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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, with large numb

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, 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
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- deleted 3y ago
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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 ago
    Last 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 ago
    The 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 ago
    It'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 ago
  Every 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 ago
You do not need to convince me that industrialization is good. I agree. What troubles me is the irresponsible approach.
- derefr 3y ago
  What'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 ago
    or you could wear glasses
    - 3y ago
superchroma 3y ago
We 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 ago
  Hey 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 ago
  That 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 ago
    Not only American.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      Almost 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 ago
        Yes. 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 ago
Terrestrial 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 ago
If 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

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 ago
  Last 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 ago
  The 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 ago
  It'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 ago
Every 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 ago

You do not need to convince me that industrialization is good. I agree. What troubles me is the irresponsible approach.

derefr 3y ago
What'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 ago
  or you could wear glasses
  - 3y ago

superchroma 3y ago

We 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 ago
Hey 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 ago
That 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 ago
  Not only American.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    Almost 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 ago
      Yes. 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 ago

Terrestrial 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 ago

If 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