I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, but my parents and my whole extended family are from an area in eastern Michigan, about 2 hours north of Detroit.
Especially back then, the local economy was heavily dependent on Dow Chemical, who has a massive facility in the area. My grandfather worked there. He was one of the first people to ever handle Saran wrap. He also recalls hilarious stories, like a time when someone pranked the foreman by dumping some stuff in the soap dispenser that turned into a sticky, snotty goo when exposed to water. He also worked in an area that used lots of iodine for a couple years. His whole body was sunflower yellow when he came home from work, but he says he never got a cold!
Some stories are more harrowing. There were air raid sirens to warn people when Dow was venting something into the atmosphere. If you heard the sirens, you went inside ASAP.
And then there was the dioxin plant (aka agent orange). He says men in their 40s who worked in the dioxin plant looked like they were in their 80s. Many hard-working people died young there.
Luckily, he was never in the Dioxin plant on a daily basis - he was a diesel mechanic and a welder. Had he been in the dioxin plant, he probably wouldn't be alive today to share those stories. I fear that, as this generation leaves us, so will the cautionary tales.
In college, some times a kid would go pass out in his car rather than drive, and people would Saran Wrap the car so they couldn’t open the doors to get out.
> I fear that, as this generation leaves us, so will the cautionary tales.
Cautionary tales that are not being learned where the similarly dreadful silicosis is concerned; there is an incredible increase in the number of cases of silicosis among kitchen fitters working on granite worktops.
(I fear we may also find this issue among people working near 3D printers using glass and carbon-fibre-filled filaments.)
> My Dad lost his Dad at the age of 34, which is no age at all in the grand scheme of things. By contrast I still have my Dad at the age of 60, which has meant an extra quarter century of guidance, support, advice, love and always being there. How lucky am I?
I lost my father when I was 30. I thought I’d been lucky because I’d had him through my “adult” life. Now I’m 40 and have a 2-year-old son, and over these past ten years I think it’s when I would have most liked to have him — when more questions came up about what he was really like as a person, beyond his role as a father. He died at 72 from lung cancer; he had been smoking since he was 13 and never went to the doctor. I guess I was lucky after all…
I lost my Dad when I was 27, he had just turned 60. Also lung cancer, also smoking since a child, also had never visited the doctor.
In the 5 years since then, I've met the love of my life, gotten engaged, and planning a family. All of this without my Dad, without his advice, without his support. It hurts, a lot. Whenever big moments in my life happen, my first instinct is always to give him a call.
Dad lost to smoking too at 60, but heart disease. As I grew through life I could relate to my memories of him at those ages, but as I come up to 60 myself I’m daunted not to have my memories of him at later ages as a guide.
32 for me, and I agree wholeheartedly. Life was relatively simple and uncomplicated for me at that age, and quickly became the opposite of that as the years wore on. His wisdom, experience, and humor while navigating a world that has gone mad is sorely missed, but practical things, too. I’m fixing up my money pit of a house (aren’t they all, though?) and the whole time I am wishing he was here so we could just work on projects together.
You gotta do what you can do - take the best of what you remember from your parents and grandparents, and pass it on. I don't feel like they're really dead as long as I'm alive. I hear their voices and their jokes and I see their smiles. Sometimes when I laugh I hear how my grandpa laughed, and I think, shit, I must sound old now. Kids make you realize how temporary we all are.
Overall we're having kids later and later myself included. This is one of the natural consequences I will face. Sometimes I wish it had kids in my twenties but for now I'm glad I didn't. We'll see.
The best age for having kids biologically, in terms of health is... Close to 18. I had my first child when I was 27 and I was already very tired in the nights, we agreed with wife that it would have been better to start earlier. Some people have kids when 35-40 and I cannot imagine it at all. I'm too tired right now. Much wiser, but my health would not allow me to stay up nights
> Close to 18. I had my first child when I was 27 and I was already very tired in the nights, we agreed with wife that it would have been better to start earlier
I have some extended family who had some unexpected kids around that 18 age and I firmly disagree that it’s better. We had so many more advantages by having kids when older, from better emotional regulation to better time management practices.
I had kids when older than you. Although some of the early years being up late weren’t easy, it also wasn’t devastatingly tiresome. My wife and I split duties and staggered our schedules.
The low sleep years were also over very quickly. It’s not like you’re up all night with kids until they’re 10 years old. Optimizing the entirety of raising kids based on being as young as possible to stay up late during the first year of life isn’t a good idea, IMO. You have to look at the big picture.
I’m sorry you’re struggling and I don’t mean to downplay your personal struggles, but at the same time I have to agree with other comments that are puzzled at someone in their 20s being so crushingly tired when parents in their 30s routinely handle child raising. If you have some unmentioned condition then I don’t mean to belittle that, but I don’t want others reading these comments to assume your description is typical.
I had my first at 42, second at 45, and about to have my third at 48. Honestly it’s been fine - thinking that people might find this unimaginable is so far from my reality. It really feels like I’ve had the same experience as those in their 30s.
Part of this might be that 40s life is a bit more chill anyhow - I no longer go and get smashed every weekend, or even have the FOMO that I’m not doing that. And work life, whilst more junior, was ultimately more extreme in my 20s and 30s. So any physical drop is probably balanced by a slight drop in general burning the candle at both ends.
But yeah, don’t think 40s parenting is a no go. Go for it!
If you want to spend time with your kids as adults, and have any grandkids remember you, younger is better. I was 30 when I had my first child; my parents might have been a little older than that when they had me. My dad died 20 years ago, my oldest son barely remembers him. My younger children technically met him but hav no memories of him. My mother died over 10 years ago.
My wife's mother had her when she was 20. She's still around, got to see her grandchildren reach adulthood, and have a long relationship with her daughter as an adult.
That's an environmental factor, though, specifically a function of our modern life style.
We had our first child at ~30, so we track this trend, too. However, I sometimes think, what if we gave in to the biological trend and[0] had kids at 18-20? If that were the common trend, then... by the time i got 36, my kids would be on their way to starting their own families. I.e. my child-rearing day would've been over, right here, today. As it is, I'm about to turn 37, and am looking forward to some 15 more years of parenting.
No, I really am looking forward to this. But the point is, the life after parenting doesn't sound so appealing anymore, not when it starts at 50 instead of 36.
--
[0] - Subject to the typical rules about age of adulthood, to not overcomplicate this.
> the life after parenting doesn't sound so appealing anymore, not when it starts at 50 instead of 36.
Even if you have kids at 18 you won’t be done with parenting at 36. Maybe they leave the home, maybe not, you will still have to do a lot of parenting for a while more. You’ll be well in your 40s before you can even think “I’m finally mostly done”.
At that age it depends on each person what they want to do with the life. A lot of my friends who had kids really early started focusing on career later in life. Exactly what they “missed”. Those who focused on career and travel when young, focused on kids later in life. I haven’t heard anyone really regretting the choice beyond “my back can’t really take it anymore”[0] because you can never know what you’re missing. You’ll never know how your life would have been otherwise and what you would have liked more or less.
[0] Me, after starting parenthood in my 40s and being lazy so my back isn’t what it could be.
At 18, I had no business even being responsible for a kid for a day. I hope the stability (both mentally and financially) that I'm able to offer my kid in their development years far outweighs the fact I won't be around as long.
We had our first when I was 37 and our second when I was 43. It wasn't so bad - it's tiring but I'm also a lot more emotionally mature than I was in my 20s and early 30s. And I have an absolute ton more money and stability (which also helps pay for things like nannies and school).
The thing I'm a little sad about is that I'm unlikely to be there for too long when my kids have kids.
My dad’s dad died when he was 13, and this dropped his family from upper middle class to basically in poverty except for owning a fully paid off house. It radically colored his outlook on life and left him risk averse and frugal, even to the expense of his quality of life. What’s the point of saving up an 8 figure nest egg and working into your 70s if you spend less than 100k/year?
I’m lucky to have him still at the age of 30 but it’s clear how traumatic losing a parent young is.
I know some people like that: the insane nest egg and that security _is_ their quality of life and the blanket they sleep well under. Their current consumption doesn't matter too much to them.
Cigarettes are not too unlike Asbestos: they've been known to be deadly for ages, but a powerful industrial lobby fought ferociously to defend their financial interests, leading to millions of preventable death.
One thing I think most Western people don't realize, especially with how terrified we are of asbestos, is that it is still used and being mined today!
Russia still extensively uses Abestos, the name literally comes from the Russian town of Asbest which is known for exporting, you guessed it, asbestos, to countries like China, India, and Brazil. Of course being Russian they also say it's a Western lie that Asbestos causes lung issues. (I shouldn't have to say this but I'm noting this, and not advocating it's true, asbestos is serious business and I wouldn't want to live in a building with it, it's just interesting that BRICS nations still use it).
Isn't asbestos used pretty much everywhere in the world (except rich countries)?
So yes, it's dangerous. But it's very cheap, and poverty is far more dangerous than asbestos. It's simply a fact: residents of most countries simply can't afford a 200k dollars asbestos-free house, like Americans or Europeans can.
If Americans had less affordable homes like the rest of the world have, they would still be building them out of asbestos.
Not using asbestos is not the reason why homes in the Western world are expensive.
https://aiobs.org/how-healthy-and-costly-are-the-most-used-i... shows insulation cost for a (typical?) 1500sqft (~140m^2 for the rest of the world) home. The most common, and also the cheapest, type of insulation being fiberglass bats at $560. So if this home would cost $200k, that's 3% of the total price. So even if asbestos would be free, it would barely move the needle in total cost.
Edit: That $560 looks suspiciously low. Googling around some more shows an insulation (incl. installation) cost for a "typical" home at around $3500-$4500. In any case, a small fraction of the total cost of a house project.
A gentle note to anyone reading, fiberglass insulation requires wearing air filters, for the same reasons noted else in this thread. Wear them expecially to cut it, but also just putting it up or working in a crawlspace with it.
I have not tried, although I was tempted just out of curiosity -- would it make it through customs and get delivered to me in the US ? The rope and fabric style products should not be that dangerous because they are long fibers that should not break off and float in the air, and the cylinder head gasket material is probably chopped short fibers but it's embedded in a matrix of other stuff.
We probably over regulate the long fiber stuff. The short felt-like fibers we used to mix into plaster, cement, anything needing strength and texture, are probably correctly banned; the risk to reward seems not worth it. Many of those products could use glass fiber just as well.
However, I think the general experience of people exposed to rock or cement dust, basically anything silica based that gets into the lungs, is that is really bad. Handling short chopped mineral fiber of any type seems like something that has to have a huge payoff, like part of a rocket for satillite launches, to be worth it.
This is good to keep in mind because there are some really interesting alternative mineral fiber products out there. Basalt fiber in particular, is sold in a chopped mix for adding to concrete, seems potentially bad. There are some interesting ceramic fibers available too.
From Old French abestos, from Latin asbestos, itself from Ancient Greek ἄσβεστος (ásbestos, “unquenchable, inextinguishable”), from ᾰ̓- (ă-, “not”) + σβέννῡμῐ (sbénnūmĭ, “I quench, quell”).
More likely the town is named after the material, there's an Asbestos in Canada as well. I always get a kick out of cities named like that: Cobalt Ontario, Uranium City, for example.
When I was nine years old, we moved to an asbestos-mining town for about a year and a half. Sometimes dust settled on our house when they were blasting up at the mine site. It’s closed now and the road into town was decommissioned. It’s a remote place to begin with but I still hear of people making the trek to get in there.
This is false actually. asbestos is banned in Russia in residential flat construction (unless it is fully isolated so that it doesn't get inside the space) exactly because it is bad for your lungs. There's limits on how much asbestos can be in the air safely and thry are pretty low
Eternit (асбестоцементный шифер) is absolutely everywhere in Russia, even if banned in residential construction, so the exposure chance is still pretty high.
It must be mentioned that this is about blue asbestos, or crocidolite, which is the most dangerous form of asbestos, but was relatively rarely used and the first to be banned. White asbestos (chrysotile) has a much lower risk[1], far more widespread use, and there are still active chrysotile mines in Russia and China.
I was very young, but I remember my grandfather was very afraid to retire from the steel mill where he worked most of his life because those who retired tended to get cancer shortly after and die. Sure enough, a little over a year after his retirement, he got a cold that wouldn't go away, and was diagnosed with cancer and died not too long afterwards.
I've wondered for a long time (based entirely on anecdotal observations) whether some forms of cancer and other illnesses arise more quickly from sudden shifts in daily habit. Sometimes it actually does seem to me like the episode in the Simpsons where Mr. Burns thinks he is invincible.
My father was a University teacher, and he would get a cold regularly between terms - as if the body knew that it couldn’t ’give in’ until the work period was over.
It's ironic that even when the subject is resistance you are looking for a master to tell you what to do. If you want to be free there must be a choice and for there to be a choice there must alternatives.
How *could* we have resisted? What were our options?
This is not just a theorethical complaint. I think there were in practice many different things you (in the plural sense) could have done that could have worked adequately. Too many things to list here, you can look up how other people protested in the past.
All parties supported the OSA (and it's surprisingly popular too) because "something must be done [about the internet], this is something, so this must be done".
It's hardly the stupidest thing British people have voted for in the last two decades, probably not even in the top 5.
Well, we didn't exactly vote for the Online Safety Act. It was introduced by the Tories in 2023 and despite them being voted out in 2024, Labour (Tory-lite) decided to push ahead with the implementation of the draconian law.
However, I don't doubt that a lot of the UK would vote for such a law as most people have a knee-jerk reaction to "won't anyone think of the children?".
My mother died from pancreatic cancer 5 months ago when she was 55 years old, 9 months after she started noticing pain and doctors started investigating it.
The worst thing is that she never worked in any hazardous environments, never smoked, never drank alcohol, avoided fried cuisine, avoided GMO-food, she was always eating as much as possible from her own garden, did not use any chemicals, she wasn't obese, she didn't have diabetes, she didn't have any problems with pancreas or any other significant health issues. None of her close relatives had cancer. For the last 30 years she lived in a very clean region that doesn't have any industrial factories/manufactures.
The only possible hazard she had - she worked for 15 years near busy road, where there was a lot of diesel/gas engine exhaust, but I doubt this is related to her pancreatic cancer, as I found normally this affects lungs/respiratory paths. Maybe she was exposed to some agricultural chemicals in her childhood, because she was living near agricultural fields in the Soviet Union, but I doubt she was significantly exposed to it.
I even joked with her that she was living probably the most cancer-cautious life, and still got cancer. So the worst thing for her is that nobody could tell what she did incorrectly to get this illness. It felt very unfair for her.
My sympathies for what must be just an awful time for you —- sporadic pancreatic cancer is just a lurking evil.
My mother died of an unusual form of it, just a little older than yours, when I was in my early twenties. It was terrible.
The only unusual thing was some prior surgery near her pancreas, from twenty years earlier, had apparently had severe scarring that was noticed during surgery to fit a stent.
I don't really think asbestos is something that needs balance to the conversation. It's like radioactive material, you will most likely not even know that you've had too much exposure until your health is already permanently affected. The illness may manifest a considerable time later so you might not even know what it was. It's very easy to unknowingly be exposed when e.g. renovating a house or other similar arrangements because there is no easy visual way to identify materials containing asbestos.
It absolutely does need balance. Many, if not most older pre 1980 houses in (Norway where I live) have some form of Asbestos in some form, e.g. Eternit, window putty, jointing putty, AIB around fireplaces, or textured paint. Usually these materials are fine if left in place, and it is tricky to avoid these materials when looking for housing since older homes make up a large fraction of our housing stock, especially in my kommune up north.
My own house probably contains some Asbestos, but getting an asbestos survey is very expensive, prohibitively so for people earning the average salary. Not to mention if asbestos is found, it is a further expense to get it removed and cleaned up. The best I can do is send a sample in for testing if I find something risky while renovating myself. Most contractors up here do no care at all if something looks like it may be ACM.
The best thing we can do for people is to provide balanced guidance on where asbestos may be and how much risk does it pose. AIB like Asbestolux is way more dangerous than Eternit is and depending on the location Eternit can remain in place.
Unfortunately if we were to take a zero tolerance approach it would cause more harm than good. How do people pay for remediation? do we all abandon our homes? what happens to the farmers who cannot move? I have no perfect answer here. Asbestos is a hazard no question, but what can we do other than common sense and balance?
> Usually these materials are fine if left in place
Maybe in Norway you need to tell people to chill over it. But the current attitude to asbestos in DIY spaces in the US/UK is far away from that, and a lot closer to “yea go on just tear it out yourself, you’ll be fine if you put on an n95 and spray some water first”.
I think the dominant attitude in the US is to stick your head in the sand. Tons of older homes have asbestos yet almost zero of them report it in their listing or their disclosure report. If you test it and find it you have to report it. If the buyer tests it and finds it, the seller doesn't want to know because then they'd have to report it. Somehow knowing the house has asbestos lowers it's value significantly more than willfully not knowing + almost certainly having it anyways.
Yes because proper asbestos removal is very costly and people don't want to deal with it, your house is going to look like the government coming for ET. Very tempting for a singular homeowner to just read up and rent some ventilation equipment and rip it out themselves on the down low even if dangers are very real. There are some old mental asylums in my hometown, beautiful stone buildings on massive property, they have been sitting vacant and decaying for years because they are full of asbestos and no one wants to deal with it.
Happened to me. Bought a house with wood floors in the basement. We had some flooding which ruined the wood and when we ripped it out to replace, turns out the wood floors were installed over the original asbestos tiles. From what I can tell, the asbestos tiles themselves were of no particular danger to us, but once they got wet and started cracking they had to be removed which cost an additional couple thousand dollars on top of replacing he floors.
The problem with not taking a "zero tolerance" approach is that the problem isn't going to go away. As you say, the asbestos including materials are often best left untouched rather than being removed by a DIYer which may well release the fibres into the air. However, that's just kicking the can down the road as at some point the house will need renovating or rebuilding and that's when the asbestos fibres will be released.
As always, it ends up cheaper to just chuck dangerous materials into the wider environment rather than dealing with them in a responsible manner. It's a shame that we can't retroactively penalise the builders that used so much asbestos.
You can’t punish retroactively, Lex retro non agit.
It’s the lawmakers that create the environment we all work inside of to maximize our profits. There’s probably at least 3 as dangerous as asbestos materials used in current day and we are yet to find out.
Zero tolerance means paralysis, it’s a naive ideal. Look at the recent medical technologies where zero tolerance for unwanted side effects has to be balanced with benefits.
With asbestos, it's not so much a trade-off as it will continue to be a possible hazard unless it's disposed of correctly. I can relate to a homeowner not wanting to pay for testing/removing asbestos ceiling tiles etc. but if they don't then any disruption to those tiles can release potentially lethal fibres into the air (asbestos doesn't have a "safe" dose, so it's not like it can be rationalised with "I only made a small hole in that tile").
Comparison with medical technologies isn't particularly valid as people can choose whether to have that treatment or not, but people can't easily choose whether their house was built with asbestos or not. If a house was already built, then the potential danger is already there and we can either deal with it sensibly or not care about the deadly consequences of releasing it into the environment.
I don't see the logic of not punishing retroactively as companies may have made a lot of profit and then pay nothing towards the clean-up costs - privatise the profit and socialise the costs. The homeowners/tenants are effectively being punished retroactively when they may suspect/discover that their house contains asbestos, so why should the builders (if they are still around) not have to pay?
Maybe there should be extra taxes imposed on industries with a history of environmental abuse to reclaim some of the costs to society.
The EPA’s own documentation states that Asbestos is primarily an occupational hazard. If the fibers are not embedded in a friable material you will not get any significant exposure. Occupational hazards are those encountered routinely by someone engaging in an occupation. So harvey the homeowner isn’t at much increased risk if he removes asbestos himself as long as he takes precautions and cleans up afterward. It’s a fiber and a dust not some magic material that soaks in through your skin. And obviously don’t start a business removing asbestos for people without doing the licensing.
Fiberglass batts are really bad to handle too, and same with gypsum dust and saw dust from cutting manufactured stone countertops. If you do anything indoors you should definitely wear a respirator and full sleeves.
> It’s a fiber and a dust not some magic material that soaks in through your skin
I feel you're being a bit flippant with the known danger of disturbing asbestos containing materials. The dust and fibres are typically too fine to be controlled by a household vacuum cleaner and will require specialist handling to minimise the risk. Yes, the dust isn't absorbed through the skin, but instead is breathed in and enters the lungs where it causes problems.
You're right about using respirators/masks when dealing with dust, but special care needs to be taken with asbestos dust and not all dust masks will protect your lungs from the dust/fibres.
Whether or not specific regulations exist for a particular danger, if a company or individual can be found to be aware of the negative consequences of their use of certain compounds and they don't publicly document those dangers they can (in the US anyway) and should absolutely be held legally accountable for failure to warn.
History is rife with companies/industries who were well aware of the dangers they were creating to people for decades while actively suppressing the evidence of such that they themselves discovered.
Which companies this applies to for Asbestos in particular, I couldn't tell you, but it would be shocking if there weren't lots of bad actors who knew they were bad actors considering there has been research on the dangers of Asbestos since 1927 -- nearly a full century ago.
> retroactively penalise the builders that used so much asbestos
It is not the builders fault, they did not know, but the manufacturers of ACM did for decades! and they were penalized. Most were forced to set up trusts to cover certain expenses in the US, but I am not sure what their scope is.
In Germany, regulations around asbestos are quite strict: You're not allowed to "seal it in" by e.g. putting floor leveling compounds on top of old asbestos-containing flooring. If there's asbestos found during renovations, it needs to be removed professionally.
When we re-did our kitchen we found asbestos-containing glue under a new-ish layer of tiles one of the previous owners of the apartment just laid on top. I wish regulations would already have been stricter back then (and that they would have been followed - another story...) as this surprise find caused massive delays to the construction and forced us to temporarily move out during the removal and decontamination.
One of the best ways to make DIY-ing in buildings built before 1994 (when asbestos was banned for construction in Germany) safe has been to buy a H-filtration class shop vac. It can filter out asbestos fibers and many other fine dust particles that aren't healthy to inhale and was barely more expensive than a comparably good vac.
Yes, that is why when you test positive for asbestos you add a little "a" sticker to the material to notify anyone in the future.
I think you are missing the point. Many people like myself want to take care of it, and would hire a proper crew to take care of it, but we are not wealthy enough to just call in a crew without some financial planning. This is not just an annoying expense, quite a bit more than that.
Unlike radiation, there's no safe asbestos exposure, if you're really unlucky a single strand can screw you up. On the other hand, of all people having worked at asbestos facilities with early 20th century approach to PPE only 20% developed mesothelioma and 10% died from it.
Thinking before swinging your drill will get most people safe enough not to worry about it.
I don't really buy the comparison. If you're really unlucky, you can get cancer from a "safe dose" of radiation.
Low exposures of both things are statistically less likely to hurt you than large doses. We pick a line to call "safe", but completely safety in either case is not guaranteed.
There is a natural level of radioactivity which the body is used to compensate. Small additional doses of radioactivity can therefor be neglected. This is not true for stuff like abestos.
The ending is in praise of dads. Wonderful. I lost my dad when I was 8. I still miss him every day. It’s hard to know beforehand how cool it is to watch your kids grow and change. I hope I get to see how cool my kids are in their old age.
I remember when I was living in Melbourne I read a story about the Wunderlich factory which operated in the suburb of sunshine. Supposedly they left their wast just sitting in the yard (which was very centrally located so people would commonly cut through it). The local kids loved playing in the dusty stuff and on windy days it was apparently like a snowstorm. The factory operated up until the 80s, it is hard to believe.
Attempts to reopen the mine and sell asbestos to the developing world under a new brand caught the attention of the Daily Show leading to some train wreck coverage that ultimately led to them changing the name of the town.
I know its not fashionable, but things like asbestos is the point of regulation.
If you ignore the health effects, asbestos is a fucking brilliant material, strong(if used with a binder) exceptionally fireproof, UV stable and fairly inert.
Why _wouldn't_ you use it? To use modern parlance; only melts wouldn't use it, thats who (this message brought to you by your friendly corporate sponsor...)
The problem is that it still kills now[1]. Because its a time bomb, with a dwell time of well over 10-20 years, its very lard to pin point the cause.
The only way that its _stopped_ being put into building materials is through regulation. The problem now for us, especailly in the UK is the power of regulation is being ablated through incompetence, funding cuts and a concerted effort by those who stand to benefit from a weakened regulatory system.
Most regulation is formed from the blood of victims. We may not _like_ what the regulation is, and lord knows it needs improving. But to not have it, or worst, have it and not be enforced, is a terrible state of affairs.
Luckily thanks to regulation the use of asbestos in new builds has almost completely been eliminated (I'm sure there are some uses somewhere where it's indispensable?), but there's of course a huge number of places where it turns up in all kinds of renovation projects.
In addition to buildings, e.g. ships. Think about a steamship, what material that is fireproof and doesn't rot do you think they used for insulating boilers and steam pipes? One museum ship I'm somewhat familiar with ripped out all the asbestos insulation and replaced it with IIRC mostly mineral or glass wool during a major renovation some years back, just to make it safer for the mostly volunteers who dedicate their time to keep the ship functioning.
Our business leaders have successfully painted shortsightedness, greed, and nihilism as beneficial business traits embraced by adults willing to accept life’s difficult realities.
In reality, only personal and group morality protected our society from such forces, and letting ethics retard profit and growth became seriously uncool in the 80s hippie backlash.
Would you buy a product with asbestos in if it wasn't regulated against? (Assuming we removed all similar regulation so the lack of regulation does not its self imply safety.)
Of course you wouldn't.
We have journalists to uncover dangers like this; they are clearly financially incentivised to do so. We have courts to assess damages. We don't need government regulation.
Such a common trope that "the heartless capitalist doesn't care about harming customers so we need the government to save us". Of course the capitalist cares about harming customers, she needs to sell to them (and their competitors product will be much more successful if it is not harmful!).
And, in either case, regulation or free market will only save us if there are viable alternatives. Fossil fuels still kill people, but we don't regulate against it because there is currently no viable alternative.
I don't know if this comment is one of ignorance, or juvenile "well actually", but it is tragically misinformed. From an Australian perspective all of the big players, CSR, John Mansviille, & James Hardy, knew asbestos was a significant hazard by _at least_ the 40s. There were early epidemiological studies of cancers around asbestos work sites, and workers, in the 50s here in NSW. Unions and gov health departments start to push back on exposure and seek meaningful damages in the 60s and 70s. There were _public_ campaigns about the dangers in the 70s and 80s. It wasnt meaningfully restricted, _and continued to be commonly used_, through the 80s. A complete ban, primarily workplaces IIRC, wasnt introduced until 2003. The randian wank fantasy of "the informed consumer knows best" has been repudiated innumerable times.
And, as others have pointed out, this is not an individual choice. The families who got asbestosis from washing their fathers work clothes didnt make a choice. The bloom of cancers for residential suburbs miles around james hardy in camellia didnt have a choice. There is no expiration date on the dangers of friable asbestos. It remains hidden in the common environment forever, until someone else stumbles on it.
Would you buy a product with asbestos in it if its presence wasn't disclosed? You might, if it provided value vs alternatives.
Manufacturers are successuful when they sell. If their product is found dangerous they a) deny and muddy the waters, b) settle lawsuits and if that doesn't work c) close up shop and open a new business. Customer unwelfare is a cost of business.
Asbestos is hard to hide, certainly competitors of the Asbestos-using company would know they were using Asbestos. They, at least, would have an incentive to advertise how bad their competitors product is because it uses Asbestos.
Equally, once it has been established that Asbestos is harmful any company using it would be so sued that they would quickly cease to exist.
Yes the free market doesn't stop health risks immediately but neither does regulation (see: asbestos!)
Would you tell people your product has asbestos in it, if it wasn’t regulated that you had to? Of course you wouldn’t. And then, apparently, you would blame your customer for buying it.
No doubt when electric cars become better in every way than fossil fuel cars, the government will create a regulation banning fossil fuel cars. Everyone will rejoice that the government stopped those horrible fossil-fuel burning cars! Of course, the vast majority of people would have switched to the electric cars at this point anyway.
Internal memos from 1970s - 2000s reveal knowledge of asbestos traces. Executives, better known as caring capitalists, resisted disclosure.
In case you think this isn’t a pattern: Purdue and Oxy, General Motors and their ignitions switches, DuPont and “confirmed animal carcinogen” Teflon, Philip Morris’ cigarette campaigns, VWs dieselgate…
Each of them found to be suppressing knowledge knowingly harming consumers.
Yes of course it is in their interest to lie / hide until it becomes public knowledge. But regulation has the exact same problem (hence why Asbestos was not regulated for a long time, same with your other examples).
When it is widely known (and therefore can be regulated) it is already too late as it's now in the producers interest to cease producing it.
Heavy litigation after the fact can disincentivise the lying in the first place. If legislation doesn't not allow for this (e.g. because of time limitations) then it should be amended.
All successful markets in history have been regulated to some degree. A market requires sellers AND buyers and buyers will flock to a market where they're not burdened with the cost and expense of having to do their own research and investigation before even considering a purchase, never mind actually completing a trade.
Completely unregulated markets simply don't scale in terms of successful trading - the regulation replaces the work each buyer would have to do and thus is actually more efficient than having each buyer replicate the work of the regulator. This is why they have been out-competed by regulated markets in the course of history.
I don’t understand your point - there’s no symmetry there.
Regulated venues dominate nearly every sphere of trading in terms of volume.
They have done this by being more attractive to buyers and sellers than unregulated venues - i.e. regulated venues have out-competed unregulated venues.
In the market for trading venues, regulated venues have won.
Even if OT, I would take the chance to remember the great sicilian hacker Asbesto, that I never had the honour to know personally, for what represented for the hacker culture in Italy. And for his aweson woodcraft mastery. May R.I.P.
Asbestos is genuinely more terrifying then nuclear radiation.
If something is radioactive then a Geiger counter will tell you at a distance, it'll even triangulate it.
Asbestos? It can be everywhere and the only way to know is to collect samples, pay $100 a piece to a lab to do phase contrast microscopy and wait.
Then do it again the next time you find something suspicious.
And once you've cleaned it out..well hope your handling was good coz who knows if you got it all - without collecting a lot of samples and testing again.
My house has a few asbestos pieces, and in digging up the yard I've pulled a huge amount of asbestos fiber cement from cheap renovations by previous owners - the stuff was about 10 cm below the surface.
Its carcinogenic “modus operandi” is also completely different to anything else. Asbestos is chemically inert, so how does is cause cancer? The tiny crystalline needles puncture cells, sometimes during cell division, and strands of dna will get tangled up and result in messed up genetics.
Yes and I would like to add, it is all about the "dose". It is a common misconception that tangled DNA will automatically lead to spreading cancer.
Per day a normal person develops tangled up dna cells in the hundreds, that is a normal process, but the immune system can handle it without problems and can get rid of it (unfortunately not always). So with Asbestos it is all about the dose too. Although a relative small amount could be already _potential_ harmful.
IIRC, asbestos does not directly cause cells to become cancerous, but it is an irritant that reawakens cancerous cells the body had forced into dormancy.
I'm not a doctor or researcher in that field, but my understanding is that cancer is not 'one disease', but rather a huge number of different diseases which mostly have in common that they develop some kind of tumors.
That's also one reason why progress in cancer research and drug development is so slow. 'Fix' one cancer, and what you've developed likely has little effect on the zillion other cancer variants.
Mesothelioma caused by asbestos is only a single disease. It has a known cause. It has been well researched. The causal links are clear: prevention is the answer. It doesn't matter that other cancers are different diseases, that is irrelevant to mesothelioma caused by asbestos.
Yes, I agree with all of the above. I was just pointing out that cancer from asbestos being different from other cancers isn't so unique since a lot of cancers are different from all other cancers.
When I was younger, my dad had me help him repair the roof of the shed by getting on top of it, putting these sorts of flexible sheets over the old corrugated ones (that are made of asbestos cement) and driving nails through the top one all the way until it'd hit the wood frame underneath.
Now, asbestosis is more common in long term exposure so it might be fine, but not bothering to tell me to wear a respirator and the ignorance after I brought it up years later makes me disgusted. So now I have to wonder whether decades later I'll have complications without clear ways to address them.
1. driving nails into it won't release as many particles as cutting or similar activities would
2. the fact that there's a flexible sheet on top of the asbestos one means that the only exposure would typically be through the created hole through which the nail is being driven, or the sides of the sheet, so it should be sealed off enough anyways
3. since the activity took place in fresh air instead of indoors, the wind (even though there wasn't much of it) should take care of any particles that are left
I get the reasoning, but at the same time, it's bad that he made that judgement call himself and couldn't be bothered to tell me. Like, at least give me the information and give me the choice on how to proceed, I would have much preferred to wear a mask instead. It's a bit like riding a bike, helmets are there for a good reason, even if the choice whether to wear them is (or should be) yours.
The reasoning does seem... reaaonable. But in this case it's likely not reasoning but rather its guilt-laden doppleganger: rationalization after the fact. Very common in my family, especially the confident/proud ones, including myself.
I try to recognize when I realize I'm doing it, stop, apologize for the deception that it is, and commit to more sincere communication.
Alternatively, regularly informing your family of each infinitesimal danger in this world is a path to neurosis or estrangement. There is a balance, and in some cases non-disclosure does feel the right path (to me).
Yup, agreed. His reasoning is sound except the choice should be yours. I have the feeling that the older generation is a bit more callous with safety and health. The comparison with motorcycles is apt, because I've read about similar generational issues in the motorcyclegear subreddit.
> The company mined asbestos-bearing rock at several sites in South Africa
"In South Africa" is not very specific.
it seems to have been firstly in this remote in the remote Northern Cape where "The mine eventually became the largest crocidolite mine in the world" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koegas_mine
Our house has an asbestos flue in the bathroom. I'm very careful never to go near that thing, and never ever to cut/drill/attempt to remove it myself. But I wonder how many people would never know it was asbestos.
If you leave asbestos alone it's safe, and if you need to drill into it, use shaving cream so that the fibers don't get into the air. It's not a big deal if you are careful. But don't be reckless - you need to know what you are drilling into and do it slowly.
The cancer causing mechanism of asbestos is mechanical. A single strand in the wrong place could cut your DNA up. With any probabilistic process the more exposure the more chances and the greater the likelihood.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, but my parents and my whole extended family are from an area in eastern Michigan, about 2 hours north of Detroit.
Especially back then, the local economy was heavily dependent on Dow Chemical, who has a massive facility in the area. My grandfather worked there. He was one of the first people to ever handle Saran wrap. He also recalls hilarious stories, like a time when someone pranked the foreman by dumping some stuff in the soap dispenser that turned into a sticky, snotty goo when exposed to water. He also worked in an area that used lots of iodine for a couple years. His whole body was sunflower yellow when he came home from work, but he says he never got a cold!
Some stories are more harrowing. There were air raid sirens to warn people when Dow was venting something into the atmosphere. If you heard the sirens, you went inside ASAP.
And then there was the dioxin plant (aka agent orange). He says men in their 40s who worked in the dioxin plant looked like they were in their 80s. Many hard-working people died young there.
Luckily, he was never in the Dioxin plant on a daily basis - he was a diesel mechanic and a welder. Had he been in the dioxin plant, he probably wouldn't be alive today to share those stories. I fear that, as this generation leaves us, so will the cautionary tales.
https://www.michiganlcv.org/case/no-compensation-victims-tox...
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/midwest/2023/01/30/705...
In college, some times a kid would go pass out in his car rather than drive, and people would Saran Wrap the car so they couldn’t open the doors to get out.
just open the window and cut it with your keys?
Yep! But it takes a while to figure that out.
> I fear that, as this generation leaves us, so will the cautionary tales.
Cautionary tales that are not being learned where the similarly dreadful silicosis is concerned; there is an incredible increase in the number of cases of silicosis among kitchen fitters working on granite worktops.
(I fear we may also find this issue among people working near 3D printers using glass and carbon-fibre-filled filaments.)
> My Dad lost his Dad at the age of 34, which is no age at all in the grand scheme of things. By contrast I still have my Dad at the age of 60, which has meant an extra quarter century of guidance, support, advice, love and always being there. How lucky am I?
I lost my father when I was 30. I thought I’d been lucky because I’d had him through my “adult” life. Now I’m 40 and have a 2-year-old son, and over these past ten years I think it’s when I would have most liked to have him — when more questions came up about what he was really like as a person, beyond his role as a father. He died at 72 from lung cancer; he had been smoking since he was 13 and never went to the doctor. I guess I was lucky after all…
Oof, this one hits home.
I lost my Dad when I was 27, he had just turned 60. Also lung cancer, also smoking since a child, also had never visited the doctor.
In the 5 years since then, I've met the love of my life, gotten engaged, and planning a family. All of this without my Dad, without his advice, without his support. It hurts, a lot. Whenever big moments in my life happen, my first instinct is always to give him a call.
Dad lost to smoking too at 60, but heart disease. As I grew through life I could relate to my memories of him at those ages, but as I come up to 60 myself I’m daunted not to have my memories of him at later ages as a guide.
32 for me, and I agree wholeheartedly. Life was relatively simple and uncomplicated for me at that age, and quickly became the opposite of that as the years wore on. His wisdom, experience, and humor while navigating a world that has gone mad is sorely missed, but practical things, too. I’m fixing up my money pit of a house (aren’t they all, though?) and the whole time I am wishing he was here so we could just work on projects together.
You gotta do what you can do - take the best of what you remember from your parents and grandparents, and pass it on. I don't feel like they're really dead as long as I'm alive. I hear their voices and their jokes and I see their smiles. Sometimes when I laugh I hear how my grandpa laughed, and I think, shit, I must sound old now. Kids make you realize how temporary we all are.
Lost my dad when I was 45. That’s still too young. Over the last 5 years I have missed out on so many conversations with him.
I was 6 when my dad died, next year I’ll be the same age he was when he died (38). Life’s weird.
I emphasise with your grief. I lost my dad when I was 30 too. He died when my wife was pregnant with our first child.
It still cuts me up to think about how my kids have never known my dad, and their grandad.
Overall we're having kids later and later myself included. This is one of the natural consequences I will face. Sometimes I wish it had kids in my twenties but for now I'm glad I didn't. We'll see.
The best age for having kids biologically, in terms of health is... Close to 18. I had my first child when I was 27 and I was already very tired in the nights, we agreed with wife that it would have been better to start earlier. Some people have kids when 35-40 and I cannot imagine it at all. I'm too tired right now. Much wiser, but my health would not allow me to stay up nights
> Close to 18. I had my first child when I was 27 and I was already very tired in the nights, we agreed with wife that it would have been better to start earlier
I have some extended family who had some unexpected kids around that 18 age and I firmly disagree that it’s better. We had so many more advantages by having kids when older, from better emotional regulation to better time management practices.
I had kids when older than you. Although some of the early years being up late weren’t easy, it also wasn’t devastatingly tiresome. My wife and I split duties and staggered our schedules.
The low sleep years were also over very quickly. It’s not like you’re up all night with kids until they’re 10 years old. Optimizing the entirety of raising kids based on being as young as possible to stay up late during the first year of life isn’t a good idea, IMO. You have to look at the big picture.
I’m sorry you’re struggling and I don’t mean to downplay your personal struggles, but at the same time I have to agree with other comments that are puzzled at someone in their 20s being so crushingly tired when parents in their 30s routinely handle child raising. If you have some unmentioned condition then I don’t mean to belittle that, but I don’t want others reading these comments to assume your description is typical.
I had my first at 42, second at 45, and about to have my third at 48. Honestly it’s been fine - thinking that people might find this unimaginable is so far from my reality. It really feels like I’ve had the same experience as those in their 30s.
Part of this might be that 40s life is a bit more chill anyhow - I no longer go and get smashed every weekend, or even have the FOMO that I’m not doing that. And work life, whilst more junior, was ultimately more extreme in my 20s and 30s. So any physical drop is probably balanced by a slight drop in general burning the candle at both ends. But yeah, don’t think 40s parenting is a no go. Go for it!
Biologically yes... Probably but maturity, stability wise closer to 30-35 seems to be pretty good. At least the going rate amongst my friends
If you want to spend time with your kids as adults, and have any grandkids remember you, younger is better. I was 30 when I had my first child; my parents might have been a little older than that when they had me. My dad died 20 years ago, my oldest son barely remembers him. My younger children technically met him but hav no memories of him. My mother died over 10 years ago.
My wife's mother had her when she was 20. She's still around, got to see her grandchildren reach adulthood, and have a long relationship with her daughter as an adult.
That's an environmental factor, though, specifically a function of our modern life style.
We had our first child at ~30, so we track this trend, too. However, I sometimes think, what if we gave in to the biological trend and[0] had kids at 18-20? If that were the common trend, then... by the time i got 36, my kids would be on their way to starting their own families. I.e. my child-rearing day would've been over, right here, today. As it is, I'm about to turn 37, and am looking forward to some 15 more years of parenting.
No, I really am looking forward to this. But the point is, the life after parenting doesn't sound so appealing anymore, not when it starts at 50 instead of 36.
--
[0] - Subject to the typical rules about age of adulthood, to not overcomplicate this.
> the life after parenting doesn't sound so appealing anymore, not when it starts at 50 instead of 36.
Even if you have kids at 18 you won’t be done with parenting at 36. Maybe they leave the home, maybe not, you will still have to do a lot of parenting for a while more. You’ll be well in your 40s before you can even think “I’m finally mostly done”.
At that age it depends on each person what they want to do with the life. A lot of my friends who had kids really early started focusing on career later in life. Exactly what they “missed”. Those who focused on career and travel when young, focused on kids later in life. I haven’t heard anyone really regretting the choice beyond “my back can’t really take it anymore”[0] because you can never know what you’re missing. You’ll never know how your life would have been otherwise and what you would have liked more or less.
[0] Me, after starting parenthood in my 40s and being lazy so my back isn’t what it could be.
At 18, I had no business even being responsible for a kid for a day. I hope the stability (both mentally and financially) that I'm able to offer my kid in their development years far outweighs the fact I won't be around as long.
Buddy if you're 27 and already describe your life as very tired, there's more going on than pure aging...
Have to agree on this one. That has nothing to do with aging at 27 but it's the easy explanation for some people to not dig deeper.
no I'm almost twice that. I'm saying that if I had children in 40s it would be impossible for me.
We had our first when I was 37 and our second when I was 43. It wasn't so bad - it's tiring but I'm also a lot more emotionally mature than I was in my 20s and early 30s. And I have an absolute ton more money and stability (which also helps pay for things like nannies and school).
The thing I'm a little sad about is that I'm unlikely to be there for too long when my kids have kids.
I dunno, medical science keeps advancing. Maybe you’ll live forever.
I mean yeah, that’s literally what he’s saying: He’s saying he’s very tired because of his children, especially how they keep him up at night.
My dad’s dad died when he was 13, and this dropped his family from upper middle class to basically in poverty except for owning a fully paid off house. It radically colored his outlook on life and left him risk averse and frugal, even to the expense of his quality of life. What’s the point of saving up an 8 figure nest egg and working into your 70s if you spend less than 100k/year?
I’m lucky to have him still at the age of 30 but it’s clear how traumatic losing a parent young is.
I know some people like that: the insane nest egg and that security _is_ their quality of life and the blanket they sleep well under. Their current consumption doesn't matter too much to them.
> What’s the point of saving up an 8 figure nest egg and working into your 70s if you spend less than 100k/year?
Leaving your kids better off.
Cigarettes are not too unlike Asbestos: they've been known to be deadly for ages, but a powerful industrial lobby fought ferociously to defend their financial interests, leading to millions of preventable death.
One thing I think most Western people don't realize, especially with how terrified we are of asbestos, is that it is still used and being mined today!
Russia still extensively uses Abestos, the name literally comes from the Russian town of Asbest which is known for exporting, you guessed it, asbestos, to countries like China, India, and Brazil. Of course being Russian they also say it's a Western lie that Asbestos causes lung issues. (I shouldn't have to say this but I'm noting this, and not advocating it's true, asbestos is serious business and I wouldn't want to live in a building with it, it's just interesting that BRICS nations still use it).
As they say, the main export of Russia is suffering. Both figuratively and literally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy3piCUPIkc
Isn't asbestos used pretty much everywhere in the world (except rich countries)?
So yes, it's dangerous. But it's very cheap, and poverty is far more dangerous than asbestos. It's simply a fact: residents of most countries simply can't afford a 200k dollars asbestos-free house, like Americans or Europeans can.
If Americans had less affordable homes like the rest of the world have, they would still be building them out of asbestos.
Not using asbestos is not the reason why homes in the Western world are expensive.
https://aiobs.org/how-healthy-and-costly-are-the-most-used-i... shows insulation cost for a (typical?) 1500sqft (~140m^2 for the rest of the world) home. The most common, and also the cheapest, type of insulation being fiberglass bats at $560. So if this home would cost $200k, that's 3% of the total price. So even if asbestos would be free, it would barely move the needle in total cost.
Edit: That $560 looks suspiciously low. Googling around some more shows an insulation (incl. installation) cost for a "typical" home at around $3500-$4500. In any case, a small fraction of the total cost of a house project.
$560 out of $200k is 0.3%. $4500 out of $200k is 2.3%. Either way, yeah it's a small fraction.
A gentle note to anyone reading, fiberglass insulation requires wearing air filters, for the same reasons noted else in this thread. Wear them expecially to cut it, but also just putting it up or working in a crawlspace with it.
I would appear that you can buy it on Alibaba:
https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?tab=all&SearchText=asbe...
I have not tried, although I was tempted just out of curiosity -- would it make it through customs and get delivered to me in the US ? The rope and fabric style products should not be that dangerous because they are long fibers that should not break off and float in the air, and the cylinder head gasket material is probably chopped short fibers but it's embedded in a matrix of other stuff.
We probably over regulate the long fiber stuff. The short felt-like fibers we used to mix into plaster, cement, anything needing strength and texture, are probably correctly banned; the risk to reward seems not worth it. Many of those products could use glass fiber just as well.
However, I think the general experience of people exposed to rock or cement dust, basically anything silica based that gets into the lungs, is that is really bad. Handling short chopped mineral fiber of any type seems like something that has to have a huge payoff, like part of a rocket for satillite launches, to be worth it.
This is good to keep in mind because there are some really interesting alternative mineral fiber products out there. Basalt fiber in particular, is sold in a chopped mix for adding to concrete, seems potentially bad. There are some interesting ceramic fibers available too.
https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?tab=all&SearchText=basa...
https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?tab=all&SearchText=cera...
>the name literally comes from the Russian town of Asbest which is known for exporting, you guessed it, asbestos
Seems incorrect.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/asbestos
Etymology
From Old French abestos, from Latin asbestos, itself from Ancient Greek ἄσβεστος (ásbestos, “unquenchable, inextinguishable”), from ᾰ̓- (ă-, “not”) + σβέννῡμῐ (sbénnūmĭ, “I quench, quell”).
More likely the town is named after the material, there's an Asbestos in Canada as well. I always get a kick out of cities named like that: Cobalt Ontario, Uranium City, for example.
They renamed the town, it's called Val-des-Sources now.
There is this very interesting study on workers of the still-active mine in Asbest, well worth a read:
https://asbest-study.iarc.who.int/
When I was nine years old, we moved to an asbestos-mining town for about a year and a half. Sometimes dust settled on our house when they were blasting up at the mine site. It’s closed now and the road into town was decommissioned. It’s a remote place to begin with but I still hear of people making the trek to get in there.
It's still in use today,all over the world in industrial and laboratory equipment. Many countries also do mine it.
What that Russian city is alone is in ignoring safety requirements and mining it like people did in the 90s.
This is false actually. asbestos is banned in Russia in residential flat construction (unless it is fully isolated so that it doesn't get inside the space) exactly because it is bad for your lungs. There's limits on how much asbestos can be in the air safely and thry are pretty low
Eternit (асбестоцементный шифер) is absolutely everywhere in Russia, even if banned in residential construction, so the exposure chance is still pretty high.
It must be mentioned that this is about blue asbestos, or crocidolite, which is the most dangerous form of asbestos, but was relatively rarely used and the first to be banned. White asbestos (chrysotile) has a much lower risk[1], far more widespread use, and there are still active chrysotile mines in Russia and China.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581056/
I was very young, but I remember my grandfather was very afraid to retire from the steel mill where he worked most of his life because those who retired tended to get cancer shortly after and die. Sure enough, a little over a year after his retirement, he got a cold that wouldn't go away, and was diagnosed with cancer and died not too long afterwards.
I've wondered for a long time (based entirely on anecdotal observations) whether some forms of cancer and other illnesses arise more quickly from sudden shifts in daily habit. Sometimes it actually does seem to me like the episode in the Simpsons where Mr. Burns thinks he is invincible.
My father was a University teacher, and he would get a cold regularly between terms - as if the body knew that it couldn’t ’give in’ until the work period was over.
Were all the retirees retiring at a certain point? E.g. 20 years after starting
I recently came across this unfortunate promotion for asbestos from back in the day:
https://imgur.com/V1QcX7I
Asbestos was also used as 'fake snow'. Famously the snow scene in the 'Wizard of Oz' movie was 100% pure asbestos.
It's unfortunate this article is about the UK and Imgur has blocked the UK because of the Online Safety Act :(
I wouldn't blame Imgur for that, but the UK gov + people who elected them/didn't resist.
Pray tell, precisely how should we have resisted?
It's ironic that even when the subject is resistance you are looking for a master to tell you what to do. If you want to be free there must be a choice and for there to be a choice there must alternatives.
This is not just a theorethical complaint. I think there were in practice many different things you (in the plural sense) could have done that could have worked adequately. Too many things to list here, you can look up how other people protested in the past.You could protest but then you'd be arrested for disturbing the peace.
Oh yes, please don't think I was blaming Imgur!
All parties supported the OSA (and it's surprisingly popular too) because "something must be done [about the internet], this is something, so this must be done".
It's hardly the stupidest thing British people have voted for in the last two decades, probably not even in the top 5.
Well, we didn't exactly vote for the Online Safety Act. It was introduced by the Tories in 2023 and despite them being voted out in 2024, Labour (Tory-lite) decided to push ahead with the implementation of the draconian law.
However, I don't doubt that a lot of the UK would vote for such a law as most people have a knee-jerk reaction to "won't anyone think of the children?".
And I just found this related passage in the Wikipedia article:
> More than 1,000 tons of asbestos are thought to have been released into the air following the buildings' destruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos
My mother died from pancreatic cancer 5 months ago when she was 55 years old, 9 months after she started noticing pain and doctors started investigating it. The worst thing is that she never worked in any hazardous environments, never smoked, never drank alcohol, avoided fried cuisine, avoided GMO-food, she was always eating as much as possible from her own garden, did not use any chemicals, she wasn't obese, she didn't have diabetes, she didn't have any problems with pancreas or any other significant health issues. None of her close relatives had cancer. For the last 30 years she lived in a very clean region that doesn't have any industrial factories/manufactures.
The only possible hazard she had - she worked for 15 years near busy road, where there was a lot of diesel/gas engine exhaust, but I doubt this is related to her pancreatic cancer, as I found normally this affects lungs/respiratory paths. Maybe she was exposed to some agricultural chemicals in her childhood, because she was living near agricultural fields in the Soviet Union, but I doubt she was significantly exposed to it.
I even joked with her that she was living probably the most cancer-cautious life, and still got cancer. So the worst thing for her is that nobody could tell what she did incorrectly to get this illness. It felt very unfair for her.
> avoided GMO-food, she was always eating as much as possible from her own garden
Depending where she lived, this may have been the cause.
Plenty of people unknowingly live and grow food in areas that had toxic waste dumped on them a century ago, and it's still there in the dirt.
GMO food, in addition to not being any worse for you than non-GMO food, generally gets grown in places that have always been agricultural land.
My sympathies for what must be just an awful time for you —- sporadic pancreatic cancer is just a lurking evil.
My mother died of an unusual form of it, just a little older than yours, when I was in my early twenties. It was terrible.
The only unusual thing was some prior surgery near her pancreas, from twenty years earlier, had apparently had severe scarring that was noticed during surgery to fit a stent.
It comes up a lot on the diyuk subreddit so they have pinned mega thread about it. I like it to give a little balance to the conversation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DIYUK/comments/133jq4r/the_is_this_...
I don't really think asbestos is something that needs balance to the conversation. It's like radioactive material, you will most likely not even know that you've had too much exposure until your health is already permanently affected. The illness may manifest a considerable time later so you might not even know what it was. It's very easy to unknowingly be exposed when e.g. renovating a house or other similar arrangements because there is no easy visual way to identify materials containing asbestos.
It absolutely does need balance. Many, if not most older pre 1980 houses in (Norway where I live) have some form of Asbestos in some form, e.g. Eternit, window putty, jointing putty, AIB around fireplaces, or textured paint. Usually these materials are fine if left in place, and it is tricky to avoid these materials when looking for housing since older homes make up a large fraction of our housing stock, especially in my kommune up north.
My own house probably contains some Asbestos, but getting an asbestos survey is very expensive, prohibitively so for people earning the average salary. Not to mention if asbestos is found, it is a further expense to get it removed and cleaned up. The best I can do is send a sample in for testing if I find something risky while renovating myself. Most contractors up here do no care at all if something looks like it may be ACM.
The best thing we can do for people is to provide balanced guidance on where asbestos may be and how much risk does it pose. AIB like Asbestolux is way more dangerous than Eternit is and depending on the location Eternit can remain in place.
Unfortunately if we were to take a zero tolerance approach it would cause more harm than good. How do people pay for remediation? do we all abandon our homes? what happens to the farmers who cannot move? I have no perfect answer here. Asbestos is a hazard no question, but what can we do other than common sense and balance?
> Usually these materials are fine if left in place
Maybe in Norway you need to tell people to chill over it. But the current attitude to asbestos in DIY spaces in the US/UK is far away from that, and a lot closer to “yea go on just tear it out yourself, you’ll be fine if you put on an n95 and spray some water first”.
I think the dominant attitude in the US is to stick your head in the sand. Tons of older homes have asbestos yet almost zero of them report it in their listing or their disclosure report. If you test it and find it you have to report it. If the buyer tests it and finds it, the seller doesn't want to know because then they'd have to report it. Somehow knowing the house has asbestos lowers it's value significantly more than willfully not knowing + almost certainly having it anyways.
Yes because proper asbestos removal is very costly and people don't want to deal with it, your house is going to look like the government coming for ET. Very tempting for a singular homeowner to just read up and rent some ventilation equipment and rip it out themselves on the down low even if dangers are very real. There are some old mental asylums in my hometown, beautiful stone buildings on massive property, they have been sitting vacant and decaying for years because they are full of asbestos and no one wants to deal with it.
Happened to me. Bought a house with wood floors in the basement. We had some flooding which ruined the wood and when we ripped it out to replace, turns out the wood floors were installed over the original asbestos tiles. From what I can tell, the asbestos tiles themselves were of no particular danger to us, but once they got wet and started cracking they had to be removed which cost an additional couple thousand dollars on top of replacing he floors.
> current attitude to asbestos in DIY spaces in the US/UK
Nope, same attitude here.
The problem with not taking a "zero tolerance" approach is that the problem isn't going to go away. As you say, the asbestos including materials are often best left untouched rather than being removed by a DIYer which may well release the fibres into the air. However, that's just kicking the can down the road as at some point the house will need renovating or rebuilding and that's when the asbestos fibres will be released.
As always, it ends up cheaper to just chuck dangerous materials into the wider environment rather than dealing with them in a responsible manner. It's a shame that we can't retroactively penalise the builders that used so much asbestos.
You can’t punish retroactively, Lex retro non agit. It’s the lawmakers that create the environment we all work inside of to maximize our profits. There’s probably at least 3 as dangerous as asbestos materials used in current day and we are yet to find out.
Zero tolerance means paralysis, it’s a naive ideal. Look at the recent medical technologies where zero tolerance for unwanted side effects has to be balanced with benefits.
What isn’t a trade-off?
With asbestos, it's not so much a trade-off as it will continue to be a possible hazard unless it's disposed of correctly. I can relate to a homeowner not wanting to pay for testing/removing asbestos ceiling tiles etc. but if they don't then any disruption to those tiles can release potentially lethal fibres into the air (asbestos doesn't have a "safe" dose, so it's not like it can be rationalised with "I only made a small hole in that tile").
Comparison with medical technologies isn't particularly valid as people can choose whether to have that treatment or not, but people can't easily choose whether their house was built with asbestos or not. If a house was already built, then the potential danger is already there and we can either deal with it sensibly or not care about the deadly consequences of releasing it into the environment.
I don't see the logic of not punishing retroactively as companies may have made a lot of profit and then pay nothing towards the clean-up costs - privatise the profit and socialise the costs. The homeowners/tenants are effectively being punished retroactively when they may suspect/discover that their house contains asbestos, so why should the builders (if they are still around) not have to pay?
Maybe there should be extra taxes imposed on industries with a history of environmental abuse to reclaim some of the costs to society.
The EPA’s own documentation states that Asbestos is primarily an occupational hazard. If the fibers are not embedded in a friable material you will not get any significant exposure. Occupational hazards are those encountered routinely by someone engaging in an occupation. So harvey the homeowner isn’t at much increased risk if he removes asbestos himself as long as he takes precautions and cleans up afterward. It’s a fiber and a dust not some magic material that soaks in through your skin. And obviously don’t start a business removing asbestos for people without doing the licensing.
Fiberglass batts are really bad to handle too, and same with gypsum dust and saw dust from cutting manufactured stone countertops. If you do anything indoors you should definitely wear a respirator and full sleeves.
> It’s a fiber and a dust not some magic material that soaks in through your skin
I feel you're being a bit flippant with the known danger of disturbing asbestos containing materials. The dust and fibres are typically too fine to be controlled by a household vacuum cleaner and will require specialist handling to minimise the risk. Yes, the dust isn't absorbed through the skin, but instead is breathed in and enters the lungs where it causes problems.
You're right about using respirators/masks when dealing with dust, but special care needs to be taken with asbestos dust and not all dust masks will protect your lungs from the dust/fibres.
Whether or not specific regulations exist for a particular danger, if a company or individual can be found to be aware of the negative consequences of their use of certain compounds and they don't publicly document those dangers they can (in the US anyway) and should absolutely be held legally accountable for failure to warn.
History is rife with companies/industries who were well aware of the dangers they were creating to people for decades while actively suppressing the evidence of such that they themselves discovered.
Which companies this applies to for Asbestos in particular, I couldn't tell you, but it would be shocking if there weren't lots of bad actors who knew they were bad actors considering there has been research on the dangers of Asbestos since 1927 -- nearly a full century ago.
> retroactively penalise the builders that used so much asbestos
It is not the builders fault, they did not know, but the manufacturers of ACM did for decades! and they were penalized. Most were forced to set up trusts to cover certain expenses in the US, but I am not sure what their scope is.
In Germany, regulations around asbestos are quite strict: You're not allowed to "seal it in" by e.g. putting floor leveling compounds on top of old asbestos-containing flooring. If there's asbestos found during renovations, it needs to be removed professionally.
When we re-did our kitchen we found asbestos-containing glue under a new-ish layer of tiles one of the previous owners of the apartment just laid on top. I wish regulations would already have been stricter back then (and that they would have been followed - another story...) as this surprise find caused massive delays to the construction and forced us to temporarily move out during the removal and decontamination.
One of the best ways to make DIY-ing in buildings built before 1994 (when asbestos was banned for construction in Germany) safe has been to buy a H-filtration class shop vac. It can filter out asbestos fibers and many other fine dust particles that aren't healthy to inhale and was barely more expensive than a comparably good vac.
> problem isn't going to go away.
Yes, that is why when you test positive for asbestos you add a little "a" sticker to the material to notify anyone in the future.
I think you are missing the point. Many people like myself want to take care of it, and would hire a proper crew to take care of it, but we are not wealthy enough to just call in a crew without some financial planning. This is not just an annoying expense, quite a bit more than that.
Unlike radiation, there's no safe asbestos exposure, if you're really unlucky a single strand can screw you up. On the other hand, of all people having worked at asbestos facilities with early 20th century approach to PPE only 20% developed mesothelioma and 10% died from it.
Thinking before swinging your drill will get most people safe enough not to worry about it.
I don't really buy the comparison. If you're really unlucky, you can get cancer from a "safe dose" of radiation.
Low exposures of both things are statistically less likely to hurt you than large doses. We pick a line to call "safe", but completely safety in either case is not guaranteed.
There is a natural level of radioactivity which the body is used to compensate. Small additional doses of radioactivity can therefor be neglected. This is not true for stuff like abestos.
The ending is in praise of dads. Wonderful. I lost my dad when I was 8. I still miss him every day. It’s hard to know beforehand how cool it is to watch your kids grow and change. I hope I get to see how cool my kids are in their old age.
Here’s to workers rights and living longer.
I remember when I was living in Melbourne I read a story about the Wunderlich factory which operated in the suburb of sunshine. Supposedly they left their wast just sitting in the yard (which was very centrally located so people would commonly cut through it). The local kids loved playing in the dusty stuff and on windy days it was apparently like a snowstorm. The factory operated up until the 80s, it is hard to believe.
Great article to reinforce my unease at finding asbestos tiles while remodeling a bedroom.
Relatedly, Asbestos used to be a place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val-des-Sources
Attempts to reopen the mine and sell asbestos to the developing world under a new brand caught the attention of the Daily Show leading to some train wreck coverage that ultimately led to them changing the name of the town.
I know its not fashionable, but things like asbestos is the point of regulation.
If you ignore the health effects, asbestos is a fucking brilliant material, strong(if used with a binder) exceptionally fireproof, UV stable and fairly inert.
Why _wouldn't_ you use it? To use modern parlance; only melts wouldn't use it, thats who (this message brought to you by your friendly corporate sponsor...)
The problem is that it still kills now[1]. Because its a time bomb, with a dwell time of well over 10-20 years, its very lard to pin point the cause.
The only way that its _stopped_ being put into building materials is through regulation. The problem now for us, especailly in the UK is the power of regulation is being ablated through incompetence, funding cuts and a concerted effort by those who stand to benefit from a weakened regulatory system.
Most regulation is formed from the blood of victims. We may not _like_ what the regulation is, and lord knows it needs improving. But to not have it, or worst, have it and not be enforced, is a terrible state of affairs.
[1]https://neu.org.uk/latest/library/what-real-risk-asbestos-sc...
Luckily thanks to regulation the use of asbestos in new builds has almost completely been eliminated (I'm sure there are some uses somewhere where it's indispensable?), but there's of course a huge number of places where it turns up in all kinds of renovation projects.
In addition to buildings, e.g. ships. Think about a steamship, what material that is fireproof and doesn't rot do you think they used for insulating boilers and steam pipes? One museum ship I'm somewhat familiar with ripped out all the asbestos insulation and replaced it with IIRC mostly mineral or glass wool during a major renovation some years back, just to make it safer for the mostly volunteers who dedicate their time to keep the ship functioning.
Ships, especially navy ships, have lead to lots of mesothelioma cases in later life.
Our business leaders have successfully painted shortsightedness, greed, and nihilism as beneficial business traits embraced by adults willing to accept life’s difficult realities.
In reality, only personal and group morality protected our society from such forces, and letting ethics retard profit and growth became seriously uncool in the 80s hippie backlash.
Would you buy a product with asbestos in if it wasn't regulated against? (Assuming we removed all similar regulation so the lack of regulation does not its self imply safety.)
Of course you wouldn't.
We have journalists to uncover dangers like this; they are clearly financially incentivised to do so. We have courts to assess damages. We don't need government regulation.
Such a common trope that "the heartless capitalist doesn't care about harming customers so we need the government to save us". Of course the capitalist cares about harming customers, she needs to sell to them (and their competitors product will be much more successful if it is not harmful!).
And, in either case, regulation or free market will only save us if there are viable alternatives. Fossil fuels still kill people, but we don't regulate against it because there is currently no viable alternative.
I don't know if this comment is one of ignorance, or juvenile "well actually", but it is tragically misinformed. From an Australian perspective all of the big players, CSR, John Mansviille, & James Hardy, knew asbestos was a significant hazard by _at least_ the 40s. There were early epidemiological studies of cancers around asbestos work sites, and workers, in the 50s here in NSW. Unions and gov health departments start to push back on exposure and seek meaningful damages in the 60s and 70s. There were _public_ campaigns about the dangers in the 70s and 80s. It wasnt meaningfully restricted, _and continued to be commonly used_, through the 80s. A complete ban, primarily workplaces IIRC, wasnt introduced until 2003. The randian wank fantasy of "the informed consumer knows best" has been repudiated innumerable times.
And, as others have pointed out, this is not an individual choice. The families who got asbestosis from washing their fathers work clothes didnt make a choice. The bloom of cancers for residential suburbs miles around james hardy in camellia didnt have a choice. There is no expiration date on the dangers of friable asbestos. It remains hidden in the common environment forever, until someone else stumbles on it.
Would you buy a product with asbestos in it if its presence wasn't disclosed? You might, if it provided value vs alternatives.
Manufacturers are successuful when they sell. If their product is found dangerous they a) deny and muddy the waters, b) settle lawsuits and if that doesn't work c) close up shop and open a new business. Customer unwelfare is a cost of business.
Asbestos is hard to hide, certainly competitors of the Asbestos-using company would know they were using Asbestos. They, at least, would have an incentive to advertise how bad their competitors product is because it uses Asbestos.
Equally, once it has been established that Asbestos is harmful any company using it would be so sued that they would quickly cease to exist.
Yes the free market doesn't stop health risks immediately but neither does regulation (see: asbestos!)
Would you tell people your product has asbestos in it, if it wasn’t regulated that you had to? Of course you wouldn’t. And then, apparently, you would blame your customer for buying it.
> Fossil fuels still kill people, but we don't regulate against it
ULEZ, Euro 6, clean air act (both US and UK), there are more though.
You are correct, I meant regulate to ban them.
No doubt when electric cars become better in every way than fossil fuel cars, the government will create a regulation banning fossil fuel cars. Everyone will rejoice that the government stopped those horrible fossil-fuel burning cars! Of course, the vast majority of people would have switched to the electric cars at this point anyway.
> Of course the capitalist cares about harming customers, she needs to sell to them
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsona...
Internal memos from 1970s - 2000s reveal knowledge of asbestos traces. Executives, better known as caring capitalists, resisted disclosure.
In case you think this isn’t a pattern: Purdue and Oxy, General Motors and their ignitions switches, DuPont and “confirmed animal carcinogen” Teflon, Philip Morris’ cigarette campaigns, VWs dieselgate…
Each of them found to be suppressing knowledge knowingly harming consumers.
Yes of course it is in their interest to lie / hide until it becomes public knowledge. But regulation has the exact same problem (hence why Asbestos was not regulated for a long time, same with your other examples).
When it is widely known (and therefore can be regulated) it is already too late as it's now in the producers interest to cease producing it.
Heavy litigation after the fact can disincentivise the lying in the first place. If legislation doesn't not allow for this (e.g. because of time limitations) then it should be amended.
All successful markets in history have been regulated to some degree. A market requires sellers AND buyers and buyers will flock to a market where they're not burdened with the cost and expense of having to do their own research and investigation before even considering a purchase, never mind actually completing a trade.
Completely unregulated markets simply don't scale in terms of successful trading - the regulation replaces the work each buyer would have to do and thus is actually more efficient than having each buyer replicate the work of the regulator. This is why they have been out-competed by regulated markets in the course of history.
So have all unsuccessful markets. I think this says more about human power dynamics than the necessity of market regulation.
I don’t understand your point - there’s no symmetry there.
Regulated venues dominate nearly every sphere of trading in terms of volume.
They have done this by being more attractive to buyers and sellers than unregulated venues - i.e. regulated venues have out-competed unregulated venues.
In the market for trading venues, regulated venues have won.
>currently no viable alternative
So false.
Even if OT, I would take the chance to remember the great sicilian hacker Asbesto, that I never had the honour to know personally, for what represented for the hacker culture in Italy. And for his aweson woodcraft mastery. May R.I.P.
I posted diamondgeezer’s blog post on High Street to HackerNews some time ago, and he was most bemused by the HackerNews effect on his website.
I’ve also just posted his great article on British Summer Time, I would have that would have been more popular;
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45710093
Asbestos is genuinely more terrifying then nuclear radiation.
If something is radioactive then a Geiger counter will tell you at a distance, it'll even triangulate it.
Asbestos? It can be everywhere and the only way to know is to collect samples, pay $100 a piece to a lab to do phase contrast microscopy and wait.
Then do it again the next time you find something suspicious.
And once you've cleaned it out..well hope your handling was good coz who knows if you got it all - without collecting a lot of samples and testing again.
My house has a few asbestos pieces, and in digging up the yard I've pulled a huge amount of asbestos fiber cement from cheap renovations by previous owners - the stuff was about 10 cm below the surface.
Its carcinogenic “modus operandi” is also completely different to anything else. Asbestos is chemically inert, so how does is cause cancer? The tiny crystalline needles puncture cells, sometimes during cell division, and strands of dna will get tangled up and result in messed up genetics.
Yes and I would like to add, it is all about the "dose". It is a common misconception that tangled DNA will automatically lead to spreading cancer. Per day a normal person develops tangled up dna cells in the hundreds, that is a normal process, but the immune system can handle it without problems and can get rid of it (unfortunately not always). So with Asbestos it is all about the dose too. Although a relative small amount could be already _potential_ harmful.
IIRC, asbestos does not directly cause cells to become cancerous, but it is an irritant that reawakens cancerous cells the body had forced into dormancy.
It's not at all uncommon. Virtually everything that has tiny sharp pieces in it, will work like that. Graphene for instance.
You’re correct. Iirc the blueish smoke from car tires share a similar property.
Which cheese from Lidl do you recommend? I'm in the UK.
I'm not a doctor or researcher in that field, but my understanding is that cancer is not 'one disease', but rather a huge number of different diseases which mostly have in common that they develop some kind of tumors.
That's also one reason why progress in cancer research and drug development is so slow. 'Fix' one cancer, and what you've developed likely has little effect on the zillion other cancer variants.
Mesothelioma caused by asbestos is only a single disease. It has a known cause. It has been well researched. The causal links are clear: prevention is the answer. It doesn't matter that other cancers are different diseases, that is irrelevant to mesothelioma caused by asbestos.
Yes, I agree with all of the above. I was just pointing out that cancer from asbestos being different from other cancers isn't so unique since a lot of cancers are different from all other cancers.
If it's intact and below surface the risk is far lower. You have to worry about airborne asbestos.
Not saying you should ignore it but don't dig it up without knowing what you're in for.
When I was younger, my dad had me help him repair the roof of the shed by getting on top of it, putting these sorts of flexible sheets over the old corrugated ones (that are made of asbestos cement) and driving nails through the top one all the way until it'd hit the wood frame underneath.
Now, asbestosis is more common in long term exposure so it might be fine, but not bothering to tell me to wear a respirator and the ignorance after I brought it up years later makes me disgusted. So now I have to wonder whether decades later I'll have complications without clear ways to address them.
By now, the dangers of asbestos are well known. What was his reasoning about being ignorant?
His reasoning, the way he told me, was that:
I get the reasoning, but at the same time, it's bad that he made that judgement call himself and couldn't be bothered to tell me. Like, at least give me the information and give me the choice on how to proceed, I would have much preferred to wear a mask instead. It's a bit like riding a bike, helmets are there for a good reason, even if the choice whether to wear them is (or should be) yours.The reasoning does seem... reaaonable. But in this case it's likely not reasoning but rather its guilt-laden doppleganger: rationalization after the fact. Very common in my family, especially the confident/proud ones, including myself.
I try to recognize when I realize I'm doing it, stop, apologize for the deception that it is, and commit to more sincere communication.
Alternatively, regularly informing your family of each infinitesimal danger in this world is a path to neurosis or estrangement. There is a balance, and in some cases non-disclosure does feel the right path (to me).
Yup, agreed. His reasoning is sound except the choice should be yours. I have the feeling that the older generation is a bit more callous with safety and health. The comparison with motorcycles is apt, because I've read about similar generational issues in the motorcyclegear subreddit.
> The company mined asbestos-bearing rock at several sites in South Africa
"In South Africa" is not very specific.
it seems to have been firstly in this remote in the remote Northern Cape where "The mine eventually became the largest crocidolite mine in the world" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koegas_mine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos_Mountains
It predictably wasn't consequence-free at that end either, see the later parts of article. And many other sources, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/sep/15/weekend...
Plenty of people die from asbestos exposure when renovating their house.
Our house has an asbestos flue in the bathroom. I'm very careful never to go near that thing, and never ever to cut/drill/attempt to remove it myself. But I wonder how many people would never know it was asbestos.
If you leave asbestos alone it's safe, and if you need to drill into it, use shaving cream so that the fibers don't get into the air. It's not a big deal if you are careful. But don't be reckless - you need to know what you are drilling into and do it slowly.
Source? Usually it is just tradesmen who worked with it directly, or their wives.
This is an interesting claim.
How many is plenty and what are the sources to back this?
This is not factual.
Asbestos is not kryptonite. One time exposure is not going to have short term or long term impact to your health.
There is a lot of FUD around asbestos, check out all of the panicked posts on reddit.
This is not factual.
The cancer causing mechanism of asbestos is mechanical. A single strand in the wrong place could cut your DNA up. With any probabilistic process the more exposure the more chances and the greater the likelihood.
I had a garden shed with an asbestos roof when we moved in - the first renovation was to get rid of it entirely.
Connect and die
To believe that governments as recent as the first Trump administration wanted to protect the asbestos industry: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-p...
Designing the way to route amplifiers in aesbesto attic, which is one element for compressed exposure to respitory disease.