How can you poison people with DDT? DDT is harmless to humans. It's been eaten in large doses to demonstrate this point.

The only harm involved with DDT is the millions of poor mostly-non-white people dead from malaria (including many children) because of the irrationality of some privileged wealthier mostly-white people (not including many children).

For more info start with http://industrialprogress.com/2012/01/26/the-story-of-ddt/ and google.

    Alex Epstein is the director of the Center for
    Industrial Progress, an organization he founded
    in 2011. Its mission is to "inspire Americans to
    embrace industrial progress as a cultural ideal."
    He is also a blogger at Master Resource, a "Free
    Market Energy Blog," and a past fellow of the Ayn
    Rand Institute, an organization that has received
    funding from the Koch Foundations including at
    least $50,000 between 2005 and 2010.

http://www.desmogblog.com/alex-epstein

Some of my favorite blog post titles of his:

* Coal is Clean: http://industrialprogress.com/2012/03/12/coal-is-clean/

* Keep Our "Addiction" to Oil, End Our Allergy to Self-Assertion: http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr005=zvtlch4...

* Why We Should Love the Oil Companies: http://www.masterresource.org/2012/06/love-oil-companies-edu... (I think this might be my favorite for its shades of Dr. Strangelove's subtitle)

This is simply not true. There are scads of studies that have established DDT's potential for human toxicity in diabetes and cancer. Not only that, DDT's LD50 is not particularly large.

Salesmen used to drink large amounts of organophosphates to show farmers it was harmless -- now we know that class of peaticides cause serious neurological disorders.

Source?

Or more importantly, where is the evidence that exposure to much lower dosages of DDT causes more harms than millions dead of malaria?

Yeah, but malaria mostly only kills (tens of millions of) children in poor countries in Africa and Asia so it's of no concern to right-thinking environmentalists in rich Western countries.

You're exaggerating. Malaria is a killer, but it's not tens of millions of children per year. The WHO estimates a number just shy of a million, about 50% children. That's still a sizable number and in principle you're right - most of them are in poor countries.

However, the mechanisms that drive this are more complex. A grossly simplified version goes like this: Since the population that's hit worst has no buying power, no pharmaceutical company is interested in developing a vaccine or an effective, cheap treatment. Malaria is very much a poor peoples illness due to a variety of contributing factors: No access to effective treatment, no access to mosquito nets, no proper hygienic conditions, no enclosed living spaces that keep mosquitos out.

Just spraying DDT on every swamp in Africa is not a solution to the problem. DDT accumulates in the food chain, mostly in fat and gets fed to the children you're trying to protect via the mothers milk. It is linked to an increased rate of stillborn and cancer. It's really not the kind of stuff you'd want to use if there's any alternative.

So, you're going to boycott every other company that dumped PCBs and pesticides and other carcinogens into groundwater, right?

Where did I say I was boycotting anything? I was merely explaining why I think Monsanto and the Koch brothers are worse than Facebook.

My mistake, sorry. Tech has an unjustifiably positive view of its own long-term environmental impact, so, hotbutton.

All good, apologies for the rude tone. I feel like I've had increasing issues with people misinterpreting or misreading my comments on here lately. I took that out on you unnecessarily. Cheers.

edit: really, i'm getting downvoted by someone for civility?

Explicit displays of civility always get upvoted over the long term, but anything anybody writes will get downvoted at some point. Best not to think about it.

My guess is that someone on a phone accidentally down-voted you when they wanted to up-vote. Those little arrows are... well... little!

you're probably getting downvoted (not by me) for implying that anybody on HN might misinterpret or misread your comment. because obviously IT'S YOUR FAULT FOR WRITING THE KIND OF COMMENT THAT COULD BE MISINTERPRETED YOU LOSER!!!!!!!!!

The Bloomberg story on the Koch Brothers is a complete smear job: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/09/bloomberg-legi...

Statists don't like the Koch's because they hate anyone who believes that people should be free to make their own decisions without being ordered about by small-minded busybodies whose self-image depends on the delusion that they know what's best for everyone else. And rather than engage in debate, they find it much easier to just demonize their opponents with dishonest ad hominim attacks.

Ad hominem as in "small-minded busybodies"? The irony...

> people should be free to make their own decisions without being ordered about by small-minded busybodies whose self-image depends on the delusion that they know what's best for everyone else

You do know they funded the Tea Party.

And that would be bad how? I should ask where you got all your information on the Tea Party since it seems like there is more than one smear job going.