Turns out getting particles into our lungs are bad!
I recently did some DIY on an old cottage on our land which was empty for years, I got a N100 mask since it was painted with lead paint which was flaking off and I was putting lead containment paint over it after brushing it down.
An older person seeing me take this rudimentary precaution went about mocking me for being timid.
It's well-known that both asbestos and wood dust (especially hardwood dust) are carcinogens, but (for example) mesothelioma is very bad and does not require heavy, prolonged exposure — brief and/or low-level exposure has been shown to cause it too. Additionally, inhaled asbestos fibers can remain in the lungs and pleural lining for decades. In contrast, the human body can expel wood dust over time.
What exactly do you think that study contradicts? It seems to show that asbestos increases the risk of lung cancer for about two decades. That seems to support the comment you're saying it disproves, not disprove it.
One of the sad things about the massive increase in popularity of engineered quartz countertops has been the massive increase in 20-something year olds getting silicosis and needing lung transplants.
Just to be clear about your source for other readers. It discusses the workers who produce these counter tops versus people merely having them in the home (what I originally inferred with your comment), it says the mean age of onset was 43 years old, and that 79% of the workers with silicosis did not use personal protective equipment.
I’m pretty certain the studies are lagging indicators with regards to the age of incidence; the jobs have seen a significant shift in the ages of employees as more of the work is now done by immigrant/second gen labor than in years prior. A family on my street in Palo Alto had three sons diagnosed with silicosis by 25.
That’s an ignorant interpretation of those statistics.
13% risk is a number controlling out other factors. Cancer is a numbers game and as a person living your life you stack the risks together.
Trying to rhetorically minimize the danger of this stuff by comparing it to sawdust is specious and gross. Exposure to sawdust is a narrow occupational hazard easily mitigated with PPE. Exposure to asbestos is a much broader - use of baby powder, serving on a ship, working in a boiler room, working as a mechanic, etc. Its a very broad risk that most workers didn’t even realize they were exposed to - just their presence was a risk.
> 13% risk is a number controlling out other factors
So is the other figure, so the comparison is valid. Maybe wood dust is more dangerous that you assume?
BTW, the asbestos in baby powder had nothing to do with industrial use of asbestos. It was in the talc because asbestos and talc are frequently coincident in the ground.
i discovered this after buying a house with asbestos and looking not only into the official guidelines but the undercurrent of industry experts, their observations. the risks of asbestos are massively overblown in the way that the public understands it. massively. it was shocking to find out.
assuming you are correct, what if someone is exposed to both asbestos and sawdust? And what if that person is also a smoker? And now that person also lives in a house with high radon exposure.
correct. An additional chance of 13% to get cancer is a lot, because the chances are already quite high. Trying to downplay the risks of asbestos isn't helping.
One of my friends told me at one of the FAANGs, some of the employees were openly asking on financial-planning internal mailing list in how to qualify their kids for financial aid or grants because they made too much.
I manage a large software team (developers, analysts, PMs, support, writers)... The actual work we accomplish as a team increased with remote working. No more time wasted fighting our way through traffic, or in the case of people in India, fighting monsoons, to get into an office.
This does make my job harder. The reason for this is that a great deal of my work happens in 30-minute increments, making decisions, in meetings. But that is not how software gets built. Developers work in half-day increments. Flow matters, extended concentration matters (I was a software developer for over two decades). Making my job easier at the expense of my people would be utterly foolish. I think most software-oriented tech companies (or departments) will hold to this. The real challenge, as always, is to find people driven to work hard and who delight in solving problems.
I don't know how this dichotomy of time-boxing translates to other businesses that aren't about crafting software or extended periods of what is essentially thought-work. Restaurateurs must go to the restaurant, factory workers to the factory, but if your job is crafting text in digital form, you can be located anywhere.
It seems like signing up for globalization means having to accept consequences like this. You can’t bemoan when invasive species affects local ecosystems when you also allow unabated global transport with absolutely no security or inspection for diseases or insects etc.
You can’t be lazy with inspection and then be shocked when an extremely global eceonomy introduces Bark Beetles and decimate your trees. Either accept this outcome or spend more money at entry points or stop globalization with countries that don’t inspect their exports to avoid the situation completely.
The bark beetle is not an invasive species in Central Europe though. The main reason is climate change (the last decade was increasingly hotter, drier and 'stormier') combined with a man-made tree mono culture (which goes back a few hundred years).
The same thing happened in California also due to climate change. The beetles here thrived far more than they used to due to shorter/warmer winters with less/no snow in the mountains, and beetle population exploded and they killed probably a million or more trees. Up in the mountains in California you can't drive anywhere without seeing thousands of dead trees all around you - and it's everywhere in the mountains here, probably millions of trees dead - I obviously don't know an exact count, but it's quite a lot.
Every Uber driver I’ve had in US and Canada are happy with driving for Uber. One guy I had the other day drives under as his second job and He says it pays his rent, his car payment and gas and his primary job goes straight to savings. The idea that these Uber drivers are slaves is a lie.
“Uber drivers are slaves is a lie” is a bit oversimplification, but the children in mines analogy doesn’t make sense. The idea is to get rid of child labour, not labour in general. It’s not like we don’t have adults working in mines. I know in Northern Ontario there are people who enjoy the job since it pays fairly well. I understand it’s physically excruciating, but consenting adults sign up for it.
In Uber’s case, consenting adults sign up for the terms in employee unfriendly environments (e.g. US). From what I’ve heard from my drivers, it’s either that or some other minimum wage job they don’t wanna do.
Every Uber driver I’ve had in US and Canada are happy with driving for Uber. One guy I had the other day drives under as his second job and He says it pays his rent, his car payment and gas and his primary job goes straight to savings.
I wrote a comment using similar logic. Every child I've met working in mines was happy to be able to provide money for their family.
The logic is bad. It's poor reasoning to say, "Every person I've met doing X is happy. Therefore letting people do X is a good thing." I was pointing that out.
That doesn’t make sense, they can’t assume the lock is freed after the timeout. They have to retry to get the lock again, because another process might have taken the lock. Also, redis is single threaded so access to redis is by definition serialized.
In the past i used SQS where the client can extend the TTL of a given message (or lock in this case?) while it is still alive. Isn’t that possible with Redis?
Japan needs to move to a 4 day work week. Their culture and lifestyle is sucking the will to live from their young people. Moving to a 4 day work week will help the kids loosen up and feeling confident that they’re not bringing kids into a dystopian matrix-like world where all you do is work and then die.
How can data collected by the government be private? That should all be available to the public since it was gathered with public funds. Has no one issued a freedom of information request?
> Personally, I think an individual’s privacy should take precedence here.
There's no individual's privacy even at stake here. None of the data that's non-public is even material or relevant to the dispute here, beyond that the professors in question signed an agreement to access the data for unrelated matters.
> How can data collected by the government be private? That should all be available to the public since it was gathered with public funds. Has no one issued a freedom of information request?
Agreed. What gives the government the right to reject my FOIA requests for the exact specification and design files for gaseous centrifuges, implosion devices, and nerve gas?
Extreme natsec examples aside, there are a thousand reasons to keep government data private, not the least of which is constituent privacy. Deanonymizing data is far easier than preparing it for release and the data schools keep on students is particularly sensitive (I'm not claiming that that's the case with this data, just making a general observation).
Just about every accepts that it's reasonable for some government collected information to be kept private. FOIA requests exclude "personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy". https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-A...
In this case it was for "student-level data that detail the demographic information and the performance records over time of California’s 5.8 million students but without any names or identifying information. That data is the gold standard for accurate research. A partnership contract details the department’s commitments and researchers’ responsibilities, including strong assurances they will have security protections in place to protect students’ privacy and anonymity."
The thing about this sort of data is, removing PII from the dataset doesn't make it fully or even sufficiently anonymous. If there's only one Pacific Islander student in the Shasta Union High School District then it's easy to figure out who that is by coming it with other public data.
] Statistical organizations have long collected information under a promise of confidentiality that the information provided will be used for statistical purposes, but that the publications will not produce information that can be traced back to a specific individual or establishment. To accomplish this goal, statistical organizations have long suppressed information in their publications. For example, in a table presenting the sales of each business in a town grouped by business category, a cell that has information from only one company might be suppressed, in order to maintain the confidentiality of that company's specific sales.
The clear justification for keeping this information private is that the government won't get sufficiently useful data without this promise. The United States Census Bureau released "confidential" information about draft evaders and Japanese-Americans; if you think they might do that again, perhaps you'll lie about some of the questions.
People who receive this sort of information are required to take special care to maintain the needed level of anonymity.
There's of course no reason why this should be used to muzzle researchers for completely unrelated fields.
IMHO,Making the public pay for records, at high expense in a digital age is how the government limit information. Police arrest\crime data, Court data, Zoning Data, Meeting transcripts, Budget Data, etc, and yes, Education data.
Society shouldnt accept this data should be behind paywalls or accept high costs to access it. Or paper only releases to stop release restrictions for costs and size.
Zoning data and meeting transcripts generally are public? At least in NY that's been my experience.
A lot of the rest I'd rather was private. Although it'd be nice to get aggregated data for certain crimes which currently are tracked at each individual department level and not in any sort of national manner.
For some reason, there’s a contingent of people that think that by poking holes and pooh-poohing things, it gives them clout. It happens far too often in tech and I hate it. Look how often the post has “can’t” or “couldn’t”.
Instead of giving reasons why something sucks, how about being supportive and talking about why it’s awesome and what possibilities this opens up?
I don't think OP is being overly negative in relation to the tone of the rest of the comments here. Nobody else up until this comment had mentioned anything about the actual important performance characteristics that the paper's authors' are claiming, and this does put it into perspective with the current state of the art. And OP does even end on an optimistic note anyway. No need to resort to personal attacks.
Edit: I appreciate you toning down the more combative part of your comment.
While I often agree that the tone on these kinds of posts on HN is often annoyingly and unproductively cynical, I think him just pointing out the current limitations of the result is not that much of a problem. It isn't like he's making the overused "perpetually 20 years away" joke about potentially revolutionary technologies.
People with prolonged exposure to sawdust have a 16% chance of getting cancer.
Asbestos is dangerous but not nearly as dangerous as most people think.