Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#211

Post by mschuster91 » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #129

formerly_proven wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no particular reason why you can't put a diesel engine in a plane and indeed there are a number of diesel engines certified for just that.

There are few technical reasons, to be sure, but there are plenty of economic and business reasons. The most popular engines in general aviation are Continental/Lycoming ones, and these are based on what, 50+ years old basic designs? Automotive industry have developed significantly better piston engines in last few decades, in terms of power to weight ratio, fuel efficiency, MTBF and service interval. However, the na…

> but they are facing a lot of very real problems, for example, lack of maintenance infrastructure.

Comprehensive government regulation would create such an infrastructure. When the government says "in 5 years we will disallow creation of new airframes that use leaded gas, and in 10 years there will be no more leaded gas sold, and in 15 years additives will be illegal", everyone knows what's on the horizon - and you can bet that there will be engine vendors selling modification kits and maintenance infrastructure, since now everyone knows that there will be a massive market coming up as everyone has to adapt to the new rules if they want to keep flying!

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#212

Post by dzhiurgis » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #197

R0b0t1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fuel itself is toxic to the environment and animals. The fuels can have really harsh things in them like benzene, iirc.

Not too different from ordinary gasoline.

Which is complete bonkers.

We fill our cars every week and when you stand there thinking "damn I love this smell" yet when there's 1ppm of benzene in sun cream people scream "caaaancer"...

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#213

Post by mschuster91 » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

krisgee wrote: post #57

air7 wrote: post #6

> The most compelling option was actually ethanol. But from the perspective of GM, Kitman wrote, ethanol wasn’t an option. It couldn’t be patented and GM couldn’t control its production. And oil companies like Du Pont "hated it," he wrote, perceiving it to be a threat to their control of the internal combustion engine. I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "r…

>Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business? Many government owned companies actually make a profit until private industry lobbies them into ineffectiveness. The US Post Office was profitable until a change lobbied by Fed-Ex and UPS forced them to ke…

> People just hate seeing the government make money.

No, this is too generic - name the correct groups: Conservatives, neo-liberals and the rich elites hate see "the government" or government-owned/ran entities make money.

Everyone else sees that government-run services usually provide decent service at affordable prices, and that after privatization, service quality goes downhill and the cost keeps rising.

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#214

Post by smolder » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

AmVess wrote: post #13

G3rn0ti wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ethanol was so effective as an anti-knocking agent why didn’t gas stations just mix ethanol with petrol and sold that fuel with profit? Ethanol is cheaper and much safer to manufacture then tetraethyllead. But they didn’t… I am not an expert on combustion engines but the biggest problem with ethanol in the early days was it polluted the engine with water that it absorbed as a water soluble organic compound. Those…

Read more on how hard and long GM tried to suppress opposition to leaded gas, it was no conspiracy.

It was a conspiracy... by GM.

Conspiracy: n. An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.

The word conspiracy doesn't mean the same as "conspiracy theory" and even that doesn't necessarily imply something wacky like reptilian aliens secretly controlling the government.

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#215

Post by markdown » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

heresie-dabord wrote: post #206

afavour wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? Maybe an overwrought comparison but I genuinely do feel like we’ll look back on this age of social media and disinformation in the same way we did leaded gas. The people making money knew exactly how dangerous it was and the problems it caused but they did everything in their power to cover it up in the name of profit. Originally it felt like a social annoyance a…

> Maybe an overwrought comparison Yes, I assert that comparing social media to a deadly substance is overwrought, hyperbolic, and not lucid enough to be helpful. Lead causes brain damage and kills people. What we call social media is an advertising business offering free channels of shallow discourse as incentive. The business has delivered. Consider social media to be a test of the education system and of democracy…

> Lead causes brain damage and kills people.

With all the deaths caused by anti-vaxxers, one could argue that social media also causes brain damage and kills people.

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#216

Post by nate_meurer » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

Aloha wrote: post #210

nate_meurer wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TEL also acts as a natural lubricant of its own, the lead acting as lubricant, particularly on valve and other top end engine components. This is a myth. TEL has no lubricative properties in engines. The reality is opposite; lead deposits are corrosive. From https://www.shell.com/business-customers/aviation/aeroshell/... : "The temperature for Lead deposits to form tend to be favourable around the spark plugs (as t…

TEL before combustion does have lubricative qualities, much in the way phosphorus does in oil or sulfur does in diesel fuel. After combustion, its like any heavy metal being burned, it turns into an oxide, which has a variety of characteristics.

It's the supposed benefits of the post-combustion lead oxide deposits that defenders of leaded gas cite. I have never heard anyone cite the lubricity of TEL itself.

The most popular theory is that the lead oxide fouling reduces the occurence or effects of micro-welds between valve and seat surfaces, which otherwise produce abrasive particles that contribute to valve seat recession. While this theory is plausible, it has not been shown to occur under normal operating conditions in automotive engines, nor in aviation engines as far as I know.

The final report from the EPA's Valve Seat Recession Working Group found no evidence that leaded gas reduces engine wear under any but the most extreme operating conditions:

https://archive.epa.gov/international/air/web/pdf/vsr-finald...

"In real world conditions, virtually no evidence of excessive valve wear has been found in vehicle or engine operation in normal everyday use, and several studies that monitored vehicles in actual daily service in countries that eliminated lead found no excessive valve wear."

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#217

Post by rl3 » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

markdown wrote: post #215

heresie-dabord wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe an overwrought comparison Yes, I assert that comparing social media to a deadly substance is overwrought, hyperbolic, and not lucid enough to be helpful. Lead causes brain damage and kills people. What we call social media is an advertising business offering free channels of shallow discourse as incentive. The business has delivered. Consider social media to be a test of the education system and of democracy…

> Lead causes brain damage and kills people. With all the deaths caused by anti-vaxxers, one could argue that social media also causes brain damage and kills people.

Likewise with disinformation’s role in electing officials that don’t take climate change seriously, or who roll back EPA protections.

If anything social media has a capacity for indirect harm that is in some cases greater than the original harm in question.

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#218

Post by yyyk » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 9:35 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #61

air7 wrote: post #6

> The most compelling option was actually ethanol. But from the perspective of GM, Kitman wrote, ethanol wasn’t an option. It couldn’t be patented and GM couldn’t control its production. And oil companies like Du Pont "hated it," he wrote, perceiving it to be a threat to their control of the internal combustion engine. I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "r…

> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening. There are many such examples. Here’s one from my life: when I was in the pharmaceutical business one of the chemists developed a treatment for a fairly common disease. He and a couple of others tried it on themselves. We could have patented it and run it through clinical trials, b…

>> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening. >There are many such examples... one of the chemists developed a treatment for a fairly common disease... We were a startup so didn’t spend any effort doing a study much less a full program.

It's understandable that a startup could not invest further in something they can't sell. The problem seems therefor deeper than a general invocation of 'free markets'.

Perhaps the real problem is that apparently there was no way or perhaps incentive to publish the result without an expensive full study. Had the idea been published perhaps someone else would have picked it up. Would the recent fashion of preprints have helped?

Or maybe the problem is that pharmaceutical business/research income depends on patents alone, and we should have some form of public investment which guaranteed profits for development of treatments regardless of patents?

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#219

Post by bckygldstn » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #26

warning26 wrote: post #2

Interesting, I had assumed they just didn’t know that lead was bad back then. What’s even weirder is how there are still people today who insist that banning leaded gasoline was an key example of government overreach. Someone once was arguing this point to me and I just had to drop the topic because it was such a baffling stance.

America has two radically different concepts of freedom that travel under the same name. Both start with "I should be free to do as I want". One ends with "as long as I don't harm others". The other ends with "regardless of harm to others". You were dealing with the latter. It of course sounds insane when you say it baldly like this, which is why it rarely gets stated openly. But a lot of traditional societal structu…

Are there any freedoms fought over in America that truly do no harm to others? Most discussions revolve around tradeoffs between harm and benefit.

It seems like "as long as I don't harm others" means "I consider the small harm to others worthwhile for the benefits". And "regardless of harm to others" is using the same approach to come to a conclusion you disagree with.

There's a lot of different ways to approach freedom, but I don't think "I don't care about others" and "I would never inconvenience others" is an accurate binary taxonomy.

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#220

Post by SavantIdiot » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

paulkrush wrote: post #91

I guess we live on the shoulders of nastiness and things get better. So TEL was part of our boot sequence. What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? BTW: The guy that invented TEL also invented CFCs! See Thomas Midgley Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr . This guy who invents awesome working chemicals that are tragically bad for people on a worldwide scale manages to exit life dues to his…

> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today?

I'm gonna go with overfishing. Anyone who has been shopping since the 1990's has seen fish diversity decline and prices skyrocket beyond inflation (not to mention a sharp increase in farmed and faux-colored fish like salmon). Illegal fishing is impossible to combat.

See China's illegal fleets:

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27412691 [2] https://twitter.com/epineyro_ok/status/1378112721628114947