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.
Well, I said historians because I don’t think that will happen anytime soon. The US is almost completely captured. The time to send people to prison was during the previous administration. I still cannot believe that Americans re-elected a literal failed insurrectionist
I agree, if people voted for this I wouldn’t expect any ramifications at all. People have to be so far gone to have actually wanted this that they’re not just going to change their mind.
DOGE is simply a tool of global capital, and shouldn't be singled out as the root cause of anything. Its purpose was to cut money from being redistributed through government programs, so it could go to the financial markets instead via tax cuts for the wealthiests and inefficient defense contracts. It achieved its goal wonderfully.
Well, there will at least be historians in other countries covering the downfall in detail, if there is indeed a bigger downfall than has already happened.
Democracies are pretty good at studying the failures of other countries and learning about them.
That's always an open question. Fascism does frequently collapse into other authoritarian regimes, too. But fascism itself will always fail.
It is a movement motivated by the petty grievances of cowards and fools, and the same hate and violence they project outward always turns inward at the end.
Fair. Though based on previous experiments fascist regimes aren’t that stable and competent, they have a tendency to self-destruct once they are in power. It’s a sad state of affairs that is considered optimistic
From 11 to 3 employees. Doesn't seem that outrageous outside of such a time of crisis (since this lab seem dedicated solely to outbreaks, not research), which is when the parent entity should temporarily allocate more people.
I've worked along scientists a few times, many twiddling their thumbs and coasting along on the back of their PhD. No idea if this applies here, mind you, but I don't see an innate need for that many people, even if this disease has major outbreaks (let's say > 50 cases) every few years.
Impressive judgment from someone who presumably has no knowledge of the types of problems the lab was addressing, the scope of research, the actual individuals employed, or the prior and anticipated impact of their work. This was the whole problem with DOGE: cuts were indiscriminate and based more on feels than factual data. I won't posit that those cuts were all downside - but we will be paying to discover which were really needed for years to come.
You should have mentioned this up front so we all knew you were fully qualified to understand the staffing needs of critical governmental health organizations.
We've discovered that ambulance drivers are only driving people to hospital for 5% of the week. As such we've cut the 20 staff that used to give 120% coverage to 5. The 4 days of coverage is still more than 8x more than needed to cover working 5% of the week, so obviously we don't expect any deaths on the days we don't have any ambulance drivers working.
In the unlikely event excess ambulance drivers are needed we'll temporarily hire them on an ad hoc basis at double the normal rate. They will obviously happily jump on this opportunity, working less than 5% of the year at double pay is much better for just those hours than being paid 60% of what you'd get as an ambulance driver in another career all year round and actually being able to afford your mortgage.
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.
That ignores that point that this department only activates after the outbreak has started, so if it was increased to 100 people it wouldn’t have prevented the crisis.
> “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.
They’re not thinking. They like the cuts, and DOGE, and musk, and the feel of that boot coming down on the neck. So they’re making post hoc rationalizations for everything.
It’s certainly not motivated by principles or a concern for reality.
Some people think that the only ones downsized were the “dead weight”, so therefore, with them and their bureaucracy out of the way, the remaining people will be faster and better able to do their real work. From what I’ve seen, this is not the case. If anything, the opposite may have happened.
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.
It's worth noting that Taylor Farms consumer bagged salads are consistently marked, in the form of an alphanumeric code printed on the bag near the sell-by date.
When this code begins with TF (like, say, the TFRB182A11B I had on a bag in my fridge last month), it's a Taylor Farms product.
They control a huge percentage of this market. Their products can be hard to avoid, and are sold under a wide variety of different brand names. But again: They're all marked with TF.
---
It's also worth noting that there's some brand names that are never products of Taylor Farms.
Dole is the only example that I can find in stores near me (Ohio), but there may be others wherever you are. (Food distribution is often very regionalized.)
It boggles my mind that people think that salad contains only lettuce. My world is much more flavorful than that.
I like my salad with a mixture of leafy greens, maybe with some radicchio or red cabbage for contrast, and perhaps some snow peas, radishes, and shredded carrots. I can keep all of that stuff around at the house and keep it fresh and prep it all, and that sounds very nice in theory -- except, most of it will probably rot before it gets consumed.
Or I can just buy a bag of salad and eat some of it at my whim.
---
I'm further astounded that people bother with complaining about someone else's choice of food. It's not like I broke into your wallet and used your money to buy bagged salad that I then replaced the contents of your fridge with.
Bagged salad isn't your issue; it isn't an issue at all.
What motivates you to make fun of me in this way, fellow HN user?
It’s much more polluting (why wrap salad in a plastic bag?), promotes bacteria growth (and disease like in the present case), and further removes us from food in its original form. Of course you’re to spend your money however you see fit, that’s not the issue.
The salad is wrapped in a plastic bag because it is useful. People exist, and some of us are gross. For instance: We don't wash our hands often enough, or properly-enough. We sneeze all over everything wherever we go.
We could get rid of the modern marvel of plastic bags, or get rid of the people instead. (I'm not a big fan of eugenics.)
Maybe I'd grow it myself and avoid all packaging and distribution problems, but the climate where I live doesn't support that very well at all and I like having salad during more than one brief period per year. Sustenance farming isn't really one of my goals in life.
And no, I do not think that my want for a salad at a time of my choosing constitutes some kind of unholy elevation of decadence. It's just a salad, and people are allowed to have things.
And the bag, itself, doesn't promote cyclospora outbreaks. It persists on things like greens, but it does not grow on them. That stuff comes from literal shit, like -- you know -- the stuff that everyone makes.
> It's worth noting that Taylor Farms consumer bagged salads are consistently marked, in the form of an alphanumeric code printed on the bag near the sell-by date.
This reads like C strings having not only a null terminator but carrying around a lifetime value specified in microseconds, and memory safety errors leading to weeks of explosive diarrhea.
How important is iceberg to your diet that you needed to create this YOLO lettuce header (heh)?
Serious question: Have you ever really looked at the packaging of the food products that you buy at the store?
Including some manner of descriptive coding isn't necessarily universal, but it has nonetheless been a normal way of doing things for a very long time.
It's similar to email headers or ip:port pairs in that it's hidden in plain sight. It's also similar in that most folks just don't notice them, and wouldn't care if they did notice them.
For instance: Plain old soda cans, which my dad made countless billions of during his career. There was a time when a person could show him a random 12oz soda can and there was a very strong chance that he'd be able to identify its origin by looking at it.
And I don't mean just the company that produced it, or the specific manufacturing plant within that company.
He could deduce the date of production, the line on which it was produced, the bodymaker within that line that did the metal stamping, whether it was made during the day or night shift, and (with a calendar) which crew was working during that particular shift.
And that's just the can itself.
The origin of the contents of the can are also generally available for anyone with the right knowledge to observe, usually with videojet printing on the can's dome. He wasn't in the can-filling business so he wasn't much help with those codes, but they were present.
But again, on any normal day: No normal person ever even notices the presence of this information.
Taylor Farms isn't an outlier here with their labelling at all.
Which is a benefit in itself, it adds texture and is inoffensively flavoured (hell on the right day or if I haven't drank enough water yet it can taste great). All without adding many calories to the meal. It's also a much cheaper alternative than ozempic for those of us who don't have the consistent willpower to not treat ourselves to more food when we're hungry even if we know we have all the calories we need.
I went to restaurant last night and asked where the chicken was sourced from and their response was "it's not the usual place we get chicken, but it's US Farm Raised Hatched", but I misinterpreted the her answer as a distributor name but then I realized even if I had a name, I probably couldn't figure out past that whether or not these chickens were pasture raised. If food labels are law, why doesn't this apply to where restaurants source their ingredients?
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.
This is a really good video explaining it. There is a good opportunity for someone more enterprising than I to stand up some infrastructure to support it.
USDA inspected foods already carry markers with lot codes and factory identifiers. That is how food traceability works right now. Those values are pretty opaque to consumers though. The new 2D barcode rules seem to suggest that there will be a human readable value for the "Plant" that worked a food item, but I'm having difficulty cross referencing how this actually plays out. My reading is that the human readable value is only necessary for the next step in the chain, so a packaging company can partially obscure the human readable location value for the harvester, for example, though they will have a Plant code identifier of some sort.
If companies have a way of obscuring this info to end consumers while still meeting FDA obligations, they absolutely will, as they currently do for things like the information for companies who "Make" products right now, which are often holding companies meant to obscure business relationships.
Oh, and any human readable value will be obscured behind a QR code anyway, so all the humans who already do zero investigation to understand where their stuff comes from will continue to have no extra information.
Strict labeling laws around protected terms is an essential thing because so many people read nothing more than the packaging itself when shopping. All chicken lists "No hormones" as an advertisement despite that being law and no chicken sold will ever have those hormones.
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.
For some things like meat, eggs, and milk: The USDA-inspected processing facility is required to be listed on the package. It is usually not very far-removed from the farm. It's coded, and these days it's usually printed near the sell-by date.
They (the USDA) publish cross-references betwixt the codes and the processing plants.
It's been kind of a pain in the ass when I've looked this stuff up in the past and I wish someone would take it upon themselves to make it easier, but it's do-able.
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.
The places I worked over 15 years ago had extensive lists of allergens. They were mostly chain or corporate, I think the mom and pop places did a little guessing. I wouldn’t trust them.
I’m very sorry to hear that, but I don’t think restaurants have to be forced to deal with that. The only thing I could support is “if revenue >X then allergen disclosure is mandatory”. I know personally multiple little shops that had to refuse customers, because that’s extra hassle and responsibility that they can’t afford to deal with.
They manage fine in Europe. It’s a cultural issue. If you can’t be arsed working through the minor administrative hassle once (how often do you change the menu..) to not kill your customers then you shouldn’t be in this business.
They manage fine in China/Japan. It’s a cultural issue. People aren’t dropping dead from not being catered for their allergies.
Look, i’m not some sort of a devil that hates people with allergies. Roughly 15% of my closest friends have dietary restrictions. But we kinda understand the problem and navigate it ourselves, rather than making it someone else’s problem. Really not a big deal.
In general, I think the barrier to entry to providing goods and services is now high enough that it discourages ever larger numbers of businesses from ever being started in the first place.
In my experience in NYC kitchens, I wouldn't trust most restaurants to actually be able to accommodate certain allergies. If it isn't stated clearly on the menu, I would rather be turned away than to have an inexperienced kitchen try to manage something they haven't done before. My experience is different now that I live in the EU.
Do you also think businesses shouldn’t need to be “forced” to deal with accessibility? Web devs shouldn’t be forced to deal with accessibility either right?
Web devs aren't forced to deal with accessibility either, unless they choose to work with or for an entity that requires it. No one is coming for your self-hosted blog because its not ADA-compliant.
But if you want every restaurant to be forced into labeling, you will see the small restaurants claim all the allergens are used and they cannot protect against cross contamination.
This is a dumb conversation because the landscape of the discussion is one where the costs increase exponentially as the disability being serviced becomes more rare, and there isn't an objectively correct answer.
Maybe, but going by that 5% of the population have severe food allergies and only ~1% use wheelchairs, so if we accept wheelchair ramps etc. as being a worthwhile investment (which I do) then proper labeling and disclosure of allergens seems reasonable as well?
The labeling and disclosure is pretty much solved. The killer and the cost monster is the handling. That's why you see that "Processed in a facility that also processes XYZ" label on some foods.
I had an old coworker with a severe milk protein allergy. So bad that he would get a reaction if he (lip) kissed his wife after she drank milk or had ice cream. So eating out was basically impossible, because his food would pretty much need to be made in a totally separate kitchen to avoid any contamination risk.
So we are right back at my point. Do we force every restaurant to have a secondary allergen free kitchen so my coworker can eat there? Or does my coworker just deal with it and stick to vegan places (like he did)?
If your point is that cost doesn't perfectly match frequency, sure, it was off the cuff, but it doesn't change the underlying nature of "accommodating everyone".
My friend is less sensitive and so just accepts the risk of cross contamination in restaurants, but she chooses restaurants which don’t really use much of her allergen and tells the kitchen so they can take precautions. It’s really about risk reduction.
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.
When entering, "any allergens or intolerances" is normally asked before you're sat down. They distinguish the two to decide whether a station clean is required or if they can just point you to the menu.
If it's not already clear on the menu, most medium/large chains then hand you a tablet letting you filter by almost anything.
Alternately, they could truthfully state what allergens are in literally all of their foods, and then people who are allergic to them can safely avoid them, which is what you're expecting them to do now except without actually saying which allergens they are.
In forty years I have very rarely seen menus change substantially.
If you are working with food you should know about allergies. It just comes with the territory. I’m baffled by how this is somehow too hard for US folks yet we manage fine.
Your menus don't change because of the administrative overhead. In the mid-sized American city where I live, menus change seasonally at nice restaurants and daily at really nice restaurants. Even fast food chains experiment with adding new items all the time.
If you're able to change the menu daily, print the menus, walk through the menu with your FOH, then you can have an idea on allergens. Especially in those "really nice" restaurants where the attention is on the provenance of the ingredients (and changing daily because it was what was at the market that day).
It's just yet another arena where the US likes to wring its hands and make excuses for why the US can't do what all manner of other countries manage to do without issue, from things like this to mass transit to Internet connectivity to gun control to ... we're just soooooo unique that solutions that work elsewhere couldn't possibly work here.
Depends on the country, as enforcing that falls to the agencies of the member states. At least here in Slovakia it is followed very strictly, but then our restaurant inspectors are notoriously business unfriendly.
The linked page is for packaging, which are unique to the EU.
The US has it's own allergen labeling guidelines, which seem similar, but I'm not going to 1:1 check. For restaurants it's mostly up to the states with the FDA providing guidance.
I wonder how high the ongoing implementation cost of that would be and how that would affect choice between small, specialized and large, integrated suppliers. Sysco can probably hand me a single sheet I can use without any extra work.
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.
Thanks for the correction. I think the issue here is that none of this information is public (like I can’t call the company and ask where lot 11956 came from), so it’s impossible to know as a consumer.
Tyson in particular. Child labor? Had issues with that. Institutionally approved use of undocumented workers? Check.
And a willingness to throw both under the bus when OSHA comes knocking because they also have a large number of workplace safety incidents. Or when the workers complain about such conditions, a little call to DHS and all of a sudden ICE shows up for a raid to pick up 900 undocumented workers, but when a reporter asks officials about the fact that Tyson was giving them written instructions on how to stay under the radar for banking, tax, immigration purposes? "That's not something that's in the scope of our investigations here."
So you're saying that this type of regulation would force the food industry to start caring about whether their food comes from? That sounds like an argument in favor of it, not against it
trying to convert a massive meatpacking plan isn't step 1. it's too big a problem. that's top down. probably easier bottom up -- have a processing plant that only sources from ranchers that grass feed/finish, pasture raise, and slowly subsidize other ranchers to stop sending their product to massive meatpacking plants.
Seems like more bureaucracy that would make it even harder for new restaurants to get set up and the paperwork they would have to maintain in order to provide that information.
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.
Restaurants are one of the classic immigrant paths to upward mobility. We don't want to make that too hard.
By all means, get a license, food handler permit, etc. and know and practice good food safety, and buy ingredients from legitimate wholesalers. But at some point you don't have visibility into the supply chain and it's not reasonable to expect Joe's Taco Truck to know which specific farms produced their lettuce.
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.
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.
Knowing the sources of the food we eat is a very popular thing right now.
Isn't the capitalist way to help with this to build new restaurants that do openly provide the lineage for the food that they sell?
All of the consumers who are motivated by this information will then be free to reward these eateries with their business.
After that: Other restaurateurs will surely notice how unspeakably profitable these loyal consumers are and will begin to mimic the effort to try to capture a slice of the pie.
Ultimately, this snowballs into information being the norm instead of the rare exception. Everyone wins!
(Or, more likely: We'll broadly forget that we cared about any of this a few months from now, just as we have always done in the past, and the idea will die at the invisible hand of the free market.)
> Isn't the capitalist way to help with this to build new restaurants that do openly provide the lineage for the food that they sell?
Some people think that certain things that are not profitable are still worthwhile to society. For example, libraries and fire departments are not designed to be profitable at all, but they're established because at least some of us think they're beneficial to have despite that. A more fitting example might be the regulation on food production introduced early on in the 20th century; by your logic, a more capitalist way of solving the problem would have been to start different food companies that produced food in the way that the regulations required. I don't have any confidence that this would have ended up making much of a difference though, and I think the century since then has shown that the economy didn't fall over because of the lost profits from the regulation.
Please understand that I wrote the previous comment with a heavy dose of devil's advocacy. :)
In reality, I'm a huge fan of enabling people to find reliable information (if they want it) so they can do things like make what they feel are informed decisions (if they choose to do that).
This can happen with capitalism and food. I've known a nice lady for a very long time who has run a little food truck that serves only local, organic food.
She buys what she can directly from farmers and even the mass-produced products she uses are local-enough that she can ring up the owner on the phone and get good answers to whatever questions she has.
If one of her customers wants to know where she gets her salad greens or the excellent sausage that she serves, she'll just tell them. There's no secrets in that kitchen.
It works for her in her tiny little market segment, and her usual clientele appreciate her efforts enough that this has been her sole occupation for over a decade.
But doing what she does in the way that she does it is a ton of work. And it apparently doesn't scale in a way that capitalism, alone, can support.
And by that, I mean: If the Arby's down the road from my house had enough interest in being informative in this way, then capitalist tenets suggest that they'd be doing it already. They are not.
But if they should then that means scary words like regulation come into play, and that never happens without a cost.
I'm OK with helping to pay for information to be available even though I myself don't necessarily care at all on any normal day what factory my chicken sandwich was raised in, or which particular farms that this batch of lettuce was sourced from.
And I'm OK with paying more for this because some people do care about stuff like that.
Except: Every now and then, like when there's a cyclospora outbreak, I care quite a lot about it myself. I love the cold, liquidy crunch of lettuce on a sandwich and I do miss it when it's gone.
And since shit happens (sometimes, literally) we'd collectively have a far easier time of adjusting our supply chains when it happens if tracking them was more of built-in function of food distribution. Since capitalism has so far not accomplished that, then perhaps it is time to move on to other methods.
And TBF, I don't think they've established why the issue is so prevalent in Michigan specifically, since Taylor Farms apparently doesn't have any unique connection to Michigan.
Explosive diarrhea doesn’t take long to show up, and it may be hard to identify which company or who’s responsible when you fired all of the people from the department that it’s supposed to police those type of things.
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?
What changed is that right after the CEO visited the White House, a retraction was issued. This White House does not have a history of being factual, but does have a history of doing "favors" for big donors, which Taylor Farms is.
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.
Unfortunately, the mark of corruption spreads to everything it touches. Once you are seen taking bribes for pardons, engaging in crypto scams, and manipulating the stock market to make billions you no longer are given the benefit of the doubt. There is zero evidence for corruption in this case, other than all of the blatant corruption elsewhere. Worse, the person involved is responsible for investigating the corruption.
Yup, don't care. The trust has been broken a thousand times with this admin. Why should I believe this is the one time they are being straight with us?
I agree a company being implicated as a source of a multi-state outbreak should absolutely be communicating with the executive branch. They should absolutely have their teams talking with the USDA, FDA, CDC, state health and food agencies, and any organizations involved to assist in testing and confirming findings.
I disagree that it makes a lot of sense for the CEO of the company to go to the Whitehouse in person to have a talk about the situation.
I do agree it on its face is necessarily a direct piece of proof of corruption, as we don't actually know what was talked about. For all we know they just talked about the weather. You're free to believe that if you want. I'm not an idiot though, and when extremely corrupt people do things that look like corruption my gut instinct is to assume corrupt actions are taking place.
It's sad that this was heavily downvoted on HN but times really have changed in this community. What you said is just straight up true and not derogatory or misleading.
Seems the usual HN MAGA types can't handle the truth. Keep downvoting me. Only shows how pathetic you are. Everything I state is easily verifiable from respectable public sources.
How much of a sin is it for the ambulance-chaser to chase ambulances if the ambulances are there and legitimate? This is what the tort law is for. He's not the one who sprayed feces-water on the lettuce...
Commercial insurance means whatever action they do or don't do is ultimately irrelevant. The supplier will re-brand under another name when things quiet down, proceed to continue selling product, and deduct any capital loss over a year or two.
Global weather changes means more tropical pests and pathogens are migrating north. People are literally on fire, and shitting their pants in excitement. =3
> family owned company act like they have stock holders
A family owned company does have shareholders. The shareholders are the people who own the company.
There’s nothing all that special about a family owned business in this regard, even though they want you to believe it’s completely different. Family owned is a loose term anyway. Large companies are large companies.
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.
The existence of "socially conscious" investment funds says that there are investors out there who do value things other than total return. It is a myth that "shareholder value" must only be defined in terms of money. Brand reputation, goodwill, etc. can all be considered. It just happens that money is the overriding concern most of the time.
Sure, if you gather the investors from the start to have a unifying theme other than money, that's fine. But it's very difficult to take a random company with a bunch of unrelated shareholders and convince them all to care about the same thing.
Even the things you named (brand reputation, goodwill, etc.) are prioritized by companies because they're upstream of shareholder value. Many companies have a float in the Pride parade, an employee volunteer day and post on social media about how they're reducing their carbon footprint. Most of those companies are doing those things because they believe they ultimately increase shareholder value, not because shareholders have decided to sacrifice money because they care more about other things.
>Brian Thure served as president of Taylor Farms Tennessee from about 2012 until March 2026 and allegedly used his authority over finances, payroll, vendors and accounting to divert company money for personal benefit.
>Taylor Farms claims the alleged fraud came to light during an IRS audit
There's a tendency to want to be nice to farmers who own "family owned farms" because it evokes imagery steeped in quaint classical Americana. It is mostly from misinformation that this impression arises. Don't feel bad for a family owned farm that isn't going well. They get special bankruptcy rules, they can sell off their very valuable land as a backstop, and most of all they are probably not as small and quaint and cute as you think they are.
That doesn't seem at odds with what they said. The Waltons are a family, which illustrates the point of what a fully "family-owned" business might look like compared to one with external shareholders pretty directly. I don't think it's that hard to understand that giving the Walton's 100% of the stock seems unlikely to address any concerns people have with Walmart, which is evidence of their point that maybe "family-owned" is a red herring.
I remember seeing advice, years ago, to let lettuce sit in a weak bleach solution before use. But I doubt that’s ever been followed by many people. Current advice (at least at home) seems to be to rinse lettuce to remove dirt ( https://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheet/safe-handling-of-lettuce-... ). Apparently most health problems from lettuce are on the surface and not particularly hard to get off.
I'm so confused how to feel about these articles. this one is clearly AI written. But blessed by a lawyer so we think the stuff in here is accurate with facts?
I've accidentally posted an AI article before that seemed just as this was, and the community flagged that to oblivion. Rightfully so I think?
Does Hacker News need a "report AI" and we can then hide the AI articles as a filter?
This is the Claudiest article I've seen in a long time. "Defensible view." "No correction, no note, no acknowledgment." "The honest statement about X."
So the next question is, how much of this is true at all, versus just being hallucinations.
What's the Venn diagram of the posters demanding restaurant overregulation and downsized CDC labs testing every leaf of lettuce sold with those who enjoy unlicensed taco trucks?
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Slavery still exists in the USA. This isn't the same as job programs for reinsertion like in other countries - this is openly described as slavery.
This was related to an Arizona Correctional Industries prison labor contract. In Arizona, labor is mandatory. They either work in these corporate-tied programs or they have to work some other kind of job at the prison. Is that really a choice?
How much choice do you have? I know I don't have much. Either work or go without health care, shelter, and food. All I get to do is choose the job. Sounds like they do too.
And have minimum wages, and have workplace safety standards, have recourse for injuries while working, etc. They don't get that, they're not "employees".
> A company’s public statement in the middle of an outbreak is not marketing. It is evidence — what the company said it knew, and when, published to the world at a moment when nobody had the benefit of hindsight.
Stopped reading immediately. If we’re just going to delegate writing to Claude, I won’t bother reading this. And maybe I’ll just delegate my decisions to Claude directly.
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.
It seems plausible that someone could make a decent discriminator for distinguishing human text from AI text. I wouldn't immediately discount the idea.
> The CDC Has a Cyclospora Lab. DOGE Downsized It Last Year [1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/cdc-cyclospora-lab-doge-downsize...
DOGE will be seen by historians as the cause of so many crisis…
It is the government equivalent of El Muskito buying Twitter and then wantonly disabling components with the assumption they do nothing.
Except no one died because Twitter malfunctions here and there.
TBF the companies that failed to contain the disease are at fault, not the agency.
You can't reasonably expect government to protect everyone from everything.
How would we know which companies to blame without organizations like the CDC?
What would they even be blamed for in the first place if there were no regulatory expectations for them to adhere to?
To be fair to whom exactly? The organization tasked with disease protection and which claims they exist for "saving lives"?
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.
Well, I said historians because I don’t think that will happen anytime soon. The US is almost completely captured. The time to send people to prison was during the previous administration. I still cannot believe that Americans re-elected a literal failed insurrectionist
I agree, if people voted for this I wouldn’t expect any ramifications at all. People have to be so far gone to have actually wanted this that they’re not just going to change their mind.
DOGE is simply a tool of global capital, and shouldn't be singled out as the root cause of anything. Its purpose was to cut money from being redistributed through government programs, so it could go to the financial markets instead via tax cuts for the wealthiests and inefficient defense contracts. It achieved its goal wonderfully.
Imagine how frustrated the laid off staff must be, especially if they end up either the illness themselves.
optimistic, this requires the arc of history to bend towards non-fascism.
Yeah, as Norm Macdonald put it:
> “It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?”
Well, there will at least be historians in other countries covering the downfall in detail, if there is indeed a bigger downfall than has already happened.
Democracies are pretty good at studying the failures of other countries and learning about them.
‘and learning about them’
I’m not at all convinced about this part.
To be fair, they said learning _about_ them, not learning _from_ them.
Optimistic, this requires a civilization to have a history.
>the arc of history to bend towards non-fascism.
From wikipedia: "Fascism [...] rose to prominence primarily in Europe of the interwar period"
So what were humans doing for all the thousands of years after the advent of recorded history but before that?
Fascism with a different name
Fascism always collapses, the question is only how much will remain by the time that occurs.
And whether or not what replaces it is any better. Historically speaking, widespread democracy is still a recent development.
That's always an open question. Fascism does frequently collapse into other authoritarian regimes, too. But fascism itself will always fail.
It is a movement motivated by the petty grievances of cowards and fools, and the same hate and violence they project outward always turns inward at the end.
What definition of fascism are you using? Is China fascist?
> What definition of fascism are you using?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
> Is China fascist?
What a strange and completely irrelevant question.
Fair. Though based on previous experiments fascist regimes aren’t that stable and competent, they have a tendency to self-destruct once they are in power. It’s a sad state of affairs that is considered optimistic
Well, shit in peace i guess.
Well it's definitely not in piece/s I guess
From 11 to 3 employees. Doesn't seem that outrageous outside of such a time of crisis (since this lab seem dedicated solely to outbreaks, not research), which is when the parent entity should temporarily allocate more people.
> 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.
I've worked along scientists a few times, many twiddling their thumbs and coasting along on the back of their PhD. No idea if this applies here, mind you, but I don't see an innate need for that many people, even if this disease has major outbreaks (let's say > 50 cases) every few years.
3 does seem a bit low, though.
Impressive judgment from someone who presumably has no knowledge of the types of problems the lab was addressing, the scope of research, the actual individuals employed, or the prior and anticipated impact of their work. This was the whole problem with DOGE: cuts were indiscriminate and based more on feels than factual data. I won't posit that those cuts were all downside - but we will be paying to discover which were really needed for years to come.
> many twiddling their thumbs
Do you think some of them were wasting their time, by posting on various online forums only slightly related to their jobs?
> I've worked along scientists a few times
You should have mentioned this up front so we all knew you were fully qualified to understand the staffing needs of critical governmental health organizations.
We've discovered that ambulance drivers are only driving people to hospital for 5% of the week. As such we've cut the 20 staff that used to give 120% coverage to 5. The 4 days of coverage is still more than 8x more than needed to cover working 5% of the week, so obviously we don't expect any deaths on the days we don't have any ambulance drivers working.
In the unlikely event excess ambulance drivers are needed we'll temporarily hire them on an ad hoc basis at double the normal rate. They will obviously happily jump on this opportunity, working less than 5% of the year at double pay is much better for just those hours than being paid 60% of what you'd get as an ambulance driver in another career all year round and actually being able to afford your mortgage.
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.
That ignores that point that this department only activates after the outbreak has started, so if it was increased to 100 people it wouldn’t have prevented the crisis.
The article indicates that the department responds to crises, it did not indicate that was its only function.
Astroturfing still paying good?
While you're at it, give AI to the 3 employees and they will do the work of 30 /s
Too bad that article doesn't have any evidence that the alleged cuts have had any impact on the cyclospora response.
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.
Surely the burden of proof here is proving that a 70% headcount reduction doesn’t make a difference.
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.
Whenever I work for large corporations or government I wanna blow my brain how slow things move. Literally days work in a month.
Yes, small teams can be more productive.
I've took a ~2x pay cut just not to sit in those unproductive meetings and grind instead.
Just wait until 1 of those 3 employees left has surgery and needs FMLA, or out on maternity leave. Then it'll be even more capable. /s
Maternity leave? Women aren’t allowed to work in the Hegseth era!
what would make you think that a downsized lab can do the same amount of work
They’re not thinking. They like the cuts, and DOGE, and musk, and the feel of that boot coming down on the neck. So they’re making post hoc rationalizations for everything.
It’s certainly not motivated by principles or a concern for reality.
Some people think that the only ones downsized were the “dead weight”, so therefore, with them and their bureaucracy out of the way, the remaining people will be faster and better able to do their real work. From what I’ve seen, this is not the case. If anything, the opposite may have happened.
What would make you think this would have prevented the incident?
Man shoots himself in the foot then turns up limping, it's probably not that his shoes are too tight.
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.
It's worth noting that Taylor Farms consumer bagged salads are consistently marked, in the form of an alphanumeric code printed on the bag near the sell-by date.
When this code begins with TF (like, say, the TFRB182A11B I had on a bag in my fridge last month), it's a Taylor Farms product.
They control a huge percentage of this market. Their products can be hard to avoid, and are sold under a wide variety of different brand names. But again: They're all marked with TF.
---
It's also worth noting that there's some brand names that are never products of Taylor Farms.
Dole is the only example that I can find in stores near me (Ohio), but there may be others wherever you are. (Food distribution is often very regionalized.)
It boggles my mind that people would buy salads in bags. Instead of just a head of lettuce like the rest of the world.
It boggles my mind that people think that salad contains only lettuce. My world is much more flavorful than that.
I like my salad with a mixture of leafy greens, maybe with some radicchio or red cabbage for contrast, and perhaps some snow peas, radishes, and shredded carrots. I can keep all of that stuff around at the house and keep it fresh and prep it all, and that sounds very nice in theory -- except, most of it will probably rot before it gets consumed.
Or I can just buy a bag of salad and eat some of it at my whim.
---
I'm further astounded that people bother with complaining about someone else's choice of food. It's not like I broke into your wallet and used your money to buy bagged salad that I then replaced the contents of your fridge with.
Bagged salad isn't your issue; it isn't an issue at all.
What motivates you to make fun of me in this way, fellow HN user?
> like the rest of the world.
Are the motivations political? It's just a salad.
It’s much more polluting (why wrap salad in a plastic bag?), promotes bacteria growth (and disease like in the present case), and further removes us from food in its original form. Of course you’re to spend your money however you see fit, that’s not the issue.
The salad is wrapped in a plastic bag because it is useful. People exist, and some of us are gross. For instance: We don't wash our hands often enough, or properly-enough. We sneeze all over everything wherever we go.
We could get rid of the modern marvel of plastic bags, or get rid of the people instead. (I'm not a big fan of eugenics.)
Maybe I'd grow it myself and avoid all packaging and distribution problems, but the climate where I live doesn't support that very well at all and I like having salad during more than one brief period per year. Sustenance farming isn't really one of my goals in life.
And no, I do not think that my want for a salad at a time of my choosing constitutes some kind of unholy elevation of decadence. It's just a salad, and people are allowed to have things.
And the bag, itself, doesn't promote cyclospora outbreaks. It persists on things like greens, but it does not grow on them. That stuff comes from literal shit, like -- you know -- the stuff that everyone makes.
> It's worth noting that Taylor Farms consumer bagged salads are consistently marked, in the form of an alphanumeric code printed on the bag near the sell-by date.
This reads like C strings having not only a null terminator but carrying around a lifetime value specified in microseconds, and memory safety errors leading to weeks of explosive diarrhea.
How important is iceberg to your diet that you needed to create this YOLO lettuce header (heh)?
Serious question: Have you ever really looked at the packaging of the food products that you buy at the store?
Including some manner of descriptive coding isn't necessarily universal, but it has nonetheless been a normal way of doing things for a very long time.
It's similar to email headers or ip:port pairs in that it's hidden in plain sight. It's also similar in that most folks just don't notice them, and wouldn't care if they did notice them.
For instance: Plain old soda cans, which my dad made countless billions of during his career. There was a time when a person could show him a random 12oz soda can and there was a very strong chance that he'd be able to identify its origin by looking at it.
And I don't mean just the company that produced it, or the specific manufacturing plant within that company.
He could deduce the date of production, the line on which it was produced, the bodymaker within that line that did the metal stamping, whether it was made during the day or night shift, and (with a calendar) which crew was working during that particular shift.
And that's just the can itself.
The origin of the contents of the can are also generally available for anyone with the right knowledge to observe, usually with videojet printing on the can's dome. He wasn't in the can-filling business so he wasn't much help with those codes, but they were present.
But again, on any normal day: No normal person ever even notices the presence of this information.
Taylor Farms isn't an outlier here with their labelling at all.
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.
Not really. Lettuce has virtually zero nutritional value.
Which is a benefit in itself, it adds texture and is inoffensively flavoured (hell on the right day or if I haven't drank enough water yet it can taste great). All without adding many calories to the meal. It's also a much cheaper alternative than ozempic for those of us who don't have the consistent willpower to not treat ourselves to more food when we're hungry even if we know we have all the calories we need.
I went to restaurant last night and asked where the chicken was sourced from and their response was "it's not the usual place we get chicken, but it's US Farm Raised Hatched", but I misinterpreted the her answer as a distributor name but then I realized even if I had a name, I probably couldn't figure out past that whether or not these chickens were pasture raised. If food labels are law, why doesn't this apply to where restaurants source their ingredients?
This, but unironically
https://youtu.be/G__PVLB8Nm4
also, allergies pride parade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhaUKnt1Zmw
Are food labels required to identify where they're sourced from? I don't think so?
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.
But will it by ciphered by the manufacturer?
Tons of products already have all manner of information printed on them, but only the manufacturer can readily decrypt it.
This is a really good video explaining it. There is a good opportunity for someone more enterprising than I to stand up some infrastructure to support it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R32j6ZA3byI
That's bad ass
USDA inspected foods already carry markers with lot codes and factory identifiers. That is how food traceability works right now. Those values are pretty opaque to consumers though. The new 2D barcode rules seem to suggest that there will be a human readable value for the "Plant" that worked a food item, but I'm having difficulty cross referencing how this actually plays out. My reading is that the human readable value is only necessary for the next step in the chain, so a packaging company can partially obscure the human readable location value for the harvester, for example, though they will have a Plant code identifier of some sort.
If companies have a way of obscuring this info to end consumers while still meeting FDA obligations, they absolutely will, as they currently do for things like the information for companies who "Make" products right now, which are often holding companies meant to obscure business relationships.
Oh, and any human readable value will be obscured behind a QR code anyway, so all the humans who already do zero investigation to understand where their stuff comes from will continue to have no extra information.
Strict labeling laws around protected terms is an essential thing because so many people read nothing more than the packaging itself when shopping. All chicken lists "No hormones" as an advertisement despite that being law and no chicken sold will ever have those hormones.
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
In the US I also want to know State of Origin. Not all state food and agricultural department regulations and inspections are the same.
"Should" or "are required to?"
Regulations are minimal compared to what most consumers would want and expect.
https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/cool
Is that true though? Trump was very clear about what he would do, and was voted in.
And here we are.
Depends on the thing. Olive oil, for example, is required to list its country/countries of origin
For some things like meat, eggs, and milk: The USDA-inspected processing facility is required to be listed on the package. It is usually not very far-removed from the farm. It's coded, and these days it's usually printed near the sell-by date.
They (the USDA) publish cross-references betwixt the codes and the processing plants.
It's been kind of a pain in the ass when I've looked this stuff up in the past and I wish someone would take it upon themselves to make it easier, but it's do-able.
Restaurants don't even have to track and disclose what allergens their food contains.
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.
The places I worked over 15 years ago had extensive lists of allergens. They were mostly chain or corporate, I think the mom and pop places did a little guessing. I wouldn’t trust them.
You might like the UK. The place is wall to wall with allergen lists.
I’m very sorry to hear that, but I don’t think restaurants have to be forced to deal with that. The only thing I could support is “if revenue >X then allergen disclosure is mandatory”. I know personally multiple little shops that had to refuse customers, because that’s extra hassle and responsibility that they can’t afford to deal with.
They manage fine in Europe. It’s a cultural issue. If you can’t be arsed working through the minor administrative hassle once (how often do you change the menu..) to not kill your customers then you shouldn’t be in this business.
They manage fine in China/Japan. It’s a cultural issue. People aren’t dropping dead from not being catered for their allergies.
Look, i’m not some sort of a devil that hates people with allergies. Roughly 15% of my closest friends have dietary restrictions. But we kinda understand the problem and navigate it ourselves, rather than making it someone else’s problem. Really not a big deal.
I would rather food vendors have the right to refuse service than be subjected to laws that effectively squeeze out smaller operators.
Is your perspective of restaurants, food trucks, sidewalk cafes, etc., in Europe that they're all large market providers, and not smaller operators?
In general, I think the barrier to entry to providing goods and services is now high enough that it discourages ever larger numbers of businesses from ever being started in the first place.
This is fact, with effort being put into resolving the issue: https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/bringing-do...
In my experience in NYC kitchens, I wouldn't trust most restaurants to actually be able to accommodate certain allergies. If it isn't stated clearly on the menu, I would rather be turned away than to have an inexperienced kitchen try to manage something they haven't done before. My experience is different now that I live in the EU.
Do you also think businesses shouldn’t need to be “forced” to deal with accessibility? Web devs shouldn’t be forced to deal with accessibility either right?
Web devs aren't forced to deal with accessibility either, unless they choose to work with or for an entity that requires it. No one is coming for your self-hosted blog because its not ADA-compliant.
But if you want every restaurant to be forced into labeling, you will see the small restaurants claim all the allergens are used and they cannot protect against cross contamination.
The FDA prohibits blanket labeling of allergens. They might be able to get away with it but it wouldn’t be legal.
This is a dumb conversation because the landscape of the discussion is one where the costs increase exponentially as the disability being serviced becomes more rare, and there isn't an objectively correct answer.
Maybe, but going by that 5% of the population have severe food allergies and only ~1% use wheelchairs, so if we accept wheelchair ramps etc. as being a worthwhile investment (which I do) then proper labeling and disclosure of allergens seems reasonable as well?
The labeling and disclosure is pretty much solved. The killer and the cost monster is the handling. That's why you see that "Processed in a facility that also processes XYZ" label on some foods.
I had an old coworker with a severe milk protein allergy. So bad that he would get a reaction if he (lip) kissed his wife after she drank milk or had ice cream. So eating out was basically impossible, because his food would pretty much need to be made in a totally separate kitchen to avoid any contamination risk.
So we are right back at my point. Do we force every restaurant to have a secondary allergen free kitchen so my coworker can eat there? Or does my coworker just deal with it and stick to vegan places (like he did)?
If your point is that cost doesn't perfectly match frequency, sure, it was off the cuff, but it doesn't change the underlying nature of "accommodating everyone".
My friend is less sensitive and so just accepts the risk of cross contamination in restaurants, but she chooses restaurants which don’t really use much of her allergen and tells the kitchen so they can take precautions. It’s really about risk reduction.
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 manage here in the UK.
When entering, "any allergens or intolerances" is normally asked before you're sat down. They distinguish the two to decide whether a station clean is required or if they can just point you to the menu.
If it's not already clear on the menu, most medium/large chains then hand you a tablet letting you filter by almost anything.
Alternately, they could truthfully state what allergens are in literally all of their foods, and then people who are allergic to them can safely avoid them, which is what you're expecting them to do now except without actually saying which allergens they are.
In forty years I have very rarely seen menus change substantially.
If you are working with food you should know about allergies. It just comes with the territory. I’m baffled by how this is somehow too hard for US folks yet we manage fine.
Your menus don't change because of the administrative overhead. In the mid-sized American city where I live, menus change seasonally at nice restaurants and daily at really nice restaurants. Even fast food chains experiment with adding new items all the time.
If you're able to change the menu daily, print the menus, walk through the menu with your FOH, then you can have an idea on allergens. Especially in those "really nice" restaurants where the attention is on the provenance of the ingredients (and changing daily because it was what was at the market that day).
It's just yet another arena where the US likes to wring its hands and make excuses for why the US can't do what all manner of other countries manage to do without issue, from things like this to mass transit to Internet connectivity to gun control to ... we're just soooooo unique that solutions that work elsewhere couldn't possibly work here.
The rest of the world has been able to solve that issue
They have to in EU!
https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/campaign-2026/allergie...
Very, very poorly enforced and followed.
Depends on the country, as enforcing that falls to the agencies of the member states. At least here in Slovakia it is followed very strictly, but then our restaurant inspectors are notoriously business unfriendly.
That isn't for restaurants.
Yes it is
> For non-prepacked foods – such as those sold in restaurants, cafés or deli counters – allergen information must be provided.
The linked page is for packaging, which are unique to the EU.
The US has it's own allergen labeling guidelines, which seem similar, but I'm not going to 1:1 check. For restaurants it's mostly up to the states with the FDA providing guidance.
But you understand that if it were required, everyplace that doesn’t specify today, would slap allergens on the whole menu.
I wonder how high the ongoing implementation cost of that would be and how that would affect choice between small, specialized and large, integrated suppliers. Sysco can probably hand me a single sheet I can use without any extra work.
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.
Meat is already tracked to its origin. They can track a specific box to the farmer and supplier.
Anytime there would be a recall, they would include the lot number and manufacturer dates.
Source: I worked in meat packing and boutique butcher shops.
Edit: even things like ground beef from trimmings, we would write down every lot that went into it
Thanks for the correction. I think the issue here is that none of this information is public (like I can’t call the company and ask where lot 11956 came from), so it’s impossible to know as a consumer.
Tyson and Smithfield are the worst two brands in the USA that you can get any meat from.
Tyson in particular. Child labor? Had issues with that. Institutionally approved use of undocumented workers? Check.
And a willingness to throw both under the bus when OSHA comes knocking because they also have a large number of workplace safety incidents. Or when the workers complain about such conditions, a little call to DHS and all of a sudden ICE shows up for a raid to pick up 900 undocumented workers, but when a reporter asks officials about the fact that Tyson was giving them written instructions on how to stay under the radar for banking, tax, immigration purposes? "That's not something that's in the scope of our investigations here."
So you're saying that this type of regulation would force the food industry to start caring about whether their food comes from? That sounds like an argument in favor of it, not against it
trying to convert a massive meatpacking plan isn't step 1. it's too big a problem. that's top down. probably easier bottom up -- have a processing plant that only sources from ranchers that grass feed/finish, pasture raise, and slowly subsidize other ranchers to stop sending their product to massive meatpacking plants.
also the canonical example of a commodity. Basically the claim that all units are fully fungible.
"I went to restaurant last night and asked ..."
USDA Organic isn't perfect but it is, largely, the only meaningful information you can be given.
Everything else is weasel wording and subterfuge.
Seems like more bureaucracy that would make it even harder for new restaurants to get set up and the paperwork they would have to maintain in order to provide that information.
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.
Restaurants are one of the classic immigrant paths to upward mobility. We don't want to make that too hard.
By all means, get a license, food handler permit, etc. and know and practice good food safety, and buy ingredients from legitimate wholesalers. But at some point you don't have visibility into the supply chain and it's not reasonable to expect Joe's Taco Truck to know which specific farms produced their lettuce.
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.
Knowing the sources of the food we eat is a very popular thing right now.
Isn't the capitalist way to help with this to build new restaurants that do openly provide the lineage for the food that they sell?
All of the consumers who are motivated by this information will then be free to reward these eateries with their business.
After that: Other restaurateurs will surely notice how unspeakably profitable these loyal consumers are and will begin to mimic the effort to try to capture a slice of the pie.
Ultimately, this snowballs into information being the norm instead of the rare exception. Everyone wins!
(Or, more likely: We'll broadly forget that we cared about any of this a few months from now, just as we have always done in the past, and the idea will die at the invisible hand of the free market.)
> Isn't the capitalist way to help with this to build new restaurants that do openly provide the lineage for the food that they sell?
Some people think that certain things that are not profitable are still worthwhile to society. For example, libraries and fire departments are not designed to be profitable at all, but they're established because at least some of us think they're beneficial to have despite that. A more fitting example might be the regulation on food production introduced early on in the 20th century; by your logic, a more capitalist way of solving the problem would have been to start different food companies that produced food in the way that the regulations required. I don't have any confidence that this would have ended up making much of a difference though, and I think the century since then has shown that the economy didn't fall over because of the lost profits from the regulation.
Please understand that I wrote the previous comment with a heavy dose of devil's advocacy. :)
In reality, I'm a huge fan of enabling people to find reliable information (if they want it) so they can do things like make what they feel are informed decisions (if they choose to do that).
This can happen with capitalism and food. I've known a nice lady for a very long time who has run a little food truck that serves only local, organic food.
She buys what she can directly from farmers and even the mass-produced products she uses are local-enough that she can ring up the owner on the phone and get good answers to whatever questions she has. If one of her customers wants to know where she gets her salad greens or the excellent sausage that she serves, she'll just tell them. There's no secrets in that kitchen.
It works for her in her tiny little market segment, and her usual clientele appreciate her efforts enough that this has been her sole occupation for over a decade.
But doing what she does in the way that she does it is a ton of work. And it apparently doesn't scale in a way that capitalism, alone, can support.
And by that, I mean: If the Arby's down the road from my house had enough interest in being informative in this way, then capitalist tenets suggest that they'd be doing it already. They are not.
But if they should then that means scary words like regulation come into play, and that never happens without a cost.
I'm OK with helping to pay for information to be available even though I myself don't necessarily care at all on any normal day what factory my chicken sandwich was raised in, or which particular farms that this batch of lettuce was sourced from.
And I'm OK with paying more for this because some people do care about stuff like that.
Except: Every now and then, like when there's a cyclospora outbreak, I care quite a lot about it myself. I love the cold, liquidy crunch of lettuce on a sandwich and I do miss it when it's gone.
And since shit happens (sometimes, literally) we'd collectively have a far easier time of adjusting our supply chains when it happens if tracking them was more of built-in function of food distribution. Since capitalism has so far not accomplished that, then perhaps it is time to move on to other methods.
Count me in.
I have not been following this very closely but it seems like the source of this cyclospora contamination has been very challenging to identify.
Especially because it takes weeks before the infected start showing symptoms.
Isn't it reasonable to update the official statement as new information emerges?
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” -John Maynard Keynes.
I have gone down that quote’s rabbit hole before and it looks a lot more apocryphal than Maynard.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change-mind/
Huh. I used to think that was a Keynes quote but now I've changed my mind.
> Especially because it takes weeks before the infected start showing symptoms.
I just wanted to say that your phrasing here is a fabulously ominous one for the first episode of an HBO show.
Ha! Seems like I am living in one these days.
And TBF, I don't think they've established why the issue is so prevalent in Michigan specifically, since Taylor Farms apparently doesn't have any unique connection to Michigan.
Explosive diarrhea doesn’t take long to show up, and it may be hard to identify which company or who’s responsible when you fired all of the people from the department that it’s supposed to police those type of things.
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.
So.... Exactly the people they need right now?
Yes, it's what they need right now. No it would not have prevented anything, as the comment I was responding to implied.
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 :(
As an IBS enjoyer, no, not all diarrhea is explosive.
No, it’s actually one of the symptom, it is described as explosive, not a standard diarrhea
To me "explosive" means it comes unannounced and evacuates bowels within few seconds, ovepowering any sphincter resistance.
If that's your normal poop maybe seek medical advice.
No, from what I have heard "explosive" isn't being treated with enough weight.
Not all diarrhea is "explosive". This is worse than your average food poisoning from everything i've read (luckily, no personal experience so far).
>No, from what I have heard "explosive" isn't being treated with enough weight.
Hmm I had not heard this, that is concerning. Thank you for sharing. No more salad for me, thanks.
Took me a sec to realize you weren't quoting the guy from Tool lol
What changed is that right after the CEO visited the White House, a retraction was issued. This White House does not have a history of being factual, but does have a history of doing "favors" for big donors, which Taylor Farms is.
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.
Unfortunately, the mark of corruption spreads to everything it touches. Once you are seen taking bribes for pardons, engaging in crypto scams, and manipulating the stock market to make billions you no longer are given the benefit of the doubt. There is zero evidence for corruption in this case, other than all of the blatant corruption elsewhere. Worse, the person involved is responsible for investigating the corruption.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/05/07/democra...
https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/21073697321938
https://fortune.com/2026/05/23/trump-stock-portfolio-trading...
Yup, don't care. The trust has been broken a thousand times with this admin. Why should I believe this is the one time they are being straight with us?
You don’t mean that the people behind $MELANIA coin may have ill intentions, do you? /s
The credulousness that this administration is granted by devil’s advocates and “rationalists” is exhausting.
I agree a company being implicated as a source of a multi-state outbreak should absolutely be communicating with the executive branch. They should absolutely have their teams talking with the USDA, FDA, CDC, state health and food agencies, and any organizations involved to assist in testing and confirming findings.
I disagree that it makes a lot of sense for the CEO of the company to go to the Whitehouse in person to have a talk about the situation.
I do agree it on its face is necessarily a direct piece of proof of corruption, as we don't actually know what was talked about. For all we know they just talked about the weather. You're free to believe that if you want. I'm not an idiot though, and when extremely corrupt people do things that look like corruption my gut instinct is to assume corrupt actions are taking place.
It's sad that this was heavily downvoted on HN but times really have changed in this community. What you said is just straight up true and not derogatory or misleading.
Thanks.
Seems the usual HN MAGA types can't handle the truth. Keep downvoting me. Only shows how pathetic you are. Everything I state is easily verifiable from respectable public sources.
Deficit spending the biggest ponzi ever invented. Thanks Keynes
Fiat currency (including bitcoin) is a bigger ponzi, and the stock market (including crypto project tokens) is a bigger ponzi than that.
Marketing blogspam by an ambulance chasing attorney who stands to make a lot of money from this if public perception moves a certain way.
How much of a sin is it for the ambulance-chaser to chase ambulances if the ambulances are there and legitimate? This is what the tort law is for. He's not the one who sprayed feces-water on the lettuce...
Started out with "It's not X, it's also Y", followed by an em-dash. I didn't read any further than that.
How much does astroturfing pay these days?
That was the fastest downvote in history. Common guys, you have to but a delay on your bots. Fixed seconds + some random.
Commercial insurance means whatever action they do or don't do is ultimately irrelevant. The supplier will re-brand under another name when things quiet down, proceed to continue selling product, and deduct any capital loss over a year or two.
Global weather changes means more tropical pests and pathogens are migrating north. People are literally on fire, and shitting their pants in excitement. =3
engaging with the identity of the arguer rather than the argument. 5 yard penalty, loss of down.
Sportsball reference, permaban?
There's nothing wrong with "engaging with" the identity of someone when their identity is both reprehensible and negates any impartiality.
It's next level for a family owned company act like they have stock holders to please by cutting corners rather then doing the right thing.
> family owned company act like they have stock holders
A family owned company does have shareholders. The shareholders are the people who own the company.
There’s nothing all that special about a family owned business in this regard, even though they want you to believe it’s completely different. Family owned is a loose term anyway. Large companies are large companies.
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.
The existence of "socially conscious" investment funds says that there are investors out there who do value things other than total return. It is a myth that "shareholder value" must only be defined in terms of money. Brand reputation, goodwill, etc. can all be considered. It just happens that money is the overriding concern most of the time.
Sure, if you gather the investors from the start to have a unifying theme other than money, that's fine. But it's very difficult to take a random company with a bunch of unrelated shareholders and convince them all to care about the same thing.
Even the things you named (brand reputation, goodwill, etc.) are prioritized by companies because they're upstream of shareholder value. Many companies have a float in the Pride parade, an employee volunteer day and post on social media about how they're reducing their carbon footprint. Most of those companies are doing those things because they believe they ultimately increase shareholder value, not because shareholders have decided to sacrifice money because they care more about other things.
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.
Family or not, when these are the executives you hire for over a decade it shouldn't surprise anyone that events like this occur: https://www.ksbw.com/article/taylor-farms-tennessee-ex-presi...
>Brian Thure served as president of Taylor Farms Tennessee from about 2012 until March 2026 and allegedly used his authority over finances, payroll, vendors and accounting to divert company money for personal benefit. >Taylor Farms claims the alleged fraud came to light during an IRS audit
It’s a multi billion dollar corporation. It’s not a mom and pop 10 acre farm. Family owned means nothing at that point.
Right. By those stretches, the Sinaloa Cartel and Saudi Aramco could advertise as "family owned"
95% of farms are "family owned". Large scale family owned farms make up about 4% of all farms but 48% of agricultural output. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2025/Censu...
There's a tendency to want to be nice to farmers who own "family owned farms" because it evokes imagery steeped in quaint classical Americana. It is mostly from misinformation that this impression arises. Don't feel bad for a family owned farm that isn't going well. They get special bankruptcy rules, they can sell off their very valuable land as a backstop, and most of all they are probably not as small and quaint and cute as you think they are.
Mary Antoinette should've tried that line "It's not a monarchy, just a family-owned state"
stockholders? no. stakeholders? absolutely.
The WalMart Waltons are a "family"
At the core, "Family-owned" just means nepotism is preferred over merit.
(The mob is also "Family-owned")
SpaceX is more “family owned” than Walmart.
That doesn't seem at odds with what they said. The Waltons are a family, which illustrates the point of what a fully "family-owned" business might look like compared to one with external shareholders pretty directly. I don't think it's that hard to understand that giving the Walton's 100% of the stock seems unlikely to address any concerns people have with Walmart, which is evidence of their point that maybe "family-owned" is a red herring.
All I know is the Taylor Farms Creamy Ranch from Costco gave me the worst stomach aches for 4 days and horrible gas
I actually feel sorry for people that they have to eat this stuff.
I was always under the impression that disease and pesticide don't usually just "wash off" at home.
I remember seeing advice, years ago, to let lettuce sit in a weak bleach solution before use. But I doubt that’s ever been followed by many people. Current advice (at least at home) seems to be to rinse lettuce to remove dirt ( https://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheet/safe-handling-of-lettuce-... ). Apparently most health problems from lettuce are on the surface and not particularly hard to get off.
Which wouldn’t help in this case. It seems like it is time to irradiate produce.
Or just, you know, grow it in a clean manner, and not turn it into an ultra processed food?
This depends on the food and the disease/pesticide in question.
"is not marketing. It is evidence". ugh.
I'm so confused how to feel about these articles. this one is clearly AI written. But blessed by a lawyer so we think the stuff in here is accurate with facts?
I've accidentally posted an AI article before that seemed just as this was, and the community flagged that to oblivion. Rightfully so I think?
Does Hacker News need a "report AI" and we can then hide the AI articles as a filter?
This is the Claudiest article I've seen in a long time. "Defensible view." "No correction, no note, no acknowledgment." "The honest statement about X."
So the next question is, how much of this is true at all, versus just being hallucinations.
The lawyers rewrote it four times
What's the Venn diagram of the posters demanding restaurant overregulation and downsized CDC labs testing every leaf of lettuce sold with those who enjoy unlicensed taco trucks?
i’ve seen a whole lot of useless and bad-faith juxtapositions in my many years as an internet user, but you still managed to surprise me with this one
Where do you suppose the taco trucks procure their lettuce?
Related: https://www.wired.com/story/diarrhea-outbreak-taylor-farms-m...
btw people are DYING from this infection now:
* https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/michigan-d...
Don't care. TF uses slave labor. Boycott.
You referring to their use of prison labor?
Yes. Using forced prison labor is using slave labor.
Are the prisoners given no choice?
I’m okay with it either way - as long as prison time isn’t unjust.
AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Slavery still exists in the USA. This isn't the same as job programs for reinsertion like in other countries - this is openly described as slavery.
And if you doubt it, see these:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/inmates-at-louisianas-an...
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/06/22/prison-slavery...
At what point is it forced/not forced to you?
This was related to an Arizona Correctional Industries prison labor contract. In Arizona, labor is mandatory. They either work in these corporate-tied programs or they have to work some other kind of job at the prison. Is that really a choice?
How much choice do you have? I know I don't have much. Either work or go without health care, shelter, and food. All I get to do is choose the job. Sounds like they do too.
> All I get to do is choose the job.
And have minimum wages, and have workplace safety standards, have recourse for injuries while working, etc. They don't get that, they're not "employees".
> A company’s public statement in the middle of an outbreak is not marketing. It is evidence — what the company said it knew, and when, published to the world at a moment when nobody had the benefit of hindsight.
Stopped reading immediately. If we’re just going to delegate writing to Claude, I won’t bother reading this. And maybe I’ll just delegate my decisions to Claude directly.
Kept reading and yep there’s more, so it wasn’t just the intro.
Not quoting it though since someone said they’re ambulance chasers, they’ll have to hire out a smellchecker.
This is an obvious next step tho? When I want news, I'll just ask Claude. Everything funnels to these providers?
GPTZero "AI" score for this post: 100%
Why should I put any stock in what some snake oil "AI detector" says?
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.
You're absolutely right! Those are load-bearing assumptions.
This is the right shape!
It seems plausible that someone could make a decent discriminator for distinguishing human text from AI text. I wouldn't immediately discount the idea.