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> You're assuming average Joe has any way of knowing wether produced-by-paper seatbelts in car A is any different from vinyl seatbelts in car B without any gove

• croon 10y ago
  Sure, I definitely would, and probably give a quick glance over who performed it. Those are however not available in all fields or products. I'm also not considering myself better than anyone else, but am still very sure that a lot if not most people don't always check that. They however still deserve at least some form of baseline safety (not get sick, not get into product-fault accident) even without that. I save you by knowing how my field works and alerting you/stopping bad practices, and you save me by knowing your field. Then we institutionalize and compartmentalize that to ensure that unlike consumer reports, it's not influenced by market interests (which the US is still brilliant at ruining with lobbying). That is how a community works. Of course, you can instead pay someone explicitly to look after your interests/safety, to make sure they're not paid by other interests, ie companies wanting to pay as little as possible to sell you as much as possible. The thing is you've now just created a government. If it's not working it's not because of its concept.
  • splintercell 10y ago
    A better approach than consumer reports is label certifications. A product bearing more testing labels (like things from Under writer's laboratory, or movies rated by MPAA etc etc) will have a better chance of being marketed to bigger audience.