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What if rather than everyone needing their own, there was just a certification standard (like organic) which says the food has been scanned and confirmed to con

by cjrp 5y ago

What if rather than everyone needing their own, there was just a certification standard (like organic) which says the food has been scanned and confirmed to contain less than X lead/mercury/whatever? Side note, is this what archaeologists use, to figure out the composition of a coin, etc.?

williamtwild 5y ago
Did the water quality certification miss something in Flint? Certification means trust. Someone breaking that trust can have life long implcations for large groups of people. Giviing the individual power is better.
- bluGill 5y ago
  It probably passed at the treatment plant where it is easy to test. It would have failed at everyone's home though, where testing needs to be done house by house. (or maybe a statistical sample of houses)
GistNoesis 5y ago
Certifications are the current situation for first world countries but it takes time to get them adopted everywhere. And if you have lead paint or pipes in your house, or if you have bought some Chinese plates with beautiful colors, who will tell you that some pigments may leak into your food. There is the question of trust of the measurement where they will just sell you an approval stamp for 100$. There is also the problem that some actors have incentives to cheat, like feeding insects to your salmon, and feeding the insects from literal garbage that may get contaminated by electronic components in the dumpster. Or maybe the specific salmon just ate a ball of mercury but was not selected for testing. A generic tool, that can analyze your immediate environment without having anyone else involved is empowering and can catch a wide variety of problems that you can track further if necessary; feels like a freebie offered by Science. Although it will still need some years of work to make it as sensitive as they show it in Science-Fiction. Humans have not evolved alongside everything we extracted from the ground since the industrial revolution. It's like a new pair of eyes that would help you avoid a bad apple or smelly fish. If we could also get a cheap and easy to use Raman spectrometer to complete the XRF analyser it would also be a great addition. (I don't know what archaeologists use but they definitely can use a XRF analyser to find the composition of coins)
kaetemi 5y ago
In many parts of the world, certificates are just fancy looking paperwork that you pay for.

by cjrp 5y ago

williamtwild 5y ago

Did the water quality certification miss something in Flint? Certification means trust. Someone breaking that trust can have life long implcations for large groups of people. Giviing the individual power is better.

bluGill 5y ago
It probably passed at the treatment plant where it is easy to test. It would have failed at everyone's home though, where testing needs to be done house by house. (or maybe a statistical sample of houses)

GistNoesis 5y ago

Certifications are the current situation for first world countries but it takes time to get them adopted everywhere. And if you have lead paint or pipes in your house, or if you have bought some Chinese plates with beautiful colors, who will tell you that some pigments may leak into your food. There is the question of trust of the measurement where they will just sell you an approval stamp for 100$. There is also the problem that some actors have incentives to cheat, like feeding insects to your salmon, and feeding the insects from literal garbage that may get contaminated by electronic components in the dumpster. Or maybe the specific salmon just ate a ball of mercury but was not selected for testing. A generic tool, that can analyze your immediate environment without having anyone else involved is empowering and can catch a wide variety of problems that you can track further if necessary; feels like a freebie offered by Science. Although it will still need some years of work to make it as sensitive as they show it in Science-Fiction. Humans have not evolved alongside everything we extracted from the ground since the industrial revolution. It's like a new pair of eyes that would help you avoid a bad apple or smelly fish. If we could also get a cheap and easy to use Raman spectrometer to complete the XRF analyser it would also be a great addition. (I don't know what archaeologists use but they definitely can use a XRF analyser to find the composition of coins)

kaetemi 5y ago

In many parts of the world, certificates are just fancy looking paperwork that you pay for.