Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now • Hacker News Board

Re: Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now

#131

Post by wavepruner » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 9:24 AM UTC

laHiesh1 wrote: post #60

mrtksn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's up to voters to decide. Maybe Brusellians don't mind some trash on the streets as much as new tech's potential hazards. It's not too long ago since establishing a link between cancer and EM Radiation[0]. You say that it's fashionable moral panic but some people may say that an increase in cancer is not worth fashionable network tech investment. Just as you might think that this 5G thingy is a must have a…

People say a lot of things and people are not perfect, they are susceptible to bias and manipulation. So until someone provides some peer reviewed evidence showing that there is a causal link between radio waves emitted by cellular equipment and cancer diagnosis then I'm going to call it a moral panic. On another note, I would be open to the possibility that Satan is real and is the cause behind cancer if and only if…

The history of environmental illness epidemics is chock full of people in power with this attitude. A new technology is poorly understood technology. The lack of peer reviewed research does not prove that it's safe, either.

Re: Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now

#132

Post by laHiesh1 » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 11:58 AM UTC

wavepruner wrote: post #131

laHiesh1 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say a lot of things and people are not perfect, they are susceptible to bias and manipulation. So until someone provides some peer reviewed evidence showing that there is a causal link between radio waves emitted by cellular equipment and cancer diagnosis then I'm going to call it a moral panic. On another note, I would be open to the possibility that Satan is real and is the cause behind cancer if and only if…

The history of environmental illness epidemics is chock full of people in power with this attitude. A new technology is poorly understood technology. The lack of peer reviewed research does not prove that it's safe, either.

I'm going to need some citations there, you're saying the effects of radio waves on the human body is a subject that hasn't received much attention despite being heavily scrutinized since radio communications become a thing. The cancer scare from radio waves has being going on for significantly longer than you seem to realise and yet has yielded no evidence to suggest there is a casual link between radio wave exposure and cancer.

How much longer will you bash your head against the wall hoping it will get results?

I have no problem studying the effects of new products and technologies before being released to the general public. After all, I like knowing my drugs aren't likely to harm me. The difference here is radio wave exposure has being a subject studied to death and nothing of note has being found. Simply because you believe something to be true or could be true does not award you the right to make the assertion that it's true. Go get the evidence and bring something new to the table instead of torturing everyone involved with this nonsense.

Re: Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now

#133

Post by Avamander » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 4:19 PM UTC

stevev wrote: post #88

holografix wrote: post #32

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.

[citation required]

Re: Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now

#134

Post by Avamander » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #108

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying I don’t beleive you; just that I don’t think anyone has ever actually repusproduced cell phone sensitivity (detection) in a controlled environment. How would you know if it’s just in your head?

> How would you know if it’s just in your head? Please don't say "just" in your head. It's implying that psychological conditions aren't as significant or real as physical ones. They are very real and need to be treated just like anything else.

I will say it's "just in your head", because it is. Some person's mental illness shouldn't be a reason the rest can't build wind farms, vaccinate people or build 5G substations.

Re: Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now

#135

Post by godelski » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #130

godelski wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This just tells me you're looking for conspiracy and distrust. 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…

Ahhhh, the replication crisis. You know that isn't true in every field, right? Plus, the exact thing we're talking about HAS been replicated. Many times. Talk to a scientist about the replication scientist. Talk to ones in different fields. You'll see different responses. Correlation between the softer and harder. I'll admit particle physics has replication problems, but that's for different reasons (machines) than psychology (lots of reasons). Some fields require what would be equivalent to p values of far far less than 0.05. When we get multiple experiments agreeing when chance of coincidence is one in ten million, we tend to think that's good.

Also you're confounding the experiment. You can't do this just over New York and Montana. You do it over a lot of places. Over many countries. Plus we have other ways to test this. You can look to see if radio waves heat tissue. The fact is cell phone radiation (radio waves) are non-ionizing and unless you turn the power WAY WAY up, it isn't dangerous. Both these methods are well established and we know what we're doing. So after just these two (there's been others) we have two experiments that match our current theory.

I want to repeat that. Experiments are fitting our theory. Not hypothesis. Theory. We've been studying electromagnetism for a long time. We've been studying radio for a long time. The data is matching well established theories.

This is completely different than your jellybean case because that doesn't match any good hypothesis. There's no underlining reasoning for why only a green jellybean causes acne. That doesn't deny the jellybean correlation, but that's all it is at that point. Correlation. Which is different than causation. To graduate to causation (which is actually the thing being pointed out in that xkcd) you need to give reasoning. There are plenty of things that correlate that don't cause. [0] That's where theory comes in. But if you can't establish a good link, then you just have [0] and people laughing at you.

Tldr: go talk to scientists.

tldrr: you aren't smarter than domain experts (in their domain)

tldrrr: don't shout replication crisis when the issue we're talking about has been replicated with similar results with multile well established methods.

[0] https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Re: Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now

#136

Post by driverdan » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 10:59 PM UTC

Avamander wrote: post #134

driverdan wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would you know if it’s just in your head? Please don't say "just" in your head. It's implying that psychological conditions aren't as significant or real as physical ones. They are very real and need to be treated just like anything else.

I will say it's "just in your head", because it is. Some person's mental illness shouldn't be a reason the rest can't build wind farms, vaccinate people or build 5G substations.

I'm not saying we should allow pseudoscience. I mean the individuals should be treated with respect and their maladies should be treated seriously. That's independent of taking their claims as truth.

Re: Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now

#137

Post by w0mbat » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

xchip wrote: post #121

w0mbat wrote: post #116

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?

4G is very patchy in some urban areas and doesn't give quite the speed needed to make it so you don't need Wi-Fi/broadband at home. 5G has a hierarchy of connections at different frequencies to give better coverage.

Re: Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now

#138

Post by jnurmine » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

fock wrote: post #90

jnurmine wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With 5G latencies, you can remote control more things (like excavators). Which means less need for humans to be physically present, which means less transportation (read: cars), which means less pollution. Looking at the bigger picture, and counting in energy savings innovations on the basestation/network level, and so on, it might not be a clear-cut "5G spends more energy".

When all thy mercies, oh my progress... I think you're a victim of the fallacy of eternal growth thaught for years by capitalist and communist economists alike (and even picked up by most green movements around the globe). If you realize that our consumption is way above it's sustainable limit, the only way to prove that we have really evolved from the barbarism of a pack of wolves is to try everything possible to fo…

"innovating existing technologies so that they become more efficient"

But that is what 5G basically is, no?

And no, I don't think I'm a "victim of the fallacy of eternal growth". System-wise, any system that relies solely on continuing growth to keep itself going is certainly brittle and will start to contract or collapse once the prerequisites of increased growth are disturbed, or removed.

Furthermore, I don't think it is meaningful to abandon technological advancement just because some people think that people expect a global climate change deus ex machina from a university or corporate lab.

On the contrary, technology can really help, and I don't mean this in a blindly religious sense. We need solutions which scale and we don't currently have them. The solutions won't appear out of thin air or by magical thinking, they have to be willed out of the laws of physics and chemistry and mathematics and so on.

A good example is technology for capturing carbon dioxide at a price of under 100 USD a tonne. Add Fischer-Tropsch to that and you have fuel.

The slight problem is that the system which produces these advancements and, more importantly, can scale them to planet-wide scales is precisely the system that feeds on "eternal growth". If one disturbs or destroys that system, possible beneficial solutions won't be able to spread to all corners of the planet, thereby hindering the adoption of an innovation that takes non-trivial components to build.

To get out of that dilemma, the system must be transformed. Decentralization and distribution of for example manufacturing is required: once it's possible to print a functioning solar panel in your garage and use it to power your house, we're heading in the right direction.

Also, it's not just one dimension of waiting for technological advancements. "Reduce consumption", farm your own food, use your computer only on weekends, never fly anywhere, these will also work.

Re: Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now

#139

Post by artificialLimbs » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 12:36 PM UTC

darkpuma wrote: post #110

artificialLimbs wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't just feel cell phone radiation, it has a visible effect on my body. If I'm carrying a cell in my pocket or near my legs, some of the muscles (I believe it's the muscles) in my legs will begin to vibrate, as though they are having spasms. This happens very frequently when I have my mobile data turned on and the phone near my legs. When mobile data is off, it doesn't happen. I'd be happy to show anyone this eff…

If that were actually true, it would be an incredible medical discovery. The muscles in your legs that are effected, are they biological muscles? Your legs aren't the artificial limbs your username is referring to, are they? Your story is much more plausible if your legs are artificial.

Not referring to any artificial limbs.

Re: Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now

#140

Post by artificialLimbs » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 12:42 PM UTC

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #94

artificialLimbs wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't just feel cell phone radiation, it has a visible effect on my body. If I'm carrying a cell in my pocket or near my legs, some of the muscles (I believe it's the muscles) in my legs will begin to vibrate, as though they are having spasms. This happens very frequently when I have my mobile data turned on and the phone near my legs. When mobile data is off, it doesn't happen. I'd be happy to show anyone this eff…

I’m not saying I don’t beleive you; just that I don’t think anyone has ever actually repusproduced cell phone sensitivity (detection) in a controlled environment. How would you know if it’s just in your head?

"How would you know if it's just in your head?" Well, I suppose I wouldn't? I'd be interested to hear how a placebo effect could cause muscle spams, but I have certainly heard of things more strange.

I monitor my muscle spasms (and the rest of my body for that matter) fairly closely. The spasms don't happen often, maybe once a month or two (at most? Not sure... it's rare..) if I'm not carrying a cell in pocket with the data connection on.