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Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

As a recovering marketer I take no offense to that statement. I started my exit from the field when I was working with a PR firm that was running a "behavior modification" campaign. Psyops presumably has regulations and oversight; marketing has nothing of the sort. Want to convince a billion people to drink an addictive chemical known to cause colon cancer? Classic.

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Was that a hypothetical..? If not, are you at liberty to share which chemical?

I'm thinking high-fructose corn syrup or brominated vegetable oil.

I was referring to Coca-cola, consistently among the top advertisers in the world. Often things that are so large and commonplace, its difficult for us to see them as anything but 'normal'.

That's what I figured from the "Classic." bit, but I didn't want to spoil it for everybody else. :)

I thought to myself "that's a bit much, like advertising could trick me into drinking a dangerous beverage" then read your follow-up comment and realized I'm holding a coke in my other hand.

Insidious, isn't it? It's moments like this that I wish to all the devils ever worshiped by man that the left had jumped on the "red pill" metaphor from The Matrix instead of leaving it for misogynists and reactionaries to appropriate.

Because until the Wachowski sisters brought in the "Neo is the One" plotline with the attendant messianic tropes, the relationship between Morpheus and Thomas Anderson/Neo was one of a union organizer showing a worker blinded by false consciousness exactly how he allowed himself to be conned by his bosses.

Are you referring to alcohol or something else?

Check out the ingredients on your favorite soft drink. There's probably all sorts of stuff listed that has been shown to cause cancer in rats.

What about in humans at normal doses?

We're running a half-assed trial on the general public right now, only without a defined "normal dose", control group, compensation, or informed consent.

It’s odd how that goes. We are never going to subject as many monkeys to coke as people drinking the stuff. So we need to compromise, but rats are not a great model resulting in some false positives. However, presumably some false negatives exist that are silently killing hundreds of thousands of people.

I would like to think that any scientist who dared propose giving to monkeys the equivalent by body mass of the amount of Coca-Cola many humans consume per day would get publicly crucified by an ethics board.

Oranges, Mangos, Black Pepper, and lots of other natural things cause cancer in rats

I don't know about you, but I find it easier to consume massive quantities of Coca-Cola than I do black pepper.

Oranges and mangoes, on the other hand...

I've never been able to eat an entire orange or an entire mango. But drinking an entire two-liter bottle of Coke over the course of a couple of hours while coding or writing?

That's easy. That's why I'm fat.

Drinking the same amount of OJ will also make you fat. If OJ is too tart choose another type of orange like mandarin oranges. They're just as cancerous to rats and you can drink them like fruit punch as they are not tart.

The point is "gives rats cancer" bascially has no meaning. As another example chocolate is poison to dogs. Does that mean humans shouldn't eat chocolate foods or drink chocolate drinks?

Humans also eat plently of things that are toxic. Most spicy peppers are toxic if eaten in the quantities needed to induce by other substances in rats. So is vinegar, wine, cheese, pickles, ...

Ever heard of that super toxic dihydrogen oxide. About 360,000 people die every year from it, some with as little 120grams (1/2 a cup)

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