Posted by bikenaga 20 hours ago
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are they bad actors?
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.
Can good cops speak up about bad cops and keep their job, or do they have to remain silent? How many bad things can you see in your workplace without quitting or whistleblowing while still being a decent person? Can they opt out of illegal but defacto ticket quotas and still have a career? Does writing a few extra tickets so you can stay in the force long enough to maybe change it make you part of the problem?
Many people look at the problems in policing and say that anyone working inside that system simply must have compromised themselves to stay in.
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.
I was trying to defend my previous comment, and didn’t adequately consider your point.
Police reform would be simple to implement if we could all agree on what that looked like.
In the signal of things that are damaging society, negatively impacting individuals, police-brutality-self-investigation-no-harm-found is so far down in the noise floor, it should be about as worrying as people who live on busy street intersections not trimming back their hedges for safe driving visibility.
But somehow, here are 6 people deep in random HN comments telling me all about the importance of trimming hedges. Err, reforming police.
Is this a lazy figure of speech?
US police have recently been killing ~ 1,100 people in the US per year.
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
Near as I can tell that's more than a decades worth of hunting fatalities in the US.
IHEA published a report of 79 fatal hunting-related accidents in 2001. Twenty-nine fatalities resulted from hunters’ failures to identify targets; 11 resulted from hunters’ inability to see victims; 10 resulted from hunters firing while swinging on game (the hunter follows a moving target with their firearm).
( Not a great source, it has some obvious errors but largely meshes with other sources, I admit I've not found a good comprehensive report on the overall state of US hunting acidents, I did look at a several good state summaries )
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.
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.
As you say, stats very often obfuscate.
Seems like a pretty big difference.
(I'm totally not ATAB here, just agree that parent post analogy)
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.")
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.
https://www.propublica.org/article/garrison-school-illinois-...
https://www.propublica.org/article/shrub-oak-school-autism-n...
https://autisticadvocacy.org/actioncenter/issues/school/clim...
https://www.the74million.org/article/trump-officials-autism-...
"Selected Cases of Death and Abuse at Public and Private Schools and Treatment Centers"
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-09-719t.pdf
> Death ruled a homicide but grand jury did not indict teacher. Teacher currently teaches in Virginia
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/area-special-ed-tea...
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...
It's not the root however. The root is nepotism. What you're describing is one of ten thousand problems nepotism causes.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
[0]https://www.thisamericanlife.org/414/right-to-remain-silent/...
Also, watch Serpico. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0070666/
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.)
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.
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/...
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.
That's not really not comparable to data centers using potable water.
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.
234 m3 per tonne, of clean water.
25M tonnes per year.
=> 16M m3 of clean water per day
Edit: convert to comparable units
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").
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.
It's also a deep incumbency advantage. Of course the guys selling the existing stuff are going to dispute the safety of a competitor.
How about Fermat's last theorem?
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.
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".
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.
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.
That AI consumes somewhat less water than cities of millions is not a defense.
A city is not defined by its size. It is defined by its legal incorporation as a city. There are big cities, and there are small cities, and most cities are on the smaller side.
Try again.
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.
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...
The second part of the system is an open loop that uses water to cool the closed loop at the heat exchanger.
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.
Does the water that cool datacebters become AI? Do we ship water bearing AI around the world?
At least you have to continually monitor them as such.
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.
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.
We're being tricked!
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.
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.
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.
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).
But if you look at long timescales, it's pretty obvious that cooperation is the more powerful strategy.
We used to live in tribes of hunter gatherers, in constant danger from a hostile environment. Now, we're part of a global technological superorganism that provides for us.
If free-loading was a dominant strategy, this would never have developed.
(1) From the evolutionary biology point of view this can be explained by rate dependent selection- meaning the strategy is strong as long as only a small fraction of a population employ it. Durkheim would probably say you need these people to establish what the norms of a society are.
Who said it was done to protect the pesticide's manufacturer? It protects the industry as a whole: the agro-industry aims for low costs, and that means using cheap pesticides to increase crop yield, even it it ends up harming farmers in the process.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Paraquat (what this article is about), isn't used by any people in the links you gave (golf courses, Dutch or Swiss farmers).
https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-thought-parkinsons-wa...
What lead it to being "banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China"?
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.
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.
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.
Also, if a chemical is known to be toxic, then rigorous testing should be performed before allowing it to be widely distributed and used.
Of course not, that would be bad for capitalists. /s
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.
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.
Genuinely appreciate the source. I wasn't finding it on my own, at least not with the nexus to the EU's decision.
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....
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.
In cases where a judge is a domain expert, he may well end up even needing to recuse himself as that would generally entail opining on debatable topics one way or the other, which makes him unlikely to be able to effectively perform his role.
He was a Vice President at Monsanto (and worked as part of their contracted legal team for 7 years prior) and some of his most well known publications involved arguing for an interpretation of a 1958 law, that forbid companies using carcinogens in products, to mean that they could only knowingly allow a 'small amount' of carcinogens. His Wiki page looks like it's been hit by a PR firm. Here [1] is an older version.
So you essentially have Monsanto, by proxy, in charge of the FDA. And this sort of stuff is much more the rule than the exception. Taylor was appointed by Obama. That's not to be partisan and suggest Obama was particularly bad here, but on the contrary I think many people have a positive view of him relative to more recent presidents, yet he continued on with these practices just like literally every other administration in modern history.
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The second thing is indirect payoffs. Massive companies like Monsanto have their tentacles in just about everything in any way remotely related to their domain. If you play ball with them, you're going to find doors and opportunities open for you everywhere. On the other hand if you turn against them they will similarly use all their resources to destroy you so much as possible.
A recent article on here discussed how key research published regarding the safety of Monsanto products was ghostwritten by Monsanto themselves and then handed off to some other 'scientists' to sign their name to it and publish. [2] Once that was indisputably revealed in court (only thanks to the really smart guys doing this literally talking about it, verbatim, in emails), it took some 8 years for the article to be retracted. People just don't want to go against Monsanto.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_R._Taylor...
[2] - https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...
How familiar are you with admin law? That is what already happened before this precedent was discarded.
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).
That is very nearly the lion's share of the work these agency do, is to justify the regulations and the decisions
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.
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.
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sen-jim-inhofe-climate-change-i...
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.
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.
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
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.
"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)
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...
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.
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.
>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”.
... then you have the USA
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.
and then the approval was overturned as the evidence was crap
so, back to the original state: banned until proven safe
Source? I’m curious for this context.
Do you have a link to this decision? I'm having trouble finding it on my own.
Because paraquat was approved for use over much of the world at one point, including countries people claim require substances be "proven safe."
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.
It does, but that isn't relevant here. There were poisoning cases in France that lead to the ban [1].
> “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.
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.
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.
Also, instead of smelling like a chemical factory, your yard will smell like salad dressing for a day or so.
The scientist in me wants to see definitive proof from validated studies.
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.
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.
(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.