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[–] 102 points 1 year ago (18 children)

The secret ingredient is lead poisoning. The Baby Boomer generation spent over half their lives sniffing leaded gasoline fumes.

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  • [–] 45 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Ding ding ding!

    The reason it feels like people from that era are angrier and dumber than they used to be is because they literally are! It’s literal brain damage!

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, turns out that lead in gasoline ain't so great for the brain. I remember being oddly fascinated the first time I saw the correlation of lead being pulled from gas and violent crime plummeting 30 years later. You can see it in graphs from all across the world and can damn near set your watch to it.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    They still do. General aviation still uses 100LL aka low lead

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The FAA finally approved 100UL (unleaded), so the US is on track to stop using 100LL in most cases within the next 20 years

    EPA has tight regulations on washing your plane though, so there's no problem with lead /s

    Disclaimer: It's better than nothing that the EPA tried to do something, but the government really should have gotten their shit together and approved 100UL decades ago

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Shh, don't say it too loud or Maga will legislate the lead back in.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago

    Oh don't worry about that, they already caused their havoc

    Thanks to the FAA's shoestring budget, they don't have the funds to just issue an STC to allow existing planes to use it. Each plane owner will have to pay for one to be issued. It costs me $200 to get one issued. It costs that much because the FAA hasn't had the budget to upgrade their systems, so handling applications takes a lot of labor. They need to manually verify the make and model of aircraft will not be at risk of adverse effects from unleaded gasoline, since safety > all else

    It's a good thing the FAA verifies this, but it shouldn't be such an inefficient process. The only reason it's so inefficient is because conservatives have gutted federal agencies for so many years. MAGA will still point to the inefficient process as an example of why they should keep cutting funding, "see how inefficient the FAA is? They don't deserve our money!"

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    While lead pipes were banned in 1986, millions of lead service lines remain in service across the US to this day...

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    Lead pipes are less of an issue that it would seem, as the pipes quickly develop a layer of calcium salts on the inside, preventing the water from actually coming into contact with the lead.

    By all means, they need replaced. But they're nowhere near the contributor that leaded gasoline was. That stuff probably fucked up 6 distinct generations. If you lived in a city, you were inhaling lead constantly.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Get out of here with your fact-based science, it sounds like you did your own research. We don't like that. Please comply.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Lead pipes are less of an issue that it would seem, as the pipes quickly develop a layer of calcium salts on the inside, preventing the water from actually coming into contact with the lead.

    This right here.

    If people remember the lead in drinking water contamination in Flint Michigan, its because they had lead pipes that were well coated with the protective layers and had no trouble with lead in water. Then the newly elected city manager changed water sources to cut costs against the advice of the water engineers in the city. The other source of water was more acidic and stripped out all that protective coating and suddenly there's huge amounts of lead in the drinking water from the pipes.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Gen X kid walked arduous hikes uphill back from school in the La Cañada foothills in San Fernando Valley, id est, the Los Angeles smog bowl from ~1975 to 1985. I may literally have lead poisoning brain damage.

    I don't know how I'd get checked. 58 now.

    Curiously, I empathize with kids these days but am also extremely left-wing, and see each generation getting dismissed by the previous one as having it too easy.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I do not dismiss the next generation as having it too easy. Their minimum wage is what mine was when I young. They are basically in a ponzi scheme economy. They are either going to have to endure this distopia or violently overthrow it.

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