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Comment by kartan | Hacker News Reader

> I remain stunned at the things that are heavily regulated in America vs not.

Yes. This looks like a clear example where a regulation in place, and enforced, can save lives.

> "The inaction by the FDA not only puts many patients at serious risk from unproven stem cell offerings, but also it undermines the agency's credibility," Knoepfler wrote in an email.

This is part of the goal, I guess. To cripple regulatory agencies and then close them because they aren't effective is a widely used tactic.

I hope there is a bright future for stem cell medicine, but regulations should be included in that future so it serves citizens and not just for-profit organisations.

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> but regulations should be included in that future so it serves citizens

Regulations rarely serve citizens. They usually serve special interest groups.

Citation needed. I can think of quite a few food, consumer, financial, medical, and environmental regulations that directly serve me and my fellow citizens.

I don't consider my desire to live in a pollution-free environment to be a "special interest".

You really don't seem to remember or have been alive before a lot of these regulations were put into effect. Ever look at a food nutrition label? That one was fought tooth and nail.

Still being fought. Trans fats can be listed as 0g as long as it's <=0.5g. Sugar still has no % DV. Many other things the industry fights against.

> Sugar still has no % DV.

Because medically, that's a complicated question.

The 25-40mg/day number that's often cited is for added sugar, not inclusive of all sugar in food. That's something that's a little trickier to evaluate for processed food[0], and it varies a lot more between people than other substances for which a recommended daily value is listed.

[0] For example, fruit juice can have no sugar added, but still contain what are likely unhealthy levels of sugar depending on the serving size

> Because medically, that's a complicated question.

That fine, but with all the misdirection around sat/trans fats, and the current global obesity epidemic, I find it hard to believe the industry is solely concerned about reducing consumer confusion (IIRC, that's their stated reasoning) around a % DV for sugar.

That is, we need some kind of yard stick for sugar, because what we have now is not sufficient for the problems our society has. It may not be % DV, but off the top of my head, say relative sugar ratio to other food products in the same category. But that can be gamed as well since there're only a handful of independent companies in the industry.

> It may not be % DV, but off the top of my head, say relative sugar ratio to other food products in the same category. But that can be gamed as well since there're only a handful of independent companies in the industry.

Right now, there isn't sufficient medical consensus to require labeling. A metric that is trivial to game can be far worse than not having one at all, as is picking a metric that ultimately turns out to be incorrect and counterproductive.

We know that, broadly, "too much added sugar isn't good". But we don't know exactly how much, or what the tradeoffs are with "replacing" added sugar with natural sugar (by substituting foods in diets), or with replacing added sugar with various sugar substitutes, or even if there is a meaningful difference between the different kinds of sugar (sucrose, glucose, fructose, etc.). There are speculations with some evidence to suggest reasonable hypotheses, but prematurely acting on those hypotheses has very far-reaching consequences.

I'm always gobsmacked when anyone fights against labeling requirements. If you don't want people knowing what's in your stuff, should you really be selling it to them?

It's been really interesting to watch the fight over GMO labeling. A lot of people who I'd normally consider to be on "my side" in this (pro-GMO) are strongly against labeling requirements.

Granted, GMO labeling requirements are essentially a "give an inch" scenario. Since there is no logical reason why GMO would be the deciding factor between safe and unsafe versions of a plant (especially since the resulting plant is tested in the same way as common produce), it really seems asinine to require the labeling. Requiring GMO labeling legitimizes hooplah; and opens the door to labeling requirements for almost any dumb, irrelevant characteristic of the product. This also introduces tonnes of new requirements up and down the supply chain, it's not just about labeling at that point, because now you have to be able to prove that you don't need the label.

Then there's the problem of the commercial code. If you say it's GMO, so that you don't get sued by GMO paranoids, then you could be sued by sane people for selling goods of a different description than the one on the label (by just saying it's GMO to be safe).

if it is GMO, is it not reasonable to assume it is likely to have more herbicide/pesticide particles?

I don't think that assumption can be made, no. My understanding is that the purpose is generally not to be able to put more pesticide on the crop, but for the crop to react less to the amount of pesticide necessary to provide the desired environment for the plant; and this is only in the case of pesticide-resistance modifications. There are, for example, GMO rice strains which are intended to increase yield in pesticide-free crops, and in cooler climates than typically desired for rice.

Regarding herbicide: "By 2016 there was a 100-fold increase from the late 1970s in the frequency of applications and volumes of glyphosate-based herbicides (GBHs) applied, partly in response to the unprecedented global emergence and spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds.[5]:1"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate

But i was mistaken on pesticides, the GM for plants to create Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria leads to a reduction in the requirement of pesticide.

EDIT: but this is not about what two HN commenters believe to be right or wrong, it's about the ability for consumers to discern for themselves what is right or wrong.

I agree with your closing point, but I think there's a distinction to be drawn between labeling for pesticide/herbicide residue rates, and labeling for GMO. There's nothing about GMO that requires the use of pesticide, and some GMOs are intended to eliminate the need for pesticide application. If they change the microbiome or gross chemical composition of the plant, then that's a different matter altogether.

So why these "special interest groups" do everything they can to avoid regulations laws being passed?

"If all men were angels, no government would be necessary." -James Madison

Hence effective, nuanced regulation is absolutely vital and libertarianism is an illusionary utopia like communism, with sensible and practical being somewhere in the middle.

Libertarianism comes from the left, first used by an anarcho-communist. Between libertarianism and communism there's nothing....

Yes, I know what you mean, but this is a pet peeve of mine. Right-wing libertarianism differ from left-wing libertarianism in the view on property in particular.

But neither see regulation as always unacceptable, but "just" want government actions to maximize liberty. This can lead to very different outcomes depending on how you think.

E.g. food safety regulations will restrict the liberty of both seller and buyer. But at the same time if properly done they protect the buyer against potentially far worse damage to liberty - ultimately potentially costing the buyers life. The seller on the other hand at worst suffers a loss of revenue.

There are further few cases where the buyer would knowingly and willingly buy unsafe food without intending to put others at the risk of harm. As such the ultimate consumer's liberty is likely to be at greater risk than the sellers liberty in the absence of regulation.

Weighing the relative impact on liberty, some degree of food safety rules would seem to be the lesser evil. I'm not saying that's the only alternative or right intrpretation, but that libertarianism in general is more complicated than just stripping all rules.

Stripping the wrong regulation can have a greater negative than positive impact on liberty

Maybe instead of trying to write specific regulations for every little thing, we should just equalize this imbalance of damage.

If a seller's misbehavior causes a buyer's death, then consider that as murder. If it's premeditated, execute the people responsible.

OK, I don't really think this would be a good idea, but I do think it's worth at least thinking about how that would look and why we don't do it. Why is it that the alternative to regulation must always be "caveat emptor"? If a company deliberately sells a faulty product that kills a customer, they should be treated just like a common criminal who breaks into someone's house and shoots them. From this perspective, regulations are as much about protecting the sellers as it is about protecting the buyers.

When the seller knows that will be the result, that basically is what happens.

The problem is that most accidents are accidents. You can't deter someone from causing something they don't expect to happen.

And if they aren't deterred then they have to pay for the damages, but it's easy to cause more damage than you have money to pay for it. So we end up on a quest to solve that problem without destroying individuals and small businesses (which would be destroyed immediately by e.g. a large bonding requirement).

Do you have an example of someone being executed because they intentionally sold a faulty product?

We have laws against negligence as well. You absolutely can deter people from accidentally getting people killed to some extent, or at least our laws seem to think we can.

Someone guilty of involuntary manslaughter can't pay back the damage they've done, but we still punish them under the theory that this encourages people to take some care when other people's lives might be at risk.

If making sellers responsible for accidental death and injury would destroy individuals and small businesses, this just reinforces my point that regulations protect sellers as much as buyers.

> Do you have an example of someone being executed because they intentionally sold a faulty product?

If a pharmacist decides she really hates Bob and is going to swap his medicine for poison, she goes down for murder. That obviously doesn't happen very often because the penalty for murder is high and serves as a very effective deterrent to intentional killings like that.

> We have laws against negligence as well. You absolutely can deter people from accidentally getting people killed to some extent, or at least our laws seem to think we can.

It's not that you can't deter some of them, it's that you can't deter enough of them, because they aren't doing it on purpose.

> If making sellers responsible for accidental death and injury would destroy individuals and small businesses, this just reinforces my point that regulations protect sellers as much as buyers.

The problem is regulations often do the same thing. Many regulatory compliance costs are fixed -- they cost the same million dollars whether you have a billion customers or just three.

I'm not talking about an individual action like a pharmacist giving a patient poison instead of medicine. I'm talking about a corporate decision to deliberately give customers an unsafe product because it saves money. Consider the Ford Pinto for a concrete example. Or for a case where it isn't even a buyer/seller relationship, any operator of a coal power plant. They'd easily top the list of worst serial killers of all time if we counted it as murder.

> I'm talking about a corporate decision to deliberately give customers an unsafe product because it saves money. Consider the Ford Pinto for a concrete example.

The problem with those decisions is that you can't get out of them. Killing them isn't your will. It's not the same thing.

Suppose you make cars. You know that 5% of your customers will get into a serious accident, and of that 5%, if you add $1000 to the cost of each car, you can save 1% of them. So $1000/car to save one in 2000 people; two million dollars per person. If you don't do it you know that you sell 60 million cars and so 30,000 people will die. Do you do it? What if it costs $10,000/car? $50,000/car?

At some point you have to say no or a car would cost thirty trillion dollars. And if some company decides that a human life is worth 1.5 million dollars but you later decide that it should be worth 2.1 million dollars, is that really the level of mistake that deserves execution?

All you really have to do is let them know ahead of time how much money it will actually cost them in jury awards, and let the victims sue the coal companies. If you set the value right they'll either figure out how to kill fewer people, or shut down operations.

The analytic scenarios like that have never been the problem because if the company is already doing the math and you don't like the outcome then all you have to do is change the numbers. The problem has always been what to do about businesses that kill people without expecting to.

We wouldn't accept that for an individual. If a pharmacist gets a patient killed because they're deliberately putting a poison into their medicine which they estimate will only kill 0.05% of their patients, they're going to prison.

Half the medicine pharmacists administer is poison that does kill some of their patients. Read the side effects -- liver damage, hypertension, death. They know those outcomes are possible and will happen in some percentage of patients.

There is a difference between giving someone poison for no reason, or purely out of malice, vs. doing it because there is some countervailing advantage that justifies the risk. And sometimes the advantage is just that it costs less than an alternative.

People know that an old Ford Mustang isn't as safe as a new Mercedes S-Class, but it's also less expensive.

That only works if the substance in question is approved for medical use. If it's just some random compound that the FDA has never looked at, they're going to prison.

Thus once again illustrating the advantages of regulation for sellers, not just buyers.

> We have laws against negligence as well. You absolutely can deter people from accidentally getting people killed to some extent, or at least our laws seem to think we can.

And yet tobacco-companies still exist.

> If a company deliberately sells a faulty product that kills a customer, they should be treated just like a common criminal who breaks into someone's house and shoots them

I think they should, if they knew what the consequence would be.

But the problem is not so much the extreme cases as the borderline cases where it is hard to prove intent, and hard to prove the understood the severety of the consequences.

Should I be allowed to advertise my unhealthy products in ways that implies they're good for you? Do it to a large enough audience, and it'll likely kill, but not directly. We know more than enough about human willpower to know that to drag out "free will" in those contexts is meaningless.

Now consider how long it took us to get to a consensus of the danger of tobacco, and how long it took us to start penalising the tobacco industry for their deceit in fighting regulation, and consider how much higher the stakes would be if it was not about regulating them but about locking up their executives.

>Regulations rarely serve citizens. They usually serve special interest groups

3 blind women would disagree.

Your comment is being downvoted to hell, because it utterly deserves to be.

It's not only wrong to the point of being asinine — it's also the precise propaganda concept that is most widely promoted by special interest groups in their campaigns to defeat or roll back regulations that serve citizens.

The same can be said about lack of regulation.

Dude. I mean, I broadly agree, but you can't just throw it out there on an article like this like it'll be productive in any way at all; you've got to actually make a case. Remember that even the regulators who most ostentatiously serve special interest groups usually have some excuse that they're trying to make things safer and better for people at large somehow or another: you should seek to pre-emptively overcome at least the basic entry-level apologetics for them, doubly so in a situation like this.

Things that could make your case:

- bring up the issue of regulatory capture (ideally with an example from the exact relevant bureaucracy) and complain that this is evidence that the bureaucracy is focused on the interest groups instead of on the people it claims to protect, with overreactions after the fact that do not actually serve to provide effective protection (chronically fighting yesterday's battle)

- bring up the actual negative impact of certain regulations on people and demonstrate that they are worse than this particular failure (candidate topics: insanely slow FDA approval of new manufacturing of generic drugs leading to things like the EpiPen episode, "certificate of need" legislation leading to higher prices and reduced availability of medical services in the name of protecting incumbent hospital profits, etc)

- look for other failures where medical regulatory frameworks have demonstrated that they are ineffective ways to protect people

- perhaps opine that these people are going to be ruined now anyway and that a regulatory backlash is totally redundant, thwarting none of the bad guys and burdening good guys

... in short, try a post with, like, actual content sometime, it's more effective :b

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