[BoxOfRain]

I think what the argument comes down to is how much risk we're willing to tolerate as a society. There's definitely a middle ground to be had between an under-cautious world where things like leaded petrol and thalidomide are on the market causing immense human suffering, and an overly cautious world where progress is suffocated by the glacially slow wheels of bureaucracy and endless spurious "safety" objections by lobbyists attempting to kill their competition in its crib.

Having said that, the EU is a bit of a unique specimen when it comes to things like this. I'm perhaps being a little unfair to the precautionary principle per se when I suppose it's more the EU's implementation of it that I'm criticising. I don't want this to come across as an anti-EU polemic either, there's obviously pros and cons here and I realise the EU is very much in a class by itself when it comes to political polities which make comparisons quite difficult. My own biases are probably at play here too, for various reasons I'd say my risk tolerance is probably higher than most.

[jszymborski]

I think that's fair criticism.

I've enough friends who work for the Canadian government or university administration to know that there is a coveted and illusive middle ground where vital regulation doesn't grind all it touches to a hapless stand-still.

Hot take: I think the HN software dev crowd might not be the worst equipped to help towards addressing these sorts of problem. From the horror stories I hear, disciplined approaches to tooling could solve a class of problems that appear to be pervasive.