Actually I think the opposite is true in many cases. Food quality and safety standards are higher than ever.
This stuff sticks out because it’s getting caught and called out. There was a time when information spread slowly, tracking supply chains was basically impossible, and many businesses would do shady things because they knew they were unlikely to get caught.
Now we can sample things like honey with lab equipment that is basically magic compared to technology 50 years ago, so these things are getting caught. We also have the internet to share stories, so they’re getting seen.
So while people are becoming more aware, I think these things are actually better than in the past.
It’s high trust in very specific ways. Walk into a supermarket and a box of X name brand whatever and it’s 99.99% guaranteed to be manufactured by the company it says on the box and be safe to consume no need for holographic stickers or whatnot.
However, pick up a high value product and it’s likely to be some effectively identical fake while still being sold by the company it says on the box. An expensive restaurant is quite likely to be selling you fish when it says it’s fish but it may not be the correct species of fish etc etc.
Eating at a random food truck is safe because we care a lot about safety, but let the buyer beware around just about anything else.
> However, pick up a high value product and it’s likely to be some effectively identical fake while still being sold by the company it says on the box.
What is this supposed to mean? Every high value product I purchase is definitely unique to the company that makes it. My laptop, GPU, car, and phone are definitely not some rebranded items.
It’s hard to sell a counterfeit car or GPU without someone noticing a difference.
Clothes, chargers, cables, etc are counterfeit because it isn’t nearly as obvious.
Name brand foods often come with significant markups and would be fairly easy to counterfeit premium bottled water etc. Except as the article mentions food substitutes generally happen earlier in the supply chain not at the grocery store.
The reverse also happens, knock-offs being as high quality as the name-brand because it's cheaper on the production side to use existing factories/machinery.
Actually I think the opposite is true in many cases. Food quality and safety standards are higher than ever.
You are correct. At least in the United States.
There was a university agronomist on the radio a couple of weeks ago talking about how people get all worked up about food recalls. They act like there are more of them than ever before.
She said the amazing thing is that there aren't more recalls, since we produce and consume so much food than ever with so much involved in the process.
She says the system isn't perfect (no system ever is), but it's far better than what we've had in the past and the results are remarkable.
It’s fascinating how the 24/7 news cycle and social media have convinced so many people that everything is awful.
I still hear younger coworkers snidely remark that the US is an “third world country with cellphones” while they live a lifestyle with safety, comfort, and luxury that puts them in the top 1% of people in the world. It’s wild.
My thought would be that it's as much the fact that society is growing. It used to be we'd buy our food from the producers of it. If it was bad, word would get around and the 10-50 people that were buying from them would stop; and they'd be out of business. Then society grew and we got local stores. And, while the same _idea_ was true, there was a lot more people and word didn't get around as much; so the impact was smaller. Then big stores, major chains, and you and your 100 friends that know something is bad... don't matter to them very much. Then online retailers and now nobody matters to them. If word they they're cheating people gets out, they change the name of their business and they're fine again.
So sure, the pursuit of profits is impactful; but the lack of repercussions (when making choices that hurt others) is a pretty major player, too.
I'm increasingly convinced this switches cause and effect. Focusing on profit above all is a capitalist manifestation of an authoritarian zero-sum society; in state socialism it manifests as top-down anti-worker state focused on metrics and productivity. (In both cases a major problem is an absence of labor unions and formally independent oversight. People forget that Lenin killed workers who went on strike.)
I get annoyed at "capitalism is bad for the environment" because it ignores the Soviets' environmental devastation, which was done in the name of improving society. The truth is that environmentalism is a distinct ideology from purely economic concerns, and it wasn't until the 60s that environmentalism became a left-liberal agenda item. I think it is similar with authoritarianism versus democracy. Democratic capitalists work for their workers; authoritarian capitalists work for their investors.
Just beware that plenty of people are pretending to be "Democratic capitalists" and saying they work for you and even do things that look very good - but the end result is not good for you. Even in the case someone is honestly trying to work for you uintended consequences of their actions can be worse for you.
And yet, this has happened since we've been around.
One of the most ancient examples of the written words we have is from a copper merchant complaining about the quality of the ingots he received[1]. The tablet could just as easily have been a complaint about the quality of honey purchased.
I'd argue there is much more fraud with product coming from china than what is locally produced. Fraud always existed but now it's more prevalent than before, simply because some countries don't really try to enforce simple rules.
For instance, Chinese mother refuse to buy powder milk in china since there has been so much fraud. Manufacturer put melamine (a plastic chemical) in powder milk for years to make them appear with more protein than reality, inducing kidney damage to newborn.
That kind of thing doesn't happen in civilized society, this require a complete lack of morality and wide corruption.
We used to sell _literal_ "snake oil" as a curative.
What you may actually be witnessing is a low awareness society turn into a high awareness one. What is being highlighted is you never should have had that trust in the first place.
And the funny thing is that the actual (or of you prefer, literal) snake oil, from Chinese water snakes, likely had at least some therapeutic properties. But much of what was sold as snake oil was itself adulterated (other animal oils, vegetable oils, or quite often, petroleum-based oil).
Actual snake oil in the 1800s came from Chinese water snakes, and Chinese laborers who immigrated to the U.S. shared it with fellow workers as they helped build the transcontinental railroad. This type of snake oil, Pedersen says, was indeed an effective anti-inflammatory.... Enter the mysterious Clark Stanley in 1893.... Standing on stage in front of a growing crowd, Stanley pulled a rattlesnake out of a sack resting near his feet. In dramatic fashion, he slit the rattlesnake open with a knife, placed the snake in a vat of boiling water, and watched as its fat rose to the surface. Stanley sold his product, dubbed “Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment,” in liniment jars, boasting about its healing powers. Of course, Stanley’s snake oil was a marketing gimmick from the very start.
Stanley's oil's actual ingredients: "mineral oil, beef fat, red pepper and turpentine". (Above article).
His and others' deceptive practices lead to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.
Exactly. Food purity and safety has probably never been higher. 100 years ago there was widespread adulteration and contamination of food, in addition to pure snake oil sold as beneficial medication.
I could imagine more adulteration happening as globalization goes up, because traceability gets so much more difficult.
Food safety has probably gone up over the past 30 years. But I suspect adulteration has too.
The exact thing in question might be slightly different, but nothing is new.
In the case of rents, the evil landlord raising rents and kicking people out is a trope you see in 1910s fiction. (probably before that, but I haven't personally read much fiction older than about 1910)
The original claim that Michelangelo11 made is that society in the past was higher trust. That's the claim that needs evidence. The person who disagrees with the initial claim is not the one who needs to initially provide evidence.
I generally agree, but someone making another claim in response also needs evidence. If the response was, 'what is the evidence?', that would be different.
How do I reconcile my claim that Michelangelo11 is looking at the past with rose colored glasses against your observation that things were much worse 100 years ago? These views are the same. There is nothing for me to reconcile.
I did not express my idea clearly. The narrative is that the past was awful, and to a degree that it sounds cartoonish. I personally think it's smelling like propaganda: "You think it's bad now? Well you should be grateful. Before we came around life was unlivable, etc."
So I'm asking why you think nostalgia is more powerful than:
1. the dominant narrative
2. The possibility of that narrative being true and living it.
Old people are not easily scammed because they are inherently stupid. It's because they grew up in a time when fewer people were trying to scam them, and are not on guard. I don't think seniors from the Soviet Union have this problem.
The phrase "a sucker born every minute" is not near as old as "caveat emptor" or "cui bono", but the constancy of viewpoint should have told you something
> I recently read The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe, which I loved, especially because he tries to replicate ancient alchemical recipes in his own lab. And sometimes he succeeds! For instance, he attempts to make the “sulfur of antimony” by following the instructions in The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (Der Triumph-Wagen Antimonii), written by an alchemist named Basil Valentine sometime around the year 1600. At first, all Principe gets is a “dirty gray lump”. Then he realizes the recipe calls for “Hungarian antimony,” so instead of using pure lab-grade antimony, he literally orders some raw Eastern European ore, and suddenly the reaction works! It turns out the Hungarian dirt is special because it contains a bit of silicon dioxide, something Basil Valentine couldn’t have known.
> No wonder alchemists thought they were dealing with mysterious forces beyond the realm of human understanding. To them, that’s exactly what they were doing! If you don’t realize that your ore is lacking silicon dioxide—because you don’t even have the concept of silicon dioxide—then a reaction that worked one time might not work a second time, you’ll have no idea why that happened, and you’ll go nuts looking for explanations. Maybe Venus was in the wrong position? Maybe I didn’t approach my work with a pure enough heart? Or maybe my antimony was poisoned by a demon!
> An alchemist working in the year 1600 would have been justified in thinking that the physical world was too hopelessly complex to ever be understood—random, even. One day you get the sulfur of antimony, the next day you get a dirty gray lump, nobody knows why, and nobody will ever know why. And yet everything they did turned out to be governed by laws—laws that were discovered by humans, laws that are now taught in high school chemistry. Things seem random until you understand ‘em.
Well, this example doesn't just fail to support the argument, but undercuts it. Basil successfully identified the kind of antimony that would work, -despite- having no concept of sulfur dioxide. He did not write down something like "not all kinds of antimony work for this recipe, so get a bunch of different kinds and try them all" -- that, or a stronger version ("sometimes the recipe fails, we don't know why"), would support the author's point.
So we're left with the author trying to argue that this alchemist thought the world was "too hopelessly complex to ever be understood" on the basis of ... the alchemist correctly identifying the ingredient that would make the recipe work.
Yes, agree 100% with the "practice over and over" approach (I'm reminded of the "50 pounds of pots" story, shared by Derek Sivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097663 ). I already do that, I'm just looking for sources to supplement it.
> Brutalism is an architectural style of the 20th century that mainly uses concrete as a building material. The term "brutalism" comes from the French expression "béton brut", which means "raw concrete".
This is very, very long, and I've read about the first third while skimming the rest. (In general, Venkatesh's essays tend to be enormously padded with a very low signal-to-noise ratio, so this isn't too surprising.) That said, my impression is that you could condense this essay to, roughly, the following:
"It's always optimal to leave some energy aside rather than use it to increase performance in areas where you want higher performance, since your environment is more unpredictable than you think, no matter how unpredictable you already think it is."
Stated this way, it feels relatively trite for anyone who's already spent some time thinking about this sort of thing, and also largely unobjectionable (you could argue for some caveats, e.g. in situations when you're putting energy into increasing your energy capacity, foom-style).
Would anyone here disagree? If you think I've missed something important or I'm not giving the essay enough credit, I'd be really curious to hear your points.
"Shortly after my book was in print, I began to reread Gibbon, ... and after I started it occurred to me to count the errors that his expert editor, J. B. Bury, recorded in the footnotes. I do not mean misstatements due to later research, but Gibbon's errors in using his own sources – wrong names, taking a town for a man, saying the opposite of what the cited source plainly says. I found 20 such in volume 1, forty in vol. 2, 20 again in 3, at which halfway point I stopped. And the curious thing is that the text with these blemishes is of Gibbon's own revised edition. But even so, there is nothing like Gibbon, Burckhardt, and others whose work is or was thus pockmarked."
