How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
If you prefer to watch your history, PBS’ American Experience documentary series did an episode based on Blum’s book (see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poisoners ); it can be streamed via a bunch of different video services.
The main thing they shove in there to stop you drinking it is denatonium benzoate ("bitrex"), which will make you _regret_ putting it in your mouth, but won't kill you because you'll immediately want to spit it out instead. The other ingredients are mostly to stop you trying to get the bitrex back out and then selling it as bootleg booze (thus evading the tax).
It might be lazily reworded, but hyperbole like that hurts the commenter's credibility and makes me less likely to believe them.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
I think it would be perfectly safe - though you probably don't want to live directly downwind:
You know where I’m going with this, right? To pick a random example, go look up saccharin. Whether or not it is “not harmful” depends on when in the last 100 years you ask the question.
Lead is never going to be safe. Julius Caesar's engineer, Vitruvius, reported, "water is much more wholesome from earthenware pipes than from lead pipes.“ Lead was added to cheap wine illegally in the 18th and early 19th centuries as a sweetener.. Note the illegal bit because we knew it was toxic.
But fast forward and... In the late 1950s through the 1970s Herbert Needleman and Clair Cameron Patterson did research trying to prove lead's toxicity to humans.[231] In the 1980s Needleman was falsely accused of scientific misconduct by the lead industry associates.[232][233]
Read the history and we just keep discovering the same issues over and over again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning Yet, we still keep adding it to various products today and people still get significant exposure.
To me that seems to indicate that we need to keep a record of why laws are made, so that the case is simply ready to be made when the sun is due to set.
But the people who have something to gain by unwisely rolling back regulation, and who have money to buy themselves platforms, are deliberately not talking about the reasons the laws exist, so short of something more akin to state control of media, what are you going to do?
Whether and why a practice is useful generally has little or nothing to do with people's understanding of whether and why it is useful. The arguments people advance for everything, including valuable things, are almost uniformly nonsense and easy to disprove.
So, a record of why laws are made wouldn't really serve any purpose.
and I wonder what they will say about cellphone radiation in 30 years? (or some time in the future where there's not a strong litiginous cellphone industry)
The real point of my question is not to raise conspiracy theories about 5G, but to illustrate a point. Our regulatory organisations operate under a “let’s do it and ban it later if some people die” kind of attitude.
We have saturated lab animals with immense amounts of energy from every part of the RF spectrum; at the frequencies used by 5G, the only effect we've reliably identified is heating of tissues at extremely high exposure levels. We have conducted hundreds of epidemiological studies and found no clinically significant effects. We know of no plausible biological mechanism for significant adverse health effects from normal levels of RF exposure. The exposure limits for user devices and base station equipment are set at extremely conservative levels on a precautionary basis, just in case there's some very subtle effect that we haven't yet been able to identify.
Things have changed enormously from the "let's put radium in everything" era. Nowadays there's a good case to be made that we've swung too far in the opposite direction and we're letting people die because the FDA is too conservative in approving new medications (and old Russian medications with a proven track record that's impossible to patent therefore nobody has the incentive to spend millions on getting through the FDA vetting process, but that's a different issue).
A cynical take might be that they are two sides of the same coin. Regulation meant to protect big business and at the same time choke out any competition.
No. Absolutely not. Maybe in a few particulars, but not in the general case.
The reason that FDA approval is difficult is because we aren't discovering any more wonder drugs. The low hanging fruit has all been picked.
In the meantime, we are stuffing our farm animals with antibiotics, growth hormones, covering our fields with pesticides and herbicides that have not proven to be safe, stuff our furniture with all sorts of wonderful fireproof substances that, twenty years down the road, we discover to be carcinogenic, and in general, rely on victims to prove that what they have been sold is dangerous.
If we were actually prudent about this sort of thing, we'd require producers of goods to prove that what they are doing is safe - instead of waiting for people to be hurt or killed, followed by decades of studies and litigation.
We can't even effectively hold companies accountable for selling dangerous product, when they know their products are dangerous. There are barely any controls for harm that they inflict out of ignorance.
So... you don't. You don't verify it, because you can't. You can't verify all of science from first principles. You can't inspect every building you enter and verify that it meets code. You can't inspect every electronic device for NSA taps. You can't inspect all of your food, drinking water, or even all of the FOSS code you use. Society is too large, and the domains of knowledge and expertise that feed into it are too complex for any individual to fully comprehend.
You can't eliminate risk or trust from life. As far as vaccines go, you just have to trust that they work and are not likely to be poison and take the shot.
The more logical recipient of a new name is the new, fixed-capitalism you should be pushing for. Saying "oh the bad parts aren't capitalism, that's corporatism, that's different" is just playing word games to try to hide the fact that what we're doing isn't working as-is.
On the other hand, there are some much better established words for a close partnership between the state and a set of established major businesses: "crony capitalism" and "fascism".
"Fascism" isn't really a good idea either; in modern use it appears to be nothing more than a synonym for "badness".
At what cost, though? Sure: us Westerners are way better off than 50 years ago, but the effects that capitalism has had on the environment (especially global warming and natural resource exploitation) are on the best way to totally wreck the planet for our children, and I don't want to get started on the plight of those in the poorest regions of the world that have gotten even poorer in the same timeframe.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/fashion-gains-a-f...
Radium decay results in ionizing radiation. Meaning that it carries enough energy to kick electrons from their orbitals.
Radio-communication technology sold to ordinary consumers does not emit ionizing radiation. It's not allowed to do so due to regulatory organizations.
Imagine the same but with the radium: The Animals would have obviously got cancer or Aplastic Anemia (Or more acute symptoms of radiation sickness). If there was clear evidence that 5G caused illness in humans, it wouldn't be happening
Simultaneously there are regular articles posted on this very same site about fake news, selective reporting and irreproducible scientific studies. It is hard not to be skeptical.