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Plenty of people die from asbestos exposure when renovating their house.
I recently came across this unfortunate promotion for asbestos from back in the day: https://imgur.com/V1QcX7I
I’ve also just posted his great article on British Summer Time, I would have that would have been more popular;
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's unfortunate this article is about the UK and Imgur has blocked the UK because of the Online Safety Act :(
I wouldn't blame Imgur for that, but the UK gov + people who elected them/didn't resist.
It's hardly the stupidest thing British people have voted for in the last two decades, probably not even in the top 5.
Asbestos is genuinely more terrifying then nuclear radiation. If something is radioactive then a Geiger counter will tell you at a distance, it'll even triangulate it. Asbestos? It can be everywhere and the only way to know is to collect samples, pay $100 a piece to a lab to do phase contrast microscopy and wait. Then do it again the next time you find something suspicious. And once you've cleaned it out..well hope y…
Its carcinogenic “modus operandi” is also completely different to anything else. Asbestos is chemically inert, so how does is cause cancer? The tiny crystalline needles puncture cells, sometimes during cell division, and strands of dna will get tangled up and result in messed up genetics.
Now, asbestosis is more common in long term exposure so it might be fine, but not bothering to tell me to wear a respirator and the ignorance after I brought it up years later makes me disgusted. So now I have to wonder whether decades later I'll have complications without clear ways to address them.
> My Dad lost his Dad at the age of 34, which is no age at all in the grand scheme of things. By contrast I still have my Dad at the age of 60, which has meant an extra quarter century of guidance, support, advice, love and always being there. How lucky am I? I lost my father when I was 30. I thought I’d been lucky because I’d had him through my “adult” life. Now I’m 40 and have a 2-year-old son, and over these past…
Overall we're having kids later and later myself included. This is one of the natural consequences I will face. Sometimes I wish it had kids in my twenties but for now I'm glad I didn't. We'll see.
I know its not fashionable, but things like asbestos is the point of regulation. If you ignore the health effects, asbestos is a fucking brilliant material, strong(if used with a binder) exceptionally fireproof, UV stable and fairly inert. Why _wouldn't_ you use it? To use modern parlance; only melts wouldn't use it, thats who (this message brought to you by your friendly corporate sponsor...) The problem is that it…
In addition to buildings, e.g. ships. Think about a steamship, what material that is fireproof and doesn't rot do you think they used for insulating boilers and steam pipes? One museum ship I'm somewhat familiar with ripped out all the asbestos insulation and replaced it with IIRC mostly mineral or glass wool during a major renovation some years back, just to make it safer for the mostly volunteers who dedicate their time to keep the ship functioning.
When I was younger, my dad had me help him repair the roof of the shed by getting on top of it, putting these sorts of flexible sheets over the old corrugated ones (that are made of asbestos cement) and driving nails through the top one all the way until it'd hit the wood frame underneath. Now, asbestosis is more common in long term exposure so it might be fine, but not bothering to tell me to wear a respirator and t…