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…
Processed/GMO foods with less nutrients, exhaust and brake dust from motorways and streets, HPV variants that don't get attention, Lyme disease, probably long-COVID, probably a ton of things I haven't even heard of.
Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
321–330 of 428 posts
Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
#322I've got a sneaking suspicion we ought to go through everything else Thomas MIdgley Jr. invented and ban it, just to be sure. Leaded gas, CFCs, and the contraption he killed himself with is a worrying pattern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr .
Says the internet warrior who has invented nothing.
Being on HN he probably invented a novel way of making kids click on ads. But yeah, fridge bad. Car bad. t.HN
Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of these increase healthcare costs for everyone involved.
And you commuting increases congestion for everyone else. And you buying food makes food more expensive for everyone else. So what. You honestly can't distinguish between this and pouring lead into the atmosphere? This seems like some demagoguery fetish at best.
> And you buying food makes food more expensive for everyone else.
Not true. You raising the demand of a good enables the producers to employ economies of scale thus making food less expensive for all.
Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. It's blaming smokers for second-hand smoke. We need to figure out the social-media equivalent of "no smoking" signs.
A circle-cross with the Twitter bird in the middle would do.
Pre covid there was a pub chain in london that banned use of electronic devices, presumably to get people talking instead of tweeting.
Went in with a colleague to have lunch and go over some diagrams. Got laptop out so we could see the diagrams and then got kicked out, had lunch down the road instead.
If I’m eating out on my own I’ll read a kindle. That’s not allowed. Read a dead tree is fine though. Pathetic.
Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
#325Earlier 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…
Factory farms, polyunsaturated fats, refined grains (white wheat and rice), HFCS, human driven cars, and sitting desks will all be seen as barbaric or grossly unhealthy in the future.
Throughout the last year or so, I've seen multiple people on HN call out polyunsaturated fats, is there a specific reason for that? Google hasn't really turned up anything for me that looked particularly compelling.
Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is unfortunately not trying to see the problem from the future hindsight. Which is the exercise that GP is suggesting.
Social media is not a toxin of any sort. To call it "toxic" is a metaphor that expresses the revulsion that people feel for the idiocies that social media channels have uncovered. So I do disagree with the liberty of the metaphor in this case. Social media is the business of providing channels of communication to people in exchange for some lucrative data. Other businesses do this too (television, radio, newspapers).…
Lead poisoning does have a clear biological mechanism, establishing it as a toxin in a way that social media does not.
However, the liberty of the metaphor is well justified.
Social media is a plausible (not proven, but plausible) factor in a 57% increase in teen suicide between 2008 and 2018 (noting that rates were stable for the years 2000-2008, and that 2006 was the watershed year for smartphones and social media)[1].
I'm not motivated to dig out the numerous resources showing the deleterious influence of social media on teen psychology, but it doesn't take much searching if you are open. There are clear psychological mechanisms, and Facebook especially was clearly and explicitly designed to take advantage of these psychological mechanisms.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr69/NVSR-69-11-508.pdf
Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Midgley's legacy has been scarred by the negative environmental impact of leaded gasoline and Freon. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny".
And yet, it is also considered that he has benefited more than harmed; simply by helping provide countless people with refrigeration.
because traditional methods of food preservation deserved to be abandoned?
Your argument assumes refrigeration is a universal good, and other alternatives were not. Likewise, that the highly centralized food distribution system which became the defacto due to refrigeration is a universal good, while decentralized systems are not.
such as the rich and varied food of Vietnam. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/02/vietnams-low-tech-fe...
Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's incredibly wrong. Nearly every conservative I know feels that government services should be ran like a business, as also profitable like a business (at least self-sustainable). What they disagree with is funding those services with tax money. Which obviously follows.
> What they disagree with is funding those services with tax money.
Without massive governmental subsidies, many services - especially public transport, postal service, libraries - would simply be unaffordable for wide parts of the population.
Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
#329Algeria was the last country to ban leaded gas last month.
Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is unfortunately not trying to see the problem from the future hindsight. Which is the exercise that GP is suggesting.
Social media is not a toxin of any sort. To call it "toxic" is a metaphor that expresses the revulsion that people feel for the idiocies that social media channels have uncovered. So I do disagree with the liberty of the metaphor in this case. Social media is the business of providing channels of communication to people in exchange for some lucrative data. Other businesses do this too (television, radio, newspapers).…
Social media is the business of providing channels of communication to people in exchange for
In most popular cases, it is communication of people to finely drawn images of all sorts of ideas which bring money. Social media is not a social media, it’s an advertising/deception media. Face it: people on average are not able to socialize properly on a large scale, because the reality is boring and images of all sorts are escapist’s fun. That’s why cinema/theaters and artists existed since forever. “Social” media is a well-coined term that everyone accepted blindly.