Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by shrubby 142 days ago
We have banned heroin so we should be able to ban anything else that's toxic. For us, close ones or even the generations to come.

Algorithm, food, intoxicants, anything that has manipulative potential.

4 comments

> We have banned heroin so we should be able to ban anything else that's toxic

Except banning heroin clearly didn't work so well! There's still a lot of people using it. And the profits from selling it go to criminal gangs. And the people using it often die due to inconsistent dosing.

How do you define "manipulative potential"? If you ban sugar in drinks, do you ban fruit juice too? Where do we draw the line for "acceptable harm"? Personally I don't want to live in a society which bans huge numbers of things.

You can tax drinks based on the amount of sugar they contain. Yes, including juices.
Yeah, in my country oat milk is now taxed as a juice, of course milk isn't. So the plant based alternative is now 2x the price of cow milk. Thanx Milk industry.
Milk is an order of magnitude healthier than the highly processed sludge called oak “milk”.
Source?
It’s considered an Ultraproceed food item. Just look up how it’s made and what’s added to it (oils, emulsifiers, fortified with minerals). It’s basically liquid cereal, but maybe worse.
I agree. Maybe one would need to ban the misinformative marketing (although I know that opens another can of worms).
What's the difference between a big company and a criminal gang if not for the law? If it wasn't for the big companies, more dangerous things would be illegal, just like Heroin and other hard drugs.
I mean, it's not often you hear about tobacco dealers shooting each other in a crowded mall, or alcohol bosses getting their house blown up (or sometimes their neighbors house). So there might be a few small differences between companies and criminal gangs.
> or alcohol bosses getting their house blown up (or sometimes their neighbors house).

There was a time when alcohol dealing led to an awful lot of that sort of violence. We put a stop to it when we legalized Alcohol and regulated it.

It didn't seem to go too well last time it was attempted with one other drug. Namely ethanol. It might be time to try again as there doesn't seem to be any safe consumption level.
Well, yeah, but who are you to decide what I do with my body? I'm not hurting anyone. (Nice to meet you, I'm the advocate of the Devil.)
If I would look onto you as my obedient slavish worker I would like you to not kill yourself.
Shall we ban sex too?

Our bodies interact with extremely large amounts of elements in the environment and behavior that act beyond our conscious comprehension.

Sometimes in our favour and some others against us.

Banning everything that at some point worked against us is just establishing human life full of total deprivation. Worse than living in jail. Good luck maintaining a society in those conditions.

The individual and the society should instead focus on educating and teaching how to navigate an environment full of those elements.

That would be fine, if countries like the USA weren't actively turning their backs on logic and facts, and returning to a period that history refers to as the "dark ages"
I'm having a hard time seeing a valid comparison between the act of keeping the species alive and the act of consuming poisonous chemicals.