Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhn_mk1 | Hacker News Reader

Lead is a bad example, unless you mean long forgotten times. Even Romans knew:

> The Romans were aware that lead could cause serious health problems

https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-historic...

Asbestos, likewise, was being used 80 years after the discovery of ill effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asbestos_disease_medic...

Radium's danger was known 2 years after its discovery according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium#Hazards

I think your examples support the thesis that we're actually decent at discovering harmful effects, but we don't mind them.

But they don't support the thesis that we might find something unpleasant about power electronics that we don't yet know about.

View on HN

> I think your examples support the thesis that we're actually decent at discovering harmful effects, but we don't mind them.

I think it's less that we don't mind them, and more that it unfortunately is a slow process to go from first research realising there's a problem to general scientific consensus to then one or both of public awareness becoming big enough that companies have to respond and stop choosing profit over safety, or government concern needs to become great enough to enforce it through regulation.

I think we're seeing it with plastics at the moment, it seems very likely that in 50 years we'll a) know much more about the harm micro-plastics do and b) look back at now and think "there was enough evidence, why didn't they ban it immediately?" Well, because it's really convenient and cheap, companies don't want to give up profits, people like me don't want to give up convenient packaging etc, and governments don't want to piss off consumers and businesses at the same time by banning it too fast. Similar story for the climate crisis.

We already know that microplastics are dangerous (BPA, leeching of random compounds, plankton overpopulation, animals with stuffed stomachs), there's no need to wait 50 years more.

Otherwise I agree with what you say, and I'd say it agrees with what I said: we're pretty good at detecting harmful effects, and good at not taking them into account.

But that's not what the parent implied.

I don’t think you’ve followed completely the phases that need to be gone through: the fact that microplastics are still being produced is the most straightforward demonstration that can be had on the fact that companies are still to be forced by the general public to stop producing them

Yeah but we happily painted our walls with it even just 20 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com