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Comment by m-j-fox | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it somewhat on the sellers who are willing to blind people for a buck? That's not ok even in China.

For a given SKU, Amazon commingles inventory, so who you bought from may not be the company who stocked the FBA shelf with the product. Surely Amazon can trace it back, but I think Amazon lost the "just a marketplace" defense a long time ago as a result.

Is the process of commingling inventory documented? That policy is slightly alarming. What would stop someone from sending boxes full of rocks to the fulfillment center with the sku of an iPad?

When you sell products through Amazon FBA (ship to Amazon, and they sell and ship it with the Prime logo), they give you the option to commingle inventory for most products if they have a UPC on them. They scan the UPC and then credit your account with 1 of the product. Your product is then mixed in with the rest [0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId...

They put some sort of deadly chemical in baby milk to make it more frothy, because that's a sign of more protein... they don't give a shit ("they" being some turbo-capitalists...).

No, "they" are not "turbo-capitalists." "They" are criminals. Or were, in any case. At least some of the executives responsible for that incident were executed.

You say that like there's a difference.

There most certainly is a difference. Have you been to China? These "turbo-capitalists" are all Communist Party connected scumbags that literally would rather see people die and make a yaun than worry about safety.

Parts of China is pure filth. There is no quality control until bad PR surfaces. Then it's all about saving face.

Here in the US, I think we've seen what the rhetoric of false equivalency gets us. Go peddle that somewhere else.

It was a more mundane horror. The melamine acts as a filler but also tests as protein. In the body it causes kidney trouble. In the end, 0.001% of the babies fed the adulterated formula died. (3 out of 300000). That makes being fed the tainted formula roughly as deadly as traveling 500 miles in a car in the United States.

So it wasn't a case of adding deadly poison, it was a case of adding an almost safe ingredient because the manufacturers needed to get their cost down to compete. Amazingly, it appears that melamine was even too expensive and they bought scrap melamine from the manufacturing process which was not pure enough to be used in plastics, beacuase it contained the actual kidney damaging chemical rather than just the precursor.

Lots of detail in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

Speaking as somebody who has chronic kidney disease but is very much not dead (last I checked), I feel compelled to point out that the car analogy omits the vast majority of the people impacted, many of whom will have lifelong battles with cardiovascular health and increased risk of serious illnesses (e.g. gout). Kidney damage is permanent and irreversible. Renal tissue does not regenerate.

Just because only six babies died from acute kidney damage (according to the article you linked, which does not quite agree with your numbers) does not mean that's where the damage ends. Evidently there were 54,000 babies who were impacted severely enough to be hospitalized -- that's 18%, a far cry from 0.001%, and most definitely not an indication that an ingredient is "almost safe". Ignoring 53,997 of them makes your analogy incomplete to the point of being specious.

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