- cross-posted to:
- whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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It’s true. We owe a lot of food standards to companies like Heinz, that would put rotten tomatoes (those not even fit for animal consumption) in their ketchup.
Regulations are written in blood
But I’m an alpha man child and I need to make people bleed to prove it!
To continue with the argument of “the market will self-regulate and people wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again”
Okay but how many people died, how many people are suffering long-term effects, and what’s stopping them from adding a different deadly thing to our food?
wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again
Assuming there is perfect information in the market. In reality there is heavy information asymmetry.
It also assumes free competition while we have every market dominated by a few players buying up everyone else, often with cartel like behavior.
It also assumes it is immediately deadly poison, and doesn’t do something like cause early dementia 25 years later.
It also assumes the masses behave rationally, which they won’t ever.
We’ll just get the cheapest shit with the limited information we are given, unless it is life-or-death, where we will pay any price out of fear.
Also, if you want inspections to make sure there isn’t bird shit in the milk, then you need regulation. Otherwise people are just drinking bird shit and they don’t know.
Also the evidence shows this isn’t really true, anyway.
Market self regulation assumes informed consumers that are smart enough to know what things mean. Also it assumes healthy competition and companies that are competing to make the best product at the chrapest price. It ALSO assumes brand lotalty isn’t a thing, and consumers are judging things purely objectively.
Like, i understand the idea, but in practice there are a ton of caveats.
Market self regulation assumes informed consumers that are smart enough to know what things mean
Not just smart enough, but informed enough. That means every person spending literally hundreds/thousands of hours per week researching every single aspect of every purchase they make. Investigating supply chains, performing chemical analysis on their foods and clothing, etc. It’s not even remotely realistic.
So instead, we outsource and consolidate that research and testing, by paying taxes to a central authority who verifies all manufacturers keep things safe so we don’t have to worry about accidentally buying Cheerios that are laced with lead. AKA: The government and regulations.
And also they’re already basically Monopolies. You don’t have real options. Most food products come from like 3 mega corps who own hundreds of brands.
To continue with the argument of “the market will self-regulate and people wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again”
Turns out the parent company owns every other brand of that product, so going to another brand is meaningless
Most US foods produced under their ‘regulations’ are forbidden in EU.
And for good reason.Now it’ll be 10x worse. Just don’t eat here and don’t buy food from USA. I say this as an American. We are fucked.
I will link to the 1858 Bradford sweets poisoning.
One of the weirdest aspects of America is that we think people whose job is making money for shareholders should have more power than the public servants we hire to work for us.
I think thats just a subset of the whole “Government should be run like a business” mindset.
There’s a hardline belief that any business is automatically more efficient than government because if it weren’t it would die from competition, period, end of story. The real equation is that companies are as inefficient as they can afford to be, and the bigger ones can afford plenty. In one of my jobs my manager gave me maybe 2 or 3 weeks of actual work to do in 6 months. In another my team was told to hold off starting a project because there was a change of plan and they didn’t know exactly what they wanted. So we just screwed around for a couple months. I won’t say what company but in both cases it rhymed with Bicrosoft.
Regulations, and safety laws, and labor laws are WRITTEN IN BLOOD. People have literally died for every regulation we have on the books, it’s WHY the laws were written
And lawsuits
I’m all for safety regulations and laws, but I also understand why people are frustrated with them.
People writing the laws or corporate policies are incredibly lazy and just copy paste a bunch of stuff to where it’s not really required imo.
Like workcrews must always have a hardhat on. Then there are landscapers working in a garden pulling weeds even if there are no trees for miles. What’s going to happen? A tornado throws a rake at your head?
That is a great example.
What happens when that crew is called to work next week where there are trees? Without that rule some businesses would skip buying PPE all together and say “screw it, it’s just one day what could happen?” Or they might have PPE that no one takes care of. Someone forgets theirs and no one stops them from working. If you have ever watched an OSHA safety video you know most work place deaths are due to being lazy or stupid.
Most businesses only cares about how much money you make and how much money you cost. That is why we need regulations even when you think they are a pointless waste.
You still need a rule, but just don’t be lazy and have a blanket rule. Instead of always have a hard hat, just say hard hats required if there are any objects on site withing 30 feet that are above 6’ or something.
If a business doesn’t buy hard hats because it only applies some of the time, then fine then when people aren’t wearing hard hats when there are objects within 30 feet of working that’s are higher than 6’.
My business works In one area for 30 minutes every 2 weeks that requires a hard hat. The rest of the time it isn’t required. We still provide the hard hats. But expecting employees to wear them everywhere else is ridiculous.
Your response is exactly why blanket rules are needed. You’re objecting about wearing safety equipment because you don’t feel like you need it. Maybe sometimes you don’t but allowing it to be a choice means that some moron is going to say they never need it. What is worse is that the one moron not being safe puts the rest of the team in danger. I used to work in the Oil and Gas industry and there were so many situations where someone getting injured meant someone else would have to extract them from the dangerous situation which then put the rescue team in danger. Personal choice isn’t cool when you’re then making everyone else’s lives worse.
For 30 minutes every 2 weeks, how often do you inspect your hard hats? Do you know how long they are supposed to be in circulation before being removed? Do they have the appropriate documentation for inspection and replacement? I’m willing to bet that with such a small amount of use none of that is a thing for you and your team. Hard hats wear out due to sun and temperature exposure long before they actually “look worn out”. I’d see all of the guys on the pipelines and wells have hard hats and flame retardant clothes replaced on a regular bases and then we’d have the guys who came in the service the water tanks that were run by a 3rd party contractor who had all old equipment because we were their only client for the type of situation that actually needed PPE.
The more judgement based exceptions you put in the regulations, the less compliance you have, and the more “rules lawyers” on your crew wasting time and energy trying to talk their way around some edge case loophole.
And the more often people will take the lazy option, rather then the safe one.
Also the more exceptions you have to rules, the more confusing it is and the more likely people are going to fuck it up.
“Always wear a hardhat on site” - easy. simple. minimal room for interpretation.
“Always wear a hardhat on site when any of the following conditions are true: [a, b, c, d] unless [e, f]” is going to lead to errors, and then people will get hurt.
People aren’t that smart. Especially when they’re not motivated, or distracted.
Then there are landscapers working in a garden pulling weeds even if there are no trees for miles. What’s going to happen?
As someone who used to be an operations manager for several work-crews, I fully understand why you would just make a fucking blanket-rule. Because the more people you put on a work crew, the more obvious and stupid risks they will take. It was a daily struggle to get people to wear glove and eye protection using hammers, and the times that I didn’t enforce it as a “do it or get sent home” rule, can you guess what happened?
No really, we were on first-name basis with people at the urgent-care center my company worked out a deal with.
Sure the day that they’re raking the yard there’s no chance of someone suffering a head-injury. Until one of them is loading the wheelbarrow back on the truck and didn’t bother lowering the lift-gate because they chose to load their buckets and tools first and didn’t want shit to fall out of the back of the truck, then the goddamn wheelbarrow falls and lands on Martinez’s head and now he needs stitches and X-rays and is off the team for a week and we have another worker’s comp claim and everyone’s paycheck suffers for it.
We wouldn’t need PPE rules and a thousand other safety regulations if people were always smart, alert and watching for hazards. They’re not. They’re incredibly dumb. Everyone is. So we need blanket-rules.
And you just know the second someone got hurt they’d turn around and sue you because you didn’t tell them not to do that. Even people who know better will cut corners “Ehhhh, I don’t need to find my safety glasses. I’m just grinding this part for a second…”
Then there are the situations where you think “Why the hell do I need a hard hat? I’m jut walking around with a clip board.” That is the day Steve loses his hammer off of the roof and it makes a 1 in a million bounce directly onto your skull and now you are in the hospital getting a hematoma drained off of your brain.
100%, all of that.
I once owned and raised exotic reptiles, I remember being told “Take precautions in your terrariums, if there’s a way they can harm themselves, no matter how remote, they WILL find a way to maim or kill themselves with anything you put in there.”
I realized over time that this rule applies to all of us.
I am just astonished the concept of blanket safety rules is getting pushback on the same website where people routinely show gifs and clips of people suffering freak accidents at worksites.
They also need to be reviewed on a regular basis. If the reason for the regulation is gone it should be dropped. I think every law and regulation should have a nonbinding statement describing the motivation behind it.
I would agree with this. Regulations need to keep up with the times. I’ve often challenged my libertarian/“small” government friends to point out which regulation they want to see removed. Book, chapter, and verse; bonus if they can elaborate on why the context under which it was approved no longer applies. Perhaps I do agree that a regulation needs to be updated or removed. None ever take me up on it. I just let them know that “because I want to” is not a valid starting point for deregulation.
Like the joke goes, Libertarians are like house cats. Completely dependent on a system they neither understand nor appreciate and fiercely confident of their own independence.
Surely you could’ve come up with a better example.
Chalk is just calcium carbonate. Modern medicine uses calcium carbonate to as a calcium supplement.
We are still adding things to milk. Any milk that’s “calcium fortified” or “extra calcium”, and a lot of nut-milks, have calcium carbonate as an ingredient to this day.
I mean, I get your point…honestly, I do…but it’s coming across nearly as the same sort of anti-science drivel you’d expect from the counterargument.
It’s not the chalk that’s the problem.
It’s using it to disguise the fact that the milk you’re selling is spoiled.
In big cities like New York, some dairies fed cows leftover grain mush from distilleries, called swill. The cows were sick, the milk was watery and bluish, and to make it look normal, some sellers added stuff like chalk, flour, even plaster. It wasn’t about hiding spoiled milk like you suggest - it was about making terrible milk from unhealthy cows seem drinkable.
Bro. Jesus fucking christ.
It wasn’t about hiding spoiled milk like you suggest - it was about making terrible milk from unhealthy cows seem drinkable.
That’s literally the same thing. Did you just learn what a thesaurus is?
Except it’s not the same thing. Spoiled refers to milk that has gone bad due to age or improper storage. That’s not what the swill milk scandal was about. It was milk that was bad to begin with - not spoiled, just poor quality because it came from sick animals.
Yeah. I get that…but the way it was phrased by OOP it was as of “chalk” was used by an example as if that makes it somehow worse. We still put “chalk” in milk, though.
Better example is like those people who say “eww” to hotdogs because there’s a regulation limiting how many bug parts are allowed in them…not even considering the alternative of “no limit on how many bug parts”.
Or my wife, who refuses to eat a cherry tomato if it fell on the ground.
Industrial chalk that was used as adulterants wasn’t nearly as pure as the calcium carbonate you are imagining
Plus I can’t imagine that a company who is adulterating their milk with chalk dust is going to stop to find and choose a food-safe chalk dust and supplier. They’d just scoop a bunch from whoever’s cheapest, and if they adulterate their chalk dust with bleach or something, that’ll be going straight into the milk.
we’ve become complacent for so long due to good regulations keeping us safe invisibly, that your average voter seems to think we never needed them to begin with.
The ignorance is staggering and dangerous
Yeah the good times making weak people has gone full swing and people don’t realize how bad it could be.
Weak people who have never been tested with an actual bad time in their life. Just upset if they had even a little restriction.
In your examples you know those things are being added to the milk because it’s in the ingredients, the case OP mentioned you didn’t know. Are you able to see the difference?
And there were many other things added to food besides chalk
Exactly. There are better examples. Chalk is a bad one because it is, technically, edible, and still being used as an additive to this day.
Chalk in OP’s example was being added without people’s knowledge, it doesn’t matter how inoffensive it is. How hard is it to grasp?
Because people are dumb. Chalk is in milk, now, right on the label…even marketed as a feature. I’ve got two bottles of alt-milk in my fridge now, store-brand Almondmilk and Planet Oat. Both list chalk as the second ingredient.
But if you tell that to any random schmuck they either won’t believe you or they’ll be disgusted. And then probably keep drinking it anyway.
And that’s with the information right there on the label.
I’m not trying to downplay the example, but there were far worse atrocities fixed by regulations.
You seem to be going in circles and ignoring my comments.
Ditto.
Republicans: But we are the ones selling the spoiled milk.
And if we’re all killed, who will the big companies get money from?
Corporations wont let us have Medicare for All - why? Why do they ALL lobby so hard against it? It would make their costs cheaper, right? They wouldn’t have to pay for our health insurance. Plus we could get medicines so we can be at work more instead of home sick or spreading sickness at work. So it must not be cheaper in some way for them to have Medicare for All - right? Why do they think it would be more expensive for THEM if we all had public health care?
Because that would detect cancer (and toxins) and allow us to class action sue companies for them. Can’t sue if it was never detected. Thats why they find carcinogens and lead in kids’ products so much - their products dont have more lead in them, but kids all can be on Medicaid and that catches it. Flint, MI, water poisoning was detected by a kid on Medicaid.
They don’t want us to all have healthcare because that is public science and it will absolutely detect what theyve been lying and poisoning us with. It would probably destroy all the big companies like Nestle, Johnson&Johnson, Colgate, etc…
They will market safe food as a new product and charge you more for food that wont kill you.
Speaking of Americans, at least half of us are criminally uneducated and watch literally nothing but Fox News. You can’t teach them even with indisputable proof. If the talking heads say it’s bad, then it’s bad.
Framing one half of the population as beyond saving or inherently evil is not just lazy - it’s historically dangerous. It reduces millions of individuals into a caricature and gives people permission to treat them with contempt, as if that’s somehow virtuous. That kind of thinking has been used to justify some of the worst things we’ve done to each other as humans.
When you actually talk to people outside your bubble, you quickly realize that most of us want the same basic things - stability, safety, meaning, a fair shot in life. We just have different beliefs about how to get there. Writing off entire groups as irredeemable only erodes any future possibility of understanding or change.
I agree with you. No one is beyond saving, education, or help. Some people seem irredeemable, and they may decide to act that way, but the option is always there. This idea is the core, it’s fundamental to my moral code my beliefs, my ethics. Everyone can learn and grow, and it takes serious damage to remove that capability.
However, we’re dealing with people who are denying our right to exist and don’t engage in good faith. Until they can take those basic steps affirming the social contract, I see no reason debate with such people needs to take place with words.
However, we’re dealing with people who are denying our right to exist and don’t engage in good faith. Until they can take those basic steps affirming the social contract, I see no reason debate with such people needs to take place with words.
What you’re talking about here is certain individuals - and I take no issue with that. There absolutely are people who are too far gone and probably can’t be pulled back. But those aren’t the people I’ve been referring to.
My issue is with lumping tens of millions of people into the same group based solely on their political leaning and then speaking about them as if they all share the same beliefs. That’s virtually never true, no matter what group we’re talking about. The differences within a group are often greater than the differences between groups. In other words, there’s more variation between individual Republicans than there is between the average Republican and the average Democrat. My point is: they’re not all the same, and they shouldn’t be treated as such.
For fucks sake, this whole “let’s all hold hands and sing Kumbaya” response is pure garbage. They’re trying to pull that “oh, it’s just different opinions” crap, but that’s a load of bullshit. We’re not talking about whether pineapple belongs on pizza here. We’re talking about a movement built on lies, hate, and actively trying to undo hundreds of years of suffrage and civil rights movements that allow you to have free speach.
This ain’t about “different beliefs on how to get there.” Half these people are living in a fantasy world where facts don’t matter and anyone who doesn’t look or think like them is the enemy. You can’t “understand” someone who thinks immigrants are poisoning the blood of America or that the last election was stolen with zero proof. That’s not a “belief”; that’s a dangerous delusion.
And this whole “tolerance” nonsense? Please. You don’t tolerate people who want to strip away your rights or incite violence against your neighbors. That’s not virtuous; that’s being a damn doormat. Some ideas are just plain wrong, and some people are so far gone on the Fox News Kool-Aid that they’re beyond reason. Pretending otherwise is just enabling the madness.
The Paradox of Tolerance is akin to an invading force telling the insurgence that no one else has to die as long as they comply.
For fuck’s sake, this whole “we need to live peacefully with our neighbors” rhetoric is pure garbage. They’re trying to pull that “oh, we just need to coexist” crap, but that’s a load of bullshit. We’re not talking about disagreements over taxes here. We’re talking about a group built on lies and corruption, poisoning the roots of our nation and threatening everything we’ve worked for.
This isn’t about “different ideas on how to build a society.” These people live in a fantasy world, manipulating the media, the economy, and the schools. They don’t care about our culture, our history, or our future. You can’t “understand” someone who undermines the moral fabric of the country and destroys our unity from the inside. That’s not a belief - it’s a threat.
And this whole “tolerance” nonsense? Please. You don’t tolerate a parasite. That’s not virtuous - that’s weak. Some ideas are poison. Some people are too far gone. Pretending otherwise just enables the collapse.
Sound familiar?
Because it should.
You literally contradicted the entirety of your last response. But good job. 👍
The thing is, when you speak to red hats on an individual level, the person you commented said they want the same basic safety and quality of life we do. I agree, this is true.
Where it strays is folks in power have preyed on the ignorance of the most blue collar, “School is for yuppies” “never lived anywhere but the boonies/sticks” kind of people.
The propaganda worked on them. They were targeted by this regime for decades, and it’s finally manifested.
Of course I speak on a macro level, because on a micro level I’ve cut out every racist/bigot in my life. Propaganda is a hell of a drug, and not everyone finds value in education which helps you spot it. Its a mess for sure
That’s the point if “The Paradox of Tolerance”. I talk to these people on a daily basis. On the surface level, they are decent human beings. Until such a topic is touched on.but when they truly feel comfortable, is when they start spewing hate. That’s when I stop sympathizing.
Every person deserves a right to speak, but when that speech encroaches on another’s right to existence, is where I draw the line.
A truly free society maximizes relative freedom for as many as possible, not absolute freedom for some at the cost of freedom of others.
And yes, this is exactly the line drawn by the paradox of tolerance.
The difference between left and right wing, non - economically, is still about distribution of power. But not only monetary power, but also the power granted by the positive and negative freedoms we have in a social system. Only that in our societies, freedom and wealth are heavily entangled, and increasingly so.
I simply took your message and swapped out Republicans to Jews just to highlight the eerie similarities in tone and logic. I hoped this would be obvious and wouldn’t need explaining. I guess I was wrong.
you telling me conservatives and corporate sociopaths are an ethnicity? you telling me the world wouldn’t be a better place without them? are you seriously so fucking stupid that you think we can compromise with christian nationalists?
purge now, purge yesterday, purge forever. or humanity dies.
Corporations wont let us have Medicare for All - why? Why do they ALL lobby so hard against it? It would make their costs cheaper, right? They wouldn’t have to pay for our health insurance. Plus we could get medicines so we can be at work more instead of home sick or spreading sickness at work. So it must not be cheaper in some way for them to have Medicare for All - right? Why do they think it would be more expensive for THEM if we all had public health care?
Because that would detect cancer (and toxins) and allow us to class action sue companies for them. Can’t sue if it was never detected. Thats why they find carcinogens and lead in kids’ products so much - their products dont have more lead in them, but kids all can be on Medicaid and that catches it. Flint, MI, water poisoning was detected by a kid on Medicaid.
They don’t want us to all have healthcare because that is public science and it will absolutely detect what theyve been lying and poisoning us with. It would probably destroy all the big companies like Nestle, Johnson&Johnson, Colgate, etc…
Public healthcare also removes one of the few leashes they have on workers to keep them in line. My Father in law used to work at a local retail chain in my area, and the pay was straight dogshit, but the health insurance was phenomenal. It kept many workers from leaving for better paying jobs.
Rivers full of industrial waste used to catch on fire, bosses used to lock workers in and let them die in fires(triangle shirtwaist fire),school was only for the wealthy, kids used to work, companies used to poison people en masse and deny it with no consequences(radium girls) work was 12 hours a day 7 days a week(people literally died to change this and trump people voted for this to happen again
We didn’t regulate the housing market after 2008 cause the people with money were already getting in the driver seat and wouldn’t have it.
I’ll never forget this one guy I know complaining about government regulations. Hes unemployed.
