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.
Apparently burning toast can generate trace amounts of acrylamide.
This was enough to convince me a subset of these people are complete lunatics.
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, the credibility of the scientific establishment in Joe Sixpack's eyes takes another hit, with all-too-predictable consequences.
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.
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.
Regardless of the strength of the evidence, which is yet another problem with the whole idea.
You are also begging the question, asserting that the law has no useful impact and is thus useless or even harmful.
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."
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.
Couldn't you fix your water standards without subjecting the rest of us to something this stupid?
Note that the state did eventually modify the communications that the law required.
https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/crnr/proposition-65-clea...
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.
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?