I'm sure the cost to give every ground zero worker clean-room level suits with a built in filter would have been 1/100000th the total cost compared to the medical expense of treating them over the next 25 years.
Clean room equipment is kind of the opposite of what was needed. Clean room equipment protects the room from the people.
What’s was needed was likely pretty basic PPE: P100 respirators along with outer clothing that would be kept out of people’s homes and showers when leaving the site. (PAPRs would have been even better, but they wouldn’t have been cheap or available in large numbers on short notice.) Unfortunately, if you watch modern construction workers, you’ll find that PPE is almost universally ignored when performing common but dangerous tasks like cutting concrete or lead-painted surfaces.
I've been well served by just using a P100 respirator when I'm doing anything dirty or dusty. There have been a few times that it's reduced exposure to something bad that I didn't know about, among them removing old shingles from my attic (asbestos composite material) or sanding paint that I had tested negative for lead (transparent varnish underneath had lead).
Weird. Wasn’t lead typically used as an opacifying agent?
In any case, if you test by taking a little scraping, you can only detect lead that you actually scraped. But if you test with X-ray fluorescence, you get an integrated density over a decent thickness.
Also, even if the P100 respirator protects you adequately while sanding, it provides no protection against future exposure to the dust that you create.
but importantly, the down-the-line costs can be obfuscated and spread across the private and public sectors just enough that the government can claim deniability and therefore is no longer on the hook for the costs.
The funny thing to me about this is how driven by (ignorant) public demand that led to premature re-openings. People have agency, and it’s always a little depressing to see people acting like they’re robots being led by a shadowy power.
People bitches about masks, about everything and politicians tend to give in to that.
The politicians (and more directly, their corporate sponsors) stoked that opinion. It didn't come from nowhere. From day 1 of the pandemic the reactionary media ecosystem would not shut the fuck up for even a MOMENT about the unnecessary "draconian" "authoritarian" lockdowns and how bad they were. Why? Because said corporate masters were losing shitloads of money because it was dangerous for customers to go shopping, and it was even more dangerous for people to go to work. But we can't possibly pump the brakes on the economy, even for a moment! Lines have to go up, no matter how many millions of lives it costed.
Yes, the people demanded it, but that demand itself was a created thing. Sure we would've had our vaccine deniers and other assorted cranks, we always have and will, but we had an entire sector of the mass media pouring gasoline on that fire as fast as they fucking could to manage exactly what fucking happened.
And like, even if you want to say the above is tinfoil hat shit: Okay, then the Governments job in this situation would be to defer to experts and figure out public policies that would keep people safe. Which we did, kind of, for awhile. But like if public opinion is screeching so loud for lockdowns to end, the government should fucking say NO. That's their JOB.
Agency isn't some magical axiomatic property where if you exercise it you're the sole contributing factor to your actions. Exercising agency, like making any other choice, is a decision whose inputs include your circumstances, history, etc.
Consider someone who quit smoking cigarettes in the 1950s. That was a time when cigarette smoking was common and not widely considered unhealthy. That person exercised agency. Now consider someone who quit in the 2020s, when cigarette smoking is widely warned against. That person exercised agency, too. More people quit smoking in the 2020s than the 1950s, by any measure. Does that mean people had less agency in the 1950s? No, it means the inputs to their decision-making on how to exercise their agency were different.
Agency occurs in individuals who operate within systems and Americans are some of the most propagandized people on the face of the Earth, and some of the worst educated in the global north. Average reading level is 6th grade. Critical thinking is in the shitter. "I did my own research" is specifically a cultural meme describing how piss poor Americans and many other overseas in the same global north are at both obtaining rigorous sourced information and using it to make decisions. COVID was a demonstration of all of these issues brought to a scale where it became impossible to ignore.
I blame systems more than people because systems should know better, and they largely did, but their ability to act has been hamstrung by one of our political parties holding the line on the notion that "Freedom" means ignorant dipshits with ignorant dipshit opinions should get to weigh in with equal credibility to people who actually understand things, which is a large part of why our government can no longer function apart from passing more fucking tax breaks for people who don't need them while our infrastructure rots and the wife of the owner of WWE dismantles the department of education.
The main reason I don't buy "agency" here is because ultimately the agency of covidiots shouldn't have been a factor either way. We have law enforcement supposedly, I'm told, to ensure the safety of the public. So do it then. Nations the world over that would be characterized as "free" managed to restrict the flow of people and goods in such a way to ensure safety much, much better than we did. Saying "well the people wanted lockdown to end" is fucking pathetic excuse-making on the part of the powerful. Of course people wanted lockdowns to end, they fucking sucked. I too missed restaurants. I too missed shopping. I too missed haircuts. But if it wasn't time yet it wasn't time, and when it was time should've been determined by people in the health sciences who study pandemics, not dipshits from flyover states.
I'm genuinely sorry that a huge chunk of our populace that lives in places with poor economic opportunities and low social mobility get their fee fees hurt when people who study shit for a living say "you're wrong about this" but that's simply a lower-tier issue than the broad strokes health of the country. If the mere notion that someone else who you may not respect knows more than you and is therefore being asked before you sends you into a mental health spiral, may I suggest therapy?
Comments
I'm sure the cost to give every ground zero worker clean-room level suits with a built in filter would have been 1/100000th the total cost compared to the medical expense of treating them over the next 25 years.
Clean room equipment is kind of the opposite of what was needed. Clean room equipment protects the room from the people.
What’s was needed was likely pretty basic PPE: P100 respirators along with outer clothing that would be kept out of people’s homes and showers when leaving the site. (PAPRs would have been even better, but they wouldn’t have been cheap or available in large numbers on short notice.) Unfortunately, if you watch modern construction workers, you’ll find that PPE is almost universally ignored when performing common but dangerous tasks like cutting concrete or lead-painted surfaces.
I've been well served by just using a P100 respirator when I'm doing anything dirty or dusty. There have been a few times that it's reduced exposure to something bad that I didn't know about, among them removing old shingles from my attic (asbestos composite material) or sanding paint that I had tested negative for lead (transparent varnish underneath had lead).
Weird. Wasn’t lead typically used as an opacifying agent?
In any case, if you test by taking a little scraping, you can only detect lead that you actually scraped. But if you test with X-ray fluorescence, you get an integrated density over a decent thickness.
Also, even if the P100 respirator protects you adequately while sanding, it provides no protection against future exposure to the dust that you create.
That's its role in paint, but lead glass [0] is a thing, so transparent lead-based compounds do exist.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_glass
Even the kind of masks we all got used to during COVID (KN95 etc) would have probably done wonders compared to the nothing they were given.
but importantly, the down-the-line costs can be obfuscated and spread across the private and public sectors just enough that the government can claim deniability and therefore is no longer on the hook for the costs.
Doesn't matter. Literally the same calculus as reopening everything far prematurely for COVID: "But the economy!"
The people running this show don't give a flying fuck about the working class. They'll march us into the meat grinder no matter what.
The funny thing to me about this is how driven by (ignorant) public demand that led to premature re-openings. People have agency, and it’s always a little depressing to see people acting like they’re robots being led by a shadowy power.
People bitches about masks, about everything and politicians tend to give in to that.
The politicians (and more directly, their corporate sponsors) stoked that opinion. It didn't come from nowhere. From day 1 of the pandemic the reactionary media ecosystem would not shut the fuck up for even a MOMENT about the unnecessary "draconian" "authoritarian" lockdowns and how bad they were. Why? Because said corporate masters were losing shitloads of money because it was dangerous for customers to go shopping, and it was even more dangerous for people to go to work. But we can't possibly pump the brakes on the economy, even for a moment! Lines have to go up, no matter how many millions of lives it costed.
Yes, the people demanded it, but that demand itself was a created thing. Sure we would've had our vaccine deniers and other assorted cranks, we always have and will, but we had an entire sector of the mass media pouring gasoline on that fire as fast as they fucking could to manage exactly what fucking happened.
And like, even if you want to say the above is tinfoil hat shit: Okay, then the Governments job in this situation would be to defer to experts and figure out public policies that would keep people safe. Which we did, kind of, for awhile. But like if public opinion is screeching so loud for lockdowns to end, the government should fucking say NO. That's their JOB.
Again, “People I disagree with have no agency” is a really unfortunate cognitive failure mode.
GP didn't say that, though.
Agency isn't some magical axiomatic property where if you exercise it you're the sole contributing factor to your actions. Exercising agency, like making any other choice, is a decision whose inputs include your circumstances, history, etc.
Consider someone who quit smoking cigarettes in the 1950s. That was a time when cigarette smoking was common and not widely considered unhealthy. That person exercised agency. Now consider someone who quit in the 2020s, when cigarette smoking is widely warned against. That person exercised agency, too. More people quit smoking in the 2020s than the 1950s, by any measure. Does that mean people had less agency in the 1950s? No, it means the inputs to their decision-making on how to exercise their agency were different.
Agency occurs in individuals who operate within systems and Americans are some of the most propagandized people on the face of the Earth, and some of the worst educated in the global north. Average reading level is 6th grade. Critical thinking is in the shitter. "I did my own research" is specifically a cultural meme describing how piss poor Americans and many other overseas in the same global north are at both obtaining rigorous sourced information and using it to make decisions. COVID was a demonstration of all of these issues brought to a scale where it became impossible to ignore.
I blame systems more than people because systems should know better, and they largely did, but their ability to act has been hamstrung by one of our political parties holding the line on the notion that "Freedom" means ignorant dipshits with ignorant dipshit opinions should get to weigh in with equal credibility to people who actually understand things, which is a large part of why our government can no longer function apart from passing more fucking tax breaks for people who don't need them while our infrastructure rots and the wife of the owner of WWE dismantles the department of education.
The main reason I don't buy "agency" here is because ultimately the agency of covidiots shouldn't have been a factor either way. We have law enforcement supposedly, I'm told, to ensure the safety of the public. So do it then. Nations the world over that would be characterized as "free" managed to restrict the flow of people and goods in such a way to ensure safety much, much better than we did. Saying "well the people wanted lockdown to end" is fucking pathetic excuse-making on the part of the powerful. Of course people wanted lockdowns to end, they fucking sucked. I too missed restaurants. I too missed shopping. I too missed haircuts. But if it wasn't time yet it wasn't time, and when it was time should've been determined by people in the health sciences who study pandemics, not dipshits from flyover states.
I'm genuinely sorry that a huge chunk of our populace that lives in places with poor economic opportunities and low social mobility get their fee fees hurt when people who study shit for a living say "you're wrong about this" but that's simply a lower-tier issue than the broad strokes health of the country. If the mere notion that someone else who you may not respect knows more than you and is therefore being asked before you sends you into a mental health spiral, may I suggest therapy?