zug_zug

So assessments of safety of a chemical aren't hard science. They are statistical judgment calls (often based on things like giving a much, much higher dose to a rodent and looking for short-term effects).

And the reason that is is because there's no affordable, moral way to give 100,000 farmers [nor consumers] a small dose of a product for 20 years before declaring it safe. So the system guesses, and it guesses wrong, often erring against the side of caution in the US (it's actually quite shocking how many pesticides later get revoked after approval).

Europe takes a more "precautionary principle" approach. In those cases of ambiguity (which is most things approved and not), they err to the side of caution.

Notice how this claim here is again shifting the burden to the victims (their research doesn't meet standard X, allegedly). Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

Reminds me of "cancer alley" [1].

As somebody who's looked in to this a bit, the deeper I dug the more I ultimately moved toward the conclusion (reluctantly) that indeed big corporations are the baddies. I have an instinct to steel-math both sides, but not every issue has two compelling sides to it...

One example of them clearly being the baddies is them paying people to social media astroturf to defend the roundup pesticide online [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Alley

2. https://galiherlaw.com/media-manipulation-comes-out-during-m...

I dunno seems like a nothingburger to me. There are plenty of real things to worry about these days... somebody dubbing something so I can watch it isn't an issue for me. Presumably the viewers could just turn off the dubbing if they wanted?

I don't get it -- software performs at human levels for translation. Do you (and should you) need permissions to do a translation of a show for the audience?

I mean my immediate reaction is it's probably not reasonable what happened to your classmate. One wrong doesn't justify another...

Actually it's not super easy to explain to the layman, since it uses cryptography. But if you'd like to learn more ChatGPT is very knowledgeable.

But it sounds like your wish is to keep your kid off screens in general, which I don't think age verification would accomplish.

Chat GPT would be happy to explain "Rate-limited anonymous credentials" to you. Just because you can't think of something doesn't mean brilliant mathematicians can't.

Not OP, but how about not being allowed to lose more than 1% of your net worth (or salary?) gambling in a year? (The gambling platforms would be required to monitor your losses)

I'd pass a law that you can only lose in a year .1% of your current retirement savings (at which point you're cut off from gambling for the year). It may sound crazy to spend even a 10th of a % of your retirement on gambling, but that means if you have 1mm saved you can gamble $1k a year.

Cryptographically there are techniques that let you prove you're one of the several hundred million adults in the US that don't reveal anything about which adult you are. It's much less complicated than bitcoin.

I'm bringing this up because it's the perfect litmus test to show whether you really care about age verification, or if you want personal trackability for all internet behavior.

I'd be okay with this for certain situations (e.g. a forum that doesn't want to foreign agitators to pretend they are US voters), but the whole porn thing is a ridiculous farce because there are still going to always be millions of non-us porn sites that don't enforce US laws.

For me the last remaining killer feature of ChatGPT is the quality of the voice chat. Do any of the competitors have something like that?

Well you need to actually think about what you're saying here. Suppose for example China/Israel/whoever is the first to invent really, really great drones (like the size of a bird or even a bumblebee) that are lethal.

So then China could, at any point, call up the US president and say "Look there's a drone in the room with you right now. Shut down all your nuclear facilities or I hereby declare war and you're dead within 10 seconds." Then failing that they could hit the VP next, Secretary of state, etc etc.

Point being the idea of sticking with WW2 "rules" with current and future technology is laughably implausible.

And I guarantee you the citizens of Israel would NOT think it's perfectly legit, legal, and fair if Netenyahu got assassinated with a drone along with his military commanders.

So let me just understand your position here. Suppose the US declares war on Venezuela. Suppose a venezuelan living in America just looks up a bunch of US generals addresses online, and then sets all their houses on fire killing them in their sleep in their McMansions in suburbia.

Are you saying that's a valid military strike, and therefore can't possibly be terrorism? Suppose this person is so successful he kills 1,000 and generals and numerous quit their jobs and move in fear for their life, just to really clarify what you're arguing here.

So you're arguing if the US declared war on Venezuela, that Venezuela could just use a drone to blow up the US president and that's just how war should work from now on?

Because it's only a matter of years until drones get small and stealthy enough that nobody is safe; exploding pagers are a clear first step in this direction.

Two things

Firstly, generals, like anybody else can be terrorized.

Secondly, even if you only kill generals, that doesn't mean you didn't cause terror for everybody else. Imagine for example that Hezbollah found a way to poison the food for Israel's top X military personnel. It would cause a state of emotional terror for many people in Israel about their food safety for decades most likely, even if they weren't in the military themselves.

I don't know if it's "legal" or not and by who's laws, but it certainly seems like terrorism to me (i.e. intentionally creating a state of terror).

I think if Lebanon found a clever way to assassinate the top 45 military commanders in Israel the same people who are defending this wouldn't be calling it a "Legal act of war".

Ironic that your comment downvoted... gosh darn emotional humans

I mean I love the concept. However something makes me suspect none of these will be the completely-walkable, full of art, no-pollution, no plastic, utopia city I'm thinking of.

But no harm in them trying their idea...

Well we have no idea what the effects of glyphosate are because almost everybody has it in their system. Is it possible that's why autism, depression, add are so much higher among us than amish? Who's to say?

On what basis should we blindly trust this fao.org study as conclusive? If Monsanto ghost-wrote one paper, how many other studies did it put its finger on the scale for?

Tl; dr:

One of the cornerstone studies claiming glyphosate was safe is now suspected to have been written entirely ghost-written by Monsanto.

A recent analysis (2025) shows that this paper has been cited more than 99.9% of all glyphosate-related research — i.e. it disproportionately shaped scientific and public perceptions of glyphosate’s safety for decades.

[ https://undark.org/2025/08/15/opinion-ghostwritten-paper-gly... ]

Well either you didn't read what you cited, in which case you sort of owe us an apology and need to back off your claim.

Or you did read it in which case you'd realize it has nothing to do with people wanting government age verification, and then you also need to back off your claim and owe us an apology.

That's a powerpoint of somebody really trying to push an agenda and has nothing to do with age verification. The 88% support is for "social media platforms to protect minors from online harms, such as the promotion of eating disorders, suicide, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation."

I'm sure social media could say with 99% accuracy whether somebody is a minor already just based on advertising data and if a law prevented facebook from showing diet pill ads to a kid that has absolutely zero with some sort of government tracking bullshit.

The fact that you are citing 3 studies without even reading them apparently really makes me suspicious of your motivation here.

Just because something isn't ideal doesn't mean it's worth making a law about. Running with scissors -- not best practice. Worth trying to legislate? Absolutely not.

Somebody who's 17 choosing to look at porn? Not in America's top 1 million problems.

What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this?

If the politicians keep voting for things their constituents don't (and in these cases actively push back against so hard that the politician are forced to withdraw the push) that seems like strong evidence that politicians are doing something with an external incentive...

Politicians having bad incentives (e.g. campaign donations) isn't conspiracy thinking, it's a documented reality. Hell, we even had a supreme court judge taking a present from somebody who's case he was ACTIVELY OVERSEEING.

How about stacked the supreme court with sycophants (at least one of which has been caught taking bribes) whereby allowing his gross violations of the law to be tolerated on appeal to the supreme court (legal eagle has a great video on this).

And then bullied executive who dare disagree with him (e.g. jan 6 commission, and his first impeachment) and even perform completely baseless criminal investigations that (e.g. against Comey) that are so ill-advised that he has to appoint unqualified prosecutors to even file these claims because no serious one would stand for it.

He now wields enough scary-factor that even though we have handwritten proof of his involvement with Eepstein that his own party is too cowardly to impeach him or even release the files (the same party that freaked out about Clinton getting a blowjob now afraid to go after a pedophile, and one who flirts with the idea of pardoning Maxwell and moved her to a minimum security facility)

I used to think like that. Now in my country we have a president who would use that to deport or target political opponents, track people who criticize Israel, etc.

You can never put the genie back in the bottle and you never know who will be in charge in 20 years

Yeah. I was pretty neutral on ruby, until somewhere I worked some coworker put an @ on a variable relating to sessions and suddenly people started seeing each other's accounts.

Now some people won't fault the language for that, but it feels like a footgun and I've noticed a trend that often the worst (I.e. most dangerous) gravitate toward languages with the fewest safeties in them (less type safety, no compile checks, no memory safety, little concurrency safety, less safety around shared state)

Well there's a comment here saying "I won't consider it 'true' AI until it solves all millenium problems"... That goalpost seems to be defining AI as not only human level but as superhuman level (e.g. 1 in a million level intellect or harder)

Well props to them for continuing to improve, winning on cost-effectiveness, and continuing to publicly share their improvements. Hard not to root for them as a force to prevent an AI corporate monopoly/duopoly.