• Ileftreddit@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    Regulations, and safety laws, and labor laws are WRITTEN IN BLOOD. People have literally died for every regulation we have on the books, it’s WHY the laws were written

    • Pyr@lemmy.ca
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      15 days ago

      I’m all for safety regulations and laws, but I also understand why people are frustrated with them.

      People writing the laws or corporate policies are incredibly lazy and just copy paste a bunch of stuff to where it’s not really required imo.

      Like workcrews must always have a hardhat on. Then there are landscapers working in a garden pulling weeds even if there are no trees for miles. What’s going to happen? A tornado throws a rake at your head?

      • ameancow@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

        Then there are landscapers working in a garden pulling weeds even if there are no trees for miles. What’s going to happen?

        As someone who used to be an operations manager for several work-crews, I fully understand why you would just make a fucking blanket-rule. Because the more people you put on a work crew, the more obvious and stupid risks they will take. It was a daily struggle to get people to wear glove and eye protection using hammers, and the times that I didn’t enforce it as a “do it or get sent home” rule, can you guess what happened?

        No really, we were on first-name basis with people at the urgent-care center my company worked out a deal with.

        Sure the day that they’re raking the yard there’s no chance of someone suffering a head-injury. Until one of them is loading the wheelbarrow back on the truck and didn’t bother lowering the lift-gate because they chose to load their buckets and tools first and didn’t want shit to fall out of the back of the truck, then the goddamn wheelbarrow falls and lands on Martinez’s head and now he needs stitches and X-rays and is off the team for a week and we have another worker’s comp claim and everyone’s paycheck suffers for it.

        We wouldn’t need PPE rules and a thousand other safety regulations if people were always smart, alert and watching for hazards. They’re not. They’re incredibly dumb. Everyone is. So we need blanket-rules.

  • Miles O'Brien@startrek.website
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    17 days ago

    To continue with the argument of “the market will self-regulate and people wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again”

    Okay but how many people died, how many people are suffering long-term effects, and what’s stopping them from adding a different deadly thing to our food?

    • ApatheticCactus@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Market self regulation assumes informed consumers that are smart enough to know what things mean. Also it assumes healthy competition and companies that are competing to make the best product at the chrapest price. It ALSO assumes brand lotalty isn’t a thing, and consumers are judging things purely objectively.

      Like, i understand the idea, but in practice there are a ton of caveats.

    • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
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      17 days ago

      wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again

      Assuming there is perfect information in the market. In reality there is heavy information asymmetry.

      It also assumes free competition while we have every market dominated by a few players buying up everyone else, often with cartel like behavior.

    • workerONE@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Also, if you want inspections to make sure there isn’t bird shit in the milk, then you need regulation. Otherwise people are just drinking bird shit and they don’t know.

    • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      16 days ago

      To continue with the argument of “the market will self-regulate and people wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again”

      Turns out the parent company owns every other brand of that product, so going to another brand is meaningless

  • Ambiance6195@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    17 days ago

    Speaking of Americans, at least half of us are criminally uneducated and watch literally nothing but Fox News. You can’t teach them even with indisputable proof. If the talking heads say it’s bad, then it’s bad.

    • Opinionhaver@feddit.uk
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      17 days ago

      Framing one half of the population as beyond saving or inherently evil is not just lazy - it’s historically dangerous. It reduces millions of individuals into a caricature and gives people permission to treat them with contempt, as if that’s somehow virtuous. That kind of thinking has been used to justify some of the worst things we’ve done to each other as humans.

      When you actually talk to people outside your bubble, you quickly realize that most of us want the same basic things - stability, safety, meaning, a fair shot in life. We just have different beliefs about how to get there. Writing off entire groups as irredeemable only erodes any future possibility of understanding or change.

  • toadjones79@lemm.ee
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    17 days ago

    Bleach, actually. A small amount of bleach added to spoiled milk makes it taste brand new. The government actually suggested this in a few countries for a while.

    Plaster in flour was common enough that after the miller, the middle men, and then the baker all added a cut, there were loaves being sold with less than 20% flour in them. The result was mass malnutrition.

    Also, and this is a spicy one but backed by basic economics, regulations are a required element to capitalism. The notion that deregulation is pro capitalism is a misinterpretation of the idea that markets are self regulating. A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations. All our current economic woes are the result of straying away from proven economic theory (mostly deregulation) to the right allowing the corruption of the marketplace and emergence of a strong oligarchy.

    • T156@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations.

      We’ve had numerous laws precisely because companies couldn’t play fair, and made things worse for all involved. The government didn’t pass laws against company towns, scrip, and predatory pricing because they decided to ban things for fun.

    • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      Also, and this is a spicy one but backed by basic economics, regulations are a required element to capitalism

      Indeed the free market itself has demanded regulations, hence why they exist. And the regulations don’t actually per se stop crime, they simply give a quick mechanistic action afterwards to getting retribution when the regulations are violated - they bankrupt corrupt businesses over time.

      • toadjones79@lemm.ee
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        13 days ago

        Or, they balance the benefits of corrupt practices with equally detrimental (to the corrupt entity) costs. Making them less profitable than fair trade.

    • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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      15 days ago

      I’ll go extra-spicy and point out that there’s no such thing as “ownership” as we know it without government. Legal-wonkishly, ownership is enforceable, transferrable, exclusive title to property. I can “own” land that I’m only physically present on for a few days per year because my name is on a piece of paper in a file cabinet in a government office, and it’s backed up by a court system and police force that’s constituted and willing to enforce my title.

      I just mention it because a lot of the deregulation whiners are the same people as the “taxation is theft” whiners.

      • toadjones79@lemm.ee
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        13 days ago

        Oh boy. You struck gold here.

        The US Constitution is the highest form of trade pact. That is all the federal government exists for, is to facilitate trade. Catching murderers, building roads, investing in education, stopping infectious disease… All there to keep us working, buying, and trading goods and services because without that whole segments of society starve and start wars.

        I love how dumb the anti-taxation argument is because they have zero idea that they wouldn’t have any money, or jobs, without the government doing what it does with all that tax money.

        Also, never forget that when you work for a wage you are selling your time. Looking at it that way changes how you feel about your life and job. It is 100% a choice that you make because the trade is worth the pay. If not, make yourself more valuable and get out. (It would take too long to explain how that works with disabilities and government aid).

    • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations.

      And the truth is that the oligarchs, the established players in the game of capitalism, do not want a free market. They want a market with the illusion of freedom. A free market like the one you describe is, in fact, a true free market. Because then they have to actually compete with new players. Players who don’t come from the same backgrounds as the established players. Who may have different beliefs, who might not have the same skin color. Who may have a superior product or service to one or more of the established players. Who are free to sit at the same tables as oligarchs and take up space because their government gives them the power to do so. De regulation gives the illusion of a market being free, by making it so that if you want to be a new player in the game, you can, but unless you pay obeisance to the top players, you’re not getting very far. Plus the top players will buy you out, which is essentially them bribing you to walk away from the table.

      • toadjones79@lemm.ee
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        13 days ago

        That’s why an oligarchy is NOT the same thing as capitalism. You cannot have a free market if an oligarchy exists. Additionally, the four foundational principles of capitalism are:

        1. The right to own property and work for your own well being.
        2. The right to own the profits of your labors, after modest taxation.
        3. Laws and regulations to prevent corruption.
        4. The enforcement of those laws and regulations.

        Edit: wow, the spelling errors sure make that seem crazy as hell. Fixed.

  • Formfiller@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    Rivers full of industrial waste used to catch on fire, bosses used to lock workers in and let them die in fires(triangle shirtwaist fire),school was only for the wealthy, kids used to work, companies used to poison people en masse and deny it with no consequences(radium girls) work was 12 hours a day 7 days a week(people literally died to change this and trump people voted for this to happen again

  • SSNs4evr@leminal.space
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    15 days ago

    But if we change from the way we do things now, the opportunity to learn the same lessons all over again, every few decades, might be lost.

  • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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    16 days ago

    What is so incredible is that we are living st a time with such massive food surplus that it would blow the mind of anyone living in the past… but they will let all of it go to waste and just add bullshit to the food just because they can…

    • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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      15 days ago

      The absolute surplus afforded to us by modern farming and then the waste of so much of it will never cease to piss me off and will likely piss me off more in the future when we lose it to climate change.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    One of the weirdest aspects of America is that we think people whose job is making money for shareholders should have more power than the public servants we, the public, hire to work for us.

  • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    Corporations wont let us have Medicare for All - why? Why do they ALL lobby so hard against it? It would make their costs cheaper, right? They wouldn’t have to pay for our health insurance. Plus we could get medicines so we can be at work more instead of home sick or spreading sickness at work. So it must not be cheaper in some way for them to have Medicare for All - right? Why do they think it would be more expensive for THEM if we all had public health care?

    Because that would detect cancer (and toxins) and allow us to class action sue companies for them. Can’t sue if it was never detected. Thats why they find carcinogens and lead in kids’ products so much - their products dont have more lead in them, but kids all can be on Medicaid and that catches it. Flint, MI, water poisoning was detected by a kid on Medicaid.

    They don’t want us to all have healthcare because that is public science and it will absolutely detect what theyve been lying and poisoning us with. It would probably destroy all the big companies like Nestle, Johnson&Johnson, Colgate, etc…

  • untakenusername@sh.itjust.works
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    17 days ago

    just to point out the other side of this…

    (and I already know I’ma be downvoted for just saying that)

    Some regulations are bad. Many are good and we actually need them, but some are bad. For example, when there’s a few large companies in an industry, they often lobby for regulations designed to increase the cost of doing business. While the big fish can pay the costs of these extra regulations, smaller companies cant, and just cant compete with the big fish, lowering the amount of competition in the industry and promoting more monopolistic behavior. We saw Openai try to do exactly this back when they went to Congress to warn the senators about the dangers of ‘agi’ and how it quickly needed to be regulated. Well they failed, and now there’s tons of companies with their own products that rival Chatgpt in every way other than the brand recognition.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    16 days ago

    That’s just the free market working as intended. Collateral damage.

    Maybe people should do research on the available milk brands before giving it to their children if they didn’t want them to drink bleach.

    Edit: I tried to resist adding the “/s,” but we live in crazy (stupid) times, so…

    • stelelor@lemmy.ca
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      16 days ago

      Excellent idea! I’m sure that information will be readily available from independent trustworthy sources that are not the government! Failing that, I always have my trusty mass spectrometer in my kitchen and I run all my foods through it just in case!

  • MoreFPSmorebetter@lemmy.zip
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    15 days ago

    most regulations exist because corporations suck.

    Some exist simply to screw people over or charge them money for something they shouldn’t have in the first place.

    See: Regulations around building structures on private property.

    Maybe I’m alone in this one but I don’t think I should need to get the cities approval or pay them a licensing fee to build a shed or a tree house in private property. They can lick my sweaty taint for all I care.

    • Demdaru@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      Except when that shed catches a fire and that spreads to your neighbour. Or a part of your tree house breaks off and by freak accident hits neighbour on the other side of fence.

      Laws are not written for perfect scenario. Laws are written to prevent the bad scenarios.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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      15 days ago

      See: Regulations around building structures on private property.

      Even those are based on people doing it wrong in the past and endangering themselves and others.