attenuated both by the rest of their flesh, the building's walls, the computer's chassis, and at least several feet of free space/inverse square.
Shame, I already sent this to my coworkers. Time to retract this cool story.
We know for a fact that many American businesses knowingly allow faulty and dangerous products on the market (see the Ford Pinto,) and that American food corporations have allow tainted meat onto the market.
But for some reason we don't fault capitalism for that the way we would fault communism for this, if it were true. If anything, the most likely reaction this happening in the US would be to deregulate industries so capitalism could capitalize even harder.
Also didn't you have sarcastic Chornobyl jokes in the 80s if you lived anywhere near East or Central Europe? We certainly did have a lot of them in East Germany.
It is not being presented as a tall tale or a sarcastic joke. It's being presented as fact. I'm merely asking why people feel the need to make up stories and to propagate stories that are untrue. That is a question I am genuinely interested in.
Why, when we know this is complete BS, do people feel the need to 1) make it up in the first place and 2) propagate the story without engaging their mental faculties.
People propagate falsehoods for numerous reasons. The first is, they don't know it's false. They hear a joke or a hypothetical story and repeat it as fact, and in the retelling it gets amplified. Details get conflated; someone hears a story about slightly radioactive cows and also about computers being affected by radiation, and blends them. Or an expat tells a story about his homeland, exaggerated slightly for effect, and is misunderstood by those who hear it based on their own biases.
In the end we only have so much brainpower. We don't always consider the plausibility of everything to a deep degree. I am nearly positive that you have propagated falsehood where you "should have known better."
And sometimes we tell things that are just a good story. I propagate the neural network tank recognition one to my students because it's a perfect story. I do say that I know it's probably false, but I'm sure some of them will repeat it to others as fact.
So that is your reason there.
I'm just interested in the undercurrent of why people seem to like this story and I think it pretty much is "Communism Bad" even though as mentioned otherwhere in this thread (and by me) capitalism has an awful record when it comes to food quality the one thing that is being knocked in this story.
Nah, it's "holy shit radioactive cows causing single-event-upset!@"
It's the legend of the impossible to troubleshoot magical problem that actually makes perfect physical sense (even though it doesn't).
The communism-bad is merely an afterthought that adds a little more appeal to some people.
Indeed, my perspective reading this story... I need to teach a different group of students about SEU and SEL. The thought of radioactive cows from Chernobyl causing upsets is an absolutely "sticky" story that would make the idea of effects from ionizing radiation stay prominently in students' minds, and reinforce my position as a crazy teacher with students.
My reaction as I realized that it was BS and I couldn't justify using it was disappointment.
GARAK: My dear Doctor, they're all true.
BASHIR: Even the lies?
GARAK: Especially the lies.
[1]: page 2, line starting with K580 of https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86R00995R0005011...
Story is likely made up.
It's a funny story, but the physics is impossible, and there's several historically implausible details as well, so I'm comfortable saying it's made up.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41586836 - Sept 2024 (21 comments)
Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208014 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)
Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16628877 - March 2018 (19 comments)
This article is complete rubbish. Everything was tightly measured and controlled. The radiation levels required to trigger memory bits (ferrite memory!) in a building next to the train station, through the walls and metal panels enclosing computer blocks and at such a distance, would probably make a cow glow in the dark :) Geiger counters weren’t restricted - they just weren’t sold to the general public. But somehow, after Chernobyl, every one of my friends managed to procure one (I had three). Even the final part about "filling in immigration papers with any country" is implausible. It wasn’t possible to simply emigrate from the Soviet Union to any country. There was a limited Jewish emigration path, but it was far from easy.
This is likely also related to the (likely stretched) story about a train full of radioactive meat that floated around for a while [0] that seems to get interpreted a little differently each time [1].
[0] https://time.com/4305507/chernobyl-30-agriculture-disaster/#...
[1] https://origins.osu.edu/milestones/april-2016-eating-you-foo...
adzm•5mo ago
A tangent, but why was this?
Analemma_•5mo ago
AnimalMuppet•5mo ago
But the answer that one would conclude is "so that private citizens can't find out all the shady things we're doing with radioactive stuff".
I presume that was the policy even before Chernobyl. The US did not run an entirely clean nuclear program, but the USSR was worse (perhaps because ordinary people in the US could have Geiger counters, and so the powers that be knew that they were less likely to get away with spilling radio emitters).
pinewurst•5mo ago
evan_•5mo ago
> the government plan was to mix the meat from Chernobyl-area cattle with the uncontaminated meat from the rest of the country
I wonder if this was posted now as a result of a report of radioactive shrimp being sold at Wal-Mart:
https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-informatio...
gostsamo•5mo ago
y-curious•5mo ago
That said, my parents are from the former USSR and just because there isn't a law on the books doesn't mean it wasn't de facto banned.
barbazoo•5mo ago
Same is true the other way around. Just because someone claims something to have happened, it doesn't mean it actually has. Maybe they were just "impossible" to obtain similar to how a lot of non essential things were hard to obtain in socialist/communist countries at that time.
lb1lf•5mo ago
('During the recent fire at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, only trace amounts of radioactivity has been detected outside the immediate vicinity...')
or espionage ('Hmmm... I wonder why many of the freight cars coming down the track from the alleged paint factory in East Podunkskij are 100x more radioactive than those from other areas?')
We are, after all, talking about a system which restricted access to photocopiers.
guga42k•5mo ago
potato3732842•5mo ago
cyberax•5mo ago
The USSR was strictly controlling radio transmitters and survey equipment but not regular measurement devices.