Californians have watered down the phrase 'cancer-causing' so much that probably nobody cares! I guess being down-wind of a Starbucks counts as being in a sacrifice zone according to Californian regulations!
For instance, Wikipedia:
> The requirements apply to amounts above what would present a 1-in-100,000 risk of cancer assuming lifetime exposure (for carcinogens)
Using the standard ~$5M statistical value of life, this mean that you need to label a product if it is estimated to impose the equivalent of $50 in costs if someone is regularly exposed to the chemical over an entire lifetime. I'm not sure what frequency of exposure is being assumed here, but naively that means that if I use the product once a week, it requires notification of about 2 cents worth of harm per usage.
Meanwhile the other examples it uses are that you have to be warned when you're being exposed to things like diesel exhaust. Which, um, actually does cause cancer.
And kids will lick a lampshade.
Regulations always have dumb results. If you put the warning on anything with lead in it, people make fun of the warning on a Tiffany lamp. If you don't, people are shocked that you don't have the label on a child's toy with lead paint.
Regulators are never going to thread the needle that well. They're not capable of it. This is a huge problem when they're banning stuff. When they're labeling stuff, eh. People will figure it out.
If you have warnings literally everywhere, for minor things, that noone really cares about, because the risks are miniscule, people will start ignoring even the dangerous but identical-looking signs. "this item causes cancer" ... are we talking about asbestos, or are we talking about a roasted potato? If the labels are the same, people stop noticing them.
But what he described is exactly how asbestos is handled in discourse in any other context. People absolutely lose their minds over it.
But, then I thought: hmm... maybe his is a great example. People are terrible at assessing risks. The word 'asbestos' is likely to cause a greater reaction than is warranted. It's the opposite side of the coin from peoples' reactions to those prop 65 signs.
Devil's advocate, it has an effect on some minority of people. Then the company loses sales and has the incentive to stop using the carcinogen if possible.
Your lifetime risk of getting cancer from that thing might have been one in a thousand, so you don't really care, but the company has ten million customers and getting them to change prevents 10,000 cancers.
This is a pretty good alternative to banning the thing. Because if there is a reasonable way to stop using the carcinogen, you don't want to be the company that has the cancer warning when your competitors don't. But if there isn't, maybe the risk is low enough that people make an informed choice to take the risk for the benefit of the thing with no better alternative, and that's fine too.
I have changed my behavior in response to health info on labels, so this is anecdotal evidence against your assertion.
PR campaigns have been known to work, e.g. alcohol in Russia in the 90s.
The fact that every coffee shop in California is still open, despite people being warned for years that they sell products that cause cancer. The vast majority of people clearly do not care about the warning.
And what do you think is the benefit of putting unsupported warnings on things? Do you think it's actively beneficial? Do you think it's harmless? If it's beneficial or harmless we might as well go ahead and put a warning label on absolutely everything regardless. Then how do we react to this linked article? We'd ignore it.
If you're the one who wants warning labels on things that don't need warning about then you justify that position!
>The fact that every coffee shop in California is still open, despite people being warned for years that they sell products that cause cancer. The vast majority of people clearly do not care about the warning.
Or they care, but have balanced the risks vs. their enjoyment of coffee. But they may see a warning on, for example, olive oil which contains lead, and decide to buy another product.
>putting unsupported warnings on things?
What do you mean by unsupported here? As in, not supported by science? Or by the people? Because I'm pretty sure it's well supported by science that certain products are carcinogenic and that consuming them, unsurprisingly, isn't very good. We can argue about what thresholds constitute a tangible risk, for sure, but either way the fact that some things cause cancer is surely considered "supported".
>that don't need warning about
Same question -- just referring to coffee or all labels on everything? I agree with this if you're just referring to coffee, but there are certainly labels that I do pay attention to and consider a warning useful.
I think there's a happy middle-ground here. If my favorite juice has lead, I want to know. If my favorite coffee shop has a 1 in 10,000,000 of causing cancer, I probably don't need the warning each day.
What about the steering wheel and the arm rests?
My pen doesn't have a warning, is that because the manufacturer chooses to consider exposure through skin contact only, but chewing on it is actually a sizeable risk?
When the risk is infinitesimal and the warning placed on so many items, what is the value of that warning?
I think the reality is we have so many terrible chemicals all around us that it feels like an over reaction, when it's actually the exact opposite -- manufacturers have made many a deal with the devil.
Everything has some amount of lead back from the days when it was used recklessly. Everything has some amount of mercury that's still going up smokestacks. (Now we catch most of it--not all of it!) Plants pick up some arsenic from the soil--for medical reasons I eat a lot of rice and it's enough of an issue I make sure to buy rice grown in low-arsenic areas.
Speaking personally: fuck you for making fun of that effort!
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully from now on, we'd appreciate it.
I'm not making fun of it - I'm saying it's actively harmful because when people now see articles like this and read 'cancer-causing' they'll think 'like Starbucks coffee, so I'm happy with that risk - not a problem'.
Well, I can think of multiple site guidelines I see violated here too.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Really, it'd be a compliment to call your comments facile. This article has as an opening graphic a stark juxtaposition of harsh industry and children attending school, which it then proceeds to discuss pretty thoroughly. It is difficult to believe you think the discussion there is about risks analogous to drinking a cup of coffee.
I don't think that! And that's the point - same warning, but not the same risk.
The article was quite interesting, and showed some very good points. When you use words like "when people now see articles like this" to completely dismiss its very point, it ceases to feel like good faith discussion of anything besides some personal agenda you related to an article keyword.
I think you're misreading my comments.
I'm not dismissing the article. It's the opposite. I'm saying that my fear is that other people will unfortunately dismiss the article, due to fatigue of being warned that things cause cancer.
Please write more carefully if you mean what you say when pressed, because these thoughts are not without merit, but the top level comment was completely off-topic and derogatory to the article and has scarcely spawned a useful discussion.
I’m really not sure how you managed to take that away from the top level comment! I didn't say anything derogatory about it if you re-read it. I think you're possibly bringing in some kind of preconception.
The article is important but its impact is watered down by people making ‘cancer-causing’ a daily warning. That was the point.
> I didn't say anything derogatory about it if you re-read it
he says in response to a comment clearly outlining why it reads as derogatory regardless of author intention, ignoring those points to instead imply I am the problem.
> The article is important but its impact is watered down by people making ‘cancer-causing’ a daily warning. That was the point.
You can't really tell me that was the point - where do you suggest the article is important in your initial comment? Answer with a quotation please.
To me, and any reasonable reader, the point was that you hate California, and everything else was just a weak justification to make that comment on this article.
The risk posed by these different items varies wildly, but they're all treated the same from a warning label perspective. And once you realize benign items get the label, you start to ignore it wherever you see it.
What California did for air quality is fantastic. I'm proud of my state for its leadership on that and related things. But that doesn't excuse the failure of Prop 65 warnings. They're worse than just "silly". They dilute real warnings and cause people to ignore the whole lot.
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Better would be a warning with relative danger. Something like a how-cooked-is-your-goose measure: rare, mid-rare, medium, medium-well, well done, charcoal.
If the labels of danger are without some sort of quantification, there is a fault.