101–110 of 154 posts
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> Most people are critically malnourished, so it holds on to any that it can get. This is not how chemistry works. The body will use (catalyze) what you give it, but the more reactive substances are used quicker and in greater abundance. Also who are these people that are critically malnourished? In the western world at least, we have access to all the vitamins and minerals we need just by way of the food we eat even…
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Where's the evidence that those proteins need "activating"? The body has plenty of functions that are best left on their default settings or minimized. For that matter, activating and poisoning aren't even mutually exclusive, you can run an engine too fast and burn it, work out till you get rhabdo and your P looks like T, etc. To show it's healthy you'd need studies showing better health of exposed people, or at leas…
>The body has plenty of functions that are best left on their default settings or minimized. We're arguing what the 'default' is. I'm arguing the default state is with lead. It would be strange for a protein to evolve to get so easily activated by a toxin. >To show it's healthy you'd need studies showing better health of exposed people, or at least some theoretical reason you'd want lead to make it even plausible. I…
This Cautionary Tales podcast episode talks about him [0]. Both were invented in the service of DuPont. CFC at least helped making refrigeration safer and helped getting it to the masses. Leaded gasoline on the other hand was always known as a bad idea. In both cases though, DuPont fought back hard to prevent bans of these solutions. They rather kill the planet than their profits. Suitably enough he killed himself wi…
Polio was absolutely terrible for those who had it. I wouldn’t blame him for having it. Or for ending it. However, for other reasons, I agree with you. http://acshist.scs.illinois.edu/bulletin_open_access/v31-2/v...
Friendly reminder that leaded gas is still used all over the United States today in airports (avgas). And if you live near an airport you are probably affected by elevated lead levels. https://news.sccgov.org/news-release/study-commissioned-coun...
This is what people really mean when they say "regulations are written in blood". If there isn't visible blood, we're usually happy to hurt people. FAA refuses to act here. Regulations are written in blood. And no one is bleeding yet.
If you had a time machine, would you go back in time to kill Hitler or this guy?
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Where's the evidence that those proteins need "activating"? The body has plenty of functions that are best left on their default settings or minimized. For that matter, activating and poisoning aren't even mutually exclusive, you can run an engine too fast and burn it, work out till you get rhabdo and your P looks like T, etc. To show it's healthy you'd need studies showing better health of exposed people, or at leas…
>The body has plenty of functions that are best left on their default settings or minimized. We're arguing what the 'default' is. I'm arguing the default state is with lead. It would be strange for a protein to evolve to get so easily activated by a toxin. >To show it's healthy you'd need studies showing better health of exposed people, or at least some theoretical reason you'd want lead to make it even plausible. I…
There's new hazards that didn't exist then, but a some of them are exactly due to the body doing harmful things with surplus nutrition, that's what obesity is.
Toxins activate things all the time. Just because it can be activated doesn't prove it should be activated at any more than the baseline level, and some things might be better off activated less.
There's various papers on "ultratrace elements" and a few old ones on "lead deficiency" talking about impaired lipid absorption, and reduced Hct and Hb(Isn't lower but still normal hemoglobin a good thing?) but people are likely already getting more lead than 100 years ago.
Even if there's some role for lead and the papers aren't getting it wrong, everyone's probably getting more than the optimal point. Unless they study that optimal point it could be above, the same as, or well below what our ancestors got.
Or perhaps the optimal point has even changed. Maybe lead helped them have Moe Hb, which helped them persistence hunt or something, but now we don't need any boosts like that to meet typical or even optimal levels of excercise, and it just puts unneeded stress on the heart.
We do have studies like this showing detrimental effects to people with increased lead, even within the typical range(https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.106.6...)
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Nuclear weapons were not a mistake.
Neither is leaded gasoline. As the FAA is eager to point out, it's not safe to do anything else. Can you imagine? Most aviation would never have happened if this guy hadn't invented leaded gasoline.
There's no inspection or modification of the aircraft. It's just a piece of paper. The FAA could fix the problem for those aircraft with the stroke of a pen.
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> If every country had nukes wold would be much more peaceful place. It does not work. Countries would still fight conventional wars, because not everything is worth escalating. Even in your example. They are being invaded and are at risk of losing their country (well, they were at some point anyway). Do you reckon they’d throw a nuke at the US and so be absolutely certain to lose everything they have rather than fig…
Question is would USA risk direct conflict with a country if they could actually suffer some actual losses of combatants on their own soil? They might, but I think it would substantially lower the risk. Same applies to most current conflicts. And about non traditional fights, maybe there would be less of those as big countries would be more careful about their actions. Also I believe that if every school kid had a gu…
Yes, and a lot more shootings. IMO the same applies to nukes. If every country had nukes then they'd be less conventional warfare, but a lot more nuclear bombings. It only takes one person to decide it's a good idea.
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I would also emphasize a more social issue to this. There's also a tendency for society to discount the dangers of something when the impact is sporadically distributed or long-term. Beyond the endless corporate lobbying and sold out scientists/politicians working to convince everybody that leaded fuel was 100% safe, I think there was also probably a mindset of many in society that 'Well, if leaded fuel is so poisono…
It's infinitely more convenient to assume that the leaders in the past were evil and the masses of the past ignorant than it is to assume they weren't let alone assume they were mostly just like us. It must be nice to be able to make those assumptions and believe them...
The absolute terrible thing about leaded gasoline is that they were already aware of several other additives (including ethanol, IIRC) that have the desired anti-knocking properties. But they went with tetraethyl lead anyway because it is cheaper and provided a few cents more profit per gallon. A cent was worth more back then than it does now, but still :-(