They had stored waste that is dangerous if it gets wet in a location that bordered a river that floods and was populated. New waste discoveries are made periodically - they are a horrible company.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/443538/rio-tinto-takes-o...

NZ government owns 51% of Meridian, so really in either case it's the government offering them a sweetener :)

It’s not “job creation” if the “creator” didn’t bring the money to pay the workers from capital that would have been otherwise inaccessible as a wage source in that country. Government=Taxpayer money is not that.

For the resources they use (the entire out put of a huge hydroelectric plant and serious pollution) they provide about 1,000 jobs.

The opportunity cost of putting all that energy to make aluminium is huge.

They produce the most 'green' aluminiy in the world, would you rather it be made with coal fired electricity?

As for providing 1000jobs, yeah, maybe directly, but those people spend money in town, not to mention the contracts Tiwai would bave with other companies in town.

The economic value has been huge.

Mining company blows stuff up, pays a small fee, and profits handsomely.

What would happen if someone blew up the mining company office due to a "paperwork oversight"?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23527303

Dec 2020 update: RT ordered to rebuild the cave:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55250137.amp

Mar 2021 update: Execs fired, given golden parachutes. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56261514.amp

May 2021 update: Shareholders vote 60%-40% to symbolic protest of golden parachutes

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/05/06/business/rio-tinto-shareh...

I'm impressed by the followup reporting. Usually it's hard to find updates on things.

"They were seen as one of Australia's most significant archaeological research sites, but they also had more than eight million tonnes of high-grade iron ore, with an estimated value of £75m (A$132m; $96m)."

Rio Tinto's official page on this is also worth a read.

https://www.riotinto.com/en/news/inquiry-into-juukan-gorge

Fascinating where they choose to use passive vs active voice.

- "Our relationship with the PKKP people extends over more than 17 years"

- "We are engaging with the PKKP people"

- "In partnership with the PKKP people, we are focusing on understanding"

- "We can re-establish a sense of place"

Contrast with:

- "The decision to destroy the rock shelters was taken nearly eight years ago"

- "the site was reclassified as ‘cleared’ for mining"

- "knowledge and awareness of the location and significance of the site was progressively lost"

- "the Juukan 2 rock shelter is likely to be irreparably damaged"

The Hero, Villain, Victim triangle plays out beautifully there.

In the Active, you have the company positioning itself as the Hero helping the Victim.

In the Passive, you find them pointing to some unidentified character from the company’s past (8 years ago) who stands as the Villain responsible for this.

They’ve positioned it as if the company is merely the Hero currently trying to help the Victims.

Anthropomorphism has taken an evolutionary leapfrog past people.

All this suffering and destruction to meekly underperform the stock market. Why do these executives have jobs?

Maybe because they're paying out profits in dividends?

(In other words, your earlier comment about bloodsucking profiteers misses the mark a little bit.)

No, it's only good for short term value. Long-term the regulatory and social environment evolves to punish these kind of companies.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/can-i-offer-you-a-nice-egg-in...

I suggest you do the same for acronyms that you don’t know.

https://churchofthought.org/blog/2020/06/25/busy-beaver-is-t...

it looks like they're just scraping by.

It happens. eg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the_C...

allegedly due to an "outdated map". They eventually settled for several million dollars.

Things made by humans are temporary. If not miners, then flood, earthquake, or other human pursuit would eventually wipe the slate clean.

From a more local perspective, imagine moving away from an area for whatever reason and then a thousand years later someone finds your dirty dishes and Twisted Sister poster and wants to preserve it for posterity.

Source: https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-2021/...

Yet another case where the fine needs to be a percentage of revenue.

You can't hide revenue, but you can hide assets. You might get your $100M judgement, but it's pointless when you can't collect it because the company you fined is a pass-through entity with no assets.

So if a plant has a chemical leak, the company can’t sell every other plant, pay a huge dividend, and then declare bankruptcy to avoid paying damages. The plant would have to be insured for up to the total dividend payout. The insurance company would charge a huge fee based on what they think the plant will end up costing after a court battle, etc.

You would probably kill a few janitors, and the executives would come out unscathed, again.

If you're going to go as far as engaging in violence, it's much better to go after the executives directly, as they're the ones who deserve it, not the guys making minimum wage to clean out the trash cans.

46,000 years from the company's last use, right? I mean, just to make the comparison complete.

46,000 years ago was the first habitation, not the last.

https://www.thebeaverton.com/2016/12/catholics-beaten-police...

They were only designated fully human (as in counted in the census, given most civil rights) in 1967. It took a referendum.

To give the Australians their due the vote was >90%bin favour

EDIT It was until 1983 that indigenous Australians had the same voting obligations as other Australians.

But hey Arizonans will get a handful of jobs for a couple decades while the mineral wealth that belongs to Americans is funneled to a select few.

And With an international mining company, The wealth isn’t staying local or even likely in America.

And as tax payers, the public is getting shafted too. If the lease actually had American tax payers seeing a fair share in return for their land being damaged and the wealth used up, and there was also an amenable compromise with the native Americans for whom that site is sacred, then yeah it could be okay even if it would be temporary jobs.

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Did Rio Tinto just not know the caves were there? Who was supposed to be responsible for them knowing -- was it their responsibility or that of the government? Did they know caves existed but not know they had historical significance? Were they following standard safety protocols and had no intention of damaging the cave, but there were unseen side effects of earth shifting or something?

Articles like this infuriate me because they invite us to assign knee-jerk blame, but then don't actually give any of the information needed to make that assessment.

And if this happened a year ago, surely there's a more recent more informative article that could have been submitted instead? I'm not sure what the point of submitting this particular article is -- there aren't any actionable details here on what perhaps needs to change in going forwards to prevent this type of thing from happening again.

True. There's slightly more in the inquiry report:

Never Again: Inquiry into the destruction of 46,000 year old caves at the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region of Western Australia - Interim Report (PDF) https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/committees/rep...

This comment from elsewhere on this page has links to some related stories and updates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27987689

https://savegrampiansclimbing.org

"Our five values – safety, teamwork, respect, integrity and excellence – define how we treat each other and how we work together. We are committed to an inclusive environment where people feel comfortable to be themselves. And we want our people to feel that all voices are heard, all cultures respected and that a variety of perspectives are not only welcome – they are essential to our success."

It's interesting that those values apply only within the company, and does not include anything about respecting natural or historical resources, or respecting local law. So, props for honesty?

[0] https://www.riotinto.com/careers

Nobody sane obviously buys that bullcrap, not the people who come up with it, not the management, shareholders, stock holders, employees, nobody. So we can entirely ignore this, its not meant literally, or in any other serious way.

So, my friend, I understand where you're coming from, but I would encourage you to set aside your cynicism. You'll notice that I used the word "should" in the previous paragraph. I think you're right about how it is but let's not give up on how things should be.

This is a false dichotomy. Why do either? The alternative is not pretend that people mean what they say and not give them a pass on their hypocrisy.

And it also helps me refine my earlier point. Too often I hear cynics (who are, after all, just disappointed idealists) effectively argue that we should give up, the game is rigged, and they'll get away with it no matter what we do. As emotionally safe as this position is, it's also self-fulfilling, and ultimately gives the powerful ever less accountability.

That said, I think "meaning what you say" should be an element of accountability, too, but you're right in that it's not strictly necessary.

I would say doing so is fundamental to consequentialist [1] and especially utilitarian [2] ethics. I'm not saying those are the best, but they are somewhat common.

How do we measure if someone means what they say?

[1]. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/

[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

As for the more philosophical stuff, I think I'm talking about (retributive) justice, and even more specifically, about how public attitudes about justice have a self-fulfilling effect on justice. My hypothesis is that cynical views on justice tend to be self-reinforcing, and idealistic views of justice are also self-reinforcing.

The primary utility of the cynical view seems to be personal/emotional, but comes at the expense of taking pressure off of the world to be better. I suppose my goal here is to encourage disappointed idealists to take up the idealistic mantel, and learn to get disappointed in people again. It's painful to care, but the pain is worth it to produce a better world.

They are coming now to my country (Serbia) and people are mad as hell, they don't want them here.

The natives of that land would probably be deprived of their exclusive access, and private buyers could hide their own collections from the world. But most public buyers and many private ones would be very motivated to share these precious items with the world, scientifically and culturally. The publicity increases their resale value if nothing else.

How many ancient artifacts are hidden away because they are illegal to own? I might or might not have owned such an arrowhead once. If I did and still did that could make it something I had to hide. The pool of artifacts available to archaeologists and museums may well be smaller due to such perverse incentives.

I know people who make home displays of arrowheads and potshards they've found. But others, not wanting to openly break federal law, keep them hidden in drawers. The law effectively hides away evidence of the ancient people that came before us. If they removed the threat we could openly celebrate them instead.

The artifacts that were destroyed were priceless. If they had prices, they probably would be high, and so would be carefully preserved instead.

Most archaelogists are public employees or employed by institutions dependent on public funds. This makes them more inclined to state intervention than the average citizen. Their paychecks literally depend on it.

> As a former archaeologist, we really don't care about random contextless artifacts.

Collectors do still value random artifacts, but a collection is much more valuable in context. A company that found such a site and could exploit it would be wise to hire archaeologists to improve the value of their property. You can sell the Crown Jewels for more than you can sell the individual jewels.

I don't intend to be dismissive in saying this, but the arguments that you're making are wildly off-base about the underlying subject. Moreover, archaeology for the sole purpose of increasing commercial value violates strong ethical norms.

Unless they weren't. Then they'd be blown up anyway, except we'd perceive a moral right for them to do so, and it would be harder to fight back against the practice.

also about the guy resigning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24448458

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Submitted title was "Rio Tinto blew up 46,000-year-old Aboriginal caves in Western Australia (2020)"

Odd to see such dogmatic reverence for pg's rule to the extent that you actively remove the key information which drives interest in a post initially.

How does condemning titles to bland, irrelevant, uninteresting "original" statements fit with on-topic posts meant to be "anything that good hackers would find interesting"?

1. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

If you really want to understand HN's approach to titles, I can explain more, but I'd like to be sure first that you aren't just trying to pick a fight about it, since that's boring and never works.

One short, partial answer is that in practice, the kind of thing people do when they're trying to make titles less "bland, irrelevant, uninteresting" is actually to make them more provocative and baity, which is not at all the same thing as what the HN guidelines mean by "interesting". Provocation and curiosity not only aren't the same, they may even be disjoint states.

There are perfectly viable ways to financially disincentivize companies (or individuals!) from bad acts like this without building a society where the default punishment for anything zeitgeist-bad is imprisonment?

Prison is a last resort when you _can't_ get people to follow laws using other means (ie, a serial rapist is not going to be deterred by financial penalties). But if a CEO or corporation is doing something clearly for profit, there is an obvious and easy way to prevent it without taking someone's life away. It's barbaric and unnecessary.

The system is bad, no matter who you target!

Which is why the most appropriate solution for those who hold themselves above the system due to their wealth and influence is to stick them directly in the worst parts of it and force them to experience it for years.

Absolutely. A target that deserves it.

Short prison sentences for white collar crime, rather than easy to pay fines, would change the landscape

Financial disincentives have NEVER worked because our system isn't designed to punish these things, by design.

2. Even if it was, do you understand what a deduction is? You still lose money; you'd be changing the base on your federal income payments, but since your income tax is at most 40% or so, you're still paying at minimum 60% of the penalty (even if it was deductible, which it is not).

2. Business taxes aren't the same as individuals taxes.

Cooincidentally she's used her powers to make herself immune from being blamed or having to worry about causing climate change. [1] Says it all really...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jul/28/queen-secret...

Then I would be validated in my belief that your reading comprehension is poor? Or do you truly believe that the caves were formed a mere 46K years ago?

Pragmatic