Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Collapse of the FDA

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 220 posts

Re: The Collapse of the FDA

#201

Post by mistrial9 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #186
mistrial9 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so cowboys meet Darwin and their population drops. An alternative is a "nanny state" where every personal choice must pass regulation. This is as old as the hills, but add new abilities to monitor for compliance at scale; new orders of magnitude advantages for certain high-tech; and new amounts of money in an active and massive economic system. Without prescribing any solution here, is it that much of a stretch to th…

The point of the nanny state is to stop aggressive actors causing widespread harm. not allowing companies to poison people for profit, ensuring people are qualified to do safety critical jobs. Making sure that companies can't cut OSHA for profit, ensuring that buildings are built to withstand the weather properly, even though it costs more. A lot of the "nanny state" shit is there because people died. Now, of course…

this is moronic twaddle lacking any middle ground. If you want to prove that public forums are a doomed method of communication, this post is a great start.

I mentioned none of those things

Re: The Collapse of the FDA

#202

Post by mcphage »

monero-xmr wrote: post #129
tsimionescu wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know so little about how the world actually works that it's funny you even try to speak about it. Society would literally cease to function if the government stopped providing the services that your "friction" funds. Roads, the court system, police, waste and water, defense - these barely scratch the surface of what the US government provides, and yet remove any one of them and it would be enough to bring down th…

The us government should only provide a system for contract resolution, police, and defense. I can’t think of a single other thing the government should do

> I can’t think of a single other thing the government should do

Have you ever flushed a toilet before?

Re: The Collapse of the FDA

#203

Post by freejazz »

mistrial9 wrote: post #200
freejazz wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>so cowboys meet Darwin and their population drops. I'm not sure why you think "let people poison others for profit, their customers will die" is a good argument.

no - I said nothing like that

What's the difference? You called them cowboys? Pretended like companies wouldn't actually sell poison?

Re: The Collapse of the FDA

#204

Post by insane_dreamer »

The one thing I liked about RFK is that he was going to "take on" the big food conglomerates and all the garbage that they are feeding Americans especially those unable to afford, or who do not have easy access to, healthy alternatives (whereas the garbage food is ubiquitous).

It would seem dismantling the FDA is the opposite of that; what's needed are more regulations on food, or at least policies that result in more healthy food being available and affordable to Americans, not less regulation.

Re: The Collapse of the FDA

#205

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

terminalshort wrote: post #156
shadowgovt wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People tend to be annoyed by things they interact with frequently. I get annoyed by web development, but I wouldn't want to see the solution be a federally mandated burning to the ground of the HTML standard.

Would you like to see a HTML standard imposed by law and that takes years and billions of dollars to amend? I don't think you would like that either. If I had to choose between the two, I'll take the wild west no standard option.

For some reason, that reminds me of how Microsoft abused web development with their IE6 browser. So much wasted time and effort by so many developers just so that Microsoft could extend their monopoly.

Re: The Collapse of the FDA

#206

Post by rob74 »

jajko wrote: post #88
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDTA removes all metals. It's simply a compound that forms water-soluble complexes with metal ions, removing them from the body. The way idiots kill their children with it is that among other metals, it removes calcium ions, and those are necessary for life, with low enough concentration in blood eventually resulting in cardiac arrest. So said idiots have an autistic child, read junk online that tells them that "toxi…

If you have such parents, you basically lost the game of life without having a chance to participate much. The only real solution would be to forcibly and permanently take children away from such people, not something I see flying in US if we don't include ie physical abuse or pedophilia. I feel like a basic human life value has decreased recently. Be it ongoing brutal wars, news pushing doom and gloom 24/7, covid ce…

That was my first reaction to this article too: "Ok, gutting the FDA is bad, but the destruction of some other agencies that are not even mentioned in this article actually has worse consequences. If someone believes the quacks, takes Ivermectin or EDTA and dies, that's fine for me - I hope they at least get a Darwin Award for their effort!". But when you think about people doing this to other people (including but not only children) who can't decide for themselves, it gets much more complicated...

Re: The Collapse of the FDA

#207

Post by kongolongo »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #33

I wish someone would convince RFK that prescription drug ads are bad for his brand of quack medicine. We could at least get rid of that societal cancer while the rest is torn down.

Why are prescription drug ads bad? Its not like consumers can prescribe or buy it for themselves.

If there is a problem with overconsumption or misuse of prescription drugs isn't the blame on the medical professionals that prescribe them? Ads to the general public seems far down on the list of culprits here.

Re: The Collapse of the FDA

#208

Post by kongolongo »

vel0city wrote: post #52
alejohausner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard RFK say that it’s hard to ban TV ads for drugs. They are “speech” according to the 1st amendment, or something like that. Too bad. News broadcasts are full of those ads, and hence TV journalists are loath to investigate the people that pay their salaries.

There's loads of precedent pointing to commercial speech such as marketing as having some specific carve outs on the right to free speech. After all we have limits on tobacco marketing and food labeling requirements.

Consumers can directly buy alcohol and tobacco, they cannot buy prescription drugs directly. If there is a problem isn't the primary culprit the prescriber?

Re: The Collapse of the FDA

#209

Post by stego-tech »

King-Aaron wrote: post #13
stego-tech wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t give the buffoon too much credit, as a lot of these weaknesses were engineered starting around Reagan (with Carter and Nixon also shouldering some, but far less overall, blame). Neoliberalism and its “invisible hand of the free market” alliance with Laissez-Faire Capitalism all but ensured the demise of institutions and social safety nets in the name of maximum profit for the moneyed classes. We built a Golden…

I see this argument of "oh it's been happening for a long time" getting thrown around a lot, and it feels like a really non-good-faith point of view that seems to ignore the administration directly targeting these institutions for destruction. Yes, poor management is a big problem that could be seen as an intentional structural issue, but this is a totally different ball game that's being played right now.

It’s really not, though; it’s just the proverbial relief crew in a later inning of the same ball game. The players have been shuffled around or replaced, but look at the tenures of some of the players in question and you can draw a pretty direct line all the way back.

It’s not minimizing or trivializing the harms of today by pointing out their origins in the past; rather, it’s acknowledging this has been a long-term goal of those in power for decades, and it’ll take decades of continued, organized change to improve things.

There are no easy solutions or quick wins here. It’s a long game, always has been and always will be. More people need to understand that

Re: The Collapse of the FDA

#210

Post by vel0city »

kongolongo wrote: post #208
vel0city wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's loads of precedent pointing to commercial speech such as marketing as having some specific carve outs on the right to free speech. After all we have limits on tobacco marketing and food labeling requirements.

Consumers can directly buy alcohol and tobacco, they cannot buy prescription drugs directly. If there is a problem isn't the primary culprit the prescriber?

If consumers can't even buy these drugs, why do the direct marketing at all? Are you trying to suggest the consumer doesn't have much weight in the prescribing decisions of their doctors?

Clearly the pharmaceutical companies think there's a strong reason to directly market these drugs to consumers even if they can't directly purchase these drugs. The ads almost always say "ask your doctor about..." not "think about prescribing x to your patients..." If these ads didn't do much the industry wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on them.

Post reply on HN