reddit_refugee3
reddit_refugee3 on Hacker News
Most overdoses could be avoided by knowing exactly what you're taking, at what dose, and maybe even under supervision (like at safe injection sites; places that have gone years without a single person dying on premises).
The homeless people thing is a failure of our healthcare and housing systems.
Fentanyl only exists on the black market because drugs are illegal. Fentanyl is kind of a shit high compared to other opioids, it's only a problem because dealers are cutting their illegal drugs with it.
What it comes down to (which is what it always comes down to in capitalism), is capital. Accruing (and facilitating the accrual of) and protecting capital is the main function of the state, so it's only natural that regulations to protect regular people at the cost of a fraction of profits of the bourgeoisie, would take decades to be put in place. If ever.
Same thing goes for social media and AI. We sit back and watch as it corrodes and destroys our societies, so a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations can report profits to their shareholders every quarter.
This isn't anything new, there are people way smarter than you and I that figured this out a long time ago... Just don't say his name or else nobody will take you seriously.
The French Revolution paved the way for just about every pro-worker reform in the modern world.
And how did that "protest vote" go for the UK?
This is just the nature of capitalism. The more capital you have, the more leverage you have.
The people who actually create the product are always at a disadvantage compared to those who own the means of that production.
You can try pooling resources together to negotiate collectively (unions), but without government intervention to put a thumb on the scale to try to even the playing field for unions vs corporations, even that would usually end poorly for the people who produce the actual product (see: union busting, the Pinkertons, etc.). Historically, they may actually even straight up just kill you for trying.
Capital also equals political power (even moreso since Citizens United), and corporations use that power to do everything they can to prevent that balance from tipping any direction but theirs.
But this is why regulations exist in the first place. That's like saying we shouldn't regulate surgery, because it's always risky.
We should require certain credentials and safety measures for people who want to take civilians to the ocean floor in a tiny sub. I don't think that should be a controversial take.
The onus to make sure that a service they are going to use isn't any more dangerous than it has to be, shouldn't be on the consumer. I don't want to live in a society that thinks it's acceptable to hand-wave death and suffering away as if human lives are acceptable collateral in the "free market" correcting itself.
Customers would still understand that the thing they're going to do is super dangerous, but they should be able to rest easy knowing that the company they're using for this meets some minimal level of safety.
[...]
>this paper ought to be a hypothetical as such exposure should not happen.
Of course it shouldn't happen. We all wish bad things didn't happen...
I am having trouble wrapping my head around this comment. I don't think people are purposefully exposing themselves to the chemical... Like yeah, of course everyone hopes that they won't need to know what happens when someone is exposed to benzene, but that doesn't mean we don't study it anyway. I don't think "hypothetical" is the word here since the possibility of benzene exposure is very real.
The implication here seems to be that, as soon as you discover the negative effects of exposure to a certain chemical, that chemical is instantly no longer a threat to anybody. Just because we may have known about this ~50 years ago, doesn't mean that we can just stop worrying about it.