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

smithsonianmag.com

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

#241

Post by kube-system »

kennywinker wrote: post #96
kube-system wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this frequently, but I don’t think it will do what many people think it would. Part of the power of FOSS is that it often leans on copyright to compel sharing. But, in the absence of copyright, why wouldn’t capitalistic powers simply stop sharing their code?

I think the gp post was not suggesting “get rid of copyright and leave oss unprotected” - by “OSS should be the default” i read that it should continue to be protected while copyright is removed. It would not be hard for new laws to enshrine + protect OSS licenses

> it should continue to be protected while copyright is removed. It would not be hard for new laws to enshrine + protect OSS licenses

Those things are logical opposites. If someone has a right to place any conditions at all on the way people copy their software, that is a copyright.

Maybe they meant to suggest copyright reform.

I make this point because people often like that GPL forces republishing of derivative works. This is an exercise of copyright, not a lack of it.

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

#243

Post by heresie-dabord »

botverse wrote: post #207
heresie-dabord wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe an overwrought comparison Yes, I assert that comparing social media to a deadly substance is overwrought, hyperbolic, and not lucid enough to be helpful. Lead causes brain damage and kills people. What we call social media is an advertising business offering free channels of shallow discourse as incentive. The business has delivered. Consider social media to be a test of the education system and of democracy…

That is unfortunately not trying to see the problem from the future hindsight. Which is the exercise that GP is suggesting.

Social media is not a toxin of any sort. To call it "toxic" is a metaphor that expresses the revulsion that people feel for the idiocies that social media channels have uncovered.

So I do disagree with the liberty of the metaphor in this case.

Social media is the business of providing channels of communication to people in exchange for some lucrative data. Other businesses do this too (television, radio, newspapers).

I am not at all a proponent of social media. The discourse is broken by petty, idiotic exchanges. The signal-to-noise ration is far too low and the sophisticated advertising techniques have become a form of surveillance that I reject.

But petty, idiotic exchanges have always existed. So have ignorant people, propaganda, gullible people, and fanatics. They can meet in basements, in taverns, in temples, in arenas... The fundamental problem is failing education and social disorder.

It takes great liberty of metaphor to compare social media to a real toxin. I share people's dislike of social media. But I will look back on the past decade and not blame any of the social-media companies for the idiocy of people who should know better through public education.

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

#245

Post by jandrese »

stefan_ wrote: post #173
paulkrush wrote: post #91

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…

Wood heating remains improbably popular (and favorably regulated). Not to mention the stupidity of diesel cars: trading a little bit less CO2 for actively poisoning the lungs of your immediate environment.

Wood is at least not a fossil fuel.

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

#246

Post by Sharlin »

air7 wrote: post #6

> The most compelling option was actually ethanol. But from the perspective of GM, Kitman wrote, ethanol wasn’t an option. It couldn’t be patented and GM couldn’t control its production. And oil companies like Du Pont "hated it," he wrote, perceiving it to be a threat to their control of the internal combustion engine. I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "r…

Free markets have zero incentive to correct for negative externalities by themselves. Free markets also want to become non-free through monopolization. These are the two classic cases of market failure, and the reason no actual economist (or, really, anyone who has read and understood an Econ 101 textbook) believes in unregulated free markets.

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

#247

Post by young_unixer »

paulkrush wrote: post #91

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?

We should be ashamed at the number of people that die everyday in car "accidents". Specially pedestrians and cyclists.

If you looked at our reaction to Covid, you'd think we value human life very much, but when you look at how our streets works, you realize we actually don't.

The problem is even worse in poor countries.

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

#248

Post by SavantIdiot »

DenisM wrote: post #234
SavantIdiot wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "the coddling of the mind"?

The term came from https://www.thecoddling.com/ but here I refer to a specific aspect: 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 thing…

> Suppose your reaction to discomfort is to retreat or isolate yourself from it.

Why wouldn't that be my reaction? Seems a pretty normal reaction to most discomfort. I lean into discomfort only when necessary and avoid it otherwise at all costs, that strategy has gotten me pretty far in my half+ century.

But even if we assume the proposition that people somehow become more withdrawn as they withdraw... what's the downside?

Perhaps your downtown really is a mess and they choose to avoid it. I'm guessing you're not a mind reader, and yet you've created a narrative that your friends have withdrawn due to their inability to handle discomfort and are now... what exactly, bad for the earth? (Recall, that was literally the proposition you responded to.)

Sounds rather arbitrary as well as subjectively punitive to me.

EDIT: This reminds me of me when I was in my 20's. I used to look down on people who went on vacation and stayed in hotels, or god forbid, resorts. I saw them as soft-headed sheeple who needed to be spoon-fed "fun in a can". Not me. I backpacked. I went to developing nations. In my mind, if you went to a foreign country, you didn't really "visit it" unless you lived among the natives and got your fingers dirty. I got giardia in Belize, was held up at gunpoint in Serbia, escorted by soldiers in Israel, woke up in a roach infested bed in a hostel in Thailand. ... But today? I want to snap my fingers and have someone bring me a cocktail while I sit poolside and sun my fat belly. I no longer enjoy wallowing in 3rd world filth as a means to establish me credentials. I want comfort because I work too goddamn hard for my vacations to involve police reports. So perhaps this is result of cowering away from discomfort, or perhaps it is just a change of priorities.

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

#249

Post by ruytlm »

hazbot wrote: post #232
CharlesW wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think your analogy is pretty apt. However, even though I don't think you can give corporations a free ride just because 'people could choose not to use the product', this is not an absolute! 'People could choose not to use the product' does hold a lot of truth.

When social media companies are trying to make the media as addictive as possible to keep you scrolling and viewing ads, and employing psychological exploits to do so, it's not quite as simple as 'people can just choose not to use it'.

It's hardly a free choice when they're actively undermining your ability to choose freely.

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

#250

Post by cwp »

CharlesW wrote: post #227
cwp wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. It's blaming smokers for second-hand smoke. We need to figure out the social-media equivalent of "no smoking" signs.
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