Amazon is so completely irresponsible for their marketplace that recently, shopping for a glass oral thermometer (because the digital ones suck) I stumbled on reviews with photos showing products that had no mercury inside and actual blobs of mercury stuck to the tip that goes in your mouth. These were still for sale.
I feel like even 10 years ago, online marketplaces would have taken measures to prevent stuff like this.
From that perspective, all of these services that rate products still place all the onus on the individual consumer. What would be really "luxury" in the modern context would be an online marketplace that vetted every product and whose primary product was trust, as opoosed to logistics and convenience. I'd much rather pay $150/yr for a service that vetted its products and took a week to deliver them, than to have a bunch of worthless or dangerous junk delivered the next day.
> Amazon is so completely irresponsible for their marketplace that recently, shopping for a glass oral thermometer (because the digital ones suck) I stumbled on reviews with photos showing products that had no mercury inside and actual blobs of mercury stuck to the tip that goes in your mouth. These were still for sale.
I did wonder about how this kind of thing was handled in the UK, and (a) Amazon will happily offer a mercury thermometer for sale and (b) it has been illegal to sell mercury thermometers in the UK since 2009.
The absolute poster child for ubiquitous illegal toxic products though? Disposable vapes.
I'm convinced the major tobacco companies will do well if the government ever manages to crack down on sketchy and illegal vaping products and stores. But this seems very hard to do.
I've thought about that too, but in the end, price always wins - this is why the Amazons and Walmarts of the world have out-competed local small businesses.
The major flaw in your example is that you have a site saying product X is good and trusted, but people will then go look online for a competitor that sells it for cheaper.
This is where capitalism clashes with consumer rights / safety. What should be the case is that all products sold on all stores are safe. That's what consumer safety organizations are for, but it seems like they have lost the battle against the flood of Chinese crap coming in.
At least in Europe, this is mainly because these companies ship for cheap directly to customers. Customs and the like can check a container full of the same USB chargers easily and efficiently, but if that container full crosses the border in 10.000 individual packages it's impossible.
Thankfully they're putting the brakes on it, but it took forever.
>The major flaw in your example is that you have a site saying product X is good and trusted, but people will then go look online for a competitor that sells it for cheaper.
Product X is good and trusted, except:
- due to mixed inventory you were sent product Y, which is poison
- product X has a complex supply chain, and it was previously good and trusted, and now it's poison and you had no idea anything changed
I wondered that as well, but they are. I've started to think there's an organized effort by a government with a lot of state-owned enterprises to actually dispose of toxic waste by shipping it to gullible American consumers. Not that it isn't also poisoning people there.
Amazon is straight up evil at this point. People have pointed out they are selling fake fuses that have most likely gotten people killed, Amazon has done nothing. I am sure the same is occurring across other product categories like your example.
The 'luxury' you are talking about was called Brands, with the idea being that a company's Brand was worth more than lure of profits/shortcuts that could result in ruining the Brand.
>> The 'luxury' you are talking about was called Brands
I dunno. Branding was my gig for a long time. I think brands were a weak substitute for artisans / bespoke makers who had to personally stand by their work. Once upon a time there was a guy named Levi Strauss who made sturdy jeans, some guy named McDonald who made good hamburgers, a couple guys named Johnson who sold talcum powder. And that guy Nobel who invented new ways to blow up the coyote. If any of their products failed, it was on them. Then branding came along and quality declined, but people paid for inferior products because they had the name and stamp of the founder on them. The notion that brands have to maintain the quality associated with their namesake is the central illusion that trillions of dollars spent on branding seeks to create. It turns out that it's cheaper to prop up the name with advertising than it is with selling quality products.
And that doesn't even touch on brands like DuPont or Chevron, where all the positive connotations are purely from brand marketing built as a shroud around selling mass death.
> I think brands were a weak substitute for artisans / bespoke makers who had to personally stand by their work.
Another way to say that is "companies are too big". When companies become big enough that they don't have to worry about the repercussions of screwing over their customers, they're too big.
Right. Absolutely. But then again, everyone can buy jeans now and you don't have to ride your horse across 500 miles of desert and hitch it up to Levi's store. So no one who orders em online now knows what they were worth then. No one's riding horses around in their underwear anymore.
To be serious: I don't think that overpopulation or delivering better things to more people is really the problem. Big companies are indeed a problem. Along with big governments on the other side. They both rely on rent-seeking methods of extracting value while lowering expectations, rather than providing better services. There needs to be a balance of regulation and innovation, that prevents regulatory capture and prevents monopolies without exploding bureaucracies that hamper small businesses. Small businesses are fantastic drivers of prosperity and creativity. That would be the civic ideal I'd implement if I had any interest in getting into government.
Amazon is rather like the Silk Road[0] of old. You're buying cinnamon from some guy in Europe who knows not even the vague direction it came from, let alone what's in it or how it came to be. This could be considered irresponsible today, or it could be considered efficient, depending on your perspective.
I also feel like Amazon should take more responsibility, but then I get angry when my ISP or government "takes responsibility" for online content. What's the difference between Amazon and an ISP? One could argue an ISP is a natural monopoly and therefore should always be a neutral carrier. But maybe Amazon is a natural monopoly too? Could the economy really support ten different Amazons? That would be like having ten different Silk Roads, but there's only one way from Asia to Europe.
It does seem odd to me that Amazon gets a free pass as a common carrier while ISPs seemingly do not. Probably because taking responsibility would affect Amazon's bottom line, while ISPs don't really care.
I'm tackling part of the issue of food toxin remediation with my new venture, NeutraOat (neutraoat.com). It's a modified oat fiber supplement that selectively traps BPA, PFAS, and plasticizers in the gut and reduces levels in the blood serum.
The funding for this is tough, though. Everyone loves the idea, but it's difficult to find people to fund R&D to make sure the product actually works over brand building and marketing. I've had to be very scrappy. Hopefully this will change in the future as we build momentum and awareness, but for right now it's tooth and nail.
Sounds interesting. I heard about oat's ability to absorb nasty stuff in the gut for awhile. However, in the UK oats are dried out using glyphosate...a known carcinogen!
Feels like modern society makes it nearly impossible to not be exposed to harmful substances...so I hope you're successful.
I'll try some. For a long time I've been wary of organic oats because of concern about mycotoxins. I first thought about this after buying some Tesco non-organic oats that tasted of mould. I thought maybe pesticides reduced that risk and organic oats would be even worse. I later tasted mould in non-organic Sainsburys oats (which I suspect were from the same supplier as the Tesco ones), and then again from non-organic Mornflake oats (which were presumably not from the same supplier because they tasted different). I eventually switched to non-organic Quaker oats, which for several years had no perceptible mould taste, but not so long ago I had a box of Quaker oats that tasted of mould too.
It now occurs to me that the mould could have grown post-harvest, and maybe reliance on herbicides to desiccate crops could encourage a sloppy attitude toward drying. Maybe organic crops actually have lower risk of mycotoxin contamination because the farmers are forced to take more care with moisture levels. I carefully taste a small portion of each new batch, but I don't think taste is a reliable means of detecting mould contamination. It's also possible that mould grew because of improper storage after the oats were packaged, which is made worse by the modern trend of cardboard/paper packaging.
I'm still not confident with any brand, but I like oats too much to stop eating them.
I thought glyphosate was only a danger for people applying it (something that's been denied for a long time)
Also as far as I know it goes into the weeds it kills, not in the plant you want to keep (is your food) ? Else it would also die ?
I have no connection to these people, except I have eaten their jumbo oats. They have been an organic farm since 1949. I doubt they use glyphosate, but you could ask them?
Also, before you demonise glyphosate too much, it is worth realising its role in the widespread adoption of low/no till farming, which reduces fertilizer usage, reduces carbon emissions from the soil, and uses tractor power and time, therefore reducing carbon again.
Basically by killing all of the weeds with something that won't kill the crop you are about to plant, means you don't have to plough. It is a classic trade off, do you want the (hard to quantify and heavily disputed) risk of glyphosate, or higher carbon emissions
No till farming is much more difficult to do organically.
Electric tractors aren't a thing. That is because a battery big enough to power a tractor pulling a plough all day is infeasibly large. Pulling a constant load is a very different thing to a car that coasts most of the time.
Humans are not strong enough to pull ploughs. You could grow food and feed it to draught animals, but as you point out, that is horribly inefficient.
Mythical Electric Tractor or not, you still have carbon being released from the ground by ploughing to control weeds. You can avoid ploughing to control weeds with glyphosate.
When a better solution for weed control comes along we can say goodbye to glyphosate too, I believe it is about as far off as Desktop Linux, as in 'next year'.
Just remember, glyphosate costs farmers money. They wouldn't use it if there was a better way
The whole point of glyphosate is that it deteriorates very very quickly, and your oats should contain exactly zero of it. Obviously that's the theory, I'd love someone to test it. But in US wheat is routinely dessicated with glyphosate so either their bread is giving everyone cancer, or the compound does actually break down as expected. Or maybe it's somewhere in between.
Either way, it's like the article said - it's impossible for us consumers to figure any of this stuff out. We have to rely on public agencies, which are under constant attack from multinational corporations throwing billions of dollars at the issue, because following regulations costs money. And that's in developed countries, if you're buying stuff from places with barely functional food quality inspection then good luck I guess.
> The reported half-life of glyphosate in soil varies from two to 197 days with a typical field half-life of 47 days being suggested.[56] Soil and climate conditions affect glyphosate's persistence in soil. The median half-life of glyphosate in water varies from a few days to 91 days.[56] At a site in Texas, half-life was as little as three days. A site in Iowa had a half-life of 141.9 days.[94] The glyphosate metabolite AMPA has been found in Swedish forest soils up to two years after a glyphosate application.
It has a lower half-life in water, and a lower half-life when it's warmer.
I store my oats both dry and cold.
As for cancer, I don't know - but it certainly is giving everyone parkinsons.
But you see - this is the whole problem. Every time I tried looking into it myself all I could find was that "dessicating crops with glyphosate is safe because it breaks down before it makes it into your food". If that is just simply not true or at the very least "true but only in ideal conditions that happen 5% of the time" then we're all screwed and no one seems to care.
So I need to put something in my body to prevent other things in my body? I don't mean to be the party pooper but this is my first thought. Health conscious people care about plastics in their body and are probably shopping organic and what not. So you have a high hurdle to climb with any "modified" foods.
Except now I have the problem of trusting that this new supplement isn't contaminated with anything, _and_ that the "microscopic pores" resulting from this "patented process" don't turn out to have some harmful effect in the body.
This is precisely why I happily pay for an annual subscription to ConsumerLab[0]. It's largely just for supplements and a few functional foods, but with a tiny staff they are doing more work to help the public on the unregulated medicine market than the entire FDA, IMHO.
Congress are the ones who define what the FDA does. Blame them and the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Congress could easily tell the FDA to do something different.
Blaming people for a problem only helps if you have the power to take away their ability to cause the problem. In this case, the most effective way to keep Congress from causing you health problems by giving you misinformation about supplements would seem to be to get your information from a source that Congress doesn't control, such as ConsumerLab. Hopefully it's a better source than the FDA rather than a worse one; but, if not, maybe you can switch to a better one, or start one yourself.
I also recently subscribed to ConsumerLab, and I'm glad I did. I wish they could test products more frequently as things are bound to change from batch to batch, but it's a whole lot better than nothing.
I don't take a lot of supplements, but I won't buy even one without some form of third party testing.
Independent lab testing for contaminants and actual active ingredient levels vs. what's stated. They also publish summaries of studies on the active ingredients that test the effectiveness against claimed therapeutic value. (It's depressing how few studies actually show benefit over placebo.)
Looks like something I'd love to support / become member in, but I wonder how many brands outside US the lab tests? Do they also test products available in Europe/Asia?
Yes, the answer is not some business plan by which some can dodge disaster in an untrustworthy market, the answer is to recognize that this planet is a spaceship i.e. materially closed, and we are massively soiling the nest, microplastic is in steak because it's literally everywhere on the surface of the earth, etc.
Therefore, good ecological governance is a requirement, as is the analysis, as a public service, of the resources and ecosystems, and the services they provide human beings and our dependents, i.e. a democratic and just policy, not a lucrative plan to privatize yet more of public health
If one is convinced the best vehicle for the above in the near term is a business, then it had better have a different approach than is typical of personal health tech startups
Empowering individuals isn't worthless by any means but pitting one against another with asymmetric information is worse than worthless
The fundamental constraint the article alludes to is the powerlessness of consumer choice. You can’t make a better choice because you don’t have any better option. When there is a better option, you lack the tools to verify that the option is truly better vs scamming you to pay more for something which either doesn’t matter or is simply a lie.
Prior to free trade, you could reasonably sue the manufacturers or distributors for egregious harms. You could also reasonably expect domestic regulatory authorities to intervene before these harms entered the market.*
In principal, this could be done in a free trade system with counterparties who implement and enforce similar rules. But then you need all parties to agree on any new rules and enforcement mechanisms. You only need one bad actor to nuke the arrangement by growing without these burdens.
* Assuming regulations and laws are equitably and incorruptibly enforced in the local government.
A second-order issue there is the pervasive phenomenon of people wanting things cheap which results in hidden costs. When it costs more to make things safer or to test that they are safe, bad actors can succeed by not doing that and finding ways to dodge responsibility, because people just gravitate towards low prices. Part of the "governance" challenge is forcing market participants to internalize their costs.
Somewhat ironically, a countervailing strategy has emerged of charging more for something based on the claim that it's "natural", "organic", "handcrafted", etc. This strategy can also be seen in various types of "detectors" and at-home tests for things, and perhaps even things like the ConsumerLabs mentioned in another comment.
This muddies the waters even more, since even people who are willing to pay more for something that's better can't figure out how to avoid paying more for something that's just equally bad. These problems exist not just in the realm of food and health but in all product categories.
> Empowering individuals to solve collective problems rarely work.
In Canadian elementary school in the 2000s, we spent a long time talking about our carbon footprint. The hope was that by carpooling and turning off lights when you left the room, we might still have an Earth to live on by 2030.
Even at the time I felt a little patronized. Having read enough literature on the subject now the math does become clear: we won't solve our climate issues by guilt tripping children on their individual consumption. It's a problem that needs international government attention.
But also education; one major shift is that measures that were taken in the past (e.g. vaccination campaigns) were so successful that a generation or three of people have grown up without any of the vaccinated diseases, so now they're like "...why do we even need these?". Add some scaremongering of chemicals and demonizing of autism aaand there's epidemics of measles again.
That's not a solution. There is no practical solution for this, and has not been for the millennia on human history; it's only been in the recent decades where we've been able the hallucinate about knowing about toxins in our daily lives.
Legislation is just paper, you have no enforcement mechanism beyond what you already have currently: suing companies on a case by case basis.
No amount of legislation will make it practical to do comprehensive chemical tests on every single domestic and imported product, or do comprehensive safety studies on every single chemical used in such products, or to handle the legal proceedings to prosecute all violations. Our society does not have the resources to sustain the incomprehensibly large regulatory and compliance industry needed to enforce a shadow of such legislation.
Of course, not everything has to be tested every time, that's where certifications come in - get your stuff tested when you first want to import something, get a certificate, don't need to get it tested again every time. But if you fail a spot check you lose the certificate and import righs.
Good luck with million+ products from ie China going through tens of thousands of companies. Or Bangladesh, Pakistan, Morocco, Vietnam and so on and on.
I get you guys, its the ideal and good to strive for, but then go out and check ie kids stores or any supermarket. Out of touch with reality.
And why is that? Since majority simply doesn't care.
But we often need legislation to enact individual-driven change. If you have legislation that says what is the allowed level of lead in food, then you as an individual can bring the case for prosecution against companies that make food with lead over that threshold, even if we both agree that it's impractical to test every single domestic and imported product individually on a national level.
> Legislation is just paper, you have no enforcement mechanism beyond what you already have currently: suing companies on a case by case basis.
Well, you can have a better enforcement mechanism then. One that involves things like fines and jail time for executives of companies that perpetrate harms on the public via their products.
This is nonsense, regulation has forced huge improvements in food quality. You don't need lawsuits if agencies are regularly testing and authorized to levy penalties based on the results.
Uh, it used to be until it was gutted in the last 30 years. Legislation and bureaucracy has been one of the most successful interventions for public health for centuries.
Read about the hole in the ozone layer. Banning lead paint. Read about the invention of public water authorities. Read Silent Spring and read about its aftermath. Look into the history of air pollution and the EPA. These are some of the crown jewels of human history.
There has never been a point where tipping point public demand for regulation did not lead to regulation (if it was for example unconstitutional to regulate). Which makes the assertion that regulation is the solution unprovable.
If the FDA never got established, would firms emerge that put their seals of approval on medicine and become trusted? We will never know. It's pointless to point out what happened before the FDA and after because these are not random samples, the FDA didn't get randomly created. The demand for the FDA if denied would have transformed into the demand for something else.
We will also never know the progress in medicine we lost due to the red tape. There would of certainly been scandals and deaths, but if we got a cancer cure as a result would it not have been worth it?
I suspect that if regulation was not a feature of government we would of solved it in other ways, such as the ability to pierce the corporate veil both civilly and criminally for gross negligence etc. And third parties whose only product is trust - these parties would have infinitely more incentive to preserve that trust than governments.
You are mistaken; legislation is not what achieved those. Massive, focused public scrutiny on pinpoint issues is what achieved those.
Passing legislation without the latter is meaningless, and if you have the latter, you don't necessarily need legislation; the free market will force a correction (although politicians will follow the will of the people anyway).
You cannot achieve that across the countless toxins and/or potential toxins that exist in our world; the public does not have enough attention to spare for that.
Or to put it more simply, regular people don't have the time or energy to spare on worrying about every little thing that could potentially, maybe be toxic, in some tiny way over decades.
Have legislation and bureaucracy been the driving force or the symptom?
Government action in democracies just about always lags public support (because you need the public to support a thing so you can say "elect me I'll do it" or "re-elect me I did it").
I disagree with this. There are plenty of counterexamples where an individual can have a measurably positive impact on their own life. Solar + batteries comes to mind.
Also in your linked example, you brought up reading and literacy as something that would not improve collective problems, and I couldn't disagree more.
Unfortunately, individual action doesn't have significant effects - the article mentions leaded fuels, that wasn't something that could be done by individuals alone. You mention solar + batteries but to be blunt, that's only something middle class homeowners can afford, and they're a minority. Maybe some landlords in housing projects but they want government funding for that.
Feels like you're on a different tack here: improving your "own life" is different from solving "collective problems".
Further, setting up solar + batteries solves a non-modest individual problem, but is not by itself (i.e. reducing carbon footprint; an example mentioned in the parent's link) the solution to climate change. (yes it helps; but incentives leading to people installing solar have a much bigger impact; and the biggest incentive was maybe China building a solar panel industry, but I'm not trying to go down that tangent)
That's fair. I think I had read the parent a little differently. I was interpreting this as situations where an individual can improve their own experience of a collective problem, in a way accessible to most. But I acknowledge that's a bit different.
With the solar+battery, I was thinking of solving grid issues and energy prices, which it does do.
Good article. But just to note, lead was already a known poison at the time when it was added to gasoline. Significant concerns were raised. Production was even halted for a while in the US due to health incidents.
That guy's entire wikipedia page is an almost surreal read. For introducing lead into gasoline and the proliferation of CFCs, he was termed a "one-man environmental disaster". His death is equally fascinating. He invented a mechanical device to help him out of bed because of his polio-related infirmity, and ended up getting strangled by it.
> Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny".
Lead in gas increased compression rations and allowed us to build higher horsepower engines. Lead is still used in avgas for this reason. Engine knock was a big problem at the time.
I wonder about lead levels in soil near gen aviation airports for this reason, and in the neighborhoods that sometimes get built on decommissioned runways.
I assume it's pretty inconsequential because if it weren't I'd hear real people talking about it (like with lead paint, and various forms of soil contamination) and as it stands I only hear fake internet comment section hand wringers hand wringing about it.
Ethanol has other downsides regarding corrosion and reacting with various organic and organic-ish (read: rubber) components. Those were bigger problems back then because everything was carbureted and they didn't have modern plastics.
> Oil companies and automobile manufacturers (especially General Motors, which owned the patent jointly filed by Kettering and Midgley) promoted the TEL additive as an inexpensive alternative superior to ethanol or ethanol-blended fuels, on which they could make very little profit.
Functionally, as others have commented, it is there to reduce knocking. But lead was used instead of ethanol (aka alcohol) because it was more profitable despite being poisonous.
It surely reduced it by a tiny amount compared to just straight octane, but ethanol reduced it by something like 10%. So using TEL instead of ethanol gave you about 10% higher gas mileage.
At worst to get equivalent octane rating you lose about 4 percent in power density. In practice you won't notice due to the slightly more efficient burning of alcohol.
The Austrian consumer protection association has just released results on tests of headphones: https://vki.at/Presse/PA-Kopfhoerer-2025 (German article), and found that 40% contained possibly harmful chemicals, including the parts that touch your body.
It's wild. I have children, and I spent a great time researching foods, bottles, toys, etc., but I would've never thought much about doubting the (big brand) consumer electronics that we all use every day.
That article is a classic example of a prevalent error in this line of commentary: indiscriminately taking a "possibly harmful chemical", translating it to a totally different context (say, touching it instead of eating it), and then assuming that any interaction with the chemical is therefore bad.
The article specifically calls out pthalates and bisphenols (both common in plastics), but there's absolutely no reason to believe -- unless you're regularly eating your headphones -- that this is a problem.
Totally agree with you - the dermal exposure is a different pathway, and that could be more clearly mentioned. The fact that these materials are present are not automatically hazards (but they do state that!). I also wouldn't automatically assume that the products marked as red are not safe to use. For me it's just interesting to see that some manufacturers can do without, or less of those components.
Well, plastics generally require plasticizers. The Bisphenol A kerfuffle has largely resulted in the use of different plasticizers, which has in turn caused the sort of people who are fearful of chemicals to expand their definitions of “harmful” to include those new chemicals. It’s a never-ending cycle, but the evidence never really gets any better.
Let me just save you the effort of further rounds of responses here: if you chew on plastic, you will be exposed to the chemicals in plastic. If you’re truly worried about this, don’t buy plastic items.
Right, and I agree and I don’t. I’d o my best to explain to my kids they should never put anything in their mouth that isn’t made to be eaten.
But this should be considered when we make blanket claims about it’s okay because we’re just touching them, not eating them. We have to think about how people actually behave, not ideal usage.
By the way, headphones are required in elementary school here and are used at least an hour a day.
I wonder how much this is causing the worldwide swing toward authoritarianism. Lead exposure can cause lower conscientiousness, lower agreeableness, and higher neuroticism.[1]
Especially considering the age of people who actually vote and who the politicians in power are (at least in the U.S.)
Is lead exposure going up or down? I assume it's going down, because lead gasoline was banned, lead paint was banned, and the lead that was in the environment due to those 2 source is slowly being cleaned up.
I at least assume lead exposure now is lower than when leaded gas was primarily used. In the US it started to be phased out in 1973 and finished in 1996.
The reality is that poison is dose dependent, and we’ve mostly identified all the dangerous things and their doses. That lead in the bottle and the formaldehyde in your cheap clothes is bad … but not in a way that will detectably cause you harm or impair your life
I'm pretty confident that thanks to us getting rid of a lot of stuff already (lead, etc), we're now more able to detect other stuff that is causing issues (like microplastics, although there was a lot less of that in the 70's)
Climate change seems to be a topic that's "OK" to be skeptical about because you can't see it right now, today, with your own eyes.
I wonder if folks who aren't so keen on the idea of climate change would be more open to the idea of population-level poisoning?
These two issues seem to get lumped in the same bucket but it does seem that population-level poisoning seems to be more of an acute threat. Lead, asbestos, microplastics, PFAs, pesticides... Who knows what these will do over generations, and there is certainly more chemical poisons we've introduced into our environment that we haven't even discovered.
In my experience, in the US, harmful chemicals in products are a lot more credible than climate change, to people who listen to the Right. An example that has been in the news: pregnant women taking Tylenol.
For whatever reason, a “natural” lifestyle is more compatible with American conservative politics than an environmentally responsible lifestyle. I think the two can easily overlap, but the former would have to emphasized for it to get any traction with that audience.
EDIT: Replace “for whatever reason” with “due to the influence of the fossil fuel industry”
I'm curious, how many more years do we need to get decent data points to have a controller experiment between "people who min/maxed their health" vs an average person? Life expectancy here in Tokyo is 81/87 years (for men/women), and if constant chase for the "peak health" results in the same average... I'm not sure if it's worth it other than the general 80/20 rule of suggestions?
Incentives. I use consumerlab because trust is their product, if they break their trust once - they will ruin their business.
I inclined to trust the business which earns money from me - this means they are aligned with value I get and there is little incentive to break the trust and a high stakes to keep the trust when you get paid to be trustworthy.
I trust more the greedy capitalists than politicians in this question because I don't understand incentives of the latter. At least the business model is fairly transparent - you can check the company and how it makes money, in reverse incentives of the governments and their officials is broken - to get elected, get rich, get power, not lose job and keep producing new laws and regulations because if you want to keep your job you can't say “Everything is working, the best thing I can do right now is to monitor the system, collect the data and do nothing for a few years”.
Equally as large and interesting is the industry of targeting and subverting consumer watchdog groups. Wirecutter's infiltration and takeover is a fascinating example.
The solution here is the Government regulating and managing the situation. It has been recognized for a century - if not more - that the onus is on the State.
It’s true. It’s also great that we have companies that want to do better. All it takes is a board & executive who don’t care for public good, but only for short term profit, and the entire mission of the company goes up in flames. And since profit is essentially the only thing that executives & boards are allowed to care about, it’s essentially inevitable unless the company founders stay laser focused on their mission, never take on arbitrary investors, and even consider PBCs.
VC-backed companies in the tech space have an especially horrid track record on this stuff. I was reading about how cool Blueprint seems as a company, but couldn’t help thinking “at least until they get bought out or fucked by investors”
Which is exactly why the government should be involved. Companies simply do not have incentives to protect humans in almost any way without the government stepping in. It’ll always be cheaper to fuck humans over, and always more expensive to do right by them.
Bloodletting is a solution. Donate blood as frequently as they allow you. Plasma donation works even better (higher frequency) if you trust the machines and the process.
Sadly, it's not a complete solution as some harmful substances bio-accumulate in other tissues. A benefit may be had regardless as some substances leach back into the blood if the concentration gradient is sufficient.
If the logic is "get rid of your bad blood, let your body make some good blood instead", why would the body make the good blood if all we consume is full of plastic anyways?
The trend of making these medical tests cheaper and easier to obtain is going to result in a lot of positive change. Certainly for individuals and hopefully the anonymized data helps get the spotlight on larger trends.
If you have ever visited the ruins of Pompeii, you might have seen all the lead pipes that provided water to the city. I wonder how that affected the health of the citizens back then.
My understanding is that the high calcium content in their water supply formed a lining on the inside of the pipes which largely prevented any exposure.
Yeah, the water problems in Flint weren't the pipes directly, but that the water had changed so the lead was no longer protected from getting in the water.
Given almost anything can do something bad to you I've got a rule of thumb not to worry much about things unless they can quantify how many years they take off your life. There are still quite a lot of those around - smoking, air pollution and obesity being some of the top ones that can do >10 years. I'm not to bad on smoking and air pollution but could lose a pound or two. I figure central London has dropped from a couple of years off to maybe a couple of months over the time I've been around here.
When I was a baby we lived virtually directly under the Sydney Harvour Bridge, I got lead poisoning as a result of runoff from the bridge. The combination of leaded petrol and leaded paint runoff poisoned the soil in playgrounds and the area more generally.
My case and probably those of others lead to a huge cleanup of the bridge.
My life has been absolutetly plagued with chronic health and "developmental" problems. Neurodivergence and other conditions litter my family tree, but they seem to effect me much more severely than they do most of my relatives.
I often find myself wondering these days if my life would have featured significantly less hardship were it not for the lead poisoning.
"This will be a big business"
No. It shouldn't be a "business", it should be laws that are enforced fast, education, public shaming of companies putting poison in their products.
Volatile Organic compounds in paint were known to be poisonous since 17th century (see Bernardino Ramazzini's works). Just listen to the goddamn scientists for once.
You can't solve a problem caused by capitalism corner cutting with more capitalism.
This reminds me a bit of a private group that did a big study (I thought in SFBA) looking at the amount of microplastics in different stuff, for example delivered food. Just thinking about it because of the startup he mentioned and I was wondering if it was them, but can’t find the article now. I know it was discussed at length here.
>Is the furniture I sit in every day made with harmful substances?
If I made you a chair out of wood and finished it with pure linseed oil, do you promise not to complain that it needs repainting regularly? If I make you a cushion out of horse hair and canvas, do you promise not to complain that it is uncomfortable and not flame retardant? Will you be ok that you can't wipe off stains like you could with your old one?
The convenience of modern materials is what drives this, as much as the profit motive
i live in Europe and the public discourse around this is always very high and i don't think we have 1/10 of the problems in the article, but maybe I'm lulu
I'm no nutritional expert but from what I understand: If you look at traditional food people ate very different around the world but by some miracle all of those traditional diets cover all angles of nutrition. It seems to suggest that in the long run only cultures who eat a complete diet survive. You can of course survive for a really long time with all kinds of deficiencies but apparently time will catch up. How this happens I don't know but it isn't actually important. The point I wanted to make is that poison isn't even required. Unless you have experimental success after perhaps thousands of years of trial and error we would have to actively monitor and adjust everything with an iron fist. Specially this idea that anything goes unless harm is proven needs to go. There is an enormous amount of low hanging fruit but to do the entire job entirely will be a humongous undertaking.
>Only a business with this as its core competency is capable of the breadth and depth required for this Herculean task.
It doesn't have to be a business, and it absolutely should not be. Preventing poisoning of people, animals, and the environment is something capitalism has proven utterly incapable of, and in fact (literally) violently opposed to.
This is the kind of thing that needs to be done at the government level. The goal is societal benefit, not profit.
> All the exhaust fumes pooled and hung in the air there. And these were the 1970s: literally all the gasoline was leaded.1 This was lead poisoning. Over the years, the children were getting brain damage.
And if you live in a city today it's only marginally better. Remember that everyone selfishly driving their car is choosing to poison you rather than dealing with public transport. They give you lung cancer from their exhaust and microplastics in the brain from their tires. And if that wasn't enough, year after year the cars get bigger and survivability for pedestrians in an accent, especially children becomes less likely the larger the car.
The inconvenient truth is that car drivers are horrible humans causing harm to their direct environment they themselves have to life in but we as a society deem that totally a-ok. And the Road accidents every year? Necessary and unavoidable of course. But then the same people argue about gun control. The double-think is astounding.
For me, I make a conscious attempt not to use a car unless it's actually warranted. I often go weeks without driving at all. Many people have the opposite approach: they take every possible opportunity to drive.
This raises the interesting point of finding a balance between knowing/searching and letting go when it comes to health. Lead is a major one but obession about health can lead to anxiety, stress. I think that finding the major factors that affect health is what matters (sunlight, sleep, walking, cooking with stainless steel, etc.) and letting go of all the minor details. This is an issue that has been close to my heart for years, and my perspective on it has changed over time. Anxiety can be a real problem.
Lead is actually dangerous. Arguably the panic from things which are .. much less well evidenced, shall we say, causes people to overlook the real problems.
Damage from lead. The 'obsession' here is that the right level of lead in any product should be ZERO.
There should be international pacts, like what was done for gases destroying the ozone layer, to remove lead entirely from products
Amazon is so completely irresponsible for their marketplace that recently, shopping for a glass oral thermometer (because the digital ones suck) I stumbled on reviews with photos showing products that had no mercury inside and actual blobs of mercury stuck to the tip that goes in your mouth. These were still for sale.
I feel like even 10 years ago, online marketplaces would have taken measures to prevent stuff like this.
From that perspective, all of these services that rate products still place all the onus on the individual consumer. What would be really "luxury" in the modern context would be an online marketplace that vetted every product and whose primary product was trust, as opoosed to logistics and convenience. I'd much rather pay $150/yr for a service that vetted its products and took a week to deliver them, than to have a bunch of worthless or dangerous junk delivered the next day.
> Amazon is so completely irresponsible for their marketplace that recently, shopping for a glass oral thermometer (because the digital ones suck) I stumbled on reviews with photos showing products that had no mercury inside and actual blobs of mercury stuck to the tip that goes in your mouth. These were still for sale.
I did wonder about how this kind of thing was handled in the UK, and (a) Amazon will happily offer a mercury thermometer for sale and (b) it has been illegal to sell mercury thermometers in the UK since 2009.
The absolute poster child for ubiquitous illegal toxic products though? Disposable vapes.
I'm convinced the major tobacco companies will do well if the government ever manages to crack down on sketchy and illegal vaping products and stores. But this seems very hard to do.
I've thought about that too, but in the end, price always wins - this is why the Amazons and Walmarts of the world have out-competed local small businesses.
The major flaw in your example is that you have a site saying product X is good and trusted, but people will then go look online for a competitor that sells it for cheaper.
This is where capitalism clashes with consumer rights / safety. What should be the case is that all products sold on all stores are safe. That's what consumer safety organizations are for, but it seems like they have lost the battle against the flood of Chinese crap coming in.
At least in Europe, this is mainly because these companies ship for cheap directly to customers. Customs and the like can check a container full of the same USB chargers easily and efficiently, but if that container full crosses the border in 10.000 individual packages it's impossible.
Thankfully they're putting the brakes on it, but it took forever.
>The major flaw in your example is that you have a site saying product X is good and trusted, but people will then go look online for a competitor that sells it for cheaper.
Product X is good and trusted, except:
Why are they even selling mercury thermometers for oral use when an alcohol one (the red liquid) does fine
Mercury has higher thermal conductivity than alcohol. The temperature reading stabilizes faster with mercury.
I wondered that as well, but they are. I've started to think there's an organized effort by a government with a lot of state-owned enterprises to actually dispose of toxic waste by shipping it to gullible American consumers. Not that it isn't also poisoning people there.
Isn't this a new concept of this era ?
We profit from letting others be free to harm you but we cannot be held responsible.
disruptism ? platformism ?
Amazon is straight up evil at this point. People have pointed out they are selling fake fuses that have most likely gotten people killed, Amazon has done nothing. I am sure the same is occurring across other product categories like your example.
The 'luxury' you are talking about was called Brands, with the idea being that a company's Brand was worth more than lure of profits/shortcuts that could result in ruining the Brand.
>> The 'luxury' you are talking about was called Brands
I dunno. Branding was my gig for a long time. I think brands were a weak substitute for artisans / bespoke makers who had to personally stand by their work. Once upon a time there was a guy named Levi Strauss who made sturdy jeans, some guy named McDonald who made good hamburgers, a couple guys named Johnson who sold talcum powder. And that guy Nobel who invented new ways to blow up the coyote. If any of their products failed, it was on them. Then branding came along and quality declined, but people paid for inferior products because they had the name and stamp of the founder on them. The notion that brands have to maintain the quality associated with their namesake is the central illusion that trillions of dollars spent on branding seeks to create. It turns out that it's cheaper to prop up the name with advertising than it is with selling quality products.
And that doesn't even touch on brands like DuPont or Chevron, where all the positive connotations are purely from brand marketing built as a shroud around selling mass death.
> I think brands were a weak substitute for artisans / bespoke makers who had to personally stand by their work.
Another way to say that is "companies are too big". When companies become big enough that they don't have to worry about the repercussions of screwing over their customers, they're too big.
Right. Absolutely. But then again, everyone can buy jeans now and you don't have to ride your horse across 500 miles of desert and hitch it up to Levi's store. So no one who orders em online now knows what they were worth then. No one's riding horses around in their underwear anymore.
To be serious: I don't think that overpopulation or delivering better things to more people is really the problem. Big companies are indeed a problem. Along with big governments on the other side. They both rely on rent-seeking methods of extracting value while lowering expectations, rather than providing better services. There needs to be a balance of regulation and innovation, that prevents regulatory capture and prevents monopolies without exploding bureaucracies that hamper small businesses. Small businesses are fantastic drivers of prosperity and creativity. That would be the civic ideal I'd implement if I had any interest in getting into government.
Why do you think mercury blob is going to the mouth?
Those are usually rectal thermometer, with 0.1°C precision or better. Also sometimes used to measure body temperature in armpits.
Amazon is rather like the Silk Road[0] of old. You're buying cinnamon from some guy in Europe who knows not even the vague direction it came from, let alone what's in it or how it came to be. This could be considered irresponsible today, or it could be considered efficient, depending on your perspective.
I also feel like Amazon should take more responsibility, but then I get angry when my ISP or government "takes responsibility" for online content. What's the difference between Amazon and an ISP? One could argue an ISP is a natural monopoly and therefore should always be a neutral carrier. But maybe Amazon is a natural monopoly too? Could the economy really support ten different Amazons? That would be like having ten different Silk Roads, but there's only one way from Asia to Europe.
It does seem odd to me that Amazon gets a free pass as a common carrier while ISPs seemingly do not. Probably because taking responsibility would affect Amazon's bottom line, while ISPs don't really care.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road (The ancient trading route, not the darknet marketplace).
> I feel like even 10 years ago, online marketplaces would have taken measures to prevent stuff like this.
By now the market has "matured" to pure profit orientation. Health or even survival are irrelevant. /s
I'm tackling part of the issue of food toxin remediation with my new venture, NeutraOat (neutraoat.com). It's a modified oat fiber supplement that selectively traps BPA, PFAS, and plasticizers in the gut and reduces levels in the blood serum.
The funding for this is tough, though. Everyone loves the idea, but it's difficult to find people to fund R&D to make sure the product actually works over brand building and marketing. I've had to be very scrappy. Hopefully this will change in the future as we build momentum and awareness, but for right now it's tooth and nail.
> it's difficult to find people to fund R&D to make sure the product actually works
In the US it doesn't matter. Just talk about the problem and pretend like it works. You'll be rich.
Sounds interesting. I heard about oat's ability to absorb nasty stuff in the gut for awhile. However, in the UK oats are dried out using glyphosate...a known carcinogen!
Feels like modern society makes it nearly impossible to not be exposed to harmful substances...so I hope you're successful.
Flahavans are the best oats (£3/kg). ~200 year old Irish company
> We specifically prohibit the use of Glyphosate spraying at any stage of the growing of oats by our farmers.
https://www.flahavans.com/inside-flahavans/our-oats/gmo-glyp...
I'll try some. For a long time I've been wary of organic oats because of concern about mycotoxins. I first thought about this after buying some Tesco non-organic oats that tasted of mould. I thought maybe pesticides reduced that risk and organic oats would be even worse. I later tasted mould in non-organic Sainsburys oats (which I suspect were from the same supplier as the Tesco ones), and then again from non-organic Mornflake oats (which were presumably not from the same supplier because they tasted different). I eventually switched to non-organic Quaker oats, which for several years had no perceptible mould taste, but not so long ago I had a box of Quaker oats that tasted of mould too.
It now occurs to me that the mould could have grown post-harvest, and maybe reliance on herbicides to desiccate crops could encourage a sloppy attitude toward drying. Maybe organic crops actually have lower risk of mycotoxin contamination because the farmers are forced to take more care with moisture levels. I carefully taste a small portion of each new batch, but I don't think taste is a reliable means of detecting mould contamination. It's also possible that mould grew because of improper storage after the oats were packaged, which is made worse by the modern trend of cardboard/paper packaging.
I'm still not confident with any brand, but I like oats too much to stop eating them.
I thought glyphosate was only a danger for people applying it (something that's been denied for a long time) Also as far as I know it goes into the weeds it kills, not in the plant you want to keep (is your food) ? Else it would also die ?
I heard that farmers ‘spray off’ the crop to kill it to make harvesting easier.
Is this a dirty hack or an intended use case ?
A dirty intended use case...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation#Systemic_desi...
I have no connection to these people, except I have eaten their jumbo oats. They have been an organic farm since 1949. I doubt they use glyphosate, but you could ask them?
https://www.pimhill.com/
Also, before you demonise glyphosate too much, it is worth realising its role in the widespread adoption of low/no till farming, which reduces fertilizer usage, reduces carbon emissions from the soil, and uses tractor power and time, therefore reducing carbon again.
Basically by killing all of the weeds with something that won't kill the crop you are about to plant, means you don't have to plough. It is a classic trade off, do you want the (hard to quantify and heavily disputed) risk of glyphosate, or higher carbon emissions
No till farming is much more difficult to do organically.
Or you could use electric tractors. Or humans.
Or grow less crop just as food for animals to be eaten again, it is so horribly inefficient.
Electric tractors aren't a thing. That is because a battery big enough to power a tractor pulling a plough all day is infeasibly large. Pulling a constant load is a very different thing to a car that coasts most of the time.
Humans are not strong enough to pull ploughs. You could grow food and feed it to draught animals, but as you point out, that is horribly inefficient.
Mythical Electric Tractor or not, you still have carbon being released from the ground by ploughing to control weeds. You can avoid ploughing to control weeds with glyphosate.
When a better solution for weed control comes along we can say goodbye to glyphosate too, I believe it is about as far off as Desktop Linux, as in 'next year'.
Just remember, glyphosate costs farmers money. They wouldn't use it if there was a better way
The whole point of glyphosate is that it deteriorates very very quickly, and your oats should contain exactly zero of it. Obviously that's the theory, I'd love someone to test it. But in US wheat is routinely dessicated with glyphosate so either their bread is giving everyone cancer, or the compound does actually break down as expected. Or maybe it's somewhere in between.
Either way, it's like the article said - it's impossible for us consumers to figure any of this stuff out. We have to rely on public agencies, which are under constant attack from multinational corporations throwing billions of dollars at the issue, because following regulations costs money. And that's in developed countries, if you're buying stuff from places with barely functional food quality inspection then good luck I guess.
What is "very very quickly"?
From Wikipedia:
> The reported half-life of glyphosate in soil varies from two to 197 days with a typical field half-life of 47 days being suggested.[56] Soil and climate conditions affect glyphosate's persistence in soil. The median half-life of glyphosate in water varies from a few days to 91 days.[56] At a site in Texas, half-life was as little as three days. A site in Iowa had a half-life of 141.9 days.[94] The glyphosate metabolite AMPA has been found in Swedish forest soils up to two years after a glyphosate application.
It has a lower half-life in water, and a lower half-life when it's warmer. I store my oats both dry and cold.
As for cancer, I don't know - but it certainly is giving everyone parkinsons.
But you see - this is the whole problem. Every time I tried looking into it myself all I could find was that "dessicating crops with glyphosate is safe because it breaks down before it makes it into your food". If that is just simply not true or at the very least "true but only in ideal conditions that happen 5% of the time" then we're all screwed and no one seems to care.
So I need to put something in my body to prevent other things in my body? I don't mean to be the party pooper but this is my first thought. Health conscious people care about plastics in their body and are probably shopping organic and what not. So you have a high hurdle to climb with any "modified" foods.
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Except now I have the problem of trusting that this new supplement isn't contaminated with anything, _and_ that the "microscopic pores" resulting from this "patented process" don't turn out to have some harmful effect in the body.
I guess it would be sort of similar to activated charcoal? And that's surely well studied, and also "eaten"
You might have just filtered off all the nutrients and have yourself a dietary deficiency. Oops.
And your supplements might well be contaminated...
I suppose you wouldn't be eating these oats regularly? More like a couple times, then test the levels and maybe repeat after a while?
Not sure or the US programs are running, but check out SBIRs
I wish you luck!
Good luck. I'll order some if it works.
This is precisely why I happily pay for an annual subscription to ConsumerLab[0]. It's largely just for supplements and a few functional foods, but with a tiny staff they are doing more work to help the public on the unregulated medicine market than the entire FDA, IMHO.
[0]https://www.consumerlab.com/
Congress are the ones who define what the FDA does. Blame them and the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Congress could easily tell the FDA to do something different.
Blaming people for a problem only helps if you have the power to take away their ability to cause the problem. In this case, the most effective way to keep Congress from causing you health problems by giving you misinformation about supplements would seem to be to get your information from a source that Congress doesn't control, such as ConsumerLab. Hopefully it's a better source than the FDA rather than a worse one; but, if not, maybe you can switch to a better one, or start one yourself.
I also recently subscribed to ConsumerLab, and I'm glad I did. I wish they could test products more frequently as things are bound to change from batch to batch, but it's a whole lot better than nothing.
I don't take a lot of supplements, but I won't buy even one without some form of third party testing.
What does a subscription to ConsumerLab provide you? Is in in-depth product-reviews? e.g. you are curious of a supplement, you check there first?
Independent lab testing for contaminants and actual active ingredient levels vs. what's stated. They also publish summaries of studies on the active ingredients that test the effectiveness against claimed therapeutic value. (It's depressing how few studies actually show benefit over placebo.)
> It's depressing how few studies actually show benefit over placebo
Look at it another way, isn’t it good to know you probably don’t need suplements.
Shout out to examine.com, they also do a great job summarizing studies on supplements.
Looks like something I'd love to support / become member in, but I wonder how many brands outside US the lab tests? Do they also test products available in Europe/Asia?
Also, a happy customer of the consumerlab. Highly recommend the product.
Subscribed. Thanks!
I don't see anything new here. How is it not just another "quality" seal that can be bought through some under-the-table deal?
Empowering individuals to solve collective problems rarely work.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31178680>
The appropriate solution is legislation.
> legislation
Perhaps more generally phrased as governance
Yes, the answer is not some business plan by which some can dodge disaster in an untrustworthy market, the answer is to recognize that this planet is a spaceship i.e. materially closed, and we are massively soiling the nest, microplastic is in steak because it's literally everywhere on the surface of the earth, etc.
Therefore, good ecological governance is a requirement, as is the analysis, as a public service, of the resources and ecosystems, and the services they provide human beings and our dependents, i.e. a democratic and just policy, not a lucrative plan to privatize yet more of public health
If one is convinced the best vehicle for the above in the near term is a business, then it had better have a different approach than is typical of personal health tech startups
Empowering individuals isn't worthless by any means but pitting one against another with asymmetric information is worse than worthless
The fundamental constraint the article alludes to is the powerlessness of consumer choice. You can’t make a better choice because you don’t have any better option. When there is a better option, you lack the tools to verify that the option is truly better vs scamming you to pay more for something which either doesn’t matter or is simply a lie.
Prior to free trade, you could reasonably sue the manufacturers or distributors for egregious harms. You could also reasonably expect domestic regulatory authorities to intervene before these harms entered the market.*
In principal, this could be done in a free trade system with counterparties who implement and enforce similar rules. But then you need all parties to agree on any new rules and enforcement mechanisms. You only need one bad actor to nuke the arrangement by growing without these burdens.
* Assuming regulations and laws are equitably and incorruptibly enforced in the local government.
A second-order issue there is the pervasive phenomenon of people wanting things cheap which results in hidden costs. When it costs more to make things safer or to test that they are safe, bad actors can succeed by not doing that and finding ways to dodge responsibility, because people just gravitate towards low prices. Part of the "governance" challenge is forcing market participants to internalize their costs.
Somewhat ironically, a countervailing strategy has emerged of charging more for something based on the claim that it's "natural", "organic", "handcrafted", etc. This strategy can also be seen in various types of "detectors" and at-home tests for things, and perhaps even things like the ConsumerLabs mentioned in another comment.
This muddies the waters even more, since even people who are willing to pay more for something that's better can't figure out how to avoid paying more for something that's just equally bad. These problems exist not just in the realm of food and health but in all product categories.
> Empowering individuals to solve collective problems rarely work.
In Canadian elementary school in the 2000s, we spent a long time talking about our carbon footprint. The hope was that by carpooling and turning off lights when you left the room, we might still have an Earth to live on by 2030.
Even at the time I felt a little patronized. Having read enough literature on the subject now the math does become clear: we won't solve our climate issues by guilt tripping children on their individual consumption. It's a problem that needs international government attention.
This mindset is dangerous - "weak individuals, you better let the strong benevolent government solve your problems".
The appropriate solution is legislation AND individual empowerment.
Ideally legislation that creates individual empowerment.
But the big lobbyists hate that, so it'll never happen.
But also education; one major shift is that measures that were taken in the past (e.g. vaccination campaigns) were so successful that a generation or three of people have grown up without any of the vaccinated diseases, so now they're like "...why do we even need these?". Add some scaremongering of chemicals and demonizing of autism aaand there's epidemics of measles again.
That's not a solution. There is no practical solution for this, and has not been for the millennia on human history; it's only been in the recent decades where we've been able the hallucinate about knowing about toxins in our daily lives.
Legislation is just paper, you have no enforcement mechanism beyond what you already have currently: suing companies on a case by case basis.
> Legislation is just paper, you have no enforcement mechanism beyond what you already have currently
really one of the dumber things I've read on this website and that's quite a high bar to clear
No amount of legislation will make it practical to do comprehensive chemical tests on every single domestic and imported product, or do comprehensive safety studies on every single chemical used in such products, or to handle the legal proceedings to prosecute all violations. Our society does not have the resources to sustain the incomprehensibly large regulatory and compliance industry needed to enforce a shadow of such legislation.
Counterpoint: yeah we do, we're already doing it.
Of course, not everything has to be tested every time, that's where certifications come in - get your stuff tested when you first want to import something, get a certificate, don't need to get it tested again every time. But if you fail a spot check you lose the certificate and import righs.
Good luck with million+ products from ie China going through tens of thousands of companies. Or Bangladesh, Pakistan, Morocco, Vietnam and so on and on.
I get you guys, its the ideal and good to strive for, but then go out and check ie kids stores or any supermarket. Out of touch with reality.
And why is that? Since majority simply doesn't care.
But we often need legislation to enact individual-driven change. If you have legislation that says what is the allowed level of lead in food, then you as an individual can bring the case for prosecution against companies that make food with lead over that threshold, even if we both agree that it's impractical to test every single domestic and imported product individually on a national level.
how much of total legislation is never enforced? probably at least third
It's pointless without people caring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Food_and_Drug_A...
> Legislation is just paper, you have no enforcement mechanism beyond what you already have currently: suing companies on a case by case basis.
Well, you can have a better enforcement mechanism then. One that involves things like fines and jail time for executives of companies that perpetrate harms on the public via their products.
To quote a previous HN post I saved:
"You gotta take what you can get. This level of concern is right out the CIA guidebook of how to infiltrate a group and make sure nothing gets done"
This is nonsense, regulation has forced huge improvements in food quality. You don't need lawsuits if agencies are regularly testing and authorized to levy penalties based on the results.
Uh, it used to be until it was gutted in the last 30 years. Legislation and bureaucracy has been one of the most successful interventions for public health for centuries.
Read about the hole in the ozone layer. Banning lead paint. Read about the invention of public water authorities. Read Silent Spring and read about its aftermath. Look into the history of air pollution and the EPA. These are some of the crown jewels of human history.
There has never been a point where tipping point public demand for regulation did not lead to regulation (if it was for example unconstitutional to regulate). Which makes the assertion that regulation is the solution unprovable.
If the FDA never got established, would firms emerge that put their seals of approval on medicine and become trusted? We will never know. It's pointless to point out what happened before the FDA and after because these are not random samples, the FDA didn't get randomly created. The demand for the FDA if denied would have transformed into the demand for something else.
We will also never know the progress in medicine we lost due to the red tape. There would of certainly been scandals and deaths, but if we got a cancer cure as a result would it not have been worth it?
I suspect that if regulation was not a feature of government we would of solved it in other ways, such as the ability to pierce the corporate veil both civilly and criminally for gross negligence etc. And third parties whose only product is trust - these parties would have infinitely more incentive to preserve that trust than governments.
You are mistaken; legislation is not what achieved those. Massive, focused public scrutiny on pinpoint issues is what achieved those.
Passing legislation without the latter is meaningless, and if you have the latter, you don't necessarily need legislation; the free market will force a correction (although politicians will follow the will of the people anyway).
You cannot achieve that across the countless toxins and/or potential toxins that exist in our world; the public does not have enough attention to spare for that.
Or to put it more simply, regular people don't have the time or energy to spare on worrying about every little thing that could potentially, maybe be toxic, in some tiny way over decades.
Have legislation and bureaucracy been the driving force or the symptom?
Government action in democracies just about always lags public support (because you need the public to support a thing so you can say "elect me I'll do it" or "re-elect me I did it").
Maybe so, but in the meantime I'll take all the empowerment I can get.
Blasphemy!
Everyone knows that the correct solution is to fund startup X.
I disagree with this. There are plenty of counterexamples where an individual can have a measurably positive impact on their own life. Solar + batteries comes to mind.
Also in your linked example, you brought up reading and literacy as something that would not improve collective problems, and I couldn't disagree more.
Unfortunately, individual action doesn't have significant effects - the article mentions leaded fuels, that wasn't something that could be done by individuals alone. You mention solar + batteries but to be blunt, that's only something middle class homeowners can afford, and they're a minority. Maybe some landlords in housing projects but they want government funding for that.
Feels like you're on a different tack here: improving your "own life" is different from solving "collective problems".
Further, setting up solar + batteries solves a non-modest individual problem, but is not by itself (i.e. reducing carbon footprint; an example mentioned in the parent's link) the solution to climate change. (yes it helps; but incentives leading to people installing solar have a much bigger impact; and the biggest incentive was maybe China building a solar panel industry, but I'm not trying to go down that tangent)
That's fair. I think I had read the parent a little differently. I was interpreting this as situations where an individual can improve their own experience of a collective problem, in a way accessible to most. But I acknowledge that's a bit different.
With the solar+battery, I was thinking of solving grid issues and energy prices, which it does do.
> This was lead poisoning. ... Nobody knew.
Good article. But just to note, lead was already a known poison at the time when it was added to gasoline. Significant concerns were raised. Production was even halted for a while in the US due to health incidents.
Lead had been a known poison for nearly 2000 years when it was added to gasoline.
The guy who owned the patent for leaded gasoline and who promoted its use even got lead poisoning himself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
That guy's entire wikipedia page is an almost surreal read. For introducing lead into gasoline and the proliferation of CFCs, he was termed a "one-man environmental disaster". His death is equally fascinating. He invented a mechanical device to help him out of bed because of his polio-related infirmity, and ended up getting strangled by it.
Midgley's paralysis, as I understand it, was probably not due to polio but to lead poisoning.
Maybe the mechanical device had also achieved AGI?
> Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny".
it's incredibly surprising to me that lead was added to gasoline specifically at all.
I'd always assumed it was some expensive-to-remove byproduct of manufacture or something, so they left it in to save costs despite the risks.
Why did this happen?
Lead in gas increased compression rations and allowed us to build higher horsepower engines. Lead is still used in avgas for this reason. Engine knock was a big problem at the time.
I wonder about lead levels in soil near gen aviation airports for this reason, and in the neighborhoods that sometimes get built on decommissioned runways.
I assume it's pretty inconsequential because if it weren't I'd hear real people talking about it (like with lead paint, and various forms of soil contamination) and as it stands I only hear fake internet comment section hand wringers hand wringing about it.
Per the article we're all commenting on that's maybe not the wisest assumption.
What makes the difference between a fake hand wringer and a real one, by the way? Whether or not this happen to be standing near you at the moment?
As I understand it, both tetra ethyl lead and ethyl alcohol are anti-knock agents.
Lead was used because it was cheaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiknock_agent
Ethanol has other downsides regarding corrosion and reacting with various organic and organic-ish (read: rubber) components. Those were bigger problems back then because everything was carbureted and they didn't have modern plastics.
Ethanol on its own is an anti knock agent. E85 is RON 105 for instance.
Tetraethyl Lead was an octane raiser - an anti-knocking compound.
according to the article
> Oil companies and automobile manufacturers (especially General Motors, which owned the patent jointly filed by Kettering and Midgley) promoted the TEL additive as an inexpensive alternative superior to ethanol or ethanol-blended fuels, on which they could make very little profit.
Functionally, as others have commented, it is there to reduce knocking. But lead was used instead of ethanol (aka alcohol) because it was more profitable despite being poisonous.
It also gave better gas mileage.
It allowed people to use engines with better gas mileage, what is a different thing.
Just adding the lead addictive to gasoline reduced your gas mileage. But it made better engines work.
It surely reduced it by a tiny amount compared to just straight octane, but ethanol reduced it by something like 10%. So using TEL instead of ethanol gave you about 10% higher gas mileage.
At worst to get equivalent octane rating you lose about 4 percent in power density. In practice you won't notice due to the slightly more efficient burning of alcohol.
I don't think that is correct.
The Austrian consumer protection association has just released results on tests of headphones: https://vki.at/Presse/PA-Kopfhoerer-2025 (German article), and found that 40% contained possibly harmful chemicals, including the parts that touch your body.
It's wild. I have children, and I spent a great time researching foods, bottles, toys, etc., but I would've never thought much about doubting the (big brand) consumer electronics that we all use every day.
That article is a classic example of a prevalent error in this line of commentary: indiscriminately taking a "possibly harmful chemical", translating it to a totally different context (say, touching it instead of eating it), and then assuming that any interaction with the chemical is therefore bad.
The article specifically calls out pthalates and bisphenols (both common in plastics), but there's absolutely no reason to believe -- unless you're regularly eating your headphones -- that this is a problem.
Totally agree with you - the dermal exposure is a different pathway, and that could be more clearly mentioned. The fact that these materials are present are not automatically hazards (but they do state that!). I also wouldn't automatically assume that the products marked as red are not safe to use. For me it's just interesting to see that some manufacturers can do without, or less of those components.
Well, plastics generally require plasticizers. The Bisphenol A kerfuffle has largely resulted in the use of different plasticizers, which has in turn caused the sort of people who are fearful of chemicals to expand their definitions of “harmful” to include those new chemicals. It’s a never-ending cycle, but the evidence never really gets any better.
Children eat and chew on lots of things you’d never imagine, even up into elementary and middle school years. A smaller number of adults do too.
So don’t give them your headphones to chew on.
Let me just save you the effort of further rounds of responses here: if you chew on plastic, you will be exposed to the chemicals in plastic. If you’re truly worried about this, don’t buy plastic items.
Right, and I agree and I don’t. I’d o my best to explain to my kids they should never put anything in their mouth that isn’t made to be eaten.
But this should be considered when we make blanket claims about it’s okay because we’re just touching them, not eating them. We have to think about how people actually behave, not ideal usage.
By the way, headphones are required in elementary school here and are used at least an hour a day.
I wonder how much this is causing the worldwide swing toward authoritarianism. Lead exposure can cause lower conscientiousness, lower agreeableness, and higher neuroticism.[1]
Especially considering the age of people who actually vote and who the politicians in power are (at least in the U.S.)
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8307752/
Is lead exposure going up or down? I assume it's going down, because lead gasoline was banned, lead paint was banned, and the lead that was in the environment due to those 2 source is slowly being cleaned up.
I at least assume lead exposure now is lower than when leaded gas was primarily used. In the US it started to be phased out in 1973 and finished in 1996.
Down a lot now, but likely peaked in the 70s -- Kids growing up then are likely 50-60 which are the higher turnout voting brackets.
There's a lagging effect from lead exposure, so it's difficult to pinpoint when those exposed would be most impacted.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-americans-vote-and-ho...
The reality is that poison is dose dependent, and we’ve mostly identified all the dangerous things and their doses. That lead in the bottle and the formaldehyde in your cheap clothes is bad … but not in a way that will detectably cause you harm or impair your life
I'm pretty confident that thanks to us getting rid of a lot of stuff already (lead, etc), we're now more able to detect other stuff that is causing issues (like microplastics, although there was a lot less of that in the 70's)
Climate change seems to be a topic that's "OK" to be skeptical about because you can't see it right now, today, with your own eyes.
I wonder if folks who aren't so keen on the idea of climate change would be more open to the idea of population-level poisoning?
These two issues seem to get lumped in the same bucket but it does seem that population-level poisoning seems to be more of an acute threat. Lead, asbestos, microplastics, PFAs, pesticides... Who knows what these will do over generations, and there is certainly more chemical poisons we've introduced into our environment that we haven't even discovered.
In my experience, in the US, harmful chemicals in products are a lot more credible than climate change, to people who listen to the Right. An example that has been in the news: pregnant women taking Tylenol.
For whatever reason, a “natural” lifestyle is more compatible with American conservative politics than an environmentally responsible lifestyle. I think the two can easily overlap, but the former would have to emphasized for it to get any traction with that audience.
EDIT: Replace “for whatever reason” with “due to the influence of the fossil fuel industry”
I'm curious, how many more years do we need to get decent data points to have a controller experiment between "people who min/maxed their health" vs an average person? Life expectancy here in Tokyo is 81/87 years (for men/women), and if constant chase for the "peak health" results in the same average... I'm not sure if it's worth it other than the general 80/20 rule of suggestions?
If the incentives of private business are what got us in this health crisis, why should private business be trusted to get us out of it?
Incentives. I use consumerlab because trust is their product, if they break their trust once - they will ruin their business.
I inclined to trust the business which earns money from me - this means they are aligned with value I get and there is little incentive to break the trust and a high stakes to keep the trust when you get paid to be trustworthy.
I trust more the greedy capitalists than politicians in this question because I don't understand incentives of the latter. At least the business model is fairly transparent - you can check the company and how it makes money, in reverse incentives of the governments and their officials is broken - to get elected, get rich, get power, not lose job and keep producing new laws and regulations because if you want to keep your job you can't say “Everything is working, the best thing I can do right now is to monitor the system, collect the data and do nothing for a few years”.
Equally as large and interesting is the industry of targeting and subverting consumer watchdog groups. Wirecutter's infiltration and takeover is a fascinating example.
I was appalled to see that apparently Which? has a website funded by affiliate marketing links.
Where can I read more about Wirecutter's infiltration? Disappointed to hear since I largely trusted their reviews
The solution here is the Government regulating and managing the situation. It has been recognized for a century - if not more - that the onus is on the State.
The FDA, FTC, EPA, etc should be involved here.
It’s true. It’s also great that we have companies that want to do better. All it takes is a board & executive who don’t care for public good, but only for short term profit, and the entire mission of the company goes up in flames. And since profit is essentially the only thing that executives & boards are allowed to care about, it’s essentially inevitable unless the company founders stay laser focused on their mission, never take on arbitrary investors, and even consider PBCs.
VC-backed companies in the tech space have an especially horrid track record on this stuff. I was reading about how cool Blueprint seems as a company, but couldn’t help thinking “at least until they get bought out or fucked by investors”
Which is exactly why the government should be involved. Companies simply do not have incentives to protect humans in almost any way without the government stepping in. It’ll always be cheaper to fuck humans over, and always more expensive to do right by them.
Bloodletting is a solution. Donate blood as frequently as they allow you. Plasma donation works even better (higher frequency) if you trust the machines and the process.
Sadly, it's not a complete solution as some harmful substances bio-accumulate in other tissues. A benefit may be had regardless as some substances leach back into the blood if the concentration gradient is sufficient.
What makes you think it's a solution?
If the logic is "get rid of your bad blood, let your body make some good blood instead", why would the body make the good blood if all we consume is full of plastic anyways?
<vampire typing comment above meme />
The solution to bioaccumulation is to give it to someone else?
Source?
2 millennia of bloodletting medical practice. /s
Don't forget the poisons we've known for ages and yet overconsume: sugar, alcohol, ...
Those are regulated, and sold to willing customers. On the other hand, people who buy paint do not want to get lead-poisoned, usually.
And they are just waiting for the modern paint to be as good as the old lead paint was on exterior woodwork.
The trend of making these medical tests cheaper and easier to obtain is going to result in a lot of positive change. Certainly for individuals and hopefully the anonymized data helps get the spotlight on larger trends.
If you have ever visited the ruins of Pompeii, you might have seen all the lead pipes that provided water to the city. I wonder how that affected the health of the citizens back then.
My understanding is that the high calcium content in their water supply formed a lining on the inside of the pipes which largely prevented any exposure.
Yeah, the water problems in Flint weren't the pipes directly, but that the water had changed so the lead was no longer protected from getting in the water.
They doubled down on the exposure by adding lead to wine though.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6750289/#:~:text=The%20custo...
Less than the volcano.
Given almost anything can do something bad to you I've got a rule of thumb not to worry much about things unless they can quantify how many years they take off your life. There are still quite a lot of those around - smoking, air pollution and obesity being some of the top ones that can do >10 years. I'm not to bad on smoking and air pollution but could lose a pound or two. I figure central London has dropped from a couple of years off to maybe a couple of months over the time I've been around here.
One of those things where it’s important to make a concerted effort to limit risk.
…but then also to stop worrying after reasonable steps were taken because it’s an endless rabbit hole
When I was a baby we lived virtually directly under the Sydney Harvour Bridge, I got lead poisoning as a result of runoff from the bridge. The combination of leaded petrol and leaded paint runoff poisoned the soil in playgrounds and the area more generally.
My case and probably those of others lead to a huge cleanup of the bridge.
My life has been absolutetly plagued with chronic health and "developmental" problems. Neurodivergence and other conditions litter my family tree, but they seem to effect me much more severely than they do most of my relatives.
I often find myself wondering these days if my life would have featured significantly less hardship were it not for the lead poisoning.
"This will be a big business" No. It shouldn't be a "business", it should be laws that are enforced fast, education, public shaming of companies putting poison in their products. Volatile Organic compounds in paint were known to be poisonous since 17th century (see Bernardino Ramazzini's works). Just listen to the goddamn scientists for once. You can't solve a problem caused by capitalism corner cutting with more capitalism.
This reminds me a bit of a private group that did a big study (I thought in SFBA) looking at the amount of microplastics in different stuff, for example delivered food. Just thinking about it because of the startup he mentioned and I was wondering if it was them, but can’t find the article now. I know it was discussed at length here.
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42525633
I was just going to ask if this was it...
https://www.plasticlist.org/
...and then I saw your link. I'll leave this comment here for the convenience of others.
>Is the furniture I sit in every day made with harmful substances?
If I made you a chair out of wood and finished it with pure linseed oil, do you promise not to complain that it needs repainting regularly? If I make you a cushion out of horse hair and canvas, do you promise not to complain that it is uncomfortable and not flame retardant? Will you be ok that you can't wipe off stains like you could with your old one?
The convenience of modern materials is what drives this, as much as the profit motive
i live in Europe and the public discourse around this is always very high and i don't think we have 1/10 of the problems in the article, but maybe I'm lulu
I live in EU, and oh boy you are wrong. Same crap on the shelves, same crap on marketplaces, same supplements brands, etc etc (I live in Portugal).
I'm no nutritional expert but from what I understand: If you look at traditional food people ate very different around the world but by some miracle all of those traditional diets cover all angles of nutrition. It seems to suggest that in the long run only cultures who eat a complete diet survive. You can of course survive for a really long time with all kinds of deficiencies but apparently time will catch up. How this happens I don't know but it isn't actually important. The point I wanted to make is that poison isn't even required. Unless you have experimental success after perhaps thousands of years of trial and error we would have to actively monitor and adjust everything with an iron fist. Specially this idea that anything goes unless harm is proven needs to go. There is an enormous amount of low hanging fruit but to do the entire job entirely will be a humongous undertaking.
>Only a business with this as its core competency is capable of the breadth and depth required for this Herculean task.
It doesn't have to be a business, and it absolutely should not be. Preventing poisoning of people, animals, and the environment is something capitalism has proven utterly incapable of, and in fact (literally) violently opposed to.
This is the kind of thing that needs to be done at the government level. The goal is societal benefit, not profit.
> All the exhaust fumes pooled and hung in the air there. And these were the 1970s: literally all the gasoline was leaded.1 This was lead poisoning. Over the years, the children were getting brain damage.
And if you live in a city today it's only marginally better. Remember that everyone selfishly driving their car is choosing to poison you rather than dealing with public transport. They give you lung cancer from their exhaust and microplastics in the brain from their tires. And if that wasn't enough, year after year the cars get bigger and survivability for pedestrians in an accent, especially children becomes less likely the larger the car.
The inconvenient truth is that car drivers are horrible humans causing harm to their direct environment they themselves have to life in but we as a society deem that totally a-ok. And the Road accidents every year? Necessary and unavoidable of course. But then the same people argue about gun control. The double-think is astounding.
The prisoner isn't a horrible human because he solves his dilemma by defecting.
Disagreed.
For me, I make a conscious attempt not to use a car unless it's actually warranted. I often go weeks without driving at all. Many people have the opposite approach: they take every possible opportunity to drive.
No, I'm fairly sure he is, and this is an important question for societies to inculcate in people.
What's worse, damage from lead or damage from constant obsession about lead?
This raises the interesting point of finding a balance between knowing/searching and letting go when it comes to health. Lead is a major one but obession about health can lead to anxiety, stress. I think that finding the major factors that affect health is what matters (sunlight, sleep, walking, cooking with stainless steel, etc.) and letting go of all the minor details. This is an issue that has been close to my heart for years, and my perspective on it has changed over time. Anxiety can be a real problem.
At some point you're bound to reach the point of diminishing returns
Lead is actually dangerous. Arguably the panic from things which are .. much less well evidenced, shall we say, causes people to overlook the real problems.
Damage from lead. The 'obsession' here is that the right level of lead in any product should be ZERO. There should be international pacts, like what was done for gases destroying the ozone layer, to remove lead entirely from products
Damage from lead.