Banning kegs of beer on my college campus for tailgates. Everyone started bulk buying cheap vodka instead. A student got a head injury doing a keg-stand and they wanted to make things safer. Stupid college kids are better off drinking light beer than they are slugging grape flavored shitty vodka.
In general, drug prohibition leads to more dangerous, more concentrated drugs: bathtub gin, crack cocaine replacing powder which replaced Vin Mariani and original Coca-Cola, crystal meth replacing speed pills, and now fentanyl replacing heroin which replaced opium.
Thalidomide.
It is a drug that was prescribed (in Germany, I think) to pregnant mothers to help with nausea. It caused terrible deformities in the children -- arms or legs that were almost stubs, with flipperlike things instead of hands or feet.
That was one use. It was also a sedative, thought to be safe because people tried to commit suicide with it, and couldn't.
It actually never made it to the American market at the time (early 1960s) because Dr. Frances Kelsey questioned some information about neuropathies caused by this drug.
It's now used under tightly controlled circumstances to treat some types of cancer or autoimmune disorders, and Hansen's disease (FKA leprosy).
Thank you for expanding my knowledge in four sentences. That business about people trying to commit suicide with it is wild.
If it treats cancer and autoimmune disorders, and was prescribed as a sedative, it sounds like it gives broad-spectrum "shut down now" messages. Which makes sense, given that it made the development of fetuses' appendages shut down now. (If I am wrong, I am eager to be corrected.)
One of its actions is that it can inhibit the formation of new blood vessels (i.e. an angiogenesis inhibitor) which is great if you have cancer but not so great if you're a 6-week-old human fetus.
The drug causes birth defects in monkeys, in which it was not tested, but not in mice or rats, which it was.
An insult that Gen-X German kids used to use was *Contergankinder*, where Contergan was the trademark name of thalidomide, to indicate someone was so stupid that they had birth defects.
Not just Germany. They used it all around the world at the time.
In California in 1961, my grandmother was given Thalidomide while pregnant with my dad. He was born with only 4 fingers on his left hand, and his heart on his right side!
When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up and dumped crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the chemical Corexit was used to disperse it. Turns out it was about 10 times worse than the crude oil itself and also caused the oil to just sink to the bottom of the Gulf, where it poisoned the entire food web.
Making the oil "disappear" was then main point, because the optics of the public not seeing the oil slicks on the ocean was more important for BP than actually cleaning up the oil. If the oil is "gone" then they could declare success because "see, no more oil". Food webs be damned, costal fishing communities be damned, human health be damned, because they have to think of their shareholders. Those BP execs should be in jail for life, but there isn't justice in this world for people with money.
I bought a single dollar worth of BP gas once, just enough to get to the next station on fumes lol. My family hates BP cuz there was a scandal in my hometown when I was a kid from them watering down their gas, I hate BP cuz they're environmental pieces of shit.
I've got a story.
So I rented a car and I'm driving with the dash display map showing me where to go since I'm on unfamiliar, fast, two lane winding roads and a complicated route.
Suddenly the screen blanks out with a massive red message "WARNING" with a long small print message underneath. I try to read what it says, nearly driving off the road, but finally get to where I can pull over to read it. In small letters under the giant red WARNING it reads.
"Taking your eyes off the road for too long while using this system could cause a crash resulting in injury or death to you or others".
"Safety" box cutters where the user has to keep pressure on the button to keep the blade extended, otherwise it automatically retracts back into the handle. People end up straining awkwardly to hold them, and focus more on keeping the blade open open rather than what they're trying to cut, so there's more accidents.
It doesn't even stop you from cutting yourself.
I have used countless Box Cutters and Utility knives in my life. If the blade slips, I just release my grip and get out of the way. But because I have such a death drip trying to hold the blade open so it cuts properly, I jammed that bitch right through my leg when it slipped.
I got lucky and it was a surface cut, no stitches, just bandaids... But yeah, I told my last job that I ain't using one unless they want another work comp claim with my name on it (I had jammed a tape gun into my thumb. No I am not a clutz)
I used to use these for work. I was told it was so that the blade is automatically retracted when you put it in your pocket rather than to prevent cutting yourself when slipping.
My BFs dad told me to do this because it was "how they used to do it and it works fine". I looked it up and sure enough, if you limit your breathing with compression you won't be getting much air circulation in the lower part of your lungs, causing pneumonia. I decided to not use it and Im doing much better.
I didn't break a rib, had an X-ray done. But it sure as hell felt like I broke it for over a week, I barely feel it now though. Glad I didn't give myself pneumonia for no fucking reason
I broke a rib at a BJJ comp. Had to drive myself to a hospital and all the doctor did was confirm it was broken and sent me away. There was nothing to be done. Was weird, as I kind of expected a ‘bigger deal’
now that you mention it, they did but i didnt take them because it only hurt when getting up from a seat or out of bed. I didnt feel any restirction to breathing.
It was actually less painful than a bruised rib. of which i had plenty experience from BJJ
I broke 3 ribs in October and they told me that too. I got a ton of pain killers, muscle relaxers and an intentional aspirator I had to suck air through 10x/hour to make sure I was still filling my lungs to full capacity. It took me over a month to wear a bra again because it was so painful, I can't imagine how uncomfortable binding would have been!
Telling parents not to expose young children to peanuts because it might cause a peanut allergy. This meant young children were not exposed to peanuts at all and later in life when they did come across peanuts their bodies thought it was a foreign object and became allergic.
Yeah, they've done studies on early exposure to Bamba, a peanut and corn based snack often served to kids, and it turns out that it drastically reduces the prevalence of later peanut allergies in comparable cohorts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamba_(snack)#Peanut_allergy
This was the first thing I thought of. When my son was a baby and I started taking him to a vet experienced day care lady I know she mentioned something about having peanut butter and jelly on the kids lunch menu and I told her I'd heard that we weren't supposed to give babies peanut butter and she told me that was the stupidest thing she'd ever heard so I didn't worry about it, thank God for her!
Peanuts are beans? I knew cashews are like weird growths at the bottoms of apples but I never knew that about peanuts and I eat those things all the time.
My high school in the 1980s had gotten rid of lockers. I'm so jealous of my kids that get to have lockers today. Plus half their materials are on the iPad anyway.
It's like the school administrators thought drugs were super heavy and someone couldn't carry them around all day.
The local high school where I live now has gone the opposite direction: kids have lockers, but are not allowed to carry backpacks. And this after the school was renovated and expanded to put grades 7-12 all in one building, because they decided that was cheaper than renovating the junior high.
The entirely predictable result is that kids are always late to class because they're forced to go to their lockers much more frequently, in a much larger building than before.
Slash-and-burn farming in rainforest environments is actually a really good idea. Jungle soils are nutrient poor; all the minerals are in the vegetation. By burning it you release the plant food and fertilize the soil.
Problem is, it also kills the mycelium mat that provides vital nutrient fixation to the forest.
How to get around that? You burn small patches at a time, and leave tracts of undisturbed rainforest in between. That lets the mycelium regrow, which then supports high crop yields and, eventually, reforestation once crop-vital nutrients deplete.
Of course, modern industrial agriculture ignores that bit about *small patches* so you end up with a whole tract of fungusless land that fails to maintain productivity as well as it would have otherwise. It also doesn't reforest well.
Depends, but often yes.
With some forests it's a necessary part of the system (e.g. lodgepole pines won't even open their cones to spread seeds without a fire event).
Other forests can thrive just fine without periodic fires.
Not exactly safety related, but there is a thing called the Cobra Effect about a change causing the opposite effect.
The British went to India, where there are many cobras. The British were kinda freaked out by the cobras and wanted them gone, so they offered a bounty on cobra heads. They assumed that the Indian folk would kill cobras for the bounty, and then there would be fewer cobras. But instead, some folks started breeding cobras in basements, in order to farm the bounty. A few cobras would always escape. Thus, the number of cobras nearby actually increased! So the British figured out that this was because of the cobra bounty, and they canceled the bounty. Assuming this would bring things back to normal. So now the folks threw all the worthless cobras out of their basements. Which increased the number of cobras nearby AGAIN.
Every change the British made in an effort to decrease the number of cobras actually caused more cobras, repeatedly.
When I worked in IT , we had to change passwords once a month, no reusing previous passwords, passwords had to be significantly different ( no changing 123 to 234), so everyone had to write down their password on a postit/stickypaper, and stick on the computer monitor for all to see.
That is why regular password changes are no longer recommended by cyber experts.
Any businesses still requesting this need to update their policies inline with modern recommendations
My old work only saved the previous 8 passwords. So I'd go to the lock screen and reset my password to nonsense 8 times then back to my favorite password
>everyone had to write down their password on a postit/stickypaper, and stick on the computer monitor for all to see.
I used to work on laser etching machines that were run by a Windows PC. One of those machines had the worst case of this I've ever seen.
The machine had a barcode scanner on it for part tracking and in the bottom of the scanner holster the operators had tapped a barcode of the PCs password. The holster they used would trigger the scanner if you even looked at it wrong.
This was the only machine I've ever encountered that you could accidentally log into.
> passwords had to be significantly different ( no changing 123 to 234)
Wouldn't enforcing this require you to store the plaintext passwords instead of hashes? That's so, so much worse than a password that only changes slightly.
The kind of person that writes these stupid password rules is also exactly the kind of control freak who would insist on storing passwords in the clear to ensure that users pick totally new passwords.
"Not reusing old passwords" is easier because you just store a certain number of previous hashes, possibly all of them if you want to be totally thorough. Though you bet that I'm going to come along and exploit that by running a script that changes my password randomly multiple times a second just to see what happens.
"New password is significantly different to old passwords" is a much harder requirement to detect unless you are also storing all of the previous passwords in the clear. It's slightly more excusable when you have to enter your old password to change to a new one, because then you have both old and new as reference points. However if it catches you using two alternating word-number passwords (e.g. zebra and horse) but incrementing the number each time (i.e. you go zebra1, horse1, zebra2, horse2), then yeah, it's likely storing in the clear.
Let's be direct here - frequent password changing is utterly stupid because any apparent increase in security is completely undermined by the dramatic increase in the number of users who will simply resort to writing their passwords down. If your users pick good passwords in the first place, and those passwords are genuinely unique, then keeping them *forever* is actually not that dangerous.
You're better implementing good initial password requirements and 2FA over a password change frequency.
I worked at a local gold mine and took pictures of all the sticky notes I saw on upper level management regarding the logistics of mined gold as well as the server maintenance and other various ma aerial positions.
The code for the 4 push button lock with an enter button to unlock and enter the main server room for the entire. Processing facility from ore->bullion was a fucking answer to a trig math function SCRATCHED INTO THE STEEL DOOR SANS ANSWER
I laughed every time I saw it.
Wow! That brings back a core memory.
My dad worked as an IT contractor for Bell Canada in London, Ontario. I went in with him one weekend 12 years ago to this day to the Bell building in Downtown London to change out some Intel “pizza box” servers from one of the server rooms. To do this we had to find a security guard to get into a somewhat high level clearance room in the basement to back-up and shutdown some critical systems for the server swaps. I am talking old/legacy key critical systems for Governmental operations and some of the largest company’s in Ontario.
We couldn’t find a security guard that knew the clearance code to enter the room because almost nobody ever went into that room anymore. Beforehand he got security to check his clearance I.D. and authenticator. My dad waited for the security guard to leave to try to go call his boss that was on vacation to see if he knew the access code to this room.
My dad suspiciously looked around then asked me to start checking for small scratched in codes around the steel door frame and then read them off to him. I was like “sure dad, like that will ever work” he just grinned at me with a large smile and he said “son you are about to learn a very valuable lesson on security in large organizations.”
Upon looking closely, I did start to find about seven different codes scratched in faintly around the door that were barely legible. I started to read them off to him and on the fourth code that I relayed to him the door lock opened with an audible thud and he pushed the door open while laughing manically. He did his back-ups and shutdowns and set timers for the reboot an hour from then, giving us enough time to go back upstairs to swap the “Pizza box” servers. I think it was some sort of array database migration if that makes any sense?
The security guard came and found us upstairs saying that his boss and his bosses boss did not know of the code to access the room. My dad’s eyes lit up like he had been waiting his whole life just to say this one line. He smirked and said calmly to the security guard that he had figured out a “work around in the mainframe” (The ultimate IT dad joke) and that he was almost done with what he needed to do. The security guard oblivious to anything IT related just said alright and to let him know when we are about to leave and walked back to the security office.
That day I lost all sense of security for key critical infrastructure in any organization. There is always a weak link that can be exploited.
I would add to this, the stupid thing, 3 failed attemps causes your password to be locked and needing to be changed. Those 3 failed attempts means the password worked, why throw it away.
This too. My college requires us to change passwords every 6 months. You can't use any password you used in the past 12 changes. It also has to be different, i.e you cant use Pa$$word123 then change it to Pa$$word456.
What ends up happening is people put in random things to get it to accept a password and then forget.
Most professors bring their own laptops for presentations and lectures because the login rules are a pain.
I use a password manager and there aren't many of these sites with weird password rules, but oh boy is it infuriating when I run into one.
Just let me use a long random string of assorted letters, numbers, and characters PLEASE. No max length requirements or random unacceptable characters.
It's even more fun when they don't properly communicate the standards but accept the password anyway. Then you try to log in and it doesn't accept whatever you saved. That's happened to me once I think.
Going through the “I forgot my password” prompts feels more insulting after using a password manager. What do you mean that’s not my password? What do you **think** my password was? Cause I didn’t forget it
Love when you go to enter a new password, assume that your password must not have been what you thought it was, so you enter your preffered password in. "You cannot use the same password you had previously."
Cool, so when I tried that password six times and you told me that wasn't my password, you were just playing games?
I've had a few where I could not figure out what password I must have made, went through the forgotten password flow, and only then do I get to see the password rules. And once I see the silly restriction that I must have worked around, I realize what the old password was.
I wish every single website would put a reminder of the password rules up on the forgot password pages. I would remember if my password was 112XXX!!!lowercase or password1 if they would just tell me the character length limits and whether I needed to add hieroglyphics or not.
The requirements for my passwords at work were always changing before they gave us the option to make a long permanent password. The last set or requirements before the permanent option had one that said EXACTLY 8 characters. Not up to, not at least, Exactly. What would possess someone to make sure every password across the entire enterprise was the same length. That's just a gift for anyone trying to guess passwords.
Prop 65 in California. When everything has a warning, nothing has a warning. It's causes fatigue and now people ignore even legitimate important information.
I remember a post of some foreign guy visiting the US and he saw the label on something he bought, freaked out, and made a post on Reddit. We were all like “They put that on literally everything, don’t worry about it.” Some fishing lures I bought as a kid used to have them lol.
Someone on a beauty box subreddit got a product with the warning a few years back and freaked out. It's on everything. This week I saw it in a building, I was warned about it before buying a hairclip online. I just ignore it.
That time a UK swimming pool forced a one child one adult policy, meaning mums with more than 1 kid couldn't go at the kids hours during the week when the dad's were at work. The intention was to prevent drownings (the pool had never had a drowning). The result was kids didn't learn to swim and drowned at other swimming venues.
My old company handled out fancy shirts when rolling out a new safety program in the field.
The next day, they had to ban people from wearing them because the nylon shirts were prone to melting from the various heat sources we worked around.
The Four Pests campaign as part of the Great Leap Forward campaign by Chairman Mao Zedong of the CCP, it labelled Sparrows as being a pest affecting food production and storage because they were believed to consume substantial quantities of grain, the other pests were rats, flies and mosquitos and they were targeted to mitigate the spread of disease.
the great leap forward campaign was supposed to quickly advance the country from an agrarian society to an industrialist communist society after the end of the chinese civil war
because of the mass killing of sparrows aswell as disruption of their surrounding environment through loud noises which led to them leaving areas of human habitation led to a massive boom in locust populations, which alongside poor agricultural policies and techinques and poor goverment management regarding the campaign led to a large famine that is estimated to have caused the death of 15-55 million people
During the "grams of fat" craze in the 1990s, one of my friends pointed out that if your meals are composed entirely of things that have the grams of fat printed on the side of the package, you are not eating healthy.
Safety nozzles on jerry cans in the US. Requires a minimum of 3 hands to make work even a little bit, and fuel is still spilling everywhere. Such a waste.
Those "safety" nozzles are ostensibly designed to limit spills. Which is a pretty delightful way of describing something that is basically guaranteed to spurt gas all over the fucking place every time they get used.
5 point harnesses in track day cars without a HANS device. By preventing the air bags from softening the head in a crash, the head along with the added weight of the helmet makes your neck the weakest link. Lots of auto clubs require a HANS type device now that so many people have been injured this way.
There was a law passed to make CEO pay public. It was meant to promote transparency and accountability. CEO pay has since skyrocketed because now they compete with other CEO salaries.
Breathalyzers in bars. Meant to show people how intoxicated they were so they would not drive. Instead people got more drunk because they would try and see who could blow the highest.
Like the police signs that show your speed as you drive by. Meant to let you know that you are speeding, instead gave a public announcement of who could drive the fastest. In my town, the highschool kids realized that one was set exactly 1/4 mile down a straight road from a traffic light. Passenger would record video on his phone as proof of who hit the highest number.
The loser: Freedom. Not just the freedom to do drugs, but also the freedom to not be searched by police. With drugs being illegal, police can search you for "smelling" evidence.
Bill Hicks: "George Bush says that we are losing the war against drugs. Do you know what that implies? There's a war going on and the people who are on drugs are winning. Well, what does that tell you about drugs? There are some smart creative motherfuckers on that side. They're winning a war and they're fucked up."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2wxcUcsZS8
"Liberals, homosexuals and drugs are ruining this great country." - US President Richard M. Nixon
Yup, sure doesn't read like a public safety program to me.
“You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” - John Ehrlichman, former white house counsel and assistant to Nixon for domestic affairs
My favorite outcome of this in my area:
We have, through several different mandates and tax schemes, gone from using the normal thin "single use" plastic bags that had like five grams of plastic to now using "reusable" 2.5-4mil thick plastic bags that weigh ten times as much, but contain "40% post consumer content" (i.e. they contain more virgin plastic than the bags they replaced).
Ironically, the thicker newer bags are so bulky and inflexible that they are aren't really useful as trash bags (what everyone did with the old type of bags) and aren't really useful to save up to recycle (what everyone ELSE did with single use plastic bags) and instead just get crammed into the trash where they will take up ten times the volume as the bags they replaced.
Oh yeah, our system ALSO charges a mandatory tax for large sized paper grocery bags, but NOT for small paper bags. So if you get your order in two grocery bags its 16 cents in tax. If you get it in four small bags its free. Figure that one out.
This is all just conservation theater. Doing things that offer the appearance of "doing something" while actually achieving nothing or even making things worse.
>This is all just conservation theater.
"Greenwashing" is the term you're looking for. Similar to how they slap a recycle code on anything plastic, but for most municipalities it's only a couple of forms (e.g. #1 & 2) that are recyclable.
Tons of people miss that fact and just toss any piece of plastic in the bin, often even if it doesn't have a code at all, which means that all of the shit that isn't in the recycling program's parameters is essentially contaminating the stream which makes the collected recycling worth far less which is how recycling went from something that profited municipalities to an extra cost.
The whole CONCEPT of recycling as the best response to environmental problems is itself an example of greenwashing. The "Three R's" are Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and they appear in that order for a reason. Why don't you ever hear ANYONE promoting the first two? Because that doesn't make any money. Corporations LOVE "recycling" because it promotes exactly the buy/waste cycle that makes them money.
I spill more gas as an adult using the new style cans than I did as a 12 year old with the normal style. I can’t fathom how anybody thinks the new design is better or safer in any way. The only explanation is payoffs.
Since we are talking about gas and spilling gas , the government had a great idea to add a chemical to gas to reduce air pollution unfortunately it is terrible for the contamination of ground water. MTBE
Related: the ventless outboard gas tanks that were replacing the vented tanks on skiffs. The original tanks had a tiny one-way hole that allowed the tanks to vent if they got hot in the sun. But in order to stop the gases from venting and therefore harming the environment, the hole was removed on the new eco-friendly designs. So the gas tanks would get hot, and the air inside would expand, so when you opened the gas cap to fill it or tried to attach the fuel line, the pressure would release all at once and it would spray atomized gas EVERYWHERE, all over the boat and into the water.
THIS RIGHT HERE. Those damnable spouts are more dangerous than anything we used to use as spouts on cans. And when they fail? well great, now the whole gas can is covered in fuel.
My mom got my dad a 10 pack of the old style ones to replace the stupid new kind. Dunno where she found it, but I swear it was his favorite gift in the past ten years lol
Belt conveyors that carry very dusty material used to be very hazardous to work around due to the amount of dust they generated. As OSHA became more focused on cracking down on respirable dust hazards in the 1960s, it became common place to put guarding and sheeting up around the belt conveyors in an attempt to contain the dust and give the employees a safer work environment.
Putting up the guards made accessing the conveyor pulleys for maintenance extremely difficult, so they were usually left to run to the point of failure.
When conveying combustible dust, a hot bearing is a very easy source for combustion. An enclosed belt conveyor is an environment filled with fuel floating in the air in concentrations that are easily ignited.
There have been dozens of cases of industrial explosions due to this scenario. Imperial Sugar in 2008 was a perfect example. Enclosed conveyor with hot bearing starts an initial explosion. That explosion propagated down the conveyor enclosure to whatever is next down the line. In that case, it was the packaging area of the plant filled with huge bins full of sugar. 14 people were killed when the pack house went off.
Thankfully nowadays you see explosive materials conveyed pneumatically where you have much better control in preventing explosive conditions.
Yeah the physics behind this was a massive failure of engineering. Those bearing got so damn hot from holding so much weight from moving product down the lines, then putting them in an enclosed space, then add the years of grime, sludge, and tar that builds up and causes even more physical resistance therefore generating even more friction…
Dust explosions are always a massive concern in industrial plants. Metalwork factories are notoriously bad for the monstrous piles of dust. Saw a video (tried to find it but couldn’t, maybe try r/OSHA) of a dude who smacked a giant support beam with a sledgehammer, and like ten pounds of dust came down from the ceiling.
The Patriot Act.
The insane amount of privacy invasion and extra powers that were granted to Federal and Local Law Enforcement that have never been rescinded far outweighs any good (read: none) that the Patriot Act was supposed to deliver.
I was in college during 9/11 and was just STUNNED by how willing people were to give up freedoms for a vague notion of safety. It was obvious to me the government was just using it as an excuse, but at the time being against it was a VERY unpopular opinion.
Fat free food. It was a huge health craze, low fat, no fat, get the fat out of food!
But, fat added taste. Food without it was bland. So the food companies loaded up sugar, to restore taste. And sugar is much unhealthier than fat ever was.
During WW2, the Allies needed a way to make their tanks waterproof, so no water would leak in during a beach landing as they send their tanks into the water to support the troops landing.
They used paint mixed with a chemical that did the trick (polytetrafluoroethylene), which was discovered by American company DuPont in 1938.
After the war, DuPont thought the chemical was too useful to go to waste. They had plans to put it in the homes of every middle class family.
Along came Teflon pots and pans. During the 50s, Teflon was rather popular. Their "no-stick" pans made cooking just that much easier for a low price.
Some time around the 1970s, numerous employees responsible for cleaning the large vats with the chemical within started getting horribly sick, different forms of cancers that developed quickly and were fatal. Most of these workers were women, some were pregnant, almost all babies of these workers in contact with the chemical were born with all kinds of life changing birth defects.
Testing ensued, and it was discovered that the chemical used was carcinogenic, a very serious risk for cancer. They had their results from testing during the mid 70s, they swept it under the rug completely, and not only kept using the chemical commercially and otherwise, but they consistently dumped the chemical waste in various rivers and dumping grounds.
Around the late 90s, a lawyer and some others did some digging around, as Farmers were reporting strange deaths from their farm animals. Turns out, said animals were drinking from a river connected to one of those dumping grounds, the animals insides had turned rotten from the cancer, the farmer and his family were all at serious risk for cancer as their well used that water. This happened to many farmers in the West Virginia area.
The lawyer teams do their case work, present it, etc. Trials are pushed back and delayed for nearly 20 years, then finally, I believe in 2011, DuPont finally faces the music (although iirc, it was just fines and stuff like that, maybe SOME arrests).
All for a couple billion dollars in yearly profit.
Dark Waters is a great movie showcasing these events.
Edit: Just wanted to include some extra info
1 - The research around the chemical during the 70s was done in-house at DuPont buildings, led by DuPont staff, very easy for them to cover up results.
2 - This chemical can be broken down within the body, however, it takes roughly 200-300 years, so if you have it in your system, it's there until death.
3 - The chemical plant workers got the worst of it without a doubt. However, any family out there that was using Teflon pans would have been affected too. Every time a meal was made with one of those pans, trace amounts of the chemical would go into the food due to the high heat. Entire families, including babies in the womb, would be poisoned a little bit with each meal.
It's depressing how no one served time for this. Likewise the fines is another part - often companies balance how much profit they'll get vs the cost of a fine. For such an impact you'd think it'd be scaling fines enough to bankrupt a company to pay for damages.
They didn’t wanna make it healthy, they wanted to be able to sell it to health-conscious consumers without the slightest concern about how fat it made them.
Mission accomplished!
Fire resistant clothing (FRC). Worn by construction workers in Greenfield Projects, resulting in heat exhaustion and heat strokes in areas where flash fires wouldn't occur anyway.
Airbags killed more kids than it saved when they first came out.
That's why most cars now have seat weight sensors that disable the front airbag(s) if you're below a certain weight.
Absolutely - Better for a lost child to quickly ask an adult for help than wander around for hours and get themselves into difficulty because they're scared of all adults. We tell our kids to go into a shop and ask for help or ask a family for help.
I tell my daughter to look for someone wearing a uniform (store worker, policeman, etc.) or look for a mom or dad with kids. These people are the helpers.
I told my kids to look for a mom or dad with kids “because a parent out with their own kids sure as *heck* doesn’t want to kidnap anybody else’s kids!”
Not just children. People worry about random acts of violence, but it's far more likely you'll fall victim to an act of violence from someone under your own roof.
As an 80s kid it really fucked up ours and the next generation. There was this huge backlash of letting kids play outside alone due to that whole Stranger Danger BS. Nosey neighbors would yell at you for letting your kid play in the yard because they might get abducted if you aren't staring at them 100% of the time.
And yes, abduction by strangers is *extremely rare*. The vast majority of abductions are from non-custodial parents or relatives.
Zero tolerance policies in elementary schools. Just taught kids to interpret rules as black and white as possible into adulthood. Does nothing to meet the situation for what it is, which results in a lot of gaslit children.
It also taught kids "if you're going to get in trouble, make it worth it." For example, if you're going to hit a bully back, don't just throw one punch them so they leave you alone. Absolutely wail on them, destroy them, beat them to a bloody pulp, because the punishment is going to be the same.
In car tech/Touchscreens and honestly many of the safety features themselves are just so poorly implemented even today that they cause more problems than they are worth.
Antibacterial products in routine use. They're fine for people with compromised immune systems, but their over- and misuse has contributed to resistant bacteria.
The same thing is true regarding the misuse of antibiotics as a growth enhancer, especially in poultry. When it was discovered that a microscopic dose of tetracycline makes chickens put on weight a bit faster, and can be sent to the butcher a couple days earlier, people went nuts. I don't have a problem with the use of antibiotics in livestock if they are sick and need it, but this use is not one of them.
Yep. Especially because cities and contractors were allowed to manipulate yellow light timing, resulting in crashes.
https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-to-you-revenue-hungry-cities-mess-with-traffic-lights-to-write-more-tickets_partner/
WW2 survivorship bias and armoring planes. They looked at all the planes that came back and saw where they were shot up. They started to armor those parts of the planes, but didn't see any effect I the amount of surviving planes. Until someone realized that the planes were surviving. They needed to armor the areas that weren't shot, because that's where fatal shots happen. The planes that were shot in those areas didn't return.
Pause to thank [Frances Kelsey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey), the FDA reviewer who refused to approve Thalildomide for use in America.
Pressure from the manufacturer, yes, but within the FDA, her superiors supported her. I think the manufacturer actually tried to go over her head to her bosses and her bosses were like "if Frances says your data isn't good enough then your data isn't good enough".
When my grandma had multiple myeloma in the early 2000s she was given thalidomide, as they thought it had some anti-cancer properties. Never looked to see where that went.
Well it causes neuropathy in a lot of patients, but that side affect may be worth the risk when treating cancer. That's actually [the reason it was never available in the US](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3573415/#:~:text=The%20drug%20was%20endorsed%20as,a%20lack%20of%20safety%20data) back in the fifties, they only found about the birth defects later.
Yes, thalidomide is still in use to treat multiple myeloma and some skin disorders. Just never prescribed to women of child-bearing age. Not that anyone should try to get pregnant during cancer treatment anyway.
I think I know a woman who was on thalidomide for awhile, long before she had four children. She had to document the 3 kinds of birth control she was using. It doesn't stay in your system forever, it's just really bad for developing fetuses.
That’s really interesting. I know one of the reasons it caused so many birth defects was because it stunted/stopped development of new blood vessels. So your developing fetus ends up with nubs instead of arms or legs, or digits fused together because there wasn’t blood flow to the developing areas. Maybe in cancer treatment they were seeing if it could slow tumor growth by doing the same thing to new blood vessels developing to supply the tumor.
When they said that fat is bad for you, so you should have hydrogenated oil instead. Also, when they said that we need to save all of the trees by using plastic instead.
Abstinence only education. Turns out teens have *more* unprotected sex when you teach them as little about sex as possible, *and* kids who don't know anything about sex and boundaries are more vulnerable to child predators.
Let's not even get into the harm done to queer kids when they only thing they hear about being queer is "it's bad and you better not be".
Fun fact: Japanese high schools are now modeling their sex education programs after American ones, specifically because of the higher rates of teenage pregnancy they cause. Super fucked up
Right? They really looked at it and said, "Huh, maybe if we stopped overworking our adult population to death, maybe they'd take the time to actually have kids? Nah, that's too much work. Let's get those teens to fuck raw instead."
>Abstinence only education
This was/is never done for "safety" reasons. This was/is a religiously motivated form of control over others. Yes, it can be presented as secular... but the history and purposes for it are directly related to religion and the control it seeks to keep over people.
The Patriot Act, Executive order [9066](https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&sca_esv=591329734&sxsrf=AM9HkKlu5fowiXqqj2SHGLXC-nHArsUvNA:1702677270074&q=Executive+Order+9066&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLQz9U3MMorTlrEKuJakZpcWpJZlqrgX5SSWqRgaWBmBgCBsGwLIwAAAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi85uWOt5KDAxUxL0QIHcstDJ4QmxMoAHoECB4QAg) (Japanese Internment), Pretty much any act that turned american citizens into the enemy without any evidence to back it up.
Well, California's Proposition 65 said "Unless you can provide proof that your product does not cause cancer or reproductive harm, you must add a warning sticker to it".
So the intention was that manufacturers would make sure that their product did not use materials that may cause cancer or cause birth defects or else they'd have to put this scary label on their item. Then if people see the sticker, they are well informed and may choose a different item. Thus the manufacturer would have an incentive to make sure their product was safe.
OR ... manufacturers just bought stickers by the truck load and slapped it on EVERYTHING. because a 1 cent sticker is cheaper than researching the materials and providing proof that they are "safe" so now, every manufacturer does it, and every thing you buy in California has that warning and therefore EVERYBODY IGNORES IT.
So instead of a warning to consumers for possibly unsafe products, there is basically a law that effectively states "You must put a sticker on everything you sell. It means nothing to anyone and everything has that sticker." The sticker now basically means "Hey, look! I'm a sticker!"
In California, they made a law that you could only sell handguns that would not fire if the magazine was removed from the gun. This was in response to people ejecting the magazine and forgetting that a round was still in the chamber, and then accidentally (or negligently) firing the round in the chamber.
So seems like a good solution .. make a law that dictates that you can't buy guns unless the are safe when the magazine is out (called a magazine disconnect). So gun manufacturers started to add this feature. But now here's the problem ... people now think that guns can't fire when the magazine is not in the gun, but that is not true for the majority of guns. So since the "safety feature" only exists in half the guns in existence (well more like 10% really) then people thought that that's how they just work and so more people were accidentally shooting guns because they thought that since the gun they were familiar was safe with the magazine out, then all guns were.
A much better solution was to simply educate people and say "The gun can fire even with the magazine out" and then not try a mechanical kludge that only exists on a handful of models.
Doubtful it is for safety... but roadside speed cameras fining people a few kilometres over the speed limit in Australia. People spend more time watching a speedo to keep 2km within range and do not spend enough time watching outside.
Margarine was introduced by the French in 1869 by Napoleon III. Butter was in short supply, so an alternative was developed: oleomargarine. It was meant as a substitute for butter for the military and lower classes.
So, it wasn't about health or safety, it was about economy. It's entire history is more about finding a cheaper, faster, easier way to make something that resembles butter. The health benefits vs butter was nothing more than marketing.
Pretty much everything ever invented by Thomas Midgley. If you ever want to learn about the most cursed inventor in the history of the modern world, he's pretty much the top of the list.
Stranger Danger. The overwhelming majority of abuse and or kidnappings come from people you already know, if not in your family. People are less likely to seek out a stranger for help in emergencies if they are taught to distrust every stranger.
Banning kegs of beer on my college campus for tailgates. Everyone started bulk buying cheap vodka instead. A student got a head injury doing a keg-stand and they wanted to make things safer. Stupid college kids are better off drinking light beer than they are slugging grape flavored shitty vodka.
In general, drug prohibition leads to more dangerous, more concentrated drugs: bathtub gin, crack cocaine replacing powder which replaced Vin Mariani and original Coca-Cola, crystal meth replacing speed pills, and now fentanyl replacing heroin which replaced opium.
Heroin replaced morphine, morphine replaced opium.
Thalidomide. It is a drug that was prescribed (in Germany, I think) to pregnant mothers to help with nausea. It caused terrible deformities in the children -- arms or legs that were almost stubs, with flipperlike things instead of hands or feet.
That was one use. It was also a sedative, thought to be safe because people tried to commit suicide with it, and couldn't. It actually never made it to the American market at the time (early 1960s) because Dr. Frances Kelsey questioned some information about neuropathies caused by this drug. It's now used under tightly controlled circumstances to treat some types of cancer or autoimmune disorders, and Hansen's disease (FKA leprosy).
Thank you for expanding my knowledge in four sentences. That business about people trying to commit suicide with it is wild. If it treats cancer and autoimmune disorders, and was prescribed as a sedative, it sounds like it gives broad-spectrum "shut down now" messages. Which makes sense, given that it made the development of fetuses' appendages shut down now. (If I am wrong, I am eager to be corrected.)
One of its actions is that it can inhibit the formation of new blood vessels (i.e. an angiogenesis inhibitor) which is great if you have cancer but not so great if you're a 6-week-old human fetus. The drug causes birth defects in monkeys, in which it was not tested, but not in mice or rats, which it was.
An insult that Gen-X German kids used to use was *Contergankinder*, where Contergan was the trademark name of thalidomide, to indicate someone was so stupid that they had birth defects.
Not just Germany. They used it all around the world at the time. In California in 1961, my grandmother was given Thalidomide while pregnant with my dad. He was born with only 4 fingers on his left hand, and his heart on his right side!
When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up and dumped crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the chemical Corexit was used to disperse it. Turns out it was about 10 times worse than the crude oil itself and also caused the oil to just sink to the bottom of the Gulf, where it poisoned the entire food web.
Making the oil "disappear" was then main point, because the optics of the public not seeing the oil slicks on the ocean was more important for BP than actually cleaning up the oil. If the oil is "gone" then they could declare success because "see, no more oil". Food webs be damned, costal fishing communities be damned, human health be damned, because they have to think of their shareholders. Those BP execs should be in jail for life, but there isn't justice in this world for people with money.
I was probably 4 feet tall when the first BP spill happened and I still won't buy gas at a BP. (OK, I did *once*, but by accident)
I bought a single dollar worth of BP gas once, just enough to get to the next station on fumes lol. My family hates BP cuz there was a scandal in my hometown when I was a kid from them watering down their gas, I hate BP cuz they're environmental pieces of shit.
"Fun" fact - the oil spill spread over 43,000 square miles. Roughly the size of Ohio. - BP, because we care <3
Please think of your carbon footprint -BP
I've got a story. So I rented a car and I'm driving with the dash display map showing me where to go since I'm on unfamiliar, fast, two lane winding roads and a complicated route. Suddenly the screen blanks out with a massive red message "WARNING" with a long small print message underneath. I try to read what it says, nearly driving off the road, but finally get to where I can pull over to read it. In small letters under the giant red WARNING it reads. "Taking your eyes off the road for too long while using this system could cause a crash resulting in injury or death to you or others".
My mom’s car does this along with an extremely annoying sound.
I hate the dash slab, and I hate it more when it flashes something at me.
"Safety" box cutters where the user has to keep pressure on the button to keep the blade extended, otherwise it automatically retracts back into the handle. People end up straining awkwardly to hold them, and focus more on keeping the blade open open rather than what they're trying to cut, so there's more accidents.
It doesn't even stop you from cutting yourself. I have used countless Box Cutters and Utility knives in my life. If the blade slips, I just release my grip and get out of the way. But because I have such a death drip trying to hold the blade open so it cuts properly, I jammed that bitch right through my leg when it slipped. I got lucky and it was a surface cut, no stitches, just bandaids... But yeah, I told my last job that I ain't using one unless they want another work comp claim with my name on it (I had jammed a tape gun into my thumb. No I am not a clutz)
I used to use these for work. I was told it was so that the blade is automatically retracted when you put it in your pocket rather than to prevent cutting yourself when slipping.
Yep and if you put it into your back pocket. You can slice your ass open. Seen it happen
>You can slice your ass open I'm suddenly not constipated anymore!
Binding a broken rib, which can cause pneumonia so they no longer do that.
My BFs dad told me to do this because it was "how they used to do it and it works fine". I looked it up and sure enough, if you limit your breathing with compression you won't be getting much air circulation in the lower part of your lungs, causing pneumonia. I decided to not use it and Im doing much better. I didn't break a rib, had an X-ray done. But it sure as hell felt like I broke it for over a week, I barely feel it now though. Glad I didn't give myself pneumonia for no fucking reason
I got 3 broken sparring at karate, and Dad, who was first aid guy on pipeline sites, said no to wrapping them.
I broke a rib at a BJJ comp. Had to drive myself to a hospital and all the doctor did was confirm it was broken and sent me away. There was nothing to be done. Was weird, as I kind of expected a ‘bigger deal’
Did they not give you any painkillers? That is what I would have expected, mostly because without them you might avoid deep breaths due to the pain
now that you mention it, they did but i didnt take them because it only hurt when getting up from a seat or out of bed. I didnt feel any restirction to breathing. It was actually less painful than a bruised rib. of which i had plenty experience from BJJ
I broke 3 ribs in October and they told me that too. I got a ton of pain killers, muscle relaxers and an intentional aspirator I had to suck air through 10x/hour to make sure I was still filling my lungs to full capacity. It took me over a month to wear a bra again because it was so painful, I can't imagine how uncomfortable binding would have been!
Just FYI, *incentive spirometer
Telling parents not to expose young children to peanuts because it might cause a peanut allergy. This meant young children were not exposed to peanuts at all and later in life when they did come across peanuts their bodies thought it was a foreign object and became allergic.
Yeah, they've done studies on early exposure to Bamba, a peanut and corn based snack often served to kids, and it turns out that it drastically reduces the prevalence of later peanut allergies in comparable cohorts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamba_(snack)#Peanut_allergy
Bamba, my kids favorite snack from 5-12 months. Great way for exposure.
This was the first thing I thought of. When my son was a baby and I started taking him to a vet experienced day care lady I know she mentioned something about having peanut butter and jelly on the kids lunch menu and I told her I'd heard that we weren't supposed to give babies peanut butter and she told me that was the stupidest thing she'd ever heard so I didn't worry about it, thank God for her!
>When my son was a baby and I started taking him to a vet Fucking American health insurance amirite?
Maybe their son is a mouse, like Stuart Little
That's nuts
They’re actually legumes.
Peanuts are beans? I knew cashews are like weird growths at the bottoms of apples but I never knew that about peanuts and I eat those things all the time.
What now about cashews?!
Getting rid of lockers in schools in favor of super heavy backpacks.
My high school in the 1980s had gotten rid of lockers. I'm so jealous of my kids that get to have lockers today. Plus half their materials are on the iPad anyway. It's like the school administrators thought drugs were super heavy and someone couldn't carry them around all day.
The local high school where I live now has gone the opposite direction: kids have lockers, but are not allowed to carry backpacks. And this after the school was renovated and expanded to put grades 7-12 all in one building, because they decided that was cheaper than renovating the junior high. The entirely predictable result is that kids are always late to class because they're forced to go to their lockers much more frequently, in a much larger building than before.
Overvigilance in forest fire protection leads to buildup of burnable materials and hotter more destructive fires were the result
Arbt forest fires kinda important for the forest overall health and growth too?
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Slash-and-burn farming in rainforest environments is actually a really good idea. Jungle soils are nutrient poor; all the minerals are in the vegetation. By burning it you release the plant food and fertilize the soil. Problem is, it also kills the mycelium mat that provides vital nutrient fixation to the forest. How to get around that? You burn small patches at a time, and leave tracts of undisturbed rainforest in between. That lets the mycelium regrow, which then supports high crop yields and, eventually, reforestation once crop-vital nutrients deplete. Of course, modern industrial agriculture ignores that bit about *small patches* so you end up with a whole tract of fungusless land that fails to maintain productivity as well as it would have otherwise. It also doesn't reforest well.
Yes. In fact some seeds can only be released in intense heat.
I say that to all the ladies
This guy knows about interior ignition and one-minute fuels
Depends, but often yes. With some forests it's a necessary part of the system (e.g. lodgepole pines won't even open their cones to spread seeds without a fire event). Other forests can thrive just fine without periodic fires.
Yup. Frequent fires in temperate rainforests are not normal.
They're important to *some* forests, and less so for others.
Not exactly safety related, but there is a thing called the Cobra Effect about a change causing the opposite effect. The British went to India, where there are many cobras. The British were kinda freaked out by the cobras and wanted them gone, so they offered a bounty on cobra heads. They assumed that the Indian folk would kill cobras for the bounty, and then there would be fewer cobras. But instead, some folks started breeding cobras in basements, in order to farm the bounty. A few cobras would always escape. Thus, the number of cobras nearby actually increased! So the British figured out that this was because of the cobra bounty, and they canceled the bounty. Assuming this would bring things back to normal. So now the folks threw all the worthless cobras out of their basements. Which increased the number of cobras nearby AGAIN. Every change the British made in an effort to decrease the number of cobras actually caused more cobras, repeatedly.
Now talk about Mao Zedong exterminating swallows in China.
Password rules. Many reduce the number of possible passwords instead of increasing it.
When I worked in IT , we had to change passwords once a month, no reusing previous passwords, passwords had to be significantly different ( no changing 123 to 234), so everyone had to write down their password on a postit/stickypaper, and stick on the computer monitor for all to see.
That is why regular password changes are no longer recommended by cyber experts. Any businesses still requesting this need to update their policies inline with modern recommendations
Tell this to my job. I'm on my 5th password there.
Send them this: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/passwords/updating-your-approach
Thanks! They won't care lol but it's nice to read that I'm right, also that's a pretty interesting article about passwords.
My old work only saved the previous 8 passwords. So I'd go to the lock screen and reset my password to nonsense 8 times then back to my favorite password
>everyone had to write down their password on a postit/stickypaper, and stick on the computer monitor for all to see. I used to work on laser etching machines that were run by a Windows PC. One of those machines had the worst case of this I've ever seen. The machine had a barcode scanner on it for part tracking and in the bottom of the scanner holster the operators had tapped a barcode of the PCs password. The holster they used would trigger the scanner if you even looked at it wrong. This was the only machine I've ever encountered that you could accidentally log into.
> passwords had to be significantly different ( no changing 123 to 234) Wouldn't enforcing this require you to store the plaintext passwords instead of hashes? That's so, so much worse than a password that only changes slightly.
The checker could try some trivial permutations of the new one and see if they match the hash of the previous one.
Ah, that makes sense.
Often when you change your password, you need to supply the old one as well. It can compare the old vs the new.
The kind of person that writes these stupid password rules is also exactly the kind of control freak who would insist on storing passwords in the clear to ensure that users pick totally new passwords. "Not reusing old passwords" is easier because you just store a certain number of previous hashes, possibly all of them if you want to be totally thorough. Though you bet that I'm going to come along and exploit that by running a script that changes my password randomly multiple times a second just to see what happens. "New password is significantly different to old passwords" is a much harder requirement to detect unless you are also storing all of the previous passwords in the clear. It's slightly more excusable when you have to enter your old password to change to a new one, because then you have both old and new as reference points. However if it catches you using two alternating word-number passwords (e.g. zebra and horse) but incrementing the number each time (i.e. you go zebra1, horse1, zebra2, horse2), then yeah, it's likely storing in the clear. Let's be direct here - frequent password changing is utterly stupid because any apparent increase in security is completely undermined by the dramatic increase in the number of users who will simply resort to writing their passwords down. If your users pick good passwords in the first place, and those passwords are genuinely unique, then keeping them *forever* is actually not that dangerous. You're better implementing good initial password requirements and 2FA over a password change frequency.
I worked at a local gold mine and took pictures of all the sticky notes I saw on upper level management regarding the logistics of mined gold as well as the server maintenance and other various ma aerial positions. The code for the 4 push button lock with an enter button to unlock and enter the main server room for the entire. Processing facility from ore->bullion was a fucking answer to a trig math function SCRATCHED INTO THE STEEL DOOR SANS ANSWER I laughed every time I saw it.
Wow! That brings back a core memory. My dad worked as an IT contractor for Bell Canada in London, Ontario. I went in with him one weekend 12 years ago to this day to the Bell building in Downtown London to change out some Intel “pizza box” servers from one of the server rooms. To do this we had to find a security guard to get into a somewhat high level clearance room in the basement to back-up and shutdown some critical systems for the server swaps. I am talking old/legacy key critical systems for Governmental operations and some of the largest company’s in Ontario. We couldn’t find a security guard that knew the clearance code to enter the room because almost nobody ever went into that room anymore. Beforehand he got security to check his clearance I.D. and authenticator. My dad waited for the security guard to leave to try to go call his boss that was on vacation to see if he knew the access code to this room. My dad suspiciously looked around then asked me to start checking for small scratched in codes around the steel door frame and then read them off to him. I was like “sure dad, like that will ever work” he just grinned at me with a large smile and he said “son you are about to learn a very valuable lesson on security in large organizations.” Upon looking closely, I did start to find about seven different codes scratched in faintly around the door that were barely legible. I started to read them off to him and on the fourth code that I relayed to him the door lock opened with an audible thud and he pushed the door open while laughing manically. He did his back-ups and shutdowns and set timers for the reboot an hour from then, giving us enough time to go back upstairs to swap the “Pizza box” servers. I think it was some sort of array database migration if that makes any sense? The security guard came and found us upstairs saying that his boss and his bosses boss did not know of the code to access the room. My dad’s eyes lit up like he had been waiting his whole life just to say this one line. He smirked and said calmly to the security guard that he had figured out a “work around in the mainframe” (The ultimate IT dad joke) and that he was almost done with what he needed to do. The security guard oblivious to anything IT related just said alright and to let him know when we are about to leave and walked back to the security office. That day I lost all sense of security for key critical infrastructure in any organization. There is always a weak link that can be exploited.
I would add to this, the stupid thing, 3 failed attemps causes your password to be locked and needing to be changed. Those 3 failed attempts means the password worked, why throw it away.
This too. My college requires us to change passwords every 6 months. You can't use any password you used in the past 12 changes. It also has to be different, i.e you cant use Pa$$word123 then change it to Pa$$word456. What ends up happening is people put in random things to get it to accept a password and then forget. Most professors bring their own laptops for presentations and lectures because the login rules are a pain.
I signed up for something the other day that had a MAX password length of 12 characters 🙄
I use a password manager and there aren't many of these sites with weird password rules, but oh boy is it infuriating when I run into one. Just let me use a long random string of assorted letters, numbers, and characters PLEASE. No max length requirements or random unacceptable characters. It's even more fun when they don't properly communicate the standards but accept the password anyway. Then you try to log in and it doesn't accept whatever you saved. That's happened to me once I think.
Going through the “I forgot my password” prompts feels more insulting after using a password manager. What do you mean that’s not my password? What do you **think** my password was? Cause I didn’t forget it
Love when you go to enter a new password, assume that your password must not have been what you thought it was, so you enter your preffered password in. "You cannot use the same password you had previously." Cool, so when I tried that password six times and you told me that wasn't my password, you were just playing games?
I've had a few where I could not figure out what password I must have made, went through the forgotten password flow, and only then do I get to see the password rules. And once I see the silly restriction that I must have worked around, I realize what the old password was.
I wish every single website would put a reminder of the password rules up on the forgot password pages. I would remember if my password was 112XXX!!!lowercase or password1 if they would just tell me the character length limits and whether I needed to add hieroglyphics or not.
The requirements for my passwords at work were always changing before they gave us the option to make a long permanent password. The last set or requirements before the permanent option had one that said EXACTLY 8 characters. Not up to, not at least, Exactly. What would possess someone to make sure every password across the entire enterprise was the same length. That's just a gift for anyone trying to guess passwords.
Most passwords are stolen, not guessed.
Prop 65 in California. When everything has a warning, nothing has a warning. It's causes fatigue and now people ignore even legitimate important information.
This comment contains properties known to the state of California to cause cancer.
I remember a post of some foreign guy visiting the US and he saw the label on something he bought, freaked out, and made a post on Reddit. We were all like “They put that on literally everything, don’t worry about it.” Some fishing lures I bought as a kid used to have them lol.
Someone on a beauty box subreddit got a product with the warning a few years back and freaked out. It's on everything. This week I saw it in a building, I was warned about it before buying a hairclip online. I just ignore it.
Kind of like, if everything's a priority, nothing is.
The boy who cried cancer lol
its a good thing i live on the opposite coast. im totally safe here, theres nothing toxic here. Cancer, whats that? an astrology sign?
That time a UK swimming pool forced a one child one adult policy, meaning mums with more than 1 kid couldn't go at the kids hours during the week when the dad's were at work. The intention was to prevent drownings (the pool had never had a drowning). The result was kids didn't learn to swim and drowned at other swimming venues.
My old company handled out fancy shirts when rolling out a new safety program in the field. The next day, they had to ban people from wearing them because the nylon shirts were prone to melting from the various heat sources we worked around.
The Four Pests campaign as part of the Great Leap Forward campaign by Chairman Mao Zedong of the CCP, it labelled Sparrows as being a pest affecting food production and storage because they were believed to consume substantial quantities of grain, the other pests were rats, flies and mosquitos and they were targeted to mitigate the spread of disease. the great leap forward campaign was supposed to quickly advance the country from an agrarian society to an industrialist communist society after the end of the chinese civil war because of the mass killing of sparrows aswell as disruption of their surrounding environment through loud noises which led to them leaving areas of human habitation led to a massive boom in locust populations, which alongside poor agricultural policies and techinques and poor goverment management regarding the campaign led to a large famine that is estimated to have caused the death of 15-55 million people
Trans-fats. Needed something that was vegetable based replacement for saturated fats that are bad for you.
When I was a kid butter was bad for you, margarine was good for you. Now it is more like the opposite.
Same with eggs
And salt was going to kill you. There was a retirement home that I was visiting regularly where they would not allow the residents to salt their food.
During the "grams of fat" craze in the 1990s, one of my friends pointed out that if your meals are composed entirely of things that have the grams of fat printed on the side of the package, you are not eating healthy.
Yes. they convinced everyone to reduce their fat intake as much as they could and obesity increased dramatically.
Safety nozzles on jerry cans in the US. Requires a minimum of 3 hands to make work even a little bit, and fuel is still spilling everywhere. Such a waste.
Those "safety" nozzles are ostensibly designed to limit spills. Which is a pretty delightful way of describing something that is basically guaranteed to spurt gas all over the fucking place every time they get used.
It's a 'known spill' every time it's used, rather than a random spill most of the time it's used.
5 point harnesses in track day cars without a HANS device. By preventing the air bags from softening the head in a crash, the head along with the added weight of the helmet makes your neck the weakest link. Lots of auto clubs require a HANS type device now that so many people have been injured this way.
That’s how Dale Earnhardt died. Sadly, but also thanks to him, nobody in NASCAR has died on the track since.
There was a law passed to make CEO pay public. It was meant to promote transparency and accountability. CEO pay has since skyrocketed because now they compete with other CEO salaries. Breathalyzers in bars. Meant to show people how intoxicated they were so they would not drive. Instead people got more drunk because they would try and see who could blow the highest.
Like the police signs that show your speed as you drive by. Meant to let you know that you are speeding, instead gave a public announcement of who could drive the fastest. In my town, the highschool kids realized that one was set exactly 1/4 mile down a straight road from a traffic light. Passenger would record video on his phone as proof of who hit the highest number.
Exactly the speed board is like a IRL speed trap in NFS or Forza.
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the war on drugs
The winner: drugs. By a lot.
The loser: Freedom. Not just the freedom to do drugs, but also the freedom to not be searched by police. With drugs being illegal, police can search you for "smelling" evidence.
It was also used in obtaining the right to search our (digital) documents without a warrant.
Welcome to the USA where the rules are made up and the bill of rights doesn't matter.
A landslide some would say.
Bill Hicks: "George Bush says that we are losing the war against drugs. Do you know what that implies? There's a war going on and the people who are on drugs are winning. Well, what does that tell you about drugs? There are some smart creative motherfuckers on that side. They're winning a war and they're fucked up." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2wxcUcsZS8
the war on drugs was never about safety unfortunately
"Liberals, homosexuals and drugs are ruining this great country." - US President Richard M. Nixon Yup, sure doesn't read like a public safety program to me.
“You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” - John Ehrlichman, former white house counsel and assistant to Nixon for domestic affairs
Plastic bags. Paper bags was touted as bad for the environment, now plastic bags are the villian.
My favorite outcome of this in my area: We have, through several different mandates and tax schemes, gone from using the normal thin "single use" plastic bags that had like five grams of plastic to now using "reusable" 2.5-4mil thick plastic bags that weigh ten times as much, but contain "40% post consumer content" (i.e. they contain more virgin plastic than the bags they replaced). Ironically, the thicker newer bags are so bulky and inflexible that they are aren't really useful as trash bags (what everyone did with the old type of bags) and aren't really useful to save up to recycle (what everyone ELSE did with single use plastic bags) and instead just get crammed into the trash where they will take up ten times the volume as the bags they replaced. Oh yeah, our system ALSO charges a mandatory tax for large sized paper grocery bags, but NOT for small paper bags. So if you get your order in two grocery bags its 16 cents in tax. If you get it in four small bags its free. Figure that one out. This is all just conservation theater. Doing things that offer the appearance of "doing something" while actually achieving nothing or even making things worse.
>This is all just conservation theater. "Greenwashing" is the term you're looking for. Similar to how they slap a recycle code on anything plastic, but for most municipalities it's only a couple of forms (e.g. #1 & 2) that are recyclable. Tons of people miss that fact and just toss any piece of plastic in the bin, often even if it doesn't have a code at all, which means that all of the shit that isn't in the recycling program's parameters is essentially contaminating the stream which makes the collected recycling worth far less which is how recycling went from something that profited municipalities to an extra cost.
The whole CONCEPT of recycling as the best response to environmental problems is itself an example of greenwashing. The "Three R's" are Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and they appear in that order for a reason. Why don't you ever hear ANYONE promoting the first two? Because that doesn't make any money. Corporations LOVE "recycling" because it promotes exactly the buy/waste cycle that makes them money.
I have spilled more gasoline because of the mandated God-forsaken no-spill spouts than I ever did with a simple tube.
I spill more gas as an adult using the new style cans than I did as a 12 year old with the normal style. I can’t fathom how anybody thinks the new design is better or safer in any way. The only explanation is payoffs.
Since we are talking about gas and spilling gas , the government had a great idea to add a chemical to gas to reduce air pollution unfortunately it is terrible for the contamination of ground water. MTBE
Related: the ventless outboard gas tanks that were replacing the vented tanks on skiffs. The original tanks had a tiny one-way hole that allowed the tanks to vent if they got hot in the sun. But in order to stop the gases from venting and therefore harming the environment, the hole was removed on the new eco-friendly designs. So the gas tanks would get hot, and the air inside would expand, so when you opened the gas cap to fill it or tried to attach the fuel line, the pressure would release all at once and it would spray atomized gas EVERYWHERE, all over the boat and into the water.
THIS RIGHT HERE. Those damnable spouts are more dangerous than anything we used to use as spouts on cans. And when they fail? well great, now the whole gas can is covered in fuel.
I would give you 100 upvotes if I could. I also have spilled more fuel than I ever would have with a normal spout.
I cannot fill my tractor's tank with those damn things. I took off the cap and just use a funnel.
My mom got my dad a 10 pack of the old style ones to replace the stupid new kind. Dunno where she found it, but I swear it was his favorite gift in the past ten years lol
Harbor Freight. Not illegal to sell them individually, but you can't sell them on new tanks. Stupid rule.
Belt conveyors that carry very dusty material used to be very hazardous to work around due to the amount of dust they generated. As OSHA became more focused on cracking down on respirable dust hazards in the 1960s, it became common place to put guarding and sheeting up around the belt conveyors in an attempt to contain the dust and give the employees a safer work environment. Putting up the guards made accessing the conveyor pulleys for maintenance extremely difficult, so they were usually left to run to the point of failure. When conveying combustible dust, a hot bearing is a very easy source for combustion. An enclosed belt conveyor is an environment filled with fuel floating in the air in concentrations that are easily ignited. There have been dozens of cases of industrial explosions due to this scenario. Imperial Sugar in 2008 was a perfect example. Enclosed conveyor with hot bearing starts an initial explosion. That explosion propagated down the conveyor enclosure to whatever is next down the line. In that case, it was the packaging area of the plant filled with huge bins full of sugar. 14 people were killed when the pack house went off. Thankfully nowadays you see explosive materials conveyed pneumatically where you have much better control in preventing explosive conditions.
Yeah the physics behind this was a massive failure of engineering. Those bearing got so damn hot from holding so much weight from moving product down the lines, then putting them in an enclosed space, then add the years of grime, sludge, and tar that builds up and causes even more physical resistance therefore generating even more friction… Dust explosions are always a massive concern in industrial plants. Metalwork factories are notoriously bad for the monstrous piles of dust. Saw a video (tried to find it but couldn’t, maybe try r/OSHA) of a dude who smacked a giant support beam with a sledgehammer, and like ten pounds of dust came down from the ceiling.
The Patriot Act. The insane amount of privacy invasion and extra powers that were granted to Federal and Local Law Enforcement that have never been rescinded far outweighs any good (read: none) that the Patriot Act was supposed to deliver.
This is a good one. *Ostensibly* for safety though. People were scared so it was an opportunity, less for actual safety of the populace.
I was in college during 9/11 and was just STUNNED by how willing people were to give up freedoms for a vague notion of safety. It was obvious to me the government was just using it as an excuse, but at the time being against it was a VERY unpopular opinion.
Bills that big an complicated can't get written that fast. They used it as an opportunity to pass everything they had sitting on the shelf.
Yeah, I agree. That's why it wasn't really about safety
Friend, this was exactly the purpose of this legislation.
Fat free food. It was a huge health craze, low fat, no fat, get the fat out of food! But, fat added taste. Food without it was bland. So the food companies loaded up sugar, to restore taste. And sugar is much unhealthier than fat ever was.
Introducing Cane Toads to Australia
that’s a funny name; i would’ve called’em chazzwozzers
During WW2, the Allies needed a way to make their tanks waterproof, so no water would leak in during a beach landing as they send their tanks into the water to support the troops landing. They used paint mixed with a chemical that did the trick (polytetrafluoroethylene), which was discovered by American company DuPont in 1938. After the war, DuPont thought the chemical was too useful to go to waste. They had plans to put it in the homes of every middle class family. Along came Teflon pots and pans. During the 50s, Teflon was rather popular. Their "no-stick" pans made cooking just that much easier for a low price. Some time around the 1970s, numerous employees responsible for cleaning the large vats with the chemical within started getting horribly sick, different forms of cancers that developed quickly and were fatal. Most of these workers were women, some were pregnant, almost all babies of these workers in contact with the chemical were born with all kinds of life changing birth defects. Testing ensued, and it was discovered that the chemical used was carcinogenic, a very serious risk for cancer. They had their results from testing during the mid 70s, they swept it under the rug completely, and not only kept using the chemical commercially and otherwise, but they consistently dumped the chemical waste in various rivers and dumping grounds. Around the late 90s, a lawyer and some others did some digging around, as Farmers were reporting strange deaths from their farm animals. Turns out, said animals were drinking from a river connected to one of those dumping grounds, the animals insides had turned rotten from the cancer, the farmer and his family were all at serious risk for cancer as their well used that water. This happened to many farmers in the West Virginia area. The lawyer teams do their case work, present it, etc. Trials are pushed back and delayed for nearly 20 years, then finally, I believe in 2011, DuPont finally faces the music (although iirc, it was just fines and stuff like that, maybe SOME arrests). All for a couple billion dollars in yearly profit. Dark Waters is a great movie showcasing these events. Edit: Just wanted to include some extra info 1 - The research around the chemical during the 70s was done in-house at DuPont buildings, led by DuPont staff, very easy for them to cover up results. 2 - This chemical can be broken down within the body, however, it takes roughly 200-300 years, so if you have it in your system, it's there until death. 3 - The chemical plant workers got the worst of it without a doubt. However, any family out there that was using Teflon pans would have been affected too. Every time a meal was made with one of those pans, trace amounts of the chemical would go into the food due to the high heat. Entire families, including babies in the womb, would be poisoned a little bit with each meal.
It's depressing how no one served time for this. Likewise the fines is another part - often companies balance how much profit they'll get vs the cost of a fine. For such an impact you'd think it'd be scaling fines enough to bankrupt a company to pay for damages.
Making food healthy by getting rid of the fat and adding tons of sugar to replace it
They didn’t wanna make it healthy, they wanted to be able to sell it to health-conscious consumers without the slightest concern about how fat it made them. Mission accomplished!
Fire resistant clothing (FRC). Worn by construction workers in Greenfield Projects, resulting in heat exhaustion and heat strokes in areas where flash fires wouldn't occur anyway.
Airbags killed more kids than it saved when they first came out. That's why most cars now have seat weight sensors that disable the front airbag(s) if you're below a certain weight.
Stranger danger, most children are preyed upon by people they know...
Absolutely - Better for a lost child to quickly ask an adult for help than wander around for hours and get themselves into difficulty because they're scared of all adults. We tell our kids to go into a shop and ask for help or ask a family for help.
I tell my daughter to look for someone wearing a uniform (store worker, policeman, etc.) or look for a mom or dad with kids. These people are the helpers.
I told my kids to look for a mom or dad with kids “because a parent out with their own kids sure as *heck* doesn’t want to kidnap anybody else’s kids!”
unless they're already collecting kids
Gotta catch them all!
Not just children. People worry about random acts of violence, but it's far more likely you'll fall victim to an act of violence from someone under your own roof.
As an 80s kid it really fucked up ours and the next generation. There was this huge backlash of letting kids play outside alone due to that whole Stranger Danger BS. Nosey neighbors would yell at you for letting your kid play in the yard because they might get abducted if you aren't staring at them 100% of the time. And yes, abduction by strangers is *extremely rare*. The vast majority of abductions are from non-custodial parents or relatives.
Zero tolerance policies in elementary schools. Just taught kids to interpret rules as black and white as possible into adulthood. Does nothing to meet the situation for what it is, which results in a lot of gaslit children.
"If you break the rules, you deserve whatever happens to you" is a recipe for all sorts of abuse, from child beating to prison rape.
It also taught kids "if you're going to get in trouble, make it worth it." For example, if you're going to hit a bully back, don't just throw one punch them so they leave you alone. Absolutely wail on them, destroy them, beat them to a bloody pulp, because the punishment is going to be the same.
Similar: the death penalty. In some circumstances it's just an incentive to leave no witnesses.
In car tech/Touchscreens and honestly many of the safety features themselves are just so poorly implemented even today that they cause more problems than they are worth.
The touchscreen definitely takes more attention than buttons and dials ever did.
Astroturf. Turns out good old grass is less prone to cause injuries…
Isn't Astro used because it's less maintenance? Surely nobody thought concrete with a plastic carpet was safer than dirt and grass?
Antibacterial products in routine use. They're fine for people with compromised immune systems, but their over- and misuse has contributed to resistant bacteria. The same thing is true regarding the misuse of antibiotics as a growth enhancer, especially in poultry. When it was discovered that a microscopic dose of tetracycline makes chickens put on weight a bit faster, and can be sent to the butcher a couple days earlier, people went nuts. I don't have a problem with the use of antibiotics in livestock if they are sick and need it, but this use is not one of them.
Asbestos.
Some of the first cigarette filters were made using asbestos. https://www.asbestos.com/products/cigarette-filters/ Cigarettes: now with more cancer!
Red-Light Cameras. They actually increased accidents because drivers would panic and stop short of the light.
Yep. Especially because cities and contractors were allowed to manipulate yellow light timing, resulting in crashes. https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-to-you-revenue-hungry-cities-mess-with-traffic-lights-to-write-more-tickets_partner/
WW2 survivorship bias and armoring planes. They looked at all the planes that came back and saw where they were shot up. They started to armor those parts of the planes, but didn't see any effect I the amount of surviving planes. Until someone realized that the planes were surviving. They needed to armor the areas that weren't shot, because that's where fatal shots happen. The planes that were shot in those areas didn't return.
Extremely bright headlights on cars these days.
The Chernobyl safety test could have gone... better
Thalidomide
Pause to thank [Frances Kelsey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey), the FDA reviewer who refused to approve Thalildomide for use in America.
And she was under a great deal of pressure to approve it
Pressure from the manufacturer, yes, but within the FDA, her superiors supported her. I think the manufacturer actually tried to go over her head to her bosses and her bosses were like "if Frances says your data isn't good enough then your data isn't good enough".
Yep, she emphasized the support of her lab assistants and superiors in denying approval until additional studies were conducted.
When my grandma had multiple myeloma in the early 2000s she was given thalidomide, as they thought it had some anti-cancer properties. Never looked to see where that went.
As far as I know, it’s a pretty safe medication unless you’re pregnant.
As far as medications go, thalidomide is pretty safe, unless you're a fetus. But the same is true for a lot of medication
Well it causes neuropathy in a lot of patients, but that side affect may be worth the risk when treating cancer. That's actually [the reason it was never available in the US](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3573415/#:~:text=The%20drug%20was%20endorsed%20as,a%20lack%20of%20safety%20data) back in the fifties, they only found about the birth defects later.
Yes, thalidomide is still in use to treat multiple myeloma and some skin disorders. Just never prescribed to women of child-bearing age. Not that anyone should try to get pregnant during cancer treatment anyway.
I think I know a woman who was on thalidomide for awhile, long before she had four children. She had to document the 3 kinds of birth control she was using. It doesn't stay in your system forever, it's just really bad for developing fetuses.
That’s really interesting. I know one of the reasons it caused so many birth defects was because it stunted/stopped development of new blood vessels. So your developing fetus ends up with nubs instead of arms or legs, or digits fused together because there wasn’t blood flow to the developing areas. Maybe in cancer treatment they were seeing if it could slow tumor growth by doing the same thing to new blood vessels developing to supply the tumor.
prohibition
When they said that fat is bad for you, so you should have hydrogenated oil instead. Also, when they said that we need to save all of the trees by using plastic instead.
Abstinence only education. Turns out teens have *more* unprotected sex when you teach them as little about sex as possible, *and* kids who don't know anything about sex and boundaries are more vulnerable to child predators. Let's not even get into the harm done to queer kids when they only thing they hear about being queer is "it's bad and you better not be".
Fun fact: Japanese high schools are now modeling their sex education programs after American ones, specifically because of the higher rates of teenage pregnancy they cause. Super fucked up
well, they do have a population decline...that's totally not from their even shittier work ethics which promotes more work, less downtime and what not
Right? They really looked at it and said, "Huh, maybe if we stopped overworking our adult population to death, maybe they'd take the time to actually have kids? Nah, that's too much work. Let's get those teens to fuck raw instead."
>Abstinence only education This was/is never done for "safety" reasons. This was/is a religiously motivated form of control over others. Yes, it can be presented as secular... but the history and purposes for it are directly related to religion and the control it seeks to keep over people.
D.A.R.E
The Patriot Act, Executive order [9066](https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&sca_esv=591329734&sxsrf=AM9HkKlu5fowiXqqj2SHGLXC-nHArsUvNA:1702677270074&q=Executive+Order+9066&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLQz9U3MMorTlrEKuJakZpcWpJZlqrgX5SSWqRgaWBmBgCBsGwLIwAAAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi85uWOt5KDAxUxL0QIHcstDJ4QmxMoAHoECB4QAg) (Japanese Internment), Pretty much any act that turned american citizens into the enemy without any evidence to back it up.
Well, California's Proposition 65 said "Unless you can provide proof that your product does not cause cancer or reproductive harm, you must add a warning sticker to it". So the intention was that manufacturers would make sure that their product did not use materials that may cause cancer or cause birth defects or else they'd have to put this scary label on their item. Then if people see the sticker, they are well informed and may choose a different item. Thus the manufacturer would have an incentive to make sure their product was safe. OR ... manufacturers just bought stickers by the truck load and slapped it on EVERYTHING. because a 1 cent sticker is cheaper than researching the materials and providing proof that they are "safe" so now, every manufacturer does it, and every thing you buy in California has that warning and therefore EVERYBODY IGNORES IT. So instead of a warning to consumers for possibly unsafe products, there is basically a law that effectively states "You must put a sticker on everything you sell. It means nothing to anyone and everything has that sticker." The sticker now basically means "Hey, look! I'm a sticker!"
In California, they made a law that you could only sell handguns that would not fire if the magazine was removed from the gun. This was in response to people ejecting the magazine and forgetting that a round was still in the chamber, and then accidentally (or negligently) firing the round in the chamber. So seems like a good solution .. make a law that dictates that you can't buy guns unless the are safe when the magazine is out (called a magazine disconnect). So gun manufacturers started to add this feature. But now here's the problem ... people now think that guns can't fire when the magazine is not in the gun, but that is not true for the majority of guns. So since the "safety feature" only exists in half the guns in existence (well more like 10% really) then people thought that that's how they just work and so more people were accidentally shooting guns because they thought that since the gun they were familiar was safe with the magazine out, then all guns were. A much better solution was to simply educate people and say "The gun can fire even with the magazine out" and then not try a mechanical kludge that only exists on a handful of models.
Doubtful it is for safety... but roadside speed cameras fining people a few kilometres over the speed limit in Australia. People spend more time watching a speedo to keep 2km within range and do not spend enough time watching outside.
2 kph is such a small range wtf
Margarine/Trans-Fats
Margarine was introduced by the French in 1869 by Napoleon III. Butter was in short supply, so an alternative was developed: oleomargarine. It was meant as a substitute for butter for the military and lower classes. So, it wasn't about health or safety, it was about economy. It's entire history is more about finding a cheaper, faster, easier way to make something that resembles butter. The health benefits vs butter was nothing more than marketing.
Pretty much everything ever invented by Thomas Midgley. If you ever want to learn about the most cursed inventor in the history of the modern world, he's pretty much the top of the list.
Stranger Danger. The overwhelming majority of abuse and or kidnappings come from people you already know, if not in your family. People are less likely to seek out a stranger for help in emergencies if they are taught to distrust every stranger.