The various "OMG MICROPLASTICS" studies always smacked of alarmism. No one has actually identified tangible harms from microplastics; it's just taken as a given that they are bad. So this fueled a bunch of studies that tried to find them everywhere. Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying. So I fully expect we'll still be panicking over vague, undefined harm whenever we find microplastics somewhere.
This type of research requires very little creativity or study design -- just throw a dart in a room and try and find microplastics in whatever it lands on. Boom, you get a grant for your study, and journalists will cover your result because it gets clicks. Whenever this type of incentive exists, we should be very skeptical of a rapidly-emerging consensus.
So, I think that while it's true that we haven't really demonstrated any tangible harms of microplastics, and there is a lot of alarmism around it, I think the concern is more rational than it might appear.
If it's true that microplastics are everywhere and in everything (which maybe that's now not actually the case), even a very small chance that there's some serious harm we're not aware of should be taken extremely seriously, because at this point there's (apparently) no practical way to avoid or get away from them, or to even stop producing them. And since they're such a new phenomenon in these quantities, we haven't really had the time to really drill down and figure out *if* there are longterm negative effects.
IMO, we should be intellectually humble about our lack of knowledge on these microplastics, and part of that humility should involve being cautious about introducing them to our bodies and environment.
We aren't really looking. In the most well known case we were able to identify they were killing salmon because the salmon were dieing and worked back from that, not because some study led there first.
asking, for all tasks shown to introduce large amounts of microplastics in our bodies and environment, "can we accomplish this task in a way that doesn't introduce microplastics in our bodies and environment"?
For example, using a reusable metal gourd instead of plastic water bottles for the task of 'portable hydration'.
and because this is Hacker News, I'll kindly welcome the comment: 'well actually metal gourds have some toxic substance in the lining that's worse than microplastics' and reply: ok, Cardboard bottles then. Or a gourd made of a sheep's bladder like back in the good ol' days, whatever they used back in the bronze age.
I think we avoid the whole "personality responsibility" and "these paper straws fucking suck" angle with water bottles and the like and instead focus on "do we need a factory in China making 15,000,000 plastic trinkets for happy meals" or "does literally every single item for sale on the entire planet have to come in plastic wrapping", etc
Given the track record of other things we introduced to the environment in mass quantities only to realize later were horrifyingly detrimental (CFCs and tetraethyl lead, etc) -- i think people are right that we should not take such a thing lightly
Not that it really matters, climate driven ecological collapse will probably make it irrelevant by the time it would matter
Beware of the confirmation bias, it works both ways. Reporting might be alarmist (it always is), actual research is largely not. This study doesn't discredit the entire field, it's pretty obvious that microplastics are everywhere and different types are harmful to an unclear extent, even if the amount might be overestimated in some studies.
>This type of research requires very little creativity or study design -- just throw a dart in a room and try and find microplastics in whatever it lands on. Boom, you get a grant for your study
Precisely, and mapping of that kind is entirely valid and required in huge amounts to have the full picture. Somebody has to do the grunt work.
> Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying.
What great pains are they going through? The study is a discussion of measurement techniques and makes no comment on whether they are harmful because that’s irrelevant to the paper.
This could just as easily be a paper on how wearing the wrong type of gloves results in overestimating calcium in soil. You’re the one injecting a political agenda.
Hey remember what happened with BPA? That was frustrating. We saw ostensibly legitimate concern, then manufacturers telling us they got rid of it. Maybe it would’ve inspired confidence if the removal adverts came with data sheets on the replacement chemicals.
Peter Attia (I know, but I trust his ability to synthesize medical research) did a whole deep dive on this and IIRC determined that for the most part, it wasn't a big concern for anyone with remotely normal consumption patterns.
One could say that all living beings are made of naturally occurring microplastics, long before humans even existed. After all, where else did that oil in the ground come from?
He shows no remorse for any innocent lives lost during these operations. He emphasizes that the "minimum" number of innocent deaths has been achieved, and for him, that's job done.
You can accept that warfare is sometimes necessary and that innocent lives are sometimes lost. But necessity shouldn't be enough to wipe away any semblance of remorse if you have a functioning moral conscience.
Karp may be right on the merits right now, but he's clearly a broken human being. This is not someone I want involved in our country's warfare apparatus for the long term, because eventually his sociopathy will kill people who didn't need to die.
> Modern kernel anti-cheat systems are, without exaggeration, among the most sophisticated pieces of software running on consumer Windows machines. They operate at the highest privilege level available to software, they intercept kernel callbacks that were designed for legitimate security products, they scan memory structures that most programmers never touch in their entire careers, and they do all of this transparently while a game is running.
Okay, chill. I'm willing to believe that anti-cheat software is "sophisticated", but intercepting system calls doesn't make it so. There is plenty of software that operates at elevated privilege and runs transparently while other software is running, while intentionally being unsophisticated. It's called a kernel subsystem.
That's not true at all. I don't like HR departments, and I think they're the scum of the corporate world, especially the latest batch of HR geniuses to slither out of whatever business school swamp spawns them.
But their job is to protect the company. If you report behavior that presents a liability for the company, HR will take it seriously. I know people who've been fired through these processes.
What you shouldn't do is report frivolous complaints. A lot of people misunderstand HR the same way they misunderstand the legal system in America. They use it in place of having a grown-up conversation. Like judges, HR people will have little patience with matters that could've been resolved by putting on your big boy or big girl pants.
There are some people who just have high cholesterol but none of the other risk factors. I'm one of them. I did a calcium score on my heart, and it came back clean. The cardiologist basically said my cholesterol is just part of who I am, and it's not causing problems.
If you're similar to me, you might want to get a second opinion. There are different kinds of LdL cholesterol, and the small, dense particles are the ones that cause blockages. Big puffy ones don't. I have mostly big puffy ones, but classifying them is a different test that has to be special-ordered.
I also have a very low resting heart rate, exercise regularly, have a high VO2Max, and have a healthy diet. So the claim that I was at major risk of a cardiac episode just didn't pass the smell test. If it wasn't for those things, I probably wouldn't have asked questions when my doctor said I should go on a statin.
unfortunately im not in the same situation. I have a high incidence in my family, my calcium score wasn't clean (especially for someone my age) and my vo2max isnt the best either. Though my many stress tests have always been fine.
I don't think im in terrible shape right now, but looking ahead 10 to 20 years, without medical intervention I probably would be.
> One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US.
That's not what I read. The article is saying that you can get meaningful service improvements via what is essentially a free measure: cutting the number of stops. I personally regularly take a route in San Francisco that would unquestionably be better off by cutting a swathe of stops through the Mission, where it stops every two blocks on a street with painful light cycles and tons of pedestrian traffic.
The result is that by the afternoon, two or three buses on this route have piled up, one right behind the other, and passengers have to wait 45 minutes for the next one if they miss one of those.
Had the exact same reaction to that exact scene. Just couldn't get past it. It wasn't as bad as when I tried to watch Big Bang Theory (which multiple people assured me that I'd love), but it was in that ballpark.
Rotisserie chickens are a great deal. Lots of calories and protein, and you can save the carcass to make stock. They're cheap relative to restaurant food as well.
This type of research requires very little creativity or study design -- just throw a dart in a room and try and find microplastics in whatever it lands on. Boom, you get a grant for your study, and journalists will cover your result because it gets clicks. Whenever this type of incentive exists, we should be very skeptical of a rapidly-emerging consensus.
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