The real problem here is that the FDA is recommending throwing out the butter purely based on the labels.
If they said, "throw out the butter if you (or whomever would have consumed it) have an allergy to milk as this is dairy milk-based butter", or if Costco said, "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter" it would make more sense.
I don’t think the Forbes article is accurate when it suggests that FDA is urging consumers to “toss your butter in the trash” for this recall.
According to FDA: “Recalls are actions taken by a firm to remove a product from the market. Recalls may be conducted on a firm's own initiative, by FDA request, or by FDA order under statutory authority.” [1]
This particular recall [2] was “Voluntary: Firm initiated” and classified as “Class II” meaning low probability of serious adverse health consequences. The mislabeled product will be removed from the shelves, but I don’t think FDA is recommending throwing out the butter as the Forbes article implies.
It's a recall. You want to avoid any further confusion. You go with the simplest instructions possible. Just because they recommend you throw it away doesn't mean you actually _have_ to.
> "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter"
What value does returned butter have? It's not something we can refurbish. It would be ultimately be thrown away anyways.
What are the penalties imposed on a customer who does not throw out their recalled butter? As far as I know, there are none? So with the current messaging, anyone willing to take on this risk by keeping their butter can keep it. People who don’t see that option might not be able to perfectly understand the risk. So, this messaging feels perfectly reasonable to me.
(Notice also that it's a manufacturer-initiated recall.)
Am I missing an FDA press release about the recall?
Also:
> or if Costco said, "return it...
Costco doesn't want the butter back. It would cost way more to verify that it's still sellable than it would be to simply offer a replacement product to affected customers who ask for one.
> General guidelines from the FDA advise consumers who have purchased any recalled food to dispose of the product or return it to the retailer for a full refund.
Which is a bit of a different statement… general guidelines would have to cover things like a recall for E. coli … and isn't perhaps the best advice here. But I'm wondering, did that get twisted into TFA's
> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is urging customers to check their refrigerators for specific product codes and to follow its disposal instructions if they find affected butter.
…when no specific urging for this is taking place, which is what I think most readers would think?
(But holy heck. Why do those recall notices not appear on the FDA recalls[1] page?)
I found both, actually. They're both in the "event" link I provided, but you can't get a detail view for recall F-0122-2025. This seems fine to me, given that all of the data you'd find in the detail view for each seems to be present in the "event" view that displays them both.
> (But holy heck. Why do those recall notices not appear on the FDA recalls[1] page?)
I think because of this: " Press Release Not Issued For This Recall ".
> But I'm wondering, did that get twisted into TFA's...
Oh, that's an excellent spot. Yeah, a game of lazy telephone is probably exactly what happened.
Remember when journalists had more time to do a good job on the articles they chose to submit to their editors?
You aren't missing anything. I tried to find the FDA's press release, including to what the article links to when they're supposedly summarizing what the "FDA alert" says. The linked website is just a general list of FDA alerts, and doesn't list kirkland butter at all.
The same link you posted (FDA event listing) is the only thing I can find directly from the FDA on it, and they don't say "throw out the butter". They just say they're issuing a recall due to mislabeled product, that's it.
If the product details in the recall notice match the details on the food product you have at home, do not open or consume the product. Instead, do one of the following: + Return the product to the place of purchase for a refund. + Dispose of the product following the instructions provided in the recall notice to make sure no one will consume it.
I haven't been able to find a source for the FDA actually making any kind of statement on this recall at all.
If that's their official default recommendation, and they didn't say something to the contrary specifically for this recall, then that is what they're recommending for this recall.
This reminds me of when Sony disabled their officially supported OtherOS support (used to install Linux and other os's dual boot) with an update. Of course without the update, no access to the Sony Store, games that require the latest Sony PS3 stopped working, etc...
Class actions are more about penalizing the company than making customers whole. I’m pretty sure the legal and settlement costs were enough to make Sony create processes to avoid that happening again.
Disagree. What was the revenue upside of the openness to start with? Probably less than $3.75m.
$3.75m is tiny to Sony but probably quite large for the group responsible for the loss. I know I've seen serious trouble at Fortune 10 companies over $3m issues, when the 6-person group's annual budget is $500k.
Well for one, they got "free" marketing for PS3 by getting it associated with supercomputer performance. They averaged almost 12.5M units sold per year, which means a lot of game sales (where the money really comes from). They're the largest video game company in the world, and make about $2B earnings before interest and taxes per year these days.
>
Well for one, they got "free" marketing for PS3 by getting it associated with supercomputer performance.
At least in Germany's nerd circles Sony's behaviour rather lead to "so nie" jokes (explanation of "so nie": when you pronouce "Sony" with the first syllable like you would pronounce a German word, stress the second syllable, and put a little break between the syllables, it sounds like "so nie" [German for "never this way"]), and lots of people used this "little different" prounciation of "Sony" to express their disgust for Sony's behaviour. This "guerilla pronounciation" of "Sony" helped to spread quite some reputational damage of Sony among hackers and tech enthusiasts in Germany.
You also needed onerous levels of proof to get that whopper of a payout. IIRC you needed a photo of you using it or to submit a dump of your MBR showing the OtherOS partition.
Sony omitted OtherOS support with the PS3 Slim hardware revision with seemingly no technical justification and later removed it from existing consoles.
Afterwards several researchers investigated how to execute third-party code on the device and succeeded. [1] In response Sony did attempt to prosecute several people under DMCA and similar claims [2] and were more successful with certain defendants in some countries versus others.
Nowhere near the same level of "forced", but the earliest similar situation I know of was Microsoft issuing an update to MS-DOS that removed the "DoubleSpace" filesystem compression feature due to losing a patent lawsuit [1]. They later introduced another update with a replacement, "DriveSpace", that did roughly the same thing but with an incompatible on-disk format and a modest performance hit.
Your politicans, like Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, believe that the laws of Australia trump the laws of Mathematics, in the context of trying to weaken strong encryption. In at least some areas, they need a better education.
Not the best example for a tech savvy person. He had that image as he made a heap of $$ investing in some early internet company, but yeah he didn't seem to actually know what he was doing tech wise.
His real crime was playing a part in destroying the fibre to the premise internet rollout across Australia. He thought he could do it cheaper with mixed copper/coaxial technology.
The laws of Australia do trump the laws of mathematics in that context though?
If the government forces Google to push out a version of FacebookMessenger.apk to the Play Store account belonging to janetlovescats93@gmail.com, which uploads hourly plaintext chat logs to a Google Drive folder that authorities can read, then I'm really not sure what the mathematics of Facebook Messenger's encryption can do?
It makes sense but it's not trivial to discover, since languages separated by about 10,000 years have changed enough that it's almost impossible to find similarities. This paper talks about separations from 12-24 thousand years.
Proto-Afro Asiatic (edit: ancestor of Coptic, Hebrew, Amhara, Arabic, Tigre, the Berber languages, Aramaic, Hausa (IIRC), and a number of less commonly spoken languages) likely dates back to more than 10K years ago, but we have the benefit of more than 5,000 years of writing in both Egyptian and the Akkadian. We don't have that benefit with any of the indigenous languages of Siberia or North America.
Also, linguistic typology is not the best way to show relatedness, since languages change. For example, proto-Indo European had Nominative Accusative alignment, and was highly inflected, but modern English is almost completely uninflected, and Hindi has Ergative-Absolutive alignment for some tenses.
I looked at the structural features they mentioned, and at least some of them are well known to change quite dramatically. (Some Indo European languages picked up a difference between exclusive and inclusive we, places of articulation change, languages develop and lose gendered nouns, others have lost some distinctions of number (dual has been lost in most IE languages).
But I'm not a linguist, so any linguist can comment on whether these are fair criticisms.
Also, as others mentioned Na-Dene (Navajo is the most spoken language in this group), is already believed to have a connection to the Ket language of Siberia.
> but modern English is almost completely uninflected
That really depends what you're counting; if you ask which words in a sentence must be inflected, English still looks highly inflected. If you compare it to other inflected languages, the number of distinct forms for any given word is low, but this doesn't do much to help learners coming from languages that don't observe the same distinctions that require inflection in English. They don't do a lot better choosing between the fivish forms of an English verb than between the dozens of forms of a Latin verb.
> dual has been lost in most IE languages
This is a good tangential example; the dual persists, in reduced form, in modern English! We don't inflect verbs for it. But we do inflect determiners; we scrupulously distinguish both from all in a manner that most people in the world find confusing.
There's been a massive problem of diploma mills, both in America, and even worse in Canada, where colleges have basically been admitting students for fake degrees for pay, just because it gets them work permits post graduation much more easily, as somewhat of a workaround Canadian immigration.
Canada recently has cracked down on (I believe undergraduate) student visas recently, with effectively a per-province cap. I'm not sure if Canada has a problem with diploma mills at the Master's level though.
Sometimes it's not even Diploma Mills but state schools wanting to sweet sweet foreign student money. One of my H-1B coworker got her Masters in Computer Science from University of Houston. She was competent programmer but her work and another developer work was indistinguishable. She said 97% of her class was foreign students because if you look at the program, it makes little sense for any American to go into debt to get this degree.
The Republic of the Marshall Islands is the closest thing to being a US Protectorate without being a US posession.
It is officially an Associated State with a Compact of Free Association with the US. Its (non-naturalized) citizens have a right to work in and live in the US, equal access to welfare programs (that even green card holders don't have), and many US domestic agencies provide services there (the US Post office, and FEMA amongst others). And of course they have DoD protection (Edit: for Marshallese owned ships only), and use the US Dollar.
But it's even true in places which are _definitely_ not US proxies. Note that the US financial sanctions have an insanely wide reaching effect, given the need to be able to transact in US dollars.
Because of the US sanctions against Carrie Lam, the previous Chief Executive of Hong Kong, she had to withdraw her own salary from the Hong Kong SAR government in cash, because no bank in Hong Kong could deal with her and also offer US dollar denominated services.
If they said, "throw out the butter if you (or whomever would have consumed it) have an allergy to milk as this is dairy milk-based butter", or if Costco said, "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter" it would make more sense.