Bay Area city blocks 5G deployments over cancer concerns

Fortunately, the specialist he referred me to was pleased with the steps I have been taking.

I can't really blame the first specialist - I'll concur that he is going to do the greatest good to the greatest number with his tactic. But, it means that our interests are in conflict: not an ideal relationship to have with your medical counsel.

To understand why they are bad: if you can't see them then you are effectively in the dark. And people are afraid of the dark.

You’d be better off citing evidence that the frequencies used in 5G don’t have adverse long term effects on biological systems.

We’ve had millions of years to evolve complex biological systems to deal with the radiation from visible and UV light spectrum. Microwave radiation, not so much. It’s fine for people to be cautious.

I just wanted to suggest that respiratory health issues caused by vehicle traffic may be a more complicated issue than the metrics of that report suggests.

No, inverse square.

> has to speak to a tower miles away

But the tower has a very sensitive antenna, so your phone doesn't need to put much power into transmitting. The effect of the phone on your brain and body is small compared to ordinary thermal noise at your body's temperature.

> putting it against your brain for hours on end

If you're going to be talking that much and are worried about this (which I don't think you need to be, but everyone has to make their own judgments), you can use a bluetooth headset. Bluetooth transmit power is an order of magnitude smaller, at least, than cell phone transmit power.

You probably have incident on your body more energy sitting under a light bulb than from a cell phone, not to mention the nuclear fireball in the fucking sky.

Interestingly though, in some environments you can actually get better than free space loss. I remember an off-hand comment from a professor in university that in concrete tunnels you can get R^1.6-1.8 because the tunnel acts as a waveguide

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting_vector

Radio is much lower frequency than light, once you get below the UV spectrum the only known effect that light and radio have is thermal, that is heating flesh, ie heat lamps, microwave ovens.

Yet everyone walks around outside under orders of magnitude higher intensity radiation that has full scientific consensus to cause cancer without giving it much thought.

I for one am not worried about my cellphone that has the power output of a led penlight.

Given the quality of the average study I'm not going to drop my arguments for the yelling. "There is a study" means little or even nothing at all.

Also, I think I read about what you mean and I think you are misinterpreting it. Of course in the end human life is all about emotions and what controls inside your brain what evidence is accepted naturally is quite complex or we would not have that "old scientists need to die" meme, but it does not mean at all that arguments don't ever work.

The problem with the average argument - don't know if adding "especially on the Internet" is justified or if it's actually not much different than the rest of life - is atrociously bad. I would not be persuaded by most arguments made to me and I think that this is very rational.

There is more than one side to this. The problem is good arguments take a lot of effort and time - and it's an iterative process. It needs someone to take somebody else seriously, mostly to be able to "read" the other person, what their issue actually is. Very often it isn't what somebody says. The brain puts thoughts into words not like a computer, where what you get on the outside is a correct representation of internal state. Instead, human speech is itself an iterative process and develops dynamically. For example, it may very well be that what somebody really needs is somebody they feel they can trust, rather than that they need the actual details. Even worse, while you say things, if you really put effort into it, _what_ you think may very well change too!

That lack of trust is an issue for very good reasons in large parts of our society is a fact, unfortunately. I think the discussion is full of "barking at the wrong tree". Yes, I think technical arguments won't help because underneath there is a severe lack of trust in authorities, medical, technical, administrative. Which quite frankly I don't find irrational.

I think arguing about frequencies and what they do is like trying to treat the skin problems of a severe disease instead of the underlying cause. Of course, it is much - MUCH - harder to get at that underlying cause, which is way to obig and hard to get at, far easier to go after the symptoms. Because to really treat such issues deeply would mean big changes to our society.

By the way, it is not true that radio frequencies can't cause cancer at all (and that we are certain of this knowledge), as I read in some comments here. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10926722 Yes that's very specific and extreme, they were right under the radar for much of their life. I read it first in the context of German Bundeswehr radar technicians (example: https://www.dw.com/en/german-army-cancer-victims-sue-us-rada...). Also: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/radio-frequency-radiatio...

In fact, to the extent any potential harm exists, the characteristics of 5G would likely make it far less harmful; 5G does a far better job of managing both direction and power, whereas older cell technologies are more indiscriminate.

World capital of NIMBY turns down development because NIMBY. Not surprised, just disappointed.

Where there's already LTE, not so much.