Just a data point here, an acquaintance of mine gave himself lead poisoning by visiting the shooting range too often for target practice. I think he wears a breather when he goes now.
[flagged]
Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study
261–270 of 479 posts
Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Battery retailers will pay you $25 for the old one and even if you just dump it, desperate people will collect it and hump it down to the recycler to get the core refund. Nobody wants your old soldered electronics. That stuff is nothing but trash.
All of the battery retailers around where I live (southern Indiana, USA) stopped paying for old lead-acid batteries years ago. Only the local scrap metal yard still pays for them, and they only pay $5 per battery. People only bring in their old batteries for recycling because it waives the core charge.
You just contradicted yourself. The core charge is them paying you for the old battery.
Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study
#263I'd like to point out that, although it is illegal to put lead in water supply lines in the US, there is a loophole that allows it in hot water lines. As a result, for certain fittings, most big-box hardware stores only sell the leaded variants, and label them "hot water heater supply line" or something similar.
Why are there so many loopholes in every single US law? Everytime there’s a major health issue or anything extremely anti consumer it’s because of a loophole in the formulation of a US law. Are US lawmakers that bad? Or is it judges who interpret laws literally instead of using the intent?
> Why are there so many loopholes in every single US law
Bribery of politicians
Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study
#264Question for any IQ skeptics here (e.g. "it just measures your ability to take tests" or "it just tells you how rich your parents are"): what's your response to studies like this? Is there anything that can be said about the effect of lead on cognitive function? Why might IQ be a good measure of lead-induced stupidification, but unreliable for literally anything else?
You have to read the study to find out what it meant by IQ. People freely confuse IQ (a score on a test that's calling itself an IQ test) with IQ (a platonic ideal statistic people assume exists for the purpose of publishing research about it). This could be either.
No, IQ is just the test result; the theoretical phenomena understood to be underlying it are things like g and task-specific factors.
Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you ever find yourself cleaning the inside of a hot water heater some day, it will disabuse you of that habit. I'm sure it's mostly harmless, but they accumulate a truly horrific amount of mineral deposits and other weird gunk in there.
They accumulate gunk that was present in the cold water supply.
Yes, but water coming from the cold water tap has spent less time sitting in that accumulated stuff.
Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this actually a thing? I know there are videos of watwr hammer on youtube (US centric) There are no regulations afaik in Europe in domestic = no-industrial plumbing and sure we have quarter valves which you can quickly turn off. I never ever heard of a bursting pipe because of water hammmer.
I use quarter turn ball valves everywhere and slam the crap out of them. If a pipe bursts from that, it needs to be fixed, and I’d rather it happen while I’m there slamming valves around than when I’m not home. But it has never happened.
Ah yes, the chaos monkey approach to plumbing. I buy it. The best time to have a leak is during or immediately after doing plumbing work. The worst time is when you are asleep, out of the house, or on vacation.
Isn't it code nowadays to have water hammer arrestors that trap air and create a cushion?
Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude, you are spewing out random things as if they are fact. Yet you lack an understanding of what IQ is. IQ is an attempt to measure a general intelligence factor (g-factor). What happened is that researchers noticed that people who are good at some tests tend to also be good at other tests, even if it's from very different domain. E.g. say you are good with math, you also tend to be good in you language skills. Thi…
> Dude, you are spewing out random things as if they are fact. Yet you lack an understanding of what IQ is. In my previous career, I did quite a bit of research on IQ. I’m pretty sure I have a decent understanding of what it is. If you take out your straw-mans and overstatements of what I said, then I think you will be able to find research that supports everything I said above about IQ approximately to the degree of…
Let’s make it easy - please cite the research that shows that an IQ gap of 20+ leads to worse leadership results.
Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study
#268Does anyone know the the risk is for electronics hobbyist?
Don't lick your boards, wash your hands before you eat, and if you're really concerned, wear gloves while handling solder wire. The smoke from soldering isn't lead - a soldering tip is (if it's not literally glowing into the yellows) far, far too cold to vaporize any lead from solder - you need to be 1500+C for it to start being a problem, and you're not soldering that high. It's rosin smoke, and if you're in doubt,…
Also, afaik, there's no reason for hobbyists to not always use lead-free solder. But of course that doesn't mean something you're taking apart used lead free.
Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study
#269This feels like a good time to bring up the lead-crime hypothesis (flaws and all). For those who don't know, there's a strong (if faulty) correlation between lead levels in preschool children and crime rates: https://www.vox.com/2016/1/14/17991876/crime-drop-murder-lea... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis Regardless of what you think about the hypothesis, the growth and crunch in lead levels…
The subsequent evidence is so strong that I don't think it's appropriate to call it faulty. In the paper "Life After Lead" they study a boundary effect of children who were just above and just below treatment thresholds for blood lead levels and the outcomes in terms of crime, school success, etc are stark. Figure 4(F) particularly. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20160056
I haven’t read the paper, but I wonder how well they control for economic status. I’d expect the better off a family is the less lead they have in their life - and I’d expect economic status to actually be a cause of better education, health, incarceration, etc.
Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are often fairly sensible reasons or good intent behind many of them. People don't normally drink hot water; it's not a great idea, as it has higher levels of dissolved solids and higher risk of contamination by organisms (like legionnaires). Meanwhile, lead helps make metals and solders more resilient to high temperatures and fatigue at low cost. Banning lead from the hot side could therefore decrease reliabil…
Basically nothing you said here is true. People don't normally drink hot water People drink hot water all the time not to mention cooking, tea, instant coffee and more. legionnaires That's from water being stagnant for long periods of time. lead helps make metals and solders more resilient to high temperatures Not only is this not true, but water is never going to go above boiling. Propane torches (used for soldering…
> People drink hot water all the time not to mention cooking, tea, instant coffee and more.
I always use cold water and then boil it in a kettle. Even in Europe with our copper pipes the heat will dissolve more crap apparently. It's always advised to do this.
> That's from water being stagnant for long periods of time.
Yeah stagnant under optimal bacterial growth temperatures like 30C. And it enters the body through the lungs, from vapors in the shower. Not drinking it doesn't prevent legionnaire disease.
In fact what does prevent it is heating the water significantly, like around 60C. And chlorinating. It's also why the water here in Spain it's almost undrinkable from all the chlorine here in summer. They just have to put that much in it to prevent outdoor pipes growing bacteria. Yet in summer the water is still hot and brown when I open the tap after it's been outside in the pipe all day. I drink a lot of bottled water, lol.
> Not only is this not true, but water is never going to go above boiling. Propane torches (used for soldering pipes) burns at 1,980C
Yeah lead solder actually melts at a much lower temperature. I still use it for that reason because lead free is a bitch to work with. I only solder micro electronics though.