391–400 of 433 posts
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If you did that you’d end up with a lot of deaths. These vasodilators are contraindicated for a wide variety of heart/health issues as well as other prescriptions.
Cull the herd.
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There is a blackmarket of repurposed Amazon Product Pages. This is a problem that Amazon knows about and does nothing to resolve. So the way it works is that some company makes a page for a stuffed animal for example. They name the product page appropriately and start selling their toys. They push hard and gets lots of reviews and build up the aSEO (amazon search Optimization) for that page. They build up 1,000 posit…
I have heard similar stories of Amazon fraud like you describe. I don't know if everything is true, but this is a problem which can be solved with PKI. With PKI, the customer reviews a product, and puts the hash of his review somewhere on the internet. The hash might be the hashed version of a JSON like so: {company: "Stuffed Animal company", product: "Stuffed Animal", review: "Very good stuffed animal toy"} When the…
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You're assuming that people would disregard the labels. But people with allergies don't disregard the labels, they buy a different product. Most others don't care if it has traces of nuts or not because nuts aren't going to kill them, so those products find a wide market of people who are perfectly safe eating them. California says that everything causes cancer because everything kind of causes cancer and their label…
> But people with allergies don't disregard the labels, they buy a different product. I have a nut-allergic friend who has given up on reading the labels and relies on his own common sense, because the labels are on everything now. (Worse, if you look at what's happened with sesame, manufacturers now deliberately incorporate sesame into their recipes so that they can put the warning labels on, because that's cheaper…
There is a difference between containing nuts and being processed on equipment that also processed nuts. The difference matters more for some people than others.
> Worse, if you look at what's happened with sesame, manufacturers now deliberately incorporate sesame into their recipes so that they can put the warning labels on, because that's cheaper than the risk of selling a product that doesn't contain sesame
This is what happens when you have bad rules.
They have a machine which has processed nuts in the past, it isn't cost effective to remove every trace of nuts from it, so they accurately labeled their product as one processed on equipment that has processed nuts. Maybe the trace amounts aren't enough to matter, but the consequences can be dire so they're cautious. Isn't this supposed to be about safety?
They only added nuts to the product after you prohibited them from being conservative. And they're being atypically conservative because the "dangerous" label isn't applicable to most of their customers who they then don't have to worry about being deterred.
> How do you imagine that this might be accomplished? If manufacturers have the choice of a) go through an approvals process b) put a warning label on their product, they're going to pick b, every time.
Why is the company even involved in the process? They produce a new product and it initially gets a label that says it hasn't been tested, which will rightfully deter customers when most existing products don't have that label. The government performs its testing to check if it's harmful, prioritizing based on which new products are expected to be popular, and once published their results go on the label one way or the other.
If the company wants to get rid of the untested label or not have it present at release they can pay for expedited evaluation and go to the front of the line, but all popular products get tested relatively quickly and so untested products are suspect, and products evaluated as unsafe then have to be labeled as unsafe.
> And the result is that smoking has fallen a lot more slowly than predicted and millions of people have died.
As compared to the times when we've prohibited other substances and people all stopped using them immediately?
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I have heard similar stories of Amazon fraud like you describe. I don't know if everything is true, but this is a problem which can be solved with PKI. With PKI, the customer reviews a product, and puts the hash of his review somewhere on the internet. The hash might be the hashed version of a JSON like so: {company: "Stuffed Animal company", product: "Stuffed Animal", review: "Very good stuffed animal toy"} When the…
Another problem solved by decentralization! You should sell some NFTs to celebrate.
There are multiple solutions, but the cheaper solution will be offered by a perfect competition system as economic theory suggests. Anyone is free to choose the most expensive solution if so desires. I don't mind at all if someone pays 1000 times more for the same PKI and uses a more expensive system than a blockchain one.
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> People do disregard labels including those with allergies. Exception that proves the rule. The purpose of the law is to protect people who act within reason. If you have an allergy and don't read the label, that's on you, not the company or the government. > Ahh, but the risks are such companies will still put that label on everything unless companies where required to only put such a label on products with signifi…
> “regulators say you have to label this” and “regulators say you cannot buy this even with informed consent” are two different things They are the same issue, because labels get applied even when not needed which destroys informed consent. Allergies cover a huge range of sensitivities. People with quite severe allergies can consume small quantities and not notice when someone else with the exact same allergies just…
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My mum was a big believer in homeopathy and Bach flower remedies. The homeopathic sodium chloride and silicon dioxide sugar tablets probably didn't hurt me, but given how dumb Bach flower remedies are it's entirely possible she randomly and unwittingly dosed me with a small quantity of ground up something in the Solanaceae family. Governments care because well meaning hippy parents who don't know any better feeding s…
And this is something the "Freedom!"-yelpers don't mention: Yes, adults can be "Free!" to do crappy and dangerous things to themselves, but when it's parents poisoning children, you have to be pretty damned sociopathic to only consider how the rights of the parents are being infringed by regulation. I honestly think some people consider children to be property.
In practice parents and the government agree most of the time because it's established science that no one contests, and cases where the government got it wrong are a large class of exceptions. Then people see the government forcing its rules even when they're in the wrong and lose faith in the whole system, including the general consensus. Then you get more counter-culture types fooling around with weird plants.
Whereas in the absence of coercion, the people who are right when the government is wrong are able to openly prove it without being punished, which allows the government to improve its recommendations more rapidly, which reduces how often their recommendations are wrong and thereby the number of people disregarding them wholesale after watching them be incompetent pigheaded bullies.
Supplements on Amazon have been a disaster for the better part of a decade, maybe longer.
It's painful to see abuse after abuse and little regulatory action.
Except in a very small handful of situations, the best case scenario is that the company pays a small fine.
That fine gets announced years after the abuse, then, that pittance gets litigated down over even more years.
The risk adjusted present value might as well be zero.
Why would any company ever do the right thing?
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> But people with allergies don't disregard the labels, they buy a different product. I have a nut-allergic friend who has given up on reading the labels and relies on his own common sense, because the labels are on everything now. (Worse, if you look at what's happened with sesame, manufacturers now deliberately incorporate sesame into their recipes so that they can put the warning labels on, because that's cheaper…
> I have a nut-allergic friend who has given up on reading the labels and relies on his own common sense, because the labels are on everything now. There is a difference between containing nuts and being processed on equipment that also processed nuts. The difference matters more for some people than others. > Worse, if you look at what's happened with sesame, manufacturers now deliberately incorporate sesame into th…
Safety should be about safe outcomes, not about maximising the number of warnings.
> They only added nuts to the product after you prohibited them from being conservative. And they're being atypically conservative because the "dangerous" label isn't applicable to most of their customers who they then don't have to worry about being deterred.
There's nothing atypical about it. They're finding the cheapest way to avoid liability and they genuinely don't care whether that means "being conservative" or poisoning their customers, and it's not going to result in good outcomes for the customers.
> Why is the company even involved in the process? They produce a new product and it initially gets a label that says it hasn't been tested, which will rightfully deter customers when most existing products don't have that label. The government performs its testing to check if it's harmful, prioritizing based on which new products are expected to be popular, and once published their results go on the label one way or the other.
Presumably you're going to campaign for the massive increase in taxation that would be necessary to enable the government to do testing comparable to what's currently done in any remotely reasonable timeframe? (And some kinds of testing simply can't be done fast - if you want to test for negative after-effects that may take years to show up, there's no way to make that not take years).
> As compared to the times when we've prohibited other substances and people all stopped using them immediately?
As opposed to market consensus on what was expected. And yeah, frankly, banning substances generally does reduce consumption; not to zero, but to significantly less than without the ban.
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It's just super ironic the parent post said they avoid counterfeits and knock-offs by shopping on Aliexpress. Aliexpress is basically counterfeit and knock-off central... On Amazon, look at who the seller is. If it's Amazon or the actual manufacturer, you'll be fine. For the rest, you need to do some additional research on the seller's business - but it's understandable to not want to do that effort. With that said,…
> It's just super ironic the parent post said they avoid counterfeits and knock-offs by shopping on Aliexpress. Aliexpress is basically counterfeit and knock-off central... It doesn't. You read it wrong. Read it again.
> Here's my list of things I won't buy on Amazon.com
> However, [Amazon.com is] no longer my first source. I'll go Aliexpress, eBay, and Walmart first.
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And this is something the "Freedom!"-yelpers don't mention: Yes, adults can be "Free!" to do crappy and dangerous things to themselves, but when it's parents poisoning children, you have to be pretty damned sociopathic to only consider how the rights of the parents are being infringed by regulation. I honestly think some people consider children to be property.
This is assuming the parents are rubes and the government is competent, ignoring the cases when it's the other way around. In practice parents and the government agree most of the time because it's established science that no one contests, and cases where the government got it wrong are a large class of exceptions. Then people see the government forcing its rules even when they're in the wrong and lose faith in the w…
Or corporal punishment, where scientific consensus since 1990s is that it is harmful. The countries which have banned it since did so ahead of change in public opinion.
There are times when the government is wrong, but it is by far more right than wrong. Thanks to government intervention we saw childhood mortality drop from the high levels in previous centuries, and letting parents just do their thing would eliminate much of that progress.