> the companies have to prove beyond doubt the harmlessness.
There must be a reasonable balance struck somewhere. One cannot prove a negative, after all, and if anything new must be proven beyond doubt that it has no short, medium, or long-term effects on human health, you are not going to have anything new, period.
Acetaminophen, for example, has been in use for a century and a half, yet we still don't know how it really works[0]. If we don't know how it works, how are we to know that it won't harm us in some insidious way?
The counter point is that the vast majority of produced stuff is absolute useless garbage no one actually needs, or a gazillion of ripoffs from each other. Consumerism is a plague not only for people but also for the environment.
I think we can see a „dry-run“ of some product launch, point out dangerous flaws, and repeat until something actually useful is proposed that is not some profit-extraction tradeoff that makes something else worse.
This is rather extreme by intention, the truth probably is somewhere between, but I think most people can’t see how a more regulated system can actually thrive much better than putting people into poverty death loops and destroying the planet in the process.
There must be a reasonable balance struck somewhere. One cannot prove a negative, after all, and if anything new must be proven beyond doubt that it has no short, medium, or long-term effects on human health, you are not going to have anything new, period.
Acetaminophen, for example, has been in use for a century and a half, yet we still don't know how it really works[0]. If we don't know how it works, how are we to know that it won't harm us in some insidious way?
[0]: https://medicine.tufts.edu/news-events/news/how-does-acetami...