> where home ownership is insanely cheap due to low demand, but people don’t want to do it.
No one does it because there are no jobs in those places. We're failing as a society to build sufficient housing in areas of economic opportunity. In some areas we're moving backwards, Manhattan housed 300K more people in 1950 than it does today.
Not every job can be remote and most types of work benefit from agglomeration effects. Pretending that we can will people to live middle Pennsylvania by creating jobs somehow is foolish when we could simply build housing where the jobs already are.
When it's a developer tool we call it RUM or real user monitoring. It's super useful for solving bugs, but obviously the potential for abuse or user hostile activity is super high.
> The whole idea we allow “safe levels” of anything toxic is a concession to industry at the expense of the environment and consumers
No, it would be totally unworkable to do anything else. Plenty of normal from the ground food stuffs have low but safe levels of toxic substances in them. You wouldn't be able to preserve meat or smoke cheese. The list would go on forever.
Plenty of meat preservation techniques have a bunch of rather concerning data pointing towards possible long term health impacts.
It might turn out it's better to simply kill the animal minutes before consumption, as is done in some cultures for fish, rather than killing it weeks in advance and preserving it through refrigeration/drying/salting/canning/etc.
You're quoting half of my statement and taking it out of context.
I specified artificial for a reason. I'm talking about unnaturally altered environments and manufacturing (and for the most part, its the latter but some activities, e.g. mining or poor agriculture practices, have knock off effects that poison environments).
I'm not talking about naturally occurring lead. I realize trace amounts can be found in things like vegetables and meats even when care is taken to use clean soil (e.g. the soil doesn't have any lead contamination, which unfortunately this is not regulated very well in the US) and clean processing methods.
However, these 'safe amounts' are void of any real effort to understand them in combination. For example, lets say product A is deemed to allow a 'safe amount' of 10000 ppb, product B 8000 ppb, product C 12500 ppb and so on. These ppb amounts are determined without thought to other forms of lead exposure from other products. If you look at how much lead and other toxins you're exposed to through a variety of sources it will add up over time.
Simply because it doesn't add up to the thresholds for lead poisoning doesn't mean it lacks any negative consequences
No I got the context. As you said, there are trace amounts of lead and even arsenic in agricultural products for all kinds of reasons, some plants LOVE to fix heavy metals.
> If you look at how much lead and other toxins you're exposed to through a variety of sources it will add up over time
There's simply no evidence to support the broad claim that different toxic substances below their safe thresholds cumulatively are unsafe.
> Simply because it doesn't add up to the thresholds for lead poisoning doesn't mean it lacks any negative consequences
Sure, but you can't in practice prevent ever conceivable negative outcome. You have to think about tradeoffs.
The science is clear. There is no safe level of lead exposure. It is perfectly reasonable to measure the amount of lead in childrens’ toothpaste and seek to identify the source and further seek to minimize it. If it’s coming from one particular ingredient perhaps an alternative can be found.
Lead is well known to cause developmental and particularly mental development problems in children. Is it economically feasible? I don’t know. What would you pay for an extra 10 IQ points for your child? Better emotional regulation, fewer violent outbursts? These are all things lead is known to affect.
I’d sure pay extra for lead free. I’m sure you could convince a few million hippy parents to go for it too.
As for preserved meat and smoked cheese… if it can’t be done safely I’m not sure I want it. Haven’t preserved meats been linked to pancreatic cancer? Once we discover that we give people the chance to make other choices.
The early European hunter-gatherers uses something like dugout canoes, and examples dating back 7k years have been found in Italy. Experienced paddlers with good wind and current conditions could cover 60 miles in about a day. The 90 miles form Sicily to Tunisia is also possible to cover in such a canoe, and DNA form skeletal remains does indeed show that people made the journey.
The size of the federal workforce has been remarkably stable for decades[1]. It hasn't dipped below 2.7 million since 1967 ad only recently cracked 3 million again.
The real issue with fruit juice is that you can easily consume the juice of several pieces of fruit all at once and in a form that makes the sugar rapidly available so you get insulin spikes. The serving size for children of juice is 4-6oz which isn't very much volume, so its super easy to over do it.
If you eat the whole fruit that sugar s bound up with fiber so you don't consume as much as easily and you digest it more slowly. Fiber plays a key role in satiety (feeling full) and stripped of fiber its easy to consume too many calories. A whole orange contains 3-6x the fiber of the equivalent volume of orange juice with pulp.
Specialization has it's down sides as even Adam Smith noted. Doing the same thing every day can feel mentally dull even for knowledge work. If you specialized in sweeping, grinding through a software bug might feel like a great and novel accomplishment.
It's a bit off topic but the drop ceilings and wall to wall carpeting in that gallery are so redolent of churches from the 1990s that I could have almost guessed this was at Bob Jones University from the photos.
No one does it because there are no jobs in those places. We're failing as a society to build sufficient housing in areas of economic opportunity. In some areas we're moving backwards, Manhattan housed 300K more people in 1950 than it does today.
Not every job can be remote and most types of work benefit from agglomeration effects. Pretending that we can will people to live middle Pennsylvania by creating jobs somehow is foolish when we could simply build housing where the jobs already are.
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