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Comment by llamaimperative | Hacker News Reader

Victorian era London: "Just inhaling the air I can taste all sorts of particulate that people say is 'bad for you.' Knowing that it's bad is literally worthless junkformation."

While you are relatively powerless to prevent exposure to these compounds, you actually can advocate for stronger controls on them at the societal level. Not sure if you've noticed but we do indeed have a fertility crisis, and there's good reason to suspect compounds like these and the fatalistic Laissez-Faire attitude toward them hold a substantial amount of the blame.

Unless of course the leap you're really making is from "this fact is inconvenient" to "this fact is therefore false."

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This is why people stopped putting Arsenic in expensive wallpaper. But I guess people would have considered that worthless junk information in Victorian times too

In Victorian London most of the bakers also adulterated their flour to make cheaper, whiter bread. (Bread was the main staple food, consumed in large quantities by most people.) Adulterants included plaster of Paris, bean flour, chalk, ground-up bone, and in particular alum, which caused all sorts of health problems.

My problem is that this junkformation is literally junk: WTF am I supposed to do with it? It's way too broad and vague to be useful for anything; no specific materials or products were named and they even admit they can't comment on other color plastics because they didn't research.

So it's worthless junkformation. It's not inconvenient, it's probably not false, it's also a spectacular waste of my time.

Uhhh you're supposed to go get pissed off at and vote against politicians who are failing to protect you and your kids, or write letters to them requesting action, or go talk to your compatriots to inspire them to do the same, duh.

These things are tractable. We have solved similar problems countless times in the past. You know what it took? The general public deciding to give a fuck and demand action from their elected representatives.

If it's that much of a waste of your time, what are you doing here in the comment section? You could've written a letter to your representative in the time you sat here complaining about the impossibility of action. Instead you decided to sit here and actively deter other people from stepping up to the plate to actually fix the damn thing, too.

>vote against politicians who are failing to protect you and your kids,

And I do. Most of the people here will likely call me a heretical bigoted fascist for the way I vote, though.

>write letters to them requesting action,

Literal waste of time, ink and paper.

>go talk to your compatriots to inspire them to do the same,

Been there, done that.

>what are you doing here in the comment section?

Pointing out this junkformation is just that: Junk.

Again, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this junkformation? There's nothing of substance here, nothing for me to do anything with.

"Black plastic bad!"? Okay, and? Y'all got something I can actually work with? Show me something I can give a damn about and I will.

If not, this is a waste of my time. I'll note that my time only becomes more valuable as I get older (and more jaded), too.

I just described several things you could do, and your response was “literal waste of time.”

So yeah, I guess you can’t do anything. You specifically, as an individual, are powerless. I mean you “chose” to make yourself powerless and are somehow wearing it as a badge of intelligence and pride or whatever, but yeah, at the end of the day you’re just neutering yourself. Brave! Smart! Patriotic! Etc.

Everything good in the world originated from people who didn’t opt out of the hard work of solving problems, but anyone is free to be a free rider in our society, I suppose.

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