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].
You should consider dropping that instinct. If you look into how corporations have behaved historically you'd assume evil until proven innocent. Especially US corps.
This is the reason we have people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities.
If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic.
Edit: By the way, I also don't think we should trust big companies indiscriminately. Like, we could have a system for pesticide approval that errs on the side of caution: We only permit pesticides for which there is undisputed evidence that the chemicals do not cause problems for humans/animals/other plants etc.
"If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic."
I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong. The tendency to optimize for profits at the expense of everything else, to ignore all negative externalities is inherent to all American corporations.
The main thing that people snag on is scale and frequency.
If you are super into "ACAB" (all cops are bastards) you can easily "research" this all day for weeks and find so many insane cases of police being absolute bastards. You would be so solidified in your belief that police as an institution are fundamentally a force of evil.
But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is almost always where people run aground. Stats are almost always obfuscated for things that people develop a moral conviction around. Imagine trying to acknowledge the stat there are effectively zero transgender people perving on others in public bathrooms.
ACAB is not about the proportion of bad encounters to good encounters. It is about the police system as a whole that defends and provides cover for the bad ones.
If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
Suppose you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and 500000 actors are “good except that they protect that one guy”, and then the one guy dies of a freak heart attack,
and then all but one of the 500000 are replaced with “good actors” except that they defend the guy who remains from the 500000.
You're reducing it down too far. Policing has a problem policing itself -- it's very well documented.
People take it too far in both directions, but it's safe to say that there's more than one bad actors and the system demonstrably tolerates and defends them right up to the point where they are forced not to.
Right, there’s clearly a problem, and I think even a systemic problem. I just don’t think it follows that literally every officer is therefore culpable. I think I would say that probably almost every police union leader is culpable.
And who votes for those union leaders? The cops. They vote for corrupt people to protect their own corruption. It's a corrupt system from top to bottom.
I explicitly stated that it was "more than one" and in no way intimated that it was all cops.
One of the simplest things we could do as a country to help mitigate this is to end the War on Drugs. It was never about protecting people, and was always about enabling oppression of "others".
The other simple thing to do is to stop using cops for "welfare checks" and mental health crises -- those situations are uniformly better handled by social workers. This has tragically been put under the category of "defund the police", but the idea itself is sound. The "defund" slogan is so bad it's almost like it was created to sabotage the effort.
>If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
This line of thinking will either be totally unable to ever build a large organization, or else will pathologically explain-away wrong-doing due to black and white thinking.
This sort of thing is unfortunately very common in many large bureaucracies, especially across the government. A notable (and likely controversial) case in point is teachers who (sexually or physically) abuse students, and are kept on the payrolls, often in ‘rubber-rooms’. Are public schools worth having?
I guess the equivalent here is the teachers and the teachers unions covering up that abuse, moving the abuses around to other schools, and lobbying for special protection for those abusers even after they are caught and convicted.
Its not perfect as an analogy since police are the state's sanctioned violence and teachers are not, nor are teachers in charge of preventing rape generally, but it kind of works since kids generally do have to go to school of some kind.
I expect in the above hypothetical the person you're asking would agree that yes, all teachers are part of the rape problem. The logic is the same and it hinges on the idea that allowing and intentionally enabling <very bad abuse if power> instead of fighting to expose and stop it makes you part of that problem even if you aren't directly doing the bad thing. Doubly so if your job is to expose and stop that abuse in every group except your own.
Teachers in many jurisdictions (I don’t know about every jurisdiction) are required (and paid) to take training in spotting signs of sexual or physical abuse, and are (at least often) legally required to report it. In that sense, they are ‘in charge of’ preventing sexual abuse.
I don't think many teachers think that abusing students is part of their job, but there are LOTS of cops who think that abusing their power to kill / maim / steal from / rape citizens is JUST fine.
If someone had this experience I’d encourage them to look into how police departments across the US consistently fight against any accountability for the cops who perpetuate those relatively few awful encounters. “Most interactions are harmless therefore the negativity is overblown and cops are trustworthy” is one takeaway if you stop your research at the right point. “if you have a bad experience with a cop the entire department will turn against you; they are not to be trusted” is a more accurate takeaway.
If we apply your logic, would you say it's fair to go around and say "all teachers are bastards", when referring to teacher unions that make it hard to fire incompetent teachers? Or maybe "all doctors are bastards" when referencing how the american medical association (the trade association for doctors) makes it hard for more doctors to be admitted?
Sure, but one key difference is that if either of those groups steps outside the law, you can recourse to the law to check them.
Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem. This is before one even starts unpacking the knapsack of how much law is designed to protect the police from consequences of performing their duties (leading to the unfortunate example "They can blow the side off your house if they have reason to believe it will help them catch a suspect and the recompense is that your insurance might cover that damage.")
>Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem.
I don't see how this is a relevant factor for the two cases I mentioned. Sure, it's bad that are part of the justice system, and therefore you can't use the justice system to correct their misbehavior, but you're not going to involve the justice system for incompetent teachers, or not enough doctors being admitted. For all intents and purposes the dynamic is the same.
you are definitely going to start involving the justice system if teachers and doctors start physically abusing people, illegally detaining them and killing them!
I am not at all joking when I make the claim that police committing sex crimes is a problem that is frequently swept under the rug by both police internal affairs and the judicial system.
>But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is hardly a revelation. There are levels of bastardy in between "angelic philosopher-saint and paladin of justice" and "demonic hellspawn stomping babies for resisting arrest". The cop who just hands out false tickets to meet quota is just as ACAB as the one who finally loses his temper and shoots someone without true cause, but one gets to hide it better. Intuitively, I suspect that the cumulative actions of the low-level ACAB behaviors add more misery and injustice to the world than all the wrongful deaths and incarceration combined.
pedantic, but "ACAB" doesn't necessarily mean every (or most) cops do horrible things all the time (that's the strawman version).
one, more nuanced, sentiment is something more like "all cops are bastards as long as bad cops are protected."
another sentiment is "modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers; thus, all of policing is rooted in bastard behavior, therefore: all cops are bastards".
there are plenty of other ways to interpret the phrase. "acab" is shorthand for a lot of legitimate grievances.
> modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers;
That's not (entirely) true, though? Every modern police department has its roots in London Metropolitan Police Force which had nothing to do with salve catching can't say much about strikebreakers, but I know specifically LMPF went on multiple strikes themselves. It had also nothing to do with solving crimes, that's just a bonus.
My favorite slogan is “Slogans are always bad.” . It can be interpreted in a lot of different ways that make a lot of sense, and that’s why I repeat it often, without clarifying what I mean by it.
That is a lot of words to make a claim that nobody would accept if they used it for other issues. If somebody said that all blacks are criminals and used your exact argument, nobody would buy it.
You picked a terrible example as a counterpoint, because ACAB is about police protecting bad police (or generally, authorities defending each other as a gang themselves).
Which is seen in every group of authorities around the country. They literally give out get out of jail free cards for cops’ friends and family in many parts of the country, that is systemic, and has nothing to do with frequency of cops committing crimes.
And when a cop tries to do something about it, this is the sort of thing that happens. This guy seems like he's trying to do the right thing, but the system is designed so he can't:
> Bianchi claims his superiors retaliated against him for his stance against the “corrupt” cards after he was warned by an official with the Police Benevolent Association, New York City’s largest police union, that he would not be protected by his union if he wrote tickets for people with cards. And if he continued, he’d be reassigned... The lawsuit cites several instances where his NYPD colleagues complained about his ticket-writing, including on Facebook...
> Bianchi’s service as a traffic cop ended last summer when he wrote a ticket to a friend of the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, the lawsuit states.
> Schoolcraft amassed a set of tapes which demonstrated corruption and abuse within New York City's 81st Police Precinct. The tapes include conversations related to the issues of arrest quotas and investigations. [...] Schoolcraft was harassed, particularly in 2009, after he began to voice his concerns within the precinct. He was told he needed to increase arrest numbers and received a bad evaluation.
His fellow officers had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward. They told the hospital that his claims were a sign of paranoid delusions. He was eventually vindicated, but his career was destroyed.
It's been a long time since I heard this, but I believe there is recording here [0] of his colleagues forcing themselves into his apartment to have him committed.
> I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong
You really can't. You can start off with a prior that it's more likely the corporation is wrong than not. But if you're assuming your conclusion, you're going to find evidence for what you're looking for. (You see the same thing happen with folks who start off by assuming the government is in the wrong.)
When you go shopping and see two items for sale that seem nearly identical, do you buy the cheaper one?
If you have long term savings do you want it to earn interest?
The desire to optimize for profit exists at all levels among all participants in the economy. Everyone does it. We are the system and the system is us.
Regulations are usually the only way to fix these things because there are game theoretic effects in play. If your company spends more to clean up and others don’t, you lose… because people buy cheaper products and invest in firms with higher profit margins. The only way out we’ve found is to simultaneously compel everyone. But that doesn’t remove the incentive.
Yeah I'm aware. Learning about how American capitalism functions is what set me on the path of being an anticapitalist. Reforms and regulations will never be effective here in solving this issue. The system itself is poisonous.
I have a bias towards not dying, and so far that has steered me away from activities that increase my likelihood of it. Bias is not intrinsically negative (that's prejudice), it just means a preference towards.
That bias is well earned. Maybe one day corporations will do enough good things in the world to undo the evil they've perpetuated. I'm not holding my breath.
>people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities
Does it not?
"We estimate that 1 MWh of energy consumption by a data center requires 7.1 m3 of water." If Microsoft, Amazon and Google are assumed to have ~8000 MW of data centers in the US, that is 1.4M m3 per day. The city of Philadelphia supplies 850K m3 per day.
Yeah, but that is for everything. YouTube, Amazon itself, AWS, Azure, GCP, ... not just AI stuff. I mean, it is still a lot of water, but the numbers are not that easy to calculate IMHO
Why do we need to assume so many things, when we can peg it to reality.
Worldwide, Google's data centers averaged 3.7GW in 2024. Globally, they use 8.135e9 gallons of water in the year, which is 30.8e6m³ per year, which is 84e3m³ per day. Double that to meet the assumed 8GW data center capacity, 168e3m³/day. QED: the estimate 1.4e6m³/day is high by a factor of 10x. Or, in other words, the entire information industry consumes the same amount of water as one very small city.
I believe this is why Google states their water consumption as equivalent to 51 golf courses. It gives a useful benchmark for comparison. But any way you look at it the water consumption of the information sector is basically nothing.
Even the golf course trade association only claims 10% grey water use.
Also, you're going to be shocked, data centers can cool with grey water as well. The now-cancelled Project Blue data center near Tucson was going to build and operate a wastewater pipeline and treatment plant and give it to the city, but the shouting NIMBYs prevailed anyway. The developer now intends to use air-to-air cooling, which costs more energy.
Resource consumption of AI is unclear on two axes:
1) As other commenters have noted: raw numbers. In general, people are taking the resource consumption of new datacenters and attributing 100% of that to "because AI," when the reality is generally that while AI is increasing spend on new infrastructure, data companies are always spending on new infrastructure because of everything they do.
2) Comparative cost. In general, image synthesis takes between 80 and 300 times fewer resources (mostly electricity) per image than human creation does. It turns out a modern digital artist letting their CPU idle and screen on while they muse is soaking significant resources that an AI is using to just synthesize. Granted, this is also not an apples-to-apples comparison because the average AI flow generates dozens of draft images to find the one that is used, but the net resource effect might be less energy spent in total per produced image (on a skew of "more spent by computers" and "less by people").
I agree, but that's what people are implicitly doing every time they toss out one of those "The machine drinks a glass of water every time it" statistics. We are to assume a human doesn't.
Nonsense, if we view proving as providing evidence for, then absolutely we can prove a negative. We have our priors, we accumulate evidence, we generate a posterior. At some point we are sufficiently convinced. Don't get hung up on the narrow mathematical definition of prove (c.f. the exception[al case] that proves [tests] the rule), and we're just dandy.
I like to think that what the “can’t prove a negative” phrase originated from was someone grasping at the difference between Pi_1 and Sigma_1 statements . For a Pi_1 statement, one needs only a single counterexample to refute it, but to verify it by considering individual cases, one has to consider all of them and show that they all work (which, if there are infinitely many, it is impossible to handle them all individually, and if there are just a lot, it may still be infeasible) . Conversely, for a Sigma_1 statement, a single example is sufficient to verify the claim, but refuting it by checking individual cases would require checking every case.
And when a chemical goes off patent protection and you have a new patented chemical ready to go, it's advantageous to suddenly dis the now public domain entity.
AI water usage is pretty bad on a local scale where a large water consumer(Data centers) start sucking up more water than the local table can bear at the expense of the people living there.
Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person. It's correct that these companies will push limits and avoid accountability. It's correct that they're generally a liability creating a massive bubble and speculation based on an immature tech designed to automate as many careers away as possible without a proposed solution to the newly unemployed besides "deliver fast food" or "die".
Despite legally treating corporations as people, there's no consistently enforced mechanism that can punish them like people. Monsanto can't be sent to jail for murder. Their C-Levels will never see a cell the way the average person can have the book thrown at them for comparably minor crimes.
Because companies cannot be held accountable legally and effectively, it's important to assume the worst, to generate the public blowback to hold them accountable via lost business.
>Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person.
That just sounds more like cope than anything else. eg. "AI companies sucking up all the water might not be a real issue, but I still think they're evil for other reasons".
There are shades of gray here. But you are absolutely not required to extend benefit of the doubt to entities that have not earned it. That's a recipe for disaster.
Personally, I find myself to be incredibly biased against corporations over people. I've met a lot of people in my life, they seem mostly nice if a bit stupid. Well intentioned. Selfish.
Are corporations mostly well intentioned? Well, consider that some people tried to put "good intentions" into corporations bylaws and has been viciously resisted.
Corporations will happily take everything you have if you accidentally give it to them. Actual human beings aren't like that.
This is unworkable in practice; nothing will ever be completely safe. Instead, we need a public regulatory body that makes reasonable risk/reward tradeoffs when approving necessary chemicals. However, this system breaks down completely when you allow for lobbying and a revolving door between the public and private sectors.
It's a rational default position to say, "I'll default to distrusting large corporate scientific literature that tells me neurotoxins on my food aren't a problem."
As with any rule of thumb, that one will sometimes land you on the wrong side of history, but my guess is that it will more often than not guide you well if you don't have the time to dive deeper into a subject.
I'm not saying all corporations are evil. I'm not saying all corporate science is bad or bunk. But, corporations have a poor track record with this sort of thing, and it's the kind of thing that could obviously have large, negative societal consequences if we get it wrong. This is the category of problem for which the science needs to be clear and overwhelming in favor of a thing before we should allow it.
Ai does us a crap-ton of water.
Most data centers use closed loop liquid cooling with heat exchangers to water cooling. (At least all the big ones like Google and Amazon do)
I’m curious what evidence you think you’ve seen to the contrary. from my side, I used to build data centers and my friends are still in the industry. As of a month ago I’ve had discussions with Google engineers who build data centers regarding their carful navigation of water rights, testing of waste water etc.
The Dalles data centers use a large fraction of the water supply of The Dalles because the data centers are extremely large and the town of The Dalles is of negligible size. It is also true that the paper mill of Valliant, Oklahoma uses 50 million gallons of water per day and that the town of Valliant, Oklahoma, population 819, uses less than 1% of that amount, so the paper mill can be said to be using > 99% of the local water supply but this is also a meaningless comparison.
So we'll move the datacenters from the tiny town to just outside of a giant city which will probably move that percentage down to only a few percent if even that. Problem solved!
You're looking at the wrong metrics to compare here if we're trying to just gauge how efficient a datacenter is or is not. This metric could be useful if the datacenters are attached to the municipal water system and thus begin to be a massive load compared to what was originally planned/built, but in terms of understanding the total water use compared to other industrial users its kind of a meaningless statistic.
I’ve been unclear on this. What datacenter out there is using an open loop cooling system that does not return the water after cooling for other uses?
It seems extremely inefficient to have to filter river water over and over then to dump it into the ground so deep it doesn’t go back to getting into an aquifer.
As is always the case when discussing systems, the answer changes depending on where you draw the system boundary. In some cases you would expect water to fall as rain in the same watershed where it was drawn. This is the case for example of water "used by" California rice fields that are irrigated by flood. In other cases, you can expect the water to disappear into a distant system. This would be the case for water drawn from fossil aquifers.
Corporations should be assumed to act in line with their interests, which is the bottom line. "Morality" isn't the lens that you need to try to view them through to understand their intentions and actions. But yes, their motivations pretty much always lay outside of any moral good due to the nature of them.
> the bear isn't evil but it will still maul you on sight
The bear still has unified agency. Corporations do not. (No group of people do.) More than the wind, less than a bear. And I think their flaws are probably shared by all large human organisations.
Isn't unified agency the point of forming an organization? The organization generally elects leaders to direct the actions of the organization for some common purpose, e.g. through policies and direct decisions, and they can (or should) be held accountable for those actions.
Maybe this is taking it too far, but anyway: corporations don't have any agency. They are not persons. The organization and constellation of interests of corporations may be such that:
1. immoral people (such as psychopaths) will be disproportionately at the helm of large corporations
2. regular people will make immoral decisions, because to do otherwise would be against their own interests or because the consequences / moral impact are hidden from their awareness
There is no way to act in life that isn't in some sense moral or political, because it also impacts others and you are always responsible for your what you do (or don't do). And corporations are just a bunch of people doing stuff together. To maintain otherwise is in itself a (im)moral act, intentionally or not, see point 2 above.
It's not that cynical when you consider that corporations exist precisely to shield owners and leadership from legal (and to a lesser extent) monetary responsibility.
Evil confers an individual advantage. Pro-social behavior confers a group advantage. That's why sociopaths continue to walk along us. Society can tolerate a few of them, but only up to a point.
Evolution works on the level of the reproducing organism, i.e. the individual.
Google group selection if you'd like to go down a deep rabbit hole but the upshot is, if pro-social behavior did not confer and individual advantage, the individuals who lose the trait would outcompete their conspecifics and the pro-social trait would not be fixed in the population.
This is why you usually see additional stabilizing mechanism(s) to suppress free-loading, in addition to the pro-social traits themselves, even in very simple examples of pro-social traits such as bacteria collaboratively creating biofilms.
The genes coding for the biofilms are usually coded on transmissible plasmids, making it possible for one individual to re-infect another that has lost it.
You might consider the justice system, police etc. as analogous to that.
So yes, in the case where you're part of a functioning society and free-loading on the pro-social behavior of others, that is temporarily beneficial to you - until the stabilizing mechanisms kick in.
I'm not saying in practice you can never get away with anything, of course you can. But on average you can't, we wouldn't be a social species otherwise.
In your Durkheimian analogy, sociopaths are cancer and while the body usually handles one off rogue cells, it often fails when tumors and eventually metastasis develop.
That can happen, sure, but the cancer's strategy is not a winning one - it dies along with the host.
Again, I'm not arguing for some naive Panglossian view. Things can get pretty bad transiently.
I just take exception at the cynical view that evil is somehow intrinsically more powerful than good.
"Survival of the fittest" is often misunderstood that way too, as survival of the strong and selfish, when, on the contrary, evolution is full of examples of cooperation being stable over long timescales.
Evil simply has more options available than good. Sure, those options, like all options, have pros and cons. Cancer, like sociopathy, can have a pretty good run even if it ends ultimately in demise.
I very much want to push back against any bias towards a just world. Bad people often live their whole lives without any consequence (think prostate cancer) while good people struggle (think my cuticles, which deserve much more than I usually give).
If the corporate veil, a legislative invention, were abolished or significantly weakened companies would stop acting evil pretty quickly. So yeah, this tracks.
You can certainly accept a bias against corporations but you still should never assume every accusation is correct. Otherwise you'd be inclined to believe bullshit theories like Moderna wants our kids to have autism.
You're right. That's why I never took the Covid vaccine and I convinced everyone I know to avoid it as well. You cannot trust big pharma after all the evil things they've done.
Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand. If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good. I think it is too easy to blame them when ultimately, we are the one who support them.
In the case of farming, we want cheap food, and the way to make cheap food is intensive farming, with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. So, companies make pesticides, farmers use them, and we eat the cheap food. Because we recognize that some checks need to be put in place, we elect governments to regulate all that, and or vote goes to whoever makes the best balance between cheap food, taxes and subsidies, and general health and precautions. This is crucial because cheap food is a matter of survival to some.
So in the end, there are no "baddies", just a system that's not perfect. Also keep in mind that big corporation are made of a lot of people, you may be one of them. I am. Does it make us evil? Maybe a little, but I don't think any more than average, as middle-class, I even tend to think we define the average.
> If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good.
This is so naive.
People do not ask corporations to be evil and they certainly don't demand it. People ask for good value and convenience and corporations respond by doing by amorally pursuing that.
However, when you ask consumers if they want value and convenience at the cost of *evil*, they almost always say no.
Corporations have a demonstrated and well-documented history of actively hiding their evil actions because they know consumers are not aligned with them at all.
If consumers "demand" evil, as you say, then corporations wouldn't try to hide it.
Even when eggs are clearly labeled "caged" and "free range", many people will buy the "caged" eggs despite the clear implications in terms of animal welfare.
Also, while I consider organic food to be mostly (but not completely) a scam, most people don't buy organic. Which can be interpreted as "if it is cheaper with pesticides than without, I will go for pesticides".
In cars, emission control devices have to me made mandatory and almost no one would pay for them. And even with that, people sometimes break the law to remove them (ex: catalytic converter). It is common for all environmental laws.
Of course, if you talk to people face to face, most will tell you that they don't want value and convenience at the cost of evil, but in private, if can turn a blind eye, they will.
And most of these company evil practices are often not very well hidden. Sometimes, they are genuinely criminal, highly secret operations, but they are often not, as criminal lawsuits are costly, and secrets like that don't last long in big companies. But if it is legal and it brings value convenience to people, people usually don't want to look too much, even when some NGOs try to bring awareness.
I think "caged" is not "evil" in a lot of people's minds. This is NOT society saying "we will look the other way", it's society saying, "that's not evil"
Also, organic doesn't mean, "without pesticides" it means a lot MORE than that. For example, I have no problem buying genetically modified produce. If there was an option for "pesticide free, but not organic because of GMO" I would probably buy that.
Anyways, my point really being, you can't extrapolate that people are looking the other way because of price. All your examples are more of examples of society not being morally aligned to what you are considering evil.
> Even when eggs are clearly labeled "caged" and "free range", many people will buy the "caged" eggs despite the clear implications in terms of animal welfare.
Are many egg cartons actually labeled as "caged" around you? Where I am its either advertised as cage-free or its unlabeled. Its not like the options are "tiny torture chambers": $2.99, "unclean hellscape": $3.99, "rainbows and sunshine": $4.99. Its also hard to tell what these things mean, because "cage-free" can still be a pretty terrible existence for the birds as well.
But I do agree though, if there's a seemingly similar product with a much cheaper price tag a ton of people (myself included) will often reach for the cheaper product.
This is assuming that every consumers knows what evil goes into their consumption. They don't, and not by choice, but because nobody will tell them. Ever. In fact, everyone will spend billions to make sure they don't know.
The problem with simplistic free market dynamics views is that they rely on consumer choice. Consumer choice relies on consumer consent and free information flow.
As soon as EITHER of those two are chilled, even just a tiny bit, the free market dynamics thinking falls down like a house of cards. Now the situation is orders of magnitude more complex, and we actually have to think about what's going on, inatead of appealing to a model so bare-bones it's practically impossible to see in real life.
This only really applies in a world of complete information. Pesticide side effects were an enormous externality, which only the company was aware of. And they obviously worked hard to keep that information out of the public consciousness. Perhaps there could be nuance to producing the pesticide, weighing food prices against health impacts, but that’s no justification for lying about what it does.
There are refineries within a stone's throw from my house. One of them sits on the highest point in our water table and the vacuum it creates has been destroying our famously soft water by creating underground fault lines which pollute the aquifer with leeched hard minerals.
I used to be a proponent of the industrial agriculture, because technological progress of all kinds (genetics, chemicals, mechanisation) are the reason why food is now abundant.
But the massive disinformation campaigns and targeted harassment of researchers, as well as the outright corruption of science is where they lost me. Surely you wouldn't do things like that if you had clear consciousness.
> One example of them clearly being the baddies is them paying people to social media astroturf to defend the roundup pesticide online [2].
It certainly looks bad but I'm not sure the logic really follows.
It's just modern PR. Companies used to just do that by having good relationships with journalist but now social media has taken a lot of that role away. It's a fairly natural transition for companies to make and I'd be surprised if you couldn't find a lot of major corporations that don't do something similar.
And, also, it doesn't necessarily follow that they are either willingly lying or that their products are unsafe.
An excellent movie on basically the same topic is Michael Clayton, with George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, and Tilda Swinton in IMO each of their best career performances.
Excellent movie. Worth noting that it was written by Tony Gilroy, who created Andor and cowrote The Bourne Identity, so if you enjoyed those you're likely to enjoy this.
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.
IMO the FDA should do a better job at helping the populace distinguish between these two:
1) Evidence for the null hypothesis (there are enough studies with sufficient statistical power to determine that product likely does not cause harm at a >95% CI).
2) There is no evidence that it is unsafe. (nor that it is safe).
The problem is #2 sounds a lot stronger and often better than #1 when put into English. There must be some easy to understand way to do it, IE an 'insufficient testing' vs. 'tested' label/website or something.
Shouldn't most chemicals be assumed unsafe until proven otherwise? How many chemicals have we produced in a lab that have no harmful effects? Even medicine is bad for you, it's just better than the disease it's meant to treat. I don't know why we'd treat something designed to kill animals as safe for humans without studies showing that it's not harmful. (Well I do know why, but I don't know why voters go along with it.)
And when we're talking about things in this realm, the general saying is "The dose makes the poison"... Water will kill you if you drink enough of it.
And we do have all sorts of studies showing that harm from these substances isn't immediately apparent (they all have safety sheets, and maximum safe exposure levels) . What we're missing, mainly because it's just incredibly hard to ethically source, is long term studies.
So the question you're really asking is "what's your tolerance to risk?". I think it's fine to have different governing bodies take different stances on that scale. What's less fine is failure to act on information because of profit motives.
Long story short - this isn't so simple. You bathe in chemicals all day every day.
Because of its high toxicity, the European Union withdrew paraquat from its market in July 2007 [1]
So it's clearly poisonous to humans in high doses, I guess the argument is that perhaps the smaller doses exposed to farmers may not lead to sufficient ingestion to cause harm. The parkinsons seems like pretty clear evidence against that.
> If it simply hasn't been approved in other countries, one can't use that information to infer about its safety.
I don't know why you're trying to defend this with counterfactuals/hypotheticals instead of just googling. Feels like you're bending over backward here.
Chevron clasically has ignored health and safety requirements to the point where there was once the “Chevron Doctrine” which deferred legal interpretations to specialized regulatory agencies which established clearer guidance against murky legislative directives. The Doctrine was recently overturned by the ostensibly rogue SCOTUS as highlighted by the harvard business review:
https://hbr.org/2024/09/the-end-of-the-chevron-doctrine-is-b...
That's a rather rose colored way of framing what Chevron was. It essentially removed the role of the judiciary in settling disputes. In cases where a regulator's action was deemed at least "reasonable", the judiciary was obligated to simply defer to the regulator's interpretation.
And due to widespread regulatory capture, this is hardly some social benefit. The original case Chevron Doctrine was based on [1] essentially came down to the EPA interpreting anti-pollution laws in a way enabling companies to expand pollution-causing constructions with no oversight. The EPA was then sued, and defeated, by an environmental activist group, but then that decision was overturned by the Supreme Court and Chevron Deference was born.
Other examples are the FCC deeming broadband internet as a "information service" instead of a "telecommunications service" (which would have meant common-carrier obligations would have applied), and so on. Another one [3] - Congress passed legislation deeming that power plants must use the "best technology available" to "minimize the adverse environmental impact" of their water intakes/processing. The EPA interpretation instead allowed companies to use a cost-benefit analysis and pick cheaper techs. And I could go on. Chevron Deference was an abomination.
> In cases where a regulator's action was deemed at least "reasonable", the judiciary was obligated to simply defer to the regulator's interpretation.
That is the way it _should_ be. Judges are not subject matter experts in all of human endeavors, but they are expected to make rulings over that domain. Relying on experts and career civil servants advice is generally good, unless they’re being unreasonable.
unfortunately civil servants are not perfect and not elected. If they 'take bribes' I don't want a judge to accept their word. They should have to justify their ruling before the court. The judge should defer to them only after finding their decision was good in the first place.
> If they 'take bribes' I don't want a judge to accept their word. They should have to justify their ruling before the court.
If they're taking bribes they should be tried under corruption laws such as 18 U.S.C. § 201
Meanwhile our SC justices can accept all kinds of gifts from industry and make whatever ruling they want without any repercussions. They're in charge of determining their own conflicts of interests and their own ethics violations. Which surprise, they never seem to have any!
Its far easier to remove a regulator, even one of a supposedly independent agency (we'll see how that goes), for doing something obviously corrupt than a Supreme Court judge, as evidenced by the current court.
It was weaponized by both parties to create defacto laws without proper legal procedure. It should’ve been unconstitutional from the beginning as only Congress can make laws. Regulatory agencies are far easier to control, generally contain administration-friendly plants, and are not expected to provide any justification for their decisions. The result is laws that change as the wind blows, confusions, and rights restrictions done by people who should have no business doing so. The “reasonable interpretation” rule allowed Congress to completely defer to them and force citizens to spend tremendous capital getting a case to the Supreme Court.
Chevron’s overturn was objectively a huge win and hardly a “rogue” decision. That editorialization is not a fair representation of the problems it has caused when regulatory agencies begin attempting to regulate constitutional rights. It was overly vague and gave far too much power to people who cannot be trusted with it.
We shouldn’t need Chevron Deference to make laws that protect people from harm done by corporations. Period. If we do, it’s a failure of Congress to do their jobs and a mechanism should be in place to have a “reset button” (like many other countries when they form a government).
It’s pretty clear that rule making and adjudication are in the preview of the executive branch. Congress and courts can’t possibly make laws and hold trials for every possible minor situation.
Some agencies lean towards proper justification (the EPA, for example, has been generally okay at best about this) other regulatory bodies don't.
While it is not a popular topic here, gun laws, and I am taking a risk with my karma even talking about it, have been subject to some of the most vague and dangerous interpretations by the ATF. In this case we provided congress a way to bypass constitutional scrutiny (pre-bruen) by deferring to the ATF. Two examples are bump stocks, and FRTs, both of which the ATF interpreted as "machine guns", defying their own regulatory definition, and creating felons out of innocent people quite literally overnight. Honest people had their doors literally kicked in. This is a terrifying level of power. It is not the first time the ATF has done this. I would recommend spending time reading the writings of GOA and FPC if you'd like to see how confusing it is for a law abiding gun owner to stay within the lines of the law when Chevron Deference existed. At any point something you lawfully buy, fill out the correct forms, and lawfully own, could be suddenly interpreted with no notification as criminal and thus you INSTANTLY become a felon. There are violations of ex-post-facto, denial of constitutional rights, etc.
Justification is highly subjective and in many cases these regulatory agencies are handed the pen to write and sign their laws.
There is no difference between a regulatory agency writing and passing law, and congress completely deferring all responsibility to them. This is the problem. "Justification" is not held to any standard.
My personal opinion is opinion from a regulatory agency should be held to a higher standard than even the most prestigious academic journal given the consequences. Chevron Deference being used to regulate companies is one thing. Chevron Deference being used to regulate constitutional rights is a consequence, and thus, it is a good thing it is eliminated. Perhaps congress can actually do it's job and demand a higher level of scrutiny, care, and precision from our regulatory agencies.
Expecting Congress to directly regulate the minutia of industry, medicine or technology is absurd, these are giant categories with their own subfields that need specialized technocratic leadership.
Chevron Deference is used to bypass congressional and court scrutiny. I'm getting downvoted, particularly, because I do not believe people understand the extent of what Chevron Deference provides. I am not surprised. It's not mentioned often, it's often editorialized particularly by leftist media as a great boon to our society, and most people are unaffected by it.
Congress is expected to make laws. End of story. Chevron Deference allows them to reduce their own liability and burden by rubberstamping opinion into law. That is a tremendous problem. Congress' core directive is to protect our rights. Not restrict them. Industry plants have a much easier time infesting regulatory bodies through revolving door policies, regulatory bodies change with every administration, and regulatory bodies are not held to a standard of rigor that approaches 1/10th of the worst quality scientific journal. That is a major problem. The first thing any true tactical politician will do is move his or her favorite industry plants into regulatory bodies. Then, they can give "opinion" that aligns with the view of that person, which is then rubberstamped into law.
If we cannot expect congress to do their job our government has failed it's absolute simplest purpose. There are then much greater problems than whether turtles are choking on can holders.
I trust the scientific expertise of a career bureaucrat holding a PhD more than a congresscritter that brings a snowball onto the Senate floor as "proof" climate change isn't real[1].
To expect anyone to create meaningful regulation on every sector of the economy is absurd, our system is far too complex.
We need regulation if we want to live in a safe & healthy modern society.
Unless you just disagree with the second proposition, it seems your implication is that every congress person should be an expert on every sector of the economy and fiscal policy, and be able to craft meaningful laws, or at least have strong opinions about them. Otherwise, they would just be accepting laws written by other people, just like delegating to the regulator.
Corruption exists in every system. I grew up with clean air and water thanks to the current regulatory system, and have benefited from a safe work culture my whole life. Best I can tell the only guy who has really done anything to stop that is the current President, so kinda a crude characterization to say that they change with every admin.
I never implied congress is expected to be experts on everything. What I do expect is a level of scrutiny much higher than what is considered rigorous by academic standards.
It should not be a hard ask that regulatory bodies produce meaningful, thoughtful, and extensive uneditorialized reports on a subject. These are then given in summary to congress who can use this information to inform regulation.
This strategy is superior for a few reasons:
1. It keeps regulatory bodies honest and when held to the highest possible standard of scrutiny works to prevent a lot of trivial gaming of the system
2. It separates the powers appropriately. Congress can ask anyone to do research and return results. This is not the same as providing an unelected body defacto law writing power.
And on the final point regulation can be good. I think it's dishonest to interpret my position as anti-regulation. Rather, I think regulation is trivially corruptable. Regulatory capture is the mechanism by which the largest wealth-having class maintains their power. Regulatory capture is trivialized through the use of Chevron Deference (see my post above). By cleanly separating the two we reduce the probability of corruption. If a corrupt politician can't inject their stooges to defer to then we have an extra mechanism by which to protect our rights, and protect our health. It then falls on congress to do the right thing. Then it's OUR responsibility to elect people who will do that.
If we allow for the assumption congressmen are not idiots, are capable of reading and referring to experts, and act accordingly then there should be no meaningful difference modulo preventing unelected officials from writing law. If we cannot guarantee that, then it's not corruption, it's a complete failure of the legislative branch of government and the election system. Which I think we both agree here in one way or another that the system has completely failed.
"Under Chevron, if a judge found that the agency had made a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous congressional directive, they were obliged to defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law, effectively ending any substantive review of a challenged rule. The repeal of Chevron is a huge blow to regulators, evidenced by the fact that the decision had been cited more than 18,000 times over 40 years."
the Chevron Doctrine is new to me; it appears that the parent comment was not answering "why was it banned internationally" but rather emphasizing weakness in US procedures
[Edit] The below comment is inaccurate. The pesticide sprayed for gypsy moths was DDT. I am leaving this comment because it should be known that this was a thing even though it is now off topic.
P̵a̵r̵a̵q̵u̵a̵t̵ DDT is also linked to the polio pandemic. It was sprayed everywhere gypsy moths were found. Great success at killing moths. Also weakened human children to to where a common disease could get into spines and cause paralysis.
Researching this kind of stuff is not for the faint of heart. Its horrible all the way down. Not recommended for the faint of heart.
Paraquat is a herbicide, not an insecticide, so why would it be sprayed for moths? I searched for information linking moths, paraquat, and polio, but couldn't find any. Is this claim a hallucination?
The common name is "spongy moths" now, to avoid a racial epithet.
"In July 2021 the Entomological Society of America decided to remove the name "gypsy moth" from its Common Names of Insects and Related Organisms List as "hurtful to the Romani people", since gypsy is considered an ethnic slur by some Romani people." [1]
um. My uncle died of polio, and I was a medical researcher (phd) for a while.
Polio can cause paralysis just fine on its own, it doesn't need DDT or paraquat to help it.
And you are also right that widespread spraying of DDT lead to all kind of problems (killed all the birds, for one, leading to "Silent Spring"), which one reason it was banned.
another reason is the mosquitos developed resistance.
> What lead it to being "banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China"?
Almost everyone who banned it did so because of acute toxicity - it requires careful handling to use safely.
Unfortunately, it was commonly used to commit suicide in many countries. In other countries, it was deaths from accidental ingestion, lung damage from unsafe handling, etc.
I don't know of any country that banned it because of a purported link to Parkinson's.
There's a synthetic opioid called MPPP, which, if inappropriately synthesized (IIRC, using too much heat in one step), yields MPTP, which is non-toxic in and of itself, but has the ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, where it is then metabolized into MPP+, which is potently neurotoxic to the dopaminergic neurons of the Substantia Nigra, reliably producing a Parkinsonism in those exposed to it (from wikipedia):
>The chloride salt of MPP+ found use in the 1970s as an herbicide under the common name cyperquat.[4][3] Though no longer in use as an herbicide, cyperquat's closely related structural analog paraquat still finds widespread usage, raising some safety concerns.
> Over the last two centuries the pendulum of opinion has swung widely as to whether the cause of PD was due to genetics or environment causes [69]. While MPTP has not yet been found in the native environment, beginning in the 1980s the pendulum swung dramatically in the direction of the environmental hypothesis, spurred not only by the observation that a simple pyridine (MPTP) could induce so many of the features of PD, but also the striking similarity between its toxic metabolite, MPP+ and paraquat (differing only by one methyl group) [70], an herbicide that is used worldwide. Since that time, a large number of studies have shown pesticide exposure is a risk factor for PD [71]. Interesting, this risk is enhanced by the presence of certain genetic variants [72], consistent to the adage that “genetics load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger”.
Actually, surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly, given the interesting history and a large chunk of HNers being functional drug addicts--albeit not necessarily of opioids), MPPP was discussed here just last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41053383
The other thing you should know is that they use it to help the plants grow, but they use larger amounts to kill the plants at the same time so they can uniformly harvest. So we eat more of this crap than you'd expect, because they are using it beyond expected ways
I think they might refer to the EU approving of paraquat, which was appealed by Sweden and other countries and it was a legal process churning on until 2007 when the presumed link with Parkinson's and other factors led to the decision to ban it.
> political pressure. Same reason lots of stuff is banned in the EU even when it's safer than other things that aren't banned.
You avoid the question instead of answering it (What caused that "political pressure"? Does such a thing just occur randomly in nature?), following it by an assertion that you don't bother to provide any evidence for.
I believe the EU tends to follow a precautionary principle, namely a substance generally must be shown to be safe before it’s approved. In contrast, the US follows a risk-based approach where a substance can often be used unless it’s shown to be harmful. So it isn't really that many "safe" things in the EU are banned, rather they have not been approved. Pretty sure this is specific to food additives, though may apply to other areas.
> While Chinese companies supply paraquat to American farmers, the report points out China is also a big purchaser of crops, like soybeans, that are grown with help from the pesticide.
> “In these two ways, China economically benefits from the application of paraquat in the U.S., where it outsources many of its associated health hazards,” the report said.
There would arguably be a poetic justice to the US taking a turn at bearing health and environmental costs to benefit other nations, but it's not right for that to happen to any country.
(Unfortunate for many like me who considered them relatively safe for years and did a lot of chemistry with them.)
Farmers use many chemicals for a variety of tasks and it wouldn't surprise me if there were multiple chemicals involved, perhaps even synergistically. Maybe a farmer exposed to paraquat is fine, but one who is exposed to both paraquat and a copper-based antifungal or fumes from a welding repair become more damaged. Hard to say.
I got shingles-ish rash after sitting in an outdoor jacuzzi in Salinas, California. Visited the urgent care and the Standard-trained doctor of immigrant farm laborers said it was related to the pesticides. Said he lost both parents in their 40s and suspects it was the indiscriminate spraying from the air in the 70/80/90s. Eye-opening and thought-provoking.
As a city dweller, I used to use Roundup along my fence line. Then I read an article in a newspaper about spraying chemicals when there is a breeze. So I read the label on the Roundup bottle and it said absolutely do not spray in any windy conditions. Next I polled my coworkers about this and they all said they just stay upwind!
The bottle label also said Roundup is active for up to 30 days, then I thought about my dogs. I no longer use any chemical for lawn care.
As to the plight of the farmers: I wonder if most of them bothered to used proper personal protection gear when spraying? Even if they had enclosed cabs, the chemical would still coat the tractor and tank surfaces which can be rubbed against at any time.
In many parts of the country whole counties smell of pesticide for a few days every year (and pig-shit another few days, but that’s a different issue)
I’ve lived in some of them, and my mom did a lot of by-hand weed-killer spraying (big plastic refillable jug with sprayer hose & wand) along a mile-plus of fence line, for years. Her generation didn’t really do PPE, so no respirator. Died relatively young of a Parkinson’s-adjacent dementia a little while back. No history of any of that in the family. Hm.
When the stories about Roundup started floating around, I switched to 30% strength vinegar with a squirt of dish soap in it. It kills weeds and undesired plants off just as quickly and effectively as Roundup did, but obviously it does not prevent new seeds from sprouting. It is indiscriminate, whereas Roundup selectively targets broad-leafed plants, so you want to avoid getting it on grass. I use a big tarp to mask off the grass if I am using it heavily along the lawn borders. It's very effective for things like borders, gravel paths, stuff like that.
Also, instead of smelling like a chemical factory, your yard will smell like salad dressing for a day or so.
Something that is supposed to be done to legally use it properly under FIFRA. There's a reason why it says in big letters READ ENTIRE LABEL BEFORE USE.
Its nuts to me there's so many people out there buying crazy chemicals and just #yolo'ing it all over the place.
Most modern home AC systems have, as a rule of thumb, ten percent fresh air intake. This varies, depending on the home size and state and local codes. On my home the fresh air vent is high up in my attic, which should protect me from over spraying of chemicals. However, if you have a window unit or an on ground system this will affect your exposure.
In an effort to save money, some will close their fresh air vent, this is not recommended because of the lack of air trade out in the system.
The chance this is a trustworthy source for me is close to 0. This just sound like fantastic pseudology:
“Even secondary exposure can be dangerous. One case published in the Rhode Island Medical Journal described an instance where a 50-year-old man accidentally ingested paraquat, and the nurse treating him was burned by his urine that splashed onto her forearms. Within a day, her skin blistered and sloughed off.
Yeah, I found it myself. And yes, it's nasty stuff. But in the context of the article, it’s pure nonsense.
Should we ban anhydrous ammonia, chlorine, or gasoline? They are nasty and dangerous too. The article is purely scare-mongering to make it seem true while obviously pushing an agenda. This is not science. See my reply at the same level after I did a review.
Harmless compared to random genitic mutation which happens all the time and is never studied. only gmo is held to any standard at all, when other forms of genetic change are held to any standard we can ask if one is better - but for now even the most biased corporate study is better than the alternatives.
Why does that sound untrustworthy? Do you have any idea of what the tobacco industry hid about second hand smoke exposure? How is it somehow more plausible this nurse made up her condition than pesticide manufactures being honest about the impacts?
I don’t think the nurse is lying at all. The medical case is real. My point is that the article omitted the fact that the patient she treated had ingested a massive, lethal dose of concentrate (acute poisoning), and she was exposed to it when extracting it. The journalist used the symptoms of a suicide attempt to illustrate the risks of routine farming, which I think is misleading. It’s not about the nurse making it up... it’s about the article leaving out the context that matters most. Especially when pushing the argument that it causes Parkinson's.
My gut intuition just didn't like the framing. Now that I have read through it thoroughly, my answer is this: It's untrustworthy because it is obviously extremely selective with what it includes, omits relevant base rates, uses graphical examples out of context, and has an obvious bias and agenda. That is just one of tens of examples in the article.
Your tobacco reference can be condensed into: "Large firms are known to lie and cover up things." I agree 100%. They plainly outright lied directly AND lied by covering up.
But the reaction to that is not to lie better. And by better, I mean lying by omission, juxtaposition, and framing. These are still methods of lying, just that they are harder for people to detect.
I mean you can click on the source right there, that is literally what happened: http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima.... The description maybe makes it sound a little more extreme than it actually was, but it's the correct terminology and an accurate description of events.
Is lying by omission and juxtaposition. It's manipulation. And it pisses me off to no end. I read the original source. It has NOTHING to do with Parkinson’s. It’s a suicidal dose ingested, and when extracted, it was still a dangerous chemical. If I drank a gallon of gasoline and you pumped it out of me, then it caught fire, it wouldn't explain anything except that gasoline is dangerous and burns. Nobody disputes that with regard to this chemical. So why slip it in like that? And the fact that people don't care just shows why they CAN “just slip it in there” in an article about Parkinson’s... nobody cares as long as it confirms their bias.
I only care about evidence that proves that it causes Parkinson’s, with basic scientific rigor. I’ll eat my hat if any of the cited studies did basic attempt at falsification.
I just finished reading article
and honestly, my BS detector is going off the charts.
I’m not saying pesticides are health tonics, but this piece feels like pure litigation PR rather than an actual investigation. It prioritizes storytelling over science and engages in what I can only describe as lying by omission. Here are the main issues I found:
The nurse whose skin peeled off just from touching a patient’s urine? The article frames this to make you think, "Wow, this stuff is so toxic that if a farmer uses it, his body becomes a weapon." I looked into the medical case this is likely based on. That patient didn't just "farm" with Paraquat; he ingested a lethal, concentrated dose (usually a suicide attempt). By leaving out that the patient drank a cup of poison, the author conflates Acute Poisoning (death in days, acid urine) with Chronic Exposure (trace amounts over years). If the farmer in the main story had enough Paraquat in his system to burn a nurse’s skin, he wouldn’t be alive to give an interview about Parkinson’s. He’d be dead from multi-organ failure. Omitting this context is manipulative fear-mongering.
Then there is the math: Parkinson’s affects about 1% of the elderly population. There are 2 million farms in the US. Even if Paraquat was essentially harmless water, you would still have tens of thousands of farmers with Parkinson’s purely by chance. The article ignores this base rate to imply that every diagnosis is a result of the chemical. It treats a probabilistic risk as a deterministic cause.
It also ignores confounders (like the "Rural Cluster" Problem). Farming is a "chemical soup" lifestyle. You have well water (a known PD risk), head trauma risks, and exposure to dozens of other chemicals like Rotenone or Maneb. The article presents a direct line: Paraquat -> PD. But scientifically, isolating one chemical from 30 years of rural living is a nightmare. The article doesn't even attempt to falsify the hypothesis or look at other factors; it just assumes the lawsuit's narrative is the scientific truth.
The article also fails basic science standards. It is storytelling, not science. A real scientific inquiry follows Popperian standards—you make a conjecture and then try to disprove it. This article does the opposite: it acts like a defense attorney. It stacks up emotional anecdotes and selective correlations to confirm its bias and ignores the replication crisis in epidemiology where results often don't stick.
This isn't journalism and it’s not science; it’s advocacy via outrage. It uses the real tragedy of these farmers to push a specific narrative, relying on readers not knowing the difference between drinking poison and spraying crops. If you’ve ever wondered why science doesn’t make more progress, and we have the replication crisis, look no further.
Isn't this old news? If you are a Vietnam vet who were exposed to Agent Orange or other herbicides, and you get Parkinson's, the VA assumes it was from Vietnam. My grandfather had Parkinson's a long time ago it was always said it was due to pesticides they used while farming.
First acknowledge AO death was in 2015, they gaslighted entire generations. Had Nixon not sent his campaign manager to Vietnam in 1969, and promised the VietCong a better deal later when he was president, we wouldn't have spent those five unneeded years there and wouldn't have used AO.
One of my relatives owned an animal farm for a couple of decades and got a very rare muscle wasting disease. A high school friend of his, who was also a farmer, got the same disease. I imagine there were innumerable harmful chemicals on the land and in the water from decades of use before he bought it in the 90s.
So the U.S. is still using 11-17 lbs/yr despite warnings and bans really since 1986, a re-authorization in 2021 by the EPA, and known elevated risk near use sites, which corporations have fought against claiming "no definitive proof". So if the U.S. allows its use "as directed", who can be legally accountable for all this?
My father is a data point in this. He was a farmer all his life and ultimately it was Parkinson's that did him in. While we took some precautions, I have no doubt that the herbicides we used should have been handled more carefully.
"With evidence of its harms stacking up, it’s already been banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China, where it’s made. Yet last year, its manufacturer Syngenta, a subsidiary of a company owned by the Chinese government, continued selling paraquat in the United States and other nations that haven’t banned it."
Here in Germany, farmers are regularly complaining about all the bureaucracy and "unnecessary" safety requirements in regards to pesticides and over-fertilization . But they also complain when nothing grows anymore because they killed the top soil with too much fertilizer, poisoned the groundwater and then die of Parkinson because, who would have thought, all those regulations and safety requirements had a point after all. I don't know how to help those people, I really don't.
>Chevron, which never manufactured paraquat and hasn’t sold it since 1986 ... should not be liable
I think Chevron may have a point, no one knew back then and they stopped selling it ~40 years ago. But ---
To me, if the US had a real Health Care System, people would not have to file lawsuits to get the care they need.
But in the US, this is how things work. The care these people need is unaffordable by everyone in the US except for the very rich. So they will be waiting probably 10 to 20 years for relief as the lawsuit works it way through the courts and appeals.
Except the data doesnt back up that assertion. Golf course employees and golfers have no higher rates of than the public at large. So what gives?
If the very people who spend most of their waking lives on the grounds and among those fertilizers and pesticides do not have any great instance, maybe just maybe its something else. Like the gallons of unregulated chemicals that are in those tract houses that were all built around the same time...
one example is the drywall was used extensively in the 90's. Its makeup banned in the country of origin, China but its product was used all throughout the US for decades.
The correlation seems to point to usage ground water that is contaminated with pesticides. So people living close to the golf courses have higher Parkinson risk.
Probably golfers and employees less so.
I just read another article about this, but the affected group is military from Camp Legume. The water in Legume was contaminated, and its actually given a control group test for the incidence of Parkinson’s with Camp Pendleton, where the water was not contaminated.
Many medical preparations are oil rather than water soluble. Seed oils tend to be the cheapest choice, and probably still have trace amounts of pesticides/herbicides/fungicide--even after processing. Under such conditions, one must wonder how many of our modern neurodegenerative conditions are iatrogenic. Genetics may load the chamber, but environment pulls the trigger.
"In 110 PD cases and 358 controls, PD was associated with use of a group of pesticides that inhibit mitochondrial complex I [odds ratio (OR) = 1.7; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.0–2.8] including rotenone (OR = 2.5; 95% CI, 1.3–4.7) and with use of a group of pesticides that cause oxidative stress (OR = 2.0; 95% CI, 1.2–3.6), including paraquat (OR = 2.5; 95% CI, 1.4–4.7)."
"Ambient paraquat exposure assessed at both residence and workplace was associated with PD, based on several different exposure measures. The PD patients both lived and worked near agricultural facilities applying greater amounts of the herbicide than community controls. For workplace proximity to commercial applications since 1974, working near paraquat applications every year in the window [odds ratio (OR) = 2.15, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.46, 3.19] and a higher average intensity of exposure [per 10 pounds (4.54 kilograms), OR = 2.08, 95% CI = 1.31, 3.38] were both associated with an increased odds of PD. Similar associations were observed for residential proximity (duration: OR = 1.91, 95% CI = 1.30, 2.83; average intensity: OR = 1.72, 95% CI = 0.99, 3.04). Risk estimates were comparable for men and women, and the strongest odds were observed for those diagnosed at ≤60 years of age."
"DPR’s preliminary scientific evaluation found that the current registered uses of paraquat in California may adversely affect non-target organisms, including birds, mammals and aquatic organisms, with the most significant risks to birds. Additional mitigation measures, beyond current restrictions on paraquat use currently in effect, may not feasibly reduce these environmental impacts to acceptable levels.
Consistent with United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (U.S. EPA) 2019 review, DPR’s review of existing human health studies does not indicate a causal association between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s disease."
It's a herbicide, not a pesticide. I clicked the article because I was surprised that any current pesticides are that harmful to humans.
Pesticides are, generally, safe to humans. Herbicides are, generally, not at all safe to humans. Roundup is probably the most safe outside of per-emergents like corn husks or whatever, but it's not a free ride either.
I am dubious of all the claims that say something designed to kill organic life is safe because it just means "safe at X dose". Like there isn't a pesticide made where I could drink a tablespoon of it and be fine. It just doesn't present noticeable effects at tiny doses so it is labeled safe.
Like if I drank a 1/4 shot of Vodka every morning I wouldn't notice it at all, but I imagine it would have some impacts on my health over the long run.
Not to mention we might have 30+ chemicals/medications/additives/whatever all being consumed constantly at "safe levels" with no research into how they interact or accumulate.
> Pesticides are substances that are used to control pests. They include herbicides, insecticides, nematicides, fungicides, and many others (see table). The most common of these are herbicides, which account for approximately 50% of all pesticide use globally.[0]
You're trying to be pedantic, but you're actually wrong. If you think about it, from the perspective of anyone trying to raise crops, weeds are pests. (They are pests to lots of non-farmers, too.)
Similarly...
> A pest is any organism harmful to humans or human concerns. The term is particularly used for creatures that damage crops, livestock, and forestry or cause a nuisance to people, especially in their homes.
> Plants may be considered pests, for example, if they are invasive species or weeds.
While saying "it's an herbicide, not a pesticide" is categorically incorrect, I still think it would be better if the journalist used the more specific and less confusing term here.
There are many common pesticides which have extreme toxicity to humans, including HCN (Hydrogen Cyanide), (ab)used under the brand-name Zyklon B in WW2, and still sold today as a (controlled-use) pesticide under generic brand names.
It's a chasm-leap to say that pesticides are generally safe to humans.
they are designed to target specific aspects of the insects nervous systems that humans dont have and are used in small doses/by the time any residue reaches a human its diluted. herbicides are very different.
Paraquat seems like it should be banned on its acute toxicity grounds alone, but the Parkinson's link as phrased doesn't stand out given the article's statistics. A thousand out of a million is a thousandth.
A baseline rate or Parkinsons would be a good addition to the article. I have seen figures of 1 out of 331 for total or apparently about 1.1M total. Farmers make up about 2% of the population. Doing rough back of envelope math shows that you would expect 22K farmers to have Parkinsons assuming even distribution by population.
The numbers aren't precise but if the article's thousands was taken literally it would ironically suggest paraquat has a protective effect against Parkinsons which is obviously absurd thing to assume from a known neurotoxin.
Not every farmer with Parkinsons is suing though. If we assume 1% of farmers are involved in lawsuits then thousands is alarming because it would imply 10x rates. 10% suing though and it is expected. 100% suing would be 1/10th the general rate which would fit with the absurd counterfactual hypothesis that non-lethal paraquat exposure prevents Parkinsons.
The government absolutely cannot be trusted to protect the individual, whether a farmer or a consumer. It is coming down to each individual protecting himself by assessing the safety of the ingredients, sometimes also the purity.
The chemical manufacturer, Syngenta, is the same one involved in the creation of atrazine, the chemical notorious for preliminary evidence of the whole frog sex-changing while it's been sprayed all over the US but banned in most other countries.
propublica.org has endless great articles on this and other horrors in the US
but if we aren't going to change a damn thing with daily mass shooting we sure aren't going to fix poisoning the environment, fracking is 100x worse than this and "sacrifice zones" are a real thing
follow the money, sue before current administration makes it illegal to sue
I was casually chatting with my uncle who is a doctor, he says something along the lines that if a chemical can kill a rat or a mosquito, to assume it won't do any damage to humans is kind of hilarious.
Of course humans who inhale this thing in small quantities won't die, but you can be sure they will kill some tissues that they go into. Now comes another problem of regular exposure, and these chemicals having an entry, but no exit path. That just means there are tissues, that are likely dying out every time there is a exposure.
Again none of this might kill you at the first exposure, but if there are enough dead tissues, there sure is likely to be things like Parkinson's or may be even diabetes.
Im guessing combined with this, if you already some bad genetics it could cause issues like these.
Fries used to be fried in beef tallow oil basically everywhere. Most fast-food chains went to vegetable oils for various reasons (vegan, subsidized, cheaper, supposedly healthier, etc). Many perceive a noticeable taste difference.
This is the legitimate end of the spectrum. The science that drove tallow out of kitchens and homes was incomplete, particularly when it was replaced with trans fats.
Where it goes off the rails is when nutters conclude that because tallow was wronged in one context, it is wronged in all of them, which leads to folks rubbing tallow on their faces [1]. (It's probably harmless. I've used it as a foot cream because I got samples at my farmers' market.)
One of the big benefits for corporations is that rancidity in vegetable oils isn't as noticeable by smell, so they can keep using them after they've gone off. Just to add to how much cheaper they are.
Have there been any blind tastings for that? I mean, if people swear by beef tallow's taste, they should be able to also prove it experimentally.
This would also set a level field between beef tallow and other oils. I would expect that a lot have changed in the fast food industry supply chain since the "good old days". Frying oil is only one of the factors that may have affected the taste of fries. Not to mention that everything tastes better when one is young.
The difference wasn’t subtle, and they cooked differently after the switch, too. Plenty of folks had the experience of noticing that they’d had a run of bad batches of fries before finding out the recipe had change (so now all batches were bad) and effectively did do a blind taste test.
I assure you if you'd been alive and consuming fast food french fries before and after the change you wouldn't think a blind test was required. The difference between whatever the hell McDonalds was using before the switch and after was jarring.
"for various reasons" ... not really, the main reason was "supposedly healthier." There was pressure from healthy food advocates, mostly based on pop science claims. In the 1980s the "fat and dietary cholesterol is bad" trend started. That's when restaurants switched away from beef tallow, so they could advertise "fried in vegetable oil" as if that was healthier. They also introduced salads, oat bran muffins, changed from milk to yogurt ice cream, and other things that customers generally didn't want but could be claimed to be "healthy."
The amount of sugar added to prepared food took a big jump around this time, as it replaced fat to make the food taste good. Around this time is when obesity started to become a bigger problem.
That I did know. I lived through the change and "noticeable taste difference" is a massive understatement. What fresh indignity has been injected into the media cycle that makes this in any way relevant?
Technically, yes, but it's a similar relationship of humans being animals. If you say animals, the audience will assume you're not talking about humans.
Under Trump, so many regulations have been setback. It will only get worse. I think the answer has to be on the community level, pushing back against industrial use that has not been rigorously tested. However, many believe that job creation is more important than the right of individuals (innocents) to a life free of health issues.
I honestly think there's a technology / robotics solution to the pesticide, and especially herbicide, problems. I'm in completely the wrong space to see it happen, but I'm still hopeful someone smart can do it.
Skepticism is healthy. You've found that the numbers don't make sense at face value. The problem is that you stopped there, you haven't even made any attempt at reconciling them with the original claim.
What if the US number of 1 in 400 figure is that high precisely because it includes people exposed to pesticide? In other words, maybe the number would be 1 in 500 if it weren't for Paraquat? You'd have to look at concentration maps or at the very least check what's the diagnosis rates in other countries before you can truly dismiss the claim, imho.
The article already talks to the numbers they mean and what scale they believe it to be:
> More than 6,400 lawsuits against Syngenta and Chevron that allege a link between paraquat and Parkinson’s are pending in the U.S. District Court of Southern Illinois. Another 1,300 cases have been brought in Pennsylvania, 450 in California and more are scattered throughout state courts.
> “I do think it’s important to be clear that number is probably not even close to representative of how many people have been impacted by this,” said Christian Simmons, a legal expert for Drugwatch.
I'm not saying you have to believe it, just that rhetorically asking if it's more than 5,000 in the US is redundant when the article already says there are more than that many individual cases about it in a single district court.
My grandfather was a crop duster pilot in the 60s-70s. He died of Parkinson's almost 4 years ago today. He is the only one in my family to succumb to this disease. For a brief moment I was relieved to know there was some explanation for his suffering.
Then I read the HN comments.
It is beyond infuriating to read a well researched paper with 1300 open cases legal with overwhelming evidence only to be met with "zero chance this is real."
The article mentions epidemiological studies showing that people living or working near farmland where paraquat is used have a higher incidence of Parkinson's.
Don't be so quick to dismiss it, there could be a link.
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...
You should consider dropping that instinct. If you look into how corporations have behaved historically you'd assume evil until proven innocent. Especially US corps.
> You should consider dropping that instinct.
This is the reason we have people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities.
If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic.
Edit: By the way, I also don't think we should trust big companies indiscriminately. Like, we could have a system for pesticide approval that errs on the side of caution: We only permit pesticides for which there is undisputed evidence that the chemicals do not cause problems for humans/animals/other plants etc.
"If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic."
I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong. The tendency to optimize for profits at the expense of everything else, to ignore all negative externalities is inherent to all American corporations.
The main thing that people snag on is scale and frequency.
If you are super into "ACAB" (all cops are bastards) you can easily "research" this all day for weeks and find so many insane cases of police being absolute bastards. You would be so solidified in your belief that police as an institution are fundamentally a force of evil.
But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is almost always where people run aground. Stats are almost always obfuscated for things that people develop a moral conviction around. Imagine trying to acknowledge the stat there are effectively zero transgender people perving on others in public bathrooms.
ACAB is not about the proportion of bad encounters to good encounters. It is about the police system as a whole that defends and provides cover for the bad ones.
If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
Suppose you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and 500000 actors are “good except that they protect that one guy”, and then the one guy dies of a freak heart attack, and then all but one of the 500000 are replaced with “good actors” except that they defend the guy who remains from the 500000.
Are they bad actors?
You're reducing it down too far. Policing has a problem policing itself -- it's very well documented.
People take it too far in both directions, but it's safe to say that there's more than one bad actors and the system demonstrably tolerates and defends them right up to the point where they are forced not to.
Right, there’s clearly a problem, and I think even a systemic problem. I just don’t think it follows that literally every officer is therefore culpable. I think I would say that probably almost every police union leader is culpable.
And who votes for those union leaders? The cops. They vote for corrupt people to protect their own corruption. It's a corrupt system from top to bottom.
I explicitly stated that it was "more than one" and in no way intimated that it was all cops.
One of the simplest things we could do as a country to help mitigate this is to end the War on Drugs. It was never about protecting people, and was always about enabling oppression of "others".
The other simple thing to do is to stop using cops for "welfare checks" and mental health crises -- those situations are uniformly better handled by social workers. This has tragically been put under the category of "defund the police", but the idea itself is sound. The "defund" slogan is so bad it's almost like it was created to sabotage the effort.
>If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
This line of thinking will either be totally unable to ever build a large organization, or else will pathologically explain-away wrong-doing due to black and white thinking.
A large organization that gives their employees paid vacation when any other person is sent to prison isn't an organization worth having.
This sort of thing is unfortunately very common in many large bureaucracies, especially across the government. A notable (and likely controversial) case in point is teachers who (sexually or physically) abuse students, and are kept on the payrolls, often in ‘rubber-rooms’. Are public schools worth having?
I guess the equivalent here is the teachers and the teachers unions covering up that abuse, moving the abuses around to other schools, and lobbying for special protection for those abusers even after they are caught and convicted.
Its not perfect as an analogy since police are the state's sanctioned violence and teachers are not, nor are teachers in charge of preventing rape generally, but it kind of works since kids generally do have to go to school of some kind.
I expect in the above hypothetical the person you're asking would agree that yes, all teachers are part of the rape problem. The logic is the same and it hinges on the idea that allowing and intentionally enabling <very bad abuse if power> instead of fighting to expose and stop it makes you part of that problem even if you aren't directly doing the bad thing. Doubly so if your job is to expose and stop that abuse in every group except your own.
Teachers in many jurisdictions (I don’t know about every jurisdiction) are required (and paid) to take training in spotting signs of sexual or physical abuse, and are (at least often) legally required to report it. In that sense, they are ‘in charge of’ preventing sexual abuse.
I don't think many teachers think that abusing students is part of their job, but there are LOTS of cops who think that abusing their power to kill / maim / steal from / rape citizens is JUST fine.
If someone had this experience I’d encourage them to look into how police departments across the US consistently fight against any accountability for the cops who perpetuate those relatively few awful encounters. “Most interactions are harmless therefore the negativity is overblown and cops are trustworthy” is one takeaway if you stop your research at the right point. “if you have a bad experience with a cop the entire department will turn against you; they are not to be trusted” is a more accurate takeaway.
As you say, stats very often obfuscate.
If we apply your logic, would you say it's fair to go around and say "all teachers are bastards", when referring to teacher unions that make it hard to fire incompetent teachers? Or maybe "all doctors are bastards" when referencing how the american medical association (the trade association for doctors) makes it hard for more doctors to be admitted?
Sure, but one key difference is that if either of those groups steps outside the law, you can recourse to the law to check them.
Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem. This is before one even starts unpacking the knapsack of how much law is designed to protect the police from consequences of performing their duties (leading to the unfortunate example "They can blow the side off your house if they have reason to believe it will help them catch a suspect and the recompense is that your insurance might cover that damage.")
>Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem.
I don't see how this is a relevant factor for the two cases I mentioned. Sure, it's bad that are part of the justice system, and therefore you can't use the justice system to correct their misbehavior, but you're not going to involve the justice system for incompetent teachers, or not enough doctors being admitted. For all intents and purposes the dynamic is the same.
Teachers and doctors may abuse their authority, but there is a sharp legal limit to what they can get away with.
There are sharp legal limits to what cops can get away with: they've just historically been unenforced by government prosecutors and/or juries.
you are definitely going to start involving the justice system if teachers and doctors start physically abusing people, illegally detaining them and killing them!
> incompetent teachers
I'm not really talking about incompetence, and incomptenece isn't the largest issue in the category of "things that make people say ACAB."
https://www.wtrf.com/top-stories/teacher-charged-with-sex-cr...
I am not at all joking when I make the claim that police committing sex crimes is a problem that is frequently swept under the rug by both police internal affairs and the judicial system.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/08/daniel-holtz...
How many teachers are getting off on murder charges due to their position as a teacher?
Seems like a pretty big difference.
They only murder talents and/or curiosity in children or self esteem.
(I'm totally not ATAB here, just agree that parent post analogy)
Using murder in this context to minimize -actually murder- is pretty bad taste.
Yes.
It's not the root however. The root is nepotism. What you're describing is one of ten thousand problems nepotism causes.
Misanthropy is the logical conclusion /s
"If you research police corruption you'll probably find out the police are corrupt."
Large corporations and the police both have statistically significant problems to be a concern to the average person.
Frequency isn't the issue it's recurrence across municipalities. That's what makes it clear there is a systemic issue.
Imagine if we didn't make laws about murder because "It's not that frequent of a problem only 1 in 500,000 people are murdered"
>But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is hardly a revelation. There are levels of bastardy in between "angelic philosopher-saint and paladin of justice" and "demonic hellspawn stomping babies for resisting arrest". The cop who just hands out false tickets to meet quota is just as ACAB as the one who finally loses his temper and shoots someone without true cause, but one gets to hide it better. Intuitively, I suspect that the cumulative actions of the low-level ACAB behaviors add more misery and injustice to the world than all the wrongful deaths and incarceration combined.
pedantic, but "ACAB" doesn't necessarily mean every (or most) cops do horrible things all the time (that's the strawman version).
one, more nuanced, sentiment is something more like "all cops are bastards as long as bad cops are protected."
another sentiment is "modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers; thus, all of policing is rooted in bastard behavior, therefore: all cops are bastards".
there are plenty of other ways to interpret the phrase. "acab" is shorthand for a lot of legitimate grievances.
> modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers;
That's not (entirely) true, though? Every modern police department has its roots in London Metropolitan Police Force which had nothing to do with salve catching can't say much about strikebreakers, but I know specifically LMPF went on multiple strikes themselves. It had also nothing to do with solving crimes, that's just a bonus.
My favorite slogan is “Slogans are always bad.” . It can be interpreted in a lot of different ways that make a lot of sense, and that’s why I repeat it often, without clarifying what I mean by it.
and yet, here you are, indirectly swiping at something instead of just saying what you mean :)
That is a lot of words to make a claim that nobody would accept if they used it for other issues. If somebody said that all blacks are criminals and used your exact argument, nobody would buy it.
ah yes, race, something famously chosen
You picked a terrible example as a counterpoint, because ACAB is about police protecting bad police (or generally, authorities defending each other as a gang themselves).
Which is seen in every group of authorities around the country. They literally give out get out of jail free cards for cops’ friends and family in many parts of the country, that is systemic, and has nothing to do with frequency of cops committing crimes.
And when a cop tries to do something about it, this is the sort of thing that happens. This guy seems like he's trying to do the right thing, but the system is designed so he can't:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/04/nypd-lawsuit...
> Bianchi claims his superiors retaliated against him for his stance against the “corrupt” cards after he was warned by an official with the Police Benevolent Association, New York City’s largest police union, that he would not be protected by his union if he wrote tickets for people with cards. And if he continued, he’d be reassigned... The lawsuit cites several instances where his NYPD colleagues complained about his ticket-writing, including on Facebook...
> Bianchi’s service as a traffic cop ended last summer when he wrote a ticket to a friend of the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, the lawsuit states.
Adrian Schoolcraft is the name that comes to mind for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
> Schoolcraft amassed a set of tapes which demonstrated corruption and abuse within New York City's 81st Police Precinct. The tapes include conversations related to the issues of arrest quotas and investigations. [...] Schoolcraft was harassed, particularly in 2009, after he began to voice his concerns within the precinct. He was told he needed to increase arrest numbers and received a bad evaluation.
His fellow officers had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward. They told the hospital that his claims were a sign of paranoid delusions. He was eventually vindicated, but his career was destroyed.
It's been a long time since I heard this, but I believe there is recording here [0] of his colleagues forcing themselves into his apartment to have him committed.
[0]https://www.thisamericanlife.org/414/right-to-remain-silent/...
Also, watch Serpico. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0070666/
> I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong
You really can't. You can start off with a prior that it's more likely the corporation is wrong than not. But if you're assuming your conclusion, you're going to find evidence for what you're looking for. (You see the same thing happen with folks who start off by assuming the government is in the wrong.)
When you go shopping and see two items for sale that seem nearly identical, do you buy the cheaper one?
If you have long term savings do you want it to earn interest?
The desire to optimize for profit exists at all levels among all participants in the economy. Everyone does it. We are the system and the system is us.
Regulations are usually the only way to fix these things because there are game theoretic effects in play. If your company spends more to clean up and others don’t, you lose… because people buy cheaper products and invest in firms with higher profit margins. The only way out we’ve found is to simultaneously compel everyone. But that doesn’t remove the incentive.
Yeah I'm aware. Learning about how American capitalism functions is what set me on the path of being an anticapitalist. Reforms and regulations will never be effective here in solving this issue. The system itself is poisonous.
what is the solution
It might seem like bias will get you to where you're going faster, but at the end of the day it's just bias.
I have a bias towards not dying, and so far that has steered me away from activities that increase my likelihood of it. Bias is not intrinsically negative (that's prejudice), it just means a preference towards.
A bias in perception won't help you be perceptive.
That bias is well earned. Maybe one day corporations will do enough good things in the world to undo the evil they've perpetuated. I'm not holding my breath.
>people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities
Does it not?
"We estimate that 1 MWh of energy consumption by a data center requires 7.1 m3 of water." If Microsoft, Amazon and Google are assumed to have ~8000 MW of data centers in the US, that is 1.4M m3 per day. The city of Philadelphia supplies 850K m3 per day.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1/...
Yeah, but that is for everything. YouTube, Amazon itself, AWS, Azure, GCP, ... not just AI stuff. I mean, it is still a lot of water, but the numbers are not that easy to calculate IMHO
Many if not most data centers are pulling water out of the ground that will never be replaced. The problem is multidimensional, not just volume.
Why do we need to assume so many things, when we can peg it to reality.
Worldwide, Google's data centers averaged 3.7GW in 2024. Globally, they use 8.135e9 gallons of water in the year, which is 30.8e6m³ per year, which is 84e3m³ per day. Double that to meet the assumed 8GW data center capacity, 168e3m³/day. QED: the estimate 1.4e6m³/day is high by a factor of 10x. Or, in other words, the entire information industry consumes the same amount of water as one very small city.
I believe this is why Google states their water consumption as equivalent to 51 golf courses. It gives a useful benchmark for comparison. But any way you look at it the water consumption of the information sector is basically nothing.
All the golf courses where I live use grey water - water that would otherwise be dumped into oceans/estuaries/rivers/etc.
That's not really not comparable to data centers using potable water.
Even the golf course trade association only claims 10% grey water use.
Also, you're going to be shocked, data centers can cool with grey water as well. The now-cancelled Project Blue data center near Tucson was going to build and operate a wastewater pipeline and treatment plant and give it to the city, but the shouting NIMBYs prevailed anyway. The developer now intends to use air-to-air cooling, which costs more energy.
how much is it in burgers and steaks? serious question
Don’t forget cotton.
234 m3 per tonne, of clean water.
25M tonnes per year.
=> 16M m3 of clean water per day
Edit: convert to comparable units
Philadelphia? 80K m3 water for 10K lbs beef per day. But that's not potable water, which is a lot of what data centers are using
Resource consumption of AI is unclear on two axes:
1) As other commenters have noted: raw numbers. In general, people are taking the resource consumption of new datacenters and attributing 100% of that to "because AI," when the reality is generally that while AI is increasing spend on new infrastructure, data companies are always spending on new infrastructure because of everything they do.
2) Comparative cost. In general, image synthesis takes between 80 and 300 times fewer resources (mostly electricity) per image than human creation does. It turns out a modern digital artist letting their CPU idle and screen on while they muse is soaking significant resources that an AI is using to just synthesize. Granted, this is also not an apples-to-apples comparison because the average AI flow generates dozens of draft images to find the one that is used, but the net resource effect might be less energy spent in total per produced image (on a skew of "more spent by computers" and "less by people").
Comparing humans with machines on resource use gives some seriously dystopian vibes.
I agree, but that's what people are implicitly doing every time they toss out one of those "The machine drinks a glass of water every time it" statistics. We are to assume a human doesn't.
"undisputed evidence that the chemicals do not cause problems"
Impossible standard. You cannot prove a negative.
But, I think it's fair to assume that any chemical that is toxic to plant or insect life is probably something you want to be careful with.
Nonsense, if we view proving as providing evidence for, then absolutely we can prove a negative. We have our priors, we accumulate evidence, we generate a posterior. At some point we are sufficiently convinced. Don't get hung up on the narrow mathematical definition of prove (c.f. the exception[al case] that proves [tests] the rule), and we're just dandy.
I like to think that what the “can’t prove a negative” phrase originated from was someone grasping at the difference between Pi_1 and Sigma_1 statements . For a Pi_1 statement, one needs only a single counterexample to refute it, but to verify it by considering individual cases, one has to consider all of them and show that they all work (which, if there are infinitely many, it is impossible to handle them all individually, and if there are just a lot, it may still be infeasible) . Conversely, for a Sigma_1 statement, a single example is sufficient to verify the claim, but refuting it by checking individual cases would require checking every case.
> Impossible standard. You cannot prove a negative
It's also a deep incumbency advantage. Of course the guys selling the existing stuff are going to dispute the safety of a competitor.
And when a chemical goes off patent protection and you have a new patented chemical ready to go, it's advantageous to suddenly dis the now public domain entity.
You cannot prove a negative.
How about Fermat's last theorem?
Mathematics and scientific proof of negatives are different kinds of proofs.
AI water usage is pretty bad on a local scale where a large water consumer(Data centers) start sucking up more water than the local table can bear at the expense of the people living there.
Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person. It's correct that these companies will push limits and avoid accountability. It's correct that they're generally a liability creating a massive bubble and speculation based on an immature tech designed to automate as many careers away as possible without a proposed solution to the newly unemployed besides "deliver fast food" or "die".
Despite legally treating corporations as people, there's no consistently enforced mechanism that can punish them like people. Monsanto can't be sent to jail for murder. Their C-Levels will never see a cell the way the average person can have the book thrown at them for comparably minor crimes.
Because companies cannot be held accountable legally and effectively, it's important to assume the worst, to generate the public blowback to hold them accountable via lost business.
>Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person.
That just sounds more like cope than anything else. eg. "AI companies sucking up all the water might not be a real issue, but I still think they're evil for other reasons".
Not at all. NOT AT ALL.
There are shades of gray here. But you are absolutely not required to extend benefit of the doubt to entities that have not earned it. That's a recipe for disaster.
Personally, I find myself to be incredibly biased against corporations over people. I've met a lot of people in my life, they seem mostly nice if a bit stupid. Well intentioned. Selfish.
Are corporations mostly well intentioned? Well, consider that some people tried to put "good intentions" into corporations bylaws and has been viciously resisted.
Corporations will happily take everything you have if you accidentally give it to them. Actual human beings aren't like that.
> …undisputed evidence… do not cause problems…
This is unworkable in practice; nothing will ever be completely safe. Instead, we need a public regulatory body that makes reasonable risk/reward tradeoffs when approving necessary chemicals. However, this system breaks down completely when you allow for lobbying and a revolving door between the public and private sectors.
Your edit was a good one.
It's a rational default position to say, "I'll default to distrusting large corporate scientific literature that tells me neurotoxins on my food aren't a problem."
As with any rule of thumb, that one will sometimes land you on the wrong side of history, but my guess is that it will more often than not guide you well if you don't have the time to dive deeper into a subject.
I'm not saying all corporations are evil. I'm not saying all corporate science is bad or bunk. But, corporations have a poor track record with this sort of thing, and it's the kind of thing that could obviously have large, negative societal consequences if we get it wrong. This is the category of problem for which the science needs to be clear and overwhelming in favor of a thing before we should allow it.
Indeed. Every rule has an exception but heuristics are useful.
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yzlsoj/e...
AI does consume huge amounts of water comparable to entire cities. A single AI facility consumes more water than most cities.
That AI consumes somewhat less water than cities of millions is not a defense.
No that's incorrect. Now you're just lying and making things up.
Ai does us a crap-ton of water. Most data centers use closed loop liquid cooling with heat exchangers to water cooling. (At least all the big ones like Google and Amazon do)
I’m curious what evidence you think you’ve seen to the contrary. from my side, I used to build data centers and my friends are still in the industry. As of a month ago I’ve had discussions with Google engineers who build data centers regarding their carful navigation of water rights, testing of waste water etc.
> Most data centers use closed loop liquid cooling with heat exchangers to water cooling.
If these data centers are so water efficient, please explain the Dalles data center use > 25% of their water supply?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230130142801/https://centralor...
https://web.archive.org/web/20251014013855/https://www.orego...
Did they say it was efficient? The "closed loop" is only one part of the system that cycles water between the heat exchanger and the building/servers.
The second part of the system is an open loop that uses water to cool the closed loop at the heat exchanger.
They implied that DCs somehow save water because of being closed loop. The closed loop is a red herring, since the outer loop dumps potable water.
The Dalles data centers use a large fraction of the water supply of The Dalles because the data centers are extremely large and the town of The Dalles is of negligible size. It is also true that the paper mill of Valliant, Oklahoma uses 50 million gallons of water per day and that the town of Valliant, Oklahoma, population 819, uses less than 1% of that amount, so the paper mill can be said to be using > 99% of the local water supply but this is also a meaningless comparison.
So we'll move the datacenters from the tiny town to just outside of a giant city which will probably move that percentage down to only a few percent if even that. Problem solved!
You're looking at the wrong metrics to compare here if we're trying to just gauge how efficient a datacenter is or is not. This metric could be useful if the datacenters are attached to the municipal water system and thus begin to be a massive load compared to what was originally planned/built, but in terms of understanding the total water use compared to other industrial users its kind of a meaningless statistic.
Parent says consume, you write use.
I’ve been unclear on this. What datacenter out there is using an open loop cooling system that does not return the water after cooling for other uses?
It seems extremely inefficient to have to filter river water over and over then to dump it into the ground so deep it doesn’t go back to getting into an aquifer.
The water that is "used" by data centers is evaporated. That's where it goes. The sky.
So you are saying it’s an open loop, and can we not calculate when these million of gallons of water are going to come back down?
As is always the case when discussing systems, the answer changes depending on where you draw the system boundary. In some cases you would expect water to fall as rain in the same watershed where it was drawn. This is the case for example of water "used by" California rice fields that are irrigated by flood. In other cases, you can expect the water to disappear into a distant system. This would be the case for water drawn from fossil aquifers.
Corporations have to be assumed to be amoral, which means that practically speaking, you can assume they'll tend towards evil.
At least you have to continually monitor them as such.
Corporations should be assumed to act in line with their interests, which is the bottom line. "Morality" isn't the lens that you need to try to view them through to understand their intentions and actions. But yes, their motivations pretty much always lay outside of any moral good due to the nature of them.
Yeah ok, the bear isn't evil but it will still maul you on sight.
> the bear isn't evil but it will still maul you on sight
The bear still has unified agency. Corporations do not. (No group of people do.) More than the wind, less than a bear. And I think their flaws are probably shared by all large human organisations.
Isn't unified agency the point of forming an organization? The organization generally elects leaders to direct the actions of the organization for some common purpose, e.g. through policies and direct decisions, and they can (or should) be held accountable for those actions.
They're lawnmowers[1], not bears.
1: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
Maybe this is taking it too far, but anyway: corporations don't have any agency. They are not persons. The organization and constellation of interests of corporations may be such that:
1. immoral people (such as psychopaths) will be disproportionately at the helm of large corporations
2. regular people will make immoral decisions, because to do otherwise would be against their own interests or because the consequences / moral impact are hidden from their awareness
There is no way to act in life that isn't in some sense moral or political, because it also impacts others and you are always responsible for your what you do (or don't do). And corporations are just a bunch of people doing stuff together. To maintain otherwise is in itself a (im)moral act, intentionally or not, see point 2 above.
If corporations are not people then why are their ads full of elements that make us feel warm and fuzzy?
We're being tricked!
> you can assume they'll tend towards evil.
An unnecessarily cynical take. What this is implying is that, in the absence of any morals, evil provides a selective advantage.
And yet, pro-social behavior has evolved many times independently through natural selection.
It's not that cynical when you consider that corporations exist precisely to shield owners and leadership from legal (and to a lesser extent) monetary responsibility.
Evil confers an individual advantage. Pro-social behavior confers a group advantage. That's why sociopaths continue to walk along us. Society can tolerate a few of them, but only up to a point.
Evolution works on the level of the reproducing organism, i.e. the individual.
Google group selection if you'd like to go down a deep rabbit hole but the upshot is, if pro-social behavior did not confer and individual advantage, the individuals who lose the trait would outcompete their conspecifics and the pro-social trait would not be fixed in the population.
This is why you usually see additional stabilizing mechanism(s) to suppress free-loading, in addition to the pro-social traits themselves, even in very simple examples of pro-social traits such as bacteria collaboratively creating biofilms.
The genes coding for the biofilms are usually coded on transmissible plasmids, making it possible for one individual to re-infect another that has lost it.
You might consider the justice system, police etc. as analogous to that.
So yes, in the case where you're part of a functioning society and free-loading on the pro-social behavior of others, that is temporarily beneficial to you - until the stabilizing mechanisms kick in.
I'm not saying in practice you can never get away with anything, of course you can. But on average you can't, we wouldn't be a social species otherwise.
In your Durkheimian analogy, sociopaths are cancer and while the body usually handles one off rogue cells, it often fails when tumors and eventually metastasis develop.
That can happen, sure, but the cancer's strategy is not a winning one - it dies along with the host.
Again, I'm not arguing for some naive Panglossian view. Things can get pretty bad transiently.
I just take exception at the cynical view that evil is somehow intrinsically more powerful than good.
"Survival of the fittest" is often misunderstood that way too, as survival of the strong and selfish, when, on the contrary, evolution is full of examples of cooperation being stable over long timescales.
Evil simply has more options available than good. Sure, those options, like all options, have pros and cons. Cancer, like sociopathy, can have a pretty good run even if it ends ultimately in demise.
I very much want to push back against any bias towards a just world. Bad people often live their whole lives without any consequence (think prostate cancer) while good people struggle (think my cuticles, which deserve much more than I usually give).
Perhaps, but it’s much easier to find contrived ways to stay neutral, than take a stance and actually be the change you want to see.
Legislatively allowed evil
If the corporate veil, a legislative invention, were abolished or significantly weakened companies would stop acting evil pretty quickly. So yeah, this tracks.
This is a gross misunderstanding of what the corporate veil is.
You can certainly accept a bias against corporations but you still should never assume every accusation is correct. Otherwise you'd be inclined to believe bullshit theories like Moderna wants our kids to have autism.
You're right. That's why I never took the Covid vaccine and I convinced everyone I know to avoid it as well. You cannot trust big pharma after all the evil things they've done.
>Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It is a consequence of our current model of living, where the only thing that matters is proffit.
Unfortunately, in the current political environment saying that there are things that matters more than profit makes you a Commie somehow…
It's a Chinese company selling this stuff so being a commie doesn't save you.
Use of it is banned in China though...
We need some more nuance here.
Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand. If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good. I think it is too easy to blame them when ultimately, we are the one who support them.
In the case of farming, we want cheap food, and the way to make cheap food is intensive farming, with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. So, companies make pesticides, farmers use them, and we eat the cheap food. Because we recognize that some checks need to be put in place, we elect governments to regulate all that, and or vote goes to whoever makes the best balance between cheap food, taxes and subsidies, and general health and precautions. This is crucial because cheap food is a matter of survival to some.
So in the end, there are no "baddies", just a system that's not perfect. Also keep in mind that big corporation are made of a lot of people, you may be one of them. I am. Does it make us evil? Maybe a little, but I don't think any more than average, as middle-class, I even tend to think we define the average.
> If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good.
This is so naive.
People do not ask corporations to be evil and they certainly don't demand it. People ask for good value and convenience and corporations respond by doing by amorally pursuing that.
However, when you ask consumers if they want value and convenience at the cost of *evil*, they almost always say no.
Corporations have a demonstrated and well-documented history of actively hiding their evil actions because they know consumers are not aligned with them at all.
If consumers "demand" evil, as you say, then corporations wouldn't try to hide it.
Counterexample.
Even when eggs are clearly labeled "caged" and "free range", many people will buy the "caged" eggs despite the clear implications in terms of animal welfare.
Also, while I consider organic food to be mostly (but not completely) a scam, most people don't buy organic. Which can be interpreted as "if it is cheaper with pesticides than without, I will go for pesticides".
In cars, emission control devices have to me made mandatory and almost no one would pay for them. And even with that, people sometimes break the law to remove them (ex: catalytic converter). It is common for all environmental laws.
Of course, if you talk to people face to face, most will tell you that they don't want value and convenience at the cost of evil, but in private, if can turn a blind eye, they will.
And most of these company evil practices are often not very well hidden. Sometimes, they are genuinely criminal, highly secret operations, but they are often not, as criminal lawsuits are costly, and secrets like that don't last long in big companies. But if it is legal and it brings value convenience to people, people usually don't want to look too much, even when some NGOs try to bring awareness.
I think "caged" is not "evil" in a lot of people's minds. This is NOT society saying "we will look the other way", it's society saying, "that's not evil"
Also, organic doesn't mean, "without pesticides" it means a lot MORE than that. For example, I have no problem buying genetically modified produce. If there was an option for "pesticide free, but not organic because of GMO" I would probably buy that.
Anyways, my point really being, you can't extrapolate that people are looking the other way because of price. All your examples are more of examples of society not being morally aligned to what you are considering evil.
> Even when eggs are clearly labeled "caged" and "free range", many people will buy the "caged" eggs despite the clear implications in terms of animal welfare.
Are many egg cartons actually labeled as "caged" around you? Where I am its either advertised as cage-free or its unlabeled. Its not like the options are "tiny torture chambers": $2.99, "unclean hellscape": $3.99, "rainbows and sunshine": $4.99. Its also hard to tell what these things mean, because "cage-free" can still be a pretty terrible existence for the birds as well.
But I do agree though, if there's a seemingly similar product with a much cheaper price tag a ton of people (myself included) will often reach for the cheaper product.
This is assuming that every consumers knows what evil goes into their consumption. They don't, and not by choice, but because nobody will tell them. Ever. In fact, everyone will spend billions to make sure they don't know.
The problem with simplistic free market dynamics views is that they rely on consumer choice. Consumer choice relies on consumer consent and free information flow.
As soon as EITHER of those two are chilled, even just a tiny bit, the free market dynamics thinking falls down like a house of cards. Now the situation is orders of magnitude more complex, and we actually have to think about what's going on, inatead of appealing to a model so bare-bones it's practically impossible to see in real life.
> Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand
How do you define evil? Profit motivation at the expense of human life is as evil as anything you're ever going to find outside of fantasy literature.
The issue is when companies try to hide their evil, manipulate public opinion, lobby (bribe) lawmakers to disable the democratic process, ...
All of which happens regularly, and especially in this case, as the person you responded to showed.
Don't seek nuance where there is none.
This only really applies in a world of complete information. Pesticide side effects were an enormous externality, which only the company was aware of. And they obviously worked hard to keep that information out of the public consciousness. Perhaps there could be nuance to producing the pesticide, weighing food prices against health impacts, but that’s no justification for lying about what it does.
Checking in from cancer alley!
There are refineries within a stone's throw from my house. One of them sits on the highest point in our water table and the vacuum it creates has been destroying our famously soft water by creating underground fault lines which pollute the aquifer with leeched hard minerals.
But hey, oil.
Seeing how much having an unlimited upside corrupts corporations seeded my first serious doubts about capitalism.
I used to be a proponent of the industrial agriculture, because technological progress of all kinds (genetics, chemicals, mechanisation) are the reason why food is now abundant.
But the massive disinformation campaigns and targeted harassment of researchers, as well as the outright corruption of science is where they lost me. Surely you wouldn't do things like that if you had clear consciousness.
> One example of them clearly being the baddies is them paying people to social media astroturf to defend the roundup pesticide online [2].
It certainly looks bad but I'm not sure the logic really follows.
It's just modern PR. Companies used to just do that by having good relationships with journalist but now social media has taken a lot of that role away. It's a fairly natural transition for companies to make and I'd be surprised if you couldn't find a lot of major corporations that don't do something similar.
And, also, it doesn't necessarily follow that they are either willingly lying or that their products are unsafe.
There is so much evidence of this connection piling up ..
E.g.:
Proximity to golf courses where pesticides are used -> Parkinson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933580
Farmers using pesticides have 60% higher Parkinson risk (2019): https://nos.nl/artikel/2302396-landbouwgif-kan-kans-op-parki... (Dutch)
Parkinson should be labeled as profession-linked disease for farmers(Swiss): https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/pestizide-als-krankmacher-pa...
You're conflating different chemicals together.
Paraquat (what this article is about), isn't used by any people in the links you gave (golf courses, Dutch or Swiss farmers).
An excellent movie on basically the same topic is Michael Clayton, with George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, and Tilda Swinton in IMO each of their best career performances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Clayton
Excellent movie. Worth noting that it was written by Tony Gilroy, who created Andor and cowrote The Bourne Identity, so if you enjoyed those you're likely to enjoy this.
One of my favourite movies. Everyone in it is so good.
"Critics point to research linking paraquat exposure to Parkinson’s, while the manufacturer pushes back, saying none of it is peer-reviewed."
What lead it to being "banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China"?
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.
IMO the FDA should do a better job at helping the populace distinguish between these two:
1) Evidence for the null hypothesis (there are enough studies with sufficient statistical power to determine that product likely does not cause harm at a >95% CI).
2) There is no evidence that it is unsafe. (nor that it is safe).
The problem is #2 sounds a lot stronger and often better than #1 when put into English. There must be some easy to understand way to do it, IE an 'insufficient testing' vs. 'tested' label/website or something.
Shouldn't most chemicals be assumed unsafe until proven otherwise? How many chemicals have we produced in a lab that have no harmful effects? Even medicine is bad for you, it's just better than the disease it's meant to treat. I don't know why we'd treat something designed to kill animals as safe for humans without studies showing that it's not harmful. (Well I do know why, but I don't know why voters go along with it.)
Literally everything is "chemicals".
And when we're talking about things in this realm, the general saying is "The dose makes the poison"... Water will kill you if you drink enough of it.
And we do have all sorts of studies showing that harm from these substances isn't immediately apparent (they all have safety sheets, and maximum safe exposure levels) . What we're missing, mainly because it's just incredibly hard to ethically source, is long term studies.
So the question you're really asking is "what's your tolerance to risk?". I think it's fine to have different governing bodies take different stances on that scale. What's less fine is failure to act on information because of profit motives.
Long story short - this isn't so simple. You bathe in chemicals all day every day.
> assessments of safety of a chemical aren't hard science
These are still data. I'm curious for the contexts that lead other countries to actively ban the substance.
If it simply hasn't been approved in other countries, one can't use that information to infer about its safety.
Because of its high toxicity, the European Union withdrew paraquat from its market in July 2007 [1]
So it's clearly poisonous to humans in high doses, I guess the argument is that perhaps the smaller doses exposed to farmers may not lead to sufficient ingestion to cause harm. The parkinsons seems like pretty clear evidence against that.
> If it simply hasn't been approved in other countries, one can't use that information to infer about its safety.
I don't know why you're trying to defend this with counterfactuals/hypotheticals instead of just googling. Feels like you're bending over backward here.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3657034/
> don't know why you're trying to defend this with counterfactuals/hypotheticals instead of just googling
Genuinely appreciate the source. I wasn't finding it on my own, at least not with the nexus to the EU's decision.
The US is very capitalist and consumer based. They error on the side of “does it make money?” Or “will I lose money?”
Chevron clasically has ignored health and safety requirements to the point where there was once the “Chevron Doctrine” which deferred legal interpretations to specialized regulatory agencies which established clearer guidance against murky legislative directives. The Doctrine was recently overturned by the ostensibly rogue SCOTUS as highlighted by the harvard business review: https://hbr.org/2024/09/the-end-of-the-chevron-doctrine-is-b...
That's a rather rose colored way of framing what Chevron was. It essentially removed the role of the judiciary in settling disputes. In cases where a regulator's action was deemed at least "reasonable", the judiciary was obligated to simply defer to the regulator's interpretation.
And due to widespread regulatory capture, this is hardly some social benefit. The original case Chevron Doctrine was based on [1] essentially came down to the EPA interpreting anti-pollution laws in a way enabling companies to expand pollution-causing constructions with no oversight. The EPA was then sued, and defeated, by an environmental activist group, but then that decision was overturned by the Supreme Court and Chevron Deference was born.
Other examples are the FCC deeming broadband internet as a "information service" instead of a "telecommunications service" (which would have meant common-carrier obligations would have applied), and so on. Another one [3] - Congress passed legislation deeming that power plants must use the "best technology available" to "minimize the adverse environmental impact" of their water intakes/processing. The EPA interpretation instead allowed companies to use a cost-benefit analysis and pick cheaper techs. And I could go on. Chevron Deference was an abomination.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natura....
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Cable_&_Telecommunica...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entergy_Corp._v._Riverkeeper_I....
> In cases where a regulator's action was deemed at least "reasonable", the judiciary was obligated to simply defer to the regulator's interpretation.
That is the way it _should_ be. Judges are not subject matter experts in all of human endeavors, but they are expected to make rulings over that domain. Relying on experts and career civil servants advice is generally good, unless they’re being unreasonable.
unfortunately civil servants are not perfect and not elected. If they 'take bribes' I don't want a judge to accept their word. They should have to justify their ruling before the court. The judge should defer to them only after finding their decision was good in the first place.
> They should have to justify their ruling before the court
How familiar are you with admin law? That is what already happened before this precedent was discarded.
> If they 'take bribes' I don't want a judge to accept their word. They should have to justify their ruling before the court.
If they're taking bribes they should be tried under corruption laws such as 18 U.S.C. § 201
Meanwhile our SC justices can accept all kinds of gifts from industry and make whatever ruling they want without any repercussions. They're in charge of determining their own conflicts of interests and their own ethics violations. Which surprise, they never seem to have any!
Its far easier to remove a regulator, even one of a supposedly independent agency (we'll see how that goes), for doing something obviously corrupt than a Supreme Court judge, as evidenced by the current court.
Chevron didn’t establish clearer guidelines.
It was weaponized by both parties to create defacto laws without proper legal procedure. It should’ve been unconstitutional from the beginning as only Congress can make laws. Regulatory agencies are far easier to control, generally contain administration-friendly plants, and are not expected to provide any justification for their decisions. The result is laws that change as the wind blows, confusions, and rights restrictions done by people who should have no business doing so. The “reasonable interpretation” rule allowed Congress to completely defer to them and force citizens to spend tremendous capital getting a case to the Supreme Court.
Chevron’s overturn was objectively a huge win and hardly a “rogue” decision. That editorialization is not a fair representation of the problems it has caused when regulatory agencies begin attempting to regulate constitutional rights. It was overly vague and gave far too much power to people who cannot be trusted with it.
We shouldn’t need Chevron Deference to make laws that protect people from harm done by corporations. Period. If we do, it’s a failure of Congress to do their jobs and a mechanism should be in place to have a “reset button” (like many other countries when they form a government).
It’s pretty clear that rule making and adjudication are in the preview of the executive branch. Congress and courts can’t possibly make laws and hold trials for every possible minor situation.
hang on, in what way are regulatory agencies not expected to provide justification.
That is very nearly the lion's share of the work these agency do, is to justify the regulations and the decisions
Some agencies lean towards proper justification (the EPA, for example, has been generally okay at best about this) other regulatory bodies don't.
While it is not a popular topic here, gun laws, and I am taking a risk with my karma even talking about it, have been subject to some of the most vague and dangerous interpretations by the ATF. In this case we provided congress a way to bypass constitutional scrutiny (pre-bruen) by deferring to the ATF. Two examples are bump stocks, and FRTs, both of which the ATF interpreted as "machine guns", defying their own regulatory definition, and creating felons out of innocent people quite literally overnight. Honest people had their doors literally kicked in. This is a terrifying level of power. It is not the first time the ATF has done this. I would recommend spending time reading the writings of GOA and FPC if you'd like to see how confusing it is for a law abiding gun owner to stay within the lines of the law when Chevron Deference existed. At any point something you lawfully buy, fill out the correct forms, and lawfully own, could be suddenly interpreted with no notification as criminal and thus you INSTANTLY become a felon. There are violations of ex-post-facto, denial of constitutional rights, etc.
Justification is highly subjective and in many cases these regulatory agencies are handed the pen to write and sign their laws.
There is no difference between a regulatory agency writing and passing law, and congress completely deferring all responsibility to them. This is the problem. "Justification" is not held to any standard.
My personal opinion is opinion from a regulatory agency should be held to a higher standard than even the most prestigious academic journal given the consequences. Chevron Deference being used to regulate companies is one thing. Chevron Deference being used to regulate constitutional rights is a consequence, and thus, it is a good thing it is eliminated. Perhaps congress can actually do it's job and demand a higher level of scrutiny, care, and precision from our regulatory agencies.
Expecting Congress to directly regulate the minutia of industry, medicine or technology is absurd, these are giant categories with their own subfields that need specialized technocratic leadership.
Chevron Deference is used to bypass congressional and court scrutiny. I'm getting downvoted, particularly, because I do not believe people understand the extent of what Chevron Deference provides. I am not surprised. It's not mentioned often, it's often editorialized particularly by leftist media as a great boon to our society, and most people are unaffected by it.
Congress is expected to make laws. End of story. Chevron Deference allows them to reduce their own liability and burden by rubberstamping opinion into law. That is a tremendous problem. Congress' core directive is to protect our rights. Not restrict them. Industry plants have a much easier time infesting regulatory bodies through revolving door policies, regulatory bodies change with every administration, and regulatory bodies are not held to a standard of rigor that approaches 1/10th of the worst quality scientific journal. That is a major problem. The first thing any true tactical politician will do is move his or her favorite industry plants into regulatory bodies. Then, they can give "opinion" that aligns with the view of that person, which is then rubberstamped into law.
If we cannot expect congress to do their job our government has failed it's absolute simplest purpose. There are then much greater problems than whether turtles are choking on can holders.
I trust the scientific expertise of a career bureaucrat holding a PhD more than a congresscritter that brings a snowball onto the Senate floor as "proof" climate change isn't real[1].
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sen-jim-inhofe-climate-change-i...
My position is simple and has 2 parts:
To expect anyone to create meaningful regulation on every sector of the economy is absurd, our system is far too complex.
We need regulation if we want to live in a safe & healthy modern society.
Unless you just disagree with the second proposition, it seems your implication is that every congress person should be an expert on every sector of the economy and fiscal policy, and be able to craft meaningful laws, or at least have strong opinions about them. Otherwise, they would just be accepting laws written by other people, just like delegating to the regulator.
Corruption exists in every system. I grew up with clean air and water thanks to the current regulatory system, and have benefited from a safe work culture my whole life. Best I can tell the only guy who has really done anything to stop that is the current President, so kinda a crude characterization to say that they change with every admin.
I never implied congress is expected to be experts on everything. What I do expect is a level of scrutiny much higher than what is considered rigorous by academic standards.
It should not be a hard ask that regulatory bodies produce meaningful, thoughtful, and extensive uneditorialized reports on a subject. These are then given in summary to congress who can use this information to inform regulation.
This strategy is superior for a few reasons:
1. It keeps regulatory bodies honest and when held to the highest possible standard of scrutiny works to prevent a lot of trivial gaming of the system
2. It separates the powers appropriately. Congress can ask anyone to do research and return results. This is not the same as providing an unelected body defacto law writing power.
And on the final point regulation can be good. I think it's dishonest to interpret my position as anti-regulation. Rather, I think regulation is trivially corruptable. Regulatory capture is the mechanism by which the largest wealth-having class maintains their power. Regulatory capture is trivialized through the use of Chevron Deference (see my post above). By cleanly separating the two we reduce the probability of corruption. If a corrupt politician can't inject their stooges to defer to then we have an extra mechanism by which to protect our rights, and protect our health. It then falls on congress to do the right thing. Then it's OUR responsibility to elect people who will do that.
If we allow for the assumption congressmen are not idiots, are capable of reading and referring to experts, and act accordingly then there should be no meaningful difference modulo preventing unelected officials from writing law. If we cannot guarantee that, then it's not corruption, it's a complete failure of the legislative branch of government and the election system. Which I think we both agree here in one way or another that the system has completely failed.
"Under Chevron, if a judge found that the agency had made a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous congressional directive, they were obliged to defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law, effectively ending any substantive review of a challenged rule. The repeal of Chevron is a huge blow to regulators, evidenced by the fact that the decision had been cited more than 18,000 times over 40 years."
the Chevron Doctrine is new to me; it appears that the parent comment was not answering "why was it banned internationally" but rather emphasizing weakness in US procedures
Did we have a regulation banning paraquat that was overturned when Chevron was overturned? If not, it’s irrelevant.
[Edit] The below comment is inaccurate. The pesticide sprayed for gypsy moths was DDT. I am leaving this comment because it should be known that this was a thing even though it is now off topic.
P̵a̵r̵a̵q̵u̵a̵t̵ DDT is also linked to the polio pandemic. It was sprayed everywhere gypsy moths were found. Great success at killing moths. Also weakened human children to to where a common disease could get into spines and cause paralysis.
Researching this kind of stuff is not for the faint of heart. Its horrible all the way down. Not recommended for the faint of heart.
Paraquat is a herbicide, not an insecticide, so why would it be sprayed for moths? I searched for information linking moths, paraquat, and polio, but couldn't find any. Is this claim a hallucination?
Well damn... my bad. Comment before coffee. It was DDT.
"Moth and the Iron Lung" by Forrest Maready
Forrest was interviewed by Bret Weinstein if you are interested (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7wYUnQUESU)
It is. The polio link was suggested for DDT, which was a controversial insecticide. But it was probably bunk, as were most other concerns about DDT: https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-polio-vaccine-ddt-pest...
>gypsy moths
The common name is "spongy moths" now, to avoid a racial epithet.
"In July 2021 the Entomological Society of America decided to remove the name "gypsy moth" from its Common Names of Insects and Related Organisms List as "hurtful to the Romani people", since gypsy is considered an ethnic slur by some Romani people." [1]
[1] https://www.entsoc.org/entomological-society-america-discont...
um. My uncle died of polio, and I was a medical researcher (phd) for a while.
Polio can cause paralysis just fine on its own, it doesn't need DDT or paraquat to help it.
And you are also right that widespread spraying of DDT lead to all kind of problems (killed all the birds, for one, leading to "Silent Spring"), which one reason it was banned.
another reason is the mosquitos developed resistance.
> What lead it to being "banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China"?
Almost everyone who banned it did so because of acute toxicity - it requires careful handling to use safely.
Unfortunately, it was commonly used to commit suicide in many countries. In other countries, it was deaths from accidental ingestion, lung damage from unsafe handling, etc.
I don't know of any country that banned it because of a purported link to Parkinson's.
There's a synthetic opioid called MPPP, which, if inappropriately synthesized (IIRC, using too much heat in one step), yields MPTP, which is non-toxic in and of itself, but has the ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, where it is then metabolized into MPP+, which is potently neurotoxic to the dopaminergic neurons of the Substantia Nigra, reliably producing a Parkinsonism in those exposed to it (from wikipedia):
>The chloride salt of MPP+ found use in the 1970s as an herbicide under the common name cyperquat.[4][3] Though no longer in use as an herbicide, cyperquat's closely related structural analog paraquat still finds widespread usage, raising some safety concerns.
EDIT: the neurotoxicity of MPTP was discovered after a number of heroin addicts developed a sudden, irreversible Parkinsonism after injecting bad batches: https://archive.org/details/TheCaseoftheFrozenAddict
The doctor featured in that NOVA episdoe summarizes the history of MPTP and its relevance to Parkinson's research and epidemiology here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5345642/
> Over the last two centuries the pendulum of opinion has swung widely as to whether the cause of PD was due to genetics or environment causes [69]. While MPTP has not yet been found in the native environment, beginning in the 1980s the pendulum swung dramatically in the direction of the environmental hypothesis, spurred not only by the observation that a simple pyridine (MPTP) could induce so many of the features of PD, but also the striking similarity between its toxic metabolite, MPP+ and paraquat (differing only by one methyl group) [70], an herbicide that is used worldwide. Since that time, a large number of studies have shown pesticide exposure is a risk factor for PD [71]. Interesting, this risk is enhanced by the presence of certain genetic variants [72], consistent to the adage that “genetics load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger”.
Actually, surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly, given the interesting history and a large chunk of HNers being functional drug addicts--albeit not necessarily of opioids), MPPP was discussed here just last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41053383
The other thing you should know is that they use it to help the plants grow, but they use larger amounts to kill the plants at the same time so they can uniformly harvest. So we eat more of this crap than you'd expect, because they are using it beyond expected ways
in most civilised countries: chemicals added to food are banned until proven safe
... then you have the USA
What civilized countries are we talking about?
Because paraquat was approved for use over much of the world at one point, including countries people claim require substances be "proven safe."
> chemicals added to food are banned until proven safe
Is that the case here? Paraquat wasn’t banned for any reason, it just hasn’t been approved yet?
That doesn’t comport with how the word “banned” is usually used.
yes, the companies producing it tried getting it approved, and it was for a bit
and then the approval was overturned as the evidence was crap
so, back to the original state: banned until proven safe
> then the approval was overturned as the evidence was crap
Source? I’m curious for this context.
I think they might refer to the EU approving of paraquat, which was appealed by Sweden and other countries and it was a legal process churning on until 2007 when the presumed link with Parkinson's and other factors led to the decision to ban it.
> when the presumed link with Parkinson's and other factors led to the decision to ban it
Do you have a link to this decision? I'm having trouble finding it on my own.
First instance:
https://curia.europa.eu/en/actu/communiques/cp07/aff/cp07004...
ECJ:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
that means it could not be sold as fertiliser since that term is presumably regulated.
>What lead it to being "banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China"?
political pressure. Same reason lots of stuff is banned in the EU even when it's safer than other things that aren't banned.
> political pressure. Same reason lots of stuff is banned in the EU even when it's safer than other things that aren't banned.
You avoid the question instead of answering it (What caused that "political pressure"? Does such a thing just occur randomly in nature?), following it by an assertion that you don't bother to provide any evidence for.
I believe the EU tends to follow a precautionary principle, namely a substance generally must be shown to be safe before it’s approved. In contrast, the US follows a risk-based approach where a substance can often be used unless it’s shown to be harmful. So it isn't really that many "safe" things in the EU are banned, rather they have not been approved. Pretty sure this is specific to food additives, though may apply to other areas.
> believe the EU tends to follow a precautionary principle
It does, but that isn't relevant here. There were poisoning cases in France that lead to the ban [1].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3657034/
> While Chinese companies supply paraquat to American farmers, the report points out China is also a big purchaser of crops, like soybeans, that are grown with help from the pesticide.
> “In these two ways, China economically benefits from the application of paraquat in the U.S., where it outsources many of its associated health hazards,” the report said.
There would arguably be a poetic justice to the US taking a turn at bearing health and environmental costs to benefit other nations, but it's not right for that to happen to any country.
There are plenty of things that can lead to Parkinson's. Recently we learned even copper salts carry a risk: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01618...
(Unfortunate for many like me who considered them relatively safe for years and did a lot of chemistry with them.)
Farmers use many chemicals for a variety of tasks and it wouldn't surprise me if there were multiple chemicals involved, perhaps even synergistically. Maybe a farmer exposed to paraquat is fine, but one who is exposed to both paraquat and a copper-based antifungal or fumes from a welding repair become more damaged. Hard to say.
I got shingles-ish rash after sitting in an outdoor jacuzzi in Salinas, California. Visited the urgent care and the Standard-trained doctor of immigrant farm laborers said it was related to the pesticides. Said he lost both parents in their 40s and suspects it was the indiscriminate spraying from the air in the 70/80/90s. Eye-opening and thought-provoking.
<indiscriminate spraying from the air>
As a city dweller, I used to use Roundup along my fence line. Then I read an article in a newspaper about spraying chemicals when there is a breeze. So I read the label on the Roundup bottle and it said absolutely do not spray in any windy conditions. Next I polled my coworkers about this and they all said they just stay upwind!
The bottle label also said Roundup is active for up to 30 days, then I thought about my dogs. I no longer use any chemical for lawn care.
As to the plight of the farmers: I wonder if most of them bothered to used proper personal protection gear when spraying? Even if they had enclosed cabs, the chemical would still coat the tractor and tank surfaces which can be rubbed against at any time.
In many parts of the country whole counties smell of pesticide for a few days every year (and pig-shit another few days, but that’s a different issue)
I’ve lived in some of them, and my mom did a lot of by-hand weed-killer spraying (big plastic refillable jug with sprayer hose & wand) along a mile-plus of fence line, for years. Her generation didn’t really do PPE, so no respirator. Died relatively young of a Parkinson’s-adjacent dementia a little while back. No history of any of that in the family. Hm.
When the stories about Roundup started floating around, I switched to 30% strength vinegar with a squirt of dish soap in it. It kills weeds and undesired plants off just as quickly and effectively as Roundup did, but obviously it does not prevent new seeds from sprouting. It is indiscriminate, whereas Roundup selectively targets broad-leafed plants, so you want to avoid getting it on grass. I use a big tarp to mask off the grass if I am using it heavily along the lawn borders. It's very effective for things like borders, gravel paths, stuff like that.
Also, instead of smelling like a chemical factory, your yard will smell like salad dressing for a day or so.
My dad used Roundup extensively in the garden in the 80s and 90s. Both he and a gardener he hired to help died from dementia.
The scientist in me wants to see definitive proof from validated studies.
Monsanto has muddied the waters on many studies and was caught. They are currently involved in many lawsuits and have lost most.
> So I read the label on the Roundup bottle
Something that is supposed to be done to legally use it properly under FIFRA. There's a reason why it says in big letters READ ENTIRE LABEL BEFORE USE.
Its nuts to me there's so many people out there buying crazy chemicals and just #yolo'ing it all over the place.
And get in in the air intakes for the AC, or even if they closed it off to only recycle internal air, they brought chemical in with them
Most modern home AC systems have, as a rule of thumb, ten percent fresh air intake. This varies, depending on the home size and state and local codes. On my home the fresh air vent is high up in my attic, which should protect me from over spraying of chemicals. However, if you have a window unit or an on ground system this will affect your exposure.
In an effort to save money, some will close their fresh air vent, this is not recommended because of the lack of air trade out in the system.
The chance this is a trustworthy source for me is close to 0. This just sound like fantastic pseudology:
“Even secondary exposure can be dangerous. One case published in the Rhode Island Medical Journal described an instance where a 50-year-old man accidentally ingested paraquat, and the nurse treating him was burned by his urine that splashed onto her forearms. Within a day, her skin blistered and sloughed off.
I was able to find the references (including photos of the mentioned forearms) on PubMed and the RIMJ after a quick search. Paraquat is nasty stuff.
- [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33769492/
- [1] http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima... (via https://rimedicalsociety.org/rhode-island-medical-journal/)
- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat
Yeah, I found it myself. And yes, it's nasty stuff. But in the context of the article, it’s pure nonsense.
Should we ban anhydrous ammonia, chlorine, or gasoline? They are nasty and dangerous too. The article is purely scare-mongering to make it seem true while obviously pushing an agenda. This is not science. See my reply at the same level after I did a review.
How did his urethra not burn off?
I can’t believe I’m typing this question
"Paraquat, a heavily regulated weed killer, is banned in more than 70 countries…"
Seventy countries kind of suggested to me that something is up with this chemical.
GMOs are harmless but also widely banned.
GMOs aren't toxic chemicals, two distinct things
I was on that train, too, but... harmless according to whom? The same ag lobbyists who claimed Roundup was harmless?
I'm pretty freaking far from a conspiracy theorist, but I've lived through:
* Tobacco companies claiming it was safe.
* Alcohol companies claiming it was safe.
* Food companies claiming trans fats were safe.
* Oil companies claiming leaded gasoline was safe.
* Mining companies claiming asbestos was safe.
...and a gazillion similar episodes.
At this point, it seems absolutely insane to trust any large industry's claims that their products are safe.
Harmless compared to random genitic mutation which happens all the time and is never studied. only gmo is held to any standard at all, when other forms of genetic change are held to any standard we can ask if one is better - but for now even the most biased corporate study is better than the alternatives.
Why does that sound untrustworthy? Do you have any idea of what the tobacco industry hid about second hand smoke exposure? How is it somehow more plausible this nurse made up her condition than pesticide manufactures being honest about the impacts?
I don’t think the nurse is lying at all. The medical case is real. My point is that the article omitted the fact that the patient she treated had ingested a massive, lethal dose of concentrate (acute poisoning), and she was exposed to it when extracting it. The journalist used the symptoms of a suicide attempt to illustrate the risks of routine farming, which I think is misleading. It’s not about the nurse making it up... it’s about the article leaving out the context that matters most. Especially when pushing the argument that it causes Parkinson's.
My gut intuition just didn't like the framing. Now that I have read through it thoroughly, my answer is this: It's untrustworthy because it is obviously extremely selective with what it includes, omits relevant base rates, uses graphical examples out of context, and has an obvious bias and agenda. That is just one of tens of examples in the article.
Your tobacco reference can be condensed into: "Large firms are known to lie and cover up things." I agree 100%. They plainly outright lied directly AND lied by covering up. But the reaction to that is not to lie better. And by better, I mean lying by omission, juxtaposition, and framing. These are still methods of lying, just that they are harder for people to detect.
I mean you can click on the source right there, that is literally what happened: http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima.... The description maybe makes it sound a little more extreme than it actually was, but it's the correct terminology and an accurate description of events.
Is lying by omission and juxtaposition. It's manipulation. And it pisses me off to no end. I read the original source. It has NOTHING to do with Parkinson’s. It’s a suicidal dose ingested, and when extracted, it was still a dangerous chemical. If I drank a gallon of gasoline and you pumped it out of me, then it caught fire, it wouldn't explain anything except that gasoline is dangerous and burns. Nobody disputes that with regard to this chemical. So why slip it in like that? And the fact that people don't care just shows why they CAN “just slip it in there” in an article about Parkinson’s... nobody cares as long as it confirms their bias.
I only care about evidence that proves that it causes Parkinson’s, with basic scientific rigor. I’ll eat my hat if any of the cited studies did basic attempt at falsification.
I agree. If merely being splashed by his corrosive urine sloughed off her skin, I think he would not be alive to urinate.
It seems unlikely but possible that she was highly sensitive or allergic to the substance in a way that he wasn't
I just finished reading article and honestly, my BS detector is going off the charts.
I’m not saying pesticides are health tonics, but this piece feels like pure litigation PR rather than an actual investigation. It prioritizes storytelling over science and engages in what I can only describe as lying by omission. Here are the main issues I found:
The nurse whose skin peeled off just from touching a patient’s urine? The article frames this to make you think, "Wow, this stuff is so toxic that if a farmer uses it, his body becomes a weapon." I looked into the medical case this is likely based on. That patient didn't just "farm" with Paraquat; he ingested a lethal, concentrated dose (usually a suicide attempt). By leaving out that the patient drank a cup of poison, the author conflates Acute Poisoning (death in days, acid urine) with Chronic Exposure (trace amounts over years). If the farmer in the main story had enough Paraquat in his system to burn a nurse’s skin, he wouldn’t be alive to give an interview about Parkinson’s. He’d be dead from multi-organ failure. Omitting this context is manipulative fear-mongering.
Then there is the math: Parkinson’s affects about 1% of the elderly population. There are 2 million farms in the US. Even if Paraquat was essentially harmless water, you would still have tens of thousands of farmers with Parkinson’s purely by chance. The article ignores this base rate to imply that every diagnosis is a result of the chemical. It treats a probabilistic risk as a deterministic cause.
It also ignores confounders (like the "Rural Cluster" Problem). Farming is a "chemical soup" lifestyle. You have well water (a known PD risk), head trauma risks, and exposure to dozens of other chemicals like Rotenone or Maneb. The article presents a direct line: Paraquat -> PD. But scientifically, isolating one chemical from 30 years of rural living is a nightmare. The article doesn't even attempt to falsify the hypothesis or look at other factors; it just assumes the lawsuit's narrative is the scientific truth.
The article also fails basic science standards. It is storytelling, not science. A real scientific inquiry follows Popperian standards—you make a conjecture and then try to disprove it. This article does the opposite: it acts like a defense attorney. It stacks up emotional anecdotes and selective correlations to confirm its bias and ignores the replication crisis in epidemiology where results often don't stick.
This isn't journalism and it’s not science; it’s advocacy via outrage. It uses the real tragedy of these farmers to push a specific narrative, relying on readers not knowing the difference between drinking poison and spraying crops. If you’ve ever wondered why science doesn’t make more progress, and we have the replication crisis, look no further.
Isn't this old news? If you are a Vietnam vet who were exposed to Agent Orange or other herbicides, and you get Parkinson's, the VA assumes it was from Vietnam. My grandfather had Parkinson's a long time ago it was always said it was due to pesticides they used while farming.
IIRC the issue with AO was the dioxins present as a side-product of the synthesis, not the herbicide itself. Dioxins are nasty.
First acknowledge AO death was in 2015, they gaslighted entire generations. Had Nixon not sent his campaign manager to Vietnam in 1969, and promised the VietCong a better deal later when he was president, we wouldn't have spent those five unneeded years there and wouldn't have used AO.
One of my relatives owned an animal farm for a couple of decades and got a very rare muscle wasting disease. A high school friend of his, who was also a farmer, got the same disease. I imagine there were innumerable harmful chemicals on the land and in the water from decades of use before he bought it in the 90s.
So the U.S. is still using 11-17 lbs/yr despite warnings and bans really since 1986, a re-authorization in 2021 by the EPA, and known elevated risk near use sites, which corporations have fought against claiming "no definitive proof". So if the U.S. allows its use "as directed", who can be legally accountable for all this?
My father is a data point in this. He was a farmer all his life and ultimately it was Parkinson's that did him in. While we took some precautions, I have no doubt that the herbicides we used should have been handled more carefully.
Sorry for your loss - it's a terrible disease.
My mother is also data point - grew up on a farm where her father used it. She was diagnosed with Parkinson's 2018.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VtUGoGZtI8
ChubbyEmu video for "A Farmer Mistakenly Drank His Own Herbicide. This Is What Happened To His Brain."
https://archive.ph/YVt2I
I looked up this pesticide. It is banned in EU. Not exactly surprising.
They did that in 2007. Some countries banned it as early as 1983. Remind me, what year is it now?
"With evidence of its harms stacking up, it’s already been banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China, where it’s made. Yet last year, its manufacturer Syngenta, a subsidiary of a company owned by the Chinese government, continued selling paraquat in the United States and other nations that haven’t banned it."
Here in Germany, farmers are regularly complaining about all the bureaucracy and "unnecessary" safety requirements in regards to pesticides and over-fertilization . But they also complain when nothing grows anymore because they killed the top soil with too much fertilizer, poisoned the groundwater and then die of Parkinson because, who would have thought, all those regulations and safety requirements had a point after all. I don't know how to help those people, I really don't.
>Chevron, which never manufactured paraquat and hasn’t sold it since 1986 ... should not be liable
I think Chevron may have a point, no one knew back then and they stopped selling it ~40 years ago. But ---
To me, if the US had a real Health Care System, people would not have to file lawsuits to get the care they need.
But in the US, this is how things work. The care these people need is unaffordable by everyone in the US except for the very rich. So they will be waiting probably 10 to 20 years for relief as the lawsuit works it way through the courts and appeals.
https://archive.ph/YVt2I
Too bad they voted to eliminate accountability for businesses that poison people.
Now they get to find out.
Same issue as living near golf courses?
I know a guy who had a weird habit of using his mouth to clean his golf ball. He eventually got oral cancer.
Except the data doesnt back up that assertion. Golf course employees and golfers have no higher rates of than the public at large. So what gives?
If the very people who spend most of their waking lives on the grounds and among those fertilizers and pesticides do not have any great instance, maybe just maybe its something else. Like the gallons of unregulated chemicals that are in those tract houses that were all built around the same time...
one example is the drywall was used extensively in the 90's. Its makeup banned in the country of origin, China but its product was used all throughout the US for decades.
Data does back up this assertion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933580
The correlation seems to point to usage ground water that is contaminated with pesticides. So people living close to the golf courses have higher Parkinson risk. Probably golfers and employees less so.
A related, recent story: "Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water"
Highlighting the role of environmental pollution in causing Parkinson’s.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46216422
https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-thought-parkinsons-wa...
https://archive.is/ZvjZH
I just read another article about this, but the affected group is military from Camp Legume. The water in Legume was contaminated, and its actually given a control group test for the incidence of Parkinson’s with Camp Pendleton, where the water was not contaminated.
Spoiler: it looks like the farmers are right
https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-thought-parkinsons-wa...
Amazing thing is TCE was banned by the Biden EPA in 2024 and Trump’s EPA stopped its ban.
For anyone stopping by looking for more info, it’s Camp Lejeune not Legume.
Camp Legume may be a reference to this scene from the film Blazing Saddles:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VPIP9KXdmO0
Good lord. Thank you. Served in Pendleton and I should know better.
The EPA should check crayons for brain-eating chemicals
Minor correction: it's Camp Lejeune. I just had to chime in because Camp Legume is both very funny and kind of an appropriate typo for the topic.
In the Netherlands there is a discussion about agriculture impact on public health.
Each pesticide individually is safe but nobody knows what happens when you mix fifty chemicals and put them in the ground water.
On a positive note you have to die from something and ignorance is bliss.
This reminded me that the current administration has approved PFAS pesticides aka forever chemicals which are linked to certain cancers. What could possibly go wrong. https://time.com/7336883/epa-pfas-pesticides-health-risks/
Many medical preparations are oil rather than water soluble. Seed oils tend to be the cheapest choice, and probably still have trace amounts of pesticides/herbicides/fungicide--even after processing. Under such conditions, one must wonder how many of our modern neurodegenerative conditions are iatrogenic. Genetics may load the chamber, but environment pulls the trigger.
Here's some of the research linked in the article.
"Rotenone, Paraquat, and Parkinson’s Disease" - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3114824/
"In 110 PD cases and 358 controls, PD was associated with use of a group of pesticides that inhibit mitochondrial complex I [odds ratio (OR) = 1.7; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.0–2.8] including rotenone (OR = 2.5; 95% CI, 1.3–4.7) and with use of a group of pesticides that cause oxidative stress (OR = 2.0; 95% CI, 1.2–3.6), including paraquat (OR = 2.5; 95% CI, 1.4–4.7)."
"Agricultural paraquat dichloride use and Parkinson's disease in California's Central Valley" - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38309714/#full-view-affiliat...
"Ambient paraquat exposure assessed at both residence and workplace was associated with PD, based on several different exposure measures. The PD patients both lived and worked near agricultural facilities applying greater amounts of the herbicide than community controls. For workplace proximity to commercial applications since 1974, working near paraquat applications every year in the window [odds ratio (OR) = 2.15, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.46, 3.19] and a higher average intensity of exposure [per 10 pounds (4.54 kilograms), OR = 2.08, 95% CI = 1.31, 3.38] were both associated with an increased odds of PD. Similar associations were observed for residential proximity (duration: OR = 1.91, 95% CI = 1.30, 2.83; average intensity: OR = 1.72, 95% CI = 0.99, 3.04). Risk estimates were comparable for men and women, and the strongest odds were observed for those diagnosed at ≤60 years of age."
"Department of Pesticide Regulation Releases Preliminary Findings from Review of Environmental and Human Health Studies Related to the Use of the Pesticide Paraquat" - https://www.cdpr.ca.gov/2024/12/30/department-of-pesticide-r...
"DPR’s preliminary scientific evaluation found that the current registered uses of paraquat in California may adversely affect non-target organisms, including birds, mammals and aquatic organisms, with the most significant risks to birds. Additional mitigation measures, beyond current restrictions on paraquat use currently in effect, may not feasibly reduce these environmental impacts to acceptable levels.
Consistent with United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (U.S. EPA) 2019 review, DPR’s review of existing human health studies does not indicate a causal association between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s disease."
It's a herbicide, not a pesticide. I clicked the article because I was surprised that any current pesticides are that harmful to humans.
Pesticides are, generally, safe to humans. Herbicides are, generally, not at all safe to humans. Roundup is probably the most safe outside of per-emergents like corn husks or whatever, but it's not a free ride either.
I am dubious of all the claims that say something designed to kill organic life is safe because it just means "safe at X dose". Like there isn't a pesticide made where I could drink a tablespoon of it and be fine. It just doesn't present noticeable effects at tiny doses so it is labeled safe.
Like if I drank a 1/4 shot of Vodka every morning I wouldn't notice it at all, but I imagine it would have some impacts on my health over the long run.
Not to mention we might have 30+ chemicals/medications/additives/whatever all being consumed constantly at "safe levels" with no research into how they interact or accumulate.
https://kagi.com/search?q=Pesticide
> Pesticides are substances that are used to control pests. They include herbicides, insecticides, nematicides, fungicides, and many others (see table). The most common of these are herbicides, which account for approximately 50% of all pesticide use globally.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide
You're trying to be pedantic, but you're actually wrong. If you think about it, from the perspective of anyone trying to raise crops, weeds are pests. (They are pests to lots of non-farmers, too.)
Similarly...
> A pest is any organism harmful to humans or human concerns. The term is particularly used for creatures that damage crops, livestock, and forestry or cause a nuisance to people, especially in their homes.
> Plants may be considered pests, for example, if they are invasive species or weeds.
While saying "it's an herbicide, not a pesticide" is categorically incorrect, I still think it would be better if the journalist used the more specific and less confusing term here.
It's a chasm-leap to say that pesticides are generally safe to humans.
> Pesticides are, generally, safe to humans
Out of curiosity, why?
they are designed to target specific aspects of the insects nervous systems that humans dont have and are used in small doses/by the time any residue reaches a human its diluted. herbicides are very different.
Why can't we be similarly selective with plants?
Paraquat seems like it should be banned on its acute toxicity grounds alone, but the Parkinson's link as phrased doesn't stand out given the article's statistics. A thousand out of a million is a thousandth.
A baseline rate or Parkinsons would be a good addition to the article. I have seen figures of 1 out of 331 for total or apparently about 1.1M total. Farmers make up about 2% of the population. Doing rough back of envelope math shows that you would expect 22K farmers to have Parkinsons assuming even distribution by population. The numbers aren't precise but if the article's thousands was taken literally it would ironically suggest paraquat has a protective effect against Parkinsons which is obviously absurd thing to assume from a known neurotoxin.
Not every farmer with Parkinsons is suing though. If we assume 1% of farmers are involved in lawsuits then thousands is alarming because it would imply 10x rates. 10% suing though and it is expected. 100% suing would be 1/10th the general rate which would fit with the absurd counterfactual hypothesis that non-lethal paraquat exposure prevents Parkinsons.
The government absolutely cannot be trusted to protect the individual, whether a farmer or a consumer. It is coming down to each individual protecting himself by assessing the safety of the ingredients, sometimes also the purity.
The chemical manufacturer, Syngenta, is the same one involved in the creation of atrazine, the chemical notorious for preliminary evidence of the whole frog sex-changing while it's been sprayed all over the US but banned in most other countries.
propublica.org has endless great articles on this and other horrors in the US
but if we aren't going to change a damn thing with daily mass shooting we sure aren't going to fix poisoning the environment, fracking is 100x worse than this and "sacrifice zones" are a real thing
follow the money, sue before current administration makes it illegal to sue
https://www.propublica.org/series/sacrifice-zones
I was casually chatting with my uncle who is a doctor, he says something along the lines that if a chemical can kill a rat or a mosquito, to assume it won't do any damage to humans is kind of hilarious.
Of course humans who inhale this thing in small quantities won't die, but you can be sure they will kill some tissues that they go into. Now comes another problem of regular exposure, and these chemicals having an entry, but no exit path. That just means there are tissues, that are likely dying out every time there is a exposure.
Again none of this might kill you at the first exposure, but if there are enough dead tissues, there sure is likely to be things like Parkinson's or may be even diabetes.
Im guessing combined with this, if you already some bad genetics it could cause issues like these.
Meanwhile, RFK is too busy talking vaccines and beef tallow...
I know I'm going to regret this but...beef tallow? What?
Fries used to be fried in beef tallow oil basically everywhere. Most fast-food chains went to vegetable oils for various reasons (vegan, subsidized, cheaper, supposedly healthier, etc). Many perceive a noticeable taste difference.
> Most fast-food chains went to vegetable oils
This is the legitimate end of the spectrum. The science that drove tallow out of kitchens and homes was incomplete, particularly when it was replaced with trans fats.
Where it goes off the rails is when nutters conclude that because tallow was wronged in one context, it is wronged in all of them, which leads to folks rubbing tallow on their faces [1]. (It's probably harmless. I've used it as a foot cream because I got samples at my farmers' market.)
[1] https://www.prevention.com/beauty/skin-care/a63833046/beef-t...
One of the big benefits for corporations is that rancidity in vegetable oils isn't as noticeable by smell, so they can keep using them after they've gone off. Just to add to how much cheaper they are.
Have there been any blind tastings for that? I mean, if people swear by beef tallow's taste, they should be able to also prove it experimentally.
This would also set a level field between beef tallow and other oils. I would expect that a lot have changed in the fast food industry supply chain since the "good old days". Frying oil is only one of the factors that may have affected the taste of fries. Not to mention that everything tastes better when one is young.
The difference wasn’t subtle, and they cooked differently after the switch, too. Plenty of folks had the experience of noticing that they’d had a run of bad batches of fries before finding out the recipe had change (so now all batches were bad) and effectively did do a blind taste test.
It was very noticeable when McDonald's switched over. They were the first domino to fall.
I assure you if you'd been alive and consuming fast food french fries before and after the change you wouldn't think a blind test was required. The difference between whatever the hell McDonalds was using before the switch and after was jarring.
"for various reasons" ... not really, the main reason was "supposedly healthier." There was pressure from healthy food advocates, mostly based on pop science claims. In the 1980s the "fat and dietary cholesterol is bad" trend started. That's when restaurants switched away from beef tallow, so they could advertise "fried in vegetable oil" as if that was healthier. They also introduced salads, oat bran muffins, changed from milk to yogurt ice cream, and other things that customers generally didn't want but could be claimed to be "healthy."
The amount of sugar added to prepared food took a big jump around this time, as it replaced fat to make the food taste good. Around this time is when obesity started to become a bigger problem.
That I did know. I lived through the change and "noticeable taste difference" is a massive understatement. What fresh indignity has been injected into the media cycle that makes this in any way relevant?
Why can't all of these things be problematic? Why the binary thinking?
Am I the only one that thinks it's weird to call a weed killer a pesticide?
Herbicides are a pesticide [1]. (Alongside insecticides, fungicides and fumigants, among others.)
[1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2017-01/documents/pe...
Technically, yes, but it's a similar relationship of humans being animals. If you say animals, the audience will assume you're not talking about humans.
Did you mean "beast" or "creature"?
Scientific terminology should be precise, not based on colloquial usages
Huh.
Poisons are poison!
And they sprayed this shit all over themselves and people nearby.
Under Trump, so many regulations have been setback. It will only get worse. I think the answer has to be on the community level, pushing back against industrial use that has not been rigorously tested. However, many believe that job creation is more important than the right of individuals (innocents) to a life free of health issues.
I honestly think there's a technology / robotics solution to the pesticide, and especially herbicide, problems. I'm in completely the wrong space to see it happen, but I'm still hopeful someone smart can do it.
Are the migrant workers getting Parkinson's, or only the white males who can pull the heartstrings of MAGA folks?
1 in 400 US citizens is diagnosed with parkinsons, if by "thousands", this headline means 5000, then 1 in 2000 US farmers has Parkinson's. Stop it.
Skepticism is healthy. You've found that the numbers don't make sense at face value. The problem is that you stopped there, you haven't even made any attempt at reconciling them with the original claim.
What if the US number of 1 in 400 figure is that high precisely because it includes people exposed to pesticide? In other words, maybe the number would be 1 in 500 if it weren't for Paraquat? You'd have to look at concentration maps or at the very least check what's the diagnosis rates in other countries before you can truly dismiss the claim, imho.
The article already talks to the numbers they mean and what scale they believe it to be:
> More than 6,400 lawsuits against Syngenta and Chevron that allege a link between paraquat and Parkinson’s are pending in the U.S. District Court of Southern Illinois. Another 1,300 cases have been brought in Pennsylvania, 450 in California and more are scattered throughout state courts.
> “I do think it’s important to be clear that number is probably not even close to representative of how many people have been impacted by this,” said Christian Simmons, a legal expert for Drugwatch.
There are hundreds of pictures of the Loch Ness monster.
I'm not saying you have to believe it, just that rhetorically asking if it's more than 5,000 in the US is redundant when the article already says there are more than that many individual cases about it in a single district court.
I drastically underestimated the number of farmers, who skew older. This is very unlikely to be anything.
Is that just stating a hunch or do you have new data outside the 2 narratives presented in the article driving that?
My grandfather was a crop duster pilot in the 60s-70s. He died of Parkinson's almost 4 years ago today. He is the only one in my family to succumb to this disease. For a brief moment I was relieved to know there was some explanation for his suffering.
Then I read the HN comments. It is beyond infuriating to read a well researched paper with 1300 open cases legal with overwhelming evidence only to be met with "zero chance this is real."
If only we had tools like science and statistics... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...
The article mentions epidemiological studies showing that people living or working near farmland where paraquat is used have a higher incidence of Parkinson's.
Don't be so quick to dismiss it, there could be a link.
Paraquat was used in horrendous amounts mid century. It may be a dose dependant outcome.