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Smog in our brains

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Re: Smog in our brains

#41

Post by yeellow »

addicted wrote: post #35
Houshalter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had adopted nuclear power decades ago, none of that would be an issue. Solar power is only just now catching up to cost effectiveness with nuclear. And only on sunny days, the storage problem is very far away from being solved. Maybe coal is cheaper, but only if you exclude externalities. The amount of radiation released by nuclear is tiny compared to coal. Not to mention mercury, carbon dioxide, etc.

The only reason nuclear is even viable today is because nuclear technokogy isn't as bad today as it was a few decades ago. Every time we have a massive nuclear disaster the defense (a valid one!) Is that the disaster happened from a poorer technology that isn't used anymore today. If we had built out nuclear earlier we would have had a lot more nuclear disasters. The problem with nuclear is solely that by the time th…

Pakistan has nuclear weapon and 4 nuclear power plants.

Re: Smog in our brains

#42

Post by ABCLAW »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #36
trhway wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>conflation of neurotoxins in water and largely benign electronics makes very little sense. dopamine addiction coming from and through the benign electronics may count for something.

I agree with that to a point. It does count for something for sure, but I think the analogy breaks down pretty quickly from there. I don't want to be pedantic or overly demanding of the statement either though. I just thought, when I read it, that the issues are much more complex than that, and the analogy overly simplifies the matter. I'm a big fan of electronic devices, and a huge believer in them being a medium fo…

The root of the issue is our neural biochemistry.

Are societies are expected to re-engineer our brains rather than put addiction in context? Or are they expected to create societies where our reward pathways are firmly under their control?

I like having fun games to play too, and I'd be upset if someone stopped my dopamine drip too. That said, lets not pretend there isn't a wave of weaponized addiction sweeping through the software design world. What other solutions exist to that problem?

Re: Smog in our brains

#43

Post by jdc »

legulere wrote: post #40
Houshalter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. This has nothing to do with the planet being destroyed, but minor health effects of air pollution. Which in first world countries, is vastly less than it used to be. And could be eliminated entirely in a few years with technology like solar power and electric cars. Possibly it could have been seriously cut back decades ago, if environmentalists hadn't fought so hard against nuclear.

Electric cars surprisingly don't reduce particulate matter air pollution by much. A big part of the pollution comes from wear of the tires and the road. It's higher with heavier cars and electric cars generally are heavier because of their batteries. Then you have the effect of reemission of PM already lying on the road that stays the same. Another way of PM emissions that is not tackled at all is agriculture. And it…

Just how great are the PM emissions from car tires? Has anyone quantified the effect?

Re: Smog in our brains

#44

Post by tomatsu »

leggomylibro wrote: post #18
Terr_ wrote: post #2

I wouldn't be surprised if some future historians are able to look back at modern cities the same way that we look at granny pictures of a soot-streaked city of the industrial revolution. "Yes, some of them thought that it was bad to have all that stuff around, but most thought it wasn't too serious compared to the immediate economic benefit it brought."

I definitely get a little worried about fumes, in a modern urban city. Diesel pollutants are local, and when I walk across a 4+ lane street with traffic, I always find myself practically gagging on exhaust fumes. That can't be healthy. We should really ban big diesel rigs from areas with population density above a certain threshold. Especially considering how little the regulations around diesel emissions are actuall…

> We should really ban big diesel rigs from areas with population density above a certain threshold.

I'd go much further than that. I'd ban all combustion engines in cities.

There are enough alternatives: Walking, bicycles, ebikes, trams, electric buses, trains, and electric cars.

We should try to keep the air as clean as possible in densely populated areas.

Re: Smog in our brains

#45

Post by catdog »

freeflight wrote: post #39
Houshalter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had adopted nuclear power decades ago, none of that would be an issue. Solar power is only just now catching up to cost effectiveness with nuclear. And only on sunny days, the storage problem is very far away from being solved. Maybe coal is cheaper, but only if you exclude externalities. The amount of radiation released by nuclear is tiny compared to coal. Not to mention mercury, carbon dioxide, etc.

>If we had adopted nuclear power decades ago, none of that would be an issue. Then we would have even more problems with final disposal than we already have, that's the topic none of the pro-nuclear people ever want to touch on because they fully realize it's quite an issue. As is, it's already bad enough how plant operators socialize these long-term costs while keeping all the profits private, which is the only way…

Another problem with going fully nuclear: society is going to be highly dependent on basically a hand full of reactors so it's not that easy to shut them down in case unexpected defects are found or if they simply get too old without newer ones being built in time. We see this e.g. in France which largely runs on nuclear power: they still operate some old reactors with serious known issues. There also were some winters in the recent years where their grid was close to a blackout because a substantial part of the nuclear plants where in maintenance mode and electrical heating is widely used. It is only possible to prevent this because neighboring countries like Germany are able to reliably produce a lot of excess electricity (still too much coal unfortunately, thanks Merkel :() which they can import.

Re: Smog in our brains

#46

Post by Terr_ »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #4
Terr_ wrote: post #2

I wouldn't be surprised if some future historians are able to look back at modern cities the same way that we look at granny pictures of a soot-streaked city of the industrial revolution. "Yes, some of them thought that it was bad to have all that stuff around, but most thought it wasn't too serious compared to the immediate economic benefit it brought."

Someday people may also look back at the television and the smartphone and compare the garbage we call mass media that we put into our minds to the lead in Roman water pipes.

IMO the issue isn't media-consumption per-se, but the mechanisms used in advertising and how our society condones certain tactics for one group "hacking the brains" of another.

Re: Smog in our brains

#47

Post by Terr_ »

virmundi wrote: post #6
Terr_ wrote: post #2

I wouldn't be surprised if some future historians are able to look back at modern cities the same way that we look at granny pictures of a soot-streaked city of the industrial revolution. "Yes, some of them thought that it was bad to have all that stuff around, but most thought it wasn't too serious compared to the immediate economic benefit it brought."

And the question is "were they wrong?" Soot-streaked cities of the industrial revolution had to be soot-streaked. They didn't have any other technology. They had to use what they could to make better things. It provided better economic benefit, and ultimately better life for us all (such as antibiotics). We're at a point where we have better things, but choose to not use them. It's intrinsically different than the in…

> And the question is "were they wrong?"

I think the more-useful question is whether folks knew the tradeoffs and made an informed decision in the first place.

Should someone have made more effort to determine the tradeoffs before widespread implementation? Were any facts withheld or investigation curtailed? Did one group (wrongly?) benefit from another group's ignorance?

Re: Smog in our brains

#48

Post by akiselev »

addicted wrote: post #30
Houshalter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. This has nothing to do with the planet being destroyed, but minor health effects of air pollution. Which in first world countries, is vastly less than it used to be. And could be eliminated entirely in a few years with technology like solar power and electric cars. Possibly it could have been seriously cut back decades ago, if environmentalists hadn't fought so hard against nuclear.

Yea. The real problem was fightng against a technology that is more expensive yhan cleaner options, has massive NIMBY problems that are not yet resolved, gets more expensive as time goes on, has led to massive cpncentrated disasters and still is unable to find a solution to its long term problems. A technology whose proponents's best answer even today is "wait until the next breakthrough". Nuclear: The one trick the…

> A technology whose proponents's best answer even today is "wait until the next breakthrough".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb

This was researcher was completed by the United Aircraft Corporation in the late 60's and early 70's before it was canceled by Nixon along with the Mars program. It was under a NASA contract for space exploration so the literature is in the context of a rocket engine but it is even more compelling as a terrestrial reactor as it uses a tiny amount of fuel (tens of kilos instead of tens of tonnes) and actively keeps that fuel at supercritical so if power is lost the entire thing fizzles out. This is a fast neutron design with an extremely high neutron cross section, far beyond that of any other reactor, easily allowing you to feed nuclear waste into it and very efficiently transmute much of it into fuel or more manageable waste that is then separated out by centrifuges (which are already in the design to separate usable UF6 from the neon exhaust). UAC was set to win a contract to test the reactor with nuclear fuel when NASA pulled the plug so the anti-nuclear crowd isn't to blame for that line of development dying.

However, all of the technological breakthroughs in computation, material science, and nuclear engineering needed to make this happen at an industrial scale have all been discovered since the project was canceled. If it weren't for all the anti-nuclear hysteria, we might have actually had someone willing to take the risk to bring the nuclear lightbulb reactor to market. Sadly, almost all of the scientists and engineers that worked on this design have passed on so the institutional knowledge is gone and the design was classified for a while so no other nations picked up on it in time. You may be able to find the original papers on NASA/JPL's archives but AFAIK they were reclassified a few years ago.

Re: Smog in our brains

#49

Post by acd »

Clean diesel is the biggest industry scam since smoking. Thousands die every year from small particle emission from vehicles. Smog damages baby brain development.

Most diesel cars emitt up to ten times small particles like pm2.5 than car regulation and it's really bad for human health.

Re: Smog in our brains

#50

Post by nooron »

akiselev wrote: post #48
addicted wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea. The real problem was fightng against a technology that is more expensive yhan cleaner options, has massive NIMBY problems that are not yet resolved, gets more expensive as time goes on, has led to massive cpncentrated disasters and still is unable to find a solution to its long term problems. A technology whose proponents's best answer even today is "wait until the next breakthrough". Nuclear: The one trick the…

> A technology whose proponents's best answer even today is "wait until the next breakthrough". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb This was researcher was completed by the United Aircraft Corporation in the late 60's and early 70's before it was canceled by Nixon along with the Mars program. It was under a NASA contract for space exploration so the literature is in the context of a rocket engine but it i…

I recommend To the End of the Solar System by James Dewar, on this topic. He's an evangelist, but it has great primary source docs.
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