That may be the case but it would still be a good idea to look at regulating these run away feedback loops writ large so that people can't just play a game of whack-a-mole where they play the same old tricks in different sectors or invent whole new mediums to play the same old games afresh
I acknowledge that like prostitution advertisement isn't going to ever go away completely, and I acknowledge that also like prostitute it's a better world where we legalize and regulate advertisement over a world where we didn't but with that said it's really dismaying that vanguard of our industrial and technological capability as a species is built on advertisement.
Will that always be the case? Or will the people who work at these organizations finally realize that they're only making the world a worse place every time they integrate advertisements into their business model?
If this bubble pops spectacularly and causes financial Armageddon for people's pensions, people who never wanted this to happen or had any part in it really -- who is responsible?
Will we start to have discussions aboutt aking this kind of ability to destroy the economy away from people who are absolutely insulate from such destruction?
Or will we bail them out and restart the timer to cyclical and preventable financial destruction?
It will be 2008 all over again. Nobody will be jailed, but the excuses are going to be juicy. I can already come with these, will see, time will tell how well I guessed:
- Too big to fail
- We can't jail those people, we need them to push our innovation forward
What I'd like to see is a stationary lab / communication relay that processes samples that are brought to it by a variety of rovers that can be launched with the lab or in other missions.
It would be neat to see different companies, schools, or nations come up with variations on the rovers that only need to support the common interface of passing materials to the lab for analysis.
You could even drop more labs and build a network of them and expanding the range of your little rover nodes.
Once you have a decent rover design sorted out you can work on mass producing it and achieving economies of scale.
Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?
Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.
I had a boss at a greenhouse tell me once that his old-timey agriculture prof at a big university would swear by the safety of glyphosate and he would literally drinking a shot glass of the stuff in every first year class like he was that dude who drank H. pylori to prove ulcers were caused by an infection.
This kind of insane grandstanding where a professor openly drinks herbicides for years in university classrooms came from absurd marketing from Monsanto and neither of these things have any place in our society.
Monsanto had a financial interest to make that professor into a fervent Jonestown-esque believer of their product and the end result was that spread that fervour to thousands of students who went out into the industry and figured that if it's alright for that guy to drink it then it must be alright to spray that shit everywhere as often as they want.
The downstream effect of that is you're on HN in 2018 advocating for glyphosate and then again in 2025 when someone points out how ubiquitous confidentially incorrect opinions about glycophosate are.
> Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?
Speaking of motte-and-bailey fallacy, pivoting from "Dr Oz was right about glyphosate" to this run-on claim:
> Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.
Is a textbook motte-and-bailey play. The original argument wasn't that "society and the ecosystem would be better if everyone didn't use chemicals". The claim above was that anyone who said there wasn't evidence that glyphosate caused cancer was wrong and Dr. Oz was right.
And that argument was a fallacy in itself. The retraction of a single paper is not equivalent to saying that glyphosate is dangerous, that it causes cancer, or that Dr. Oz was right.
These threads are frustrating because a small number of people are trying to share real papers and talk about the subject, but it's getting overrun with people who aren't interested in discussing science at all. They've made up their minds that chemicals are bad, glyphosate causes cancer, and Dr. Oz was right and they're here to push that narrative regardless of what the content of the linked article actually says.
You’re accusing me of a motte-and-bailey by inventing a bailey I never argued.
I didn’t say glyphosate definitively causes cancer, I didn’t say Dr. Oz was right, and I’m certainly not arguing that 'all chemicals are bad.' My point was about the credibility of the evidence around glyphosate -- specifically the ghostwritten papers, the regulatory capture, the marketing practices and how that stuff shaped industry and academic attitudes.
That’s a critique of how scientific consensus gets constructed and how it trickles down to sites like HN. It is absolutely not some anti-chemical crusade like you're making it out to be.
If you want to disagree with that argument that would be great but engage with what I actually said, not this Dr. Oz strawman.
I don't know what you're talking about. None of my opinions about glyphosate have anything to do with some stunt where somebody drank glyphosate. I wouldn't drink glyphosate. Nothing has happened between 2018 and 2025 that has changed my (not very strongly held) beliefs that glyphosate is broadly safer than the herbicides that get used when it isn't. I also don't give a shit how Monsanto is promoting glyphosate; Monsanto's success or failure as an enterprise simply doesn't factor into my thinking at all.
I'm not saying your views came from some professor drinking glyphosate. I'm saying the social and regulatory environment around glyphosate was distorted by decades of industry driven messaging, ghostwritten research, and normalization of reckless demonstrations.
That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of us including farmers, scientists, regulators, journalists, and yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters such as yourself.
My point is that the issue isn't whether glyphosate is 'safer than alternatives' but whether the entire ecosystem of evidence and perception surrounding it was manipulated. This paper that we're talking about is but one example of that. So the question isn't about your personal motives but how you came to believe what you believe about Monsanto products and who stands to gain from you believing those things and expressing them on social media.
That's a tricky one that I find myself pondering a lot as a contractor.
I've ultimately decided that if it's something I'm required to learn for this specific task then I'm billing for the time spent doing that. But if it's something that I figure I should know as a person being hired to do a task in this particular domain then I won't bill for it.
To me it's the difference between hiring a mechanic to 'rebuild an engine' and 'rebuild a rare X764-DB-23 model of an exotic engine.'
It's reasonable to expect a mechanic to know how to rebuild an engine but it isn't necessarily reasonable to expect a mechanic to know how to rebuild that particular engine and therefore it's reasonable for that mechanic to charge you for their time spent learning the nuances and details of that particular engine by reading the manual, watching youtube tear down videos, or searching /r/mechanic/ on Reddit for commentary about that specific video.
It's important to strike a balance between these kinds of things as a contractor. You don't want to undervalue your time and you don't want to charge unreasonable rates.
I agree with your assessment. In my case, I am a mechanical engineer and what he was billing me for smelled of being scammed - he thought I was ignorant. I confronted him on it and he backed down.
I've had similar experiences with auto repair shops. Recently I got a BS estimate for an alternator replacement, and a BS explanation. Fortunately, I had done my homework beforehand and knew everything about how to replace the alternator on my particular car, and the service rep knew he was outmaneuvered and gave me a fair price.
Women believe they are targeted by auto mechanics, but they target men as much as they can, too.
The Youtube Algorithm must be recommending similar videos to the both of us as I started getting the same kind of content a few weeks ago. I'm pretty partial to the Ace of Base "I saw the sign" cover that it's been recommending.[0]
It would be neat to see a humanoid robot feed the tape into the machine and press play and then have the camera zoom out to a bunch of robots dancing together.
Something about robots dancing to music that's produced by a mechanical MIDI machine feels right. Like a prelude to the impending replacement of humanity.
Ultimately it's a distinction without a difference. Maliciously stupid or stupidly malicious invariably leads to the same place.
The discussion we should be having is how we can come together to remove people from power and minimize the influence they have on society.
We don't have the carbon budget to let billionaires who conspires from island fortresses in Hawaii do this kind of reckless stuff.
It's so dismaying to see these industries muster the capital and political resources to make these kinds of infrastructure projects a reality when they've done nothing comparable w.r.t to climate change.
It tells me that the issue around the climate has always been a lack of will not ability.
> Reframing old shows to fit a new aspect ratio is antithetical to the spirit of media restoration, and cheapens the future of our shared culture. The folks at the studios who insist on hobbling their most classic television shows are really bad at their jobs.
I disgree with this. I'm fine with companies putting out new versions of something that are experimental like this, but I tihnk that they need to both acknowledge that they're experimental and put out versions that are true to the original intent.
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