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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

> It was a clear and flagrant abuse of the "may contain traces" mechanism. The bakeries caused harm for consumers as a way to avoid the coats of doing business safely.

My view is that the business should be able to decide who they want to service or not. According to recent US studies, 0.2% of the population have a noticeable allergy to sesame. Seems like bakeries don't want to invest money for such a small percentage. It sucks but this opens the door for new bakeries to cater towards those with this specific allergy. Why does the government need to force business to do it?

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The number might be 0.2% for just sesame, but roughly 10% of Americans have some form of allergy[0]. I'm guessing the reasoning here is to attempt to prevent "allergen creep", where the endgame would be major manufacturers throwing their hands up and listing most products as possibly containing many allergens (or, as in this case, intentionally introducing unnecessary ingredients). If this were to happen, we would expect a number approaching 10% of consumers to have a needlessly large selection of foods they couldn't reliably purchase, even if there would be negligible risk otherwise.

At that point, the usefulness of requiring the labels to begin with is considerably diminished. Having a cottage industry of "actually correctly labeled" foods because the standard labels are poorly enforced seems inefficient, IMHO.

[0]https://www.foodallergy.org/resources/facts-and-statistics

If this happened where we added allergens to all foods, it might actually help in the long term.

even if it were 10%, we shouldn't expect 90% of consumers to subsidize the other 10%

I'm not sure how to separate this mindset from one that would have commercial buildings not be required to include elevators and wheelchair ramps. Do you also think that's an unfair burden to put on the roughly-90% of people who are not mobility-impaired? (Not implying any judgement either way, just curious if this is a consistent viewpoint).

I think one difference is that there isn't a great alternative option in the case of commercial buildings -- if you have a job in a given building that doesn't accommodate your disability, you can't just go find a different building. But insofar as food is concerned, you could pay more for more carefully-manufactured food, or just cook for yourself

But then you are putting that burden on those people. You don’t have to work in that commercial building either you can find another job for example

> Do you also think that's an unfair burden to put on the roughly-90% of people who are not mobility-impaired?

Not op, but I share his view and don't think commercial buildings should be forced to accommodate people who are mobility-impaired.

Then you should hope to never become mobility impaired :)

Remember, we are all just temporarily abled and one accident away from needing accomodation from society.

I doubt it would change my opinion though. It's a matter of principle for me.

Exactly. It's like insurance, even if you have no sympathy, you're probably ok paying a little for other people's accidents because you could just as easily have one. Allergens are different, though.

This sort of thought implies not believing in insurance of any kind. Why should people pay into a common fund when only a small percentage of them will ever use it.

People generally don't develop allergies randomly in life. There's no insurance value here.

People can develop allergies during their lifetime, it's not just something that you're born with. There's also ongoing studies trying to desensitise people's allergies so that they can deal with foods more easily. So a person's allergy status can and does change during their lifetime.

But my message was about the general principle of insurance being the very thing your comment was against. The situation where the vast majority of people pay some cost of which only a few need to utilise.

> People can develop allergies during their lifetime, it's not just something that you're born with.

Sure, but the likelihood of that is low enough that insuring against that isn't worth it for most people

> But my message was about the general principle of insurance being the very thing your comment was against. The situation where the vast majority of people pay some cost of which only a few need to utilise.

No, the principle of insurance is that people pay to hedge against some event that has a reasonable likelihood of happening to them at some point. Whether it's a majority or a minority paying for it is not central to the concept of insurance.

Insurance only works if the majority pay but only the minority get paid. Anything else and you risk not getting paid if the event occurs.

Nope. Assume you have insurance with a one-time fee of $X. It insures against a single kind of event that happens with 60% probability, and pays out $1.6X. So the majority of people are likely to have the event happen to them. The EV of the cost to the insurer is then $1.6X * 0.6 = $0.96X, so the books are expected to balance.

Obviously I'm ignoring variance in this calculation, but you can easily adjust the numbers to give a margin of safety.

You have an insurer which insures you against an even that happens 1% of the time, but you are its one and only customer. The event happens to you, so the insurer has to pay you out. Since it doesn't have any more money than what you paid into it, it goes bankrupt and you do not get paid.

For insurance to work more people have to pay into the system than people who receive payment, otherwise the insurer will go bankrupt.

I guess we should repeal the Americans with Disabilities Act then?

Yes? If the government can find a better way to help people with disabilities, great. But small business being sued because a booth is 6 inches too small, or universities having to take down lectures because they lacked close captioning seems to clearly go to far to me. People seem to have a terrible time understanding diffused societal costs and opportunity costs.

I don’t think either of those things is in the spirit of the ADA. ADA requires reasonable accommodation. So if it would be unreasonable, the law says the accommodation isn’t necessary. What I see in those two instances is judicial overreach and a college not wanting to appear insensitive.

Some day if you find yourself with limited mobility you will be thankful the ADA requires the things it does, because you would find it challenging to live in society without it. The market of “disabled people wanting to shop in a store” is vanishingly small and totally unserved without at least some regulation. I’m sure it offends your free market principles, but the free market isn’t the best thing for all of us.

unironically. would love to have those berkeley lectures back online

You won't like how popular such a repeal would be. Americans really hate the less fortunate of their society.

This can’t be resolved by the FDA; the systemic issue is that industrial baking is permitted to operate facilities at monopoly scale. Breaking up the Bakery Belles would absolutely lead to the return of distinctions between different facilities that enabled sesame-free production to exist in the first place.

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