Hacker News Reader

Comment by exp1orer | Hacker News Reader

So this suggests that the samples submitted to the FDA for testing were not representative of ordinary food.

This reminds me of the ongoing Tetra Tech/Hunter's Point scandal [1], where the US Navy paid $300M to a contractor to clean up a development site. The contractor was required to submit samples from the site to prove they had cleaned it up. Instead, they just pulled soil from known clean places and submitted for testing.

How much of the ongoing monitoring activity that our government does relies on good faith from companies? Is this the tip of the iceberg, or do the fact that these cases get caught prove that the meta-monitoring is working well?

How can we improve this state of affairs?

[1] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/1/26/16916742/hunters-point-shipy...

View on HN

I helped get a device through part15 testing during an internship and was shocked to find that you don’t need the same firmware (like at all. You can run totally different oses and everything, they don’t have to share a single line of code.) As long as you say “this is pretty much the same as what we’re shipping to users” you’re fine. They don’t really have anyway to double check it and to be honest I wouldn’t be totally surprised if a lot of devices used different power levels and generally behaved differently in the field just by mistake.

After doing that, when ever I hear about things being “tested” to standards from some arm of a government I instinctively think of that. I don’t know how you could practically improve on it either.

Random sample testing after the product ships with large fines for violators.

Jail time for CEOs and board members of violators.

Huawei does this with their phones during rf emissions testing don't they? And the same is said about cars during crash tests.

I know Huawei did exactly this when their phone network equipment was being tested for approval and adoption by mobile phone networks.

> cars during crash tests

The IIHS at least buys its cars from dealers like any consumer would, rather than getting them direct from manufacturers, to prevent them from sending specially modified cars for testing.

Depending on what rules apply to your particular transmitter and if you're not just doing FCC but also testing for other countries' standards, sometimes you cannot run the production software in order to actually test the radio as required.

Granted, you're right, it's the honor system that what ships to customers works like the test subject did, but it's not always entirely due to malice.

Oh no, I wasn't saying it's malicious, just that many government tests work on good faith when you wouldn't necessarily expect it.

Most of the world runs of on good faith and best intentions, without it everything would break down. This goes for taxes, healthcare, insurance, checks, postal mail, traffic code, currency, etc.

This also holds for an alarming number of electronic systems such as the phone network, and many ISP network configurations. While it's tempting to say no trust should be required, that's very expensive, like bitcoin.

For system to be cost effective, trust is necessary. Requiring self-control is cheap and often effective, because people want to abide by the law. Requiring submission of soil samples is rather expensive, and fairly strong control, because cheating is a very deliberate act.

We probably have to ask, how can we improve the trust? Higher morals and more transparency could be one answer.

I feel like that is an unreasonable generalization.

It's not remotely hard at all for the FDA to buy products off the shelf and test them for glyphosate. They need not and should not trust samples obtained any other way.

That seems reasonable to me. Real world test.

Fair point, it does put some management on to the FDA, but that seems reasonable.. and cost seem small.

Still the FDA can't test all shops, and there is a risk they just test the same shipment. Trusting samples from companies is easy, and fake those samples is a very deliberate crime. It's easy to fake currency, that doesn't mean people do it.

I don't think "higher morals" is a realistic solution within our current market economy - these are multi-billion dollar corporations which operate on a separate set of motivations from any of their employees.

I also don't think our only alternatives are "trust these companies to self-monitor", or blockchain.

I'm thinking about 2 kinds of solutions: 1) technical solutions which would improve the current chain-of-custody tracking (this could involve blockchain, but it doesn't have to). 2) policy solutions which might involve something like "less frequent, but more rigorous testing, with stronger penalties".

And I'm confused by your statement "Requiring submission of soil samples is rather expensive, and fairly strong control, because cheating is a very deliberate act." - but what these instances prove is that corporations will cheat anyway.

Okay, I guess my point was to say control without trust is expensive. Some level of trust in companies and institutions is necessary. And when balancing this we should consider cost.

You made the statement in the context of the currently discussed article, where not trusting the companies and obtaining samples from supermarkets would have been at least as easy and cheap. That makes it a bit hard to understand what your point is, we have a concrete example, there is no need to theorize about other scenarios. What you came up with has little or no connection to the item being discussed.

Trust is a scale issue. Beyond a certain scale, beyond a certain degree of abstraction, it just doesn't exist anymore. Everything DOES break down, and has been doing so since the Roman Empire broke down, and even before that into prehistory.

If we like to retain what structures and expectations we have, the one thing we can't expect is to trust the largest and most unaccountable aggregations of power. At this point, those largest powers aren't governments, certainly not the FDA.

The usual solution to self reporting systems is audits. The entire tax system works this way. It won't catch everything, but does manage to put some teeth in the process and can catch systematic cheating.

In this case, occasional random (and where warranted, targeted) sampling and testing by the agency would detect whether provided samples are routinely doctored.

Audits and fines. i.e. If you cheat and you get caught cheating, you get a punishment much larger than the cost of following the rules in the first place.

> this suggests ...

Not quite. It suggests that it’s possible that regular food has glyphosate residue. But samples “brought from home” may have been contaminated elsewhere. This is why we depend on rigorous controlled tests.

It’s also possible that the “official tests” were rigged, and suspiscions about that led the testers to go rogue, and that glyphosate really IS in our food in larger concentrations than we are led to believe. That seems more plausible.

> Not quite. It suggests that it’s possible that regular food has glyphosate residue. But samples “brought from home” may have been contaminated elsewhere

It doesn't matter to the consumer where in the supply chain the food got glyphosate on it. If it has residue by the time I get home, I don't want to eat it.

Yes, but it rather matters in terms of how to keep it out.

It matters when you want to discuss blame and solutions.

Yes. but the first step is to acknowledge it. That is the point the parent is talking about..

> It doesn't matter to the consumer where in the supply chain the food got glyphosate on it.

It does if the food got it, not from anywhere in the food supply chain, but from the home's own supply of Roundup, which has found its way in small quantities into all kinds of places.

> samples “brought from home” may have been contaminated elsewhere.

Or they may have been contaminated at home, if the home has Roundup somewhere around.

> Tetra Tech/Hunter's Point scandal

Every time I read about that place a little scene plays in my head.

Sergeant Carter: Gomer Pyle! Come here!

Gomer Pyle: Yes Sarge!

Sergeant Carter: This bucket of luminous watch dial paint has gone bad. Take it to the hazardous materials station.

Gomer Pyle: But that's all the way across the base. And you took my motor pool privileges away.

Sergeant Carter: Just do it Pyle!

...

5 minutes later ... Gomer dumps a bucket of black sludge into a hole in the base commanders flower garden. And tosses the bucket in the trash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com