Horrible fact of the day: Chevron just released a new boat fuel that WILL give you cancer.
Not “might”, not “could”, WILL. It has a cancer ratio of 1:1, as in, in a group of 10 people, ALL 10 would contract CANCER.
The EPA’s safety limit is 1:1,000,000 as in 1 in a million people get cancer.
The EPA approved it anyways. I am not joking. The EPA approved a boat fuel that has a near 100% chance of giving someone cancer. It has such a good chance of giving someone cancer that if you DIDN’T get cancer YOU WOULD BE AN OUTLIER.
So here’s a fact I learned from looking into it. If 100 people would eat fish that lived in waters contaminated by this fuel, it is assumed 7 of those people would get cancer.
Also handing this material unprotected gives you cancer at a rate of 1.3:1. Yes you read that right not the 1 in 7.8 chance of lung cancer from smoking, over 100% chance of cancer from this.
As of Friday August 4th the article I read said Chevron wasn’t making it yet. They want to though. They won’t tell people where they plan to make I though nor which boats will be using it. So that’s great.
it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.
example:
it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more
dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has
generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are
inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like
streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of
those spaces.
(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)
thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.
the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground - the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.
pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.
so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.
so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.
They found chemicals in the water. They say it’s low levels.
…you all should take a Sudden and Deep interest in gardening. That leads to the Mississippi and the Mississippi River provides something like 25% of the surface water we use. That’s ¼ of the country. And that’s just the surface water.
The Mississippi River is Already so dirty that part of the Mississippi is referred to as Cancer Alley because the pollution in that area has caused higher cancer rates in locals.
In Cancer Alley (where they protest new industries and existing ones already polluting the air & water) all the EPA did was test some stuff, take some samples, and surveys, then ask a few specific businesses to cut emissions by 85%
The EPA since has said they met that goal. Locals don’t buy it and they want emissions cut to .2 micrograms per cubic meter of air which is what the EPA designated as safe.
I googled it.
This is their air quality right now 2-25-2023
It’s good. It’s green and everything. Even on a map view which I also looked at.
See that asterisk, though?
“The most harmful pollution consists of small particulate matter, 2.5 microns in size or less, called PM2.5. These particles are small enough to work their way deep into the lungs and into the bloodstream, where they trigger heart attack, stroke, lung cancer and asthma.” Source
I want to clarify and emphasize that is 1.2x the amount that the WHO recommends for a YEAR of exposure. And it’s just what they have in Laplace, LA today.
And in case you wondering a pm2.5 pollution level is like smoking one cigarette a day. Babies are inhaling that. Kids have been inhaling that since birth. Pregnant women in Cancer Alley have higher miscarriage rates on top of everything else, too. Otherwise healthy people are dying of cancer.
The WHO graph of long term exposure and mortality for exactly what they’re experiencing:
But the air quality is marked as Good.
Now getting back to East Palestine, OH.
Do not fucking believe these people telling you the water and food is safe or pollution levels are “low”. They’re already saying the air quality is safe but uhhhhhhh this current AQI for East Palestine says its definitely the annual limit for pm2.5 exposure and Ohio has had a steady stream of it. In fact, East Palestine had awful levels even before the accident.
So who’s idea of safe are they using when they sell us these headlines.
I hope more than anything that the community is able to repair itself and give these companies the hell they deserve.
It’s what they get for ignoring rail safety, ignoring community safety, and neglecting to implement better safety measures that would prevented this. And the gall to fucking LIE about it after???
Obligatory disclaimer that the whaling industry was terrible and cruel and decimated populations of an amazing animal that has yet to recover almost 200 years later.
But it is just so fascinating to me. The only sea occupation where your destination was literally just THE SEA. That’s it. You go out there and you don’t come back until it’s somewhat worth it, however long that takes. There are familiar grounds one would go to first, yes, but no routes, no schedules, no final destinations, no sense of when one comes back if one ever comes back. Just going to lonelier and lonelier places that no other ship is going to nor has need to go to. And when one finally happens to see another whaler it was a cause for an extended social event in ways that other maritime jobs just DID NOT have time for.
Highly diverse crews that were, of course, not without racism and inequity by any means (the entire job was…rife with inequity since idle agents ashore were already taking around 60% of the cut), but also one where one’s rank was ultimately determined by ‘can you kill a whale?’. And where the social component was so closely intertwined the fact that one would be at sea likely 3-4 years and if there was ANY surviving it and ANY success of it everyone had to more-or-less get along with each other.
And over the course of those years and years staring down aimless stretches of boredom you get the most fascinating folk art. And folk art that is so often tied to domestics. Making yarn swifts and pie crimpers and valentines for your girl outta BONES. Bones that came from the moments where that boredom was punctuated by Complete Terror.
An industry that was just like…SO violent and bloody and brutal, all for the aim of bringing back materials to make things that were so staid and domestic. Lamp oil. Candles. Corset Stays. Perfume Bases. Soaps. Just…candles paid for by so much blood from people, from animals. And was something that for such a fleeting moment was one of THE American industries, before settling, mercifully, into obscurity.
IT’S REALLY FASCINATING TO ME and so unlike any other maritime professions. I feel like piracy is the thing that comes closest to whaling in terms of all of the componants above, in a weird way, but whaling is such a thing of its own. UNIQUE AND TERRIBLE CREATURE.
I cannot recommend Gretchen McCulloch’s book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language highly enough:
What these profiles inevitably find is that popular teenagers are texting or snapping or other-kind-of-messaging each other, for seemingly no reason, at rates completely unfathomable to the adult writer. Thousands of texts a month! Running up data bills! If they dig a step deeper, they may also find that shyer, nerdier, or more introverted teens are doing less of all this.
But none of this is unique to the internet. As the linguist and internet researcher Susan Herring points out, her generation of baby boomer teens hung out “aimlessly” in malls, at drive-in movies, at sock hops and school sports games and public parks. They created codes and wrote backwards to pass notes, the same way kids in internet generations create inventive language for texting, and they decorated their lockers or bedrooms like a younger generation takes great care with their social media profiles. Whether they’re spending hours on the landline telephone, racking up a massive texting bill, or being “addicted” to Facebook or MySpace or Instagram, something that teens want to do in every generation is spend a lot of unstructured time hanging out, flirting, and jockeying for status with their peers.
Herring also points to a French sociology study from 1981, which found that sociability is highest among teenagers and young adults, and declines as people get older. “All else being equal,” writes Herring, “this suggests that one should interpret observed differences in digital sociability between younger and older users as life-stage related, rather than as indicating an ongoing change in the direction of increased sociability for all digital media users.” Even the fact that teens use all kinds of social networks at higher rates than twentysomethings doesn’t necessarily mean that they prefer to hang out online. Studies consistently show that most teens would rather hang out with their friends in person. The reasons are telling: teens prefer offline interaction because it’s “more fun” and you “can understand what people mean better.” But suburban isolation, the hostility of malls and other public places to groups of loitering teenagers, and schedules packed with extracurriculars make these in-person hangouts difficult, so instead teens turn to whatever social site or app contains their friends (and not their parents). As danah boyd puts it, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”
Just like the teens who whiled away hours in mall food courts or on landline telephones became adults who spent entirely reasonable amounts of time in malls and on phone calls, the amount of time that current teens spend on social media or their phones is not necessarily a harbinger of what they or we are all going to be doing in a decade. After all, adults have much better social options. They can go out, sans curfew, to bars, pubs, concerts, restaurants, clubs, and parties, or choose to stay in with friends, roommates, or romantic partners. Why, adults can even invite people over without parental permission and keep the bedroom door closed!
McCulloch, Gretchen. Because Internet. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
(Bolding mine.)
“Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”
this probably hasn’t made the news in other countries - huge mining company Rio Tinto managed to lose this little capsule (8 x 6 mm) somewhere in West Australia:
it’s caesium-137, the stuff that has made Chernobyl uninhabitable, and you don’t want to be standing within 5-10 meters of it, because it’s blasting out beta and gamma rays. you REALLY don’t want to pick it up, because it’ll give you radiation burns.
what’s nuts is it seems to have somehow escaped from its “secure” container and fallen out of a bolt hole while being transported, and then nobody noticed for TWO WEEKS.
anyway there are fire fighters on their sixth day of scouring 1,400 km (!) of desert road right now, but it’s so small that it may never be found (I think the detection radius with the equipment they’re using is maybe 20m). it’s so small that it could have stuck in a car’s tire treads, or been picked up by an unfortunate bird or other wildlife. it has a half-life of 30 years, which means it’ll be dangerously radioactive for centuries.
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