Complete noob question, but if it never goes away how does it get into chickens? It sounds like your point and this article combined are implying that having chickens (whose eggs you don't eat but who do eat the bugs) would actually be a method of removing lead from the land?
Some companies are looking at this for nickel mining: grow trees that leech metals out of the soil and end up with metal concentrations that are competitive with ore!
Back of the envelope calculation using the data from article.
To take soil from the Australian residential guideline for soils of 300mg/kg to the article recommended 117mg/kg, you need to remove 183mg/kg from the soil.
The average lead content in the eggs was 301µg/kg, so 183mg/301µg = 608. Meaning, for every kg of soil in your backyard, you need the chickens to lay 608 kg of eggs.
It isn't literally true that it never goes away, or you would be right that the eggs couldn't have lead in them, but my understanding is the amount removed by chickens is pretty minimal as a fraction of what's there
> The question is whether we can recognize and want to solve the problems imo. Today our media seems incapable of highlighting issues. The media pushes a narrative to effect social change (ie political); rather than presents the issues.
Interesting. I actually have a completely opposite theory of media. In my experience and research, the way that news media effect change actually _is_ to make narratives and more importantly, bang on and on about them for quite possibly years.
Obviously, me being in the UK, it might be different. But I can find countless examples of the media just presenting issues neutrally and absolutely nothing happening. Because people presented with just an issue simply go "damn, that's crazy, someone should do something about that", and then forget it unless it's about dogs.
But the success cases of the media truly affecting change (I'd list some example but they're all UK cases. A big one is one of our papers spent years pushing for an investigation into a famous case of a mass death at a football match where the police blamed the victims for looting corpses and attacking people to deflect from them not acting in time.) But they all seem to include specifically _finding_ narratives to frame stories with and basically telling them again and again with constant calls to action and searching out every new detail about the story that can have anything done about it.
This is why the NRA are so incredibly effective at making change, they bang on and on about one thing and tell their members whenever anything they can show up to is happening and exactly what to say and do to disrupt or prevent it.
The media (assuming were talking news media) needs to be held to a higher standard imo. The search for truth is a difficult, nuanced, and incredibly important to our society. Using it as a tool to push any narrative erodes trust in it and leads to more relativist crap.
I opined on this is another thread and essentially despaired of ever being able to hold the media to a higher standard, because of the regulating-the-experts problem.
In my thinking, we'll cause more harm than good by trying to adjust the output, so why try?
Instead, we should focus on the economic input and make it more profitable to produce quality news. And notably, that is very much not the economic incentives in place for news now.
I've heard this explanation so many times but it feels like it has an enormous missing piece, like, maybe I just have fucking ADHD or something but never in my life has doing things and going places I don't want to ever gotten easier with repetition or consistency, it still needs motivation because ability to get up and do things is what motivation _is_.
Unless by discipline people mean literally disciplining myself when I fail I'm just gonna remain confused.
Sorry I wasn't clear about what I mean. I don't mean the ends, I mean the means. like exercising, or studying, or even brushing my fucking teeth have never in my life stopped being a manual decision. I want the ends obviously, like everyone else does, want them a lot in fact, but discipline just seems like an impossible thing for me because it _never_ seems to stop needing motivation to do things I need to do however long of a streak I do manage to build.
> On a side note : am I the only one who is tired of the current (decade(s)-long...) trend in blogs/articles of "deconstructing" positive/common-sense behaviors? "The dangers of tidiness", "Embrace your bipolarity", "Why I stopped aiming for excellence" etc... (I am not denying the risks of being too extreme and I understand the "click-bait" need of those writers, but still, it is very telling...)
I think the you're seeing unconnected things as connected here, it's very much a problem with the internet in general, these blog posts and articles aren't aimed at everyone, they're talking to a specific subset of people who do have in fact have issues with toxic ideas about work, "The perfect is the enemy of the good" is important advice _for perfectionists_ like my sister desperately needed to hear that growing up, I most certainly did not.
The internet in all of it's design tells you that any advice that gets popular enough must be some universal wisdom even when the people who write these articles do prefix everything they say with constant reminders that their advice is only for specific people (and the ones that don't do that claim to have found the answer to everything and start cults).
This trend you're seeing isn't a cultural shift, it's just a collection of people with specific problems trying to help each other. I could say the same about the life-optimisation obsessed section of the self help market that does shout about hard work, discipline, and grindset.
tl;dr they're only "positive common sense behaviours" to you, but the article's are for the people for whom they are in fact toxic blockades to happiness. My sister really could've done with hearing that tidiness isn't more important than being able to actually use your space.
Well, I agree there is no planned things & that I am just connecting random dots.
But would you have found the same proportion of books or articles promoting what seems counter-intuitive behaviors/mindsets just for the contradiction itself?
I think the authors just need to find an easy way to say something new, and what is more easy than going against something "common"?
> I think the authors just need to find an easy way to say something new, and what is more easy than going against something "common"?
I'm sure some of them do, but having seen first hand the damage to productivity and happiness these "common behaviours" can do to people who don't have my personality type, the books deconstructing them and putting them back together for people you start to realise are just another kind of productivity guide but for atypical people.
There are lots of books deconstructing ordinary weight loss advice for people with eating disorders as well, the thing is that once you get cynical enough you start to realise that they really are just the other side of the same coin, the goal is the same "tell people how to get to a healthy weight" just with different perspective.
It took a whole hell of a lot of "deconstructing common behaviours" for people to settle on not beating children in schools, we didn't get rid of the concept of discipline and punishment, we just picked up a new, more universal framework that works better.
> Kids refuse a bath usually not because they’re rebelling against themselves or the parents, but because they don’t get the concept of delayed gratification yet
I'm confused by this thought because there _isn't_ any delayed gratification in kids taking a bath, as she said, kids love it once they're in there, and they're usually not even running their own bath if they're the age I think she's talking about, so where's the delay, walking to the bathroom? There's certainly less delay than going swimming, and kids love that too.
Getting kids into the bath, even though they like it once they're in there, and given, as she says in the article, that they've liked it before isn't a problem of delayed gratification. It's a problem of routine and requirement, of apathy and change. You have to stop whatever it is you're doing and go take a bath _every day_, my nephew absolutely loves going to the park, but if we did it every day there'd be so many days where he doesn't feel like it, even if he loves it every time he gets there.
This is exactly the point the author is making, discipline is about doing things that need doing, the question is whether it's still discipline if it's something you're doing only for your own enjoyment, and whether finding enjoyment out of things you need to do is enough.
> there _isn't_ any delayed gratification in kids taking a bath, as she said, kids love it once they're in there
Keyword here is "once", kids love it _once_ they're there. The point is that -at the time when the parent is asking the kid to stop what they're doing and shower- they (don't want to / don't understand why they should / etc...) stop what they're doing. Take a look at the Stanford marshmallow experiment[1].
I don't see why it discipline can't be about both though, delayed gratification _and_ routine and requirement as you said. I'd add that routine can help (mainly for kids) in establishing a pattern where the value of delayed gratification can be harnessed.
> discipline is about doing things that need doing,
There's nothing inherent in what the word discipline means that signifies anything regarding doing what needs to be done. It's more about doing what you understand to be good for you later, even if you don't fully (or irrationally) don't want to do now, specifically if it's a small sacrifice now for a greater reward later.
> Keyword here is "once", kids love it _once_ they're there. The point is that -at the time when the parent is asking the kid to stop what they're doing and shower- they (don't want to / don't understand why they should / etc...) stop what they're doing.
Yeah but that seems like a completely different concept from delaying though, they're not any _more_ gratified being in the bath than they would've been playing tag or whatever they were doing before. And again it doesn't apply if you make it not something regular they have to do, getting kids to change what they're doing like swapping games isn't anywhere near as hard as getting kids to swap games where one of them is a bath.
> Take a look at the Stanford marshmallow experiment[1].
I know all about the Stanford Marshmallow experiment, it's a miserable abortion of an experiment that everyone talks about like received wisdom when every attempt to repeat it's long term findings has like half the effect if you account for even the slightest confounding variables.
(Sorry I'm dunking on it so much, I had to write a paper on it during my degree, everything they found about the kids doing better in life because they could delay gratification completely disappears once you realise that the kids who could wait were just the kids who grew up with more money and never had to worry about food at all, and once you account for parental income and stability you find out the differences in life outcomes are entirely caused by familial wealth.)
Read the follow up studies section if you want to know what I'm talking about, some of the confounding variables they didn't account for include "early cognitive ability and behaviour, family background, and home environment" but also trust in the researcher, if the child had had a promise broken by an adult even _kind of_ recently they were far more likely to fail the test.
Also having read a lot of those studies for that paper, I can say that even the Wikipedia article feels a bit generous to it.
</rant>
> There's nothing inherent in what the word discipline means that signifies anything regarding doing what needs to be done. It's more about doing what you understand to be good for you later, even if you don't fully (or irrationally) don't want to do now, specifically if it's a small sacrifice now for a greater reward later.
Yeah that sounds right actually. I never thought of it like that, thank you.
Is that a solution though? unless you send your ship instantly after those bullets another objects could still just come in from the side after they've passed, unless these bullets cover significantly more than the front facing area of your entire ship it won't work, and if you do send it directly in front of your ship immediately before your flight then you've just invented metal shields, and if they do hit something you're still going to be hitting shrapnel and spalling at appreciable fractions of the speed of light.
> There's a weird sense of internal entitlement where some (likely a small, but still substantial) number of people work there, are well paid, and yet act internally as if it's some terrible place doing terrible things (yet stay working there). Whatever way they rationalize this to themselves - it's odd.
So far in my career I've worked for a government contractor, doing basically good things that benefit the government and the public, a large service exclusively serving gambling companies some of whom were committing obvious crimes including automatically gender detecting players and rate limiting anyone with a woman's name (under the assumption that any women on their service are men who've been banned or rate limited themselves using their wive's credit cards), and a supermarket, and honestly, the hardest place to leave was the gambling company that I thought constantly about how I should leave.
It took suddenly being made redundant due to the pandemic for me to really try hard to find another job, I'd applied to plenty but I never really pushed myself properly, or took them seriously enough because stability at the cost of bitterness and feeling like the smallest cog in a meat grinder of human misery is a weird sort of comfortable, it's leaving a splinter in because pulling it out is scary, it's not ripping off a bandaid, a "childish" failure of character, but ultimately relatable and human.
And I _wasn't_ making 6 figures. I _didn't_ spend years of my life building up to getting into that position, it was just the first job out of university paying slightly more than the average, I can't imagine if I had got into Google and realised what these people must've realised about themselves and the system and how they are really no exits that aren't steps down unless you're entrepreneurial and willing to take a big risk, you think Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Netflix/Uber don't make some big moral compromises to sell and produce in China?
I'm not (trying to) justify their decisions, just rather painfully admit that I can relate.
The Deja vu sensation of this conversation happening almost identically 2 days ago (everything from wondering how >100% efficiency works, someone explaining it's from the environment, and then someone else explaining efficiency is inappropriate and COP exists) is kinda wild.
Can't wait for all our text input boxes on the web to be GPT-3-enabled, and then all comments on HN and Reddit and Twitter will be just people accepting the defaults, and it will end up just being GPT-3 talking to itself, and we can all go back to doing something productive.
Pretty sure FB has several instances of itself with all the users played by GPT-3 trained on the users’ previous activities so they can monte carlo various changes, like pre-A|B testing or estimating impact of various new ad types or congressional testimonies.
Didn't you mean to say "where I _can't_ easily see and move things around"? or are you making a different point I'm not understanding, because it looks like you're negating yourself and I'm not sure what you mean.
If you compare people to apartheid murderers and _don't_ specify how you mean, you can't exactly claim he's jumping down _your_ throat taking that the wrong way.
"Oh, these leftists seem like Adolf Hitler"
"Fuck you"
"Hey, hey, I didn't specify _how_ they're like Hitler, I just meant how he dehumanises people, not _any_ of the things almost everyone in the world knows him for"
This is why I hate the anti-woke, just incredible levels of smug, trolling styles of communication, constantly saying inflammatory bullshit and then pulling back and acting "attacked" and calling people "close-minded" for not asking you to elaborate on obvious "veiled" insults and bile.
