This is somehow becoming my refrain. California is a great place to live, so long as you don't want kids, are not poor, or think that interactions with the state should make sense.
And where goes California, so goes the nation. Or something like that.
I'm also curious, not having parented normal UMC kids, how often non-poor kids get tested for lead exposure. Mara's levels are okay but not ideal. She had one high test well before she came to us but didn't show anything like that on repeat, which implies she'd had lead on the surface of her finger rather than in the blood itself. She was getting tested yearly or semi-annually at the doctor and quarterly or semi-annually through WIC, and because she still eats non-food objects we'll keep doing at least semi-annual tests even though normally I think at 4 she'd have aged out if we weren't still pushing for ongoing testing.
One of my brothers did AmeriCorps work for a lead-safe babies program that sent public health nurses with test kids out to new moms in high-risk areas to teach them about how to keep their kids away from lead in the homes. I think both Philly and Baltimore had been part of that program, which may have expanded since. It had good results and I should probably read up on it more.
Jane's been tested for lead once so far (at her 1-year appointment, I think?), and her levels were fine, so nothing since then, since nothing relevant in her environment has changed. I expect we'll ask for another test after we've moved to a new house.
We have a house built after 1978 so the doctor told us we didn't need to test. Of course, most houses around here are old (I think the mean date of construction is in the 30s), so most kids get at least one test.
I feel like the lead in the house was tested as part of the home-buying process? I don't really remember, but I have a vague notion of being able to not worry about lead levels. (Soil level never occurred to me, but this is not an industrial smelt factory part of the country, of course. We'll kill ourselves on coal fire plants, thank you very much.)
Oh right, it must have just been a corollary to the newness of our house.
By federal law, if you move into a house built before 1978, the seller or landlord gives you a pamphlet about lead paint.
If the old paint is visibly chipped and crumbling, they give you two pamphlets and a pocket-sized pack of handi-wipes.
Lead inspections are relatively expensive and time-consuming, and they mean that you and everyone else buying your house from then on must disclose that you know for a fact there is lead (which there totally is if your house is old), so people usually pass on them and work on the assumption that there is indeed lead.
@9: So...what you are saying is lead is basically like herpes.
Which is why it's so disturbing when it happens to small children.
I do lead testing for the kid, b/c of an older house.
12: "small children are like..." NO YOU MONSTER STOP IT
Small children fly like a banana.
Nuh-uh. The lead makes them heavier.
Small children need analogies to prep for the SAT.
Note that the SAT banned analogies years ago--the racial achievement gap on those two sections was the smallest.
18: Both true, possibly unrelated, tidbits.
This thread makes me want to get my own lead levels tested. I bet it's pretty high. Some of my drumming last night was fucking metal.
I haven't taken the SAT in twenty five years.
How do I think remediation should be addressed? By the government, in the form of academic and medical support, and as well as the clean up costs. ...
This is not particularly helpful. Even the government does not have infinite resources so it has to set priorities. Is there any compelling evidence that lead exposure is currently one of the most urgent problems that the government has to deal with?
Of course, if it's gotten more racist, maybe I should try again and see if my percentile goes up.
My impression was that lead is actually a big fucking deal, and that if you want to cut down crime you really need to address lead exposure. But also, my understanding was that things are way way better than they used to be, and so maybe it's not a major priority anymore.
But it might be that money spent on lead exposure is a better way to make people smarter and less likely to commit crime than the same money spent on schools or prisons.
Real quick, on a family evening:
I was one of the ones in the previous thread downplaying lead risks in an individual house, but let me be clear: living in an old house in an old neighborhood in a deindustrialized city, we've treated lead testing as an important part of childhood, and I think that remediation for widespread contamination is a necessity.
Here's my basic attitude: All those years that factories were spewing poisons into the environment for free, they were stealing from the future (us and our children) to fatten their owners' wallets (and to make things better for the relevant consumers). When the companies that benefitted most directly can be forced to pay for cleanup, that's the most just. But when the company is gone, then we should all chip in, because we all benefited from cheap materials and/or products. It would be entirely just to place a 1% (or whatever) surtax on all income to cover the cost of fixing what should have been done right on the first place.
Actually, it occurs to me that doing so would be rhetorically good from the point of view of showing developing countries that the US hasn't gotten to pollute the world "for free"; that we're now paying the price for burning all that coal and dumping all that effluent.
Also, ponies.
26: More reason to view Ryan Avent with contempt, btw.
he racial achievement gap on those two sections was the smallest.
Wait, what? They killed the least racist section of the SAT?
Also: the analogies were least racist? Is that because they caused students of all backgrounds to respond with a hearty WTF?
25: It can get absurd when the main companies that polluted no longer exist. My brother talked about looking at old building supply catalogs to see who sold products with asbestos since the makers went broke years ago. All this stuff happened before most of those involved were born and is probably still happening.
Even the government does not have infinite resources so it has to set priorities. Is there any compelling evidence that lead exposure is currently one of the most urgent problems that the government has to deal with?
Oh, I totally agree - it's obscene how many dire problems go drastically underfunded.
Like the bus to my house after 10 pm. I can walk if the weather is nice, but otherwise I have to leave the bar early or drive with a buzz. Or go to a shitty bar.
18 19
Note that the SAT banned analogies years ago--the racial achievement gap on those two sections was the smallest.
Actually analogies were removed (in part at least) because of complaints that they were unfair to blacks. See here for example.
Although eliminating analogies is an admirable first step since studies have found these to be biased against those from non-white, non-middle-class backgrounds, (what with questions involving words like "regatta") ...
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My fb status describes how Hawaiian Punch climbed on Jammies and said "I climbed up here with my STRONG MUSCLES. And then I stand on him and dance!"
My colleagues are commenting "Girl Power!" and what an attitude on that girl. I neglected to mention that she was buck naked, and was standing on his knees while he sat in a chair, so that she was essentially dancing with her crotch in her face. Which did indeed make it all the more hilarious.
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28: Yep, they killed the section with the smallest gap. Not sure why it was killed or why the gap was the smallest.
My middle class regatta was poorly attended.
I remember the Diff'rent Strokes episode where Arnold schooled the public official about how racist standardized tests are. Although in retrospect I think that episode was itself pretty racist- the example I remember: How many people can sleep in a 3 bedroom house with 2 beds per room? Arnold said something like 20, essentially because the black people he grew up with were used to overcrowded slums! Haha Mr. public official!
Although in retrospect I think that episode was itself pretty racist
That would be a good name for a blog reviewing 80's TV.
Speaking of walking to the bar, my trip there and back brings today's total for foot travel to 13.5 miles (10.5 running, 3 to the bar and back). I think that is a record for me.
38: A half-marathon!
33: I was going to make a Crossfit joke on that post, but I was feeling too lazy due to use of weight training machines.
39.1: In two weeks. My sister's flying in to town, so I can't back out.
24: my understanding was that things are way way better than they used to be
Surely there is some kind of Pareto Principle analogue here. In my experience, the places where you'd want the remediation the most, i.e. the oldest, most lead-painty houses, with the most chipped paint and small children resident, and where there is less access to screening due to transience, language barriers, suspicion of government workers etc., are the ones that get the least amount of remediation. So, probably there have been a lot of improvements, and as with Mara's case, there are kids getting screened and hopefully high levels at screenings equates to some attempt at remediation, but I'm pretty sure, just based on what I've seen in the neighborhood I live in, that this is not reaching the most effectively dispossessed. Frinstance, how many middle class yards do you see where there are half a dozen kids playing on bare dirt all the time? How many mid-to-upper working-class yards?
My understanding is that the main way things have improved on the lead front is through getting the lead out of gasoline.
We have a house built after 1978
Same here and the water supply is all snow runoff from the mountains so lead exposure isn't much of a worry. I have a lot unjacketed lead bullets but I'm pretty careful about how I handle them when I'm making rounds.
I am hearing 35 as sung by Kelis ...
My yacht club brings all the boys to the yard.
If I bought a house built much before 1978 (I did, several times) I'd want evidence that the plumbing had been seen to more recently than that whatever it was made of originally.
42: Yes. The median lead level in for children in the US in '70s was 15 ug/dl (90% > 10) when the effort to curb the lead (TEL) in gasoline really began (final ban for road vehicles in the US in 1995). Current standards are 10 with proposals to lower to it to 5. My eldest tested a bit high one time (3-4, I think) so we did a regular follow-up testing. Of course my wife and I surely had levels several times higher than that as children.
This paper gives a good historical overview. The whole TEL story comes with a convenient industry-paid scientific villain, Robert Kehoe who held sway fro nearly half a century, until geologic and ice core evidence showed how dramatically environmental lead levels had increased.
Of course my wife and I surely had levels several times higher than that as children.
Baby Boomers took all the resources.
You probably got your share of this one as well.
This article is more specifically about the whole TEL fiasco including the spate of industrial worker deaths and illnesses when they first began manufacturing it in the '20s. "These men probably went insane because they worked too hard."
I do wonder how much lead I got. Our house was build in 1971, so it did have lead paint. On the other hand, probably much less lead than a house built 30 years before and the paint was new and unpeeling when I was in my paint eating days. Also, we were a long, long way from a factory or a road that got much traffic.
52: Lead paint had really dropped off by 1950, so not much of a problem there for something from 1971. My understanding is that it was pretty well-mixed in the atmosphere although not uniform worldwide. Ice cores from Greenland were elevated, ones from Antarctica not nearly so much.
I grew up much closer to Greenland than Antarctica.
I do guess city/suburban dwellers would have had more exposure than folks in rural areas, but have not seen any statistics on that.
We got the pesticide exposure and nitrates in the drinking water.
46: I know the home inspection process is very, very different in the US and UK, as discussed here previously, but here you can definitely have the plumbing inspected (we did, and the homeowner agreed to replace the leaking toilet stack, hooray!) and not have an official lead inspection done. We did not have a lead inspection because this is a 110-year-old house and I 100% expect that there is lead paint under there somewhere and we just proceed under the assumption that all paint could be lead without having to deal with the cost of official remediation that we'd have needed if we'd had the test run.
If the previous owners had purchased before 1978, I might have been more nervous than that, but they definitely painted (and wallpapered and wallpapered and wallpapered) and all the paint cans they left in the basement were certainly lead-free.
Have you been stripping multiple layers of 80s wallpaper?
58: Only sort of! Instead I've hired a team of three Guatemalan guys who started today and will have the whole bedroom and dressing room stripped by Wednesday or so. With 10-foot ceilings (which are wallpapered, obvs, though we're going to just leave that and paint the fuck over it) I decided it was not going to be good for my spine or mental health to try to make this a DIY project.
The previous owners also helpfully smoked on everything for 30 years, so we get to see what color the wallpaper was supposed to be before it got coated with nicotine and whatnot. I'd thought the sepia tinge to everything was an aesthetic choice, but it turns out I was wrong! The bathroom woodwork is the worst, and drips waterfalls of nicotine no matter how much we clean or in one case have even painted over it.
Good luck. I don't know how you get out smoke on wood. Or why they smoked in the bathroom so much.
I don't know how to get smoke out of wood either. I guess smoking in the clawfoot tub would have been as much fun to them as drinking in it is for me, though mine is much more non-disruptive even if I decide to leave my glass on the window ledge. Still, the ugliness of the house is why we got a good price and it's so awesome underneath it all that I don't let the wallpaper (except maybe the floral wallpaper on the clawfoot tub itself!) get me down.
(except maybe the floral wallpaper on the clawfoot tub itself!)
A bold aesthetic choice indeed.
I'm assuming they only wallpapered the outside of the tub.
floral wallpaper on the clawfoot tub itself!
My sister lived in an apartment that had this! Gorgeous building with great bones, but an utterly disgusting apartment.
OK, I just reloaded and started reading the first sentence of 61, which makes less than no sense out of context.
65: The essence of smoke is bound tightly to the wood and can only be liberated by the cleansing mechanism of fire.
63: You assume correctly, and we had the tub interior sprayed when we moved in so that there wouldn't be rust spots or general grodiness. I'll repaint (but probably not strip, thanks to lead concerns) the outside whenever we redo that bathroom.
great bones
Heh, Baader-Meinhof. My wife used this phrase yesterday, and it was the first I recall hearing it in that context.
67: Does tub-interior painting work (i.e. last more than a few years)? I'm sick of looking at this one giant rust spot on our tub. I was thinking of putting in one of those acrylic liners, but that turns out to be expensive. Replacing the tub simply isn't an option without redoing the whole bathroom.
69: We're maybe three years past having our tub done, and it hasn't degraded noticeably. Wasn't perfect -- there are spots where you can see that it's a paint job -- but it's better than the tub was beforehand.
47: The real villain in that saga. He was like Hitler 1.0.1.
70: The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon occurs when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it.
69: We've managed to scratch it in a few places and that was totally the fault of someone in our family, but I'm about to get a fix kit. It was expensive ($400, maybe?) but not as expensive as a new tub and it worked very, very well. Other people in the neighborhood have had theirs last for decades.
71: Three years is enough time for me. I suppose we'll need a new tub someday, but I don't want to do it now.
I really don't want do go decades without a new tub. The bathroom is dated, just not spend several thousand right now dated.
73: Huh. I know this phenomenon as "Plate-O-Shrimp" from Repo Man. Never saw the other name for it.
Tangentially relevant: what scientists did and didn't get right about Deepwater Horizon.
72: Yes, he pushed the whole thing and and was the one who set up Kehoe. And there's the Midgley, of course (see also CFCs).
On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever.Had never heard this characterization of Midgley before, had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history.
Nor this: In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted poliomyelitis, which left him severely disabled. This led him to devise an elaborate system of strings and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. This system was the eventual cause of his death when he was accidentally entangled in the ropes of this device and died of strangulation at the age of 55
Did you hear about when an explosion left metal shards in his eye, and he devised a method of bathing his eye in mercury to draw them out?
HOW HAS THERE NOT BEEN A BIOPIC YET
STARRING HUGH JACKMAN
77 The key thing about about the "plate o' shrimp" phenomena though is the simultaneity.
Yeah, Midgley is the other one.
77: Hmm, I assumed it was more well-known. The first three of these Baader-Meinhof references from the archives are to it rather than the gang.
73: I figured it had to be something like that. Definitely doesn't work for me as a name for the phenomenon, since the Baader-Meinhof gang is an assumed piece of cultural and historical knowledge for people in my field.
77: amusingly, we watched that movie two days ago.
And I am completely blanking on the Plate-O-Shrimp part. It's like the anti-Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.
I always wondered if there was a name for that phenomenon. Sad to find out that it apparently has two names, both inadequate and confusing.
85: Whoa. Unperceived plate-o-shrimp.
87: Well, you can go with diegogarcity. Alternatively, be the change.
86: a lot of people don't realize what's really going on.
Other SMK: (Stuff Miller Knows)
1) The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.
2) John Wayne was a fag.
Somehow I thought Miller was played by Dick Miller. Apparently not.
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To the OP: further evidence that America is not a first world country: University of Florida closes CS.
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@ 94
I believe it was in response to the governor of Florida's attempt to eliminate anthropologists. Look like the anthropologists got the last laugh.
82: Yeah, Midgley is the other one.
I went with Kehoe first since I think his role was most analogous to that of the current crop of industry-financed global warming deniers.
Everything I know about John Wayne I learned from the movies.
Jesus, am I the only one to notice the New Zero Kanada reference?
Here's #438: The School District of Philadelphia is giving up trying to solve its chronic funding problems, so it's just dissolving itself.