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America's FDA Wants to Update Its Definition of 'Healthy'. The Food Industry Doesn't by EditorDavid
Monday March 6th, 2023 at 6:13 AM

Slashdot
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America's public health-protecting Food and Drug Administration wants to update its definition of "healthy" for purposes of product labeling. But the Washington Post reports dozens of food manufacturers are now "claiming the new standards are draconian and will result in most current food products not making the cut, or in unappealing product reformulations." Under the proposal, manufacturers can label their products "healthy" only if they contain a meaningful amount of food from at least one of the main food groups such as fruit, vegetable or dairy, as recommended by federal dietary guidelines. They must also adhere to specific limits for certain nutrients, such as saturated fat, sodium and added sugars. It's the added sugar limit that has been the sticking point for many food executives. The FDA's previous rules put limits around saturated fat and sodium but did not include limits on added sugars. The Consumer Brands Association, which represents 1,700 major food companies from General Mills to Pepsi, wrote a 54-page comment to the FDA in which it stated the proposed rule was overly restrictive and would result in a framework that would automatically disqualify a vast majority of packaged foods.... The proposed rule, if finalized, they said, would violate the First Amendment rights of food companies and could harm both consumers and manufacturers. The Sugar Association has an issue with the added sugar limit; Campbell Soup is more focused on that sodium.... Virtually every part of the food industry appeared disgruntled (here are the 402 comments about the proposed rule). Baby food company Happy Family Organics said the proposed rule probably would lead to an unintended exclusion of some nutrient-rich products. And the American Cheese Society took a more philosophical approach, saying the word "healthy" isn't that helpful on a label and should be used in a complete diet or lifestyle context rather than in a nutrient or single food-focused context. The FDA estimates that up to just 0.4% of people who try to follow their guidelines would be swayed by the word "healthy" in their long-term food-purchasing decisions, according to the article. It's a position supported by a research paper in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing analyzing hundreds of international studies on the effectiveness of front-of-package nutrition labeling. "The authors found that the most effective means of conveying nutrition information is a graphic warning label, as has been adopted in Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Mexico and Israel. In Chile, black warning labels shaped like stop signs are required for packaged food and drinks that exceed, per 100 grams: 275 calories, 400 milligrams of sodium, 10 grams of sugar or four grams of saturated fats."

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rlauzon
20 days ago
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Neither group has our best interests at heart.

Amazon cuts off Parler’s web hosting following Apple, Google bans | Ars Technica
Monday January 11th, 2021 at 6:06 AM

Ars Technica - All content
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Amazon Web Services is suspending Parler's access to its hosting services at the end of the weekend, potentially driving the service offline unless it can find a new provider.

"Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST," Amazon wrote to Parler in an email obtained and first reported by BuzzFeed.

The email from AWS to Parler cites several examples of violent and threatening posts made in recent days, including threats to "systematically assassinate liberal leaders, liberal activists, BLM leaders and supporters," and others. "Given the unfortunate events that transpired this past week in Washington, D.C., there is serious risk that this type of content will further incite violence," the message adds.

Parler launched in 2018 as a "free speech" alternative to Twitter and Facebook. Through 2019 and 2020, it drew a number of conservative, right-wing, and far-right fringe users. Usage has dramatically increased in the past few days in the wake of Wednesday's events at the US Capitol and President Donald Trump's subsequent total ban from Twitter and other platforms.

That increased traffic has also brought increased threats of violence to the platform, which technology companies across the board seem to be taking more seriously after this week—and no wonder, as the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol made widespread use of social media to plan, carry out, and brag about their activity.

Parler, however, has not articulated a clear plan for dealing with violent threats on its platform. As Amazon wrote:

It's clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t "feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform." This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts.

Apple also removed Parler from its iOS App Store earlier today, citing similar concerns.

"Parler has not upheld its commitment to moderate and remove harmful or dangerous content encouraging violence and illegal activity, and is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines," Apple wrote. "Your app will be removed from the App Store until we receive an update that is compliant with the App Store Review Guidelines and you have demonstrated your ability to effectively moderate and filter the dangerous and harmful content on your service."

Google already booted Parler from its app store on Friday, also citing the prevalence of explicitly violent content left up on the platform.

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rlauzon
804 days ago
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Yet the Leftie Social media still allows hate groups like the CCP to have a platform. The hypocricy is amazing here.
fxer
805 days ago
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Parler can’t moderate because there would only be a rump of users left, the normie conservatives weren’t banned from Twitter/FB etc
Bend, Oregon
dreadhead
805 days ago
I can't imagine having to migrate to a whole new hosting platform in like a day.
fxer
805 days ago
Especially if they’re using any AWS platform specific shit like Lambda or Aurora etc. Co-lo hardware and self-hosting mongodb is their reality now
acdha
805 days ago
They claim not to be using things which would be hard to migrate but they’ll need a lot of capacity and given how sensitive the information they expect from users is I would especially wonder about vulnerabilities introduced in a panicked migration. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of fascists.
fancycwabs
803 days ago
Based on what I'm reading this morning, all of Parler's information is now hosted on an FBI server at a minimum.
dreadhead
803 days ago
I also read that they did not secure stuff properly (shocking) and that 70TB of data was downloaded...
fxer
803 days ago
Little Bobby Tables got ‘em

Parler CEO says the company has been dropped by "every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers", which could end the business (Bruce Haring/Deadline)
Monday January 11th, 2021 at 6:03 AM

Techmeme
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Bruce Haring / Deadline:
Parler CEO says the company has been dropped by “every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers”, which could end the business  —  Parler CEO Mark Matze said today that his company have been dropped by virtually all of their business alliances after Amazon …

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HarlandCorbin
804 days ago
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Boo Hoo. It was used for nefarious purposes, and the company was warned and didn't care.
rlauzon
804 days ago
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Lefties hate any site that has actual free speech. The only speech that they think is good is the speech they agree with.
kazriko
804 days ago
A bit, yeah. Though, it was a mistake to go to yet another centralized site. The only way that free speech can go in the modern internet is to disperse. Go back to protocols instead of sites. Blogs and the fediverse. I had hoped they might see this when Gab when fediverse, then they mass defederated... I run my own blog, and my own Pleroma site, and it only costs me a bit of time and about $5 for the VPS. Anyone can add my blog to their RSS reader, anyone can follow my posts from any fediverse platform, they don't have to sign up for just one specific site with a single point of failure.
803 days ago
My own opinions aside, this seems like the "free market" at work as intended. These companies decided it wasn't profitable to host/distribute certain types of content (as they have done with leftist persons/groups). Aren't they just protecting shareholder value?
rlauzon
803 days ago
nocko: You talk "free market" and convienently ignore the collusion that happened to kick Parler off the Internet. The hypocricy from Lefties is amazing.
803 days ago
I'm not certain how describing how our system (a system I don't endorse) operates is hypocritical. All the businesses which you accuse of collusion are large, publically traded companies whose interests are very similar. If Amazon doesn't think it's profitable to host it in their DC, why would a functionally identical setup at Google prove more profitable? If it's unprofitable to host the WebUI (AWS), wouldn't it be similarly unprofitable to host the Android or iOS UI? Bad press is unprofitable. Corporations are value maximizing machines. There's no reason to believe that multinational corporations have suddenly grown a conscience... If they are acting, we should assume that they are doing so out of business necessity (perceived or real) and that's what proponents of the "free market" call efficiency.

Raphael Warnock, Georgia's first Black senator, honors his mother's 'hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton’ - The Washington Post
Thursday January 7th, 2021 at 7:04 PM

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rlauzon
807 days ago
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The posturing of the Leftie's is really getting annoying.

radicalgraff:“One does not earn a billion dollars. They steal...
Monday January 4th, 2021 at 6:03 AM

Postcards from Space
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radicalgraff:

“One does not earn a billion dollars. They steal your wages”

Sticker seen in Seattle

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rlauzon
811 days ago
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I see the socialists are out in force in Seattle. But no surprise there. Seattle is full of useless people who want to be paid to be incompetent.
811 days ago
The robber barons will never love you back.
rlauzon
811 days ago
Neither will the socialists.
810 days ago
Ha. Turnabout is fair play, I suppose. I'd point out that twice so far you've made (intentionally or unintentionally) very sweeping statements about large groups of people. "Seattle is full of useless people", "the socialists". I'd propose to you that there is some nuance at play. Universal healthcare isn't stalinism. Not all 'socialists' are Marxist/Leninists or authoritarian... and Seattle is also has plenty of mercenary-like cogs who will fulfill any contract that the market decides is valuable. I realize that perhaps I grouped capitalists in a similar way... but I think there's a distinction. Socialism is a big tent for ideas that (at least self-identify) as improving the material conditions of the humans under it's influence... where as capitalism is a big tent of ideas on how to most effectively extract and centralize resources. It seems like there could be some good outcomes in the 'socialism' family of philosophies... perhaps democratic confederalism, social ecology, or communialisms seem promissing for some groups of people. For capitalism, it's difficult (at least for me) to find any ideas that haven't been deployed already to devistating effect already. Most of the defense of the status quo that I hear seems reducible to "Capitalism made t-shirts/iphones/whatever cost less than $actual_social_and_environmental_costs, so it's impossible to say it's bad... which seems too simplistic to engage with. Anywho, dialogue FWIW.

New national polls are disastrous for Trump — and state polls aren’t much better by Dylan Scott
Monday October 12th, 2020 at 5:55 AM

Vox - All
2 Comments and 3 Shares
President Donald Trump isn’t catching up with Democratic nominee Joe Biden, according to new 2020 election polls. | Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Joe Biden’s polling lead has gotten huge. But Trump could still make up a lot of ground.

With millions of votes already cast and just three weeks until Election Day, President Donald Trump does not appear to be making up ground in his reelection race against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

An ABC News/Washington Post national poll released Sunday found Biden leading Trump with likely voters by 12 percentage points, 54 percent to 42 percent, with the Libertarian and Green Party candidates together attracting just 3 percent of likely voters. The poll was conducted entirely after Trump’s October 5 discharge from Walter Reed Medical Center, where he was treated for Covid-19. It shows Biden doubling his lead from the last ABC/Post poll, which found Biden up 6 percentage points in late September.

These days, a 12 percentage point national lead for Biden is largely in line with overall polling averages. FiveThirtyEight gives the Democratic candidate a 10.4 percentage point average lead, while Real Clear Politics puts Biden’s average lead at 9.8 percentage points.

And the ABC/Washington Post results align with other recent polls as well. The University of Southern California’s tracking poll also posted new findings on Sunday and found Biden up 11.75 percentage points. A massive Pew Research Center poll, which surveyed more than 10,500 voters, showed a 10 point lead for Biden earlier this week.

This has been a steady race, with Biden holding a meaningful lead throughout the campaign — a marked difference from 2016, when the polls were much more volatile. Trump needs good news if he’s going to turn his campaign around. He’s not getting it.

Trump continues to poll poorly in key swing states

All of these polls were conducted nationally, and, of course, presidential elections are not won by the national popular vote. However, Trump hasn’t made much progress in the battleground states he will need to win to secure 270 votes in the Electoral College, either.

Fresh CBS News polling, taken from October 6 to 9, found Biden leading Trump by 6 percentage points in Michigan and tied in Iowa, both states that Trump won in 2016. The new polling also showed Biden enjoying a 6 percentage point edge in Nevada, a state Hillary Clinton won in 2016 that Democrats want to hold in 2020.

New battleground-state polls from Baldwin Wallace University showed Biden beating Trump in both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (with a 5 percentage point lead in the former and a 7 percentage point lead in the latter).

If he can’t win at least one state in the Midwestern trifecta — Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin — that won him the White House in 2016, Trump effectively has no path to 270 Electoral College votes, barring the highly unlikely scenario that he is able to flip states considered safely Democratic on election night.

In the most important swing states, the odds are against Trump right now, based on FiveThirtyEight’s polling average:

  • In Michigan, Biden is averaging an 8 percentage point lead over Trump
  • Biden enjoys an average lead of 7.3 percentage points in Pennsylvania
  • Biden is also leading Trump by 7.2 percentage points on average in Wisconsin

Two of the more Republican Midwestern states, Iowa and Ohio, are also drifting away from Trump after he won them by 8 percentage points or more in 2016:

  • Biden currently holds a 1 percentage point lead in the FiveThirtyEight polling average for Iowa
  • The former vice president is also ahead by an average of 0.7 percentage points in Ohio

Biden also leads Trump by 3 or 4 percentage points in both Arizona and Florida, two additional states Trump won in 2016 that Democrats don’t need to win to prevail in the Electoral College, but that would pad the margins of a Biden victory — making it harder for the president to challenge the results.

Trump, meanwhile, doesn’t appear to be in serious competition to win any of the states where Clinton triumphed in 2016. Minnesota and Nevada have been considered the most likely targets for any map expansion on Trump’s part, but Biden is leading by 9.2 percentage points in the former and 6.8 percentage points in the latter, per the FiveThirtyEight averages.

Taking Biden’s strength in national and state polling together, FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 election forecast gives Biden 86 in 100 odds of winning the presidency. That is substantially higher than Clinton’s 71 percent chance on Election Day 2016.

Biden’s strong polls don’t mean he will win the presidency

Biden’s apparent advantage doesn’t mean Trump can’t win, as Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende emphasized on Twitter. Because of the Electoral College’s rightward lean, Trump could lose the popular vote by several percentage points and still win enough states (by holding onto Florida, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, for starters) to win a majority in the Electoral College.

That translates to about a 1-in-7 chance. Let's call it 1-in-8 to make the math easy. We did this ad nauseum in 2016, seemingly to little effect, but that 1-in-8 chance is roughly the same chance of having three kids, all boys. That's not unusual. Trust me! 3/

— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) October 11, 2020

If you rounded the other way, to 1-in-6, you'd have the chances of losing at Russian Roulette. Again, if you were playing Russian Roulette, you'd be really nervous, and probably focused on the ways you could lose, rather than win. 4/

— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) October 11, 2020

How could that happen? Well, the polls could tighten over the final weeks of the race, as undecided voters make up their minds, and perhaps as Republicans skeptical of Trump ultimately decide to stick with their party. Pollsters could also be missing some Trump voters, leading them to underestimate his support as they did in critical states in the 2016 election.

In an interview with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, Trende pointed to Trump’s job approval — currently a few points higher (43.6 percent in the FiveThirtyEight average) than his average support in election polls (41.9 percent) — as one possible indicator of Trump’s ability to make up ground in the final weeks.

But, at this point, it seems fair to say everything would need to break right for Trump, and the polls would once again need to be significantly wrong, for the president to win another term. The New York Times has a feature that estimates what the 2020 result would be if the state polls are as far off as they were in 2016 and, even under that scenario, it still projects a Biden win.

Of course, when using polls to attempt to predict future events, it is important to never say never. The 2016 election was a searing reminder that events with a 1-in-4 or 1-in-6 chance of happening can, and do, happen.

But with millions of people having already voted — and many others having already made up their minds — the polls suggest time may be running out for Trump to shake up the 2020 campaign.


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rlauzon
895 days ago
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Gotta keep up the false Narrative, I suppose.
JimB
895 days ago
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Don't be complacent. Vote for Biden, the candidate that isn't trump!
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