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Comment by MichaelRo | Hacker News Reader

Well my father was an agricultural engineer at a state farm, obviously handling herbicides and pesticides. I remember him telling me that herbicide is harmless: "you can drink a spoon of it and you'd be fine, unlike pesticide".

Well... he got Parkinson's.

He also told us: "sugar is harmless". My parents would prepare house made syrup with a lot of sugar and he liked drinking it with soda. Quite a lot of it. Eventually when he started feeling not so good, he'd fight off the feeling by downing some additional glasses or sugary drink.

Well ... he got diabetes.

Eventually it was Parkinson's what finished him. In a way it's effect is similar to Stephen Hawking's disease, loss of motor function, only much slowly, albeit inevitably. Problem is you lose not just voluntary but also vegetative muscle function, including gut movements. Which is what eventually kills you: even though you can't swallow food anymore (not that you're feeling hungry, you feel sick and miserable) and it's fed to you by a tube, there's no point when your gut can't move it out of your body eventually. Nasty way to die.

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I had the opposite experience. Chemists on my family, so everything was dangerous. The PVC tubes were dangerous because of plasticisers, epoxy resins combined with other chemicals. Flame retardants on foams a big no no. Teflon pans getting overheated being nasty so trow them away. Pesticides and herbicides forbidden at home.

It was certainly a pain is the ass while growing up. On the other hand, my family members are getting old (nearing 100) without cancer, Parkinson, Alzheimer or things like that, preserving mobility and autonomy.

Would be cool if there was a single site with an easy-to-use but comprehensive index of all such materials found in and around an average home that would make a chemist anxious, along with the safe alternative.

If an individual does this, then they should be prepared to be sued. For example, say that Teflon in toxic and you will surely be sued.

There are federal agencies that are supposed to monitor thse things, but in some countries these institutions are broken. IMHO Europe does the best job of regulating toxic substances. Even in other jurisdictions, there are manufacturers guides that are often not read or adhered to.

I think this info is mostly out there and is able to be found.

Yes, I agree that a comprehensive global index would be a great thing - so start with checking there (I forget where their index is!)

And don't forget, alcohol, tobacco, driving and sugar are by far the biggest killers in our modern societies!

That's how you get the Prop 65 warning nonsense.

Besides, chemists themselves have varying ideas of personal safety, depending on what they work with and how flammable/explosive/toxic/all of the above it is. The only real solution, unfortunately, is for the regulatory authorities to make and publish clear evidence based decisions.

There are tools like EPA Safer Choice and various apps built around helping people find safer choices when shopping, for what it's worth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPA_Safer_Choice

On my mom's side of the family, there runs a genetic illness which is autosomal dominant, and inevitably disabling. If you have the gene, you will go blind before you reach old age. There are no treatments and the is no cure.

My dad, who is strict and obsessive about his diet, exercise, and overall health is right now facing two large, cancerous, deadly tumors. They are the result of a complication, decades later, from a then-undiscovered disease transmitted to him through a life-saving blood transfusion after a traffic accident in which he was not at all.

It seems clear to me that whether we retain autonomy, mobility, and health is hardly up to us. Disability and ill health are things that can come for any of us, and when they do, it's not always about the choices we've made in life. Securing mobility and autonomy isn't about assuring you will always be free of disability— it's about learning to do so within disability, which is practically inevitable.

> It seems clear to me that whether we retain autonomy, mobility, and health is hardly up to us.

Things we have agency over are not sufficient, but are necessary, to retain healthspan into old age or at least maximise our capacity for it, despite us being at the whim of stochastic events or possibly inexorable progressive disease.

> It seems clear to me that whether we retain autonomy, mobility, and health is hardly up to us.

There are ways to dramatically increase or decrease your odds. There are no hard guarantees but statistically it's extremely clear that your lifestyle is a huge differentiator. Obesity and diabetes are easy to avoid for the vast majority of people and will absolutely fuck you up. Even cancers are like 70%+ lifestyle/environmental related.

Just like you have people who survive car crashes in 1980s cars while not wearing a seatbelt and people who die in a 2023 car with 12 airbags while wearing a seat belt. Your conclusion shouldn't be that seatbelts don't do much

My gf's dad was on the way down, 65, getting fat, low mobility, out of breath all the time, &c. we motivated him, he lost 35kg+ in a year, no more shortness of breath, much better mobility, all health metrics improved, it doesn't mean he'll live longer, but he'll for sure live better

Wish I could motivate my mom. She's quite overweight and she even agrees she needs to lose it, but she just wont exercise or stop buying sweets and snacks. My father and I have told her we're happy to go without that stuff in the house but she still buys it. Whenever she eats the stuff she has some excuse.

I've tried to teach her the IIFYM approach so she can still enjoy treats but she resists and insists that 'intermittent fasting' (eating almost nothing on Monday and Wednesday) has been succeeding for her. She'll lose two pounds and celebrate, then gains it back.

Same. I even got my mom an electric bicycle as a present, just to lower the entry to physical exercise, but it just collected dust in the corner, despite endless promises to start using it. She passed away suddenly 3 years ago. I'm sure her heart just gave up. Still can't really take it in.

If the joy of your bad habits outweigh whatever other sources of joy you have in your daily life, then it's hard to motivate someone to stop. In their mind, they are making the conclusion that they'd rather die with some joy from the bad habit than die entirely unhappy - which kind of makes sense.

>If the joy of your bad habits outweigh whatever other sources of joy you have in your daily life, then it's hard to motivate someone to stop. In their mind, they are making the conclusion that they'd rather die with some joy from the bad habit than die entirely unhappy

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is the kicker for my mom. We were driving back from an errand and she said she wanted to stop for a [marketing name of 1000 cal coffee-slushie]. I gently but firmly reminded her that wasn't going to help her goals and she launched into a small tantrum that included 'It's the only joy I get'.

I love her so much and I'm terrified of her suddenly being gone, or worse, declining into early alzheimers/dementia like her dad did.

She is receptive to discussing changing her habits in general, but if I get specific and try to help her start any sort of plan to give them up or minimize them, she responds as if I am attacking her. I don't know what to do.

I've never struggled with my weight, but I once noticed I was getting heavier than I liked and I successfully lost about 30lb in 4-5 months. It doesn't have to be that intense for her, but I know what works. I just can't get her to commit to any variation of a serious approach.

> Your conclusion shouldn't be that seatbelts don't do much

My conclusion is weaker than that. It's that while we try to do what we can, we should retain a kind of humility and realism, that we remember we don't get a 'final say' over own fates. And also that we recognize our continuity with the disabled, even in times of our own health, and that our individual pursuits of health not become a desperate striving to separate ourselves from others who are perceived as weak or helpless.

I think one of the things that has made my father's predicament so earth-shattering to him, beyond even the prospect of death, is that he really wants to think of him self as the kind of person who 'doesn't get sick', that he could really, simply, choose to be well. As a result, the cancer has been not just terrifying and uncomfortable, but an irreconcilable challenge to his worldview. As a result, it seems like he's really struggling to integrate an understanding of his current situation into his perspective. Instead, he flips back and forth between his old view (that he's kind of invincible, that disability and illness are for other people) and a new despair.

Remembering the limits of our control isn't, for me, about giving up, but about grounding ourselves and staying connected to others (including to those who are ill or disabled in ways we might not want to even imagine as possibilities in our own futures).

It's often those two extremes, and I like to claim your parents' type are the smarter ones. The others feel like they are above everybody else; everybody else just has unjustified fears because they are stupid and don't understand, and sure while there were enough instances in the past where something turned out to be a really bad idea much later, it never crosses their mind that they could make the same mistake, or any mistake at all. Just being exceedingly smart (according to themselves) makes everything they do and say true, safe and right.

It can happen at all levels, not just to "stupid people". It's just that those higher up the education chain can create far more disastrous results.

Teflon pans being dangerous is a safe bet. Teflon is famously inert and sticks to nothing... so how did they stick it to the pan? The chemicals they use for that must be very reactive and it's a good bet to assume anything like that is toxic.

oh boy

Even if they were perfectly safe it's a terrible product. They're the closest you can get to disposable pans, at best you'll get 5-10 years out of them, then you have to throw the whole thing away because the top 0.01mm is damaged

That did not convince me.

They do use a chemical primer for making Teflon stick, but also surface roughening, like how inert glass glaze sticks to pottery.

Though glass and pottery are both ceramics so I believe there is a chemical/material bond as well that doesn't take a primer. But you also have things like porcelain sink that is ceramic on metal, and even porcelain metal cookware that are too and would defy your statement of inert on metal == bad automatically.

Some metals have a self oxidized coating that is inert and stuck on, for example titanium cookware used in hiking.

I've seen scraped up Teflon pans that seemed to have some sort of crap between the coating and the metal; I don't think it's just a mechanical bond.

Anyway, with how gentle you need to treat those pans I don't think they're worth it, even if safe. Stainless or cast iron aren't hard to clean and are essentially idiot proof, so that's what I like to use.

They do use a chemical primer.

Glass is famously inert and sticks to nothing, so how does enameling work?

People eat off of enameled glass? Enamel chips and wears off and are often made with toxic metals. I don't know how it sticks in the first place, but it doesn't follow that if enamels are safe teflon must be as well.

Uhhh... enameled cast iron cookware is pretty standard. It's practically invulnerable.

> People eat off of enameled glass?

Maybe? They certainly cook with it.

It's interesting what people would say about the safety of industrial chemicals. My dad worked as an aircraft maintenance engineer for an airliner, working on the big passenger aircraft. When he was being trained in the 70s/80s, they used 111-trichloroethane for a lot of stuff. They were told that the stuff was so safe that you could drink it. Later, he got kidney cancer. He sued and got only partial compensation because the court concluded that there was only a 50% chance that his cancer was from the 111-trichloroethane. Of course, today, we as a society still don't know if it causes cancer, but we think it might. https://wwwn.cdc.gov/tsp/ToxFAQs/ToxFAQsDetails.aspx?faqid=4...

Still, whether or not it does, it's wild that people would say things like that back then. Hey all, use this stuff, but you probably wouldn't want to drink it while you have lunch, right? Because we don't know what it really does to the body, so let's play it safe and use proper safety procedures, OK?

Nope, it's, "this stuff is harmless, you could drink it and you'll be fine."

> Hey all, use this stuff, but you probably wouldn't want to drink it while you have lunch, right?

I don't know about that standard. There's a lot of things that are safe to work with that I wouldn't want to make part of lunch.

    > it's wild that people
    > would say things like that
    > back then.

I think it's "wild" that you're so confidently clinging to the narrative that there was a causal link between this chemical and your dad's cancer.

Sure, it's possible, but clearly decades of data since then failing to move it away from the "probably a carcinogenic" column supports the notion that it's more harmless than not.

The list of IARC group 2A includes bitumen (widely used in roofing), red meat, drinks above 65°C (150°F), being a barber, and working night shifts.

I don't know why your reply is being hidden. it is completely fair to say most people drawing such links are likely mistaken.

I'm not confidently clinging, just saying there's a probable causality link.

My father has several brothers and sisters, none got Parkinson's but none worked with herbicides. An acquaintance that was also an agricultural engineer, colleague of my father, also got Parkinson's. There were lots of people in the town around those chemicals but noone kept track. They're almost all gone by now, but old age is also a factor. On the other hand it's almost certain not all got Parkinson's so funk knows. Again I didn't verify and I'm not in the mood to verify, although it would be possible since it's a small town. Go round every house and ask if their deceased relative had Parkinson's. But to what purpose?

You too need to read my comment again. See my reply to gp comment.

You seem to have reading comprehension issues. I nowhere said that I thought there was a causal link. I cited well-known medical organizations that said it was probable. I in no way put my own feelings into that statement. You were reading things that weren't there and then making incorrect inferences. I'm certainly not clinging to anything. But I do still think it's wild to say that it's perfectly fine to drink 111-trichloroethane. If you think it's not wild to say this, perhaps we can meet up, I'll pour 111-trichloroethane into a cup, and you can drink it in front of me. Me, I'll continue to say it's wild to say it's OK to drink the stuff.

> You seem to have reading comprehension issues.

You seem to have a particular obsession with drawing equivalences between the safety ratings of industrial chemicals and their ingestion.

Of course I wouldn't drink 111-trichloroethane, I wouldn't drink bitumen either.

Neither is intended for human consumption, so these safety ratings need to be considered in the context of their intended uses.

The CDC source you cited notes that it was phased out due to damage to the ozone layer, which is orthogonal to any human safety concerns.

When I was at school in the 70s, if we got something on our hands in the science labs we'd wash it off with acetone or benzene (but were never advised to drink them)

And I still remember the chemistry teacher rolling beads of mercury round his palm to show us how mobile it was.

Acetone appears to be pretty high on the effective-divided-by-unsafe spectrum.

Yeah acetone is innocuous (at reasonable doses) and even present (and produced) naturally in our body.

I remember my science teacher telling us they used to use mercury in the class and he'd wonder if any of his old students were walking around cuckoo because of it.

In 1924 the inventor of the lead additive for gasoline, Thomas Midgley Jr., poured the additive over his hands and inhaled its vapors for a minute, as a demonstration at a press conference. He knew it was poisonous though.

Seems like such demonstrations, even just describing it, were de riguer in the wild west era of industrial chemical innovation.

Fun fact, Thomas Midgley Jr. also invented CFCs.

Went to check if he ever had any erm, "effects", but this is even wilder:

> "In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted polio and was left severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. On November 2, 1944, at the age of 55, he was found dead at his home in Worthington, Ohio. He had been killed by his own device after he became entangled in it and died of strangulation"

Yes his death was extremely fitting.

He did get lead poisoning at least twice according to wikipedia, before and after the demonstration, requiring vacations to recuperate.

Don't tell me he took copper supplements on his holidays?

https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA?si=hgG67vKmBBLgKgeg

This youtube channel does a good job of explaining his inventions and just how bad for society they were.

it's not how that works. you need to look at the counterfactuals too.

TEL decreased knocking, which decreased incomplete combustion, which decreased pollution a lot.

lead pollution from gasoline was about 30% of all lead pollution.

it's great that people recognized how harmful lead pollution is and coordinated action was taken.

for CFCs it allowed the development of fridges that use non-hazardous working fluid. previous ones used propane for example, folks kept their fridges on the porch because there were some that exploded.

from this article/essay (I'm not endorsing the main message, but the need for nuance and cost-benefit analysis is correct IMHO)

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/11/technological-sta...

Surely the counterfactual isn’t “what if we did nothing to reduce knocking”, but rather “what if we used any of the other substances which were known to reduce knocking and known to be safer, such as ethanol”?

Yes, and also "if we cared more about proving health safety", and unfortunately it seems - looking at aviation where TEL is just getting phased out - mostly we don't care enough.

R290 (highly pure propane) is still used pretty widely as a refrigerant with relatively low environmental impact.

The worse is, ethanol also has the same effect on gasoline and engines, however since GM needed something they can patent and control and exploit, they invented TEL and pushed it aggressively [0].

> So in February 1923, a filling station sold the first tank of leaded gasoline. Midgley wasn’t there: he was in bed with severe lead poisoning... [0]

This guy is an embodiment of quick-acting karma, and he didn't listen.

[0]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-...

If I recall correctly, ethanol needed to be added at around a 10% level to prevent engine knocking. At its peak, lead was present at around 1.1 grams per gallon, so about 0.1%.

Not intended to excuse them. The amount of additive required was why leaded gas was cheaper than using ethanol. And as a reason, three generations grew up with lead poisoning.

Pretty sure there are still people using illegally using this crap in road vehicles I think.

I think you can still buy TEL as an additive in the US for older/smaller engines?

Edit/Answer: No. You get lead substitutes instead [0].

[0]: https://www.walmart.com/search?q=Lead+substitute

Another listener of Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales? If not, give it a listen! https://timharford.com/2022/11/cautionary-tales-the-inventor... The story of the Radium Girls tell a similar tale. Lick your Radium loaded brush to sharpen the tip, totally fine. Then the company denies all responsibility, and actively oppose concerned workers that start losing teeth, limbs and eventually their lives.

I see clear pattern. Some guys now tell you: self driving is around a corner, the cars are safe. We know how it ended with chemicals from 30 years ago. DDT is a good example of it both for Western world as well for soviet union. 30 years from now we will shake the heads thinking about 2 ton vehicles with camera trying navigate by themselves. Looks like that it’s in the human nature to believe things that are too good to be true.

Delayed effects are a bit different.

DDT as used is safe for humans though.

it's estimated that DDT saved 500 million lives. so you know, it's not black and white.

and FSD works, just not efficient if the safety parameter is set to high, because "suddenly" human drivers will start to bully it

It's not so much about "as used", but how it was produced by Montrose Corp and dumped straight down the municipal sewer by the ton, decades later leaving a signature in every marine animal off southern California and sometimes much farther away.

Self-driving is very easy to evaluate. We humans are potentially very good drivers, and in practice we all can say if someone is driving safely or not.

Chemical and biological interactions are very difficult to evaluate and predict, so I don't see the parallels here.

One is a very hard research field, while the other requires complex hardware, but it is readily applicable if/when it works.

Part of self driving is dealing with those human drivers who are terrible drivers though.

This is what makes the whole thing so hard. If we could have dedicated roads for self driving cars it would be easy peasy. No need to interpret road markings, signs, other vehicles and their intentions. Because it would all be communicated digitally over radio. Steering a car is total peanuts for a computer.

It's the unexpected stuff that makes it hard. Like that Uber car that killed that lady that crossed the road with her bike in the dark at a totally unexpected spot. A human is better at those things because they're caused by other humans who aren't logical.

But such matters are really hard to test and evaluate for precisely because they are unexpected.

All you say is true.

Even then, that's many orders of magnitude easier than predicting all possible chemical interactions of a given compound.

Predicting the actions of humans is easier than determining chemical interactions of a given compound?

Yes, but only because in the general case, the actions are very limited by the controls of a car.

Steering wheel, two pedals, that's only three axes of possible inputs.

> Self-driving is very easy to evaluate.

I disagree. We can say that someone is driving safely in one given moment. A drunk driver could drive quite safely through a main road while we watch them, and then turn around a corner and run over someone the moment they leave our sight. We can only extrapolate the "goodness" of a driver by expanding the time we spend observing their driving. 2-3 hours of evaluation will be quite solid. It would be even more solid if we are inside the car with the driver, and if we have received training about how to evaluate a driver. And the result would be even more reliable if the evaluator is financially independent from the driver. And for safety, the car should have controls that allow the examinator to take over if needed.

So yeah, I am describing a driving test. As far as I know we don't have those for self-driving cars. We should.

They should be way more thorough than than the ones we give to a human, because machines lack the shared context that humans have with each other. Tests like driving offroad, driving while there's tiny (fake) animals around, behavior in a (staged) accident, etc. Things that we know a human will have enough context to deal with, but for a machine it's not a given.

One advantage is that these tests could be done in parallel. You can load the same AI in 50 identical vehicles and have 50 examinators run tests on it at the same time.

>> We can only extrapolate the "goodness" of a driver by expanding the time we spend observing their driving. 2-3 hours of evaluation will be quite solid.

Millions of miles driven with extensive telemetry for every instant in time and you do not think it amounts to a meaningful level of observation?

Personally, I'd be more comfortable when get to trillions that cover all aspects of the globe in all seasons 24 hours per day over 365 days per year for perhaps a decade. Edge cases are likely insane everywhere, we already know that. Are my estimates overkill? Perhaps. But it's what I'd like.

Not if my son has to share a road with them, no.

Sure, we're shaking our head about DDT, but we're still very much relying on DDT's less obviously harmful successors. I hope it won't be the same with self-driving cars. Where there's a will, there's a way, and technology does advance. And at some point, the only way to improve things further will be to remove manually driven cars from the streets.

I, too, am skeptical that wide-scale adoption of autonomous vehicles will be an overall good for humanity. I'm afraid it's going to make us humans even more dependent on hyper-complex technology, hence more vulnerable to issues like over-concentration of capital and break-downs of the global supply chain system. That it will atrophy some of our collective native capabilities (for example, the skill to assess risk and take action based on our innate grasp of physics of motion and psychology of others). We would in effect be outsourcing our physical safety to large corporations. Even if more safe, comfortable and efficient, I don't think that's a good idea.

poor analogy

if I recall TCE (is tricholoroethylene the same as 111-trichloroethane?) has significant links to Parkinsons and is classed as a known carcinogen over here in the UK

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/cleaning-chemical-...

No it's not the same as trichloroethylene.

Trichloroethylene is [Cl-C-Cl]=[Cl-C-H]

whereas 1,1,1-trichloroethane is [Cl-C-Cl -Cl]-[H-C-H -H]

Trichloroethylene is really evil.

Whereas 1,1,1-trichloroethane much less.

That sounds like a lot to go through, for both him and you. Sorry to hear of it.

Similar with my father. He is on the rapid decline stage. He's overweight, diabetic and suffering from congestive heart failure. Everything he did to get himself here was self inflicted because the consequences were not immediate and he was so self obsessed with his own correctness over doing what the hell he wanted that he was invincible. They won't do surgery on him to repair his heart because it's too risky. They took away his driving license. He sits at home all day waiting to die with cognitive visible on a weekly basis. His bowel has stopped working properly as well now.

I always look at it like this: if the human body had a operators manual, would putting that inside your body be in the section marked O or the section marked X. If it's likely to go in the section marked X then you're either taking a risk or lining yourself up for a particularly shitty decline one day.

the problem with using anecdotes like these to evaluate causation is that the people who handled herbicides and pesticides all their life and did not get Parkinson's will not be posting about it

There is probably a better chance they will than people that got Parkinson.

stay hydrated!

Eating a lot of anything can be harmful, but at this point it's widely accepted that eating sugar isn't more likely to cause diabetes. See this article if you wish to know more https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glycemia.shtml

> For example, fruits have many advantages over grains, besides the difference between sugar and starch. Bread and pasta consumption are strongly associated with the occurrence of diabetes, fruit consumption has a strong inverse association.

Is this true? Where are the sources?

At the bottom. But quite frankly you can get whatever result you like out of nutritional approaches by picking sources. I mean that's how they do meta-analysis studies. Pick an answer, fit the sources to it and publish. Then get picked up by some idiotic media on a slow news day and the next thing you have is a diet fad.

Eat anything that is actually food, in moderation.

Not trying to be contrarian here, but this statement goes against everything I've read. Happy to learn something new, but this source is sketchy at best - do you have any additional sources of more merit?

Not sure what constitutes merit to you, but here is American Diabetes Association saying it's a myth that diabetes is caused by eating sugar - http://main.diabetes.org/ws/ADM/MRC_ADM_2018_Myths.pdf

That's a weird pamphlet. It goes on to say sugary soda increases risk because it's calorie and carbohydrate high.

I get that "cause" is too strong, genetic predisposition is a huge factor, etc.

But can we really expect that an 1800 calorie/day diet of sugar cubes is no more likely to cause insulin insensitivity than 1800 calories of non-sugary/starchy food?

Comparing things in isolation like that is not very useful because you need other nutrients too. If a person ate 1800 calories from milk, orange juice and some amount of white sugar, honey etc. I don't think they would be more likely to develop insulin insensitivity. Sugar shouldn't be eaten alone. I'm not sure if this is true, but Ray Peat here claims that potassium has a similar role to insulin, so eating fruits and milk won't negatively affect your blood sugar as much - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYAihAkCaw8

Certainly. Lots of ways to blunt sugar's effects on blood-sugar by eating it with something else. And this can be specific to individuals. Apples don't impact me much at all, but do for other people.

My contrived sugar-cube-diet is dumb. I only mean, if insulin resistance is a problem you want to avoid, don't demand your body produce tons of insulin all the time to counter consuming things that spike blood-sugar.

I'm only weirded out by the specific "Type 2 diabetes is not caused by sugar, but by genetics and lifestyle factors." when the "lifestyle factors" listed in the pamphlet include diets high in sugar.

Thanks, this is good. I wasn't trying to discredit, the site just seemed unprofessional and gave me a vibe.

I am curious, like the other poster, how it says eating sugar isn't necessarily a cause but sugary drinks are. I wonder if that's due to their use of fructose?

It could be because of other lifestyle choices or predispositions which correlate with drinking sugary drinks. It could also be because those drinks don't have potassium or other nutrients which are present in fruits.

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