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.
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.
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.
> “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.
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.
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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.
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I'm further astounded that people bother with complaining about someone else's choice of food. It's not like broke into your wallet and used your money to buy bagged salad that I then replaced the contents of your food 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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
optimistic, this requires the arc of history to bend towards non-fascism.
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Well, shit in peace i guess.
Well it's definitely not in piece/s I guess
[flagged]
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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Surely the burden of proof here is proving that a 70% headcount reduction doesn’t make a difference.
what would make you think that a downsized lab can do the same amount of work
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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.
[dead]
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 broke into your wallet and used your money to buy bagged salad that I then replaced the contents of your food 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 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 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.
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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They have to in EU!
https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/campaign-2026/allergie...
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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/
> 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.
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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 :(
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Took me a sec to realize you weren't quoting the guy from Tool lol
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.
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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.
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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.
Thanks.
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.
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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.
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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?
All I know is the Taylor Farms Creamy Ranch from Costco gave me the worst stomach aches for 4 days and horrible gas
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.
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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
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.
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> 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?
I see they followed Fauci's Covid playbook. Thank goodness Cyclospora is rarely fatal.
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.
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It seems plausible that someone could make a decent discriminator for distinguishing human text from AI text. I wouldn't immediately discount the idea.