31–37 of 37 posts
> supervisors assured them that rosy cheeks would be the only physical side effect to swallowing the radium-laced pigment A nice reminder that you shouldn't drink the koolaid unless you can actually see your bosses doing it.
In the incident that coined “drinking the koolaid”, the bosses did drink it.
(semi interesting tangent on the correctness of that phrase)
You know, who knows what happened to the investors in US Radium? Where did their funds go, and is there a trail of other problems (or bodies) with their subsequent investments? I'd like to know who I hypothetically should and shouldn't be investing my money with, as I want the world to be a better place.
Our entire modern society is built on the blood (and brilliance) of the past. Lessons were learned.
You'll go crazy trying to trace it all.
One part of the saga of “why didn't anyone do anything?” is that this was a state's rights problem originally: > In New Jersey, reformers won their fight for a law allowing compensation for “radium necrosis.” State labor and health agencies were able to halt lip pointing, but their power over industry was sometimes limited. For example, the New Jersey Labor Department issued to U.S. Radium Corporation an order to tig…
To be honest those ads were true. Radioactive water _will_ give you “natural energy”, it will be bad for your body though.
> supervisors assured them that rosy cheeks would be the only physical side effect to swallowing the radium-laced pigment A nice reminder that you shouldn't drink the koolaid unless you can actually see your bosses doing it.
The company he worked for chose to create and promote TEL because it was more profitable, as something that could be patented and monopolized, despite Ethanol being a great octane booster and being used with ICEs since their invention. They didn't want to use Ethanol because that would have been a competitive market.
Your boss will happily give himself cancer in the future to save a dime in the now, especially if you get the cancer way way faster than he does. Your boss will do this because his boss will put pressure on him until he does, and because people are stupid and irrational.
> supervisors assured them that rosy cheeks would be the only physical side effect to swallowing the radium-laced pigment A nice reminder that you shouldn't drink the koolaid unless you can actually see your bosses doing it.
When there was worry about the toxicity of TetraEthylLead in gas, Thomas Midgley stood at a podium, poured it over his hands, and sniffed a glass of it for about a minute and told the audience he could do this every day without suffering ill effects. Midgley eventually took a leave of absence from work due to lead poisoning. The company he worked for chose to create and promote TEL because it was more profitable, as…
> in 1944, he was found strangled to death by a device he devised to allow him to get out of bed unassisted. It is often reported that he had been accidentally killed by his own invention, but his death was declared by the coroner to be a suicide.
If actually suicide, perhaps he felt remorse? Elsewhere in the wiki page:
> Midgley "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history",[32] and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny".[33] Fred Pearce, writing for New Scientist, described Midgley as a "one-man environmental disaster".[34]
What a legacy, hope the patents were worth it.
One part of the saga of “why didn't anyone do anything?” is that this was a state's rights problem originally: > In New Jersey, reformers won their fight for a law allowing compensation for “radium necrosis.” State labor and health agencies were able to halt lip pointing, but their power over industry was sometimes limited. For example, the New Jersey Labor Department issued to U.S. Radium Corporation an order to tig…