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points by DannyPage 2 days ago | 0 comments
It seems like you believe it was wrong for Swartz to have been prosecuted. It doesn't seem like it would serve justice to prosecute other people in the same malicious way. Doing the wrong thing now just because a wrong thing happened in the past is not how a just society operates.
[–] NegativeLatency 2 days ago
The difference here is that you have an individual with no profit motive being hounded by the government, vs a corporation with a profit motive and evidence of a continued pattern being let off with a slap on the wrist. To me that is not a just society.
[–] smallmancontrov 2 days ago
Yeah, the "profit motive makes it right" idea that permeates our culture and law is bass ackwards.
[–] fasterik 2 days ago
There is also a "profit motive makes it wrong" idea permeating at least parts of the culture, which is equally suspect. We should apply standards consistently and judge the ethics by the amount of harm that was caused.
[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago
It's not equally suspect. Profit seeking behavior, left unchecked, yields problematic outcomes rather quickly. Unmonetized actions don't seem to have this tendency. Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line. Until we can find a way to bias our economic outputs away from things that harm and towards things that help, guilty until proven innocent is the right heuristic for profit seekers.
[–] gbacon 2 days ago
> Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line.

Who? Name names. You are making a bold, broad claim. Who are these specific people against whom you have specific evidence of their willingness to “distribute contaminated food … quite readily in service to their bottom line”?

[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago
The incident I had in mind is described here: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...

A quote from that page:

> FDA’s leading hypothesis remains that this was likely an act of economically motivated adulteration.

Maybe the cinnamon case was an isolated incident, but the use of lead compounds to change a food's color is a trend. Per https://www.npr.org/2024/10/24/nx-s1-5119336/cinnamon-lead-f...

> We're aware of this practice in turmeric, where lead chromate has been added to enhance the color

Are you actually going to argue that people don't do things that are unsafe for others when money is on the line? We're living in an ocean of evidence that it happens.

[–] gbacon 1 day ago
When asked for specifics about the evidently irresponsible charge that you made, you answered with conjectures.
[–] preg_match 2 days ago
It's a thing, it's called food fraud. Happens commonly these days with various spices, which are often cut with metals to increase their weight. Sometimes those metals are heavy metals, which are obviously bad for you.

Historically this happened to basically all food. Meat was sold rotten, meat was pumped with water for volume, people lied about what meat they were selling, meat was glued together with other meat to create reconstituted cuts that were sold as whole, and on and on. We had exposes, The Jungle, and now that basically doesn't exist because of the FDA.

But, in countries without an FDA equivalent, you can imagine that food fraud runs wild. It ran wild in the US, too, and I think it's fair to say that the only thing limiting it isn't morals, it's the FDA and regulatory framework we've built.

[–] gbacon 1 day ago
Name names; name and shame. Be specific about the charge you’re making. I’m not interested in the handwaving.

I assume that you understand that The Jungle was a work of fiction and that Ida Tarbell’s father was a failed oilman.

[–] fasterik 2 days ago
"Guilty until proven innocent" is an authoritarian, quasi-Stalinist view. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with seeking profit, and most people who do so are completely within ethical bounds. For the ones who do unethical things, we have laws and courts to decide that and to punish them appropriately.
[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago
Maybe not intrinsically, but until it stops hurting people in practice, we are going to remain suspicious.
[–] gbacon 2 days ago
It is not profit motive but public choice economics, from which we see that state actors and agencies act in their own interest. The difference is a defenseless individual being bullied by an overly zealous official who thought she had something to gain by beating up a nerd versus an organization picking on someone their own size.
[–] throwitaway222 2 days ago
I actually think we should maximally punish people for breaking the law if the law exists. And remove or edit the law if it no longer serves the people. The way we go about this stuff is that we let people break laws until it serves some purpose. Instead we should remove or edit the laws.

Otherwise we're creating a system where it is unfair for some people.

[–] Vaushite 2 days ago
I think they're just pointing out how the wrong thing always happens to the little guy.
[–] acuteaura 2 days ago
You’d have some standing if Anthropic actually acted in the interest of the public.
[–] TheCoelacanth 2 days ago
Anthropic has ample resources to fight this law if it is unjust. They should get vigorous, to-the-letter enforcement of the law to stress-test it for people who don't have the same level of resources.

Selective application of the law in favor of the rich and powerful is a perversion of justice, even if it does sometimes result in more just outcomes in individual cases.