Mismatched priorities
Folks, I am in a terrible mood. A dear friend just lost their 16 year old child to a motor vehicle accident. It is horrible and unfathomable pain they must be feeling as a parent. My heart breaks for them. Yet the policy draft out of the United States government for making children healthy again makes no mention of this, which is the number two leading cause of death in children. (Number one is firearms.) It does however mention the need to do more research into the harm of WiFi radiation with respect to opening the blood brain barrier to toxins as well as 5G's effects on health. In other words, garbage science. The US has given up its scientific lead and it won't recover in my lifetime.
👻 darkghost [Left leaning independent]
2025-08-19 · 9 months ago · 👍 bsj38381 · 🙁 2
8 Comments ↓
🚀 stack [anarchist] · 2025-08-19 at 04:10:
I am really sorry. When I lived in the boonies, every year a kid would die in a car around prom time. You are totally right.
🦔 bsj38381 [Left-Leaning Libertarian] · 2025-08-20 at 22:15:
It's bogus to me that people would rather believe in fake science crap, than believing that kids die from car crashes and gunshots, something a kid shouldn't have to deal with. But because the US would rather waste their time and money for crap nobody wants. I've never gotten sick from WiFi radiation either.
👻 darkghost [OP, Left leaning independent] · 2025-08-20 at 23:29:
I worked with a guy who had a PhD in engineering and was a certified engineer able to work on civil engineering projects. He slept under a grounded blanket to reduce his RF exposure. Must have been fun explaining that to the TSA (we were on a trip together.) Smarts can be broad and smarts can not cross knowledge domains. This stuff has been looked into a lot (imagine the liability of every office worker ever being exposed to something hazardous besides bad coffee) and nothing has ever been found. But all you need is goal driven studies, lots of cherry picking data, and crap methodology to sew uncertainty. That's the goal!
🚀 stack [anarchist] · 2025-08-21 at 01:53:
I am an honorary electrical engineer with a bit of RF experience. I know too many people with acoustic neuromas.
I like falling asleep to audiobooks, and keep my phone nearby. I most definitely sleep better when I set it to airplane mode. Wired soft headphones of course; I would never put a microwave transmitter inside my skull.
I've considered making a Faraday cage 4-poster bed with conductive mesh fabric, but it is really hard to do it right.
The best sleep of my life was at Wilson's Prom in Australia, no phone service and wombats running around at night.
Oh, and while I am not at all convinced that microwave radiation gives you cancer, my pet theory is that it makes you stupid by very slowly cooking your brain. A microwave oven cooks meat at a couple of hundred watts on low; a phone shoves maybe two watts into your skull.
Give it a few decades and see how smart you are then.
👻 darkghost [OP, Left leaning independent] · 2025-08-21 at 09:08:
Most microwave ovens don't have a "low" power setting and instead use a duty cycle that switches 1,000 watts of power off and on. Newer inductive microwave ovens can actually lower power output but it is still hundreds of watts. WiFi transmitters operate at peak 0.1 watts per ETSI standards. 10^5 difference there. To visualize: picture a gallon of milk vs a swimming pool of milk. That is the magnitude.
Meanwhile stupidity predates synthetic microwave radiation by a considerable amount, having been discovered by the ancients sometime around the invention of spoken language.
In conclusion: There is a far greater risk of stupid coming from the content of those microwaves entering your device rather than your head.
🚀 stack [anarchist] · 2025-08-21 at 12:10:
I think the biggest misunderstanding has to do with the energy reduction at the square of distance, making pretty much anything not immediately touching you or being inside your head not an issue.
Phones and WiFi routers however will put out up to 2 watts of RF. Multiply by daily usage times a few decades, with a few hundred unknown factors
Your scull forms a resonant cavity and I don't like the idea of using it to bounce microwaves, even though blutooth is pretty low-power. Resonant cavities form standing waves, and all bets are off.
👻 darkghost [OP, Left leaning independent] · 2025-08-21 at 15:27:
I will just have to refer to the philosopher Albert Yankovic, who in his essay titled "Dare to be Stupid" suggests one "stick your head in the microwave and get yourself a tan" among other pieces of advise.
In all seriousness, in neuroscience research laboratory animals are sacrificed by high power microwaves precisely for the reason that it preserves metabolic and anatomic integrity of the brain and its tissues better than any other form of killing.
🚀 stack [anarchist] · 2025-08-21 at 15:52:
That is interesting! I would think that high-power microwaves would boil water and disrupt tissues.
Not likely to give you tan though.