been tracking it for
quite some time too. If it's some poison that's easy to indentify,
kind of odd the FDA apparently can't figure it out either.


add some laws, put a couple CEOs in prison, fiancially devastate some companies and products will be safer for everyone.

Don't you think it would be a good idea to find out what's actually
wrong, first?

companies find defects, and rather than come clean and fix the problem they decide it cheaper to cover them up.


That's certainly true in some cases. In some cases the "fix" could involve
hundreds of millions, for example recalling cars. In that case, I can
see motive to try to avoid a recall. But even that doesn't explain what
happened at GM, for example. They knew they had some kind of problem with
the ignition switches moving too easily to the off position. Your profit
explanation is a reasonable explanation of why they didn't do a recall
earlier. But it doesn't explain why they kept using the same switch for
many more years. The only thing that had to be done was have a pin that
was 1/8" longer in the switch. Certainly a profit motive doesn't explain
their failure to at least fix it moving forward.

The problem with the Beneful thing is that I don't see reason to believe
that a fix would cost them anything. The product was OK for a long time.
Just go back to making it like they used to make it. And if they know
what the problem is, but are covering it up, it has the liklihood of
severely impacting the whole company as dogs continue to die, get sick etc.
It just doesn't make sense to me that they know what it is, but won't fix it
and are going to continue to make a deadly product. It's possible, but
it doesn't seem too likely. It seems more likely that they can't figure
out what it is either. The FDA knows about it, so far apparently they
either haven't looked into it or if they have, they don't know what's
causing it either.



takata knew for years its airbags were killing people, and even once the info became public, they fought a general recall to save a buck.....

So did the govt and they let it go on. The problem with Takata may be
similar to the problem with Beneful. My understanding is that to this
day no one knows what the exact cause of the problem is. They thought
it was excess humidity on the factory floor, then something else, etc.
And one aspect of that whole scenario that made no sense to me was
the auto companies were recalling cars based on where they were registered
on the theory that they were only likely to misfire and cause injury in
states that were hot and humid. And again, the govt is OK with that.
So, the same car in FL gets recalled, if it's in MD, it does not.

I see a couple Senators are getting involved in the Beneful thing now.
Maybe they can at least get some more attention on it at the FDA.