Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy

Re:Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and En... by Consultant32452 on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @05:27PM (#21208301)

I'm interested in your thoughts on one public policy example of this. Back when AIDS first hit, the community of scientists and public policy makers said that while it was starting in the gay and drug community any moment it would hop into the general population. They knew this was a lie, but told us this because they didn't believe Americans would spend money helping gays and junkies.

I've come to understand that to varying degrees a lot of public policy works this way.

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Re:Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and En... by Nasrudith on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @05:35PM (#21208388)

I don't think that was even a lie - disease doesn't respect tidy social boundaries of guilt and innocence. Especially with unscreened blood at the time.

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Re:Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and En... by anon1m0us on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @08:39PM (#21209768)

Yeah, I don't think it was a lie either. It was an expectation about the future. We worry about diseases jumping demographics all the time, sometimes even from one species to another.

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Re:Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and En... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @05:35PM (#21208385)

Thank you for saying that. Conditioning on this being accurate information, I just lost that much trust in the community of scientists.

This is how "hacking" the public policymaking fucks up society. And then people are surprised antivaxxers are a thing. They are a thing because we're all being constantly manipulated, and some people just don't have the capacity or patience to separate the truth from bullshit.

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Re:Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and En... by icebraining on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @06:51PM (#21209044)

How can one even lose trust in "the community of scientists"? It's such a vague concept.

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Re:Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and En... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @07:01PM (#21209126)

WRT. "the community of scientists", I was just parroting the expression the comment I replied to used. I primarily meant medical reporting and its public policy implications.

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