151–160 of 469 posts
A lot of workers don’t wear protective gear. By choice. Nobody to blame but themselves.
You could also blame the people who want gaudy countertops for their McMansions, or for their 'flip.'
Objectively, it has a very high utility per dollar. Heat resistant, water resistant, knife resistant, stain resistant, etc.
Tangentially related, there's this copper mining museum in BC (1) in what used to be one of these corporate towns where you lived and died. They do a quick demo of the equipments they used back in the day, in a pre cut hole. Even with your hands on your hears it's painful, teeth chattering - and they don't even really hit the rock. People working in there weren't wearing any sort of hearing protection and became deaf…
In the century between the 1850s and 1950s we went from not even having radio communications or the germ theory of disease to building nuclear submarines and fiber optic data networks.
Once we had penicillin and cities stopped dumping raw sewage into the water supply, people started to have better options and these kinds of businesses had to improve safety to attract workers.
If you had to choose between the job you have now and the ones they had then, how much more would they have to pay you to get you to choose the latter? More than it costs for the safety equipment, right? So they started installing it.
Then governments passed laws requiring it because politicians are adept at taking credit for good things that were about to happen regardless.
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Perhaps unexpectedly, people dying are usually _cheaper_ for a healthcare system than healthy people. This has been studied a lot with smokers, basically people in old age cost far more than young people and thus a true cost-minimizing system would not be how you expect. Of course, we aren't trying to minimize cost so the premise is flawed.
This is very dependent on the illness. From a cost perspective it’s best that people die suddenly. If I live a fairly healthy life into my 80s and die of a heart attack, I might not necessarily have cost my insurer that much, as opposed to if I suffer from a chronic illness for 10, 20, 30 years. Cancer is now usually not a sudden death sentence - treatment is good enough now that most cancers caught early can be trea…
Small clarification - early detection is most often curative and cheap.
The really expensive part is that several advanced stage cancers (even IV with widely disseminated metastatic disease) now survive for many years on treatments costing low to mid 6 figures/year.
It actually provides a pretty good incentive for insurers to cover screening and early detection beyond what is mandated by law.
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Like giving people an incentive to illegally come to your country ? If there are no difference between coming legally or illegally the choice is easy. Like I could just book a one way flight to LA and become a US citizen because reasons ?
Like how most of our ancestors got here, you mean?
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Do you have a source? Everything I’m reading [1] says that granite contains 10-45% silica, compared to quartz containing 90%+. [1] https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/publications/OSHA37...
Those are pretty much equivalent health-wise. The poison cloud is half as dense, but still a poison cloud.
This isn’t the same as something like a virus, where it’s more binary.
To be clear, I’m not arguing to prove I’m right (because I’m certainly not an expert and am open to being wrong), I’m trying to understand more about how particle inhalation can have varying risks (or not) based on density.
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Not agreeing/disagreeing with this you but I wonder how you feel about obesity tax ? Low physical fitness tax ? There's plenty of evidence that exercise and diet significantly impact health (especially on population level) - like you said there's an incentive to keep those people healthy contributors instead of chronic burdens on the system. Sounds like a logical extension but doesn't seem popular/implemented widely.
Tax on sugar, sure. But having an obesity tax would be like having a silicosis tax.
And what about physical activity ?
What I find interesting when comparing the US the Canada on topics like these is that in Canada, there is self-interest in demanding workers be protected. Like beyond the fact that it's a good thing you do. Because we have a public health care system, funded by taxes, having a large number of young men out of the work force (not paying taxes) and using the health care system effectively means my taxes, everyone's tax…
Perhaps unexpectedly, people dying are usually _cheaper_ for a healthcare system than healthy people. This has been studied a lot with smokers, basically people in old age cost far more than young people and thus a true cost-minimizing system would not be how you expect. Of course, we aren't trying to minimize cost so the premise is flawed.
In any case, anything that makes people die young, or more generally reduces people’s capacity to work (like many diseases of affluence) is incredibly expensive to society once you factor in indirect and opportunity costs.
What I find interesting when comparing the US the Canada on topics like these is that in Canada, there is self-interest in demanding workers be protected. Like beyond the fact that it's a good thing you do. Because we have a public health care system, funded by taxes, having a large number of young men out of the work force (not paying taxes) and using the health care system effectively means my taxes, everyone's tax…
How do you explain the massive push to ban/stop Smoking? The US is pretty much the only country to successfully reduce it, near as I can tell (perhaps Canada has had success too?).
I'm pretty sure the figures will look somewhat similar in most western countries.
"Nearly half of the workers suffering silicosis in the UCLA and UCSF study said their workplaces were using water to control dust. Roughly a quarter said they always had respiratory protection. Fazio said studies have found that in many shops, dust is so thick in the air that respirators cannot filter out a sufficient amount. Metzger argued that the kind of sophisticated and costly measures that would be needed to re…
I wish it was more specific about the materials.
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Tax on sugar, sure. But having an obesity tax would be like having a silicosis tax.
This is based on the assumption that sugar causes obesity - I don't think there's any strong evidence for that, or that low carb diets work better for fat loss than low fat, from what I've seen both have same effect (calories equated) and both have equally terrible long term adherence/outcomes. Sugar seems like a nice villain but it's more likely that you'd have to tax any high calorie food that tastes good. And what…
The best public investment to promote physical activity is designing cities to enable "the gym of life"!