3 ms·
Most of the world runs of on good faith and best intentions, without it everything would break down. This goes for taxes, healthcare, insurance, checks, postal
by jopsen 9y ago
Most of the world runs of on good faith and best intentions, without it everything would break down. This goes for taxes, healthcare, insurance, checks, postal mail, traffic code, currency, etc.
This also holds for an alarming number of electronic systems such as the phone network, and many ISP network configurations. While it's tempting to say no trust should be required, that's very expensive, like bitcoin.
For system to be cost effective, trust is necessary. Requiring self-control is cheap and often effective, because people want to abide by the law. Requiring submission of soil samples is rather expensive, and fairly strong control, because cheating is a very deliberate act.
We probably have to ask, how can we improve the trust? Higher morals and more transparency could be one answer.
- alexandercrohde 9y agoI feel like that is an unreasonable generalization. It's not remotely hard at all for the FDA to buy products off the shelf and test them for glyphosate. They need not and should not trust samples obtained any other way.
- PantaloonFlames 9y agoThat seems reasonable to me. Real world test.
- jopsen 8y agoFair point, it does put some management on to the FDA, but that seems reasonable.. and cost seem small. Still the FDA can't test all shops, and there is a risk they just test the same shipment. Trusting samples from companies is easy, and fake those samples is a very deliberate crime. It's easy to fake currency, that doesn't mean people do it.
- exp1orer 9y agoI don't think "higher morals" is a realistic solution within our current market economy - these are multi-billion dollar corporations which operate on a separate set of motivations from any of their employees. I also don't think our only alternatives are "trust these companies to self-monitor", or blockchain. I'm thinking about 2 kinds of solutions: 1) technical solutions which would improve the current chain-of-custody tracking (this could involve blockchain, but it doesn't have to). 2) policy solutions which might involve something like "less frequent, but more rigorous testing, with stronger penalties". And I'm confused by your statement "Requiring submission of soil samples is rather expensive, and fairly strong control, because cheating is a very deliberate act." - but what these instances prove is that corporations will cheat anyway.
- jopsen 8y agoOkay, I guess my point was to say control without trust is expensive. Some level of trust in companies and institutions is necessary. And when balancing this we should consider cost.
- ItsMe000001 8y agoYou made the statement in the context of the currently discussed article, where not trusting the companies and obtaining samples from supermarkets would have been at least as easy and cheap. That makes it a bit hard to understand what your point is, we have a concrete example, there is no need to theorize about other scenarios. What you came up with has little or no connection to the item being discussed.
- Applejinx 8y agoTrust is a scale issue. Beyond a certain scale, beyond a certain degree of abstraction, it just doesn't exist anymore. Everything DOES break down, and has been doing so since the Roman Empire broke down, and even before that into prehistory. If we like to retain what structures and expectations we have, the one thing we can't expect is to trust the largest and most unaccountable aggregations of power. At this point, those largest powers aren't governments, certainly not the FDA.