People working in there weren't wearing any sort of hearing protection and became deaf within months. And after introducing pressured air driven equipment, they were all dying in a few years from silicosis. Until someone added water spraying to precipitate the dust into mud (wherein their issue became to fiddle caked in mud all day long in the dark, which I guess is an improvement over certain death). Which happened years later.
Thinking about the kind of life they had terrorizes me. I don't get how, for the longest time, people were fine with that. I mean no judgement on the workers, they probably didn't have a choice - but the people sending them in probably saw them as kettle.
Makes you think about the sort of progress in worker protection that was made since then. But also this kind of story reveals how people are still ready to profiteer from such deadly practices, if given the opportunity.
In the century between the 1850s and 1950s we went from not even having radio communications or the germ theory of disease to building nuclear submarines and fiber optic data networks.
Once we had penicillin and cities stopped dumping raw sewage into the water supply, people started to have better options and these kinds of businesses had to improve safety to attract workers.
If you had to choose between the job you have now and the ones they had then, how much more would they have to pay you to get you to choose the latter? More than it costs for the safety equipment, right? So they started installing it.
Then governments passed laws requiring it because politicians are adept at taking credit for good things that were about to happen regardless.
This view also assumes that skills are perfectly replaceable, that there's no cost for requalifying for another profession, and that this is instantaneous or that people have some magical way to offset the opportunity costs of requalification while they train for another job.
The problem nowadays (and this is not exclusive to HN, although it is especially salient here) is that people like to fall between two ideological extremes: Either that the government is a inherently neutral and benign all powerful institution 100% of the time, or that free markets always exist, and are always pareto-efficient and that governments action is always some sort of rent-seeking parasite.
In the real world things are a lot more complicated. Not every thing can be solved with the heavy hand of government, neither the market itself is always able to reach the most humane solution. Politics is still needed, and we haven't reached the end of History.
With this attitude we’d still be driving with leaded gas, living in lead painting rooms with asbestos roofs and spraying ozone layer destroying aerosols amongst a bunch of other things. The mechanism you described only really works with short term safety issues. If it takes years or decades for health problems to develop neither workers nor their employers tend to be particularly bothered about solving them.
A non-trivial number of these mine workers were arrested on trumped up charges like "vagrancy" for not having a job or "trespassing" for walking along a railroad. They would often be sold to companies as convict lease (cheap) labor. Essentially slave labor long after the Civil War since the 13th Amendment has the slavery loophole where it's allowed as long as you're convicted of a crime.
This disproportionately affected freed slaves in the South but was an issue for everyone everywhere since it introduced a profit motive to manufactured charges and inflated sentences. The extent that it predominantly affected Black folks and poor white folks had a lot to do with public sentiment not doing anything about it for a very long time.
To a not-small-enough extent, the same conditions exist today where labor can be coerced for little to no pay among the prison population, many of whom have been threatened with obscenely long sentences being shortened by accepting plea deals even when innocent or with extenuating circumstances. For-profit prisons often make the situation worse by further incentivizing incarceration on a larger scale.
It’s not just people “profiteering” though? The story mentions workers standing at Home Depot. These are ordinary homeowners hiring these shops to custom cut countertops for them. It’s not some mega-corp mass-manufacturing counter tops.
And now half the people who should be trying to put a stop to it are instead talking about how we need low skill, low education foreign workers that can easily be exploited to keep consumer prices low.
Metzger argued that the kind of sophisticated and costly measures that would be needed to reliably protect workers cutting engineered stone are not economically plausible in an industry where immigrant workers typically labor in small shops and are often paid in cash. Engineered stone "is too dangerous to be used safely," he said. "If there’s any industrial product that should be banned, this is the product.""
All this thanks to synthetic stone - important note for countertops owners, if you want to make sure you don't support the product
This is not a technology problem, this is an 1880s "Safety devices are too expensive problem" along with paid under the table workers problem. All kinds of other industries manufacture 'dangerous' products with regulations that protect the workers. Housing and agriculture are both industries that do not and fight ever further for anti-regulations to protect the workers even less.
Regulation is the only way to prevent labor from being treated as disposable by these businesses, regardless of the status of these workers.
Just because there's more silica doesn't mean that it's suddenly unsafe whereas cutting granite is safe. Even drywall or cutting concrete you're supposed to wear PPE.
Yeah, but it doesn’t kill you within a few years if you don’t, right?
It seems that the US either lacks suitable health and safety legislation or fails to enforce it.
What kind of countertops should be avoided? Would have been nice if the article suggested some solutions as well
Cass Sunstein was the administer of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The OIRA is given the remit to review drafted rules (ie regulations) that various federal agencies want to enact. The OIRA is supposed to perform an external cost-benefit analysis of the proposed regulations. OIRA is suppose to turn around rulings in 90 days.
While Cass Sunstein was administrator (2009 to 2012), various pieces of regulation were submitted for review, and ended up being reviewed for ~3+ years. Examples include:
* Requiring rear-view cameras (submitted for review in 2011, regulation finally passed in 2014 with a 2018 deadline for compliance)
* The silicosis workplace safety regulations (as mentioned - submitted in 2011, finally passed review in 2013)
* Coal ash handling regulations (from the EPA) delayed from 2009 to 2014
For the specific case of silicosis specifically, it doesn't appear that the OIRA ended up blocking the regulation, though it certainly slowed it down.
Some news articles:
* https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/attacks-on-science/white-ho...
* https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-regu...
* https://www.theregreview.org/2013/11/26/26-verchick-silica/
It is worth noting that these delays continued after Sunstein left office, and there's certainly evidence of OIRA significantly delaying review processes prior to Suntein's term as administrator.
Even more surprising to me was Sunstein and his wife Samantha Power attending Henry Kissinger's birthday party after Power previously published a book basically pinning 150,000 deaths in Cambodia directly on him. They knew this guy is basically a war criminal and still went to celebrate his birthday.
I’m pretty sure none of them wore masks when doing this. I honestly didn’t think to wear a mask either (since they weren’t and never really even warned us how bad it would be), but fortunately we were behind closed doors most of the time the particles were in the air.
Fortunately it was a granite countertop and not quartz. But I still can’t imagine that stuff is good to breathe on a recurring basis, and it still amazes me that they were fairly casual about the whole thing.
My guess is the industry just isn’t educating workers about the risks.
Granites are primarily composed of feldspar and quartz, which are both primarily composed of silica. Silica is the thing that causes silicosis, and when that granite was cut it was clouds of silica dust that covered your home.
You were no more safe in that granite dust than you would have been in quartz dust.
[1] https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/publications/OSHA37...
A relative of mine died of silicosis after having worked for years in the granite industry. Granite is probably as bad without adequate protection.
This article [1] indicates quartz contains about 2x silica vs. granite.
[1] https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2019/10/29/silicosi...
My guess is that the companies that did were undercut by the ones that didn't.
The problem is not lack of education but lack of enforcement of regulations.
People have an attitude (somewhat helpful) that you can always get will yourself to recovery or "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and all that, but severe damage to your lungs really has no treatment. Essentially your body just adapts to the reduced function by being more efficient or by changes in behavior (like walking slower). That lung capacity is lost for good.
There is tons of decisions about factory equipment where there is a trade off between safety and the environment. Factory managers often joke about how various scrubbing equipment has OSHA on one side, and the EPA on the other. It is critical that the culture prioritizes safety above all else.
Wasn’t great but the rent was cheap, until it wasn’t
I wish I ONLY had to clean the surfaces once a week.
In my country and city unfortunately -- even though I dont live near a major road or construction site -- dust is everywhere. Within 24 hours or less of wiping clean, you can see a visible layer of dust on any horizontal surface in home.
I suspect the problem is that welding related disease/problems show up quite quickly in most cases, and welding tends to be a higher paid industry. More room for margin on PPE and workers have higher demands.
I just am astounded, horrified. The answer to abusive management is simply rebalance power. The answer to abusive markets is pay more (Edit: better supply chain ledgers)
Just horrified
re supply chains - the simple way to stop sales of any product is a shelf market like this: "The product X was manufactured by the small child who last month was mutilates by a factory accident. Nice picture. our product has the following verified supply chain. but it's more expensive. your choice of course"
Actually, it is possible to transplant lung, but sure, this is not solution of real problem, people for some reason cannot fulfill safety considerations.
In reality, what I seen myself, in such cases, all adequate people work with respirator or gas mask, they are now extremely affordable.
And yes, I many times hear, they feel discomfort, it is usually really hot in coal mine, so people frequently take off mask, and for short moment of slight comfort, sacrifice their health.
Unfortunately, after covid I understand them. Yes, psychology don't like wear mask, even when it is not really limiting breath.
I few times have to just sit in mask for 2-4 hours, this was extremely hard.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/dosh_publications/Engineered-sto...
In New Jersey which also has lots of stone cutting, doesn’t allow dry cutting and has entirely different advice.
https://www.nj.gov/health/workplacehealthandsafety/documents...
> New Jersey law (N.J.S.A. 34:5-182) requires that employers provide workers with full-face air-purifying respirators when engineering controls cannot be used. Use of respirators should be part of a complete respiratory protection program.
While the CA page says
Respirators should only be used:
• As a last resort for
protection when local
exhaust ventilation or
water controls are not
feasible or do not
adequately control
employee airborne
exposures.
• Where exposures
exceed the permissible
exposure limit (50 μg/m3,
8-hour TWA) while installing or implementing feasible
engineering and work practice controls.
• When the employee is in a regulated area.
More fun stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I0IAwOIwXo
If workers refuse to wear masks, then whose fault is this?! If employers do not provide the PPE necessary of this job, then they should be sued and put in jail! My friend was buying 3M N95 masks before COVID-19 at extremely low prices in small quantities - somewhere between $.50 and $.70 a piece. So, everybody can calculate the "savings" those cruel employers do - a lot less than $50/mo/employee!
There are so many Latino workers in Southern California who do not wear PPE for a variety of reasons. For example, all those leaf blowers not only breathe in gas for hours, but they also inhale dust and mold! And nobody seems to care about them! My city of Irvine for years was pretending they want to enforce the switch to electrical leaf blowers as based on numerous studies, 2-stroke engines pollute the air of California a lot more than all cars together, but have done nothing! If I don't run and close all my windows, my house gets filled with gas for literally minutes and then it's really hard to get rid of those toxic fumes! This madness should stop!
The same applies to many other workers! There's the law, but nobody seems to care to enforce it!
It doesn't matter whose fault it is; it remains the employers responsibility to ensure that it does not happen, if necessary by dismissing the worker concerned.
Anyway, do you expect their employer to watch them all the time when they work? If they have passed instruction and cannot be supervised all the time, then it's employees fault.
“All this thanks to synthetic stone - important note for countertops owners, if you want to make sure you don't support the product”
The difference is not in the danger of the materials.
The difference is supplying safety equipment and having a culture that demands the use of it.
Regulations work.
When enforced.
Does OSHA not require masks in these cases?
Management on the other hand should enforce masks as a means to avoid liability.
Contrast that with recent efforts to hire nearly one hundred thousand IRS agents to get a sense of the priorities of your leadership.
[0]https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/news-insights/workplace-sa...
If you need to wear a respirator all day i'm told the most comfortable is an air supply and dragging a hose behind you.
The only problem is that a 6800-series costs $200, plus probably $30 a month in P100 cartridges given the level of particulates in the air, and that's more than these companies think their workers' lives are worth.
In cases like these you have to ban the dangerous material, or essentially kill the market for the products that use it.
BTW, I'm not sure how solid granite, soapstone, marble, etc. would be any better. Maybe my 30 year old totally fake Corian is back in style. But for the microplastics from scrubbing it?
There's a OSHA/NIOSH pamphlet linked through the original article (https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/publications/OSHA37...) with table and additional details.
The pamphlet said that in one study, a marble shop performing dry grinding (no wetting, nor other engineering controls) had airborne silica levels of 39-45 ug/m3, while a granite shop which also did not use engineering controls say 89-460ug/m3.
However, all three organizations have been subject to decades of budgetary cuts/freezes/criticism by republican lawmakers and thus have a fraction of the inspectors they should.
https://blogs.luc.edu/compliance/?p=4470
https://www.kqed.org/news/11875988/minimal-to-non-existent-s...
https://peer.org/lack-of-scientists-dooms-epa-chemical-revie...
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/environment/bs-md-drinking...
The Senate also is allergic to appointing a permanent leader of the ATF: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-the-atf-is-often-leade...
The way republicans have functioned for a few decades (after realizing that legislatively trying to kill the ATF, EPA, OSHA, etc is unpopular) is to hamstring the budget for those departments, tie up leadership appointments as much as possible, and then in hearings shout about how ineffective the agencies are.
It's like starving someone and then criticizing them for being lazy and inactive.
The same technique is used to attack social services. WIC, a food stamp program for mothers with infants and children, requires yearly "certification" which involves in-person interviews at offices that few and far between, often not public transit accessible, and so on. How is a mother who is so poor she needs WIC (and thus may not even have a car) supposed to afford to take a day off from work and travel to an office so someone can verify that her child still exists?
Compare that to other government programs that benefit the wealthy and corporations. Do people writing off luxury cars, entire homes, and bizjets have to show up at a regional IRS office (annually) to have their records audited, proving that the luxury property is actually being used for business purposes and they're entitled to a writeoff (or being given use of said property without paying taxes on it)?
Asbestos is apparently worse because of the sharp edges of the particles, but if I put any angle grinder dust under the microscope I see plenty of sharp bits too.
I think the actually harmful thing is that the dust is 'fresh' rather than being the result of years of chemical weathering which tends to smooth off the sharpest pointiest bits at nanometer scale.
Poking around on the CDC site, it seems like the most recent data they have up is from 2014.
Safety regulations need to be put in place with the cheapest being a good quality respirator.
As a musician, it especially kills me to watch people destroy their ears. These workers are often too young to appreciate good health.
"I used to, but the acid kept dissolving them."
I support everyone's right to destroy themselves if they choose to do so.
If we don't have the right to destroy ourselves, how can we also have rights to build and better ourselves? How can we be said to own ourselves at all if we can't choose to destroy ourselves?
The idea that we can't be allowed to choose to harm or destroy ourselves is the most fundamental violation of the most basic of human rights.
The next time you're driving around and you see someone getting work done on their roof, take note if the roofers are using anchors/ropes/harnesses. IME it's about 50-50.
Use a mask and cut it using water for dust management
If people were getting shocked while working with electricity we'd be calling the ridiculousness of it. This is basically the same thing, over a longer timeframe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicosis#Regulation_in_the_US
TL;DR: it's already regulated (by OSHA). Total number of deaths annually by silicosis in the US is low (~15/year). The workers need to file an OSHA complaint if they haven't already.
the OSHA page (https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19...) mention "the employer shall fully and properly implement the engineering controls, work practices, and respiratory protection specified for the task on Table 1" which one could read as more than just need to provide but I have idea if it's true.
As for the death tool which seem low it's not so good when take into account the number of worker (from the article):
> In California, workplace safety regulators have estimated that out of roughly 4,000 workers in the industry across the state, silicosis will afflict between 485 and 848 — and that as many as 161 could ultimately die
A modern example: I've seen gravestone engravers completely covered in stone dust while wearing only a thin handkerchief; no hearing, eye, or proper lung protection. Sure they should know the risks but you can't force people to not smoke tobacco or use proper PPE.
If that means steel-toed shoes, a jock cup, thick gloves, shooting glasses, amplifying mickey mouse muffs, sunscreen, bottled water, and a P100 respirator, so be it.
Safety regs are written in blood. And it only takes an instant or a culture of disregard to lead to later cancer, permanent disfigurement, or death. There are no old bold pilots or construction workers.
1) The ancient Greeks and Romans knew about the hazards of breathing dust, and knew that stone workers were particularly at risk.
2) The name Silicosis was coined in 1870 by Achille Visconti who was studying lung disease in hard-rock miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicosis
3) Silicosis can be entirely avoided by cutting stone (and silicon bearing ceramic materials) with a "wet cut"... literally just add water!
So, this danger has been known to stone workers for 2 millennia, protection is cheap, effective and readily available, and yet people are still falling prey to it.
I have personally witnessed professional counter top installers working in obviously unsafe ways, who have actively & energetically refused face masks, water dust collection, and vacuum dust collection (which is far less effective).
This is an article about human frailty, not about some new threat.
It is an important point that human callousness towards the well being of others seems to be self emergent. Clearly the people at the top of the stone cutting industry in LA are not investing in training their new young workers in proper technique.
How can this be addressed? I don't know. It seems Adam Smith and Karl Marx have both failed to leave us useful guidance on the subject.
PPI is VERY important, and so many people ignore it.
Edit: changed wording to agree with you.
Not the same disease per se as there are slight differences but coal workers pneumoconiosis and silicosis are very similar given that they have a very similar inhalational dust profile.
We have quartz composite worktops in Europe too. I'm pretty sure that people aren't getting silicosis from them here. You can buy them in IKEA https://www.ikea.com/no/no/p/kasker-spesialtilpasset-benkepl...
Engineered stone is created, it's not like natural stone, we don't have to cut it. They also have the choice to cast it, net shape.
They just need to redo their whole schema, they need to reconfigure their process to customize the engineered stone before its solidified, not after.
That's not viable. They are cut only after the actual physical space has been built (carpentry mainly) because measurements have to be taken then since nothing is perfectly true/plumb/square. Today the turnaround is about a week for the material to be cut and then installed. Sending it off to the manufacturer to create to spec would not only add several weeks to the process but significant expense.
Stone (both natural and engineered) can be cut safely. These shops just haven't been. Proper respirators, ventilation, and wetting will create a safe space to work in.
I think that's the problem, we're unwilling collectively as a society to pay the cost.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/silicosi...
Yahoo news is something I avoid like the plague.
The solutions exist, the problem is making people invest in them and stick to it.
In the ideological camp with me are the "degrowthers", who seem to be more common in Europe than in the US, but they all seem to be pitching borderless, stateless surveillance communism that relies on the same ultra high-speed high-tech plastic-based international-shipping constructs we have now, except with "green" energy instead of regular energy.
You're right that it's more common in Europe. When I go back to the US life feels so insanely gluttonous. Driving a studio apartment three miles to get a coffee is lunacy
It sure is. I have a cheap drip coffee maker that I drink from all day, at a cost of a few cents a cup. Dirt cheap.
What you can do is live the life you want. Many people talk like you, but never make changes in their own life. A few do make such choices, and many after 10 years realize they didn't actually want the things they did and return to modern life.
Because we have a public health care system, funded by taxes, having a large number of young men out of the work force (not paying taxes) and using the health care system effectively means my taxes, everyone's taxes, are higher.
There's incentives for our government to protect workers from risks that will cost a fortune to fix.
In America, there's only the "because it's the right thing to do" reason, which is never enough for anyone to actually do anything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to ask you not to do this on HN more than once before. Please avoid it in the future.
I can see how what I said would be construed that way.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/resp.14242
> There’s incentives for our government to protect workers from risks that will cost a fortune to fix.
There are many examples where this is inaccurate but let’s keep it simple and delve a little deeper into the silicosis problem presented in this specific study.
From the JAMA article:
Although a substantial number of the patients, including some of those who were uninsured or with restricted-scope Medi-Cal, likely had an undocumented immigration status, we did not directly collect information about whether individuals were undocumented immigrants.
Note that public health system in Canada is not “free”. Legal immigrants, documented workers, citizens and refugees have access to provincial or federal health insurance which pays for care.
Undocumented or illegal immigrants have neither (and also would not get WSIB which would be the payer for most silicosis cases) and actually have better coverage in California.
Additionally:
Ten patients (19%) were uninsured, 20 (38%) had restricted-scope Medi-Cal, 7 (13%) had Medi-Cal, 8 (15%) had private insurance, and 7 (13%) had workers’ compensation.
So 34/52 had some form of government provided or mandated insurance.
As an aside while restricted-scope Medi-Cal and uninsured rates are the surrogates for undocumented immigrants in this study, those over the age of 50 (or 19-25) are also eligible for full scope Medi-Cal but were not identified in this study. Medi-Cal will also be expanding in January 2024 to cover undocumented immigrants aged 26-49.
Even if we assume Canada’s silicosis incidence is lower, all of the above strongly suggests your public health system cost-savings incentive hypothesis is incorrect.
I'm enough of a pedant to annoy the fuck out of most anybody who knows me, but really? Look, there is no "free" health care anywhere, but it's a term that has (perhaps unfortunately) become widely used as a synonym for, depending on your sensibilities "no charge at the point of service" and/or "socialized health insurance and health care coverage".
And Canada is certainly one or both of those.
The metric "well, they don't provide it for undocumented persons" is a weird one, as is the use of California as a counter-example.
Sure, no axe to grind here. Do tell us your impartial take.
Dad knew but he was stuck in the past of "It had to be done" mentality. And really as a high school drop out he really may not have understood the danger. For years he and my grandfather had a painting business with the paint at that time containing lead.
In any case, anything that makes people die young, or more generally reduces people’s capacity to work (like many diseases of affluence) is incredibly expensive to society once you factor in indirect and opportunity costs.
From a cost perspective it’s best that people die suddenly. If I live a fairly healthy life into my 80s and die of a heart attack, I might not necessarily have cost my insurer that much, as opposed to if I suffer from a chronic illness for 10, 20, 30 years.
Cancer is now usually not a sudden death sentence - treatment is good enough now that most cancers caught early can be treated and patients often go through multiple remissions before it or a complication from treatment finally gets them.
Insurers very much do not want their customers getting cancer, because it is invariable an extraordinarily expensive condition to treat and treatment can go on for years.
This is not exactly the best use case for arguing about Canada versus US healthcare policies.
> While there are no accurate figures representing the number or composition of undocumented migrant population in Canada, estimates range between 20,000 and 500,000 persons
> Research suggests most undocumented individuals live in large urban centres and typically work in seasonal and informal sectors, such as construction, agriculture, caregiving and housekeeping.
> Undocumented migrants are a vulnerable group due to their lack of immigration status, as was seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have limited access to health care, social services or employment protections.
Source: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
Until this year, asylum-seekers could transit through the United States into Canada under the Safe Third Country Agreement, by crossing the border at an irregular crossing like Roxham Road.
Sources: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/deal-roxham-road-migrants-b...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-asylum-seeker-increase...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230601135133/https://www.nytim...
Is there any evidence of this? That the Canadian Gov cares more about workers than the US Gov?
>Because we have a public health care system, funded by taxes, having a large number of young men out of the work force (not paying taxes) and using the health care system effectively means my taxes, everyone's taxes, are higher.
What evidence do you have that this is the case?
>In America, there's only the "because it's the right thing to do" reason, which is never enough for anyone to actually do anything.
Is this your opinion or is this the reality. I don't know if you have ever walked by a construction site in Toronto to see guys cutting cement or stone. None of them have masks. Sometimes they will have a wet saw when cutting cement on the street but that is to reduce dust for traffic and pedestrians and not so much for their health. The Canadian Postal Union fought the Federal Gov for years to provide an environment where paper dust was considered a health hazard and workers need to be protected. Many postal workers suffered from COPD because paper dust was too fine for the Lungs to filter. What about farmers and dust? I'm sure they suffer just as much as American farmers.
I've come to realize Canadians suffer from an inferiority complex and have to constantly try and make comparisons to make themselves feel better, it's a strange phenomena.
- Expat....
Yeah one heck of a perverse incentive.
Someone taken out of the workforce may qualify for that if they don’t already qualify for disability insurance or similar payments (although I’m not 100% clear if those are funded via private disability insurance or public programs)
That is true with or without publicly funded healthcare.
The US healthcare system uses private insurance, implying that more use of the healthcare system raises everyone's premiums. And people without insurance then go to emergency rooms which are in turn still passing the cost onto private insurers. So voters already have the same incentive in order to avoid their premiums going up.
On top of that, insurance is optional. There is no guarantee a person will get affordable care. That's the entire point of the system! If there were a guarantee, it would be indistinguishable from Canada (and practically every other country's) single payer healthcare system.
The taxes part is the same; only the healthcare half is different.
A more plausible conclusion from observing the results of an entity's involvement in something is that if it is incompetent with the thing you gave it to do, don't give it more stuff to do.
When my code doesn't work, I don't sunset the code, I fix it. Why would the best course of action be to stop trying instead of fixing the root of the problem?
Sugar tax, coal tax, corn syrup tax, worked-your-employees-90h/week tax? Sure.
Maybe subsidies for selling fresh fruit and veg also.
I guess you could tax their victims instead though... they don't have a lobby so theyre probably easier to take advantage of.
The US is pretty much the only country to successfully reduce it, near as I can tell (perhaps Canada has had success too?).
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-624-x/2012001/article...
[2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-625-x/2020001/article...
[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/smoking-rate...
[4] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/sales-of-cigarettes-per-a...
https://uwaterloo.ca/tobacco-use-canada/adult-tobacco-use/sm...
I'm pretty sure the figures will look somewhat similar in most western countries.
The point, at least as I interpreted it, was that society is very good at building callous machines that throw away human lives for no reason and then the same society turns and pats itself on the back for the incredible virtue it has in allowing those people to "heroically" destroy themselves.
These countertops might not even outlive the people they're killing at a young age. In the past 15 years, I've talked to people who have gone from needing granite counter tops, to quartz, to the next trendy fashion. If a countertop killed me, then I would hope that it would last a century, but the truth is that it might not last a decade simply due to being unfashionable. And somehow I doubt its replacement is going to be any safer to cut.
To those who didn't read it - it is a rather short novel, uncannily funny, scary, and most of all - revealing of how human societies actually work. This is one of the earlier Pelevin's works, so the style is still illustrious. Some jokes might not be immediately transparent as they are contextualized in the late USSR.
Correction: it is scary in the cthonic/transcendent sense, not that it is spooky (it's not at all).
No matter if the countertop last forever you still died just for someone greed or utter apathy and negligence ...
First, you're striping agency from those workers blaming abstract society instead. There is no such thing as "collective guilt". Those particular workers are free to leave such an unsafe industry at any moment, probably even more free than, say, smokers who choose death from respiratory complications. I have exactly zero empathy for either. True that sometimes workers are not exactly free to leave the job and coerced into insane working conditions, e.g. the curse of russian monotowns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwzP-zr0S0c . That is definitely not the case for california though.
Second, your interpretation of the book is not right. Works of Pelevin, just as many other great writers, are not exactly fiction, but a compilation of a real life contemporary trends distorted by weird observation angle and grotesque style. The core theme of Omon Ra is very basic: government brainwashes people to be literal disposable cogs. AFAIR the book does not reference "society" in any way. I've read the book over 20 years ago though. One great thing about Pelevin is that he definitely had access to people of highest power at some point (early 00's at least) and translated their completely crazy worldviews into his books.
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. ..."
> It finds that each year homeowners remodel upwards of 10.2 million kitchens — roughly one in 10 of all households — and 14.2 million bathrooms, two of the most important rooms in a home. Further, annual new home construction adds roughly 1 million kitchens and 2.3 million bathrooms to the marketplace
National Kitchen + Bath Association (NKBA)
this is like the Shein of counters. wealthy people probably use natural stone.
I've taught him well.
Well, it depends on the situation.
If I, a factory owner, offer optional safety equipment that slows workers down a bit, but I also demand such high productivity that corners have to be cut - whose fault is it when the inevitable happens?
What if I, a factory owner, provide optional basic safety equipment costing $30 per person, but the mask makes the goggles steam up and the boots aren't comfortable? There's better safety equipment available for $300 per person - is it my fault for not buying it?
What if I, a factory owner, happened to start my factory by hiring macho tough guys who don't like wearing a mask, and subsequent hires learn that behaviour from them?
Generally I to listen to the craftspeople I employ on issues of safety because keeping them safe is the whole point of safety. But they and I have a shared responsibility to make sure, if they say the machine is actually safer without the guard, that they're right about that.
There are plenty of people to blame, and there is plenty that can be done. This dumb ass "No regulations needed, free market will take care of itself" is how the rich put the poor or ignorant into early, terrible graves.
There's some small margin of workers who have access to protective gear but don't wear it, but in reality for most workers it's the job of the company to provide it and train workers to use it.
With that mentality we'd still have 1800s lifespans