GasBandit
Staff member
"pinnacle"
The highest level or peak
If you want some fucking peak incivility, I can roll back the clocks and give all you fuckshits some 2005 Gasbandit. How'djya like that?
Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats
- Thread starter GasBandit
- Start date
The highest level or peak
If you want some fucking peak incivility, I can roll back the clocks and give all you fuckshits some 2005 Gasbandit. How'djya like that?
This place won't go anywhere if there are not differing opinions.
figmentPez
Staff member
I stand by what I said. While applying it to this specific case is hyperbolic, this type of incivility is the peak. Hiding disrespect behind a veil of false intellectualism is much worse than open hostility. Pretending to be reasonable, while knowingly employing logical fallacies is of greater harm than resorting to angry tirades. This type of faux-civility is the worst form of incivility that I can think of. Anything worse is beyond mere rudeness, and into the realm of actual violence.
figmentPez
Staff member
Here's the thing. It's possible to admit that Trump has done bad things, without agreeing about everything else. It's possible to say "you know what, asbestos really is a carcinogen and it should be heavily restricted in it's use, and monitored as an extreme health hazard" without also saying "the Republican party is wrong about everything". People can, and should, criticize their own political group when it does bad things.
GasBandit
Staff member
It's really, really not.
This forum is the most civil it has ever been, and I think a lot of people don't remember how things used to be.
Except, the issue with Asbestos is that it can't even be mined safely - and I don't mean it has a higher risk of causing mining accidents or anything like that, you cannot physically remove it from the ground without creating fine particulate dust. Inhalation of that fine particulate dust - so fine that even NiOSH masks are useless against it - causes cancer at higher than acceptable levels (according to pretty much every human health organization out there). Furthermore, because the particulate is so small, it isn't simply the miners themselves who face a risk of inhaling it, but everyone with whom they come in contact after they leave the mine. Then you get into the people who work at processing plants where the chunks of asbestos are broken down - and everyone they come into contact with; and the people who manufacture the products with it, and everyone they come into contact with. And then, finally, at the far other end of the spectrum, you have consumers who don't even know they're at risk of coming into contact with the material because manufacturers aren't required to give up trade secrets and you can say asbestos mixed with, say, ferrous iron filings, is a trade secret and just not disclose that that's what's in the paint that your workers are applying to your aircraft (Lockheed Martin used Asbestos mixed with iron and other materials as an applied coating to attempt to further reduce radar cross sections of the A-12 and SR-71). We have alternatives to these products already. It took 72 years after the risk of asbestos was discovered until regulation was put into place, and now we're OK getting rid of that regulation because "material science is better now?" It may be, but until robots are the only ones coming into contact with the material in its unfinished state, how many people have to die before it's OK to just move on from this horrible material for common use?
Kinda seems more like willful ignorance trying to get other people to agree in an effort to not be the only guy who isn't upset. Not knowing any of the folks involved, though... Meh. Maybe Stienman's a home inspector or insulation expert who works with asbestos removal every day without PPE, and has never suffered any ill-effects...?
I've got a friend with permanent nodules in his lungs from 6 weeks of work without proper protective gear over 10 years ago in an asbestos-rich environment. His life-expectancy is dropping. He has to get his lungs scraped out regularly in an effort to keep breathing. His heart has stopped multiple times during these procedures, which has lead to brain damage. Fortunately, since his condition was due to oversight by his boss, all of his medical treatments are paid for, but that's really the only silver lining for him. Going forward, if asbestos is going to be reintroduced into the construction and manufacturing industries without regulation or testing, will people who develop similar problems even be able to sue for exposure? Or will it just be considered a hazard of the job?
Oh sweet. PvP will be funny . . . and we can warn the past about Trump. We should start by getting @Celt Z to guard the door to the Miss America pageant's dressing room.
You know, this is all pointless, since steiman has offered no argument about how they'll make sure the asbestos is safe.
Until he does there's nothing to discuss really.
He's the one that needs to prove they'll make it as safe as all those non-airborne poisonous substances he mentioned....
Until he does there's nothing to discuss really.
He's the one that needs to prove they'll make it as safe as all those non-airborne poisonous substances he mentioned....
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Ah yes, because taxing people for healthcare = intrusive control, like those damn western european dictatorships, while letting cops get away with murder is not allowing government too much power over you...
Safe asbestos, obviously...
This is the kind of argument I like, not a lot of the "look how bad it is!" This is a good argument as to why it shouldn't be used, as opposed to other toxic and dangerous substances which still are, because they're useful in some way.
Too many other arguments in this thread come down to "its' dangerous, ban it!" Gared, yours didn't, it's good. And persuasive too. Not that I ever wanted to un-ban something, but honestly, I'm not qualified to comment meaningfully on it. Truthfully, none of us are (unless somebody is a specialist in hazardous materials), and thus we have to take advice from specialists. But who do you believe these days and why? That's a much harder argument. Just banning anything that is dangerous is also bad IMO, but when there's no trust in experts (all the people saying "chemicals" are bad are an extreme that exists), what do you do? I don't have a good answer to that, but it's still a concern IMO.
You don't have to be an expert to know that asbestos causes cancer. It's common knowledge. By your logic it'd be wrong for one of us that isn't an expert to say that smoking causes cancer as well.
The only reason this is a debate is because the US has a dumb motherfucker as president and halforums has a dumb motherfucker that feels the need to defend the dumb motherfucker president on literally everything.
The only reason this is a debate is because the US has a dumb motherfucker as president and halforums has a dumb motherfucker that feels the need to defend the dumb motherfucker president on literally everything.
I'm doing what-now?
Yes but so many other things cause it as well, and are in common usage too (lead and mercury being prominent ones). That's what makes this MORE than just a debate on "does it cause cancer -> BAN!" Or at least it should be. I still point to @Gared's post as to a good argument why this substance is different. Basically, if a substance can be safely used, then it's probably OK (barring other factors). Just that it "causes cancer" isn't a good reason IMO.
Keeping the cheeto-man from getting his dirty orange fingerprints on Miss America contestants in 2005, I think?
There was time-travel involved. Someone call the Doctor. >.<
GasBandit
Staff member
Getting put in harm's way, is what it sounds like.
I mean, we did participate in the parades from '95-'98, so I guess I'd really be putting the "guard" in "color guard". I think we're over-estimating teenage Celt Z's skills with a rifle.
For one thing, it was made of wood.
Even in it's safest finished state (a form of concrete), it still eventually breaks down and starts releasing the particulates into the air again.
You can hit people with a wooden rifle.
Trust me, I know.
I don't actually see him making that assertion.
For one thing, asbestos can't ever be made "safe," just like plutonium, botox, or methylated mercury can't be made "safe." However, they all have uses, and then those uses have to be weighed against their inherent hazards to see if they're worth it.
You say this a lot, but I'm still not seeing it. What I mostly see is @stienman frequently being excoriated simply because he does not discuss everything in a black/white binary fashion.
--Patrick
What he said was "Now that we better understand the mechanisms of cancer (not perfectly, but better) then we know in what ways we can use the material that won't put people at risk."
I'm having trouble thinking of any, outside of deep-space usage, and even then the dangers of mining and processing the stuff are still present. So... what use can you come up with for asbestos that "won't put people at risk"?
figmentPez
Staff member
Yes, they have uses, and everywhere they are used is subject to monitoring. If an area were contaminated with plutonium, or mercury, or lead, or even botulinum toxin, they'd be subject to some sort of oversight. It is a blatant strawman to say that all those opposed to asbestos are saying it can't be used anywhere ever. What we are saying is that it is such a toxic substance that it needs regulation. The EPA should, absolutley, be concerned with with how much asbestos is in the environment, and asbestos should not just be used freely.
If and when there is a safe way to mine, refine, and use asbestos, then we can make exceptions to the regulations on it's use. Just opening the floodgates and ignoring all the harmful uses that are already present is gross negligence.
First of all, please don't get the impression that I believe asbestos is suddenly undergoing some kind of rennaisance because of some revolutionary discovery where it's an ingredient in some sort of miracle cure/metamaterial/process/whatever. I fully believe that this is because someone convinced someone else to relax regulations so that a (short-term) profit could be realized.
That said, it has physical properties which may make it desirable in the high-temperature manufacture of goods (since, unlike firebrick, it can be simultaneously heat-resistant and "soft"). It also seems to me that there are times where, when weighing the risk of directly handling asbestos against the risk of directly handling objects heated to 1000-plus degrees Farenheit (~550 Celsius), the asbestos hazard may be deemed the lesser of the two. There is no argument that asbestos can be pretty dang useful, it is just again a question of whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
And as stienman has already mentioned, it's not that asbestos itself is poisonous, it is actually rather inert. The danger is tied to its physical properties, not its chemical composition, which is why he was comparing it to carbon nanotubes (or any nanotubes, really).
No argument with this at all.
--Patrick
Thank you. I agree that banning something outright without careful study is also a bad idea (except in ridiculously extreme cases, none of which I can really think of off the top of my head without sounding like a screeching loony). I also know that there are applications out there for which asbestos really is the best material, either because there literally are no alternatives or because the alternatives that do exist are even more harmful than asbestos. I mean, there was a time (during and after WWII) when we (the US) were paying women (I'm not trying to make the argument that we did this to them because they were women, it's just that my source was a documentary about the roles of women in the aerospace industry throughout aviation history) minimum wage to paint speedometers with radioactive paint because it glowed in the dark, and telling them that it was non-toxic and safe to handle without safety equipment. We've obviously stopped doing that, but we haven't banned glow in the dark substances or radioactive materials, just the practice of lying to people and telling them that it's healthy.
I'm no specialist in hazardous materials, but I do have a history of working with them in manufacturing roles. Through those roles, one of the things I learned was what grade of filtration can handle what size of particulate (which adhesives/paints/solvents can the counter tops crew spray in the open work bay and which ones have to be handled by the guys in the spray booth?). I've also had to deal with asbestos from a potential remediation aspect. While my company didn't handle asbestos remediation, my installers had to know what to do if they encountered any questionable material on a job-site. When the answer given to the install manager was "get them offsite until a remediation crew can be brought in," he wasn't happy with the delay that would cause, so he tasked me to find them better masks so they could just stay onsite and work while they waited for the actual remediation to begin. Through my research - which I'll admit was far from my highest priority at the time due to the ridiculousness of the request - one of the first things I discovered was that even professional grade commercial NiOSH filtration won't catch the finest asbestos particulates, and that the filters that do are prohibitively expensive. Plus it was against OSHA regs so I basically politely told him to sit and spin. Even if I hadn't had specific information regarding asbestos and commercial grade filtration, though, I still would have had information about filtration to know which standardization organizations, regulatory agencies, and civilian oversight groups handle things like filtration, and could have used those as jumping off points to start an investigation into this specific topic. And, I'd posit, even if I hadn't had a knowledge of which organizations to look into, I'm at least familiar enough with the concept of those organizations existing to know to look for them. Then - for me - it's a matter of finding the majority or centrist consensus. I can't help it, extremes to either side tend to repulse me, and they rub my sense of scientific methodology wrong as being the outlying cases instead of the norm/mean.
But really what it came down to for me, after several occasions of me embarrassing myself and exploding at people undeservedly, was a conscious decision that if I'm going to give an opinion on something, I'm going to educate myself the best I can about it before I weigh in. There are plenty of topics that I'm interested in, that I read threads about, but never weigh in on, because they're not interesting enough or important enough, or they don't impact me directly enough, for me to devote any of my time to researching to a point of basic layperson understanding. Now, obviously I have some subjects where I'm always going to struggle to separate my emotional reaction from even the most well-reasoned science, and I'm in no way perfect; but these days I do try to appeal to logic and reason in addition to emotion at the very least. And, if I don't have time to research it myself, I ask people I know personally who I trust for their opinions on it. In fact, I did some brief research into the topic of mining asbestos (remember, all of my first-hand experience with it comes from the standpoint of the removal of products containing it) to see if it was in any way safe not because I wanted to contradict Stienman, he's one of the people whose opinions I trust, I was just doing my due diligence (checking to see if there's been a massive breakthrough in filtration safety since 2015 when I last researched this) before posting about its removal and found that it hadn't, and that mining it was just as dangerous.
Throughout the process, I've come up with some general "rules" for myself:
- Avoid .com websites as primary sources, especially if they have the name of the product/condition/topic that you're researching in their name or as their URL. In this case, it meant skipping pretty much the entire front page of Google results, all of which were from MesotheliomaLawyers.us and Asbestos.com - hardly organizations that I would expect to be unbiased.
- Don't take any headline at face value.
- Check multiple sources, on both sides of the "argument."
- If I start physically shaking while I try to type, I'm far too emotionally invested and need to walk away (without posting whatever I've already typed).
figmentPez
Staff member
I agree, and furthermore, the idea that new usage of asbestos is the sole concern is a red herring. There's also the issue of past usage of asbestos. All the old buildings that have asbestos insulation, that have cleanup costs involved any time there is renovation, demolition, accidental damage, etc. Removing EPA oversight of these situations means a lot of old, definitively unsafe installations of asbestos will be spread out into the environment with no one monitoring who is exposed to how much. Instead of preventing exposure to this known carcinogen, it will then end up as litigation after the fact. An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure, unless you're taking the gamble on not ever having to pay for someone else's pound of cure.
This is a great idea, and I wish it were more universally adopted. I am an unusually smart layman, and unlike your situation I'm not bothered as much if I'm not 100% ironclad prior to wading in so long as I feel like I have a good grasp of what's being discussed. However, I am also willing to change my opinion (gasp!) when presented with evidence refuting whatever my position might be, so I suppose that makes up for being wrong now and again. Yes, that means I sometimes make people mad at me.
This is also a good maxim to follow.
--Patrick
figmentPez
Staff member
None of these advantages mean it should be exempt from EPA scrutiny. That is the issue. Not if exceptions should be made, but right now it's been removed from being monitored at all. That's the issue, and discussing the merits of asbestos use in specific commercial applications is just a smokescreen. If there are safe or necessary uses, then exceptions can be made. What's important is that there are buildings out there that have asbestos insulation, and it's known that such is not a safe use, and those buildings need to be monitored so that when that insulation is disturbed, it is not spread out into the environment where it will cause cancer.
We have to because every four years large groups of red or blue team people start threatening to move here.
Or that you haven't eaten lunch yet. *nags*
The first few articles I found only say that the EPA will no longer consider whether the asbestos that gets out of a product can then get into the ground, water, or air when deciding whether to allow that product's manufacture/import. Sure, they might monitor it, but they won't ban/block something because of it. They also say that 95% of our imported asbestos came from Brazil last year (not Russia) BUT that Brazil banned asbestos mining in December of 2017.
...so yes, it does look like the timing fits well with the idea of Russia magnanimously stepping in to help us with our sudden 2018 asbestos drought out of the kindness of their hearts. So thoughtful of them.
--Patrick
Then you might need some glasses:
Better to eliminate any potential threat than to learn how to live with it safely and utilize it.
Hmm:
The first few articles I found only say that the EPA will no longer consider whether the asbestos that gets out of a product can then get into the ground, water, or air when deciding whether to allow that product's manufacture/import
Tell me again how we use the same consideration for plutonium?
EDIT: but anyway, you're using a very deceptive concept of "safe" there, in case i didn't make it clear.
Using generic statements without actually taking a stand = being nuanced...
And, unlike you, he never actually addresses the issue once his stance is clearly inapplicable to what Trump is actually doing.
...
Also asbestos was never fully banned in the US anyway: https://www.asbestos.com/legislation/ban/
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Look, that works both ways, if you don't actually know the dangers of asbestos, you (in the generic sense, not you personally) shouldn't make any arguments about it either...
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"Safe" meaning "Where the detriments no longer matter," e.g., any harmful things can be negated.
I consider fire to be "safe" because we understand how it works and routinely use it safely, even though it still gets out of control from time to time.
We don't, we consider plutonium to be significantly more dangerous than asbestos. But we still routinely use it for things even though we've known how dangerous it is since at least the 1940's.
--Patrick
figmentPez
Staff member
And, in case you haven't noticed, there's an entire regulatory commission specifically for radioactive materials and nuclear issues.. The U.S.NRC. Plutonium is most definitely regulated. It wasn't necessary to de-regulate plutonium in order to have it be used. So why are people claiming that it was necessary to de-regulate asbestos?