Ask HN: What Is Today's Lead? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Is Today's Lead?

38 pointstikkun29 comments

"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?

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Social media is today's tobacco. It's everywhere, it's cool, but people realize after a few years that it's bad for them.

Sugar too. Last generation was sugar subsidies. Now we have sugar tax.

Sugar alternatives are probably like lead. Things like sucralose which has some scientific evidence against them, and things like stevia which have some cultural avoidance, but don't seem like they're properly studied. Western societies seem to be increasingly avoiding it, and it's getting dumped hard into third world countries, in combination with sugar taxes.

EMF could be on the list. Pop science suggests it's completely safe. I've had a guy angrily disagree with me on the internet, posting a link saying it's safe, and yet the link literally said that it's hazardous in very short range.

Phones do have a legal restriction on how much radiation they're allowed to emit. But this all small stuff. Right now, everything is powered on wifi. We have neighbors running high powered routers and repeaters. We're getting Starlink and 5G.

We've established a safe line for EMF exposure but we should probably review it with all the environmental factors coming in at once.

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.

Regulation.

If we're producing and consuming things that are found to be dangerous, we should regulate/ban and force quality improvements.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Wide use of antibiotics destroying the balance of people's gut biomes.

Microplastics.

Already mentioned in original: environmental chemicals mimicking hormones.

Social media, 24 hour news cycle, perhaps even smart phones in some ways

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.

I'm not that keen on that. Odds are that when the plastic is broken down, it'd be broken down into CO2. we're much better off just locking all that carbon away underground. If anything, we'd be better off with some micro-organism that turned CO2 into some type of hydrocarbon.

There's a lot of questionable medication being prescribed these days. I'm not sure if it's just because I come from a crappy background, but even a lot of the kids in my family seem to be on prescription medication these days. SSRIs, stimulants, sleeping drugs, etc.

I'm fairly well read on pharmacology due to problems I've had in the past with pharmaceuticals (but also because of my interest in nootropics) and the stuff they'll prescribe to children today I wouldn't touch personally. It's also surprising to me how readily certain pharmaceuticals are prescribed at all given they're not extensively studied in children.

I could give examples, but it's frankly too depressing. But from what I've observed it seems clear to me that we don't have a clear understanding of how long-term use of SSRIs might affect a developing child's brain.

This seems like an odd perspective. Relative to not having medical problems, all prescription medication is bad for you. Most healthy people wouldn’t touch it. (The others are why you need a prescription).

The question is how the problems induced by the medication compare to the problems solved by the medication. You don’t want to be on an SSRI, true. You also don’t want to be tortured around the clock by your own mind. Which is worse? I’m no doctor but I think the accepted answer is “it depends.”

The problem goes a bit deeper than that. Medications are currently being used as a bandaid to cover up the symptoms of our systemic issues which lead to mental health issues. Instead of fixing the systemic issues created by our capitalistic society we just throw medications at our children

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...

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.

Drug prohibition. Opiate overdoses due to the war on drugs are a major cause for lower US average life expectancy.

This is a big one. Legalizing and regulating currently illegal drugs would remove most of the harm because nearly all of that harm is from not only adulteration but simply the interaction of people with the "justice" system

1) Non-regenerative farming - things could be so much more productive, without the non-renewable inputs and loss of fertility.

2) Non-regenerative attention farming - commodifying our dissent and selling it to advertisers creates huge negative externalities

1) Indoor exposure (ie. lack of time outdoors. For example, we need sun exposure to create vitamin D; the supplements are nowhere near as good.)

2) Inactivity. Our bodies need to move to be healthy.

Light and sound might turn out to have greater impacts than realised.

Artificial sweeteners

Changes in soil.

Seed oils

Is canola oil bad for you?

Its not, its actually one of the best far sources and its a seed oil

Don't make ridiculous blanket statements, its just plain wrong

> Its not,

It is.

That's #4 in the post..

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