The county mayor describes himself as a Rothbardian, and the government here sometimes feels openly hostile to people, but especially to bicyclists. I received a lot of harassment for cycling, it is not supported culturally, and is even viewed as though I am a political enemy of the people. Huge, lifted emotional-support trucks are pretty common here.
Well, those distances use a nearby highway, and there are no bike lanes anywhere (let alone sidewalks). As mentioned earlier, being suicidal means I did use a bicycle anyway, and after a couple years I had a brain injury, was hit by cars twice and ended up with permanent injuries. So… yeah, I don’t recommend cycling (if you feel like being alive and able-bodied, anyway).
What is also not mentioned is that the nearest supermarket is a shitty Walmart, the nearest park is very small and not really worth going to, and the bus is not a practical form of public transit here.
I have to drive 20 - 30 minutes to actually get to stores, parks, or other places I would actually go to. I think that’s pretty good relative to most people, I live in a centralized location and most places are equidistant. I used to live in a nearby more rural town and I had to drive 45 - 60 minutes to get most places, and that was much worse.
I live in a suburb in the U.S.
Notes:
I have run to the park before despite being far away, but I think most people would (rightfully) think I was suicidal for doing so. A lot of the way to the park requires walking on dangerous streets where people drive fast around blind curves and where there is little to no shoulders to squeeze by if there are cars, most of the way has no sidewalks, and I have to cross busy roads where drivers are going 80+kmh.
Owning a car here is considered a part of being an adult, people without a car are seen as childish or immature, and usually suspected of being drunks who have lost their license due to DUIs or felons who cannot have a driving license and aren’t allowed to leave the state. It is assumed everyone drives everywhere, alternatives are unthinkable to most people here.
is that a lemmy feature?
sweet - thanks for broadening my perspective!
I wonder what fields are the most networked on LinkedIn.
For example, I know for a while (like 7+ years ago now), Twitter was a place where programmers were networking and jobs could be secured that way.
I didn’t expect to be most places I ended up.
I wonder if linkedin is actually a way people get jobs (if it ever was) 🤔
I use dark mode on my personal devices and light mode on my work devices, that way the screens feel more different and being on my personal devices don’t make me feel as much like I’m at work.
Thank you for the article, it looks like there is a lot in the way of getting a clear picture of how much plastic additives and their leaching impact health, but I do think plastic additives have been clearly shown to be toxic and bad for the health. I always feel it is ironic when “BPA-free” is used as marketing, as it isn’t disclosed what other additives they might be adding to that particular plastic, even if it doesn’t use BPA (or whether the plastic even would have had BPA in the first place).
Oh wow, yeah - the sample size is small but if I were playing devil’s advocate (which apparently I’m doing here, lol), while the correlation seems clear the cause could still be some other common root cause - maybe the same reason they have a diet heavy in plastics is separately why they had worse health outcomes, so it would be nice to reproduce this correlation and try to control for those kinds of differences. Just as an example of what I mean: perhaps the reason they have more plastic is because they ate more fast food, and fast-food happens to have more plastics in the food, but the causal mechanism for the worse health outcomes could come from the fast-food heavy diet, rather than just the presence of plastics in the plaque which happens to coincide with the worse diet. This is not meant to be proof it isn’t the plastics, I am just trying to show how hard it can be to move from demonstrated correlation to causal connections.
Still, if they can find a causal mechanism that explains how the microplastics are playing a role, that will be huge. It certainly seems like good enough evidence to be wary of microplastics.
Your comparison to cigarettes is apt, especially the way that the industry manipulated the public. I also agree that there is sufficient evidence to decrease microplastics, I just look forward to that causal mechanisms being discovered that demonstrate the ways they harm us.
So unless someone is trying to argue that microplastics found in the clog didn’t help contribute to the clog to any degree it’s clearly having a bad effect on the body.
Yes, I would assume that the presence of the microplastics in the plaque is not contributing significantly to the accumulation of the plaque or the development of the heart disease, since it is the plaque accumulation that causes the heart disease and the presence of microplastics is more like the presence of other bioaccumulators in higher-trophic organisms (like vitamin B12, mercury, or strontium-90).
I do agree this is like talking about the toxicity of the stainless steel of the knife found in someone’s heart - clearly the problem here isn’t the material of the knife and whether it is toxic, but the fact that someone was stabbed. Likewise, the problem is the accumulation of the plaque and the heart disease that follows - the focus on the microplastics is irrelevant except that it is concerning if we later find out microplastics are causing disease.
The only reason I’m focusing on whether the microplastics are indeed toxic or not is because that is a big claim, and if found to be true would be really big news. It sounds like that hasn’t been demonstrated yet, though I want to look at the link zero_spelled_with_an_ecks sent, it looks like the article talks about leaching from microplastics that may have more clear health impacts.
I don’t mean to be nit-picking, in university classes professors have discussed microplastics like in the context of agriculture and food-supply and my professors basically said the science is not out yet about what the effects of microplastics are, even if everyone felt they were probably bad there wasn’t evidence yet as to how they were bad. I couldn’t tell if the headline was implying there was a breakthrough in the science, and looking now it just seems like there hasn’t been one and it’s just more of the general sentiment that plastics are probably bad.
Right, but PFAS isn’t even plastic, it’s a chemical used as a coating to make things like take-out containers waterproof. PFAS is its own environmental catastrophe, but it doesn’t relate to whether microplastics are toxic.
Plastic itself isn’t toxic, in fact plastic is biochemically inert (not a source, but further reading on Wikipedia). Various additives to plastic have been shown to be toxic, but those are less relevant to discussions of accumulating microplastics in the body.
Some contexts would be more likely to have negative health impact from microplastics, like when there are larger particles of plastic in the air that factory workers get in their lungs, maybe those particles could cause mechanical damage to the lungs that lead to cancers or other conditions.
That is speculative, and it shows we need more studies to find ways that microplastics impact health, but the title is a little misleading characterizing plastics as toxic in the context of microplastics in arterial plaque, since that is not demonstrated to pose a health risk (even if we all agree it is concerning and may pose some kind of health risk we aren’t yet aware of).
This just shows the plastic is found in the arterial plaque, not that the plastic has a toxic effect on the body.
EDIT: The article in question did find a correlation with the presence of microplastics in the plaque and worse health outcomes compared to those without microplastics detected in their plaque:
In this study, patients with carotid artery plaque in which MNPs were detected had a higher risk of a composite of myocardial infarction, stroke, or death from any cause at 34 months of follow-up than those in whom MNPs were not detected.
I totally could be wrong, but I thought when they discover microplastics cause some kind of health condition that would be huge news.
Searching around, I found this article talking about the known toxic effects of additives like BPA: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7920297/
But I don’t think that demonstrates the toxicity of microplastics accumulating in the body.
This article had more promising citations to follow-up on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics_effects_on_human_health
It says the plastic pollution in the clogged arteries are toxic, is that true? It was my understanding that they don’t actually know what effect the plastics have on the body, and people just assume the effects are bad (not unreasonably).
yesss! and any broth really could work here in substitute for more flavor, but beer and onions is a bomb combo, especially with brats
haha, good to know - thanks!
oof, that’s not good
yeah, that makes sense in your context - canned squash isn’t so bad, definitely not worth making from scratch.
I’m in a suburb where I have grown squash in my compost bin and gotten a harvest that lasted me a whole year, and that squash was some of the tastiest and had the most colorful of any squash I’ve had. The squash was also essentially free, a waste product, and in that context it seemed worth it (at least in some sense). However, it does take time and planning and a lot more work, and as you’re saying depending on who you’re baking for they may not appreciate it.
yeah, during COVID the mayor became famous for running attack ads against the health department, and as a result of his leadership the state legislature stripped the health department of their ability to implement any policies or directives