They don't make "insert thing here" like they used to...
Discussion
The recent reports of London smog got me thinking about this...
1952 - The Great Smog directly kills up to 12,000 people, and staying inside isn't necessarily a defence, as it penetrated buildings in places too.
2017 - People complain about having black snot and the occasional sore throat.
Or how about toys?
2016 shockingly sees toys being sold with almost 1,000 parts per million of lead in them.
Compare that to 1950s lead soldiers which were, er, 1,000,000 parts per million lead, barring the paint!
Certainly progress is a good thing, but it does sometimes feel as though we constantly reset the bar so that we never actually sit down and consider just how good we've got things now...
1952 - The Great Smog directly kills up to 12,000 people, and staying inside isn't necessarily a defence, as it penetrated buildings in places too.
2017 - People complain about having black snot and the occasional sore throat.
Or how about toys?
2016 shockingly sees toys being sold with almost 1,000 parts per million of lead in them.
Compare that to 1950s lead soldiers which were, er, 1,000,000 parts per million lead, barring the paint!
Certainly progress is a good thing, but it does sometimes feel as though we constantly reset the bar so that we never actually sit down and consider just how good we've got things now...
can't remember said:
austinsmirk said:
Influenza. without googling (as that's cheating)
didn't the "Spanish flu", kill more people in the early 1920's in the UK, than WW1 did in battle ?
Flu kills more than 250,000 people a year.didn't the "Spanish flu", kill more people in the early 1920's in the UK, than WW1 did in battle ?
The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus.[1] It infected 500 million people across the world,[2] including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and resulted in the deaths of 50 to 100 million (three to five percent of the world's population[3]), making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.[4][5][6] Disease had already greatly limited life expectancy in the early 20th century. A considerable spike occurred at the time of the pandemic, specifically the year 1918. Life expectancy dropped by about 12 years.[7][8][9][10]
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