Excellent example of how free markets can go quite badly without regulation. The strong color of lead tainted turmeric had stronger sales. If you sold non-poison you were likely to go out of business, being outcompeted by your competitors.
The free market absolutist response to these events is typically that market forces from consumer preference will drive down leaded turmeric sales, and “who’s to stop me from consuming lead if I want to.”
The core issue I have with free market absolutist arguments is their reliance on perfect information across parties and perfectly rational actors. Those constraints make any system of governance viable, and in my view, are a defining feature of extremist ideologies.
I see the problem a bit differently. Perhaps a society could function in a model like that. But we decided it's too burdensome and we ceded this responsibility to the government. In such a world, it is paradoxically more dangerous to come across some under-regulated niche, because our default assumption is that the government took care of the risk. It doesn't even cross your mind that you should be asking about lead in your turmeric.
This is sort of what happened with welfare too. For a long time, we depended on private charities to take care of the less fortunate. We decided the system sucked, so we established a government-operated safety net. But in this reality, it can be worse if you slip through the cracks of government programs. People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help.
Anyway, I wouldn't write it off as extremism. It's just we need to pick an option and stick to it. In a "nanny-state" world, you can't decide that you're not going to regulate food safety anymore and hope that the market will sort it out.
The idea that South Asians consumed poisoned lead because of high average levels of trust in the efficiency of their governments and their regulation of the food supply as opposed to low information on lead poisoning isn't one that survives contact with reality. So the "but the market would have solved this if only lead poisoning was legal" position is definitely an extreme one.
The world has had millennia of not regulating very much, and the market very rarely sorted it out.
The world has had millennia of not regulating very much
The one exception is weights and measures. There is a long tradition of regulating these strictly, because experience has shown that the market is incapable of driving the cheats out of business and that there must be trust in the markets because else trade will slow down.
Most economists and left-leaning research institutes disagree with this. Transaction costs, both monetary and temporal, are always higher with more regulation and governmental institutional involvement.
You're not describing a position taken by sane libertarians, though. Their argument is different: that if the government didn't regulate so much, customers would depend on the merchant's reputation, possibly backed by independent testing done by private sector institutions. A modern-day parallel would be electrical safety. In the US, this is largely handled by private organizations such as the UL. You can buy a non-UL extension cord or a toaster if you want.
And look, I'm not arguing that this is a better solution. But I think it makes sense to attack the strongest version of that argument, not the weakest one.
I don't necessarily want to add or take away from your point, but I do want to note that I believe this is false:
> People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help.
GoFundMe raises about $650 million for medical costs each year[0]. That's just one little thing, I suppose, but there are many, many NGOs, charities, religious institutions and unaffiliated individuals providing personal care inside their communities and outside. There's plenty of care that /cannot be provided/ by these organisations, and was not provided in the past by private charities either. Neither could provide cancer treatment or cure a patient with major injuries from a car accident. That's a job for institutionalized healthcare.
"Protection of the public from fraud in the marketing of food products represents
one of the earliest forms of government regulation of commercial enterprise" -- https://www.jstor.org/stable/26658854 "FOOD DRUG COSMETIC LAW JOURNAL 39, 2-73 (1984)
A History of Government Regulation of Adulteration and
Misbranding of Food"
The introduction covers food regulation from Biblical and Roman times to the present. If you think about how many of the Biblical rules are devoted to food handling in some sense, it starts to become clear how food regulation is civilization and the state, as much as any other kind of ancient law. I will never understand the Libertarian dream of a "prelapsarian" world where everyone is free to sell poison to everyone else with no consequences.
In particular, adding lead to tumeric was illegal before they made a show of enforcing it in 2019. So their previous policy was the worst of both worlds; telling people they were safe while allowing them to be poisoned.
Also, the free market requires the actual damage to materialise before it gets factored into the decision making of participants. E.g. climate change effects may eventually get factored into the energy markets, but by then, the damage would have been done.
It wouldn't factor in even then, because it's a classic externality.
Polluters don't contribute individually to climate change just for themselves or their customers, they contribute -- each in a small way -- to the problem for everyone on the planet.
If factory pollution was somehow isolated to just the factory or people buying things from that factory, instead of just going into everyone's air, regulation would be much less necessary, because in that case yes, consumer behavior would change. People wouldn't want smog inside their homes because they bought a new widget from a polluting manufacturer.
This is the inherent problem with people complaining that they have the right to pollute with their cars or factories or what have you as an argument against regulation. The pollution doesn't just stay next to the person creating it! If someone invents a box that captures all the fumes that car puts off and localizes it to the car itself, then sure, pollute all you want.
This is not true. Plenty of people already changed their consumer behavior due to Climate Change info. For example Solar deployment is quite impressive around the word even if it's not always the best strategy financially (governmental incentives included).
The assumption of perfect information is still useful as long state actors maintain market conditions for that.
Bangladesh example: Consumers didn't know about lead in turmeric. After the information campaign consumers know about lead in turmeric but not whether a specific seller offers lead-free turmeric. After the raids consumers know that they can usually trust turmeric to be lead-free.
The assumption of perfectly rational actors is not so useful.
However there's another solution. State actors should control confusopoly. That's a lot more difficult, but if the market is not too complex, one can assume consumers are mostly rational.
In other words: in reality the assumptions are not assumptions but preconditions for a free market.
I also dislike how they’re reactionary in nature and therefore are satisfied with an inferior process. I’d rather protect the market from lead rather than wait and hope they notice the harm it’s causing and decide to stop buying the product.
A popular implicit assumption, probably because nobody really though about it, is that economics models often include perfect cooperation. If it takes multiple people to get to an optimal outcome, they will all cooperate and never do any infighting. Economists use reverse causality and argue that non-cooperative behavior doesn't exist. You know, in exactly the same way racism/sexism was sometimes considered irrational by some economists.
I am a Princeton trained economist from the 1980's and not once, not ever do we talk about non-cooperative behavior not existing. Rather, it is sub-optimal and self-defeating in the long run and that's why economies that evolve into hierarchical control eventually result in rebellion.
And bewilderingly about the last claim, but yes, I know, racism/sexism is sometimes considered irrational by some economists, because, um, you know, it is?
Consider that literally everyone used to believe it was either benign or beneficial, (including western experts before they got expelled) used it for various purposes and noticed no ill effects. It was found in the neanderthals. Now you come and claim that everybody is wrong.
You know that you can look up "lead poisoning" and it effects, right? It's an entire thing with many studies into it and a well-understood mechanism of how it happens and so on? It tastes sweet and is a very useful material and the toxicity is delayed because it builds up in the body over time, especially through touch rather than consumption. The symptoms might also not be immediately noticeable, especially if malnutrition, parasites and other contaminants are also widespread.
If you want to get into a conspiracy of Western corporations trying to suppress a useful thing by spreading lies about it contrary to traditional wisdom, maybe try hemp/cannabis (no, not just for getting high: there are plenty of industrial uses hampered by the illegality of "marijuana"). Lead seems like a really bad hill to die on given that it's been known to have adverse health effects for over 2000 years (while continuously being used because it was so darn useful and contamination was often limited by how it was used for most of history).
It's in part outright lies, in majority calling the healthy state defects and the defects the healthy state. Yes, the body accumulates it, because it needs it.
The conspiracy isn't that corporations supress it, the conspiracy is that corporations paid the experts to argue against its toxicity.
It hasn't been known as poison, there are only a couple of dubious quotes over the 2000 years, when it was used in cosmetics, medicine, even food preparation. The belief of its neurotoxicity is only about half a century old, with no determinable origin of its discovery.
There is a couple of dubious quotes, the well documented fact that they cooked in it rather strongly implies that this belief wasn't widespread either.
It really seems like the climate change debate, only that the deniers won, and those who claim otherwise are getting silenced even as the effects are becoming obvious, and people desperately look for some explanation why people are getting increasingly ill, frail, weak, and dumb.
Except there is no such reliance on perfect information of all parties.
You're coming up with a scarecrow and then tearing it down and pretending it's the real thing.
The actual free market answer to these things is that if poisonous turmeric is such a big issue, it will be noticed (by some people dropping dead if nothing else) which will result in consumers prioritizing "knowing if the turmeric is poisonous", resulting in a "food safety rating industry" being created which either consumers or producers can fund in order to accurately determine the safety of the food.
We can see stuff like this happen all the time in the financial industry with ratings agencies, and we saw it prior to government based agencies that fullfil that role.
Branding was big in the 1800s as a response to precisely that sort of behavior.
Lead doesn't cause people to just "drop dead" like that. Like other heavy metals, it bioaccumulates and gradually causes harm. It is not something where people can trace their problem to one specific seller, or even turmeric specifically.
The supply and demand curve doesn't always cross with imperfect information. A lot of free market presuppositions fail actually. This is accepted by many contemporary economists. Samuel Bowles on Mindscape podcast was an interesting high level discussion
The idea of contaminated food being solved by a food safety rating industry set up to rate thousands of small South Asian market stalls for the benefit of poor and sometimes functionally illiterate customers after enough of them have traced their family members' deaths to the food supply sounds more like the sort of scenario raised to mock libertarians than 'perfect information', which is just a technical requirement for an ideally functioning market in economics (the theory that safety ratings industries can fill the gap is a theory of markets converging on consumers having all relevant information anyway)
Even if we assume safety ratings for a complex food supply chain resulting in tens of thousands of one man businesses selling to people earning a dollar a day is a massive market opportunity, brands and safety labels are trivially copied by sufficiently people selling adulterated food, so they alone fundamentally don't solve the problem. Only a government can step in and regulate that IP, and at that point they might be better off just banning the poisoning...
> We can see stuff like this happen all the time in the financial industry with ratings agencies, and we saw it prior to government based agencies that fullfil that role.
Did you just use the rating agencies as a POSITIVE example? The financial crash that partly came about because those rating agencies were 100% corrupt and didn't work at all you know...
>Except there is no such reliance on perfect information of all parties.
Exactly. The market is the decentralized method by which information is distributed.
>Straw-man
Yes, agreed. I wonder how much laissez-faire material some of these commenters have actually read. Perhaps they read from a different flavor of "market absolutism", which brings the question of unnecessary generalization.
In my reading of the Rothbardian ancap canon, insurance companies, liability for damages and private certification boards are advanced. Under this system imperfect information is taken as a given. Market participants like private food safety inspectors have an incentive to have better information than their competitors.
Contrast the above to the government regulation schemes where acceptable levels of adulterants are not necessary to report. Similarly, polluters can freely pollute within the EPA guidelines without liability. One could make the same leap of attributing "perfect information" to government regulators. If not for perfect information, how else can the FDA know the acceptable level of a contaminant?
Private regulatory and certification bodies would give consumers choices for cleaner standards than the government monopoly. I hope it goes without saying that the existence of a state backed regulatory body makes it harder for a private one to enter the market.
Finally, in response to the top level comment, it is worth noting that if a similar comment were made in favor of markets rather than regulation, one could reasonably expect it to be flagged into oblivion. Perhaps rightly so, because the topic has derailed the discussion. It speaks to the depth of the discussion when market opponents haven't even bothered to read what they are criticizing. HN isn't the place for this.
Bangladesh as a whole is a good case study on a few things:
1) Capitalism is the only reliable route for a nation to escape poverty. Bangladesh has socialism as one of the central tenants of the 1972 constitution, but abandoned it in the 21st century. And economic growth has increased dramatically since then and transformed the lives of people.
2) Government can play a significant role in a capitalist society through investing in public health, education, and infrastructure. The Bangladeshi government has been active recently, thanks to Russian and Chinese funding, building railroads, power plants, etc. This is an economic approach to development—combining a free market with an active government that facilitates business and builds infrastructure—that goes back to Abraham Lincoln in the US.
3) The government can play a large role in eliminating shady business practices, violent political extremism and crime, and generally making a society where people are safe to engage in commerce and build things.
The fourth leg of the chair is government efforts to wipe out corruption, as in China. But Bangladesh isn’t there yet, and may never get there.
Honestly it's weird that this needed specific market regulation. Anyone selling anything with significant amounts of lead in it for human consumption belongs in jail simply because poisoning people is a crime.
"Specific market regulation" in this case can also include police action. The police going after murderers who poison people with lead IS MARKET REGULATION.
It was extraordinarily tragic how people responded to the Economist's piece about lead in turmeric here in India.
While normally most of the stupidity lies on one side of the political spectrum, you could see both sides lambasting it as a hit piece by Big West against traditional healing and spices.
Most people took the "everything is contaminated anyway, why single out turmeric?" route. This is the best route to take if you want lead contamination to continue.
The biggest tragedy about ideological divides is how it makes people immune to truth-seeking behaviours. Lead contamination should not be political. Lead doesn't care who you vote for or on what basis you are butthurt.
Kudos to our neighbours for, once again, showing us that there are better ways to do things.
My summary, there are Two sets of bad comments: one US Americans who think all regulations are bad (shockingly common here) and Indians who think all criticism is a personal insult to them.
> US Americans who think all regulations are bad (shockingly common here)
Yeah, it's annoying and a perfect example of how intelligence, knowledge and smarts in some areas do not indicate anything about general intelligence, knowledge and smarts in life. Brilliant doctors and engineers can be completely incapable of using a screwdriver or unaware of how anything outside of their domains functions. And frustratingly, they often assume that because they're brilliant in their field, their brilliance applies elsewhere.. but it doesn't.
> Indians who think all criticism is a personal insult to them
I've seen this as a common trend on any India-related discussion. Does anyone have any ideas as to why?
> I've seen this as a common trend on any India-related discussion. Does anyone have any ideas as to why?
My theory is the rise of Hindunationationalism, and nationalism in general in India, which leads to the feeling of needing to defend ones country against any perceived attacks. Combine this with a huge country and rising levels of English proficency and you will get that type of comments on English speaking online boards.
It's sadly a bit worse than religious nationalism.
It's start with that common religious nationalist myth:
'We are the best/greatest in the world, because god made us So (baked just right).'
Then continue with a that bit that separate it from Cesarism (and Stalinisme):
'But we aren't the greatest country in the world, we aren't at our rightful place: ahead of our ennemies'.
Then you have different follow-up. A Maoist 'we should improve and work hard, especially you, to make up for it', Or a more fascist/whiny approach 'its because of those pesky I internal traitors (usually Jews, sometimes communists, it seems to be Muslims in India currently)'.
The issue is that India nationalism is moving from a somehow Maoist mythos (except with more competent leadership, which isn't hard tbh) to a victim hood, whiney myth that imho lead to at best reactionary thinking, at worst fascism (I don't think they're there at all, I don't think they can their society is too much... Indian? to be really fascist, but I can see castes becoming a real thing again.)
In general, I think nationalism is like being proud of something you don't control and don't have any impact on, so a bit dumb, but Human. I'm OK with it, mostly. But add paranoid victimhood to nationalism and you have the dumbest ideology in the world.
Also combined with the fact that many people in the west genuinely do look down on India. Not necessarily in an overtly racist way, but thinking it's still the India of the 1950s, rather than a country which can build supersonic jet fighters and land probes on the moon.
Further combined with the fact that in some rural parts of the country, life actually has not changed that much from the 1950s.
The subcontinent has a face-saving culture where direct criticism is socially discouraged. By contrast, Western Europeans and Americans especially almost seem to revel in criticism. I think it’s actually a cultural superpower that enables them to be successful in the modern business world.
(I’d love to understand what causes this tendency. My speculation is that it’s the “salvation through faith alone” of Protestant Christianity. If you’re not defined by what you do, maybe you’re liable to take criticism of your actions less personally.)
The downfall of the previous govt in 2014 was a case study in "don't get caught or called out for bullshit". Citizen-led and media-driven discussions on corruption decimated any speck of pro-govt voices in the country.
The govt that replaced them took note, and used old laws to effectively crush dissent in mainstream media (major newspapers and the top TV channels) while building an army of loyal followers fuelled by bot-energy who invade any comment section seen to criticise the Modi govt.
It is hard to say how much of the country is nationalist. perhaps only the 35% odd per cent that voted for Modi in a first-past the post system are possibly in this club. But online, they dominate discourse.
It is a strategically built system, with Whatsapp forwards decided in advance and lines of thought determined through centralised control. It made use of the analytics Obama used and even pioneered the use of newer companies like Cambridge Analytica even before Brexit, to control discourse on social media.
Some people genuinely drink the cool-aid, but rarely does an intelligent person do so. Nationalists are usually upper-caste and elite and prone to self-victimhood ideals about how they are oppressed.
I wonder if the topic comes up about common Mustard oil, which I use to cook with almost every day, and how it is actually banned for human consumption or anything other than a topical rubbing oil in the US.
That’s probably just the FDA being racist, though. My family has been eating mustard oil for generations and my grandparents lived to their 80s in Bangladesh. My parents have the “for topical use only” mustard oil in their cupboard—they never even noticed the warning until I pointed it out. I’m much more concerned about the canola or soy oils…
People can't verify all the info they come across and start trusting some sources as reliable. Many Indians used to trust facts/opinions from Western media as reliable and neutral but after the arrival of social media, lot of prejudices and fake news from the same sources are exposed so the trust deficit makes almost all the opinions questionable. There is also a section driven by ideology or biases due to past history.
It can be simultanenously true that it was a hit piece by Economist, and that there is a real problem regarding lead in turmeric which will now not be solved.
The title in the Economist was "How to stop turmeric from killing people?" which suggests that the problem is turmeric (suggesting hit piece), not lead, while the text tells a different story. But many people will only remember the title.
Whenever I see articles like this I wonder the same. In theory it is possible to trace back where anything one buys came from, in practice not so much because almost inevitably you'll hit a company along the production/shipping chain refusing to disclose information. But yeah even if it were, a home test would still be a better source of truth. Assuming the test is correct. Lead tests are fairly common though (because of historic lead painting and water piping) and in some countries sort of regulated so that shouldn't be an issue. As for any other pollution: it might be saner in the end to not worry about it too much, there's just so many things which can go wrong.
What's shocking to me that producers were simply adding a lead colorant on purpose. I thought the challenge would be from some hard to avoid environmental pollution, or a complex chemical process going wrong. Nope, it's just lead paint.
We're having similar problem with Nitrite salts in Ham, not as deadly though. It shows how we're willing to make things look better just to sell more and at the detriment of health.
> When the Food Safety Authority showed up at the market and started issuing fines for lead adulteration, it stopped being a savvy business move to add lead. Purchasers who were accustomed to unnatural lead-colored turmeric learned how to recognize non-adulterated turmeric. And so lead went from ubiquitous to nearly nonexistent in the space of just a few years.
Change always takes time. India is a large, diverse developing country with many different language groups and wide disparities in living standards. Many people still don’t have access to basic sanitation. Controversies like this are a universal experience in human development. The government’s role is to step in here; casting people as monstrous misses the broader context in my opinion.
Look how long it took for people in the Western world to unanimously accept that vaccines do indeed work and to comply with national immunization programs to protect those with compromised immune systems on whom the vaccines won't work.
I don’t think the smallpox vaccine for instance was particularly controversial?
There were already several states in Europe which required compulsory vaccination before 1810 a few decades after it was developed. I think it seemed like a no-brainer to most at least slightly educated people in the 19th century (after all everyone back then had grown up seeing loads of people around them dying from all kinds of nowadays easily preventable diseases).
Smallpox vaccines were quite controversial at the time and opponents went for much the same disinformation tactics as with the covid vaccines. For example, rumors that cow heads would start sprouting from your body were published (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/01/07/3755986...) in popular media. There were also Church leaders saying that it was immoral to intervene in God's will in this way: if He decided you should get smallpox then that was your fate.
It's not so far from people fearing that COVID vaccines were full of microchips to control your brains, or that it was all a mass sterilization campaign organized by the deep state or whatever.
I've never met a libertarian who believed in the right to secretly adulterate product with undetectable slow acting poison customers don't know about or understand.
It's on the level of "you made a choice, alone, purely for the benefit of your family, not much socialist nanny state going on now."
There's plenty to discuss and even argue about across ideological lines. Unless it's straw-men all the way down when there becomes no point, which seems a shame to me.
Maybe next time phrase the thing more along the lines of:
"How do libertarians view such market regulation success?"
> I've never met a libertarian who believed in the right to secretly adulterate product
Yes but they are not necessarily able to clearly explain how can that be prevented from happening without the ‘nanny state’. Which I assume what the comment above was implying, instead of explicitly supporting poisoning food.
There's a discussion to be had there but I say, now explicitly, that it is pointless in this kind of bad faith context. Frame your incredulity as a question.
How can this be prevented without a nanny state?
Libertarians in general, do not believe in the legalisation of violence which is orthogonal to the nanny state. Same as if someone were to randomly put arsenic in your food. That understood how do you deal with it? It's your right to knowingly consume poison in full knowledge of what it is and what it does to you OR you are prevented from doing so because, when you have full knowledge, you will make the wrong decision deciding arsenic is tastier or whatever. Noting also there exist compromises between those two (eg you can do whatever to yourself, but it's made harder - with differing views on how good or bad such policy is). All of those /can/ prevent _unwitting_ lead poisoning. Which polict is best, according to what criteria and at what necessary cost in trade off is something on which reasonable people can disagree, and can be discussed productively and in good faith.
To be fair I've never heard anyone claim that 100% prevention is even possible.
Even the most ardent libertarian at most believes that maybe 90% of the population can be 'protected' by various, non-govermental, systems to a sufficient degree, but there will always be some fraction, in this case tumeric eaters, that slowly get lead poisoned regardless.
Bangladesh is a good A/B example of how much poverty in the developing world is driven by ineffective government. When my family left the country in 1989, it was a poster child for third world dysfunction. At the time it was ruled by a military dictator. Through the 1990s, “democracy” proved ineffective and fragile.
Then something changed. Starting in 2001, the leaders of both main parties adopted a sort of autocratic neoliberalism. They implemented IMF mandated reforms, etc. Since 2001, Bangladesh’s GDP per capita has increased by a factor of six. It’s still a breathtakingly corrupt and incompetent country. The opposition leader is currently in prison. And the son of the current Prime Minister fled the country and is living in the US. But it’s at least minimally competent. Foreign money doesn’t completely disappear when it comes into the country. Chinese and Russian funding has actually turned into real infrastructure: railroads, a nuclear power plant, etc. It’s been a remarkable change.
When it was still Pakistan, they asked the central government for a nuclear power plant like Karachi had and I think they got like a cobalt 60 target for medical isotopes. Absolute own goal on the federation’s part.
"Lead poisoning kills millions annually. One country is showing the way forward."
Extremely ironic and deceptive title, considering Bangladesh was also one of the only countries who's created a culture completely fine with defrauding and poisoning its own people.
Not weighing cultures against one another. It's just dumb to praise a country for fixing a problem when said country is the sole creator of it. It is the bare minimum not to poison people. We don't need to be giving pats on the back for adhering to the bare minimum.
Not directly relevant, however the way that HN removes specific words from titles has become a tad obnoxious and patronising.
In this specific case, the title is accurate, and HN’s title modification is wrong. I guess the removal of “how” was meant to combat titles like “how I made my code 500x faster”.
HN guidelines tell us to not editorialise titles or headlines, and to be accurate. Why does HN then get to modify titles with glorified and inaccurate regexes?
Edit: I understand “it’s their website”, however rules-for-thee-not-for-me creates inconsistency, and makes it harder for contributors how to behave up front. It will lead to more editorialising, and doesn’t appear in-line with the posture HN has had over the years.
"H0w [...]" titles would be somewhat amusing and appropriate as a hacky way to bash those in, albeit inappropriate as being rather silly and circumventing this sort of policy.
The HN website editorializing titles automatically indeed seems wrong though: if those are bad or clickbaity titles, they probably could just not be upvoted much, maybe flagged, and otherwise dealt with using generic mechanisms, but attempting to automatically improve them does not seem to do much good. On a more optimistic note, at least those are predictable substitutions for now, and not any of the ML business.
Yeah. Similarly, the HN convention of removing the number from a listicle doesn't stop them from being listicles, it just means users are more likely to click on them in the mistaken belief that they're a reasoned piece written by a subject matter expert.
And the idea that the worst thing an author can do to grab your attention is stick a number in the title seems quaint in the context of the modern internet. Meanwhile, most of the actual ragebait makes it through unscathed...
> if those are bad or clickbaity titles, they probably could just not be upvoted much
I am an active /new page lurker. You'd be surprised by the number of times I've seen clickbaity titles getting upvoted and making it to the front page.
Sure the clickbaity titles had good content too, otherwise they wouldn't get upvoted again and again. But when there are two posts with equally good content, the one with clickbaity title gets the needed votes soon enough to get into the front page and the other one keeps languishing at /new. It's sad but that's what I see happening again and again at /new.
I try to offset the unfairness by voting for the non-clickbaity interesting posts but adding one vote to a post that nobody else is voting for does not make any meaningful difference.
It doesn't need an option as in a button (HN doesn't seem to have developers on it), but it's required to comply with a deletion of your account under GDPR. Emailing someone is fine, after all, "do things that don't scale" is one of the known adages in this space.
Fair point. That option is out there - but it is not clear. I have gone through the FAQ entry and the linked comment which talks of “shared ownership” of a thread — which, this is my guess, is implying every comment is shared. I find that troubling.
I don’t think it would be too much to clearly add a sentence or few in that FAQ entry about how a person can get an account and its history erased from hn, even if its via an email (though such a button would be nice — which maybe just sends an email mentioning the hn username?)
But I also acknowledge that matters of account and data deletions aren’t straightforward.
But they have (a lot of) EU users, and they gather PII from those users (such as email, or in some cases username == first name or full name ; and profile description can contain PII ; they probably also get our IP) so they still must abide by GDPR.
If you have EU users you can't hide behind "well *my* country says you can take PII and not charge VAT and not provide refunds, and I don't care about 3D Secure or DSP2 when I charge EU credit cards etc etc."
You have to either comply with the law to get those users and customers, or withdraw from there.
It seems logical that as a citizen of [insert country] I should be able to rely on my own country's protections against [insert risk] whether the third party is from my own land or not.
Well yes. If a company is in the US and they didn't want to abide by GDPR, then their service can simply not be available to EU users.
Many US sites do that when they locate your IP in the EU. You basically get a "sorry, this is not for you" banner and you're SOL trying to get to the content
So, how does this work with countries that have, say, strict porn laws. Does Singapore or Saudia Arabia get to impose it's morals on the rest of the world?
We don't need you (whatever "you" means) to sign a treaty with "us" in order for "our" law to apply when you deal with "our" citizens.
Sometimes there is zero leverage and "you" can't be found/sued/fined. But for large companies, there's no easy way out. That's why Meta is in hot waters ; they can't just say "oh we'll put our HQ back in California and now the EU can't say anything about how we collect data/show ads to EU users". That can't fly.
Even if you made up a new country and went there (with no treaty), you'd still be outside the local law of the users you're dealing with, and there are many ways for the user's jurisdiction to apply leverage if you're enough of a big deal.
> Like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the US laws apply to where consumers reside, not where the company is headquartered. It doesn’t matter if a company doesn’t have an office in California if it has customers, website visitors, etc. that reside there and their personal information is being processed by the company.
So, yes, if I was an EU company, I would need to abide by California privacy laws. Now IIRC there's some fine print in California's laws that says this only matters if the company is over a certain size, has a minimum number of CA users, and resells information. But that "filter" is also part of CA law, not EU law.
I agree that if "How " is removed from a the title of a dated article, but "[year]" is not inserted in the same edit, that's a bug. Either fix the title completely, or don't bother.
What I hate about this one is that the headlines which were trendy before aren’t trendy now but we’re still left with these rules, and secondly that the modified titles can become a more dramatic title.
If you look at the bold text at the beginning of the article it should be "Lead poisoning kills millions annually. One country is showing the way forward."
Underneath the bold text is smaller text "How Bangladesh removed lead from turmeric spice — and saved lives."
> If you look at the URL it should be "bangladesh-tumeric-lead-poisoning-contamination-public-health"
The URL is not the title and should not be used as such. It’s just a convenient way of accessing the article later. There are several reasons why URLs can (and often do) differ from the titles, it would be a terrible policy to base the HN story titles on them.
Is this any different? This article comes down to "there was lead in tumeric, the government was warned and goods were tested". I can't think of any other (effective) way a country could ban a toxic substance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36481693
(408 points/4 months ago/209 comments)
And another big turmeric/lead post 9 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38139011
(270 points/9 days ago/191 comments)