He’s just going to get people killed. But that’s ok he doesn’t give a shit anyways, so it’s moot. What are a few thousand dead peasants when we could make big stock number go up?
He’s just going to get people killed. But that’s ok he doesn’t give a shit anyways, so it’s moot. What are a few thousand dead peasants when we could make big stock number go up?
So I visited Bangladesh one time, and learned they have insanely high rates of cancer there. Why? Well it turns out that (among other reasons) the farmers had been injecting formaldehyde into their vegetables because it made them last longer on the shelves, and therefore sold better.
This is what you get with no regulations. A sick and dying population.
“regulations are written in blood” is a quote for a reason
I spent a decade living around Africa, and this kind of thinking is common. DDT was what everyone put on the tomatoes because pests mean loss of food. Who wants that?
Lack of relations is only about living in short-term survival thinking 24/7. Long term effects mean nothing.
DDT isn’t going to cause health problems for the people in Africa. It will cause problems for some birds near the top of the food chain however.
It’s just the easiest example to use. I have maybe dozens more examples that require more storytelling and setup.
Ever had someone try to sell you a car with visible drywall screws holding the bumper on, like you were the dick for pointing them out?
DDT won’t fuck you up if you die in your 20s from unrelated causes
Go read about how horribly adulterated food was in Europe and the US in the 1800s and before. They’d add sawdust to flour, chalk, toxic metals, rotten meat was sold regularly, etc. Patent medicines were essentially drug trafficking or just scams. Soldiers in the Spanish-American war were supplied with canned meat from the US Civil War. I saw an old film from the time the Pure Food and Drug act was passed showing a can of meat being opened and it literally shot out from the gasses inside.
Well, the Libertarians and Republicans had their heads poisoned with total rot like Ayn Rand’s horrible sci-fi, and then spent the past several decades screaming about how derrp, we don’t need no regulations!
Now I guess we all get to find out along with these dolts.
Not to mention the US falling 110% into the cult of individualism. Individualism is fine if it is balanced with the needs of society as a whole. You can’t even get people to chip into schools and roads, shared resources, anymore.
Do you have examples of this stuff happening in continental European countries? I’d love to jump down that rabbit hole.
In the past I’ve read descriptions of systematic bad practices in the industrialized Uk, but I can’t recall reading about similar things happening in other western European countries. Nothing systematic anyhow. I’d image that the french would have had a(nother) revolution if anyone had tried that stuff with their food.
Enjoy!
I think the English were just better at recording it.
https://victorianweb.org/science/health/health1.html
https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-fight-against-food-adulteration/2020253.article
Here is one in Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esing_Bakery_incident
France passed a food adulteration law in 1905. Many countries were cracking down on it around this time along with the US with the Pure Food and Drug Act under Teddy Roosevelt.
Examples of food adulteration in France in the 1800s:
https://review.gale.com/2020/01/08/wine-adulteration-in-the-nineteenth-century/
Copper-colored vegetables: French beans, cucumbers, and samphires were often colored green with copper. This could have fatal consequences.
Beer: Brewers added substances like copperas, quassia, liquorice juice, and Nux vomica to make beer bitter.
Wine: The wine industry was affected by the Phylloxera epidemic, which destroyed a large proportion of vines. In response, wine adulteration increased.
Confectionery: Arsenic and mercury compounds were used as colorants.
Mustard: Lead chromate was added to mustard.
Meat: Animal health became a concern as meat consumption increased.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
Funny thing with that book it was intended to reveal the horrible working conditions in the industry but instead the public latched onto it as revealing how foul and adulterated food had become.
Exactly
Fair point, on the other hand, have you considered line must go up?
Seriously. It’s like no one realizes the literal most important thing in all of the world.
Line go up.
Fuck your family, fuck your health, fuck your safety, fuck yo couch, fuck the environment, LINE GO UP!
C.R.E.A.M.
… Fml
In every civilization there comes a time where the interests of the elite grilled too far apart from the interests of the common people. Some kind of correction becomes inevitable. The way this correction plays out and who wins is another matter. But it looks like in the coming decades, maybe centuries, a new to type of economic model gets worked out, based on sustainability first, or very soon new tech is survived that allowed further line going up without destroying the planet. But living through a pivot in history is always a stressful affair.
I’m kind of relieved we’re extincting ourselves before we become an interstellar plague of misery, with children being born into inescapable, perpetual oxygen debt to the local corporate leadership on Mars and Titan colonies.
We’d make the Ferengi look like altruists. We were a mistake of evolution.
It’s the current western dominionist mindset that’s the mistake. Don’t mistake that for all of humanity (even if it currently makes up 90% of it).
As opposed to…who exactly? That one tribe in the sentinel Islands that hasn’t been contacted by modern civilization yet?
Sure. Also many other cultures who have been contacted and haven’t been completely destroyed.
But the point is not that we should copy some tiny tribe’s way of life, the point is that western dominionism is not the only way that humans are capable of organising their societies. There are likely many other ways that have never been tried yet that are much better than what we have now.
So… would you ignore all of recorded history, and most of anthropological records that dictate humanity has always been in a race to find new and exciting ways to kill each other?
I don’t think that that’s the only reasonable intpretation you can draw from anthropology and archaeology.
If you want a good example of an alternative interpretation, I’d recommend reading Wengrow and Graeber’s boom The Dawn Of Everything.
Yeah I remember wiping my feet on his couch
Rick James from Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories?
R.I.P. Charlie Murphy
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zG29C4skboc
What? And sacrifice my bonus?
Think of the money to be made from selling medical care for contaminated food.
They will just call it Freedom Juice™ and write on the packaging that it makes the food taste more better.