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Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

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Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#221

Post by rayiner »

willcipriano wrote: post #95
dcow wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is against cheap workers paying taxes. They’re against undocumented workers getting paid under the table and unfairly competing with documented workers that have to pay taxes and thus are more expensive. Gotta solve the documentation problem one way or another.

Once illegal immigrants gain citizenship and essentially basic civil rights (being a criminal federally isn't really freedom no matter if your state is sort of cool about it or not) they will no longer be willing to work in these conditions. They don't report or sue now due to their status, people fear deportation and it's often used as a threat by business owners and housewives employing cleaners and nannies.

Okay, so how long does someone have to be in the country illegally before they gain citizenship?

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#222

Post by [deleted] »

whimsicalism wrote: post #28
thadk wrote: post #8

According to this podcast, Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge, used his economist-oriented federal government department to delay and block legislated regulation related to protection for silicosis during the Obama administration. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id...

Jeez - Sunstein has such great work in legal scholarship, but I guess power corrupts? Even more surprising to me was Sunstein and his wife Samantha Power attending Henry Kissinger's birthday party after Power previously published a book basically pinning 150,000 deaths in Cambodia directly on him. They knew this guy is basically a war criminal and still went to celebrate his birthday.

[deleted]

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#223

Post by lazide »

Shaanie wrote: post #158
lazide wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?).

What's with Americans and their strange view that the US is somehow managing to do something nobody else has? Just as an example I checked my country: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Prevalence-of-daily-smok... I'm pretty sure the figures will look somewhat similar in most western countries.

What is it with non-Americans and their strange view that the US as a whole does anything?

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#224

Post by rayiner »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #137
nerdponx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to know as well. When my parents remodeled their kitchen they got some kind of simulated granite aggregate made of recycled material that I believe was fully heatproof and held up very well over the years. But did somebody get silicosis in the process?

They might have, you have no way of knowing whether the factory in which they were made used PPE or not. If they were cheap, probably not, if they were expensive, maybe, or maybe the manufacturer was just pocketing more profit.

Most of these aren’t made in a “factory.” Because countertops are heavy and pretty much all custom sized and shaped, they’re being made in small scale local businesses.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#225

Post by zolbrek »

hadlock wrote: post #191
Aeolun wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even drywall or cutting concrete you're supposed to wear PPE Yeah, but it doesn’t kill you within a few years if you don’t, right?

It never leaves your lungs though. In the last 20 years we went from "dust masks are for wimps" to "wow not wearing PPE is terrible". One small silver lining of covid is that even relatively oblivious home owners even wear PPE for small projects now. Smoking OR inhaling large amounts of dust might not kill you, but both are bound to make you miserable later in life. There is already a steep drop off in lung cancer de…

Metalworking apprentice here, I started wearing a respirator regularly after seeing the gunk cleaned out of my nasal passages by using a neti pot.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#226

Post by zolbrek »

smeej wrote: post #21
hackernewds wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vote with your wallet is the most effective method. Look at plastic straws today. What kind of countertops should be avoided? Would have been nice if the article suggested some solutions as well

Plastic straws are still ubiquitous everywhere they weren't legislated out of existence. What does that have to do with voting with your wallet?

If only. The EU declared exterminatus on them. I saw a few in the wild recently in Germany and it reminded me of happier times.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#227

Post by lazide »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #126
lazide wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curious about how you got that impression. In Canada, smoking is down from 26% in 2001[1] to 15% in 2019[2]. (Cannabis consumption is probably trending upward though). I have no reason to believe that this decline is particular to the US and Canada. Japan has been trending down from 33% in 2000 to 20% in 2020[3]. I expect this will have accelerated since the government made a strong anti-smoking push during the T…

Ah, it was just a much larger shift in the US, especially demographically. It went from 44% of adults (stats not gathered on younger folks, but anecdotally it was ‘cool’ and a lot of highschool age kids smoked) to 13.8% for adults (anecdotally many quite old) and only 8.8% for younger folks.

Traveling outside the US to Europe or Asia (eastern/southern Europe or China in particular) it’s very visible, where in the US outside of a few locations it’s almost invisible now and notably uncommon.

Especially for educated or higher income folks, too.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#228

Post by bagels »

mhb wrote: post #159
bagels wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it was more specific about the materials.

The materials are a second order effect. Undoubtedly breathing granite, soapstone or whatever dust isn't good for you either. Maybe it just takes longer to kill you.

Sure, but the article focuses on "the booming popularity of countertops made of engineered stone", without specifying what that actually is.

How can I avoid buying these products or reduce exposure to these more dangerous materials if I'm a worker? Is porcelain "engineered stone"?

They should have ppe for any cutting, regardless, I agree.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#229

Post by bagels »

flangola7 wrote: post #146
bagels wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for collecting this. A couple years to draft & study some proposed regulation doesn't seem that heinous to me. It would make sense to not hastily publish a regulation that will last decades without really considering it and its effects well. They can be a source of lawsuits, and I would assume, you want it to be effective which can take some study.

No, the delay was artificial. Consider the effects? How about the possibility delaying i needlessly ncreases the number of humans dying?

There are already regulations requiring ppe and ventilation that aren't followed, they are already dying despite regulations.

I'm not saying that we need more delays. I'm also not saying that there isn't room for more regulation here, but just slapping any poorly considered regulation down may not solve the problem.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#230

Post by haldujai »

CrazyStat wrote: post #206
haldujai wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re looking at the wrong metric and misinterpreting the stats, not only is overall survival not a good metric for cancer screening none of the studies are sufficiently powered for OS. What you want to do is look at stage at presentation, treatment costs by stage, and screening costs. These were done for nearly every recommended screening program. The available evidence behind currently recommended screening progra…

I'm going to strongly push back on both (1) the notion that overall survival is the wrong metric and (2) that I'm misinterpreting something, given that I didn't really offer any interpretation at all. I just cited a paper. > What you want to do is No, what I want to do is assess whether broad screening programs actually make people live longer. Overall survival is the correct metric. Evidence in favor of the claim is…

> No, what I want to do is assess whether broad screening programs actually make people live longer. Overall survival is the correct metric. Evidence in favor of the claim is lacking.

Correct according to whom? If you want to choose only one metric quality adjusted life years is likely the best one.

While OS may be your goal that's not the primary endpoint of screening programs.

Some examples of why OS is limited: breast lumpectomy vs mastectomy and systemic therapy or polypectomy vs neoadjuvant therapy and colonic resection are both associated with very high morbidity that is very important to patients. The vast majority of patients care about quality of life.

> "Sufficiently powered" is relative to what size of effect you want to detect--which you haven't specified, so I'm not sure how you can make the assertion that none of the studies are sufficiently powered.

We do not expect any one screening program to have a large change on overall survival because there are many ways to die, very few studies are powered to detect the small differences expected. The reference below does some modeling and discusses cancer-specific vs all-cause mortality for your perusal.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cam4.2476

> These outcomes ignore negative effects of screening on people who don't have cancer, which is why I'm not interested in them.

See morbidity discussion around delayed diagnosis above.

> And yes, there are negative effects, and no, they are not negligible.

As you're choosing to limit the discussion to overall survival, do you have any data to support the claim that screening has more than a negligible negative effect?

There is a better argument to be made for other harms of screening like cost and stress but if we want to discuss these negative effects of screening we also have to step back from overall survival and discuss morbidity benefits.

ETA:

> 2) that I'm misinterpreting something, given that I didn't really offer any interpretation at all.

This is your interpretation, and is an incorrect one:

> The evidence in favor of mass screening programs in the hope of early detection is actually weak to non-existent [1].

The evidence you cite says nothing about early detection and treatment paradigms.

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