Hacker News Reader

Comment by KeytarHero | Hacker News Reader

I guess the residents of the San Juan Islands must be quite a different demographic from the Canadian islands just across the border. This would never happen on one of the Canadian Gulf Islands, because too many residents are worried about the "wireless radiation" causing headaches or cancer. (This is also where 1 in 6 residents refused a smart power meter [1], mostly out of supposed safety concerns.)

[1] "Gulf Islanders 15 times more likely to oppose BC Hydro smart meters than Vancouverites" http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Gulf+Islanders+times+...

View on HN

Regardless of unfounded concerns, I've refused a smart meter where I live for two reasons - one, they're extremely expensive, there's a large yearly fee equivalent to 20% of my power costs, even though they don't have to send a tech out to read the meter. Two, I don't want to share data about my power usage with my utility. I'm happy to have the data, and I do log power usage locally myself to a very high precision, but I don't trust the utility to keep that data safe - my power usage data is a VERY good predictor of whether I'm home or not, which is data very useful to burglars.

Beautiful place, I was there last summer. AFAIK suspicions about wireless radiation having adverse health effects have not been substantiated.

The subject comes up in places distant from BC. Considering the upcoming election year, here in Portland we usually have a few "fringe" candidates for local office asserting WiFi in public schools is "damaging" children, causing them to misbehave, etc.

Obviously most of the population is unconcerned about such risk. I suppose if it turned out that wireless signals really do cause some obscure deleterious effects, the "tinfoil hat" crowd will say they told us so. I'd go with the odds that's even less likely than winning the Megabucks lottery 3 times in a row.

Yeah, the only "proof" that people tend to cite is that the WHO has classified EM radiation in a class that basically means "we have no idea if it causes cancer or not, but it might", along with just about everything [1].

I lived in Victoria for a few years. My landlords there had refused a smart meter - yet they had WiFi, and both had cell phones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_carcinog...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com