Thousands of U.s. Farmers Have Parkinson's. They Blame a Deadly Pesticide

I think they might refer to the EU approving of paraquat, which was appealed by Sweden and other countries and it was a legal process churning on until 2007 when the presumed link with Parkinson's and other factors led to the decision to ban it.

My position is simple and has 2 parts:

To expect anyone to create meaningful regulation on every sector of the economy is absurd, our system is far too complex.

We need regulation if we want to live in a safe healthy modern society.

Unless you just disagree with the second Your implication is that every congress person should be an expert on every sector of the economy and fiscal policy, and be able to craft meaningful laws, or at least have strong opinions about them. Otherwise, they would just be accepting laws written by other people, just like the regulator.

Corruption exists in every system. I grew up with clean air and water thanks to the current regulatory system, and have benefited from a safe work culture my whole life. Best I can tell the only guy who has really done anything to stop that is the current President, so kinda a crude characterization to say that they change with every admin.

I trust the scientific expertise of a career bureaucrat holding a PhD more than a congresscritter that brings a snowball onto the Senate floor as "proof" climate change isn't real[1].

1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sen-jim-inhofe-climate-change-i...

> If they 'take bribes' I don't want a judge to accept their word. They should have to justify their ruling before the court.

If they're taking bribes they should be tried under corruption laws such as 18 U.S.C. § 201

Meanwhile our SC justices can accept all kinds of gifts from industry and make whatever ruling they want without any repercussions. They're in charge of determining their own conflicts of interests and their own ethics violations. Which surprising, they never seem to have any!

Its far easier to remove a regulator, even one of a supposedly independent agency (we'll see how that goes), for doing something obviously corrupt than a Supreme Court judge, as evidenced by the current court.

They don't overtly take bribes. It's a mixture of two things. The first is a corporate revolving door. Look at the head of a regulatory agency and he's often a corporate insider - regulatory capture. For instance many regulations that greatly expanded the reach and reduced requirements for GMOs passed under Michael R Taylor [1] as the head of the FDA.

He was a Vice President at Monsanto (and worked as part of their contracted legal team for 7 years prior) and some of his most well known publications involved arguing for an interpretation of a 1958 law that forbid companies using carcinogens in products, to mean that they could only knowingly allow a 'small amount' of carcinogens. His Wiki page looks like it's been hit by a PR firm. Here [1] is an older version.

So you essentially have Monsanto, by proxy, in charge of the FDA. And this sort of stuff is much more the rule than the exception. Taylor was appointed by Obama. That's not to be partisan and suggest Obama was particularly bad here, but on the contrary I think many people have a positive view of him relative to more recent presidents, yet he continued on with these practices just like literally every other administration in modern history.

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The second thing is indirect payoffs. Massive companies like Monsanto have their tentacles in just about everything in any way remotely related to their domain. If you play ball with them, you're going to find doors and opportunities open for you everywhere. On the other hand if you turn against them they will similarly use all their resources to destroy you so much as possible.

A recent article on here discussed how key research published regarding the safety of Monsanto products was ghostwritten by Monsanto themselves and then handed off to some other 'scientists' to sign their name to it and publish. [2] Once that was indisputably revealed in court (only thanks to the really smart guys doing this literally talking about it, verbatim, in emails), it took some 8 years for the article to be retracted. People just don't want to go against Monsanto.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_R._Taylor...

[2] - https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...

> They should have to justify their ruling before the court

How familiar are you with admin law? That is what already happened before this precedent was discarded.

> If a substance already exists in nature and has been in use for a long time, then it's reasonable to take the position that it is probably within harm limits.

Reasonable, but wrong.

Simple case: Did you know that occupational sawdust exposure is strongly associated with cancer in the paranasal sinuses and nasal cavity?

There's also some pretty compelling evidence that coronavirus's (so common cold & flu) are associated with dementia/Alzheimer's.

Alcohol increases cancer rate more than some of the "chemicals" people will complain about. So does Bacon. So does sunlight.

All of which have been floating around in Human contact for a LONG time.

Again - we do a pretty good job at filtering out the stuff that's fast acting and harmful. It's just really difficult to tease out information that requires long term monitoring and involves small/moderate increases in risk.

Think about how long it took us to figure out that lead exposure is really nasty. We used lead for thousands of years prior, and it's literally a base element.

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As for

> Also, if a chemical is known to be toxic, then rigorous testing should be performed before allowing it to be widely distributed and used.

No one is arguing otherwise, and normally large and expensive studies are done on short term harm (extensive animal testing). But you tell me how we can reasonably and ethically do longitudinal studies on large groups of humans to determine if a new substance is going to cause small/moderate cancer rate bumps over 50+ years?

This is just genuinely a difficult problem to address, and it's not simply like we can go "wait 50 years and see"! Because usually we're trying to use these things to address existing problems. Ex - pesticides and fertilizers might still be net positives even with the cancer risk - do we avoid them and let people starve today? Or feed everyone now and have a 10% bump in cancer rates 50 years later? There's no golden ticket here.

It sounds reasonable until you try to apply that same logic to other things. For instance if you like chocolate, you'll assume the choco you bought at the store is delicious, but after the first bite you'll revise or not that opinion.

The initial framing might give more leeway for positive aspects or negative aspects, but people aren't that bad at reevaluating a prioris as long as they're no vesting or penalty associated.

I have a bias towards not dying, and so far that has steered me away from activities that increase my likelihood of it. Bias is not intrinsically negative (that's prejudice), it just means a preference towards.

That bias is well earned. Maybe one day corporations will do enough good things in the world to undo the evil they've perpetuated. I'm not holding my breath.

If someone had this experience I’d encourage them to look into how police departments across the US consistently fight against any accountability for the cops who perpetuate those relatively few awful encounters. “Most interactions are harmless therefore the negativity is overblown and cops are trustworthy” is one takeaway if you stop your research at the right point. “if you have a bad experience with a cop the entire department will turn against you; they are not to be trusted” is a more accurate takeaway.

As you say, stats very often obfuscate.

pedantic, but "ACAB" doesn't necessarily mean every (or most) cops do horrible things all the time (that's the strawman version).

one, more nuanced, sentiment is something more like "all cops are bastards as long as bad cops are protected."

another sentiment is "modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers; thus, all of policing is rooted in bastard behavior, therefore: all cops are bastards".

there are plenty of other ways to interpret the phrase. "acab" is shorthand for a lot of legitimate grievances.

You picked a terrible example as a counterpoint, because ACAB is about police protecting bad police (or generally, authorities defending each other as a gang themselves).

ACAB is not about the proportion of bad encounters to good encounters. It is about the police system as a whole that defends and provides cover for the bad ones.

If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.

  IHEA published a report of 79 fatal hunting-related accidents in 2001. Twenty-nine fatalities resulted from hunters’ failures to identify targets; 11 resulted from hunters’ inability to see victims; 10 resulted from hunters firing while swinging on game (the hunter follows a moving target with their firearm).

>But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.

This is hardly a revelation. There are levels of bastardy in between "angelic philosopher-saint and paladin of justice" and "demonic hellspawn stomping babies for resisting arrest". The cop who just hands out false tickets to meet quota is just as ACAB as the one who finally loses his temper and shoots someone without true cause, but one gets to hide it better. Intuitively, I suspect that the cumulative actions of the low-level ACAB behaviors add more misery and injustice to the world than all the wrongful deaths and incarceration combined.

"If you research police corruption you'll probably find out the police are corrupt."

Large corporations and the police both have statistically significant problems to be a concern to the average person.

Frequency isn't the issue it's recurrence across municipalities. That's what makes it clear there is a systemic issue.

Imagine if we didn't make laws about murder because "It's not that frequent of a problem only 1 in 500,000 people are murdered"

Yeah I'm aware. Learning about how American capitalism functions is what set me on the path of being an anticapitalist. Reforms and regulations will never be effective here in solving this issue. The system itself is poisonous.

And when a chemical goes off patent protection and you have a new patented chemical ready to go, it's advantageous to suddenly dis the now public domain entity.

Mathematics and scientific proof of negatives are different kinds of proofs.

I like to think that what the “can’t prove a negative” phrase originated from was someone grasping at the difference between Pi_1 and Sigma_1 statements . For a Pi_1 statement, one needs only a single counterexample to refute it, but to verify it by considering individual cases, one has to consider all of them and show that they all work (which, if there are infinitely many, it is impossible to handle them all individually, and if there are just a lot, it may still be infeasible) . Conversely, for a Sigma_1 statement, a single example is sufficient to verify the claim, but refuting it by checking individual cases would require checking every case.

Many if not most data centers are pulling water out of the ground that will never be replaced. The problem is multidimensional, not just volume.

Don’t forget cotton.

234 m3 per tonne, of clean water.

25M tonnes per year.

=> 16M m3 of clean water per day

Edit: convert to comparable units

Philadelphia? 80K m3 water for 10K lbs beef per day. But that's not potable water, which is a lot of what data centers are using

Comparing humans with machines on resource use gives some seriously dystopian vibes.

All the golf courses where I live use grey water - water that would otherwise be dumped into oceans/estuaries/rivers/etc.

That's not really not comparable to data centers using potable water.

No, that's incorrect. Others have provided citations demonstrating that the big tech AI facilities use more water than cities with populations of 100,000 people.

A city is not defined by its size. It is defined by its legal incorporation as a city. There are big cities, and there are small cities, and most cities are on the smaller side.

Try again.

The water that is "used" by data centers is evaporated. That's where it goes. The sky.

Did they say it was efficient? The "closed loop" is only one part of the system that cycles water between the heat exchanger and the building/servers.

The second part of the system is an open loop that uses water to cool the closed loop at the heat exchanger.

The Dalles data centers use a large fraction of the water supply of The Dalles because the data centers are extremely large and the town of The Dalles is of negligible size. It is also true that the paper mill of Valliant, Oklahoma uses 50 million gallons of water per day and that the town of Valliant, Oklahoma, population 819, uses less than 1% of that amount, so the paper mill can be said to be using > 99% of the local water supply but this is also a meaningless comparison.