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Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

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Re: Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

#311

Post by ch4s3 »

ElephantsMyAnus wrote: post #287
ch4s3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rate of violent crime nearly quadrupled between 1960 and its peak in 1991 in the US. Even with the COIVD bump, rates are comparable to the mid 60s, and aren't tracking the previous climb.

Really? It looks like the complete opposite happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/me...

Yes, 2015 was about on par with 1967[1] in terms of property and violent crime. Incarceration is not what I was talking about.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/me...

Re: Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

#312

Post by pessimizer »

opo wrote: post #236
KennyBlanken wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This wrong classification, going back to ignorant viewpoints of the early-mid 1900's It "goes back" to Nixon needing a tool to criminalize the anti-war and racial justice movement. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich... By the time Nixon came out with that policy, multiple commissions around the world had concluded that pot was largely harmless and should be decriminalized. People in his ow…

>...It "goes back" to Nixon needing a tool to criminalize the anti-war and racial justice movement. The alleged Ehrlichman quote is brought up every single time drug prohibition is mentioned but it should be taken with at least some skepticism. The surviving members of his family don't believe he made the quote: >...Multiple family members of Ehrlichman (who died in 1999) challenge the veracity of the quote: The 1994…

You posted this after a direct Anslinger quote had been posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30602134

Re: Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

#313

Post by brain_staple »

pklausler wrote: post #310
hateful wrote: post #297

Thomas Midgley Jr can be thanked for this. He also played a role in developing CFCs (Freon). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr .

Midgley can be blamed for leaded gasoline, but not lead paint or lead plumbing. (He also came to a famously ironic end, strangling in a rope contraption of his own design.)

Not so ironic, that's exactly how I'd expect Midgley to die.

Re: Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

#314

Post by mf_tomb »

miketery wrote: post #20
softwarebeware wrote: post #10

It makes me angry to think of how wreckless the generations before millenials were. Lead's risks and damages were well-known long before 1996. And they still didn't ban it until then.

Same goes for sugar. We know the dangers it poses, we are also seeing how much it increases risk of death due to covid. I don't think we should be surpsied, as much as pushing to regulate this garbage. As an aside, Michelle Obama's campaign when Obama was in office was about improvement children's health. Her focus was going to be on nutrition (lunch food). Shortly thereafter Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" a…

Sugar is bad, but it's only one part of the picture:

"Evidence-informed dietary priorities include increased fruits, nonstarchy vegetables, nuts, legumes, fish, vegetable oils, yogurt, and minimally processed whole grains; and fewer red meats, processed (e.g., sodium-preserved) meats, and foods rich in refined grains, starch, added sugars, salt, and trans fat."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4814348/

Re: Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

#315

Post by ElephantsMyAnus »

ch4s3 wrote: post #311
ElephantsMyAnus wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? It looks like the complete opposite happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/me...

Yes, 2015 was about on par with 1967[1] in terms of property and violent crime. Incarceration is not what I was talking about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/me...

But you agree that it needs an explanation, right? You gloat about a dramatic decrease in crime, yet the number of inmates increased tenfold over that time period.

Re: Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

#316

Post by survirtual »

scruple wrote: post #282
chrisweekly wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to post something v similar about psilocybin. The war on drugs has had such awful consequences and repercussions and costs, it boggles the mind.

To suggest that there is no potential for psychological harm from psychedelics is naive. I've personally suffered long-lasting psychological harm from a bad mushroom trip and I have at least a couple of friends/acquaintances who have, as well. You can quibble over the details of why and how adverse effects happen but it doesn't change the fact that they do.

I meant physiological harm, definitely a mistype on my end.

That said, psilocybin is highly sensitive to set and setting, especially to other neural nets and especially to others also on it. There is a massive host of issues in partaking with friends or around anyone else for that matter. It will amplify hidden untruths or other sort of otherwise “benign” sober psychological distress and make them acute.

What people call a “bad trip” I call an important lesson. We can choose to react negatively and label it accordingly, or visit it in a sense that a very advanced mindset was indicating a problem. When done this way, bad states cease to exist and it becomes clear the “bad trips” were just bad other things that needed some conscious attention.

All this to say: go get lost in the woods and trip with some plants & with people who hang with that setting, they will take care of you and it is a much better setting to do the work on self.

Re: Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

#317

Post by jart »

redleader55 wrote: post #209
teknopaul wrote: post #200

Independent of the effect of lead on intelligence isn't it impossible to reduce the IQ of half the population because IQ is a comparative calculation across that population. Ie as intelligence goes down the definition of 100 IQ points changes? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

The IQ should be defined for the human race, in a time independent way, not for a specific nation or group. This allows us to make comparisons between different times, between different societies, etc. Otherwise, if the IQ is redefined to always follow the current mean, it can only be used to classify people between smarter than average and "dumber" than average, which is not so useful.

I guess it's useful if your goal is to figure out how to divide kids into separate math classes. I don't think anyone intended ability to rotate blocks and scramble letters as a timeless gauge of the quality of a person.

Re: Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

#318

Post by pessimizer »

zelon88 wrote: post #215
shagmin wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to [0] peak marijuana usage was in the 70s. I don't think with a smaller/more stable subset of the population partaking there's going to be many more people saying "we should have known better" than there currently are. https://www.mlive.com/resizer/G7WZuDwdu5D2eCujzIi_RYGWYkc=/7...

I wasn't there in the 70s, but from what I understand potency of the 70s wasn't nearly what it is today. I have no source for this, but I've been in countless circles with long time smokers who all correlate the same story; that modern day mids was literally the best quality Marijuana you could find in the 70s. So that's probably about 10% THC compared to 30% THC which is not uncommon today.

When you smoke with people these days, they only take a couple of hits. In the 90s when we smoked it was joint after joint after joint.

It's basically the cigarette filter thing; people know where they want to get, and they'll keep going until they get there, no matter how weak you make it. Which is what made filtered cigarettes worse for your lungs than unfiltered ones.

The calculus would be different if you were talking about edibles, because they actually sneak up on and can surprise you.

Re: Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

#319

Post by ch4s3 »

ElephantsMyAnus wrote: post #287
ch4s3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rate of violent crime nearly quadrupled between 1960 and its peak in 1991 in the US. Even with the COIVD bump, rates are comparable to the mid 60s, and aren't tracking the previous climb.

Really? It looks like the complete opposite happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/me...

To respond to your other comment, homicide rates were falling starting around 1990, and the prison population exploded after that. Something else must be going one here. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons[1] as of last month 45.3% of the total US prison population is there for non-violent drug offenses. Only 3.1% is for homicide, assault, or kidnapping. In the late 80s and early 90s lots of states and the federal government instituted really draconian sentencing laws.

So yeah, violent crime is WAY down from 1990, drug arrests have been soaring since.

[1]https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

Re: Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

#320

Post by cpncrunch »

ck2 wrote: post #141

Lead exposure isn't over by a long-shot. Anywhere there is an airport with prop aircraft there is leaded fuel/exhaust spew for miles around it. Can't believe we just don't have the care to protect people, write it off as their problem and then let the poor/ignorant suffer in "pollution zones"

The EPA is planning on issuing a proposed endangerment finding for leaded avgas in 2023, and there are already a number of unleaded avgas replacements available that can be used in the majority of aircraft (other than some high compression engines).

https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engin...

In terms of actual lead, the amount used by aviation is a tiny fraction of that used in cars.

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