Managing complexity is important even if it results in suboptimal solutions.
Imagine if when building a house you needed to shape every single brick for it’s actual load. Sure you end up using less materials, but you lost economies of scale and suddenly need vast quantities of computing power for minimal gain.
Using uniform bricks and banning stuff may seem wasteful, but it enables efficiency elsewhere.
That's not what's happening in terms of asbestos. Rather, it's more like "Electricity has caused buildings to burn down, so lets ban electricity".
Rather than focusing on the safe use of a material, we instead lean towards removing it all together. Older materials with known faults (such as wood being flammable) are deemed acceptable simply due to having known weaknesses in a period where we didn't care about safety. If we found out wood causes cancer, we'd still use it in building and furniture because we've always used it in building and furniture.
It's not an economies of scale problem.
When you get right down to it, the people that got mesothelioma from asbestos pretty much universally directly worked with it (usually in the form of doing things like blowing it in loose form for insulation).
Yet we spent an ungodly amount of money and time stripping asbestos from buildings that had been there for decades not causing any problems. Ironically, directly exposing people to asbestos in the process (more than you'd ever be exposed to it was left undisturbed).
Asbestos is still used when there are not good alternatives.
Asbestos is only prohibited where there are practical alternatives.
The problem with asbestos is it was used where there was no rationale for its use beyond profits as a bulk material.
Those profits were only available because the health costs were externalized.
The existence of practical alternatives is the reason asbestos abatement is possible. The cost of abatement is almost entirely the removal and disposal, the cost of replacement materials is not a major factor.
Thw reason why we don't use asbestos because removing it without endangering people sucks. We had a room at our university where they discovered an aspestos (or similar) ceiling and the removal took a month and had to be done by people with respirators, full body suits, air filters and hand tools.
If you have to do such a thing every time you are rebuilding something it is not going to economic.
That's for loose packed asbestos (common in roofs).
That's not all or the only way asbestos can be packaged. Which is my point. If you bind asbestos to vinyl, for example, you get a lot of the same insulation benefits with none of the problems of becoming a health hazard.
That's the problem. Yes, loose blown asbestos IS a problem and a major health hazard, but it's not the only form asbestos can take. Hence, baby thrown out with the bath water.
What about when you need to drill into or cut the vinyl for renovations, or if the house catches on fire, or floods? What about the factory workers at the asbestos-vinyl plant?
Maybe asbestos binded to vinyl is literally not a health hazard in any of these cases, but this needs to be shown in a positive way. The reason it's regulated/nearly banned is because the default way we treat materials is that they are assumed safe until data shows otherwise, and we obviously can't treat asbestos as a default material.
> What about when you need to drill into or cut the vinyl for renovations
Wear a mask. But also, you likely aren't going to be affected. The risks are primarily for people working heavily with the stuff. Similar to how you could get silicosis cutting concrete but you likely won't get silicosis because you don't do that enough daily.
> if the house catches on fire
The neat thing about asbestos is it doesn't burn. That being said, the fumes from a fire are toxic without the asbestos so it's not exactly like it's making it more dangerous. (perhaps cleanup is what you're referring to?)
> or floods
Getting asbestos wet keeps it from Aerosolization. In fact, it's recommended to do that anyways if you are removing asbestos. (though, water isn't good enough to make it completely safe, it's better than nothing). [1]
> The reason it's regulated/nearly banned is because the default way we treat materials is that they are assumed safe until data shows otherwise, and we obviously can't treat asbestos as a default material.
The reason it's regulated/nearly banned is because the asbestos industry hid the dangers of it and got exposed in a very public way which generated heavy public outcry. We treat it like this not because it's rational, but because of public outrage. Asbestos has become synonymous with unsafe, no questions asked. [2]
Mercury and lead have similar more well known public health problems, yet purchasing CFLs and lead water pipes remain everywhere. Why? because there's not nearly the same level of outrage.
> The reason it's regulated/nearly banned is because the asbestos industry hid the dangers of it and got exposed in a very public way which generated heavy public outcry. We treat it like this not because it's rational, but because of public outrage.
I recently learned that in the mid 20th century there was a huge scandal when it came out that TV game shows were rigged. The public was outraged and a law was passed prohibiting the fixing of "purportedly bona fide contests of intellectual knowledge or intellectual skill". You can go to prison for up to a year for this.
Fixing a purportedly bona fide professional wrestling match was and remains completely legal, of course, because that's not a contest of intellectual skill. Fixed quiz shows are a scourge upon the public, but fixed sporting events are just good fun.
The whole “just leave it and it’s fine” just isn’t practical for a lot of it though. I’m going through it right now, we’re leasing a new lab/workshop which will have some offices etc. in an older building. We literally can’t change any lighting fixture or add any WiFi access points without drilling through asbestos cement ceiling tiles and creating dust. So instead we’re having them removed, because any tiny subsequent change we’d need to do would expose employees to asbestos dust…
It’s just not worth having in any building you want to ever make any alterations to… And the only reason to have it would be just to have the same insulation value with a slightly thinner panel than what we’ll replace it with!
No, it requires a cost/benefit mindset, like everything else.
There's nothing special about old buildings requiring compromise. Asbestos is just particularly costly. It sucks, and often it's more benefit in the long run to just rip that band-aid off now rather than live with suboptimal compromises for decades to come.
Yeah, that's it. Luckily it's not actually too hard to remove the ceiling tiles - they're not standard size grid but are drop-in, so nothing has to be cut to remove them and we can have new ceiling tiles made with a non-asbestos fibreboard with an insulation panel glued to the back of it. We'll probably end up removing about a fifth of the tiles in strategic locations for access and ceiling mounted things, because the disposal cost is so high to do all of them. Ideally we could get it all gone but as you said, it's just finding the cost/benefit balance.
And there are whole programs designed to reduce worldwide deaths from smoke, precisely because it is a major problem. It's something we're actively working on because it's so serious and plausibly fixable.
> Dr. Smith has spent decades studying the health effects of indoor air pollution due to biomass burning on women and children in developing countries.
Your link is talking about indoor fires. Outdoor fire pits wouldn't concentrate the smoke in the living area. I have no idea what the total effect would be for outdoor fires, but it isnt' the same as the indoor burning biomass stoves
wood burning stoves are absolutely required to be updated now with certified emissions stoves. all four wood burning stoves/fireplaces in our cabin had to be replaced before we could finalize the purchase. also it would have been considered uninsurable if the stoves were not updated to meet the new wood burning standards.
these weren’t like antique stoves either, if i’m remembering correctly they were new in like 2000ish.
honestly, the region of our cabin is noticeably more pleasant to be in since they started requiring this—when i used to go there as a kid, the air was just awful to breathe when everyone was using the previous gen wood burning fireplaces.
Its a pretty big leap to say we would still use wood to build if it came out it caused cancer. Steel framing is becoming much more popular now, and is mandatory code for the reasons you listed in certain situations.
We (the US) still allow asbestos in certain scenarios in an attempt to keep the baby and the profits. https://www.maacenter.org/asbestos/products/. Talc especially has had a lot of attention in the last year or so.
I think there is also a pretty big difference between how people view a material with undesirable qualities such as electric causing fires, or wood being flammable, compared to asbestos damaging the individual.
> We (the US) still allow asbestos in certain scenarios
Very few scenarios allow it and there's active lobbying to remove it even in those usecases. The guide you linked to primarily cites old products still in circulation and not new products.
> When you get right down to it, the people that got mesothelioma from asbestos pretty much universally directly worked with it (usually in the form of doing things like blowing it in loose form for insulation).
Yeah, cause they often (as I understand) were not using proper protective measures to keep from inhaling the dust particles. A common thing I have seen on construction sites of all sorts, is the workers refusing to use some thing or the other, because it makes them uncomfortable, or harder to see (but still can) or harder to breath (but still can) or some other jackanapes idea like that.
> Yet we spent an ungodly amount of money and time stripping asbestos from buildings that had been there for decades not causing any problems. Ironically, directly exposing people to asbestos in the process (more than you'd ever be exposed to it was left undisturbed).
This is where things get real fun. When moist or absolutely damp/wet, asbestos is basically harmless (to the lungs) because it's almost impossible to breath it in at that point. If you somehow manage to breath that in, you have to basically be trying to do it. When it is dryer than chalk on a hot summers day with 0% humidity though, then yeah it can cause all sorts of problems. But even then, people removing it tend to do the thing that the other prior mentioned construction workers (often) won't do.
They wear gloves, have masks on; and even are running some form of proper ventilation. And so much of the issue is averted.
Then comes the media and government. They take edge case scenarios like these, and hype them up; whilst mixing in the prior construction workers into the data. This makes things look worse than they really are.
It's not just Asbestos you can find this sort of thing with them. You can find media and government doing this with many things if you look carefully.
But that being said, none of this is to say that Asbestos isn't a problem at all. It's just to say that Asbestos gets the treatment it does for the same reason we have warning labels on nearly everything.
The problem is that mesothelioma (the worst case) is a particularly nasty cancer, and the more common things it causes, like lung cancer and asbestosis aren't fun either. We still get people contracting these diseases decades after doing home renovations here in Australia because it was in so many building materials for decades here. They just didn't know about the danger (despite massive publicity campaigns).
And for what? In 99% of the uses of asbestos domestically and commercially there are safe products that can do just as good a job, perhaps just requiring things to be slightly thicker to get the same insulating value... Sure there are some niche industrial and scientific applications where it's still potentially the best performing option but so much of what it was used for, it just didn't need to be...
People have always done that, but down votes don’t actually matter so why worry about it?
I make plenty of comments knowing people will downvote them based on content and still ended up so much positive karma it would take serious effort to burn it all.
I think the overall vibe is quite different from what it was in 2010 say? It used to be 'post erlang' when there was too much off topic posting, but these days discussions seem to be highly dominated by people who are 'tech adjacent' and have no idea how to code or build products, and no experience outside of big, crappy, late-stage 'tech' companies.
downvotes cause you to be essentially a lite-shadow ban if they happen enough, especially if in a flagged thread/comment. You get rate limited, which means only 5 comments per day allowed. Max.
So, sorry, but while I didn't downvote you, I do disagree with you; entirely. Validly.
That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site.
The thread also has interesting discussions on other mod tools: shadowbanning, IP bans, and the like.
Apparently the way to un-rate-limit an account is to send in an email and mention that you will "stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Some amount of convincing prostration may be required, as a sort of high-level turing test. There does not seem to be a way to do this while not giving away your email address (which was not required at signup).
The moderator mentioned something about repeated, human-written warnings before rate-limiting, but this does not seem to be the case now (2020) - rate limiting seems to be a milder, less-known variant of the shadowban.
Look. All I know is what I looked up, and have read in the past; and that I wasn't rate limited until after I commented on a thread that suddenly got mega-flagged and I deleted my comment to try to be safe. Wasn't fast enough I guess, cause either an auto-bot just rate limited everyone in it; or a mod did.
Prior to that, I wasn't rate limited. After that, I was. Make of it what you will.
Imagine if when building a house you needed to shape every single brick for it’s actual load. Sure you end up using less materials, but you lost economies of scale and suddenly need vast quantities of computing power for minimal gain.
Using uniform bricks and banning stuff may seem wasteful, but it enables efficiency elsewhere.