[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What Is Today's Lead?
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Ask HN: What Is Today's Lead?
"What is the thing that looking back will turn out to be horrible
for us and pervasive in the environment?" Posted by
u/adamgordonbell in another thread on HN today. This seems to be a
very important question. Some of my proposals: 1) Environmental
contaminants in water, food, and air
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/13/a-chemical-hunger-part-
iii-environmental-contaminants/ 2) Xenoestrogens in plastics,
pesticides, toiletries, perfumes, polyester and nylon clothing
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3947648/ 3) Mass
consumption of pharmaceutical drugs 4) Vegetable seed oils
https://chriskresser.com/how-industrial-seed-oils-are-making-us-
sick/ 5) Sugar and hyper palatable foods
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/
6) Endemic pathogens like toxoplasmosis
https://www.hardtowrite.com/pathogens/ What else? What is today's
lead?
Author : tikkun
Score : 26 points
Date : 2022-05-29 16:01 UTC (7 hours ago)
| dzdt wrote:
| Wide use of antibiotics destroying the balance of people's gut
| biomes.
|
| Microplastics.
|
| Already mentioned in original: environmental chemicals mimicking
| hormones.
| [deleted]
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I don't think there's anything as bad as lead, so all of these
| are distant runners-up:
|
| * Particulate matter from internal combustion engines, brake pads
| (contributes to cardiovascular disorders)
|
| * Plastics leeching chemicals into food
|
| * Second-hand drugs in our drinking water
|
| * Microplastics (maybe)
|
| If I can stand on a soapbox for a minute, it would be nice if
| there were any societal move to reduce these risk factors, but we
| can see from the California "Prop 65" warnings how far people
| will go to deflect from doing something useful.
| nixonpjoshua1 wrote:
| The problem with prop 65 is that the warning gives no detail to
| the level of risk or even type of risk, lead is labeled the
| same as coffee
| more_corn wrote:
| Yeah, well intentioned but poorly executed plans don't mean
| planning is useless or good intentions are useless. It means
| don't do things badly.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'd suggest looking to practices which:
|
| - Are very widely used.
|
| - Deliver a clear short-term benefit.
|
| - Have a remarkably low cost.
|
| - Whose long-term impacts _may_ be complex or difficult to
| demonstrate.
|
| - Which have a clear entrenched interest.
|
| Most of the options you list seem to fit these criteria. There
| will be many others.
|
| For a longer list, borrowing on work of Charles Perrow ( _Normal
| Accidents_ ), I suggest that the following tend to be
| determinants of complexity (stated in low/high relation, no
| particular listing order):
|
| - Coupling flexibility: loose/tight
|
| - Coupling count: low/high
|
| - Internal complexity: low/high
|
| - Threshold sensitivity: low/high
|
| - Self-restabilisation tendency: high/low
|
| - Constraints/tolerances (design, manufacture, operational,
| maintenance, training, financial): loose/tight
|
| - Incident consequence: low/high
|
| - Scale (components, mass, distance, time, energy
| (kinetic/potential), information, decision): low/high (absolute
| log)
|
| - Decision or response cycle: long/short
|
| - Environmental uniformity: high/low
|
| - Environmental stability: high/low
|
| - State determinability: high/low
|
| - Risk determinability: high/low
|
| - Controls coupling: tight/loose
|
| - Controls response: high/low
|
| - Controls limits: high/low
|
| - Controls complexity: low/high
|
| See:
| https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/97208f300fc4013901a300...
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| I'm tempted to say plastics, but I'm also actually kind of
| optimistic that either we'll engineer fungi / bacteria to
| decompose it, or said fungi / bacteria will evolve on its own to
| decompose it. We're already seeing signs of the latter.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/14/bugs-acr...
|
| For that reason my vote is on processed foods as well as foods
| grown "industrially", for the simple fact that we can't really
| support 8+ billion people without them. On an individual level,
| sure, you can eat whole foods and grow your own in rich soil that
| yields nutritionally dense vegetables if you have the means, but
| on a systemic level I'm not sure you can undo all the changes in
| our "food system" without also causing a global famine. Besides,
| are you really going too miss-out on a night with friends at a
| restaurant because they use seed oils? Is that same restaurant
| willing to increase their prices in order to cover the cost of
| using good ingredients?
|
| So yeah, I think for now we're going to have to contend with
| nutritionally-poor vegetables, pesticides, herbicides, novel
| zoonotic diseases from animals living in cramped and unhygenic
| virus factories (the next pandemic is more likely to come from a
| pig or a chicken than a bat or a pangolin), and plant-based meat
| which a complex list of ingredients that most people are too lazy
| to personally vet.
| ellopoppit wrote:
| Social media, 24 hour news cycle, perhaps even smart phones in
| some ways
| npc12345 wrote:
| Seed oils
| version_five wrote:
| Drug prohibition. Opiate overdoses due to the war on drugs are a
| major cause for lower US average life expectancy.
| bsder wrote:
| Processed food.
|
| We put _enormous_ amounts of glop in food solely for the purpose
| of being able to package and ship it through an industrial supply
| chain so a few megacorporations can consolidate their profits.
| And, just like lead, we _know_ this stuff is bad for us.
|
| In the US, we have lost a _LOT_ of scattered places that used to
| make and serve food locally. There used to be a lot of gas
| stations, bars, churches, etc. in the old mill towns that all
| served some amount of home made food.
|
| It wasn't necessarily "healthy"--it tended toward starches with
| lots of cream and butter. Too much of it was fried. There was
| rarely a fresh vegetable to be found, but quite often the
| vegetables came from someone's local garden and had been canned
| fairly recently. It was generally all made from scratch with
| _real ingredients_.
|
| To top it off, a lot of science over time is finding that those
| "unhealthy" dishes weren't as bad for you as we thought.
| _448 wrote:
| Everything boils down to these two things: Laziness(masqueraded
| as "convenience") and Greed.
|
| All the 6 points you listed above stem from these two factors.
|
| People started becoming lazy and evolved the idea of mass
| production, which in turn forced the producers, due to greed, to
| instigate people for mass consumption.
|
| We need to tweak globalisation a bit to improve the situation.
| Globalisation is good for many things, but not for every thing.
|
| First, start with food and clothing. People should grow and
| consume as much local food as possible. The same goes for
| clothing. That way we won't have this problem of excesses and
| harm to the environment.
|
| Next, reduce reliance on private transport. Use as much public
| transport as possible or walk if the distance is not that far.
| This will help reduce dependence on fossil fuel for which young
| blood is spilled on the battle grounds and shores afar.
|
| If we do these two things, we will see a massive change for the
| better.
| bequanna wrote:
| Regulation.
|
| If we're producing and consuming things that are found to be
| dangerous, we should regulate/ban and force quality
| improvements.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >Everything boils down to these two things:
| Laziness(masqueraded as "convenience") and Greed.
|
| There is also the need to feed people, which is neither
| laziness or greed. A lot of tech is needed to make enough food
| for people.
|
| >People should grow and consume as much local food as possible.
|
| Also known as lower standard of living - people don't want
| that. Large scale food production has made cost of food go from
| ~40% of family budget (around 1900) to 10%. It has also widened
| diets allowing lots of variety that people also choose. Also
| large scale food production has increased yields incredibly,
| without which many people on the planet now would starve.
|
| >help reduce dependence on fossil fuel
|
| Those same fossil fuels provide modern medicine (and a host of
| other modern benefits), which again I think people like to
| have.
| ironmagma wrote:
| I would guess PFOS/PFAS (which are in paper straws by the way)
| and synthetic carpets which are 95% plastic, which can become
| suspended in the air and may contribute to microplastics in the
| body.
| jmopp wrote:
| Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Sure, we breathe it out and
| it's necessary for plant life. But we are currently at levels
| beyond what we've had in the last 14 million years. I don't think
| people have realised yet we're in a slow-motion car crash. It
| also ticks all 5 of the criteria dredmorbius stated in this
| thread.
| taubek wrote:
| Changes in soil.
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