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.