theres a background amount of radiation. its everywhere, even in higher amounts than youd expect like bananas and airplanes. no amount is safe, but the risks are neglibly small when exposure is minimized. concentrated amounts can be safe when exposure is controlled and managed with oversight programs in place. disasters can be managed with disaster programs, but its still possible that unforseen problems can cause big issues. unregulated handling can poison local populations. corporate influence on government can be a problrm.
what a comparison! there should be an award for this.
If background radiation is everywhere, how can there be no safe dose.
It’s a fun analogy, but reinforces an incorrect assumption.
The higher the level, the more full chambers?
The risk of dying increases linearly with the number of bullets you load.
A different model suggests that very low levels are either benign or even helpful.
Ah, the classic shoot yourself with small caliber bullets to build up an immunity against the larger caliber ones!
The body is hit by natural radiation all the time and so it has mechanisms for this. Not so much for macroscopic projectiles.
The question is how these mechanisms behave and whether a small amount of radiation stimulates them… and then how much, for how long, etc. It’s a complex model with multiple systems and feedback loops.
Jokes don't translate well in ASCII, sorry. It's a (I thought) well known meme.
Nothing in what others have said suggests low levels are deadly or even likely to be damaging, at leas not over the time frame of a human life as defined by the many things that can take us out.
> or even helpful.
A larger amount of something being damaging does not rule out a small amount being helpful, there just comes a point when the potential danger starts to outweigh the potential benefits. Water is very beneficial, necessary in fact, but too much of it over a short time will kill you.
In particular the linear model treats chronic exposure as all the same; X amount for a week is the same as X/52 for a year.
i wasnt aware this was contested. its what i was taught in the us nuclear navy.
> If background radiation is everywhere, how can there be no safe dose.
this is not a self-evident refutation and is a bad argument. cancer is the 2nd leading cause of death in the US, meaning there is an even higher nonlethal occurance of cancer. this is not all radiations doing, but its hardly obvious that bathing in radiation your whole life is a "safe dose"
this is exactly what i said in my original comment.
I looked up competing LNT models. TIL about radiation hormesis. theoretically, near-zero but >0 levels of radiation activate dormant repair mechanisms that not only repair radiation damage, but also non-radiation damage; this results in a healthier host. interesting.
having thought about this for all of 30 seconds, i wonder if both models arent simultaneously correct. if most radiation damage is repairable, activating dormant repair mechanisms with tiny amounts of radiation would be a net benefit. however, if there exists any possible irrepairable damage in any cell anywhere on your body regardless of otherwise functioning repair processes - which i dont know to be true but seems likely - then LNT could also be true concurrently with radiation hormesis.
Easy: there is no absolutely safe dose.
At normal background levels the chance of it causing you significant trouble before something else has long since killed you off in some other way is practically zero so there effectively a “safe enough” dose. But if you are very very unlucky background levels could cause you an embuggerance that becomes life changing or life ending.
It is more complicated than safe doses of most (but obviously not all) drugs/poisons/etc, because for most of the latter they are purged from your system in fairly short order assuming you survive the initial hit, so the next hit if there is one of equal strength is likely to have much the same effect. Radiation tends to hang around a lot longer so repeated exposure to higher levels builds up so the safe dose has to be stated “over time” rather than being simplified to a fixed dose perhaps related to your mass.
There was a village (unfortunately I can't find the reference in a quick search ATM) where there was/is an unusually high incidence of thyroid cancer which was thought to be a genetic pre-disposition as the population stated from a fairly small gene pool, but is now thought to be because the background radiation in the area is a bit higher than elsewhere due to the makeup of the local ground rocks. The difference is nothing to worry about if passing through or visiting regularly, in fact the difference is small enough not to be a major concern to the locals, but a lifetime of the extra exposure is enough to at least be visible in certain health stats.
Triuranium octoxide (Yellowcake):
Yellowcake is as radiologically harmless as natural potassium-carrying minerals or thorium-oxide mantles used in paraffin fuel lanterns.
Most companies have zero data controls and it ends up getting passed around everywhere and saved off by employees for their own personal use.
It's like waving money in front of people when you have no way to determine if it gets stolen or by whom.
I was raised in a family bookeeping business that handled all of the vital business data for hundreds of clients. Data protection and privacy (respect for clients) were always job #1.
This came to be my philosophy for all user data in any context. A philosophy that very few people share--and the rise of the web seems to have reversed any possibility of such a philosophy taking hold as user data became a form of currency.
I’ve thought of this way in a broader sense.
If you have any data from user data to internal data from various LOB it should be : Data is the new uranium.
But selling it raw with the personal identifying information of the data subject is almost always a complete no-go.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
Grinder surely made much more from data sales than the 6.something million Erous it was find. The paltry fines under GDPR do nothing to dissuade this behavio. That's been a recurring theme in previous HN discussions on this topic.
Right now, I would posit that these low penalties are for show. Governments don't want to lose the economic benefit of having these companies operate in the EU and the general public can be satisfied that their governments are on top of the issue.
...sure, but they also had business expenses. Fining them for all the revenue would more or less instantly kill the company, which is hardly the goal.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ppp-gr...
One case, a hospital first got a warning, then a small fine and then a mid six figure fine for a case involving a single patient. You can rely on them having learned their lesson and that there will not be a third fine.
Imagine if Hacker News would leak its user database. I assume there is not much in there, so the impact would pretty much be non existent.
This isn't about what one can do, it is about what is prudent. Grindr just learned a lesson about the difference.