7 ms·

This is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_. Instead of making sure their produ

This is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_. Instead of making sure their products are safe, they just say everything is unsafe, because they know consumers will become numb to it. Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice. They have the money and the capability, but they choose profit over consumer safety, and that's THEIR sin, not ours.

NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
The problem with Prop 65 is that we've delegated plaintiff's attorneys to conduct private enforcement actions. Also that the law requires a warning, but doesn't require an explanation of what the material is, what part of the product contains it, or how you are likely to get exposed to it. As I mentioned elsewhere on this discussion, this is why pure cotton patches now come with Prop 65 warnings (if you might use them to clean a rifle...) Rag on corporations all you want, but Prop 65 is a terrible law.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  it's almost like if corporations could pay politicians to turn good laws into garbage laws, uh?
  - Nasrudith 2y ago
    The numbering scheme was a hint: there were no politicians involved with a ballot initiative. This is what demagoguery combined with direct democracy get you.
    - 1oooqooq 2y ago
      good point, butpropositions don't get created in a vacuum
      - Gormo 2y ago
        Nothing happens in a vacuum, least of all government interventions into society.
konschubert 2y ago
I don’t know what the margins on bread are, but I would bet that they are tiny since this is a competitive market. Meaning that this kind of medical-lab-style cross contamination protocol will either raise the cost of the product or reduce the variety and choice.
- mgkimsal 2y ago
  > Meaning that this kind of medical-lab-style cross contamination protocol will either raise the cost of the product or reduce the variety and choice. If the result is a safer population, why wouldn't we want this?
  - NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
    ... because at some point, the gains in safety are infinitesimal and the reductions in quality of life are large.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Verdex 2y ago
    Because it doesn't necessarily result in a safer population. This is software engineering par for the course. Just because you want some software to have some feature doesn't mean that the other requirements and/or reality will cooperate and give you a desirable outcome. For example, coral snake antivenom. For quite a while the US only had a single coral snake antivenom on the market because it was made by a company that was grandfathered in. The new(ish) FDA rules made developing a new coral snake antivenom not something anyone wanted to do. So of course the one existing vendor when out of business. Last I heard (around 2022) people were trying to come up with a new antivenom but thus far have been unsuccessful. Prescribing that things be safer doesn't force reality to conform and we have examples of this occurring.
  - gwbas1c 2y ago
    > If the result is a safer population, why wouldn't we want this? There's an anecdote that an AI was asked to make trains safer, and it decided that the trains should never leave the station. Quality of life involves some risk. IE, you need to exercise, but you might injure yourself doing it.
quietbritishjim 2y ago
> Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer These things are not comparable. While adding sesame to everything to circumvent a law is certainly not fair, it is a reasonable ingredient to some products (whereas mice that give us cancer is, at the very least, not a goal). I like sesame buns! And, for young children, it's actually quite important to expose them to a range of allergens because shielding them makes them much more likely to develop allergies.
- b112 2y ago
  Shawn Woods... now my hero youtuber!
  - quietbritishjim 2y ago
    What does this mean?
    - b112 2y ago
      Mousetrap Mondays.. I am afraid of cancer causing mice.
      - quietbritishjim 2y ago
        That doesn't really answer my question, but it doesn't sound like it has much to do with my comment.
- radicality 2y ago
  I’m European, and have been living in the US for a number of years and in Europe before that. It’s like some alternate reality here in the US, where peanuts, bread, and shrimp are out to kill a large part of the population. The article says they estimate 33M people in US to have food allergies which sounds insane to me. I fully agree on exposure to these allergens when young. Have your child eat wide variety of foods, have them play out in the open and get dirty, have them play with animals, wash hands and keep clean but not to the point of sterility, etc. One personal anecdote - when I was a few years old I apparently started having a lot of asthma-like coughing symptoms. We got a German shepherd, whom I would then play with, hug a lot, and sleep. My symptoms went away pretty quickly. Similarly, my parents made sure I eat normal meals and not a ‘child’ diet. Eg I was never allowed to order from a ‘kids menu’. At home, salmon or shrimp for dinner and I don’t want it as a young child? Too bad, that’s dinner, eat that or go hungry (and of course I ended up eating and now love many cuisines and allergic to nothing).
StableAlkyne 2y ago
> Our food shouldn't contain allergens You can pry my gluten-laden, peanut-oil containing, dairy-filled pizza from my cold dead hands! (The problem isn't allergens, many of which are delicious. The problem is not correctly labeling allergens - I think that's the point you wanted to make at least!)
- Atotalnoob 2y ago
  I have a food allergy (gluten, celiacs). It’s ridiculous to make everything allergen free. It’s also gross, I hate those products that I dubbed “everything free” that are free from the top N allergens. They have a place in the market, but they aren’t that good
water-your-self 2y ago
Have computer mice ever caused cancer or isnthat hyperbole
bigyikes 2y ago
If the law doesn’t take into account human and corporate behavior, it’s not a good law. It may ultimately be the corporation’s “fault” but that doesn’t change the fact that the law created perverse incentives. I hear the same argument for the GDPR laws that have resulted in annoying cookie banners everywhere. Sure, it’s technically the website owner’s fault for spying and adding a shitty banner, but… those banners didn’t exist until the law was created. We need better laws that more wholly account for human behavior.
- pwg 2y ago
  The politicians writing the law were likely unaware (or ignored) the Cobra Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect#The_original_cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect#The_original_cobr...
- hot_gril 2y ago
  GDPR is the dumbest recent law I can think of. Even if a website has no intent to track users, it's way too hard (aka expensive) to tell if you're compliant without slapping on a banner.
  - account42 2y ago
    The only dumb thing about the GDPR are hot takes like yours. It's pretty easy to not needlessly track and accumulate data about your users. It's harder when your users are not your customers but a product you are trying to sell to third-parties but discouraging that is a good thing.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - 2y ago
BobbyJo 2y ago
> _corporations are lazy_ In market terms: "corporations try to be capital-efficient because they are competing with each other over price-sensitive consumers."
- practicemaths 2y ago
  TBF laziness is the natural order to the universe. Ain't nothin doin more than it has to.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Yeah, but corporations are paid lots of money to not be lazy.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - practicemaths 2y ago
      [dead]
    - Gormo 2y ago
      No, they're not -- they're paid lots of money to satisfy the demand that actually exists in the market.
      - account42 2y ago
        But they are not even doing that - see: false advertising, captive markets, monopolies, etc.
        Gormo 2y ago
        But those things are not what consumers are paying for. It's totally appropriate to hold firms accountable when they are doing manipulative things instead of satisfying demand, but restricting them from fulfilling the demand that actually exists on account of some third party's ideological prescriptions about what the market should be demanding is unacceptable.
wnevets 2y ago
> the real problem is _corporations are lazy_. But we knew that already. The people coming up with the rules must take that into account otherwise you get prop 65 warnings and cookie banners everywhere.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hollerith 2y ago
>Our food shouldn't contain allergens Every protein is allergenic to somebody, and even some non-proteins are allergenic (e.g., they are small molecules that can get inside a somatic protein, which changes the somatic protein's shape, which makes the somatic protein allergenic).
- LorenPechtel 2y ago
  Disagree. There are proteins that if you're allergic to them your body will turn on itself. You'll be dead and no longer care what you're allergic to.
  - account42 2y ago
    Ok, we can agree that food should't contain human meat Mr. Pendant.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    Replace "protein" with "non-self protein", then, or "any protein in food".
LorenPechtel 2y ago
This is the same issue as 65--setting an unreasonable standard and then blaming business when the standard isn't met. It used to be that when companies produced products in the same facilities that produced products on the allergen list they would label them as "may contain". Not something they added, but not something they promised it did not inadvertently contain. A company is free to produce products in facilities that do not also process the standard allergens but to do so will be more expensive and few people want to pay the extra cost for something which is of no benefit to them. If you're not allergic to sesame it does not matter if there's a bit of sesame in your food. The whole food labeling thing is being taken to excess. The FDA is going bonkers about what companies are or are not adding, while there's no requirement for documenting what impurities might remain. As far as I'm concerned the FDA can take their labeling rules and shove them where the sun doesn't shine. Instead, put a QR code. It comes up with a page that lists what they intentionally added (no generic categories--I know I don't have issues with all "artificial flavors" but I do with some. And "natural flavors" comes in a close second), what cross-contamination is likely and for any refined product what the raw material was that it came from and to what degree it was purified. In addition to the human-readable form it also contains a standardized representation meant for machine parsing. Scan the code with an appropriate app and it flags anything on the list that it has been told to flag.
- bumby 2y ago
  >Instead, put a QR code. Please, no. Tech is not the solution to everything. Every time you put an additional layer between the consumer and information, and more prone to breaking. Software tech is notoriously unreliable in the consumer space because of the sheer number of interfaces. It makes the overall system less good for the consumer. I don't want to have to go through a decision tree on a phone, or a QR code, to get information that was previously available by just opening my eyeballs. I don't want to have to use my smartphone to get the directions for my presciption medication, or to see the price of gas or groceries. Those systems are designed to make the corporations life easier at the expense of the consumer. There are many cases where tech makes things easier for the consumer. I don't think this is one of them.
solardev 2y ago
> Our food shouldn't contain allergens But one person's allergens are another's tasty ingredients. I love my sesame bagels. I don't even know what food would remain if you banned all the allergens. Tapioca powder with beef flavors? Sesame is one thing. It's delicious but probably not a major subsistence food for anyone. Chinese restaurants would miss their sesame oils though. Next, it's hard enough to ban fish and shellfish. Many subcultures depend on them, especially near major bodies of water. No tree nuts or peanuts? A lunch staple gone for millions. Jam will be so lonely. Or wheat. Or milk. Or egg. Or soy? That's the end of breakfast and bakeries and dessert, I guess. The vegetarians will get awfully hungry. I think at that point, the only thing left to eat would be the regulators themselves. Karma's never been so tasty...
smsm42 2y ago
And that's why we have insane laws. Because of people saying stuff like "our food shouldn't contain allergens" and spewing vague nonsense about evil profitmongers, while enabling demagogues who promote insane schemes built to inflame ignoramuses, like prop 65. Virtually anything can be an allergen, and a lot of chemicals, given enough concentration and bad luck, can lead to cancer or birth defects. So ignoramuses demand laws that mark any chemical that can be reasonably thought of harming anyone in any circumstance possible in theory, and then blame corporations when the outcome is disastrous.
michaelcampbell 2y ago
> _corporations are lazy_ Corporations are optimized to make money; doing the non-lazy thing here costs money.
Gormo 2y ago
>This is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_. I mean, I'd definitely say that laws that are obviously incompatible with the incentive structures clearly present in real life are indeed bad laws. Everyone is lazy -- or, more to the point, everyone has finite resources to allocate to their pursuits -- and expecting corporations and consumers to incur exorbitant costs in order to ensure optimal resolution to every possible edge case is neither reasonable nor realistic. The problem isn't that "corporations are lazy"; the problem is that some people unaccountably expect them to be otherwise. > Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice. But we do indeed have plenty of choice. There are a ton of options for getting high-quality food and other products that go through lots of extra steps and give consumers much more granular information about how they were produced and what's in them. Those options are just much more expensive, and many people are perfectly happy to make the choice to use products that may e.g. increase a particular risk from 0.001% to 0.002% in order to avoid paying twice as much for it. One note, however: it's impossible for food not to include allergens, as people can develop allergies to essentially anything. Encumbering access to food products that provide nutrition and pleasure to the vast majority of people in order to eliminate the responsibility of a small fraction of the population to exercise care over their own consumption choices is ethically dubious, to say the least.

NovemberWhiskey 2y ago

The problem with Prop 65 is that we've delegated plaintiff's attorneys to conduct private enforcement actions. Also that the law requires a warning, but doesn't require an explanation of what the material is, what part of the product contains it, or how you are likely to get exposed to it. As I mentioned elsewhere on this discussion, this is why pure cotton patches now come with Prop 65 warnings (if you might use them to clean a rifle...) Rag on corporations all you want, but Prop 65 is a terrible law.

1oooqooq 2y ago
it's almost like if corporations could pay politicians to turn good laws into garbage laws, uh?
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  The numbering scheme was a hint: there were no politicians involved with a ballot initiative. This is what demagoguery combined with direct democracy get you.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    good point, butpropositions don't get created in a vacuum
    - Gormo 2y ago
      Nothing happens in a vacuum, least of all government interventions into society.

konschubert 2y ago

I don’t know what the margins on bread are, but I would bet that they are tiny since this is a competitive market. Meaning that this kind of medical-lab-style cross contamination protocol will either raise the cost of the product or reduce the variety and choice.

mgkimsal 2y ago
> Meaning that this kind of medical-lab-style cross contamination protocol will either raise the cost of the product or reduce the variety and choice. If the result is a safer population, why wouldn't we want this?
- NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
  ... because at some point, the gains in safety are infinitesimal and the reductions in quality of life are large.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Verdex 2y ago
  Because it doesn't necessarily result in a safer population. This is software engineering par for the course. Just because you want some software to have some feature doesn't mean that the other requirements and/or reality will cooperate and give you a desirable outcome. For example, coral snake antivenom. For quite a while the US only had a single coral snake antivenom on the market because it was made by a company that was grandfathered in. The new(ish) FDA rules made developing a new coral snake antivenom not something anyone wanted to do. So of course the one existing vendor when out of business. Last I heard (around 2022) people were trying to come up with a new antivenom but thus far have been unsuccessful. Prescribing that things be safer doesn't force reality to conform and we have examples of this occurring.
- gwbas1c 2y ago
  > If the result is a safer population, why wouldn't we want this? There's an anecdote that an AI was asked to make trains safer, and it decided that the trains should never leave the station. Quality of life involves some risk. IE, you need to exercise, but you might injure yourself doing it.

quietbritishjim 2y ago

> Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer These things are not comparable. While adding sesame to everything to circumvent a law is certainly not fair, it is a reasonable ingredient to some products (whereas mice that give us cancer is, at the very least, not a goal). I like sesame buns! And, for young children, it's actually quite important to expose them to a range of allergens because shielding them makes them much more likely to develop allergies.

b112 2y ago
Shawn Woods... now my hero youtuber!
- quietbritishjim 2y ago
  What does this mean?
  - b112 2y ago
    Mousetrap Mondays.. I am afraid of cancer causing mice.
    - quietbritishjim 2y ago
      That doesn't really answer my question, but it doesn't sound like it has much to do with my comment.
radicality 2y ago
I’m European, and have been living in the US for a number of years and in Europe before that. It’s like some alternate reality here in the US, where peanuts, bread, and shrimp are out to kill a large part of the population. The article says they estimate 33M people in US to have food allergies which sounds insane to me. I fully agree on exposure to these allergens when young. Have your child eat wide variety of foods, have them play out in the open and get dirty, have them play with animals, wash hands and keep clean but not to the point of sterility, etc. One personal anecdote - when I was a few years old I apparently started having a lot of asthma-like coughing symptoms. We got a German shepherd, whom I would then play with, hug a lot, and sleep. My symptoms went away pretty quickly. Similarly, my parents made sure I eat normal meals and not a ‘child’ diet. Eg I was never allowed to order from a ‘kids menu’. At home, salmon or shrimp for dinner and I don’t want it as a young child? Too bad, that’s dinner, eat that or go hungry (and of course I ended up eating and now love many cuisines and allergic to nothing).

StableAlkyne 2y ago

> Our food shouldn't contain allergens You can pry my gluten-laden, peanut-oil containing, dairy-filled pizza from my cold dead hands! (The problem isn't allergens, many of which are delicious. The problem is not correctly labeling allergens - I think that's the point you wanted to make at least!)

Atotalnoob 2y ago
I have a food allergy (gluten, celiacs). It’s ridiculous to make everything allergen free. It’s also gross, I hate those products that I dubbed “everything free” that are free from the top N allergens. They have a place in the market, but they aren’t that good

water-your-self 2y ago

Have computer mice ever caused cancer or isnthat hyperbole

bigyikes 2y ago

If the law doesn’t take into account human and corporate behavior, it’s not a good law. It may ultimately be the corporation’s “fault” but that doesn’t change the fact that the law created perverse incentives. I hear the same argument for the GDPR laws that have resulted in annoying cookie banners everywhere. Sure, it’s technically the website owner’s fault for spying and adding a shitty banner, but… those banners didn’t exist until the law was created. We need better laws that more wholly account for human behavior.

pwg 2y ago
The politicians writing the law were likely unaware (or ignored) the Cobra Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect#The_original_cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect#The_original_cobr...
hot_gril 2y ago
GDPR is the dumbest recent law I can think of. Even if a website has no intent to track users, it's way too hard (aka expensive) to tell if you're compliant without slapping on a banner.
- account42 2y ago
  The only dumb thing about the GDPR are hot takes like yours. It's pretty easy to not needlessly track and accumulate data about your users. It's harder when your users are not your customers but a product you are trying to sell to third-parties but discouraging that is a good thing.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- 2y ago

BobbyJo 2y ago

> _corporations are lazy_ In market terms: "corporations try to be capital-efficient because they are competing with each other over price-sensitive consumers."

practicemaths 2y ago
TBF laziness is the natural order to the universe. Ain't nothin doin more than it has to.
- immibis 2y ago
  Yeah, but corporations are paid lots of money to not be lazy.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - practicemaths 2y ago
    [dead]
  - Gormo 2y ago
    No, they're not -- they're paid lots of money to satisfy the demand that actually exists in the market.
    - account42 2y ago
      But they are not even doing that - see: false advertising, captive markets, monopolies, etc.
      - Gormo 2y ago
        But those things are not what consumers are paying for. It's totally appropriate to hold firms accountable when they are doing manipulative things instead of satisfying demand, but restricting them from fulfilling the demand that actually exists on account of some third party's ideological prescriptions about what the market should be demanding is unacceptable.

wnevets 2y ago

> the real problem is _corporations are lazy_. But we knew that already. The people coming up with the rules must take that into account otherwise you get prop 65 warnings and cookie banners everywhere.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hollerith 2y ago

>Our food shouldn't contain allergens Every protein is allergenic to somebody, and even some non-proteins are allergenic (e.g., they are small molecules that can get inside a somatic protein, which changes the somatic protein's shape, which makes the somatic protein allergenic).

LorenPechtel 2y ago
Disagree. There are proteins that if you're allergic to them your body will turn on itself. You'll be dead and no longer care what you're allergic to.
- account42 2y ago
  Ok, we can agree that food should't contain human meat Mr. Pendant.
- hollerith 2y ago
  Replace "protein" with "non-self protein", then, or "any protein in food".

LorenPechtel 2y ago

This is the same issue as 65--setting an unreasonable standard and then blaming business when the standard isn't met. It used to be that when companies produced products in the same facilities that produced products on the allergen list they would label them as "may contain". Not something they added, but not something they promised it did not inadvertently contain. A company is free to produce products in facilities that do not also process the standard allergens but to do so will be more expensive and few people want to pay the extra cost for something which is of no benefit to them. If you're not allergic to sesame it does not matter if there's a bit of sesame in your food. The whole food labeling thing is being taken to excess. The FDA is going bonkers about what companies are or are not adding, while there's no requirement for documenting what impurities might remain. As far as I'm concerned the FDA can take their labeling rules and shove them where the sun doesn't shine. Instead, put a QR code. It comes up with a page that lists what they intentionally added (no generic categories--I know I don't have issues with all "artificial flavors" but I do with some. And "natural flavors" comes in a close second), what cross-contamination is likely and for any refined product what the raw material was that it came from and to what degree it was purified. In addition to the human-readable form it also contains a standardized representation meant for machine parsing. Scan the code with an appropriate app and it flags anything on the list that it has been told to flag.

bumby 2y ago
>Instead, put a QR code. Please, no. Tech is not the solution to everything. Every time you put an additional layer between the consumer and information, and more prone to breaking. Software tech is notoriously unreliable in the consumer space because of the sheer number of interfaces. It makes the overall system less good for the consumer. I don't want to have to go through a decision tree on a phone, or a QR code, to get information that was previously available by just opening my eyeballs. I don't want to have to use my smartphone to get the directions for my presciption medication, or to see the price of gas or groceries. Those systems are designed to make the corporations life easier at the expense of the consumer. There are many cases where tech makes things easier for the consumer. I don't think this is one of them.

solardev 2y ago

> Our food shouldn't contain allergens But one person's allergens are another's tasty ingredients. I love my sesame bagels. I don't even know what food would remain if you banned all the allergens. Tapioca powder with beef flavors? Sesame is one thing. It's delicious but probably not a major subsistence food for anyone. Chinese restaurants would miss their sesame oils though. Next, it's hard enough to ban fish and shellfish. Many subcultures depend on them, especially near major bodies of water. No tree nuts or peanuts? A lunch staple gone for millions. Jam will be so lonely. Or wheat. Or milk. Or egg. Or soy? That's the end of breakfast and bakeries and dessert, I guess. The vegetarians will get awfully hungry. I think at that point, the only thing left to eat would be the regulators themselves. Karma's never been so tasty...

smsm42 2y ago

And that's why we have insane laws. Because of people saying stuff like "our food shouldn't contain allergens" and spewing vague nonsense about evil profitmongers, while enabling demagogues who promote insane schemes built to inflame ignoramuses, like prop 65. Virtually anything can be an allergen, and a lot of chemicals, given enough concentration and bad luck, can lead to cancer or birth defects. So ignoramuses demand laws that mark any chemical that can be reasonably thought of harming anyone in any circumstance possible in theory, and then blame corporations when the outcome is disastrous.

michaelcampbell 2y ago

> _corporations are lazy_ Corporations are optimized to make money; doing the non-lazy thing here costs money.

Gormo 2y ago

>This is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_. I mean, I'd definitely say that laws that are obviously incompatible with the incentive structures clearly present in real life are indeed bad laws. Everyone is lazy -- or, more to the point, everyone has finite resources to allocate to their pursuits -- and expecting corporations and consumers to incur exorbitant costs in order to ensure optimal resolution to every possible edge case is neither reasonable nor realistic. The problem isn't that "corporations are lazy"; the problem is that some people unaccountably expect them to be otherwise. > Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice. But we do indeed have plenty of choice. There are a ton of options for getting high-quality food and other products that go through lots of extra steps and give consumers much more granular information about how they were produced and what's in them. Those options are just much more expensive, and many people are perfectly happy to make the choice to use products that may e.g. increase a particular risk from 0.001% to 0.002% in order to avoid paying twice as much for it. One note, however: it's impossible for food not to include allergens, as people can develop allergies to essentially anything. Encumbering access to food products that provide nutrition and pleasure to the vast majority of people in order to eliminate the responsibility of a small fraction of the population to exercise care over their own consumption choices is ethically dubious, to say the least.