| >This is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_. I mean, I'd definitely say that laws that are obviously incompatible with the incentive structures clearly present in real life are indeed bad laws. Everyone is lazy -- or, more to the point, everyone has finite resources to allocate to their pursuits -- and expecting corporations and consumers to incur exorbitant costs in order to ensure optimal resolution to every possible edge case is neither reasonable nor realistic. The problem isn't that "corporations are lazy"; the problem is that some people unaccountably expect them to be otherwise. > Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice. But we do indeed have plenty of choice. There are a ton of options for getting high-quality food and other products that go through lots of extra steps and give consumers much more granular information about how they were produced and what's in them. Those options are just much more expensive, and many people are perfectly happy to make the choice to use products that may e.g. increase a particular risk from 0.001% to 0.002% in order to avoid paying twice as much for it. One note, however: it's impossible for food not to include allergens, as people can develop allergies to essentially anything. Encumbering access to food products that provide nutrition and pleasure to the vast majority of people in order to eliminate the responsibility of a small fraction of the population to exercise care over their own consumption choices is ethically dubious, to say the least. |