So what exactly makes the Koch Brothers and Monsanto worse than Facebook (also a horrible political lobbying monster corporation)? Because they're not tech companies who your friends work at?
Facebook: ???. I guess their CEO is an arrogant, 20-something billionaire, and they play fast and loose with online privacy. They have yet to kill anyone or commit treason[1]. So there's that.
[1] Or, as they'd call it on Arrested Development, "light treason"
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!!!!!!!
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.
> 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 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.
I am not sure that the target audience for the app is identically opposed to "lobbying" and "big corporations" for any player. They might feel that there's something particularly repugnant in the goals or ideology of Koch Brothers or Monsanto that doesn't apply to Facebook. Further, you are unlikely to accidentally buy Facebook-owned breakfast cereal.
because the first has the audacity to not agree with the left and the second is a corporation who patents genetics and similar?
Really it all comes down to irrational hate by one side or the other and unfortunately this type of irrationality is best observed on sites like Hacker's News and Slashdot, Digg was bad too in its good days. The level of pretentiousness is astounding, but fortunately other than up/down/karma and bombastic posts the members of such sites do little else.
The Koch brothers are indeed very influential. Remember when they bankrolled that Libertarian Party that now controls American politics, legalized all the drugs and abolished the income tax?
Just one of many baskets they put their eggs in. It's like pointing out a single failed company to suggest the whole portfolio of them is crappy. Maybe their goal was just giving more exposure to libertarian ideas.
