231–240 of 428 posts
Gasoline is poison in general though
It is fairly trivial to avoid drinking gasoline. For example, I managed it 100 per cent of the time so far, and I am 43. It is not as trivial to avoid breathing in lead when you live around cars that use leaded gasoline.
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Yeah, the analogy between toxic media and toxic chemicals is pretty good. However, I'd put they blame for that somewhere you might find surprising: influencers. Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days, but if there's anyone that knows the dangers and all the ill effects but ignores them to make a profit, it's content creators. They are hyper-attuned to the way people respond to their content, and they'll do…
> Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days, but if there's anyone that knows the dangers and all the ill effects but ignores them to make a profit, it's content creators. This is like blaming smokers instead of Philip Morris.
Interesting, I had assumed they just didn’t know that lead was bad back then. What’s even weirder is how there are still people today who insist that banning leaded gasoline was an key example of government overreach. Someone once was arguing this point to me and I just had to drop the topic because it was such a baffling stance.
America has two radically different concepts of freedom that travel under the same name. Both start with "I should be free to do as I want". One ends with "as long as I don't harm others". The other ends with "regardless of harm to others". You were dealing with the latter. It of course sounds insane when you say it baldly like this, which is why it rarely gets stated openly. But a lot of traditional societal structu…
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- Sugar. - Social networks. - The coddling of the mind. I think you will find that all three have vicious cycles built into them.
What is "the coddling of the mind"?
Suppose your reaction to discomfort is to retreat or isolate yourself from it. Having done so you will find that your calibration of comfort has changed and things you previously found at the fringe but normal now became clearly uncomfortable. If you repeat this process several times you will find that the field of acceptable things to do has narrowed itself to a single fine line of propriety that is surrounded by a vast field horrors and misdemeanors. Worse yet, the narrower the range of acceptable things, the more anxious you will be and the harder you will lash out at those recently (but no longer) normal things.
For a tame example, I have a number of friends who as they got richer retreated into more and more comfortable suburbs. Perfectly reasonable right? Well, they are now afraid to visit downtown because crime, dirt, and homeless. Not at all reasonable anymore.
I'm sure you can come up with more examples. In fact now that I told you, you can't escape seeing them.
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Sugar is an excellent example. In fact, the sugar industry has been behind the effort to deflect blame to fat for the last 50 years. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
It’s kind of hard to discern from the article, so is fat good and was unfairly blamed? Or fat and sugar are both bad, but they emphasized the fat part?
The basic logic of the anti-sugar sentiment is this:
Excess of blood sugar is toxic and so it triggers a shot of insulin, intended to drain sugar from the blood and hide it in various places: the muscle tissue, the liver, and last resort - the fat cells. Normally it works just fine, but sometimes the system gets overwhelmed with a big sugar rush and starts producing too much insulin, draining too much sugar, overshooting the target, causing hunger, craving for more sugar, and eating more sugar. The human then goes into the infinite loop of sugar binging accumulating fat on the go.
Now if you add dietary fat into the mixture it's possible that the fat cells will suck it up too. That I don't know for sure.
I guess we live on the shoulders of nastiness and things get better. So TEL was part of our boot sequence. What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? BTW: The guy that invented TEL also invented CFCs! See Thomas Midgley Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr . This guy who invents awesome working chemicals that are tragically bad for people on a worldwide scale manages to exit life dues to his…
> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? I'm gonna go with overfishing. Anyone who has been shopping since the 1990's has seen fish diversity decline and prices skyrocket beyond inflation (not to mention a sharp increase in farmed and faux-colored fish like salmon). Illegal fishing is impossible to combat. See China's illegal fleets: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27412691 [2] https://twitter.…
I guess we live on the shoulders of nastiness and things get better. So TEL was part of our boot sequence. What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? BTW: The guy that invented TEL also invented CFCs! See Thomas Midgley Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr . This guy who invents awesome working chemicals that are tragically bad for people on a worldwide scale manages to exit life dues to his…
"What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today?" I have a suspicion that slathering typical consumer sunblock agents (and spraying the out of aerosol cans, and breathing the sunblock, etc.) is going to seem unwise to future us.
I guess we live on the shoulders of nastiness and things get better. So TEL was part of our boot sequence. What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? BTW: The guy that invented TEL also invented CFCs! See Thomas Midgley Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr . This guy who invents awesome working chemicals that are tragically bad for people on a worldwide scale manages to exit life dues to his…
> Midgley's legacy has been scarred by the negative environmental impact of leaded gasoline and Freon. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny".
I guess we live on the shoulders of nastiness and things get better. So TEL was part of our boot sequence. What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? BTW: The guy that invented TEL also invented CFCs! See Thomas Midgley Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr . This guy who invents awesome working chemicals that are tragically bad for people on a worldwide scale manages to exit life dues to his…