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Comment by RecycledEle | Hacker News Reader

The EPA ruling against Apple casts doubt on your ad hominem accusations.

Nothing in the report is actually of gravity. If that’s really the extent of mismanagement, it’s pretty tame for a R&D semiconductor lab.

Is it typical for an R&D semiconductor lab to be located in a residential neighborhood?

this isn’t a residential neighborhood, this is industrial zoning with ONE apartment building that got an exception. Probably due to the generally horrible housing situation over there. Nonetheless, it’s actually not that uncommon to find semiconductor labs in suburban areas, mostly low vol or R&D of course, but it’s far from unheard of.

If there were ever a use for the EPA, surely “stopping megacorps from releasing toxic chemicals into residential neighborhoods and retaliating against whistleblowers” would be it.

We’re not talking about some agile startup that rents the nearest place where they can assemble their hardware. This is one of the three most valuable companies in the world, essentially purchasing residential real estate to use as a venue for unsupervised high-tech manufacturing that flouts all environmental regulations they’d otherwise be subject to. And the reason is so that their highly paid employees can have a shorter commute to their R&D lab.

have you actually read the EPA report? This has never been proven, the issues they found are more on the level of procedural scrutiny and unmarked waste buckets. That’s FAR from "releasing toxic chemicals into a residential neighborhood", which it isn’t, it’s industrial zoned land. The one apartment building is also literally built on a EPA superfund site, entirely unrelated to Apple. So even if the issues reported aren’t hypochondria or part of the myriad of other vendettas this woman had with Apple, it’s still just as likely that it may have something to do with the superfund site.

Personally, I’d prefer living next to a low vol semi lab to a whole myriad of other enterprises: petrochem, industrial scale chemistry, coal powerplants, GA airports using 100LL avgas, the list goes on. But hey, that’s just like my opinion man.

Did you read the report and specifically the areas of concern the EPA had? They seem minor at best. More than half of them are mislabeled containers that are too broad.

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