Diseases that lead to death have had substantially better funding over the past 100s of years and chronic conditions are often rarely diagnosed, properly recognised let alone treated. The disabled is a club almost everyone joins at some point in there life and everyone is one accident or infection away from joining it for the the rest of their life. At the moment societies recognition and treatment of those with these conditions is really bad. The 9/11 survivors will be suffering for the rest of their lives. Medicine is something we all want, but at the moment the amount invested by governments is quite low compared to the upside impact on humanity of finding real answers.
If even a little bit of the insurance money could start funneling into things like physical therapy (actual physical therapy not the BS artists at big hospitals who print you out a sheet of generic exercises) people could see practitioners who actually care about you being functional.
I tore my achilles and saw a string of doctors, podiatrists, physical therapists, chiropractors, etc. before finally finding someone that doesn't take insurance but who had me running again within a few months. He was cheap compared to the amount my insurance was being billed for a chiropractor to try and sell me $500 custom insoles. The money is there it is just being funneled in all the wrong ways.
He will even send you an algolia link to prove he isn't biased... which is just gold. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
What’s was needed was likely pretty basic PPE: P100 respirators along with outer clothing that would be kept out of people’s homes and showers when leaving the site. (PAPRs would have been even better, but they wouldn’t have been cheap or available in large numbers on short notice.) Unfortunately, if you watch modern construction workers, you’ll find that PPE is almost universally ignored when performing common but dangerous tasks like cutting concrete or lead-painted surfaces.
Weird. Wasn’t lead typically used as an opacifying agent?
In any case, if you test by taking a little scraping, you can only detect lead that you actually scraped. But if you test with X-ray fluorescence, you get an integrated density over a decent thickness.
Also, even if the P100 respirator protects you adequately while sanding, it provides no protection against future exposure to the dust that you create.
The people running this show don't give a flying fuck about the working class. They'll march us into the meat grinder no matter what.
People bitches about masks, about everything and politicians tend to give in to that.
Yes, the people demanded it, but that demand itself was a created thing. Sure we would've had our vaccine deniers and other assorted cranks, we always have and will, but we had an entire sector of the mass media pouring gasoline on that fire as fast as they fucking could to manage exactly what fucking happened.
And like, even if you want to say the above is tinfoil hat shit: Okay, then the Governments job in this situation would be to defer to experts and figure out public policies that would keep people safe. Which we did, kind of, for awhile. But like if public opinion is screeching so loud for lockdowns to end, the government should fucking say NO. That's their JOB.
Agency isn't some magical axiomatic property where if you exercise it you're the sole contributing factor to your actions. Exercising agency, like making any other choice, is a decision whose inputs include your circumstances, history, etc.
Consider someone who quit smoking cigarettes in the 1950s. That was a time when cigarette smoking was common and not widely considered unhealthy. That person exercised agency. Now consider someone who quit in the 2020s, when cigarette smoking is widely warned against. That person exercised agency, too. More people quit smoking in the 2020s than the 1950s, by any measure. Does that mean people had less agency in the 1950s? No, it means the inputs to their decision-making on how to exercise their agency were different.
I blame systems more than people because systems should know better, and they largely did, but their ability to act has been hamstrung by one of our political parties holding the line on the notion that "Freedom" means ignorant dipshits with ignorant dipshit opinions should get to weigh in with equal credibility to people who actually understand things, which is a large part of why our government can no longer function apart from passing more fucking tax breaks for people who don't need them while our infrastructure rots and the wife of the owner of WWE dismantles the department of education.
The main reason I don't buy "agency" here is because ultimately the agency of covidiots shouldn't have been a factor either way. We have law enforcement supposedly, I'm told, to ensure the safety of the public. So do it then. Nations the world over that would be characterized as "free" managed to restrict the flow of people and goods in such a way to ensure safety much, much better than we did. Saying "well the people wanted lockdown to end" is fucking pathetic excuse-making on the part of the powerful. Of course people wanted lockdowns to end, they fucking sucked. I too missed restaurants. I too missed shopping. I too missed haircuts. But if it wasn't time yet it wasn't time.
1.5 Million people died from Covid, not just died but SUFFERED and died from 2020-2024
there was a 9/11 every other day for years, sometimes every day
there are STILL in 2026 several hundred per month dying from Covid
there are still ten million people or more living the hell of long-covid and will never recover
but because Covid was spread out over years, not a single memorial, it will never be over
in my life I've been notably traumatized first by the endless loops of the Challenger tragedy and then 9/11, I often wonder what the next event will be
I should also point out we also killed a million people in Iraq in response to 9/11 who will never ever have a memorial, Bush/Cheney would never ever have had the military enlistment to invade Iraq if it wasn't for the hype of 9/11 by the media, even Bush has mentioned it himself
I still think if we showed people dying from covid in the more gruesome way, it may have changed our response to it, just as if we show any human or being dying in a gruesome way.
Instead, it's clear that that isn't the case. Plenty of research, including studies on firefighters and other first responders on 9/11 and the days after (and plenty of anecdata from doctors around here) have borne out that the health effects from being around Ground Zero for the first couple of weeks after 9/11 was much deadlier than simply breathing in mild air pollution.
(In addition, while I didn't live here at the turn of the century... what air pollution? Manhattan doesn't have a collection of coal power plants near Wall Street. It doesn't have more ICE cars than most other cities; it probably had fewer ICE cars per square mile than an ordinary Wal-mart parking lot in the suburbs.)
9/11 resulted in building collapse throwing something like 1-2 million tons of debris into the air, which then fell and was on fire in a huge pile for 100 days.
Concrete, drywall, glass, asbestos, you name it.
This is nothing like regular car/heating/power combustion exhaust which is well understood, regulated, and result of reasonably efficient conversion of mass to energy.. at least by comparison.
About 400 tons of asbestos was thrown into the atmosphere around Manhattan when the towers fell.
The distinction is that the strongest evidence is among responders, workers, residents, and others who were directly exposed, rather than showing that cancer suddenly increased across all of NYC.
Realistically if you want the level of professionalism and coverage a site like Stat produces you are going to have to pay for some of it. The alternative is the “free” internet which is increasingly worthless slop.
Of all the conspiracy theories around 9/11, “it didn’t really make anyone sick” is one of the weirder ones to me. The cause/effect is pretty well documented.
(Sarcasm aside, there obviously are big problems for how these 2 nations responded to the massive terrorist attacks. But I kind of think it’s questionable to pretend there was no big terrorist attack that triggered the response...)
We did go there for no reason since they weren't involved in 9/11.
We are always downstream of a past violence. Let's stop with the simplistic "they started it, so we are allowed to kill thousands of them", and maybe then we can start building a better world.