In the 70s, catalytic converters were filled with beadlike material and could be emptied and refilled. There were no real onboard computers etc on most cars.
Simple method would have been to empty out the cat of the reactive material.
I came across one of the refill bags at one of my old jobs. New old stock. Crazy stuff, picture the consistency of cat litter/1-2mm beads
Likely yes. It was a GM part at an old motor home dealership. I sold them on Ebay for the guy i worked for, we had a lot of old inventory to clear out and found that in it lol
Core it out and put an exhaust pipe through the center but today's cars have sensors on them. I remember some places were trying out road-side pollution detectors to nail the cheaters. Removing the cats back then made my cars run better and faster
I'm just hoping to get one of those homophobic cats one day. You know, the ones with 2 different color eyes? However, I will be prepared to disable my homophobic cat if it helps my car run better. 🤣🤣
My dad enlarged the fuel filler so the regular leaded woukd fit. All that happens it the CAT is poisoned, and won't do it's job, reducing unburned hydrocarbons.
This is it. Lead was introduced way before we were children and most susceptible. But the real combination was the generation of the interstate system in combination with lead (thanks GM and Standard Oil!)
Realistically there was likely lead in the hose. Lead, while being bioaccumulate and a potent neurotoxin, does improve a lot of products like mixed with rubber it extends the life and makes it even more pliable. This is not an endorsement for the use of lead anywhere. It’s poison.
When we were moving from the Outer Banks to San Diego, we decided to make it a move/fun road trip. We had to stop at a gas station that time forgot in Nowheresville, New Mexico. I went in to get a drink while my brilliant husband put gas in our Ryder rental truck. I came out to find him letting the gas fall into the tank, the pump nozzle about 3-4 inches above the gas tank hole (I can't think of its name right now. Fuel door, maybe?). I asked him what he was doing, and he informed me that the nozzle wouldn't fit in the hole. Somehow, we had found the last gas station on earth that sold leaded gas, and he had never pumped leaded (regular) gas before, so regular to him was unleaded. I found the mechanic and asked him what was going to happen to this truck that we didn't own. He laughed and said it would run great. Awesome. The truck actually did run quite well the rest of the day. I hadn't even thought about saying anything to my husband about the difference in the gas because it was something I thought everyone knew, so my bad. So, yeah, I remember the post-transition period quite well...lol.
I lived in a nowheresville NM town until 1994. My 66 Mustang took leaded gas which you could still buy at almost every gas station then. I left my car with my brother when I moved to the Southeast.
At first I thought "Well, wait... lead paint peaked a long time prior to the 80's..." but forgot about all that yummy gas we siphoned in the oil embargoes. So yeah, ok. We lead the day back then.
I might do this next time. But what I really want to test is the "forever chemical" levels that Veritasium did a video about. But that test is hella expensive.
This graph’s design is bizarre. Why is the X axis “age in 2015” with a domain of 0-75, when it could just be birth year?
Am I the only one who looked at this and thought “fuck, now I have to do arithmetic?!” before realizing it’s just your age now - 10 years? This shouldn’t be necessary. Do we need an updated graph of age in 2025? Why oh why not just “year in which you were born”? Then it’s evergreen. 🙄
I think it's a pretty neat graph - it's conveying a lot of information - You could turn each one of those bars into a pie chart to give the same information, but then, you'd have several charts instead of just one, or it wouldn't be as accurate, or it wouldn't show the change over time as well. Definitely a great job for the chart-maker!
Think of it like pie charts turned into bars. Each color represents the percentile of blood lead levels in their blood. So, the way to read it is to find your age (or what your age was in 2015.) Let's say someone was 30. You could then take the colors of that bar and make a simple pie chart with those percentages. So, about 40% of the 30 year olds had 5 parts per liter of blood (or whatever that distribution is, I'm not a scientist.) another 30% had 10, and so on, up the chart. The left scale is 100% because it's measuring the full 100% of each age range.
So this isn't really saying "Gen X is 100% lead", it's saying that 100% of every age group tested had some lead in their blood, with Gen X having the highest dosage across the full age range" (a thing that should surprise noone.)
Yes, it’s a stacked bar graph that adds up to 100%. The age-50-in-2015 (🙄 just say 1965, guys) bar says that nobody had <5 micrograms of lead per deciliter, but about 20% had between 5 and 10 mcg/dl. So that’s the turquoise bar at the bottom. It looks like about 30% of them had between 10-15 mcg/dl, which is the yellow bar, which starts where the turquoise bar ends. And so on.
My mind is sharp, it’s my ears that are going (well, also my eyes) because of too much time blasting Rush and The Who and Led Zeppelin through Walkman headphones as a youte.
Not sure what you mean. Are you talking about the Y axis? I’m cool with the Y axis. 0% being at the origin is the sane option. High concentration is at the top of the Y axis, and the stacked colors are easy to distinguish.
The implications of this are that the average GenX member has an IQ between 6 and 14 pts lower than normal. Just the light blue level contributes between 2 and 4 pts drop.
And that the generation will have decreased memory retention and are at increased risk of dementia.
Good news, I was 40! There's a bit of a dip for those of us born in '75. I doubt that anomaly is legit, but a lead-addled Gen-Xer can hope, right? Oh yeah, and I used to help my parents burn the lead paint off our summer home's cottage when I was 8 or so. Sears and others sold a heating element you held over the paint and it caused it to bubble up from the wood and smoke. Nothing like some gaseous lead in the morning of your life.
I wonder about this as well, though. I wonder what my potential would have been if I'd grown up without leaded everything, or smoking in every public space, with proper nutrition, and parents that nurtured and encouraged me.
They were just trying to hoard all of those tasty morsels for themselves. They didn’t want people to know how tasty leaded avocado green or burnt orange paint really is. Same with those silica gel packets. Ha, “Do not eat” means “we don’t think you can handle the tastiness of this little flavor packet”.
Although she was more worried about the fact that the dog drank out of it first. She also claimed we’d be sterile from standing too close to the color TV…
No danger from them. Microwaves don't leak “radiation” as you think of it. If it leaks, it leaks radio waves or RF. The only thing RF can do is heat things.
I once left cookies overnight in my inlaws' microwave. Ants everywhere. I removed the cookies and nuked the ants. Nothing happened to them... I was sooo disappointed!
It's funny when we finally got a microwave, mom put all these papers she got from people at work debunking the radiation thing (this was the '80s believe it or not). She's 84 and thankfully has a decent sense of humor about it all.
This is the same woman who insisted for a decade I, a renowned chocoholic, disliked chocolate. "MOM! Seriously." I asked her why she sends me crazy high cacao/dark chocolate bars on my birthday. "I'm making up for getting you wrong." Once I was FaceTime visiting her and stood next to our TV, moving several feet away and against it. "Why are you doing that, you're making me diz—oh. Very funny, mister smartass."
Lead paint on our toys, on our baby cribs, the walls of our houses, in anything motorized which aerosolized the lead into a convenient spray…fucking everywhere!
There's a theory that declining crime rates are due to the legalization of abortion. Adjusted for state law changes... You see the drop in crime almost exactly 18 years after abortion is made legal. Freakanomics has a whole section on it.
The great news is that lead lasts generations! Our body will convert lead and use in a similar way to calcium: it's in our bones for life and sheaths our neurons (myelon). When women exposed to lead as children, the lead stored in the bones is leached from our bones to help make the baby...it's the gift that keeps on giving.
The overlap of high lead areas to violent crime matches near perfectly.
I had a theory for explaining the state of the US and how people seem to have gone cray-cray en masse. My theory was lead poisoning due to bad piping.
"Exposure to lead can result in a variety of effects upon neuropsychological functioning including deficits in general intellectual functioning, ability to sustain attention on tasks, organization of thinking and behavior, speech articulation, language comprehension and production, learning and memory efficiency, fine motor skills, high activity level, reduced problem solving flexibility and poor behavioral self-control."
https://www.mwph.org/health-services/lead-treatment/poisoning-effects#:~:text=Exposure%20to%20lead%20can%20result,learning%20and%20memory%20efficiency%2C%20fine
Assuming this went untreated for 60+ years, what are the long term effects on adults?
Veritassium on YouTube has a wonderful video about the lead and gasoline in the guy who invented it. The shocking part was they estimate anywhere between 2 to 8 IQ points globally were lost because of worldwide lead exposure during those years.
What do you suppose is worse for the collective mental health of a generation, this one (which includes me, in my 40's in 2015), or having a smart phone in your face 24/7 delivering instant artificial dopamine hits all day as your brain develops?
I think being exposed while being a developing kid is worse than being exposed as an adult. I remember reading something about this during the Flint water crisis. Flint is my hometown FTW.
Sorry, please help me understand what is going on in this graph... I was 42 in 2015, does that mean there's a 30% chance my blood is 100% lead? Me like picture pretty colors!
Seems I dodged a bullet. 37 in 2015. I work with lead for stained glass and actually had it tested and 1.13. Guessing by the time I was born people were slacking off on leaded fuel and paint.
The worst part of the leaded gas/paint/piping issue is our society was well aware of the process. Lead toxicity is known to be part of the decline of the Greek and Roman empires.
Greeks had heavy lead amounts in the glaze of pottery... including sex toys... the Romans lined aquaducts and the seams in baths with lead.
So to say it took over 20 years to rid lead from gasoline with that knowledge says it was delayed 20 years from its addition.
But at least we invented the "ultra-clean room" because of it.
Maybe the 73/74 oil embargo cleaned up the environment temporarily giving you a little break in exposure before prices dropped enough for people to return to their old driving patterns.
I always got a little bonus lead if I was at my grandparents' house during quail season. I still remember my grandma admonishing me to not swallow any BBs because they'd make me stupid. She could never quite get all the shot out of the birds.
Of course I swallowed a BB here and there because I was a little kid.
Jokes on them! I used to go around eating those soft magnets hoping to get superpowers, so I'm pretty sure it extracted all the lead from my body at some point.
EelsEverywhere@reddit
Remember that transition period between “regular” gas and “regular”gas?
Outside_Ad1669@reddit
Lol yea, you could actually buy a bottle of lead additive to dump into your fuel tank when filling up with "regular."
EelsEverywhere@reddit
I remember my parents “knowing a guy” who could disable your cat so you could by regular instead of the more expensive unleaded
cometshoney@reddit
How does one disable the cat? If it helps my car run better, I have cats to spare.
QualityBushRat@reddit
I had a bad cat in my El Camino when I was younger. Cut it out installed 2" electrical conduit with soup cans and hose clamps.
Garuda34@reddit
It appears that you have a degree in Redneck Engineering.
Got mine from Upthaholler U.
DepartmentNatural@reddit
Cut the cut off the car & remove the insides & weld it back in place
cometshoney@reddit
Now there's a cut involved, too? This cat is getting more complicated by the hour.
DepartmentNatural@reddit
Yes, it's totally common to weld in a cat or do work on the exhaust pipes & welds are needed. Sorry, things are hard
PilotKnob@reddit
The quickest way to do it is to disconnect the pipes and ram something through it.
cometshoney@reddit
Intake to exhaust or exhaust to intake? I would hate to ram it through my cat in the wrong direction and make everything worse.
PilotKnob@reddit
If you don't know what you're doing, I recommend against it. You can really mess up a vehicle, and I mean expensively, by doing what I said.
Jonnyflash80@reddit
You have to cut it out. The exhaust fucking stinks without a CAT though.
yallknowme19@reddit
In the 70s, catalytic converters were filled with beadlike material and could be emptied and refilled. There were no real onboard computers etc on most cars.
Simple method would have been to empty out the cat of the reactive material.
I came across one of the refill bags at one of my old jobs. New old stock. Crazy stuff, picture the consistency of cat litter/1-2mm beads
Honest_Road17@reddit
Those beads were probably platinum.
yallknowme19@reddit
Likely yes. It was a GM part at an old motor home dealership. I sold them on Ebay for the guy i worked for, we had a lot of old inventory to clear out and found that in it lol
Feisty_Stomach_7213@reddit
Cut it out entirely
LoudMind967@reddit
Cops used to get down and look for missing cats
LoudMind967@reddit
Core it out and put an exhaust pipe through the center but today's cars have sensors on them. I remember some places were trying out road-side pollution detectors to nail the cheaters. Removing the cats back then made my cars run better and faster
BigBellyBoy@reddit
Cat and car are interchangeable around these parts. These parts being Reddit.
cometshoney@reddit
I'm just hoping to get one of those homophobic cats one day. You know, the ones with 2 different color eyes? However, I will be prepared to disable my homophobic cat if it helps my car run better. 🤣🤣
Dangerous_Strength77@reddit
Grab them on the back of the neck, just above the shoulders.
cometshoney@reddit
Uh huh. Tell me more.
Grobbekee@reddit
He saw it off and sold it.
denzien@reddit
Gut it
Vocabulary-Pollution@reddit
Feed it some lead
Komaisnotsalty@reddit
I tried disabling my sister's cat, but she can clear a room with her fart bombs - a whole different level of gas.
redbeard914@reddit
My dad enlarged the fuel filler so the regular leaded woukd fit. All that happens it the CAT is poisoned, and won't do it's job, reducing unburned hydrocarbons.
Jmazoso@reddit
Same here. It actually tested very clean when it started to have to pass emissions.
EveningRequirement27@reddit
“Instead ‘o lead” is what my dad used I think.
dirtydan442@reddit
You still can https://www.amazon.com/Niteo-Products-LLC-LEAD-SUBSTITUTE/dp/B083QR29JR/ref=sr_1_6?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.WL-t6GQPRevXhsADN1L2eYixJj8qIn-7xWU0336QpSAbAg4E8JvkRz8efwiq_0UjkPiCdZNcqMsbJi9xl70p8U5TEhOWyKb-0dKc-EWAZSYiHk6kEyLjlWbQbQ49bECBqJ3OKk6etMUNx8Y6kbwAd9d41vDjUe6-mmAvXwXzS7nd266tUtYiA9BW4VN07eqFqmSxOKVQTOcXIYl17E3JjLiR_qQN1icbFv_QCc-vlNdXe3mc6UbBFTjYSbSmviI1v81Xv7xnYaLN2j6zkugzVbtvgISVfR_T3ajYy91CQuA.5Pscm4-VHU5rPeO9JqWkKP1fDeT428EyXuStDgKv6Io&dib_tag=se&hvadid=695311053801&hvdev=c&hvexpln=67&hvlocphy=9032222&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=3460229047625174184--&hvqmt=e&hvrand=3460229047625174184&hvtargid=kwd-299904110090&hydadcr=24660_13626701&keywords=lead+substitute&mcid=bf66fa3983fa30c9b527ee19e77e40df&qid=1760804182&sr=8-6
neepster44@reddit
No wonder we are so fucked up…
_Brandobaris_@reddit
This is it. Lead was introduced way before we were children and most susceptible. But the real combination was the generation of the interstate system in combination with lead (thanks GM and Standard Oil!)
https://nonprofitnewsfeed.com/resource/the-rise-and-fall-of-leaded-gasoline-an-absurd-true-timeline/
Thanks-4allthefish@reddit
And I thought it was all that drinking through a garden hose...
00sucker00@reddit
And the McDonald’s collectible cups
cuzwhat@reddit
You aren’t supposed to eat the cups.
00sucker00@reddit
Now someone tells me
Phobos1982@reddit
Still have mine!
adashiel@reddit
I still have one of those damn things. It’s the one with Garfield in a canoe.
geof2001@reddit
Instructions unclear indranknfromthe gas hose
marmeylady@reddit
Same… and engraving pipes and stuff with rocks tips I cleaned out with my mouth. I forgot that until very now. Fuuuuck
_Brandobaris_@reddit
Realistically there was likely lead in the hose. Lead, while being bioaccumulate and a potent neurotoxin, does improve a lot of products like mixed with rubber it extends the life and makes it even more pliable. This is not an endorsement for the use of lead anywhere. It’s poison.
LastOneSergeant@reddit
Great article. Sad. But great.
_Brandobaris_@reddit
Thanks and yeah 😞
LoudMind967@reddit
Leaded and unleaded. Some cars still needed the lead for a while because they were designed for leaded gas
r4d4r_3n5@reddit
Just yesterday I was mentioning how much better gasoline smelled when it had lead in it. 😆
tinglingearballs@reddit
When you know you know. . .
RaspberryOk2707@reddit
Sleepy, little, bunny rabbit.
timeforitnowright@reddit
My grandma would go out of her way with her Monte Carlo to get the leaded gas until they no longer had it.
cometshoney@reddit
When we were moving from the Outer Banks to San Diego, we decided to make it a move/fun road trip. We had to stop at a gas station that time forgot in Nowheresville, New Mexico. I went in to get a drink while my brilliant husband put gas in our Ryder rental truck. I came out to find him letting the gas fall into the tank, the pump nozzle about 3-4 inches above the gas tank hole (I can't think of its name right now. Fuel door, maybe?). I asked him what he was doing, and he informed me that the nozzle wouldn't fit in the hole. Somehow, we had found the last gas station on earth that sold leaded gas, and he had never pumped leaded (regular) gas before, so regular to him was unleaded. I found the mechanic and asked him what was going to happen to this truck that we didn't own. He laughed and said it would run great. Awesome. The truck actually did run quite well the rest of the day. I hadn't even thought about saying anything to my husband about the difference in the gas because it was something I thought everyone knew, so my bad. So, yeah, I remember the post-transition period quite well...lol.
dsmac085@reddit
I lived in a nowheresville NM town until 1994. My 66 Mustang took leaded gas which you could still buy at almost every gas station then. I left my car with my brother when I moved to the Southeast.
cometshoney@reddit
This happened in May 1994. The pumps still had the flipping numbers on them. We might have been in your Nowheresville.
Interesting_Debate57@reddit
Fuck me.
Puzzled_Respond_3335@reddit
I still sometimes ask for unleaded
Karens__Last__Ziti@reddit
I do lol
Grigori_the_Lemur@reddit
At first I thought "Well, wait... lead paint peaked a long time prior to the 80's..." but forgot about all that yummy gas we siphoned in the oil embargoes. So yeah, ok. We lead the day back then.
WhereWolfish@reddit
Well, shit.
untetheredgrief@reddit
FYI you can get your lead levels checked with your annual physical blood test.
OisinDebard@reddit
I might do this next time. But what I really want to test is the "forever chemical" levels that Veritasium did a video about. But that test is hella expensive.
PoolNoodleSamurai@reddit
This graph’s design is bizarre. Why is the X axis “age in 2015” with a domain of 0-75, when it could just be birth year?
Am I the only one who looked at this and thought “fuck, now I have to do arithmetic?!” before realizing it’s just your age now - 10 years? This shouldn’t be necessary. Do we need an updated graph of age in 2025? Why oh why not just “year in which you were born”? Then it’s evergreen. 🙄
cosmo7@reddit
The person who designed the map was born in 1970.
OisinDebard@reddit
I think it's a pretty neat graph - it's conveying a lot of information - You could turn each one of those bars into a pie chart to give the same information, but then, you'd have several charts instead of just one, or it wouldn't be as accurate, or it wouldn't show the change over time as well. Definitely a great job for the chart-maker!
OisinDebard@reddit
Think of it like pie charts turned into bars. Each color represents the percentile of blood lead levels in their blood. So, the way to read it is to find your age (or what your age was in 2015.) Let's say someone was 30. You could then take the colors of that bar and make a simple pie chart with those percentages. So, about 40% of the 30 year olds had 5 parts per liter of blood (or whatever that distribution is, I'm not a scientist.) another 30% had 10, and so on, up the chart. The left scale is 100% because it's measuring the full 100% of each age range.
So this isn't really saying "Gen X is 100% lead", it's saying that 100% of every age group tested had some lead in their blood, with Gen X having the highest dosage across the full age range" (a thing that should surprise noone.)
kev0153@reddit
I know give us a break, the generation that this most important too has lead coated brains.
MostlyBrine@reddit
We might be better protected against gamma radiation. Who knows?
FlemCandangoS@reddit
Also I can’t figure out the x axis. Is the height of the bar the percent of the population of that age that has that percent lead distribution?
PoolNoodleSamurai@reddit
Sounds like you actually do have figured it out.
Yes, it’s a stacked bar graph that adds up to 100%. The age-50-in-2015 (🙄 just say 1965, guys) bar says that nobody had <5 micrograms of lead per deciliter, but about 20% had between 5 and 10 mcg/dl. So that’s the turquoise bar at the bottom. It looks like about 30% of them had between 10-15 mcg/dl, which is the yellow bar, which starts where the turquoise bar ends. And so on.
FlemCandangoS@reddit
Thank you for not pointing out that I meant y-axis and explaining it as though I had.
AintNoNeedForYa@reddit
That’s the lead clouding your mind
PoolNoodleSamurai@reddit
My mind is sharp, it’s my ears that are going (well, also my eyes) because of too much time blasting Rush and The Who and Led Zeppelin through Walkman headphones as a youte.
ContributionDapper84@reddit
And why is highness depicted as lowness?
PoolNoodleSamurai@reddit
Not sure what you mean. Are you talking about the Y axis? I’m cool with the Y axis. 0% being at the origin is the sane option. High concentration is at the top of the Y axis, and the stacked colors are easy to distinguish.
EventHorizonbyGA@reddit
The implications of this are that the average GenX member has an IQ between 6 and 14 pts lower than normal. Just the light blue level contributes between 2 and 4 pts drop.
And that the generation will have decreased memory retention and are at increased risk of dementia.
mikebrown33@reddit
That explains Glam Rock
Ichgebibble@reddit
That’s okay, everyone after us is 98% microplastics
DayneGaraio@reddit
Oh don't worry, you have those too! No one left behind with micro plastics.
liddybuckfan@reddit
The micro plastics have to be there to keep the lead company.
Ichgebibble@reddit
I forgot forever chemicals. That probably makes us like 80% lead, 15% chemicals and 5% plastics.
Dazzling-Let1829@reddit
When RFK sees this, he will conclude that kids need to be exposed to more lead in order to prevent Autism.
Bokononfoma@reddit
Nah. We're just big boned.
forkedquality@reddit
So, we are born leaders, right?
mlokc@reddit
Some people are born to lead. Some people just ingest it.
LemonPartyW0rldTour@reddit
Well they shouldn’t have made paint chips so delicious.
Patrucio71@reddit
"Muncha buncha paint chips go with lunch!"
Oh wait...that was Fritos...
wwaxwork@reddit
But damn it our car engines sounded smooth as hell.
johnbr@reddit
I can only imagine how much more intelligent I might have been had I not been 45 in 2015. Holy cow.
JimmyFree@reddit
Right there with you, and drinking/smoking/etc. was normal when women were pregnant.
JohnnyPiston@reddit
We licked the walls
Happy_Confection90@reddit
Just a little. They typically say as the most effected we lost about 4-7 IQ points to the lead.
Pleasant_Studio9690@reddit
Good news, I was 40! There's a bit of a dip for those of us born in '75. I doubt that anomaly is legit, but a lead-addled Gen-Xer can hope, right? Oh yeah, and I used to help my parents burn the lead paint off our summer home's cottage when I was 8 or so. Sears and others sold a heating element you held over the paint and it caused it to bubble up from the wood and smoke. Nothing like some gaseous lead in the morning of your life.
BridgestoneX@reddit
fuel crisis. we snagged a couple years where ppl drove less
Mercuryshottoo@reddit
in Charlie Brown voice I was 39
Don't know what that little spike for my year is, maybe they had a big party to use it all up, just doing lines of lead paint chips everywhere
punchcreations@reddit
Heavy metals are more easily absorbed through the lungs than the digestive tract.
thesturdygerman@reddit
My job after club target practice was to sweep up the lead dust.
ArchSchnitz@reddit
35 in 2015! Wooo! I almost have all my brain!
I wonder about this as well, though. I wonder what my potential would have been if I'd grown up without leaded everything, or smoking in every public space, with proper nutrition, and parents that nurtured and encouraged me.
I'd be a terror.
stephenforbes@reddit
I'm not sure if it was the huffing freon or the lead that made me dumb as a doorbell.
Ok_Researcher_9796@reddit
I was only 38. Guess I'm lucky
jbenze@reddit
Same but I also remember chipping a ton of lead paint as a kid when my parents renovated the house so it probably balances out.
flipzyshitzy@reddit
Now do plastic.
Sufficient_Laugh@reddit
Heavy
Jimathomas@reddit
gramslamx@reddit
Where’s my damn superpowers?
MovingTarget-@reddit
Toxic avenger?
December_Warlock@reddit
Sadly, there are no superpowers, just some damaged brain development
Stellatombraider@reddit
Sure, I saw the PSAs about not eating paint chips, but they're not the boss of me.
MovingTarget-@reddit
I hankered for a hunk o' Paint chip as well!
Key-Special-3404@reddit
Lead paint was only removed from the market in the mid 80s....
Happy_Cat_3600@reddit
They were just trying to hoard all of those tasty morsels for themselves. They didn’t want people to know how tasty leaded avocado green or burnt orange paint really is. Same with those silica gel packets. Ha, “Do not eat” means “we don’t think you can handle the tastiness of this little flavor packet”.
benbenpens@reddit
Those lead paint chips weren’t just gonna eat themselves yep.
EthanDMatthews@reddit
Oof. I’m peak lead.
But I’m sure I lived far from the worst of it, in a remote region of the USA called Los Angeles. 🙄
MovingTarget-@reddit
I grew up in the industrial belt ... I'm sure I'm fiiiiiine
omysweede@reddit
I am kinda wondering if it wouldn't affect red states more than blue states, due to the resistance to environmental protections.
Remember the smog?
CoralSpringsDHead@reddit
I read that chart at age 55 and was happy that it looked like I escaped the worst of it.
Then I noticed it said “age in 2015”
Whelp, I’m boned!
MovingTarget-@reddit
This is exactly what I did lol.
Significant_Ruin4870@reddit
Aren't we all.
YendorZenitram@reddit
ug/DL is the units for the Y-axis but it's labeled 0-100%. This is filling me with unreasonable lead-induced rage...
RockSteady65@reddit
Used to play with mercury too
Lost_Trucker_1979@reddit
Thinking of it now you really don't see paint chips anymore. Like large slivers of paint flanking off.
shaun_of_the_south@reddit
Probably how I can dive so deep.
CommentFool@reddit
The lead affected me so much that I 100% can't figure out what that graph is trying to say
Authoritaye@reddit
Surprised we aren’t murdering everything left right and centre like Mike Meyers.
leapingcow@reddit
Anyone else remember enjoying the fumes whenever your parents would tank up? I loved the smell of gas in the morning.
RKsu99@reddit
Coincides perfectly with “kids being forced to stare out the back of a station wagon” for long ass road trips.
Jmazoso@reddit
With their “help, we’re being kidnapped” or “blow the air horn” signs
hughcifer-106103@reddit
that explains our recent voting patterns
tuvar_hiede@reddit
Need to adjust 10 years since the graph is from 2015
Jonnyflash80@reddit
I was 35 in 2015, so I'm in the low range.
Fish-Weekly@reddit
It’s the hose water after all
FrostnJack@reddit
See? Mom said that would happen.
Although she was more worried about the fact that the dog drank out of it first. She also claimed we’d be sterile from standing too close to the color TV…
Kilashandra1996@reddit
And radiation from the new fangled microwave ovens!
Speech-Language@reddit
No danger from them. Microwaves don't leak “radiation” as you think of it. If it leaks, it leaks radio waves or RF. The only thing RF can do is heat things.
Kilashandra1996@reddit
I once left cookies overnight in my inlaws' microwave. Ants everywhere. I removed the cookies and nuked the ants. Nothing happened to them... I was sooo disappointed!
Fish-Weekly@reddit
Sure, if you believe the propaganda that “Big Microwave” puts out 😅
FrostnJack@reddit
It's funny when we finally got a microwave, mom put all these papers she got from people at work debunking the radiation thing (this was the '80s believe it or not). She's 84 and thankfully has a decent sense of humor about it all.
This is the same woman who insisted for a decade I, a renowned chocoholic, disliked chocolate. "MOM! Seriously." I asked her why she sends me crazy high cacao/dark chocolate bars on my birthday. "I'm making up for getting you wrong." Once I was FaceTime visiting her and stood next to our TV, moving several feet away and against it. "Why are you doing that, you're making me diz—oh. Very funny, mister smartass."
axebodyspraytester@reddit
I still don't have one.
CharleyLH@reddit
Mom always says don’t drink lead in the house…
TheRateBeerian@reddit
God damn I was 45 in 2015, I’m right at the peak of that shit
omegamun@reddit
Lead paint on our toys, on our baby cribs, the walls of our houses, in anything motorized which aerosolized the lead into a convenient spray…fucking everywhere!
Nonetoobrightatall@reddit
Is that bad?
AriadneThread@reddit
Username confirmed ;)
Nonetoobrightatall@reddit
Too much lead.
Oxjrnine@reddit
This chart doesn’t make any sense. Plus crime rates associated with high led exposure have been declining since the 90s
dolwedge@reddit
There's a theory that declining crime rates are due to the legalization of abortion. Adjusted for state law changes... You see the drop in crime almost exactly 18 years after abortion is made legal. Freakanomics has a whole section on it.
ColonelSpacePirate@reddit
This graph is super weird as gasoline had lead in it (widespread in the 1920s)
GatzMaster@reddit
Is it just because I'm still on coffee #1, or does that graph make little sense?
AriadneThread@reddit
Both. It's a crappy chart, and we both need another cuppa.
Key-Special-3404@reddit
The great news is that lead lasts generations! Our body will convert lead and use in a similar way to calcium: it's in our bones for life and sheaths our neurons (myelon). When women exposed to lead as children, the lead stored in the bones is leached from our bones to help make the baby...it's the gift that keeps on giving.
The overlap of high lead areas to violent crime matches near perfectly.
Lead poisoning is forever.
AriadneThread@reddit
And that is depressing. We can only try to do better with later generations, after boomers die off and we are finally in charge.
Hippy_Lynne@reddit
What the fuck is going on with that outlier for kids born in 75? 😂
AriadneThread@reddit
Gas shortage!
omysweede@reddit
I had a theory for explaining the state of the US and how people seem to have gone cray-cray en masse. My theory was lead poisoning due to bad piping.
"Exposure to lead can result in a variety of effects upon neuropsychological functioning including deficits in general intellectual functioning, ability to sustain attention on tasks, organization of thinking and behavior, speech articulation, language comprehension and production, learning and memory efficiency, fine motor skills, high activity level, reduced problem solving flexibility and poor behavioral self-control." https://www.mwph.org/health-services/lead-treatment/poisoning-effects#:~:text=Exposure%20to%20lead%20can%20result,learning%20and%20memory%20efficiency%2C%20fine
Assuming this went untreated for 60+ years, what are the long term effects on adults?
AriadneThread@reddit
I choose to make this my go-to on crazy people from now on. They can't help themselves. They are lead-addled! 👍🏻
ffphier@reddit
Mmmmmmmm…lead
Left-Thinker-5512@reddit
What is this chart trying to tell me?
NerdyComfort-78@reddit
Veritassium on YouTube has a wonderful video about the lead and gasoline in the guy who invented it. The shocking part was they estimate anywhere between 2 to 8 IQ points globally were lost because of worldwide lead exposure during those years.
This guy also invented Pfas “forever chemicals”.
Veritasium
Difficult_Limit2718@reddit
I typically use this to explain MAGA
Individual_Ask9957@reddit
Peak lead
Status_Entrepreneur4@reddit
This is when I'm thankful to be an Xennial and at lower end of the red lol
spargel_gesicht@reddit
Thanks, boomers!
SXTY82@reddit
You remove it and install a fake o2 sensor
whatevertoad@reddit
When I was 3yo we moved to an old house with peeling paint. I remember just sitting on the porch peeling away that paint for fun.
Ed98208@reddit
I guess I'm more lead than human at this point.
puppy-paw-print@reddit
“Lead paint: Delicious but Deadly”
miketoaster@reddit
So what, I dont care.
FingerDemon500@reddit
This makes me so ANGRY! And sarcastic.
1989DiscGolfer@reddit
What do you suppose is worse for the collective mental health of a generation, this one (which includes me, in my 40's in 2015), or having a smart phone in your face 24/7 delivering instant artificial dopamine hits all day as your brain develops?
WilliePullout@reddit
I remember moving into a rental and you had to sign a waiver that you wouldn’t consume the paint.
MedPhys90@reddit
Order what methods they used to determine lead concentration?
redzedx77@reddit
Also: we all grew up in houses with lead paint, even if under layers of newer…
GasFun9380@reddit
Winning is the best!
Knitiotsavant@reddit
Winning feels good.
MetalTrek1@reddit
I'm 55 now, so that includes me. 🤷
dangelo7654398@reddit
That explains a lot, seriously. There was a definite dip in intelligence in the 1970s.
Hagfist@reddit
Bullshit. Boomers got way more exposure.
kev0153@reddit
I think being exposed while being a developing kid is worse than being exposed as an adult. I remember reading something about this during the Flint water crisis. Flint is my hometown FTW.
joecarter93@reddit
The Heavy Metal generation
Individual_Note_8756@reddit
THIS is the answer!!
Ecstatic-Respect-455@reddit
🤘
GrnViper@reddit
Thank you boomers!
__perigee__@reddit
More like the Greatest Generation. Midgley and Kittering started the lead in gasoline farce in the early 1920s.
HHSquad@reddit
Silent Generation probably
ImpressionThis8059@reddit
Oh well fuck it
wootr68@reddit
I’m so dumb with lead that I can’t figure out how old I am in this 2015 chart
yerBoyShoe@reddit
Sorry, please help me understand what is going on in this graph... I was 42 in 2015, does that mean there's a 30% chance my blood is 100% lead? Me like picture pretty colors!
AgentLead_TTV@reddit
Oh hell yeah!
Nomadic-Texan@reddit
It’s so interesting you can kind of see house renovations in there before it was known about paint encapsulating
defiantnoodle@reddit
You think it staved off effects from the asbestos tiles in chemistry class?
Chainedheat@reddit
And yet I am still smarter than my colleagues both younger and older than myself………..
WileyCoyote7@reddit
This explains…so much. Could’ve really used this chart back in school to explain my grades. “You see Ms. Snodapple, the lead in my head…”
dylangaine@reddit
How do they expect us to understand this chart.
PastEntrance5780@reddit
How did those older than GenX not have lead. I thought leaded gas was the norm until the conversion?
99laika@reddit
Freaking D&D miniatures were made with lead. I’m sure I chewed or sucked on at least one. I guess that orc got me after all.
marty_anaconda@reddit
I don't see the porblim
FrostnJack@reddit
Dayam. I was gonna think, “were they sure?!” Then I noticed, actually, my blood does feel pretty heavy…
TurtleToast2@reddit
You're not fat, you're lead-boned.
FrostnJack@reddit
Ugh. I feel even heavier now.
Olderbutnotdead619@reddit
Mexican candy
QuokkaNerd@reddit
This explains so much...
SingleMaltShooter@reddit
All that drinking from the garden hose
TheOriginalBeefus@reddit
Uh that explains my duh
c0rksea@reddit
You could say we’re metal! 🤘🎸
sir_culo@reddit
Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Accurate_Humor948@reddit
Sorta good news. Thought I was feeling heavy from getting fat. Turns out it’s just lead
Upper-Affect5971@reddit
that explains the taste in my mouth.
Cutthechitchata-hole@reddit
That would be the gingivitis
JoeSicko@reddit
Cavity creeps will Getcha.
vinegar@reddit
WE! MAKE! HOLES IN TEETH!
Upper-Affect5971@reddit
No way, i use Aim!
kookiemaster@reddit
Seems I dodged a bullet. 37 in 2015. I work with lead for stained glass and actually had it tested and 1.13. Guessing by the time I was born people were slacking off on leaded fuel and paint.
Agathocles87@reddit
That’s why we liked Heavy Metal
sunningmybuns@reddit
My mother put mercurochrome on wounds that I would get as a kid
I_am_ChivoBlanco@reddit
There will never be anyone more heavy metal than us.
bedlog@reddit
protien shakes have recently been discovered to have large amounts of lead in them https://www.cbsnews.com/news/protein-powders-shakes-lead-consumer-reports/
ContributionDry2252@reddit
I'm glad we got rid of leaded gasoline in the nineties before our kids were born.
Fit_Cut_4238@reddit
I remember chewing on a lead painted (and repainted) radiator. It was sweet as they say. I'm now president of the united states.
DubiousSpaniel@reddit
Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Is this chart for real. I must be the leaddiest!
Junior_Lavishness_96@reddit
I still remember picking at and playing with peeling paint chips on the windowsills of our house.
BeetsMe666@reddit
The worst part of the leaded gas/paint/piping issue is our society was well aware of the process. Lead toxicity is known to be part of the decline of the Greek and Roman empires.
Greeks had heavy lead amounts in the glaze of pottery... including sex toys... the Romans lined aquaducts and the seams in baths with lead.
So to say it took over 20 years to rid lead from gasoline with that knowledge says it was delayed 20 years from its addition.
But at least we invented the "ultra-clean room" because of it.
mustardman73@reddit
now that's heavy
JMLobo83@reddit
Huh. Sometimes growing up poor away from internal combustion engines is actually a good thing.
PRC_Spy@reddit
This graph makes me so happy that I grew up somewhere rural with cleaner air.
Probably got filled up with organophosphates instead though.
movieator@reddit
The lead and microplastics in body can just battle it out until I die.
nhh@reddit
Yeah, lead Zeppelin you mean. 100%
MasterBlasterSnap@reddit
Rock on
Roy_Coulee@reddit
Wow man. We’re heavy.
jones_qc@reddit
There is a reason genx is the most conservative cohort out there
Cool_Jelly_9402@reddit
I think I just escaped it being 35 in 2015
SiameseChihuahua@reddit
We're metal!
Opposite_Ad_1707@reddit
Damn …… We were tards from lead.
scooter_orourke@reddit
Tetraethyl lead in gasoline poisoned the entire world from 1920's until Algeria was the last country to ban leaded gasoline in 2021
ResponsibilityFew318@reddit
I once chewed on split shot fishing weights like bubble gum.
kantmakm@reddit
Now do mercury.
Reachforthesky777@reddit
I remember toothpaste in metal tubes but I cant remember what kind of metal they were.
Hyack57@reddit
Distinctly remember my mom going to a gas station in our Chevy Malibu and the attendant asking “regular or unleaded”. 80s.
justanaccountimade1@reddit
Regular with extra lead, please.
HotTakes4Free@reddit
ChardFar6574@reddit
Well damn. 🤣🤣
https://i.redd.it/ffn5jsf0fsvf1.gif
TenYearHangover@reddit
I breathed too much lead to understand what this chart is trying to tell me
AZJHawk@reddit
How did us 1975 babies emerge relatively unscathed?
jawshoeaw@reddit
By not living within a mile of an interstate
Phantomtastic@reddit
Maybe the 73/74 oil embargo cleaned up the environment temporarily giving you a little break in exposure before prices dropped enough for people to return to their old driving patterns.
AZJHawk@reddit
I hadn’t thought about that. Very possible.
Whenever I see graphics like this or on the ozone layer, I curse Thomas Midgley.
FAx32@reddit
Heavy, man.
TypicalBody7663@reddit
We lead
Gavagirl23@reddit
I always got a little bonus lead if I was at my grandparents' house during quail season. I still remember my grandma admonishing me to not swallow any BBs because they'd make me stupid. She could never quite get all the shot out of the birds.
Of course I swallowed a BB here and there because I was a little kid.
KlutzyProfessional8@reddit
If you pronounce it "leed" then it doesn't sound so bad.
nb6635@reddit
I should probably stop eating those paint chips with salsa every night.
The_Jitterati@reddit
Well that explains a few things.
root_fifth_octave@reddit
We’re going down like a lead balloon. Or a Led Zeppelin
Ok-Commercial-924@reddit
We're #1, we're #1!
pzoony@reddit
I never ate the paint chips. I did gnaw on fishing tackle though
peptide2@reddit
And played with mercury
Outside_Ad1669@reddit
I still do. Something just feels off until I get that fix by using my teeth to pinch the lead weights onto my line.
pzoony@reddit
Those little weights are surprisingly chewy. Kind of like a spicy tootsie roll
Old-Kaleidoscope1874@reddit
Jokes on them! I used to go around eating those soft magnets hoping to get superpowers, so I'm pretty sure it extracted all the lead from my body at some point.
guzzijason@reddit
I was out mowing the lawn (and spilling leaded gas on myself) from about the time I could toddle.
freshcoastghost@reddit
It's all coming together now.
BigDamBeavers@reddit
All the times my dad paid me $5 to paint the hull of his sailboat all day long.
wrenchedups@reddit
I spent my formative years pumping leaded gas into cars.
I spent several of my adult years pumping low-leaded gas into airplanes.
I’m ahead of the curve. Or behind it.
erkose@reddit
Yeah, we could consume anything and survive.
HLOFRND@reddit
God damn hose water.
/s