[phendrenad2]

Same with cigarettes and asbestos. Everyone knew smokers had shorter lives, but the facts were suppressed because it was inconvenient. Everyone knew asbestos was dangerous, but they put it in every single house for decades because "fire was worse".

And don't even get me started on DDT and teflon.

[hyperhello]

Cigarette smoking really got going in the world wars, I understand, especially ww2 when the world had manufacturers serving the effort. The custom is dying with the veterans as everyone knows they have a hall pass for it but the rest of us don’t. So smoking was a shorter life but that hardly matters when you’re deployed in theater.

[gilrain]

> The custom is dying with the veterans

You might want to update your knowledge.

[hyperhello]

As of 2024, the cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults is 9.9%, which is an all-time low.

[jghn]

Asbestos gets a bit of a bad rap. There's an enormous difference from e.g. asbestos tiles and siding in a house vs loose clumps of insulation at mass scale in large factories and such.

But at some point people decided that any asbestos was an immediate ticket to mesothelioma and had to eradicate it altogether.

[edelbitter]

I guess some forms of asbestos are fine to use in residential development.. as long as houses never burn or get damaged in earthquakes or suffer flood damage or need extensive renovations.. and as long as we do not care about some unimportant landscapes and river systems in (ideally, canada or russia or something of the sort) and all of its current and future inhabitants.

[marcosdumay]

Asbestos in safe forms does not become dangerous from fire or earthquake or flood damage.

It does becomes dangerous from badly done demolition work. And they are harmful to the people mining and manufacturing them.

But for a long while, almost every material was extremely harmful for the people mining and manufacturing them. It really took a while to determine that asbestos is actually worse than fiberglass or gypsum.

[jghn]

Even then, it's overblown. The fibers embedded in the cement siding that was common for a while as an example, that's just never going to be friable to a degree that matters. Not to mention the issue is really more of a long term exposure thing. You'd need to be quite an unlucky person to take one whiff of some asbestos fibers and get mesothelioma decades later.

[cgyvbunji]

It's perfectly safe to sit in a room full of asbestos insulation like it is to sit in front of any computer from the 90s (leaded solder) but it's still good to ban asbestos just like it was probably good to switch to RoHS solder.