alt Hacker NewsSame with cigarettes and asbestos. Everyone knew smokers had shorter lives, but the facts were suppressed because it was inconvenient. Everyone knew asbestos was dangerous, but they put it in every single house for decades because "fire was worse".
And don't even get me started on DDT and teflon.
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hyperhello • today at 6:12 PM
Cigarette smoking really got going in the world wars, I understand, especially ww2 when the world had manufacturers serving the effort. The custom is dying with the veterans as everyone knows they have a hall pass for it but the rest of us don’t. So smoking was a shorter life but that hardly matters when you’re deployed in theater.
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Asbestos gets a bit of a bad rap. There's an enormous difference from e.g. asbestos tiles and siding in a house vs loose clumps of insulation at mass scale in large factories and such.
But at some point people decided that any asbestos was an immediate ticket to mesothelioma and had to eradicate it altogether.