Even the ALCU? The NAACP? The AFL-CIO? The NRA? The Innocence Project? I suspect like most things in life, the situation is far more complex than can be captured in a simple 4 word rote expression.
That’s both a non-sequitor as it doesn’t remotely answer my question, and is one of the purest “appeals to authority” fallacies I’ve seen in the wild recently
We're talking about pesticides with health consequences. Do you think it's good for people to get chronic health conditions and die younger? I'm assuming that's not what you mean, since that's kind of a nasty stance... but I don't know what else you could mean in this case.
To play devil’s advocate it is commonly stated that higher productivity per acre relative to organic agriculture can mean using fewer acres and having more land providing ecosystem services.
Certainly some people in the world suffer from malnutrition and would benefit from more or better food.
Practically though we want to use the practices that give the most yield for a given amount of risk. I am still shaking my head over the time I saw TruGreen Chemlawn spraying all the trees in front of a hotel, many of which are famous for not having pest problems. I guess they had to do something so the customer thinks they are getting something.
in reality there are a lot of factors, if you get your agronomy right you can greatly increase output with limit commercial inputs, see
Just to point out, even organic practices utilize pesticides. It's supposed to be as a last resort, although there's debate as to whether that really happens in practice with the larger producers.
Organic approved pesticides do include harmful chemicals. Things like diatomaceous earth are a potential carcinogen.
I can’t speak for what they were doing, but one thing to note is that not all sprays are for insecticides/fungicides.
It’s possible they were doing a foliar nutrient spray, to keep the trees greener/healthier.
There are also calcium carbonate sprays which act as sun protectants (rather than nutrition), preventing sunburn and helps cool the leaves. Best applied right before a major heat event.
It would seem you've made a rush to judgement in this case, Dan.
I'm patiently correcting people's broken narratives -- as kindly and magnanimously as anyone reasonably can, given, as in this particular case, the highly provocative and unsubstantiated statements they're making. While remaining direct, human and authentic (that is, without mincing words, or swathing them in undue or superficial gentleness -- considering the sometimes quite crass nature of what they've been saying).
Can you explain how [4] breaks guidelines, please?
I can see how [1]-[3] might appear contentious, at a very casual glance - but the wording I used in [4] was on its own terms entirely innocuous.
All I'm saying is, basically -- "OK, so that's your position then" (while correctly and relevantly noting also, as you will confirm from the comment history, that they were conspicuously evasive in providing a straightforward answer up until that point).
The follow-up question about the abducted minors (in case you were wondering about that) was entirely legitimate and relevant, as it's one of the many (rather awful and nasty) complications of the conflict that people who think there's an easy "deal" involving territory that just be cut to end this thing typically aren't thinking of (because by and large they aren't following the situation too closely anyway).
They didn't have to answer it of course, but there was nothing uncivil about the question in itself, or my phrasing of it.
Also, you'll note that I'm very carefully and diplomatically defusing their completely gratuitous and uncivil provocation ("I'm not your bitch"), which I notice you did not flag or call out the user on, even though this (in addition to "Are we 12 year olds?", and calling it a "BS question" when it was the exact opposite) was obviously way more inflammatory than any possible reading of my posting.
In this case, you should be calling out the other user for their needlessly inflammatory rhetoric here -- not me, for my far more centered and non-escalatory response.
Apartheid is the word used to describe practices and policies where one racial group dominates the other. Having legislators or other occupation of the oppressed racial group does not free you from label.
There are famous historic examples of apartheid where the suppressed racial groups had plenty of opportunities as well as seat at the legislator. This includes the Jim Crow South, Apartheid South Africa, and even Rhodesia.
Apartheid is the word used by most people all over the world, including by several countries, international organizations, and even the ICJ. Now it can be argued that the apartheid only extends to the occupied territories (including East Jerusalem), however I—as do many people—would consider that a distinction without a difference, (it is also arguable whether that is true).
> A multi-ethnic society would be the end of the Jews
This is a racist, anti-Arab belief. Unless I’m misunderstanding, you are generalizing over a whole population of people that they are all intolerant, and cannot share society with other people.
Thanks for the links! They were reasonably well-balanced, well-reasoned and well-sourced pieces of journalism.
The profile on Walz was interesting. The overall assessment of "moderate" seems fairly reasonable, and the article did a good job covering the complexity and diversity of issues. Seems like Walz is far-left on abortion, center-left on economics, centerist on policing, center-right on environment along with some token populist stunts to appeal to various groups.
Not a publication I was familiar with before, but seems like a good source for liberal-biased but still fundamentally truthy information.
Low taxes on gasoline. Approval of oil pipeline through Minnesota. Support for factory-farmed meat industry. Allowing agricultural pollution. Increased government spending on car-dependent infrastructure.
This article points to another written by Sharon Lerner at the intercept[1], which shows that, since the EPA was founded in 1974, ALL of the directors of its Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention went on to work for the pesticide industry.
All of them! The agency has worked to rubber stamp the pesticide industry’s proposals from the day it was founded.
I try not to second guess the moderation. I think at the individual post level it is often wrong but on average it is good.
My feeling was that I was not so happy with the discussion this post spawned, but I thought it got better over time.
An odd thing about it is that posts about "identity politics" are frequently identified as pernicious and get flagged very quickly on HN. "Politics" today seems to be a matter of choosing issues to fit your tribe as opposed to choosing a tribe that fits your issues
There's another axis one could draw between, say, Marx and Milton Freedman which was an important political axis in the West until the fall of the Soviet Union but until 2016 or so there was a consensus that Milton Freedman had won. You got two of the biggest welfare expansions in Bush's Medicare Part D and Obama's Affordable Care Act but both of those were fundamentally privatized and, I think, took a bit of legitimacy out of the system because they created profit for special interests. Clinton very much continued with the direction Reagan set out in.
Since 2016 partisans of both political parties are freaked out about the rise of China, our seeming inability to do anything about it (where are photogs going to get drones in the US if relations sour with China?), extreme monopolization, etc. Both parties are moving to a more interventionist stance so again on "who controls the means of production?" you aren't really getting a choice.
The two most important splits in Trotskyism post 1970 I think were (1) the issues that caused the SWP to drop out of the 4th international in the 1980s which the consequence that there is no US affiliate of the 4th international and (2) identity politics vs class politics. Jacobin has a definite opinion on that last one.
It makes sense as a general behavior since it suppresses flamewars by hiding the original bad post that kicked them off along with the replies (that are likely flames). The downside is that when HN posters perform well, they're responding to bad posts with good posts, and the good posts get suppressed.
The alternative (sparing rampant flamewars to rescue the occasional good-reply-to-a-bad-post) would probably add fuel to flamewars.
Related ~100 pg report from Dec 2022. We'll researched and well articulated, in my opinion at least.
In history books it's appropriately shocking to see those photos of kids playing in clouds of DEET sprayed by trucks, 1950s and 60s, yet today we're many orders of magnitude beyond that with glyphosate.
53 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadEvery lobby is toxic.
That’s both a non-sequitor as it doesn’t remotely answer my question, and is one of the purest “appeals to authority” fallacies I’ve seen in the wild recently
Certainly some people in the world suffer from malnutrition and would benefit from more or better food.
Practically though we want to use the practices that give the most yield for a given amount of risk. I am still shaking my head over the time I saw TruGreen Chemlawn spraying all the trees in front of a hotel, many of which are famous for not having pest problems. I guess they had to do something so the customer thinks they are getting something.
in reality there are a lot of factors, if you get your agronomy right you can greatly increase output with limit commercial inputs, see
https://ghgmitigation.irri.org/mitigation-technologies/syste...
Organic approved pesticides do include harmful chemicals. Things like diatomaceous earth are a potential carcinogen.
It’s possible they were doing a foliar nutrient spray, to keep the trees greener/healthier.
There are also calcium carbonate sprays which act as sun protectants (rather than nutrition), preventing sunburn and helps cool the leaves. Best applied right before a major heat event.
Overall we produce way too much food, a lot goes to waste.
In the west everyone is fat as fuck, food quantity is a solved problem.
The answer to why we use pesticides is the same answer as to why we used lead in paint, asbestos everywhere, freon, DDT, &c... profit
However, I will take anything that brings awareness to possible culprits of why the US has, by far, the worst cancer incidences in the entire world.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-incidence?tab=char...
Seems to correlate with pesticide use by year...
https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/pnsp/usage/maps/show_map.php?ye...
And by location (when accounting for age that increases risk a lot)
https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-...
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm patiently correcting people's broken narratives -- as kindly and magnanimously as anyone reasonably can, given, as in this particular case, the highly provocative and unsubstantiated statements they're making. While remaining direct, human and authentic (that is, without mincing words, or swathing them in undue or superficial gentleness -- considering the sometimes quite crass nature of what they've been saying).
That's all that's happening here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41186081
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41183748
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166359
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123755
Not cool.
I tried at length to persuade you to stop doing this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40749821) but appear to have failed with that.
I can see how [1]-[3] might appear contentious, at a very casual glance - but the wording I used in [4] was on its own terms entirely innocuous.
All I'm saying is, basically -- "OK, so that's your position then" (while correctly and relevantly noting also, as you will confirm from the comment history, that they were conspicuously evasive in providing a straightforward answer up until that point).
The follow-up question about the abducted minors (in case you were wondering about that) was entirely legitimate and relevant, as it's one of the many (rather awful and nasty) complications of the conflict that people who think there's an easy "deal" involving territory that just be cut to end this thing typically aren't thinking of (because by and large they aren't following the situation too closely anyway).
They didn't have to answer it of course, but there was nothing uncivil about the question in itself, or my phrasing of it.
Also, you'll note that I'm very carefully and diplomatically defusing their completely gratuitous and uncivil provocation ("I'm not your bitch"), which I notice you did not flag or call out the user on, even though this (in addition to "Are we 12 year olds?", and calling it a "BS question" when it was the exact opposite) was obviously way more inflammatory than any possible reading of my posting.
In this case, you should be calling out the other user for their needlessly inflammatory rhetoric here -- not me, for my far more centered and non-escalatory response.
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123755
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abductions_in_the_Russo-...
Assuming you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123755: it was personal and flamey.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There are famous historic examples of apartheid where the suppressed racial groups had plenty of opportunities as well as seat at the legislator. This includes the Jim Crow South, Apartheid South Africa, and even Rhodesia.
Apartheid is the word used by most people all over the world, including by several countries, international organizations, and even the ICJ. Now it can be argued that the apartheid only extends to the occupied territories (including East Jerusalem), however I—as do many people—would consider that a distinction without a difference, (it is also arguable whether that is true).
> A multi-ethnic society would be the end of the Jews
This is a racist, anti-Arab belief. Unless I’m misunderstanding, you are generalizing over a whole population of people that they are all intolerant, and cannot share society with other people.
The profile on Walz was interesting. The overall assessment of "moderate" seems fairly reasonable, and the article did a good job covering the complexity and diversity of issues. Seems like Walz is far-left on abortion, center-left on economics, centerist on policing, center-right on environment along with some token populist stunts to appeal to various groups.
Not a publication I was familiar with before, but seems like a good source for liberal-biased but still fundamentally truthy information.
All of them! The agency has worked to rubber stamp the pesticide industry’s proposals from the day it was founded.
What a rotten country we live in.
1. https://theintercept.com/2021/06/30/epa-pesticides-exposure-...
My feeling was that I was not so happy with the discussion this post spawned, but I thought it got better over time.
An odd thing about it is that posts about "identity politics" are frequently identified as pernicious and get flagged very quickly on HN. "Politics" today seems to be a matter of choosing issues to fit your tribe as opposed to choosing a tribe that fits your issues
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/23/views-of-the...
There's another axis one could draw between, say, Marx and Milton Freedman which was an important political axis in the West until the fall of the Soviet Union but until 2016 or so there was a consensus that Milton Freedman had won. You got two of the biggest welfare expansions in Bush's Medicare Part D and Obama's Affordable Care Act but both of those were fundamentally privatized and, I think, took a bit of legitimacy out of the system because they created profit for special interests. Clinton very much continued with the direction Reagan set out in.
Since 2016 partisans of both political parties are freaked out about the rise of China, our seeming inability to do anything about it (where are photogs going to get drones in the US if relations sour with China?), extreme monopolization, etc. Both parties are moving to a more interventionist stance so again on "who controls the means of production?" you aren't really getting a choice.
The two most important splits in Trotskyism post 1970 I think were (1) the issues that caused the SWP to drop out of the 4th international in the 1980s which the consequence that there is no US affiliate of the 4th international and (2) identity politics vs class politics. Jacobin has a definite opinion on that last one.
The alternative (sparing rampant flamewars to rescue the occasional good-reply-to-a-bad-post) would probably add fuel to flamewars.
In history books it's appropriately shocking to see those photos of kids playing in clouds of DEET sprayed by trucks, 1950s and 60s, yet today we're many orders of magnitude beyond that with glyphosate.
https://foe.org/resources/merchants-of-poison/