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Posted by downbad_ 3 hours ago

Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented (2016)(www.smithsonianmag.com)
95 points | 58 commentspage 2
phendrenad2 2 hours ago|
Same with cigarettes and asbestos. Everyone knew smokers had shorter lives, but the facts were suppressed because it was inconvenient. Everyone knew asbestos was dangerous, but they put it in every single house for decades because "fire was worse".

And don't even get me started on DDT and teflon.

hyperhello 2 hours ago||
Cigarette smoking really got going in the world wars, I understand, especially ww2 when the world had manufacturers serving the effort. The custom is dying with the veterans as everyone knows they have a hall pass for it but the rest of us don’t. So smoking was a shorter life but that hardly matters when you’re deployed in theater.
gilrain 1 hour ago||
> The custom is dying with the veterans

You might want to update your knowledge.

hyperhello 1 hour ago||
As of 2024, the cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults is 9.9%, which is an all-time low.
wizzwizz4 1 hour ago||
What about vaping? That's not great, either.
jghn 1 hour ago||
Asbestos gets a bit of a bad rap. There's an enormous difference from e.g. asbestos tiles and siding in a house vs loose clumps of insulation at mass scale in large factories and such.

But at some point people decided that any asbestos was an immediate ticket to mesothelioma and had to eradicate it altogether.

edelbitter 35 minutes ago||
I guess some forms of asbestos are fine to use in residential development.. as long as houses never burn or get damaged in earthquakes or suffer flood damage or need extensive renovations.. and as long as we do not care about some unimportant landscapes and river systems in (ideally, canada or russia or something of the sort) and all of its current and future inhabitants.
ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago||
Some previous discussion:

2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508

HumanEater 2 hours ago||
Why is this surfacing up?
weard_beard 2 hours ago||
hmm good question.
phoronixrly 2 hours ago||
[flagged]
cyanydeez 2 hours ago||
i'm fairly certain the reason trump was elected is the long tail of leaded gasoline; the timing fits pretty well.
schmookeeg 5 minutes ago||
Calling my airplane a MAGA airplane is a good way to get my wife to argue for a boat instead. :)
Epa095 2 hours ago||
Why did these same people vote differently earlier? Does the effect of leaded gasoline show up later in life?

And does not explain all the young men voting for him.

hyperhello 2 hours ago|||
Yes, the psychological effects of environmental lead last a lifetime. No, they didn’t vote differently, they have always gravitated to actors that promise simple solutions and highlight bad blood and animus.
digitaltrees 2 hours ago||||
They didn’t vote differently. There were a larger number of the greatest generation that were more comfortable with shared sacrifice in service of society and less entitled like the baby boomers are.
vlian2088 2 hours ago||
now let's dig up some old timey polls and see how the greatest generation felt about the issues you hold dear :)
JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago||
Read charitably, OP isn’t decrying a disagreement on issues as much as the willingness to burn everything down just to see someone else hurt more than oneself. This is present on the left. But it’s uniquely politically actualised by MAGA. (The Democratic Socialists winning elections aren’t seeking to overturn elections or violently storm governing bodies.)
cyanydeez 1 hour ago||||
there's no "same people"; leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80's but wasn't finished until around 2000s.

The elderly are simply more engaged and that's what happened.

add-sub-mul-div 1 hour ago|||
It doesn't happen overnight. It takes time to weaken a strong country to the point where a reality show buffoon can become president.
aa_is_op 3 hours ago||
The guy that invented spent years bed-ridden because of it... yet he still went to trade shows to show it off
chistev 2 hours ago||
He was bedridden because of Polio.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872443

m4d 2 hours ago|||
Anytime Thomas Midgley Jr. pops up, I take the opportunity to re-listen to his episode on the Memory Palace. Wonderful bit of historical biography: https://thememorypalace.us/butterflies/
afzalive 3 hours ago|||
And he also invented CFCs
throw1234567891 2 hours ago||
“What don’t kill you makes you more strong”.
p0w3n3d 2 hours ago||

  Ah. We can't patent XYZ let's use ABC. 
Such sociopathic thinking.
dbg31415 2 hours ago|
The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA

> This, my dear friend, is all I can at present recollect on the Subject. You will see by it, that the Opinion of this mischievous Effect from Lead, is at least above Sixty Years old; and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receiv'd and practis'd on.

> Benjamin Franklin, 1786

tim-tday 38 minutes ago|
Elon might take the lead with his destruction of US aid. I heard an estimate that millions of unnecessary deaths may come of it.