How they used to get rid of motor oil back in the day.
The oil is now outside of the environment
It’s not IN an environment, it’s been towed OUTSIDE the ENVIRONMENT
For the uninitiated: Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off
But what about the front?
It’s still attached isn’t it?!
I mean… the wisdom not really incorrect - the oil would soak into the ground. In this era people just piled up garbage in their back yard and burned it. Obviously this isn’t an appropriate way to dispose of things in 2024.
The wisdom is incorrect though, in the sense that you aren’t ‘disposing’ of the oil using this method. You are simply hiding it while simultaneously toxifying your immediate environment.
Semantics. What does it mean to “dispose” of something?
to get rid of something, especially by throwing it away
I love how nowadays they made it illegal to wash your car out on the street because it pollutes the ground.
Like motherfucker where do you think this dirt goes to when it falls off the car while driving?
They should outlaw cars to fix this.
It’s the soap
Soap is not a grave concern for pollution. What got it banned - at least where I live - was the occupation of public space and consequent danger for circulation of other cars and pedestrians.
He said can’t wash on the street which implies you can wash on the driveway which will immediately spill into the street.
I suspect the law is more of a safety law created after some teens were hit while washing their car and the parents demanded something must be done.
Dope username
It’s illegal to wash on the driveway or street over here. Well, technically not, it’s just illegal to wash it in a way without proper waste water disposal, which means that you could put up a water barrier (think kiddie pool) to collect everything and then dispose of it properly.
Rain water drains usually don’t go to waste water treatment, shit might get in there from ordinary use but there’s no need to put all kinds of random detergents and polishing agents and whatnot on top of that. Also at least on the Autobahn they have separate rain water channels to catch all the tyre microplastics etc. And if you can afford a car that’s worth washing you can afford going to a DIY washing place stop whining.
We have safe cleaning detergents, the government agencies themselves claim it’s the dirt hence a reply to their claim
Link?
I’m not gonna scroll through instagram until that advertisement shows up again.
You’re free to move here in scroll senselessly to get the ad again.
I’m sorry, but are you getting your information on the effects of car detergent on the environment from an advertisement!?!?
Remember when those dish detergent ads were washing oil off birds? THOSE BIRDS STILL DIED ANYWAYS
An advertisement from the official government thing over here. It’s the governments own official website.
Stop freaking out over some dude online you’ll never meet irl.
Collect yourself and go offline for the day, maybe try to relax for a bit and breathe some outdoor air. Have a conversation with a neighbour or local shopkeep.
Best. Sauce. Ever.
Another one.
Go outside, have some real human interaction and learn to get over yourself.
Log off for a couple weeks and see if you can become a real human boy once more.
illegal to wash your car out on the street because it pollutes the ground.
If you have a rainwater sewer, you’re basically pouring soap and oil straight into the nearest river or lake.
“Feed a cold, starve a fever.” Rest, hydrate, and eat if you can.
We also learned that a mild fever is productive in fighting the virus and that you should let it get to a certain point before dealing with it.
This is why I try to endure the fever side effects of vaccines as much as I can without taking a tylenol, so my immune system gets some proper “training” to recognize and fight the real thing.
Likewise, “break a fever”.
I thought a fever breaking was just parlance about a fever ending?
It means trying to end a fever by bringing the temperature of the person down via whatever method.
Fevers do break on their own. One second you feel miserable, the next you feel better.
The saying is to break it earlier.
Aristotle was obviously a great teacher and philosopher but he ended up being wrong about a lot. Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
He thought eels didn’t procreate because no one had ever seen it happening. (They go out to sea to fuck.) He was into bees and correctly noticed that there were workers and drones and that young bees grow out of the honeycomb. But he just assumed the Queen was a King and that worker bees were out collecting tiny baby bees from flowers. (He thought the air just blew pollen around and the honey naturally appeared.)
He had a lot of ideas that were just ideas but he was so influential and his writings were preserved and translated. It took a shocking number of years for people to question if Aristotle was full of shit.
The worst part of it was that for a ton of stuff he had contemporaries that were right about much much more, but were dismissed in favor of his confidently incorrect BS.
For example the Epicureans, who thought matter was made of tiny indivisible parts, that light too was made of indivisible parts moving really fast, that each parent contributed to a “doubled seed” which determined the traits of the child and could bring back features of skipped generations, that the animals which we see today were just the ones that were best able to survive to reproduce, and that all of existence arose only from the random interactions of these indivisible parts of matter and not from any intelligent design.
And because Aristotle’s stupid ideas influenced the lineage of modern thought, most people learn about him but very few learn about the other group that effectively preempted modern thought millennia earlier.
But he just assumed the Queen was a King
Actually, he acknowledged “some say” the Queen was female, but then argued it couldn’t be because the gods don’t give women weapons and it had a stinger. And the identification of the leader of the hive as male was actually used for centuries to justify patriarchal monarchy as being “by God’s design” because after all, look at the bee hive (somehow when we realized it was actually a female that logic went up in smoke).
So there were other people that did know what was correct, but Aristotle screwed up the development of thinking around it by rationalizing an opposite answer with an appeal to misogyny.
Wild that he was only two degrees of separation from a teacher famed for praising the knowledge of self-ignorance and not falling into false positives and negatives.
What I’m getting from this is that people were the same back then as they are now. Aristotle was basically a hack who said just the right bigoted things for the ruling class to latch onto to justify the status quo. Like an ancient political commentator, or popular “scientist” who says anything for attention.
But the Epicureans also denied that virtue is primary in achieving eudaimonia and from a Stoic POV, that’s just a cardinal sin. Due to the Stoics is also the idea of animals being self-aware as well as cosmopolitanism and the absolutely unheard of notion that women have the same mental faculties as men and thus should also enjoy education.
But really, all the “Figuring out how to be like Sokrates” schools of philosophy were highly productive.
It’s Plato’s fault. Plato was a shithead.
“Element” is a fairly general word, we just generally use it colloquially to refer specifically to the chemical elements. If you interpret his usage in the same way we use “states of matter”, it’s not horrendously far off. Earth, water, air, and fire roughly correspond to solid, liquid, gas, and (extremely rudimentary, very low ionization) plasma (or perhaps a more general energetic concept). In any case, an object “wanting” to get to its “natural” place also isn’t terribly far off from a statement of consistent physical laws. Solids do “want” to accumulate with other solids by gravity, energetic gases do “want” to rise above less energetic ones through buoyancy.
damn, you already said the thing I said but better
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My boy Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women, and whatever testable hypothesis he created to prove that fact didn’t include, you know, counting the teeth of men and women.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, and will agree that “classical elements” is probably the dumbest thing to accuse him of being wrong about. Hell, I have considered getting a Bekker number tattoo, but he was definitely full of some shit. It’s okay to acknowledge he was right about some things and wrong about others. That’s the whole point of this thread.
REEEEEE
IF HE WAS WRONG THEN HE WAS WROOOOONG
ree
It’s fascinating just how utterly alien this all sounds to our modern ears, with the benefit of many generations cycling through the creation and deployment of the written word, then the printed word, then electromagnetic communication, then computers, then the internet.
Imagine the strange descriptions and explanations that were passed down via the spoken word and memory alone, for countless generations until arriving at Aristotle. Before the Sumerians and all the way up to the Phoenicians and FINALLY the invention of a workable, practical phonetic alphabet. Imagine the tales they would tell! So many of them lost to time, before they had a chance at being registered in a physical medium.
How did they make sense of what they saw in the night skies at places like Lascaux and Gobekli Tepe? How did they regard and explain the migration of the birds, the rainbow and the lightning?
Accumulating knowledge and communications technology have standardized certain views of the world, one step at a time, first slowly then more rapidly, and accelerating. In the days of Aristotle, this was all just barely beginning, and I believe that what we don’t know about those people before that time - the human primate in the process of becoming civilized - could surprise and confound us, that their views might have been more alien and even outlandish to us than we can imagine.
I mean… Aristotle sounds weird enough, right? I believe he’s just the tip of a huge and deep iceberg of ideas and time.
Ok, but the rocks and flames thing is pretty cute. The elements… they yearn for their homes…
Same, elements. Same.
Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
That’s basically correct, though, as long as you’re intepreting “elements” to mean something more in linenwith “states of matter”, rather than actual fundamental periodic style elements.
Check out the history of bird migration science. There was everything from birds going to the moon for winter, swallows burrowing in the mud, transmorphing to different species, up to the 19th century
Add to that where people thought bugs and vermin come from. Obviously they spring fully formed for dirt and muck. Even rats come from rotting grain.
Sounds stupid, but not worse than tiny animals in your blood making you sick (germ theory), or basically anything from cosmology from the Big Bang to dark energy
For anyone curious the history really is interesting, when reading previously I learned about Pfeilstorch, storks throughout the years that had flown to Germany with African arrows stuck in them. First seen at a time when people didn’t understand bird migration, it helped to explain where all the birds would go.
Lightning never strikes the same place twice. In fact it favors repeated strikes at the same arcing point.
In the middle ages churches would ring the steeple bells during a thunderstorm in an effort to soothe God. (it was assumed the Christian God was directly responsible for lightning.) This resulted in such an epidemic of lightning deaths among parish priests that ringing church bells in thunderstorms remains a criminal act in some regions of Europe.
Modern cathedrals and statues are fitted with replaceable lightning rods, in an admission God is content to let the mechanics of static electricity guide His thunderbolts.
I always suspected that the “no mixing wool and linen” verses in the Bible were due to miniature lightning striking (heh) the fear of God into the ancients.
Classic case of survivorship bias
People back in the day had just as much terrible advice as we have today, it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice
But to answer the question, anything related to the ingestion of mercury
Or anything radioactive. Turns out it was a bad idea to make radium-lined water coolers
But whatt about radium dusted clothing, they have such a healthy glow too them./s
Was listening to an American history podcast (the dollop) about the radium girls. They wore uranium infused lipstick because it glowed and they thought it was cute. They licked their fingers regularly to help apply uranium dust to things.
While their male supervisors were wearing full lead suits totally for no reason and let those girls do that.
Many of them lost their jaws. There was a suit filed that they won, but every single one of those girls died before they could collect the money.
The suit led to a law establishing workers’ safety rights, so it wasn’t all bad. But that law was definitely written in those girls’ blood.
Wikipedia link to radium girls
I think you got the right idea but that description is missing the big points.
They were painting watches and their employers told them to use their lips to make fine points on the brushes, meaning they ingested a ton of the paint. The employers told them it was harmless despite evidence to the contrary. They chose not to use other options because wiping the brush on their lips increased productivity and they were paid per watch.
I don’t think you meant to imply that they were doing it for trivial reasons, but I do think mentioning that they were doing it for a job and that their employers were intentionally deceiving them is important context!
Sure, but they did also paint their nails, teeth, and lips with it for fun, so person above isn’t entirely wrong about that either.
A decent amount of safety law was written in the blood or sweat of women. The origins of fire code come from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire which manufactured garments in New York which was staffed almost entirely by women.
Not to say a lot of safety law wasn’t developed because of the deaths of men but a bunch of women dying all at once due to negligence does seem to be a decently galvanizing force for society which makes it easier to get a ball rolling and women, particularly widows and family members of victims , have always been important advocates and organizers in the fight for safety legislation.
Just a small correction. They were women. Not minor female children. Calling them girls is infantilizing.
They were women. Not minor female children.
At least accordingly to this link, the trend for dial-painters was to be teenagers. Some started as early as their fourteens. It makes sense considering the 1920s, when adult women were expected to stay at home and take care of children, not to be part of the workforce. So odds are that “radium girls” is accurate, because most of them were not adult women.
Wikipedia, and the sources that Wikipedia is relying on, are also rather consistently calling them “Radium girls”. This is clearly a fixed expression, that shouldn’t be decomposed like you’re doing.
And even if we disregard both things above (we should not), your “small correction” boils down to “I’ll vomit an «ackshyually» to boss the other user around on language usage, disregarding what they say to whine about how they say it”. This is simply not contributive.
Only infantile here is you
Radioactive jock straps put out a lot more radiation.
Anything related to health care in general, really. Keep in mind that germ theory was only invented in the late 16th century, and it was ridiculed for centuries in favour of Miasma theory. It wasn’t until the mid 19th century that it started gaining legitimacy.
it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice
Okay but… I thought that was basically the point, in that if the advice survived for that long, then it is worth paying attention to at least, to consider if it might apply to a particular situation? e.g. chicken soup really is good for a cold, whether we knew the precise reasons why or not.
Not even ancient- we used to prescribe cigarettes to cure asthma.
We used to blow tobacco smoke up people’s asses, literally.
I believe that’s where the famous saying originates from.
Doc, I have a killer migraine.
Ah, I have just the thing…
pulls out cast iron skillet.
Try a hammer?
Which it did - eventually.
witch burning
Yep, better to test if they can swim.
Or if they weigh as much as a duck
She turned me into a newt!
… A newt?
…I got better.
Just need to know if they’re heavier than a duck.
But she coughed nails! Her master’s 6 year old daughter saw the maid do that!
I read Montaigne’s essays (written in the 1500’s) and while his views are remarkably modern in many ways, one thing that stuck out to me was how unabashedly elitist he is. The translation I had used the phrase “common herd” to refer to the large majority of people who failed to impress him due to their lack of education or strength of character. I hesitate to speak for him since I think he was a wiser man than I am, but I expect that our modern notions about democracy would have seemed ridiculous to him. He might accept that universal suffrage is in practice the least-bad option currently available to us, but he would argue that at least in principle it would be better to exclude people who don’t actually know how to run a country from the process of deciding how the country is to be run.
(He would also be unashamed to say that the life of an exceptional person is worth more than the life of someone ordinary, but we think that in the modern day too. We just consider it rude to be so explicit about it.)
To be fair, our modern concept of democracy really is quite shitty and the only reason we use it is because it is better than anything else we came up with so far.
But generally the notion that the common person cannot be entrusted with politics holds true even if we find it distasteful. The average person is a fucking idiot and objectively not qualified to decide on political matters.
Case in point, Brexit.
Compounding the problem, this environment rewards charlatans and sociopaths. There will always be some that will exploit a weak spot in the system, in bad faith, no matter what the system is.
No, it’s not. But it is ingrained.
Without knowing his works, I’d argue for him that he’s right to some extent towards an uneducated population, BUT the reason we have universal suffrage is that our founding fathers assumed that:
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Everyone would be well-educated and make rational if not reasonable assumptions about politicians (eg, not elect morons who immediately try and sabotage the government, citizenry, and friends)
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Politicians would serve as public servants and would be even better educated and would work hard to brush up on things so that the common man wouldn’t have to learn the ins and outs of complicated decisions in terms of complex trade agreements, city planning and zoning law, and universal medical systems that work across state lines.
Obviously, it didn’t quite go that way. But it’s why I’m such an advocate for good public schools and free education, because it pays itself back in spades when it comes to R&D/innovation and an informed populace who make the country and world a better place to live.
They also put in “checks and balances” to ensure elitist rule anyways which we are seeing the fruits of.
The founding fathers did not believe in universal suffrage; at the time only people who owned land could vote–to say nothing of even less privileged groups than that–and they were fine with that policy, in part because these were considered to be the people with the most skin in the game.
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by that metric, we’d better fire all our politicians
No argument here 🤷
Its perfectly safe to burn any and all trash
Especially batteries
It was safe to burn batteries when they were made of zinc.
Modern battery chemistry is the problem there
It was somewhat safe when there were like 2 billion people on the planet. Not so much when there’s 8 billion.
All sane people know you should eat batteries, damn it!
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Most forms of medical advice, some of it stuck around for a long ass time (bloodletting and the idea of spirits and humors lasted several millennia), but I imagine that the vast majority of it is lost to time.
You don’t even have to go all that far back to see this in action.
In the 90’s, the universal medical advice was to avoid fats, sauces and dear lord never eat more than 2-3 eggs in a week or you’ll have a coronary before 40.
You still shouldn’t go overboard with fats and sauce which is made with fat, but the advice that you shouldn’t eat more than 2-3 eggs in a week is entirely defunct now.
You can eat 2-3 eggs a day (which many people do without even knowing as eggs are used in a whole lot of things) without any medical disadvantages.
The problem now is studies saying fat is bad are sometimes studying vegetable oil, and then saying all fat is bad.
It’s USUALLY not the studies or scientists themselves that do that, it’s shitty ‘science’ reporting from media outlets.
No the studies say it.
Study design also plays a role in how risk is measured and presented (see transcripts at these links): https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-the-egg-board-designs-misleading-studies/
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/debunking-egg-industry-myths/
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/eggs-and-arterial-function/
A bucket of salt is probably more healthy for you than listening to anything a site with “facts” in the name says.
And that’s not even looking at who’s behind that site and the wording they use.
Remember, breathing gives you an elevated risk of lungcancer.
How about the WHO? https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/salt-reduction
After believing Dr. Gregor (the author of that site) for awhile, i don’t believe or trust him anymore. He’s a vegan and I think he’s set on a vegan mission despite him claiming he’s not.
You still shouldn’t go overboard with fats and sauce which is made with fat, but the advice that you shouldn’t eat more than 2-3 eggs in a week is entirely defunct now.
You can eat 2-3 eggs a day (which many people do without even knowing as eggs are used in a whole lot of things) without any medical disadvantages
The thing with cholesterol is still true though. What matters is, once a lot is fine (body can regulate that) but over a long time it is bad, promotes arteriosclerosis. So, no, the “without any medical disadvantages” bit is not true.
I remember that…a lot of people just looked at the advice given and said “I don’t trust people trying to tell me margarine is healthier than butter”.
Read the theories of René Descartes (17th century) about the nature of air and the atmosphere. Try to get his original texts (translation if needed), not any secondary works.
It is some seriously sick stuff, from today’s point of view :-)
At his time he was quite a renowned scientist.
Phlogiston, its where heat comes from!
it’s* where
That there is an invisible structure all around us that allows gravity, light and electricity to move through it. Now debunked or replaced.
Trepanning to release evil spirits.
Drill a hole in your head as a cureall for any mental behaviour abnormalities. Still practised as an emergency surgery, only to release life-threatening blood and pressure buildup inside the cranial cavity.
Gut pain? Almost drowned? Time to blow some tobacco smoke up your bum. Discontinued.
Fun fact: This is also how Ethernet (wired network connection) got its name. Ether was already dismissed as a theory, but “omnipresent, completely-passive medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves” was a good description of hardware layer that can transfer data in a way that’s abstracting all the signal handling complexity for higher layers.
So in a way I’m actually sending this comment via Ethernet.
Huh, now I wish wifi was just called the ether
Lets make the change now, all wireless data, ‘wifi’, the cloud, it all comes from the ether.
Interestingly, we’ve kind of looped all the way around. We describe the particles of the universe with omnipresent fields, which isn’t really the same idea as aether but has some neat similarities.
Babylonian astronomy
pretty interesting wiki page, is their 60 base math the reason we still have 60 base time?
Basically, yes. Time, angles, geographic coordinates.
round things! time being a flat circle, obviously. ;)
