[bcrosby95]

That's a pretty shitty response to an actual problem.

Companies don't need to prove the safety of things like this.

Look at bpa free. Most people don't even know that bpa free plastic tends to be just as bad, or potentially worse than bpa. The press doesn't give a shit I guess. Society went through its giant bpa panic and now it's tired of dealing with this so let's just ignore it and move onto the next thing. Ignorance is bliss.

[bravoetch]

You're okay with companies not being responsible, but you want the press to help you out here? I feel the opposite. Companies should be responsible for poisoning us, and the press has zero to do with it.

[pizlonator]

I don’t think that the problem some posters are alluding to is the kind where we should be placing blame.

The problem is:

- Humans invent something useful and cool.

- Humans discover that the cool and useful thing is toxic as fuck, but only after years go by. It takes years for the awareness of the toxicity to become widespread enough for everyone to concur it’s a problem. Often, we only find out about the toxicity as a result of the cool chemical becoming hella widespread.

- Humans invent alternatives that are different enough to obviously not have the same exact problem.

But: what toxic nonsense or buttcancer risks will we discover about the alternatives? No way to know immediately since it takes years to find out. And it’s only when the alternatives become widespread that we can even do the science to figure out what’s up. And by the time they become widespread, some folks got buttcancer.

That’s the problem: just because there’s an alternative that is different from the thing we found out to be toxic doesn’t meant that the alternative isn’t toxic. And we find out it’s toxic because people get hurt.

It’s not that the press is bad… it’s just a fundamental problem in science and engineering. You need scale to discover the really bad issues.

[Miraste]

The problem is the point between 2 and 3:

- Humans who discovered the toxicity lie, bribe, bully, and cheat to stop anyone else from finding out. The solution is delayed by decades and deaths go through the roof.

[pizlonator]

Yup.

But we have seen that movie many times, haven’t we? It’s a given that if someone builds a business on a thing and that thing turns out to cause buttcancer, they gonna cover that shit up.

Sometimes covering it up is easy if you just rely on scientific ground truths, like “the dose is the poison”. Even water is a poison if you chug too much of it, so just the discovery that something is poisonous at some dose is almost like tautological. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the “cover up” was based on that kind of science.

Basically, if there’s utility to something, then there’s money to be made, careers to be made, legacies at stake, etc - and that will bias folks towards covering shit up.

I bet you the folks involved in the cover up were good people who just failed to check their biases.

[digging]

> Humans discover that the cool and useful thing is toxic as fuck, but only after years go by. It takes years for the awareness of the toxicity to become widespread enough for everyone to concur it’s a problem.

There's no reason for there to be years between discovery and action. It doesn't matter how quickly the discovery ripples through lay society. Once it's known that something is harming and/or killing people, it should be stopped.

[pizlonator]

Yeah, should.

But what if there are no alternatives?

What if the alternatives are worse?

What if the alternatives are the kind of thing that could possibly be worse but we don’t have enough experience with them yet to know that they are worse?

Often the known bad thing is better than the thing you don’t know to be bad yet.

[digging]

Then we don't have that product until it can be safely created. It's extremely dangerous to treat innovation as irreversible

[mensetmanusman]

"There's no reason for there to be years between discovery and action."

Democracy is slow.

[digging]

Most government actions aren't democratic.

[FollowingTheDao]

> it’s just a fundamental problem in science and engineering.

In my opinion is is a problem not of science and engineering, but of human greed.

We do not need these products, we want them. As a species we did fine without them but suddenly in the last 100 years we need the so desperately?

Adding, no one can give me a response, just downvotes. Why is the aversion to speaking about greed so strong here on hacker news?

[pizlonator]

Greed is always part of it. It’s a part of everything.

Thats why I don’t usually use greed as an explanation for stuff. Of course greed is part of the system and sometimes it causes bad things to happen. Sometimes it also causes good things to happen. So, if you want to prevent the bad, it’s useful to look for some explanation that isn’t just “greed”.

[FollowingTheDao]

> Greed is always part of it. It’s a part of everything.

That statement is doing allot of heavy lifting.

Greed: excessive or rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions.

That definition of greed is certainly not a part of everything in my life.

Can you name something that that greed leads to something good happening?

[NovemberWhiskey]

Case in point: new refrigerants with lower global-warming-potential were adopted after the hue-and-cry about CFCs. Many of the new refrigerants are now also source of concern due to PFAS. The CFC refrigerants themselves were introduced as superior and safer alternatives to things like ammonia and chloromethane.