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Yep, California has raised the bar, and to do so it had to take risks. In particular, it risked looking silly-- and in penis-politics looking silly in front of

Yep, California has raised the bar, and to do so it had to take risks. In particular, it risked looking silly-- and in penis-politics looking silly in front of your opponents is an existential risk. The good news is, some of these risks paid off and became national standards. So, thanks to California, you are poisoned a little less every day. Speaking personally: fuck you for making fun of that effort!

chrisseaton 5y ago
Don't know why you've chosen to use personal abuse? That's against the site guidelines here https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html please don't do that. I'm not making fun of it - I'm saying it's actively harmful because when people now see articles like this and read 'cancer-causing' they'll think 'like Starbucks coffee, so I'm happy with that risk - not a problem'.
- nawgz 5y ago
  > when people now see articles like this and read 'cancer-causing' they'll think 'like Starbucks coffee, so I'm happy with that risk - not a problem'. Well, I can think of multiple site guidelines I see violated here too. > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Really, it'd be a compliment to call your comments facile. This article has as an opening graphic a stark juxtaposition of harsh industry and children attending school, which it then proceeds to discuss pretty thoroughly. It is difficult to believe you think the discussion there is about risks analogous to drinking a cup of coffee.
  - fundad 5y ago
    Every post is going to attract someone "just asking questions" about whether a normal, serious, hypothetical person would immediately be thinking about right-wing talking points instead of thinking about health and suffering.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > It is difficult to believe you think the discussion there is about risks analogous to drinking a cup of coffee. I don't think that! And that's the point - same warning, but not the same risk.
    - nawgz 5y ago
      If you think the behavior of people who do not read the article will be unchanged by yet another discussion of cancer, I think you will perhaps be surprised to learn that people who don't care about privacy don't care about yet another discussion of government overreach and people who don't care about politics remain unbothered by news articles decrying fascism or communism. The article was quite interesting, and showed some very good points. When you use words like "when people now see articles like this" to completely dismiss its very point, it ceases to feel like good faith discussion of anything besides some personal agenda you related to an article keyword.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        > When you use words like "when people now see articles like this" to completely dismiss its very point I think you're misreading my comments. I'm not dismissing the article. It's the opposite. I'm saying that my fear is that other people will unfortunately dismiss the article, due to fatigue of being warned that things cause cancer.
        nawgz 5y ago
        You are strongly whitewashing your own comments. Your first comment - as mentioned re: personal agendas - was about 75% dedicated to to railing against California. The other 25% was where you expressed your opinion of the article: "probably nobody cares" Please write more carefully if you mean what you say when pressed, because these thoughts are not without merit, but the top level comment was completely off-topic and derogatory to the article and has scarcely spawned a useful discussion.
        chrisseaton 5y ago
rhacker 5y ago
I would remove the fu stuff. But I appreciate your appreciation of prop 65. Even if tons of products still have the warning, the amount of lead in various things has dropped significantly since implemented.
- infecto 5y ago
  I wish your comment was the parent comment. It would be nice to understand what the benefits are because we all know about the silly cancer warnings in Starbucks.
ericd 5y ago
Cmon, prop 65 is terribly implemented, and so the results are absurd. It’d be like if your software’s logging just sent “there’s an error” over and over via email to the whole team with no more details. Not even time stamps.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mdp2021 5y ago
Is it not a good idea to first ask for clarifications, when there is a doubt about one's message? If the labels of danger are without some sort of quantification, there is a fault.
function_seven 5y ago
I think parent is referring to the useless Prop 65 warnings that are plastered on everything. They're so ubiquitous as to be completely meaningless. No sense of scale or relative risk. The coffee carries the same warning as the jug of pesticide you spray on your fruit trees. Same warning is on an Ethernet cable as is on a can of paint. The risk posed by these different items varies wildly, but they're all treated the same from a warning label perspective. And once you realize benign items get the label, you start to ignore it wherever you see it. What California did for air quality is fantastic. I'm proud of my state for its leadership on that and related things. But that doesn't excuse the failure of Prop 65 warnings. They're worse than just "silly". They dilute real warnings and cause people to ignore the whole lot.
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  That's the equivalent of software monitoring alerts that engineers can't do anything to fix. Alert! A new user has joined. Alert! A user has logged in 47,000 times in the last minute The second gets ignored because of the flood of the first kind of message. It's called Attention Fatigue and policies often don't take the effect seriously enough. Better would be a warning with relative danger. Something like a how-cooked-is-your-goose measure: rare, mid-rare, medium, medium-well, well done, charcoal.
dang 5y ago
Breaking the site guidelines like that will get you banned here, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully from now on, we'd appreciate it.

chrisseaton 5y ago

Don't know why you've chosen to use personal abuse? That's against the site guidelines here https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html please don't do that. I'm not making fun of it - I'm saying it's actively harmful because when people now see articles like this and read 'cancer-causing' they'll think 'like Starbucks coffee, so I'm happy with that risk - not a problem'.

nawgz 5y ago
> when people now see articles like this and read 'cancer-causing' they'll think 'like Starbucks coffee, so I'm happy with that risk - not a problem'. Well, I can think of multiple site guidelines I see violated here too. > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Really, it'd be a compliment to call your comments facile. This article has as an opening graphic a stark juxtaposition of harsh industry and children attending school, which it then proceeds to discuss pretty thoroughly. It is difficult to believe you think the discussion there is about risks analogous to drinking a cup of coffee.
- fundad 5y ago
  Every post is going to attract someone "just asking questions" about whether a normal, serious, hypothetical person would immediately be thinking about right-wing talking points instead of thinking about health and suffering.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > It is difficult to believe you think the discussion there is about risks analogous to drinking a cup of coffee. I don't think that! And that's the point - same warning, but not the same risk.
  - nawgz 5y ago
    If you think the behavior of people who do not read the article will be unchanged by yet another discussion of cancer, I think you will perhaps be surprised to learn that people who don't care about privacy don't care about yet another discussion of government overreach and people who don't care about politics remain unbothered by news articles decrying fascism or communism. The article was quite interesting, and showed some very good points. When you use words like "when people now see articles like this" to completely dismiss its very point, it ceases to feel like good faith discussion of anything besides some personal agenda you related to an article keyword.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > When you use words like "when people now see articles like this" to completely dismiss its very point I think you're misreading my comments. I'm not dismissing the article. It's the opposite. I'm saying that my fear is that other people will unfortunately dismiss the article, due to fatigue of being warned that things cause cancer.
      - nawgz 5y ago
        You are strongly whitewashing your own comments. Your first comment - as mentioned re: personal agendas - was about 75% dedicated to to railing against California. The other 25% was where you expressed your opinion of the article: "probably nobody cares" Please write more carefully if you mean what you say when pressed, because these thoughts are not without merit, but the top level comment was completely off-topic and derogatory to the article and has scarcely spawned a useful discussion.
        chrisseaton 5y ago

rhacker 5y ago

I would remove the fu stuff. But I appreciate your appreciation of prop 65. Even if tons of products still have the warning, the amount of lead in various things has dropped significantly since implemented.

infecto 5y ago
I wish your comment was the parent comment. It would be nice to understand what the benefits are because we all know about the silly cancer warnings in Starbucks.

ericd 5y ago

Cmon, prop 65 is terribly implemented, and so the results are absurd. It’d be like if your software’s logging just sent “there’s an error” over and over via email to the whole team with no more details. Not even time stamps.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mdp2021 5y ago

Is it not a good idea to first ask for clarifications, when there is a doubt about one's message? If the labels of danger are without some sort of quantification, there is a fault.

function_seven 5y ago

I think parent is referring to the useless Prop 65 warnings that are plastered on everything. They're so ubiquitous as to be completely meaningless. No sense of scale or relative risk. The coffee carries the same warning as the jug of pesticide you spray on your fruit trees. Same warning is on an Ethernet cable as is on a can of paint. The risk posed by these different items varies wildly, but they're all treated the same from a warning label perspective. And once you realize benign items get the label, you start to ignore it wherever you see it. What California did for air quality is fantastic. I'm proud of my state for its leadership on that and related things. But that doesn't excuse the failure of Prop 65 warnings. They're worse than just "silly". They dilute real warnings and cause people to ignore the whole lot.

slowmovintarget 5y ago
That's the equivalent of software monitoring alerts that engineers can't do anything to fix. Alert! A new user has joined. Alert! A user has logged in 47,000 times in the last minute The second gets ignored because of the flood of the first kind of message. It's called Attention Fatigue and policies often don't take the effect seriously enough. Better would be a warning with relative danger. Something like a how-cooked-is-your-goose measure: rare, mid-rare, medium, medium-well, well done, charcoal.

dang 5y ago

Breaking the site guidelines like that will get you banned here, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully from now on, we'd appreciate it.