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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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Regulations are written in blood
But I’m an alpha man child and I need to make people bleed to prove it!
Don’t worry I’m sure we’ll find some place that lets you feel the bleeding edge of unregulated capitalism in an alpha release.
To continue with the argument of “the market will self-regulate and people wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again”
Okay but how many people died, how many people are suffering long-term effects, and what’s stopping them from adding a different deadly thing to our food?
And also they’re already basically Monopolies. You don’t have real options. Most food products come from like 3 mega corps who own hundreds of brands.
To continue with the argument of “the market will self-regulate and people wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again”
Turns out the parent company owns every other brand of that product, so going to another brand is meaningless
wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again
Assuming there is perfect information in the market. In reality there is heavy information asymmetry.
It also assumes free competition while we have every market dominated by a few players buying up everyone else, often with cartel like behavior.
It also assumes it is immediately deadly poison, and doesn’t do something like cause early dementia 25 years later.
It also assumes the masses behave rationally, which they won’t ever.
We’ll just get the cheapest shit with the limited information we are given, unless it is life-or-death, where we will pay any price out of fear.
Also the evidence shows this isn’t really true, anyway.
Also, if you want inspections to make sure there isn’t bird shit in the milk, then you need regulation. Otherwise people are just drinking bird shit and they don’t know.
Market self regulation assumes informed consumers that are smart enough to know what things mean. Also it assumes healthy competition and companies that are competing to make the best product at the chrapest price. It ALSO assumes brand lotalty isn’t a thing, and consumers are judging things purely objectively.
Like, i understand the idea, but in practice there are a ton of caveats.
Market self regulation assumes informed consumers that are smart enough to know what things mean
Not just smart enough, but informed enough. That means every person spending literally hundreds/thousands of hours per week researching every single aspect of every purchase they make. Investigating supply chains, performing chemical analysis on their foods and clothing, etc. It’s not even remotely realistic.
So instead, we outsource and consolidate that research and testing, by paying taxes to a central authority who verifies all manufacturers keep things safe so we don’t have to worry about accidentally buying Cheerios that are laced with lead. AKA: The government and regulations.
“But what about my rights?? Drinking spoiled milk with chalk probably cures cancer or something, of course They don’t want you doing that! Why do you hate freedom?”
You’re free to add your own chalk.
I will link to the 1858 Bradford sweets poisoning.
What is so incredible is that we are living st a time with such massive food surplus that it would blow the mind of anyone living in the past… but they will let all of it go to waste and just add bullshit to the food just because they can…
And make it unaffordable, because fuck it why not
Two for one deal of fucking everyone over.
The absolute surplus afforded to us by modern farming and then the waste of so much of it will never cease to piss me off and will likely piss me off more in the future when we lose it to climate change.
You don’t know half of it. The sheer amount of overwork farmland is going through world wide is causing soil depletion like no tomorrow. We may even end up seeing a full blown worldwide famine in some years time when it gets to the point that we simply cannot revitalize farm land.
We produce such an incredible glut of food it isn’t funny. If we took all the surplus that we make we could feed the whole of China for an entire year. That is how much is being thrown to waste.
No, we aren’t- the current solar maximum while we have record heat and while the ozone is diminishing means we have mass death speeding up.
This is actually worse than you realize, because normally the solar maximum in the past DID mean peak crop yields and more food for animals and people. So much so a farmer in the 1800s predicted much of the stock market peak and troughs based on the solar cycle. The PEAKS were at solar maxiumums.
https://www.therationalinvestor.com/blog/how-the-benner-cycle-predicts-100-years-of-market-movement
So we should actually be at a food surplus/peak but climate change etc is so bad (we are past 6 maybe 7 of 9 boundaries to live on earth) that we are dying and animals are dying. Mass, MASS deaths of insects and birds and sea life. We probably don’t have enough food worldwide any more, not this year at least. In the past, yes, sure. But presently, I’m not so sure. Maybe. But a lot of animals have died including from bird flu.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
https://www.livescience.com/heatwave-cooks-sealife-to-death.html
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/nearly-billion-monarch-butterflies-vanished-since-1990
https://www.thecooldown.com/outdoors/declining-bird-populations-report-cornell-lab/
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/INSECT-APOCALYPSE/egpbykdxjvq/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/16/climate-change-triggers-earthquakes-tsunamis-volcanoes
One of the weirdest aspects of America is that we think people whose job is making money for shareholders should have more power than the public servants we, the public, hire to work for us.
I think thats just a subset of the whole “Government should be run like a business” mindset.
There’s a hardline belief that any business is automatically more efficient than government because if it weren’t it would die from competition, period, end of story. The real equation is that companies are as inefficient as they can afford to be, and the bigger ones can afford plenty. In one of my jobs my manager gave me maybe 2 or 3 weeks of actual work to do in 6 months. In another my team was told to hold off starting a project because there was a change of plan and they didn’t know exactly what they wanted. So we just screwed around for a couple months. I won’t say what company but in both cases it rhymed with Bicrosoft.
Business and government do different things. The government is like the brain of the body, it receives info and dispatches messages to various areas to have the body respond.
The economy is our blood, it literally transfers resources like food to various areas of the body.
They do different functions. They do different things. How can you run a brain/nervous system like a circulatory/blood system? They are different and for different things. They mean they want to run the country BY businesses, as if businesses had control, not as if it was its own separate business.
Further with this analogy, the peripheral nerves are like our communications systems, the lymph is like the military combined with 501cs (mix of attacking and helpful resources, eg vitamins in chylomicrons). And the people are all the individual cells, do their best in their specialized roles and communicating with the brain what needs they have so the brain can dispatch or change things to keep everything running well in homeostasis.
A group of cells (like a business) who demands too many resources/blood supply will kill other cells. It can be hard for the brain to figure out why cells are dying and may attack the wrong cells to correct it, and give resources to the wrong cells. This is how the US has started to die.
Hands up if you didn’t already know that. Or intuited it. To me this seems to be something only US-Americans who argue purely ideologically for a “small government” need reminding of. They’re paradoxically often the first in line calling for government intervention when their drinking water is full of poop or something.
Most US foods produced under their ‘regulations’ are forbidden in EU.
And for good reason.Now it’ll be 10x worse. Just don’t eat here and don’t buy food from USA. I say this as an American. We are fucked.
Pure unadulterated capitalism means adulterated bread, wine, and milk.
You mean like milk with bird flu, or bread with a dozen ingredients?
Aluminum sulfate in the bread, anti-freeze in the wine, and chalk in the milk.
KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY BREADED MILK-WINE!
That’s just the free market working as intended. Collateral damage.
Maybe people should do research on the available milk brands before giving it to their children if they didn’t want them to drink bleach.
Edit: I tried to resist adding the “/s,” but we live in crazy (stupid) times, so…
The Free Market (holy be thy name) gives you the choice between $1/bottle for milk with chalk and bleach, or $10/bottle for one with less chalk and bleach. If you want one without chalk and bleach, you’ll need to find your own cow.
Also, the cows all have birth defects and need uranium-powered antibiotics to stay alive.
Now, let us open our song books to number 34: “Praise Hayek and His Perfect Mustache”.
Blasphemer! In our house we praise Wittgenstein, not that Austrian hack
With no regulation there will be no other milk brands.
Excellent idea! I’m sure that information will be readily available from independent trustworthy sources that are not the government! Failing that, I always have my trusty mass spectrometer in my kitchen and I run all my foods through it just in case!
Maybe people should do research on the available milk brands before giving it to their children if they didn’t want them to drink bleach.
Without regulation, the company could also just lie. Nothing would dictate that they would have to tell the truth about their product.
Well that’s why you need to do your own research. As in looking at products under microscopes, doing physics equations, etc.
If you’re not an expert on every product you purchase (and the science behind them), well then that’s on you and your kid deserves getting lead poisoning from his band-aids.
Poe’s law and all that
Old saying “Fire and flight regulations are written in blood.” Food regulations are likely written in various excretions?
There have absolutely been deaths due to unsafe, mass produced foods.
Insane! 178 others were left with permanent injury including kidney and brain damage!
And this was entirely preventable
However, the Jack in the Box fast-food restaurant chain had knowledge of but disregarded Washington state laws which required burgers to be cooked to 155 °F (68 °C), the temperature necessary to completely kill E. coli. Instead, it adhered to the federal standard of 140 °F (60 °C). If Jack in the Box followed the state cooking standard, the outbreak would have been prevented, according to court documents and experts from the Washington State Health Department.
New safety laws/rules are always in reaction to bad behavior or to shift liability
I worked in industrial food plants in the central valley of California
Jack n the Box killing children, changed the food industry
All the big retailers & fast food chains started requiring SAP, ISO type material resource planning systems to limit their liability. We had regular drills where we had to find a specific package wherever it might be within the hour as if there was a problem that had come to light
While OSHA & CalOSHA exist, our biggest driver of safety improvements was the workmans comp insurance companies. They would do inspections a couple of times a year & we would implement their “suggestions”
In 20+ years the only time I heard about an OSHA inspection was after an outside contractor got crushed by a loading dock he was working on & failed to block it up, they were in & out in an hourCalifornia and Washington States ahead of the game again, especially in 2025+
Excretions with blood?
They’re the best excretions…
Puss is an option too
Corporations wont let us have Medicare for All - why? Why do they ALL lobby so hard against it? It would make their costs cheaper, right? They wouldn’t have to pay for our health insurance. Plus we could get medicines so we can be at work more instead of home sick or spreading sickness at work. So it must not be cheaper in some way for them to have Medicare for All - right? Why do they think it would be more expensive for THEM if we all had public health care?
Because that would detect cancer (and toxins) and allow us to class action sue companies for them. Can’t sue if it was never detected. Thats why they find carcinogens and lead in kids’ products so much - their products dont have more lead in them, but kids all can be on Medicaid and that catches it. Flint, MI, water poisoning was detected by a kid on Medicaid.
They don’t want us to all have healthcare because that is public science and it will absolutely detect what theyve been lying and poisoning us with. It would probably destroy all the big companies like Nestle, Johnson&Johnson, Colgate, etc…
Public healthcare also removes one of the few leashes they have on workers to keep them in line. My Father in law used to work at a local retail chain in my area, and the pay was straight dogshit, but the health insurance was phenomenal. It kept many workers from leaving for better paying jobs.
just to point out the other side of this…
(and I already know I’ma be downvoted for just saying that)
Some regulations are bad. Many are good and we actually need them, but some are bad. For example, when there’s a few large companies in an industry, they often lobby for regulations designed to increase the cost of doing business. While the big fish can pay the costs of these extra regulations, smaller companies cant, and just cant compete with the big fish, lowering the amount of competition in the industry and promoting more monopolistic behavior. We saw Openai try to do exactly this back when they went to Congress to warn the senators about the dangers of ‘agi’ and how it quickly needed to be regulated. Well they failed, and now there’s tons of companies with their own products that rival Chatgpt in every way other than the brand recognition.
you don’t solve this by having less regulations lmao
its solved by getting money out of politics, along with removing regulations that don’t make sense and keeping the ones that do
Folks here think regulation, and immediately put it to food and Ai or other white collar applications.
Working in plastic manufacturing for ten years, and chemical manufacturing for a few more, the term deregulatuon terrifies me. Regulations keep employees safe, and aims to keep the products we make safe.
I think of environmental impacts first and foremost, which is the kind of deregulation I assumed was meant with this regimes obsession with bringing back coal, oil, and mining/deforestation if our national parks.
Getting money out of politics is implemented with regulation. We only have one environment, and they want to deregulate environmental safety/preservation.
…removing regulations that don’t make sense and keeping the ones that do
Having safety regulations for plastic manufacturing and protecting the environment makes sense, so those should exist.
sure but regulatory capture and a controlled market are not really a counter argument to regulation so much as an argument for more regulation
strict rules enforcing disclosure and other sunshine laws are key to exposing corruption like you are suggesting
Wait, so you’re telling me that this politician who will definitely get a CEO position in that company does not want to make life better for me?
The tweet itself limits its scope to food safety regulations specifically. The title of this lemmy post was condensed for brevity, which might create the impression that it’s trying to make a larger point about regulations in toto. But I figured I could get away with it because I figured that surely people would read the tweet before commenting.
People? Read? Never.
I know, but pretty much every comment on this point about regulation isn’t just discussing food regulations, their talking about regulations as a whole. Also my point about some regulations not helping can still be applied to foods.
I mean look at the stuff they say about ketchup:
The consistency of the finished food is such that its flow is not more than 14 centimeters in 30 seconds at 20 °C when tested in a Bostwick Consistometer in the following manner: Check temperature of mixture and adjust to 20±1 °C.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-155/subpart-B/section-155.194 - section B, part 1.
the flow of ketchup does not matter in the slightest to anyone
Reminds me of car startups (in the US) taking off one wheel, turning them into moto/autocycles, so they wouldn’t have to go through expensive car certification processes
There’s also regulations that actually hurt the things they are intended to protect. It’s generally called perverse incentives. The example here is related to endangered species. It’s in the interest of those that find an endangered species on their property to “shovel and shut up” as the presence only creates problems for the owner.
And if we’re all killed, who will the big companies get money from?
They will market safe food as a new product and charge you more for food that wont kill you.
Corporations wont let us have Medicare for All - why? Why do they ALL lobby so hard against it? It would make their costs cheaper, right? They wouldn’t have to pay for our health insurance. Plus we could get medicines so we can be at work more instead of home sick or spreading sickness at work. So it must not be cheaper in some way for them to have Medicare for All - right? Why do they think it would be more expensive for THEM if we all had public health care?
Because that would detect cancer (and toxins) and allow us to class action sue companies for them. Can’t sue if it was never detected. Thats why they find carcinogens and lead in kids’ products so much - their products dont have more lead in them, but kids all can be on Medicaid and that catches it. Flint, MI, water poisoning was detected by a kid on Medicaid.
They don’t want us to all have healthcare because that is public science and it will absolutely detect what theyve been lying and poisoning us with. It would probably destroy all the big companies like Nestle, Johnson&Johnson, Colgate, etc…
Republicans: But we are the ones selling the spoiled milk.
