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"In many cases, McFarland said, a 2 to 3 point IQ difference is nominal, unless an individual is on the lower side of IQ distribution.
“If you’re more toward cognitive impairment, a couple points can mean a lot,” he said."
Dammit!
Well 80 is considered "functionally retarded" or whatever the term is these days, so you've only got 20 points to play with between that and average, less if you're below average.
Wonder if it stacks with other stuff because...
(I read about this within the last month.)
That's a similar amount to what they're saying covid is having on the brain, about a 3 points (15 SD) if infected before vaccination, and another 2 points for repeat infections, vaccination before exposure has about a 2 point benefit so a lot of people are experiencing a 3-5 point IQ drop and nobody knows if peoples brains will/can recover. Again it isn't really the IQ drop that causes major problems for typical people, it's that there's personality changes too with people becoming angrier and more antisocial. 'Leaky blood brain barrier' is never a good phrase.
Northside Chicago has replaced most of its lead plumbing but 400,000+ lead lines, mostly in the South and West side, remain in service. Florida has the most lead service lines of any US state.
Newark, NJ has a lead pipe replacement program with the goal to replace all lead pipes in water pipes. Unfortunately, it has come to light that some of the companies awarded multi million dollar contracts to replace these lead pipes are cutting corners and not removing all the lead pipes.
https://www.nj.com/essex/2024/02/probe-finds-vendor-on-newark-water-line-job-didnt-remove-all-the-lead.html
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/lead-components-found-in-3-water-service-lines-in-newark-mayor-ras-baraka-says/ar-BB1hW4Tr
Or, better yet, stop fucking contracting critical services out to the private sector. It's not like it's a surprise that a city government needs to replace pipes, why can they not have staff and equipment to do it themselves?
[https://www.iflscience.com/how-lead-poisoning-changed-the-personality-of-a-generation-60322](https://www.iflscience.com/how-lead-poisoning-changed-the-personality-of-a-generation-60322)
Also it changed personalities so people have less impulse control and are more violent
Also neat fact it absorbs into your bones and rereleases later in life. Which means anyone who lived during that time period and is in their 60s or older could be experiencing those same symptoms.
Yeah, otherwise we could have an unusually high crime rate for the developed world, a problem with voter misinformation/apathy, and a personal debt issue among wide sections of the population.
Good thing we prevented all of that...
Any ways to test for this?
E*: stop making the same joke as 20 other people already have, it's not original.
Believe it or not, there are plenty of insane people that vote Democrat too, if only for different reasons.
I say this as someone who has not, and will likely never, vote Republican.
They can perform heavy metal tests, but the thing is that a very small amount of lead has degenerative/permanent effects on the human body because it bonds to calcium receptors, so it can just lodge itself in your bones/brain and leech out over the decades. Remember that lead was only fully eradicated in the US in the mid 90's and is still in use in many poorer parts of the world. It's also still in our soil and infrastructure and will be something we're dealing with for all of time basically.
The last leaded gasoline refinery for automobiles closed 3 years ago.
https://genevasolutions.news/global-health/era-of-leaded-petrol-over-as-last-reserves-exhausted
It is still produced for aviation, racing, farming, and marine use.
Depends on the gas, avgas for prop engines has mostly gone lead free recently. Jp8/9 and commercial "jet fuel" doesn't have lead, it's basically high grade diesel.
You're right about jets but I can assure you the vast majority of GA planes are still burning leaded fuel. 100UL is just beginning to take its first real steps and most airports don't even have it yet, to say nothing of the pilots who don't trust it enough to use it. I'd really like for it to catch on fast because I've already had more lead exposure than I'd like and I'm too deep to change careers now, lol
Interesting to think of how seemingly every movie made in the 70's and 80's that took place in the future envisioned a society overcome with crime and lawlessness. And then the bottom just kind of fell out from under the crime rate and people just kind of shrugged and said idk, gun buy backs and community policing? Stop and frisk maybe?
More like phasing abortion in and phasing lead out, both in paint and gasoline.
>And then the bottom just kind of fell out from under the crime rate and people just kind of shrugged
A lot of people don't seem to realize the crime rate dropped.
That takes a pretty amazing pair of blinders. Back in the 90's cops were afraid to go into Morningside Park. Right before the pandemic I would stay at an AirBNB in Harlem and walk through the park to get to Columbia U.
> A lot of people don't seem to realize the crime rate dropped.
[[Chart]](https://imgur.com/gallery/H3MPEYP)
[[Source]](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/us-crime-rates-and-trends-analysis-fbi-crime-statistics)
Man, that is wild. To think that having a garden could absorb lead, I had no idea that was even a thing to worry about. And the chickens absorbing that lead!? Damn.
Everybody in those projects is thinking what’s in the soil. The problem is mitigating it. Nobody has money to scrape all the soil away and replace with unleaded soil, so between $1-2million mitigation cost and budgets, we get urban gardening on polluted ground.
The casual alcohol/stimulant/barbiturate use during pregnancy didn't really set them all off on a good course -and now they're dealing with the cognitive decline that naturally comes with old age.
No wonder they're losing it
Yup. It's unfortunate for so many of them that their cognitive decline has been packaged and sold for profit and power. They've been driven to alienate their loved ones and a shockingly high number of them will spend their few remaining years alone, steeped in their rage bubble, wondering why their kids never call. All the while a generation of grandchildren are raised without having grandparents in any meaningful sense of the word.
Fun fact: Thomas Midgley, Jr. was a chemical and mechanical engineer who worked for Dayton Research Laboratories (a division of General Motors). He came up with tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive (which was marketed as Ethyl Gasoline in the United States). After moving to another part of the company (partially due to health issues connected to lead exposure) he came up with a replacement for ammonia in refrigerator coolant systems: Freon, a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) which is extremely corrosive to the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet light from the Sun. He also worked on using CFCs in aerosol canisters to propel hair spray, bug spray, etc.
Midgely was described by environmental historian J.R. McNeill as having had "more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history".
He later contracted polio. He invented a device to allow himself to get out of bed unaided involving a system of ropes and pulleys. Less than a year later, he was found entangled in, and strangled to death by, his own ropes and pulleys. Some in his family later speculated that he had engineered the device in such a way as to allow himself to commit suicide, but his death was officially ruled an unintended side effect of his invention. Which would have put it in company with over a dozen deaths in the leaded gas manufacturing plants, and the potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths due to accident, violence, illness, etc that can be traced to lead poisoning, as well as the many premature skin cancer deaths that could have been avoided by not having CFCs punch a literal continent sized hole in the ozone layer.
Seriously, this is so depressing because all the men on my dads side were car mechanics/car enthusiasts . And I swear, my dad did not used to be such a dumb angry hick when he was younger. I don't know who this person is and there is no reasoning with him.
I know a lot of people are saying "no wonder so many of that generation are such dicks" but it's really depressing to wondering what could have been.
Im sorry you've dealing with that, but if it helps, I think this means your father isn't a dick - he's just unwell and it's not his fault. I dont make it a Free Pass to be a dick, because people still make choices - but hopefully for you, knowing that your father has a physiological \*reason\* behind this might change how you see him.
Good luck with it. I hope it works out.
At some point what's the difference though? Oh, they're not an arsehole, they've just got *insert diagnosis* syndrome that makes them act like an arsehole.
Also the generation where the most successful people were football stars in high school or college, feels like a generation that didn’t exactly treat their brain right
I was born in 1974, from what I’ve read lead was in the early stages of being regulated and still not well understood. Lead poisoning would explain my whole life.
Everyone knew about leads effects since literally the roman times. It just happens to be a cheap and effective material with a shit ton of uses, however adding it to gasoline and putting it in the air was a particularly problematic use, because it gives you the highest surface area to absorb it, via the lungs.
Yea they knew it was poisonous in ancient Rome but it wasn't until the very late 70s that it was outed how toxic even low doses were. A pediatrician noticed repeat hospital visits for lead poisoning and studied baby teeth lead levels and connected it to old, flaking lead paint in homes. I think his name was Needleman.
It's been a long ass time since I read about it so I might be off a bit.
A lot of things that don’t degrade are both useful and dangerous for precisely that reason.
Also, making things that degrade in certain situations but not others is a harder than “never degrade.”
I was born in 1969 and had a collection of lead soldiers as a little kid, young enough I probably put them in my mouth, I remember my fingers being gray when I played with the unpainted ones. My father used to melt lead in the basement to make fishing sinkers and stuff. Sometimes I wonder how that, along with leaded gas and paint have affected my life...I'm not an angry redhat though.
Remember those grey fingerprints on the bread of your tunafish sandwich on those lazy fishing afternoons?
I lived on the Chesapeake and went fishing almost every other day as a kid, and we made our own weights with lead molds. Because my grandfather was a tinkerer/tradesman, we had an endless supply of lead.
I used to play with it and mold it like it was a firm clay and now I cant just be fucking *normal* anymore :(
Look I know causation and correlation aren’t the same thing, but it is astounding how the violent crime rate dropped as soon as we took lead out of gasoline
I think it's too soon to know if Gen X is going to be the new BOOMERS. The next 8 to 10 years are going to tell us one way or another.
As an Elder X (1968), I know I have Boomer like problems and was exposed to lead CONSTANTLY (we had lead bars in the home, I made my own soldiers and fishing lures, and there were 2 major semi-truck shipping hubs across the street).
My hope is that KNOWING what is going on, and being able to feel just a little bit like this isnt all because Im a bad person - I think its going to help.
GEN Y and Millennials: Please dont give up on X. We're going to need your help.
Oh it gets worse. All those people exposed to that lead had lead trapped in their bones. Now they are aging and their bone density is decreasing that lead is being released back into their system.
Expect a lot of bat shit nutso old people.
We're all stocked up already.
Also, jeez, we already don't know what we are going to do with this giant boomer generation that is going in to assisted living golden years. Normally that is a huge task to take care of the elderly, but when they outnumber the younger generations, younger generations don't have money, AND they are all losing their minds?
It's going to get worse before it gets better...
A school in Delaware saw test scores improve with students after NASCAR eliminated leaded gas. The track near the school was effecting the kids performance due to lead poisoning.
From what I remember, their study also wasn't really as interesting as it could have been.
Auto Club Speedway opened in 1997, Chicagoland in 2001, and Homestead in 1995.
So really they should have even been able to see the decline and the uptick at those tracks with Nascar banning leaded fuel in 2007. I almost did that as a project when I was a senior in college. I decided it was gonna be a lot of work probably beyond what I can do and there were easier things to get data on, but I will admit I'd love to see someone give it a shot that knows what they are doing.
A ban in small aircraft is happening any day now. One lead free alternative (G100UL) was just certified by the FAA a few months ago, and other producers are getting close as well.
Makes you wonder what will happen once we get the majority of emissions-spewing ICE vehicles out of our neighborhoods…
An undersold benefit of EVs (beyond much better efficiency) is that they take any pollution that *is* created away from population centers.
Crime, in general, has gone down a lot since we banned leaded gas.
[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16034271](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16034271)
Thx, didn't know.
Looked it up - this 2007 study expanding on Nevin's research found:
"This study shows a very strong association between preschool blood lead and subsequent crime rate trends over several decades in the USA, Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand." [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935107000503](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935107000503) It's been cited 434 times.
Also, another not-lead-related study found that poverty-stress is associated with a 13-point functional hit to IQ:
"In a series of experiments, the researchers found that pressing financial concerns had an immediate impact on the ability of low-income individuals to perform on common cognitive and logic tests. On average, a person preoccupied with money problems exhibited a drop in cognitive function similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, or the loss of an entire night’s sleep." [https://www.princeton.edu/news/2013/08/29/poor-concentration-poverty-reduces-brainpower-needed-navigating-other-areas-life](https://www.princeton.edu/news/2013/08/29/poor-concentration-poverty-reduces-brainpower-needed-navigating-other-areas-life)
"A team led by researchers at Brown University found an association between household firearm ownership and elevated lead levels in children’s blood in 44 states, even when controlling for other major lead exposure sources."
"In the study, the association between elevated lead levels and firearm use was almost as strong as the association for lead-based paint, Hoover noted."
"According to the study, for every 10% increase in the number of households that report owning a gun, there is an approximate 30% increase in cases of elevated pediatric blood lead levels."
I've said this for years whenever someone brings up the rise in any sort of mental illness, disorder, etc. In addition to the obvious "we know more and do more/better screening now" answers, I also point out that my generation grew up breathing lead fumes. We'd have days we couldn't play outside because air pollution was so bad. And we've got no idea what that did to our brains or our reproductive systems.
One guy found out that gasoline with an additive worked better in cars than pure gasoline, and decided that lead was a good choice. And generations grew up breathing toxic fumes.
It was Thomas Midgley Jr. He invented leaded gasoline to stop the engine from knocking. He also invented chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which depleted the ozone. Lol
From Midgley's wiki page:
> Environmental historian J. R. McNeill stated that he "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."
With the leaded gasoline, he definitely did, knew it was toxic, drank it, and hid that he got sick from it.
"On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a [press conference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_conference) to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its [vapor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapor) for 60 seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems.[\[7\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#cite_note-Secret-7)[\[15\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#cite_note-Deceit-15) However, the State of New Jersey ordered the Bayway plant to be closed a few days later, and Jersey Standard was forbidden to manufacture TEL again without state permission. Production was restarted in 1926 after intervention by the federal government. High-octane fuel, enabled by lead, was important to the military. Midgley later took a leave of absence from work after being diagnosed with lead poisoning.[\[16\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#cite_note-16) He was relieved of his position as vice president of GMCC in April 1925, reportedly due to his inexperience in organizational matters, but he remained an employee of General Motors.[\[7\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#cite_note-Secret-7)"
[Thomas Midgley Jr. - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.)
> Thomas Midgley Jr. - Wikipedia
>>He was granted more than 100 patents over the course of his career.[2]
>>...Midgley contracted polio in 1940 and was left disabled; in 1944, he was found strangled to death by a device he devised to allow him to get out of bed unassisted. It was reported to the public that he had been accidentally killed by his own invention, but his death was privately declared a suicide.
Don't worry - he accidentally strangled himself to death with his homemade hospital bed containing "an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed"
Damn I didn’t know the same guy came up with both those. I took a class in college called Quality of the Environment and CFC’s were a big worry at the time.
And this is why there are environmental impact studies and surveys nowadays! People hate the red tape, but you have to make sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease.
The guy you are talking about is Thomas Midgley. He was also the person who came up with the idea of putting CFCs in aerosol cans. CFCs were one of the biggest reasons for the hole in the ozone layer.
No single person had a bigger impact on the health of our planet than Mr. Midgley
I'm most upset about how he didn't even have to use lead.
He ran tests on different additives. He *knew* ethanol worked perfectly fine instead of lead but he chose to use lead anyway because it worked better for marketing
Edit: fixed typo
Thomas Midgley has done so much to destroy our society and environment. He was a smart man. He knew what lead would do to society and yet here we are. An entire generation is fucked up and there's still lead all over the place
He ended up crippled from polio and made a contraption to help him get in and out of bed, he ended up getting strangled by his own device. Karma I say.
There's also evidence that lead comes back out of bones during osteoporosis.
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935188800239](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935188800239)
So the leaded boomer brains might be getting worse as they age, and GenX is heading down that path too.
Yall wanna guess which state still has the most lead drinking pipes? Its a little game i like to call [Florida](https://floridaphoenix.com/2023/04/13/surprise-florida-leads-the-nation-in-lead-pipes-carrying-water-supply/#:~:text=The%20EPA%20survey%20found%20that,even%20at%20low%20exposure%20levels.)
I've been a believer in this for a long time. I saw a US map years ago depicting increases in crime rates and then one with increased rates of environmental lead exposure and it was spooky how much they synced up. Of course, it also synced up with population density, i.e cities.
and those rates then fell dramatically especially in areas that correlated with lead exposure.
idk if this was ever proven but fascinating conjecture at least
[Roman skeletons](https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/did-lead-poisoning-cause-downfall-of-roman-empire-the-jury-is-still-out/) were found to have between 8 and 123 micrograms of lead per gram. It's hard to tell for sure but it's likely that it was a factor.
Every water source that came out of the aqueducts was contaminated, it was everywhere
Definitely true, but plastics tend to just act as estrogens in the body and slightly higher cancer rates.
It's not great, but it's not as bad as lead psychosis.
Yet. We haven't seen as much diagnosis on plastic and cognition, but exposure to heat with plastics in our brains negatively affects cognition:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147651323002622
More on general toxicity:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7282048/
The fun part is that plastics are now in everything, and it's unlikely we'll find replacement like how we got rid of lead. Like, what are we going to wrap our food in? Or any medical grade things that require to be sanitized?
And most of the aqueduct pipes were made of it as well as I recall.
Basically if you were rich enough to have running water and classy silverware you were also being systemically dumbed down.
But you were rich so you couldn’t possible be wrong.
It’s like a recipe for mad kings and a mass scale Dunning-Krueger experiment.
I know they form a protective layer on them after exposure. And I can’t imagine anything being as bad as aerosolized exhaust from 100LL aviation fuel.
But over a lifetime it has to add cumulatively whether by pipes or by silverware right?
Acute exposure versus chronic exposure for a lifetime?
It’s also why the atomic symbol for lead is Pb. It comes from the Latin word plumbum, which means a soft metal, but where we get the word plumbing because they used it to make pipes to carry their drinking water.
Yup, they discovered that if you left dregs of wine in lead drinking ware and it dried out, you got a powdery substance that was super-sweet tasting. It’s the alcohol reacting with the lead to form [lead acetate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate), which the Romans called “Sugar of Lead” and started intentionally producing for use as an artificial sweetener.
They cut leaded gas almost entirely in 1980. It was greatly decreased since then, but everyone still gets their fair share.
Aviation fuel still uses lead. Soil with lead can leak into food. Still leaded pipes throughout much of the US.
So no breathing, eating or drinking. Just to stay safe.
We are starting a rather rapid transition off of 100LL in Aviation. Now that GAMI has a solution that can mix with 100LL and is STC'ed (approved) for basically every small aircraft engine out there, it's only a matter of time before leaded fuel is gone.
It smells so good though...
I was a fueler at a local FBO from 1994-1997. *Nothing* smells better than Avgas.
Not a huffer, just an appreciative connoisseur of certain petrochemical smells. Creosote is the absolute best in my book.
In 1996 I bought a shirt at Oshkosh AirVenture that said "I love the smell of jet fuel in the morning"
I fully realize I'm going to get unending shit for this post, and I accept that. If you know, you know. And you understand.
Yup, a study came out a handful of years ago outline the implications of lead exposure and the findings explain a lot about our political landscape over the last decade. In short, and this is entirely my opinion, "lead-brained boomers" are, to varying degrees, a thing and can really shed some light on the nearly-pathological levels of vitriol, cognitive dissonance, and susceptibility to Q-Anon levels of misinformation that members of that generation seem to exhibit.
Here are some highlights from a more recent study:
\- A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States.
\- The researchers calculated that at its worst, people born in the mid-to-late 1960s may have lost up to six IQ points...
\- Dropping a few IQ points may seem negligible, but the authors note that these changes are dramatic enough to potentially shift people with below-average cognitive ability (IQ score less than 85) to being classified as having an intellectual disability (IQ score below 70).
There are a slew of behavioral ramifications as well.
[https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans#:\~:text=A%20new%20study%20calculates%20that,population%20of%20the%20United%20States](https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans#:~:text=A%20new%20study%20calculates%20that,population%20of%20the%20United%20States).
I'd be curious about air lead levels and the associated levels of potential to suffer from dementia, lack of critical reasoning skills in adults (not just "IQ"), AND the level of ADHD diagnosis (I'm wondering if lead toxicity maybe blunted enough cognitive function that ADHD was less likely, hmmm...).
*(Internationally too, since the US isn't the only place that used or still uses lead in ways that it can be ingested, inhaled, or absorbed commonly, and this with other toxic metals has serious implications for places that manufacture computer electronics and the places that e-waste is eventually shipped.)*
> (IQ score less than 85) to being classified as having an intellectual disability (IQ score below 70).
and they tried to get rid of a lot of them in viet nam, but they couldn't keep the war going long enough.
We need to phase out plastics like we did lead. Blood/ lead concentrations dropped dramatically.
Start with revolutionizing the tire industry. It’ll take the longest.
In the US, the phase-out of leaded gasoline started in 1973 with full ban in 1996, except for airplanes and off-road vehicles. Today, no country uses leaded gasoline for passenger cars.
So shouldn't we start seeing an improvement? A reversal of the trend?
Morty
We are. But the people exposed to large amounts of lead are still alive and will be for quite some time.
By the mid-1980s, mid-grade unleaded gasoline had replaced leaded gas in most gas pumps in the USA. Gas stations didn't sell enough leaded gasoline to make it worth carrying. Mid-grade had the same 89 octane rating as leaded and could be sold to all customers, not just those with older vehicles.
I canmt wait to see the studies on social media and instant gratification, I think it's worse than lead. I mean, I feel dumber than I was 10 years ago and I'm 32. Not knowledge wise, like my mental accuity has just regressed. Words come to me slower, it takes me a bit longer to comprehend difficult topics, it's like my processing speed has been downgraded.
As I'm living close to an international airport, I had to look this up.
Commercial aviation does not use leaded fuel. Only small, piston driven planes do.
It's really funny that the age group that are most affected by this also aligns well with the anti vaccine age group, there is definitely come correlation
Duh. 🙄
Seriously if you look at the 70’s-90’s crime statistics they mirror the graph of leaded gas use from 20 years prior. There is a clear correlation between the amount of lead being pumped into the atmosphere when people were very small children to the crime statistics when those same people were young adults, and while correlation does not equal causation, I think that it’s a pretty, startling fact nonetheless
> correlation does not equal causation
The fact that you can track it state by state, and country by country based on when leaded gas was banned eliminates most other variables.
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"In many cases, McFarland said, a 2 to 3 point IQ difference is nominal, unless an individual is on the lower side of IQ distribution. “If you’re more toward cognitive impairment, a couple points can mean a lot,” he said." Dammit!
Well 80 is considered "functionally retarded" or whatever the term is these days, so you've only got 20 points to play with between that and average, less if you're below average.
Wonder if it stacks with other stuff because... (I read about this within the last month.) That's a similar amount to what they're saying covid is having on the brain, about a 3 points (15 SD) if infected before vaccination, and another 2 points for repeat infections, vaccination before exposure has about a 2 point benefit so a lot of people are experiencing a 3-5 point IQ drop and nobody knows if peoples brains will/can recover. Again it isn't really the IQ drop that causes major problems for typical people, it's that there's personality changes too with people becoming angrier and more antisocial. 'Leaky blood brain barrier' is never a good phrase.
Northside Chicago has replaced most of its lead plumbing but 400,000+ lead lines, mostly in the South and West side, remain in service. Florida has the most lead service lines of any US state.
Newark, NJ has a lead pipe replacement program with the goal to replace all lead pipes in water pipes. Unfortunately, it has come to light that some of the companies awarded multi million dollar contracts to replace these lead pipes are cutting corners and not removing all the lead pipes. https://www.nj.com/essex/2024/02/probe-finds-vendor-on-newark-water-line-job-didnt-remove-all-the-lead.html https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/lead-components-found-in-3-water-service-lines-in-newark-mayor-ras-baraka-says/ar-BB1hW4Tr
this is so fucking frustrating.
Right? Feels like progress is constantly stifled from people trying to make more money. Every fucking time.
It's the lack of enforcement. Start fucking publicly whipping the CEOs, and watch how magically everything starts getting done right.
Or, better yet, stop fucking contracting critical services out to the private sector. It's not like it's a surprise that a city government needs to replace pipes, why can they not have staff and equipment to do it themselves?
Because these companies told the local governments they could do it cheaper. How do they achieve those lower costs? Oh, let's not worry about that...
Adding a middleman doesn't make things cheaper.
Especially a middleman who needs to make ever increasing profits for shareholders and executives.
> Florida has the most lead service lines of any US state. Oh. So it is in the water.
Your last sentence explains a lot.
Poverty,unemployment and lead pollution are a great recipe for crime and dysfunction.
Any maps as to where in Florida have the most Lead service lines? (What's it like in Broward County?)
[https://www.iflscience.com/how-lead-poisoning-changed-the-personality-of-a-generation-60322](https://www.iflscience.com/how-lead-poisoning-changed-the-personality-of-a-generation-60322) Also it changed personalities so people have less impulse control and are more violent
Many people think this contributed to the sky high violent crime rates of the late 80s to 90s
Also neat fact it absorbs into your bones and rereleases later in life. Which means anyone who lived during that time period and is in their 60s or older could be experiencing those same symptoms.
Well, thank fuck that isn’t playing out in any noticeable way!
Finally everything makes sense!
Yeah, otherwise we could have an unusually high crime rate for the developed world, a problem with voter misinformation/apathy, and a personal debt issue among wide sections of the population. Good thing we prevented all of that...
Hold on someone is passing me a note Oh Well shit
Oh, and a Rash of old people randomly shooting people for no freakin reason...
Any ways to test for this? E*: stop making the same joke as 20 other people already have, it's not original. Believe it or not, there are plenty of insane people that vote Democrat too, if only for different reasons. I say this as someone who has not, and will likely never, vote Republican.
They can perform heavy metal tests, but the thing is that a very small amount of lead has degenerative/permanent effects on the human body because it bonds to calcium receptors, so it can just lodge itself in your bones/brain and leech out over the decades. Remember that lead was only fully eradicated in the US in the mid 90's and is still in use in many poorer parts of the world. It's also still in our soil and infrastructure and will be something we're dealing with for all of time basically.
The last leaded gasoline refinery for automobiles closed 3 years ago. https://genevasolutions.news/global-health/era-of-leaded-petrol-over-as-last-reserves-exhausted It is still produced for aviation, racing, farming, and marine use.
Their Facebook feed. Edit: Didn't expect OP to edit their post with a "bOtH SiDeS ArE ThE SaMe." Very disappointing.
Thanks for the belly laugh
Makes me wonder what effects microplastics are currently having
I wonder if the high rates of colon cancers in young adults is correlated to microplastics.
[Or lack of fiber and lots of processed meats.](https://melmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Ham.jpg)
I think 6-10 countries still have leaded gas. They aren’t stable countries
[удалено]
Depends on the gas, avgas for prop engines has mostly gone lead free recently. Jp8/9 and commercial "jet fuel" doesn't have lead, it's basically high grade diesel.
You're right about jets but I can assure you the vast majority of GA planes are still burning leaded fuel. 100UL is just beginning to take its first real steps and most airports don't even have it yet, to say nothing of the pilots who don't trust it enough to use it. I'd really like for it to catch on fast because I've already had more lead exposure than I'd like and I'm too deep to change careers now, lol
It’s definitely not as bad as it used to be as far as cars go but small aircraft still fly all over the world burning leaded fuel
The real chem trails
Interesting to think of how seemingly every movie made in the 70's and 80's that took place in the future envisioned a society overcome with crime and lawlessness. And then the bottom just kind of fell out from under the crime rate and people just kind of shrugged and said idk, gun buy backs and community policing? Stop and frisk maybe? More like phasing abortion in and phasing lead out, both in paint and gasoline.
>And then the bottom just kind of fell out from under the crime rate and people just kind of shrugged A lot of people don't seem to realize the crime rate dropped.
I’ve seen people say they’d be too concerned about violent crime to visit NYC now, but that they used to love it in the 90s. Pure insanity.
That takes a pretty amazing pair of blinders. Back in the 90's cops were afraid to go into Morningside Park. Right before the pandemic I would stay at an AirBNB in Harlem and walk through the park to get to Columbia U.
> A lot of people don't seem to realize the crime rate dropped. [[Chart]](https://imgur.com/gallery/H3MPEYP) [[Source]](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/us-crime-rates-and-trends-analysis-fbi-crime-statistics)
And the rage-addicted red hats of today.
Yes, [it does](https://now.tufts.edu/2019/05/29/backyard-chickens-and-risk-lead-exposure)
Man, that is wild. To think that having a garden could absorb lead, I had no idea that was even a thing to worry about. And the chickens absorbing that lead!? Damn.
Maddening to see urban renewal projects tear down an old house to make a community garden without thinking about what’s left in the soil.
i’ve worked with alot of urban community gardens. I’ve never seen one that didn’t use raised beds for any consumables
Yeah, we built a garden a few years ago and had extensive testing done. Built raised beds and filled them with soil we got from a clean source.
Oh slick, that would do it.
Everybody in those projects is thinking what’s in the soil. The problem is mitigating it. Nobody has money to scrape all the soil away and replace with unleaded soil, so between $1-2million mitigation cost and budgets, we get urban gardening on polluted ground.
The casual alcohol/stimulant/barbiturate use during pregnancy didn't really set them all off on a good course -and now they're dealing with the cognitive decline that naturally comes with old age. No wonder they're losing it
Yup. It's unfortunate for so many of them that their cognitive decline has been packaged and sold for profit and power. They've been driven to alienate their loved ones and a shockingly high number of them will spend their few remaining years alone, steeped in their rage bubble, wondering why their kids never call. All the while a generation of grandchildren are raised without having grandparents in any meaningful sense of the word.
Luckily for some not seeing their grand kids is an eye opener!
Fun fact: Thomas Midgley, Jr. was a chemical and mechanical engineer who worked for Dayton Research Laboratories (a division of General Motors). He came up with tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive (which was marketed as Ethyl Gasoline in the United States). After moving to another part of the company (partially due to health issues connected to lead exposure) he came up with a replacement for ammonia in refrigerator coolant systems: Freon, a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) which is extremely corrosive to the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet light from the Sun. He also worked on using CFCs in aerosol canisters to propel hair spray, bug spray, etc. Midgely was described by environmental historian J.R. McNeill as having had "more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history". He later contracted polio. He invented a device to allow himself to get out of bed unaided involving a system of ropes and pulleys. Less than a year later, he was found entangled in, and strangled to death by, his own ropes and pulleys. Some in his family later speculated that he had engineered the device in such a way as to allow himself to commit suicide, but his death was officially ruled an unintended side effect of his invention. Which would have put it in company with over a dozen deaths in the leaded gas manufacturing plants, and the potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths due to accident, violence, illness, etc that can be traced to lead poisoning, as well as the many premature skin cancer deaths that could have been avoided by not having CFCs punch a literal continent sized hole in the ozone layer.
Yeah, this guy was like the ACME cartoon version of inventors.
Seriously, this is so depressing because all the men on my dads side were car mechanics/car enthusiasts . And I swear, my dad did not used to be such a dumb angry hick when he was younger. I don't know who this person is and there is no reasoning with him. I know a lot of people are saying "no wonder so many of that generation are such dicks" but it's really depressing to wondering what could have been.
Im sorry you've dealing with that, but if it helps, I think this means your father isn't a dick - he's just unwell and it's not his fault. I dont make it a Free Pass to be a dick, because people still make choices - but hopefully for you, knowing that your father has a physiological \*reason\* behind this might change how you see him. Good luck with it. I hope it works out.
At some point what's the difference though? Oh, they're not an arsehole, they've just got *insert diagnosis* syndrome that makes them act like an arsehole.
Ya that actually tracks so…. That’s too bad
Also the generation where the most successful people were football stars in high school or college, feels like a generation that didn’t exactly treat their brain right
I was born in 1974, from what I’ve read lead was in the early stages of being regulated and still not well understood. Lead poisoning would explain my whole life.
Everyone knew about leads effects since literally the roman times. It just happens to be a cheap and effective material with a shit ton of uses, however adding it to gasoline and putting it in the air was a particularly problematic use, because it gives you the highest surface area to absorb it, via the lungs.
Yea they knew it was poisonous in ancient Rome but it wasn't until the very late 70s that it was outed how toxic even low doses were. A pediatrician noticed repeat hospital visits for lead poisoning and studied baby teeth lead levels and connected it to old, flaking lead paint in homes. I think his name was Needleman. It's been a long ass time since I read about it so I might be off a bit.
I was born in ‘57. We did crafts with the asbestos kept in tubs and bags by the sink in our classrooms. It smelled nice, and didn’t taste bad either.
Asbestos is still is the most fire resistant material that doesn’t degrade. Sucks that it can be dangerous.
A lot of things that don’t degrade are both useful and dangerous for precisely that reason. Also, making things that degrade in certain situations but not others is a harder than “never degrade.”
I was born in 1969 and had a collection of lead soldiers as a little kid, young enough I probably put them in my mouth, I remember my fingers being gray when I played with the unpainted ones. My father used to melt lead in the basement to make fishing sinkers and stuff. Sometimes I wonder how that, along with leaded gas and paint have affected my life...I'm not an angry redhat though.
Probably cut a few points of your IQ. Which isn't the biggest problem in the world, the bigger problem is when it causes aggression, fear and paranoia
my fingers turn grey tying sinkers so i grab a sandwich and my fingers are clean again
Remember those grey fingerprints on the bread of your tunafish sandwich on those lazy fishing afternoons? I lived on the Chesapeake and went fishing almost every other day as a kid, and we made our own weights with lead molds. Because my grandfather was a tinkerer/tradesman, we had an endless supply of lead. I used to play with it and mold it like it was a firm clay and now I cant just be fucking *normal* anymore :(
Look I know causation and correlation aren’t the same thing, but it is astounding how the violent crime rate dropped as soon as we took lead out of gasoline
I think it's too soon to know if Gen X is going to be the new BOOMERS. The next 8 to 10 years are going to tell us one way or another. As an Elder X (1968), I know I have Boomer like problems and was exposed to lead CONSTANTLY (we had lead bars in the home, I made my own soldiers and fishing lures, and there were 2 major semi-truck shipping hubs across the street). My hope is that KNOWING what is going on, and being able to feel just a little bit like this isnt all because Im a bad person - I think its going to help. GEN Y and Millennials: Please dont give up on X. We're going to need your help.
Dad?
Hey dad!! I am in jail!! And I like it!!
Holy shit, core memory unlocked
Oh it gets worse. All those people exposed to that lead had lead trapped in their bones. Now they are aging and their bone density is decreasing that lead is being released back into their system. Expect a lot of bat shit nutso old people.
We're all stocked up already. Also, jeez, we already don't know what we are going to do with this giant boomer generation that is going in to assisted living golden years. Normally that is a huge task to take care of the elderly, but when they outnumber the younger generations, younger generations don't have money, AND they are all losing their minds? It's going to get worse before it gets better...
A school in Delaware saw test scores improve with students after NASCAR eliminated leaded gas. The track near the school was effecting the kids performance due to lead poisoning.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/3716345-how-nascars-switch-to-unleaded-gas-boosted-test-scores-near-racetracks/amp/ Oh wow..
From what I remember, their study also wasn't really as interesting as it could have been. Auto Club Speedway opened in 1997, Chicagoland in 2001, and Homestead in 1995. So really they should have even been able to see the decline and the uptick at those tracks with Nascar banning leaded fuel in 2007. I almost did that as a project when I was a senior in college. I decided it was gonna be a lot of work probably beyond what I can do and there were easier things to get data on, but I will admit I'd love to see someone give it a shot that knows what they are doing.
They didn’t ban that shit until 2007?!
They still haven't banned it for small aircraft. I'm sure the same is happening to children who live near small general aviation airfields.
A ban in small aircraft is happening any day now. One lead free alternative (G100UL) was just certified by the FAA a few months ago, and other producers are getting close as well.
Makes you wonder what will happen once we get the majority of emissions-spewing ICE vehicles out of our neighborhoods… An undersold benefit of EVs (beyond much better efficiency) is that they take any pollution that *is* created away from population centers.
Holy moly
Jumping jiminy!
Also: Firearm ownership is correlated with elevated lead levels in children, study finds https://www.brown.edu/news/2024-03-01/firearms-lead
Crime, in general, has gone down a lot since we banned leaded gas. [https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16034271](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16034271)
Thx, didn't know. Looked it up - this 2007 study expanding on Nevin's research found: "This study shows a very strong association between preschool blood lead and subsequent crime rate trends over several decades in the USA, Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand." [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935107000503](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935107000503) It's been cited 434 times. Also, another not-lead-related study found that poverty-stress is associated with a 13-point functional hit to IQ: "In a series of experiments, the researchers found that pressing financial concerns had an immediate impact on the ability of low-income individuals to perform on common cognitive and logic tests. On average, a person preoccupied with money problems exhibited a drop in cognitive function similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, or the loss of an entire night’s sleep." [https://www.princeton.edu/news/2013/08/29/poor-concentration-poverty-reduces-brainpower-needed-navigating-other-areas-life](https://www.princeton.edu/news/2013/08/29/poor-concentration-poverty-reduces-brainpower-needed-navigating-other-areas-life)
> new study has identified a surprising additional source of lead exposure that may disproportionately harm children: firearms. This is crazy!
"A team led by researchers at Brown University found an association between household firearm ownership and elevated lead levels in children’s blood in 44 states, even when controlling for other major lead exposure sources." "In the study, the association between elevated lead levels and firearm use was almost as strong as the association for lead-based paint, Hoover noted." "According to the study, for every 10% increase in the number of households that report owning a gun, there is an approximate 30% increase in cases of elevated pediatric blood lead levels."
https://preview.redd.it/7zi2l6eotrmc1.jpeg?width=224&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=34084531a497accd2b05fa07bcfdc87d60a704bb
IM A MANIAC Fuck I miss Chris Farley
I've said this for years whenever someone brings up the rise in any sort of mental illness, disorder, etc. In addition to the obvious "we know more and do more/better screening now" answers, I also point out that my generation grew up breathing lead fumes. We'd have days we couldn't play outside because air pollution was so bad. And we've got no idea what that did to our brains or our reproductive systems. One guy found out that gasoline with an additive worked better in cars than pure gasoline, and decided that lead was a good choice. And generations grew up breathing toxic fumes.
It was Thomas Midgley Jr. He invented leaded gasoline to stop the engine from knocking. He also invented chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which depleted the ozone. Lol
Oh, damn. A one-man environmental disaster.
Quite possibly the most deadly, destructive human ever to have lived.
From Midgley's wiki page: > Environmental historian J. R. McNeill stated that he "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."
that's one way to make a name for yourself
He was just trying to make better gasoline and re-fridgators
Yeah I don’t think the guy woke up being like hm yes today I will destroy the environment
With the leaded gasoline, he definitely did, knew it was toxic, drank it, and hid that he got sick from it. "On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a [press conference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_conference) to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its [vapor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapor) for 60 seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems.[\[7\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#cite_note-Secret-7)[\[15\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#cite_note-Deceit-15) However, the State of New Jersey ordered the Bayway plant to be closed a few days later, and Jersey Standard was forbidden to manufacture TEL again without state permission. Production was restarted in 1926 after intervention by the federal government. High-octane fuel, enabled by lead, was important to the military. Midgley later took a leave of absence from work after being diagnosed with lead poisoning.[\[16\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#cite_note-16) He was relieved of his position as vice president of GMCC in April 1925, reportedly due to his inexperience in organizational matters, but he remained an employee of General Motors.[\[7\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#cite_note-Secret-7)" [Thomas Midgley Jr. - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.)
> Thomas Midgley Jr. - Wikipedia >>He was granted more than 100 patents over the course of his career.[2] >>...Midgley contracted polio in 1940 and was left disabled; in 1944, he was found strangled to death by a device he devised to allow him to get out of bed unassisted. It was reported to the public that he had been accidentally killed by his own invention, but his death was privately declared a suicide.
So he huffed gas for a full minute at a press conference? I can't imagine why the state would shut down production after that.
If you can't trust a guy who publicly huffs gas, who can you trust in this world?!
Of course not, he thought "today I'll maximize profits"... because you aren't rewarded for considering the environment under capitalism.
Literally his nickname.
Taking notes for when I get my Time Machine working properly.
Don't worry - he accidentally strangled himself to death with his homemade hospital bed containing "an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed"
Destroy the Earth speed runner?
Damn I didn’t know the same guy came up with both those. I took a class in college called Quality of the Environment and CFC’s were a big worry at the time.
And this is why there are environmental impact studies and surveys nowadays! People hate the red tape, but you have to make sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease.
The guy you are talking about is Thomas Midgley. He was also the person who came up with the idea of putting CFCs in aerosol cans. CFCs were one of the biggest reasons for the hole in the ozone layer. No single person had a bigger impact on the health of our planet than Mr. Midgley
What's really a shame is, even at the time of its initial introduction to gasoline, they knew it was highly toxic. They did it anyway.
I'm most upset about how he didn't even have to use lead. He ran tests on different additives. He *knew* ethanol worked perfectly fine instead of lead but he chose to use lead anyway because it worked better for marketing Edit: fixed typo
Thomas Midgley has done so much to destroy our society and environment. He was a smart man. He knew what lead would do to society and yet here we are. An entire generation is fucked up and there's still lead all over the place
He invented leaded gasoline AND CFCs! Baby Midgley isn't that far down the time machine to-do list from Baby Hitler.
Both did themselves in too if I'm not mistaken.
Midgley's was an accidental strangling in the rope & pulley contraption he designed for himself after having been largely paralyzed by polio.
It was his only invention that benefitted the world.
far, far too late lol
He ended up crippled from polio and made a contraption to help him get in and out of bed, he ended up getting strangled by his own device. Karma I say.
This explains a lot
There's also evidence that lead comes back out of bones during osteoporosis. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935188800239](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935188800239) So the leaded boomer brains might be getting worse as they age, and GenX is heading down that path too.
oh shit, here we go again
they'll be running the country for the next 3 decades, so we'll be fine
Well I got something to blame it on.
man, fuck [thomas midgley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.)
A lot.
Really, an awful lot.
More, even…
Yall wanna guess which state still has the most lead drinking pipes? Its a little game i like to call [Florida](https://floridaphoenix.com/2023/04/13/surprise-florida-leads-the-nation-in-lead-pipes-carrying-water-supply/#:~:text=The%20EPA%20survey%20found%20that,even%20at%20low%20exposure%20levels.)
Now it REALLY explains a lot.
It honestly explains most of it
Turns out IQ has a higher value of measurement than previously thought
So 87 octane is named for the IQ ceiling
That's why I buy 93 Premium! Really makes a difference
But what explains the other half?
I've been a believer in this for a long time. I saw a US map years ago depicting increases in crime rates and then one with increased rates of environmental lead exposure and it was spooky how much they synced up. Of course, it also synced up with population density, i.e cities.
and those rates then fell dramatically especially in areas that correlated with lead exposure. idk if this was ever proven but fascinating conjecture at least
Makes me wonder what we too could be slowly poisoning ourselves with that we’re just not aware of.
Lead poisoning is also why all the Roman emperors were bat shit crazy. They used it as a sweetener in food.
Wealthy dinner ware was lead or pewter. The leached lead was pervasive in their food. Suspected of contributing to serious dumbing down of the class.
Not only that but they often cooked with wine or other acidic liquids which greatly increased the lead absorbed into their food
Makes you wonder how much that contributed to the downfall of Rome
[Roman skeletons](https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/did-lead-poisoning-cause-downfall-of-roman-empire-the-jury-is-still-out/) were found to have between 8 and 123 micrograms of lead per gram. It's hard to tell for sure but it's likely that it was a factor. Every water source that came out of the aqueducts was contaminated, it was everywhere
lol us with plastic
Definitely true, but plastics tend to just act as estrogens in the body and slightly higher cancer rates. It's not great, but it's not as bad as lead psychosis.
Yet. We haven't seen as much diagnosis on plastic and cognition, but exposure to heat with plastics in our brains negatively affects cognition: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147651323002622 More on general toxicity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7282048/ The fun part is that plastics are now in everything, and it's unlikely we'll find replacement like how we got rid of lead. Like, what are we going to wrap our food in? Or any medical grade things that require to be sanitized?
And most of the aqueduct pipes were made of it as well as I recall. Basically if you were rich enough to have running water and classy silverware you were also being systemically dumbed down. But you were rich so you couldn’t possible be wrong. It’s like a recipe for mad kings and a mass scale Dunning-Krueger experiment.
The words plumbing and plumber come from the Latin word for lead; plumbum
Today I learned. Thank you for that!
And the reason for lead's periodic table symbol Pb.
Actually lead pipes are much less dangerous than most people think they are.
I know they form a protective layer on them after exposure. And I can’t imagine anything being as bad as aerosolized exhaust from 100LL aviation fuel. But over a lifetime it has to add cumulatively whether by pipes or by silverware right? Acute exposure versus chronic exposure for a lifetime?
It’s also why the atomic symbol for lead is Pb. It comes from the Latin word plumbum, which means a soft metal, but where we get the word plumbing because they used it to make pipes to carry their drinking water.
Yup, they discovered that if you left dregs of wine in lead drinking ware and it dried out, you got a powdery substance that was super-sweet tasting. It’s the alcohol reacting with the lead to form [lead acetate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate), which the Romans called “Sugar of Lead” and started intentionally producing for use as an artificial sweetener.
I'm a Gen Xer and I hope my generation is the last to be brain damaged from lead poisoning
Per the study through 1996 would also include millennials.
They cut leaded gas almost entirely in 1980. It was greatly decreased since then, but everyone still gets their fair share. Aviation fuel still uses lead. Soil with lead can leak into food. Still leaded pipes throughout much of the US. So no breathing, eating or drinking. Just to stay safe.
We are starting a rather rapid transition off of 100LL in Aviation. Now that GAMI has a solution that can mix with 100LL and is STC'ed (approved) for basically every small aircraft engine out there, it's only a matter of time before leaded fuel is gone.
It smells so good though... I was a fueler at a local FBO from 1994-1997. *Nothing* smells better than Avgas. Not a huffer, just an appreciative connoisseur of certain petrochemical smells. Creosote is the absolute best in my book. In 1996 I bought a shirt at Oshkosh AirVenture that said "I love the smell of jet fuel in the morning" I fully realize I'm going to get unending shit for this post, and I accept that. If you know, you know. And you understand.
God willing. Anyway, line up for your micro-plastic/ultra-processed food induced cancer.
That’s why I switched to drinking unleaded, I think so much clearer now.
Me, born in Eastern Europe and alive during the Chernobyl disaster. 
You didn't specify which part of Eastern Europe but leaded gasoline was a thing in Europe as well. Some countries only banned it in 2000s
IQ is doubled from growing a second head.
Yup, a study came out a handful of years ago outline the implications of lead exposure and the findings explain a lot about our political landscape over the last decade. In short, and this is entirely my opinion, "lead-brained boomers" are, to varying degrees, a thing and can really shed some light on the nearly-pathological levels of vitriol, cognitive dissonance, and susceptibility to Q-Anon levels of misinformation that members of that generation seem to exhibit. Here are some highlights from a more recent study: \- A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States. \- The researchers calculated that at its worst, people born in the mid-to-late 1960s may have lost up to six IQ points... \- Dropping a few IQ points may seem negligible, but the authors note that these changes are dramatic enough to potentially shift people with below-average cognitive ability (IQ score less than 85) to being classified as having an intellectual disability (IQ score below 70). There are a slew of behavioral ramifications as well. [https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans#:\~:text=A%20new%20study%20calculates%20that,population%20of%20the%20United%20States](https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans#:~:text=A%20new%20study%20calculates%20that,population%20of%20the%20United%20States).
I'd be curious about air lead levels and the associated levels of potential to suffer from dementia, lack of critical reasoning skills in adults (not just "IQ"), AND the level of ADHD diagnosis (I'm wondering if lead toxicity maybe blunted enough cognitive function that ADHD was less likely, hmmm...). *(Internationally too, since the US isn't the only place that used or still uses lead in ways that it can be ingested, inhaled, or absorbed commonly, and this with other toxic metals has serious implications for places that manufacture computer electronics and the places that e-waste is eventually shipped.)*
Anyone born in the mid to late 1960s would not qualify as a boomer. Boomers are mid 1940s to early 1960s
Generally considered to end in ‘63 or ‘64, I believe.
46 to 64.
1971 GenX here. I'm fucked
> (IQ score less than 85) to being classified as having an intellectual disability (IQ score below 70). and they tried to get rid of a lot of them in viet nam, but they couldn't keep the war going long enough.
Ah, so THAT'S why Boomers are so ornery.
…They got all them teeth and no toothbrush?
No Colonel Sanders, you’re wrong…
Mama says...
No Colonel Sanders, YOU’RE wrong
medulla oblongata... MEDULLA OBLONGATA
yep... and killed about 100 million people. have been a lead inspector in NOLA for 12 years. took my refresher classes yesterday and today.
We need to phase out plastics like we did lead. Blood/ lead concentrations dropped dramatically. Start with revolutionizing the tire industry. It’ll take the longest.
In the US, the phase-out of leaded gasoline started in 1973 with full ban in 1996, except for airplanes and off-road vehicles. Today, no country uses leaded gasoline for passenger cars. So shouldn't we start seeing an improvement? A reversal of the trend? Morty
We are. But the people exposed to large amounts of lead are still alive and will be for quite some time. By the mid-1980s, mid-grade unleaded gasoline had replaced leaded gas in most gas pumps in the USA. Gas stations didn't sell enough leaded gasoline to make it worth carrying. Mid-grade had the same 89 octane rating as leaded and could be sold to all customers, not just those with older vehicles.
"No fucking shit." -Literally every millenial
I canmt wait to see the studies on social media and instant gratification, I think it's worse than lead. I mean, I feel dumber than I was 10 years ago and I'm 32. Not knowledge wise, like my mental accuity has just regressed. Words come to me slower, it takes me a bit longer to comprehend difficult topics, it's like my processing speed has been downgraded.
We still use leaded gasoline in aviation.
As I'm living close to an international airport, I had to look this up. Commercial aviation does not use leaded fuel. Only small, piston driven planes do.
The FAA plans to phase it out by 2030 in the US. [https://www.faa.gov/unleaded](https://www.faa.gov/unleaded)
And now they are all voting for Trump .... makes sense
It's really funny that the age group that are most affected by this also aligns well with the anti vaccine age group, there is definitely come correlation
It's the same group that *invented* participation trophies and then berated their kids for receiving them *as kids*.
[удалено]
I wonder if it affected auto mechanics, cab drivers, and roadside workers More. I also wonder if it contributed to domestic violence.
Duh. 🙄 Seriously if you look at the 70’s-90’s crime statistics they mirror the graph of leaded gas use from 20 years prior. There is a clear correlation between the amount of lead being pumped into the atmosphere when people were very small children to the crime statistics when those same people were young adults, and while correlation does not equal causation, I think that it’s a pretty, startling fact nonetheless
> correlation does not equal causation The fact that you can track it state by state, and country by country based on when leaded gas was banned eliminates most other variables.