Judge rules California coffee shops must display cancer warnings
thehill.com
thehill.com
Prop 65 has such a high false positive rate that it's worthless; it does nothing to inform nor protect citizens. When there's a sign on everything, the "warning" doesn't matter anymore. Moreover, just because something has a carcinogen doesn't automatically mean it's unhealthy nor that it will harm you.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3575799 [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/almost-everything-causes-canc... [3] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/general-info/kno... [4] https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/08/15/17-carcinogenic...
Examples: sunshine, candles, birth control
If we could, we would absolutely ban it. It is grossly unsafe.
Also sunshine got more dangerous with the ozone layer depletion (man-made)
We need more vigilance from Captain Obvious, who has been slacking off.
..and (tax payer) money.
Someone else should get a ballot measure to improve or repeal the law. I think the idea behind the law is good, but the short-sighted implementation makes it useless.
It would never work, because we can't have nice things. But a boy can dream.
As with most laws...
Tinfoil: The people that actually elevate cancer risk by a significant amount but get drowned out by the noise must be very happy about this.
You can't tell me that this is giving you useful information. The noise is drowning out the signal.
When I was a kid I didn't have anyone to tell me and no reminders to wear a respirator.
Edit: after submitting, I realized I've never used "silicon" sand as a blasting abrasive, but only glued to paper or cloth. I typically blast with aluminium oxide, coal slag, or glass beads.
You do realize you can research everything you ingest. Nobody bars you from it.
And there is a public health risk to worthless warning labels. Not to mention the unstated economic cost of trying to navigate and implement these worthless regulations.
If the regulations were limited to chemicals with the amount of evidence of harm that these examples have, there would be fewer people with issues.
Instead they get applied to these... and coffee, and sand, and lots of other things with very little evidence of harm, to the point that it stops being a signal of evidence of harm and starts being meaningless noise.
I'll start out by saying that I think that an $800 minimum is waaaay too high.
But I continue by pointing out that it's not for "doing business," it's a tax for having the legal fiction of limited liability[0] enforced by the state. You only pay the minimum tax if you are a corporate entity (Inc or LLC). That's a subtle, but in my opinion important, difference.
If you're willing to transact business in your own name as your own personal liability, the state--at least for this tax; I'm not conversant with the full roster of non-corporate business taxes in California--doesn't charge you for the privilege. If you want the shield of your personal assets separate from your corporate persona then, yes, the state charges you for that privilege. Every state has some sort of fee or tax. Some are very small (Wyoming is only $30 or $40, I believe) while some, like California's, are quite large on the minimum end.
[0]: http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/revenue-and-taxation-code/rtc-se...
First off, $800 is probably too low. It's in California's interest to drive away low margin businesses. If your business really struggles to pay $800 then you should move to Texas or Wyoming. $800 is unlikely to get you even a parking space.
Second, all actual data, actual evidence, not handwavy whining about regulations, indicate California is still far and away the most dynamic economy in the US with the best business growth [1]. Now you might argue California's growth would be even more extraordinary with less regulations (though again, if people ever bother to open a book and learn from the past they'd see most deregulation efforts eg electricity have done more harm than good) but this is a far cry from what may be the most dynamic economy in the world hosting a "small business assassination program."
[1] https://www.ocregister.com/2017/08/28/what-business-exodus-c...
I joke, but there's a reason why small business don't move to rural America, even if they would pay much less taxes and running costs.
This particular case is a little silly, but what's the alternative? "Use common sense," is too vague and easy to abuse, so this is what we get.
Coffees show a huge difference between not-brewed and brewed. Here some examples from that link:
not-brewed --> brewed (ppb)
458 6
377 6
411 6
539 7
3747 93
However, the article says: "At issue is a chemical, acrylamide, which is produced while roasting coffee beans."
So is the danger when coffee is being roasted? brewed too? Is that a concern for people (employees especially) spending a lot of time in coffee shops because of airborne acrylamide? or acrylamide left on surfaces or something?
I wonder how brewed coffee gets singled out when it literally has the lowest values of any items in that table. Carrots & Peas baby food has over double the ppb of brewed coffee.
It’s impossible to construct a building which would not contain some element which would trigger the legal requirement of posting the sign.
The sign conveys you absolutely no information. Look closer and you will see they are posted on every commercial building run by someone smart enough to know to post them. The more entertaining places I’ve seen them is grocery stores and preschools.
The cure: Have a fast limit on the list and in order to introduce new items on the list of items needing the warning, you have to remove one from the list.
Barring that, require some threshold of known effect, before something can be added to the list.
Perhaps someone should just put a label on the roadsigns as you enter the State of California saying, "May contain nuts".
Yeah, this is the kind of research that would never advance anyone career, bring anyone glory, or bring science closer to a "cure" for cancer. And yeah, once you'd want to start actually employing a reliable test in the wild, you'd probably severely reduce your changes of a successful career (and maybe even of continued personal survival), because you'll soon step on some pretty huge toes.
But really, improving tests and sensors should be a top priority of bio-medical research... It might slow down some industries, but hopefully not that much. "Moonshot" projects like "curing" cancer or diabetes are "fun", but we're building a world where we're surrounded by stuff of which we have no idea what's safe or what not.
My personal current worry is actually with the cornucopia of chemicals with neurodegenerative effect that could be all around us, but this reminded me of the fact that we're also basically in the "dark ages" when it comes to determining carcinogenicity in a practical way (hint: it's not about what you can do as part of a funded research project in a few years, it's about having a portable test kit that any average Joe could use to test the hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds and mixtures of them that are all around us, and then in the tones of likely mostly wrong data resulting from it "fish" for maybe actually relevantly dangerous stuff, and then do real research to confirm those ...but then again modern medical research is allergic to "fishing data for patterns" too, so maybe this would need some reframing).
[0] http://time.com/4369809/very-hot-drinks-are-probable-cancer-...
Also, note that it was a nonprofit, the American Cancer Society, that sued to enforce this, not the state of California.
There are no regulations at issue, there is an initiative statute; and, while, yes it is easy to sue and claim a statute is overbroad, it is much harder to win such a suit: “overbroad” isn't just “covers more conduct than good policy judgement would permit”, but “exceeds any constitutionally permitted purpose to impose a chilling effect or outright prohibition on constitutionally protected conduct.”
In fact, as that claim would be a defense in any lawsuit under the act, if it was such an easy win, it would have been made in one of the cases—like the present one—under the act.
Should carcinogenic warnings be on all those examples he mentioned? If no, why should it be on coffee? If yes, why isn't there legislation pushing for french fry warnings?
But I suspect that heating any food much over 100 °C will create carcinogens. Even cooking rice, if it browns at all by accident. And indeed, some folks cook at 50-70 °C to avoid that. Sprouted grain "bread" baked at ~50 °C is especially strange.
Acrylamide was discovered in foods in April 2002 by Eritrean scientist Eden Tareke in Sweden when she found the chemical in starchy foods, such as potato chips (potato crisps), French fries (chips), and bread that had been heated higher than 120 °C (248 °F) (production of acrylamide in the heating process was shown to be temperature-dependent).[17] It was not found in food that had been boiled[17][18] or in foods that were not heated.[17]
https://www.flickr.com/photos/shakataganai/6039225908
That doesn't make the situation any less absurd, however.
Note: He placed the sticker there himself as a joke. His laptop isn't really illegal in California.
The cost of compliance is less than $0.20
I think there are better arguments for your PoV than this one.
Regulations are cumulative. This is yet another thing to add to the list of notices that have to be up and yet another thing that an unaccountable city inspector in a bad mood might decide it not quite displayed prominently for their liking and fine you.
That is what businesses complain about, not the cost of each regulation, the cost of complying with all the regulations, all the time, with no way to defend yourself and no one to tell you if its enough (and defend you if someone disagrees later).
I was visiting once and saw a plaque on a (condo?) building with the warning.
The antivaccine movement is a very small proportion of the population, and one which (unlike the universities) is opposed by the people setting policy (California has a reasonably strong vaccine mandate, and is in the process of further narrowing the allowable exemptions.)
> Too much regulation yet opiod overdose is prevalent.
California has the third lowest opioid overdose death rate in the nation [0]; insofar as California actually has “too much regulation” and that is a thing that could reasonably be expected to be contradictory to a relatively high opioid impact (both of which premises are less than clearly established), no such contradiction is evident.
But, aside from the relevance of that claimed contradiction, sure, California is a large and diverse state, not a uniform hive mind. It has plenty of contradictions. It would be weird if it didn't.
[0] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/opioid-overdose-de...
Not really. Less than 50% of Pixar employees' children at their day care are vaccinated. And these are people with much more money, and thus more political clout, than average.
After salaries, bonuses and all sorts of frivolous expenses, no doubt.
No such things as "non-profit group" in this world; just a group with an accounting ledger in which a column labeled "profit" works out to zero.
Natural, traditional foods and drinks don't need any warnings. The ingredient is roasted coffee and water; go bleepin' google if you want to know how either might be bad for you.