11 ms·
PFAS is to my generation as leaded gasoline is to the prior generation(s), and asbestos to the ones before them, and so forth from when the first chimneys were
by voz_ 3y ago
PFAS is to my generation as leaded gasoline is to the prior generation(s), and asbestos to the ones before them, and so forth from when the first chimneys were put up to spew toxic sludge into our air and rivers at the start of the industrial revolution. There is something so sad, so unworkable, and so deeply troubling about how this kind of thing keeps happening.
- fsckboy 3y agowe used to live malnourished, with stunted growth, women dying in childbirth to bring 8 kids into the world half of whom would die in childhood, with large numbers of men dying before they couldn't afford reading glasses they would need. (my gf was 1 of 5 surviving from 10 born, with horsedrawn transportation and starvation) all that industrialization brought us to much healthier longer lives filled with amenities undreamed of 100 years ago, including corrective vision. now as a society we uncover problems, we fix them. We're doing pretty well.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justinator 3y ago[flagged]
- gus_massa 3y ago> Bruh we're not going to have glaciers in like 5 years. Do you have a source for that? The predictions I remember are much longer.
- slily 3y agoLast I heard they were supposed to be gone by the year 2000. Edit: nevermind, it was actually just 10 years ago that Antarctica was supposed to be entirely ice-free in the summer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsioIw4bvzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsioIw4bvzI I'm sure today's models and predictions are 100% accurate and undeniable, though. "Bruh."
- sn0wf1re 3y ago> 75% chance that within 5 to 7 years there could be a period of no ice cap [paraphrasing] If you look at the trend line between 1995 and 2010 in the NASA data this was a reasonable prediction. The Northwest passage is now open for the first time in recorded history, things are melting fast. > ...Bob used the figure of 2030... Last I checked it wasn't 2030 yet. NASA has a nice* video of the North polar ice cap. https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/155/video-annual-arctic-sea-ice-minimum-1979-2022-with-area-graph/ https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/155/video-annual-... * It's okay, the graph doesn't have a zero-indexed base which it should. Edit: Also Antarctica is the South ice cap, not the North, which is the video clip you linked.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justinator 3y agoThe source is me: I go outside where glaciers were and they're not there anymore. This is not something that's been up to debate. What do you think is causing the sea levels around the world to rise? Have you seen the news about Greenland, Antarctica, and the North Pole, recently? https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-finds-some-iconic-world-heritage-glaciers-will-disappear-2050 https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-finds-some-iconic-...
- anigbrowl 3y agoIt's hyperbolic (and this whole subthread thread is a good example of how hyperbole goes poorly on HN), but it' definitely a within-many-people's-lifetimes kinda problem. Kaczynski-style anti-industrialism doesn't make for good discourse, but neither does Benthamite rah-rah-ism. Our increased material comfort comes at the price of a techno-panopticon and toxic consumerism, or as one astute observer described it, a 'boring dystopia'.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> we're not going to have glaciers in like 5 years This isn't a good-faith reading of the comment. Would most people give up the myriad of benefits of industrialization to reverse our impact on the climate? > Fix that People are trying. If there's one thing that doesn't help them, it's folks suggesting progress on climate change requires de-industrialisation or permanently and drastically reduced standards of living.
- BobTheDestroyer 3y ago[flagged]
- Dalewyn 3y agoEvery five years we have someone say we won't have glaciers in five years. The more I see these kinds of sensationalist fearmongering, the more I am content to not give a damn.
- voz_ 3y agoYou do not need to convince me that industrialization is good. I agree. What troubles me is the irresponsible approach.
- derefr 3y agoWhat's "responsible" about putting the breaks on technological progress, when that technological progress has statistically-positive net QALY effects? Let me give a concrete example: what would be "responsible" about doing a 10-year FDA trial to approve a novel anti-cancer therapy, for a cancer that currently has no existing treatment? Even if this novel cancer treatment killed 50% of the people treated, if the rest went into remission, that'd be 50% more people who would be not dead at the end of the treatment, than if there was no treatment. We'd still be better off approving it immediately; and every day we'd delay to be "responsible" would be lives lost that could have been saved! Obviously, no real technology kills 50% of people while preventing the other 50% from dying of some horrible disease. But real technologies might do things very analogous to this. For example, the Haber-Bosch process. Contributes to global warming; but also enables 10x as many people to have food to eat. If you don't see how PFAS are an example of this kind of "benefits in lives saved outweigh whatever risk" technology: what chemical do you think is used in the lining of IV tubes to prevent the growth of bacterial biofilms? (This is the likely highest lifetime source of PFAS exposure for the average person. But it's also a necessary one!) And, in fact, why do you think the contact lenses are using PFAS? Same idea. The benefit (not potentially getting a bacterial eye infection) severely outweighs any potential risk. PFAS in your eye could mean that your eye is slightly — in a way that's hard enough to measure that we haven't yet noticed it in clinical practice — more likely to get [some disease we aren't aware of] over the long term. But putting a contact lens without PFAS in your eye, means that your eye is quite a bit more likely to get infected, and need to be removed, or possibly even transmit an infection right into your brain!
- jemmyw 3y agoor you could wear glasses
- 3y ago
- superchroma 3y agoWe don't fix them, what on earth are you talking about? Nobody has any idea what to do about Wittenoom, it's screwed for a relative forever as far as human timescales are concerned. PFAS contamination is the same. So many of our mistakes are. We can't fix Chernobyl, the tens of thousands of barrels of DDT at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of California or scores of other atrocities we have committed. This isn't a case of breaking out the dustpan and broom and packing away our toys!
- pengaru 3y agoHey man, relax, AGI and one-way tickets to Mars will save us!
- vram22 3y ago>now as a society we uncover problems, we fix them. We're doing pretty well. Doing pretty well? Doubt if the parents of all those severely deformed thalidomide-affected babies, or the babies themselves, would agree: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal
- loeg 3y agoThat was extremely sad event for a relatively short period of time and small percentage of American families, but it certainly isn't worse than the average child or maternal mortality rate of the 19th century.
- vram22 3y agoNot only American.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoAlmost all not American. Thalidomide was never approved for general use in the United States -- in fact, the FDA rejected it six times. As a result only 17 thalidomide babies were born here. Today, it is used for several conditions, but never in pregnant women, or women who might become pregnant.
- vram22 3y agoYes. One of the Wikipedia articles I linked above, talks about and has a photo of an official receiving an award from the then US president, from preventing thalidomide from being approved for use in the US (early on). And yet there were deaths. So, not only American. Plus, the article itself says many non-American deaths happened.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago> we used to live malnourished, with stunted growth, women dying in childbirth to bring 8 kids into the world half of whom would die in childhood... > We're doing pretty well. You know it's interesting to think about who is doing well and who is not thanks to global industrialization. In the last 50 years "we" in the OECD countries simply moved our polluting industry to poor countries, where people have had their ancestral farm land taken by governments and replaced with polluting factories. This has left many of them with few opportunities other than to work in dangerous factories while living and raising their children in toxic wastelands. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/gallery/2015/oct/23/the-river-runs-black-pollution-from-bangladeshs-tanneries-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> "we" in the OECD countries simply moved our polluting industry to poor countries Carbon intensity of GDP, worldwide, fell almost 40% between 1980 and 2021 [1]. (-1.3% CAGR.) We do offshore toxic industries. But we're also getting better at being less toxic. Environmentalism isn't all a shell game. [1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/co2-emissions-intensity-of-gdp-1990-2021 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/co2-emissions...
- brnaftr361 3y agoTerrestrial and marine diversity is crashing. We're keeping people alive and the way we allocate resources means that's a bad thing. The individual human is more replaceable that ever before. The sheer scale of things unfolding, and the momentum of them is necessarily unstoppable. Most of what we've done is eking out extra carrying capacity, which has then been exploited while the net quality of life has actually not appreciably gained, while the things that can't be meaningfully quantified have taken a visible decrement. Did we forget climate change? Finite resources? Expectations for these advancements to continue as things get increasingly complicated and the likelihood of reaching the threshold where it all breaks down... I'm certainly thankful we'll have 10 billion people to share that ride with. Misery loves her company. It's all a monkey paw and we've been standing in place for a century.
- lm28469 3y agoIf you're cold and start burning your furnitures in the middle of your living room you'll feel nice and cozy for a little while, it's not sustainable though
- contravariant 3y agoI think you can go back quite a bit further. Heck most of humanities progress was spent trying to figure out how to stay in a single place without turning it incapable of supporting human life within a few months.
- milsorgen 3y agoI think we're gonna have several asbestos/lead moments in our lifetimes. PFAS, micro plastics, endocrine disruption, I'd also wager marijuana is likely to have its own big tobacco moment eventually, I've heard fruits and vegetables have slowly been losing nutrient density over generations but I have not looked into that yet. There's more nebulous things like the impact of AI or the way we now communicate (or don't communicate in many cases)... We have a lot of problems or potential problems that are going to be relatively subtle and or persistent over years and decades and I don't feel we are really taking them as seriously as we should. One thing that really worries me is how many of these various things may interact, we see this in pharmaceuticals where it's very hard if not impossible to rigorously test all the potential interactions. We have introduced a tremendous amount of changes to our lives in increasingly short time frames.
- shmerl 3y agoAsbestos isn't even properly banned in US despite of universal knowledge of it being harmful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#United_States
- voakbasda 3y agoNutrient density in food has decreased due to the switch to synthetic fertilizers used by intensive farming practices. Man-made fertilizers contain only the big three (phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen) nutrients, leading to the slow depletion of micronutrients in the soil. Without an abundance of those other elements, plants cannot incorporate them and the resulting crops will lack them. As a result, modern industrial food contains a fraction of the micronutrients as compared to the same food from a century past, and there has not been a widespread effort to fix the problem.
- voldacar 3y agoAsbestos shouldn't be compared to leaded gasoline imo. It's quite safe and inert if you don't physically disturb it.
- seiferteric 3y agoWell so is leaded gas, the problem is people kept burning it!
- fomine3 3y agoAlso adopting asbestos were somewhat reasonable at that time (from thousands years ago to hundred year ago). Leaded gasoline was terrible from the beginning. They don't adopt ethanol for profit.
- TylerE 3y agoYou’re confusing quite a few things here. Ethanol wasn’t put in gasoline until decades after the lead came out. Ethanol was absolutely added for profit… but much like HFCS, it was about propping up big agribusiness.
- fomine3 3y agoThis is what I meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Kettering#Flxible,_and_later_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Kettering#Flxible,_...
- maxerickson 3y agoEthanol replaced MBTE. MBTE is awful (any persistent groundwater contaminant is awful) and it's a good thing it's gone. Higher percentages of ethanol are arguably not worthwhile, but getting rid of MBTE is almost certainly the right choice.
- voldacar 3y agoThey adopted ethanol because of the farm lobby
- 3y ago
- 29athrowaway 3y agoDDT was probably worse than all.
- failuser 3y agoWhat it proven to be dangerous for people? It caused ecological problems, but direct harm for people was suggested, not proven as far as I know.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoIt lasts in water for 150 years. It kills everything, causes eggshell thining (birds, fish, etc). It is fat soluble and accumulates through the food chain.
- foobiekr 3y agoThey were really pretty close. Leaded gas was banned for new model cars in 1985 but didn't stop being used until 1996 - the year of XML! - and asbestos was and is everywhere, the gift that keeps on giving. Popcorn ceiling in a house built in 1980 CA? Probably full of asbestos because grandfathered in. And so on. Just kind of amazing.
- steveBK123 3y agoBut when will be ban XML?
- turtleyacht 3y agoAsbestos--spiky things in the lungs. XML: lots of sticky typing of tags. We don't yet know what we have wrought with XML, what insidious harms shall come from squished fingers upon rubber-domed keys. Over and over, the tags! Opening and closing, the tags! Verbose yet incomplete, Wayward schemas in attr equals, Transforms atop loops and ifs, Ending yet starting yet ending <starting Maven, web.xml, SOAP-- Newlines and through lines, blobs in SQL row lines <!-- comments too Trees never perish, Always and ever the roots flourish
- thatfrenchguy 3y agoLead poisoning came before asbestos fwiw