The natural extract is the secret and always imported from the US, but the variations are in the water and also the sugar syrup used, it depends the location in the world (source: I visited a factory once)
It's not the only company doing that. In Italy you get a amazing liquor named 'Coca Buton' that imports and processes cocoa leafs to Italy.
As far as I know the only European company that is allowed to do that. And I swear that drink does still contain some alkaloid magic, even thought there obviously is no cocaine in it.
That's true in the least helpful sense. We only know a subset of potential problems when it comes to food contamination and certainly don't test for all of even those. We naturally have no idea about the effects of yet undiscovered contaminants.
You can do generic tests like testing for toxicity, but that won't give you the full picture.
If you don't have a list of all the input raw materials, intermediates, by-products, impurities, surface materials that can leech into the final product, etc; you can't test for them.
well, it seems that it was info that coke didn't actually really personally need, and ultimately also not their loss if it was leaked. They probably just thought she was a liability
She used her position at Coca-Cola to steal other companies information.
The headline is a bit sensationalised and the lining formula isn't actually Coca-Cola's "secret formula", it's just a coating company's formula (Akzo Nobel N.V if I understand correctly, but she tried with multiple other suppliers).
That's why I found it weird at first, so many companies produce aluminium cans and beverages for aluminium cans that Coca-Cola itself couldn't have been the one holder of some special secret coating formula. But the importance of Coca-Cola did help her get leverage to obtain the coating formula from Akzo Nobel.
As long as Coca-Cola has decent evidence that is was never company policy nor management decision to steal suppliers formulas, they will probably get away without financial penalty.
Ooh, another secret formula story from Coca-Cola. They are awesome at marketing, how else can you explain that people choose their products which are twice or three times as expensive as competing products sitting next to it on the shelf which in many cases, at least according to my children, even taste better.
Forget marketing, every single product of this company slowly kills tens of millions, while supporting and increasing sugar addiction worldwide. A pure net loss for humanity. I dont see that much difference compared to tobacco industry, same fuck-them-all mindset.
But I guess if you cant show story with kids blown to pieces or similar level of abhorrent immediate effect its all a-OK.
Fruit juice is hardly better. A glass of, say, apple juice has several apples worth of sugar but much less than a single apple’s worth of dietary fibre.
A pal of mine is a chemical engineer who's main job is designing the pipework for plants in the pharma and food sectors. They opened up a new Coke manufacturing facility a few years back and he was able to make a stab at the list of specific ingredients based off their stated viscosity, boiling temperature and Reynolds number.
The major ingredients, like sugar, water, CO2 are the main ones that affect the design of a processing factory.
Yet the flavourings are the ones that will be organic molecules in tiny concentrations, not affecting the design of processing plants, yet very important for anyone wanting to copy the flavor.
Your comment about your pal just reminded me of "The Integral Principles of the Structural Dynamics of Flow", an fictional technical book used as a plot device in the Patriot TV series.
“A little something like this, John.
Let me walk you through our Donnelly nuts basing and crack system rim-riding grip configuration. Using a field of half C sprats, and brass fitted nickle slits, our bracketed caps and splay flexed brace columns vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of one half meter from the damper crown to the spur plyths. How? Well, we bolster 12 husked nuts to each girdle jerry, while flex tandems press a task apparatus of ten, vertically composited patch hamplers. Then, pin flam fasten pan traps at both maiden apexes of the jim joints. A little something like that, Lakeman.”
Love this show! Cleverly written and incredibly underrated.
While I'm not sure I have much sympathy for her, at the end of the day these were her choices (and she makes a pretty terrible criminal at the end of the day), it is interesting to me that she was handed a rather large 14 year sentence, despite not actually giving the illegal trade secrets and data to anyone else.
Every mile of you driving causes a non-zero amount of risk of injury to other road users. The specific crash might be "accidental", but by driving you're making a conscious choice to cause harm to other people.
Maybe a better example is to refer to the marginal effects on mortality caused by vehicle pollution, whereby simply by driving the vehicle causes harm to others, without necessitating a direct consequence of the behavior itself (such in the case of a crash). If say, one in every 10,000 trips resulted in a crash, it would be a bit absurd to say each trip I drive results in 1/10000 of a crash, whereas emitted pollutants is discrete and measurable.
Tell me more about the millions dead because of coke. Are you going to apologize for criminals because people have free will? Did coke force people to drink it?
I believe the thread started with a veiled reference to the Sacklers and the lack of jail time related to the manufacture, marketing and covering up the fact that they knew of widespread abuse of OxyCotin (opioids).
It's so funny to watch commentators on HN act like every relationship sports two equal parties that individually are "autonomous rational agents"
Coke is cheaper than bottled water because of the aggressive subsidies they've pursued. The reason that poverty is correlated with obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and dementia (among others) is not politically neutral or ethically innocent. It's a byproduct of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible.
Sure, you're right, the board of coca cola did not put a gun to my head and force me to do a kegger with their sodas. They "only" spent more than the discretionary budgets of some nation states to get kids "craving" (read: addicted to) high fructose corn syrup.
Speaking of guns and forcing people though, are we going to talk about how the company funds paramilitary forces in countries such as Columbia where they kill union activists? I guess those people are foreigners so they don't really enter the calculus. There's nothing more quintessentially American than funding death squads in Latin America I suppose. https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/
Watching people defend multinationals that would turn them into Soylent Green for 0.01% higher quarter-quarter growth is tragic.
No, we aren't because this is a story about IP theft. Why the comments devolved into apologizing for criminals is beyond me. Nobody is defending multinationals, theft is theft is theft regardless of your politics or personal agenda.
>Coke is cheaper than bottled water because of the aggressive subsidies they've pursued.
Source? Last time I looked into it[1], the claim didn't hold up to scrutiny.
>Speaking of guns and forcing people though, are we going to talk about how the company funds paramilitary forces in countries such as Columbia where they kill union activists? I guess those people are foreigners so they don't really enter the calculus. There's nothing more quintessentially American than funding death squads in Latin America I suppose. https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/
I skimmed the article and couldn't find anything that supports the claim that "the company funds paramilitary forces". It mentions there's a lawsuit that claims coca-cola was "complicit" (which by the way, ended up being dismissed[2]), and outlines violence against labor organizers by the paramilitaries, but stops short of claiming they were funded by the company.
>Are you going to apologize for criminals because people have free will?
Typically victims of crime didn't choose to be harmed out of their own free will. A murder victim didn't consent to be killed. In that case I'm not sure how "free will" applies. People suffering from the negative effects of coke however, did consume it out of their free will.
How do corporations "indirectly kill millions"? If you're talking about things like "Coke selling sugary drinks that contribute to millions of people dying of health problems", well, it's perfectly legal for you to sell sugary drinks too.
It's a bit more apparent if we use Coke's Christian name, 'Coca-Cola', and take a second to break it down. Coca-Cola implies a cola made from coca. Which is pretty much what it is. Coca farming is kind of a big deal and soft drinks aren't the only thing you can make from the coca plant. And while Coca-Cola does use leaf extract that has had the cocaine removed from it, this is less a "seedless watermelon" situation and more of a "decaffeinated coffee" situation.
So basically, Coca-Cola is kind of orthogonal to Colombian drug cartels.
>And while Coca-Cola does use leaf extract that has had the cocaine removed from it, this is less a "seedless watermelon" situation and more of a "decaffeinated coffee" situation.
>So basically, Coca-Cola is kind of orthogonal to Colombian drug cartels.
This comment is baffling. The first paragraph implies that coca-cola is somehow acting like a drug cartel because their products contain coca extract, but the second paragraph does a 180 and claims that it's "orthogonal" (ie. independent or irrelevant) to drug cartels.
Why would the information that Coca-Cola uses coca plants imply that they are a drug cartel?
They base their business off of the same plant as the drug cartels. They operate independently, and Coca-Cola isn't really going to do anything about the cartels. Or care what they do to coca farmers as long as they also get the part of the plant they care about. And since they don't need the cocaine, it's quite possible that Coca-Cola is made with the by-products of the cocaine extraction process.
Technically, we could have one without the other. Because each needs a part that the other does not. And I'm sure as long as it's cheap enough, Coca-Cola isn't going to question too hard about where its extract is source from.
And to be fair, Coca-Cola isn't above hiring paramilitaries to keep people in line.
It's quite normal that the actual damage weighs in the sentence. Consider the following: someone speeds across an intersection, without paying attention to the traffic lights and right of way. Or the same, but a car is hit, and the driver of the other car is hurt. Or the driver and two little children die. Would it be reasonable to punish in the first case like in the latter, or vice versa?
We often have separate crimes for unsuccessful attempts to commit a crime ("inchoate offenses"), despite no direct harm having been done, which tend to result in less-severe punishments than for successful attempts. E.g. attempted murder is still sentenced pretty harshly, but only around half the length that an actual murder would get.
So I guess that the question is how much time successfully selling the secret would have gotten her.
As always, the US government goes after the small fry who are easy wins to appear to be doing something. The irony is the only real victim here is the Chinese government who made a grant to start a company that was spent on real estate speculation instead.
Govts look at businesses as entities keeping people out of trouble, then there are the dietary elements which also reduce violence, Obese people are less likely to cause trouble, so Coke (and other soft drinks/food manufacturers) will always come out on top.
This is so absurd. Laws exist and were broken. In this case state sponsored IP theft was carried out against a business. There are no small fries involved in any of this. Thousand talents is industrialized espionage.
It seems easy enough for me to understand not to steal from anyone.
That sounds reasonable to me. If you want protection, file for a patent and share the information. Society benefits from information being more widely available, so it doesn't make sense to specifically help protect secrets.
I guess society disagrees, and honestly this like many comments here seem to have an anti-corporate agenda behind them that is truly irrelevant to the facts at hand.
My comment was specifically in reply to whether it should be illegal. Obviously trade secrets are protected by law. My response is that indeed that law is bad, and society has no reason to protect trade secrets by law, and good reason not to (other than some limited protection through contracts maybe, but that should be a civil matter).
The patent system exists to incentivize sharing information through a limited time monopoly. Giving trade secrets an unlimited time monopoly protection by criminalizing someone sharing them undermines that, and means that patents will only be used for low-value ideas that are obvious/easy to independently reinvent or reverse engineer.
Do you think the level of phosphoric acid is safe? Or is a company relying on the inability of medical experts to state the amount in a can is healthy or not.
What a ridiculous assertion. Nobody forces you to drink that sweet sweet nectar.
Should we legislate everything that might be unhealthy? There are plenty of nanny states who will do that for you, I don't live in one.
If I want to be sure, I'll grow and make it myself. Relying on someone else to tell you always ends the same way, nanny or not. Science still can't agree on aspertame.
I'd personally be extremely shocked if it hasn't affected her daughters career + prospects at all. Essentially her mother "poisoned the well" in my mind. I really hope it hasn't though.
I have heard before about BPAs being bad, but it made me kinda chuckle that increasing the risk of diabetes was mentioned, while this story is about Coke. Thank goodness, the liner won't give you diabetes no more.
The fact that coke was sufficiently worried about a 2um thick layer on the inside of their cans that they decided to do what appears to be an emergency formula change tells me that management probably has data showing BPA to be really bad (and therefore a risk to their business if everyone with infertility, obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer sues them)
> coke was sufficiently worried about a 2um thick layer
Whether they were worried themselves or not is not what made them change, French law (then followed by the rest of the EU, California and China) was the reason.
> Aluminum beverage cans are particularly tricky. The biggest factories stamp out 16 million cans a day; each requires a perfectly uniform inner coating, sprayed on in seconds. The liner recipes are calibrated to the recipes of the drinks, with their different levels of acidity, sugar, caffeine, oils and, in some cases, alcohol. The polymer, once dried, can’t react in any way with the beverage, even after months on a supermarket shelf, lest the precisely calibrated flavor profile of a Topo Chico strawberry hibiscus hard seltzer or a Monster Assault energy drink be corrupted.
> All that complexity lends the industry a deep resistance to change. But You arrived at Coke at a rare moment of disruption, caused by concerns about a ubiquitous liner ingredient called bisphenol A, or BPA. A growing, if not unanimous, body of research has suggested that BPA can interfere with the body’s endocrine system, increasing the risk of a host of health problems including Type 2 diabetes and accelerated puberty. In 2010, France banned BPA in baby bottles, later expanding the ban to include any food packaging sold in the country.
If it doesn't react with the beverage... what's the issue supposed to be?
> If it doesn't react with the beverage... what's the issue supposed to be?
BPA doesn't react with the beverage, but it does dissolve in it in small quantities, and although it's not acutely toxic it has biological effects even in small quantities as it (imperfectly) mimics estrogen.
> "at the turn of the 20th century, the average age for an American girl to get her period was 16 or 17. Today, that number has decreased to 12 or 13 years." -- Hector O. Chapa, MD, FACOG, clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Texas A&M College of Medicine
As a government, I would be really worried about such a change in my population, especially if I didn't understand the exact cause. Previously the age of marriage was mostly based on this puberty age - if societal norms change and 12 year olds start having babies, that will be a huge impact on the economic outlook of the country.
I wasn't asking what the problem was supposed to be with consuming BPA. I was asking what the problem was supposed to be with using BPA under the assumption that it can't get into the food. There really shouldn't be a problem in that case.
Parallel answers seem to state that dissolving is not a reaction, which seems weird to me, but OK.
Wikipedia tells us that dissolving occurs when differences in electrical charge across molecules of solvent (e.g., a molecule of water is famously negative around the oxygen and positive around the hydrogens) interact with differences in electrical charge across molecules of solute such that the molecules of solute get stripped out of the structure they were in and surrounded by molecules of solvent, held in place by what appears to be essentially an ionic bond between the solute and the solvent.
I'm not sure why that's not considered "chemistry".
a chemical reaction is a specific thing within the realm of chemistry, rather than attempt to define it myself and get it wrong, I will quote Oxford Languages (via google) here:
chemical reaction: process that involves rearrangement of the molecular or ionic structure of a substance, as distinct from a change in physical form or a nuclear reaction.
So, a chemical reaction is not just what you would colloquially describe as a reaction of something that belongs to the realm of chemistry, it has a specific definition. A reaction is H + O2 = H2O (omitting concerns of stoichiometry for simplicities sake). A reaction is not e.g. salt dissolving in water, because salt stays salt (NaCl) and water stays water (H2O)
> When salt dissolves in water, it becomes separate Na+ and Cl- ions.
This is something I wonder about. How separate are the salt ions when salt dissolves in water? If you add a chunk of sodium to water it will explode; that doesn't happen when you add salt.
"Reaction" typically means "chemical reaction." Dissolving is not a chemical reaction. BPA is tasteless and odorless, so it wouldn't adulterate the taste of the food is the point.
I see that that is the standard terminology (which I was not previously aware of), but setting the terminology this way makes about as much sense to me as saying that there is no difference, as far as the chemistry is concerned, between a measure of distilled water and a measure of strong acid.
At the start of the 20th century the average American was probably malnourished and everyone had pellagra, because we cared more about growing cash crops than whether poor people were fed or not. This eventually changed because it meant we couldn't draft enough people healthy enough to go to war.
I assume a phone copy done at a border checkpoint.
Chinese apps tend to not encrypt anything stored on device, and while android itself supports full device encryption it tends to be disabled on China models, or if it is enabled it is just the users 4 digit pin that protects the key, with no secure processor to prevent just trying every pin.
The article does not suggest that either of those people ever traveled to the United States. (It says this instead: (Like Liu, Fan presumably remains in China, beyond the reach of US law enforcement.)) It does say that Liu went to Italy... but it doesn't mention anything unusual happening at the border there. Phone confiscation is not a routine border-crossing event.
The article did mention they had a WeChat clone from her phone, could it have been a group chat from them? (I don't know if WeChat even has that option.)
WeChat does have group chats, so that's a thing that could happen. It doesn't seem plausible for this particular message, since Liu is defending himself to Fan against accusations from You. If that message went straight to You (in a group chat with Fan), I would expect it to be described differently.
There's whole bunch of people making awesome craft drinks as a hobby, and lots of them own YouTube. If you are upset with coke, you can find some of these quite interesting!
> The liner recipes are calibrated to the recipes of the drinks, with their different levels of acidity, sugar, caffeine, oils and, in some cases, alcohol. The polymer, once dried, can’t react in any way with the beverage, even after months on a supermarket shelf, lest the precisely calibrated flavor profile of a Topo Chico strawberry hibiscus hard seltzer or a Monster Assault energy drink be corrupted.
I have always believe that this the reason why coke from a plastic bottle tastes different that one from a metal can or glass bottle. Personally I try to stay clear of the plastic bottle as I find that can/glass taste better.
Some articles say it's reaction with the plastic. But others, and an interview I heard once with someone from Coca-Cola, say it's because plastic bottles are more permeable to CO₂ gas than glass bottles or metal cans. That is, they leak fizz faster. So more CO₂ is added to the plastic bottle version of the drink to ensure it stays fizzy over its shelf life. This excess CO₂ (which is carbonic acid H₂CO₃ when dissolved in water) changes the taste slightly.
> Shannon You in particular had access to some of the most closely held information at the company: a set of detailed chemical recipes for the 2-micron-thick plastic liners inside the beverage cans Coke filled and sold. A federal prosecutor would later describe these as the company’s “other secret formulas.” Developed at great expense, they were likely even more important than the theatrically guarded recipe for Coke’s namesake soft drink—that sugary, acidic brew would, without a liner, devour the metal of its can.
Soda cans have a mm thin coating that I already knew about. But my big takeaway from this article:
That coating is non-trivial to get right and, if gotten wrong, will react with the beverage inside the can.
It’s surprising to me that regulators allow this to be kept a trade secret. I understand using patents to give them a monopoly. But knowing what I know now, after reading that article, I don’t trust a drink coming from these cans. There’s no way for consumers to review the product for safety.
I always assumed these containers were able to be audited by consumer watch groups and advocacy groups.
> It’s surprising to me that regulators allow this to be kept a trade secret.
The FDA protects trade secrets and more broadly "any commercially valuable plan, formula, or device". Just because something is a trade secret doesn't mean you don't have to tell the FDA about it.
That said, it's not like you really have to prove something is safe before adding it to food.
> There’s no way for consumers to review the product for safety.
Disagree. Or rather, knowing what the coating is does not make you any safer. What it should be is very different from what it actually is and what is inadvertently included with it. 3rd party analysis is the only thing that actually tells you what is in something.
It is useful to have public listings of things for people who want to categorically avoid BPA or MSG or whatever, but that's really a different issue from safety. If it crosses over into a real safety concern, like a nut allergy, trade secrets are overridden. I (personally) don't think it's good to say that any safety concern (in this case, a hypothetical one!) can override trade secrets. I don't think it's unreasonable to disagree with that though.
The article mentions chemistry vs. performance. You can test the performance of the material (reactivity to contents of can, BPA leaching) without knowing how it's made or the secrets. Shannon Yu kept asking for the detailed chemistry when others in position usually only care about the performance.
> [At her new job,] she would make $157,000 a year, a slight bump over her Coke salary, with a $15,000 signing bonus.
She was a 50 year old chemist with a lot of expertise, and she was making less than an entry level SWE.
Also, her deal with the Chinese company is described as
> codifying her 33.5% stake and entitling her to a salary of 600,000 yuan per year.
Which is like $85k. (A 33% stake in something that could be big is significant though.)
Still, it all seems like a lot of risk for not a ton of money.
It reminds me of political bribery scandals. You hear how much some politician was paid, and you're like -- "that's it? That's all it costs?"
2. I guess she aspired to be yet another Chinese analogue of Samuel Slater (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater). But it doesn't sound like she was on track to accomplish nearly so much, even if she'd succeeded. Slater had an empire by the end.
3. This just reinforces my impression that the stuff they use in food packaging must be horrendous.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadhttps://www.naturalnews.com/032658_Coca-Cola_cocaine.html
As far as I know the only European company that is allowed to do that. And I swear that drink does still contain some alkaloid magic, even thought there obviously is no cocaine in it.
It's similar with banknotes. The materials used is public knowledge (and parts of it patented), but manufacturing is a secret to avoid counterfeiting.
If you don't have a list of all the input raw materials, intermediates, by-products, impurities, surface materials that can leech into the final product, etc; you can't test for them.
I work in infosec and we partner with the FBI on corporate espionage. We take it very seriously, and they always get caught.
You would think a huge company like this would’t run the risk of laying off one of these people.
The headline is a bit sensationalised and the lining formula isn't actually Coca-Cola's "secret formula", it's just a coating company's formula (Akzo Nobel N.V if I understand correctly, but she tried with multiple other suppliers).
That's why I found it weird at first, so many companies produce aluminium cans and beverages for aluminium cans that Coca-Cola itself couldn't have been the one holder of some special secret coating formula. But the importance of Coca-Cola did help her get leverage to obtain the coating formula from Akzo Nobel.
But I guess if you cant show story with kids blown to pieces or similar level of abhorrent immediate effect its all a-OK.
coke's so bad for kids. give them juice or milk instead.
Juice is nutritionally out of fashion now.
We also don't randomly poison ourself with alcohol and blame the drink Industrie.
Yet the flavourings are the ones that will be organic molecules in tiny concentrations, not affecting the design of processing plants, yet very important for anyone wanting to copy the flavor.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4687882
They even created a one season podcast read by the fictional author, Leslie G Claret, who's played by the actor Kurtwood Smith.
Does your pal really work as a chemical engineer ;)
Love this show! Cleverly written and incredibly underrated.
Coke is cheaper than bottled water because of the aggressive subsidies they've pursued. The reason that poverty is correlated with obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and dementia (among others) is not politically neutral or ethically innocent. It's a byproduct of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible.
Sure, you're right, the board of coca cola did not put a gun to my head and force me to do a kegger with their sodas. They "only" spent more than the discretionary budgets of some nation states to get kids "craving" (read: addicted to) high fructose corn syrup.
Speaking of guns and forcing people though, are we going to talk about how the company funds paramilitary forces in countries such as Columbia where they kill union activists? I guess those people are foreigners so they don't really enter the calculus. There's nothing more quintessentially American than funding death squads in Latin America I suppose. https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/
Watching people defend multinationals that would turn them into Soylent Green for 0.01% higher quarter-quarter growth is tragic.
Source? Last time I looked into it[1], the claim didn't hold up to scrutiny.
>Speaking of guns and forcing people though, are we going to talk about how the company funds paramilitary forces in countries such as Columbia where they kill union activists? I guess those people are foreigners so they don't really enter the calculus. There's nothing more quintessentially American than funding death squads in Latin America I suppose. https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/
I skimmed the article and couldn't find anything that supports the claim that "the company funds paramilitary forces". It mentions there's a lawsuit that claims coca-cola was "complicit" (which by the way, ended up being dismissed[2]), and outlines violence against labor organizers by the paramilitaries, but stops short of claiming they were funded by the company.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36841407
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.
Typically victims of crime didn't choose to be harmed out of their own free will. A murder victim didn't consent to be killed. In that case I'm not sure how "free will" applies. People suffering from the negative effects of coke however, did consume it out of their free will.
That is exactly my point. The implication in many comments is that the crime is ok because "coca cola bad" - it's not.
So basically, Coca-Cola is kind of orthogonal to Colombian drug cartels.
>So basically, Coca-Cola is kind of orthogonal to Colombian drug cartels.
This comment is baffling. The first paragraph implies that coca-cola is somehow acting like a drug cartel because their products contain coca extract, but the second paragraph does a 180 and claims that it's "orthogonal" (ie. independent or irrelevant) to drug cartels.
They base their business off of the same plant as the drug cartels. They operate independently, and Coca-Cola isn't really going to do anything about the cartels. Or care what they do to coca farmers as long as they also get the part of the plant they care about. And since they don't need the cocaine, it's quite possible that Coca-Cola is made with the by-products of the cocaine extraction process.
Technically, we could have one without the other. Because each needs a part that the other does not. And I'm sure as long as it's cheap enough, Coca-Cola isn't going to question too hard about where its extract is source from.
And to be fair, Coca-Cola isn't above hiring paramilitaries to keep people in line.
So I guess that the question is how much time successfully selling the secret would have gotten her.
It seems easy enough for me to understand not to steal from anyone.
I guess society disagrees, and honestly this like many comments here seem to have an anti-corporate agenda behind them that is truly irrelevant to the facts at hand.
The patent system exists to incentivize sharing information through a limited time monopoly. Giving trade secrets an unlimited time monopoly protection by criminalizing someone sharing them undermines that, and means that patents will only be used for low-value ideas that are obvious/easy to independently reinvent or reverse engineer.
Do you think IP should come before human health?
Should we legislate everything that might be unhealthy? There are plenty of nanny states who will do that for you, I don't live in one.
If I want to be sure, I'll grow and make it myself. Relying on someone else to tell you always ends the same way, nanny or not. Science still can't agree on aspertame.
Whether they were worried themselves or not is not what made them change, French law (then followed by the rest of the EU, California and China) was the reason.
> All that complexity lends the industry a deep resistance to change. But You arrived at Coke at a rare moment of disruption, caused by concerns about a ubiquitous liner ingredient called bisphenol A, or BPA. A growing, if not unanimous, body of research has suggested that BPA can interfere with the body’s endocrine system, increasing the risk of a host of health problems including Type 2 diabetes and accelerated puberty. In 2010, France banned BPA in baby bottles, later expanding the ban to include any food packaging sold in the country.
If it doesn't react with the beverage... what's the issue supposed to be?
BPA doesn't react with the beverage, but it does dissolve in it in small quantities, and although it's not acutely toxic it has biological effects even in small quantities as it (imperfectly) mimics estrogen.
> "at the turn of the 20th century, the average age for an American girl to get her period was 16 or 17. Today, that number has decreased to 12 or 13 years." -- Hector O. Chapa, MD, FACOG, clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Texas A&M College of Medicine
As a government, I would be really worried about such a change in my population, especially if I didn't understand the exact cause. Previously the age of marriage was mostly based on this puberty age - if societal norms change and 12 year olds start having babies, that will be a huge impact on the economic outlook of the country.
Parallel answers seem to state that dissolving is not a reaction, which seems weird to me, but OK.
I'm not sure why that's not considered "chemistry".
chemical reaction: process that involves rearrangement of the molecular or ionic structure of a substance, as distinct from a change in physical form or a nuclear reaction.
So, a chemical reaction is not just what you would colloquially describe as a reaction of something that belongs to the realm of chemistry, it has a specific definition. A reaction is H + O2 = H2O (omitting concerns of stoichiometry for simplicities sake). A reaction is not e.g. salt dissolving in water, because salt stays salt (NaCl) and water stays water (H2O)
This is something I wonder about. How separate are the salt ions when salt dissolves in water? If you add a chunk of sodium to water it will explode; that doesn't happen when you add salt.
I see that that is the standard terminology (which I was not previously aware of), but setting the terminology this way makes about as much sense to me as saying that there is no difference, as far as the chemistry is concerned, between a measure of distilled water and a measure of strong acid.
How is the American court getting access to messages sent from one Chinese person in China to another Chinese person in China?
Chinese apps tend to not encrypt anything stored on device, and while android itself supports full device encryption it tends to be disabled on China models, or if it is enabled it is just the users 4 digit pin that protects the key, with no secure processor to prevent just trying every pin.
I have always believe that this the reason why coke from a plastic bottle tastes different that one from a metal can or glass bottle. Personally I try to stay clear of the plastic bottle as I find that can/glass taste better.
Aluminum in general is great at blocking most gases, but especially oxygen.
Good old analog loophole to DLP (and copyright protection [except when it comes to duplicating dollar bills]).
Soda cans have a mm thin coating that I already knew about. But my big takeaway from this article:
That coating is non-trivial to get right and, if gotten wrong, will react with the beverage inside the can.
It’s surprising to me that regulators allow this to be kept a trade secret. I understand using patents to give them a monopoly. But knowing what I know now, after reading that article, I don’t trust a drink coming from these cans. There’s no way for consumers to review the product for safety.
I always assumed these containers were able to be audited by consumer watch groups and advocacy groups.
The FDA protects trade secrets and more broadly "any commercially valuable plan, formula, or device". Just because something is a trade secret doesn't mean you don't have to tell the FDA about it.
That said, it's not like you really have to prove something is safe before adding it to food.
> There’s no way for consumers to review the product for safety.
Disagree. Or rather, knowing what the coating is does not make you any safer. What it should be is very different from what it actually is and what is inadvertently included with it. 3rd party analysis is the only thing that actually tells you what is in something.
It is useful to have public listings of things for people who want to categorically avoid BPA or MSG or whatever, but that's really a different issue from safety. If it crosses over into a real safety concern, like a nut allergy, trade secrets are overridden. I (personally) don't think it's good to say that any safety concern (in this case, a hypothetical one!) can override trade secrets. I don't think it's unreasonable to disagree with that though.
> [At her new job,] she would make $157,000 a year, a slight bump over her Coke salary, with a $15,000 signing bonus.
She was a 50 year old chemist with a lot of expertise, and she was making less than an entry level SWE.
Also, her deal with the Chinese company is described as
> codifying her 33.5% stake and entitling her to a salary of 600,000 yuan per year.
Which is like $85k. (A 33% stake in something that could be big is significant though.)
Still, it all seems like a lot of risk for not a ton of money.
It reminds me of political bribery scandals. You hear how much some politician was paid, and you're like -- "that's it? That's all it costs?"
2. I guess she aspired to be yet another Chinese analogue of Samuel Slater (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater). But it doesn't sound like she was on track to accomplish nearly so much, even if she'd succeeded. Slater had an empire by the end.
3. This just reinforces my impression that the stuff they use in food packaging must be horrendous.
Yep, chemistry pays pretty terribly. Its part of why after finishing my BSc (Chem/Maths) I went into software dev instead, despite really enjoying it