8 ms·
How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer
- m463 7y agoMakes me think that regulation moves very slowly.
- microcolonel 7y agoIt moves slowly in both directions. If everything had built-in sunset provisions, it would be a lot easier to try things.
- Retric 7y agoThat seems like a terrible idea because people forget why useful regulations where needed. Lead is never going to be safe. Julius Caesar's engineer, Vitruvius, reported, "water is much more wholesome from earthenware pipes than from lead pipes.“ Lead was added to cheap wine illegally in the 18th and early 19th centuries as a sweetener.. Note the illegal bit because we knew it was toxic. But fast forward and... In the late 1950s through the 1970s Herbert Needleman and Clair Cameron Patterson did research trying to prove lead's toxicity to humans.[231] In the 1980s Needleman was falsely accused of scientific misconduct by the lead industry associates.[232][233] Read the history and we just keep discovering the same issues over and over again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning Yet, we still keep adding it to various products today and people still get significant exposure.
- microcolonel 7y ago> That seems like a terrible idea because people forget why useful regulations were needed. To me that seems to indicate that we need to keep a record of why laws are made, so that the case is simply ready to be made when the sun is due to set.
- majormajor 7y agoNeither contemporary recordings nor history books are hard to find. But the people who have something to gain by unwisely rolling back regulation, and who have money to buy themselves platforms, are deliberately not talking about the reasons the laws exist, so short of something more akin to state control of media, what are you going to do?
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> To me that seems to indicate that we need to keep a record of why laws are made Whether and why a practice is useful generally has little or nothing to do with people's understanding of whether and why it is useful. The arguments people advance for everything, including valuable things, are almost uniformly nonsense and easy to disprove. So, a record of why laws are made wouldn't really serve any purpose.
- stuaxo 7y agoLaws should be measured against the reasons they were created.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoIf you start doing a good thing for a bad reason, you should stop?
- vidarh 7y agoAn alternative would be if instead of sunset provisions laws are made to explicitly include testable goals, and a process for challenging them by proving they don't achieve their intended goal.
- lordgrenville 7y agoReally interesting that the Romans already knew that lead pipes were bad. To be fair, though, they had a lot of other spurious beliefs, and I can understand why people would have assumed it was just superstition. Especially since the toxicity is very slow.
- m463 7y agoOn the other hand, what about autism and vaccines? Or wifi emissions? and I wonder what they will say about cellphone radiation in 30 years? (or some time in the future where there's not a strong litiginous cellphone industry)
- gizmo686 7y agoWe already have an example of how sunset provisions work in the US: the federal budget and tax ceiling. What ends up happening is that some politicians hold the sunsetting provision hostage to get their pet issue. Imagine if instead furloughing federal workers, we had the Purge.
- ptah 7y agomaybe a blanket precautionary principle regulation would work better: manufacturers have to prove it is not harmful
- mikestew 7y agomanufacturers have to prove...not... You know where I’m going with this, right? To pick a random example, go look up saccharin. Whether or not it is “not harmful” depends on when in the last 100 years you ask the question.
- ptah 7y agowe would have known earlier if there was a burden to prove it was safe
- fenglida 7y agoHow long until will it be until we find out the effects of 5G radiation? The real point of my question is not to raise conspiracy theories about 5G, but to illustrate a point. Our regulatory organisations operate under a “let’s do it and ban it later if some people die” kind of attitude.
- solveit 7y agoIt's just you. Things have changed enormously from the "let's put radium in everything" era. Nowadays there's a good case to be made that we've swung too far in the opposite direction and we're letting people die because the FDA is too conservative in approving new medications (and old Russian medications with a proven track record that's impossible to patent therefore nobody has the incentive to spend millions on getting through the FDA vetting process, but that's a different issue).
- ajna91 7y agoI think sadly we may live in the worst of both worlds. Overly burdensome regulation on medical innovation, yet free hand in other areas like lead in gasoline, microbeads in our hair gel, and who knows what else. A cynical take might be that they are two sides of the same coin. Regulation meant to protect big business and at the same time choke out any competition.
- weq 7y agoIMO this a consequence of Capitalism. At some point, when companies get to large, buying regulations becomes the new ball game. This can go both ways, once u buy your regulation, making it harder for others becomes the next ball game...
- x3n0ph3n3 7y agoWhat you described is called "corporatism", and we can agree that it's a major problem. Assigning the flaws of corporatism to all of capitalism is to miss all of the good capitalism has done for the world.
- jupp0r 7y agoWhen you think people had learned their lesson by the 1930s, don't forget about watching atomic bomb tests from the side of the road in Nevada in the 50s: https://allthatsinteresting.com/atomic-tourism https://allthatsinteresting.com/atomic-tourism
- djtriptych 7y agoIf totally do it if it were even close to safe. Is a small yield blast dangerous from 75 miles?
- arethuza 7y agoYou can use Nukemap to work that out: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ I think it would be perfectly safe - though you probably don't want to live directly downwind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders
- TeMPOraL 7y agoSame here. While I sincerely hope nuclear weapons will never again be used against humans, I dream to be able to see a real nuclear detonation with my own eyes, from as close as safely possible.
- spraak 7y agoReminds me of the gleeful use of DDT as well. It's a common pattern.
- crdotson 7y agoProbably a bad example. A lot more people died from malaria than would ever have been harmed by DDT.
- User23 7y agoMost people have no idea malaria was endemic in the USA as far north as New York State. The advantage of the DDT saturation was that it wiped out the disease reservoir completely, precisely because it persisted in the environment. Modern "responsible" DDT usage (treated nets, wall spraying, etc) is just breeding resistant mosquitoes.
- taneq 7y agoWe gleefully use all sorts of new things. Most of them turn out like sliced bread, and we stop thinking of it as "gleefully using them" and just accept them as part of our lives. It's only the odd occasion when things go wrong that confirmation bias kicks in and we think of all the other times that something hasn't worked out.
- hamilyon2 7y agoDDT is a miracle chemical with little downsides. Whole epidemics were shut down thanks to it.
- smacktoward 7y agoIf you are interested in this subject, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Deborah Blum’s excellent 2011 book The Poisoner’s Handbook (https://www.amazon.com/Poisoners-Handbook-Murder-Forensic-Medicine/dp/014311882X https://www.amazon.com/Poisoners-Handbook-Murder-Forensic-Me...), which tells the stories of a bunch of different chemical catastrophes from the same period. Radium is covered, as well as such other “what were they thinking?” stories as the introduction of lead into gasoline and the poisoning of industrial alcohol by the government during Prohibition in a misguided effort to keep it from being turned into bootleg liquor. It’s full of fascinating case studies, and Blum has an engaging writing style that makes it a good read. If you prefer to watch your history, PBS’ American Experience documentary series did an episode based on Blum’s book (see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poisoners http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poisoners ); it can be streamed via a bunch of different video services.
- th0ma5 7y agoWe still poison alcohol not only for prohibition reasons but also tax reasons.
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoWhat do you mean by "we poison alcohol"?
- tialaramex 7y agoIn the EU at least the denatured alcohols sold to the general public (e.g. as cleaning products) don't have enough actual poison in them to cause much damage. The main thing they shove in there to stop you drinking it is denatonium benzoate ("bitrex"), which will make you _regret_ putting it in your mouth, but won't kill you because you'll immediately want to spit it out instead. The other ingredients are mostly to stop you trying to get the bitrex back out and then selling it as bootleg booze (thus evading the tax).
- jmkni 7y agoI think Nintendo coat Switch cartridges with the same thing, to prevent kids from putting the tiny cartridges in their mouth.
- rootsudo 7y agoIf you go to the Wikipedia Article for Radium Girls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls - You'd see it's an exact mirror of much of the text that's reposted on theatlantic.com article.
- ajna91 7y agoI find this kind of thing quite often, and it always annoys me.
- djtriptych 7y agoWe should automate wiki-plagiarism checks.
- dehrmann 7y agoI did, and I searched for several random 4-6 word phrases in the Atlantic article from the Wikipedia one, and I didn't find anything making it obvious much of the content is an exact mirror.
- forgotmypwd123 7y agoIts lazily reworded, still plaigarism
- dehrmann 7y ago> ...an exact mirror... It might be lazily reworded, but hyperbole like that hurts the commenter's credibility and makes me less likely to believe them.