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Pinto didn't convince anyone to be safer per se. More like capitalist risk management learned they need to account for current and future punitive liability. This is not a bad thing short of guillotine the capitalists now. Workers are kind of doomed if tort reform ever makes it without agency driven safety shoring up the cost with penalties to make the cost benefit analysis require built in morals. It's a rough subject because for every home run no duh make it safer bit you cover, there's a few more trolley problems where the risk eats a person so the quality or length of life improves for more people. We're gung ho about cultures of zero and then turn around and document in your Process Safety Management documentation that when taken with your entire portfolio of manufacturing capital, someone's going to die to make your widgets but at a socially acceptable rate. Same with health insurance death panels kind of.
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Oct 4, 2018 01:58
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Nilered put up a video about liquid rockets about 3 seconds ago but it obviously belongs here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OszX18NLtrY
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Oct 4, 2018 21:08
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Grundulum posted:If you (general you) want to skip those checks, it’s not like anyone can physically stop you. But blame should fall squarely on your head—and/or the head of the superior ordering you to skip those checks—if that 0.1% chance happens and tragedy ensues. Fear of blame isn't always an effective motivating factor. Sometimes someone simply has to be forced to be safe, by which I mean, do it the right way or you're fired. When workers refuse to be safe but managemnet has a culture of safety, this is an effective approach. But when management is focused on profits over safety/compliance, there's not much workers can do. That's why there has to be an effective regulatory system that is focused on management: it's ultimately management's job (and they're the only ones able) to force that percentage of workers who can't or won't follow burdensome but necessary rules to shape up or take a hike. My brother's a union pipefitter apprentice. Here in the bay area, employers often contract with the union for workers despite the higher cost, because the union workers have proper safety training and certifications. On those jobs, management is aware of and values high-quality work performed by employees willing and able to toe the line. But even in those conditions, my brother has direct experience with workers (journeymen, who he is supposed to take instructions from) who demand things be done their way, regardless of the safety rules, and get super pissed/retaliate in subtle ways when an apprentice escalates the issue to a foreman to overule rather than just do what they're told. On small jobs with a handful of people it can become impossible to function due to a problem employee. Recently a guy fell through a hole 20 feet onto concrete because he refused to follow my brother's explicit advice on rigging (my brother has a rigging cert). After returning to work from a multi-week absence, the guy was worse than ever. Instead of learning the lesson "it pays to be safe" he was emotionally invested in proving himself right, and in doing work as fast as possible because his absence had delayed the project. Dude just wouldn't learn and the boss couldn't really fire him because he'd already had to run off another union guy (no-call no-show work absence is intolerable in this industry) and didn't have the political clout to get the union to pull another journeyman, especially with two apprentices on the job. So when a supply delay forced a cut, my brother was laid off the job and that jackass is still there. My brother's actually happy and relieved, and back at work already because there's too much work and not enough apprentices to go around right now anyway, but the situation is a microcosm of the dysfunction endemic to the industry. And it's far, far worse with the non-union crews, who have less training. The only effective counter to this kind of horseshit is regulators cracking down really hard, as in, immediately stop work at any site where safety rules aren't being followed to the letter, and for repeat offenders, hefty fines. Management can't be allowed to pull political retaliation bullshit like "but you already sent back one guy, if you send back another guy we may decline to keep working on your job" in response to safety problems, and that goes for all forms of management... contractor, contractee, union supervisor, foreman, whoever. There's no way to make this bubble up from the bottom when the little guy on the job site has his livelihood at stake and no real power to affect change if he wants to pay the rent.
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Oct 4, 2018 22:47
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Fender Anarchist posted:Nilered put up a video about liquid rockets about 3 seconds ago but it obviously belongs here Hah, someone sent him a copy of Ignition!, and his immediate reaction was "you know, I have some aniline and RFNA lying about...". I've always thought of NileRed as a fairly sensible and careful guy (compared to Cody, at least), but that's a book that brings out the best in people.
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Oct 5, 2018 00:28
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I like that Isaac Asimov wrote the forward - John Clark wrote a couple of sf stories.
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Oct 5, 2018 01:43
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Computer viking posted:Hah, someone sent him a copy of Ignition!, and his immediate reaction was "you know, I have some aniline and RFNA lying about...". I've always thought of NileRed as a fairly sensible and careful guy (compared to Cody, at least), but that's a book that brings out the best in people. Considering that NileRed made and safely contained his own RFNA, I'm sure he's a lot safer about his methods than Cody ever will be. However, Cody "Drinks the Cyanide" "Hits the Nitroglycerin With a Hammer" Don is entertaining. And much safer than 90% of the other experimental Youtubers wh are entirely likely to kill or cripple themselves on camera one day.
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Oct 5, 2018 10:30
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“Don” is his middle name?  I thought that was just something he said to be silly, because it makes him sound like a dinosaur or an ancient Greek philosopher.
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Oct 5, 2018 10:39
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if cody ever dies from one of his experiments it'll be a long slow death from heavy metal poisoning
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Oct 5, 2018 10:39
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CommunistPancake posted:if cody ever dies from one of his experiments it'll be a long slow death from heavy metal poisoning He’s going to go out to fight a wildfire and collapse from heat, exertion, altitude, and carbon monoxide. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 10:48 on Oct 5, 2018 |
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Oct 5, 2018 10:44
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Platystemon posted:He’s going to go out to fight a wildfire and collapse from heat, exertion, altitude, and carbon dioxide. Admittedly, when I saw that video, I wanted to drive to Utah, hunt him down, and smack him with that shovel.
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Oct 5, 2018 10:47
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Platystemon posted:“Don” is his middle name? It's "dawn," and he goes by his first+middle in real life I think.
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Oct 5, 2018 15:46
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rndmnmbr posted:Admittedly, when I saw that video, I wanted to drive to Utah, hunt him down, and smack him with that shovel. Sorry, what happened?
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Oct 5, 2018 20:09
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Nebakenezzer posted:Sorry, what happened? I'm guessing this. "I run home to help with a grass fire that started up in the neighboring canyon." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhk7UkqPAvQ
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Oct 6, 2018 01:36
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That the one where he almost passed out from CO from being near the fire?
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Oct 6, 2018 01:41
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Nebakenezzer posted:Sorry, what happened? He took on a massive multi-acre grassfire by smacking burning grass with a shovel, nearly killing himself with carbon monoxide in the process. I reiterate an earlier post, but you don't fight a grassfire. You cut firebreaks a safe distance downwind, patrol the firebreaks with pumper trucks to catch anything making it over the firebreak, and let everything upwind of the firebreak burn. The only time you get up close and personal is when homes and occupied structures are endangered, and then still all you do is cut a firebreak around it, soak the area in water, hit anything that lights up with a hose, and most importantly have a safe exit and be prepared to abandon a losing effort and run. Grassfires are very unpredictable and dangerous, and you don't tangle with them on foot.
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Oct 6, 2018 05:47
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Phanatic posted:
Yeah, autocratic systems where the ones in power are nearly totally divorced from the consequences of their actions on the populace are very, very, lovely (which is why the rise of autocrats and autocrats lite in so much of the world is really worrying) that doesn't lessen the pretty obvious issues with capitalism and the many misaligned incentives modern economies and political systems suffer from.
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Oct 8, 2018 02:14
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As bad as the California water management thing is (and as dumb an idea of growing lettuce in the Imperial Valley is*) I'd say that "Let's drain the Aral Sea to grow cotton in *: Or growing lettuce at all because it's literally the worst thing ever and should be eradicated. E: Although, this isn't necessarily a socialism/capitalism thing, it's a democracy/autocracy thing, a democracy has (at least in theory) a way for interest groups to pressure policymakers and a court system to prevent unilateral action. Schadenboner has a new favorite as of 02:29 on Oct 8, 2018 |
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Oct 8, 2018 02:20
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The Soviet agricultural failures were very much a triumph of ideology over science, where whatever sounded more communist won out for a while. That's kind of a separate axis from democratic/autocratic; something like technocrat/idealist (or populist?). Consider Switzerland vs modern China - both have a certain "do what works" pragmatism, but they get there in very different ways. On another axis, compare China today vs under Mao: One had farmers shoot all birds to save crops, and tried to make industrial steel in backyards; the other is a brutally efficient producer of most things ... and both are comparably undemocratic.
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Oct 8, 2018 10:16
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darthbob88 posted:I'm guessing this. "I run home to help with a grass fire that started up in the neighboring canyon." If you aren't prepared to fight a fire, don't. Small grass fires are not put out by beating rocks into submission. Get a flapper (it's basically a heavy piece of rubber on the end of a long handle). Get an old carpet and soak it in a drum of water. Also get a backpack sprayer. That'll knock down most controllable fires well. If you didn't start the fire yourself with a specific purpose, get on the horn and get professionals in. We used to do controlled burns on the farm all the time and they are manageable. That image of the hillside is not manageable.
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Oct 8, 2018 16:51
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rndmnmbr posted:I reiterate an earlier post, but you don't fight a grassfire. You cut firebreaks a safe distance downwind, patrol the firebreaks with pumper trucks to catch anything making it over the firebreak, and let everything upwind of the firebreak burn. The only time you get up close and personal is when homes and occupied structures are endangered, and then still all you do is cut a firebreak around it, soak the area in water, hit anything that lights up with a hose, and most importantly have a safe exit and be prepared to abandon a losing effort and run. Grassfires are very unpredictable and dangerous, and you don't tangle with them on foot. What's a brief memorable way to put that.. howabout "Don't fight a grassfire by stopping the fire, fight it by stopping the grass. That's what the shovel is for." Controlled burns and backburning become intuitive when you see it as cutting off a fuel supply.
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Oct 10, 2018 15:20
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Not really sure where to ask besides here but does anybody have the source for the claim that Marie Curie was a horrible person to work for/under since she knowingly kept unsafe workspace conditions?
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Oct 11, 2018 03:04
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Telsa Cola posted:Not really sure where to ask besides here but does anybody have the source for the claim that Marie Curie was a horrible person to work for/under since she knowingly kept unsafe workspace conditions? I’ve never really looked into it, but I imagine some of that might be character With zero evidence I would not be surprised if she was painted as a “bitch” because she wouldn’t put up with a lot of misogyny. E: Auto-correct can be weird and *completely* change the meaning. I left it stuck out, because I think it was kind of funny.
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Oct 11, 2018 03:17
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Proteus Jones posted:I’ve never really looked into it, but I imagine some of that might be character Yeah that is what I am thinking as well but I have seen it brought up a couple of times in different threads so I wanted to see if people had a source for it or if they are just talking out their rear end.
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Oct 11, 2018 03:25
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Found this article about life in the radiation wild west. Seems more indifference to safety. It looks so terrible today because the culture now (at least on paper) says safety before production. Back then the work came first.
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Oct 11, 2018 03:51
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Technically she did run a lab with unsafe working conditions, but that's less on her and far more on the extremely undeveloped nature of the field at the time. Nobody really knew at the time just what radiation could do, so everyone was doing poo poo that in hindsight would freak out any current scientist in the field. (Tesla stuck his head in an X-ray beam for a time before wisely reconsidering after the heat got to him.) In particular Marie Curie often kept a sample of some radioactive isotope on her person as a party amusement or an impromptu flashlight in addition to several other test tubes around her home and workspace; to this day many of her papers and even her cookbook are hazardous without gear. It was only after scandals like the Radium Girls in the 1920s that the danger of radiation was first realized, and by then Curie was in her twilight years. As for the reasons for character assassination, being a woman at the turn of the 20th century was unfortunately not the full story. She wasn't French, so in an era of nationalism the right-wing press loved to bash her for being Polish. And being a foreigner, she could then be painted as either godless or (even worse!) Jewish.  Yeah, poo poo like the Dreyfus Affair didn't show up in isolation.
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Oct 11, 2018 04:02
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Rad, thank you for your answers. It looks like the claims is basically bunk. Ill call it out next time I see it.
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Oct 11, 2018 04:14
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Health physics books that go a bit into history speak of her with reverence, and they'd be the first ones to go after someone for deliberately or unusually (for the time) unsafe radiological practices.
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Oct 11, 2018 04:25
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NGDBSS posted:Technically she did run a lab with unsafe working conditions, but that's less on her and far more on the extremely undeveloped nature of the field at the time. Nobody really knew at the time just what radiation could do, so everyone was doing poo poo that in hindsight would freak out any current scientist in the field. (Tesla stuck his head in an X-ray beam for a time before wisely reconsidering after the heat got to him.) In particular Marie Curie often kept a sample of some radioactive isotope on her person as a party amusement or an impromptu flashlight in addition to several other test tubes around her home and workspace; to this day many of her papers and even her cookbook are hazardous without gear. It was only after scandals like the Radium Girls in the 1920s that the danger of radiation was first realized, and by then Curie was in her twilight years. Her bones were tested for radioactivity a few years back (I think they were being moved for some reason) and they found no traces of radioactivity. Her lab hygiene was excellent and she suffered no radium contamination. It is suspected that her leukemia was the result of the poorly-shielded portable X-ray machine that she built and used during WWI almost constantly for years.
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Oct 11, 2018 04:35
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Didn't one of the attendees of the Solvay Conferences effectively tell her "gently caress the haters" at one point? Usually the story involves it coming from Einstein (natch), but is that true or not? Either way, she was a badass, and her daughter also picked up a Nobel as well (her son-in-law got a peace prize for UNICEF)
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Oct 11, 2018 04:41
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NGDBSS posted:Technically she did run a lab with unsafe working conditions, but that's less on her and far more on the extremely undeveloped nature of the field at the time. Nobody really knew at the time just what radiation could do, so everyone was doing poo poo that in hindsight would freak out any current scientist in the field. (Tesla stuck his head in an X-ray beam for a time before wisely reconsidering after the heat got to him.) In particular Marie Curie often kept a sample of some radioactive isotope on her person as a party amusement or an impromptu flashlight in addition to several other test tubes around her home and workspace; to this day many of her papers and even her cookbook are hazardous without gear. It was only after scandals like the Radium Girls in the 1920s that the danger of radiation was first realized, and by then Curie was in her twilight years. From what I've seen, it's really her daughter, Irčne Joliot-Curie, who can be blamed, since when she was in charge they actually knew what the hazards were, and she didn't care. http://www.labsafety.org/marie-curie-looking-back A lotta people just conflate the Curies, though
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Oct 11, 2018 04:53
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Tunicate posted:A lotta people just conflate the Curies, though  Combined dose is what really matters.
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Oct 11, 2018 10:15
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Deteriorata posted:Her bones were tested for radioactivity a few years back (I think they were being moved for some reason) and they found no traces of radioactivity. Her lab hygiene was excellent and she suffered no radium contamination. How could her lab hygiene be excellent when all her lab effects are contaminated with radium? (She had aplastic anemia, not leukemia, and there's no way to tell whether the cause was the ionizing radiation she was exposed to via the x-ray machines or the ionizing radiation she was exposed to in her research).
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Oct 11, 2018 13:48
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In the book The Making of The Atomic Bomb there are several quotes and references to her having painful radiation burns on her hands from handling samples.
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Oct 12, 2018 07:17
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Deteriorata posted:Her bones were tested for radioactivity a few years back (I think they were being moved for some reason) and they found no traces of radioactivity. Her lab hygiene was excellent and she suffered no radium contamination. While a lot of the stuff about her isn’t true, I’m gonna need a source on this one because everything I’ve seen has said her stuff is contaminated to hell and back.
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Oct 12, 2018 07:41
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Kinetica posted:While a lot of the stuff about her isn’t true, I’m gonna need a source on this one because everything I’ve seen has said her stuff is contaminated to hell and back. https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfrp.asso.fr%2Fmedias%2Fsfrp%2Fdocuments%2FExhumation%2520Marie%2520Curie.pdf&pdf=true 
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Oct 12, 2018 16:26
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I'd never heard that Marie Curie's remains are radioactive -- I don't see how you could get your body that state without dying of acute radiation poisoning -- but I have heard that artifacts like her lab notebooks are contaminated enough to be considered low-level waste, which is a lot more plausible. Like yes some of the calcium in her bones has probably been replaced with radium but, again, if it was enough to harm the people disinterring her body eighty years later, she absolutely would have died a lot more rapidly and brutally than she did.
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Oct 12, 2018 17:50
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Deteriorata posted:She was exhumed in 1995 to be reinterred at the the Pantheon in Paris. They were afraid that she might be terribly radioactive, so they took great precautions in opening her coffin. Their fears were unfounded, as almost no excess radioactivity was detected. Ok, fair enough- I didn’t know that. I know her stuff is and just made the connection everything is
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Oct 14, 2018 17:09
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Sagebrush posted:I'd never heard that Marie Curie's remains are radioactive -- I don't see how you could get your body that state without dying of acute radiation poisoning -- but I have heard that artifacts like her lab notebooks are contaminated enough to be considered low-level waste, which is a lot more plausible. Yeah. You have to intentionally drink radioactive water for that to happen.
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Oct 14, 2018 17:23
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I think I'd never thought critically about her lab hygiene after learning what low level waste actually means. I don't think it's be physically possible to have a ground breaking nuclear lab at the turn of the century without the whole thing being low level waste just because that's something that kicks in when you're just measurably above background. Short of extensive uneconomic decon, the lab was never going to be clean afterward. The uneconomic part still applies even for cold trash from hot zones. There's a ton of cold trash going into the low level garbage dump just because there's no cost reason to scan it and prove it's cold instead of just trash it in the low level.
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Oct 14, 2018 17:31
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Re. Radithor that poo poo's still around in concept. Some of the people in the cult I grew up in were into this "supplement" that was a bunch of minerals dissolved in heavy water. you were supposed to add like a drop or two of it (heavy water is expensive!) to whatever you drank in the morning. Heavy water isn't radioactive, but it will still kill you if you consume enough because many biological processes don't work correctly with deuterium replacing hydrogen. They made me try it a couple of times and anecdotally I just got diarrhea.
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Oct 14, 2018 17:34
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