[voz_]

PFAS is to my generation as leaded gasoline is to the prior generation(s), and asbestos to the ones before them, and so forth from when the first chimneys were put up to spew toxic sludge into our air and rivers at the start of the industrial revolution. There is something so sad, so unworkable, and so deeply troubling about how this kind of thing keeps happening.

[fsckboy]

we used to live malnourished, with stunted growth, women dying in childbirth to bring 8 kids into the world half of whom would die in childhood, with large numbers of men dying before they couldn't afford reading glasses they would need. (my gf was 1 of 5 surviving from 10 born, with horsedrawn transportation and starvation)

all that industrialization brought us to much healthier longer lives filled with amenities undreamed of 100 years ago, including corrective vision.

now as a society we uncover problems, we fix them. We're doing pretty well.

[brnaftr361]

Terrestrial and marine diversity is crashing. We're keeping people alive and the way we allocate resources means that's a bad thing. The individual human is more replaceable that ever before. The sheer scale of things unfolding, and the momentum of them is necessarily unstoppable. Most of what we've done is eking out extra carrying capacity, which has then been exploited while the net quality of life has actually not appreciably gained, while the things that can't be meaningfully quantified have taken a visible decrement. Did we forget climate change? Finite resources? Expectations for these advancements to continue as things get increasingly complicated and the likelihood of reaching the threshold where it all breaks down...

I'm certainly thankful we'll have 10 billion people to share that ride with. Misery loves her company.

It's all a monkey paw and we've been standing in place for a century.

[TaylorAlexander]

> we used to live malnourished, with stunted growth, women dying in childbirth to bring 8 kids into the world half of whom would die in childhood...

> We're doing pretty well.

You know it's interesting to think about who is doing well and who is not thanks to global industrialization. In the last 50 years "we" in the OECD countries simply moved our polluting industry to poor countries, where people have had their ancestral farm land taken by governments and replaced with polluting factories. This has left many of them with few opportunities other than to work in dangerous factories while living and raising their children in toxic wastelands.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

[JumpCrisscross]

> "we" in the OECD countries simply moved our polluting industry to poor countries

Carbon intensity of GDP, worldwide, fell almost 40% between 1980 and 2021 [1]. (-1.3% CAGR.)

We do offshore toxic industries. But we're also getting better at being less toxic. Environmentalism isn't all a shell game.

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/co2-emissions...

[superchroma]

We don't fix them, what on earth are you talking about?

Nobody has any idea what to do about Wittenoom, it's screwed for a relative forever as far as human timescales are concerned. PFAS contamination is the same. So many of our mistakes are. We can't fix Chernobyl, the tens of thousands of barrels of DDT at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of California or scores of other atrocities we have committed. This isn't a case of breaking out the dustpan and broom and packing away our toys!

[pengaru]

Hey man, relax, AGI and one-way tickets to Mars will save us!

[vram22]

>now as a society we uncover problems, we fix them. We're doing pretty well.

Doing pretty well?

Doubt if the parents of all those severely deformed thalidomide-affected babies, or the babies themselves, would agree:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal

[loeg]

That was extremely sad event for a relatively short period of time and small percentage of American families, but it certainly isn't worse than the average child or maternal mortality rate of the 19th century.

[vram22]

Not only American.

[Turing_Machine]

Almost all not American. Thalidomide was never approved for general use in the United States -- in fact, the FDA rejected it six times. As a result only 17 thalidomide babies were born here. Today, it is used for several conditions, but never in pregnant women, or women who might become pregnant.

[vram22]

Yes. One of the Wikipedia articles I linked above, talks about and has a photo of an official receiving an award from the then US president, from preventing thalidomide from being approved for use in the US (early on).

And yet there were deaths.

So, not only American.

Plus, the article itself says many non-American deaths happened.

[voz_]

You do not need to convince me that industrialization is good. I agree. What troubles me is the irresponsible approach.

[derefr]

What's "responsible" about putting the breaks on technological progress, when that technological progress has statistically-positive net QALY effects?

Let me give a concrete example: what would be "responsible" about doing a 10-year FDA trial to approve a novel anti-cancer therapy, for a cancer that currently has no existing treatment?

Even if this novel cancer treatment killed 50% of the people treated, if the rest went into remission, that'd be 50% more people who would be not dead at the end of the treatment, than if there was no treatment. We'd still be better off approving it immediately; and every day we'd delay to be "responsible" would be lives lost that could have been saved!

Obviously, no real technology kills 50% of people while preventing the other 50% from dying of some horrible disease. But real technologies might do things very analogous to this. For example, the Haber-Bosch process. Contributes to global warming; but also enables 10x as many people to have food to eat.

If you don't see how PFAS are an example of this kind of "benefits in lives saved outweigh whatever risk" technology: what chemical do you think is used in the lining of IV tubes to prevent the growth of bacterial biofilms? (This is the likely highest lifetime source of PFAS exposure for the average person. But it's also a necessary one!)

And, in fact, why do you think the contact lenses are using PFAS? Same idea. The benefit (not potentially getting a bacterial eye infection) severely outweighs any potential risk. PFAS in your eye could mean that your eye is slightly — in a way that's hard enough to measure that we haven't yet noticed it in clinical practice — more likely to get [some disease we aren't aware of] over the long term. But putting a contact lens without PFAS in your eye, means that your eye is quite a bit more likely to get infected, and need to be removed, or possibly even transmit an infection right into your brain!

[jemmyw]

or you could wear glasses

[derefr]

"The constant pressure from the nosepads and arms of glasses on your face, has potentially deleterious long-term consequences to the lymphatic channels of the face, resulting in increased incidence of sinus pressure headaches, fibromyalgia, middle-ear infections leading to tinnitus, and potentially even blockages of glymphatic drainage leading to increased likelihood of brain aneurism in old age."

...is the sort of thing the FDA would say, if you had just invented glasses today; before then demanding a 20-year longitudinal cohort study to disprove those possible risks. (They might also list all those same risk factors for wearing a hat.)

My point being — we can come up with all sorts of plausible potential risks of literally any technology, new or old. There are plenty of subtle long-term consequences of our interactions with everyday objects that nobody has ever stopped to consider; anything can potentially be doing esoteric bad things to us.

But if we invented prescription glasses today, and everyone until now had been just walking around nearsighted — bumping into things, unable to legally drive, etc — for lack of them; then should we hold off on allowing them to be sold, until we do such a study? Or should we accept that being able to see outweighs a bunch of entirely-hypothetical risks?

Or, on a related note, how about this: would it have been "responsible" to prevent people from getting laser eye surgery, out of concern that it might make their night vision worse?

[jemmyw]

I'm not really sure what you're getting at. You can get glasses now and not put PFAS in your eye and have improved vision. Some people don't like wearing glasses and would prefer contacts. Maybe they can make an informed decision between long term discomfort and the very low increased possibility of a future eye disease? People aren't good at long term thinking though.

re laser eye surgery, there was a story pretty recently about the number of post surgery issues being downplayed and under-represented. If you had a full and true picture of the risks then you might avoid laser eye surgery, but people running laser eye surgery clinics don't want you to have all the information.

[Am4TIfIsER0ppos]

Those people saved by cancer treatments or IV drips should die, for the environment of course(!) This is what they really believe so you can be damn sure they will make you poorer by denying you the luxury of contact lenses. And they'd have a more acceptable excuse of "wear glasses".

[revscat]

No one believes this.

[loeg]

This guy in an adjacent comment seems to think we should stop wearing contacts for the environment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35957473

[lm28469]

If you're cold and start burning your furnitures in the middle of your living room you'll feel nice and cozy for a little while, it's not sustainable though

[voldacar]

Asbestos shouldn't be compared to leaded gasoline imo. It's quite safe and inert if you don't physically disturb it.

[fomine3]

Also adopting asbestos were somewhat reasonable at that time (from thousands years ago to hundred year ago). Leaded gasoline was terrible from the beginning. They don't adopt ethanol for profit.

[TylerE]

You’re confusing quite a few things here. Ethanol wasn’t put in gasoline until decades after the lead came out.

Ethanol was absolutely added for profit… but much like HFCS, it was about propping up big agribusiness.

[maxerickson]

Ethanol replaced MBTE. MBTE is awful (any persistent groundwater contaminant is awful) and it's a good thing it's gone.

Higher percentages of ethanol are arguably not worthwhile, but getting rid of MBTE is almost certainly the right choice.

[fomine3]

This is what I meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Kettering#Flxible,_...

[voldacar]

They adopted ethanol because of the farm lobby

[seiferteric]

Well so is leaded gas, the problem is people kept burning it!

[rcme]

How do you mine, manufacture, install, or remove it without physically disturbing it?

[milsorgen]

I think we're gonna have several asbestos/lead moments in our lifetimes. PFAS, micro plastics, endocrine disruption, I'd also wager marijuana is likely to have its own big tobacco moment eventually, I've heard fruits and vegetables have slowly been losing nutrient density over generations but I have not looked into that yet. There's more nebulous things like the impact of AI or the way we now communicate (or don't communicate in many cases)... We have a lot of problems or potential problems that are going to be relatively subtle and or persistent over years and decades and I don't feel we are really taking them as seriously as we should. One thing that really worries me is how many of these various things may interact, we see this in pharmaceuticals where it's very hard if not impossible to rigorously test all the potential interactions. We have introduced a tremendous amount of changes to our lives in increasingly short time frames.

[shmerl]

Asbestos isn't even properly banned in US despite of universal knowledge of it being harmful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#United_States

[voakbasda]

Nutrient density in food has decreased due to the switch to synthetic fertilizers used by intensive farming practices. Man-made fertilizers contain only the big three (phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen) nutrients, leading to the slow depletion of micronutrients in the soil. Without an abundance of those other elements, plants cannot incorporate them and the resulting crops will lack them. As a result, modern industrial food contains a fraction of the micronutrients as compared to the same food from a century past, and there has not been a widespread effort to fix the problem.

[contravariant]

I think you can go back quite a bit further. Heck most of humanities progress was spent trying to figure out how to stay in a single place without turning it incapable of supporting human life within a few months.

[foobiekr]

They were really pretty close. Leaded gas was banned for new model cars in 1985 but didn't stop being used until 1996 - the year of XML! - and asbestos was and is everywhere, the gift that keeps on giving. Popcorn ceiling in a house built in 1980 CA? Probably full of asbestos because grandfathered in. And so on.

Just kind of amazing.

[steveBK123]

But when will be ban XML?

[turtleyacht]

Asbestos--spiky things in the lungs.

XML: lots of sticky typing of tags.

We don't yet know what we have wrought with XML, what insidious harms shall come from squished fingers upon rubber-domed keys.

  Over and over, the tags!
  Opening and closing, the tags!
  Verbose yet incomplete,
  Wayward schemas in attr equals,
  Transforms atop loops and ifs,
  Ending yet starting yet ending <starting
  Maven, web.xml, SOAP--
  Newlines and through lines, blobs in
  SQL row lines <!-- comments too
  Trees never perish,
  Always and ever the roots flourish

[thatfrenchguy]

Lead poisoning came before asbestos fwiw

[29athrowaway]

DDT was probably worse than all.

[failuser]

What it proven to be dangerous for people? It caused ecological problems, but direct harm for people was suggested, not proven as far as I know.

[29athrowaway]

It lasts in water for 150 years. It kills everything, causes eggshell thining (birds, fish, etc).

It is fat soluble and accumulates through the food chain.