151–160 of 229 posts
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No, the US imposes its will on the rest of us by having an awesome arsenal and an eagerness to use it.
The carrot and the stick are both handy. Soft power can make the difference between grumbling and active rebellion.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/china/china-lead-poisoning-ti...
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> The agency of Americans is also contributing to this reccuring. I’m going to push back very, very hard on ascribing any sort of blame on anyone other than those who are committing these acts. Least of all the American taxpayer, regardless of whether or not dismantling USAID is a good idea. If the rest of the world is so helpless that all hope depends on Americans to solve even problems such as this and it’s our fau…
The problem is present in America, per the article. ‘In the early 2000s, New York City's health department noticed a perplexing blip: A surprisingly large number of Bangladeshi children in New York City were showing up in their lead database.’ For the cost of the research mentioned in the article, that seems a small sum to pay relative to the result achieved. ‘Soft power’ is not valued by many anymore, but cut it all…
I’m not actually sure that the juice is worth the squeeze though with respect to your first paragraph and I think you are stretching. The better argument instead is just the appeal to soft power or Conservative “we need to save the world” sensibilities aka Bush Jr. and AIDS for example.
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The point is that this (and similar) problems are not categorically caught at the US border.
But I wasn't suggesting it would be 'caught at the US border' so much as that if you're buying from big industrial process exporting around the world it's just so much less likely to be an issue to begin with. Article is about relatively small time farmers (processing and perhaps direct selling it themselves) trying to save their failed crop and their livelihood.
There are plenty of very mainstream industrial brands with all sorts of contamination.
> I don't think you need to worry buying it from a store that's imported it properly
This statement is not true.
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The article makes clear that the initiative, though announced by USAID with other partners, was funded primarily by philanthropy. > The money – most of it from Open Philanthropy – will go to more than a dozen countries from Indonesia and Uganda to Ghana and Peru. From other sources, I think the US _financial_ commitment was actually pretty minimal ($4M). But if USAID had been providing important governance, administr…
> But is it really so strange to you to think that the richest and most powerful country might have some role to play in international problems that arise from comparative poverty? I think this is a mischaracterization of parent's point. He didn't say it was strange , and he didn't say we had no role to play. > that the use of our military is more criticized than any other. But we're big and rich and powerful and we'…
I grew up in India and now live in the US. My mom recently got some ground turmeric from our own farm when she visited us. I am was stunned by how much more duller, brownish-yellow it was compared to the turmeric I buy in Indian stores in the US. Those are usually really bright yellows. Now, I am really scared that even stuff sold in California is probably lead paint tainted turmeric.
Burlap and Barrel tests their turmeric for lead and publishes the results. It’s a lot more expensive than Indian store turmeric, but personally I’m no longer willing to buy untested turmeric. (Relatedly, Lundberg publishes the arsenic levels of their brown rice, so that’s basically the only brand of rice I buy any more.)
There’s basically no reason to ever use powdered or dried.
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The article makes clear that the initiative, though announced by USAID with other partners, was funded primarily by philanthropy. > The money – most of it from Open Philanthropy – will go to more than a dozen countries from Indonesia and Uganda to Ghana and Peru. From other sources, I think the US _financial_ commitment was actually pretty minimal ($4M). But if USAID had been providing important governance, administr…
> But is it really so strange to you to think that the richest and most powerful country might have some role to play in international problems that arise from comparative poverty? I think this is a mischaracterization of parent's point. He didn't say it was strange , and he didn't say we had no role to play. > that the use of our military is more criticized than any other. But we're big and rich and powerful and we'…
> then I don’t want to hear a peep about us taking any other actions in the world that we deem just
I think the noteworthy peeps are not about the mere fact that we involve ourselves in the world outside our borders but that we often do it pretty badly. We attack Iraq with "shock and awe" over WMDs that do not exist, and create the Abu Ghraib prison. We drone strike weddings. We set up puppet governments ... for a while. We sign up for climate accords and then back out (multiple times).
I read his point as, "if we have an obligation to fix other people's problems, we shouldn't be subject to complaints when our foreign adventures go wrong".
And I think that's crap; we have both an obligation to try to fix the important problems that wealth or force can fix, and we have an obligation to use both carefully and ethically.
> which I would rephrase as "We can't be police and not police at the same time.
To be clear, in this turmeric story, they did an ad/leaflet campaign about the issue, and then Bangladesh's own Food Safety Authority cracked down. This wasn't about the US enforcing its laws or standards anywhere else. Getting involved and helping to solve a problem doesn't need to mean being the police. And I'm not an expert, but I think almost none of the stuff that flowed through USAID was about being "police".
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Yeah, and probably in, say, Switzerland that's exactly what people would do if they had this problem. But here in Argentina, for example, a friend of mine had his house raided by the police because he revealed that the voting machines the country was planning to adopt were flawed and vulnerable to falsified election results. And in the US right now immigrants are getting arrested and deported if they show up to their…
> the US government was prohibiting labs from telling people whether their covid tests were positive or negative. Are you referring to unvetted experimental tests, or something else? https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/politics/coronavirus-testing-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de... #news from March 10, 02020 how Helen Chu at the University of Washington discovered that covid had spread to #USA. She was running the Seattle Flu Study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in association with the Washington State Department of Health, whose state epidemiologist Dr. Scott Lindquist requested her to test for #covid, but was blocked by the FDA from telling the people who had it, because “the group was not certified to provide test results to anyone outside of their own investigators.” The FDA's repeated refusal was “because the lab was not certified as a clinical laboratory [just a research laboratory, which has much higher standards] under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months.”
The CDC was also trying to develop tests, but the tests they shipped were defective. Meanwhile the Seattle Flu Study sequenced the genome of the virus and discovered that a new variant had arisen. All of this was in late February.
> On March 2, the Seattle Flu Study’s institutional review board at the University of Washington determined that it would be unethical for the researchers not to test and report the results in a public health emergency, Dr. Starita said. Since then, her laboratory has found and reported numerous additional cases, all of which have been confirmed.
But then:
> on Monday night [presumably March 8], state regulators, enforcing Medicare rules, stepped in and again told them to stop until they could finish getting certified as a clinical laboratory, a process that could take many weeks.
Describing this as "unvetted experimental tests" is in some sense technically correct, but it's like describing me checking the voltage at a test point in my power supply with my multimeter as an "unvetted experimental test". Nobody has vetted my test plan, my multimeter may be out of calibration, and I might even not be checking circuit node I think I'm checking.
But if you think that's a valid criticism of what I'm doing, you need to be locked up where you can't harm others.
The main difference is that Helen Chu is the Allergy and Infectious Disease Program Lead at an R1 university, and literally the person who discovered that covid had spread to the US, while I'm not the lead of anything, and nobody will die if I don't find out why this power supply doesn't work until next week, so I don't have an IRB telling me that it's my ethical obligation to measure that test point.
The Trump Administration's handled the covid pandemic like a fucking bunch of clowns, but the CDC and FDA are mostly civil service, and most of the numbskulls who did this are career civil servants, not political appointees.
The US government is a motherfucking glioblastoma of incompetence, and that seriously interferes with well-intentioned, sensible plans like the one proposed by londons_explore.
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Quoting perihelions's comment above: [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25214856/ ("Contaminated turmeric is a potential source of lead exposure for children in rural Bangladesh" / "Results: Lead concentrations in many turmeric samples were elevated, with lead concentrations as high as 483 ppm")
>as much as 1000 ppm or even higher. The higher it is, the less likely for challenges in detection, and/or interference from background. >lead concentrations as high as 483 ppm SSDD. Shouldn't be that hard to detect at that level which is way above ppb. There are a number of reliable methods. However if the Minimum Detectable Level for a particular test procedure was only 500 ppm or above, one of these samples would…