Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

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I think the original intention of Proposition 65 was to provide a disincentive for businesses to use toxic chemicals and a disincentive for people to frequent spaces where they were used. However, it doesn't seem to have been calibrated effectively: the authors of the proposition may have thought that businesses would have a clear and easy choice between "using dangerous chemicals" and "not using dangerous chemicals", but so many things have ended up getting included that the value of that signal has been severely diluted.

It would probably be more useful if they had some kind of scale of danger, kind of like in the NFPA fire diamond where hazards are rated from 0 to 4. Another alternative could be to label only substances that a typical citizen would not expect to be present in a certain kind of facility (which maybe could be established by having the state perform surveys). For instance, a typical citizen would probably expect jet fuel to be present at an airport.

The problem is that Prop 65 excessively concentrates on the agent, whereas any time spent looking at toxicology will tell you that the agent is only a small part of what constitutes a medically meaningful exposure (route of exposure, cumulative dose, concentration, etc. -- the law addresses none of these except that some cancer-causing compound is present, whether or not it means anything in practice).

And since the law essentially absolves you if you issue such warnings and the warning is so ubiquitous as not to alarm people anymore, well, you might as well slap it on everything.

Yeah, those thresholds got set way too low. But worse, they don't really provide much in the way of actual _information_, as several people above have noted.

An article I read about this whole coffee thing mentioned that

"The state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment adopted new regulations last year that will require more specific warnings that list the chemical consumers may be exposed to and list a website with more information. Parking garages, for example, will have to post that breathing air there exposes drivers to carbon monoxide and gas and diesel exhaust and warns people not to linger longer than necessary."

(From: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/26/coffee-sold-in-california-co...)

...which should hopefully make the warnings more useful - though I've no idea whether their overall usefulness will outweigh their overall cost.

How would it make them any more useful? It's not like hanging out parking garages and breathing in exhaust are a favorite pastimes for Californians now (though this impression can easily be made if one considers the results of California lawmaking, I admit). People know exhaust gases are not a healthy thing, and there's no reason to hang out in parking garage anyway. However, since being in parking garages, when parking, is unavoidable, putting useless warnings there desensitizes people to all sort of such warnings, and makes them ignore any kind - including those kinds that might have been useful (such as in a facility where actual dangerous chemicals are present) - but now, nobody would even notice those warnings anymore, just as nobody reads what's on Windows warnings, people just click 'OK', whatever it is.

Yes we saw this in the UK when they applied the regs for chemical hazards in factories to offices.

Makes me laugh when I compare my first work place we had our own irradiation sources plus the required safety officer oh and that experiment we did where the working fluid was moten metal:-)

Not to mention the full service buildings (ie those with compressed air) where the compressed air reservoir was a risk - not to mention the lab where we had a separate fluron release alarm plus staff trained to use breathing apparatus to attempt a rescue with.

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