|
Pembroke Fuse posted:As a dev, I always wonder how amoral or immoral you have to be to build this kind of system and not wonder what the human repercussions are going to be. "human repercussions" is something amazon does not think about in the slightest.
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2019 18:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 10:20 |
|
|
Baronjutter posted:"human repercussions" is something I'm not being the least bit pedantic. This is a symptom of a systemic problem; Amazon is just a very big fish.
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2019 18:31
|
|
|
My brother in law’s new girlfriend legitimately believes antidepressants are totally not necessary because some horseshit “therapist” who runs her fuckin’ yoga group said so, and all you have to do to be well is eat 100% vegan and, I quote, “move your neurotransmitters from one side of your head to the other to balance them out.’ Punchline: this woman is a teacher, like in a school.
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2019 18:42
|
|
|
Hi, did someone page me?
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2019 22:02
|
|
|
Wrong thread
DR FRASIER KRANG fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Apr 27, 2019 |
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2019 22:09
|
|
|
Pembroke Fuse posted:As a dev, I always wonder how amoral or immoral you have to be to build this kind of system and not wonder what the human repercussions are going to be. This is a mere preliminary round in the contest to find out what the 21st century's equivalent of "I was just following orders" is going to be - "I'm just a software developer" or "the algorithm told me to" appear to be the current frontrunners.
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2019 23:49
|
|
|
TyroneGoldstein posted:Because somewhere along the line, supplement grifters managed to permanently keep their products away from being regulated by the FDA. Like they fight that poo poo tooth and nail against every attempt to change the status quo. I know of at least one long term major scientific study that more then likely force a change in this.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2019 02:30
|
|
|
bloodysabbath posted:My brother in law’s new girlfriend legitimately believes antidepressants are totally not necessary because some horseshit “therapist” who runs her fuckin’ yoga group said so, and all you have to do to be well is eat 100% vegan and, I quote, “move your neurotransmitters from one side of your head to the other to balance them out.’ i mean as long as they arent doing a health class it wouldnt really matter, people can be very dumb in one way while still being smart in another
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2019 02:40
|
|
|
mandatory lesbian posted:i mean as long as they arent doing a health class it wouldnt really matter, people can be very dumb in one way while still being smart in another It's a bit alarming because one of the most important lessons a child can learn is a healthy skepticism and a need to test other peoples claims against their understanding of the universe. The kind of person who accepts something as stupid as "move the neurotransmitters to balance them out" and "be vegan" is probably passing on their sheeplike naivete.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2019 02:44
|
|
|
I know more than most about FDA regulation of supplements and homeopathic remedies. I hope a brief(ha) informative derail is OK. Dietary Supplements: FDA regulation in this category is limited from several directions: 1. Money. This always comes first and foremost. FDA has not even a tiny fraction of the amount of money necessary to perform its duties. I tried to do a back of the envelope calculation in 2016 and what I came up with was FDA needed roughly 12 times its budget at the time to perform its baseline duties, not counting scaling costs and not counting the entire tobacco products category. Full enforcement action by FDA is relatively expensive, and they have to effectively triage cases, keeping a budget reserve in the event of some catastrophic emergency like a big food poisoning case. This is the biggest single issue facing the agency on every front: with more money, everything else below would be signficantly less of an issue. 2. Legal threats. There are well-funded, horrible libertarian nonprofits in DC that exist purely to pursue the destruction of regulatory oversight. These organizations hover around regulatory agencies, trying to set up test cases that will let them strip the agencies of their power. For the FDA, the most prominent of these is the Washington Legal Foundation, a Koch-funded legal pressure group whose cases are behind some of the worst changes in drug regulatory law over the past 50 years. FDA is extremely cautious about taking full legal action because they can file suit against a clear bad actor and suddenly, whoops! It turns out that company was set up by WLF, they have a test case, and now direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs is closely protected speech. This is why so much FDA action is in the form of "guidance" or "warning letters". (it's worth emphasizing that these groups are not the same as Big Business, per se; industry trade groups like PhRMA have repeatedly opposed positions taken by the WLF because they'd throw the market into absolute chaos and make the public lose faith in medicine as a whole). 3. DSHEA(the law that created the dietary supplement category) is badly drafted. I can't give you the full skinny on all the factors here or it'd be a thread unto itself, so consider this the bird's eye view. Dietary supplements being their own category makes a degree of sense: 1. There is stuff like vitamins that is well understood, found in food and consumed by the public for beneficial effect. 2. Substances that are used as supplements often can't be patented, so it would be an impossible barrier to market entry if they were treated as new drugs and had to go through normal approvals. 3. There are herbs and other supplement substances with a history of potentially beneficial use that could be more easily researched if they don't have to go through drug approvals. At the time DSHEA was passed, it seemed like many of these substances could be miraculously powerful (and some were, most famously folic acid supplementation). DSHEA was an attempt to create a space for herbs and vitamins and a few other products to basically exist in the legal market - before DSHEA, supplements were effectively unregulated and de facto illegal. It also allocated research funding to begin studying these substances to determine their benefits. Many of the people involved with DSHEA were not bad actors; they were crunchy granola hippie types who really believed in the power of herbal medicine, or honest companies trying to sell vitamins legally, or ethnobotanists who wanted to make sense of indigenous practices (and see indigenous peoples profit from their knowledge). These people were involved with DSHEA, and a lot of them are still around. Unfortunately, DSHEA was horribly drafted, on many, many levels, probably in part due to the influence of bad actors (I can't speak to the details on that, but yeah, Orrin Hatch sucks). The highlights: 1. Dietary Supplements are permitted to make "structure function claims", like "supports heart health", rather than disease claims, like "lowers cholesterol". This is kinda absurd and backwards, because the beneficial effects of, e.g. vitamins, are still causally similar to medicine. There was a rationale for this distinction, but this claim structure has the effect of confusing consumers and lets bad actors drive a truck through the loophole. A recent example (that did actually create enforcement action) was that companies were selling a product that "supports memory maintenance"...i.e. they were telling people it was a cure for Alzheimer's. 2. Dietary Supplements carry a disclaimer on the packaging that the claimed effects haven't been confirmed by the FDA. The FDA doesn't test supplements in advance; this was intentional, because the plan was that over a decade or so, a fuckton of science would be done to supplements and evidence would be developed to differentiate these claims with evidence that FDA could certify, reducing this category until it would be removed by a future law. This never happened for a number of reasons, principally because the government provided almost no funding for research and industry research was, shall we say, lacking. There's a small, growing body of good research coming out of some nonprofits affiliated with good actors in the dietary supplement industry, but the way the law is structured, there's no financial benefit for anyone involved for having evidence that their stuff works. 3. The category definition for supplements is broad enough that people produce a lot of "synthetic" supplements. 4. FDA has no premarket notification or approval or registration for dietary supplements. This is the big problem. For other kinds of products, FDA knows what's out there. For dietary supplements, I could whip up boner pills in my basement and begin selling them to regional drug stores. Products can openly contain improper ingredients, or make improper claims, or contain unlisted pharmaceutical ingredients, or be manufactured under unsafe conditions. FDA has no way to know what substances are on the market, and no active monitoring premarket for purity, safety, or honesty. And, crucially, there's no money for enforcement or scrutiny. The agency tends to only be able to justify acting when poison control or the CDC identifies a trend of, for example, heart attacks in people using herbal boner pills (that in fact contain massive overdoses of viagra). There's an ocean of this crap in stores, and FDA's sailing blind, tied to the mast. This has gotten much, much worse over time because: 1. A culture of abuse has spread on the market where people actively seek out illicit, "adulterated" supplements, and where conspiracy theories about medicine are actively spread (think Alex Jones, for example). 2. Criminal actors have figured out how to run laps around FDA's limited monitoring and enforcement capacity. If you shut down a product, an identical one with a barely changed label may appear literally the next day. 3. China has become a huge source of illicit pharmaceuticals that are being dumped into sham supplements, a flow that's almost impossible to stop overseas. 4. Truly sociopathic venture capitalists are attempting to leverage the space on large scale via new avenues. The period immediately after DSHEA was bad, but the combo of the above four factors have made the situation unrecognizably worse. I especially hate #1 on this list because false beliefs about dietary supplements and associated alt med beliefs can wind up spreading and reinforcing conspiracy theories about medicine, anti-vaxx, chiro, sovereign citizen beliefs, you name it. It's a hole in public understanding of evidence, spreading all sorts of other harms to all sectors of society. The FDA under Gottlieb started to discuss the contours of a "DSHEA 2.0" that will fix a bunch of these issues (in particular, a product registration requirement is a possibility). But this will require the passage of a new law by congress, and it's going to take a few years at a minimum. Homeopathic remedies: Fishmech is pretty much completely correct on this one. FDA, HHS etc would love to shut down the homeopathic industry as a whole, but they are legally barred from doing so. Homeopathic substances are also usually a lower priority for FDA because they make up a small part of the market (and because FDA can only even try to act when, to take a recent example, a homeopathy company fucks up dilution on hemlock teething tablets and kills a bunch of infants). Organic: "Organic" is directly regulated by the USDA, and it does have a specific meaning about the methods used to raise or produce USDA-regulated commodities and products. For what it's worth, USDA does enforce organic labeling, and the content of organic compliance regs aren't really meant to protect Big Ag. However, Fishmech is correct that most organic practices are garbage that offer no health benefits. Some organic practices required for USDA labeling offer environmental or animal welfare benefits, but the cert mark is opaque about specific practices. "Organic" is thus principally a marketing term with no underlying value not better captured by more specific claims or third party certifications. Afterword: For those interested in these topics, I want to recommend the pseudoscience thread in SAL. In this thread we have a number of goon experts that post detailed explanations of common beliefs and myths about all sorts of products and fields, and where I routinely make stupid errors and promise effortposts that fail to materialize. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Apr 28, 2019 |
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2019 03:55
|
|
|
I go to some of the many weekly yoga classes that my gym offers and in about half of the classes the instructor winds up saying some stupid poo poo about detoxification or activating your neurotransmitters, etc this is a pretty working-class area with a lot of shared living situations, i can't even imagine what a yoga class in white collar suburbs must be like
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2019 04:07
|
|
|
Hungry posted:This is a mere preliminary round in the contest to find out what the 21st century's equivalent of "I was just following orders" is going to be - "I'm just a software developer" or "the algorithm told me to" appear to be the current frontrunners. Ah good, now I can point to a bunch of opaque neural networks lovingly dubbed "AIchmann" and blame them for all the crimes against humanity that I've committed.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2019 04:47
|
|
|
mandatory lesbian posted:i mean as long as they arent doing a health class it wouldnt really matter, people can be very dumb in one way while still being smart in another She is literally a dietician who goes there to teach high school kids about health.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2019 15:35
|
|
|
JustJeff88 posted:I'm not being the least bit pedantic. This is a symptom of a systemic problem; Amazon is just a very big fish. Liberal Arts education? What a waste of time.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2019 15:54
|
|
bloodysabbath posted:She is literally a dietician who goes there to teach high school kids about health. Tell her supervisors.
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2019 16:47
|
|
|
bloodysabbath posted:Punchline: this woman is a teacher, like in a school. Teaching is such a poorly managed and paid profession that it's pretty often a mix of truly talented people with a real passion and people scraped off the bottom of the barrel because a job that wants you to have a masters degree to get paid 45,000 dollars after 20 years in a career doesn't pull the best people and no one in between.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2019 16:55
|
|
|
quote:(and because FDA can only even try to act when, to take a recent example, a homeopathy company fucks up dilution on hemlock teething tablets and kills a bunch of infants). I'm sorry, what teething tablets?
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2019 17:58
|
|
|
Jedi425 posted:I'm sorry, what teething tablets? Sugar teething tablets. Because homeopathy, you know.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2019 18:01
|
|
I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
Jedi425 posted:I'm sorry, what teething tablets? I was wrong, it looks like the active ingredient was actually Belladonna. https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-...nd-hylands-baby https://www.hylands.com/discontinuation-faqs (notice their website does not acknowledge fault and avoids mentioning the active ingredient - Hyland's refused to accept any blame for the ten deaths.) What's the little angels smilie code? Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:13 on May 4, 2019 |
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2019 20:06
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:I was wrong, it looks like the active ingredient was actually Belladonna.  What the gently caress. Giving nightshade to infants. You'd be safer putting a loving shot of booze in their baby bottle.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2019 20:42
|
|
|
Mister Facetious posted:
Well, if they made it appropriately, there'd be no nightshade in their nightshade infant medicine.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2019 02:34
|
|
|
Ratoslov posted:Well, if they made it appropriately, there'd be no nightshade in their nightshade infant medicine. Yep. But they couldn't make it right, and actually put nightshade in their imaginary nightshade potion.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2019 12:34
|
|
|
anonumos posted:Yep. But they couldn't make it right, and actually put nightshade in their imaginary nightshade potion. The dose makes the poison; in a tiny enough amount deadly nightshade isn't deadly at all. The problem is that homeopathy isn't exactly known for following rigorous procedures and released batches with harmful to lethal doses of nightshade. Granted I personally would like to keep the amount of nightshade given deliberately to babies at "none" but what do I know? I'm just a stupid goon.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2019 23:09
|
|
|
There is no such thing as "made properly" in the context of homeopathy. Who knows, maybe someone at The Homeopathy Factory thought it would be better to put a significant amount in the dose. It's all bullshit anyway, it's not like a doctor's going to come out of the back room and provide some data proving what the proper Nightshade dose is for an infant. These are the same type of hucksters that convince people to feed bleach to their kids as a cure for autism. When the kid starts vomiting they don't say "oh well maybe the dose was too high", they say "it's working, he's vomiting out the autism!"
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 03:51
|
|
|
Do snake oil salesmen ever try to discredit each other? "Don't you know bleach is poison? It's an industrial chemical! Would you put something for cleaning floors in your body!? Here, try my ~ * o All Natural™ o * ~ toxin-purging colloidal silver tonic instead!"
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 04:10
|
|
|
QuarkJets posted:There is no such thing as "made properly" in the context of homeopathy. They couldn't even be bothered to make it correctly according to the tenets of their insane beliefs. Like if a Christian ate donuts on Sunday instead of bread. Or in this case hemlock instead of bread, I guess.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 07:03
|
|
|
I want to start a company in the US that sells properly manufactured and safe sugar pills in tins with homeopathic marketing on them. Guilt free capitalism, gently caress yeah.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 08:40
|
|
|
^^^ I was surprised to learn that that wasn't already how the homeopathic industry workedMister Facetious posted:Do snake oil salesmen ever try to discredit each other? Yes actually the dudes trying to get you to ingest turpentine advise against ingesting bleach and vice versa cause their cure-all is already a cure-all and you might mess with the magic if you try to combine panaceas
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 08:50
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:I know more than most about FDA regulation of supplements and homeopathic remedies. I hope a brief(ha) informative derail is OK. Please post a version of this on Medium or something so I can share it around.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 12:36
|
|
|
wassssuuuuuuuupquote:Why Amazon Is Gobbling Up Failed Malls https://www.wsj.com/video/why-amazon-is-gobbling-up-failed-malls/FC3559FE-945E-447C-8837-151C31D69127.html evade paywall by opening up an incognito window, entering https://facebook.com/l.php?u= as a prefix, then append the wsj URL. tah-dah, you are now pretending that you got linked through facebook
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 17:39
|
|
|
Mister Facetious posted:
The "Tummy Ache" product from Hyland has silver nitrate in it labeled as Argentum Nitricum.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 18:28
|
|
LanceHunter posted:Please post a version of this on Medium or something so I can share it around. I'm sorry, but I'm attempting to/about to enter a position that's too close to this area and at least for the near future, I can't afford that kind of exposure. I had another effortpost here with Supplement Buying Tipz, but an internet outage ate it. Short version: 1. Keep a list of what supplements you consume. This helps for communicating about them with your doctor, and to identify possible causes if something goes wrong. 2. Do what your doctor says when it comes to supplements. Some supplements do have important, valuable health effects. These supplements are usually built into clinical and insurance guidelines, like folate for women who are pregnant or planning to conceive. 3. It's possible to take too much of vitamins, even non-fat-soluble ones. The same is true of food substances marketed as supplements, like cinnamon. If a label says it contains 1300% of your daily value of something, I mean, yeesh. ask your doctor. 4. Vitamin C megadosing doesn't work, unless you have a deficiency of vitamin C. 5. Big national companies and big store brand supplements are likely to be safer. Tiny operations, especially online only ones, may not be. There are many exceptions to this rule. 6. Some homeopathic products try to hide and pretend they're drugs- check the whole label when you're buying OTC health products. The word "remedy" and weird pseudo-latin active ingredient names are sometimes warning signs. 7. There are a bazillion certifications out there for supplements. There are a couple good ones, but few are really trustworthy. 8. Do Not consume anything containing "laetrile", "apricot kernels" or "Vitamin B17". These are all the same substance, amygdalin, which is falsely believed to be an anticancer wonder substance. In reality, it metabolizes into cyanide. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:43 on May 6, 2019 |
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 21:37
|
|
|
Cyanide will kill tumours! It will just also kill the rest of you at the same time.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 22:01
|
|
|
PT6A posted:Cyanide will kill tumours! Every time I get a "secret ingredient kills cancer, big pharma doesn't want you to know" e-mail from a grandparent or parent, I always send this one back...  Saving this one to my PC has been well worth the time and space.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 22:08
|
|
|
Now I'm thinking of that "Republican Tears" image, but the bottle says Javex Bleach.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 22:23
|
|
|
Aren't a lot of chemotherapy drugs basically extremely destructive to the body, but they destroy cancer cells more effectively than they kill the rest of your cells? We seem to know how to kill cancer -- the real trick is not killing the rest of your body at the same time.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 22:31
|
|
|
Nice post/avatar combo. The key thing is that chemotherapy is a last resort specifically because it's so destructive to the human body and administered under medical supervision.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 22:54
|
|
|
The stereotype is that it's destructive, but that's a side effect of a whole range of agents that have varying effect profiles. I'm not an expert on cancer by any means, but there's basically a genre of pseudoscience that's "purgative" - this thing hurts/feels strange to do, so it must be either good for me, or killing the disease. It's important to emphasize that these other substances and methods aren't equivalent to chemotherapy just because they're destructive. See also: bleach enemas, all sorts of "cleanses" and "purges", self-destructive diets, etc. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:07 on May 6, 2019 |
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 23:05
|
|
|
Aren't you glad that there are commercials for a "home treatment option" that are trying to get people to believe that they don't have to go back to the doctor regularly while on chemo?
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 23:06
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 10:20 |
|
|
Remember the 'Doctor's Book of Home Remedies' commercials? That thing was as thick as a Bible; did it have anything that wasn't bullshit in it?
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2019 23:38
|
|