Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial • Hacker News Board

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#181

Post by ftrobro » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 9:57 AM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #117

KennyBlanken wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe where GMOs are banned and pesticide use is lower...yields are higher than in the US. "We need to use poison to grow food to feed everyone" is bunch of false-dilemma poppycock. If it were truly a matter of "we need to feed everyone", we wouldn't be wasting massive amounts of grain on raising cattle, which is one of most wasteful ways of generating food there is. 80% of agricultural land is used for cattle, b…

> pesticide use is lower... It's not. Europe uses somewhat lower amount of pesticides because it has more land that regularly freezes which helps to control insects. When corrected for that, Europe uses more pesticides for similar climates. > yields are higher than in the US. They aren't, when corrected for the land area.

What do you mean by "corrected for the land area"? According to this study, in the period 2016-2020 wheat yields per acre were more than twice as high in Germany than in North Dakota or Kansas.

https://ag.purdue.edu/commercialag/home/resource/2022/05/int...

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#182

Post by pravus » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 10:15 AM UTC

iamthepieman wrote: post #53

My brother worked as a landscaper and spilled concentrated roundup all over his back and down his legs about two years ago when a backpack tank sprung a leak. About a year ago, he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. 2 months ago, he passed away - less than a year after he was diagnosed. Is there a cause/effect relationship between these events? I don't know but hearing about the various trials and studie…

I'm not telling you what to do, but I really wish this kind of thinking would stop.

I've spilled concentrated round-up all over my arms and legs many times because I used it regularly as weed control all over my property in Texas. I've also been regularly exposed to all sorts of noxious chemicals like acetone, gasoline, diesel, various alcohols, and many different organic compounds in general. On bare skin (solvents get your hands clean fast!). Part of my life is a mixture of agriculture, oil/gas, and just general West Texas grime.

I eat virtually 100% meat now which is also supposed to give me cancer. The teflon-coated pan I use to cook eggs doesn't have much teflon anymore because I've scraped most of it off through cooking (I never wash it). When I was a child, J&J baby power was an absolute staple in all households I ever visited and I've inhaled clouds of it. I have been sun-burned countless times in my life and still regularly seek long intervals of intense sun with no sun-screen. My family were early adopters of cellular phones so I've been exposed to brain-cancer causing RF/EM radiation for over 30 years now.

No cancer. No diseases. No allergies. No excess pains. No respiratory issues. No mental fog. No general health issue to report in any way. I'm the healthiest and fittest in my life at 47. I never go to the doctor any more because the last few times I went all of my lab work came back perfect.

Maybe one day I will get some fatal disease or just get run over by a truck. For now I'm going to just keep betting on the odds, though. Most of the health fears I see today seem to have an extremely low chance of occurrence (if at all) and many times is confined to very niche cohorts. The science behind most of it is pure garbage and popular opinion is generally driven by court case outcomes rather than verifiable facts.

I'm sorry for your loss, but there doesn't need to be "justice" for every case of bad fortune. There has never been a causal link to cancer with glyphosate and it has been well studied and used for many, many, many years by many, many, many people.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#183

Post by cyberax » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 10:52 AM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #159

cyberax wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSDS are crap. They are literally worse than useless. For example, I'm using perfluorohexyloctane eye drops. Its MSDS says that it's a severe eye irritant and requires eye protection when working with it. Again, for literal eye drops.

The dose makes the poison. Hundreds of people have been murdered using insulin, but I wear a device which injects me with it every 30 seconds.

Perfluorohexyloctane is inert. It is also used to fill the eyeballs, after vitrectomy. It can damage the eye only mechanically.

Yet it's listed as a severe eye irritant.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#184

Post by reducesuffering » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 11:16 AM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #171

reducesuffering wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to drink a cup of it then

> Amongst mammals, glyphosate is considered to have "low to very low toxicity". The LD50 of glyphosate is 5,000 mg/kg for rats, 10,000 mg/kg in mice and 3,530 mg/kg in goats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate I wouldn't just go drink it for fun, but for what it is, it's surprisingly safe.

If you wouldn’t drink a cup for fun, then do you know how many aggregate cups you’re getting per month from all the food you eat? They didn’t poof into existence. Every part of your food is from glysophate sprayed crops and animals that have food-chained them.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#185

Post by jstanley » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 11:29 AM UTC

Reptur wrote: post #10

Doubt they even blinked, these companies hire people to calculate risk and so they can continue to get away with it. Just a cost of business. Bayer's gross revenue for just 2022 was 53.4B. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BAYRY/bayer/revenu...

I don't understand why this type of comment comes up every time a big company gets a big fine. It seems no big fine is big enough to satisfy people.

It is crazy to think they don't care about losing $332M. Of course they care! That's an enormous amount of money no matter how big you are.

It's enough money to pay for literally hundreds of engineers to work full-time for multiple years to solve the problem.

The point that you don't care about a $332M fine is the point you stop bothering to run the business at all.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#186

Post by clbrmbr » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 11:48 AM UTC

jdblair wrote: post #179

selcuka wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Roundup isn't a pesticide, or an insecticide (as the charts above are labeled). Roundup is an herbicide Pesticide is an umbrella term for herbicides, insecticides, and other types of substances. If you've read the paper, it mentions that too: > Pesticides are substances used to repel, kill, or control animals (insecticides) or plants (herbicides) that are considered to be pests. You are correct, though, in that whi…

Ok! Thanks for the correction!

This was a new one for me, too.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#187

Post by fyokdrigd » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 12:05 PM UTC

w10-1 wrote: post #38

The judgment was based on failure to warn of risk, not negligence in design. On causation, as far as I can tell, the 2015 finding of epidemiological evidence for a 41% increase in non-hodgkins lymphoma (NHL) was rebutted by non-affiliated researchers, but paid experts are continuing to publish, and claim others have recently found a mechanism. But AFAIK there's no epidemiological or mechanistic proof, now or at the t…

> unclear any commercial gardener avoids glyphosate even today

you fell for the spin dr work. roundup have tons of that, but it's not what 1) might cause cancer or 2) what is defended in their patents.

well, it might cause cancer too. but not what was always argued against roundup.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#188

Post by throwawaaarrgh » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 12:14 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #128

These lawsuits have to end. It's a clear post-truth society nonsense. It doesn't matter that there's zero link between glyphosate and cancer. The evidence needs to be there before these lawsuits are allowed to proceed.

Actually what they found is that Roundup is potentially cancerous, not glyphosate. Roundup has a host of additive chemicals aside from glyphosate which have been shown to be likely cancerous. Glyphosate by itself is fairly benign.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#189

Post by robertlagrant » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 12:18 PM UTC

rudyfink wrote: post #153

robertlagrant wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses aren't trying to harm. They aren't a Mao or a Stalin just going for The Greater Good no matter how many people they have to kill. They're trying to make a profit, and sometimes horribly unethical people in those businesses will not care about harm in order to make a profit. But the goal isn't harm.

To be clear, I was not suggesting the intent was harm for harm's sake. I was suggesting that it was in the company's/businesses' interest to harm. I agree that, often, that interest is framed as making profit, but it can also be framed as reducing cost, not having to care, etc. The bigger point is that such an incentive exists and that it is further incentivized if the individuals who are harmed are deprived of a mec…

> framed as making profit, but it can also be framed as reducing cost

Reducing cost does increase profit. Profit is (basically) revenue minus cost.

> The bigger point is that such an incentive exists and that it is further incentivized if the individuals who are harmed are deprived of a mechanism to resist.

Of course. Russia is invading Ukraine right now, as causing harm can benefit you, if you don't care about harm. This isn't a business thing; it's a people thing.

It's just that the blast radius of a business's harm is much smaller than a state's, and it's possible to shape rules so that profit incentives line up (even better) with harm minimisation. There's no harm minimisation you can do when a power-hungry person gets into a political position.

Re: Bayer hit with $332M judgement in Roundup cancer trial

#190

Post by throwawaaarrgh » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 12:22 PM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #2

People look at you like you're crazy if you tell them you avoid oats, grains, nuts that are particularly heavy in glyphosate.

Glyphosate breaks down within a few days, doesn't remain in plants, and is passed out the body quickly even if you were exposed to it while spraying. You're not going to get any of it by eating oats.