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I do agree with that. It's a complicated trade-off between spending resources to police companies Vs doing all the testing. Companies will usually be doing a l

I do agree with that. It's a complicated trade-off between spending resources to police companies Vs doing all the testing. Companies will usually be doing a lot of internal testing on new products, so they'll have a lot of the necessary tech and processes already in place. The trick is to ensure that faking results is penalised enough to make it not worth the risk. Most of the time it's cheaper to trust companies and then focus on the safety stats, though that fails with your examples of non-obvious issues.

mrguyorama 1y ago
It's NOT a complicated tradeoff at all. The point is you either willingly spend the resources to independently test things for safety or companies WILL kill you to save a dollar. This has been proven time and time again, big and small. We have the FDA entirely because a small company made "medicine" by buying medicine powder and putting it in a solvent that was acutely toxic that they didn't even think to give to an animal or something first. Literally just sold a random liquid to people as "medicine" and it killed a hundred people in utter agony. Leaded gas was never a technical requirement. We could have been using Ethanol as our anti-knock/octane booster since the very beginning and never poison anyone but quite literally, the company chose instead to put Tetraethyl lead into gas because they could patent it, despite it being literally poison. Same with PFOAs from 3M, who knew it was lethally toxic to mammals at fairly low doses decades and decades ago, but made no attempt to tell anyone or notify anyone or even reduce how much they were pouring it into waterways upstream of small communities. When they finally got sued by a lawyer who dug this all up in discovery, they finally said "Okay we will replace it" and replaced it with a nearly identical chemical that is just as toxic to mammals that they hope will break down easier in the environment, but how long will that take to demonstrate is false, and what are they going to switch to then? Nixon made the EPA because companies would rather everyone die than change literally anything they've developed about their process or product, because they don't care about people dying. This idea of "bad press" or people will just stop using your products has demonstrably failed. So suck it up, pay some taxes, test things for safety, and stop letting people die for such minuscule boosts in private company profits.

mrguyorama 1y ago

It's NOT a complicated tradeoff at all. The point is you either willingly spend the resources to independently test things for safety or companies WILL kill you to save a dollar. This has been proven time and time again, big and small. We have the FDA entirely because a small company made "medicine" by buying medicine powder and putting it in a solvent that was acutely toxic that they didn't even think to give to an animal or something first. Literally just sold a random liquid to people as "medicine" and it killed a hundred people in utter agony. Leaded gas was never a technical requirement. We could have been using Ethanol as our anti-knock/octane booster since the very beginning and never poison anyone but quite literally, the company chose instead to put Tetraethyl lead into gas because they could patent it, despite it being literally poison. Same with PFOAs from 3M, who knew it was lethally toxic to mammals at fairly low doses decades and decades ago, but made no attempt to tell anyone or notify anyone or even reduce how much they were pouring it into waterways upstream of small communities. When they finally got sued by a lawyer who dug this all up in discovery, they finally said "Okay we will replace it" and replaced it with a nearly identical chemical that is just as toxic to mammals that they hope will break down easier in the environment, but how long will that take to demonstrate is false, and what are they going to switch to then? Nixon made the EPA because companies would rather everyone die than change literally anything they've developed about their process or product, because they don't care about people dying. This idea of "bad press" or people will just stop using your products has demonstrably failed. So suck it up, pay some taxes, test things for safety, and stop letting people die for such minuscule boosts in private company profits.