How weird to see this on HN, I just bought a house 8 minutes down the road from the chosen site. It's completely unrelated, this is the first I've seen this news.
It's actually even worse than that now. With the massive influx of immigrants recently, there are now 2+ families sharing one apartment. It's turning into the worst of the ghettos in many areas. Traffic is worse than ever. GO trains are fuller than ever.
Many people are escaping to Alberta. No respite in sight
The dataset you linked to doesn't seem to show any of the chip fabs already operating in the US. Do you have any reason to believe that chip fabs (as they are run these days) are major polluters on par with other industries?
You’re free to live wherever you choose.
Basically any large concentration of people is going to result in businesses existing that produce air pollution.
Everything in life is trade-offs. It sure would be nice to live in pristine untouched nature but also somehow have all modern conveniences and also somehow have a high income that is most commonly found in cities...
Like yeah I'm sure some people can square that circle, but most people need to live in places with more pollution than the countryside so they can make a living.
You’re free to look at this data and say: “well, it doesn’t conclusively prove that living next to a chip fab is bad, so I’m fine with it.” That’s your right. You can live where ever you want. But the data suggests living near industrial sources of pollution is bad for your health. Without any data suggesting that living near a chip fab is neutral to our health, I think applying Occam’s razor is warranted.
Doesn't this directly contradict the incidence of cancer vs. distance to industrial pollution maps? Like you're literally many times more likely to get cancer if you live near a source of industrial pollution compared to other people who live in your same city but don't live right next to a source of industrial pollution.
Think about it like this: the volume of a sphere increases proportional to the radius cubed. That means the further you get from a source of pollution, the density of that pollution falls off by a cubic of the distance. That's quite a sharp drop off. So small sources of pollution may pose some risk, but due to the small amount of particulate combined with how fast the pollution drops off means it's not so dangerous. Very large sources of pollution, however, may be dangerous for some distance.
- Living in a sparsely populated area that is near a chip fab presents X health risks due to its specific kind of industrial pollution.
- Living in a densely populated city without a chip fab presents Y health risks associated with higher traffic, other kinds of businesses that produce air pollution, etc.
I would want to see X quantified against Y in order to make an apples to apples comparison here. If such a comparison is made, it seems likely to me that the health risks are similar. Hence, the only way to minimize your health risks is to live in a sparsely populated area that has no jobs. Anyplace with significant economic activity is likely to be hazardous to your health in some way.
And even if X is significantly more hazardous than Y, okay, then what? "Don't move there" is a lot less helpful than proposing regulations that minimize people's exposure to pollution while still letting us have chip fabs. The damn things need to be built somewhere for us to have nice things, so let's figure out how to do it right instead of just scaring people with (potentially) misleading stats.