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There must be some way to add a legal mechanism for preventing obvious and egregious loophole exploitation. Why can it not be done?

ben_w 3y ago
Mmm, sounds like the arguments between "common law" and "roman law".
mrweasel 3y ago
I've seen one suggestion, regarding closing loopholes in general but it has it's own issues. The idea is that you define the intention of a law and violate the intention of the law then you're punished as well. So in this case the intention is to make people eat healthy and Kellogg is violating that intention by replacing sugar with an ingredient that they know isn't covered, because they specifically lobbied for it not to be. Similarly Coca-Cola by designing their labels to only have the warning on one side and asking the supermarket to place the items so that the warning isn't visible. There's no real way that these companies come out of this looking good. Either they label correctly and people can see that their product is a lot more unhealthy than they might have realized or they go to court to protect their "right" to knowingly damage the healthy of their customers for profit. I fail to understand how you can have so little moral integrity. Why not just embrace the new labels and design better products.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > Why not just embrace the new labels and design better products. Not to disagree, but this is probably the same kind of thinking that means websites have popovers saying "we respect your privacy click here so we can share your behaviour with an unfeeling AI designed to manipulate you into obsessively returning to this site at best, and at worst also with advertisers who will use their own unfeeling AI to manipulate you into buying stuff you don't need and can't afford for the highest price they can squeeze out of your overburdened wallet"… instead of just not having analytics and advertising tracking.

ben_w 3y ago

Mmm, sounds like the arguments between "common law" and "roman law".

mrweasel 3y ago

I've seen one suggestion, regarding closing loopholes in general but it has it's own issues. The idea is that you define the intention of a law and violate the intention of the law then you're punished as well. So in this case the intention is to make people eat healthy and Kellogg is violating that intention by replacing sugar with an ingredient that they know isn't covered, because they specifically lobbied for it not to be. Similarly Coca-Cola by designing their labels to only have the warning on one side and asking the supermarket to place the items so that the warning isn't visible. There's no real way that these companies come out of this looking good. Either they label correctly and people can see that their product is a lot more unhealthy than they might have realized or they go to court to protect their "right" to knowingly damage the healthy of their customers for profit. I fail to understand how you can have so little moral integrity. Why not just embrace the new labels and design better products.

ben_w 3y ago
> Why not just embrace the new labels and design better products. Not to disagree, but this is probably the same kind of thinking that means websites have popovers saying "we respect your privacy click here so we can share your behaviour with an unfeeling AI designed to manipulate you into obsessively returning to this site at best, and at worst also with advertisers who will use their own unfeeling AI to manipulate you into buying stuff you don't need and can't afford for the highest price they can squeeze out of your overburdened wallet"… instead of just not having analytics and advertising tracking.