"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
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"Rod Speed" wrote in message
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Arfa Daily wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Ian Field wrote
tm wrote
William Sommerwerck wrote

The ROHS rationale was to protect the health of folks doing
recycling.

That's only part of it. It's supposedly true that rain (and other
solvents)
leech lead from electronic equipment, and it winds up in drinking
water.

Therein lies an example of why we have the RoHS BS.

But lead was mined out of the ground in the first place!

But not much of the drinking water comes from where its mined.

Not that I think it makes any sense at all to ban lead in solder.

Much drinking water in the UK was, and continues to be, supplied via
lead pipes, and not all areas have 'hard' water supplies that coat the
inside of those pipes with a 'protective' limescale layer.

Yebbut, some have blamed the decline of the
roman empire on their use of lead plumbing pipes.


I think the theory was more to do with them using lead acetate (sugar of
lead) to sweeten their wine than of lead pipes to deliver water. It's a
nice theory, but that's all it is. Empires decline for many reasons. I
think about the only certainty is that they always do. Lead acetate may
have played some small contributory part in the process, but the decline
of the Roman Empire is pretty well documented, and there were far more
significant reasons for it.



Maybe that's what happened to the british empire too ?

The British Empire declined for various 'modern' reasons, not the least of
which were countries figuring that they could manage their affairs and
positions on the world stage, better than was being done for them by us.
This made them lobby for regaining their independence, and for the most
part, we willingly gave them it back. As I'm sure that anyone with an
interest in world affairs will attest to, the results for some of those
countries, have been less than inspiring.


It wasn't just Britain lost its empire, at the end of WW2 the Japs actually
had to protect their former Dutch POWs from their former servants.