Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything | Hacker News Reader

Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything

smithsonianmag.com

420 pointsHooke173 comments

Today there is a one woman campaign against lead in consumer products by Tamara Rubin. [1] Unfortunately she doesn't know how to make a professional looking website and doesn't have a degree as a doctor (which would be of no value in her endeavor- operating an XRF tester and posting the results). She is however trained and certified in performing XRF tests and has probably done more XRF testing of consumer products than any other human being. Her testing has been verified independently when the CPI initiated recalls of for example baby bottles after her initial reporting.

I found her information after one of my children tested high for lead levels even though there are no lead paint issues in our neighborhood.

The highest risk for severe lead contamination is still things from our past. Painting can still be dangerous- some houses still have original lead paint that has been painted on top of or they could have a deck that was painted with marine paint (which is still allowed to have lead). Another higher risk level is antique dishware.

In modern products lead and other heavy metal contamination issues are still somewhat widespread, but thankful at much lower levels than in the past- to the point that most people won't test high for heavy metals. But unfortunately it's possible to accidentally buy the wrong products and get unsafe exposure levels.

We only really have safety standards for products marketed to kids (e.g. baby bottles). If the same level of contamination exists on a small plate that is used by a child, it won't be recalled. For consumers it is often impossible to know if there is heavy metal contamination in a product. California's Prop 65 warning often indicates an issue with lead, but the issue could just be that the company didn't want to bother testing for lead in their product.

I think it is worthwhile to try to transition cookware and drinkware towards materials that are known to almost always be lead and heavy metal free- Stainless steel, cast iron, and clear glass. Additionally, this becomes another reason to eat whole foods since the manufacturing processes can also cause low levels of contamination.

[1] https://tamararubin.com/

Wow! This is a great website. And it looks fine.

And she replies in the comments. Sad quote:

> If you look above in this article there is a list of 49 things we have tested so far (49/245 published articles, and that is going to bump to 55 this week) that have all tested safe by the strictest standards – that’s about 20%.

https://tamararubin.com/2025/01/daves-killer-bread-thin-slic...

Note that that includes prenatal vitamins. None tested so far, including some of the most high-end ones on the market, meet the standard.

I think the site UX is more a feature than a bug (though probably unintentional, regardless).

If she had some super-slick SPA website that looked like a million bucks, I'd wonder where her funding was coming from. Whether it's true or not, this looks much more like someone who doesn't really know what they're doing just threw the site up to get the message out and cover her costs w/ some affiliate sales. I'm inclined to trust this more than something more "professional."

> this looks much more like someone who doesn't really know what they're doing just threw the site up to get the message out

It's a typical wordpress blog. I wouldn't expect someone who doesn't really know what they're doing to end up with a functional blog full of CSS/JS, with a comment section, that's also optimized for performance and SEO

There are some curious design/graphics choices, but we've certainly come a long way from what people who didn't really know what they were doing were accomplishing on geocities (https://geocities.restorativland.org/RainForest/Vines/)

> we've certainly come a long way from what people who didn't really know what they were doing were accomplishing on geocities (https://geocities.restorativland.org/RainForest/Vines/)

You may not be criticizing the Geocities folks (little difficult to tell with the word choice), yet I never really get why people rag on these types of Geocities sites so much. Sure, there were a large number that were "perpetually under construction." In many ways, I'd still prefer if a larger portion of the web had the freedom to simply put up this kind of site, about whatever they happened to be personally interested in, and if sites like Geocities had continued to prosper, rather than being sold to the rancor pit. It's all so homogenized now.

Looking through the site listed, there's almost nothing to condemn. Coral reef page [1], mostly somebody who likes coral reefs and provided links to university references. [1] An attempt at a photo blog or vacation photo site before there were any public places available to host, using their own design. [2] A quick page somebody threw up for a marketing summit. [3] A fan-zine website about a band from the 90's [4] A personal website (with a slightly garish color design) yet attempts at personal info, photos, and blogging. [5]

They're all rather different, there's a bunch of ideas about how to structure a website, they use a bunch different concepts about what it means to have your own "personal" location on the world wide web. They're far less homogenized than most of what amounts to current social media. And out of the ~1000, there's very few that looking back on after 20-30 years are anything to be especially embarrassed about creating or attempting to maintain.

The entire platform gave 1000's (maybe larger) a chance to experiment with a new technology in a relatively "free" environment, that probably resulted in many going on to develop further in their own web design skills and perspective on the world wide web. How much does almost anybody get these days (especially in terms of personal skills) by putting up a text message social media repository location, or a FB / Meta page?

Anyways, large aside. TL;DR "would prefer if more of the web had the free-form nature of Geocities with less condemnation of newbies attempts."

[1] https://geocities.restorativland.org/RainForest/Vines/1655/

[2] https://geocities.restorativland.org/RainForest/Vines/1775/i...

[3] https://geocities.restorativland.org/RainForest/Vines/2072/

[4] https://geocities.restorativland.org/RainForest/Vines/2393/

[5] https://geocities.restorativland.org/RainForest/Vines/2581/

Lead in Sensodyne toothpaste? How does this even happen?

corporate greed and a lack of adequate government regulation.

> some houses still have original lead paint that has been painted on top of

I was under the impression that various governmental safety bodies said that was safe so long as it remained undisturbed?

And then the owners start renovating and disturb it.

It’s unlikely to be a truly safe situation since paint wears down and chips off. It’s most dangerous though whenever there is repainting which involves sanding existing paint.

those cases are usually what's called out as when it becomes unsafe.

It's safe as long as it's on the wall but chipping needs to be addressed and for sanding/demo proper PPE/followup cleaning needs to happen. If you maintain the surface you're fine as far as any existing testing shows, usually you want to just remove any loose chips, clean the surface and paint over it so you don't need to deal with more in depth remediation.

If you have particularly destructive kids/pets/people around you may want to do more.

Any chemists here able to comment on the recent lead test kits around? Eg lumetallix.com and detectlead.com. I have one and like it but don’t know how accurate it is.

Had some leaded Pyrex among other things

I’m not a chemist, but:

As I understand it, the biggest source of lead that gets inside people is paint, especially where windows rub against it. And sometimes lead paint has been painted over but can still become airborne when abraded. I would be surprised if these tests can detect it.

Get an XRF test instead — this will quantify the amount of lead at or even under the surface. You can do this by getting a lead testing contractor to come over, and a friendly one will test as many spots as you like in a single visit. Or I suppose you could try to buy the machine, but it isn’t cheap.

(Wirecutter says the main ingredient in these fluorescence tests is methylammonium bromide.)

Unfortunately I couldn't find anyone to show up with an XRF kit - nobody in Europe seems to take lead paint seriously.

Was lead paint as widespread in Europe as it was in North America?

It varied by region. The Netherlands banned it almost a century ago. Ireland in the early 90's IIRC.

> nobody in Europe seems to take lead paint seriously

Do you live in an older property or do you think there might be a significant amount of lead-containing paint in your living/working environment?

(Not suggesting lead isn't a problem, but I've dealt with a bunch of much, much more toxic substances [full disclosure: PhD Chem])

FWIW, the UK banned lead paint over 30 years ago, lead water pipes 55 years ago, and leaded petrol 25 years ago.

There's a paper suggesting lead pollution may be approaching natural background levels https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i40/Lead-pollution-approache...

Yes, and we owned a 200 year old cottage in Ireland that definitely had leaded paint, and I needed to take paint chips and mail them to the US to get them tested because nobody in Ireland took me seriously. I had a newborn at the time, too.

> we owned a 200 year old cottage in Ireland that definitely had leaded paint [..] I had a newborn at the time, too

Not a great combo.

"In the home, lead pipes, red lead paint on metal work, leaded paint on windowsills, bannisters, door frames and doors can still exist. Lead paint was common before the 1970s and although lead paint has not been used after 1992, prior to this UK paint may have contained up to 50% lead by weight (500,000 mg/kg), which is potentially capable of causing lead poisoning in a small child if they eat just a single flake. Leaded paint at these concentrations may still be found in non-remediated Victorian properties, often below newer non-leaded paint."

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/lead-poisoning-ad...

and

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/lead-exposure-in-...

Although one shouldn't underestimate potential lead contamination in soils, too. As an undergrad I recall doing a lab in which we had to look for heavy metal contamination in the soil in a nearby public park, starting at the edge of the park right next to a busy road, and then taking samples towards the centre of the park. Unsurprisingly there was measurably higher contamination close to the road, falling away with distance from the road.

Nobody there will be wanting to tell ye about mycotoxins produced by water-damaged building materials over 35%-50% indoor humidity, either.

We did a lot to address that issue, at least.

For the reader: can only replace the building materials, or move, to address this issue.

Because there is no evidence that they harm the majority of people in real environments? That is, they typically never reach concentrations high enough to be a concern.

Good luck.

You could probably mitigate that with an oil-based primer and then oil- or water-based topcoats depending on the compatibility of the primer. I've gotten good adhesion on old oil-based paints just washing them with TSP substitute and then priming over the top without scuff-sanding.

Surprising, since the EU near-total ban on lead.

I think this extends beyond lead. Americans love tests, and Europeans are more like the person that is scared of going to the doctor because who knows what they will find.

In France we have obligatory 'diagnostic' of house sold, including many thing like asbestos but also lead paint.

We use a 20 000€ machine with radioactive material to measure the amount of lead, so not everyone can get it but you can definitely ask a technician to do it.

Cost around 300€, depends of the house size and he checks every single part of every single room that can contain lead paint. Very tedious.

I know that the same laboratory we send asbestos for measurement also did lead measurement.

If you got only a few place you are concerned, you could scrape it yourself and sent it to them.

Otherwise it's considered that lead in paint is only dangerous when the paint is old and it fall down, so that kids could eat it or if you're repainting the window and you scrub it without mask.

To my knowledge, the lead pipe are much more dangerous because there is nothing you can do. It's all city property and even if you don't drink city water, you still get poisoning from factory and restaurant using that water to make food.

> We use a 20 000€ machine with radioactive material

I’m reasonably confident that these machines use electrically powered X-ray generators and that no radioactivity is involved.

you are reasonably wrong then. my device has a cadmium 109 source, emitting 740 MBq when i bought it.

Lumping up all "Europe" into one is quite misleading. For example in France when buying/selling a property a detailed lead investigation performed by a professional is obligatory. To the level of what wall has what concentration. Plus all explanation of potential risks, etc.

How carefully you read and understand a report depends on multiple factors, but definitely there are many people in Europe that take lead paint seriously.

I'm also not a chemist but I've heard that at least some lead test kits are meant only for paint. I recently was looking for lead free solder and I ran into a lot of reviews about how the solder triggered a lead test but apparently the strips people were using also reacted with copper (which was supposed to be in the solder)

> I recently was looking for lead free solder [...]

I went looking for leaded solder(!) recently.

Turned out it's got quite hard to buy in the EU, but I was able to purchase it online from a US supplier and have it shipped.

I needed leaded solder recently too for a vintage audio project, I'm in the UK and while it was a bit of a faff to track it down initially I was able to order some locally. Might get better shipping buying from the UK next time!

I don't know where you guys are looking - both Farnell and RS Components, which are UK based and among the suppliers I use the most at work, stock leaded solder. There are other suppliers more local to me that stock it as well.

It's not like it's banned or anything, it's just not allowed to be used in (most) consumer electronics.

That's odd I remember checking Farnell because I use them myself, I guess I must have forgotten my coffee that day and missed it.

There have been reports of RS Online having refused orders from UK consumers saying that:

"It is restricted to professional users and cannot be supplied to the general public (non-trade customers)"

Are RS Online gold-plating the regulations? Probably. I bought from Digikey USA instead.

i've used a similar test but found it has false positives with zinc -- and so many things have zinc

A lot of Zinc plating (almost all galvanizing) has lead in it. It’s a common component of lead/zinc alloys (many Zamac alloys).

Lead in general is also a common component of ‘impure’ zinc (from the mine/foundry).

So chances are, your tests are correct.

Zamac alloys do not contain lead, except as a tiny amount of impurity (because we don't know how to completely remove it). Zamac is often confused for the more general "pot metal", which is a anything goes if it melts in a pot (that is on your kitchen stove!), lead often is in these, but the goal of people who use pot metal is cheap and don't worry about quality, such alloys make be as much as 50% lead because nobody cares (there is an upper limit, but defined more by it will no longer make it past the warranty).

Please keep your terms correct. Zamac is a very useful thing to look for in hobby metal casting because you can buy ingots for fairly cheap that will melt in your kitchen (I would still do it outside) and have useful known properties thus ensuring good results. Pot metal is a low quality product that you could also work with in your kitchen, but you have no idea what the results will be.

It seems to be quite sensitive, down to the nanogram level. This paper has some more details: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.3c06058

Some of the authors of that paper founded Lumetallix.

In the US, crime basically kept increasing until the 1990s and have been on a downward trend ever since. If you've fallen for the modern crime panic, it's completely manufactured. Look at any graph that goes back 40+ years and then tell me what the trend is.

The reason for this is hotly debated.

One theory is that it coincides with being 18 years or so after abortion was legalized [1]. The argument is that not forcing people to be parents who don't want to be and aren't equipped to be as well as this skewing to lower socioeconomic status. The link between poverty and crime has been well-established going back to Ancient Greece. In some ways, this is an uncomfortable argument because it's basically eugenics. In support of this, abortion access varied state-to-state by up to several years and the trends tend to follow that.

But this is a US-specific argument and I believe the trend was present in other countries.

The second big argument is removing lead from gasoline (in particular, but also water because of lead pipes) [2].

I really wonder what societal problems and public health incidents in the future will come down to micro-plastics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

My pet theory is the proliferation of digital entertainment options, and gaming / online culture. There are a lot more ways to keep yourself occupied inside, so less reason to go out and get into trouble.

Pretty sure I heard this theory held by social scientists as well.

Not just digital, this trend started back in the analog TV era. Gaming consoles certainly contributed as well.

Note that the decrease in crime coincides with a decrease in teen pregnancy, but also a decrease in fertility rates in general.

And there's claim that lead is maybe overrated after all https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead

Thanks for this analysis. It says:

> With all said and done, it is abundantly clear that the effect of lead on IQ is overestimated and studies claiming that there’s no lower-bound for negative effects have not been adequately testing their hypothesis. Instead of effects of lead, what they've really been testing has largely been stratification of lead exposures by various causes of variation in IQ.

It's because people learned that alcohol damages the fetus.

1990s was the time that the AIDS epidemic took hold. Lots of needle-sharing addicts died, reducing the number of crimes needed to support their habits. AIDS also affected the prison population, further reducing the number of active criminals.

I'm pretty sure a lot of small to y planes use leaded gas....

Correct me if I'm wrong though cuz iv always wondered how bad the fumes would be to a community thats near a busy airport.

Iv always hear jokes about how lead is the miracle element....its great for so many things and pushing efficiency in many areas....but the human body just can't stand it at all.

Indeed, I live near a seaport and there are many a day where the wind blows the fumes in our direction. I do know that the larger seaplanes use lead free fuel but the smaller planes do as I understand it.

Go sample the air and find out, be a hero

There were many, many studies.

Answer: minimal, but measurable, compared to other sources.

So worth getting rid of eventually, but not a major priority.

Scott Manley has a very detailed video[0] about usage of lead in aviation fuel, for smaller piston aircraft.

From my perspective, it’s absolutely ludicrous that we still allow lead to be used in any kind of fuel at all.

[0]: https://youtu.be/8zfIy17q9sE?si=f9K31eeecOde_YzO

It’s disappointing but predictable. Lead use by a subset of small piston aircraft is several orders of magnitude less than when cars used leaded gas. So the general public doesn’t care that much, but aircraft owners care a great deal.

That’s a voting block which often ends up being appeased in a democracy.

Small aircraft owners would happily pay a slight premium to get rid of leaded gas because doing so would eliminate the biggest avenue by which Karens complain about them.

The FAA is the big hurdle. IIRC they recently just approved some fuel as a replacement but I'm not sure if it was a "go start selling it" type of approval or if it's some sort of intermediary approval and there's further ring kissing to be done before people can actually buy it.

There was a huge amount of lobbying in the 1970’s which says otherwise.

The small Aircraft market is tiny and diverse as aircraft last a long time and many past manufacturers have failed. So, there wasn’t a viable alternative for many airplanes owners who couldn’t just swap to some other fuel or certified engine at the time. It’s been 50 years and people are still making the same arguments.

Uh, no. It's because when plane engines break they fall out of the sky onto things. They break when they aren't correctly modified to take the new fuel. It is not very realistic to mandate conversions for all of the (often quite old) planes today- like from manufacturers going out of business. It is not trivial to convert an engine, fuel system etc. and also meet the same performance so that things like stall and thrust and altitude are still accurate across the important ranges.

In practice, it's a choice between:

1. Banning or buying out older planes at not-insignificant cost 2. Swapping fuels and doing your best to get people to fix their planes, causing crashes 3. Playing it slow, requiring new planes to be compatible with lead-free fuel, building new lead-free infrastructure, and gradually encouraging people to transition

Currently we're doing 3 until it's determined that 1 is cheap enough to do. That said the FAA could certainly be doing more, but that's much more (IMO) on them not taking the issue seriously than on voters being appeased. Its a national agency, not the local school board.

Lead in cars was banned in the 1970’s, any actual transition would have long been played out by now. A “this will be outlawed in 30 years” would have hit in 20 years ago.

Instead the people convinced regulators to simply wait until some hypothetical perfect alternative could be made.

I really have a hard time taking such opinions seriously.

The kind of people screeching about the safety of a small user of lead are the same kind of people who will screech about planes falling out of the sky at marginally higher or lower rates. There isn't political will to pay your way out of the problem or screw people over at the barrel of a gun so the end result is you can't have your cake and eat it too. You may as well complain about the laws of physics.

Some, Aircraft manufactured after the 1970’s are still using leaded fuel.

Yet, Private Jets aren’t using leaded fuel. It’s just piston aircraft and thus a fraction of general aviation who benefits by avoiding a transition that could have finished a long time ago.

I don’t care about people using those aircraft, but the public is being harmed at 2 grams / gallon that shit adds up quickly around many small airports.

Until I saw that video, I had no idea about the level of compatibility required to change over to a new fuel type. Since the lead-free fuel would need to be compatible with the plane you're putting it in (e.g. seals, pipes) as well as other fuels that it could be mixed with.

If by "toy" you mean R/C aircraft, that's usually not even gasoline, but a mix of methanol and nitromethane, no lead in sight (and these days you'll find a lot more R/C stuff that's battery-powered instead). But when you move over to the general aviation world, yes, leaded gas is still the rule rather than the exception. While 100 LL has less lead than the older 100/130, it still has far more than even now-phased-out leaded auto gas. There are some aviation diesels that run on jet fuel, but they're few and far between (and sometimes vaporware), and aviation engines certified for auto fuel aren't very common, either.

Methanol? Yikes!

He's referring to glow fuel[1]. I would not suggest drinking it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glow_fuel

The good news is we in GA are finally getting reasonable 100LL replacements like G100UL and Swift 100R - and not just in the lab, but rolling out at airports. The best time for this to have happened would have been two decades ago: the second best time is this year.

Busy airports tend to imply jets which use lead free fuel. While small airplanes that use lead fuel can land at those large busy airports, they avoid it. Those airports have high landing fees and because of the amount of traffic are harder to navigate. (there are lots of other issues - as a pilot)

Small airports that are not busy compared to the large ones above can still see a fair amount of traffic and that is likely to be lead fueled.

Look up GAMI100UL.

Slowly the industry is moving but it requires an STC for both the engine and the airframe. It's an expensive and slow process.

Plus it's only available at like 3 airports right now

I am not sure why we are taping lead onto pickleball paddles where it can fall off in the gyms where children play on the floors.

Especially when alternatives like tungsten tape exist.

Hello - there is a comment thread below about my work.

Not sure how to respond within the thread, but I thought people here might be interested in watching the documentary film that I directed and produced on the subject of Lead poisoning. It has interviews with top experts and music donated by the Who and Tom Waits. Jon Fishman (drummer of Phish) is an executive producer of the project too (I helped his family when his kiddo tested positive for Lead). Here's the link to the film on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMbhbwMhs1U&t=7s - There are also lots of videos showing different lead testing methods (and discussing issues with various methods) on my YouTube channel.

Thanks for checking it out.

Getting lead out of our environments (housing stock, schools, etc) would do wonders to improving quality of life for so many people globally. Not just for those directly poisoned by it. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

Allison Hayes is another person who campaigned against lead--this time in vitamin supplements--which lead to a change in FDA rules. She was a frequent actor in Roger Corman's B-movies which is where I first encountered her. She suffered disability from the lead in Calcium supplements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allison_Hayes

> which lead to a change in FDA rules.

This seems like a relevant typo.

> “Many times … I met men who employed foreign-born labor because it was cheap and submissive, and then washed their hands of all responsibility,” she wrote. “They deliberately chose such men because it meant … a surplus of eager, undemanding labor.”

Interesting parallels to today...

If this was today people would say it's your personal right to consume lead and use leaded gas (aka freedom fuel) and we'd never be able to remove it lol

Reading the headline I was imagining the euphemistic “get the lead out” and wondered if this would be about handling procrastination. It is not. :-)

One would probably assume that there are lots of derelict lead mines everywhere since the world decided to stop using lead...

Unfortunately, lead mining today is pretty much stable[1], with only slight decreases in production volumes.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264871/production-of-lea...

Meanwhile PFAS is in everything, including some paper and carboard (so don't burn it) and very little sign of it being regulated, much less stopped.

See: - https://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas...

- https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/dan...

... or just use the search engine of your choice.

Minnesota has enacted some pretty strong and broad bans on PFAS already in effect with more to be phased in over the next 7 years. Food packaging, firefighting foam, cookware, and a broad selection of consumer products.

https://www.pca.state.mn.us/air-water-land-climate/2025-pfas...

"How dare they enfringe on the free speech of corporations using their free speech to freely sell freedom-pfas to American citizens ? I hope the agency overseeing this communist-woke crusade against free speech is going to get DOGEd out of existence" /sarcasm (but, barely)

3M's decades-long litigation about PFAS:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=PFAS+3M

And even after the settlements ever get resolved and it's no longer being produced in developed countries, economics says they'll just ship the waste to LDCs.

I hear it's more efficient to not worry about these things.

> She broke gender barriers in the broader sciences that opened stodgy male-dominated fields to women. And her approach to social justice—combining evidence-based research, interdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement—remains the blueprint for nearly all public health and policy fights today, from the smallest neighborhood disputes to global battles over pollution, natural resources and climate change.

You might say that we all follow her lead. (She led the way)

You’re plumbing new depths of humour there.

Plumbing? I think of it a /refining/ the presentation of the argument. Or /distilling/, if you will...

Lead's symbol is Pb, from plumbum. Which is where the word plumb/plumbing comes from.

Yeah yeah, I was joking about leaded gas refining/distilling. :-)

and yet

One in Four US Households Likely Exceed New Soil Lead Guidance Levels

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GH00...

The whole lead poisoning scandals are really great examples of how capitalism/free markets have serious limits to what they can achieve. They should should be seen as a useful tool to help make certain markets more efficient and not as an ideology to embraced without limitations.

Even when consumers understood that leaded petrol for example was contaminating the air and water with carcinogens that harmed many many people especially babies and small children the market still had demanded leaded petrol and that demand was catered to by companies making huge profits and scientists deemed that there was no safe threshold.

It's been speculated that the fall of the Roman Empire can be partially attributed to prevalence of lead pipes and leaded drinking vessels. When a critical mass of elites/rulers have lead poisoning there was a subsequent collapse of those societies.

In short it's basically a national security issue even if it does make fuel cheaper and more effective.

What if your elites/rulers have symptoms of lead poisoning without exposure to lead?

Basically all the boomers grew up huffing leaded car exhaust. The ones who didn't become statistical fodder for the lead crime hypothesis are running the world right now. The quality of leadership in the west will probably improve overall as the boomers and early gen X get to kicking the bucket.

> It's been speculated that the fall of the Roman Empire can be partially attributed to prevalence of lead pipes and leaded drinking vessels. When a critical mass of elites/rulers have lead poisoning there was a subsequent collapse of those societies.

I agree with the other part of your text but this lead contributing to downfall of roman society is not spoken about by serious historians.

Plagues, societal evolution, mass migration, change of climate are what caused downfall of Roman empire.

As far as I know, lead would be marginal at best.

He said speculated. I've heard that speculation many times, enough to say it is true that people speculate about it.

However as you say, there is no reason to believe it is true. People should stop speculating about it.

well... yes, he was only referring to speculations but at some point if you speculate enough, it becomes true for the general population.

There need to be a 'naysayer' answering this speculation anytime it appears or with such a good story, it spreads like wild fire.

My personal stance on this: Capitalism is extremely good at hill climbing within a certain constraint set. Almost like a constraint satisfaction algorithm.

However, if the constraints are ill-posed (eg. it is possible to externalize certain costs, by outputting co2, using lead, etc.) it WILL eventually do that.

IMHO capticalism CAN work but it needs a strong government that sets the constraints to the benefit of its people. And updates those constraints once new information becomes available.

This is in stark contrast to the often seen „just deregulate everything and line goes up“ stance. This will just create a degenerate solution (monopolies, climate change, financial crises, etc).

You're correct. Without strong externally-imposed restraint, capitalism will happily externalize its costs and crush some people.

That can be said for every system. They are tools. They all become pathological when transformed into ideologies and used to try to solve every problem in one way.

>capitalism/free markets have serious limits to what they can achieve

Why do you have to take shots at capitalism/free markets? Capitalism/free markets does not automatically imply that you can harm someone health. Capitalism/free markets solely implies financial/trade freedom.

> Why do you have to take shots at capitalism

Capitalism was a straw-man invented by Marx to take shots at. Of course he has to take shots at it, that is the whole point.

Mean while what people really do is far more complex and not suitable a 30 second pot shot. The real people doing "capitalism" are too busy doing to try to make sense of just how complex human behavior is, and so don't have time to defend it in philosophy.

>Capitalism was a straw-man invented by Marx to take shots at. Of course he has to take shots at it, that is the whole point

Make perfect sense indeed...

Capitalism is more than just free trade. Trade happens between two parties. Capitalism happens between three parties. The additional party is the capitalist who neither produces the traded goods nor consumes them, but is entitled to a share of control/profit due to some kind of abstraction (e.g. property rights).

It's pretty directly related lead poisoning because in the case of mere trade both parties are close enough to the lead to have incentives to avoid it. It's quite plausible that the dynamics change significantly when you add a third party at sufficient remove to feel safe from the hazard, yet who still has a controlling stake in the transaction.

I cannot even relate to your line of reasoning - a simple concept stretched beyond it's simple original intent.

A quip that may be simple enough to work: Capitalism is to capital as monarchy is to monarch.

Take some time to think it over. You’ve been fed the idea that it’s integral to your livelihood, but never asked to consider the dictionary definition, let alone the far-reaching effects.

I'm not aware of any stretching. That's just what the word means.

Why bother create a whole new word unless you meant something other than "free trade". Wouldn't they have said "free trade" if that's what they meant?

That is a fair enough point. Most likely the way it is got this way to do with it's history and perhaps its marketing or specifically it's anti-marketing by the communists/socialists. A free market sounds less threatening so they do not use that term.

I have to imagine that when they term was coined in the 1700s, they avoided using "free markets" because they didn't have a problem with free markets. They aimed to criticize capitalists specifically since it was capitalists and not free markets that we're causing the problems.

Not propaganda, but criticism targeted enough to be constructive. To oppose something as broad as free markets would be pointless.

>I have to imagine that when they term was coined in the 1700s, they avoided using "free markets" because they didn't have a problem with free markets. They aimed to criticize capitalists specifically since it was capitalists and not free markets that we're causing the problems.

While they targeted the 'capitalists' they had an agenda to push: socialism. Free market in itself cannot be an agenda, it's too vague and simple.

I suspect they did have a problem with free markets, though it was never explicitly stated: A true free market causes enormous differences in wealth. (though everyone is better off). A difference in wealth is a big social motivator for resentment regardless of how well off the bottom most rung of society is.

Also notice the comment I responded to - the poster used the term 'capitalism/free markets' - so the poster knew exactly the connotation of capitalism ( i.e of free market).

Sometimes the overall trend in quality-of-life improvements (democratization, healthcare, education, ...) are attributed to capitalism, when in reality almost all of these positive developments happened despite the capitalistic influences, at best, but usually in grave opposition to it. Capitalism has never brought us public infrastructure and education, environmental, food and workplace protections, social welfare, or universal healthcare. All these have been heavily fought for against capitalist interests, paid for with suffering, blood and tears. Where regulation is weak, life is hell. Outspoken free market absolutists/apologists tend to be people, who think of themselves as top predators, entitled to power and influence, always privileged, yet sooo unfairly treated in a more egalitarian system. (Everybody is gangster until they get punched in the face...) I think, these days political economy is, contrary to popular belief in entrepreneurial circles, mostly in agreement about the dynamics at work here: For the general case, free markets don't work without regulation. The most important markets (existential goods) are prone to natural monopolies.

This shouldn't be surprising really, since profit doesn't relate to broader human welfare directly, how could putting selective pressure on this single metric directly cause prosperity?! It's coincidence or human confounding factors/intervention leading to good outcomes, despite any free market ideology. Without the causal link, any argument about efficiency or stability is void. Ideological capitalism, or free market absolutism is the Torment Nexus of Goodhart's Law.

Case in point, while politically we're perpetually negotiating the extent of social darwinistic fallout of the capitalistic order, knowingly, but below the radar of affect, we're spending our planet, our long-term existential foundation three times over. Now, you don't need an academically forged "capitalistic system" in place to get self-inflicted crisis, as any preindustrial culture which transformed their prosperous island into desert rock can attest (over-consumption leading to terminal erosion), it's the lack of informed regulation in the interest of humankind.

If you think profit doesn't relate to human welfare directly then I welcome you to head into any economically depressed third world village and turn it into a utopia. Oh wait, you can't maintain the sizable bureaucratic structure and intellectual workforce when over 90% of the population is engaged in subsidence farming by necessity in order to not die of starvation.

You quite literally take the productivity of capitalism for granted and assume that its products are simply the natural state of existence, and that in the absence of the evil capitalist you would have instant magical utopias. Such folly is like thinking that if you got rid of the evil and heavy pollution-spewing engine burdening your car, you would then go even faster without any of that pollution. The work being performed is vital, even though it is outside of your ideologically blinkered willful inability to understand.

The rapid growth of education depended upon capitalism and the rise of paper-making and printing operations which themselves are dependent upon profit seeking and the price discovery mechanisms. More importantly it depended upon there being a market for books a middle class which could usefully apply those results.

If you find yourself wondering "why didn't revolutionary invention X, Y, or Z take off at this period even further in the past" the usual answer you get is that they lacked an essential prerequisite for its deployment.

You are mixing everything up and honestly seem to be a bit hysteric. Nobody rang the red door. Nobody is talking about magical utopias. You can calm down and stop barking.

I made an argument for sane regulation and its role in history. Since you are not even addressing the direct casual relationship and generously conflate capitalism with industrialization, I won't engage further.

Former libertarian here. One the principals of libertarianism is that you cannot do others harm and if you do so you have to compensate them. The issue with that idea is risk management. How do you compensate someone whose products and services has killed or handicapped someone? A life for a life? Bring back the Code of Hammurabi?

The best thing we could come up with is that as long as you follow a set of risk limiting rules then you will be spared from the highest punishment.

I still wonder about all the hobbiests, including occasionally myself who might not be treating leaded solder with the caution it deserves. I use unleaded solder but I also fix older gear.

Solder is not the problem, soldering fumes do not contain vaporized lead as that would require >400C. They might and often do contain vaporized flux/colophony/resin. You reaaaaaaallllyyyy dont want to breath that thus fume extractors are a must.

Agree with this but also want to stress the importance of washing your hands after handling solder, to be sure. And any affected surfaces in your work station / area.

You don't want to accidentally ingest tiny bits of lead from the solder, and this probably goes for solder without lead too.

one of my soldering irons regularly glows cherry red hot when under usage. So far past 400 C. I don't use that every time I solder, but sometimes I do

That being said, I think the impact of the lead may be tiny compared to the rosin fumes. The real issue is someone in a factory who may handle leaded solder ever single day. The accumulated exposure over a lifetime is a big deal

There's something extremely wrong with that iron. I've had a Tenma soldering station to that once, caused by a bad thermocouple that was lying to the controller.

thermostat burned out not longer after I bought it. Good iron design, bad thermostat design. It works great for soldering pipe and bar stock together. Don't leave it plugged in for very long.

Solder is absolutely a problem. The life cycle of your part doesn't just include when you solder it. It includes anyone who has to handle it in the future, and it includes the E-Waste dump in an impoverished country that it inevitably ends up in.

Not really, metallic lead is pretty inert. Its lead compounds and lead dust that are dangerous.

recycled PCBs are often turned into dust.

Not just due to the Pb dust though, also Al, Fe, Cu, fiberglass:

"Mineralogical analysis of dust collected from typical recycling line of waste printed circuit boards" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09560...

Yes and Cu and fiberglass and the resins are especially toxic too

I have a big spool of lead solder probably from the 1980s and I store it like treasure. It’s so much better than modern solder.

You can just buy SnPb solder today, probably with better fluxes than whatever they were using in the 80s. Non-Pb solders also work fine for almost everything (I keep a little bit of SnPb around but do most of my work in lead-free), the big thing is to have a good iron and good tips. Makes way more difference than the solder composition.

I have good news for you. Leaded solder never went away. It’s still available.

Modern solder and fluxes are also likely to outperform 40 year old solder.

You can still buy brand new solder intended for medical/mil use made in Europe/Poland by Cynel

https://www.cynel.com.pl/en/?view=article&id=99:sn60pb40-pro...

Fun fact - Rambo knows his stuff and uses Cynel sn60pb40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3XRrPZRJEw&t=11

Solder spatters everywhere even if it's not vaporized. The resulting lead-bearing powder gets everywhere.

This is especially true of hand soldering. Hand soldering requires regular cleaning of the soldering iron tip. Both the common methods (brass wool and damp sponge) produce many tiny balls of solder that roll and bounce easily. They can end up caught in clothing then fall into food.

Leaded solder in electronics is not a significant source of human exposure. In jewelry, maybe, but it's unusual to use it there, and in plumbing.

For most people or specifically among those who touch electronics for a living?

Even among those who touch electronics for a living. There are occupations that do get significant lead exposure (as the article points out), but electronics technicians have never been among them, even before fume extractors were common for soldering. Metallic lead is sufficiently hard to oxidize that even most people with lead bullets embedded in their bodies don't get lead poisoning, and, at soldering temperatures, lead's vapor pressure is not sufficient to reach a toxic dose, even taking into account lead's horrific tendency to bioaccumulate.

I concur. Recommending unleaded software to hobbyists makes people irrationally hostile. I have a theory of why...

I know you’re joking, but leaded solder is significantly easier to work with on a hobbyist level.

As long as you’re washing your hands properly and avoiding contact contamination it’s not an issue.

I’m always amazed when I see people using lead-free solder for “health reasons” who then inhale all of the fumes from their flux, though.

It's significantly easier if you have grossly inadequate soldering equipment.

This is 2025, you can get properly temperature-controlled soldering irons for dirt cheap now.

Temperature control isn't usually the real problem, it's insufficient power to heat the board up to the liquidus temperature of the solder. This is an especially annoying pain in the ass when you're desoldering components from a board with non-thermal relief pads connected to gigantic copper pours, where you basically have to either use hot air or a board preheater.

I run a hobbyist open source hardware project that is user-assembled (PhobGCC) and even though our early boards had bad thermal relief a basic Pinecil is good enough to desolder SAC305 or SN99.

But most of the issues with soldering came from people using uncontrolled irons that were either too hot, instantly burning off pads, or too cold thus not letting the flux punch through the oxides.

When you get to big copper fills, SN63 helps, but ChipQuik helps more. So does a Thermaltronics TMT-1000S which is coming next month at $125.

(love my TMT-2000S but the 1000S looks to be a steal)

You can mitigate the risk: set up a good extraction filter and wash your hands when you finish work.

Extraction fans have nothing to do with it. You don't get lead gas or floating particles in the air when you're soldering.

This is just an anecdote, but I know someone who worked with leaded solder since he was a young teen, and he sometimes holds the solder in his mouth(!) when working on tricky joints. He is in his early 90s now and still very healthy.

working on tricky solder joints in your NINETIES is kinda wild on its own!

I suspect there are far more people like that, and we just don't hear about them because they keep to themselves. This Youtuber is an exception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40519095

I wonder how much lead a solder sucker aerosolizes.

It doesn’t.

The fine coating of solder dust on my workbench suggests that you are wrong.

How do you know the dust is solder?

How is the solder getting out of the sucker? Let alone turning into a fine powder?

How much desoldering are you doing??

There are far more likely sources of particulate matter, such as flux which we know does get aerosolized.

Metallic lead isn't especially bioavailable.

Lead in paint is not metallic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_paint

You don't use solder in a place where it's exposed to friction (like window sashes with lead paint) which makes a dust, nor do you put it places where it's exposed to food or drink (again, hopefully) like with pewter or lead glass (crystal).

Lead compounds that are formed from common reactions between metallic lead and other compounds are, on the other hand, incredibly bioavailable, and very common

Re-reposting this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502232 by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=heymijo from the 2021 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 of this Smithsonian article on leaded gasoline https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-... . The MentalFloss article about Clair Patterson is especially good. Pasting the comment in full (again, this is heymijo's work not mine):

> Two beliefs became entrenched:

1. that lead is natural to the human body, and

2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed

Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]

A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.

So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.

Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson#Campai...

[2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-sc...

So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965

It's a rambling article that provides no real evidence, only speculation about future discoveries (which never came) and absurd arguments why its concentration is supposed to be smaller.

I would add this video from Veritasium linking lead to 800 million lost IQ points and an increase in crime...

"The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History"

https://www.veritasium.com/videos/2022/4/22/the-man-who-acci...

It is worth noting that Midgely was also awarded multiple prizes for helping invent Freon, which reduced our earth's ozone layer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Freon

If the toxicity of lead were discovered today, it would have been dismissed as a giant conspiracy.

By whom, though? The usual people who dismiss everything as a conspiracy? I'm sure there would be a profitable market in selling lead products to contrarians, but one of the big characteristics of the scientific policy world since lead is investigating all the various industrial poisons people have been exposed to.

Culminating in the EU "chemicals" regulation which basically assumes that everything is unsafe unless proved otherwise.

What about the use of lead in car batteries? Even if there are requirements for recycling, it is still a burden for the environment and the people that have to deal with the material is its various stages.

The last time I checked, one wasn't at risk of ingesting or inhaling the lead from a car battery. Furthermore, it is simple to recycle safely.

Not a serious concern because they're such a concentrated source of lead that they're lucrative to recycle.

Most places even pay you to recycle a lead acid battery. A "core charge" that's only refunded when you return the old battery.

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