Scented products cause indoor air pollution on par with car exhaust

Of our five senses, smell is the most well attuned for detecting something that'll hurt us internally (ie poison cancer).

This in particular bothers me because I end up having this discussion with family members all the time who are convinced that "chemicals" are bad for you, and they only eat food without "chemicals".

As a test or something, he came around spraying without telling me. I was in my office when I felt my sinuses starting to swell and my chest started tightening. When I walked out into the common room and saw him smiling at me with a “see, told you it’s your imagination” grin, my coworkers had to drag me outside because I was ready to kill him.

Look, man, I’d freaking love not to have asthma and other allergy stuff. I don’t like taking handfuls of antihistamines. I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass. I just don’t, like, enjoying dying.

Look, man, shut up.

[1 ] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bugbear

If you can suggest a pithy replacement terminology for "what we really mean" here, I'm sure we'll all adopt it whole-heartedly. Until then, people are going to use the same (easily deciphered) shorthand. Tilting at this particular windmill doesn't actually improve anything or protect anybody.

At my previous job we had a guy who'd always come and instantly open the windows. I know that I'm the minority with my preference to keep them shut, so I just suffered in silence, except for these first 30 minutes before he showed up, those were a blessing. He lived outside of the city and commuted, and one time he really needed to sleep inside the city, and I had a spare bed, so I let him sleep at my place. He walked in and instantly said "Can we open the window?", to which I replied "NO, WE CANNOT". I cannot describe how satisfying that felt.

Also, ‘things are bad for other reasons’ isn’t an argument for trying to eliminate this particular reason.

> Just do x, y, z

Ok then you take the story.

> Oh but I don't know frontend.

But you know the estimate is wrong?

I hate the word "just"

It is more about just synthesized at lab not „novel untested”.

Like you can have bread from four, water, yeast that no one would call „chemicals” - even though yeast nowadays is highly engineered.

This is one of those things that someone pointed out to me, I agreed with them and have since tried to avoid saying "just do ...", "why not just ...", etc.

However, that means I now really notice it from others. sigh

It's one. Volatile organic compound. VOC.

It doesn't take too long to tally up the O's, actually. But since this is such a math-oriented crowd, you can be sure someone will come along to do the counting for you.

Which is fine until the shorthand breaks containment, the nuance is lost, and the masses generalize it far beyond what was originally intended.

live among people, they said. it'll be nice, they said.

Having said all that, arguing these terms are bad just tells people they are wrong without giving clear direction to improve. The question that matters is what should be said instead? I think pollution is closer to a good word but when it is used the right meaning should be emphasized. The argument is not that chemicals are bad, the argument is that compounds not native to an environment have untested effects and therefore should be carefully studied especially if they are rapidly becoming abundant. Articles like this skip right to 'pollution = bad' instead of 'pollution = we should try to understand the effects quickly to make informed decisions'

There are a lot of these people. It's the same kind of people who buy their dogs "Taste of the Wild" grain free high-protein dog food because it sounds natural and therefore better than WSAVA-approved dog food, against the advice of any seasoned veterinarian.

I want to mostly breathe nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and a bit of water for comfortable humidity. I don't need anything more.

You're conflating the colloquial usage of the word chemical with the naturalistic fallacy. These are two different things, however they interrelated because of our collective failure to embrace the precautionary principle when it comes to novel synthetic compounds. The result is that newer compounds tend to be correlated with less safety testing, simply because less time has been available for testing, testing which isn't typically required before engaging in mass exposure of the public.

There's also a connection between corporate self-interest in covering up safety risks (well documented in history, and presumably also occurring today as well) because synthetic compounds can be patented while natural compounds cannot.

In short the connection is real, but it's more subtle than your simple definition-based logic is giving credit for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

That was like 15 years ago and I've at least mentioned that rule to every team I've been a part of ever since. It usually works.