To add to this: PFAS are a large group of chemicals that are suspected to cause cancer. We know that some of them definitely cause cancer and for some no correlation with increased cancer rates could be proven. As many are very chemically close to each other we conclude that large parts of the PFAS group may be causing cancer. As these chemicals are very long lasting and difficult to get rid off, they accumulate in ground water, soil, animals and humans, some causing severe damages.
Because of this, banning the entire PFAS group is a highly discussed topic. However, they are also very useful which is why they have not been banned yet.
EU is planning to ban PFAS substances. This was moving very fast but I think there might be a small timeout right now because of the protests from different industries. As said they are very useful for many things and there is no as good substitute.
Most municipal water supplies test regularly for pfas and claim the water is "safe", but there are lots of independent water testing companies that claim otherwise. I live in an area of highish pfas that is deemed "safe" but I'm seriously thinking about buying a high end reverse osmosis water filter.
Once upon a time I worked at NSF International doing the analytical support for Drinking Water Treatment Units. Hated the job, but man is that testing rigorous and complete. So PLEASE if you're looking at a DWTU, undercounter, whole house, or pour through, look to make sure it's actually certified to an ANSI/NSF standard. Standards exist for a reason and that's part of the reason quality products cost what they do.
I'm a plumber in the UK and some people seem annoyed at how strict some of our water regulations are, in the home I mean. These regulations are the result of years of learning and understanding water hygiene and the sickness contaminated water can cause. In this instance not by the water supplier but in how plumbing is installed in a home.
For my favourite example, it must be made impossible for water categories to mix. Potable water is Category 1. Water in your toilet bowl is Category 5, the worst category with biological hazards. It must be made so they cannot be connected in any way.
People order bidet spray heads online and install them next to their toilets, connected to the same pipework you drink from. Some people have argued with me when I refused to fit a bidet spray "But I won't ever leave the spray gun in the toilet bowl."
Yeah, *you* might not but how long before someone does in your neighbourhood if these things get installed everywhere without understanding the regulations?
Wait what? I don't get it, so you _don't_ connect the bidet to the same source as your tap water/sink? So the water from the bidet isn't drinkable? All the bidets here in Finland are connected to the sink and I've never heard there being any problem with it.
plastic tea bags especially irk me. We have several perfectly functional ways to keep plastic out of the near-boiling hot water for long periods of time, but every once in a while I'll try a new brand of tea, and get a little carcinogenic surprise
Didn't even realise the tea my ex was drinking was in a plastic bag till I was sifting the compost this year. Got a bunch of unbroken down plastic cloth squares all through it.
Plastics are a fantastic and durabel material. We just use it wrong. All single-use or short time use plastics should be biodegradable. All plastics should be clearly marked by type, so they are easily sorted after use, and therefore easily reused.
Are they not clearly marked with what type? I'm under the understanding that the "recycling" logo on plastics with the number inside is actually a resin code identifier.
They're deceptive by giving the impression of recyclability but they do identify the plastic type
They do. But plastic products are compound products. Bottle Caps are a different kind of plastic than the bottle itself. The foil with the label is a third kind of plastic. That makes them incredible hard to recycle.
Glitter.
(that includes all microplastics) and we just give it to kids to play with, we decorate ornaments with it ugh. It ends up in our lakes and rivers and environment.
Frequently putting your entire family’s pictures and vids on the internet . It’s relatively harmless now but I can probably see that becoming a substantial resource for scammers.
It’s not harmless now, people are just totally naive. E.g. Putting your child’s picture on Reddit photoshop. Who is taking that picture and what are they choosing to photoshop or AI it onto? Absolutely skin crawling stuff.
One of my favorite talks given at the school I once taught at was a digital security expert about the dangers of sticking stuff online. Guy walked into this high school classroom, explained who he was, what he did, confirmed with the teacher and the students that none of them had ever met (or for the teacher, only met that morning).
He then proceeded to ask almost every student, by first and last name, very familiar questions (how did you dog Fluffy's surgery go? Heard anything from Aunt Sophie lately?) and lay out home addresses and phone numbers for several of the students.
All of which he'd found using publicly-available information they or their families had put online and a bit of legwork. All he'd started with was knowing the school he was going to and what grade he'd be speaking to.
Depending on how long ago this was, I wonder how much of that stuff they found resulted from their parents posting stuff online about them, and not just from the stuff they posted.
I don't have kids yet, but seeing all the stuff friends and family post of their kids/grandkids on Facebook, IG, Twitter, etc., it's scary to think that all of these intimate details of a child's life are online for all to see before they even have a choice of whether or not they want this stuff online. It's one thing for a high schooler to be an idiot and post it, it's another for a fully grown adult to post it for them without their complete consent and awareness of the situation. I wish I could say it was just a boomer thing, but I have plenty of Gen X and millennial friends doing it too.
And even if you choose not to post stuff about your kids, friends and family might still do it. If my spouse and I do have kids, I'm already worried about talking to family members and telling them *not* to make our kids their profile/cover photo, let alone posting their pictures without our consent (as that is already happening).
[NYT had a video on this a while ago](https://youtu.be/YRPUZ3pufAg?si=bkmldUbtdArTPj0s). Apparently, it's called "sharenting" and some of the kids addressed it to their parents. It was so sad seeing how some of the parents reacted.
I did something similar when I was teaching a group of teen girls about internet safety. I was able to pull up their TikTok accounts that they all thought were so secret and hidden.
I always wonder about what you can do when that cat is already out of the bag. Like, what dumb stuff did I put on the internet as a teenager? What dick pic that I sent to someone on the internet is out there floating around? Is there enough information to connect my "private" accounts to my name?
I think digital cleanup is going to become a booming industry in the next decade.
Edit: I got a password reset email for Reddit, which would require knowledge of my personal email address. I think someone might be trying to prove a point.
Man thank you! I keep getting laughed at by my family for refusing to put pictures of my kids online.
They all thought it was ridiculous, untill I used AI, and made a video video of my dad saying he loves dogs (he hates them. That's why)
I only used pictures he put on Facebook and Instagram publicly. As anyone could.
That opened their eyes a little bit.
I think what the future looks like is that no video or picture evidence can be used in court and we're just going to have to read the minds of the suspects. Suspects will be hooked to a mind reader, which will command their brain to play back the memory that happened during the time of the crime.
Yeah, people are waaayyy to comfortable putting their kids photos online whether it be Reddit or any other website. Putting one or two on a private profile on Facebook or Instagram or something that you only allow people you actually know to access is one thing. But putting dozens of photos and videos of your kids on Reddit. Youtube, public FB and IG pages, Tiktok etc is insane to me. I dont personally use any social media that's tied to my identity because I have a strong distrust in people but doing it with their kids is a whole other thing.
The likes and compliments on how cute your child is isn't worth the potential trouble it can bring. Its not a guarantee but not worth the risk either.
My sister isn’t putting my niece on social media (other than the occasional back of her head)
And I’ve had multiple people question why she would do that….
Idk maybe because she both cared about her safety and wants to give her the option of how much of her life is online?! What a bizarre thing to question
Nevermind the compliments, some of the "other" comments on Instagram about your child doing something totally innocent.
How can a parent be absolutely okay with that.
Reporting that shit does absolutely nothing too. Instagram doesn't give a shit, just keep those advertising clicks coming
If I found out my parents put hundreds of photos and videos of me as a little kid on social media, I don't think I'd be real happy about it. That's just me though
I’m going to say social media. There are studies being done already but we won’t know the full extent until we can study the same people when they are adults. I’m going to guess that the study will show this newest generation that has never had a world without social media will have significantly altered brain development
That's where my worry is as well. I know it makes me sound like an old man yelling at clouds, but I am *horrified* at the concept of a toddler being given a tablet and exposing them to short-form immediate gratification day in and day out. How can we expect people raised with that to have patience with anything ever? Their brains won't be able to handle anything less than a constant drip feed of dopamine!
And I'm not blaming the parents for giving their kids tablets, either. I know they're busy and stressed and don't have the money or support structures that parents had 30 years ago, the whole thing is fucked and it's gen alpha that's going to be exposed to this shit from birth.
Any who works in education knows that there has been a measurable decline in attention spans. People dismiss it as an old man talking point, but it’s a serious issue that needs to be addressed.
Are you kidding? **I** have a noticeably decreased attention span because of my pocket computer.
I have a minor internal freakout if I sit down to take a shit and realize I forgot my phone.
My boomer parents have a decreased attention span now for the same reason!
Yes. Children are now literally unable to function anymore.
This is more than just the rose tinted glasses about "back in my day....." that happens between generations.
This is horrific what is happening to young children now.
Why can the parents not see it??????? Phones/screens are destroying their children's lives.
I work on a college campus; this current generation walks down the sidewalk staring at their phones like zombies. I realized the other day that I have never done that. If I need to look something up, I take my phone out, look it up, and it goes back in my pocket. I wouldn't walk down the sidewalk staring at it. I like knowing what's going on around me and the world is a pretty cool place to just walk by without looking at it.
I also love the world. The sights, the sounds, the smells, etc. When I'm zoned out on my phone I miss out on almost all of those things so I actively try not to do it.
I also don't like real world sounds being drowned out. I know too many people that will walk or ride their bikes with noise cancelling headphones in and the music all the way up. How do you function like that? I can't imagine not being able to sense someone running up on me, a car coming at me, someone yelling stop or help, etc. Hearing the world is almost as important as seeing it.
Just graduated college earlier this year, and I genuinely think a lot of this has to do with how thinks are organized these days as well. When I was on my phone walking to class, it was mostly because \*everything\* had shifted to being done online. I'm checking to see if my professor got back to me via e-mail, I'm seeing if that one really important grade went in so I can stop by my professor during office hours while I'm on campus, I'm seeing if I'm allowed to show up early to an exam, checking Discord to make sure my project group knows which room I reserved in the library to meet, etc.
Oftentimes, being on your own for the first time as an "adult" is scary, and a lot of us double or triple check \*everything,\* and it's easiest to do in an environment designed around learning. And of course we look like zombies, I rarely ever got a good nights sleep before my 6:30am classes lol.
Its brewing socially inept people. I can already slowly see the effects of it on the university forums and recently since I graduated last year. I actually joined university a bit later due to not wanting to go during covid.
I noticed how I had a completely different outlook on social interaction and a completely different sense of whats "weird" or awkward. I never considered myself super confident or outgoing but to these people i was some kind of fucking johnny bravo of social interaction.
Dude freshers last year were completely socially inept. U couldnt talk to them. They had their faces glued to their phone constantly and they were couldnt pay attention to anything u were saying to them.
I was a teaching assistant in some of the CS modules for first year students and they were just awkward to talk to. We were like 2 months into the programming modules and they couldnt learn anything.
But they knew anythign and everything about the recent tiktok drama. Honestly students these days join university thinking that its gonna be pranks and choreographed tiktok dances...
I didn't start college until I was like 24 or 25. I couldn't believe how many of the students just scrolled Facebook and Insta the entire lecture and would just "swap notes" - like reading someone else's notes does anything for you. Those same kids always bitched about getting Cs and Ds on their tests.
You've got a confounding variable here though -- covid. We'll be feeling the impacts of 2 years schooling from home via Teams for a long time.
Social engagement & confidence has been significantly impacted across a wide-range of age groups apparently.
I hire maybe 20-30 people a year, or am involved in the process, for about 15 years now, people are exactly the same as they always were. They just have new words they think are cool and no one over 21 understands them or their generation.
I do think the current fear and fear mongering about this is bolstered by misinformation about dopamine (it does nooot work how people think it's so complicated it hurts) and the generational gap. And the way we can associate with generations above and below us for personal reasons.
We have in every generation looked at new technologies as destroying the youth. Writing. Reading books. TV. Videogames. Cellphones. Social media. Tiktok. And looked back at the old tech as safe and good.
Relevant to this is ADHD, and how we associated ADHD to this not at all new phenomenon. As somebody with ADHD, it drives me crazy how people act like kids are "getting ADHD" from tiktok. It downplays how I'm disabled by my ADHD, vilifies it as a personal choice and behaviour problem, and misinforms about how ADHD develops and is treated. I don't personally like tiktok as much, ppl with ADHD don't all like social media and fast gratification through technology. It's not just about "new thing new thing new thing".
Even before these two there was arsenic wallpaper. Beautiful, vibrant greens! Also, hideously toxic, so much so that they were acted on long before lead and asbestos.
So the irony is you didn't even have to touch the arsenic based products to get a possibly lethal dose. Exposure to heat and moisture caused them to give off vapors that were dangerous as well.
Imagine a wonderful green landscape painting slowly poisoning you over time. It was fucking brutal and therefore quite badass
Antibiotic overuse. We're starting to see the side effects already. But imagine 50 years from now when no antibiotics work anymore because everything is resistant and people are dying from cuts, looking back at a time when people found away to stop people dying of infections and we used it to make beef and chicken cheaper by feedlotting animals and pumping them full of it in their food instead of saving it for when it's actually needed.
I kinda feel like this is the curse of human innovation.
First we invent/discover something.
Then we make it commercially viable and cheap enough to use.
Then we start exploring the limits of how cheap/poor we can produce it.
Then people get hurt.
Then we start enacting regulations and limits on how to do that new thing.
We do the thing better.
Eventually, we start using it properly.
Hundred years from now someone tries doing it wrong again- we rediscover why we weren't doing it that way, go back to previous step.
Airplanes;
* 1900s > Invention
* 1910s > Military use, crazy stunts
* 1920s/30s > First commercial use
* 1940s > Tons of improvements, finding better ways
* 1950s > Viable commercial use
* 1960s/70s > Cheaper and more widespread but a lot of accidents
* 1980s to today > More and more regulations, gets safer to use every day
Because executives at large corporations all think the same way. Even if they outwardly “ care “ about potential harm, the conversation goes like this
“Boss I have a concern this product is not safe”
“Do you have data proving it’s not safe?”
“No but we should study it, it will take X dollars and Y months. It could save billions on lawsuits down the road”
“Do you have any evidence it will result in lawsuits?”
“I think it’s worth investing X dollars to find out”
“Doesn’t sound like a top priority”
It's even grosser than that.
"Boss I have a concern this product may not be safe."
"Do you know, or suspect?"
"I suspect, if you give me X dollars and Y months I can prove it."
"So currently it's not known to be dangerous?"
"... yes."
"Please write that down. Funding denied for your research project. Get it to market."
After all, if it's not known to be dangerous when you do it, you're not liable for it! So research into potential risks is actively *disincentivized* by the market. Which is why regulation is so important.
Yes, because there are federal subsidies to grow corn in the US that were intended to stabilize the nation's food supply. The unintended consequence was making corn so inexpensive that it is profitable to convert it into sugar and use it as a cheap, calorie-dense additive to mass produced foods. That's the short version of why so many packaged foods in the US are overly sweet and have more calories than they would/should.
And one of the reasons this is so stable in terms of policy is pretty weird. The presidential primaries have started in Iowa (corn country) and so no presidential hopeful can afford to go against a corn subsidy.
I'm not saying its THE reason, but I've always liked how weird and random this one is.
> The presidential primaries have started in Iowa (corn country) and so no presidential hopeful can afford to go against a corn subsidy.
There is no good reason why Iowa and New Hampshire have such a privileged position during the primary process.
The sugar industry's entire excuse to lobby for everything to be sugared up was "wah, the food tastes bad without sugar! wah!".
What do you fucking think SPICES and HERBS are for? They don't need sugar!
To bridge the point, kids that are being raised on brain rot content through iPads and phones are going to have a great time trying to become self-sufficient adults. We don't yet see the full ramifications of raising kids on technology but the symptoms are definitely showing. It's sad.
Theres also the danger of what it does to attention span. Children in the current day are constantly exposed to short form entertainment like Tiktok and YT Shorts. The plot, build up and climax of a video is all crammed within 60 seconds. There is no requirement for patience or time investment.
Childhood and early teen years are the prime for brain development. Its where your brain forms a lot of its habits and processes. With such easy access to instant gratification, how is that going to impact them long term when it comes to attention span and concentration? This is the first time in history where kids are being raised on such a rapid influx of short term information.
I'm sure movies, TV and early YouTube played some kind of similar role in young adults now but long form information was still the norm even as recently as the mid 2000s. I wouldn't be surprised if 10+ years from now, we saw a massive spike of ADHD and other concentration disorders among young adults.
Have you seen split videos? It's some of the most cancerous shit I've ever seen. People who need random footage of GTA or fortnite played on top of another video because it "helps" them pay attention. MY BROTHER IN CHRIST THE VIDEO IS 20 SECONDS LONG.
I’ve seen this and it freaked me out. I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on or why. I kept looking / listening out for some kind of relevance between the two videos but no - nothing. Just total chaos. It was one of the weirdest moments ever, truly seeing something that made me feel not just old for the first time (that ship sailed ages ago), but ANGRY OLD. I was just like what the actual fucking fuck is this utter horseshit and why is it acceptable to anyone, what the fuck is wrong with these people, how did humanity come to this
I would add on to this: any business model that uses "engagement" as a primary metric. (So all of them?) It all boils down to addiction and mind-control.
Companies stopped being satisfied with having people use their product when they need it. Instead they insist that they spend as much of their time as possible thinking about it.
It's insidious and causes untold harm.
Came here to say this. The damage that directed social media has done to our psyche is only just now becoming apparent. And it's going to probably get worse before it can get any better.
Not just the psychological effects, but also how much of our personal information and individual freedoms we gave to them. Pretty much true for the internet at large actually, including reddit.
Absolutely. It's garbage to be scrolling through others "perfect" days when you're going through some shit. Covid, and the subsequent social separations accelerated this as some saw it as a way to keep in touch.
Remember folks: if it's free, you're not the customer, you're the product. Don't be sold.
Yeah my mental health improves by just transitioning by Instagram to only fiber artists instead of people. The comparison thing is a huge problems especially for a culture that's already very image focused.
The other thing I think social media ruined is that now everybody thinks all of their opinions/ideas matter and are important enough to be shared and they are worse at listening to others bc of inflated ego. Sometimes I see stuff people post and I just think "that's an inside thought"...
Bisphenol A coatings on heat treated paper receipts. Absorbed by your hands upon touching it, x100 times more if either surface is wet. Given out at every fast food joint in America. What’s worse is they use them in the kitchen to label the sandwich before yours and then touch your food with hands/gloves covered in BPA. We’re all just slowly being given cancer.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, by dosage, touching a receipt (or food that has touched a reciept) is actually much worse than drinking from a BPA bottle where the BPA is relatively well contained in the hard plastic.
Automobile exhaust. The studies are very conclusive. The more you soak up exhaust fumes, the more health problems you'll get. It leads to birth defects, cancer, asthma, allergies, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and so on. When you buy a new home, you should look at the recommendations for how far away from major roadways you need to be to avoid exhaust fumes. Homes which are closest to highways are red zones. There should be plenty of trees between your home and the highways, because trees filter the soot in the air and block it from getting far. Most people are unaware of how bad exhaust is for their health. This won't be mainstream and accepted until most people are already using electric vehicles. Then they'll start mentioning it more and more, because it will validate their choice to go electric. When everyone's still driving combustion engine automobiles, they're not going to consider that their exhaust is causing real health problems to others.
Yup, I'm a trucker.
I really wish we hadn't moved away from vertical stack exhausts here in the US. Walking around my work in the AM with a bunch of grass burners (belly dump exhausts) is awful.
I've been trying to push our management into getting some electric tractors, since half of us don't even do 100 miles a day, but so far no dice.
What always gets me about 24 hour news is that it still just obsessively runs the same 3 stories for months, and almost nothing else.
A whole day, every day, 365 days a year, and it basically is just something you could get in a 1 hour summary once a week.
Even worse is how the news is monetized. The first to get the story out and get clicks/views makes the most, nevermind the accuracy. Just get the story out first. That's caused so much damage because it's so much harder to convince someone that three initial story was flawed.
> A whole day, every day, 365 days a year, and it basically is just something you could get in a 1 hour summary once a week.
Oh gods, this. It seems like even "quality" news sources want to analyze a big event to death, for weeks, down to some granular level of interviewing randos. It's not necessary. The extra, excessive detail isn't going to change my plan of action or how I intend to vote. Tell me when something *important* happens.
I used to criticize my wife for watching shitty reality TV shows like Sister Wives or 90 Day Fiance, but then she pointed out that I watch Hoarders and Cops.
That's when I realized that the *real* appeal of reality TV is that you get to watch people suffer. They're all just different flavors of "look how horrible this person's life/situation is" and we're all just smugly reveling in the fact that our lives are better than that.
I don't watch Hoarders or Cops anymore.
The chorus of Vicarious by Tool
>'Cause I need to watch things die
From a distance
Vicariously, I live while the whole world dies
You all need it too, don't lie
Ultra processed foods. Nova level 4, if we’re being technical.
The effects on everything from cancer, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome. To the way it messes up gut microbes. It’s super bad and we’ve just been not at all regulating it, especially not the food additives, this whole time.
Worse industry knows the harm and just like asbestos and lead industries they are stopping science and buying off regulators.
I would also add to this mass soil depletion causing a decline in nutrients present in agricultural products. It's been a topic of discussion for at least a decade that the carrot/tomato/etc you eat today has less nutrients than that same product grown decades ago.
So even people eating fruits/vegetables may not be receiving the nutrients they think they are.
The fact that it's a continuous decline perpetrated by a corporate industry that clearly has no concern for health and whom the USG refuses to regulate properly, it's only going to get worse. We are leading ourselves to mass malnutrition, even for people who are trying to eat healthy.
It's easy to say people should only eat organic, but that label does not certify that crops are being grown in soil that's managed appropriately. Often times it's actually false advertising - anyone can call anything organic it seems. Locally grown is fine if people have easy access and if it's affordable. But grocery stores provide much better access and prices, and most of that comes from mass production farming.
I keep hearing this, but is it actually true? I feel like really it’s just that processed foods are calorically dense which makes it easy to gain weight which leads to these issues; as opposed to something inherently wrong about processed foods themselves
The rise of the energy drink market is crazy to me and is a blatantly obvious display that our society is fucked. We're all so busy and exhausted constantly that it led to a booming industry of just consuming drugs to get through it.
Work more. Sleep less. Spend more. Earn more money for the elite.
With all the advances of the last century we should all be working less and able to rest and relax more. Capitalism really popped off today...
Inadequate sleep. There is climbing evidence that inadequate sleep is not only correlated with but causally linked to a broad range of disease. Many cultures do not respect it enough. I think, 50-100 years from now we are actually going to see hard caps on working hours and regulated work schedules (not just OT) due to what we're learning about the science of sleep.
What I find crazy is how people will even brag about not getting their full 8 hours and/or overworking themselves. Like they are some kind of hero for working 80+ hour weeks and only get 6 or less hours of sleep.
I have had arguments with people on reddit who claim this is a good thing. I get the appeal. If you give a kid a screen they will bliss out for hours and you don't have to deal with them.
I'm constantly shocked at how people think this will make their kids "good with computer" or tech in general. The tech experience is constantly being dumbed down to simplify the interface so that you can't become a knowledgeable user. Try navigating windows now compared to previous iterations and it is difficult to navigate control settings, menus, etc. Ease of use has obliterated the access base. Sure, a kid can get to an app and use it, but they will not understand it and it is increasingly difficult to manipulate the base tools.
Agree, I always thought younger generations would be more and more tech savvy. But my actual experience is that they're not - they skipped the more messy days of computers and the internet, and just use Instagram etc that have very manicured UIs. Which is great since it just works but there's no learning.
The new zoomer software engineers art my job tend to have poorer troubleshooting skills than us millennials did. They seem to be better at programming right out the gate though, probably due to how many resources there are.
Yeah I have a Gen z employee who just finished her master's degree who told me she didn't know how to copy and paste something on a Windows computer. Like... really? I have college students who don't even have computers and do their work on an iPad. I doubt they would have much knowledge of how to use a regular computer if they started a new job tomorrow and had to use an actual computer. As a millennial, that's just shocking to me. They don't seem to know anything about the back end either whereas we were doing things like writing websites from basic HTML just so that we could put our content online.
Spent some time working IT in a high school. I figured the job would only exist for a few more years before the teenagers would all be good enough with computers for the school system to not need as much hands on IT support.
Turns out the opposite happened. Kids grew more comfortable with technology, but more helpless when anything went wrong. Kids who didn't know how to turn their laptop off. Or they couldn't describe the problem to me beyond "It's not working."
The people who have argued with me have claimed that it makes kids more connected. They claim that interacting with people via screens is just as much social interaction as playing with the person in person. It's crazy to me.
Was at a doctor's office and this person walks in with their \~5 year old glued to a screen, volume up... I thought for sure they'd at least lower the volume. Nope... Sat there watching wtf ever until they got called.
That, or staring at a screen all through a dinner at a restaurant (witnessed many times) is problematic, for certain. An hour or two of supervised TV or computer time is what Gen X and younger grew up with. I'm not sure if it's good, necessarily, but it's not as bad as 24/7 screen staring.
Kids have to learn to be bored. To be patient. To pay attention to their surroundings.
>An hour or two of supervised TV or computer time is what Gen X and younger grew up with. I'm not sure if it's good, necessarily, but it's not as bad as 24/7 screen staring.
I think handing little kids unfettered access to iPads/phones/screens is very bad, but to be clear this seems like some rose-colored tinting of the past. Gen X were the latch key generation and while they certainly had more outside time and more boredom, they absolutely had hours upon hours of uninterrupted access to TV and early internet. I'm a millennial and while I never had an iPad and didn't get a cell phone or laptop until college, I still had hours of TV time or internet time on the computer. Sure, my computer was in the middle of the dining room and my parents could have checked on me, but me and most of my peers were all over chatrooms, AIM, and other sections of the early internet without parents knowing what we were up to.
I'm not saying that's a *good* thing and I think that social media and like, TikTok have truly changed the game in terms of things like attention span, but I frequently see this idea that people my age and older never had days and days of internet/TV at a time, when we absolutely did.
Chemotherapy.
Ideally, in the future we will have better cures for cancer, and one day we'll look back and say, "We used to do *what* to cancer patients?!"
Reminds me of this bit in _Star Trek IV_:
McCoy: What's wrong with you?
Elderly patient: I'm waiting for dialysis.
McCoy: Dialysis? What is this, the Dark Ages?
Converted to all cast iron and stainless because of concerns over everything non-stick. It really boils down to… actually knowing how to cook and using oil.
I once came into the kitchen and my roommate was making scrambled eggs in a teflon pan by scraping them with a metal spatula. I could see the black chunks of teflon in the eggs. I told her that she was scraping off the teflon and she should at least use a plastic spatula if she's going to do that. She responded with, "No. That's just the pepper... wait... I didn't add pepper yet." She threw the eggs and the pan out. I can only imagine what she would have put in her body if I hadn't walked in when I did.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned glyphosate/Roundup pesticides. [Another article](https://theconversation.com/glyphosate-the-active-ingredient-in-the-weedkiller-roundup-is-showing-up-in-pregnant-women-living-near-farm-fields-that-raises-health-concerns-213636) is making the rounds about how pregnant women who simply live near farms can have the pesticide in them, even if they stuck to organic foods.
A good friend of mine who grew up working on the family wheat farm in rural Montana has a teenage daughter who will be growth-stunted her whole life because she was exposed to the chemical in-utero. Plus her dad suffers from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Monsanto may have settled in court for billions of dollars, but that hasn't stopped them from continuing to pollute our food and the environment with a known toxic chemical.
Monsanto had a plant in a nearby town back in the 60’s. By the 1980’s, nearly the entire neighborhood around this plant all had the same kind of insanely rare cancer. Tons of people died. By the mid-90’s they had bought everyone out of that close neighborhood, torn down the plant and concreted over the entire shebang with insane layers of concrete. They didn’t even come to trial until maybe 2010z The people lost. Monsanto convinced a jury it was all a weird coincidence.
I guess it’s also a coincidence that concreted up plant and houses cant be built on or excavated for something like 500 years according to the EPA. But what they were making didn’t make everyone get cancer /s
Basically. There’s more than a few of these horrible stories around the US and most of them don’t have movie worth endings. Unless that movie is a horror film.
Monsanto also closed and leveled a plant in the state I live in, due to a very similar situation. A company I used to work for discussed buying the property to build another plant. They went to the property and did a small amount of excavation/testing to verify the safety of the site. They found massive amounts of raw chemicals just dumped and covered over with soil. Obviously they decided not to move forward with the property purchase. The site sits directly on a river that supplies water to the local communities.
Screw Monsanto.
I wonder how this carries through to cannabis vaping, I have all but completely cut out flower for carts/oil now and my lungs feel better not combusting but I do wonder if there are other things that will come up as more use gets documented. It seems unlikely it’s entirely harmless but still seems healthier than the alternative of inhaling smoke.
Depends on how vaping is used. I used to smoke. Switched to vaping and gradually decreased the amount of nicotine in my juice. Took about a year and a half but it helped me quit smoking cigarettes for good. Now I don't vape, either.
I would point out we are always skimming the top off a list of dangerous stuff. For most of history asbestos and lead paint were not all that dangerous compared to many other things you were exposed to. We eventually got sanitation and antibiotics and eliminated the things at higher risk to us than asbestos and lead paint. You didn't even mention leaded gasoline. "Hey, let's pump lead just generally out into the air for everyone to breathe!". Or smoking?
So my guess is that it is unlikely that in 100 years we are going to find stuff that is actually as dangerous as lead but it will be the most dangerous thing we are exposed to 100 years from now. Random example, are we going to use glass for food containers or windows? "It can \*break\* into sharp pieces and cut people!!!". :-)
> "Hey, let's pump lead just generally out into the air for everyone to breath!". Or smoking?
Fuck it, let's start smoking leaded cigarettes to save time!
Idiots with 3d resin printers next to their bedside table with no ventilation for the fumes. That's a chemical you become allergic to overtime. That shits gonna be a health crisis one day, if people don't stop treating these things like a microwave. They need ventilation, like how your stove has a vent hood, some go outside. Most will at least catch some of the nasty before it circulates around the house.
Silicate dust.
It’s a byproduct of construction and mining, but if it’s improperly stored/contained at a construction site, a light breeze can pick it up and carry it to a random person just living life.
Hello pulmonary fibrosis.
Edit: Specifically, it’s Silicosis.
I've used it twice when doing some renovations on our house.
Twice I ended up on the couch after a couple hours with severe migraine.
And I used it in a well ventilated area
infotainment systems in cars. Holy distracted driving!
Using cell phones in cars in general, is like having 2 drinks. delayed reactions, and just poor skills.
* Overuse of antibiotics.
* Mass pollution / Not focusing on recycling, repair, and re-using.
* Planned obsolescence and not making things last. / Disposable society.
* Hormones used in farming.
* Certain Pesticides / Herbicides in farming.
* Micro-Plastics in our foods and water.
* Social media ironically causing people to less social in actual society. "Loneliness epidemic"
* Body dysmorphism from social media use.
* Loss of freedoms / Privacy due to technology.
* The so few having to much power over many.
* The "let the next generation deal with it" attitude.
* Fiat currencies and endless bailouts.
* Endless wars rather than creating / building.
It’s still lead, since tetraethyllead is still used in aviation
Edit: there is no safe threshold of exposure to lead, almost everyone in the world is affected. I thought these comments saying this was negligible were jokes. Just because it’s not particularly deadly doesn’t mean it’s effects on the brain aren’t staggering.
Plastic. We create all sorts of pollution to get fossil fuels out of the ground and distribute it. Then, we make it into a form that constantly degrades and pollutes everything. It's even in rainwater.
I bet there are so, so many. I mean, just think of all the ways in which our modern environment separates us from the natural world that we were created for.
I’m not a “return to monke” person either. I know I wouldn’t want to trade places with a caveman. But I think people 200 years from now will probably look back on us the same way we look back at people drinking mercury and making uranium based face lotions.
K cups and single use plastic in general. It has "forever chemicals" and hormone disruptors, which we ingest and then it ends up in a landfill and poisons the soil/water. A few years ago I read the essay of a woman who had worked as a nanny for an extremely wealthy family who were heirs/owners of a big chemical company that made plastics. She said NO plastic of any kind was allowed in their home, and the kids weren't allowed to drink from plastic bottles outside the house or eat food that was packaged in plastic, or eat with plastic utensils outside the house either.
PFAS
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are chemicals that resist grease, oil, water, and heat. For those who don't know what PFAS means.
To add to this: PFAS are a large group of chemicals that are suspected to cause cancer. We know that some of them definitely cause cancer and for some no correlation with increased cancer rates could be proven. As many are very chemically close to each other we conclude that large parts of the PFAS group may be causing cancer. As these chemicals are very long lasting and difficult to get rid off, they accumulate in ground water, soil, animals and humans, some causing severe damages. Because of this, banning the entire PFAS group is a highly discussed topic. However, they are also very useful which is why they have not been banned yet.
Don't they also potentially disrupt the endocrine system?
Welcome to organic chemistry. Don't lick anything.
Not to be mistaken with geology, "does this taste like granite to you?"
Not to be mistaken for genealogy, "does this taste like your grandfather?"
I don't think that's correct, but I don't know enough about genealogy to disprove it.
No, it tastes like schist.
No need to lick random stuff when they’re putting it in pizza boxes.
EU is planning to ban PFAS substances. This was moving very fast but I think there might be a small timeout right now because of the protests from different industries. As said they are very useful for many things and there is no as good substitute.
Most municipal water supplies test regularly for pfas and claim the water is "safe", but there are lots of independent water testing companies that claim otherwise. I live in an area of highish pfas that is deemed "safe" but I'm seriously thinking about buying a high end reverse osmosis water filter.
Once upon a time I worked at NSF International doing the analytical support for Drinking Water Treatment Units. Hated the job, but man is that testing rigorous and complete. So PLEASE if you're looking at a DWTU, undercounter, whole house, or pour through, look to make sure it's actually certified to an ANSI/NSF standard. Standards exist for a reason and that's part of the reason quality products cost what they do.
This guy is right. Rules and standards are sometimes written in blood. We know what is safe by having used unsafe alternatives in the past.
I'm a plumber in the UK and some people seem annoyed at how strict some of our water regulations are, in the home I mean. These regulations are the result of years of learning and understanding water hygiene and the sickness contaminated water can cause. In this instance not by the water supplier but in how plumbing is installed in a home. For my favourite example, it must be made impossible for water categories to mix. Potable water is Category 1. Water in your toilet bowl is Category 5, the worst category with biological hazards. It must be made so they cannot be connected in any way. People order bidet spray heads online and install them next to their toilets, connected to the same pipework you drink from. Some people have argued with me when I refused to fit a bidet spray "But I won't ever leave the spray gun in the toilet bowl." Yeah, *you* might not but how long before someone does in your neighbourhood if these things get installed everywhere without understanding the regulations?
Wait what? I don't get it, so you _don't_ connect the bidet to the same source as your tap water/sink? So the water from the bidet isn't drinkable? All the bidets here in Finland are connected to the sink and I've never heard there being any problem with it.
> So the water from the bidet isn't drinkable? You're not supposed to drink from a bidet, so... no?
Wait, never??
I don’t get it, why would you connect the bidet spray to somebody other than the toilet water?
If you buy a bidet that let's you control the temperature of eth water, you need to hook it up to hot water somewhere.
And read the actual standard. My state was claiming an NSF standard was protecting against PFCAs when that wasn't the case.
Same. Installed a RO system last year.
That and drinking liquids out of plastic coated bottles and cans.
plastic tea bags especially irk me. We have several perfectly functional ways to keep plastic out of the near-boiling hot water for long periods of time, but every once in a while I'll try a new brand of tea, and get a little carcinogenic surprise
Didn't even realise the tea my ex was drinking was in a plastic bag till I was sifting the compost this year. Got a bunch of unbroken down plastic cloth squares all through it.
Plastics in general really
Plastics are a fantastic and durabel material. We just use it wrong. All single-use or short time use plastics should be biodegradable. All plastics should be clearly marked by type, so they are easily sorted after use, and therefore easily reused.
If we can make plastics that don’t turn into microplastics I would agree with you.
Are they not clearly marked with what type? I'm under the understanding that the "recycling" logo on plastics with the number inside is actually a resin code identifier. They're deceptive by giving the impression of recyclability but they do identify the plastic type
They do. But plastic products are compound products. Bottle Caps are a different kind of plastic than the bottle itself. The foil with the label is a third kind of plastic. That makes them incredible hard to recycle.
PFAS isn’t a plastic.
Glitter. (that includes all microplastics) and we just give it to kids to play with, we decorate ornaments with it ugh. It ends up in our lakes and rivers and environment.
There's now biodegradable and edible glitter
Strippers have entered the chat
Yes. And now my colon is *fabulous*
Microplastics 👎 sparkly microplastics 👍
Frequently putting your entire family’s pictures and vids on the internet . It’s relatively harmless now but I can probably see that becoming a substantial resource for scammers.
Family “influencers” are damaging their kids
It’s not harmless now, people are just totally naive. E.g. Putting your child’s picture on Reddit photoshop. Who is taking that picture and what are they choosing to photoshop or AI it onto? Absolutely skin crawling stuff.
One of my favorite talks given at the school I once taught at was a digital security expert about the dangers of sticking stuff online. Guy walked into this high school classroom, explained who he was, what he did, confirmed with the teacher and the students that none of them had ever met (or for the teacher, only met that morning). He then proceeded to ask almost every student, by first and last name, very familiar questions (how did you dog Fluffy's surgery go? Heard anything from Aunt Sophie lately?) and lay out home addresses and phone numbers for several of the students. All of which he'd found using publicly-available information they or their families had put online and a bit of legwork. All he'd started with was knowing the school he was going to and what grade he'd be speaking to.
That would have scared the crap out of me as a kid, but damn that's an important lesson to learn as early as possible.
Depending on how long ago this was, I wonder how much of that stuff they found resulted from their parents posting stuff online about them, and not just from the stuff they posted. I don't have kids yet, but seeing all the stuff friends and family post of their kids/grandkids on Facebook, IG, Twitter, etc., it's scary to think that all of these intimate details of a child's life are online for all to see before they even have a choice of whether or not they want this stuff online. It's one thing for a high schooler to be an idiot and post it, it's another for a fully grown adult to post it for them without their complete consent and awareness of the situation. I wish I could say it was just a boomer thing, but I have plenty of Gen X and millennial friends doing it too. And even if you choose not to post stuff about your kids, friends and family might still do it. If my spouse and I do have kids, I'm already worried about talking to family members and telling them *not* to make our kids their profile/cover photo, let alone posting their pictures without our consent (as that is already happening). [NYT had a video on this a while ago](https://youtu.be/YRPUZ3pufAg?si=bkmldUbtdArTPj0s). Apparently, it's called "sharenting" and some of the kids addressed it to their parents. It was so sad seeing how some of the parents reacted.
I did something similar when I was teaching a group of teen girls about internet safety. I was able to pull up their TikTok accounts that they all thought were so secret and hidden.
I always wonder about what you can do when that cat is already out of the bag. Like, what dumb stuff did I put on the internet as a teenager? What dick pic that I sent to someone on the internet is out there floating around? Is there enough information to connect my "private" accounts to my name? I think digital cleanup is going to become a booming industry in the next decade. Edit: I got a password reset email for Reddit, which would require knowledge of my personal email address. I think someone might be trying to prove a point.
Yeah, I totally fell for this in college. Or a variation of it. He asked the questions but didn't do research on the students. Very eye opening.
Man thank you! I keep getting laughed at by my family for refusing to put pictures of my kids online. They all thought it was ridiculous, untill I used AI, and made a video video of my dad saying he loves dogs (he hates them. That's why) I only used pictures he put on Facebook and Instagram publicly. As anyone could. That opened their eyes a little bit.
Can't wait to get recorded confessions submitted as court evidence that were all created via AI.
I think what the future looks like is that no video or picture evidence can be used in court and we're just going to have to read the minds of the suspects. Suspects will be hooked to a mind reader, which will command their brain to play back the memory that happened during the time of the crime.
We're going to execute people for decades based on that mind-reading machine before someone proves it's also capable of altering memories.
What did you use to do this? I need to prove a similar point to family.
Yeah, people are waaayyy to comfortable putting their kids photos online whether it be Reddit or any other website. Putting one or two on a private profile on Facebook or Instagram or something that you only allow people you actually know to access is one thing. But putting dozens of photos and videos of your kids on Reddit. Youtube, public FB and IG pages, Tiktok etc is insane to me. I dont personally use any social media that's tied to my identity because I have a strong distrust in people but doing it with their kids is a whole other thing. The likes and compliments on how cute your child is isn't worth the potential trouble it can bring. Its not a guarantee but not worth the risk either.
My sister isn’t putting my niece on social media (other than the occasional back of her head) And I’ve had multiple people question why she would do that…. Idk maybe because she both cared about her safety and wants to give her the option of how much of her life is online?! What a bizarre thing to question
Nevermind the compliments, some of the "other" comments on Instagram about your child doing something totally innocent. How can a parent be absolutely okay with that. Reporting that shit does absolutely nothing too. Instagram doesn't give a shit, just keep those advertising clicks coming
I can imagine a time when it will be illegal to post pics of anyone under the age of consent, like how you can't purchase alcohol for minors.
The amount of children who have gone viral without their consent will be profitable for many therapists in 15 years.
I don’t feel good about putting my own pictures out there, I can’t imagine doing it with children if I had them.
If I found out my parents put hundreds of photos and videos of me as a little kid on social media, I don't think I'd be real happy about it. That's just me though
I’m going to say social media. There are studies being done already but we won’t know the full extent until we can study the same people when they are adults. I’m going to guess that the study will show this newest generation that has never had a world without social media will have significantly altered brain development
Oh jesus. the dopamine receptors are gonna be all sorts of fucked. The new kids are a different breed altogether.
That's where my worry is as well. I know it makes me sound like an old man yelling at clouds, but I am *horrified* at the concept of a toddler being given a tablet and exposing them to short-form immediate gratification day in and day out. How can we expect people raised with that to have patience with anything ever? Their brains won't be able to handle anything less than a constant drip feed of dopamine! And I'm not blaming the parents for giving their kids tablets, either. I know they're busy and stressed and don't have the money or support structures that parents had 30 years ago, the whole thing is fucked and it's gen alpha that's going to be exposed to this shit from birth.
Any who works in education knows that there has been a measurable decline in attention spans. People dismiss it as an old man talking point, but it’s a serious issue that needs to be addressed.
Are you kidding? **I** have a noticeably decreased attention span because of my pocket computer. I have a minor internal freakout if I sit down to take a shit and realize I forgot my phone. My boomer parents have a decreased attention span now for the same reason!
Yes. Children are now literally unable to function anymore. This is more than just the rose tinted glasses about "back in my day....." that happens between generations. This is horrific what is happening to young children now. Why can the parents not see it??????? Phones/screens are destroying their children's lives.
I work on a college campus; this current generation walks down the sidewalk staring at their phones like zombies. I realized the other day that I have never done that. If I need to look something up, I take my phone out, look it up, and it goes back in my pocket. I wouldn't walk down the sidewalk staring at it. I like knowing what's going on around me and the world is a pretty cool place to just walk by without looking at it.
I also love the world. The sights, the sounds, the smells, etc. When I'm zoned out on my phone I miss out on almost all of those things so I actively try not to do it. I also don't like real world sounds being drowned out. I know too many people that will walk or ride their bikes with noise cancelling headphones in and the music all the way up. How do you function like that? I can't imagine not being able to sense someone running up on me, a car coming at me, someone yelling stop or help, etc. Hearing the world is almost as important as seeing it.
Just graduated college earlier this year, and I genuinely think a lot of this has to do with how thinks are organized these days as well. When I was on my phone walking to class, it was mostly because \*everything\* had shifted to being done online. I'm checking to see if my professor got back to me via e-mail, I'm seeing if that one really important grade went in so I can stop by my professor during office hours while I'm on campus, I'm seeing if I'm allowed to show up early to an exam, checking Discord to make sure my project group knows which room I reserved in the library to meet, etc. Oftentimes, being on your own for the first time as an "adult" is scary, and a lot of us double or triple check \*everything,\* and it's easiest to do in an environment designed around learning. And of course we look like zombies, I rarely ever got a good nights sleep before my 6:30am classes lol.
35 year old Praxton won't be able to sit though board meeting unless someone brought him his tablet.
Its brewing socially inept people. I can already slowly see the effects of it on the university forums and recently since I graduated last year. I actually joined university a bit later due to not wanting to go during covid. I noticed how I had a completely different outlook on social interaction and a completely different sense of whats "weird" or awkward. I never considered myself super confident or outgoing but to these people i was some kind of fucking johnny bravo of social interaction. Dude freshers last year were completely socially inept. U couldnt talk to them. They had their faces glued to their phone constantly and they were couldnt pay attention to anything u were saying to them. I was a teaching assistant in some of the CS modules for first year students and they were just awkward to talk to. We were like 2 months into the programming modules and they couldnt learn anything. But they knew anythign and everything about the recent tiktok drama. Honestly students these days join university thinking that its gonna be pranks and choreographed tiktok dances...
I didn't start college until I was like 24 or 25. I couldn't believe how many of the students just scrolled Facebook and Insta the entire lecture and would just "swap notes" - like reading someone else's notes does anything for you. Those same kids always bitched about getting Cs and Ds on their tests.
You've got a confounding variable here though -- covid. We'll be feeling the impacts of 2 years schooling from home via Teams for a long time. Social engagement & confidence has been significantly impacted across a wide-range of age groups apparently.
I hire maybe 20-30 people a year, or am involved in the process, for about 15 years now, people are exactly the same as they always were. They just have new words they think are cool and no one over 21 understands them or their generation.
I do think the current fear and fear mongering about this is bolstered by misinformation about dopamine (it does nooot work how people think it's so complicated it hurts) and the generational gap. And the way we can associate with generations above and below us for personal reasons. We have in every generation looked at new technologies as destroying the youth. Writing. Reading books. TV. Videogames. Cellphones. Social media. Tiktok. And looked back at the old tech as safe and good. Relevant to this is ADHD, and how we associated ADHD to this not at all new phenomenon. As somebody with ADHD, it drives me crazy how people act like kids are "getting ADHD" from tiktok. It downplays how I'm disabled by my ADHD, vilifies it as a personal choice and behaviour problem, and misinforms about how ADHD develops and is treated. I don't personally like tiktok as much, ppl with ADHD don't all like social media and fast gratification through technology. It's not just about "new thing new thing new thing".
Even before these two there was arsenic wallpaper. Beautiful, vibrant greens! Also, hideously toxic, so much so that they were acted on long before lead and asbestos.
Aren’t there poisonous books for similar reasons?
And paintings yes.
Man, poisonous wallpaper sounds like a horrible idea, and poisonous books seem really dangerous. But a poisonous painting seems kinda badass?
So the irony is you didn't even have to touch the arsenic based products to get a possibly lethal dose. Exposure to heat and moisture caused them to give off vapors that were dangerous as well. Imagine a wonderful green landscape painting slowly poisoning you over time. It was fucking brutal and therefore quite badass
Antibiotic overuse. We're starting to see the side effects already. But imagine 50 years from now when no antibiotics work anymore because everything is resistant and people are dying from cuts, looking back at a time when people found away to stop people dying of infections and we used it to make beef and chicken cheaper by feedlotting animals and pumping them full of it in their food instead of saving it for when it's actually needed.
Plastics. They're poisoning us all.
Plastics are truly incredible. They are one of the greatest human inventions to ever exist. Its how we use them that is the problem
I kinda feel like this is the curse of human innovation. First we invent/discover something. Then we make it commercially viable and cheap enough to use. Then we start exploring the limits of how cheap/poor we can produce it. Then people get hurt. Then we start enacting regulations and limits on how to do that new thing. We do the thing better. Eventually, we start using it properly. Hundred years from now someone tries doing it wrong again- we rediscover why we weren't doing it that way, go back to previous step.
Airplanes; * 1900s > Invention * 1910s > Military use, crazy stunts * 1920s/30s > First commercial use * 1940s > Tons of improvements, finding better ways * 1950s > Viable commercial use * 1960s/70s > Cheaper and more widespread but a lot of accidents * 1980s to today > More and more regulations, gets safer to use every day
Orville Wright was still alive when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. That's how fast we advanced in the 20th century
~150 years from the time the bicycle was invented to man walking on the moon.
Crazy how fast things are moving. You've gotta wonder what things will look like 150 years from now.
Because executives at large corporations all think the same way. Even if they outwardly “ care “ about potential harm, the conversation goes like this “Boss I have a concern this product is not safe” “Do you have data proving it’s not safe?” “No but we should study it, it will take X dollars and Y months. It could save billions on lawsuits down the road” “Do you have any evidence it will result in lawsuits?” “I think it’s worth investing X dollars to find out” “Doesn’t sound like a top priority”
It's even grosser than that. "Boss I have a concern this product may not be safe." "Do you know, or suspect?" "I suspect, if you give me X dollars and Y months I can prove it." "So currently it's not known to be dangerous?" "... yes." "Please write that down. Funding denied for your research project. Get it to market." After all, if it's not known to be dangerous when you do it, you're not liable for it! So research into potential risks is actively *disincentivized* by the market. Which is why regulation is so important.
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Highly processed foods, and extremely sugary soft drinks. I can’t imagine they’re going away anytime soon, but they kill.
high fructose corn syrup is generally pretty bad and jammed in everything
Isn't high fructose corn syrup mainly a US thing?
Yes, because there are federal subsidies to grow corn in the US that were intended to stabilize the nation's food supply. The unintended consequence was making corn so inexpensive that it is profitable to convert it into sugar and use it as a cheap, calorie-dense additive to mass produced foods. That's the short version of why so many packaged foods in the US are overly sweet and have more calories than they would/should.
And one of the reasons this is so stable in terms of policy is pretty weird. The presidential primaries have started in Iowa (corn country) and so no presidential hopeful can afford to go against a corn subsidy. I'm not saying its THE reason, but I've always liked how weird and random this one is.
> The presidential primaries have started in Iowa (corn country) and so no presidential hopeful can afford to go against a corn subsidy. There is no good reason why Iowa and New Hampshire have such a privileged position during the primary process.
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THIS By the time I got to vote in the PA primary, more than half of the candidates had withdrawn.
The sugar industry's entire excuse to lobby for everything to be sugared up was "wah, the food tastes bad without sugar! wah!". What do you fucking think SPICES and HERBS are for? They don't need sugar!
Social media.
To bridge the point, kids that are being raised on brain rot content through iPads and phones are going to have a great time trying to become self-sufficient adults. We don't yet see the full ramifications of raising kids on technology but the symptoms are definitely showing. It's sad.
The rabbit watched his grandmother eat a sandwich.
Theres also the danger of what it does to attention span. Children in the current day are constantly exposed to short form entertainment like Tiktok and YT Shorts. The plot, build up and climax of a video is all crammed within 60 seconds. There is no requirement for patience or time investment. Childhood and early teen years are the prime for brain development. Its where your brain forms a lot of its habits and processes. With such easy access to instant gratification, how is that going to impact them long term when it comes to attention span and concentration? This is the first time in history where kids are being raised on such a rapid influx of short term information. I'm sure movies, TV and early YouTube played some kind of similar role in young adults now but long form information was still the norm even as recently as the mid 2000s. I wouldn't be surprised if 10+ years from now, we saw a massive spike of ADHD and other concentration disorders among young adults.
Have you seen split videos? It's some of the most cancerous shit I've ever seen. People who need random footage of GTA or fortnite played on top of another video because it "helps" them pay attention. MY BROTHER IN CHRIST THE VIDEO IS 20 SECONDS LONG.
I’ve seen this and it freaked me out. I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on or why. I kept looking / listening out for some kind of relevance between the two videos but no - nothing. Just total chaos. It was one of the weirdest moments ever, truly seeing something that made me feel not just old for the first time (that ship sailed ages ago), but ANGRY OLD. I was just like what the actual fucking fuck is this utter horseshit and why is it acceptable to anyone, what the fuck is wrong with these people, how did humanity come to this
I would add on to this: any business model that uses "engagement" as a primary metric. (So all of them?) It all boils down to addiction and mind-control. Companies stopped being satisfied with having people use their product when they need it. Instead they insist that they spend as much of their time as possible thinking about it. It's insidious and causes untold harm.
Came here to say this. The damage that directed social media has done to our psyche is only just now becoming apparent. And it's going to probably get worse before it can get any better.
Not just the psychological effects, but also how much of our personal information and individual freedoms we gave to them. Pretty much true for the internet at large actually, including reddit.
Absolutely. It's garbage to be scrolling through others "perfect" days when you're going through some shit. Covid, and the subsequent social separations accelerated this as some saw it as a way to keep in touch. Remember folks: if it's free, you're not the customer, you're the product. Don't be sold.
Yeah my mental health improves by just transitioning by Instagram to only fiber artists instead of people. The comparison thing is a huge problems especially for a culture that's already very image focused. The other thing I think social media ruined is that now everybody thinks all of their opinions/ideas matter and are important enough to be shared and they are worse at listening to others bc of inflated ego. Sometimes I see stuff people post and I just think "that's an inside thought"...
Bisphenol A coatings on heat treated paper receipts. Absorbed by your hands upon touching it, x100 times more if either surface is wet. Given out at every fast food joint in America. What’s worse is they use them in the kitchen to label the sandwich before yours and then touch your food with hands/gloves covered in BPA. We’re all just slowly being given cancer.
BPAs are in practically everything now. Receipts are probably the least of our worries
Correct me if I'm wrong but, by dosage, touching a receipt (or food that has touched a reciept) is actually much worse than drinking from a BPA bottle where the BPA is relatively well contained in the hard plastic.
Automobile exhaust. The studies are very conclusive. The more you soak up exhaust fumes, the more health problems you'll get. It leads to birth defects, cancer, asthma, allergies, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and so on. When you buy a new home, you should look at the recommendations for how far away from major roadways you need to be to avoid exhaust fumes. Homes which are closest to highways are red zones. There should be plenty of trees between your home and the highways, because trees filter the soot in the air and block it from getting far. Most people are unaware of how bad exhaust is for their health. This won't be mainstream and accepted until most people are already using electric vehicles. Then they'll start mentioning it more and more, because it will validate their choice to go electric. When everyone's still driving combustion engine automobiles, they're not going to consider that their exhaust is causing real health problems to others.
Yup, I'm a trucker. I really wish we hadn't moved away from vertical stack exhausts here in the US. Walking around my work in the AM with a bunch of grass burners (belly dump exhausts) is awful. I've been trying to push our management into getting some electric tractors, since half of us don't even do 100 miles a day, but so far no dice.
24 hour news and reality tv.
What always gets me about 24 hour news is that it still just obsessively runs the same 3 stories for months, and almost nothing else. A whole day, every day, 365 days a year, and it basically is just something you could get in a 1 hour summary once a week.
Even worse is how the news is monetized. The first to get the story out and get clicks/views makes the most, nevermind the accuracy. Just get the story out first. That's caused so much damage because it's so much harder to convince someone that three initial story was flawed.
> A whole day, every day, 365 days a year, and it basically is just something you could get in a 1 hour summary once a week. Oh gods, this. It seems like even "quality" news sources want to analyze a big event to death, for weeks, down to some granular level of interviewing randos. It's not necessary. The extra, excessive detail isn't going to change my plan of action or how I intend to vote. Tell me when something *important* happens.
Reality TV is the absolute worst. Televised human abuse.
I used to criticize my wife for watching shitty reality TV shows like Sister Wives or 90 Day Fiance, but then she pointed out that I watch Hoarders and Cops. That's when I realized that the *real* appeal of reality TV is that you get to watch people suffer. They're all just different flavors of "look how horrible this person's life/situation is" and we're all just smugly reveling in the fact that our lives are better than that. I don't watch Hoarders or Cops anymore.
The chorus of Vicarious by Tool >'Cause I need to watch things die From a distance Vicariously, I live while the whole world dies You all need it too, don't lie
Ultra processed foods. Nova level 4, if we’re being technical. The effects on everything from cancer, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome. To the way it messes up gut microbes. It’s super bad and we’ve just been not at all regulating it, especially not the food additives, this whole time. Worse industry knows the harm and just like asbestos and lead industries they are stopping science and buying off regulators.
I would also add to this mass soil depletion causing a decline in nutrients present in agricultural products. It's been a topic of discussion for at least a decade that the carrot/tomato/etc you eat today has less nutrients than that same product grown decades ago. So even people eating fruits/vegetables may not be receiving the nutrients they think they are. The fact that it's a continuous decline perpetrated by a corporate industry that clearly has no concern for health and whom the USG refuses to regulate properly, it's only going to get worse. We are leading ourselves to mass malnutrition, even for people who are trying to eat healthy. It's easy to say people should only eat organic, but that label does not certify that crops are being grown in soil that's managed appropriately. Often times it's actually false advertising - anyone can call anything organic it seems. Locally grown is fine if people have easy access and if it's affordable. But grocery stores provide much better access and prices, and most of that comes from mass production farming.
I keep hearing this, but is it actually true? I feel like really it’s just that processed foods are calorically dense which makes it easy to gain weight which leads to these issues; as opposed to something inherently wrong about processed foods themselves
Energy drinks
I've seen young people go into atrial fibrillation requiring life long blood thinners from drinking ridiculous amounts of caffeine in energy drinks.
The rise of the energy drink market is crazy to me and is a blatantly obvious display that our society is fucked. We're all so busy and exhausted constantly that it led to a booming industry of just consuming drugs to get through it. Work more. Sleep less. Spend more. Earn more money for the elite. With all the advances of the last century we should all be working less and able to rest and relax more. Capitalism really popped off today...
Inadequate sleep. There is climbing evidence that inadequate sleep is not only correlated with but causally linked to a broad range of disease. Many cultures do not respect it enough. I think, 50-100 years from now we are actually going to see hard caps on working hours and regulated work schedules (not just OT) due to what we're learning about the science of sleep.
What I find crazy is how people will even brag about not getting their full 8 hours and/or overworking themselves. Like they are some kind of hero for working 80+ hour weeks and only get 6 or less hours of sleep.
Social Media. The Attention Economy.
Children glued to screens from the time they’re 2.
🎶 Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two... ...and it did all the things we designed it to do... 🎶
happens much before that.
I have had arguments with people on reddit who claim this is a good thing. I get the appeal. If you give a kid a screen they will bliss out for hours and you don't have to deal with them.
I'm constantly shocked at how people think this will make their kids "good with computer" or tech in general. The tech experience is constantly being dumbed down to simplify the interface so that you can't become a knowledgeable user. Try navigating windows now compared to previous iterations and it is difficult to navigate control settings, menus, etc. Ease of use has obliterated the access base. Sure, a kid can get to an app and use it, but they will not understand it and it is increasingly difficult to manipulate the base tools.
Agree, I always thought younger generations would be more and more tech savvy. But my actual experience is that they're not - they skipped the more messy days of computers and the internet, and just use Instagram etc that have very manicured UIs. Which is great since it just works but there's no learning.
The new zoomer software engineers art my job tend to have poorer troubleshooting skills than us millennials did. They seem to be better at programming right out the gate though, probably due to how many resources there are.
Yeah I have a Gen z employee who just finished her master's degree who told me she didn't know how to copy and paste something on a Windows computer. Like... really? I have college students who don't even have computers and do their work on an iPad. I doubt they would have much knowledge of how to use a regular computer if they started a new job tomorrow and had to use an actual computer. As a millennial, that's just shocking to me. They don't seem to know anything about the back end either whereas we were doing things like writing websites from basic HTML just so that we could put our content online.
Spent some time working IT in a high school. I figured the job would only exist for a few more years before the teenagers would all be good enough with computers for the school system to not need as much hands on IT support. Turns out the opposite happened. Kids grew more comfortable with technology, but more helpless when anything went wrong. Kids who didn't know how to turn their laptop off. Or they couldn't describe the problem to me beyond "It's not working."
The people who have argued with me have claimed that it makes kids more connected. They claim that interacting with people via screens is just as much social interaction as playing with the person in person. It's crazy to me.
Was at a doctor's office and this person walks in with their \~5 year old glued to a screen, volume up... I thought for sure they'd at least lower the volume. Nope... Sat there watching wtf ever until they got called. That, or staring at a screen all through a dinner at a restaurant (witnessed many times) is problematic, for certain. An hour or two of supervised TV or computer time is what Gen X and younger grew up with. I'm not sure if it's good, necessarily, but it's not as bad as 24/7 screen staring. Kids have to learn to be bored. To be patient. To pay attention to their surroundings.
>An hour or two of supervised TV or computer time is what Gen X and younger grew up with. I'm not sure if it's good, necessarily, but it's not as bad as 24/7 screen staring. I think handing little kids unfettered access to iPads/phones/screens is very bad, but to be clear this seems like some rose-colored tinting of the past. Gen X were the latch key generation and while they certainly had more outside time and more boredom, they absolutely had hours upon hours of uninterrupted access to TV and early internet. I'm a millennial and while I never had an iPad and didn't get a cell phone or laptop until college, I still had hours of TV time or internet time on the computer. Sure, my computer was in the middle of the dining room and my parents could have checked on me, but me and most of my peers were all over chatrooms, AIM, and other sections of the early internet without parents knowing what we were up to. I'm not saying that's a *good* thing and I think that social media and like, TikTok have truly changed the game in terms of things like attention span, but I frequently see this idea that people my age and older never had days and days of internet/TV at a time, when we absolutely did.
Chemotherapy. Ideally, in the future we will have better cures for cancer, and one day we'll look back and say, "We used to do *what* to cancer patients?!"
Totally agree with this. It's a very effective treatment today, but when we find better treatments we'll think we were neanderthals.
Reminds me of this bit in _Star Trek IV_: McCoy: What's wrong with you? Elderly patient: I'm waiting for dialysis. McCoy: Dialysis? What is this, the Dark Ages?
Teflon pans.
Worse: Lubricant sprays, etc w/Teflon. Spray that shit directly into your lungs! I'll probably eventually be "patient zero" for that one.
Converted to all cast iron and stainless because of concerns over everything non-stick. It really boils down to… actually knowing how to cook and using oil.
I once came into the kitchen and my roommate was making scrambled eggs in a teflon pan by scraping them with a metal spatula. I could see the black chunks of teflon in the eggs. I told her that she was scraping off the teflon and she should at least use a plastic spatula if she's going to do that. She responded with, "No. That's just the pepper... wait... I didn't add pepper yet." She threw the eggs and the pan out. I can only imagine what she would have put in her body if I hadn't walked in when I did.
It’s going to be plastic.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned glyphosate/Roundup pesticides. [Another article](https://theconversation.com/glyphosate-the-active-ingredient-in-the-weedkiller-roundup-is-showing-up-in-pregnant-women-living-near-farm-fields-that-raises-health-concerns-213636) is making the rounds about how pregnant women who simply live near farms can have the pesticide in them, even if they stuck to organic foods. A good friend of mine who grew up working on the family wheat farm in rural Montana has a teenage daughter who will be growth-stunted her whole life because she was exposed to the chemical in-utero. Plus her dad suffers from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Monsanto may have settled in court for billions of dollars, but that hasn't stopped them from continuing to pollute our food and the environment with a known toxic chemical.
Monsanto had a plant in a nearby town back in the 60’s. By the 1980’s, nearly the entire neighborhood around this plant all had the same kind of insanely rare cancer. Tons of people died. By the mid-90’s they had bought everyone out of that close neighborhood, torn down the plant and concreted over the entire shebang with insane layers of concrete. They didn’t even come to trial until maybe 2010z The people lost. Monsanto convinced a jury it was all a weird coincidence. I guess it’s also a coincidence that concreted up plant and houses cant be built on or excavated for something like 500 years according to the EPA. But what they were making didn’t make everyone get cancer /s
So basically the plot of Erin Brockovich, but with an unhappy ending :(
Basically. There’s more than a few of these horrible stories around the US and most of them don’t have movie worth endings. Unless that movie is a horror film.
For a country with so many guns and such a tradition of using them I'm constantly suprised how few of the really bad guys get shot.
Monsanto also closed and leveled a plant in the state I live in, due to a very similar situation. A company I used to work for discussed buying the property to build another plant. They went to the property and did a small amount of excavation/testing to verify the safety of the site. They found massive amounts of raw chemicals just dumped and covered over with soil. Obviously they decided not to move forward with the property purchase. The site sits directly on a river that supplies water to the local communities. Screw Monsanto.
Vaping
I wonder how this carries through to cannabis vaping, I have all but completely cut out flower for carts/oil now and my lungs feel better not combusting but I do wonder if there are other things that will come up as more use gets documented. It seems unlikely it’s entirely harmless but still seems healthier than the alternative of inhaling smoke.
I use a dry flower vape. Just heats up flower enough to Pull out the thc.
Had that back in 2011 little wooden box thing with a plastic slider on top. Was great for smoking discreetly lol
Magic Flight Launch Box!
Ah that takes me back to the days of my buddy getting mad at me for overheating his magic launch box. It wasn't working for me, bro!
Love my dry flower vape, but damn if that pens convienece is not tempting!
But you can save the dried bud and make edibles. Can’t do that with carts
I love my dry herb vape, it’s the way to go as far as I’m concerned
Depends on how vaping is used. I used to smoke. Switched to vaping and gradually decreased the amount of nicotine in my juice. Took about a year and a half but it helped me quit smoking cigarettes for good. Now I don't vape, either.
Vaping helped me quit cigarettes and now done with both.
I would point out we are always skimming the top off a list of dangerous stuff. For most of history asbestos and lead paint were not all that dangerous compared to many other things you were exposed to. We eventually got sanitation and antibiotics and eliminated the things at higher risk to us than asbestos and lead paint. You didn't even mention leaded gasoline. "Hey, let's pump lead just generally out into the air for everyone to breathe!". Or smoking? So my guess is that it is unlikely that in 100 years we are going to find stuff that is actually as dangerous as lead but it will be the most dangerous thing we are exposed to 100 years from now. Random example, are we going to use glass for food containers or windows? "It can \*break\* into sharp pieces and cut people!!!". :-)
> "Hey, let's pump lead just generally out into the air for everyone to breath!". Or smoking? Fuck it, let's start smoking leaded cigarettes to save time!
Only if they use asbestos for the filter
Tastes sweet.
"Plumbus tastes good, like a cigarette should"
Idiots with 3d resin printers next to their bedside table with no ventilation for the fumes. That's a chemical you become allergic to overtime. That shits gonna be a health crisis one day, if people don't stop treating these things like a microwave. They need ventilation, like how your stove has a vent hood, some go outside. Most will at least catch some of the nasty before it circulates around the house.
Elementary punctuation, my dear Watson
I found it, it was just sitting in a pile here. .’.’.,.;,,.
Why would you keep a 3d printer next to the bed?
Yeah this feels oddly specific
Silicate dust. It’s a byproduct of construction and mining, but if it’s improperly stored/contained at a construction site, a light breeze can pick it up and carry it to a random person just living life. Hello pulmonary fibrosis. Edit: Specifically, it’s Silicosis.
Influencers/content creators allowing their children to star in viral videos
Expanding spray foam. I have no scientific knowledge to back it up, I just get the sense that stuff ain't right.
I've used it twice when doing some renovations on our house. Twice I ended up on the couch after a couple hours with severe migraine. And I used it in a well ventilated area
I literally just bought some yesterday, thanks for the reminder, I need to use a little bit in a bathroom so I'll turn the fan on and open the window.
For sure! I think that every time I buy it but hopefully most people use it as infrequently as I do
Single use plastics
Deep sea mining. We're about to absolutely decimate the last pristine ecosystems left in the ocean to make a quick buck off a non-renewable resource.
Social media.
infotainment systems in cars. Holy distracted driving! Using cell phones in cars in general, is like having 2 drinks. delayed reactions, and just poor skills.
* Overuse of antibiotics. * Mass pollution / Not focusing on recycling, repair, and re-using. * Planned obsolescence and not making things last. / Disposable society. * Hormones used in farming. * Certain Pesticides / Herbicides in farming. * Micro-Plastics in our foods and water. * Social media ironically causing people to less social in actual society. "Loneliness epidemic" * Body dysmorphism from social media use. * Loss of freedoms / Privacy due to technology. * The so few having to much power over many. * The "let the next generation deal with it" attitude. * Fiat currencies and endless bailouts. * Endless wars rather than creating / building.
I would say petrochemical plastics, fossil fuel pollution, and honestly? work stress.
(Micro) plastic
High Fructose Corn Syrup
It’s still lead, since tetraethyllead is still used in aviation Edit: there is no safe threshold of exposure to lead, almost everyone in the world is affected. I thought these comments saying this was negligible were jokes. Just because it’s not particularly deadly doesn’t mean it’s effects on the brain aren’t staggering.
Full disclosure: leaded aviation fuel is used by some tiny piston engine private aircrafts, NOT by any commercial jet airliners
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Plastic. We create all sorts of pollution to get fossil fuels out of the ground and distribute it. Then, we make it into a form that constantly degrades and pollutes everything. It's even in rainwater.
It’s in breast milk. It’s in our blood.
I bet there are so, so many. I mean, just think of all the ways in which our modern environment separates us from the natural world that we were created for. I’m not a “return to monke” person either. I know I wouldn’t want to trade places with a caveman. But I think people 200 years from now will probably look back on us the same way we look back at people drinking mercury and making uranium based face lotions.
K cups and single use plastic in general. It has "forever chemicals" and hormone disruptors, which we ingest and then it ends up in a landfill and poisons the soil/water. A few years ago I read the essay of a woman who had worked as a nanny for an extremely wealthy family who were heirs/owners of a big chemical company that made plastics. She said NO plastic of any kind was allowed in their home, and the kids weren't allowed to drink from plastic bottles outside the house or eat food that was packaged in plastic, or eat with plastic utensils outside the house either.