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by mrtksn 2637 days ago
I don't disagree on "how it should be" but there are no mechanics to enforce anything other than popularity and you don't get popular by saying things that people don't want to hear. That's how we got our bubbles in social media anyway.

I guess if you still want to keep the democracy and have your 5G in Brussels you better convince enough Brusselians that the speed increase in networking is worth risking more cancer or that EM radiation definitely does not increase health risk.

1 comments

Representative democracy, independent institutions (courts, central banks, etc), the rule of law, the constitution, international treaties, human rights, crime/rioting/revolution, and most of all the truth are all "mechanics" that put a break on making every single issue a simple popularity contest.

But when I said that I didn't want to rely on average voters' risk percpetion, I didn't actually mean any of that. I merely meant that I don't rely on it to form my own opinion (which is definitely not subject to a popularity contest).

I don't want to convince the people of Brussels of anything. I want to know the truth about the health effects of 5G, and I hope that our democracies are not too dysfunctional to let that truth inform any regulations.

You need to wait 30 or more years for the truth. Any effects if any will be highly non-linear and chronic exposure may be harmful only if one experience it for many years.
What you're talking about is uncertainty, not truth.

If we don't know anything about the effects of 5G, it could just as well be the cure for cancer.

But it's not a coin toss. We do know some things about how it works, we have decades of empirical data on similar technologies, and ultimately we always have to act in spite of uncertainty as even the effects of doing nothing are uncertain.