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.
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.
> “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.
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.
It's "simple math". I'm sure most posters here are familiar with the common managerial response to a high workload, just add more workers to the problem, more man hours will fix it.
Hasn't happened before, suddenly happens now after the cuts. It's not too complicated. People are dying and people have died. The new administration must collect all available evidence and then submit to grand juries for prosecution.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It seems plausible that someone could make a decent discriminator for distinguishing human text from AI text. I wouldn't immediately discount the idea.
I'd subjectively say <10%. Comes off to me as a well-spoken attorney speaking with their natural voice, which happens to be the kind of voice LLM's target. Attorneys are fine-tuned to sound boring and wooden (apologies to any present).
If you go back through the blog's archives, the author's heavy em-dash usage predates GPT3. (Although in that era he tended to use it incorrectly, using an EN dash character in place of the EM. But the style of how he uses them is the same).
There are also idiomatic human-typist fat-finger mistakes in this post, like the deleted whitespace character in "generic <em>E. coli</em>or fecal coliforms". The deletion is on a markup boundary (italicization), which was likely also the boundary of a mouse-highlighting section.
> 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.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/cdc-cyclospora-lab-doge-downsize...
Democracies are pretty good at studying the failures of other countries and learning about them.
I’m not at all convinced about this part.
> “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.
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.)
https://youtu.be/G__PVLB8Nm4
USDA Organic isn't perfect but it is, largely, the only meaningful information you can be given.
Everything else is weasel wording and subterfuge.
Tons of products already have all manner of information printed on them, but only the manufacturer can readily decrypt it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R32j6ZA3byI
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.
https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/cool
And here we are.
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.
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.
https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/campaign-2026/allergie...
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.
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.
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.
Literally the canonical example of capitalism-as-meat-grinder.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change-mind/
I just wanted to say that your phrasing here is a fabulously ominous one for the first episode of an HBO show.
This is, in my opinion, something that qualifies as being a long time.
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 :(
If that's your normal poop maybe seek medical advice.
Not all diarrhea is "explosive". This is worse than your average food poisoning from everything i've read (luckily, no personal experience so far).
Hmm I had not heard this, that is concerning. Thank you for sharing. No more salad for me, thanks.
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.
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...
I disagree that it makes a lot of sense for the CEO of the company to go to the Whitehouse 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.
The credulousness that this administration is granted by devil’s advocates and “rationalists” is exhausting.
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.
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.
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.
publicly traded/vc funded companies have always paid me the most because the money isn’t really theirs.
>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
At the core, "Family-owned" just means nepotism is preferred over merit.
(The mob is also "Family-owned")
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.
Global weather changes means more tropical pests and pathogens are migrating north. People are literally on fire, and shitting their pants in excitement. =3
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?
So the next question is, how much of this is true at all, versus just being hallucinations.
If you go back through the blog's archives, the author's heavy em-dash usage predates GPT3. (Although in that era he tended to use it incorrectly, using an EN dash character in place of the EM. But the style of how he uses them is the same).
There are also idiomatic human-typist fat-finger mistakes in this post, like the deleted whitespace character in "generic <em>E. coli</em>or fecal coliforms". The deletion is on a markup boundary (italicization), which was likely also the boundary of a mouse-highlighting section.
AI "AI" scores are snake-oil.
* https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/michigan-d...
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.
Not quoting it though since someone said they’re ambulance chasers, they’ll have to hire out a smellchecker.