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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately, Snowcrash's libertarian utopia has a solution to this exact problem, in the form of a little placard.

    SACRIFICE ZONE WARNING

    The National Parks Service has declared this area to be a National Sacrifice Zone.
    The Sacrifice Zone Program was developed to manage parcels of land
    whose clean-up cost exceeds their total future economic value.

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Sounds like all the Superfund sites across the country, for most of which remediation is on hold due to cost, etc. Except there are no placards. It's not altogether unlikely you have one in your backyard.

There are superfund sites near me where some idiot had a home business making lead ammunition, and another something involving mercury.

BART West Oakland station, last stop just before the tunnel to San Francisco. Look to your left, just outside the parking lot. Years ago it was a ship rope warehouse, before that? listed as a superfund site, it might be some community organizing house now. Burning Man central warehouse is on the other side of the parking lot, which IMO is completely compatible.

The entire South Bay may as well be considered a Superfund site (Silicon Valley used and dumped a lot of solvents in chipmaking). Ever wonder how Google got all that Mountain View real estate for cheap? Don't go swimming in those pretty canals.

It's not even fiction https://www.propublica.org/series/sacrifice-zones

In real life this is SuperFund, and much of the state of West Virginia.

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