Also, plastic is looking far worse now than twenty years ago though I think the net is quite complicated and therefore ambiguous at the moment.
There is an ongoing discussion about “forever chemicals” and, again, not unambiguous but the balance seems to be tilting toward them being a bad idea.
I’m not personally seeing much of a dividend from nuclear weapons given how difficult nuclear power turns out to be under capitalism in practice. But I suppose it gets a pass because otherwise my father might have died in a land war.
Remains to be seen what the net will be on oil but I’ll happy speculate that if you consider a sufficiently long timeline that one turns out bad too.
I’m still pretty mad about the “food pyramid” but I can’t offer any particular study that tries to quantify its role in the decline of american health outcomes. Certainly modern food processing techniques look like a slow moving disaster but it’s really hard to sort
our cause and effect.
Social media was neat for a few years but I would consider it a net negative.
CFCs, PFAS, BPA, phthalates, thalidomide, leaches, bloodletting, lobotomies, pretty much the entire history of mental health treatment, hydrogen airships, vermillion pigment, mercury felt stabilizer, radium water... If I were feeling particularly spicy I might even suggest things like weapons research, communism, or suburbia.
How bad actually are hydrogen airships? At this point trying to make tiltrotors any safer is not working out, so airships could be better. Though, if you have a real airport, passenger jets are unbeatably safe.
Fair point! Probably should have left them off. Despite the rather famous failing, they've had a lot of utility, and the technology is still in use today. (I think there's at least one YCombinator startup using hydrogen airships.)
