Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

> We don't need laws that help stock market participants. ~50% of Americans don't hold stock in any form

But everybody benefits from the wealth of society, which somewhat includes the value of the businesses within the economy.

Care needs to be taken not to kill the golden goose.

The problem I see with the US is the two party political system. I live in New Zealand and while MMP has serious problems, it was a great improvement over FPP.

Note I personally believe in equitable sharing of wealth ("The Scandinavian model"). But as a founder I also believe in the power of the incentives of personal gain from enterprise, which needs to be approximately 10:1 to break even given the risk (see VC).

The problem, in all cases, remains the long standing oligarch families and aristocratically rooted institutions, and their captive “public service” institutions, some of which are global in scope. Not wishing to engender a flaming thread, I will simply state that certain aspects of “institutional capture” are very much du jour topics of global interest and impact.

A global reset of “free markets” via a ‘day zero of capital accumulations’ could provide a solution. Many of the established capital hordes are legacies of activities that are now understood to be anti-social at best, and predatory at the extreme.

Coupled with this, we need pedagogical guidance to inform the new generations who are not to manor born. Almost none of the new blood born to middle or lower classes are educated in the necessities of generational wealth preservation and applications of wealth towards affecting societal outcomes. At best, we have children of Marxists and pseudo-Marxists railing against “Capital” without understanding the dynamics of societal power based on multi-generational societal networks, which transcend mere capital.

Primary sources working against such a program are precisely the “entertainment” complexes owned stock, lock, and barrel by informed and purposive societal networks, which at this point in human history have fully transcended ethnic and national boundaries, and clearly aim for stupefying the masses. There is a reason you have been treated to 2 decades of Marvel comics in films.

Public opinion is the weak point in many systems that are supposed to converge to an optimal socially-beneficial equilibrium.

The way competition and free markets are supposed to work, someone else would've introduced ethanol as an anti-knock additive, sold gasoline cheaper (and healthier!), and everyone would've benefitted. But Kettering & Midgley went on an extensive PR campaign after their invention to convince the public leaded gasoline was safe, and they had GM and Dupont's full advertising budgets at their disposal. The public wouldn't know any better, so they believe what they're told and leaded gasoline becomes the standard.

You can hear echoes of that with many Facebook advertising & misinformation campaigns today.

This also causes stock market bubbles & crashes. People are supposed to independently value securities, and then their errors cancel out and you get a very good statistical approximation of true value. Instead, they invest in what everyone else invests in in, until prices have been bid up to insane levels, then run out of gullible buyers and the price crashes.

And brand-based monopoly. Instead of judging product quality for themselves, they buy products that all their friends are buying, "trusted brands", and this creates a barrier to entry that new entrants have a very hard time surmounting.

Democracy is affected too. In theory, the best candidate should win. In practice, the candidate with the most money to buy ads wins. People's opinions are mutable; they don't rationally seek out information independently and make an informed, self-interested choice. They tend to trust what they hear a lot, which creates a market for influencing people's opinions.

I can't think of a way to solve this, though. The "solution" would be to go from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, where everybody basically assumes that whatever they're told is a lie and ignores it. Societies like this have much higher transaction costs, much lower rates of innovation, and much higher rates of violence, which is not an improvement.

Do you specifically mean the new 100 octane unleaded mentioned in the article the parent linked to?

If not, it could be some lower octane unleaded formulation. There are a couple of standards for these, but they have never caught on.

Yes - brought to you by the same people that would stop you from eating beef because cows fart.

From a tech perspective tetraethyl lead also has lubricative properties that add to exhaust valve longevity under high temperature conditions which may be one of the reasons it took so long to disappear.