Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

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Its probably best that you don't speak on my behalf when you don't know me at all.

I do in fact know how industrial ag works. I have a small farm that I'm still in the process of building up, but have meat in the freezer and produce on the shelves that we grew and processed here. We work with farmers in the regenerative movement and go to events by our local extension office that usually cater much more to the industrial ag process.

I spent two summers interning with one of the big oil companies working on software for their upstream research department. I obviously don't know everything about the industry after two internships, but have seen how the companies operate including how proud they are of all the random products they jam petroleum byproducts into (they were particularly proud of having petroleum wax in Hershey's bars).

We're simply coming at the problem from different angles. I look at many of the issues raised like PFAS, plastics in the ocean, water contamination, etc and see unsustainable systems. I totally get that we have built societies around those systems, but that doesn't make them functional or sustainable long term.

We're going to have to deal with the consequences and limitations eventually. Would you propose that we wait for the damages to pile so high that we can't avoid it anymore? Or peg our hopes on some massive government intervention to find a top-down solution that manages to avoid all the pitfalls of political and economic considerations that likely run against the solutions needed for these unsustainable systems?

I'm simply pointing out that consumers can make choices that help push solutions in the right direction. Companies only produce PFAS because we either don't know or don't care, and we collectively prefer the convenience and novelty of the products. If that's the case, why would a government push a solution down our throats? If we'd support a ban on PFAS, why wouldn't we just do that ourselves by avoiding those products?

Oh, I do avoid the obvious PFAs. I make my girlfriend use my carbon steel pans instead of her grody old Teflon ones that she puts in the dishwasher. I’ve not used Teflon in like 20 years because these issues aren’t new. A lot of people have been getting wise to that for quite some time. Every year more of the non-stick pans I see at the store use ceramic coatings instead of Teflon.

The problem is, there are a whole lot of PFAs that do a whole lot of things, and most of them aren’t food-related. You probably interact with them many times a day without knowing. We can’t solve that problem ourselves because we don’t know they’re there. If the path of entry to my body goes firefighting foam > ground water > me I can’t avoid that short of filtration. My water provider can though. I’ve traveled a lot to third world countries that have unsafe drinking water and I really don’t want that here, nor do I want to have to research everything I buy (ain’t nobody got time for that) knowing that even if I do, industrial uses I know nothing about are still causing it to end up in my water.

When we expect common people to solve a problem, we’re expecting everyone to know everything about everything. Again, ain't nobody got time for that.

I have the same criticism about a lot of environmental issues. Just yesterday someone in here was talking about their water use due to r/o filters and how we’d all have to be careful because if we all did whole home r/o we’d double our water use. Which may be true, but right now there’s one almond farm in a drought area in California somewhere that’s used more water this year than the entire HN audience could in several lifetimes.

The petroleum industry really figured this out when they promoted plastic recycling, knowing it wasn’t real, to make us feel like we could solve the problem personally rather than legislatively.

We can't and it is the same here. Your choices don’t amount to anything of significance compared to the large industrial choices you have no control over so the only answer is regulation.

A huge portion of our exposure to these chemicals really are through products we choose to buy and use though. The answer there for consumers really is simple, stick to simple products and I'd you don't know what's in it just don't buy/use it.

Firefighting foam is a great example of when a government intervention could be needed though. I don't directly interact with that product at all, I don't buy or use it. If its getting into my water then its effectively infringing on my rights. If a majority of people are willing to ban those chemicals knowing that it will make fighting fires more difficult, or impossible in some cases, then a ban makes sense as consumers are powerless there.

The bag your pasta comes sealed in, was sealed by machine lubricated by PFAS

How do you buy pasta now?

Totally not the point, but I learned how to make pasta and now I never buy it. Of course, for all I know, my pasta roller was given a good spray of Teflon lube before it left the factory. And the water came from municipal supply. Etc.

Make pasta! You can get all the ingredients without plastic bags, and you will know you're eating pasta that isn't full of preservatives to make it shelf stable for years.

I just don't think it's tenable to tell people to stick to what they know, because most people don't know much and don't have time to. I'll wager you interact with things all day every day that you don't know what's in or how it was made. We can't expect everyone to know everything. Do you know what's in the wrapper of some food you buy? Can you? Do you know if they lubricated their machine parts with PFAs? Can you? PFAs are used in so many things. There are over 15,000 unique ones manufactured, and most of them presumably have multiple uses.

I do packaged food/beverages professionally, so I know what almost every ingredient I read on the label is there for and what it does, but I don't know the health ramifications of all of them (nobody does), how they're produced, etc. And I could not expect 99% of people to know 10% of what I do. They'd never have time to.

I also don't think we know exactly how it's getting into people. The EPA says the most common source is drinking water, and it's probably getting there through pollution, waste, etc. I'm not even sure they know that really though. That's the thing about large, complex de-centralized systems, especially ones that intereact with environmental factors: there's nobody who knows how the whole thing works.

And even if it's getting into water entirely through people cleaning their non-stick pans, which I'm sure isn't the case, I can't rely on everyone else in my water supply area (literally hundreds of thousands of people) to curtail their use. Probably tens of thousands of people in my area put a Teflon pan in the dishwasher today. I can, however, rely on the water plant to filter it if they're made to do so and there's testing done.

And, also, I'm very much of the "this hysteria is overblown" mindset. When you look into actual evidence of harms caused by the levels of PFAs most people are exposed to, all you find are very weak correlations. Outside of people exposed to very high levels of the stuff, there's no solid evidence of any harm at all. You can't do any sort of controlled test since it's so pervasive and also geographical in nature due to the drinking water issue. (Everyone in a target area is either exposed to it or not exposed, so to compare people who are exposed to those who aren't, you have to compare people in different regions, thus making your study not controlled as any observable effects could be due to some other regional factors.)

That said, absence of proof is not proof of absence, and I feel fairly sure they aren't good for us or 3M would be marketing them as a pharmaceutical. I think there's some chance they're bad, and they can be affordably filtered out with the money manufacturers are going to have to pay in settlements. I'm far from a big government kinda guy (quite the opposite usually) but tragedies of the commons, which this totally is, are very much the thing we need government for.

Oh I absolutely interact with products that I'm not 100% aware of how they're made or packaged. I do try to limit this heavily though, especially when it comes to food and chemicals I put on my body like soaps and detergents.

I don't see it as a process of people having to know everything so they can opt out. As you said, that will never happen in such a complex society. Instead, people can focus much more on opting in when they do reasonably know they trust a product. That can't always be done for sure, but touching the door handle at a store is much less likely to have serious consequences than the food I eat every day.

Sure. But if the contamination is largely from water sources, as the EPA says, your food choices are fairly meaningless in this particular instance. I don’t want a society in which the rich people have fine drinking water and the poor don’t, and that’s the only alternative to this exact government intervention.

I totally agree that it seems reasonable for the government to have to step in for mitigation of PFAS already in the water. This whole thread I was only talking about the part of the system that is adding those chemicals to the water to begin with.

I may not have much say in what is already in my water but I absolutely have a say in what I spend my money on.

I think the expectation that the entire consumer market (or even just a majority) is going to collectively become universally informed about all their purchases and shift the market for the better is far less likely then a government intervention being successful.

If you go to countries where there was never any government intervention relating to cigarettes do you know what you'll find? A lot more people smoking cigarettes.

I don't think it has to mean everyone becomes informed and makes educated decisions. We can get to the same end by people simply choosing not to buy products that they don't know much about how they were made.

In other words, the solution can be additive where we only bring in products we're confident in rather than having to learn everything and remove items from there.

As someone else mentioned in this thread, it is not possible to understand how everything you purchase works. That is also incredibly infeasible. What you are asking is to effectively revert back two hundred years of technological progress (a rough estimate for the last time people were actually self sufficient at a local level).

I can't count how many studies I've seen referenced that claim the environment is effectively doomed by 2030 if we don't change course. The same goes for other areas, whether its concerns raised over the risk of chemical exposure or the fragility of our toilet paper and baby formula infrastructure when a pandemic is declared.

If you think that many of the inventions over the last couple centuries are the culprit and would have to be rolled back, that sounds miserable but it also sounds like we at least would have a better chance being proactive rather then waiting for everything to come crumbling down.

I don't personally expect climate change or chemical exposure to destroy us all, life finds a way. But if we can't expect consumers to make purchasing decisions that generally align with what they think is important, why do we even bother with markets or capitalism at all?

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