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Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

medicalxpress.com

161–170 of 479 posts

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#161
post #68
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ being public might be problematic; I've heard from more than one lawyer that one ought-not use IQ as a hiring filter, unless you have evidence that the IQ test is not biased against any protected groups. Indeed, hiring from more selective universities is, to a certain degree, a way of laundering hiring based off of IQ, since you can pass the buck to the university itself to not be racially biased.

This is a common predicament. A piece of information that, if it was made public, would be immensely useful in countless ways for the management of our society, But it might also be exploited by bad people. So it is made private. And the icing on the cake. We say "it's private because privacy is intrinsically good and a basic human right ". Not, "It's private because we fear bad people".

>would be immensely useful in countless ways for the management of our society,

Such as?

Now, maybe if one person had an IQ of 80 and the other contender had an IQ of 105 it seems like it could be useful in some particular fields. But for the most part you'll run into the "I'm 200 times smarter than you because my IQ is 102 and yours is 101".

And there is no icing on the cake. Privacy is a multipolar topic and there are many pros and cons around it.

We have rights not because they are some intrinsic part of the universe, or inalienable text written by a deity, we have rights because people working together and learning from the past mistakes in history have decided that something better than what was is attainable, and the moment we forget it something worse will take its place.

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#162
post #67
post #4

There have always been people on this site who think RoHS was a conspiracy. There are a few people who do not take the public health problems caused by lead very seriously.

And you can't, with a straight face, tell me that lead free solder matters, while we're still using lead acid batteries with dozens of pounds of lead in every car out there (to within a rounding error, and, yes, it includes almost all EV/PHEVs). The list of exemptions is very long. Lead free solder is objectively worse as a solder for just about any metric related to longevity. So you have to weigh the risks of lead…

>while we're still using lead acid batteries with dozens of pounds of lead in every car out there

Mostly those cars stay outside and the batteries tend to be expensive and highly recycled, electronics on the other hand, show up everywhere and have a poor history of recycling.

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#163
post #84
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "it just measures your ability to take tests" This is largely wrong. One could be a master at test-taking and not come close to a high score. That said, familiarly with the test/item structure almost certainly helps, especially for folks with the potential to score high (see below). > or "it just tells you how rich your parents are") Hmm… family wealth and IQ may be correlated, but not perfectly so. There are plent…

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 confidence that I stated it.

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#164
post #162
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you can't, with a straight face, tell me that lead free solder matters, while we're still using lead acid batteries with dozens of pounds of lead in every car out there (to within a rounding error, and, yes, it includes almost all EV/PHEVs). The list of exemptions is very long. Lead free solder is objectively worse as a solder for just about any metric related to longevity. So you have to weigh the risks of lead…

>while we're still using lead acid batteries with dozens of pounds of lead in every car out there Mostly those cars stay outside and the batteries tend to be expensive and highly recycled, electronics on the other hand, show up everywhere and have a poor history of recycling.

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.

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#166
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a stop valve that went bad and I wanted to replace it with a ball-valve because I prefer quarter-turn valves for shutoff valves. No ball-valves at the hardware store were lead free.

just a fair warning that you should close that quarter-turn valve very gradually when there is running water if you ever find a non-leaded version... water hammer can and will burst the weakest of your pipes.

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.

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#167
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are we going to do? Pass a law? Yes! It wouldn't burden existing homeowners because such laws almost always grandfather in existing structures. When they banned lead paint and asbestos, I don't think anyone immediately repainted their walls or replaced their asbestos drywall. It slowly phases out over a number of decades.

> When they banned lead paint and asbestos, I don't think anyone immediately repainted their walls or replaced their asbestos drywall. It slowly phases out over a number of decades. Kinda. Or, rich people got it replaced right away. Poor people are still living it with it today. Go test a $500k and a $100k (this is midwest price not SF price) house for Lead and Asbestos. I bet you find very different results on the a…

There's not really any issue with asbestos as long as you leave it alone and don't mess with it. It doesn't need to be torn out unless you're renovating.

> "THE BEST THING TO DO WITH ASBESTOS MATERIAL IN GOOD CONDITION IS TO LEAVE IT ALONE!" [1]

[1] https://www.cpsc.gov/safety-education/safety-guides/home/asb...

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#168

So is IQ a "largely pseudoscientific swindle" to quote a popular article from a few years ago, or is it not? Because if the consensus is that it doesn't matter, then why bother using it as a metric here?

taleb's argument has changed to IQ only matters for downside, not upside.

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#169
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of argument that lead-free solder isn't as good (or easy to use) and several hobbyists still use leaded solder.

Have you ever tried the lead free stuff as compared to a good 60/40 or something like that? It's horrid to use. And the lead-free stuff is far worse in manufactured equipment - how many devices have failed early due to BGA solder joint failures that basically didn't exist before RoHS requirements? I think the nVidia 8600M issues were traced to that, and plenty of other BGA equipment since 2006 or so has failed rather…

Yep, I was around for that shitshow with two laptops. Soldergate was annoying but to be honest there haven't been any similar issues at scale I'm aware of, as the issue was identified and fixed.

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#170
post #112
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people who fill their water boiler with hot tap water ...

I fill my water distiller with hot tap water. Guaranteed to be safe. Yes, I'm talking about a machine that boils the water, collects the steam, and condenses it back to water. It removes absolutely everything.

You shouldn't drink distilled water for a prolonged time as it will desalinate your body and depreve it from rare minerals.
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