#capitalism

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quoted Murderland by Caroline Fraser

Caroline Fraser: Murderland (Hardcover, english language, 2025)

Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer …

Where there's smoke, there’s fire: on September 3, 1973, a fire breaks out in the baghouse at the Bunker Hill lead smelter in Kellogg, Idaho. The baghouse building, which dates back to 1917, is the plant’s chief pollution control. Before going up the smokestack, emissions from the plant are forced through twelve thousand tube-shaped wool-and-Orlon filter bags hanging from the ceiling, each thirty feet long and eighteen inches wide. Every one of the bags is full of lead dust. On September 3, twenty-eight hundred of the bags burn, along with a section of the roof. The baghouse is now out of service. Before the fire, emissions not captured by the bags were running around 10 to 20 tons per month. After the fire, up to 160 tons per month—50 to 70 percent lead, along with arsenic, mercury, cadmium, and zinc—are pouring into the air. But lead prices are climbing—they’ll reach $479 per ton in October 1974.

Smelter officials are faced with a choice. Frank Woodruff, a company man who has climbed the copper ladder working at the Chino Mine in New Mexico, a hard man known for layoffs, has been elevated to vice president of Bunker Hill’s new parent entity. It’s now a wholly owned subsidiary of Gulf Resources and Chemical Corporation, based in Houston. He must help his overlords decide whether to shut the smelter down until the baghouse can be rebuilt, which could take six months. Other possibilities include keeping the facility open but reducing production. The most desirable option, however, is felt to be this: Continue production at current or greater levels while pumping unimaginable levels of lead into the community. Families live right next to the smelter, yards away, in a neighborhood called Deadwood Gulch. Woodruff writes a memo to chew over with corporate. He and Gulf know all about El Paso and what children there were recently deemed to be worth, and they consider the costs as if weighing up pork by the pound. “El Paso—200 children—$5 to 10,000 [per] kid,” he writes.

Another official at Bunker Hill works the math in a back-of-a-napkin calculation, estimating that the legal liability for poisoning five hundred children would amount to a mere “6–7 million.”[107] If Gulf and Bunker Hill decide to keep running the smelter flat out, increasing production, they’ll come out $10 million or $11 million ahead, even if compelled to pay an inflated $12,000 per child. The choice is children or profits. Guess which they choose. For Woodruff and his colleagues, it’s not a hard decision. They’re doing the devil’s business, which is no different from what Ted does. Like Ted, Bunker Hill has been killing people for years. It’s second nature. So the smelter does not shut down. Lead production is ramped up, for profit. The owners run the plant full bore, forcing their blast furnace smoke through the remains of the baghouse. When that slows them down, they release emissions directly into the air in what will amount to one of the largest lead-poisoning events in American history. Bunker Hill is in a box canyon with narrow walls, prone to temperature inversions. Locals call the canyon “the Box.” The Box is now filling with lead.

— Murderland by 

#capitalism

quoted Murderland by Caroline Fraser

Caroline Fraser: Murderland (Hardcover, english language, 2025)

Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer …

IN THE EARLY 1920S the fuel additive tetraethyl lead (TEL) is developed and marketed by General Motors and Standard Oil. It is designed to make automobile and airplane engines run without knocking. GM knows that an ideal antiknock solution already exists in ethyl alcohol, or ethanol. But virtually any hillbilly with a still can make ethanol from fermented fruit or corn. No profits stand to be made from it. TEL, on the other hand, can be patented. So tetraethyl lead is rebranded as “Ethyl,” which sounds friendly, like a woman’s name. Sales to the public begin on February 1, 1923, but the advertisements don’t mention lead.

On October 23, 1924, a Thursday, a man working at a Standard Oil TEL-refining plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, is seeing things that aren’t there. On Friday he begins screaming and running around the plant to escape imaginary pursuers. On Saturday he dies. Four others follow. Thirty-one workers are hospitalized with hallucinations and convulsions. The violent are placed in straitjackets. Their symptoms are the result of acute lead poisoning, or saturnism.

At around the same time, hundreds of men begin hallucinating butterflies at a DuPont plant manufacturing TEL in Deepwater, New Jersey, swiping their hands through the air, trying to push winged insects away from their faces. But it isn’t butterflies that are bothering them. It’s lead. The hallucinations terminate in “violent insanity and death,” according to The New York Times. Eight die. Three hundred fall ill. Some become permanently vacant.

The fuel additive is the work of GM’s mechanical engineer Thomas Midgley Jr., who invents not only leaded gasoline but chlorofluorocarbons, which will come to be regarded as two of the most harmful chemical compounds ever produced during the industrial age. Chlorofluorocarbons will destroy the atmosphere. Leaded gasoline will drive everyone mad, slowly, filling children’s teeth with lead. Sometimes bad things are engineered by engineers.

Lead poisoning at refineries is one thing, but what about the chronic, day-by-day, breath-by-breath exposure caused by leaded gasoline? And smelter smoke? What about the need to breathe? American physicians raise concerns that lead particulates will blanket the nation’s roads and highways, poisoning neighborhoods slowly and “insidiously.” They call it “the greatest single question in the field of public health that has ever faced the American public.”

Their concerns are swept aside, however, and Frank Howard, a vice president of the Ethyl Corporation, a joint venture between General Motors and Standard Oil, calls leaded gasoline a “gift of God.”

On October 30, 1924, untroubled by the hallucinations, convulsions, and straitjackets, Midgley, himself an Ethyl vice president, holds a press conference in the Chrysler Building in New York, and raises a tin of what he claims to be TEL in front of assembled journalists. He inhales deeply of the fumes and then, like Lady Macbeth, washes his hands in it, saying, “I’m not taking any chance whatever.” He has, in fact, begun wearing gloves religiously in his lab work. He knows that lead is absorbed through the skin. This has already happened to him: the year before, he was forced to take a long vacation in Miami to “cure” himself of lead poisoning.

In 1940, Midgley becomes paralyzed by what is said to be polio and contrives a Rube Goldberg device of pulleys and ropes to lift himself out of bed. In 1944 he strangles himself with his ropes, accidentally or on purpose. The American Chemical Society bestows upon him the Priestley Medal, its highest award, because his achievements are lasting.

— Murderland by 

#capitalism

quoted The AI Con by Alex Hanna

Alex Hanna, Emily M. Bender: The AI Con (Hardcover, 2025, HarperCollins Publishers)

A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls …

Google is aware of their responsibility for depriving the news ecosystem of its major source of advertising revenue, and has been experimenting with ways to support existing organizations. However, like many of the efforts put forward by Big Tech, many of their proposals will further entrench Al in the ecosystem, not lessen it. An investigation by 404 Media found that Google News is boosting ripped off content, slightly altered with LLM outputs, from other sites. Google has responded that they have no problem boosting these articles, stating, "Our focus when ranking content is on the quality of the content, rather than how it was produced." In other words: Al-generated content is A-okay for creating the news.

— The AI Con by ,

Google: let's mess up news for greed.

Absolutely horrendous.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #google #grift #news #capitalism

reviewed Biocode by Dawn Field

Dawn Field, Neil Davies: Biocode

A Recovering Software Engineer's Review

0.1 Introduction to Biocode

Biocode, by Field and Davies, might better be structured in two parts. Its first four chapters present the reader with what may be termed a minimal bootstrapping into the world of genetics in a broad sense. The second four chapters detail the scaling opportunities for genetic technology, showcasing how such technologies have insights to offer from the microbial world all the way to the entire planet.

The first part provides the reader with a layman’s introduction to genetic technology in its first chapter, “DNA,” a non-critical overview of real and potential commercial uses in its second chapter, “Personal Genomics,” a poor attempt to prod the ethics of the field in its third chapter, “Homo Evolutis,” and an incomplete treatment of bioinformatics in its fourth chapter, “Zoo in My Sequencer.” As evidenced by this author’s choice of adjectives, I find this part of the book deficient. The …