The U.S. Culture(s) thread

Which doesn't help when reality doesn't match with the mental picture, so people deem themselves to be failures for not achieving what is systemically made, if not outright impossible, then so incredibly unlikely that it may as well be.

It all feeds back into this nightmare, truly Kafkaesque situation the individual can find little purchase or breathing space within.

edited 9th Dec '17 5:06:10 AM by Euodiachloris

Of course, if people were more realistic about what the jobs would entail and the rewards they'd get out of them...not enough people would take them.

Chemicals all over cause problems, there's a Henry Rollins rant for that:

Taira: True enough but you also have to keep in mind the symptoms they just described for excessive levels of phosphate based pesticide exposure are amazingly similar to certain chemical weapon nerve agents at trace or low levels of exposure to the agents. Especially agents like VX which is itself a phosphate based toxin.

Nerve agents are derived from pesticides. Many are just pesticides for people.

But without pesticides, most of our crops would be eaten. The bugs eatin' the harvest are a threat as old as The Bible.

Without pesticides humanity would go hungry. Pesticides are the basis for most nerve agents -many never agents were simply scaled up. Zyklon-B was imported into the US as a de-lousing agent for prisons , the "bracero" program and as a pesticide to combat critters carrying nasty diseases. Andy from TheShawshankRedemption was likely deloused with Zykon B (mostly because the warden was a cheap-sake).

Yeah... your point? Sure, they have uses. And, a morph of thalidomide (another nerve agent derivative) actually is effective at curing morning sickness and other upset tum-tums, among its various neurological and cardiovascular effects. Still doesn't make it a topping idea to prescribe it too liberally, given that it metabloizes into the problem child at the drop of a hat.

Just because they have beneficial effects, it doesn't mean we should be bloody careless with the things, or over-utilise them. Foxglove can be great in really small doses: I don't recommend eating a whole damned plant daily. For a week.

edited 9th Dec '17 8:02:22 PM by Euodiachloris

You didn't see my youtube video above .

Noone advocates careless use of chemicals. We can't live without them. Even with regulation, the automobile kills over 35 thousand Americans every year. But America would be impassable without cars (as someone without a car, let me tell you getting around is a pain).

Are there farms that cut corners? Yeah, crooks exist in all shapes and sizes.

But it's unfair to dismiss modern farming out of hand.

Despite his best efforts, a friend of one of my former commanders got cancer from working around Army radars, as did an instructor at the Air Defense Artillery school I attended.

Sadly, bad things do happen to good people.

I'm not dismissing "modern farming". What I am saying is... a better health and safety culture should be part of it. For the sakes of both the producers and the consumers.

Cheap food shouldn't come at the price of congenital defects in farmers' kids. And, likely generations-long epigenetic effects within families.

Once upon a time, cheap blue and green dyes in everything (including food) were the bees knees. Until people worked out that arsenic and cobalt are not our friends.

In short: if society wants to eat without poisoning itself, it needs to rethink regulation, funding and subsidies.

edited 9th Dec '17 8:47:16 PM by Euodiachloris

And modern society needs to work harder to have safer alternatives. All-Natural Snake Oil is sadly, still the thing.

For some morbid reason. I really like this sentence.

Nerve agents, like pesticide but for people.

But on the pesticide thing.

It really, really and really there wouldn't be so many problems associate with their use if the farmers and the people handling the material in farms had any resemblance of safety regards towards pesticides. Not to mention the issues with farmers overdoing with the amount of pesticides needed to do the job.

One of the times I was going to the strawberry farm with my brother to see how the production was going, I was talking with him about why I had to explain the reasons for the high poisoning levels among male workers, to the college board evaluating the work the bio sensor was based on, was exactly because the sheer majority of the workers didn't bother using the PP Es needed to prevent the poisoning.

Cue when we enter the farm, we see outright see one of the workers spraying pesticides over the crops...wearing shorts and a plain shirt and nothing of the PPE. We sent him to get his PP Es but no one is really willing to work on a 32 degrees Celsius humid weather using that much stuff.

Also, when the research team interviewed the workers most of them either underestimated the risks or outright ignored them as not being really important.

edited 10th Dec '17 6:53:51 AM by AngelusNox

I grew up in the boonies and was neighbor to a man who went around spraying invasive weeds for the county. I don't think it was coincidental that his wife and children all had muscular and/or immune diseases.

The problem here is that we can talk about proper PPE and the need to measure the dose but:

• (insert Tim Taylor grunt here) many will assume the ricks just don't apply to them.
• some are lazy or find PPE uncomfortable
• some just don't care and will never read the directions

The small town I grew up in was surrounded on one side by ranches and farms. From the nearby river irrigation channels could irrigate those fields. Welp, a crew of 3-5 was painting a fence and then they just decided to DUMP the thinner and excess paint straight into the main irrigation channel. It turned the brown water sheet of paper white in one yuge spot. I was 17 at the time was was out for a walk with my dog. Had I know better I would've reported them later. As it was I was outnumber by a crew of angry farmhands who started yelling at me. I kept on moving.

Illegal dumping was a problem when the county raised some of the landfill fees.

Sadly some people just don't care.

Sadly, many ppl think their jobs depend on low safety standards. There are many who believe that the US economy itself depends on the presence of a working class who are willing to sacrifice their lives and health to their labor. Many of the ppl who believe this are themselves members of the working class.

The kicker? Given the nature of American Capitalism, Im not sure they're wrong.

edited 10th Dec '17 1:37:22 PM by DeMarquis

Re: farming, pesticides, etc. This is where GM Os could come in handy, unfortunately there's such a huge number of people worldwide that are luddite dumbfucks and opposed to GM Os.

Course we could also wipe out the invasive, destructive insects, too.

Yes, because wiping out invasive species is so easy. (And what about unintended consequences...)

True, that's a lot more tricky and more destructive than GM Os.

The insects arent all invasive. In fact, modern industrial monoculture style agriculture requires heavy use of chemicles, to elimnate anything other than the intended crop to recieve energy or resources (this includes any other life within the farm). Limitations on technology (and federal regulations) prevent them from taking this to the logical conclusion of a farm entirely sterile of anything other than chemical inputs and tradable outputs, but they try.

That and the fact that they basically have been raised to believe that they must suffer to have a value, their pride depends of their suffering. If they dont risk something, then it was never really winned.

That is a attitude that is even on "progressive" media. (and I will said that I hate the term progressive, again).

edited 10th Dec '17 5:44:35 PM by KazuyaProta

Well, that suffering and sacrifice has value in and of itself, rather than as a means to another end (one that makes the suffering and sacrifice worth it). "Suffer in silence" as a way to demonstrate your value to the community.

Companies drop liquor at holiday parties amid sexual harassment saga, study says ^note 

somehow i doubt being drunk is a prerequisite for grabbing girls' asses

It could be a facilitator, though.

No but it is used too often as an excuse and for some people with self control or boundary issues, one hell of a catalyst.

Holy Hell. Why are allegedly grimdark HBO shows far, far less colourful than this glorious mess?

Presumably because the current grimdark aesthetic doesn't allow for this kind of black, gallows humor.