Hacker Cinema
Erin Brockovich
2000 · Film · 131 min
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
A twice-divorced mother of three who sees an injustice, takes on the bad guy and wins -- with a little help from her push-up bra. Erin goes to work for an attorney and comes across medical records describing illnesses clustered in one nearby town. She starts investigating and soon exposes a monumental cover-up.
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25 comments on Hacker News
I don't trust the legal system. They could cover up the evidence, get me blocked on HackerOne, claim that my screenshots are AI-generated, hire top lawyers then make the judge to charge me for the lawyers' bill.
The big company always wins. The legal system is pure fiction at this point. What lawyer would stand against the big companies? Permanently destroying all their future career prospects.
Erin Brockovich? That's a corporate propaganda movie.
Reality is more like what happened to Julian Assange or Steven Donziger. And they had support from some powerful groups. If they didn't, we wouldn't even have heard of them. That would have been my situation. Not worth the $200 bounty.
Yet, there are ample cases of the workers living near a factory and constantly getting cancer. PG&E in Hinckley, CA comes to mind as the most well known, due to the media/movie about Erin Brockovich.
Big tech has no respect for licenses, or the law itself with Uber and the like.
People talking about licenses like they have some courtroom legitimacy is hilarious. Licenses are like patents, they are weapons of the large corporation to be used against other large corporations or the people.
Of course you can try to litigate for ten years against a big corporation with lawyers on retainer, good luck. Might even get an "Erin Brockovich" movie script out of it, but we're seeing the rule of law and legitimacy of the courts degrade rapidly and become increasingly corrupt, once over the years, but now by the day
Sodium chromate is highly corrosive to humans (as well as carcinogenic, see the movie Erin Brockovich). However, it inhibits corrosion in metal, acting as a passivating inhibitor, forming some sort of protective oxide.
I've been doing a lot of research on the impact of Minuteman and Apollo on the IC industry (which led to the current post). The Air Force likes to take credit for the IC industry, as does NASA, but the actual influence is debatable. My take is that both projects had a large impact on the IC industry, more from Minuteman. However, even in the absence of both projects, there was a lot of interest and demand for ICs. If I had to take a quantitative guess, I'd say that those projects advanced ICs by maybe a year, but the basic trajectory would have remained the same.
It's Chrome 6, the same one from the Erin Brockovich movie, and it appears to be produced naturally.
I can't help but think of the movie Erin Brockovich:
Erin Brockovich: By the way, we had that water brought in specially for you folks. Came from a well in Hinkley. Ms. Sanchez: [Puts down the glass, without drinking] I think this meeting is over. Ed Masry: Damn right it is.
Would you personally spray Roundup directly on your skin?
Because if you've ever treated a large area of your plot with weed killer with a spray indicator, it's clear as day that stuff is getting all over you with the slightest breeze.
“allows real costs to be ignored” Economists call these negative externalities.
There are a handful of movies that involve the biggest tort litigations in the US: Erin Brockovich, Dark Water, A Civil Affair, the Rainmaker. It’s not clear that most of these businesses would exist if the actual cost of negative externalities was displayed on the accounting ledger with a dollar value.
I would argue there are enough companies that have continued creating these cash cow chemicals even after there was sufficient evidence of substantial harm that additional testing would be useless, except to class action lawsuit plaintiffs to prove what the defendants already know.
Movies that cover this topic: Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, Dark Waters. More recently the talc powder lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson.
Hell, the Bay Area is littered with EPA Superfund Sites where all of the old chipmakers and their suppliers were. Good luck to Chandler, AZ (where the new American chip fans are being built). I hope you learn at least a little something from the SF peninsula’s mistakes of the 1960s-1990s.
A former naval base in my area has been decommissioned for years but still hasn’t cleaned up the firefighting chemical runoff that has seeped into the ground. Sometimes there simply isn’t a healthier substitute for a chemical or there is no legal method to prevent an organization from screwing up the environment (good luck suing the Navy for something they did 50 years ago before the harm was known).
I would agree that better testing and health trials could have identified these health risks before the companies started using these chemicals, but companies don’t have emotions or ethics. They are sociopaths seeking maximum returns and will turn a blind eye (or worse) if their profits are threatened. There is a ton of motivated reasoning within and around companies that produce and use harmful chemicals, especially if they are the only industry in a region.
Go and watch the film "Erin Brockovich". It's (in my, and many people's opinion) a good film, and people involved say it's fairly accurate.
To me it shows what class actions are for -- a serious pollution incident which effected many people, but required a huge court case against a huge company to deal with. Many people recieved 6 figure sums, enough to move away and pay for medical care.
It isn't a prefect story -- PG&E should have arguably paid even more, given the fact they basically poisoned an entire town, and knew about it for years.
I think the idea is that there are people who think their desire to do whatever they want is more important than their employer's right to limit bad publicity and legal risk. A quick re-watch of the movie Erin Brockovich might illuminate why this could happen but there are obviously other reasons.
>will only alienate
>No one is convinced
Those are some pretty broad generalizations!
I've certainly been convinced on various topics by people who were correct and also rude about it.
Do you think laywers and police are always nice when trying to get to the truth? Have you ever seen the movie Erin Brockovich, or read about the events that inspired it? Would she have had the same results while being polite the entire time?
Rude comments may break forum rules, sure. But I'm not sure sweeping generalizations about efficacy, such as the above, are needed.
More centralised authority, no local counter initiatives that bog them down, less political gridlock and stronger consensus mechanisms, less influence by third parties through lobbying which the US glamorises as free speech, no bias against public transportation and so on.
The US almost prides itself in the fact that its government is dysfunctional, that individuals can stop projects at the expense of the general public. One just needs to look at the countless of Hollywood movies where some lone Erin Brockovich-esque hero stands up to 'the machine', with the question rarely being raised what the collective costs and trade-offs are, or whether there's even a rational case to be made for the resistance.
How many people had heard of Erin Brockovich before there was a movie made about it? Not zero, but nowhere near as many as after the movie.
A huge proportion of society (who are eligible to vote) don't hear about these things even after a journalist has fought tooth and nail to release the story.
People, for many varied and complex reasons, tend not to care about this sort of stuff unless it gets glamorized.
See Edward Snowden for one example. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth, promises made and serious discussion of the problem, but is the situation now any better?
I have a feeling that the modern method to deal with PR nightmares is to acknowledge the problem, promise to fix it, and then just let the hype die before doubling down on the nefarious behavior, but with better op-sec.
If it's not obvious, I'm getting (even more) jaded about the whole issue.
I was a military wife for a lot of years. I have very serious health problems. Doctors officially blame that on my genes, which can't be changed, so it's a de facto means to throw their hands in the air and call me unfixable.
I think environmental factors are a big part of the problem and that those can be addressed.
I lived on a military base for 2.75 years where there was one tap in the house labeled "potable water." You weren't supposed to drink water from the bathroom sink while brushing teeth, yet we bathed in this stuff and washed our dishes with it, etc.
The house was not very far from Hinkley, CA, location of the hexavalent chromium plume made famous in the movie "Erin Brockovich."
When I have said on the internet that I believe hexavalent chromium poisoning is one of my problems, I have been dismissed as a nutter and conspiracy theorist by internet strangers who are confident they know all about my life better than I do.
I actually spent some years on an antivaxxer email list. They had a lot of interesting and useful information that helped me begin turning my health around while my doctor expressed zero curiosity about my improvement, advised me other patients needed him more and scheduled me fewer appointments.
YouTube recently demonitized anti vax channels (seemingly part of general trend to shut down such views). Most people seem to think that's a good thing. It leaves me wondering where people like me are supposed to go in a world where "fringe" views cannot be discussed in good faith on the internet. Are we supposed to just quietly die because that's the PC answer when doctors tell you "People like you don't get well. Symptom management is the name of the game."?
If you make zero effort to get me well and write me off for dead because of the label you gave me, wouldn't my decline and death be a form of self-fulfilling prophecy?
And when I defy that prediction, I'm written off as a crazy person and thrown off of one forum after another.
Insert some quote about "And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak."
Let's assume I agree with you. Are you stating that the movie EB (and the woman Erin Brockovich) was responsible for making Hexavalent Chromium 6 the fall guy and that there was nothing that happened in Hinkley to the very tiny population of 2k (or less) people?
Ohhh, will Julia Roberts be in the movie adaptation of this latest PG&E debacle?[0] She was so good in the last one.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich_(film)
Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action (about groundwater pollution) are both good examples, yes.
I guess it depends when the article starts its timeline. I was trying to think of movies from the 2010s or so, because I can think of a lot of tech CEO villains in that span but not many non-tech CEO villains. My best guess at why is that action films with corporate villains look better with tech companies. (For instance, Robocop is way older than the article's timeframe, but fits the same villain narrative.)
> Avatar is probably the closest thing to "CEOs trashing the environment" that's been a hit.
What about "Erin Brockovich"? PG&E is a power company, though the hexavalent chromium was used to fight corrosion.
I did not see the movie, but the Wikipedia summary says the decision was traced to upper management.
Legal recourse for a small homeowner against a large corporation is/was not a likely solution. BigCo has so many lawyers just for this type of contingency, and the homeowner lacks the financial resources to fight. Erin Brockovich was a real person, but her story was made into a movie because it was so rare.
and this would create a pretty awesome movie... think "erin brockovich"
Fair enough, but then again, you were complaining specifically about _Italian_ olive oil rather than EU values as a whole. Keep in mind that Italy has large regions that were traditionally run by the Mafia and the Camorra:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Mafia
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camorra
Also, keep in mind that - in contrast with the US and as already raised elsewhere - the EU tends to crack down on would-be fraudsters and prosecute when they find issues. Also, it's not unheard of for businesses to tip health inspectors to check out their competitors at the slightest hint of fraud. It might merely be an impression, but the same in the US seems to require alerting consumers and sometimes alarming them before the FDA bothers to wake up (as put on film in e.g. A Civil Action or Erin Brockovich).
Do you really consider the work corporate lawyers do can be summed up by the plotlines to Hollywood movies like "A Civil Action" and "Erin Brockovich"?
Because that's effectively what you've done in your reply.
Fundamentally, lawyers exist because we no longer (generally) find it acceptable to challenge each other to duels, or send Vinnie and the boys to bust someone's kneecaps when we don't like what they're doing. Irreconcilable disagreements between companies/businesses/individuals all need a means of resolution.
You understand that these moves came about because stuff like it actually happened in real life?
The film Erin Brockovich is one example.
Well... speaking about Soderbergh: Solaris was an insult against Tarkovskiy's Solaryis (and Lem?). Sex, Lies, and Videotape was very good and I remember my parents good comments about that movie. In my opinion Kafka (1991) was an excellent movie (9 in my ranking). Erin Brockovich? mmmmmm.... 5. So, in my opinion Soderbergh is prolific but abandoned his art. I would prefer a Soderbergh oscillating between very good and very bad movies but not decaying. I think Woody Allen is a better example.
The topic is very interesting but I believe it is more related to personalities. Some people are more compatible to a prolific personality and some not. Others never release, and only in this case is where the sin appears.
Well, the story is a combination of typical archetypes retold with pretty pictures. That much I cannot argue about. And I think that what you are really saying by "the plot sucked" is "it's too archetype driven". I'm basing this on:
>I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious
Sure the characters ranged from a bit 2-d (the Col.) to well fleshed out (Neytiri (watch it again if you don't believe me)) and the acting ranged from "will probably win an award it was so good" Saldana to "thanks for showing up and picking up your paycheck" Weaver. But that's nothing different than you'll find in almost every movie -- the principles are fleshed out and the supporting cast is flat.
Why can't we have more 'smart' movies like Erin Brockovich/Schindler's List/Fight Club/District 9/Oldboy/etc. (archetypes of David vs. Goliath, Greed and Bullies) or The Incredibly True Story of Two Teenagers In Love/Léon/American Beauty/Mississippi Masala/South Pacific/Moulin Rouge/West Side Story etc. (Forbidden Love) or Lawrence of Arabia/Dune/Hunt for Red October/etc. (Lovable Turncoat)... you ask? And I'd counter that all of those are as archetype driven as any other well known flick (archetype stories provided in parens).
You see where I'm going with this. Even if you don't agree with all my movie choices as being "good" or "smart" you'll at least have to agree that most movies that are at least reasonably well known are pretty much based on a dissection or aggregation of common archetypes. How many times has Romeo and Juliet been retold almost verbatim? And by and large the audience enjoys these things and says "oh the plot was so good" when really, they are just a rehash of old story ideas. We even group movies into archetype driven categories "love story", "ghost story", "suspense", etc.
So yes, I was being "cute" with my notional art-house flick. But if you want to find something not driven by archetypes, where the artists consciously try to avoid those things, you have to go there, or to France or Italy perhaps. Here, http://www.imdb.com/chart/top this is the top 250 movies on IMDB not by dollars but by rating. How many of these are "smart" movies meaning "not a rehash of archetypes"? Very few if any.
It's pretty simple really, if you don't want your intelligence to be insulted (meaning you don't want an archetype driven story), you end up with a movie about a vapid cowgirl/model with giant thumbs or a movie director that can't focus on making movies because he's too busy with all his mistresses (which is actually just a retelling of the "guy with too many girlfriends archetype"). And given that non-archetype driven movies are typically poorly rated and attended by the open public, either you are particularly "smart" or those movies tend to suck.