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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

> However, Cousins noted that PFAS levels in people have actually dropped "quite significantly in the last 20 years" and "ambient levels (of PFAS in the environment) have been the same for the past 20 years".

> "What's changed is the guidelines. They've gone down millions of times since the early 2000s, because we've learned more about the toxicity of these substances."

I think what's changed most is our standards. Used to be if you survived to reproduce, you were doing pretty good. Extra points if you got to watch your kids grow up. Now the standard is basically "Every substance that can be demonstrated to have worse health outcomes than its absence is toxic" - which on a technical level is true, and might even be what you care about, but you also need take a bigger-picture perspective and weigh it against all the other risks of ordinary living you face.

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> I think what's changed most is our standards.

PFAS didn't exist 75 years ago. Now we've almost permanently contaminated our environment and atmosphere with it, that's quite a big change.

I feel like that's taking the commenter's quote out of context, or at least missing the point. They aren't arguing that PFAS aren't everywhere, or even that they aren't harmful. They're arguing that, in the grand scheme of things, the harm produced by PFAS to humans is relatively inconsequential, especially when you consider all the improvements that technology, broadly, has brought to the human condition.

To emphasize, I think that point is very debatable, but I don't know enough about the real harms of PFAS to comment. But I do think it's valid to have a substantive debate on the true harms of PFAS, even if the other side of that debate is that comparing ourselves now to a time when the majority of kids died is the wrong yardstick.

I went and did some research, and have a friend who's a material scientist. The harms of PFAS are pretty substantial. Teflon is nasty; if you can do without it in your cookware, you probably should.

However, statistically the things that are most likely to prevent you from passing on your genes are:

  1. Not making enough money.
  2. Anxiety/depression
  3. Drug overdoses
  4. Car accidents
  5. An unhappy family life
  6. Swimming pools

And on that list of offspring averted, PFAS basically don't register. You are much better off making sure you get into a good career, talking to your kids about drugs, being very careful when you drive, and otherwise not sweating the small things than obsessing about forever-chemicals in the atmosphere.

What is remarkable here is that every single thing you say is correct.

Everything on your statistical list looks right, and can probably be proven by a stack of peer-reviewed scientific studies from medicine, sociology, psychology...

And yet as an argument, it's worthless. Worse... it's dangerous.

Because in your schema, the impact of climate change, pollution and other threats that will end this species each rank as zero! You get to "pass on your genes" merely to consign a few hundred of your descendents to a miserable death.

This is the tyranny of instrumental reason that you so cleverly use against the goal (reproduction of genes) that you purport to champion.

1, 2, 5 is my best guess.

Wait, neither climate change nor pollution are in the category of threats that are expected to literally end this species.

Within our lifetime we’re safe.

I think the point is 100-300 years (maybe longer?) from now things might reach a tipping point.

None of the above are actually expected to end the species. Not in anyone's lifetime, given the range of climates humans survive in. We might end up with a 90% reduction in population but Short of a massive asteroid impact or massive solar event it's pretty hard to imagine wiping out the entirety of humanity.

I agree. But anything causing even a 10% population decline over a short period of time would have insane second order effects (e.g. nuclear war) as we fight over control of resources.

> it's pretty hard to imagine wiping out the entirety of humanity.

That's kinda my complaint here. Imagination is more important than knowledge. If we started much earlier in education explaining to kids how remarkable and fragile our existence is, how intricately interconnected we are with nature, birds, bees, mushrooms and microbes, then maybe Hollywood disaster movie plots wouldn't seem like the only route to the end of humanity.

With only 10% of the population, we might find so much institutional knowledge lost that the remaining just can't feed themselves. We'd have to relearn hunting and gathering, and that just might not happen.

If we have to relearn hunting and gathering, that's not even closely compatible with feeding 10% of current human population, that's consistent with <1%, probably 0.1% or less of current population surviving. Feeding even 0.8 billion people still requires intensive mass agriculture.

Arguably climate change risk comes under #1 (not making enough money), because in the most likely climate change scenario, people above a certain wealth threshold will probably survive.

Not saying this will be a pleasant experience. Billions may starve. But that still leaves billions, and the purely mercenary reality is that money is what puts you on one side of that dividing line or the other.

From a certain perspective maybe. But I think that would be one coloured by a narrow mentality [0]

In a "purely mercenary reality", what you need to survive is not wealth, but peace, and that is something you cannot buy with many of the futures we're now looking at.

In a funny way, PFAS is a great metaphor. Forever chemicals have now been found in places nobody would ever have predicted. Bad things have a way of spreading in ways you won't see until they're at the gate. It might not be a good idea to bet the farm on isolationism and exceptionalism.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_mentality

Swimming pools because of drowning or chemical exposure?

Drowning is the leading cause of death for 1-4 year olds and 2nd after car accidents for 5-14 year olds

https://www.cdc.gov/drowning/facts/index.html

> being very careful when you drive

That helps, but there are more participants in traffic than just you.

Are actually there any studies that say Teflon is harmful? Not the fumes when it is heated, I mean Teflon itself.

I'll go out on a limb and say that 99% of the people buying "Glide" dental floss at COSTCO have NO IDEA that they're coated in toxins (PFAS) and if they pick up a gargantium bag of Cheerios for their kids they also probably aren't aware that those too are coated in Chlormequat chloride. Modern living.

> Cheerios for their kids they also probably aren't aware that those too are coated in Chlormequat chloride.

From Wikipedia:

> Chlormequat has not previously been registered for use on food crops in the United States. In April 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed allowing the use of the chemical on food crops such as barley, oat, triticale, and wheat. The EPA’s human health risk assessment indicated "no dietary, residential, or aggregate (i.e., combined dietary and residential exposures) risks of concern." No risks were identified by EPA to aquatic species of invertebrates, vertebrates, and plants in addition to terrestrial plants.

So probably not coated in it.

I don’t know about you but that doesn’t make me feel any better.

This might make you feel better... https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/pesticide-in-oat-products-s...

... unless you regularly eat more than 85,000 tons of oats.

> unless you regularly eat more than 85,000 tons of oats.

Between muesli in the summer and oatmeal in the winter I'm averaging close to that, but I exercise a lot so I got that going for me.

Are the Cheerios slathered in Chlormequat?

That phrasing suggests that Cheerios are intentionally coated with Chlormequat which doesn't appear to be the case. Instead, tthe grains used to manufacture Cheerios are treated with Chlormequat (though, arguably, any food product utilizing those grains would have the same issue, I'd assume). Might not make anyone feel any better, but different issue.

potato potato, literally the same thing

They're probably referring to the following study:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-024-00643-4

"Chlormequat was detected at low concentrations in samples from 2017 through 2022, with a significant increase in concentrations for samples from 2023. We also observed high detection frequencies of chlormequat in oat-based foods. These findings and chlormequat toxicity data raise concerns about current exposure levels, and warrant more expansive toxicity testing, food monitoring, and epidemiological studies to assess health effects of chlormequat exposures in humans."

...

"Despite being approved for use on crops in Europe and parts of North America, chlormequat exhibits concerning toxicological properties, as documented in historical as well as more recently published laboratory animal studies. In the early 1980s, the impacts of chlormequat exposure on reproductive toxicity and fertility were first described by Danish pig farmers who observed reproductive declines in pigs raised on chlormequat treated grains [4]. These observations were later investigated in controlled laboratory experiments on pigs and mice, whereby female pigs fed chlormequat treated grain exhibited disrupted oestrus cycling and difficulty mating compared to animals on a control chlormequat-free diet [4]. Additionally, male mice exposed to chlormequat via diet or drinking water during development exhibited decreased fertilization capacity of sperm in vitro [5]. More recent reproductive toxicity studies on chlormequat show delayed onset of puberty, reduced sperm motility, decreased weights of male reproductive organs, and decreased testosterone levels in rats exposed during sensitive windows of development, including during pregnancy and early life [6,7,8]. Developmental toxicity studies also suggest that chlormequat exposure during pregnancy can dysregulate fetal growth and metabolism [9]. Other investigations did not find impacts of chlormequat on reproduction in female mice, male pigs, or a subsequent investigation of fertilization capacity in male mice developmentally and postnatally exposed to chlormequat [4, 10, 11]. Equivocal evidence in the toxicological literature on chlormequat may be due to differences in doses tested and outcomes measured as well as selection of model organism and the sex of laboratory animals. Consequently, further investigation is warranted."

> I'll go out on a limb and say that 99% of the people buying "Glide" dental floss at COSTCO have NO IDEA that they're coated in toxins (PFAS)

Thanks for making me aware of this. I've been trying to make a point of avoiding PFAS, but it seems to be everywhere.

> The study found that women who flossed with Oral-B Glide floss had higher levels of a chemical called perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS) in their blood than women who didn’t use that type of floss.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/dental-fl...

I've been in the same camp, mostly against BPA (and it's analogs) and PFAS. It's amazing how casually they are used in consumer products, even by brands who carry marketing that is nauseatingly "save-the-earth-happy-healthy-eating".

Another one is nitrites in processed meat. All the fancy "health conscious" brands proudly state "NO NITRITES!", but then those ass hats put in a bunch of celery salt...which is just nitrites with a different name.

Note: For anyone curious, trader joes actually does sell a bacon with no nitrites of any form. First and only time I have seen it.

Comparing nitrites (which occur naturally) with PFAS and other "forever chemicals" is off the board. To my understanding the observed and very real ill-effects of toxic bacterial excretions due to nitrites being phased out in lunch-box products (sliced ham, salami) here in the EU far outweigh any possible effects of the nitrites. Source: reddit comments that seemed legit.

> All the fancy "health conscious" brands proudly state "NO NITRITES!", but then those ass hats put in a bunch of celery salt...which is just nitrites with a different name.

Marketing that takes into accounts biases of particular target group. That particular case is, I think, becoming common: since large fraction of the population is irrationally afraid of anything that has numbers in its name, whether as digits or words in any language, the companies look for whatever plant they can pull that specific substance from, and use that in production process - possibly compromising quality and efficiency, but allowing them to write ${good natural plant} in the ingredient list instead of evil E-number or satanic 6-6-hexa-whatever.

I'm conflicted about this practice. On the one hand, I hate pulling wool over other people's eyes; on the other hand, I also hate reflexive fear and anti-intellectualism of our society.

I would hazard to say that PFAs and microplastics are safer than lead and mercury but less safe than not having them at all, but only with the caveat that I believe there's got to be some sort of Zeno's Paradox correlation with environmental human health and safety.

To wit:

People used to do all sorts of self-harming things not knowing any better and now we do fewer of them.

The Romans used to sweeten their wines with powdered lead. The ancient Chinese alchemists used to make elixirs of immortality out of mercury compounds and feed them to their wealthy.

I'm not saying things are good now and that we shouldn't push for them to be better, not by any means.

Rather I am saying that as we take further steps towards optimal human health, aligning our common environmental encounters with our biology, we should remember that the effort people have put in to get us this far is only going to take us half as far the next time, and half again the time after.

And that is all well and good, progress is progress, right?

However, does it not seem like the smaller the flaw we find the more we get upset about it?

I believe this phenomenon is caused by a continuing delusion that we were once ever perfect, that we ever lived in harmony with nature, that there is some paradisian SI Garden of Eden unit we can measure our present environment against, and that the current state of events is the face of our fall from grace and must be destroyed like the monster it is.

I believe the truth is things have never been better in hundreds of ways, and they're going to keep getting better as we repent of our past mistakes and learn more about what mistakes we are still currently making, and that the world 25 years from now will be as different a world as the world of today is to the world of 1999.

The secret, and it is a secret, is to understand everything that you've just written, and quietly let the machine worry on.

That collective handwringing (set in eternal struggle as it is with financial greed) is what got us here, and it's what will get us the next 50% and the 50% after that. Wink and enjoy the ride.

...I'd like to think that we can do a bit better than that. The world could have done without things like Tetra-Ethyl-Lead, Thalidomide, and all the other fd things we've ended up with as a result of just letting the machine whirr on. We need to recognize that perverse incentives exist, the system is vulnerable to them, and as our technical prowess increases, the consequences of even one lapse are becoming larger and broader in scale beyond, in some cases, our ability to handle it by just winging it, and not* applying some level of precautionary principle.

Circle of control.

My personal ability to influence these things is so small compared to the vast swathes of the ignorant who just go with the flow of the mainstream.

Any energy I spend trying to influence things outside of my control is wasted.

Therefore, I will only endeavor to control that which I have the ability to control.

"God grant me the serenity", if you will.

Wring on brother/sister. You're (100% genuinely) the future

J&J Reach floss is pfas-free, very cheap, and a pleasure to use.

I tried a few PFAS-free dental flosses that were horrible. I settled on Reach Waxed - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005IHMXEQ

How am I supposed to keep track of things like this? Between all the chemicals, boycotts, etc etc etc I don't know how I'm supposed to use any modern product again. (Or primitive product, for that matter.) It's honestly driven me to apathy. I just don't have the bandwidth to worry about it.

Make all your own food. Even then, the crops are all loaded with Roundup and who knows what all else.

A high-fibre diet is supposed to help, as fibre can absorb toxins. To what extent I don't know. So, make your own sourdough wholewheat bread. And eat plenty of greens like broccoli, cabbage . I guess the greens are sprayed with stuff too though. As is the wheat in the bread. The fibre might counteract the effects of the sprays somewhat.

Greens I believe absorb more heavy metals.

Haven't some studies found that donating plasma helps scrub your blood?

Don’t forget about all the dihydrogen monoxide in everything these days.

I just take some sheets of aluminum foil, fold them into a hat, and then jump inside and hide from the world.

Except this isn’t true. It’s made of PTFE, which hasn’t been made with a PFA process in 15 years and is itself one of the most non reactive substances known unless you heat it to very high temperatures.

Non-reactive usually implies forever chemical.

The entire right side of the periodic table is composed exclusively of forever chemicals by this definition.

Non-reactive also means doesn’t interact chemically with other chemicals, which is a desirable thing in a plastic that might be ingested. While maybe not awesome that it sits in silt not reacting to the end of time, if it also doesn’t react with anything in your body, it’s safe to take into your body, no?

The problem with some PFAS is they don’t readily degrade but they’re biologically reactive and interact with the bodies chemistry. That’s not a great feature. But it’s a huge class of chemicals, all of which are chemicals stable due to their carbon fluorine bonds - one of the most stable bonds in nature. But that doesn’t mean they can’t react in ways that don’t break the molecule apart, or form other chemicals that maintain the integrity of the C-F bond.

But it also doesn’t mean that they DO react.

Life isn’t so simple it can be reduced to a mantra like “plastic bad” or whatever. PTFE has a lot of very useful characteristics, and its lack of reactivity in the body isn’t the least of them.

If it doesn’t react with anything in your body, how would your body clear an accumulation of it?

It’s not clear which part of the comment you meant when you said it’s not true, but PTFE is a PFAS, exactly how toxic it is or isn’t I don’t think is well known yet but people have been living with PTFE implants.

The toxicity of Glide. PFAS is a very broad class of chemicals. The toxic PFAS associated with PTFEs are PFOA and PFOS, both of which were phased out in production in the 2010s.

Whenever this topic of Glide being toxic comes up they cite this article :

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/dental-fl...

Which is written based off this study:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-018-0109-y

Which is based off blood samples drawn in 2010-2013, which is at the time PFOA was being phased out of the PTFE production process due to lawsuits around the PFOA toxicity, which DuPont was aware of. The new process using GenX (seriously), which is known to cause problems too but at a lesser extreme than PFOA. However the issue with PTFE was with the residuals of PFOA which you don’t find in commercial PTFE for GenX.

And yes, PTFE is widely used in medical implants and devices.

Can you recommend a brand of floss that is not coated in toxins?

I like Radius Sponge Floss and switched to it after I heard about the issues with Glide.

This is at best an incomplete, complacent position to take.

Homo plasticus has polluted the atmosphere and oceans, exploited topsoil and groundwater to the point of long-term destruction, and made polymers part of the global food supply. [1,2,4]

> Used to be if you survived to reproduce, you were doing pretty good.

Used to be.

And if you were lucky, you lived in a stable democracy instead of any one of the variants of violent dictatorship.

Fertility levels are in steep decline. Today's children will grow to adulthood in a world abused to the point of global disaster. [3]

Things have changed for the worse in ways that our species has never before faced.

= = =

[1]_ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/in-a-first-micropl... , https://www.theseacleaners.org/news/microplastics-in-human-b...

[2]_ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2023/06/16/humans-...

[3]_ https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230327-how-pollution-is...

[4]_ https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/07/1123462

> Things have changed for the worse in ways that our species has never before faced.

This question of "facing things" is what bothers me. Sure, science and technology is difficult and has awful side effects. Progress is a complex vector, and it isn't easy to have 'purpose' (telos) see where we should be going.

But what I see here every day is very intelligent, witty, well read people ... using their intelligence against themselves. The extraordinary intellectual acrobatics of denial and apologetics just makes me weep. And so many who just down-vote challenging questions but lack the patience and courage to form an argument.

>so many who just down-vote challenging questions but lack the patience and courage to form an argument.

Fear of the unknown is an impetus for herd mentality.

Hopefully your comment ceases to be gray…

Just been thinking about your remark about "gray". Like am I really so dull? Wow! I just realised that people who use some regular browsers see down-voted comments as kinda faded out. That's really sinister but also quite funny and in character with the dystopian creed.

How about adding random characters and line noise to unpopular comments, or replacing odd words to make them seem more deranged and subtract credibility? That wo ld g1ve the "hacker-like" #eel 00f marg1nal comments ^e$inG aT th33 3nd of s0me %$(k3d Up dd^H^H^Hddddistant dddddial-up modem w$)th iiiine noize insert hippopotamus hatstands sleep furiously

Can you hear me?

> And so many who just down-vote challenging questions but lack the patience and courage to form an argument

this is a lame attempt to flatter our intelligence but then criticize for not engaging on what are essentially marketing platforms where the stakes are usually zero, and there is no way to demonstrably prove that we're not shills, morons, or GPT bots.

You owe yourself more self-respect. You're probably in the 0.1% of people who could make a difference.

thank you for the kind words, but i am definitely a shill, moron, and/or AI bot.

sorry, denial/apologetics of what? could you expand on this a bit? thanks!

Why is the average height in the US getting taller every year? Shouldn't it be shrinking if each generation is allegedly less healthy?

This assumes height is universal proxy for health. Marfan Syndrome will make you taller, but it doesn't mean you're more healthy.

> Fertility levels are in steep decline.

and IVF works. (yes, it's a bit more risky than the Nike method - just do it, yes, it's expensive, but having kids is a lot more expensive usually.)

the linked BBC article seems to contradict its title ("For the majority of men with fertility problems, the cause remains unexplained")

also, mixing up ability and willingness to have kids is just fucking revolting. of course a lot of people are don't have kids, because bad journalism takes away people's joy. well, also this little thing called ladder pulling, and the usual coordination problems (NIMBYs, etc)

> Used to be if you survived to reproduce, you were doing pretty good. Extra points if you got to watch your kids grow up.

  " I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night, half an
  hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work
  twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission
  to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and
  dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah." [0]

WTAF is it with this "noble savage" glorification of mythical past miseries as a way to avoid thinking about how massively we've screwed up as a civilisation? That sort of response is a "Don't look up" level of avoidance and rationalising.

[0] https://python.mzonline.com/sketches/wewerepoor/

I actually think this is the opposite of noble savage imagery, and that's actually what you're doing. They're not saying things were better in the past when technology was more primative, you're the one saying that the past was better and that getting to where we are now how we have is "screwing up" something (presumably a good thing that existed in the past that is no longer present).

lol that's definitely not what he's doing, way to miss the point

unless you're actually arguing for toxic chemicals in the water that didn't exist more than 60 years ago

> way to miss the point

All of those commenters deconstructing my clumsy use of "Noble Savage" (I admit it's not quite the right thing) - are indeed (maybe wilfully) missing the point.

A better expression might be the "Parochialism of the present". But that doesn't quite get to it. Nor even Thomas Hobbes' flowery and overblown conceit of past life as "Nasty, brutish and short".

It's about a phenomenon of lionising a one dimensional idea of "progress" in a patently self-deceiving way.

Noble savage doesn't mean that you think the environment of the past was better than the present, it means that you think the people were better before being corrupted by civilisation. I.e. it's about thinking that the changing environment under progress corrupts humans, which is the opposite of what the person you are replying to is saying and is exactly what the person they're replying to is saying...

Noble savage = humans fundamentally corrupted by civilisational progress

Then I am mistaken in my labelling. Maybe something more like the "pathetic savage"?

Or what other name might we give to this phenomenon of dismissing extinction level mistakes with the appeal to the idea that "hey, it's progress"?

I think "bad tradeoffs" is the term you're looking for. If you think the negative outcome has infinite negative value, there's not really a lot that can be said to that as it becomes a Pascal's wager.

If you don't acknowledge any of the tradeoffs involved in pollution and instead just make a point about harm in a vacuum, it's hard to know how to consider it.

No, I think everyone recognises tradeoffs here and your belief that I'm creating a dichotomy is unwarranted. I'm addressing distorted perception of the parameters of tradeoffs.

Like the overwhelming exceptionalism of how we all care about the environment and the future health of our children... just don't take our gas-guzzling cars and non-stick pans way!

We are not rational beings, but we so deeply believe we are.

Im on my 4th electric car, every single one has been remarkable in terms of cost, build quality, innovation etc.

If the cybertruck was out a year earlier, I suspect I know a few people driving "gas guzzling" trucks that would have bought that instead, because it would have been cheaper, faster, and in almost every measurable and unmeasurable quality, better.

Why do you think people will forever hold on to ICE? It strikes me that electric cars are a step change in almost every way, maybe the reason people still have ICE is they didnt have a compatible electric alternative at the time.

The way these people talk about the past makes it sound like people in the past were somehow perfectly stoic in the face of discomfort or disease, but it's extremely easy to find historical documents showing that this isn't the case. I think the reason people fall into this "noble savage" trap is because they (rightfully) can't imagine living without modern technologies like refridgerators and flushing toilets, and therefore (wrongfully) conclude that the people in the past were simply more rugged to be able to live without it.

Also, as you say, it's an easy way to explain away our problems, to say that people in the past were better and if they were here today then they wouldn't be complaining like we are.

You have also entirely missed the point

I thought I was agreeing with you, what was your point then?

I think the parent comment made a reasonable point and did so in a calm manner. It in no way overplayed the misery of the past (I'd argue it vastly underplayed it).

Now, to your contention that "we've screwed up as a civilisation". What do you mean exactly? What civilization and when did the screwing up start?

> I think the parent comment made a reasonable point and did so in a calm manner.

As I have pointed out in other remarks here today, calmness reasonableness do not make a bad position good. If anything they add a palatable veneer to the harm.

> It in no way overplayed the misery of the past

I completely disagree. The idea that in the past people were "lucky to see their children grow up" is dramatic, and a tautology anyway since we are all "lucky" to see our children grow up in any epoch. It paints a needlessly bleak picture of some awful past that technological progress is implied to have eliminated with justifiable costs.

> What do you mean exactly? What civilization?

Actually, you know what. You're right [0].

"What do I think of Western civilisation? I think it would be a very good idea."

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

> I completely disagree. The idea that in the past people were "lucky to see their children grow up" is dramatic, and a tautology anyway since we are all "lucky" to see our children grow up in any epoch. It paints a needlessly bleak picture of some awful past that technological progress is implied to have eliminated with justifiable costs.

You got me there, I do think the costs for (almost) eliminating famine and diseases with double-digit mortality rates are justifiable. That said you didn't really answer my question, but I'll roll with it.

Consider the extinction of megafauna [0], the deforestation of China [1] or Mesopotamian farming practices [2]. It would be hard to blame these on Western civilization (real or imagined). I'd say we have been operating in the same unsustainable way for a long time. I wish it were otherwise because it would make everything easier.

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2013.325... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003101822... [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.128.3334.1251

> you didn't really answer my question

Fair remark, I brushed it off.

> when did this start?

It started when science and technology changed from something we do, into something we believe in.

I don't think that actually happened any time around the Enlightenment of even the Industrial Revolution, but we're definitely deep in it now. I'll leave you to put the pin in the map.

Also, the cause and effect are not so simple. It's not as if we changed our culture and beliefs, and then embarked on a century of planet-destroying madness. Rather, like the sunk-cost bias of an addict, we realised we are on a bad road, labelled that as "inevitable", surrendered before the forces of "technological determinism" and found we had no choice but to believe.

But that was a false choice.

Obsessing about ‘how we screwed up’ instead of actually working on making things better is a sign of clinical depression. FYI.

Sorry to hear that's what's eating you my friend [0]. Just hit the Xanax, heh? But as soon as you feel well come and join the rest of us working on making things better.

[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/projection

This comment is known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm.

Cause I really need my water to be non-stick.

I feel like we’ve missed a branding opportunity in the bottled water scene with this one. “Non-stick water” can be listed right next to the “Glutton Free” on the label

It's true but other risks are usually discrete. PFAS exposure continously decreases your health while driving a car has no effect on your health until you get into an accident.

The risk calculation feels different in those cases.

Cars impact your health if you would have otherwise used some form of self propelled transportation (i.e. walking).

> I think what's changed most is our standards. Used to be if you survived to reproduce, you were doing pretty good

With so many people deciding to go childless i am not so sure.

Lots of deliberately-missing-the-point by crusaders posting to your point, @nostrademons. Yes it's bad there's plastic in rainwater, they bang on about that like they've thought of something you missed.

But I agree we live with so many other risks, there may conceivably be better windmills to tilt.

Heart disease dominates the US health problems. Maybe we could do something about food in America. Something we can actually do something about, with a measurable improvement in living.

And so on.

PFAS, plastics etc.. are all related to food in America.

Sure; but not related to health in the same way as the egregious use of fats and sugar. Start with first-order causes of health issues, then when that's dealt with move on to second-order and so on.

I mean, are you arguing this is somehow a bad development?

“Sorry kid, but at least your dad got to see you ride your first bike, chalk that up to win, used to be much worse! You know, DuPont and 3M can’t give ground all the time.”

It is very hard to read about the cancer clusters in WV/OH around the heavy PFAS sites and not feel some extreme disgust at how bad it got and feel thankful that this is getting significant attention.

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