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Comment by throawayonthe | Hacker News Reader

it's weird how they say "One TOR exemption that allows the rocket fuel chemical perchlorate to be used in grain bags..." as well as the article they link to https://blogs.edf.org/health/2019/01/11/fda-perchlorate-in-f... focusing on it being a rocket fuel component

i guess it sounds scary? but it almost implies rocket fuel is somehow involved in grain transport lol. the real reason for its use i guess is to control static electricity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#:~:text=control-,s...

this is like that one time people came to my school to talk about vapes, and one of their talking points was "vapes can contain formaldehyde, and formaldehyde is used to preserve dead specimens/tissue samples" ; they did not get my issue with the lack of causal reasoning in that argument :P

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I agree the framing is poor, but is the chemical actually safe? The article contained convincing claims that it actually does cause harm.

Still, six months after it published its data, the FDA reapproved perchlorate for use in super sacks. Advocates say the agency used flawed science and manipulated the data. The FDA wrote that there was no meaningful increase in perchlorate across all the 250 foods it measured. But critics countered that the problem was not in all the food – the problem was in kids’ cereal.

The FDA largely ignored the cereal findings, and mostly does not consider endocrine system harms when developing regulations, said Tom Neltner, a former scientist with the EDF who is now director of the Unleaded Kids non-profit. He helped lead litigation over perchlorate, which was ultimately dismissed.

They're worried about the sacks when the coffee beans are being grown in lead- and arsenic-contaminated soil.

Uh, isn't that guy even more focused on lead, and this was just an additional case he took on?

https://unleadedkids.org/about-us/

How many infants do you know that drink coffee?

Or for another example (that's not mentioned in the article), saltpeter and ammonium nitrate can be used in rocket fuel too, but saltpeter has been used in food for thousands of years and ammonium nitrate is one of the most common fertilizers.

When I lived in California I saw one of those prop 65 cancer warnings on a loaf of bread.

Apparently burning toast can generate trace amounts of acrylamide.

This was enough to convince me a subset of these people are complete lunatics.

Prop 65 gets a lot of shit, but the way it is implemented makes a reasonable amount of sense. If there is evidence that the substance causes harm, it gets listed and companies producing products that contain it have to either notify consumers that it is in there, or they have to demonstrate that the amount of the substance does not cause harm (there's a very low general threshold and some specific thresholds that are higher).

That leads lots of companies to go the low cost route and use the notification safe harbor, but it also creates an incentive to find alternatives and so on. You get cases like you mention, but the alternative to the evidence based approach is to hand wave that it's not harmful.

No, it doesn't "make a reasonable amount of sense." When everything causes cancer, nothing does. No useful information is being communicated to the consumer.

Meanwhile, the credibility of the scientific establishment in Joe Sixpack's eyes takes another hit, with all-too-predictable consequences.

The flaw in that argument is a great number of chemicals do not cause cancer.

And the flaw in that argument is that every product is made with many different chemicals, at least one of which almost always seems to be on the Prop-65 list.

Regardless of the strength of the evidence, which is yet another problem with the whole idea.

The sun's radiation causes cancer, yet placing a blanket warning stating the sun causes cancer likely leads many to wholesale avoid the sun, which would be folly (humans need some amount of sunlight).

Similarly, imagine if nutrition facts labels only had to state whether the food could be potentially unhealthy, without any other nuance.

A sensible version of Prop 65 would acknowledge the specific substance, its dosage, and the best known safe dosage. Equipped with that information a consumer can make an informed decision.

Since the sun is outside the jursdiction of California, it doesn't need a prop 65 warning.

I would love to see prop 65 stickers at the exits to Starbucks(1) warning that going outside exposes you to the sun, a known carcinogen.

1. Starbucks because they are a particular case where acrylamide is a normal byproduct of roasting, and there's basically (as I understand it) no way to have it not be part of the result.

Seems like a lose lose with joe six pack. He gets to be stupid and lazy and blame you no matter what you do.

You are also begging the question, asserting that the law has no useful impact and is thus useless or even harmful.

It's not my job to prove that the law has a negative impact. It's on the legislators to show that it has a positive impact before passing it.

That didn't happen. Instead, Proposition 65 was a case of "Oh, no! Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, it must be done."

I'm not saying it is your job to do anything, I'm saying your argument against it is fallacious.

Legislators didn’t pass it. It was directly voted on by voters.

If you want to drink water with 1985 standards go find a used public toilet.

Something did have to be done because water standards were abysmal and its because of all these laws you think they’re not needed.

If there’s one tiny part of the law people have problems with; it’s probably a good law.

https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65

What do subpar water standards in California have to do with gratuitous, counterproductive scare warnings on the products we buy in 49 other states?

Couldn't you fix your water standards without subjecting the rest of us to something this stupid?

Prop 65 appears to have become a victim of its own incentive structure. When it first landed, companies had to balance whether the potential loss of sales from applying a label was worth lowering enforcement risk, so there was reason to think: is the thing I’m selling actually potentially harmful under this regulation’s definition?

But once the momentum of having these labels on _a lot_ of products gets established, customers start to un-see them, and the sales risk of applying the label drops to negligible. So just slap it on everything, which adds more noise to the signal, which further derisks adding the label, etc.

At this point it probably just needs a hard reset; tear out prop 65 in the process of replacing it with something that learns from these lessons. Maybe make the warning label cost something e.g. mandate that its application include quantitative risk backed by a third party lab test.

Be interesting to see how the new requirement to name the chemical goes.

I quite like the idea to include quantitative risk.

I think a useful addendum is that I think the government should be in charge of testing very common combinations (ie the bread example).

It would get expensive real quick for everyone otherwise.

That shouldn't be enough. Have you considered that the authors of the law did not foresee the issues like those you mentioned? And struggled to either find ways or prioritize finding ways to better communicate risks?

Note that the state did eventually modify the communications that the law required.

https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/crnr/proposition-65-clea...

> Have you considered

No, I didn't consider, I muttered "this is fucking stupid" under my breath and tossed the bread in my cart.

When you dilute the meaning of a warning so much, it becomes meaningless.

I agree. The people who made the law that led to that happening might agree. Yet companies might feel the warning is necessary. Where is the lunatic? Just people trying their best acknowledging we can do better.

this is not what i'm talking about at all, in this case it would be a similar situation if the labels said "contains acrylamide, a papermaking precursor chemical" or something else irrelevant to both the purported danger and use/reason for occurrence

and with the vapes thing, they could just say "formaldehyde is a human carcinogen, can cause permanent adverse effects to nervous system, irritate mucous membranes and aggravate asthma etc" instead of talking about tissue preservation yk?

Overexposure to Dihydrogen Monoxide kills around 300,000 people a year, and it's used in a number of culinary and industrial applications. Yet there have been NO serious attempts to regulate it, and it isn't even classed as hazardous waste.

Always comments like this on these kinds of posts. The Plant Slant fans acting condescending while literally not knowing anything about what they're talking about. Need less of this in the world.

Explain the term “Plant Slant” please. I don’t follow.

It's a YouTube channel you can lookup. He does these low-hanging fruit-style jabs at other people's tiktoks and other videos about health where they are unfortunately not super knowledgeable. He has tons of fans so it kind of turns into this toxic movement where people just regurgitate things he said (which is like identical to the comment I replied to) all over comment sections on videos.

Might be sarcasm in this case, regarding how certain molecules might be cherry-pick-regulated vs others. Although it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison to equate drowning with “overexposure” to water.

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