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Comment by londons_explore | 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

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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."

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

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.

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