So people kind of knew asbestos was harmful wayyy before it mostly stopped being used in 1979 (USA). But, it was still used constantly in many industries and ended up everywhere. What do you think is an example of something we find out is DRASTICALLY harmful 10-50 years from now? My guess would be screen time.
Microplastics is the obvious one. High fructose corn syrup. Palm oil is used in so many things (even juices and biscuits/cookies). Billionaires. Politicians.
PFAS
Oil extracted from the ground. That takes the trophy for the whole century.
Cars. I hope vroomers rots in hell
PFAS?
Don’t know much about them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PFAS
TL;DR - Teflon, plus other chemicals, but particularly Teflon
For all the panicky people:
Microplastics are bad, but they’re not remotely close to asbestos bad. Nobody is dying horribly from emphysema because they accidentally contacted microplastics two decades ago. The effects absolutely exist, but they’re quite subtle and do not involve suffocating while you cough your lungs out in small pieces.
Gylphosate is bad, but it’s mostly bad for the people working directly with it and ignoring every safety precaution (the Venn diagram of those two groups is pretty much a circle). Eating food that was once treated with gylphosate will not be remotely bad for you on any measurable scale.
Source: am chemist, work as a safety professional (independent, no large company is paying me for anything but an occasional audit that is mostly unrelated to chemistry)
But, I’ll happily add something that’s bad, but not on the level of asbestos. Indoor cooking on fire and/or with poor ventilation. It creates combustion products, releases particulate and smoke and many complex volatiles that are just drifting around in your house for pretty much the entire evening.
Edit: and growing your own food on local soil in a city. That dirt has been collecting pollution for a century, and the odds are pretty decent that it might actually qualify for remediation if you live near anywhere industrial or a big road that’s been there for a while. Get your soil tested, or use raised beds if you’re growing food.
Nobody is dying horribly from emphysema because they accidentally contacted microplastics two decades ago.
Aren’t the vast majority of people suffering cancer from asbestos exposure the people that worked with asbestos for years? From what I understand, you’re very unlikely to suffer from a single exposure.
That being said, asbestos is fucking everywhere. Veritasium recently did a video on it, and a lot of the soil around Las Vegas just naturally contains it, and gets kicked up by vehicles, construction, wind, etc.
Aren’t the vast majority of people suffering cancer from asbestos exposure the people that worked with asbestos for years?
Sorta kinda. It was much easier to get prolonged asbestos exposure than repeated glyphosate exposure. We used it in everything, including carpets and roofs. The asbestos fibers in those roofs are fine, but the glue holding them together isn’t. It’s been falling on the ground since forever, but it’s accelerating more and more.
Meanwhile, the only people working unsafely with glyphosate are basically a subset of farmers. Now, I’ve basically NEVER seen a farmer handle chemicals according to the instructions, so within that group unsafe exposure is basically 100%, but it’s a much smaller fraction of the population.
I’m not panicking, I just had my daily inhaled dose of asbestos dust today, doing a front end alignment. What do you think most brake pads are made with?
Source: Am mechanic, and know what the smell of freshly wet road consists of, which is all sorts of toxic substances, including asbestos dust. And we’ve all smelled freshly wet pavement before…
What do you think most brake pads are made with?
Today I learned the US allowed asbestos brakepads till mid 2024. Jesus fucking christ people.
Yup, sad world we live in.
But I have no lung problems… cough cough…
43 and already got toes in the grave…
Micro plastics
Honestly? Oil usage. Everyone knows it’s bad, and the only people really in a position to do anything about have a vested interest in leaving things as is.
This sounds exactly like Asbestos.
- The American industrialized food chain
- Glyphosate
- Modern technology-centric lifestyles
- Dark patterns
- Most social media
Got to say the obvious: sugar.
Industry sugar is just very bad for us for multiple reasons but it’s used everywhere because of addictive properties.
Go research the sugar cartel and the sugar Vs fat thing which brought the US to fat free stuff which massively raised obesity.
Look at the silicosis litigation that has started. Everyone wanted granite and quartz countertops, 30 years later, people cutting all that now have lung disease
Seems like the lungs are way more fragile than we would like to admit.
I do workplace safety, and it’s incredibly hard to work with (manufactured) stone in a safe way. The dust gets everywhere, and you basically have to take the same safety precautions as with asbestos remediation.
Not to mention the use of fine silica in things like abrasives and friction braking compounds.
3/4 of politicians will say porn. 1/4 will say marijuana. Gotta protect the children /s
I think porn is equivalent to a drug/alcohol. Some people can do a glass of wine with dinner and relax. Others need to get hammered every time and punch a cop. Some people can get the poison out with some porn daily/weekly and be cool. Others end up gooning for hours a day and fucking themselves up. Regardless, I don’t think access to any drug/legal porn should be restricted by the government.
You know that stinky smell on the streets and roads just after it starts raining? Yeah, that’s a combination of asphalt, tire rubber dust, and asbestos brake pad dust… What a lovely smell!
Asbestos never disappeared, it’s still used in most brake pads to this day, though there is at least some recent motivation for vehicle manufacturers to switch to other materials.
A day late and a dollar short if you ask me, cuz I bet that unless you live under a rock, you’ve inhaled asbestos before. ☹️
Yeah, thats why I included “mostly” in my question.
Hottest take and speculative: Covid.
And it kind of depends on how you think about the scale of impacts. Aspestos is horribly damaging for a few people directly exposed. The rate of exposure to covid is orders of magnitude higher.
I think we’ve really only begun to see the long term impacts, and we know already of many of the long term issues related to decline in cognitive abilities, heart issues, all kinds of other stuff. But we right now, only know the small “near tail” behavior of those issues. It will take decades to find the “long tail” behavior of the disease.
So if asbestos exposure is 100x as damaging as covid exposure, say… but 10,000x as many are exposed to covid… its overall impact is 100x that of asbestos.
Very interesting what long term effects many aspects of that situation will be.
Yeah. I mean, I think we’ll see a global drop in total average intelligence equivalent to wide-scale exposure to an environmental toxin like lead.
Asbestos is bad.
But how do you quantify the impacts of a global average decline in IQ of 1-2%?
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I wouldn’t speculate trying to split out anything regarding covid. I would treat it as a singular event.
In terms of materials, plastic food packaging maybe?
Yeah microplastics seem creepy
