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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

Factory farm companies have known that anti-biotics, hormones, and pesticides are causing increased rates of cancer and other (cough cough) disorders in the same way big oil knew that it was contributing to/causing global warming.

Every person in the comments across the internet saying the rise in all of these disorders was just about self-reporting have been unknowingly shilling for big food.

Being anti conspiracy and overly trusting of certain (cough cough) fields of science denotes an inability to rationalize.

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> Factory farm companies have known that anti-biotics, hormones, and pesticides are causing increased rates of cancer and other (cough cough) disorders

This may be true in specific cases... But surely isn't true in general.

It's the role of science and government to find out which anti-biotics, which hormones, and which pesticides case increased rates of which cancers.

As soon as there is evidence suggesting a specific pesticide has downsides that outweigh the advantages, it's time for the government to promptly ban it.

So far, I think the main failure in that process is that governments don't put enough money into science to find said evidence. Simply having a tax on biotech of say 1% to pay for independent scientists to do research would easily be enough to give us good evidence of the upsides/downsides of everything widely deployed.

"It's the role of science and government to find out which anti-biotics, which hormones, and which pesticides case increased rates of which cancers."

and until they find the answer these farms should be shut down

> It's the role of science and government to find out which anti-biotics, which hormones, and which pesticides case increased rates of which cancers.

Not necessarily.

One of several roles of government is to overcome coordination problems that would otherwise inhibit the production of public goods, such as new antibiotics and other better treatments for bacterial infections.

Another role of government is to regulate markets by creating incentives in the form of laws and legal regulations. In this case, government could estimate the societal cost of agricultural antibiotic use, and then impose taxes on agricultural antibiotic use equal to the amount of that cost. if those costs turn out to be punitive, then tough shit, they'll need to figure it out. The proceeds from tax is levied could then be redirected to basic research as needed.

Of course, this doesn't tend to work so well in practice due to any number of corruption and regulatory capture channels, so it tends to be easier to just ban harmful practices outright, which of course governments also have the power to do.

> So far, I think the main failure in that process is that governments don't put enough money into science to find said evidence.

Couldn't agree more. The evidence of how ineffective the American scientific regulatory community is all around us.

An easy example is how fast rising yeast impacts gluten intolerance, or how high fructose corn syrup impacts insulin resistance or glucose response. Highly negative correlations here, even from the advent, but the potential revenue has outweighed the desire to protect Americans.

The truth is that American business sees citizens as two ways, suckers for making bad choices (while forcing those same choices down their throat), or simply unlucky. The rich avoid the obviously harmful aspects of America, while accepting the odds on the things they can't avoid.

Personally if I were very wealthy I would spend very little time in the United States.

> It's the role of science and government to find out which anti-biotics, which hormones, and which pesticides case increased rates of which cancers.

Not if you subscribe to the precautionary principle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

"The principle is often used by policy makers in situations where there is the possibility of harm from making a certain decision (e.g. taking a particular course of action) and conclusive evidence is not yet available. For example, a government may decide to limit or restrict the widespread release of a medicine or new technology until it has been thoroughly tested. The principle acknowledges that while the progress of science and technology has often brought great benefit to humanity, it has also contributed to the creation of new threats and risks. It implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to such harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk. These protections should be relaxed only if further scientific findings emerge that provide sound evidence that no harm will result."

But imagine how much revenue we'd be missing out on if every new invention that could shave a few cents off the bottom line had to be researched first?

Just one of many brilliant decisions that the primarily white men who have ran this country throughout history made on behalf of all of us. Without our consent, of course.

Good luck proving your dad's colon cancer was caused by industrial solvents in our water supply. Call your congressman! It's a democracy!

I assume you're being downvoted because of the unnecessary reference to "white men". The sentiment here is spot on, but really, this is one area where race doesn't matter much. There are plenty of white people suffering from this stuff as well. There's definitely some value in looking at this through a critical race theory lens, as with most issues in the USA, but in this case you might say that the CRT model has poor explanatory power.

I think it's more useful to look at this as a class/economic leverage issue, as selfishness and the use of administrative power to extract economic rents seems to be a universal phenomenon. 'White' as a proxy for the racialized dynamics of European colonialism is sometimes a convenient shorthand, but glosses over other important contexts like white being a symbol of monarchy, because the aristocratic class were not required to labor outdoors. This intraracial social marker was significant enough to appear in flags: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flag#Ancien_R%C3%A9gime_...

The 'white Russians' that fought against the 'red' communists carried the association of whiteness with traditional monarchy forwards into the 20th century and this revanchist monarchism continues to shape radical politics and factional identities in the present, although the symbolism is so diluted as to be unrecognizable to most: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_movement

If we only look at 'white identities' in terms of racial coding, we fall into the trap of inadvertently criticizing people for a fact about themselves they didn't choose and can't change, and whose structural social privileges (vs those of non-European origin) are so unevenly distributed that the resulting intra-ethnic discontent has to be micromanaged through an elaborate ideological apparatus.

Better to have comprehensive information available about every aspect of our food supply so individuals can make decisions based on the science as it evolves and not have to wait for government action (which always comes last).

And who is going to make that comprehensive information available?

The companies that produce and sell food. They are currently required by law to make certain information available to the public. The law should be changed to require vastly more information for the consumer who consume their food.

But surely isn't true in general.

Why not? Wealth-making attracts two kinds of people: those who are interested in mutually beneficial exchanges, and those who see trade as a zero- or negative-sum game. Research suggests these groups exist in a roughly 60:40 proportion to each other in human populations: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

I do think your disagreement is sincere, since you propose allocating a tax on technological deployment to fund research and backing that up with strong regulation. But you overlook the phenomenon of regulatory capture by industry and bad-faith politicking. Just recently we saw how a regulator's observations about the surprisingly high negative externalities of gas stoves was quickly turned into a political football, pre-empting any meaningful policy discussion.

> increased rates of cancer and other (cough cough) disorders

Can someone translate dogwhistle to english here please?

Assumed Covid, but hard to say.

The cough cough is not a reference towards respiration. At this point, I wish I would have left it out.

But there are a myriad of illnesses that have been linked to environmental pollutants and a very high number of people will get offended if you point it out. Because the science isn't settled yet. I'll let you fill in the blanks there.

Oh what BS. If you are going to say something have the guts to say it. I honestly have no idea what disease you are referring to. Acne? Erictile dysfunction? Could be anything.

Generous of you to think it's "unknowingly". There is a strange phenomenon online where people rush to oppose things like basic animal welfare and improved food labelling or any other change to the food industry. I find it hard to swallow that there's so many regular people out there passionately defending the rights of corporations to torture animals and hide what's in their food in their free time.

> There is a strange phenomenon online where people rush to oppose things like basic animal welfare and improved food labelling or any other change to the food industry. I find it hard to swallow that there's so many regular people out there passionately defending the rights of corporations to torture animals and hide what's in their food in their free time.

I am disabled. I cannot walk very well without an assistive device. I've noticed that, when you're disabled, the average person's level of caring about your disability extends right up until the point where you're even a mild inconvenience to them. And it's for any number of reasons: "you're faking it" "you're too young to have those issues" "it's bothersome to install a ramp for people in wheelchairs" "people's assistive devices (canes, walkers, ...) take up too much space" "you're too slow getting in/out of transportation" and the list goes on. I imagine it may at least in part be the bystander effect[0], but that doesn't explain people who can be actively malicious -- and that happens more often than you may think.

The point of this anecdote is that I think something similar applies here. IMO people _do_ genuinely care about what's in their food / how it's produced... but then _they_ would have to change for the situation to improve. Suddenly it's an inconvenience to them. If the relative suffering of a disabled person isn't enough to convince someone that an inconvenience is worth it, then caring about a bunch of animals in a factory farm is just an abstract concern that they don't care about too much, but changing it is something they care about because it affects them.

That's not to say that people are _selfish_, per se, or anything like that. There's only so much time in the day, life is busy for many people, social media demands attention, food costs and inflation and housing costs and ..., and many more are all issues that are a lot more immediate to people. It's hard to care about things that are mostly just abstract concepts you aren't exposed to, when you have much more meaningful day-to-day concerns.

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

> Factory farm companies have known that anti-biotics, hormones, and pesticides are causing increased rates of cancer and other (cough cough) disorders in the same way big oil knew that it was contributing to/causing global warming.

I feel like 2 out of these 3 are not like the other (i.e. pesticides are by definition usually pretty toxic and hormones can mess up living things in all sorts of ways). And even then you need to get more specific than the broad groups to say anything intelligent about them.

> Being anti conspiracy and overly trusting of certain (cough cough) fields of science denotes an inability to rationalize.

First step to being rationale is to be able to talk about it. You wont even say which field of science you don't like. Is it biology in general?

It sounds like you're saying the government has completely shit the bed in their regulatory duties, but I don't see you assign blame there at all for some reason.

That is completely fair. But I'm not going to act like there aren't thousands of scientists and business people who are 100% aware of what is going on. Many of whom work jobs whose PURPOSE is to destroy the effectiveness of the government.

I'm just a layman so perhaps you're referring to some top secret scientist internet but here on the normal internet it has been drilled into me through comments for as long as I can remember that a large part of anti-biotic resistance is being developed because of animal agriculture and that big food is responsible.

That last sentence is often used to criticize economics but haven’t heard it on harder “sciences” before.

It's fairly common, if you're familiar with how big agro-chemical firms influence research into the harms of their products (lookup Oki's Weird Stories video about Syngenta and Tyrone Hayes), how Purdue influences academia and the medical industry, etc.

Empirical evidence and data can be used to selectively deceive. Companies can run hundreds of trials and only select ones that showed favorable results.

because it makes absolutely no sense here. what op is criticizing is on businesspeople lying to make more profit, not scientists

Not to diss on OP's comment, but out of context it sounds exactly like what COVID deniers usually say.

That's exactly what I took from "(cough cough) disorders".

Cough cough was not a respiratory reference. I simply am not going to stir up the pot by directly mentioning the fields that are corrupt or the specific disorders.

Why should anyone take you seriously when you openly admit lacking the courage of your convictions?

it's remarkable how little time it took for the big pharma to become our greatest ally

The beauty if disinformation is that it includes nuggets of truth, or uses seemingly solid rational that is flawed in a very subtle way.

I am a pro conspiracy theory person. But to be clear, there was a ton of disinformation around COVID, and this thread has nothing to do with COVID. I believe COVID is real, and that the vaccines were a good idea.

Can you share sources, studies, be more specific ?

Interesting tidbit is Bret Weinstein's finding how all mice used for drug testing all over the world were coming from a single source and because of how they were bred, they had very long telomeres which made them much less susceptible to cancer.

Somebody got a Nobel for that, the situation supposedly has improved since, but a lot of assumptions (and substances approved) are still based on research which was using these mice.

That’s not much?

Indeed. Its amazing how people can still rationalize the existing situation and help defend corporate sociopathy after all the corporate scandals that were revealed over the last few decades in which the corporations did not stop short of outright murder for profit. Avandia drug scandal comes to mind...

once I know you have an agenda, I invalidate what you have to say.

Everyone has an agenda.

I'm not sure if this is a corollary or a counterpoint to what you're trying to say here, but not all agendas are equivalent.

One person's agenda might be to make as much money as possible irrespective of consequences. Another person's agenda might be to decrease asthma rates. The fact that both people have some kind of agenda is basically irrelevant.

This is the same hole as in the classic "both sides" political attitude.

The Democrat party drummed up the "both sides" argument as cover for them turning their backs on the grassroots activism that got Barack Obama elected in 2008. In the same way, the modern focus on racial issues in the US is directly correlated with quelling the anti-classist Occupy movement.

The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Source? Those are strong claims. I'm cynical enough to find them plausible, but they're strong enough that I'm not willing to take them for granted.

I'm pretty sure "bothsidesing" (aka Murc's law) is from the Bush administration, but don't know where to find evidence.

Was Occupy class-based? They were intersectional progressive/anarchist/professional activists, so essentially they were in favor of everything ever and habitually unable to prioritize. That combined with their official policy of not deciding what their demands were destroyed themselves pretty effectively. (They also had "progressive stacking", which was like an early form of DEI liberalism.)

Class-based leftism wasn't really popular till Bernie though.

> Being anti conspiracy and overly trusting of certain (cough cough) fields of science denotes an inability to rationalize.

That's some word salad right there.

Fair criticism, not my cleanest rep. Will do better

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