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Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

As a resident of California, these warnings are a joke. You learn to pay absolutely no attention to them, because they are everywhere. They are like the real-life equivalent of the "this site uses cookies" warnings the EU imposes.

Do the people behind this lawsuit truly in good-faith believe such warnings for coffee will make the world better? (It seems hard to imagine.) Or are there other motivation at play here?

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The EU's cookie-law is often made light of here, but there's a difference between essential and non-essential cookies.

The non-essential cookie warnings for most intents and purposes can be read as "This site will track you".

Sites using essential cookies don't have to put up a warning.

Following third party links, I now often decide that particular content is not that important when the warning pops up. It also serves as a rudimentary filter for lower quality content.

So cookie warnings being everywhere tell me a tale about the sorry state of the Web, and not a joke about bureaucracy gone haywire.

It probably does more harm than good since it detracts from the severity of actual warnings on products we know can be dangerous.

I have the same issue with the EU cookie law which while well intentioned it essentially trained a whole generation to accept an annoying pop up without reading or understanding it.

As non-residents of California, we're happy to hear that residents view these warnings the same way the rest of us do. It seems that _everything_ causes cancer in California.

I've read before that businesses take it much more seriously than people do. They will consider modify their products to remove the the need for warning labels. So the law can introduce changes. Here's an example of Coca-Cola modifying the formula for the caramel color in their soda: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/03/07/148075310/co...

Prop 65 lawsuits are a money-making venture. There are law firms that specialize in bringing these cases and they collect tens of millions of dollars in settlements each year.

I used to work for an eyeglass lens manufacturer. I remember having to set up a new label printing system to print labels that said "this product contains blah blah known to cause cancer blah blah". This was on eyeglass lenses. What's the exposure risk here? Eating them? Who eats their eyeglass lenses?

Maybe the exposure risk was from dust inhalation if the lenses were cut or ground to fit a pair frames. Though point taken - prop 65 warnings are on everything. I still choose to enter parking garages.

I bought an iPhoneX case from Amazon (UK) for my partner and it came with the same warning.

As a resident of Oregon, I notice a curious pattern wherein shitty knockoff or generic products are more likely to carry the warnings, and the warnings don't say which ingredients caused the warnings to be issued. Doing reading on various product ingredients is interesting; in many cases, the manufacture of the product is hazardous to the workers, and so I have begun to see Prop 65 stickers as telling me that the laborers who produced the product worked in unsafe conditions.

In the specific case of coffee, it seems that this ruling was quite reasonable on the facts, up to the still-open question of whether acrylamide really should be considered carcinogenic.

There must be another nefarious goal behind the lawsuit. When there is need to fight the government on so many more critical issues, why would a non profit choose to waste time and money on something so pointless ? Need to dig deeper

As a consumer, I want to know the risks posed by what I buy and consume. Part of the (predictable) response to this is because its coffee. If it were, say, water bottles, cooking pots, or drinking straws; or if it were keyboards, cell phones, or socks-- the response would likely be different.

The problem is that the labels do not give us any idea of the absolute risks involved, and so, yeah, they are all ignored. A 3-4 level color coded warning would be much more useful, perhaps with a link to something more informative.

But what else is the Council for Education and Research on Toxics going to do with their time?

I once saw:

"This sign was printed with materials known by the state of California to cause ..."

*these warnings brought to you by the National Tea Council (not really)

I think it's a way to shift liability to the consumer.

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