sheer stupidity. Eating causes cancer via weight gain. Breathing air causes cancer. Eventually they'll have to list only those few things that will not cause cancer.
The judge didn’t write the law, they just read it and apply it. I agree the law needs a revisit though, because I am pretty desensitized to those warning notices (especially since they don’t have any information about what chemicals warranted them and how they were linked to cancer)
That's the law in California. Everywhere you go there are warnings that the area has chemicals that cause cancer. I'm surprised Starbucks didn't have these warnings already.
Prop 65 has such a high false positive rate that it's worthless; it does nothing to inform nor protect citizens. When there's a sign on everything, the "warning" doesn't matter anymore. Moreover, just because something has a carcinogen doesn't automatically mean it's unhealthy nor that it will harm you.
It would be a delightful piece of vandalism if people slapped stickers dating "Sunshine is known to the state of California to cause cancer" on all the moronic notices.
Probably causes more cancers each day than every nuclear disaster added together. On the other hand, without sunshine, the Earth would be frozen world covered with ice, void of life.
Also, the science behind carcinogen testing isn't exactly perfect. Ames testing (put cells on petri dishes, expose each dish to a varying degree of substance under test, plot results), for example, is subject to all sorts of problems related to the many, many ex-vivo variables those cells are exposed to simultaneously.
Unfortunately, the judge can't consider that. He didn't rule on whether or not the law is a stupid waste of time and money, he ruled that the existing [stupid] law, as written, applies.
Someone else should get a ballot measure to improve or repeal the law. I think the idea behind the law is good, but the short-sighted implementation makes it useless.
I like imagining a much better world in which we could have a Bureau of Stupid Identification. They'd have no power other than to point to something some other part of the government did and say, That is Hereby Declared Officially Stupid.
It would never work, because we can't have nice things. But a boy can dream.
If you proposed this it would just become a tool of partisan bickering anyway. This department would spend the first month when a new government is in office declaring everything they ideologically oppose from the previous government as stupid.
You can ignore it if you like but don't take the choice away from me. I'm rarely in california but I have seen these warnings while traveling there and on products that are distributed throughout the United States. I'm not well educated in biology or chemistry fields and these signs and labels have made me want to investigate, or at least think about something that I normally wouldn't. Because of these I have considered secondhand tobacco smoke (signs in hotels), benzene (on fuel (petrol) dispensers), lead in brass (plumbing fittings), asbestos (automotive brakes, clutches, gaskets), and many others. I think I make better decisions as a result: telling my kid that if he can smell petrol he's too close, and making sure a brass fitting is RoHS if it's used to convey water but I don't always wash my hands after I handle an air hose with brass fittings.
There are prop 65 warnings for sand. "This facility performs sandblasting operations. Sand contains silica, a chemical known to the state of California to cause cancer."
You can't tell me that this is giving you useful information. The noise is drowning out the signal.
Sandblasting operations are a long-recognized hazard. Not only can you get silicosis but sandblasting is an abrasive process and what else besides the sand is hanging around in the air? Tiny bits of the substrate metal? Zinc (galvanizing coating), Cadmium (another plating), Chromate (paint), Lead (paint)? Is a cured cyanoacrylate paint passivated enough that it's safe to breathe its dust?
When I was a kid I didn't have anyone to tell me and no reminders to wear a respirator.
Edit: after submitting, I realized I've never used "silicon" sand as a blasting abrasive, but only glued to paper or cloth. I typically blast with aluminium oxide, coal slag, or glass beads.
That's a good reason to have a meaningful warning sign up ("do not breathe sandblasting dust"). Unfortunately the prop 65 warning has exactly the opposite effect - hahaha yeah sand whatever - which left me with a false sense of security.
You do realize you can research everything you ingest. Nobody bars you from it.
And there is a public health risk to worthless warning labels. Not to mention the unstated economic cost of trying to navigate and implement these worthless regulations.
> Because of these I have considered secondhand tobacco smoke (signs in hotels), benzene (on fuel (petrol) dispensers), lead in brass (plumbing fittings), asbestos (automotive brakes, clutches, gaskets), and many others.
If the regulations were limited to chemicals with the amount of evidence of harm that these examples have, there would be fewer people with issues.
Instead they get applied to these... and coffee, and sand, and lots of other things with very little evidence of harm, to the point that it stops being a signal of evidence of harm and starts being meaningless noise.
Prop. 65 is stupid, but it is not the judge’s job to evaluate then wisdom of the people in adopting the mandate, it is the judge’s job to apply the law.
Do not fall into the trap of assuming that because cost of complying with the letter of an incremental regulation seems like it would low to you, that means that it does not impose a burden on business owners.
Regulations are cumulative. This is yet another thing to add to the list of notices that have to be up and yet another thing that an unaccountable city inspector in a bad mood might decide it not quite displayed prominently for their liking and fine you.
That is what businesses complain about, not the cost of each regulation, the cost of complying with all the regulations, all the time, with no way to defend yourself and no one to tell you if its enough (and defend you if someone disagrees later).
I rarely visit California, but when I do, sometimes the cancer warnings make it look like I'm on the set of a movie trying to warn me about some absurd future. OK, the parking lot could give me cancer. OK, the elevator could give me cancer.
Other baked and fried foods also contain acrylamide. So what about muffins and donuts? Or french fries? And then there are all the carcinogens in heated unsaturated oils.
Should carcinogenic warnings be on all those examples he mentioned? If no, why should it be on coffee? If yes, why isn't there legislation pushing for french fry warnings?
But I suspect that heating any food much over 100 °C will create carcinogens. Even cooking rice, if it browns at all by accident. And indeed, some folks cook at 50-70 °C to avoid that. Sprouted grain "bread" baked at ~50 °C is especially strange.
I was actually told this by a physics professor in college (in a class about science and public policy). He claimed that basically anything that is browned via heat becomes a carcinogen, so policy makers and scientific researchers have a moral obligation to ensure that "is known to cause cancer" remains a meaningful statement, because taken literally, it applies to almost anything.
Right. You have acrylamide. Plus polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH). But PAH, at least, get degraded quickly, and don't accumulate in fat, unlike similar halogenated compounds, which do. Arctic peoples are loaded with them, because they're transported north and condense out. Distillation, basically.
When people say "overregulation hurts small business in California," here's an example. Imagine just wanting to sell people coffee and not knowing you need to warn people about cancer risks of all things! Imagine getting fined by this regulation, or the myriad of others of which you could possibly run afowl. Just yikes.
Don't forget about the $800 Alternative Minimum Tax faced by every company registered in the state (or doing business in the state, or having workers in the state, or...). That's $800 even if you make zero dollars, or if you're a nonprofit, or if you lose money. California literally says "for the privilege of doing business" in the state. The ole small business assassination program.
> California literally says "for the privilege of doing business" in the state.
I'll start out by saying that I think that an $800 minimum is waaaay too high.
But I continue by pointing out that it's not for "doing business," it's a tax for having the legal fiction of limited liability[0] enforced by the state. You only pay the minimum tax if you are a corporate entity (Inc or LLC). That's a subtle, but in my opinion important, difference.
If you're willing to transact business in your own name as your own personal liability, the state--at least for this tax; I'm not conversant with the full roster of non-corporate business taxes in California--doesn't charge you for the privilege. If you want the shield of your personal assets separate from your corporate persona then, yes, the state charges you for that privilege. Every state has some sort of fee or tax. Some are very small (Wyoming is only $30 or $40, I believe) while some, like California's, are quite large on the minimum end.
So the state tax code literally says, "For the privilege of doing business in the state". [0] Their words, not mine. Whatever way you describe or justify it, the state defines it in this way specifically. Also, sole proprietorships can only be for-profit ventures in California. So if you wanted to start a non-profit, you're paying the AMT.
When people talk about California regulations driving away business it's always an immediate sign to me that they either watch too much Fox News or they're simply talking the book.
First off, $800 is probably too low. It's in California's interest to drive away low margin businesses. If your business really struggles to pay $800 then you should move to Texas or Wyoming. $800 is unlikely to get you even a parking space.
Second, all actual data, actual evidence, not handwavy whining about regulations, indicate California is still far and away the most dynamic economy in the US with the best business growth [1]. Now you might argue California's growth would be even more extraordinary with less regulations (though again, if people ever bother to open a book and learn from the past they'd see most deregulation efforts eg electricity have done more harm than good) but this is a far cry from what may be the most dynamic economy in the world hosting a "small business assassination program."
I ran a nonprofit for veterans for several years which moved about a thousand dollars a year. When I moved to California, I wanted to keep running this nonprofit, because it was actually really helping some folks out in ways that other charities don't have the granularity to know about. So here is one example of "actual data, actual evidence, not handwavy whining about regulations" -- classy! -- of a business that "couldn't even get a parking space" which the California AMT killed.
So are you saying that your non-profit was not an exempt organization? Again, the tax you refer to does not apply to exempt non-profits, such as public charities and private foundations.
No, the minimum franchise tax you refer to (not alternative minimum tax, a completely different tax) does not apply to every company in the state. In particular, it does not apply to non-profits with exempt organization status, which are what people generally think of when they think of non-profits. While my experience is with exempt organizations, my understanding is that the non-profits it applies to are non-exempt non-profits, such as homeowner's associations.
I used to think along the same lines, but then over and over again companies demonstrate that they can't be trusted to do the right thing if doing the right thing will cut into their profits.
This particular case is a little silly, but what's the alternative? "Use common sense," is too vague and easy to abuse, so this is what we get.
> California seems like a state of contradictions. Antivaccine yet some of the best universities
The antivaccine movement is a very small proportion of the population, and one which (unlike the universities) is opposed by the people setting policy (California has a reasonably strong vaccine mandate, and is in the process of further narrowing the allowable exemptions.)
> Too much regulation yet opiod overdose is prevalent.
California has the third lowest opioid overdose death rate in the nation [0]; insofar as California actually has “too much regulation” and that is a thing that could reasonably be expected to be contradictory to a relatively high opioid impact (both of which premises are less than clearly established), no such contradiction is evident.
But, aside from the relevance of that claimed contradiction, sure, California is a large and diverse state, not a uniform hive mind. It has plenty of contradictions. It would be weird if it didn't.
> The antivaccine movement is a very small proportion of the population
Not really. Less than 50% of Pixar employees' children at their day care are vaccinated. And these are people with much more money, and thus more political clout, than average.
Compared to the French fries values, those 6s and 7s looks very negligible.
However, the article says: "At issue is a chemical, acrylamide, which is produced while roasting coffee beans."
So is the danger when coffee is being roasted? brewed too?
Is that a concern for people (employees especially) spending a lot of time in coffee shops because of airborne acrylamide? or acrylamide left on surfaces or something?
I wonder how brewed coffee gets singled out when it literally has the lowest values of any items in that table. Carrots & Peas baby food has over double the ppb of brewed coffee.
The Chamber of Commerce could easily sue on the grounds that these regulations are overbroad and even the incumbent governor is on the record as saying so, but the cost of compliance (displaying a sign) is low and it's handy to have something to kvetch about.
Also, note that it was a nonprofit, the American Cancer Society, that sued to enforce this, not the state of California.
> The Chamber of Commerce could easily sue on the grounds that these regulations are overbroad
There are no regulations at issue, there is an initiative statute; and, while, yes it is easy to sue and claim a statute is overbroad, it is much harder to win such a suit: “overbroad” isn't just “covers more conduct than good policy judgement would permit”, but “exceeds any constitutionally permitted purpose to impose a chilling effect or outright prohibition on constitutionally protected conduct.”
In fact, as that claim would be a defense in any lawsuit under the act, if it was such an easy win, it would have been made in one of the cases—like the present one—under the act.
Hmm, you make a good point. I assumed they wouldn't have standing to bring it up if they weren't litigating against the state itself, and that they were limited to arguing on the facts about the acrylamide.
Of all the things people make fun of California for, this is one we deserve.
The cure: Have a fast limit on the list and in order to introduce new items on the list of items needing the warning, you have to remove one from the list.
Barring that, require some threshold of known effect, before something can be added to the list.
I've seen a magnetic tack hammer with a varnished wooden handle that had one of those stickers on it here in the UK. Was wondering if it was in case you chewed the varnish.
Perhaps someone should just put a label on the roadsigns as you enter the State of California saying, "May contain nuts".
After salaries, bonuses and all sorts of frivolous expenses, no doubt.
No such things as "non-profit group" in this world; just a group with an accounting ledger in which a column labeled "profit" works out to zero.
Natural, traditional foods and drinks don't need any warnings. The ingredient is roasted coffee and water; go bleepin' google if you want to know how either might be bad for you.
When I worked at Apple, it was fun to walk in some buildings and notice the California 'cancer warning' sign posted in the lobby. From that, you knew there was probably a hardware engineering lab somewhere in that building, because I believe they had to post those due to carcinogens released from soldering. (And, inside of Apple, that kind of knowledge would only be shared on a need-to-know basis, otherwise.)
No, they put the signs on every building everywhere because it’s cheaper than not putting them up and possibly getting fined $2,500 for everyone who ever walked inside.
It’s impossible to construct a building which would not contain some element which would trigger the legal requirement of posting the sign.
The sign conveys you absolutely no information. Look closer and you will see they are posted on every commercial building run by someone smart enough to know to post them. The more entertaining places I’ve seen them is grocery stores and preschools.
My apartment build has such a plaque because it was built on the site of an old factory or something. I am a recent import to California. I was not prepared for the amount of state sponsored signage.
Side question: why don't we actually encourage and fund research into developing solid, reliable, and standardized tests for carcinogenicity? Everybody with at least some above basic knowledge of molec bio realizes that things like the Ames test are like complete jokes... so we don't even f know which of the substances around us actually cause cancer in humans :|
Yeah, this is the kind of research that would never advance anyone career, bring anyone glory, or bring science closer to a "cure" for cancer. And yeah, once you'd want to start actually employing a reliable test in the wild, you'd probably severely reduce your changes of a successful career (and maybe even of continued personal survival), because you'll soon step on some pretty huge toes.
But really, improving tests and sensors should be a top priority of bio-medical research... It might slow down some industries, but hopefully not that much. "Moonshot" projects like "curing" cancer or diabetes are "fun", but we're building a world where we're surrounded by stuff of which we have no idea what's safe or what not.
My personal current worry is actually with the cornucopia of chemicals with neurodegenerative effect that could be all around us, but this reminded me of the fact that we're also basically in the "dark ages" when it comes to determining carcinogenicity in a practical way (hint: it's not about what you can do as part of a funded research project in a few years, it's about having a portable test kit that any average Joe could use to test the hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds and mixtures of them that are all around us, and then in the tones of likely mostly wrong data resulting from it "fish" for maybe actually relevantly dangerous stuff, and then do real research to confirm those ...but then again modern medical research is allergic to "fishing data for patterns" too, so maybe this would need some reframing).
Acrylamide was discovered in foods in April 2002 by Eritrean scientist Eden Tareke in Sweden when she found the chemical in starchy foods, such as potato chips (potato crisps), French fries (chips), and bread that had been heated higher than 120 °C (248 °F) (production of acrylamide in the heating process was shown to be temperature-dependent).[17] It was not found in food that had been boiled[17][18] or in foods that were not heated.[17]
99 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadProp 65 has such a high false positive rate that it's worthless; it does nothing to inform nor protect citizens. When there's a sign on everything, the "warning" doesn't matter anymore. Moreover, just because something has a carcinogen doesn't automatically mean it's unhealthy nor that it will harm you.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3575799 [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/almost-everything-causes-canc... [3] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/general-info/kno... [4] https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/08/15/17-carcinogenic...
Examples: sunshine, candles, birth control
If we could, we would absolutely ban it. It is grossly unsafe.
Also sunshine got more dangerous with the ozone layer depletion (man-made)
We need more vigilance from Captain Obvious, who has been slacking off.
..and (tax payer) money.
Someone else should get a ballot measure to improve or repeal the law. I think the idea behind the law is good, but the short-sighted implementation makes it useless.
It would never work, because we can't have nice things. But a boy can dream.
As with most laws...
Tinfoil: The people that actually elevate cancer risk by a significant amount but get drowned out by the noise must be very happy about this.
You can't tell me that this is giving you useful information. The noise is drowning out the signal.
When I was a kid I didn't have anyone to tell me and no reminders to wear a respirator.
Edit: after submitting, I realized I've never used "silicon" sand as a blasting abrasive, but only glued to paper or cloth. I typically blast with aluminium oxide, coal slag, or glass beads.
You do realize you can research everything you ingest. Nobody bars you from it.
And there is a public health risk to worthless warning labels. Not to mention the unstated economic cost of trying to navigate and implement these worthless regulations.
If the regulations were limited to chemicals with the amount of evidence of harm that these examples have, there would be fewer people with issues.
Instead they get applied to these... and coffee, and sand, and lots of other things with very little evidence of harm, to the point that it stops being a signal of evidence of harm and starts being meaningless noise.
The cost of compliance is less than $0.20
I think there are better arguments for your PoV than this one.
Regulations are cumulative. This is yet another thing to add to the list of notices that have to be up and yet another thing that an unaccountable city inspector in a bad mood might decide it not quite displayed prominently for their liking and fine you.
That is what businesses complain about, not the cost of each regulation, the cost of complying with all the regulations, all the time, with no way to defend yourself and no one to tell you if its enough (and defend you if someone disagrees later).
Note: He placed the sticker there himself as a joke. His laptop isn't really illegal in California.
Should carcinogenic warnings be on all those examples he mentioned? If no, why should it be on coffee? If yes, why isn't there legislation pushing for french fry warnings?
But I suspect that heating any food much over 100 °C will create carcinogens. Even cooking rice, if it browns at all by accident. And indeed, some folks cook at 50-70 °C to avoid that. Sprouted grain "bread" baked at ~50 °C is especially strange.
I'll start out by saying that I think that an $800 minimum is waaaay too high.
But I continue by pointing out that it's not for "doing business," it's a tax for having the legal fiction of limited liability[0] enforced by the state. You only pay the minimum tax if you are a corporate entity (Inc or LLC). That's a subtle, but in my opinion important, difference.
If you're willing to transact business in your own name as your own personal liability, the state--at least for this tax; I'm not conversant with the full roster of non-corporate business taxes in California--doesn't charge you for the privilege. If you want the shield of your personal assets separate from your corporate persona then, yes, the state charges you for that privilege. Every state has some sort of fee or tax. Some are very small (Wyoming is only $30 or $40, I believe) while some, like California's, are quite large on the minimum end.
0 - https://www.ftb.ca.gov/businesses/faq/712.shtml
[0]: http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/revenue-and-taxation-code/rtc-se...
First off, $800 is probably too low. It's in California's interest to drive away low margin businesses. If your business really struggles to pay $800 then you should move to Texas or Wyoming. $800 is unlikely to get you even a parking space.
Second, all actual data, actual evidence, not handwavy whining about regulations, indicate California is still far and away the most dynamic economy in the US with the best business growth [1]. Now you might argue California's growth would be even more extraordinary with less regulations (though again, if people ever bother to open a book and learn from the past they'd see most deregulation efforts eg electricity have done more harm than good) but this is a far cry from what may be the most dynamic economy in the world hosting a "small business assassination program."
[1] https://www.ocregister.com/2017/08/28/what-business-exodus-c...
I joke, but there's a reason why small business don't move to rural America, even if they would pay much less taxes and running costs.
This particular case is a little silly, but what's the alternative? "Use common sense," is too vague and easy to abuse, so this is what we get.
The antivaccine movement is a very small proportion of the population, and one which (unlike the universities) is opposed by the people setting policy (California has a reasonably strong vaccine mandate, and is in the process of further narrowing the allowable exemptions.)
> Too much regulation yet opiod overdose is prevalent.
California has the third lowest opioid overdose death rate in the nation [0]; insofar as California actually has “too much regulation” and that is a thing that could reasonably be expected to be contradictory to a relatively high opioid impact (both of which premises are less than clearly established), no such contradiction is evident.
But, aside from the relevance of that claimed contradiction, sure, California is a large and diverse state, not a uniform hive mind. It has plenty of contradictions. It would be weird if it didn't.
[0] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/opioid-overdose-de...
Not really. Less than 50% of Pixar employees' children at their day care are vaccinated. And these are people with much more money, and thus more political clout, than average.
https://www.wired.com/2015/02/tech-companies-and-vaccines/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/shakataganai/6039225908
That doesn't make the situation any less absurd, however.
Coffees show a huge difference between not-brewed and brewed. Here some examples from that link:
Compared to the French fries values, those 6s and 7s looks very negligible.However, the article says: "At issue is a chemical, acrylamide, which is produced while roasting coffee beans."
So is the danger when coffee is being roasted? brewed too? Is that a concern for people (employees especially) spending a lot of time in coffee shops because of airborne acrylamide? or acrylamide left on surfaces or something?
I wonder how brewed coffee gets singled out when it literally has the lowest values of any items in that table. Carrots & Peas baby food has over double the ppb of brewed coffee.
Also, note that it was a nonprofit, the American Cancer Society, that sued to enforce this, not the state of California.
There are no regulations at issue, there is an initiative statute; and, while, yes it is easy to sue and claim a statute is overbroad, it is much harder to win such a suit: “overbroad” isn't just “covers more conduct than good policy judgement would permit”, but “exceeds any constitutionally permitted purpose to impose a chilling effect or outright prohibition on constitutionally protected conduct.”
In fact, as that claim would be a defense in any lawsuit under the act, if it was such an easy win, it would have been made in one of the cases—like the present one—under the act.
The cure: Have a fast limit on the list and in order to introduce new items on the list of items needing the warning, you have to remove one from the list.
Barring that, require some threshold of known effect, before something can be added to the list.
Perhaps someone should just put a label on the roadsigns as you enter the State of California saying, "May contain nuts".
After salaries, bonuses and all sorts of frivolous expenses, no doubt.
No such things as "non-profit group" in this world; just a group with an accounting ledger in which a column labeled "profit" works out to zero.
Natural, traditional foods and drinks don't need any warnings. The ingredient is roasted coffee and water; go bleepin' google if you want to know how either might be bad for you.
It’s impossible to construct a building which would not contain some element which would trigger the legal requirement of posting the sign.
The sign conveys you absolutely no information. Look closer and you will see they are posted on every commercial building run by someone smart enough to know to post them. The more entertaining places I’ve seen them is grocery stores and preschools.
I was visiting once and saw a plaque on a (condo?) building with the warning.
[0] http://time.com/4369809/very-hot-drinks-are-probable-cancer-...
Yeah, this is the kind of research that would never advance anyone career, bring anyone glory, or bring science closer to a "cure" for cancer. And yeah, once you'd want to start actually employing a reliable test in the wild, you'd probably severely reduce your changes of a successful career (and maybe even of continued personal survival), because you'll soon step on some pretty huge toes.
But really, improving tests and sensors should be a top priority of bio-medical research... It might slow down some industries, but hopefully not that much. "Moonshot" projects like "curing" cancer or diabetes are "fun", but we're building a world where we're surrounded by stuff of which we have no idea what's safe or what not.
My personal current worry is actually with the cornucopia of chemicals with neurodegenerative effect that could be all around us, but this reminded me of the fact that we're also basically in the "dark ages" when it comes to determining carcinogenicity in a practical way (hint: it's not about what you can do as part of a funded research project in a few years, it's about having a portable test kit that any average Joe could use to test the hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds and mixtures of them that are all around us, and then in the tones of likely mostly wrong data resulting from it "fish" for maybe actually relevantly dangerous stuff, and then do real research to confirm those ...but then again modern medical research is allergic to "fishing data for patterns" too, so maybe this would need some reframing).
Acrylamide was discovered in foods in April 2002 by Eritrean scientist Eden Tareke in Sweden when she found the chemical in starchy foods, such as potato chips (potato crisps), French fries (chips), and bread that had been heated higher than 120 °C (248 °F) (production of acrylamide in the heating process was shown to be temperature-dependent).[17] It was not found in food that had been boiled[17][18] or in foods that were not heated.[17]