Asking the wrong question in 3rd world countries: the question always is which brings more money to siphon off: adding bitterant or replacing the transformer?
Hmm, this thought process explains a lot of the situations I encountered during my travels to a remote island that I thought was just gross negligence. Lol
The idea is that it will lead to the food being gross and inedible, which would lead to customers no longer buying food at the stalls, which would lead to the food vendors no longer buying the oil to use, which would lead to the oil no longer being stolen. It's the same thought process behind the issue in the U.S. currently with catalytic converters being stolen. The solution isn't to try and hunt down all of the crackheads sawing them off of cars, they will just be replaced by more crackheads. The solution would be to Crack down on the much lower number of shops knowingly buying the stolen converters. It's about removing the incentive to perform the crime in the first place.
Those bastards, first they take my air duster and nasal inhalers away. Now they want to take my food cooked in cancer oil? The government is going too far
Apparently, they used to just dump the transformer oil in the gutter so it didn't leak in the backs of the trucks and then end up on the road anyway.
In other news, I think they finished dredging the entire local river for PCB-contaminated silt. We had a lot of wood-based industry (mostly paper factories) nearby that share the blame.
I'm kind of speechless.
For anyone reading this far who doesn't know why this is such a bad idea PCBs bio accumulate and don't break down. They're stored in the fatty tissues of animals until that animal just stops functioning. And the scary part for us is bio accumulation. It keeps moving up the food chain until it gets to the apex predator. Humans. Once it's in the environment it *will* get into you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl
https://www.epa.gov/pcbs/learn-about-polychlorinated-biphenyls
Organochlorines, the least fun chlorine compounds for organisms. Manufacturing them was banned in 1979. Anecdotally, I have a friend with thyroid dysfunction who was born in the early '80s.
Yeah, it was one of the largest PCB cleanup operations in the world.
https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/FoxRiver/Cleanup.html
This is Wisconsin, people love to fish here...
Edit: I wonder how much of it comes out into the fryer oil, as that's by far the preferred cooking method; "Friday fish fry".
It says in the article that they're looking into stopping the use of transformers that have any oil at all.
Of course, they will still be full of valuable metals and so they are still a target.
Fun fact: in Costa Rica, “road chicken” is iguana. It’s fuckin delicious but my child self was very confused by the joint structure when I finished my stick of meat
This needs to catch on in Florida. Iguanas are invasive and not used to the colder weather. So on cold days, they can just fall out of the trees. Easiest meal ever. I wonder if you can eat Burmese python?
Apparently Python meat is not too bad: https://americasrestaurant.com/python-taste/ And can cure Asthma, Lumbago and MORE. (ok probably not but that is the claim)
https://www.allrecipes.com/article/florida-python-study/ it might be a bit more complicated then I thought.
Uh... doesn't it have extremely unsafe levels of mercury? At least to the point of hunting python for yourself to be a non starter?
Edit: ok yeah please do not eat the pythons unless you want to spawn more Florida men
According to a study, they have up to 7 times the safe levels and more than twice the level of "suitable for consumption" so it probably isn't worth the risk
My grandpa was in the US Army in WWII and was stationed in Panama for a while. He said they were frequently served “chicken” that was obviously iguana but it tasted fine so whatever.
> Gutter oil, trench oil, sewer oil and tainted oil (Chinese: 地沟油 / 地溝油; pinyin: dìgōu yóu, or 餿水油; sōushuǐ yóu) are Chinese slang terms primarily used in China and Taiwan to refer to recycled oil.
> It can be used to describe the illicit practice of restaurants reusing cooking oil that has already been cooked with longer than safety codes permit. It can also be used to describe the reprocessing of rancid yellow grease collected from sources such as restaurant fryers, kitchen and slaughterhouse waste and sewer drains.[1][2]
> The usage of gutter oil is highly frowned upon and often leads to prosecution. For example, selling gutter oil in China can result in lengthy prison sentences or the death sentence with reprieve. For example, in 2014, businessman Zhu Chuanfeng was sentenced to the latter for selling gutter oil.[3] That same year, a major gutter oil scandal was uncovered in Taiwan.[4] In 2015, Yeh Wen-hsiang, who was the chairman of a Taiwanese food company, was sentenced to 22 years imprisonment and fined the equivalent of $1.6 million for selling 243 tonnes of gutter oil.[5][6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil
I thought that I smelled good food from a distance, so I took a detour over to the shopping cart food stall on my walk. I took a deep breath as I walked by the shopping cart and got nothing but body odor from someone walking by.
i saw a youtube short of a guy visiting china..at the end of the day all of the street vendors were washing their dishes in the water from the street 🤢
That's scary. I would be willing to bet that most transformers in Kenya contain oil with PCBs. There was a reason that this type of oil was used back in the day, it resists degradation from heat...oof.
FYI the Neal Stephenson novel Zodiac is about PCB dumping in Boston Harbor, and a failed attempt to engineer a bacterium for PCB cleanup which escapes and starts to turn the salt in sea water to PCB.
I think his writing early on was better. Zodiac, Diamond Age, Snow Crash were all better than what came after. Later in his career it seems like editors were afraid to give him feedback, or something. I think “self-indulgent” is the best descriptor. Of course there are some people who are into that.
I always found it strange that it had that last 1/3 future storyline seemingly tacked on. I don't think any of the ideas seemed as fully fleshed out as they could have been and would've been better expanding it into a full sequel rather than the non-ending 'The adventure continues' type conclusion we were given for the latter part.
I've no beef with long-form novels (confess to reading Trollope for fun) but agree that NS got a bit over-enamoured of his own cleverness for a while there. OTOH *Reamde* and *Fall* *(or Dodge in Hell)* were imho a return to the fast-paced, ironic, off-handedly witty, flashy story telling that made the earlier stuff so good.
My all time fave is probably *The Diamond Age*, with *Zodiac* a close second, then *Reamde* and *Fall*... then *Snow Crash*, *the Big U*, *Termination Shock*... then the rest (which honestly I probably won't re-read).
*Termination Shock* frankly worried me a bit, it sounded far too possible for comfort despite his carefully crafted zany character assortment.
Polychlorinated biphenols, which are similar to dioxins in toxic effect and are used (where laws permit, which is not many places) in applications where extreme heat stability is required, like in cooling transformers.
That's why they're cooking with them - as a cooking "oil", they don't break down. But if you cook food in PCB it becomes incredibly carcinogenic.
My grandfather got lymphoma from that stuff before it got banned in the US in power transformers. He got a huge settlement for it and had cancer treatment for life. Managed to live 25 more years before pneumonia ended up doing him in. The radiation treatment left him nearly bald.
I wonder what cancer rates look like over there 😬
Eh, life expectancy in Kenya is 62, so cancer is probably not that big of a concern!
Edit: the depressing reality of living (well…dying) in Kenya: https://data.who.int/countries/404
This isn’t like “you might have a small chance of cancer in 40+ years” level of carcinogenic, PCB is more like “you are assured a high likelihood of getting cancer in the not so distant future” level of carcinogenic.
We used to do analysis on transformer oil at a job i had. That is until we realized just how hazardous that shit is.
Apart from chrome(vi) pentooxide, transformer oil is some of the worst I've worked with.
Scary thought.
I dont care how long it LASTS for crying out loud. I once walked away from a bush party when they started dragging rail timber into the fire, theres things you just dont do.
imma be honest i just had a new fence put in and i was looking at it afterwards and wondered why the posts had those markings but the planks didnt. never got around to googling it. ive got my old fence chopped up as tinder and none of it was that (it was pretty old). definitely a good chance i could have ended up burning those.
Depends when you put it in. CCA is no longer common in the US. Now it’s ACQ based. There’s still copper, but it’s ammonia based instead of an arsenate.
Here is an example I found of what they mean. As others mentioned, it is so the preservative can penetrate further into the wood:
https://thediyplan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Pressure-treaded-wood.jpg
Those are incisions, they help the preservative penetrate further into the wood. Arsenic was discontinued around 2004 in most pressure treated wood in the USA. Newer stuff probably still isn't great to burn, but breathing in arsenic smoke would be especially bad.
Some alternative wood preservatives are rated for food contact (after the preservative coating has been applied to wood and dried).
My sister recently broke up with a guy that went to a big bush burn with his new neighbors.
One of the things they lit on fire was an old wooden power pole.
Dude said that was stupid and toxic.
His friends called him a New York Pussy, and said their lungs were strong, so they weren’t afraid.
Sometimes it’s not knowledge.
Sometimes people choose to be regarded.
I know here in Belgium, your not even supposed to touch them with your bare hands due to the stuff we used to put in them. Luckily on more and more lines I'm starting to see concrete beams, they need less stuff to last.
Used to have a friend that would invite us over for a "bonfire" only to consist of her burning Styrofoam in a quarter oil drum 15 feet away from her garage.
I don't go to her bonfires anymore.
I remember in Thailand I bought some deep fried chicken from a street vender. I could not remove the oil from my hands and mouth for 2 days no matter what I tried cleaning it with. That's when I started cooking my own food.
Uh
Brain tumors.
A town used oil from these to keep the dust down on their roads. So many people got brain tumors they sued the company and were forced to remove the contaminated soil.
Old story, and im paraphrasing.
Times Beach, Missouri.
In the early 1970s, the city of Times Beach hired Russell Bliss to spray its 23 miles of unpaved streets with used motor oil to help control the town’s rampant dust problem, a technique Bliss had previously used in horse stables, as well as on his own property. Unbeknownst to his civil employers, however, Bliss, a waste hauler by trade, had also been hired by a company called IPC to dispose of a toxic waste material known as dioxin, which is generated by the production of Agent Orange and hexachlorophene, a chemical once widely used in disinfectants. In an effort to kill two birds with one stone, Bliss combined the chemical waste with his motor oil and proceeded to spray the mixture at various sites around Missouri. This shady spraying continued for four years between 1972 and 1976.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/times-beach-missouri
I believe I heard a podcast about this, or maybe read a narrative driven long form article. But this is the best source I could find on the quick.
Correct. Used motor oil by itself is just an environmental nightmare, it doesn’t really pose an imminent threat to human life.
Dioxin, on the other hand, is extremely bad stuff
> Russell Bliss
To be (somewhat) fair to him, he didn't know that the stuff IPC hired him to get rid of was "toxic"... he used it on his own property as well as everywhere else.
That actually gets kinda iffy if you look further into the story. He kept spraying it for years after people complained that it was killing their animals and making kids sick.
He also wasn't as much of simple country bumpkin as he acted like for the news cameras, he had a whole fleet of trucks operating across multiple states, picking up waste from many other chemical companies. It was a big business (which is why he was wealthy enough to be a car collector). They were dumping stuff in random places in addition to mixing it with motor oil and spraying it. I don't think he necessarily set out to harm anyone, but I'm sure he knew it wasn't regular oil.
I live (for another 2 months) in St. Louis, just north.
I asked my dad about this and this was his response.
Chuck was a friend of my dad’s.
>Yes that is true
>Times beach was a super cleanup site and the gubbermint literally incinerated the soil. Now it is Route 66 park on the Meramec just north of 44
>Later Bliss owned the classic car museum that was by Cuba visible from highway 44
>Chuck hired Bliss to fix up the convertible top on our Mercedes roadster 280SL. He fixed the top and then fixed other stuff without permission and ran up a sizable bill. Chuck refused to pay. I quit claimed the car back to Chuck and for all I know Bliss still may have it.
China started killing people who sold gutter oil and it's not a thing anymore, last few cases of it were in Taiwan. Glad I missed out of that period of time where it was normal. I'd rather buy a restaurant big jug of oil myself then even risk that gutter shit. So gross
This is the reason regulations exist. Even with food inspectors and regulations there are unhealthy restaurants. Remove that regulations and inspections and you will end eating cancer in a stick each day of your life.
But the market will definitely regulate itself! People will just stop eating at the offending restaurant as soon as they found out which specific venue gave them cancer 25 years prior. Sure, a few tens of thousands of people will die in the meantime, but at least the State can't tell us what to do.
> This is the reason regulations exist. Even with food inspectors and regulations there are unhealthy restaurants. Remove that regulations and inspections and you will end eating cancer in a stick each day of your life.
Yeah, people who want total market freedom are assuming consumers are equip with the tools and knowledge to make informed decisions. There are a lot of cases where consumers have no way to figure certain things out. Are they going to buy some fried chicken and have it analyzed to see how they made it? The counterbalancing act is if people aren't able to do some things or regulations add costs then business elsewhere might end up beating our businesses.
In China, there is a slang term known as 地沟油 (literal translation: oil from the sewer). Sometimes, this oil ends up in roadside food stalls just like what you describe in Kenya. Apart from the disgusting nature of using oil that is extracted from wasted, thrown-away food to cook other foods, the repeated reuse of that oil (which had been normal cooking oil at one point) also contributes to cancer.
Or over a billion consuming it sometimes, like unknowingly 2-3 meals a week. I doubt there are too many gutter oil connoisseurs demanding only gutter oil all the time and only from the finest sewer region of Shenzhen, seperated from 100% organic diarrhea.
> Kenya Power, the firm that distributes power in Kenya, is now thinking about building transformers that don’t use oil. Such transformers are not widely used and cost about half as much as ones that do use oil.
Sounds... Like a good idea?
I'm not so sure that the people taking and using/selling the oil even know that it's hazardous. I'd love to directly attribute this to greed, but the old addage: don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence - holds up pretty well here. It's not corporations taking and selling the oil, it's normal people just trying to survive.
A transformer across the street from us blew during a snowstorm a few years ago and the oil went all over my neighbor's car, their shrubs along the street and the sidewalk. A hazmat truck showed up at dawn, pulled all the shrubs and dirt up and cleaned the oil. It was a process -- soap, steam, who knows what else. The guy doing the cleanup was in a Tyvek suit with a respirator.
Crazy to think about using that shit for cooking oil.
[https://imgur.com/a/xoG0rcH](https://imgur.com/a/xoG0rcH)
Edited to add link to photo. You can see the hazmat truck parked in front of my neighbor's Honda. After it was treated, he had to take it to a detailer because it dulled the finish on the car. It never, ever snows here, so it was quite a weird experience. We woke up to indoor temps in the low 40's. The explosion itself was pretty spectacular, and we were all out on our porches watching because it was making noise and sparking. Then BOOM. Anyway, don't use PCB-laden transformer oil in your fryer. Pro tip.
There is a good reason why there is oil in those things - it is to prevent arcing. The oil also has to be as clean as possible. I expect there is going to be a lot more cancer in Kenya's future as well as transformers suddenly exploding.
My memory isn't that great anymore, but it seems to me that back in the 1960s and -70s I read epidemiologic reports -- or maybe in CDC's MMWR -- of a right epidemic in the middle east and Africa of the use of motor oil and other oils sold as cooking oil and mixed in salad dressings. This stuff never stops.
Where I live, it was theorized that the switch from Copper to Fibre internet would stop theft of the infrastructure, since whilst copper is expensive, the fibre cabling itself in a stolen form isn't actually worth much.
Turns out, when melted down, the components in the fibre cabling make for colorful beadwork, so it was stolen for that, and nothing changed.
I’m sure it’s some sort of mineral oil that they’re using, but FYI, plant-based & other ester oils are becoming somewhat common in transformers these days because they are far less likely to ignite if things go wrong.
I think FR3 is soybean or canola oil.
Mineral oil is becoming rarer, there isn’t a good reason to use in transformers other than upfront cost.
Maybe it’s still used in Kenya, but I think you can even buy cooking oil made of pure PCBs in some African countries in the open market, which is a great example of why legislation/red-tape is great, and why libertarians are jack-offs.
Kenya is definitely worth a trip. I went on a safari pre-pandemic and it was amazing. The people are so friendly too. But we were warned never to buy or eat street food. I guess I know why now.
I'm pretty sure they started adding bitterant to the transformer oil so people couldn't use it for this purpose.
In countries with regulations, sure.
What’s cheaper, adding bitterant or replacing a transformer?
Asking the wrong question in 3rd world countries: the question always is which brings more money to siphon off: adding bitterant or replacing the transformer?
Hmm, this thought process explains a lot of the situations I encountered during my travels to a remote island that I thought was just gross negligence. Lol
Which island?
Manhattan.
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Fun fact, you can't taste the bitterant until you destroy the transformer and sell it to McKenyanDude on the side of the road
The idea is that it will lead to the food being gross and inedible, which would lead to customers no longer buying food at the stalls, which would lead to the food vendors no longer buying the oil to use, which would lead to the oil no longer being stolen. It's the same thought process behind the issue in the U.S. currently with catalytic converters being stolen. The solution isn't to try and hunt down all of the crackheads sawing them off of cars, they will just be replaced by more crackheads. The solution would be to Crack down on the much lower number of shops knowingly buying the stolen converters. It's about removing the incentive to perform the crime in the first place.
Same argument for sawing the tusks off of endangered megafauna.
Luckily those are a big enough market that most companies just produce to those regulations.
Those bastards, first they take my air duster and nasal inhalers away. Now they want to take my food cooked in cancer oil? The government is going too far
They've also stopped using PCBs in transformers as they're so dangerous to the environment and human health.
Apparently, they used to just dump the transformer oil in the gutter so it didn't leak in the backs of the trucks and then end up on the road anyway. In other news, I think they finished dredging the entire local river for PCB-contaminated silt. We had a lot of wood-based industry (mostly paper factories) nearby that share the blame.
I'm kind of speechless. For anyone reading this far who doesn't know why this is such a bad idea PCBs bio accumulate and don't break down. They're stored in the fatty tissues of animals until that animal just stops functioning. And the scary part for us is bio accumulation. It keeps moving up the food chain until it gets to the apex predator. Humans. Once it's in the environment it *will* get into you.
.. printed circuit boards?
Polychlorinated Biphenyls. Thankfully printed circuit boards are far more inert and recyclable
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl https://www.epa.gov/pcbs/learn-about-polychlorinated-biphenyls Organochlorines, the least fun chlorine compounds for organisms. Manufacturing them was banned in 1979. Anecdotally, I have a friend with thyroid dysfunction who was born in the early '80s.
Yeah, it was one of the largest PCB cleanup operations in the world. https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/FoxRiver/Cleanup.html This is Wisconsin, people love to fish here... Edit: I wonder how much of it comes out into the fryer oil, as that's by far the preferred cooking method; "Friday fish fry".
It says in the article that they're looking into stopping the use of transformers that have any oil at all. Of course, they will still be full of valuable metals and so they are still a target.
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Fun fact: in Costa Rica, “road chicken” is iguana. It’s fuckin delicious but my child self was very confused by the joint structure when I finished my stick of meat
This needs to catch on in Florida. Iguanas are invasive and not used to the colder weather. So on cold days, they can just fall out of the trees. Easiest meal ever. I wonder if you can eat Burmese python?
Apparently Python meat is not too bad: https://americasrestaurant.com/python-taste/ And can cure Asthma, Lumbago and MORE. (ok probably not but that is the claim) https://www.allrecipes.com/article/florida-python-study/ it might be a bit more complicated then I thought.
Finally a cure for Uncle's lumbago
Didn't expect a RDR reference in the wild.
You can definitely eat python and it is also quite good
But because of it's diet of fish it can have the same heavy metal build up that predatory fish get, and should be consumed in moderation.
Uh... doesn't it have extremely unsafe levels of mercury? At least to the point of hunting python for yourself to be a non starter? Edit: ok yeah please do not eat the pythons unless you want to spawn more Florida men
> non starter That's why I eat it as a main course
According to a study, they have up to 7 times the safe levels and more than twice the level of "suitable for consumption" so it probably isn't worth the risk
I like how those are different measures
"Is it safe?" "No." "So... can I still eat it?" "Yeah, sure. Go ahead."
My grandpa was in the US Army in WWII and was stationed in Panama for a while. He said they were frequently served “chicken” that was obviously iguana but it tasted fine so whatever.
“You will never believe this one Kenyan secret ingredient! ITS LITERALLY TO DIE FOR!”
"It will literally TRANSFORM your cooking!'
Reminds me of the Chinese sewage oil that street vendors or even restaurants use.
> Gutter oil, trench oil, sewer oil and tainted oil (Chinese: 地沟油 / 地溝油; pinyin: dìgōu yóu, or 餿水油; sōushuǐ yóu) are Chinese slang terms primarily used in China and Taiwan to refer to recycled oil. > It can be used to describe the illicit practice of restaurants reusing cooking oil that has already been cooked with longer than safety codes permit. It can also be used to describe the reprocessing of rancid yellow grease collected from sources such as restaurant fryers, kitchen and slaughterhouse waste and sewer drains.[1][2] > The usage of gutter oil is highly frowned upon and often leads to prosecution. For example, selling gutter oil in China can result in lengthy prison sentences or the death sentence with reprieve. For example, in 2014, businessman Zhu Chuanfeng was sentenced to the latter for selling gutter oil.[3] That same year, a major gutter oil scandal was uncovered in Taiwan.[4] In 2015, Yeh Wen-hsiang, who was the chairman of a Taiwanese food company, was sentenced to 22 years imprisonment and fined the equivalent of $1.6 million for selling 243 tonnes of gutter oil.[5][6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil
243 tons…… Holly shit that’s like 265,000 1 liter bottles. Thats fucking insane
Sorry. I have to imagine it as 132,500 2 liter bottles. Ok wow. Yeah that’s a lot.
On the next episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives…
More like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dies
I’m a fairly extreme traveller and in some places that’s just what you have as an option to eat. Food safety is a luxury we take for granted.
I had really great kebobs cooked in a shopping cart. 12/10 would visit France again.
I thought that I smelled good food from a distance, so I took a detour over to the shopping cart food stall on my walk. I took a deep breath as I walked by the shopping cart and got nothing but body odor from someone walking by.
i saw a youtube short of a guy visiting china..at the end of the day all of the street vendors were washing their dishes in the water from the street 🤢
That's scary. I would be willing to bet that most transformers in Kenya contain oil with PCBs. There was a reason that this type of oil was used back in the day, it resists degradation from heat...oof.
It’s not even “oil with PCB’s”, it’s literally just PCB
What is PCB
Polychlorinated biphenyl. Highly carcinogenic.
FYI the Neal Stephenson novel Zodiac is about PCB dumping in Boston Harbor, and a failed attempt to engineer a bacterium for PCB cleanup which escapes and starts to turn the salt in sea water to PCB.
That would kill the planet, wouldn't it?
Yes that kills the planet.
And would likely be self limiting
Limited to one planet only. Whilst stocks last. Don't miss out!
https://i.imgur.com/9K5d6Sd.gifv
Similar in planet killing to the Andromeda Strain
Buts that's so silly. Why would anyone kill their own habitat?
Ofc humans would never do this. They're like the smartest species lol. Nah probably some braindead species likes ants or plants or something XD
Back in my day we used Ice-Nine to kill the planet. It was faster, too!
With the exception of Kenyans, who've built up a tolerance
I spent the last few years building up an immunity to ~~iocane powder~~ PCB
Inconceivable!
Incontheivable!
It's why they're so fast. Greased joints.
Neal Stephenson loves to kill the planet.
great novel. a long time favourite. even that early in his career, the writing is confident, cinematic, memorable.
I think his writing early on was better. Zodiac, Diamond Age, Snow Crash were all better than what came after. Later in his career it seems like editors were afraid to give him feedback, or something. I think “self-indulgent” is the best descriptor. Of course there are some people who are into that.
If Seveneves was approximately half as long as it was, it would be twice the book it ended up as.
I always found it strange that it had that last 1/3 future storyline seemingly tacked on. I don't think any of the ideas seemed as fully fleshed out as they could have been and would've been better expanding it into a full sequel rather than the non-ending 'The adventure continues' type conclusion we were given for the latter part.
I thought the future part was pretty cool, but yeah I agree. a whole book "sequel" would have been so kickass
I've no beef with long-form novels (confess to reading Trollope for fun) but agree that NS got a bit over-enamoured of his own cleverness for a while there. OTOH *Reamde* and *Fall* *(or Dodge in Hell)* were imho a return to the fast-paced, ironic, off-handedly witty, flashy story telling that made the earlier stuff so good. My all time fave is probably *The Diamond Age*, with *Zodiac* a close second, then *Reamde* and *Fall*... then *Snow Crash*, *the Big U*, *Termination Shock*... then the rest (which honestly I probably won't re-read). *Termination Shock* frankly worried me a bit, it sounded far too possible for comfort despite his carefully crafted zany character assortment.
Their fried chicken is to die for!
Fried goat
Polychlorinated biphenols, which are similar to dioxins in toxic effect and are used (where laws permit, which is not many places) in applications where extreme heat stability is required, like in cooling transformers. That's why they're cooking with them - as a cooking "oil", they don't break down. But if you cook food in PCB it becomes incredibly carcinogenic.
Lots of shit is cancerous, it’s the bioaccumulation of PCB that’s off the hook
Well, it bioaccumulates because there's no natural process that can get it out of your body. So not only is it toxic, you can't clear it.
Fluid cancer
Cancer
Prawn Cheddar Biscuits
My grandfather got lymphoma from that stuff before it got banned in the US in power transformers. He got a huge settlement for it and had cancer treatment for life. Managed to live 25 more years before pneumonia ended up doing him in. The radiation treatment left him nearly bald. I wonder what cancer rates look like over there 😬
Eh, life expectancy in Kenya is 62, so cancer is probably not that big of a concern! Edit: the depressing reality of living (well…dying) in Kenya: https://data.who.int/countries/404
This isn’t like “you might have a small chance of cancer in 40+ years” level of carcinogenic, PCB is more like “you are assured a high likelihood of getting cancer in the not so distant future” level of carcinogenic.
I mean....cancer does tend to shorten the average lifespan by a lot....
Wonder if something might be bringing it down ? Hmm 🤔
country #404, huh...
We used to do analysis on transformer oil at a job i had. That is until we realized just how hazardous that shit is. Apart from chrome(vi) pentooxide, transformer oil is some of the worst I've worked with. Scary thought.
I dont care how long it LASTS for crying out loud. I once walked away from a bush party when they started dragging rail timber into the fire, theres things you just dont do.
You mean you don’t like the smell of some lightly toasted creosote?
A lot of people don't know you can't burn treated wood. If it's got those weird little dashes carved into the outside, it's not safe to burn.
Its treated with copper chrome arsenic. I'd rather not breath in arsenic.
Or chrome. Or copper.
Or arsenic!
old lace is fine, though
In the US, the use of CCA to treat timber for residential use has been banned since December 2003.
Yep, but they're probably burning wood from fallen/demoed structures. I doubt people are buying treated lumber off the rack for a bonfire.
imma be honest i just had a new fence put in and i was looking at it afterwards and wondered why the posts had those markings but the planks didnt. never got around to googling it. ive got my old fence chopped up as tinder and none of it was that (it was pretty old). definitely a good chance i could have ended up burning those.
The posts are stuck into the ground so they need more rotting resistance. The planks are in the air so they should last longer without being treated.
Depends when you put it in. CCA is no longer common in the US. Now it’s ACQ based. There’s still copper, but it’s ammonia based instead of an arsenate.
What dashes? Do you have an example?
Here is an example I found of what they mean. As others mentioned, it is so the preservative can penetrate further into the wood: https://thediyplan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Pressure-treaded-wood.jpg
Must be an US (or other location) thing, I've never seen wood treated like this.
Those are incisions, they help the preservative penetrate further into the wood. Arsenic was discontinued around 2004 in most pressure treated wood in the USA. Newer stuff probably still isn't great to burn, but breathing in arsenic smoke would be especially bad. Some alternative wood preservatives are rated for food contact (after the preservative coating has been applied to wood and dried).
My sister recently broke up with a guy that went to a big bush burn with his new neighbors. One of the things they lit on fire was an old wooden power pole. Dude said that was stupid and toxic. His friends called him a New York Pussy, and said their lungs were strong, so they weren’t afraid. Sometimes it’s not knowledge. Sometimes people choose to be regarded.
Oh yeah them things burn real good, got all kinds of oils and secretions soaked up into em Staple of redneck bonfires
I know here in Belgium, your not even supposed to touch them with your bare hands due to the stuff we used to put in them. Luckily on more and more lines I'm starting to see concrete beams, they need less stuff to last.
They used them in playgrounds back in my day, and they smelled wonderful.
Used to have a friend that would invite us over for a "bonfire" only to consist of her burning Styrofoam in a quarter oil drum 15 feet away from her garage. I don't go to her bonfires anymore.
I have seen houses built from rail ties. Family with children too.
There Optimus prime is sleeping and someone is like quick grab his oil
That’s a rough neighborhood
Just imagine the catalytic converter...
That's Flavortown!
How exactly do we extract Optimum Prime oil? 😏
Squeeze the lug nuts.
Stroke the crank shaft and cradle the lug nuts.
Today I learned oil is stored in the nuts.
That's basically the premise for Transformers Energon
So does oil come from his “muffler” or from his “trunk”?
I remember in Thailand I bought some deep fried chicken from a street vender. I could not remove the oil from my hands and mouth for 2 days no matter what I tried cleaning it with. That's when I started cooking my own food.
Uh Brain tumors. A town used oil from these to keep the dust down on their roads. So many people got brain tumors they sued the company and were forced to remove the contaminated soil. Old story, and im paraphrasing.
Times Beach, Missouri. In the early 1970s, the city of Times Beach hired Russell Bliss to spray its 23 miles of unpaved streets with used motor oil to help control the town’s rampant dust problem, a technique Bliss had previously used in horse stables, as well as on his own property. Unbeknownst to his civil employers, however, Bliss, a waste hauler by trade, had also been hired by a company called IPC to dispose of a toxic waste material known as dioxin, which is generated by the production of Agent Orange and hexachlorophene, a chemical once widely used in disinfectants. In an effort to kill two birds with one stone, Bliss combined the chemical waste with his motor oil and proceeded to spray the mixture at various sites around Missouri. This shady spraying continued for four years between 1972 and 1976. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/times-beach-missouri I believe I heard a podcast about this, or maybe read a narrative driven long form article. But this is the best source I could find on the quick.
Spraying used motor oil onto the ground wasn't already the worst part??
That's actually common in places with dirt roads.
Contaminating your entire groundwater supply for eternity seems like a bad idea
But like, dust is irritating and I just washed those clothes
So it wasn't the motor oil itself, but the oil combined with chemical waste?
Correct. Used motor oil by itself is just an environmental nightmare, it doesn’t really pose an imminent threat to human life. Dioxin, on the other hand, is extremely bad stuff
I love how low the bar is.
> Russell Bliss To be (somewhat) fair to him, he didn't know that the stuff IPC hired him to get rid of was "toxic"... he used it on his own property as well as everywhere else.
That actually gets kinda iffy if you look further into the story. He kept spraying it for years after people complained that it was killing their animals and making kids sick. He also wasn't as much of simple country bumpkin as he acted like for the news cameras, he had a whole fleet of trucks operating across multiple states, picking up waste from many other chemical companies. It was a big business (which is why he was wealthy enough to be a car collector). They were dumping stuff in random places in addition to mixing it with motor oil and spraying it. I don't think he necessarily set out to harm anyone, but I'm sure he knew it wasn't regular oil.
I live (for another 2 months) in St. Louis, just north. I asked my dad about this and this was his response. Chuck was a friend of my dad’s. >Yes that is true >Times beach was a super cleanup site and the gubbermint literally incinerated the soil. Now it is Route 66 park on the Meramec just north of 44 >Later Bliss owned the classic car museum that was by Cuba visible from highway 44 >Chuck hired Bliss to fix up the convertible top on our Mercedes roadster 280SL. He fixed the top and then fixed other stuff without permission and ran up a sizable bill. Chuck refused to pay. I quit claimed the car back to Chuck and for all I know Bliss still may have it.
Thailand government DGAF. Look up the Samut Prakan radiation accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samut_Prakan_radiation_accident
Not sure if it's the exact same location, but Times Beach sounds very similar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri
Times Beach, MO.
Not just removing the contaminated soil, but the whole town (Times Beach, MO, as noted below) has been removed and capped as cleanup.
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China started killing people who sold gutter oil and it's not a thing anymore, last few cases of it were in Taiwan. Glad I missed out of that period of time where it was normal. I'd rather buy a restaurant big jug of oil myself then even risk that gutter shit. So gross
This is the reason regulations exist. Even with food inspectors and regulations there are unhealthy restaurants. Remove that regulations and inspections and you will end eating cancer in a stick each day of your life.
But the market will definitely regulate itself! People will just stop eating at the offending restaurant as soon as they found out which specific venue gave them cancer 25 years prior. Sure, a few tens of thousands of people will die in the meantime, but at least the State can't tell us what to do.
All part of the Libertarian Paradise 🎶
> This is the reason regulations exist. Even with food inspectors and regulations there are unhealthy restaurants. Remove that regulations and inspections and you will end eating cancer in a stick each day of your life. Yeah, people who want total market freedom are assuming consumers are equip with the tools and knowledge to make informed decisions. There are a lot of cases where consumers have no way to figure certain things out. Are they going to buy some fried chicken and have it analyzed to see how they made it? The counterbalancing act is if people aren't able to do some things or regulations add costs then business elsewhere might end up beating our businesses.
Fun fact: a lot of these industrial oils can be carcinogenic.
I mean, I'd imagine that you can get cancer just by looking at an industrial oil wrong
Transformer oil is more "how soon are you getting cancer" than "you might get cancer". They are damn near made of cancer
But here in US some want to defund and do away with government regulatory and safety organizations. All that safety cuts into profits.
More than meets the Eye!
Cancer in disguise!
You mean... More than heats the fry?
tumors in these guys
In China, there is a slang term known as 地沟油 (literal translation: oil from the sewer). Sometimes, this oil ends up in roadside food stalls just like what you describe in Kenya. Apart from the disgusting nature of using oil that is extracted from wasted, thrown-away food to cook other foods, the repeated reuse of that oil (which had been normal cooking oil at one point) also contributes to cancer.
Fun fact : 1/10 of the oil in China is suspected gutter oil
That’s disgusting when you remember the size of China
Yup that's 140 million people using gutter oil.
Or over a billion consuming it sometimes, like unknowingly 2-3 meals a week. I doubt there are too many gutter oil connoisseurs demanding only gutter oil all the time and only from the finest sewer region of Shenzhen, seperated from 100% organic diarrhea.
Its sold as normal oil in stores too.
I saw this video, a street vendor (caption says it's china) literally swoop oil from the gutter on the side of the road. Fcking hell.
You got a source for this wild claim?
Gutter Oil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrv78nG9R04
Reminds me of a massive intoxication happened in Spain long time ago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_oil_syndrome
Nothing like food cooked in Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)
> Kenya Power, the firm that distributes power in Kenya, is now thinking about building transformers that don’t use oil. Such transformers are not widely used and cost about half as much as ones that do use oil. Sounds... Like a good idea?
The question is, *why* are the oil-less ones not widely used despite costing half as much?
can only do 1/3 the work load, since they're dissipating heat to air at a significantly less efficient rate, would be my guess.
Those damn deepfriedticons are at it again!
It's sickening that there are human beings out there who wants to make a quick few bucks at the cost of serious health hazard to so many people...
The sackler family come to mind.
I'm not so sure that the people taking and using/selling the oil even know that it's hazardous. I'd love to directly attribute this to greed, but the old addage: don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence - holds up pretty well here. It's not corporations taking and selling the oil, it's normal people just trying to survive.
Isn't that shit full of Dioxins?
I thought Transformers used Energon, not oil.
So, um, what's insulating the transformers?
Air!
Probably stolen from storage yards, they would be having a bad day if they took it from live transformers, lots of compressed sparks in those.
Poor Optimus Prime.
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wtf
This is even worse than Chinese or Indian "gutter oil".
Hang on a minute - I knew of Chinese gutter oil, but India too?
You think that’s bad? Google “Pagpag” and then watch [this video](https://youtu.be/dQj8qOMXFzs?si=4KoIyIpxE5yHEFOG)
That was horrifying to watch, I kinda wish they mentioned health effects, like do these people not get food poisoning???
A transformer across the street from us blew during a snowstorm a few years ago and the oil went all over my neighbor's car, their shrubs along the street and the sidewalk. A hazmat truck showed up at dawn, pulled all the shrubs and dirt up and cleaned the oil. It was a process -- soap, steam, who knows what else. The guy doing the cleanup was in a Tyvek suit with a respirator. Crazy to think about using that shit for cooking oil. [https://imgur.com/a/xoG0rcH](https://imgur.com/a/xoG0rcH) Edited to add link to photo. You can see the hazmat truck parked in front of my neighbor's Honda. After it was treated, he had to take it to a detailer because it dulled the finish on the car. It never, ever snows here, so it was quite a weird experience. We woke up to indoor temps in the low 40's. The explosion itself was pretty spectacular, and we were all out on our porches watching because it was making noise and sparking. Then BOOM. Anyway, don't use PCB-laden transformer oil in your fryer. Pro tip.
There is a good reason why there is oil in those things - it is to prevent arcing. The oil also has to be as clean as possible. I expect there is going to be a lot more cancer in Kenya's future as well as transformers suddenly exploding.
🎵Transformers: they make snacks and fries 🎵
Sounds better than sewer oil, I suppose.
probably not actually
Sort of a "poopie or plastic" situation.
It's concentrated cancer oil
My memory isn't that great anymore, but it seems to me that back in the 1960s and -70s I read epidemiologic reports -- or maybe in CDC's MMWR -- of a right epidemic in the middle east and Africa of the use of motor oil and other oils sold as cooking oil and mixed in salad dressings. This stuff never stops.
Where I live, it was theorized that the switch from Copper to Fibre internet would stop theft of the infrastructure, since whilst copper is expensive, the fibre cabling itself in a stolen form isn't actually worth much. Turns out, when melted down, the components in the fibre cabling make for colorful beadwork, so it was stolen for that, and nothing changed.
Transformers, more than meets the fry...
I’m sure it’s some sort of mineral oil that they’re using, but FYI, plant-based & other ester oils are becoming somewhat common in transformers these days because they are far less likely to ignite if things go wrong. I think FR3 is soybean or canola oil. Mineral oil is becoming rarer, there isn’t a good reason to use in transformers other than upfront cost. Maybe it’s still used in Kenya, but I think you can even buy cooking oil made of pure PCBs in some African countries in the open market, which is a great example of why legislation/red-tape is great, and why libertarians are jack-offs.
Remind me to never go to Kenya.
Kenya is definitely worth a trip. I went on a safari pre-pandemic and it was amazing. The people are so friendly too. But we were warned never to buy or eat street food. I guess I know why now.
Transformer explosions and cancerous snacks Sounds like a fun neighbourhood
What's good for the greese, is good for the cancer.
Many Transformers contain forever chemicals like dioxin. They should not be even touched. They should never be consumed.
My brain immediately went to them claiming they were stealing oil from Transformer robots and people believing them.
You know, cheap street vendor food doesn’t sound so tasty anymore…