Not only that. Life accumulated those over the eons, as the rocks eroded, the useful metals got saved by life, and the rest was washed down. So the natural levels are way higher. Life is good at hoarding these "heavy metals".
People in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43631251 have been arguing that these people must have been some top class elite, and I totally get it. They are too good looking. But, that's how it was. The typical of the past would be above celebrity looks today. A lot of curent idols look stunted in comparison.
That’s fully consistent with the idea that there has to be some threshold for lead in food because it’s literally naturally occurring in the soil.
In fact, to fully avoid lead, you’d basically have to carefully grow food hydroponically. Certified Organic mineral fertilizers like basalt rock dust (which provide calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, etc) would obviously not be okay if you wanted to eliminate all lead, as basalt contains 7.5ppm lead, comparable to the average in the Earth’s crust.
I'm not buying this. All these claims rely on some nebulous "poor people" who were kept hidden away somewhere. There is no good reason to doubt that these photos show regular people, and the buildings they lived in.
Mm. When I go on holiday, I take notice of mundane things in the new place that are different to mundane things in my normal life. Street furniture, pylons, graffiti, the contents of supermarket shelves, dusty unpaved roads[0].
But over the years I have come to realise that I'm very odd.
When you go on holiday, how many photos do you take of regular people, vs. tourist attractions? Or, in reverse, do you know regular people[1] who often find tourists visiting their area like to take photos of their homes?
[1] This site being what it is, there's a decent chance you know someone world-famous and people do actually want photos of their home. They're not "regular people".
Both of my grandpas (who have passed away long ago), would beg to differ. People, especially when taking photos wasn't basically free, don't take photos of ordinary things. If you see 1 rose among 500 tulips, that will catch your eye. And vice versa.
Poor people were not hidden away, it's just their lives weren't that beautiful to be shown and paraded around.
Most of the people in the photos seem be ordinary, working class people. Even buddhist monks, who swore to live in poverty, celibacy and to avoid food that was too flavorful.
It isn't like we don't have records of ordinary people, even the homeless, or criminals. It's more like people like you claim the existence of a whole another kind of "poor people", who were supposedly the absolute majority, who suffered somewhere, completely ignored by everybody, and worked long hours every day on... being poor? It just doesn't seem to add up.
The problem isn't abundance, or the lack of thereof. The problem is capitalism. Capitalism creates an excess, but it gets stuck with:
1. People who have money, who already have anything they want, so they won't buy more.
2. People who don't have money, so they can't buy anything.
And it's specifically the debt based part of capitalism that prevents this from fixing itself. Giving more loans won't fix it, it only shuffles it arpund a bit at best
What needs to be done, if there is the will, is:
1. Ban all further loans.
2. Print enough money to pay all the due debts and distribute it in some way with no strings attached.
To be honest, I'm not sure if I understand what is actually claimed here (it seems that they trained the model on their own, and claim that the problem is in the dataset?) but isn't the more sensible explanation that human doctors were overdiagnosing them?
We have the exactly opposite problem. We can produce so much that there are no markets to consume it all. There is an excess and we get assaulted by ads to consume some of it. Shortages are almost absent.
Arguably, the real problem with humanity's resource use today is not consumerism - not overconsumption - but overproduction. We produce vast amounts of food only to let it go to waste. We produce vast amounts of consumer goods only to shred the unsold (or returned) surplus to maintain their price points. It's cheaper to destroy what we overproduce than to discount it or decrease production output. From an economic point of view it becomes a problem of optimizing the waste disposal costs, not the resource use (especially not resources that can be externalized) - turning food waste into animal feed or biofuels, which in turn incentivizes overproduction when those uses become too profitable.
The entrepreneurial spirit is a perfect example for this. We can talk about disruption all we want as if it means making the world better but ultimately we're looking at existing systems and seemingly saturated markets and asking "how can we add to this in a way that makes us money?". We are explicitly opposed to notions of zero-sum markets but the only way to have a non-zero sum is to add more to it and that extra something has to come from somewhere, even if it's an externality to the balance sheets. For the past century marketing has been defined by creating needs rather than addressing existing ones, selling more rather than just providing another option.
This fuels the economy but it's a horrible waste if you look at it from a detached impersonal global resource use perspective. Even trying to go against this system has been productized and can be bought as a subscription model at this point. We've unlearned any other way to do things because everything has been recuperated by the system we've built. It is indeed easier for most people nowadays to imagine the end of the world than the end of the current system and it being replaced by something better, fairer or more resource-friendly.
You could easily spend far more trying to distribute overproduced items to someone who needs them, or trying to match supply too precisely too production and the consequences of that are not symmetric either.
For example, we can survive an oversupply of food just fine. We absolutely cannot survive an undersupply of food: if you have a population needing a certain number of calories and you don't have it, then in about 3 weeks you no longer have a problem because they've died.
The excess isn't a problem on its own, but it prevents people from making money.
You get stuck with people who have money, who have everything they want, and people who don't have money who can't make any, becauae there is already a huge excess of anything that people who do have money would want.
The solution is pretty simple, tax the rich and give it to the poor. Hard to put into practice due to the power dynamics involved, but let's not pretend it's this great mystery with no possible solution.
but the guy can work cheaper if he has more money, no? If the rich, through a series of steps including taxes and a debt relief program, pays that guy's mortgage, he can work cheaper, breaking the deadlock, no? Or am I misunderstanding the problem you're stating?
People in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43631251 have been arguing that these people must have been some top class elite, and I totally get it. They are too good looking. But, that's how it was. The typical of the past would be above celebrity looks today. A lot of curent idols look stunted in comparison.