It is important to stop the introduction of these chemicals and microplastics into our environment. That should be the number one goal - to stop it at it's source instead of dealing with it after the fact. Depending on how the filtration systems scale, not everyone would be able to benefit - and certainly not wildlife which is affected.
In the meantime, it may be effective to remove these chemicals from your body through regular blood and plasma donation[0]. Although not entirely altruistic, I doubt those in need of emergency blood are asking if it contains PFASs. In the end it helps you and those in need.
I have also recently switched to stainless steel cookware and picked up a LifeStraw home water filter[1] that claims to reduce these chemicals in your drinking water.
Unfortunately, the EPA, and modern science has no proactive models to predict toxicity.
By the time disclosure occurs, studies are completed, you're 5 to 10 years into mass production. And a ban then gets another 5 years and manufacturing just needs to rotate a few molecules and those studies are now irrelevant.
Until we have a predictive model of toxicity, there's no real ability to do anything but in decadal scales.
Or you can just mandate that new chemicals need the studies before they are mass produced, not after. I really don't see a reason companies need to be able to invent a new type of plastic then immediately start spraying it onto everything I eat.
Absolutely. We are at a point where we have ore than enough technology to survive comfortably, and any new chemicals introduced into the environment should get approved before use.
I think EUA would be fine except for the fact that no one is probably introducing new plastics in an emergency situation anyway. Also the EAU authorization has lasted way too long. I think if you ask most reasonable people the emergency is over. Certainly lots of pandemic-era behaviors are over.
The "experimenting" taking place right now is pouring it into our body and water supplies. How much does that cost? An unfathomable amount, but it's not paid by the companies, so they don't care.
Wait a minute: what if leeching was actually a legitimate treatment to remove blood toxins, maybe like mercury or lead poisoning?
By the way, looks like donation removes 8% of your blood, so you’d have to donate 9 times to halve the amount of any chemical in your blood (assuming it’s not also stored elsewhere in your body).
"phlebotomy
[...] A procedure in which a needle is used to take blood from a vein, usually for laboratory testing. Phlebotomy may also be done to remove extra red blood cells from the blood, to treat certain blood disorders. Also called blood draw and venipuncture."
Probably yes, but it's hard to tease out how much since there's a lot of restrictions on who can donate, so people who donate are already a healthier demographic
You certainly shouldn't donate blood in unsanitary conditions and while you are ill and weakened from some other sickness. Which is the conditions under which bloodletting usually occured in the past.
I'm sure there's a grain of truth to it, else it wouldn't have been pushed as a treatment; likewise, there's a grain of truth in using ivermectin to treat the 'rona (in that it increases the survival chance of people who also have intestinal worms, see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...)
> picked up a LifeStraw home water filter[1] that claims to reduce these chemicals in your drinking water
Seeing that the LifeStraw pitcher is made of plastic, I wonder whether the amount of filtered chemicals is greater than the ones introduced by the plastic in the pitcher itself.
Civilization is built on plastics all the way down.
It depends. If you buy fresh fruits and vegetables and meat, eggs, milk from a local farm and use only glass/copper/stainless steel for all your cooking and drinking needs you can do pretty well at an individual level. Having water from your own well helps too but that may not be available to everyone.
> It is important to stop the introduction of these chemicals and microplastics into our environment.
This is an unreasonable, although noble, goal. The petrochemical industry is simply too embedded to be meaningfully regulated in the ways that it should be. They have had de facto nation state powers for decades, or, in the case of Saudi Arabia/Aramco, are state actors themselves.
The name "forever chemicals" kind of suggests that these things being in essentially every body of water on earth means we still could use a way to deal with filtration even if we never pollute again.
regulated by who though? the GP was making the argument that the government is captured by the oil industry. regulation by a captured government is not legitimate regulation.
That kind of black and white cynicism is incorrect and the opposite of a solution. It impedes people who actually want to fix problems, and who occasionally succeed.
I’ve found my own pockets of cynicism is motivated fundamentally by laziness. If it’s impossible to succeed, you don’t need to try, don’t need to risk failure. But it is possible.
Saying there's an ubiquitous failure of a certain approach to a problem doesn't mean "give up". I think it means you should step back, question your assumptions, think more broadly. A nice example of people doing that: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-... (not to endorse their specific policy proposals, necessarily).
Most of the “bad” microplastic pollution comes from clothes and disposable bags and utensils. Bags are clearly on their way out, being replaced by cardboard bags.
Clothes are trickier. Polyester is extremely versatile and durable. But newer formulations of nylon (which is biodegradable) or PTFE (aka "teflon") treated fabrics are comparable.
Disposable bags in the west contaminating the water? I would be immensely surprised if that's even 1% of clothes and shampoos/beauty products. We don't normally put plastic backs in running water for ages.
Thin plastic bags in the west have a very short lifecycle that goes mostly shop->home->bin->landfill (segregated from water table). There is almost no opportunity for it to actually contaminate the water.
Moreover the tradeoffs that would come with an actual meaningful reduction in, say, microplastics, are drastic QOL downgrades that many people would not accept, forever chemicals be damned.
> In the meantime, it may be effective to remove these chemicals from your body through regular blood and plasma donation[0]
slight distinction: remove these chemicals from your blood
I only mention that because there are most likely places in the body where doing this will not do anything to help remove them from that organ
As far as removing it from the blood, I wonder about the efficiency of blood donation. It seems to me that simply stopping the intake of new PFAs by drinking purified water from your pitcher should help considerably, because water consumed goes into the bloodstream regularly. Additionally, red blood cells are constantly being cycled in the body as well, with their byproducts excreted.
Does the lifestraw also remove essential minerals from the water?
I mean that's the primary reason we got a water filter ourselves, filter out some minerals so our cats get less urinary stones.
But we've switched to stainless and/or 'plain' steel ourselves as well, we still have some non-stick pans for e.g. frying eggs but we try to avoid them. Even before PFAS, I never liked the teflon pans because they wear and sometimes flake off after a while.
I won't cook eggs on anything but cast iron. I wonder what the hell people are doing that drives them to use cheap, thin, pans coated in hormone disruptors. My eggs never stick. In restaurants your eggs are cooked on steal...hundreds of eggs each shift.
too late to remove them completely, sure. too late to reduce their abundance, probably not. thank god everyone doesn't have such a short-sighted, nihilistic outlook that makes them immediately give up when presented with a difficult problem
nobody's giving up, but the priority must be in mitigation / removal not prevention (since for the reasons outlined prevention is going to be a steeper hill.) Mitigation isn't a replacement for eventual prevention though...
i agree with you, but certainly you can appreciate that what you just said is very different from expressing doomsaying sentiments like "it's too late" with no mention of pursuing a solution
How is it “giving up” to disagree with the suggestion of trying to shut the barn door after the horse has bolted rather than trying to chase it down? If we never polluted the water ever again we’d still be left with contaminated water.
> How is it “giving up” to disagree with the suggestion of trying to shut the barn door after...
the submission is about engineers filtering forever chemicals from the water. the response was "it's too late." that's giving up. if you want to be intellectually dishonest and pretend it's not, that's your choice.
> If we never polluted the water ever again we’d still be left with contaminated water.
sometimes in life you find yourself in a position where there's a mess and you need to clean it up. i don't know what else to tell you.
The post I was replying to said "That should be the number one goal - to stop it at it's source instead of dealing with it after the fact." Who's being dishonest here? The gratuitous condescension seems rather unwarranted if you're not going to figure out the context of my post before attacking it.
I definitely don't understand why post-use regulation and cleanup fees aren't baked into the cost of doing business for these companies. We need to stop being reactionary in our capitalism and be proactive.
If the goal is security, then there is more to it than just using a memory safe language. Otherwise the result of this, possibly unwittingly, seems performative.
I have been using Brave Search for a year now. It has been great. It provides relevant results and I love how Brave AI floats a summarizer to the top with cited and hyperlinked material when applicable.
Very rarely I will need to hit the Find Elsewhere 'Google' button. This is usually done for niche technical searches where Google prioritizes some forums dedicated to the topic like Reddit or Stack Overflow. I _could_ re-search with the site operator, but after scrolling down with the Google escape hatch there, the flow just seems more natural.
Just as an aside, I have also been experimenting with SearX searches. The experience isn't as streamlined as Brave Search, but I can incorporate Brave Search into my results. I find the value proposition interesting for SearX, but implementation still lacking.
If this isn't standardized in an organization it should be. Otherwise, it's the same repetitive questions, the same finger pointing, and the same miscommunication. If these are the requirements needed to put a service into production, then make it explicit. As the developer, of course I own the service, but (usually) don't have the access. Standardized as requirements, both teams can work together to produce, monitor, and troubleshoot production services smoothly. Then nobody is surprised when it is release day, and asked these questions with an impatient PM whom has already publicly set expectations.
I love Firefox. I use Firefox on Android with UBO. However, I wish they allowed about:config tweaks and user.js so we can have full control of our browser on mobile. To adjust about:config I'm forced to use Firefox Beta on Android.
I think going forward to be consistent with Firefox's values, the user should be allowed to turn off telemetry etc via about:config and I hope they make this available in the future.
I like the new UI. As with all major UI changes there will be some backlash. People become set in their ways of old UI/UX, accustomed to the training and ease of use. Users will have to adapt. And that takes effort. People hate forced effort.
I am very happy now that the android UI matches the web. I have been waiting for this for sometime, and the disconnect prior was disorienting.
I use this on my daily driver every day and is a great option to the "standard" systemd-logind or elogind. I think of it as a shining example of sourcehut's core values.
I have long been an advocate against systemd for the typical reasons (overreaching responsibilities, lock-in, lack of choice, software assumption "it will be there", complexity, driven by large corporate interests [see lock-in], being modeled after launched, etc etc). I feel like the chickens are coming home to roost.
That said, if one wants to use it, then use it. However, there are alternatives which I would love to see receive more adoption. I've been extremely happy with my Artix [1] system running s6 [2] init.
Why s6 over other options? I've long considered switching from arch to something without systemd since I use almost zero systemd features but have not had time to discern which init system to use.
Mostly because of the philosophy of the software's author. This was the selling point for me. It is incredibly small scoped by design, easy to understand, and is very explicit in it's actions. It is not as "user friendly" as other inits, though the author is currently working on making it more accessible. It practices separation of mechanism and policy, it attempts to do less than more, and it know when to stop and not introduce scope creep. All by design. I won't ever have to worry about it becoming a system layer and reaching into my network stack, or making policy decisions for me.
I'm sure other available init systems have their selling points - but to be honest, after reading s6's reasoning and design goals I was sold. I'm happy to report that after a year and a half I'm pleased with the decision.
Thank you for this information. I was leaning towards other init systems for the potential future where I switch to artix simply due to recommendation, I will reevaluate at some point. Thanks again.
In the meantime, it may be effective to remove these chemicals from your body through regular blood and plasma donation[0]. Although not entirely altruistic, I doubt those in need of emergency blood are asking if it contains PFASs. In the end it helps you and those in need.
I have also recently switched to stainless steel cookware and picked up a LifeStraw home water filter[1] that claims to reduce these chemicals in your drinking water.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8994130/ [1] https://lifestraw.com/products/lifestraw-home