121–130 of 144 posts
It looks like there are a couple of disinformation campaigns against cellphone infrastructure and particularly 5G right now. One is aimed at retargeting environmentalists to fight harmless cell towers instead of bothering industry by fighting global warming. The other looks like the usual Russian campaign to slow down the tech progress of other nations. For example there was a widely shared story that a 5G test kille…
"Two areas of the body, the eyes and the testes, are particularly vulnerable to RF heating because of the relative lack of available blood flow to dissipate the excess heat load."
2) The WHO has an article written in 2014 that says:
"Several studies investigating potential health effects in children and adolescents are underway."
source: https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electrom...
It looks like there are a couple of disinformation campaigns against cellphone infrastructure and particularly 5G right now. One is aimed at retargeting environmentalists to fight harmless cell towers instead of bothering industry by fighting global warming. The other looks like the usual Russian campaign to slow down the tech progress of other nations. For example there was a widely shared story that a 5G test kille…
Can you explain why we need 5G when 4G is already working very well?
But all those giant corporations always want to sell you more devices, more expensive services, show you ads faster, track you and spy on you better, make more excuses to raise prices, harm competition, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the question is the effects of sustained exposure. There's been tons of studies on this. All (reputable ones[0]) indicate that there is no danger. [0] I specify reputable because there are some pretty shady studies. Shady because: results can't be reproduced; exposures given are many orders of magnitude above what a person would receive; suspicious funding; non-reputable journals; etc
A lot of the "reputable ones" were funded by the industry. The truth is this is very hard to measure. You have something that happens over a period of years and is difficult to control for. How do you find a group of people in modern times who haven't used cell phones in the last decade, but at the same time are not a group of monks or Amish people with so many other lifestyle differences that everything is hopelessl…
This just tells me you're looking for conspiracy and distrust.
To comment implying that there's no way to measure, you definitely can. You look at cancer rates over time (we have that data). You also look to see if there are correlations with growth in areas where cell phone usage increased faster than in areas that were slow to adopt (this even happens in America, and we have this data). For example, New York more quickly adopted cell phones (and other radio technology) than Montana.
Just because you can't figure out how to measure something doesn't mean it isn't an already well established practice that has been verified through many different studies. Many different disciplines use this method as well. The nice thing about this method is that it is also easy to test to see if researchers are p-hacking or doing other types of data manipulation that one would expect if there was a conspiracy going on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was on HN front page some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355680
The one that shows exposure to EM radiation lengthens rat's lives, and that the older rats got more cancers..?
Having lived in Brussels for a year now and witnessing sidewalks covered in trash and bad air quality I’m quite cynical of politicians waxing lyrical about protecting their constituent’s health. I think the last paragraph in that article holds more weight. “Last week, the various governments in Belgium once again failed to reach agreement on the auctioning of the 5G licences. The file remains stuck on the distributio…
I’ll take trash and bad air quality over cancer.
I live in Brussels, internet over 4G works great and nobody complains about it being slow. I am willing to change my mind if somebody proves why we need to upgrade but (and as much as I love new tech) "if ain't broken dont touch it", if anything just make it cheaper.
4G, just like 3G before it will get slower over time. The spectrum is still shared, and the more devices are connected on the 4G bands, the less bandwith there is for each device. IMHO, 5G is not so much about speed as it is about latency and better handling of devices in high density areas. Regarding the speed aspect, keep in mind that most smartphones (which are the primary 4G connected devices) are not equipped wi…
I looked at some trial 5G gNB; you definitely feel nauseated if u r standing near these units. This will be a concern.
have you also tried to blind-test standing beside one that's switched off and on? Because plenty of people say they can "feel" cellphone radiation (so-called electrosensitivity), yet noone has ever been able to show this under controlled scientific conditions. As soon as they don't know if the radiation is there they stop feeling it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that I haven’t seen safety studies, and the null hypothesis is that a technology is mildly unsafe: most of the neat science technologies have been. The reasoning of “its not ionizing radiation so it can’t possibly impact biological systems at continuous low, structured doses!” wouldn’t pass in an advanced high school class — so it’s deeply concerning that’s what underlies the safety of a widespread tec…
Given the ridiculous complexity of our biological systems, it would be of course very naive to assume that there's no interaction. But nearly everything in our environment interacts with our biology. And for almost all of those interactions it's very hard to specify what exactly the effects are. Depending on which lens you study it through, you can arrive at a nearly random conclusion, if you even manage to get a "st…
I’m unaware of any research into the effects of long term exposure to structured non-ionizing radiation.
A meta-analysis of situations in which people make arguments like yours shows that they’re often problematic: pesticides, plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc. All of these have understated first order effects which have been masked by questionable research and fallacious arguments, and ecologically devastating second order effects which weren’t accounted for until decades later.
I think it’s telling you made ad hominems, like implying I don’t know statistics, but didn’t bother to cite these meta-analysises that support your position and refute mine.
It doesn’t seem a settled issue, as you portray:
https://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Abstract/2013/12000/...
https://www.saferemr.com/2015/09/recent-research-on-wifi-eff...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the "reputable ones" were funded by the industry. The truth is this is very hard to measure. You have something that happens over a period of years and is difficult to control for. How do you find a group of people in modern times who haven't used cell phones in the last decade, but at the same time are not a group of monks or Amish people with so many other lifestyle differences that everything is hopelessl…
> A lot of the "reputable ones" were funded by the industry. This just tells me you're looking for conspiracy and distrust. To comment implying that there's no way to measure, you definitely can. You look at cancer rates over time (we have that data). You also look to see if there are correlations with growth in areas where cell phone usage increased faster than in areas that were slow to adopt (this even happens in…
Industry funded research, for all industries, is inherently unreliable because they get to choose whether to publish it after they've seen the results. This is not a conspiracy, it's just what actually happens. They're generally not going to publish a finding that hurts their business or exposes them to litigation.
And then you're here: https://xkcd.com/882/
> You look at cancer rates over time (we have that data). You also look to see if there are correlations with growth in areas where cell phone usage increased faster than in areas that were slow to adopt (this even happens in America, and we have this data). For example, New York more quickly adopted cell phones (and other radio technology) than Montana.
At which point you're back to different lifestyles and many confounders.
Worse, availability of mobile phones affects human behavior directly, so you have to somehow account for the consequences of those behavioral changes that directly correlate with mobile usage.
Also this: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Doing this properly is hard. So hard that people generally screw it up at least a little bit. Then we get studies showing both positive and negative results, but they're all flawed in at least minor ways so everybody gets to point to the flaws in the studies whose result they didn't like.
See also: Replication crisis.
In practice the result is that we don't actually know the answer, so the question is what we should do when we're not sure.