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Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

Heh, this is the kind of "minor harm" regulation I'd typically associate with Britain rather than the US. Is the culture shifting, or is this just a California thing?

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I think California does this kind of thing a lot. A while back, they began requiring cancer warning at coffee shops [0].

I'm not in California, but growing up at least, I associated it was goofy small laws like this (along with not so goofy real laws as well).

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/starbucks-cancer-warning-judge-...

Note that your example is not a new “goofy small law”, but an industry losing a lawsuit because of complete failure to present relevant evidence in a lawsuit applying a long-established, big (but maybe still goofy) law to them.

With the result being a goofy warning on something benign. The practical result, that helps no-one (probably harms, with desensitization of cancer warnings through obvious government driven misapplication/ineptitude), is what makes it a goofy law.

This particular California law applies a rule applied to TV by a 2010 US federal law to modern media that have largely replaced TV. (It is even named after the federal law.)

So, as a broad kind of concern, no, it is not just a California thing.

I'd say mostly a California thing, though there are a number of states that sooner-or-later tend to adopt the same ideas that California leads on.

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