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Comment by swells34 | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, because those are always easy to come by.

Question: how do you know that this third party is both well-regarded and neutral?

Answer: Read a detailed review from a well-regarded neutral party that conducts laboratory reviews.

Just a small example of why the entire mentality behind "being responsible for our own outcomes" is utter bullshit. You want to be responsible for all your own outcomes, go live on an island by yourself. The rest of us live in a complex society where everyone is interdependent, and where strong governance over the things we depend on for survival is extremely important.

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Self-responsiblity being "bullshit" is the most childish sentiment I've heard all year.

Each of us are responsible for holding others accountable too, as we all currently do with other products.

Someone's pill makes someone grow a third arm, they'll be on John Oliver in no time. And without being able to hide behind "FDA said it's OK" (a la opioid epidemic) they'll feel the full brunt of the consequences.

Soviet-style dumping the power and responsiblity on government bureaus is lazy & stupid vice masquerading as virtue.

Rather than an agency that is accountable to publicly elected officials, in your mind profit driven entertainment businesses would perform this role more reliably?

Self-responsibility is just a phrase. When elaborated into the idea you have suggested it crumbles. By the time the market corrects industrial causes of human suffering, far too much preventable suffering will have occurred.

Unless you are philosophically indifferent to human suffering your ideas about self-responsibility are empty nonsense. You have no grounds to criticize others for childish sentiments.

But this is starting from a conclusion that government bureaus are more effective at alleviating human suffering than market competition. That they're faster, and more effective, and so on.

That's simply not true, and we have the entire experience of the eastern bloc that's conclusively proven it's not true.

You're simply pretending organisations like the FDA are something they're not, and that they're nothing but good, and all ills must be blamed on private actors. That's picking your conclusion first based on an emotional need to have a warm cozy paternalistic fantasy of a protector government.

Whereas in reality it's the opposite. The rapid innovation of the private sector, driven by consumers who want their suffering alleviated in the fastest and most effective way, is the suffering alleviator. And the slow, obstructive, and competition-free corrupted public sector, the FDA, is the one causing drug innovation costs to be sky high, thereby causing excess deaths and suffering that the private sector would otherwise have been preventing.

You're siding with the baddy and blaming the goodies for his wrongdoing.

No, I'm not pretending that the FDA is nothing but good, that is a straw man. What I said was correct as I said it, you didn't need to invent a point that I did not make.

Your arguments come from a hypercapitalist fantasy that systemically fails to protect vulnerable populations. Letting market forces satisfy the need of alleviating human suffering is terribly naive nonsense. When the corporations get around to policing themselves, if they do at all, the human toll will be far greater than if we as a society continue to vote for representatives who will reign them in.

You see and comprehend flaws in the current system, but you for some reason cannot see or comprehend that the dumb things you are writing here are much worse.

Bringing up paternalism in this conversation is especially puerile nonsense.

I laughed quite hard about the "vote for people to reign them in". Guess what: they don't care about you at all. They don't even know you. They know the big drug companies quite well though... You might say they even get along well.

A vote is simply an abdication of responsiblity to people far away, who you don't even know, who don't even have liability if they fail to do as they promised.

I guess you're quite young. You'll learn how the world is eventually. You think you're fighting your own little independent fight, but you're actually just an ant serving a nest you've never seen.

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