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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

#301

Post by aaomidi »

bitcharmer wrote: post #297
aaomidi wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because being “undocumented” isn’t actually “illegal”. Heck undocumented is a bad term too on its own but for other reasons. Being in the US without a right to be in it, is a civil matter. Not criminal. It hasn’t been a criminal matter, and there are actually proponents of making it a criminal matter because then these folks would get actual representation in court. Second, even if being in the US without the right t…

> What Switzerland does has no place in this discussion either. Why? I'm from EU; most countries here will require you to go through some legal process to become eligible to live and work there if you're from outside of EU. This is absolutely normal and expected. Your argumentation is not only wrong, it would be impossible to maintain peace if crossing the border without any authorization was allowed. Can you imagine…

Russian spies are literally already within the American political system.

We weren’t able to stop spies during the height of the Cold War. We won’t now. Emotional arguments that point at a random unsubstantiated threat doesn’t actually help this discussion.

Switzerland isn’t relevant in this discussion because we’re talking about the US. They’re not nearly in the same situation or league to be compared.

And again, illegal is really mainly for criminal matters. Not civil. You can keep using whatever word you want but calling it a conspiracy that “big media” is doing is just plain wrong.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#302

Post by bitcharmer »

aaomidi wrote: post #301
bitcharmer wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What Switzerland does has no place in this discussion either. Why? I'm from EU; most countries here will require you to go through some legal process to become eligible to live and work there if you're from outside of EU. This is absolutely normal and expected. Your argumentation is not only wrong, it would be impossible to maintain peace if crossing the border without any authorization was allowed. Can you imagine…

Russian spies are literally already within the American political system. We weren’t able to stop spies during the height of the Cold War. We won’t now. Emotional arguments that point at a random unsubstantiated threat doesn’t actually help this discussion. Switzerland isn’t relevant in this discussion because we’re talking about the US. They’re not nearly in the same situation or league to be compared. And again, il…

It's amazing how you avoid all the points I'm making. I've been in discussions like this too many times. There's no value in dragging it any more at this point. Thank you for your comments, but I'd rather put my energy into more constructive discourse.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#303

Post by elzbardico »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #152
charles_f wrote: post #55

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…

Today the leading cause of death is heart disease. In that era it was infectious disease. You could have a cushy job doing numbers work in a city and still die of tuberculosis from being in close quarters. People were fine with it because everything was terrible. 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 an…

It is perfectly possible in a competitive market to have terrible work conditions. While the average conditions tend to improve over time, not all workers are in a good bargain position viz-a-viz employees. There are information assymetries, transaction costs for changing jobs, short-term biases, market failures and a lot of other issues in the real world.

This view also assumes that skills are perfectly replaceable, that there's no cost for requalifying for another profession, and that this is instantaneous or that people have some magical way to offset the opportunity costs of requalification while they train for another job.

The problem nowadays (and this is not exclusive to HN, although it is especially salient here) is that people like to fall between two ideological extremes: Either that the government is a inherently neutral and benign all powerful institution 100% of the time, or that free markets always exist, and are always pareto-efficient and that governments action is always some sort of rent-seeking parasite.

In the real world things are a lot more complicated. Not every thing can be solved with the heavy hand of government, neither the market itself is always able to reach the most humane solution. Politics is still needed, and we haven't reached the end of History.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#304

Post by elzbardico »

rightbyte wrote: post #212
Tagbert wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or why pick any straws unless you have a medical condition that prevents you from just drinking. We typically order water to drink in restaurants and when it gets to the table, the servers almost always toss some straws on the table. If we say we don’t want them or if we mention when ordering that we don’t want straws, we get looks like we must be some weirdos. Why automatically push straws for everyone?

Only time I want straws is when the drink is too thick to drink by tipping the glass. Like chocolate with quite alot of cream as decoration or some smoothies. Soda with too much ice crush ... just have too much ice. I find it quite strange for adults to drink with straws. It is a child thing in my world.

This is basically cultural. In my home country straws are basically something small kids use. There are just a few beverages where a straw really adds some value, like some alcoholic drinks with plenty of floating stuff and milk-shakes.

If anything, straws make some stuff TOO easy, like drinking loads of soda while driving, and this is not good for you.

I think that a lot of problems could be solved by people just consuming less of some stuffs, instead of trying to find a technical solution to the present problems of consuming some of that stuff.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#305

Post by elzbardico »

usrnm wrote: post #43
whimsicalism wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The US has no war criminals, because no court in the world would dare to prosecute Americans for war crimes, the ICC tried once, didn't end well for them. So relax, Kissinger is one of the good guys.

One strange thing the older among us are pretty sure to notice is how in average the tech industry worker moved from a quasi-hippie political point of view towards boot-licking default.

In the old slashdot times, such a comment would probably have +5 insightful badge attached, here in HN in 2023, it is downvoted to hell.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#306

Post by whimsicalism »

elzbardico wrote: post #305
usrnm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has no war criminals, because no court in the world would dare to prosecute Americans for war crimes, the ICC tried once, didn't end well for them. So relax, Kissinger is one of the good guys.

One strange thing the older among us are pretty sure to notice is how in average the tech industry worker moved from a quasi-hippie political point of view towards boot-licking default. In the old slashdot times, such a comment would probably have +5 insightful badge attached, here in HN in 2023, it is downvoted to hell.

e: oh i misunderstood what you were saying, keeping my original comment for posterity

I think this is poe’s law in action :) I did not read the reply as earnest.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#307

Post by boringg »

rowanG077 wrote: post #19
dmbche wrote: post #2

"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…

This is a problem with all rock cutting. With adequate safety measures there is no problem.

Wet cut, venting, wear a mask and regulate if the industry won't self-regulate which seems to be the issue.

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#309

Post by Verdex »

Omon Ra [1] is probably the most important book I've ever read. The wikipedia page suggested to me that it would be a surreal alternate history comedy about the Russian space program. There was however no comedy ... or at least nothing that was comedic to me.

The point, at least as I interpreted it, was that society is very good at building callous machines that throw away human lives for no reason and then the same society turns and pats itself on the back for the incredible virtue it has in allowing those people to "heroically" destroy themselves.

These countertops might not even outlive the people they're killing at a young age. In the past 15 years, I've talked to people who have gone from needing granite counter tops, to quartz, to the next trendy fashion. If a countertop killed me, then I would hope that it would last a century, but the truth is that it might not last a decade simply due to being unfashionable. And somehow I doubt its replacement is going to be any safer to cut.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omon_Ra

Re: Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

#310

Post by quacked »

One of the frustrating things about modernity as a westerner is that I don't feel the need for the standard of living that all of these incredible-but-dangerous advances in modern science and technology have granted us. I don't need faux-stone counters cut by Central Americans, I don't to eat as varied a diet as is available, I don't need to travel anywhere over 45 mph or internationally, I don't need A/C on 95% of summer days, I don't need all of the plastic packaging that stuff is delivered in (although I often need or want the stuff it delivers). I am completely ready to live in a slowed-down, less-commodified, lower-capital environment, so I save money and am quite comfortable, but what can I do about everyone else? I'm not going to move the needle in greater society with my own choices.

In the ideological camp with me are the "degrowthers", who seem to be more common in Europe than in the US, but they all seem to be pitching borderless, stateless surveillance communism that relies on the same ultra high-speed high-tech plastic-based international-shipping constructs we have now, except with "green" energy instead of regular energy.

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