The Romans used to use lead acetate, i.e. sugar of lead as a sweetener.
I wonder how much of history can be explained by this use of lead.
America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
21–30 of 201 posts
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your profile says you're a lawyer. I have a question for you. Why did they need to ban leaded gasoline specifically? Wasn't it already illegal for anyone to spread poison in the air? Why was new regulation needed? Or, by "regulatory success", do you simply mean the recognition by the government that lead is poisonous?
It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water. You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolu…
If I may ask a second question: what do you think of emissions trading as a solution instead of bans on specific sources like leaded gasoline?
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#23I view the drop in crime as the result of a perfect storm of many factors, and perhaps this is another one. The explosion of media and the Internet occurred around the same time, so it's hard to say what caused it.
In 1996, the New York Times reported that crime had plunged for the third straight year, the sharpest drop since the end of Prohibition. Since 1993...
Need I remind you that HTML 1.0 was released in mid-1993? The Internet wasn't exploding like you are thinking quite yet. Sure, it was on the rise, but certainly not among the sort of folks breaking windows and selling drugs.
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article cites research that goes way beyond the usual sort of correlation. How much stronger would the evidence need to get?
I'm not sure, how strong should such a correlation be to be considered evidence? That's the real question. And I think when it comes to annual averages of broad trends its a real question how we should interpret correlations. To me this article is data porn, its a story with data. It may be some part of the truth, but I think it exists to entertain the data literate - so we can follow along with the numbers and pat o…
Would you at least agree the correlation seems strong enough to warrant further investigation?
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure, how strong should such a correlation be to be considered evidence? That's the real question. And I think when it comes to annual averages of broad trends its a real question how we should interpret correlations. To me this article is data porn, its a story with data. It may be some part of the truth, but I think it exists to entertain the data literate - so we can follow along with the numbers and pat o…
Would you at least agree the correlation seems strong enough to warrant further investigation?
Sure, it might even be strong evidence. It's just not clear and we see these time series correlations again and again.
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#26The Romans used to use lead acetate, i.e. sugar of lead as a sweetener. I wonder how much of history can be explained by this use of lead.
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure, how strong should such a correlation be to be considered evidence? That's the real question. And I think when it comes to annual averages of broad trends its a real question how we should interpret correlations. To me this article is data porn, its a story with data. It may be some part of the truth, but I think it exists to entertain the data literate - so we can follow along with the numbers and pat o…
The strength of the correlation or its time-scale have no bearing on whether the correlation should be considered evidence of causation. The fatal flaw of a correlation is that it can be specious — it can appear to explain reality, but really there's a third variable responsible for driving the phenomenon you're interested in. In this case, lead exposure and crime rate are correlated, but maybe lead doesn't cause cri…
That's the high level view of the problem of correlation and causation. What I'm really saying is how unlikely should we consider these correlations - especially correlations over very broad average trends in human behaviour. Now I'm sure there are some statistical tools that would give some sense of how surprising the correlation of these trends is but I'd like to know out of all the things about human society we track how many of them correlate and how closely.
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your profile says you're a lawyer. I have a question for you. Why did they need to ban leaded gasoline specifically? Wasn't it already illegal for anyone to spread poison in the air? Why was new regulation needed? Or, by "regulatory success", do you simply mean the recognition by the government that lead is poisonous?
It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water. You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolu…
> You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical.
I'll never understand how people can suppose that a government solution, which consists of a massive nation-wide bureaucracy as well as an immense violent army of what I endearingly call "the conflict resolvers" (law enforcement, courts, etc.) funded mostly by compulsory financial levies on working residents, is by any definition or stretch of the imagination "more efficient" than private litigation.
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#29tl;dr version: http://tldr.io/tldrs/50e6993885d8d1617b000a23/americas-real-...
There is now enough statistical proof that lead is the prominent cause of crime. Crime rates and lead concentrations are extremely well correlated everywhere: the more lead in the environment, the more crimes will occur. Furthermore, it is scientifically proven that lead has a very negative impact on the brain, killing gray matter and impairing neuronal communication. Unfortunately, this theory hasn't been taken seriously by the government yet because it doesn't serve any political agenda.
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#30The Romans used to use lead acetate, i.e. sugar of lead as a sweetener. I wonder how much of history can be explained by this use of lead.
I've read about that contributing to the fall of their empire before - I guess we'll never really know, but if it did then the impact of that element on human history must be massive.
Wikipedia puts it out as an option: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_roman_empire#Lead_p...