Asbestos was used because of it's flame retardation and it's easy to make. Provided it's properly encapsulated and does not become damaged risk can be mitigated. Preventing damage is the hard part, no one plans for a tree to fall on their house. Maybe if everyone just wears a air mask all the time we wouldn't have to worry about it.
When seatbelts were introduced to cars, there was a big movement against them. Some by car manufacturers to keep costs down, but a lot of backlash was from good ol' natural born idiots so contrarian and averse to change they'd let themselves die just to give a smug look about not doing what someone asked of them. The sort of dumbass who during the height of pre-vaccine Covid would drown in the fluid buildup in their lungs and refuse treatment because doing so would be an admission of fault.
These past 9 years have made me DEEPLY cynical about my fellow man. There is no bottom. No level of malicious stupidity is low enough. It's not even disappointment anymore, I'm resigned to it. Some people are so beyond hope, so beyond redemption, it's like trying to get a fucking deer to recognize itself in a mirror. Just ZERO awareness, no theory of mind, object permanence is a fucking coin flip. If it weren't for my principles, my absolute refusal to engage in dehumanization, I'd be tempted to write them off as another species just to cope with the dissonance that comes from seeing people acting that self destructive. Like it doesn't make sense. You'd expect at some point some form of pattern recognition and harm avoidance to develop. "Hey, putting my hand on the stove hurt. It hurt every time I did it. It hurt everyone I saw someone else do it too. I'm gonna put my hand on the stove and it won't hurt this time.".
I was annoyed about the seatbelt laws, but I was a little kid at the time. I came from an era of riding in the back of dad's truck and enjoying the breeze. Hell, I went from New England to Canada in the back of a capped truck. I was eight years old and never thought anything of it.
However, as I got older into my teens I got more adamant about using a seat belt, even when the laws were still sorta gray here (you were let off with no warning most times). Now its second nature, even if I'm heading 3 mins to the store. Some people still don't because they think that they're only endangering themselves. Thing is, I have a brother in law that's a first responder. He's seen people torpedo out of windows in head-on collisions and into the other car, injuring the other driver/passengers.
Honestly, I don't get what the whole problem is. You barely even notice them on you. Most people who don't put on a simple and comfortable safety belt are just being fucking stubborn children who don't like being told what to do. I'm glad I grew out of that way of thinking. Some my family are those "good ol' natural borns". They'll tell me I don't have to put my seatbelt on and every time I adamantly say, "I always do". My other brother in law will literally crank the radio so he can't hear the seatbelt alarm. Drives me insane, but I love the idiot.
I hated them as a kid because they were uncomfortable and didn't fit right. My mom made is wear it but I used to put the chest belt behind my back as soon as she turned around because it dug into my neck. I probably should have been in a car seat for way longer than I was. As an adult I don't even notice it.
Untethered occupants are a serious danger to other occupants in their own car. I wouldn't agree to drive with someone who wouldn't put one on tbh, partly because it hints at a lack of judgement and I wouldn't want that person in charge of the car.
There are still people that buy "belt silencers" or sit on their seatbelts to drive without. Newer cars will alarm, and mine even shuts down if you drive without a seatbelt
My sister's boyfriend bought an oldtimer with no seatbelt. The previous owner installed some and he took them out again. I think there is nothing that brings him more joy than to tell people how he doesn't need a seatbelt. He also drives his children around in this deathtrap. But he also refuses to wear a helmet when they ride their ebike. My sister nagged so long about it that he now takes the helmet with him, but he doesn't wear it, that's the compromise they reached. Some people are just fucking weird.
I think those are mostly for super obese people because seat belts are really uncomfortable if you're really, really fat. At least that's what I always assumed because everyone I know who has one is really fat.
I think there is a growing divide between the most and least intelligent in society, and it has been growing with tech advancement (the gap wouldn't have been that big in the middle ages). If we ever develop superintelligent AI, I can see that becoming an inflection point in this divide because we (Lemmy dwellers) will become as fallible to that AI as the people you mentioned are today in what is still a human-dominated society. Introducing AGI will vastly exasperate the gap between the most and least intelligent and I can't see society surviving that in its current form.
Tech's facilitated a lot of things, but not a schism in intelligence. That requires systemic destruction of education systems, especially those that focus on critical thinking and comprehension.
No matter how smart you are, we're still herd animals. Get enough loud drivers and it infects everyone.
Boomers have their odd naivete and emotional immaturity from intergenerational trauma, but Zoomers have something i consider worse - a self-righteousness that demands the appearance of purity and correct behaviour. It's more important to be seen to say nothing wrong than do the right thing. It's the weird US paradigm of posturing puritanism on steroids - and unfortunately the interconnectivity of the internet has facilitated that infection
I used to live in a city called Asbestos, the mine was closed back in 2012 and older folks are still angry about it, they'll even tell you that the workers handling it weren't in worse health than anyone else in the city... The worst part is that it was banned in the construction industry 30 years prior, so they kept exploiting the mine only to export it to countries that hadn't banned it, even if it meant killing people there...
LOL, libs are trying to ban asbestos! They want us all to catch fire! Asbestos causing cancer is a conspiracy, do your own research. Besides, Ivermectin will cure any cancer caused by asbestos.
/s (because the USA is crazy and someone would really post this and mean it)
A guy I went to HS with definitely did this one time on a dare. A piece of insulation fell out of the kiln in shop class n another kid smashed it n told this kid he'd give him $5 to snort it. No one thought he would, but this dude absolutely railed it. Someone asks the shop teacher later what the tiles were made of and he says asbestos mostly, but it's fine as long as you don't mess with it. 💀
I keep checking on his Facebook every couple of years to see if lung cancer got him. So far, he's still kicking lol.
Asbestos must have seemed like a fucking miracle material. Suddenly, our tinderbox world was fireproof. You can build bricks, lightweight cladding, roofing and fences for houses, car parts, curtains, electrical switchboards and protective clothing out of it without the incessant fear of a house fire or clothing fire that was constantly killing people and maiming kids. It wasn't synthetic or petroleum based, you could just dig it out of the ground. Yeah it would absolutely have supporters. They would be dumb, but they would exist.
I remember my dad being angry that they were phasing out leaded petrol and he had to buy a seperate additive to put in the Datsun fuel.
Still used in a lot of fireproof applications. Lab tables you see in chemistry and biology classrooms are a good example, most of those are made out of asbestos. Really, as long as it's well bonded and handled appropriately, it's perfectly safe. It's just costly to do so, and greedy companies don't care if their lax standards cause cancer 20 years later, so it really can't be trusted in the hands of private businesses.
Most lab tops today are not asbestos based. There's plenty of 40 plus year old ones still around that are and as long as you don't break them they're perfectly fine. But newer tops are all either epoxy or phenolic resin based.
I have no idea engineered stones causes silicosis. Is it the manufacturing or the installation or the home owner getting too close to it that causes it?
When it's cut for bench tops and such , that's what exposes people.
Lots of stonemasons here in Australia now have silicosis because of it.
Natural stone has far less issues and there is stone available which doesn't cause it
Business owners were also claiming they weren't given enough time to switch. Everyone including me (I have a friend with silicosis now) has known engineered stone was dangerous to work with for years.
So they had years of warning that it was dangerous But they pretend like it was unexpected.
We (srtaya) tried to introduce cutting standards as the silicosis is avoidable, but the cutting technique is more expensive so it got skipped for the cheaper dangerous methods.
I've been onsite plenty of times when they've been cutting that stuff up. Some owners argued better PPE would be enough for the Stonemasons, but it won't protect other people where its being cut.
Furthermore, nobody NEEDS engineered stone anyway, and people tend to take shortcuts when they are in a rush
And its mainly the workers affected. The people selling it are sometimes the ones who aren't even cutting it up (especially because they know there are risks).
Feel bad for my friend though who now has silicosis and no way to cure it.
It was the same with asbestos, there were correct handling procedures but they were skipped enough for people to still get sick from it. Better we don't use it if we don't need to.
In fact, the industry did sue and win a lawsuit in 1991 narrowing the range of asbestos compounds banned by the EPA. There have always been huge waves of resistance to every harmful compound banned by the government, from leaded gas to cigarettes to chlorofluorocarbons that harmed the ozone layer. The difference is that the present consolidation of wealth in the hands of a small group of billionaires, who control a consolidating group of media corporations, allows for unprecedented ability to control public opinion. Meanwhile, the amount of junk information floating around in social media, and failing public education, has disordered our systems of discourse. There is much more limited ability to vet quality sources of information, leaving people to worry more about fictional chemtrails than about the very real pesticides in their food
Leaded gas still isn't banned. Small airplanes still use it, and homes around airfields (including mine, which my family lived in before the airfield) are contaminated with lead. My daughter failed her 12 month lead test because of it despite us excluding her from outdoor activities in our neighborhood.
It's messed up that there are still ways lead is used in this country. Ammunition, also, is a huge scourge on our environment, and sometimes people. I'm very sorry about your daughter having that problem.
100UL (Unleaded avgas) has finally been approved for spark-ignition aviation engines just in the past couple years.
Manufacturers have finally gotten approval to build/retrofit popular small aircraft with compression-ignition engines. These can burn Jet-A in a diesel cycle instead of 100LL. Jet-A is more energy dense than 100LL, and it is cheaper.
We're finally in a regulatory position where the GA fleet can actually transition to unleaded fuels.
In fact, the industry did sue and win a lawsuit in 1991 narrowing the range of profits banned by the EPA. There have always been huge waves of resistance to every profitable compound banned by the government, from leaded gas to cigarettes to chlorofluorocarbons that harmed the ozone layer.
It would be nice to have the equivalent of a super like that's not tied to anything. Maybe a once a day thing. Could be easily misused by people like me with a shot load of alts though so maybe it doesn't federate?
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Depends who would ban it. From my life experience, we have one side that definitely would because they get mad at anything the other side. ANYTHING. While the other side is typically more rational and has critical thinking skills.
Look mate i agree but when arguing with comservatives that the exact same attitude that they give you and it annoys me because it is not a real argument to say "you are wrong and have no critical thinking skills" yet here we are again.
No, treating them as reasonable people is the reason they took power. They cannot be reasoned with as proven by decades of them hardening their views while they were treated as "reasonable people with differing views".
No, I won't cater to the idea that pointing out problems makes them worse.
I hate that the word fascist has become the new slur people use when they hear something that is against there core political beliefs. There are real fascists but they are not everyone who isn't far left. I see this turning into a left version of the red scare. People are getting increasingly extreme and violent on each side which is dangerous for the long term stability of the US. In reality I think we need more moderate politicians who are willing to reach across political briefs and backgrounds.
Correct. If anything, we've been too conservative with the word in the past decade or so. They're openly talking about shipping off undesirables to gulags, but we're supposed to tone down our rhetoric and not call them fascists.
What other side? Sure there are always a few rational people. However the vast majority choose a side and then blindly oppose anything the other side says/does. When their side happens to have critical thinking on their side they are for that, but that isn't a factor in why they choose something.
Trying to convince yourself otherwise proves that you are ignoring the issues on your own side. If you really were a rational thinker you would have to choose your side separately for every single issue - nobody has time for that which in turn means you sometimes rely on someone who turns out to be irrational but because they have proved rational in other areas you trust them here too.
I'm an independent thinker. In the past republicans and democrats had both good and bad ideas.
In today's world democrats are more for the people as a country and care more about citizens, example, making sure kids in schools get free lunches, "no child should go hungry" as they understand not everyone is rich and can afford proper meals for dinner later in the day, the cause being maybe medical debt or other unforseen hardships, example. A car accident and need a sudden co-payment of $2000 to fix or replace their car.
While republicans want to stop free lunches to save 12¢ extra in a state/county tax. So I've seen Republicans only show greed for themselves which in turn completely halts advancements in a society. Example, private healthcare. You would pay significantly less in a raise in federal tax compared to a monthly premium+ medical bills. The math isn't that hard to do, but Republicans are so blinded by the thought of "my hard earned money is for me and not for Susan who has 3 kids and her husband has terminal cancer. Now she has to pay $250,000 when he dies.
So in short. Democratic party in my eyes has been for people. Republican party in my eyes has been for themselves and everyone else can live in the streets.
There are literally hundreds of complex interconnected issues that affect our daily lives. It is impossible to have a well-informed stance on all of them. No one benefits from strong opinions based on an oversimplified understanding. That's childish.
The things that directly affect me are all things that one side is against. One side wants to remove my ability to be myself get mental health care etc.
I don't love the other side but it's the only one that will allow me time to get to a point where I can be useful in getting my ideas to people.
If you have morals and standards, its not hard to take a stance on every issue. If you support education, it doesnt take much looking into anything about education to understand how decisions fit into your worldview. And even if you support some aspects of one side and some from the other, you still have to pick a side because welcome to Americas 2 party system.
My experience with many users on lemmy who support "critical thinking" are not actually advocating critical thinking. Theyre trying to justify their mental gymnastics while simultaneously feeding their self-righteous egos
...this is the crux of it: until we confront the disinformation sphere authoritatively, the problem will persist, and crossing that line is antithetical to the american identity...
...i fear that the american identity must immolate itself, one way or the other...
We simply weren't ready for the internet. Humans haven't really been ready for any of the advances we have ever made. Hank Green has an excellent video about the societal vulnerability to new communications technology. I don't know how we address it, because we never really addressed the others either.
The original printing press enabled Luther to break the Church's theocracy. More modern printing enabled newspapers to instigate the Spanish American war. The technology is still used in the modern day for propaganda and lies.
The radio enabled the Nazis and the Red Scare to fill people's homes with hate and fear. The technology is still used in the modern day for propaganda and lies.
The TV enabled the police state and "law and order"-style Republican disinformation. People who were otherwise safe and comfortable at home were suddenly and constantly faced with escalating panic about criminals and terrorists, even while crime consistently decreased over time. The technology is still used in the modern day for propaganda and lies.
All of these new technologies didn't just change the way we communicated - they changed the way we thought about the world. Or rather, people in the right places at the right times used that technology to change how we thought about the world. We are human, and every new communications technology gives an ever smaller group of humans ever greater influence over the world.
And finally, the internet. We thought it would be different. We thought it would give voices to the many. But instead it gave the wealthy access to the soundboards where they can silence and amplify voices, and it opened up town squares for even the most hateful and ignorant ideas to gather and fester and grow to become legitimate political forces.
The internet enabled all of the massive changes we see today.
It is sad to me that Lemmy has been taken over by people calling others fascist. I think from a moderation perspective any highly political content should be removed immediately unless it is in the proper community. I'm tied of see comment after comment talking about how everyone and there dog is a fascist and other related rhetoric. It is ultimately easier to name call than it is to actually show empathy to someone you absolutely disagree with. I like to read other peoples options but the problem is that many here have turned a option into fact. Asking why they feel some way just pisses people off and makes them defensive instead of generating good discussions. Words like "fascism" ultimately serve the interests of those in power not individuals. It is used as a tool to get people emotionally engaged instead of mentally engaged. Emotional people are much easier to control and influence.
In short, I'm saddened to see Lemmy be taken over by useless political circle jerking. None of it does anything useful other than scare off new Lemmy users.
Words like “fascism” ultimately serve the interests of those in power not individuals. It is used as a tool to get people emotionally engaged instead of mentally engaged.
This is nonsense, sorry. I get it. Think for yourself. Assess your sources. Think rationally. Challenge your own beliefs.
But the people in power are openly breaking the law, abusing authority that they don't have, stripping away rights, dismantling the social safety net, shipping people off to die, and ignoring any of the constitutional and legal safeguards meant to prevent any of this. It's fascism.
Any logical, rational, thoughtful approach to the situation will provide the same exact answer as the emotional response to seeing Trump and Bukele laugh and lie about Kilmar Abrego being a terrorist. Call a spade a spade.
This is it, possiblylinux. That's the SS. We have the gestapo. There is no more "fiscal conservative." There is no more "classical libertarian." We are nazis now.
You can either be a classical american war hero and strongly oppose this, or you can be a nazi. Those are your options. I'm not saying this euphemistically. I'm not saying it as a metaphor. I'm not exaggerating for dramatic effect.
If you do not live in the US currently, and you do not want to be relocated to Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador, then you should not come here.
If you really were a rational thinker you would have to choose your side separately for every single issue
You should already do this for anything you care about? It really, really doesn't take long for the important stuff. For everything else -
You don't need to take a side on things you don't understand. If you haven't had the time to assess something... don't share an opinion about it. It's perfectly functional and rational for humans to specialize and leave problems for other humans to deal with. It is only social media that convinced people they should care about literally everything.
It takes a lot of thought and research to come up with a good opinion on some subjects. Some subjects are easy because of values, but you need a lot of study to understand other subjects.
You need to have an opinion on things you don't understand. There are people for and against vaccines - this is a very complex subject and both sides have what sounds like science behind them, and both also have real medical doctors. You are affected though so you better get to the bottom of it as both sides will tell you the wrong choice is a disaster.
There's still some pro-asbestos people, so it didn't go away 100%. I remember reading a completely mental Conservapedia article blaming 9/11 on not using asbestos.
I’m in a comment war with a nicotine denialist on here now!
In the 90s, there were still tons of people angry about seat belt laws. It’s every American’s God Given Right to fly out of the windshield and probably kill someone else.
As a left libertarian, I have a hard time arguing against seatbelt laws. As in, I know they aren't consistent with my ideology, but the outcomes of having these laws are so much better than not having them. The only thing that I can say against them is that they're one of the more commonly used bullshit pretexts for initiating traffic stops. I rationalize this trade off and violation of ideals by pointing out that the government has created a fucked up transportation market by enforcing car centrism, and until we can unfuck that, we need to deal with the side effects.
I think the argument is more about the impact on others. If you aren’t wearing a seatbelt, you become a projectile that can harm others - both in your car and outside of your car.
In general, I agree that ideologically it’s a little uncomfortable to dictate personal choices, but when it comes to road safety I think the government has reasonable grounds to enforce certain expectations (same with things like insurance.)
It is uncomfortable to give police more pretenses to stop people but road safety perhaps is one of those things we could have a hypothetical “good police force” take care of.
Government dictating that citizens MUST give money to a private company who then gives money to the politicians who make that mandate is wildly immoral. Insurance should be a government program.
Insurance as a whole should be a sort of “public union” thing. No profit motive, everyone who participates in something like driving has to pay some fee for insurance, maybe along with things like registration. Ideally along with massive improvements to public transit.
The concept of private insurance under capitalism seems at odds with itself. You have to pay out a good chunk less then you take in to turn a profit, and the best way to do that is be useless and fuck over your customers. (With health - Cigna was supposed to cover my top surgery. Pay for it up front be reimbursed reimbursed later. Then, later, it turns out that my employer specifically included a rider that excluded it. I’ve talked elsewhere about how I’ve paid CareCredit back.)
I don’t know if we should nationalize auto insurance without doing health insurance first though. Would the government be negotiating deals with mechanics? I think hospitals have structures that are easier to unionize and generally smarter/kinder folks than the general population. Mechanics tend to skew the type that’d get upset over navigating fender bender payouts with Uncle Sam, probably going to be harder to get to understand that their labor rights are good things.
Ehhhh... Traffic stops are more often than not excuses to fish for other, more serious violations or initiate a civil asset forfeiture. It's actually one of the big reasons I'm hugely pro-transit and anti-car-centrism, because it robs the state of a huge excuse for initiating police contacts.
People are emotional. They feel things, and then make up justifications for it afterwards. We all do this to some extent, in some contexts or others, but some people seem to do it the majority of the time.
Someone who smokes and has a choice between admitting they fucked up, they're hurting themselves and those around them, OR denying it so they're just a persecuted innocent? A lot of people will go for the latter. It's weakness and cowardice, but saying that won't change their mind. If results are wanted we have to do the very arduous task of massaging their emotions and I kind of resent that thankless, endless, work. Even though I almost certainly am the same way about other things.
As a former smoker (now vaper) I understand and agree with non smokers about smoking inside.
However the people who bitch about smokers outside in public piss me off.
Yes my cigarette (now vape) is soooooo much worse than the exhaust of the thousands of cars /generators/construction equipment and so on that are constantly running all around us.
But out of sight out of mind. They can't see all that exhaust shit so it doesn't exist - But those fucking smokers how dare they.
I also get mad at people who drive cars instead of walking or taking mass transit, if that helps.
But someone smoking near you makes your day undeniably, immediately, worse.
If you're sitting in a room that smells uncomfortably of cheese, and someone rips a juicy fart on your face, it would be unreasonable to be like "who cares about my shart it smells like cheese in here"
Yes my cigarette (now vape) is soooooo much worse than the exhaust of the thousands of cars /generators/construction equipment and so on that are constantly running all around us.
The problem is that nicotine itself isn’t a carcinogen, but increases the effectiveness of other carcinogens. So like, the nic is going to make that car exhaust/etc more harmful.
I don't breath in exhaust either, fully concentrated. I have as much of a problem with diffused cigarette smoke as diffused exhaust, but I fucking hate smokers that make me breath in their second hand fully potent, carcinogenic, horrible smelling smoke.
I have asthma and when I walk past a smoker it makes it harder for me to breathe for a while afterwards. I don't have the same issue with vapes though so I don't really care about those even inside of they smell nice.
Looked it up and I had no idea how bad second hand vapor can be. I don't vape or smoke but I'll give them both the same level of stink eye going forward.
I just find it kida gross to inhale something that already was in someone elses lung. It doesn't matter if it smells like cotton candy. It's pointless and stupid
My step dad had like 4 or 5 DUIs. When I was in elementary school, me and my siblings would get the privilege of “helping” start the car by showing how awesome we were at breathing!
Like, if you can afford the lawyers and come off as the right kind of good ol’ boy it doesn’t seem to matter. I think at one point he got weekend prison. He’d drive us to school with a high ball sitting in the center console.
Lot of people in my town with "party plates". Yellow plate with red letters to signal to cops that you are a frequent DUI fiend. No clue how youend up with those instead of just having your license revoked
I am evil for this and I admit it.
Seat belts laws should not be enforced on adults.
A windshield dive is a good cure for stupid, I bet a lot of MAGA would literally go out like that.
They do. But for that just pull over and do what you've got to do. Stop trying to multitask while you're in command and control of a device that can wipe out an entire family in a split second of distraction.
Oh god yes. They all literally invented a fake illness called "seat belt burn." I kid you not. And this was the 80s before commercial Internet, so it spread organically.
Yeah, one of my grandpas always chafed against wearing one, especially the part that comes across the chest. He was always "forgetting" to put it on, and holding it down so it wouldn't like press against him.
Meanwhile I don't even think about the seatbelt. Actually it feels wrong if I forget to put it on for some reason.
My mother in law would complain about wearing one while I was driving her around, so I'd just refuse to move the car until she either got out or put the seatbelt on. She wears it without complaining now. I give no fucks if people like wearing it or not, when they're in my car, I'm responsible for their safety and I won't have their blood on my hands because they think it'll never happen to them.
Those people have never seen someone who has been hit by an air bag. It's not a gentle pillow it's a punch to the face and if you aren't strapped in you're probably gonna bounce around a bit off the interior.
Banning asbestos is like discarding our heritage! 🦸 It's American ingenuity, jobs, safety in its most patriotic form. Asbestos has protected us for generations—why abandon this true-blue hero for trendy orthodoxy? Let's celebrate our history and defend what truly makes America great. #AsbestosPatriotism 🗽✨
My pa knows a guy who lost his job installing asbestos and if we stop using it you know CHINA is gonna use and make big fools of us, it's pathetic. Plus the news SAYS it's a witch hunt boiled up by BIG LUNG to steal money from hard working asbestos loving Americans 🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷
LOL. Imagine seeing asbestos truthers coughing on their deathbed swearing that it’s completely harmless and that there’s a global conspiracy against it.
Many crazy ideas seem to go hand in hand. If you’re into flat earth nonsense, there’s a pretty good chance you also oppose vaccines, drink colloidal silver and believe in intergalactic lizards.
Seems to be an emotional/psychological thing. People end up in conspiracy circles for a variety of reasons, and stupidity isn’t the dominant one. Some psychologists speak of subclnical psychosis, paranoid ideation etc. if you have those kinds of symptoms, conspiratorial thinking begins to seem increasingly appealing.
If CFCs were banned today you would see people spraying them in the air to own the libs, also spraying their children with DDTs because RFK Jr told them to
worth giving it a try....do NOT, I repeat do NOT spray RFK Jr with DDT every time you see him. I am a liberal and this would really make me cry. Don't do it!
At least using asbestos has some value. If we had not found alternatives we would still be using it. One reason measures were taken to improve safety in manufacturing rather than just banning from the get go was lack of alternatives. What im trying to say is pro-asbestos is not as coocoo crazy as anti vax and such.
You simply ban abortion and sex education which increases the birth rate and therefore it doesn't matter that a few babies die from preventable illnesses.
Asbestos is not dangerous when it is in a solid form and left alone, which is the vast majority of the use cases. It becomes dangerous when it is damaged, since that lets the fibers into the air. That is why in residential areas we leave it alone, but if it needs to be removed then hazmat type safety equipment is required. We leave it alone, which is the normal use, because removing it is the unsafe situation.
Asbestos should be banned for anything other than extremely well regulated industrial situations that may need it like any other hazardous material.
These kinds of nuanced scientific assessments don't do well with the far left in the Fediverse. They'll take you to be a shill for Big Someone. One day, we'll live in a world free of chemicals!
Risks and benefits. There are very few severe adverse reactions to vaccines. Yet some will die after receiving one. Do we now allow infectious disease to kill and maim instead? No, we weigh the risks.
If we can get the same benefit with lower risks, like asbestos replacements, we do that. Still better than dying in a fire, though.
yeah exactly what I was getting at. While we did not have good alternatives we kept allowing its use with regulation to make it as safe as possible but then as alternatives became available its usage was increasingly curtailed which is why it took so long to ban. Although just in time since I would not be surprised if todays health agencies recommended adding it to breakfast cereals.
I'm full of microplastics but I keep buying food and drink packaged in plastic _(--)/
Sometimes there's just no realistic alternative. As nice as it would be to only buy fresh, unpacked food I don't have the time, money or energy to deal with that
EDIT: oh no, the Lemmy markup has ruined my shrugging face :(
You know, there's a certain amount of gold in everyone's body, some think of ways that could be harvested after we die, they're thinking way too small. I'm going for the recyclable plastics!
What do you mean with fully banned in this example?
Pretty sure here in Europe there are also still plenty of cases where you're not forced to remove asbestos, like inaccessible old plumbing that's embedded in the utility shafts of apartment blocks. So it's also not fully banned here yet either, in that sense.
Donald Trump has already called asbestos "100% safe". His cultist followers will eagerly become pro-asbestos if he tells them to. And he will tell them to if someone pays him enough to tell them so.
My country banned smoking in all public indoor spaces almost 20 years ago. As a smoker at the time I thought it was ridiculous, felt that my rights were being violated and thought it would never last. The quality of life improvement it made is massive. Today I vape rather than smoke but wouldn't dream of doing either indoors or being where someone else is. It was 100% the right move. Not quite the same thing but you sometimes can't really understand the benefits of an alternative to the status quo, even if you understand it logically.
I don't generally mind the smoking bans, but I wish there existed some indoor spaces where it could be done. They are very limited and mostly exclusive.
It is actually astonishing it took so long for lead to be banned in the US. Even Ben Franklin railed against the use of lead in daily life and he was someone who lived and died in the 18th century.
Back when asbestos was banned, everyone trusted the government. Nobody trusts the government anymore because of its constant foreign wars, corrupt candidates, and human rights abuses. We cannot do things like mandate vaccines and ban cars if the very government that would enforce that ban is this tyrannical and shitty.
And I mean someone who claims cigarettes don't cause cancer are financially responsible if anyone who smokes a cigarette gets cancer. No need to prove they watched the channel or started smoking after seeing their video.
“RFK told Trump that materials such as cellulose and fiberglass cause autism and that to MAHA they’d have to lean hard on asbestos which he claims has no known health risks. Trump is now committed to making asbestos great again”
and was like, that does sound like something he would say
Trump dismissed the “so-called facts” and told The Times,
So does that, wasn't until I saw the other articles in the sidebar that it clicked
I'm SO glad I live in a city with a decently functioning tram system. If something like that was proposed today, there'd be thousands of people complaining about being forced out of their cars or the city losing its charm or whatever nonsense.
Old car drivers drive cars that need additives in the gas. The lead was a lubricant, and old engines ran better, and longer, on leaded gas.
They didn't just add lead because it made the gas prettier; there was a reason. I would suppose that today there are other additives that can reproduce the lubricating effects for those old cars, but old car hobbyists are niche and you're not going to find those products at Walmart, whereas there's always a local airport somewhere nearby.
I'm not defending leaded gas, but I think vintage car enthusiasts do it not because they're being stupididly misinformed and contrarian, but because they're trying to keep their engines running well.
While putting in a new generator is absolutely a better idea, that means it's not the original car. Plenty of classic car (and computing and video game and music and any hobby) enthusiasts run original hardware on purpose. Where's the fun in building an Apple IIe if you use a flash drive instead of the hard drive? Where's the soul in listening to The Four Tops on a digital recording instead of the vinyl master? Why play Sega on a flash cart instead of the original cartridges? Why drive a classic Civic if you're trying to drop a K20 in there?
New stuff is objectively better. A 4Cyl Mustang makes more power these days than a V8 from the 90s, more so for older models. You have to be a little irrational to put that amount of time into running something just because it's older.
I think you misread their comment; they weren't saying people they know are putting on new parts in old cars, they were saying people they know are maliciously putting leaded gas into new engines, presumably to "stick it to the libruls".
Where’s the fun in building an Apple IIe if you use a flash drive instead of the hard drive?
Not to be that guy, but the Apple IIe didn't have a hard drive. External tape or floppy were your only storage choices. The real cool kids had two floppy drives, so you could pirate games directly disk-to-disk.
Thomas Midgley Jr is the same guy that invented leaded gas and also invented freon (chlorofluorocarbons). Imagine being the architect of not one but two of the greatest environmental calamities of the industrial age.
And he also died from complications from polio. Not actual complications mind you, he was ensnared in harnesses he made to get around after having suffered from Polio. Made worse by his poor health having worked on TEL.
The lead was a lubricant, and old engines ran better, and longer, on leaded gas.
There were two issues. First, tetraethyl lead increased the effective octane level. That, in turn, reduced the probability of pre-ignition, e.g., the fuel-air mixture igniting before the compression cycle was completed. Higher octane allows for higher compression, which is more efficient. The other issue was the valves specifically; the lead provided a 'cushion' between the valves and the valve seats, which minimized valve wear.
The octane issue is easily solved by both better refining or by adding alcohol. It was known that you could add alcohol to gas to improve octane rating even when TEL was first added, but TEL could be patented, and alcohol couldn't. The valve issue has largely been solved by better metallurgy and manufacturing.
The one are where it hasn't been solved is small aircraft. Some small planes still use leaded gas, and it's mostly for the octane boost. TEL can give them a better octane rating than alcohol or better refinement can, which allows them to operate at much high compression. Take that away, and the engines are too underpowered to keep the plane in the air. Over 150,000 small airplanes still use leaded AvGas; thankfully, newer turboprop planes and all jet planes mostly use Jet A or Jet B fuel, which is closer to kerosene.
In theory, I think that you could convert older cars to run on unleaded fuels, but you would need new parts rather than OEM.
Thank you. All my knowledge of ICEs has been through osmosis via a friendship with a guy who used to be a mechanic; I don't care about them myself, and I appreciate the extensive added information you took the time to write. It's really the only way I learn about ICEs.
but you would need new parts rather than OEM.
Yeah, that was ultimately my point. OEM is so important to that crowd; it's both a status and a real value factor for them. They're not just being contrarian: they do it because the cars they're driving run better on leaded.
The end result may be the same, but I think the motivation matters for stuff like this. One is based on hostility, the other on a hobby passion.
I understand it as a hobby/passion, even though the old cars are far less efficient, die sooner, and are less safe than now. The only way they were better, IMO, was that they were less complicated, and thus easier to wrench on. It's significantly harder to build hot rods or street racing cars now than the way you could in the 80s and earlier.
It was a PITA to change the battery in my 2012 Volvo, and I dread the battery change in the 2016 BMW. I can't imagine doing anything more complex than that.
I love those old engines I see at the state fair, where the fuel is literally in an open pan on the top, sloshing around. They look like something you could put together yourself with enough effort, but the trade-off is efficiency.
I'd be happy with a fully solid-state car. I'm not a mechanic, or mechanically inclined, so I have no romantic attachment to gas guzzlers.
I enjoy working on engines when it's not urgent, and it's fairly low stakes if things take 5x as long as I plan, or I need more parts than I thought. OTOH, it's incredibly stressful when my motorcycle throws an engine code that tells me there's an electrical fault, and I know that I'm going go end up needing to tear it down, go through the wiring loom, and not be able to ride for a few weeks when the weather is finally getting really nice.
It’s significantly harder to build hot rods or street racing cars now than the way you could in the 80s and earlier.
Unless you know how to remap a car and have a car with plenty of power reserve.
Anything turbocharged can be remapped for more power unless you're at the limit of either the turbo, or the fuelling - and when you get there, many have options for more fuel and air. Diesels in particular are magic because you take a car that does ridiculous economy figures stock, and you double its power figures just to show people you can.
E.g Bobby Singh got 600 hp out of his diesel Audi wagon. These come stock with 240ish horsepower (176 kW or 239 PS I believe). He's done engine internals upgrades to this one, but on other peoples' cars he usually does bolt-on mods and gets about 400hp-500hp depending on what mods someone is willing to shell out for. Minus the upgraded internals, you could do this at home if you wanted to.
On the gasoline side, BMW has the B58 where you can get 500-600 hp with bolt-on mods and if you build it like people used to build hot rods, 1500 hp is doable. It's considered the new 2JZ because Toyota itself put it in the Supra instead of building their own successor to the 2JZ. The 2JZ itself was a supercar killer when built properly.
On the Japanese side, I'm not sure if they're doing anything fun new and new today, but they've all historically had at least one or two ridiculously tunable engines and Nissan will still sell you the very tunable GT-R.
Yes, some of those tunable newer engines come in pretty expensive cars, but there are still plenty of 4 bangers you can mod easily too. And it's not like the hot rodders typically used small engines in the past. It was usually big ass V8s that you couldn't even buy in most of the world because they used too much fuel lol
Unless you know how to remap a car and have a car with plenty of power reserve.
Right, that's my point though. With my '84 Chevy Monte Carlo SS, I could drop a new engine in (started with a 305, ended with a 400 short block), do a high-flow dual carb intake, get a couple Edelbrock carbs, buy some headers, straight pipes and a glasspack muffler, and get a ton more power. (And also much, much worse fuel economy.) Now you not only need to understand wrenching, you also have to have the software and knowledge to entirely re-map the fuel, since it's all computerized.
And while you are technically correct that you can get tons more power out of a lot of mostly stock engines, that does sharply reduce your engine lifespan. Of course, that's always been the case, but it used to be that you could fairly easily get your block bored and sleeved to have larger pistons ("there's no replacement for displacement"), but generally engines are running with much less material now. Oh, and they're aluminum rather than iron, so often you're going to have to send your block off to a specialist to get the cylinder bores coated for longevity. (I think my Honda CBR600RR had alusil or nikasil plating in the cylinders? I'm not sure now.)
I'm really, really not nostalgic for those days; yeah, hot rods are kind of neat, and it's fun being able to do your own mechanical work, but cars now are so much more efficient, more powerful, and last 3-4x as long as cars from the 60s through early 80s.
I love two towns over from Manville, which was the asbestos capital of America, and I can unequivocally say those morons would vote to bring asbestos back if they could.
In Defense of Asbestos: The Mineral We Love to Hate
Look, everyone’s got their vices. Some people sip whiskey to "relax," others puff cigars to feel "distinguished." But heaven forbid you mention asbestos—suddenly, you're the villain in a 1980s PSA.
But let's be honest: asbestos walked so modern insulation could run. Before we had fancy synthetic fireproofing and high-tech soundproofing, asbestos was out here doing it all. Fire-resistant? Check. Insulating? Absolutely. Durable? Like the cockroach of minerals—won’t burn, won’t break, just vibes.
“Oh, but it causes health problems,” they say, as they light their third cigarette of the day and sip their third oat milk IPA. Everything causes health problems if you inhale it long enough. Ever tried breathing in glitter? Death trap.
And what happened to personal responsibility? You don’t see us eating asbestos sandwiches. We just want a little cozy, non-flammable nostalgia in our ceilings. It’s not like we’re snorting the stuff—though, let’s be real, if someone did that in the 70s, it was probably the same guy who invented disco.
Let’s stop pretending asbestos was some mustachio-twirling villain and start recognizing it for what it was: the gritty, misunderstood hero of 20th century construction. Sure, it had a dark side—but so did lead paint, and we don't see that getting canceled on social media.
So here’s to asbestos:
May your fibers be forever airborne in the halls of history,
and your reputation just slightly less shredded than it deserves.
A friend of a friend is a dairy farmer, and we were at his place and I was introduced to raw milk for the first time, and I did not enjoy the experience, nor do I understand people who seek it out.
We should just let them bring all these things back, make the southeast US a mecca for dinks that want raw milk, lead paint, asbestos insulation, and derailed trains pumping vinyl chloride into a biodome.
Entice them to move there by saying something like, "The south is rising again, make sure you get in there before they close the doors!"
This would suck though, I would hate not to be able to go to the Smokeys ever again or see the Everglades.
I'm still in favor of asbestos. It's an amazing material for preventing fires AS LONG AS you never disturb it. The people that were most at risk of cancers were the people involved in the mining, manufacturing, and installation of asbestos products, but once the asbestos-containing products were installed, they were almost entirely safe for the occupants of the building. You could, in theory, largely mitigate the risks to the miners, manufacturers, and installers, but that is... Well, expensive. And people have a really bad tendency to ignore health and safety warnings when they're inconvenient. You see the same issue with quartz countertops; they're known to cause silicosis in people that are doing the cutting unless they do wet cutting for everything, and wear PPE, but a lot of people don't, because wet-cutting is messy and slow, and PPE is hot and uncomfortable.
There was a big movement in the late 90s to remove asbestos from old buildings; the current advice is to encapsulate it, and leave it in place.
There are plenty of things that you deal with on a daily basis that are significantly more dangerous than asbestos. And if it had been treated like the hazardous material that it is as soon as we knew it was hazardous, then it would still be used just like all the other hazardous shit we deal with daily. However, as is the usual story, companies not only hid what they knew, but outright lied about its dangers. They called it a miracle material with no downsides. And it is amazingly good at what it does, so it was put in fucking everything, much like AI is today. And so people died for profit. A lot of people.
And it is amazingly good at what it does, so it was put in fucking everything, much like AI is today. And so people died for profit. A lot of people
funny how history rhymes. I think the confluence of AI and rising fascism is going to kill a lot more people than asbestos if we don't get our shit together. probably too late now.
I do. My ceiling almost certainly has asbestos in it. I just don't touch it. Also uncovered a few chunks that looked kinda asbestossy when breaking up the concrete in the garden, it was only a few chunks so I assume something containing it had been dumped there many decades ago. I just disposed of it with everything else and pretended I didn't see anything.
It was a very dusty job in the first place so I started spraying it with water to help prevent the dust getting into the air.
I did in Chicago. And I absolutely would again, because it makes my house much less likely to burn down from e.g. an electrical fire.
I quit smoking a decade ago; my risk of lung cancer was--is--far, far higher from smoking than it ever would have been from living in a house with asbestos insulation in the walls and around pipes.
1960s: Studies, particularly by Dr. Irving Selikoff in the U.S., showed clear links between asbestos exposure and mesothelioma, lung cancer, and other illnesses, prompting greater public health concern.
I'm personally waiting for the inevitable fight over autonomous vehicles. The only way they truly work to our advantage is if nearly every car is self-driving. I absolutely foresee a "they're trying to take my Trans-am" resistance, people that will be fighting to the death not to lose the ability to drive their own car.
I'll be one of those people and so will anyone else with the smallest bit of common sense. Autonomous private vehicles will never be viable or safe within my life time.
Safe autonomous vehicles already exist btw they operate on rails and even those require a driver in case shit goes wrong.
I'm so fucking sick of tech bros trying to make public transport stupider and more complicated in the name of private profits.
My point was, as per OP, if we banned it now, there would still be a large portion claiming outrage. Either because they profit from it, or it effects a product they use or collect.
there are people who still collect items with asbestos, mostly because it's still the cheapest form of high temperature insulation (assuming no fines or harm compensation).
PieFed
philz
In Asbest, Russia, Making Asbestos Great Again
There already is lol.
I beg your pardon?
https://x.com/trueslazac/status/1911478663222026750
I would 100% agree with you with where I live, Alberta Canada.
He'd drive a truck fogging asbestos dust out the back
Hate to break it to you: https://www.archpaper.com/2018/08/epa-asbestos-manufacturing/
Asbestos was used because of it's flame retardation and it's easy to make. Provided it's properly encapsulated and does not become damaged risk can be mitigated. Preventing damage is the hard part, no one plans for a tree to fall on their house. Maybe if everyone just wears a air mask all the time we wouldn't have to worry about it.
The mask really gets in the way of eating ass, though.
A suppository is used to absorb nutrients or medicine into the body. Which brings me to my question: Can you eat ass with your butt?
Unfortunately that only produces the Infinity Turd™️ which is still under patent.
Marketing really missed an opportunity for "InfiniTurd" on that one.
Dude it was on the tip of my ass too, I originally had "Infinite Turd" but I thought give the people what they want, MCU
Not without prosthetics.
.... Yes.
Looks like you’re not familiar with the inside of my mask
Provided the ass isn't made of asbestos you should be fine to remove your mask.
Assbestos
Yea, but doesnt everything get damaged? And even if its while breaking it down when disposing/recycling/dumping it?
Asbestos is kind of a wonder material.
Easy to manufacture in complex shapes, inert (acid resistant, so great for chemical pipes), flame retardant, great insulator, and fairly cheap.
Shame that it causes really bad cancer...
O.O
They’re getting rid of silicosis protections now too.
Black lung for all!
Russia has a town named after asbestos and lobbies for asbestos.
When seatbelts were introduced to cars, there was a big movement against them. Some by car manufacturers to keep costs down, but a lot of backlash was from good ol' natural born idiots so contrarian and averse to change they'd let themselves die just to give a smug look about not doing what someone asked of them. The sort of dumbass who during the height of pre-vaccine Covid would drown in the fluid buildup in their lungs and refuse treatment because doing so would be an admission of fault.
These past 9 years have made me DEEPLY cynical about my fellow man. There is no bottom. No level of malicious stupidity is low enough. It's not even disappointment anymore, I'm resigned to it. Some people are so beyond hope, so beyond redemption, it's like trying to get a fucking deer to recognize itself in a mirror. Just ZERO awareness, no theory of mind, object permanence is a fucking coin flip. If it weren't for my principles, my absolute refusal to engage in dehumanization, I'd be tempted to write them off as another species just to cope with the dissonance that comes from seeing people acting that self destructive. Like it doesn't make sense. You'd expect at some point some form of pattern recognition and harm avoidance to develop. "Hey, putting my hand on the stove hurt. It hurt every time I did it. It hurt everyone I saw someone else do it too. I'm gonna put my hand on the stove and it won't hurt this time.".
I was annoyed about the seatbelt laws, but I was a little kid at the time. I came from an era of riding in the back of dad's truck and enjoying the breeze. Hell, I went from New England to Canada in the back of a capped truck. I was eight years old and never thought anything of it.
However, as I got older into my teens I got more adamant about using a seat belt, even when the laws were still sorta gray here (you were let off with no warning most times). Now its second nature, even if I'm heading 3 mins to the store. Some people still don't because they think that they're only endangering themselves. Thing is, I have a brother in law that's a first responder. He's seen people torpedo out of windows in head-on collisions and into the other car, injuring the other driver/passengers.
Honestly, I don't get what the whole problem is. You barely even notice them on you. Most people who don't put on a simple and comfortable safety belt are just being fucking stubborn children who don't like being told what to do. I'm glad I grew out of that way of thinking. Some my family are those "good ol' natural borns". They'll tell me I don't have to put my seatbelt on and every time I adamantly say, "I always do". My other brother in law will literally crank the radio so he can't hear the seatbelt alarm. Drives me insane, but I love the idiot.
I hated them as a kid because they were uncomfortable and didn't fit right. My mom made is wear it but I used to put the chest belt behind my back as soon as she turned around because it dug into my neck. I probably should have been in a car seat for way longer than I was. As an adult I don't even notice it.
Untethered occupants are a serious danger to other occupants in their own car. I wouldn't agree to drive with someone who wouldn't put one on tbh, partly because it hints at a lack of judgement and I wouldn't want that person in charge of the car.
There are still people that buy "belt silencers" or sit on their seatbelts to drive without. Newer cars will alarm, and mine even shuts down if you drive without a seatbelt
My sister's boyfriend bought an oldtimer with no seatbelt. The previous owner installed some and he took them out again. I think there is nothing that brings him more joy than to tell people how he doesn't need a seatbelt. He also drives his children around in this deathtrap. But he also refuses to wear a helmet when they ride their ebike. My sister nagged so long about it that he now takes the helmet with him, but he doesn't wear it, that's the compromise they reached. Some people are just fucking weird.
Is he signed up to be an organ donor?
Seen bumper sticker: No air bags, we die like men.
To be fair, I find that funny.
I assume it's sarcastic, but you never know
I think those are mostly for super obese people because seat belts are really uncomfortable if you're really, really fat. At least that's what I always assumed because everyone I know who has one is really fat.
So dying is better than being uncomfortable...
I enjoyed reading this. Well put. I also share this recent realization. It's made me feel a bit less imposter syndrome. Among other things.
I think there is a growing divide between the most and least intelligent in society, and it has been growing with tech advancement (the gap wouldn't have been that big in the middle ages). If we ever develop superintelligent AI, I can see that becoming an inflection point in this divide because we (Lemmy dwellers) will become as fallible to that AI as the people you mentioned are today in what is still a human-dominated society. Introducing AGI will vastly exasperate the gap between the most and least intelligent and I can't see society surviving that in its current form.
Not quite.
Tech's facilitated a lot of things, but not a schism in intelligence. That requires systemic destruction of education systems, especially those that focus on critical thinking and comprehension.
No matter how smart you are, we're still herd animals. Get enough loud drivers and it infects everyone.
Boomers have their odd naivete and emotional immaturity from intergenerational trauma, but Zoomers have something i consider worse - a self-righteousness that demands the appearance of purity and correct behaviour. It's more important to be seen to say nothing wrong than do the right thing. It's the weird US paradigm of posturing puritanism on steroids - and unfortunately the interconnectivity of the internet has facilitated that infection
I used to live in a city called Asbestos, the mine was closed back in 2012 and older folks are still angry about it, they'll even tell you that the workers handling it weren't in worse health than anyone else in the city... The worst part is that it was banned in the construction industry 30 years prior, so they kept exploiting the mine only to export it to countries that hadn't banned it, even if it meant killing people there...
LOL, libs are trying to ban asbestos! They want us all to catch fire! Asbestos causing cancer is a conspiracy, do your own research. Besides, Ivermectin will cure any cancer caused by asbestos.
/s (because the USA is crazy and someone would really post this and mean it)
Post it on reddit, and that will end up as a google AI recommendation next week.
Asbestos is a great way to prevent the glue on your pizza from catching on fire !
I can see them railing a line of asbestos just to own the libs. Better than vaccine denial I suppose, at least it limits the damage.
A guy I went to HS with definitely did this one time on a dare. A piece of insulation fell out of the kiln in shop class n another kid smashed it n told this kid he'd give him $5 to snort it. No one thought he would, but this dude absolutely railed it. Someone asks the shop teacher later what the tiles were made of and he says asbestos mostly, but it's fine as long as you don't mess with it. 💀
I keep checking on his Facebook every couple of years to see if lung cancer got him. So far, he's still kicking lol.
In 2018, the U.S. idiot-in-chief tried to bring it back again.
Yes! How do people not remember this?
Because a thousand other crazy things happened.
Asbestos must have seemed like a fucking miracle material. Suddenly, our tinderbox world was fireproof. You can build bricks, lightweight cladding, roofing and fences for houses, car parts, curtains, electrical switchboards and protective clothing out of it without the incessant fear of a house fire or clothing fire that was constantly killing people and maiming kids. It wasn't synthetic or petroleum based, you could just dig it out of the ground. Yeah it would absolutely have supporters. They would be dumb, but they would exist.
I remember my dad being angry that they were phasing out leaded petrol and he had to buy a seperate additive to put in the Datsun fuel.
Still used in a lot of fireproof applications. Lab tables you see in chemistry and biology classrooms are a good example, most of those are made out of asbestos. Really, as long as it's well bonded and handled appropriately, it's perfectly safe. It's just costly to do so, and greedy companies don't care if their lax standards cause cancer 20 years later, so it really can't be trusted in the hands of private businesses.
Most lab tops today are not asbestos based. There's plenty of 40 plus year old ones still around that are and as long as you don't break them they're perfectly fine. But newer tops are all either epoxy or phenolic resin based.
That's probably the case. It's been a while since I've been in a chem lab, and even then the tables and equipment weren't exactly "new" lol
Here in Australia we just banned engineered stone because it tends to cause silicosis
And yep, lots of shitty business owners whined and a few shit customers on Facebook
Silicosis is what's killing people at the moment, and business owners in particular don't seem to care, despite the fact there's is alternatives
I have no idea engineered stones causes silicosis. Is it the manufacturing or the installation or the home owner getting too close to it that causes it?
When it's cut for bench tops and such , that's what exposes people.
Lots of stonemasons here in Australia now have silicosis because of it.
Natural stone has far less issues and there is stone available which doesn't cause it
Business owners were also claiming they weren't given enough time to switch. Everyone including me (I have a friend with silicosis now) has known engineered stone was dangerous to work with for years.
So they had years of warning that it was dangerous But they pretend like it was unexpected.
We (srtaya) tried to introduce cutting standards as the silicosis is avoidable, but the cutting technique is more expensive so it got skipped for the cheaper dangerous methods.
You probably know about it more than me..
I've been onsite plenty of times when they've been cutting that stuff up. Some owners argued better PPE would be enough for the Stonemasons, but it won't protect other people where its being cut.
Furthermore, nobody NEEDS engineered stone anyway, and people tend to take shortcuts when they are in a rush
And its mainly the workers affected. The people selling it are sometimes the ones who aren't even cutting it up (especially because they know there are risks).
Feel bad for my friend though who now has silicosis and no way to cure it.
It was the same with asbestos, there were correct handling procedures but they were skipped enough for people to still get sick from it. Better we don't use it if we don't need to.
In fact, the industry did sue and win a lawsuit in 1991 narrowing the range of asbestos compounds banned by the EPA. There have always been huge waves of resistance to every harmful compound banned by the government, from leaded gas to cigarettes to chlorofluorocarbons that harmed the ozone layer. The difference is that the present consolidation of wealth in the hands of a small group of billionaires, who control a consolidating group of media corporations, allows for unprecedented ability to control public opinion. Meanwhile, the amount of junk information floating around in social media, and failing public education, has disordered our systems of discourse. There is much more limited ability to vet quality sources of information, leaving people to worry more about fictional chemtrails than about the very real pesticides in their food
Leaded gas still isn't banned. Small airplanes still use it, and homes around airfields (including mine, which my family lived in before the airfield) are contaminated with lead. My daughter failed her 12 month lead test because of it despite us excluding her from outdoor activities in our neighborhood.
It's messed up that there are still ways lead is used in this country. Ammunition, also, is a huge scourge on our environment, and sometimes people. I'm very sorry about your daughter having that problem.
100UL (Unleaded avgas) has finally been approved for spark-ignition aviation engines just in the past couple years.
Manufacturers have finally gotten approval to build/retrofit popular small aircraft with compression-ignition engines. These can burn Jet-A in a diesel cycle instead of 100LL. Jet-A is more energy dense than 100LL, and it is cheaper.
We're finally in a regulatory position where the GA fleet can actually transition to unleaded fuels.
Changed it a little.
“Don’t Tread on Mesothelioma”
Gosh, Don’t tread on me-sothelioma
We were here when history was made
Indexed by google (not bing or ddg's array of crawlers yet) now.
DDBing (DDG) hates quotation marks, exact match searches, and is slow to crawl. Google’s right quick, impressive.
Thank you 🫡 was interested to see that
Steve McQueen would be their hero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_McQueen#Illness_and_death
Until lemmy gold is a thing please have these medals, I wish I could offer more: 🏅🏅🏅🏅🏅🏅
We can let Reddit go, I think.
It would be nice to have the equivalent of a super like that's not tied to anything. Maybe a once a day thing. Could be easily misused by people like me with a shot load of alts though so maybe it doesn't federate?
Nah man, it's over. You're free.
Yep.
Why try to re-create a cess pit?
There'd be motherfuckers on TikTok snorting lines of asbestos
Deleted by author
And MAGAs would grind it, bake it, and eat it. Just to own the libs.
Deleted by moderator
Hey guys! Today we will talk about Asbestos 🤯😵😱 Scary! I know!
But I'm here to tell you that actually, asbestos is super useful and the health hazards are so out of proportion! And this brings me to my sponsor, Asbet Health! Asbet Health have given my viewers a 20% discount for the next 30 days on ALL of their 100% asbestos clothing! We are talking about light, breathable, fire resistant and stain resistant clothing that has been proven to support your health!*
*Not FDA approved
It probably would be FDA approved now.
Soon we will have "FDA approved pre-2025" to know if it's not BS
Imagine companies explicitly mentioning the year it was fda approved and people talking about it like they do about a vintage
It'd be one of those shitty AI voices too.
And also you wash it down with radithor! The healthfully radioactive water.
People would be making TikTok videos eating asbestos and cramming it up their bums claiming it cures COVID
Trumpers would start eating asbestos for breakfast just to pwn the libz
This makes me wonder if we can make a really convincing deepfake video to manipulate the Trumpets.
I wish they would
As always, Simpsons did it...
Depends who would ban it. From my life experience, we have one side that definitely would because they get mad at anything the other side. ANYTHING. While the other side is typically more rational and has critical thinking skills.
I have heard that Obama supports breathing.
I heard Obama and Biden are anti mask and anti universal healthcare now.
I also heard Obama supports Trump, so if you like Trump it means you like Obama and that makes u a dumb librul. Checkmate, everyone.
Thats however what everybody thinks about themselves
Nope. Both sides are not the same. Period.
It’s not about them actually being the same.
What @lowleekun@ani.social is saying is that no one sees themselves as the bad guy, regardless of what their opponents think.
Sure, they can view themselves however they want. Doesn't change reality.
You’re low key proving my point about how people think.
It's funny because I 100% agree with you both.
Look mate i agree but when arguing with comservatives that the exact same attitude that they give you and it annoys me because it is not a real argument to say "you are wrong and have no critical thinking skills" yet here we are again.
Conservatives are wrong and are reactionary in a way that shows they have no critical thinking skills. It is ok to acknowledge that.
It won't win anyone to your side if you're trying to convince them and say that though. That'll just harden them in their views.
If you really want to reduce the influence of the right then you'd want to stop that sort of language spreading
No, treating them as reasonable people is the reason they took power. They cannot be reasoned with as proven by decades of them hardening their views while they were treated as "reasonable people with differing views".
No, I won't cater to the idea that pointing out problems makes them worse.
A lot of those people are correct.
Are you talking about liberals being dumb?
/j
Yeah, dumb liberals with their dumb vaccines and pasteurized milk and fluoridated water and science. 🙄
Liberals were against vaccines long before conservatives were. It was never mainstream, but it was getting there.
Source?
I remember in the 90 or maybe 00s a study coming out that said vaccine scepticism was about even between liberals and conservatives.
Fucking libtards
They probably don't even know how to do the tariff hokey pokey.
Tariffs go up, stocks go down. You can't explain that.
I literally cannot tell them apart from a fascist Maga!
-young American leftists
I hate that the word fascist has become the new slur people use when they hear something that is against there core political beliefs. There are real fascists but they are not everyone who isn't far left. I see this turning into a left version of the red scare. People are getting increasingly extreme and violent on each side which is dangerous for the long term stability of the US. In reality I think we need more moderate politicians who are willing to reach across political briefs and backgrounds.
We needed that 40 years ago, in 2025 we have to fight against actual fascists doing actually fascist things.
Correct. If anything, we've been too conservative with the word in the past decade or so. They're openly talking about shipping off undesirables to gulags, but we're supposed to tone down our rhetoric and not call them fascists.
The Definition of Fascism
...there's a german word for people who supported the nazi party even though they didn't agree with all of its policies: nazi...
What other side? Sure there are always a few rational people. However the vast majority choose a side and then blindly oppose anything the other side says/does. When their side happens to have critical thinking on their side they are for that, but that isn't a factor in why they choose something.
Trying to convince yourself otherwise proves that you are ignoring the issues on your own side. If you really were a rational thinker you would have to choose your side separately for every single issue - nobody has time for that which in turn means you sometimes rely on someone who turns out to be irrational but because they have proved rational in other areas you trust them here too.
I'm an independent thinker. In the past republicans and democrats had both good and bad ideas.
In today's world democrats are more for the people as a country and care more about citizens, example, making sure kids in schools get free lunches, "no child should go hungry" as they understand not everyone is rich and can afford proper meals for dinner later in the day, the cause being maybe medical debt or other unforseen hardships, example. A car accident and need a sudden co-payment of $2000 to fix or replace their car.
While republicans want to stop free lunches to save 12¢ extra in a state/county tax. So I've seen Republicans only show greed for themselves which in turn completely halts advancements in a society. Example, private healthcare. You would pay significantly less in a raise in federal tax compared to a monthly premium+ medical bills. The math isn't that hard to do, but Republicans are so blinded by the thought of "my hard earned money is for me and not for Susan who has 3 kids and her husband has terminal cancer. Now she has to pay $250,000 when he dies.
So in short. Democratic party in my eyes has been for people. Republican party in my eyes has been for themselves and everyone else can live in the streets.
This really is not that difficult nor time consuming.
It is absolutely difficult and very time consuming
For some.
There are literally hundreds of complex interconnected issues that affect our daily lives. It is impossible to have a well-informed stance on all of them. No one benefits from strong opinions based on an oversimplified understanding. That's childish.
The things that directly affect me are all things that one side is against. One side wants to remove my ability to be myself get mental health care etc.
I don't love the other side but it's the only one that will allow me time to get to a point where I can be useful in getting my ideas to people.
If you have morals and standards, its not hard to take a stance on every issue. If you support education, it doesnt take much looking into anything about education to understand how decisions fit into your worldview. And even if you support some aspects of one side and some from the other, you still have to pick a side because welcome to Americas 2 party system.
My experience with many users on lemmy who support "critical thinking" are not actually advocating critical thinking. Theyre trying to justify their mental gymnastics while simultaneously feeding their self-righteous egos
I also think it hasn't helped that the news as become more of a propaganda outlet. They probably live in a bubble.
...this is the crux of it: until we confront the disinformation sphere authoritatively, the problem will persist, and crossing that line is antithetical to the american identity...
...i fear that the american identity must immolate itself, one way or the other...
We simply weren't ready for the internet. Humans haven't really been ready for any of the advances we have ever made. Hank Green has an excellent video about the societal vulnerability to new communications technology. I don't know how we address it, because we never really addressed the others either.
The original printing press enabled Luther to break the Church's theocracy. More modern printing enabled newspapers to instigate the Spanish American war. The technology is still used in the modern day for propaganda and lies.
The radio enabled the Nazis and the Red Scare to fill people's homes with hate and fear. The technology is still used in the modern day for propaganda and lies.
The TV enabled the police state and "law and order"-style Republican disinformation. People who were otherwise safe and comfortable at home were suddenly and constantly faced with escalating panic about criminals and terrorists, even while crime consistently decreased over time. The technology is still used in the modern day for propaganda and lies.
All of these new technologies didn't just change the way we communicated - they changed the way we thought about the world. Or rather, people in the right places at the right times used that technology to change how we thought about the world. We are human, and every new communications technology gives an ever smaller group of humans ever greater influence over the world.
And finally, the internet. We thought it would be different. We thought it would give voices to the many. But instead it gave the wealthy access to the soundboards where they can silence and amplify voices, and it opened up town squares for even the most hateful and ignorant ideas to gather and fester and grow to become legitimate political forces.
The internet enabled all of the massive changes we see today.
Welcome to the internet.
It is sad to me that Lemmy has been taken over by people calling others fascist. I think from a moderation perspective any highly political content should be removed immediately unless it is in the proper community. I'm tied of see comment after comment talking about how everyone and there dog is a fascist and other related rhetoric. It is ultimately easier to name call than it is to actually show empathy to someone you absolutely disagree with. I like to read other peoples options but the problem is that many here have turned a option into fact. Asking why they feel some way just pisses people off and makes them defensive instead of generating good discussions. Words like "fascism" ultimately serve the interests of those in power not individuals. It is used as a tool to get people emotionally engaged instead of mentally engaged. Emotional people are much easier to control and influence.
In short, I'm saddened to see Lemmy be taken over by useless political circle jerking. None of it does anything useful other than scare off new Lemmy users.
This is nonsense, sorry. I get it. Think for yourself. Assess your sources. Think rationally. Challenge your own beliefs.
But the people in power are openly breaking the law, abusing authority that they don't have, stripping away rights, dismantling the social safety net, shipping people off to die, and ignoring any of the constitutional and legal safeguards meant to prevent any of this. It's fascism.
Any logical, rational, thoughtful approach to the situation will provide the same exact answer as the emotional response to seeing Trump and Bukele laugh and lie about Kilmar Abrego being a terrorist. Call a spade a spade.
ICE agents under the republican-elected Donald Trump's republican administration arrested the wrong brown person, and after realizing this, said "take him anyway."
This is it, possiblylinux. That's the SS. We have the gestapo. There is no more "fiscal conservative." There is no more "classical libertarian." We are nazis now.
You can either be a classical american war hero and strongly oppose this, or you can be a nazi. Those are your options. I'm not saying this euphemistically. I'm not saying it as a metaphor. I'm not exaggerating for dramatic effect.
If you do not live in the US currently, and you do not want to be relocated to Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador, then you should not come here.
It takes a lot of thought and research to come up with a good opinion on some subjects. Some subjects are easy because of values, but you need a lot of study to understand other subjects.
You need to have an opinion on things you don't understand. There are people for and against vaccines - this is a very complex subject and both sides have what sounds like science behind them, and both also have real medical doctors. You are affected though so you better get to the bottom of it as both sides will tell you the wrong choice is a disaster.
There's still some pro-asbestos people, so it didn't go away 100%. I remember reading a completely mental Conservapedia article blaming 9/11 on not using asbestos.
They used asbestos in the towers though?
That was Rush Limbaugh, may he rot in piss.
I’m in a comment war with a nicotine denialist on here now!
In the 90s, there were still tons of people angry about seat belt laws. It’s every American’s God Given Right to fly out of the windshield and probably kill someone else.
There is this meme about:
Rhode Island state rep, 2011.
As a left libertarian, I have a hard time arguing against seatbelt laws. As in, I know they aren't consistent with my ideology, but the outcomes of having these laws are so much better than not having them. The only thing that I can say against them is that they're one of the more commonly used bullshit pretexts for initiating traffic stops. I rationalize this trade off and violation of ideals by pointing out that the government has created a fucked up transportation market by enforcing car centrism, and until we can unfuck that, we need to deal with the side effects.
I think the argument is more about the impact on others. If you aren’t wearing a seatbelt, you become a projectile that can harm others - both in your car and outside of your car.
In general, I agree that ideologically it’s a little uncomfortable to dictate personal choices, but when it comes to road safety I think the government has reasonable grounds to enforce certain expectations (same with things like insurance.)
It is uncomfortable to give police more pretenses to stop people but road safety perhaps is one of those things we could have a hypothetical “good police force” take care of.
Government dictating that citizens MUST give money to a private company who then gives money to the politicians who make that mandate is wildly immoral. Insurance should be a government program.
Insurance as a whole should be a sort of “public union” thing. No profit motive, everyone who participates in something like driving has to pay some fee for insurance, maybe along with things like registration. Ideally along with massive improvements to public transit.
The concept of private insurance under capitalism seems at odds with itself. You have to pay out a good chunk less then you take in to turn a profit, and the best way to do that is be useless and fuck over your customers. (With health - Cigna was supposed to cover my top surgery. Pay for it up front be reimbursed reimbursed later. Then, later, it turns out that my employer specifically included a rider that excluded it. I’ve talked elsewhere about how I’ve paid CareCredit back.)
I don’t know if we should nationalize auto insurance without doing health insurance first though. Would the government be negotiating deals with mechanics? I think hospitals have structures that are easier to unionize and generally smarter/kinder folks than the general population. Mechanics tend to skew the type that’d get upset over navigating fender bender payouts with Uncle Sam, probably going to be harder to get to understand that their labor rights are good things.
Ehhhh... Traffic stops are more often than not excuses to fish for other, more serious violations or initiate a civil asset forfeiture. It's actually one of the big reasons I'm hugely pro-transit and anti-car-centrism, because it robs the state of a huge excuse for initiating police contacts.
Don't forget airbags have also killed people.
Where'd you get a picture off all my elder family members in one place!? (j/k)
People are emotional. They feel things, and then make up justifications for it afterwards. We all do this to some extent, in some contexts or others, but some people seem to do it the majority of the time.
Someone who smokes and has a choice between admitting they fucked up, they're hurting themselves and those around them, OR denying it so they're just a persecuted innocent? A lot of people will go for the latter. It's weakness and cowardice, but saying that won't change their mind. If results are wanted we have to do the very arduous task of massaging their emotions and I kind of resent that thankless, endless, work. Even though I almost certainly am the same way about other things.
Humans are a mess.
As a former smoker (now vaper) I understand and agree with non smokers about smoking inside.
However the people who bitch about smokers outside in public piss me off.
Yes my cigarette (now vape) is soooooo much worse than the exhaust of the thousands of cars /generators/construction equipment and so on that are constantly running all around us.
But out of sight out of mind. They can't see all that exhaust shit so it doesn't exist - But those fucking smokers how dare they.
I also get mad at people who drive cars instead of walking or taking mass transit, if that helps.
But someone smoking near you makes your day undeniably, immediately, worse.
If you're sitting in a room that smells uncomfortably of cheese, and someone rips a juicy fart on your face, it would be unreasonable to be like "who cares about my shart it smells like cheese in here"
The problem is that nicotine itself isn’t a carcinogen, but increases the effectiveness of other carcinogens. So like, the nic is going to make that car exhaust/etc more harmful.
I haven't seen any car exhausts walking right next to me on the sidewalk though.
I don't breath in exhaust either, fully concentrated. I have as much of a problem with diffused cigarette smoke as diffused exhaust, but I fucking hate smokers that make me breath in their second hand fully potent, carcinogenic, horrible smelling smoke.
I have asthma and when I walk past a smoker it makes it harder for me to breathe for a while afterwards. I don't have the same issue with vapes though so I don't really care about those even inside of they smell nice.
Some of us do struggle to breathe around vapes though. Not as bad as cigarettes but it's still a problem
Looked it up and I had no idea how bad second hand vapor can be. I don't vape or smoke but I'll give them both the same level of stink eye going forward.
I just find it kida gross to inhale something that already was in someone elses lung. It doesn't matter if it smells like cotton candy. It's pointless and stupid
I stop bitching about smokers when they manage to not throw their garbage everywhere.
And yes i know, of course you are the one smoker that has a pocket ashtray.
Lol, I actually did when I smoked cigs. I can't stand littering.
I also manage to return my cart even in shitty weather ;)
Real men aren't held back by anything! The belt restricts blood flow through the body! It's a globalist conspiracy to turn our men into women!
Imagine having a heart so weak that a little piece of fabric over your chest restricts your blood flow.
Real Chad's don't let some dumb straps stop them from pumping blood like a REAL PATRIOT! B)
Even better, people in the 80s when drinking and driving was made illegal: https://youtu.be/2xcQIoh3FQQ
Still meet plenty of people who drink beer in the car
My step dad had like 4 or 5 DUIs. When I was in elementary school, me and my siblings would get the privilege of “helping” start the car by showing how awesome we were at breathing!
Like, if you can afford the lawyers and come off as the right kind of good ol’ boy it doesn’t seem to matter. I think at one point he got weekend prison. He’d drive us to school with a high ball sitting in the center console.
Lot of people in my town with "party plates". Yellow plate with red letters to signal to cops that you are a frequent DUI fiend. No clue how youend up with those instead of just having your license revoked
My father was an anti-seatbelter up until 2010-ish, when he got a newer car with a better seatbelt system.
Aren’t belts not required in Utah
Also there are pro-asbestos movements
Required as of 2015 looks like.
Guess I’m just old
I am evil for this and I admit it.
Seat belts laws should not be enforced on adults.
A windshield dive is a good cure for stupid, I bet a lot of MAGA would literally go out like that.
Trauma, potential physical harm to others. A whole set of reasons they should be enforced. I get what you're saying though.
Oh, I know it's a bad point of view. In my defense I live in a no motorcycle helmet state. As long as you carry the insurance for it.
That is so fucking stupid lol. I guess you're in a freedumb state?
You should see our gun laws. Buy it, carry it however and wherever you want. Constitutional carry.
I was surprised to find out that people also were against seatbelts. Weird
they do make it significantly harder to grab items from the back seats when at red lights, especially if they are the bs locking type.
They do. But for that just pull over and do what you've got to do. Stop trying to multitask while you're in command and control of a device that can wipe out an entire family in a split second of distraction.
Oh god yes. They all literally invented a fake illness called "seat belt burn." I kid you not. And this was the 80s before commercial Internet, so it spread organically.
Yeah, one of my grandpas always chafed against wearing one, especially the part that comes across the chest. He was always "forgetting" to put it on, and holding it down so it wouldn't like press against him.
Meanwhile I don't even think about the seatbelt. Actually it feels wrong if I forget to put it on for some reason.
"ding... ding... ding..."
My mother in law would complain about wearing one while I was driving her around, so I'd just refuse to move the car until she either got out or put the seatbelt on. She wears it without complaining now. I give no fucks if people like wearing it or not, when they're in my car, I'm responsible for their safety and I won't have their blood on my hands because they think it'll never happen to them.
Oh yeah. "You're safer being ejected from the car in a crash. My cousin's ex husband's sister's daughter survived a crash that way!"
Those people have never seen someone who has been hit by an air bag. It's not a gentle pillow it's a punch to the face and if you aren't strapped in you're probably gonna bounce around a bit off the interior.
Wasn't Trump literally trying to bring it back last time?
https://whyy.org/articles/trump-wants-to-make-asbestos-great-again/
The use of asbestos in the US was only banned in 2024.
Contracting silicosis to own the libs. Then use some sort of donkey enema as a cure.
Is that giving a donkey an enema or preforming an enema with a donkey or is it utilizing a donkey to perform an enema..
I was thinking of taking an enema meant for donkeys, but I guess whichever method is approved by RFK Jr "works".
For donkeys, by donkeys.
I think it means using an enema made for donkeys for yourself.
Banning asbestos is like discarding our heritage! 🦸 It's American ingenuity, jobs, safety in its most patriotic form. Asbestos has protected us for generations—why abandon this true-blue hero for trendy orthodoxy? Let's celebrate our history and defend what truly makes America great. #AsbestosPatriotism 🗽✨
My pa knows a guy who lost his job installing asbestos and if we stop using it you know CHINA is gonna use and make big fools of us, it's pathetic. Plus the news SAYS it's a witch hunt boiled up by BIG LUNG to steal money from hard working asbestos loving Americans 🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷
LOL. Imagine seeing asbestos truthers coughing on their deathbed swearing that it’s completely harmless and that there’s a global conspiracy against it.
I mean, we can probably just find/replace asbestos for Covid - it will be the same people making the same crazy claim.
Many crazy ideas seem to go hand in hand. If you’re into flat earth nonsense, there’s a pretty good chance you also oppose vaccines, drink colloidal silver and believe in intergalactic lizards.
It actually matches a specific personality type, and is sometimes not even related to general intelligence.
Some of these people are choosing dumb, and are not born with it.
Seems to be an emotional/psychological thing. People end up in conspiracy circles for a variety of reasons, and stupidity isn’t the dominant one. Some psychologists speak of subclnical psychosis, paranoid ideation etc. if you have those kinds of symptoms, conspiratorial thinking begins to seem increasingly appealing.
They are probably coughing because of the
cigarettescar exhaust fumesair pollutiongoddamn libsPeople are just going to have to re-learn just how fucking scary the measles and polio are, I guess.
I'm curious if America children dying will weaken the anti vax movement in other countries.
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God I hope so. Don't hope for the US to learn.
We didn't on guns after Sandy Hook so get some popcorn for the horror show to come for us.
The Dipshit tried to bring it back his last term. Guess which country is the top producer of asbestos?
It's got to be either Russia or the US.
It's not the US. When has he ever done anything to benefit the US?
If CFCs were banned today you would see people spraying them in the air to own the libs, also spraying their children with DDTs because RFK Jr told them to
worth giving it a try....do NOT, I repeat do NOT spray RFK Jr with DDT every time you see him. I am a liberal and this would really make me cry. Don't do it!
What about thalidomide?
Fun fact: They did. Rush Limbaugh had a proud "keep spraying" campaign.
Of course he did, goddam
At least using asbestos has some value. If we had not found alternatives we would still be using it. One reason measures were taken to improve safety in manufacturing rather than just banning from the get go was lack of alternatives. What im trying to say is pro-asbestos is not as coocoo crazy as anti vax and such.
We do have alternatives to vaccines though:
You simply ban abortion and sex education which increases the birth rate and therefore it doesn't matter that a few babies die from preventable illnesses.
Damn, take my vote in any presidental election.
It's still pretty bonkers to know something will kill you if you use it, and we just ignore all the science.
That would be tobacco.
Asbestos is not dangerous when it is in a solid form and left alone, which is the vast majority of the use cases. It becomes dangerous when it is damaged, since that lets the fibers into the air. That is why in residential areas we leave it alone, but if it needs to be removed then hazmat type safety equipment is required. We leave it alone, which is the normal use, because removing it is the unsafe situation.
Asbestos should be banned for anything other than extremely well regulated industrial situations that may need it like any other hazardous material.
These kinds of nuanced scientific assessments don't do well with the far left in the Fediverse. They'll take you to be a shill for Big Someone. One day, we'll live in a world free of chemicals!
You must be a shill for Big Shill!!
It's the top of the shill ladder.
Water will kill you if you don't use it with care, but everybody older than a baby uses it despite clear science on how deadly it is.
The relevant question is can we mitigate risk enough.
Risks and benefits. There are very few severe adverse reactions to vaccines. Yet some will die after receiving one. Do we now allow infectious disease to kill and maim instead? No, we weigh the risks.
If we can get the same benefit with lower risks, like asbestos replacements, we do that. Still better than dying in a fire, though.
yeah exactly what I was getting at. While we did not have good alternatives we kept allowing its use with regulation to make it as safe as possible but then as alternatives became available its usage was increasingly curtailed which is why it took so long to ban. Although just in time since I would not be surprised if todays health agencies recommended adding it to breakfast cereals.
100% of people who have come into contact with water will die.
I'm full of microplastics but I keep buying food and drink packaged in plastic _(--)/
Sometimes there's just no realistic alternative. As nice as it would be to only buy fresh, unpacked food I don't have the time, money or energy to deal with that
EDIT: oh no, the Lemmy markup has ruined my shrugging face :(
You know, there's a certain amount of gold in everyone's body, some think of ways that could be harvested after we die, they're thinking way too small. I'm going for the recyclable plastics!
It actually was just recently (a year ago) banned fully in the US. Before that, it was just prohibited to be used in new construction.
What do you mean with fully banned in this example?
Pretty sure here in Europe there are also still plenty of cases where you're not forced to remove asbestos, like inaccessible old plumbing that's embedded in the utility shafts of apartment blocks. So it's also not fully banned here yet either, in that sense.
Well it can't be sold anymore, but if you have it in your house then it's not illegal in any way
It was still sold until recently? That's pretty wild.
No no, it got banned by the EU around 2000 and was already banned in many states befpre that
I'm a little surprised Trump hasn't signed the "Asbestos Fibers Are Our Friends" Executive Order.
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The use of it in the US was banned only last year and I'm not aware of there having been such movement.
Donald Trump has already called asbestos "100% safe". His cultist followers will eagerly become pro-asbestos if he tells them to. And he will tell them to if someone pays him enough to tell them so.
They are already lead infested and thus dumb enough to believe anything Cheeto Benito says.
"When we had asbestos there was less autism. Big pharma teamed up with big construction to screw us up"
No, that’s big autism teaming up with big contracting to help facilitate the increase of people with superpowers!
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We DoN't NeEd VaCcInEs We'Ve GoT aSbEsToS!
My country banned smoking in all public indoor spaces almost 20 years ago. As a smoker at the time I thought it was ridiculous, felt that my rights were being violated and thought it would never last. The quality of life improvement it made is massive. Today I vape rather than smoke but wouldn't dream of doing either indoors or being where someone else is. It was 100% the right move. Not quite the same thing but you sometimes can't really understand the benefits of an alternative to the status quo, even if you understand it logically.
Smokers can never smell themselves so they don't think it's a big deal.
I don't generally mind the smoking bans, but I wish there existed some indoor spaces where it could be done. They are very limited and mostly exclusive.
Simpson's did it!
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lead too.
It is actually astonishing it took so long for lead to be banned in the US. Even Ben Franklin railed against the use of lead in daily life and he was someone who lived and died in the 18th century.
whoa, TIL. 1786 NO LESS
https://www.environmentaleducation.com/documents/Lead%20Resources/Ben%20Franklin%20Letter%20on%20Lead.pdf
TY!
I need my full lead gasoline
Back when asbestos was banned, everyone trusted the government. Nobody trusts the government anymore because of its constant foreign wars, corrupt candidates, and human rights abuses. We cannot do things like mandate vaccines and ban cars if the very government that would enforce that ban is this tyrannical and shitty.
Also, there are people who make money (or even just fake internet points) off of telling gullible people the opposite is true.
They should be held accountable for what they claim online.
And I mean someone who claims cigarettes don't cause cancer are financially responsible if anyone who smokes a cigarette gets cancer. No need to prove they watched the channel or started smoking after seeing their video.
Asbestos? More like Asworstos! Am I right?
What do you mean ... if?
Satire article? Please tell me that's a satire article?
It is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Tower_Times
Oh lol, it actually is. That wasn't intended.
It's ok, I read this:
and was like, that does sound like something he would say
So does that, wasn't until I saw the other articles in the sidebar that it clicked
I'm SO glad I live in a city with a decently functioning tram system. If something like that was proposed today, there'd be thousands of people complaining about being forced out of their cars or the city losing its charm or whatever nonsense.
Texas just defunded their rail project
Sponsored by the freedom initiative or something with a similar name to cover up it’s a social media campaign for a billionaire.
Old car guys are still bitter over unleaded gas. Some will drive to airports to buy the leaded stuff.
Old car drivers drive cars that need additives in the gas. The lead was a lubricant, and old engines ran better, and longer, on leaded gas.
They didn't just add lead because it made the gas prettier; there was a reason. I would suppose that today there are other additives that can reproduce the lubricating effects for those old cars, but old car hobbyists are niche and you're not going to find those products at Walmart, whereas there's always a local airport somewhere nearby.
I'm not defending leaded gas, but I think vintage car enthusiasts do it not because they're being stupididly misinformed and contrarian, but because they're trying to keep their engines running well.
I ones I know are putting it in new generators.
While putting in a new generator is absolutely a better idea, that means it's not the original car. Plenty of classic car (and computing and video game and music and any hobby) enthusiasts run original hardware on purpose. Where's the fun in building an Apple IIe if you use a flash drive instead of the hard drive? Where's the soul in listening to The Four Tops on a digital recording instead of the vinyl master? Why play Sega on a flash cart instead of the original cartridges? Why drive a classic Civic if you're trying to drop a K20 in there?
New stuff is objectively better. A 4Cyl Mustang makes more power these days than a V8 from the 90s, more so for older models. You have to be a little irrational to put that amount of time into running something just because it's older.
I think you misread their comment; they weren't saying people they know are putting on new parts in old cars, they were saying people they know are maliciously putting leaded gas into new engines, presumably to "stick it to the libruls".
Not to be that guy, but the Apple IIe didn't have a hard drive. External tape or floppy were your only storage choices. The real cool kids had two floppy drives, so you could pirate games directly disk-to-disk.
What‽‽ I never used my dual drives for that.
No, be that guy, correct incorrect information. Thank you.
Thomas Midgley Jr is the same guy that invented leaded gas and also invented freon (chlorofluorocarbons). Imagine being the architect of not one but two of the greatest environmental calamities of the industrial age.
And he also died from complications from polio. Not actual complications mind you, he was ensnared in harnesses he made to get around after having suffered from Polio. Made worse by his poor health having worked on TEL.
There were two issues. First, tetraethyl lead increased the effective octane level. That, in turn, reduced the probability of pre-ignition, e.g., the fuel-air mixture igniting before the compression cycle was completed. Higher octane allows for higher compression, which is more efficient. The other issue was the valves specifically; the lead provided a 'cushion' between the valves and the valve seats, which minimized valve wear.
The octane issue is easily solved by both better refining or by adding alcohol. It was known that you could add alcohol to gas to improve octane rating even when TEL was first added, but TEL could be patented, and alcohol couldn't. The valve issue has largely been solved by better metallurgy and manufacturing.
The one are where it hasn't been solved is small aircraft. Some small planes still use leaded gas, and it's mostly for the octane boost. TEL can give them a better octane rating than alcohol or better refinement can, which allows them to operate at much high compression. Take that away, and the engines are too underpowered to keep the plane in the air. Over 150,000 small airplanes still use leaded AvGas; thankfully, newer turboprop planes and all jet planes mostly use Jet A or Jet B fuel, which is closer to kerosene.
In theory, I think that you could convert older cars to run on unleaded fuels, but you would need new parts rather than OEM.
Thank you. All my knowledge of ICEs has been through osmosis via a friendship with a guy who used to be a mechanic; I don't care about them myself, and I appreciate the extensive added information you took the time to write. It's really the only way I learn about ICEs.
Yeah, that was ultimately my point. OEM is so important to that crowd; it's both a status and a real value factor for them. They're not just being contrarian: they do it because the cars they're driving run better on leaded.
The end result may be the same, but I think the motivation matters for stuff like this. One is based on hostility, the other on a hobby passion.
I understand it as a hobby/passion, even though the old cars are far less efficient, die sooner, and are less safe than now. The only way they were better, IMO, was that they were less complicated, and thus easier to wrench on. It's significantly harder to build hot rods or street racing cars now than the way you could in the 80s and earlier.
It was a PITA to change the battery in my 2012 Volvo, and I dread the battery change in the 2016 BMW. I can't imagine doing anything more complex than that.
I love those old engines I see at the state fair, where the fuel is literally in an open pan on the top, sloshing around. They look like something you could put together yourself with enough effort, but the trade-off is efficiency.
I'd be happy with a fully solid-state car. I'm not a mechanic, or mechanically inclined, so I have no romantic attachment to gas guzzlers.
I enjoy working on engines when it's not urgent, and it's fairly low stakes if things take 5x as long as I plan, or I need more parts than I thought. OTOH, it's incredibly stressful when my motorcycle throws an engine code that tells me there's an electrical fault, and I know that I'm going go end up needing to tear it down, go through the wiring loom, and not be able to ride for a few weeks when the weather is finally getting really nice.
Unless you know how to remap a car and have a car with plenty of power reserve.
Anything turbocharged can be remapped for more power unless you're at the limit of either the turbo, or the fuelling - and when you get there, many have options for more fuel and air. Diesels in particular are magic because you take a car that does ridiculous economy figures stock, and you double its power figures just to show people you can.
E.g Bobby Singh got 600 hp out of his diesel Audi wagon. These come stock with 240ish horsepower (176 kW or 239 PS I believe). He's done engine internals upgrades to this one, but on other peoples' cars he usually does bolt-on mods and gets about 400hp-500hp depending on what mods someone is willing to shell out for. Minus the upgraded internals, you could do this at home if you wanted to.
On the gasoline side, BMW has the B58 where you can get 500-600 hp with bolt-on mods and if you build it like people used to build hot rods, 1500 hp is doable. It's considered the new 2JZ because Toyota itself put it in the Supra instead of building their own successor to the 2JZ. The 2JZ itself was a supercar killer when built properly.
On the Japanese side, I'm not sure if they're doing anything fun new and new today, but they've all historically had at least one or two ridiculously tunable engines and Nissan will still sell you the very tunable GT-R.
Yes, some of those tunable newer engines come in pretty expensive cars, but there are still plenty of 4 bangers you can mod easily too. And it's not like the hot rodders typically used small engines in the past. It was usually big ass V8s that you couldn't even buy in most of the world because they used too much fuel lol
Right, that's my point though. With my '84 Chevy Monte Carlo SS, I could drop a new engine in (started with a 305, ended with a 400 short block), do a high-flow dual carb intake, get a couple Edelbrock carbs, buy some headers, straight pipes and a glasspack muffler, and get a ton more power. (And also much, much worse fuel economy.) Now you not only need to understand wrenching, you also have to have the software and knowledge to entirely re-map the fuel, since it's all computerized.
And while you are technically correct that you can get tons more power out of a lot of mostly stock engines, that does sharply reduce your engine lifespan. Of course, that's always been the case, but it used to be that you could fairly easily get your block bored and sleeved to have larger pistons ("there's no replacement for displacement"), but generally engines are running with much less material now. Oh, and they're aluminum rather than iron, so often you're going to have to send your block off to a specialist to get the cylinder bores coated for longevity. (I think my Honda CBR600RR had alusil or nikasil plating in the cylinders? I'm not sure now.)
I'm really, really not nostalgic for those days; yeah, hot rods are kind of neat, and it's fun being able to do your own mechanical work, but cars now are so much more efficient, more powerful, and last 3-4x as long as cars from the 60s through early 80s.
The reason was TEL stopped engine pinging.
Implication is that there are things about as bad as asbestos that should be banned, but aren't.
Cigarette, sir?
Most asbestos is made in Russia currently so definitely
I love two towns over from Manville, which was the asbestos capital of America, and I can unequivocally say those morons would vote to bring asbestos back if they could.
As long as it made someone money or kept them from losing it, yes there would be
If there wasn't such a huge amount of money in remediation, you'd likely still have them now.
i could see the same being said about leaded gasoline
AI version of this, because I found it funny:
In Defense of Asbestos: The Mineral We Love to Hate
Look, everyone’s got their vices. Some people sip whiskey to "relax," others puff cigars to feel "distinguished." But heaven forbid you mention asbestos—suddenly, you're the villain in a 1980s PSA.
But let's be honest: asbestos walked so modern insulation could run. Before we had fancy synthetic fireproofing and high-tech soundproofing, asbestos was out here doing it all. Fire-resistant? Check. Insulating? Absolutely. Durable? Like the cockroach of minerals—won’t burn, won’t break, just vibes.
“Oh, but it causes health problems,” they say, as they light their third cigarette of the day and sip their third oat milk IPA. Everything causes health problems if you inhale it long enough. Ever tried breathing in glitter? Death trap.
And what happened to personal responsibility? You don’t see us eating asbestos sandwiches. We just want a little cozy, non-flammable nostalgia in our ceilings. It’s not like we’re snorting the stuff—though, let’s be real, if someone did that in the 70s, it was probably the same guy who invented disco.
Let’s stop pretending asbestos was some mustachio-twirling villain and start recognizing it for what it was: the gritty, misunderstood hero of 20th century construction. Sure, it had a dark side—but so did lead paint, and we don't see that getting canceled on social media.
So here’s to asbestos:
May your fibers be forever airborne in the halls of history,
and your reputation just slightly less shredded than it deserves.
This is oddly convincing.
Did you llm this
yea, there is a disclaimer at the top.
Oops reading comprehension, thanks!
They would huff that shit claiming its so great.
Absolutely would be, yes
I'm surprised there isn't a "pro poison in food"
If only for those who feel
"No one tells ME what to do!"
I humbly direct you towards the raw milk crowd
A friend of a friend is a dairy farmer, and we were at his place and I was introduced to raw milk for the first time, and I did not enjoy the experience, nor do I understand people who seek it out.
As if the processed food industry doesn't already lobby Congress spendinf millions annually.
We should just let them bring all these things back, make the southeast US a mecca for dinks that want raw milk, lead paint, asbestos insulation, and derailed trains pumping vinyl chloride into a biodome.
Entice them to move there by saying something like, "The south is rising again, make sure you get in there before they close the doors!"
This would suck though, I would hate not to be able to go to the Smokeys ever again or see the Everglades.
It was only banned in 2024
Like Transfats. I remember the idiots complaining, not realizing they were getting something inferior.
Something with trans in there? That should not even come up in his mind.
they didnt go away just lowered amount for servings, an annoying amount of food still has them, like costco dogs
TRANSfats?!??!!!?? The wokes are trying to force us to be trans by putting 'transfats' in our food!!
Whats ruzzia's position on asbestos?
I'm still in favor of asbestos. It's an amazing material for preventing fires AS LONG AS you never disturb it. The people that were most at risk of cancers were the people involved in the mining, manufacturing, and installation of asbestos products, but once the asbestos-containing products were installed, they were almost entirely safe for the occupants of the building. You could, in theory, largely mitigate the risks to the miners, manufacturers, and installers, but that is... Well, expensive. And people have a really bad tendency to ignore health and safety warnings when they're inconvenient. You see the same issue with quartz countertops; they're known to cause silicosis in people that are doing the cutting unless they do wet cutting for everything, and wear PPE, but a lot of people don't, because wet-cutting is messy and slow, and PPE is hot and uncomfortable.
There was a big movement in the late 90s to remove asbestos from old buildings; the current advice is to encapsulate it, and leave it in place.
You also have to consider removal at the end of life. Or safety risks if another country drops bombs randomly on your cities.
Fair point about removal; but if you're being bombed, I think asbestos is going to be low on your list of worries.
So would you live in a house your whole life that's "almost" entirely safe? I don't think I would
There are plenty of things that you deal with on a daily basis that are significantly more dangerous than asbestos. And if it had been treated like the hazardous material that it is as soon as we knew it was hazardous, then it would still be used just like all the other hazardous shit we deal with daily. However, as is the usual story, companies not only hid what they knew, but outright lied about its dangers. They called it a miracle material with no downsides. And it is amazingly good at what it does, so it was put in fucking everything, much like AI is today. And so people died for profit. A lot of people.
funny how history rhymes. I think the confluence of AI and rising fascism is going to kill a lot more people than asbestos if we don't get our shit together. probably too late now.
Like that sandwich with "recipe created by AI" on the label?
I do. My ceiling almost certainly has asbestos in it. I just don't touch it. Also uncovered a few chunks that looked kinda asbestossy when breaking up the concrete in the garden, it was only a few chunks so I assume something containing it had been dumped there many decades ago. I just disposed of it with everything else and pretended I didn't see anything.
It was a very dusty job in the first place so I started spraying it with water to help prevent the dust getting into the air.
Millions of people do and have. They are again almost entirely fine.
I did in Chicago. And I absolutely would again, because it makes my house much less likely to burn down from e.g. an electrical fire.
I quit smoking a decade ago; my risk of lung cancer was--is--far, far higher from smoking than it ever would have been from living in a house with asbestos insulation in the walls and around pipes.
Yup. It's a pretty wondrous material, except the bit about causing cancer.
Aren't there ways to treat the asbestos and prevent the fibers from becoming airborne and posing a serious risk?
Encapsulation, yeah. That's usually what they do now, since encapsulation is usually cheaper, and generally less disruptive.
Of course he is for it.
It will make him money
And none of the thousands who will get sick and or die
Are people he knows personally
https://youtu.be/2ooj5Jhx-yI
In America sure.
Rest of the world, it would be very much limited to a very, very small minority that would be lost to cancer.
UK didn't ban asbestos till 2000, 25 years after we knew it was mega cancer.
1993 for Germany
1997 for France
1992 for Italy
2002 for Spain
China still hasn't banned asbestos.
Valuing profit over human life is not unique to the US or even capitalism(if you're foolish enough to consider China a communist state).
'Bestos saved my buddy's life in 'Nam, man.
Canada: shifty_eye_puppet.jpg
Didn’t they have asbestos shovelling competitions? 1962
Right around the time major studies confirmed the concerns from a decade earlier:
1960s: Studies, particularly by Dr. Irving Selikoff in the U.S., showed clear links between asbestos exposure and mesothelioma, lung cancer, and other illnesses, prompting greater public health concern.
Because Russia, the number one exporter of asbestoes and the number one disinformation capital of the world.
Maybe not the number one asbestoes exporter, but that wouldn't stop them from spreading misinformation if it means aweakening the rest of us.
I'm personally waiting for the inevitable fight over autonomous vehicles. The only way they truly work to our advantage is if nearly every car is self-driving. I absolutely foresee a "they're trying to take my Trans-am" resistance, people that will be fighting to the death not to lose the ability to drive their own car.
I'll be one of those people and so will anyone else with the smallest bit of common sense. Autonomous private vehicles will never be viable or safe within my life time.
Safe autonomous vehicles already exist btw they operate on rails and even those require a driver in case shit goes wrong.
I'm so fucking sick of tech bros trying to make public transport stupider and more complicated in the name of private profits.
Plastic is much more harmful than asbestos ever was.
(Try banning it)
Cool bro. I guess we should bring asbestos back then
My point was, as per OP, if we banned it now, there would still be a large portion claiming outrage. Either because they profit from it, or it effects a product they use or collect.
there are people who still collect items with asbestos, mostly because it's still the cheapest form of high temperature insulation (assuming no fines or harm compensation).