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[Smithy]

 

[rob]

If The Jungle scares you, don't read Fast Food Nation. It's kinda horrifying to know how little of our food has been made with shortcuts taken.  If it was produced by a company that isn't completely local, you should treat your food as if you know it's infected.

[Capntastic]

Growing your own food becomes much more difficult if you don't own land, have the time to tend crops because you have two jobs and children.   Or the land you own has toxic seepage into the soil or water supply due to EPA regulations being cut back or eliminated.  Regulations that try to stop people from putting out unsafe food, pollution, etc, are actually kind of important.  Would someone seriously argue that the government deciding not to regulate the sale of radium as a food additive/toothpaste/energy drink would have been a good thing?

[Painting]

Would someone seriously argue that the government deciding not to regulate the sale of radium as a food additive/toothpaste/energy drink would have been a good thing?

Yes. THE GUBBMENT CANT TELL US WHAT TO DO, IM A FREE COUNTRY (drives car into own house)

[Capntastic]

One important thing is that asking for regulation doesn't mean to regulate anything, it means to provide a baseline of safety for people.  I'm not gonna say people shouldn't be able to buy McDonalds, but I feel confident in saying that McDonalds should actually sell the product people think they're buying (like real, unspoiled meat).

[Painting]

That distinction won't be made to the public, at least not in the USA. Here, getting anything healthy or positive to happen anywhere ever is considered a felony.

[Castle]

One important thing is that asking for regulation doesn't mean to regulate anything, it means to provide a baseline of safety for people.  I'm not gonna say people shouldn't be able to buy McDonalds, but I feel confident in saying that McDonalds should actually sell the product people think they're buying (like real, unspoiled meat).

Why would you want your meat to spoil?

[Capntastic]

The real is equally as important as unspoiled.

[Irock]

The FDA has prevented good, life saving medicine from reaching the market and also kept dangerous drugs and foods on the market. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say something like, "Why would our government let something dangerous on the market? There's no way it's not safe!" It also serves as a barrier that only big pharmaceutical companies can even afford to pass, considering it costs millions and millions of dollars. It serves to keep the big companies going and keep the small ones down.

I personally would much prefer private companies to test drugs and food. And maybe then people would be more cautious of what they put in their bodies instead of blindly assuming everything is safe. Moreover, there would actually be fair competition since large corporations couldn't use the FDA monopoly as a device to prevent others from entering the market, and if they slipped up and bad food or drugs got through, they would be held accountable and the increased competition would be more than happy to take their customers.

[Paul Eres]

I understand that honest people becoming president is incredibly unlikely, but how does never voting help anything? If someone like Ron Paul somehow made it into the election, would it be better to support and vote for him or to refuse to participate? I think the best option is to only use small businesses, be self-sustainable and also support honest politician. Whether or not Ron Paul can become president, he's what opened my eyes to how broken this country (and the world) is and freed me from the republican-democrat mentality. That wouldn't have happened if nobody supported Ron Paul in his presidential runs or voted him into congress, because I never would have heard his message.

voting has two problems

first, it is a, by proxy, an infringement of rights. if you vote for someone, and they do something immoral, you are culpable for that person's immoral actions, because you got that person into power. if you voted for obama, and obama assassinates an american citizen, or bombs an afghani village and kills people in it, you are in part a murderer, just like him, because those people might be alive today if not for your vote

second, if you are anti-government, voting is a sanction of the government's existence. if you don't believe government should exist, taking part in its process is hypocritical. here's an analogy: let's say you are a slave, and you had to vote for whether to be whipped with the red whip or the blue whip. if you choose one of them, you are basically implying that they have the right to whip you. the better answer is to refuse to choose either one of them, even if they say they'll whip you with both of them if you refuse to choose one

The latter exchange  with paul sound like deux ex plot a lot, I guess we know wich choice eres does at the end of the game.

never beat it. i played a few minutes of it and then gave up; didn't like it.

[Paul Eres]

regarding the FDA, the FDA gives large corporations a monopoly by requiring about a billion dollars or more to go through their testing process. the FDA used to be more reasonable and only require a few million dollars of testing, but the big corporations gradually got the FDA to require about a billion dollars in testing before a drug can be brought to market. at that extremely high cost, only about 10 health industry corporations in the world can afford to compete in the drug market. those few can control what drugs people can take, what drugs get on the market and what drugs do not

also, because it costs so much to pass FDA testing, drugs for "niche" diseases which only a few people have don't even bother to go through the testing, because there aren't enough people suffering from that disease to make it profitable to spend a billion dollars getting through the FDA. that basically has the effect of making rare diseases incurable; because there's no profit in curing them, and even if you *did* happen to cure one, you couldn't "prove" it to anyone because it'd cost a billion dollars to prove it

[BlueSweatshirt]

I concur that capitalism only sucks when there's monopolization.
But is monopolization an inevitable outcome due to the profit mindset?
Le gasp.

[Paul Eres]

I concur that capitalism only sucks when there's monopolization.
But is monopolization an inevitable outcome due to the profit mindset?
Le gasp.

i didn't say it only sucks when there's monopolization. there are plenty of other things that can go wrong with markets besides monopolies. corporate welfare, for instance, has nothing to do with monopolies. neither does currency manipulation, derivatives trading, or groups like bain capital (mitt romney's company) which makes money by buying companies and then bankrupting them. there's also the regressive tax code we have now, where you pay a higher % of taxes the poorer you are, and some corporations even have a negative tax rate (where the more money they make, the more they are paid by the government)

but my point earlier was: all of the *worst* parts of capitalism are encouraged and enabled primarily by the government, government can't protect people from capitalism because government is capitalism

[SirNiko]

This also assumes that the money spent on regulation is all going to worthwhile product improvements. There is a point where spending additional money on regulation simply does not make the product better. You simply drive up the price and create a network of regulatory bodies that is going to last until the end of government.

Some level of regulation is important, but more regulation is not always better and often is bad.

And, generally speaking, I'm more trusting of the word of the big corporations than of government. If the government fucks up and lets toxic medicine get in they can just blame it on a scapegoat and whip up some new regulations to pretend they're fixing it. If a company fucks up and lets toxic medicine get on the market they stand to lose market share and risk going out of business.

In the end, of course, anyone anywhere can try to cheat you and hurt you for profit and sometimes even you're going to get hurt or sick at the fault of nobody. You ultimately have to be responsible for yourself.

[Paul Eres]

regulation is, pretty much 100% of the time, written by and decided by exactly those people it's intended to regulate. for instance, i once heard that there are about 10,000 pages of laws dedicated to regulating toilet seats. and who wrote those laws? lobbyists hired by toilet seat manufacturers