4 ms·

That's not the point though. The point is that companies and individuals continue to profit long after dangers are discovered, then we have to foot the cleanup

That's not the point though. The point is that companies and individuals continue to profit long after dangers are discovered, then we have to foot the cleanup bill. I looked it up and the US didn't ban lead pipe until 1986: https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/use-lead-free-pipes-fittings-fixtures-solder-and-flux-drinking-water https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/use-lead-free-pipes-fittings-fixtur... 1986! Which means that someone lobbied for lead's continue use for decades. Most likely fossil fuel companies for leaded gas, and lead manufacturers, but maybe even plumbers unions. Looks like the dangers of lead were well understood by the 1950s but probably as far back as 2000 BC: https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/get_the_lead_out/pdfs/health/Needleman_1999.pdf https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/get_the_lead_o... There is overwhelming evidence on the dangers of the other substances I mentioned. And the list of dangerous substances is too long to list here, easily going into the hundreds or thousands. Your point about the dangers of eating charred meat, while potentially true, doesn't discount these other dangers. What concerns me is that ignorance is so prevalent in our discourse now that my mention of it triggers people more strongly than the topic at hand. It's become the very tool that the wealthy and powerful use to manipulate us. They know that equivocating arguments like yours are given equal airtime with the facts. And a public not trained in civics or critical thinking skills is easily manipulated into voting against its own self-interest. That process forms the basis of center-right political strategy (adopted by republicans and establishment democrats), especially when aligned with regulatory capture of the government by corporations. Whereas the direct strategy I mentioned, of auditing and billing the guilty parties is considered laughably naive, even cruel to the hardworking snake oil salesmen. So the narrative becomes: We should wait and see if there's more evidence. Too much work, might as well give up. It's all grandfathered in now, nothing we can do anyway. And the really great part about all of this is that any guilty parties actually were grandfathered in by the EPA's 1986 SDWA amendment, exempting them from any liability from the time before then, to the tune of I don't know, $100 billion or $1 trillion or something. So it wouldn't surprise me if people in the lead business read the writing on the wall and pushed for the amendment to protect themselves. Many laws are like that, where the puppeteer can't be seen while the public focuses on the marionette. Leaving me with the inevitable conclusion that maybe we shouldn't grandfather in anything. Which is impractical, and why I say that in a very real way, great wealth is built on ignorance.

pas 3y ago
Thanks for the reply! I agree with the need for better (real) consumer protection, real health and other externalities accountability. > It's become the very tool that the wealthy and powerful use to manipulate us I don't know what this means. (More exactly it seems meaningless to me.) It seems like a rhetorical device. Everyone has biases, manipulation is ever-present, wealth is power, and of course many (most) powerful people don't shy away from using their power. But equivocating wealth/power/influence/airtime with manipulation is ... strange to me. I'm sure you know about the NIMBY activists voicing their concerns on council meetings, I'm sure you know the "the character of the neighborhood" phrase. It's a structural problem. Just like the electoral college, the senate, and so on. I like these market based libertarianish insurance-like concepts, I'm happy to try them, it's a nice way of trying to account for a lot of things. But there's zero chance of that passing due to the aforementioned structural obstacles. > And a public not trained in civics or critical thinking skills is easily manipulated into voting against its own self-interest. Yes. But I think that phrasing is very poor. Because we see they zealously believe they are voting for their interests, based on a professed alliance between them and the leader they are devoted to. (Of course, classic populist stuff. Usually with a heavy dose of arrogant anti-elitism and chauvinistic/xenophobic nationalism, etc.) That said, let's not forget that the most and best educated public was in Germany in the 1930s. I know you directly said critical thinking and civics, but we are unfortunately very far from effective education. Maybe some future generation will figure out how to do it. Also, regarding sunsetting bad stuff (and paradigm shifts), I guess you know perfectly how bad society is with this. I know nothing about the lead industry, but we know how the car, oil, and coal lobby fucked everything thrice. And when finally globalization and some progress (both technological and environmental) made the emitters "disappear" from the "Western world" the response was resentment/resistance from the miners and factory workers and shrugs from the rest of us. As long as the Chinese shit is cheap on Amazon no one cares. (And the libertarian minded folks just scold the miners that they forget to appreciate how cheap things are, and the liberal folks scold them that they should unionize and vote differently, and ... and ... and meanwhile the majority sadly doesn't even care about them or about the issue.)
- zackmorris 3y ago
  Well, what I was getting at is that my camp has warned of pretty much all of the crises we face now since the beginning. And the same thing that always happens is going to happen: the public will get to pay to clean up the mess that made the private profit. It's like the monorail episode of The Simpsons times everything. Or how South Park used to be a comedy, but now it's a documentary. How could we have seen this coming?! Please. But I'm a little disappointed in myself for how I've been responding on HN lately. My comments have been low-vibration/egocentric/projective. Is it constructive to try to go after titans of industry who fleeced the public? Will they even pay? Will it solve anything? I don't know. What I really wanted to say originally is that I wish we could look to the future, and that us hackers could come up with a machine that could cut out the lead pipe in-place and replace them with something like PVC, instead of digging trenches. If the problem seems insurmountable, then we should innovate a way to make cleanup 10 or 100 times less expensive. But see, the powers that be that created this problem for us are the same ones that drive wealth inequality. So we don't have the time, money or freedom to do the real problem solving, because we spend all of our time working on mainstream tasks to make rent. Instead what will happen is we'll get pork barrel projects at enormous expense, and established players will profit a second time around from the cleanup. Pay to dig a hole, pay to fill it in. From a progressive standpoint, I see how an informed populace participating in a democratic republic with well-funded public education could almost trivially solve (and prevent) these problems like healthy European social democracies do. But since roughly the GW Bush era of the 2000s, the libertarian voice to dismantle everything has managed to undo countless environmental laws, get the former president elected and pack the courts, among other things. Revisionist history has turned my Star Wars rebel beliefs into elitism and liberal rhetoric. So I feel a crushing level of "equivocating wealth/power/influence/airtime with manipulation". I blame the uber rich for that lack of leadership, letting us succumb to divisive politics. But I acknowledge that many of them probably witnessed the public making stupid decisions and were just as powerless to stop it as we are. I just wish that one of them would step up and set a better example, instead of behaving as NPCs due to how their wealth is tied up in voting shares. I don't know how they don't know about the dangers of their attachments from a spiritual perspective.

pas 3y ago

Thanks for the reply! I agree with the need for better (real) consumer protection, real health and other externalities accountability. > It's become the very tool that the wealthy and powerful use to manipulate us I don't know what this means. (More exactly it seems meaningless to me.) It seems like a rhetorical device. Everyone has biases, manipulation is ever-present, wealth is power, and of course many (most) powerful people don't shy away from using their power. But equivocating wealth/power/influence/airtime with manipulation is ... strange to me. I'm sure you know about the NIMBY activists voicing their concerns on council meetings, I'm sure you know the "the character of the neighborhood" phrase. It's a structural problem. Just like the electoral college, the senate, and so on. I like these market based libertarianish insurance-like concepts, I'm happy to try them, it's a nice way of trying to account for a lot of things. But there's zero chance of that passing due to the aforementioned structural obstacles. > And a public not trained in civics or critical thinking skills is easily manipulated into voting against its own self-interest. Yes. But I think that phrasing is very poor. Because we see they zealously believe they are voting for their interests, based on a professed alliance between them and the leader they are devoted to. (Of course, classic populist stuff. Usually with a heavy dose of arrogant anti-elitism and chauvinistic/xenophobic nationalism, etc.) That said, let's not forget that the most and best educated public was in Germany in the 1930s. I know you directly said critical thinking and civics, but we are unfortunately very far from effective education. Maybe some future generation will figure out how to do it. Also, regarding sunsetting bad stuff (and paradigm shifts), I guess you know perfectly how bad society is with this. I know nothing about the lead industry, but we know how the car, oil, and coal lobby fucked everything thrice. And when finally globalization and some progress (both technological and environmental) made the emitters "disappear" from the "Western world" the response was resentment/resistance from the miners and factory workers and shrugs from the rest of us. As long as the Chinese shit is cheap on Amazon no one cares. (And the libertarian minded folks just scold the miners that they forget to appreciate how cheap things are, and the liberal folks scold them that they should unionize and vote differently, and ... and ... and meanwhile the majority sadly doesn't even care about them or about the issue.)

zackmorris 3y ago
Well, what I was getting at is that my camp has warned of pretty much all of the crises we face now since the beginning. And the same thing that always happens is going to happen: the public will get to pay to clean up the mess that made the private profit. It's like the monorail episode of The Simpsons times everything. Or how South Park used to be a comedy, but now it's a documentary. How could we have seen this coming?! Please. But I'm a little disappointed in myself for how I've been responding on HN lately. My comments have been low-vibration/egocentric/projective. Is it constructive to try to go after titans of industry who fleeced the public? Will they even pay? Will it solve anything? I don't know. What I really wanted to say originally is that I wish we could look to the future, and that us hackers could come up with a machine that could cut out the lead pipe in-place and replace them with something like PVC, instead of digging trenches. If the problem seems insurmountable, then we should innovate a way to make cleanup 10 or 100 times less expensive. But see, the powers that be that created this problem for us are the same ones that drive wealth inequality. So we don't have the time, money or freedom to do the real problem solving, because we spend all of our time working on mainstream tasks to make rent. Instead what will happen is we'll get pork barrel projects at enormous expense, and established players will profit a second time around from the cleanup. Pay to dig a hole, pay to fill it in. From a progressive standpoint, I see how an informed populace participating in a democratic republic with well-funded public education could almost trivially solve (and prevent) these problems like healthy European social democracies do. But since roughly the GW Bush era of the 2000s, the libertarian voice to dismantle everything has managed to undo countless environmental laws, get the former president elected and pack the courts, among other things. Revisionist history has turned my Star Wars rebel beliefs into elitism and liberal rhetoric. So I feel a crushing level of "equivocating wealth/power/influence/airtime with manipulation". I blame the uber rich for that lack of leadership, letting us succumb to divisive politics. But I acknowledge that many of them probably witnessed the public making stupid decisions and were just as powerless to stop it as we are. I just wish that one of them would step up and set a better example, instead of behaving as NPCs due to how their wealth is tied up in voting shares. I don't know how they don't know about the dangers of their attachments from a spiritual perspective.