15 ms·

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?

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 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 own inventions, unrelated to chemistry... Kind of Ironic! Thomas Midgley, Jr. (1889–1944) was an American engineer and chemist who contracted polio at age 51, leaving him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. He became accidentally entangled in the ropes and died of strangulation at the age of 55. However, he is better known for two of his other inventions: the tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive to gasoline, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

smnrchrds 5y ago
> 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".
- jgtrosh 5y ago
  And yet, it is also considered that he has benefited more than harmed; simply by helping provide countless people with refrigeration.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    That only works if we presume that the only way we could have discovered refrigeration was via CFCs, which seems improbable to me. My chest freezer uses propane as a refrigerant; why couldn’t we have just jumped straight to that?
    - Baeocystin 5y ago
      We already had ammonia as a working fluid, and it's great at the job. Also a very toxic substance you do not want any significant quantity of in your home. The great strength of CFCs is how non-toxic/non-flammable they are compared to the alternatives.
      - jws 5y ago
        Speak for yourself! Back in the day my dorm fridge was an ammonia absorption unit. No compressor. Absolutely silent. Loved it. Perfect when living in 80 square feet.
    - jws 5y ago
      Propane can be used as a refrigerant. It is cheap and performs reasonably well. The obvious downside is flammability. In the US the total charge for a propane fridge or AC is limited to 150 grams of propane. That is a rather small window unit. I think propane had to wait for precision manufacturing to be commoditized before it could be tolerated in living spaces. Leaking propane around switching electrical equipment can end badly.
  - mellavora 5y ago
    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-fermentation-food-system-takes-advantage-of-decay.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/02/vietnams-low-tech-fe...
3grdlurker 5y ago
I can only wish that more people realized that we didn’t have to start with something so destructive before we could “get better eventually”.
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  Implying we would know about all possible destructiveness at time of invention.
  - bbreier 5y ago
    Isn't the article's primary claim exactly that?
    - magila 5y ago
      Sort of. As the saying goes: the dose makes the poison. The article itself presents a quote stating that the low level of lead exposure caused by TEL in gasoline was thought to be safe at the time.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    They knew. They chose to do it anyway because it was the better deal for them. Couldn't care less about the people they harmed. In my country, this is called criminal imprudence. If this isn't a crime in the US, it should be.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3grdlurker 5y ago
    I think that that’s just an excuse, considering how we didn’t stop when we finally knew.
xyzzy21 5y ago
Well consider what EPA managers are up to in terms of suppressing science about newly introduced chemical and their risks based on science. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/attacks-on-science/epa-leadership-suppressing-release-scientific-studies-dangers https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/attacks-on-science/epa-lead...
afavour 5y ago
> 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 and not much else but in this era of vaccine denialism, election fraud conspiracy theories, even body image issues from touched up photos, there’s little doubt in my mind that society is suffering and that the problem will likely get worse before it gets better.
- dchichkov 5y ago
  CO₂ could be candidate. Perhaps the effect will be even at a grander scale than leaded gas.
  - bjowen 5y ago
    It seems like the top of the list to me! - though it’s been emitted for longer in quantity.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  I think there are always people around, more than we care to admit, who will do things they know are bad to make a buck and to wield power (and frankly, most of us, sadly, have a price; look at the widespread participation of people in tech in the aforementioned industries and companies even though they and we all know the bad stuff they're doing). So I wouldn't treat this as some exception. I think people are extremely good at quietly repressing knowledge they're rather not have interfere with their desires. > this era of vaccine denialism Not central to your point, but this isn't really that widespread. 98% of Americans have the full regime of vaccines. The whole "antivax" scare is largely fiction and has been whipped by journalists afraid of people asking questions. Now, where the covid vaccine is concerned, that's different. People who aren't skeptical of vaccines qua vaccines are skeptical about this particular vaccine or whatever you want to call it because of the obscene level of politicization around it masquerading as "science". So I wouldn't conflate the two.
api 5y ago
Fossil carbon, loads of food additives, and the way the military industries generate much of technological innovation all come to mind.
nemacol 5y ago
>What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? Among the list of nasty things we are doing, fracking stands out. Fresh water is scarce in much of the world. Ground water is drying up and massive aquafers are eroding. Simultaneously we are pumping cancer directly in the ground, breaking up rocks, and mixing the cancer stuck in the rocks into the ground water. Pumping that cancer back out and ... god only knows what is really happening to it. My town, which relied on well water for as long as it has been a town, had city water installed in 2005~. Right around the time all the well heads were going up. I would guess that my well is no longer safe/usable - though I have never had it tested. Seems a real shame and extremely short sighted.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > though I have never had it tested. Unless neighbors had theirs tested, there's no reason to assume there are issues with your well's water quality or that fracking caused them. Testing it if you plan on using it again is reasonable, though.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    What has higher probability of causing contaminated groundwater than nearby fracking?
    - tempestn 5y ago
      It's not known that the groundwater is contaminated in this case.
      - MichaelZuo 5y ago
        In the general case do you know of a higher probability source of contamination?
- cascom 5y ago
  Slightly off topic: I’ve asked several people I know in the energy industry how they’d feel about having fracking done on their land where they drank the well water, and the response was pretty universal, no problem, as long as they knew which companies were doing the work - they view the whole thing simply from a quality standpoint, reputable operators/service providers were going to produce a safe outcome, people cutting corners was where the risk was.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
PFAS and phthalates are 2 of the biggest things. An working federal government would have banned these decades ago. Also, plastics touching food ever. "Food grade" plastic is a myth sold to us by the plastics industry. This one is going to take longer though.
- ManuelKiessling 5y ago
  „"Food grade" plastic is a myth” – do you know any reliable sources where I could read up the details?
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  Re. "food grade": I think maybe some plastics might be ok, but, when I've recently done some projects involving plastic parts, I've been shocked to learn how little is food-grade. Like, almost nothing with any dye, especially any black dye. Yet how often does one see black plastic cutlery and plates, or microwave dinner trays? Then they have this legalese on them like "do not reheat". WTF? Rubbermaid containers don't seem to be food-grade either. I'd bet that some small minority of plastic really is food grade, that the rest hides behind legalese, that consumers can't tell one from the other, and that both are routinely used for food, certainly within the home, and probably also commercially. Also: There are a bunch of dirty political tricks that industry could pull to "problematize" concern about endocrine disruptors. Think of the famous "crying Indian" ad that started the recycling scam, but with hip 2021 sensibilities. I think we're going to have to be ready for that trick. "Those right-wingers! It's like that scene in Dr. Strangelove -- always concerned with their precious bodily fluids." You can see how it'll work.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    When I was a kid I never liked plastic cups and glasses because it made the drink taste "plasticy".
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      Hot liquids are the worst. I find that takeaway coffee is disgusting because the coffee smell is replaced by the smell of melting plastics.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stefan_ 5y ago
Wood heating remains improbably popular (and favorably regulated). Not to mention the stupidity of diesel cars: trading a little bit less CO2 for actively poisoning the lungs of your immediate environment.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Wood is at least not a fossil fuel.
  - CyanBird 5y ago
    Just ensure that it is dry (actually dry) and that the combustion is complete In South of Chile where wood is a very common and available fuel for cooking or heating this has been a permanent issue every winter, too many people with asthma as a consequence of pm2.5 and other particulate materials
DenisM 5y ago
- Sugar. - Social networks. - The coddling of the mind. I think you will find that all three have vicious cycles built into them.
- nofinator 5y ago
  Sugar is an excellent example. In fact, the sugar industry has been behind the effort to deflect blame to fat for the last 50 years. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
  - lovecg 5y ago
    It’s kind of hard to discern from the article, so is fat good and was unfairly blamed? Or fat and sugar are both bad, but they emphasized the fat part?
    - DenisM 5y ago
      FWIW, my reading of the tea leaves is that fat alone is fine, sugar alone is bad, and sugar+fat maybe worse. The basic logic of the anti-sugar sentiment is this: Excess of blood sugar is toxic and so it triggers a shot of insulin, intended to drain sugar from the blood and hide it in various places: the muscle tissue, the liver, and last resort - the fat cells. Normally it works just fine, but sometimes the system gets overwhelmed with a big sugar rush and starts producing too much insulin, draining too much sugar, overshooting the target, causing hunger, craving for more sugar, and eating more sugar. The human then goes into the infinite loop of sugar binging accumulating fat on the go. Now if you add dietary fat into the mixture it's possible that the fat cells will suck it up too. That I don't know for sure.
    - stephen_g 5y ago
      I think the biggest takeaway from all the research I did is that not all fats are equal. Monounsaturated fats seem to be generally just good. Omega-3, also, seems good, and Omega-6 less so, but part of that could actually be more about the ratios of omega-6 to -3, which can be 15:1 in the Western diet but people have better health outcomes when they bring omega-6 consumption down and increase omega-3 to get the ratio closer to 4:1 to 1:1. Saturated fats are still debated - some studies did show replacing saturated fats with vegetable fats did reduce cardiovascular disease etc., but then that might be more that there are some protective effects to the vegetable fats and adding them in rather than replacing might have had a similar effect… Then there are about a million confounding variables. Doing a decent amount of exercise is a big one, because it’s harder to control for than the other common health detriment - smoking, but things like whether your dairy is grass-fed (as it is here in Australia and much of Europe) vs. grain fed apparently makes a big difference (grass fed apparently has a lot more things like CLA, omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamin K2, the benefits of which seem to potentially more than cancel out any problem from the saturated fat). One other big problem is that a lot of “low fat” products tend to have more sugar added to make up for it. Too much sugar is bad, yes, and it’s pretty alarming how seemingly little you need to be over that threshold. Literally a single can of coke is almost the entirety of the sugar one should be consuming in a whole day! Fruit juice is also pretty bad unfortunately - basically just as bad as soft drink (I love soft drinks, apple juice, sweet ice tea, it’s been a challenge to cut most of it out!).
rsync 5y ago
"What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today?" I have a suspicion that slathering typical consumer sunblock agents (and spraying the out of aerosol cans, and breathing the sunblock, etc.) is going to seem unwise to future us.
- haimez 5y ago
  Well… maybe. I mean, certainly we could find out that was the case and that there was a safer sunblock alternative we might have been using if we had only known about it- but compared to what we definitely know today about sun exposure I think this is a bit of a different story, especially for light skinned people.
  - rsync 5y ago
    Sorry - I wasn't clear ... I am not contrasting sunblock vs. no sunblock ... I am contrasting cheapy chemical sunblocks vs. pure titanium dioxide (?) which appears to be totally benign/inert and which is easy to purchase in a few different form factors (although not spray, which, again, I think is problematic).
    - devb 5y ago
      You don't have to suspect these things, because they are correct. Almost all spray sunscreen has been found to contain benzene: https://www.valisure.com/blog/valisure-news/valisure-detects-benzene-in-sunscreen/ https://www.valisure.com/blog/valisure-news/valisure-detects...
ngvrnd 5y ago
"Forever chemicals" perhaps?
SavantIdiot 5y ago
> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? I'm gonna go with overfishing. Anyone who has been shopping since the 1990's has seen fish diversity decline and prices skyrocket beyond inflation (not to mention a sharp increase in farmed and faux-colored fish like salmon). Illegal fishing is impossible to combat. See China's illegal fleets: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27412691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27412691 [2] https://twitter.com/epineyro_ok/status/1378112721628114947 https://twitter.com/epineyro_ok/status/1378112721628114947
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  My dad used to tell me stories about how when he was a kid, during the drive down to Grand Isle, you would see cars lined up on both sides of the highway for as far as the eye could see because families would park on the curb, set out some outdoor chairs, and fish for speckled trout, flounder, and redfish in the marsh. It was common when they were biting to bring home an ice chest of fish to eat. Commercial fishing also had no hard limits back then, and so we eradicated the redfish population and most of the specks. We now have pretty substantial limits on how many of each we can keep when we go fishing, to the point where you're doing it just for the experience because you won't catch enough to recoup the gas money.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    I had a laugh back in ~2000 when VP Cheney said humans weren't having an impact on the environment. I grew up on long island and we used to pull bivalves (steamers, mussels, perriwinkels (not a bivalve)) in the 60's and 70's. Then in the 90's everything was banned due to pollution. O.G. immigrants still harvested despite the bans, but it was sad to see the consequence of pollution.
    - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      Most people who are under 50 years old in the New Orleans area have NO idea whatsoever that there used to be an entire amusement park and beach on Lake Ponchartrain where people would go, enjoy the day, and enjoy the beach. This is because the water became so polluted that families no longer thought that it was safe to be in. It's been decades now and the water quality is just starting to be clean enough to swim in again.
phendrenad2 5y ago
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.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  This was probably downvoted due to the mention of GMOs but I think it is not unreasonable to be concerned about these. Most seem to be perfectly fine but one that seems most concerning is GMO roundup ready crops, not because of the GMO, but because they are being sprayed with a dangerous chemical which seems to cause cancer.
- kybernetyk 5y ago
  >GMO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
young_unixer 5y ago
> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? We should be ashamed at the number of people that die everyday in car "accidents". Specially pedestrians and cyclists. If you looked at our reaction to Covid, you'd think we value human life very much, but when you look at how our streets works, you realize we actually don't. The problem is even worse in poor countries.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  Not to mention getting hit or run over by a car is a pretty brutal, this is from experience.
  - brigandish 5y ago
    Even a tiny hit that causes no obvious injury is a shock to the system, I say that as a cyclist who's been hit a few times in that way.
aaron695 5y ago
> This guy who invents awesome working chemicals that are tragically bad for people on a worldwide scale Cars and fridges bad, is pretty much HN at it's core. These saved millions, probably billions of lives (depending on how you measure it) Thomas Midgley Jr work making these more efficient means he is an amazing human being that helped humanity saving many many lives. I guess people need something to justify pushing code around that does nothing?
8ytecoder 5y ago
Animal farming
ashtonkem 5y ago
Easy; micro plastics.
twistedpair 5y ago
Aluminum and metal particles. There are various (inconclusive) studies suggesting a tie between metal particles in the blood/brain and dementia. Ever notice that foods now say thing things like "Ingredients: baking powder (aluminum free)", that you can get "Aluminum free" deodorant, etc? Liking to stack the deck in my favor, I've moved to all stainless steel and cast iron cookware.
- stewx 5y ago
  Stainless steel cookware typically contains aluminum for the part that retains heat, whether that be a disc on the bottom of the pan or sandwiched in the walls of the vessel. Steel doesn't retain heat well but is prettier and more durable, so it goes on the outside. In any case, it should be a safe choice if you want to avoid ingesting aluminum.
  - labawi 5y ago
    Aluminium is a good conductor. I presume the reason for an aluminum layer in pots and pans is to prevent hot spots and possibly conduct the heat faster. Aluminium is the 7th most abundant element on earth (1.5% by weight) and even more so in the crust. It is used in various forms as additives in food, and discomfort medications. Reasonable tolerance seems likely. In contrast, stainless steel is typically 20% or more chromium and nickel. Both heavy metals, chromium being worse. Good stainless steel does not corrode or release much, if handled properly, but if you are cusing naked stainless steel, you are consuming chromium and nickel. Especially with new or bad cookware, acidic foods or when scraping with hard utensils. While aluminium is much less toxic, I don't in fact use cookware with aluminium surface, as I think it leaks too much / too easily. I either carefully use stainless steel, or often prefer enameled / ceramic glazed cookware.
bjowen 5y ago
There’s a whole class of persistent organic pollutants that probably fit that bill. Plastics manufacture can involve BPA and phthalates; things like PCBs / PBBs occur in a surprising range of places like transformers and capacitors, fire retardants and carbonless copy paper; dioxins form in a bunch of processes and are toxic in frighteningly small doses, and the latest to join the club are the PFAs, which are involved in firefighting foams ans surfactants, or the preparation of water repellent treatments and non-stick coatings. Many are implicated in cancers and endocrine disruption, and may bioaccumulate to significant levels even in people with low exposure. The book Slow Death by Rubber Duck (2011) was a pretty thorough introduction to the subject - although I imagine by now many of its references will be out of date by now.
lkbm 5y ago
> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? People have already listed a lot of true answers and a number of speculative answers (also likely mostly true, imo), but I'll toss in that we use two-stroke engine leaf blowers and lawn mowers everywhere—mostly right outside our homes—and it's absolutely bonkers. Massive amounts of NOx, PM2.5, etc. We spent all this time and money cleaning up our cars (which are still pretty bad), but then run these tiny things that are far worse, right where we live. I'm willing to bet the noise pollution of them + traffic has a significant negative effect on our health too, but in terms of localized air pollution, the emissions from leaf blowers running a few times week across the street from me easily trump that from all the cars driving past my house. Hoping electric leaf blowers get good and gain popularity.
- sagarm 5y ago
  Gas leaf blower fans are going into effect in sooner Bay area cities, so you'll probably get your wish.

smnrchrds 5y ago

> 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".

jgtrosh 5y ago
And yet, it is also considered that he has benefited more than harmed; simply by helping provide countless people with refrigeration.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  That only works if we presume that the only way we could have discovered refrigeration was via CFCs, which seems improbable to me. My chest freezer uses propane as a refrigerant; why couldn’t we have just jumped straight to that?
  - Baeocystin 5y ago
    We already had ammonia as a working fluid, and it's great at the job. Also a very toxic substance you do not want any significant quantity of in your home. The great strength of CFCs is how non-toxic/non-flammable they are compared to the alternatives.
    - jws 5y ago
      Speak for yourself! Back in the day my dorm fridge was an ammonia absorption unit. No compressor. Absolutely silent. Loved it. Perfect when living in 80 square feet.
  - jws 5y ago
    Propane can be used as a refrigerant. It is cheap and performs reasonably well. The obvious downside is flammability. In the US the total charge for a propane fridge or AC is limited to 150 grams of propane. That is a rather small window unit. I think propane had to wait for precision manufacturing to be commoditized before it could be tolerated in living spaces. Leaking propane around switching electrical equipment can end badly.
- mellavora 5y ago
  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-fermentation-food-system-takes-advantage-of-decay.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/02/vietnams-low-tech-fe...

3grdlurker 5y ago

I can only wish that more people realized that we didn’t have to start with something so destructive before we could “get better eventually”.

jvanderbot 5y ago
Implying we would know about all possible destructiveness at time of invention.
- bbreier 5y ago
  Isn't the article's primary claim exactly that?
  - magila 5y ago
    Sort of. As the saying goes: the dose makes the poison. The article itself presents a quote stating that the low level of lead exposure caused by TEL in gasoline was thought to be safe at the time.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  They knew. They chose to do it anyway because it was the better deal for them. Couldn't care less about the people they harmed. In my country, this is called criminal imprudence. If this isn't a crime in the US, it should be.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 3grdlurker 5y ago
  I think that that’s just an excuse, considering how we didn’t stop when we finally knew.

xyzzy21 5y ago

Well consider what EPA managers are up to in terms of suppressing science about newly introduced chemical and their risks based on science. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/attacks-on-science/epa-leadership-suppressing-release-scientific-studies-dangers https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/attacks-on-science/epa-lead...

afavour 5y ago

> 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 and not much else but in this era of vaccine denialism, election fraud conspiracy theories, even body image issues from touched up photos, there’s little doubt in my mind that society is suffering and that the problem will likely get worse before it gets better.

dchichkov 5y ago
CO₂ could be candidate. Perhaps the effect will be even at a grander scale than leaded gas.
- bjowen 5y ago
  It seems like the top of the list to me! - though it’s been emitted for longer in quantity.
bobthechef 5y ago
I think there are always people around, more than we care to admit, who will do things they know are bad to make a buck and to wield power (and frankly, most of us, sadly, have a price; look at the widespread participation of people in tech in the aforementioned industries and companies even though they and we all know the bad stuff they're doing). So I wouldn't treat this as some exception. I think people are extremely good at quietly repressing knowledge they're rather not have interfere with their desires. > this era of vaccine denialism Not central to your point, but this isn't really that widespread. 98% of Americans have the full regime of vaccines. The whole "antivax" scare is largely fiction and has been whipped by journalists afraid of people asking questions. Now, where the covid vaccine is concerned, that's different. People who aren't skeptical of vaccines qua vaccines are skeptical about this particular vaccine or whatever you want to call it because of the obscene level of politicization around it masquerading as "science". So I wouldn't conflate the two.

api 5y ago

Fossil carbon, loads of food additives, and the way the military industries generate much of technological innovation all come to mind.

nemacol 5y ago

>What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? Among the list of nasty things we are doing, fracking stands out. Fresh water is scarce in much of the world. Ground water is drying up and massive aquafers are eroding. Simultaneously we are pumping cancer directly in the ground, breaking up rocks, and mixing the cancer stuck in the rocks into the ground water. Pumping that cancer back out and ... god only knows what is really happening to it. My town, which relied on well water for as long as it has been a town, had city water installed in 2005~. Right around the time all the well heads were going up. I would guess that my well is no longer safe/usable - though I have never had it tested. Seems a real shame and extremely short sighted.

dehrmann 5y ago
> though I have never had it tested. Unless neighbors had theirs tested, there's no reason to assume there are issues with your well's water quality or that fracking caused them. Testing it if you plan on using it again is reasonable, though.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  What has higher probability of causing contaminated groundwater than nearby fracking?
  - tempestn 5y ago
    It's not known that the groundwater is contaminated in this case.
    - MichaelZuo 5y ago
      In the general case do you know of a higher probability source of contamination?
cascom 5y ago
Slightly off topic: I’ve asked several people I know in the energy industry how they’d feel about having fracking done on their land where they drank the well water, and the response was pretty universal, no problem, as long as they knew which companies were doing the work - they view the whole thing simply from a quality standpoint, reputable operators/service providers were going to produce a safe outcome, people cutting corners was where the risk was.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

PFAS and phthalates are 2 of the biggest things. An working federal government would have banned these decades ago. Also, plastics touching food ever. "Food grade" plastic is a myth sold to us by the plastics industry. This one is going to take longer though.

ManuelKiessling 5y ago
„"Food grade" plastic is a myth” – do you know any reliable sources where I could read up the details?
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
Re. "food grade": I think maybe some plastics might be ok, but, when I've recently done some projects involving plastic parts, I've been shocked to learn how little is food-grade. Like, almost nothing with any dye, especially any black dye. Yet how often does one see black plastic cutlery and plates, or microwave dinner trays? Then they have this legalese on them like "do not reheat". WTF? Rubbermaid containers don't seem to be food-grade either. I'd bet that some small minority of plastic really is food grade, that the rest hides behind legalese, that consumers can't tell one from the other, and that both are routinely used for food, certainly within the home, and probably also commercially. Also: There are a bunch of dirty political tricks that industry could pull to "problematize" concern about endocrine disruptors. Think of the famous "crying Indian" ad that started the recycling scam, but with hip 2021 sensibilities. I think we're going to have to be ready for that trick. "Those right-wingers! It's like that scene in Dr. Strangelove -- always concerned with their precious bodily fluids." You can see how it'll work.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  When I was a kid I never liked plastic cups and glasses because it made the drink taste "plasticy".
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Hot liquids are the worst. I find that takeaway coffee is disgusting because the coffee smell is replaced by the smell of melting plastics.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

stefan_ 5y ago

Wood heating remains improbably popular (and favorably regulated). Not to mention the stupidity of diesel cars: trading a little bit less CO2 for actively poisoning the lungs of your immediate environment.

jandrese 5y ago
Wood is at least not a fossil fuel.
- CyanBird 5y ago
  Just ensure that it is dry (actually dry) and that the combustion is complete In South of Chile where wood is a very common and available fuel for cooking or heating this has been a permanent issue every winter, too many people with asthma as a consequence of pm2.5 and other particulate materials

DenisM 5y ago

- Sugar. - Social networks. - The coddling of the mind. I think you will find that all three have vicious cycles built into them.

nofinator 5y ago
Sugar is an excellent example. In fact, the sugar industry has been behind the effort to deflect blame to fat for the last 50 years. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
- lovecg 5y ago
  It’s kind of hard to discern from the article, so is fat good and was unfairly blamed? Or fat and sugar are both bad, but they emphasized the fat part?
  - DenisM 5y ago
    FWIW, my reading of the tea leaves is that fat alone is fine, sugar alone is bad, and sugar+fat maybe worse. The basic logic of the anti-sugar sentiment is this: Excess of blood sugar is toxic and so it triggers a shot of insulin, intended to drain sugar from the blood and hide it in various places: the muscle tissue, the liver, and last resort - the fat cells. Normally it works just fine, but sometimes the system gets overwhelmed with a big sugar rush and starts producing too much insulin, draining too much sugar, overshooting the target, causing hunger, craving for more sugar, and eating more sugar. The human then goes into the infinite loop of sugar binging accumulating fat on the go. Now if you add dietary fat into the mixture it's possible that the fat cells will suck it up too. That I don't know for sure.
  - stephen_g 5y ago
    I think the biggest takeaway from all the research I did is that not all fats are equal. Monounsaturated fats seem to be generally just good. Omega-3, also, seems good, and Omega-6 less so, but part of that could actually be more about the ratios of omega-6 to -3, which can be 15:1 in the Western diet but people have better health outcomes when they bring omega-6 consumption down and increase omega-3 to get the ratio closer to 4:1 to 1:1. Saturated fats are still debated - some studies did show replacing saturated fats with vegetable fats did reduce cardiovascular disease etc., but then that might be more that there are some protective effects to the vegetable fats and adding them in rather than replacing might have had a similar effect… Then there are about a million confounding variables. Doing a decent amount of exercise is a big one, because it’s harder to control for than the other common health detriment - smoking, but things like whether your dairy is grass-fed (as it is here in Australia and much of Europe) vs. grain fed apparently makes a big difference (grass fed apparently has a lot more things like CLA, omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamin K2, the benefits of which seem to potentially more than cancel out any problem from the saturated fat). One other big problem is that a lot of “low fat” products tend to have more sugar added to make up for it. Too much sugar is bad, yes, and it’s pretty alarming how seemingly little you need to be over that threshold. Literally a single can of coke is almost the entirety of the sugar one should be consuming in a whole day! Fruit juice is also pretty bad unfortunately - basically just as bad as soft drink (I love soft drinks, apple juice, sweet ice tea, it’s been a challenge to cut most of it out!).

rsync 5y ago

"What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today?" I have a suspicion that slathering typical consumer sunblock agents (and spraying the out of aerosol cans, and breathing the sunblock, etc.) is going to seem unwise to future us.

haimez 5y ago
Well… maybe. I mean, certainly we could find out that was the case and that there was a safer sunblock alternative we might have been using if we had only known about it- but compared to what we definitely know today about sun exposure I think this is a bit of a different story, especially for light skinned people.
- rsync 5y ago
  Sorry - I wasn't clear ... I am not contrasting sunblock vs. no sunblock ... I am contrasting cheapy chemical sunblocks vs. pure titanium dioxide (?) which appears to be totally benign/inert and which is easy to purchase in a few different form factors (although not spray, which, again, I think is problematic).
  - devb 5y ago
    You don't have to suspect these things, because they are correct. Almost all spray sunscreen has been found to contain benzene: https://www.valisure.com/blog/valisure-news/valisure-detects-benzene-in-sunscreen/ https://www.valisure.com/blog/valisure-news/valisure-detects...

ngvrnd 5y ago

"Forever chemicals" perhaps?

SavantIdiot 5y ago

> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? I'm gonna go with overfishing. Anyone who has been shopping since the 1990's has seen fish diversity decline and prices skyrocket beyond inflation (not to mention a sharp increase in farmed and faux-colored fish like salmon). Illegal fishing is impossible to combat. See China's illegal fleets: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27412691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27412691 [2] https://twitter.com/epineyro_ok/status/1378112721628114947 https://twitter.com/epineyro_ok/status/1378112721628114947

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
My dad used to tell me stories about how when he was a kid, during the drive down to Grand Isle, you would see cars lined up on both sides of the highway for as far as the eye could see because families would park on the curb, set out some outdoor chairs, and fish for speckled trout, flounder, and redfish in the marsh. It was common when they were biting to bring home an ice chest of fish to eat. Commercial fishing also had no hard limits back then, and so we eradicated the redfish population and most of the specks. We now have pretty substantial limits on how many of each we can keep when we go fishing, to the point where you're doing it just for the experience because you won't catch enough to recoup the gas money.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I had a laugh back in ~2000 when VP Cheney said humans weren't having an impact on the environment. I grew up on long island and we used to pull bivalves (steamers, mussels, perriwinkels (not a bivalve)) in the 60's and 70's. Then in the 90's everything was banned due to pollution. O.G. immigrants still harvested despite the bans, but it was sad to see the consequence of pollution.
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Most people who are under 50 years old in the New Orleans area have NO idea whatsoever that there used to be an entire amusement park and beach on Lake Ponchartrain where people would go, enjoy the day, and enjoy the beach. This is because the water became so polluted that families no longer thought that it was safe to be in. It's been decades now and the water quality is just starting to be clean enough to swim in again.

phendrenad2 5y ago

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.

SilverRed 5y ago
This was probably downvoted due to the mention of GMOs but I think it is not unreasonable to be concerned about these. Most seem to be perfectly fine but one that seems most concerning is GMO roundup ready crops, not because of the GMO, but because they are being sprayed with a dangerous chemical which seems to cause cancer.
kybernetyk 5y ago
>GMO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice

young_unixer 5y ago

> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? We should be ashamed at the number of people that die everyday in car "accidents". Specially pedestrians and cyclists. If you looked at our reaction to Covid, you'd think we value human life very much, but when you look at how our streets works, you realize we actually don't. The problem is even worse in poor countries.

bamboozled 5y ago
Not to mention getting hit or run over by a car is a pretty brutal, this is from experience.
- brigandish 5y ago
  Even a tiny hit that causes no obvious injury is a shock to the system, I say that as a cyclist who's been hit a few times in that way.

aaron695 5y ago

> This guy who invents awesome working chemicals that are tragically bad for people on a worldwide scale Cars and fridges bad, is pretty much HN at it's core. These saved millions, probably billions of lives (depending on how you measure it) Thomas Midgley Jr work making these more efficient means he is an amazing human being that helped humanity saving many many lives. I guess people need something to justify pushing code around that does nothing?

8ytecoder 5y ago

Animal farming

ashtonkem 5y ago

Easy; micro plastics.

twistedpair 5y ago

Aluminum and metal particles. There are various (inconclusive) studies suggesting a tie between metal particles in the blood/brain and dementia. Ever notice that foods now say thing things like "Ingredients: baking powder (aluminum free)", that you can get "Aluminum free" deodorant, etc? Liking to stack the deck in my favor, I've moved to all stainless steel and cast iron cookware.

stewx 5y ago
Stainless steel cookware typically contains aluminum for the part that retains heat, whether that be a disc on the bottom of the pan or sandwiched in the walls of the vessel. Steel doesn't retain heat well but is prettier and more durable, so it goes on the outside. In any case, it should be a safe choice if you want to avoid ingesting aluminum.
- labawi 5y ago
  Aluminium is a good conductor. I presume the reason for an aluminum layer in pots and pans is to prevent hot spots and possibly conduct the heat faster. Aluminium is the 7th most abundant element on earth (1.5% by weight) and even more so in the crust. It is used in various forms as additives in food, and discomfort medications. Reasonable tolerance seems likely. In contrast, stainless steel is typically 20% or more chromium and nickel. Both heavy metals, chromium being worse. Good stainless steel does not corrode or release much, if handled properly, but if you are cusing naked stainless steel, you are consuming chromium and nickel. Especially with new or bad cookware, acidic foods or when scraping with hard utensils. While aluminium is much less toxic, I don't in fact use cookware with aluminium surface, as I think it leaks too much / too easily. I either carefully use stainless steel, or often prefer enameled / ceramic glazed cookware.

bjowen 5y ago

There’s a whole class of persistent organic pollutants that probably fit that bill. Plastics manufacture can involve BPA and phthalates; things like PCBs / PBBs occur in a surprising range of places like transformers and capacitors, fire retardants and carbonless copy paper; dioxins form in a bunch of processes and are toxic in frighteningly small doses, and the latest to join the club are the PFAs, which are involved in firefighting foams ans surfactants, or the preparation of water repellent treatments and non-stick coatings. Many are implicated in cancers and endocrine disruption, and may bioaccumulate to significant levels even in people with low exposure. The book Slow Death by Rubber Duck (2011) was a pretty thorough introduction to the subject - although I imagine by now many of its references will be out of date by now.

lkbm 5y ago

> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? People have already listed a lot of true answers and a number of speculative answers (also likely mostly true, imo), but I'll toss in that we use two-stroke engine leaf blowers and lawn mowers everywhere—mostly right outside our homes—and it's absolutely bonkers. Massive amounts of NOx, PM2.5, etc. We spent all this time and money cleaning up our cars (which are still pretty bad), but then run these tiny things that are far worse, right where we live. I'm willing to bet the noise pollution of them + traffic has a significant negative effect on our health too, but in terms of localized air pollution, the emissions from leaf blowers running a few times week across the street from me easily trump that from all the cars driving past my house. Hoping electric leaf blowers get good and gain popularity.

sagarm 5y ago
Gas leaf blower fans are going into effect in sooner Bay area cities, so you'll probably get your wish.