…sufficient for my small yard.  In response to a detailed list of questions about my purchases and about online sales in general, the EPA said that it understood its Risk Mitigation Decision “would not completely remove second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides from use by general consumers, as it intended to allow use by persons such as farmers and custodians.” It also said that it was “aware that retail has changed dramatically since 2008,” but it did not say whether it has ever taken any enforcement action against manufacturers or digital retailers. The agency added that it is currently reviewing the registration of these products but gave no timeline for the review process.
Eisemann tells me there is a familiar pattern to regulating pesticides. The development of new technologies always outpaces the scientific understanding of their risks and benefits. As a result, regulators are continually playing catch-up. Even still, he was struck when I told him I had been buying the stuff from Amazon and walmart.com. “It’s probably time for the EPA to certainly take a look at doing enforcement actions,” Eisemann says, “and it’s probably time for them to reevaluate e-commerce.”  The idea of restricting acce…

Our practices, values, and norms around maximizing freedom seem to have made sense only paired with an older world’s practical limitations on access. There are a lot of obvious metaphors for things the Internet makes easy that mere logistics had prevented before. Therefore, suspicion of those ethics of “more liberty is more better” shouldn’t be seen to represent a fundamental shift away from liberty so much as a redeepening of a commitment to figure out how liberty can work, not as a heuristic but as part of a system that doesn’t kill people’s cats (read the piece). “Light touch” regulation that assumed only the right people will get their hands on something – maybe it used to work for some things, but it seems terribly naive now.