But if you ascribe even the slightest but of agency to any of the non-Americans involved, you have to wonder if this problem will come back.
From the article:
> And recently they are celebrating some big news on the lead fighting front: This week, UNICEF and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced a new $150 million initiative to combat lead poisoning.
Americans have disassembled USAID. The agency of Americans is also contributing to this reccuring.
I’m going to push back very, very hard on ascribing any sort of blame on anyone other than those who are committing these acts. Least of all the American taxpayer, regardless of whether or not dismantling USAID is a good idea.
If the rest of the world is so helpless that all hope depends on Americans to solve even problems such as this and it’s our fault for not doing so, then I don’t want to hear a peep about us taking any other actions in the world that we deem just. You can’t have it both ways.
> The money – most of it from Open Philanthropy – will go to more than a dozen countries from Indonesia and Uganda to Ghana and Peru.
From other sources, I think the US _financial_ commitment was actually pretty minimal ($4M). But if USAID had been providing important governance, administration or coordination, withdrawing its involvement could still destabilize an effort that otherwise could have been impactful.
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/us-government-commits-4-mill...
"Blame" is a loaded word. But is it really so strange to you to think that the richest and most powerful country might have some role to play in international problems that arise from comparative poverty? And that the country with the largest military in the world also should be held to a high standard in how it uses that tremendous force?
If we were just some average-sized middle-income country, then no one would expect that we should play a disproportionate role in helping things at an international level, or that the use of our military is more criticized than any other. But we're big and rich and powerful and we've had some military presence in other continents pretty much continuously since WWII, and we shouldn't expect to be able to act with impunity.
I think this is a mischaracterization of parent's point. He didn't say it was strange , and he didn't say we had no role to play.
> that the use of our military is more criticized than any other. But we're big and rich and powerful and we've had some military presence in other continents pretty much continuously since WWII, and we shouldn't expect to be able to act with impunity
This seems largely orthogonal to parent's point, which I would rephrase as "We can't be police and not police at the same time. If your expectations require us to be both, they're bad expectations."
> then I don’t want to hear a peep about us taking any other actions in the world that we deem just
I think the noteworthy peeps are not about the mere fact that we involve ourselves in the world outside our borders but that we often do it pretty badly. We attack Iraq with "shock and awe" over WMDs that do not exist, and create the Abu Ghraib prison. We drone strike weddings. We set up puppet governments ... for a while. We sign up for climate accords and then back out (multiple times).
I read his point as, "if we have an obligation to fix other people's problems, we shouldn't be subject to complaints when our foreign adventures go wrong".
And I think that's crap; we have both an obligation to try to fix the important problems that wealth or force can fix, and we have an obligation to use both carefully and ethically.
> which I would rephrase as "We can't be police and not police at the same time.
To be clear, in this turmeric story, they did an ad/leaflet campaign about the issue, and then Bangladesh's own Food Safety Authority cracked down. This wasn't about the US enforcing its laws or standards anywhere else. Getting involved and helping to solve a problem doesn't need to mean being the police. And I'm not an expert, but I think almost none of the stuff that flowed through USAID was about being "police".
That's a bad faith reading imo. They said "action we deem just" not "things we mess up".
> Getting involved and helping to solve a problem doesn't need to mean being the police.
It generally does when the source of the problem is people. When you're actively preventing people from doing something, that is "policing". Policing isn't just arresting/shooting/bombing, it's the general enforcement of rules.
> And I'm not an expert, but I think almost none of the stuff that flowed through USAID was about being "police".
That's somewhat beside the point, as the source in both USAID and the "policing" is the US government. You dont name your hand and consider it a different person.
With respect to your point about foreign intervention, I actually have come about on Iraq and think that it might have turned out OK if perhaps not worth it monetarily or morally (arguably lying to the American public - I don’t think it’s very arguable but I want to leave room for reasonable discussion) because as I see things today - I think the quality of life in Iraq has improved and frankly they are not under the thumb of a brutal dictator. I wish I knew some folks from Iraq to educate me either way.
With that being said - often times our foreign interventions are seen as good/bad but it just depends on who you ask. We think (and I think) arming Ukraine and Taiwan are good policy - is it? What does China or war-torn Ukraine have to say about that (again with respect to Ukraine please note I am a huge hawk on arming Ukraine against Russia and would advocate for direct US intervention to stop the war), but reasonable people can have differences. The point there just being that sometimes it seems obvious that American taxpayer dollars are well spent but not always. We should just be flexible in that understanding. Just don’t try to assign blame for Americans not wanting to pay for XYZ issue. It’s wrong and counterproductive, in my view.
Not that it matters but thanks to both of you for interesting conversation and dialog.
So, it doesn’t seem like it matters much if USAID was dismantled then.
> But if USAID had been providing important governance, administration or coordination, withdrawing its involvement could still destabilize an effort that otherwise could have been impactful.
But, if. “Maybe we can make a lot of assumptions about a lot of things and pretend they’re true, and make an argument about it.” Isn’t the play. Not a real point, or something to even debate.
> “Blame" is a loaded word. But is it really so strange to you to think that the richest and most powerful country might have some role to play in international problems that arise from comparative poverty? And that the country with the largest military in the world also should be held to a high standard in how it uses that tremendous force.
You completely lost the plot here. You can’t have it both ways. Sure would be pretty neat if _any other country in the WORLD_ stepped up and did… something. Anything. Your argument really died here.
I do absolutely agree, it's not your fault that cheaper, dirtier, methods of production are being used, but your lack of standards is a major contributing factor.
This is the reason the EU and UK exclude so much US produce. To allow it would lower local standards too.
‘In the early 2000s, New York City's health department noticed a perplexing blip: A surprisingly large number of Bangladeshi children in New York City were showing up in their lead database.’
For the cost of the research mentioned in the article, that seems a small sum to pay relative to the result achieved.
‘Soft power’ is not valued by many anymore, but cut it all and it’ll be interesting to look back in a generation or two and see the result.
I’m not actually sure that the juice is worth the squeeze though with respect to your first paragraph and I think you are stretching. The better argument instead is just the appeal to soft power or Conservative “we need to save the world” sensibilities aka Bush Jr. and AIDS for example.
However, the world playing both sides of the coin on "US World Police" being bad when it does stuff but also bad when it doesn't do stuff is part of how we end up where we are.
It's a minuscule part of our budget, but an easy sell for right wingers to say "well the world isn't grateful for it and its all a bunch of waste so we are killing it" then get if not majority support, less than 50% disapproval.
The nature of the thing which is being done is relevant.
You can be against empire x taking action y while being positive it’s taking action z.
You can flail all day but you won't be able to point to another power that preserves that chance for everyone.
For example, look up the role of USAID in the Vietnam war. It was used to fund village self defense forces and the Phoenix program which used targeted apprehension and assassination to combat the Viet Cong. Sure it dug a few wells but net net I don’t think anyone can argue USAID had a positive impact for Vietnam.
USAID is 98% political interference and 2% aid. You’d think people who oppose US interference in other countries would applaud shutting USAID down.
But apparently not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPyRAcdZHDo https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/world/asia/indonesia-tofu...
I guess since it's just fraud and negligence, we should forgive it?
That’s a little hard to wrap your head around.
FWIW I've also been quoted by reporters before, and was really upset. They framed what I was saying to mean exactly the opposite of what I was saying, I assume because it fit the story better - I am 100% certain they understood me at the time, because the full context of my remarks made it very clear and we had a long conversation. So I don't lend much credence anymore to things like "what did the people interviewed in this story actually think about anything."
> You'll never guess the culprit
Not knowing about turmeric comes off as deeply ignorant when a billion people consume it as part of their daily diet.
> They don't know that this is harmful for human health
Let me assure you that they absolutely do and they couldn't care less. This also makes it seem like poor clueless farmers are to blame while mega-corporations that process, package, market and distribute these spices are never given even a passing mention!
But anyway, lead chromate is not a pesticide. The level of harm from pesticides containing heavy metals vs lead chromate is different. You're probably much much less likely to see lead poisoning levels in your blood just by consuming food treated only with pesticides.
Are you referring to unvetted experimental tests, or something else?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/politics/coronavirus-testing-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de... #news from March 10, 02020 how Helen Chu at the University of Washington discovered that covid had spread to #USA. She was running the Seattle Flu Study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in association with the Washington State Department of Health, whose state epidemiologist Dr. Scott Lindquist requested her to test for #covid, but was blocked by the FDA from telling the people who had it, because “the group was not certified to provide test results to anyone outside of their own investigators.” The FDA's repeated refusal was “because the lab was not certified as a clinical laboratory [just a research laboratory, which has much higher standards] under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months.”
The CDC was also trying to develop tests, but the tests they shipped were defective. Meanwhile the Seattle Flu Study sequenced the genome of the virus and discovered that a new variant had arisen. All of this was in late February.
> On March 2, the Seattle Flu Study’s institutional review board at the University of Washington determined that it would be unethical for the researchers not to test and report the results in a public health emergency, Dr. Starita said. Since then, her laboratory has found and reported numerous additional cases, all of which have been confirmed.
But then:
> on Monday night [presumably March 8], state regulators, enforcing Medicare rules, stepped in and again told them to stop until they could finish getting certified as a clinical laboratory, a process that could take many weeks.
Describing this as "unvetted experimental tests" is in some sense technically correct, but it's like describing me checking the voltage at a test point in my power supply with my multimeter as an "unvetted experimental test". Nobody has vetted my test plan, my multimeter may be out of calibration, and I might even not be checking circuit node I think I'm checking.
But if you think that's a valid criticism of what I'm doing, you need to be locked up where you can't harm others.
The main difference is that Helen Chu is the Allergy and Infectious Disease Program Lead at an R1 university, and literally the person who discovered that covid had spread to the US, while I'm not the lead of anything, and nobody will die if I don't find out why this power supply doesn't work until next week, so I don't have an IRB telling me that it's my ethical obligation to measure that test point.
The Trump Administration's handled the covid pandemic like a fucking bunch of clowns, but the CDC and FDA are mostly civil service, and most of the numbskulls who did this are career civil servants, not political appointees.
The US government is a motherfucking glioblastoma of incompetence, and that seriously interferes with well-intentioned, sensible plans like the one proposed by londons_explore.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jul/31/india.randeepr...
The analogy would be if someone came to the US, found salmonella on some produce, and wrote some breathless article about how they found the 'culprit'. This is business as usual masquerading as a longform news piece.
The real issue is a complete lack of testing or regulation, and I fear soon a loss of "rule of law" in the US. I mean if you bought the right person and airplane or some meme-coin, I'm pretty sure you could sell melamine in baby formula or lead paint in junk food, and it would be blamed on "those damn furriners"!
> Perhaps the lead came from agricultural pesticides? "We sampled hundreds of agrochemicals. Did not find lead in them," Forsyth says.
Lead chromate was deliberately added after harvesting to make it more yellow
For most readers of English, it is not an expected fact that someone would be intentionally adding lead to food.
In the article, the turmeric related lead poisonings were due to turmeric bought at Bangladeshi markets, not processed, packaged spices bought from a grocer.
I feel like the article should have been written from that perspective- an outsider discovering how a different community operates and polices itself- instead of from the perspective of some Western saviors uncovering a new problem.
Not every immigrant is a twenty something working on a Masters degree or working in the tech industry. Most of the Bengalis I know, especially in the NYC area, are here by sheer luck and determination moreso than formal education. The older ones have survived famine, cyclones, and literal genocide. At that point, trying to convince someone that their favorite spices or sweets that they grew up with for 40+ years may be harmful is pretty difficult.
If anything, getting to know the immigrant community has been enlightening in pointing out my own biases. It's easy to point the finger at someone else because they're a fish out of water. But put me in a different culture (or really just let time pass with the attendant changes in culture and technology) and the same thing would be true for me.
Now, I am really scared that even stuff sold in California is probably lead paint tainted turmeric.
(Relatedly, Lundberg publishes the arsenic levels of their brown rice, so that’s basically the only brand of rice I buy any more.)
There’s basically no reason to ever use powdered or dried.
The difference could be due to sun-drying (I assume?) on your family's farm vs. industrial scale freeze/spray drying, for example. Or some (non-lead, non-colouring) additive that prevents it oxidising and dulling over time perhaps. I think argon is often used (rather than air) in packaging for that purpose.
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb... ("[Consumer Reports] tested 126 products from McCormick, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and other popular brands. Almost a third had heavy metal levels high enough to raise health concerns")
You may (or not) be surprised that there's actually no general testing for heavy metals in US foods, even in categories seriously affected by them—neither by the FDA, nor the private sector.
> "Currently, about two dozen spice companies from 11 countries are subject to import alerts for lead contamination, which signal to regulators that they can detain those products. But that represents a fraction of the herbs and spices shipped to the U.S. In addition, the limited testing the FDA has done on spices has been focused on harmful bacteria, such as salmonella, not heavy metals, Ronholm says."
> "The lack of regulation leaves much of the monitoring of heavy metal levels to companies. [Consumer Reports] contacted all the ones with products in our tests to see how they limited heavy metals."
> "Of the companies that replied to our questions—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Costco, Bolner’s Fiesta, Gebhardt, Litehouse, McCormick, Roland Foods, Spice Islands, Target, and Whole Foods—a few said they require their suppliers to have a program for controlling or testing for heavy metals. But only three—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Bolner’s Fiesta, and McCormick—specifically said they test products in their manufacturing plants for heavy metals."
CR does a disservice by not sharing their test levels, but I'm willing to bet my own health that "some concern" is multiple orders of magnitude less lead than what this npr article is about.
There are plenty of very mainstream industrial brands with all sorts of contamination.
> I don't think you need to worry buying it from a store that's imported it properly
This statement is not true.
> Test 14 : Detection of lead chromate in turmeric whole > Testing Method: > * Add small quantity of turmeric whole in a transparent glass of water. > * Pure turmeric will not leave any colour. > * Adulterated turmeric appears to be bright in colour and leaves colour immediately in water.
In the same way that a lot of apples and the like will be buffed and then a soft wax coat applied so lots of apples are very shiny at the store.
if the turmeric is ground before sale i doubt there's any reason to use lead chromate.
If the turmeric is ground before sale, it's even easier to apply lead chromate and make the whole version "appear" healthier to the next processor who grinds it down and then sells the powder. If you buy it whole, then you can more easily see the color of the original root.
sorry, that's my mistake.
If the roots are wholesaled to the grinder, and the grinder doesn't know that bright means poisoned, they might prefer brighter looking roots. The ground tumeric will be poisoned.
Similarly, if the roots are poisoned and discriminating buyers aren't buying then because they're too bright, you can still grind it and sell it, and the color will blend.
And recently they are celebrating some big news on the lead fighting front: This week, UNICEF and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced a new $150 million initiative to combat lead poisoning "It is long overdue that the world is coming together," says Samatha Power <https://www.usaid.gov/organization/samantha-power>, who runs USAID.
As of 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 23, 2025, all USAID direct hire personnel, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and/or specially designated programs, will be placed on administrative leave globally (...)If you're using branded/packaged tumeric powder, or natural unpolished tumeric root, you're still good as a tumeric consumer in South Asia (though the paper differentiates branded vs packaged tumeric in Table 2, but does not explicitly explain the difference.)
Also, Patna in Bihar is the major source of Lead-adulterated tumeric (in the forms mentioned above) in India, and any exports of tumeric to other places from Patna could be harmful. Lead contamination in Guwahati, Assam is mostly found in imported tumeric from Patna.
The highest end of Pb contamination in turmeric in Bangladesh (as in OP) is, from a cursory search, maybe 483 ppm [1]. Regulatory limits in the US are in the low parts-per-billion [2]. This metal bioaccumulates over a lifetime.
[0] (.pdf) https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1581338O/3m-leadcheck-in...
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25214856/ ("Contaminated turmeric is a potential source of lead exposure for children in rural Bangladesh" / "Results: Lead concentrations in many turmeric samples were elevated, with lead concentrations as high as 483 ppm")
[2] https://www.consumerreports.org/babies-kids/baby-food/fda-pr...
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/3M-leadche...
The test is: when you add the powdered turmeric to water, natural turmeric will give the water a "light" yellow color, while adulterated turmeric will give it a "strong" yellow color.
This is not a test that I'd characterize as "easy" or "reliable".
There are also handheld scanners that cost more than a car. And yes, people in the community scan every imported toy and or food item they see to start the FDA ban process when necessary. Should buy local when you can anyway. =3
Not very much like a mass-spectrometer which creates a characteristic pattern of masses resulting from the test material as it is manipulated by the electron ionization or chemical ionization process. Where ions are detected across the atomic mass range of the particular spectrometer, forming a characteristic pattern or "spectrum" across that range.
Actually more jewelers and gold dealers than ever are using the x-ray guns professionally for bulk assay on an everyday basis. There are some handhelds which may be sensitive enough for trace analysis in food, but that requires a whole nother level of dedication beyond identification of metal objects, not just in technique and training but "laboratory" preparation as well.
The first obstacle would be convincing an owner of an instrument having capable specs, to embrace usage for things other than gold and silver assay. Then seriously pursue mastery of the instrument more so than ever to accomplish decent detection of low levels of lead and other metals like chromium, mercury, cadmium, etc.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25214856/ ("Contaminated turmeric is a potential source of lead exposure for children in rural Bangladesh" / "Results: Lead concentrations in many turmeric samples were elevated, with lead concentrations as high as 483 ppm")
The higher it is, the less likely for challenges in detection, and/or interference from background.
>lead concentrations as high as 483 ppm
SSDD.
Shouldn't be that hard to detect at that level which is way above ppb. There are a number of reliable methods.
However if the Minimum Detectable Level for a particular test procedure was only 500 ppm or above, one of these samples would report just as clean as a sample having no lead whatsoever; < 500.
MDL's like this which vary among different test methods do need to be carefully compared to the toxicity levels being screened for.
That's another one of the confounding aspects to be aware of.
Depending on circumstances, I may or may not prefer a different calibration session for each of these two levels, even though they are both within the same order of magnitude.
Either way ideally I would be preparing NIST-traceable reference materials at the proper levels for comparison & confirmation. Not much differently than I would do for the benchtop models and the forklift models of x-ray units. And to really get down into the ppb levels that's when the ICP/mass-spec comes in handy, that's a benchtop unit itself, too big to fit on a regular desk though. However you don't really get the most out of the ICP without a huge cryogenic tank of liquid argon out back so you can "consume mass quantities" ;)
With a handheld x-ray unit, if you are only assaying gold & silver it may be fine to send it back for calibration once a year, if the pawn shops even do that. For food testing I would want more of a laboratory-style analytical procedure and calibration which is concurrent with materials being tested.
>sounds like you know a lot more about the question
SSDD says it all without explanation, but here's a little.
Until you've spent lots of time at the bench, it's not easy to understand why a 1000 and a 483 might just be the same sample tested in different labs.
Or even the same lab on different days.
If so that would look even more embarrassing when my arbitrary reporting convention < 500 is applied.
But it's actually not unheard of to get a positive and a negative on the same sample even with some of the most sophisticated equipment
Explaining the rest of the story could fill textbooks, but the operators wouldn't be reading them anyway :\
So that's the most important thing to know, besides the actual spectrums which are table stakes.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/china/china-lead-poisoning-ti...
I've been suspicious of red lead oxide in paprika for a while now too.
Some paprika just seems so much brighter colored than ever to me.
It doesn't seem like something people need to worry about buying it at shops abroad imported properly though - when it was found in the US it was people bringing it home in their luggage.
FYI real, fresh turmeric is a dull orange color with a tan papery skin. It still stains the hands and cutting board when chopped, but that's normal. As the root dries, it turns a dull yellow-orange.
('My friend' hasn't bought it fresh since!)
I also know tomatoes are fruits, but in the comment section on the importance of eating fruits it would hardly be helpful to give as an example 'yes it's very important to eat plenty of fruit, such as tomato' - it's needlessly confusing when 'apple' would suffice.
https://www.cdc.gov/lead-prevention/news/outbreak-applesauce...
There's an example of lead poisoning from cinnamon, another common problem spice. IIRC it was traced to a factory in Argentina.
Paraphenylenediamine is toxic!
Nobody dumps lead in narco territories because order of law is so much better enforced than relatively lawless democratic countries like Bangladesh.
Unfortunately it looks halfway between the two pictures, although that might be from the Ginger, Orange, and other ingredients. :-/
[1] https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/organic-ginger-...
Since billions of people eat turmeric every day (not the same set, but >1 billion each day, surely), if this was an issue we'd have known about it before now.
thanks for re-iterating what i said.
The title is "Turmeric is the culprit in a global lead poisoning ..."
That is editorializing. It is a lie. they found that some markets use lead chromate to improve the product's beauty before sale.
The title leads one to believe that all or even most turmeric has lead in it, which just isn't the case.
I'm so sorry you aren't a child in a middle income country?
Most children can be poisoned eventually by a food contamination even if only some percentage of the food is contaminated because most childhoods are years long and most parents don't procure exactly the same supplies..
High-larious. TFA is dated 2024, and I've been reading reports about this practice far longer than that.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6289082/
"Researchers find lead in turmeric" [2019]
amendment: seems to be an unpopular take... my point being regulation is a workaround for a population that is worst than uneducated, miseducated, especially in regards to agriculture and "food" supply chain... if kids were provided with an actual education and not miseducated on the subject then the demand for on-demand food testing would go up, and prices for said testing would eventually go down after supply rises to meet demand increasing competition thus encouraging technological innovations to come in and lower prices
amendment ii: in a competitive market where all participants are thoroughly educated and the consumer is armed with the ability to test their food frequently then a market would likely emerge where consumers buy directly from farmers who out of market forces publish test alongside their crop
Why? What's wrong with regulation?
The whole point of regulation is safety and accountability and fairness.
Yes things can be over-regulated, but then the solution is to regulate properly, not over-regulate. The reason we don't have libertarian or anarchist societies is because they fundamentally can't solve the problems around safety, accountability, and fairness.
I guess proper schooling would help one understand the analysis techniques, but the machines are pretty expensive and most people don't have one at home.
Regulations that require food products to be regularly surveyed for heavy metals or other contaminants seem more effective than requiring every household to own and operate analysis machines.
Regulations that require foods to be tracked with origin and batch information makes it a lot easier to find out where contaminants entered the system, rather than requiring kids to go around playing Carmen Sandiego. It also helps save money with recalls when there's specific evidence to include only specific batches.
And how exactly am I going to know the farmer's published tests are correct?
And there aren't cheap tests for everyone to test all their food for thousands of different possible contaminants. That's wishful thinking.
And why do you think testing would need to become less frequent when relationships are established? It's a tried-and-true business technique to gain a reputation of high quality, then rake in the big bucks by switching selling low-quality stuff that people are fooled by.
You can understand why it's about 100,000x more efficient for everyone to say, hey, why don't we hire actual experts and give them the expensive equipment people can't afford on their own to do all these tests for us, and levy huge fines when farmers and corporations adulterate their food or otherwise make it unsafe? And we can call the rules farmers and corporations have to follow "regulations".
I genuinely don't understand why you think it should be legal for farmers to add lead to turmeric and try to sell it, and then put the responsibility on the consumer to test. I mean, do you think it should be legal for people to murder each other, and put the responsibility on others to avoid getting murdered? And if not, then why do you think poisoning people with lead is any different?
We'd need a way to enforce it though. Maybe make the farmers pinky-swear not to lie on the label because it is cheaper to lie than tell the truth? Do you think that would be enough?
If only there was some kind of group ... or administration even ... specifically tasked with making sure foods are unadulterated. Of course we can't have that though, because that would be regulation and businesses are perfect special little angels and would never ever lie. God forbid we place an evil burden like regulation on a business poisoning all of south-asia with lead.
By definition. Like a laws against murder are a burden to murderers.
The key to stopping murders isn't "get rid of the murder laws", but fix what made these people people violent (like lead poisoning?). Or in the context of this kind of regulation, the solution isn't to get rid of regulation, but make business account for the costs of their externalities from the beginning (rather than being forced to be moral by the government).
So you want regulations but you don't want to have to call them regulations. Pretty funny.