4 ms·
There needs to be a "ZAGAT's" for toxicity (in commercial and residential real estate). So at least there can be something owned and managed by the public, and
by EGreg 6y ago
There needs to be a "ZAGAT's" for toxicity (in commercial and residential real estate). So at least there can be something owned and managed by the public, and not having to rely on these agencies, many of whom need to balance "economic freedom / business friendliness" with the facts.
Such a site would need to be either hosted offshore, or have deep pockets to protect against defamation lawsuits and other litigation. It would also need to have a great process for removing false positives and false negatives. What process would that be, though? It would have to involve actual testing by trusted agencies, I think.
- elliekelly 6y agoI do a bit of side work as an environmental law journalist primarily covering Superfund cases. A lot of this data is publicly available from the EPA, especially with respect to Superfund sites. Unfortunately the data is not available in an easily digestible form. It’s tucked away in long-winded PDF reports that are unique to each site so the data collected and the way it’s presented isn’t uniform. But I do think the data is, for the most part, robust, reliable, and available if someone made the effort to devise a way to scrape and parse it.
- bjacobt 6y agoThat sounds like a good project! I looked at the documents for a site and see what you mean. I can contribute if you or someone can help navigate the documents.
- rbanffy 6y ago> these agencies, many of whom need to balance "economic freedom / business friendliness" with the facts. These agencies should not be concerned with anything other than facts and any attempt to interfere with them (as in balancing business friendliness with facts) should be considered a serious crime against the safety of the population.
- EGreg 6y agoCome on, these agencies balance things all the time. They have political interest. All of these actions can be considered crimes against the safety of populations. Just from this year: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-officials-note-serious-problems-in-coronavirus-response-the-world-health-organization-keeps-praising-them/2020/02/08/b663dd7c-4834-11ea-91ab-ce439aa5c7c1_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-of... https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/08/872419850/even-in-a-pandemic-who-believes-that-public-protests-are-important https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/08/8724198... https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/03/europe/europe-russia-vaccines-analysis-intl-cmd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/03/europe/europe-russia-vaccines... https://www.bbc.com/news/55800921 https://www.bbc.com/news/55800921 https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia-52088167 https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia-52088167 They can’t be trusted to just stick to the facts.
- rbanffy 6y agoThat’s why we need to make laws that forbid misrepresentation of facts in public functions.