> Because their customers, who they built a trusting relationship with, get hosed when the owner wants to cash out.
Sure, and it's often a real loss to customers, but are you suggesting mandating that you vet the person you're selling to for their business aspirations and then have some kind of legal covenant that binds them to those stated aspirations, enforced by...something?
Otherwise we can just be satisfied with shaming them, but seems like an awfully convenient way to sidetrack this conversation from the obvious remedies.
> That cash out comes from the future business increasing profit, which is over the longest term cutting service quality.
Which is a problem when the same person buying also bought up all the other dentist offices, so there's no choice, let alone competition, in services.
Eliminate that and the sweetheart buyout offers make a lot less financial sense and we can at least prevent the scales from tippng so steeply toward PE buying up all the dentists, hospitals, retirement homes, HVAC repair, roofing companies, pest control, etc etc
> Because their customers, who they built a trusting relationship with, get hosed when the owner wants to cash out.
Unfortunately people are mortal and everything ends. Even if a someone didn't sell their business to PE, the trusting relationship is over once they retire. There's no guarantee that someone new - even if vetted - is going to be as good as the previous owner.
> This is assigning intent without evidence, as is common in tribal politics
You are calling for constructive discourse and yet your response is an accusation of dishonesty. A non-charged assessment might use the phrase "without presenting evidence".
Not sure if you're trying to be clever (in which case I'd encourage you to just say what you mean next time), but financially penalizing a company for bad behavior absolutely is one way to pierce the corporate veil and ensure workers aligned with corporate health (through things like stock, continued employment, etc) are also aligned with societal health.
I mean it'd be less divided insofar as the minority would be more thoroughly subjugated by the state. No pesky federal government getting in the way. Though that's probably not a good thing.
> Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance.
You're responding to someone who's explaining to you that this is exactly the problem.
If an extremist can do whatever they want if they happen to excite people with a "platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans", then the problem is structural, and has to be addressed there, or literally everything you do and have can be undone by the next moron that riles people up again.
Brass tacks, if an institution has an overwhelming political leaning toward faction X and works to undermine faction Y, is it really surprising that when Y gets into power it attempts to damage the institution? This is precisely why publicly funded institutions should maintain agnostic political posture.
What fantasy world do you live in? I want to be there, the world I'm everything granted to the public is always under constant attack and threatened to be destroyed and their proponents destroy and their benefactors humiliated.
> Maybe he should have stuck with it a while longer. We cannot say for certain that it would always have failed.
Well, their execution was also very expensive and yet garbage, which is crazy with how many insanely talented people they had to work on it at one point or the other. It seems pretty clear cut as executive failure.
This does not say that and it's irresponsible to summarize it that way. That's a letter addressing a specific study from 2024 (which did record baseline levels because that's a standard experimental design step), arguing that it used an inadequate control so may have had background contamination when reporting the level of microplastics found in bottled water.
A "cohort of core studies" were not involved, and nothing was "judged to have invalid methodology". The study authors also replied, arguing that their choice of blanks was actually the better one: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2415874121
There's been a slightly weird trend of people on HN that seem so eager to judge the microplastic story as overblown and unsupported that they're overstating and overextrapolating the smallest counter evidence into its own competing narrative, as if what we needed were more narratives. Resist this! That's not how good science or science communication is done.
I respectfully disagree, this was a commonly cited technique for measuring microplastics, which is why it calls into question many studies. Thanks for calling me weird :) I guess the suggestion though is I'm paid by big plastic or something, no infact I'm just a guy reading papers who is scared of death like everyone else.
> I respectfully disagree, this was a commonly cited technique for measuring microplastics, which is why it calls into question many studies.
What exactly was a commonly cited technique and where is this citation?
Regardless, you said "invalid methodology due to not recording baseline microplastic levels" when that was not the case and wasn't the letter's objection to the study's methodology.
> Thanks for calling me weird :) I guess the suggestion though is I'm paid by big plastic or something, no infact I'm just a guy reading papers who is scared of death like everyone else.
I said the trend was weird, but feel free to pick another adjective. Self contradictory, for instance. Sick of people overextrapolating from these "bombshell" microplastic papers, I will now overextrapolate from these "bombshell" methodological papers.
Look at the publications of the author of that letter and Cassandra Rauert, the lead author of the paper on detecting plastics in human blood that you linked below. Both of them have several publications on the almost universal contamination of the planet with microplastics and are clearly worried about the impact of this. Them insisting on and helping with better science from their colleagues is not laying the question to rest, it's a call to more rigorous action (literally[2]). It is scientific malpractice to call that "growing evidence that there is much less to worry about on microplastics".
I've heavily couched my language and not claimed authority. If you are looking for examples of irresponsible communication, look inward. You've mixed real quotes from me with ones you've injected ""bombshell"". I purposefully did not use such language. I get this is an issue that can emote, and I respect your view. Perhaps you've underestimated how much of your view I share.
> However, I have sadly come to feel that many journalists who write about science, and perhaps even some scientists, see their role as activism toward a specific outcome rather than discovering and describing reality as it exists.
That's not a feeling, for journalism anyway it's an explicit fact. The Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) - the primary agency that reviews and accredits journalism programs across the United States and whose mandates directly shape the curricula of over 100 universities - has changed their standards over the years away from emphasis on truth and towards emphasis on advocating change to institute certain policies. See https://www.acejmc.org/about/strategic-plan . They still mention truth, but almost tangentially among long lists of outcomes that journalists must pursue. The current generation of journalists were trained by these principles.
The Associated Press (AP) StyleBook https://www.apstylebook.com/ similarly polices the language that journalists use to favor certain policy outcomes, with some news organizations requiring compliance as a condition of employment.
It’s literally the last clause of the last item, basically an afterthought.
> 1. Reimagine teaching and learning of journalism/communication to serve the public.
> 2. Forge diverse and inclusive programs where differences are celebrated, equity
is pursued, and diverse communities are served through improved
communication and journalism instruction.
> 3. Relentlessly strive to assure information integrity, assuring that truth is
gathered and reported.
an explicit mention in their vision* statement is hardly an afterthought. it’s also the second item in their multi-point action plan. and other mentions elsewhere.
But what exactly are you fighting for? What benefits are there to plastic food packaging, plastic kitchen utensils, kitchenware/food storage, clothing?
Plastic packaging made 20% of EU's total packaging waste in 2023 out of which 42% were recycled/downcycled. Personally plastic food packaging is the biggest portion of my family's waste output.
Plastic kitchen utensils like black plastic ladles are not durable (they break easily), and visibly degrade when exposed to heat or acidic food, unlike metal or wooden counterparts...
Plastic kitchenware and food storage containers are also considerably less durable than equivalent metal or glass products. They also stain and degrade when in contact with acidic or other specific foods...
I take it you've worn synthetic clothes, need I go into detail about how uncomfortable that is?
On top of that, most of these are tied with fossil fuel supply and prices, and you can see for yourself what's going on with that right now...
p.s. I'm pretty sure use of metal, glass, and wood is not marxism...
My point is that limiting plastic use (especially single-use plastic) is a win in my book even if it is ultimately done for the wrong reason. Thus it's not worth my time going out of my way to disprove specific research that still ultimately points out the need to curtail plastic use...
What benefits? Single use plastics have one purpose and one purpose only: allow for fossil fuel producers to dispose of the ethane byproduct that accumulates during extraction. They get paid for the disposal vs having to process it as waste themselves.
Why would the retiring dentist selling their practice be a trust or collusion problem?
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