You don't need historians to see the crisis as it was happening and as it's ongoing, the only question we need to ask is how long should the people held accountable be in prison for?

For abusing democratic offices the penalty should be at least one decade in keeping up with ancient Athenian democratic traditions.

optimistic, this requires the arc of history to bend towards non-fascism.

> From 11 to 3 employees. Doesn't seem that outrageous outside

I hope I never have you as my manager If you think a ~70% reduction in head count isn't outrageous.

The thing about crises is by the time you’re in them, they’re gonna cost way more to clean up than just not getting there in the first place.

Sounds like the lag time between going from 11 to 3 employees and having an outbreak was ~a year, so unless this is wrapped up fast enough and cheaply enough to cost less than 8 FTEs, we didn’t save a whole lot of money and we caused a whole lot of distress, so it’s hard to really call this a win.

While you're at it, give AI to the 3 employees and they will do the work of 30 /s

It's in the subheading:

> “Based on simple math, these outbreak responses—which require rapid, timely responses—are going to be greatly diminished,” the former CDC lab director tells WIRED.

Do you think that cutting funding to a lab would improve or hinder its ability to react to an outbreak like this one?

You think an agency with less people can more capably do its job? Come on now.

Surely the burden of proof here is proving that a 70% headcount reduction doesn’t make a difference.

what would make you think that a downsized lab can do the same amount of work

As engineers we know that you can't catch everything. You build resilient systems by learning from your failures and investing/iterating in better practices over time. If you want to find out how to sabotage your company really quickly, just throw a bunch of politically radicalized interns with stupid red hats at your testing, QA, dev/ops, security, customer success (+etc) procedures, slash budgets, randomly, delete test suites and see where you land. Then when things go wrong, make sure your defense is "well we don't know they would have caught anything anyway."

The cuts were actual. There's no sense in calling something that is a matter of open public record which has been widely reported on "alleged."

I understand MAGA types like to fall over themselves to evade responsibility for their actions, because they think truth is a shell game and reality has no meaningful consequences if you deny them loudly enough (see: deaths due to science denialism during the covid response and shilling of bro-science alternative medicine, upsurge in preventable illnesses like measles due to vaccine denialism, brain drain from the insane gutting of public research funding institutions and cynical re-alignment of said institutions around corporations that donated to the presidency, drastic consequences of global warming, consequences of 2A zealotry in the form of school and other mass shootings... and so on and so forth).

The hard reality is that we've been trying to get a handle on food safety for over a century. It is incredibly laborious, difficult work that requires knowledge of the many and various ways contaminants make it into the food supply, how food producers like Taylor Farms obfuscate or lie to avoid legal liability or costly regulation, and knowledge of the law and how to shape and administer it effectively. If you slash regulatory agencies that have emerged over decades to own and shepherd this work, you're going to have to own up to a lot of nasty shit over the next few decades.

In my state, water pollution was so bad in the 70s and 80s you couldn't swim in major lakes and streams. Now you can. We got there through sustained public investment in regulation and oversight. We need more of that, not less.

How important to your diet is that lettuce? Do you want to get fat eating bread all the time or can you stick your burger on that lettuce leaf? Done.

The header is the standard, which allows us to even have this conversation about tracking sources.

also, allergies pride parade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhaUKnt1Zmw

The new QR codes (to replace the 2D UPCs) that manufacturers and merchants are moving to will contain source information and even which lot it came from.

I don't know what is legally required, but many in the industry want that. The better we can identify where something comes from the better we can contain issues if we find them later.

It’s not but they should list country of origin for the ingredients

It's crazy how nothing has been done in the US about this. I got an egg allergy in my late 20s, I had never thought about it before and now eating at restaurants is such a hassle. Even the delivery apps seem to have zero affordances for food allergies, at least with a restaurant you can get some assurance by asking the staff.

Good. Restaurants are hectic to work in. Menus can change quickly, and many dishes are being cooked and prepped at once. Cross contamination chances are high, so if a restaurant MUST say an allergen is not in X,Y,Z they basically can't have it in their restaurant at all.

They have to in EU!

https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/campaign-2026/allergie...

But you understand that if it were required, everyplace that doesn’t specify today, would slap allergens on the whole menu.

I think if you watch video of a massive meatpacking plant, you'll pretty quickly realize how hard it would be to track. At the commodity scale, basically no one in the supply chain other than the rancher seems to care where the meat comes from. And the brands (Tyson, Smithfield, etc.) only want consumers to care about the logo on the box.

Literally the canonical example of capitalism-as-meat-grinder.

We have enough “restaurants” that fry an egg. We can do that ourselves. Running a proper business requires such formalities to not kill your customers. If knowing about your craft is too hard - allergies is a major part of it - then you shouldn’t be in this business.

How hard would it be for them to know their immediate supplier?

I've thought about this a lot as it's effectively my idea of Origin Marks (not the same as the curvy OM/GI system), that are like trade marks but they serve the consumer rather than the companies.

Anyway, all companies have lists of what they buy and who from in their accounts - and their banks and suppliers can corroborate those details.

I think I'd provide limits for micro-businesses (1-2 employees, below the VAT threshold in UK), and maybe have limited reporting for SMEs too. Only listing all suppliers, say.

But for larger businesses, they should list the goods/services they use and the origin of all inputs to a product (including energy). Down to the factory, not a trade mark, the actual inputs.

Companies already keep all this information.

Capitalism supposedly optimises markets, but it can't do anything like that without full information. I mean the psychological manipulation of 'brand marketing' also opposes the supposed optimisations of capitalism too, but that's another story.

All this information is already maintained, it's just not exposed for the public.

What farm was my chicken produced on? Then I can look at that farm to see if they bought a tonne of penicillin, or a GM feed. I can look at the farm to see if they have outside access for the birds, say.

We can also readily graph essential businesses for food security, and new companies can easily find suppliers, B2B companies can find gaps and opportunities - the whole web of production can be mapped this way.

You can also spot corruption and loss. Consumers can avoid companies that use upstream suppliers they disprove of - like if a footwear company has a factory in an area known for human rights abuses, that's now public info, I can check it out if I want.

Anyway, restaurants already have to know the origin of their goods for pubic health purposes, codifying can just mean the suppliers send them an enhanced receipt that the restaurant catenates with others and uploads to the government, that can be done as part of the same process as finance reporting.

If you're buying chicken out the back of a van in an alley then you're going to have extra work; if you're just using standard supply chains it should all work pretty seamlessly.

Such are the wages of destroying trust in the supply chain.

When you elect visibly corrupt people who promised to destroy that trust upstream, you double the burden for everyone downstream from them.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

If we can't figure out a way as a society to honestly tell people what food is being sold in restaurants, maybe we shouldn't be starting new restaurants until we figure that out.

Ha! Seems like I am living in one these days.

It seems that cyclospora normally averages about a week between ingestion and making its presence known.

This is, in my opinion, something that qualifies as being a long time.

They fired 8 people that were in response roles, not preventative.

Isn't the "explosive" superfluous?

Isn't all diarrhea explosive? Has anyone had "unexplosive" diarrhea? Or what aspect of the ordinance renders it "explosive"? And the cause is essentially exposure of the foodstuffs (in this case, likely leafy greens) to feces?

So poop causes poop.

Who pooped in my salad :(

Fiat currency (including bitcoin) is a bigger ponzi, and the stock market (including crypto project tokens) is a bigger ponzi than that.

Mostly to be a pedantic devil's advocate here, I'm going to argue with something you're not saying. I've heard a _lot_ of people argue that the visit is _proof_ of corruption. You're just pointing out the possibility and I'm hoping to head off a bad path.

Anyway, if a company is being declared the source of a multi-state outbreak, that company _should_ be talking to the WH. And it's possible that some of those discussions would present evidence that _should_ result in a retraction.

For example, during heartbleed my grand-boss was in on calls with the WH (I don't work on openssl, at the time I worked on a product that _used_ openssl a couple of layers down). AIUI, official guidance changed because of those calls.

If we want to find proof of corruption, this is a place to start looking, not a place to stop.

Thanks.

Sportsball reference, permaban?

There's nothing wrong with "engaging with" the identity of someone when their identity is both reprehensible and negates any impartiality.

Companies can prioritize things other that money if the shareholders all agree. The more shareholders a company has, the harder it is for them all to agree on anything aside from "we want more money". Family-owned business often (but not always) have a small number of shareholders, so it's easier for them to have shared values.

For example, my brother and I co-own a smallish (~$5 million/year revenue) software business. We do care about money to some extent, but we regularly agree to do things that work against shareholder value because we also care about things other than money. With two people, it's easy for our values to be aligned on those other things.

With dozens or more shareholders, that's basically impossible. A publicly traded company couldn't realistically be like "hey shareholders, can we agree that we care a lot about this niche local political issue in the town the company was founded?" The more shareholders you have, the more the only commonality between them is "we want more money".

There are many family-owned businesses that are only in it for the money, but "family-owned" can be a proxy for "not very many shareholders" which at least opens the door for the company to have non-financial priorities.

if anything they are even more tight fisted because every penny is theirs.

publicly traded/vc funded companies have always paid me the most because the money isn’t really theirs.

Every family-owned company I've worked for has been owned by a greedy family.

Right. By those stretches, the Sinaloa Cartel and Saudi Aramco could advertise as "family owned"

SpaceX is more “family owned” than Walmart.

Which wouldn’t help in this case. It seems like it is time to irradiate produce.

Yes. Using forced prison labor is using slave labor.

I scanned the post on pangram and got the same result. Also, I'm not sure about you, but using AI tools for AI detection seems more rigorous than people going based off counting how many em-dashes there are and similar vibes.

You shouldn't. You should instead take note of "it's not X, it's Y" and em-dashes.

It seems plausible that someone could make a decent discriminator for distinguishing human text from AI text. I wouldn't immediately discount the idea.