He clearly has an agenda against what he perceives as onerous environmental regulations: https://x.com/sdamico/status/2026536815902208479 https://x.com/sdamico/status/2026552845294792994
His point is that it's impossible to manufacture much of anything in California if you aren't grandfathered in. Seems pretty important for economic and security issues.
The electric induction cooktop he and his team has made is pretty cool! I'd check it out.
Unless you believe there needs to be a plan for CA to secede in the future and thus it needs to be self-sufficient, why does manufacturing need to be in CA? As you stated, the Impulse stove makes heavy use of outsourced manufacturing to other parties; as long as those parties are within the US (which I'm not claiming they are, but there are states like TX that are far less concerned about environmental impact than CA is and thus could pick up any such slack), why is there a security concern here?
As for the economic concern, it seems like this is backwards: I'd argue it's the HCOL that drives industry with the need for low-wage labor away to non-CA locations. There's nothing stopping non-polluting corporations from working and hiring large numbers of people in CA.
Their website says
> We’re designing and manufacturing the stovetop, battery pack, and key internal components to comply with all relevant UL standards and other applicable compliance requirements.
but this device appears to be for sale, right now. Either it is designed for safety already or it isn’t. WHICH UL safety standards? Is there an emergency shutoff? A regular old fire extinguisher probably is not going to cut it.
It's an induction stovetop. It doesn't itself get hot, other than whatever heat gets transferred to the top of the stove because it is in contact with the hot pot or pan sitting on top. I don't know about this one specifically but with most induction stovetops that just makes it warm to the touch in the area right under the pot or pan.
That's not going to be hot enough to be a problem for the battery even if for some reason they mounted it in contact with the bottom of the top surface, which I doubt they did.
My point is that’s what safety standards are for. Do they do safe things or not? You might be surprised to hear how many manufacturers do dumb things for one reason or another. If they really do comply with safety standards then they should be able to say which ones. Why don’t they say?
To your last point, I am somewhat doubtful that this website is being honest about automotive paint shops being banned in California. Am I to believe that the 3,000 auto body shops in Southern California sit on their hands all day? Was West Coast Customs just a fake TV show filmed in Texas?
https://www.autobodynews.com/news/new-paint-voc-regulations-...
If this website’s author is correct I’m supposed to believe that no paint gets applied to cars in Canada.
As another nitpick, let’s also not forget that nobody else is building oil refineries in the US. The newest one in the entire country was built in 1976. Oil demand in the US is relatively flat since decades ago; there isn’t a pressing need for new refineries.
I also think that readers in this thread should remember that California has strict air quality regulations because its geography especially in Southern California lends itself to bad air quality. These regulations are very much written in blood. Globally, almost 7 million people die prematurely every year due to air pollution.
From the page itself, "A modern auto paint shop emits volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during primer, base coat, and clear coat application. The Bay Area AQMD makes permitting a new paint shop nearly impossible. This is THE classic example of what you can't do in CA." This point is trotted out and reframed multiple times on the page but it's literally self contradictory. It's not something you can't do in California, it's something you can't do without approval in the Bay Area Air District.
It's not a good place to be doing such an activity, as the area already can't successfully keep the air healthy enough to stay within federal limits due to environmental factors that trap particulate low to the ground. If you're at all familiar with the area you know concerns about air quality are not overblown and. Go further away from people or meet strict VOC regulations if you absolutely need to be doing that kind of work in the area, seems completely reasonable to me.
Existing shops get grandfathered.
See also the counterproductive legacy of the anti-nuclear movement.
Some guy’s website claims with big red scary graphics that this stuff is banned and these poor downtrodden business owners can’t operate.
I can’t imagine that nobody has opened an auto body shop in California in the last decade or two.
When it comes to businesses like large factories opening up that’s more of something that often gets approved on a case by case basis.
E.g., we can’t just say that the Chicago Bears are banned from building a new stadium in Chicago just because they aren’t willing to pay the costs required to do so and aren’t willing to meet the city’s requirements to get the approval vote they need.
You either make it doable or you don't.
This statement doesn't acknowledge why NIMBYism is odious. The reason is that we all need housing, but new housing may devalue current housing. While some may wish to protect their housing values/community feel/etc, others wish and may rightly deserve, access to housing at the same levels of access as earlier generations.
The analogy to manufacturing does not exist—to suggest it does ignores the real negative externalities to people who live next to polluting facilities, especially those where the pollutant was not recognized during use.
Obviously, California is not composed exclusively of heavily populated cities. But it does contain a lot of them! So it is not completely insane that the regulation is skewed in favour of this.
Of course, for things that are equally polluting no matter where you do them (like burning fossil fuels), moving production outside of the location but still buying produced materials is simply passing the buck. But it's not totally clear to me that's what's happening here.
CO2 might be a long term problem, but it isn't the core health concern of living near combustion facilities - moving those away from residential areas isn't passing the buck, it's just good sense.
> Charged with regulating stationary sources of air pollution emissions, the Air District drafted its first two regulations in the 1950s: Regulation 1, which banned open burning at dumps and wrecking yards, and Regulation 2, which established controls on dust, droplets, and combustion gases from certain industrial sources.
> Much research and discussion went into the shaping of Regulation 2, but there was no doubt about the need for it. During a fact-finding visit to one particular facility, Air District engineers discovered that filters were used over air in-take vents to protect the plant's machinery from its own corrosive emissions! This much-debated regulation was finally adopted in 1960.
https://www.baaqmd.gov/en/about-the-air-district/history-of-...
The outcome is the same as long as only California does it, but the ethics of it and the outcome if every state acted like that is vastly different
The Copper stove is made in Berkeley, California, by the way.
With aligned talent you can make the process neutral. I’m assuming lots of ‘eco conscious’ engineers would love to implement better practices and get paid for it.
I think to be eco neutral, you would be cost prohibitive. Which would be an issue in car manufacturing and phone manufacturing.
Also, the website lumps adjacent tech together and says they're all banned, but they are not. Lumping sheet metal stamping in with gigs casting is plain wrong, and you could make the argument that that's an agenda driven aspect of this website. They're casting a wider net than exists.
Point stands, though. California's policy is "go fuck up some other states environment". This policy might not work forever, but that's their stance.
Which just shows that other places are allowing those costs to be externalized to society in general which is classic "privatize profits, socialize costs" that businesses have relied on.
Pointing out that such costs have been externalised for decades should be the starting point to internalise them.
I absolutely agree. 100%. The issue is single companies can't do that. They will not be competitive against companies that aren't doing it. You need an even playing field for this to work, i.e. you need legislation and uniform environmental standards across all states, whatever those standards may be. Probably even need similar pacts across countries, within reason.
Right now, the US is moving in the opposite direction to this statement.
I've grown rather weary of performative complaining about trash which has a waste lifecycle which ends at "stabilized landfill".
Because that's one of our best waste lifecycle processes: what's a disaster is greenhouse gas emissions, it waste which is reliably ending up in the oceans and doesn't biodegrade.
I cannot to move to California once all the billionaires move to Texas and Florida.
For most things it says that they are “impossible” or “near-impossible” with no explanation or just "getting a permit is hard" with no futher detail.
It does give some cherry-picked metrics : - 0 Semiconductor fabs built in CA in the last decade => as there been ANY semi fabs built outside of taiwan and china in the last decade ? Not exactly surprising. - 1 West Coast shipyard that can build destroyers, 0 New automotive paint shops permitted in CA, 0 New oil refineries permitted in CA since 1969 => We don't build those for shits and giggles, is there any demand that would justify new factories for thoses ?
Basically, the website doesn't say anything. It just gives some context-less data and one guys opinion on what he perceives as not possible.
Not that I care, I am not from the US or live there, but let's not try to pass some dude rambling as a source of actual information.
It's difficult to transport petroleum over the rocky mountains, and California requires its own blend of gasoline for use in vehicles, so there is significant demand for oil refineries in the state. Fuel imports have increased significantly due to refinery closures.[3] Some companies are trying to build pipelines to connect the west coast to refineries in Texas, but it's unclear when or if that will happen.[4]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC_Arizona
3. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65704
4. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/california-refinery-...
Everyone has an agenda. Is anything on this site false? Is it incorrect information?
But lumping that in with semiconductor fabs, which are extremely toxic, makes me wonder how many of these banned industries I don't want in my state. I think if we want to build them in the US maybe don't build them in the most agriculturally productive and highest population state. Or first figure out how to do it without turning the US into China with its "cancer villages" from poisoned river water.
I'm not defending the dysfunctional CA bureaucracy, but the site should probably focus on specific cases of government-produced insanity than a general complaint that certain industries are banned from operation.
Wait, hold on - I watched all the seasons of "Rust To Riches" on Netflix, about a small shop that flips cars.
They routinely painted cars.
They'd paint in this sealed-up room/garage thingee, the guy would wear and industrial-grade mask, and the camera would slide past as he expertly painted the car. The 30 second montages looked awesome!
That show took place in Temecula, California. So there's no way that site is accurate.
And, more to the point, if they want to show that they are accurate they should be linking to the rules & regulations that actually prohibit these things instead of just making a claim & calling it a day.
The site provides no citations, no evidence, so there’s no need to defend the count argument or honestly even make it.
The sit isn’t just false, it is flat out disrespectful to all the workers, engineers, founders, and everyone else involved in the industries he says don’t exist that actually do exist. The site is basically “I think this is hard so no one else could possibly do it”.
Secondly, it says you can't permit a new auto paint shop in CA, but it specifically mentions the Bay Area AQMD as the reason. But, as its name implies, the Bay Area AQMD only regulates within the San Francisco Bay Area. It is only one of 35 air districts in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_air_distric...
So, it is impossible to permit a new auto paint shop in all of these districts, or just the bay area? Because those are very different. It also labels starting a new paint shop as "impossible", but then says it's "nearly impossible". So is it actually impossible, or just nearly impossible?
I go by a paint shop every now and then. It’s not nearly as smelly as a quite of a few of the nearby restaurants.
So the right thing is to outsource the dirty jobs to countries that can’t afford to be picky?
Wouldn’t it be better for the world if we used our wealth to develop methods of safe semiconductor manufacturing with low environmental impact, and proudly built those facilities in California?
It's not like the laws are simply "you can't make semiconductors here". The laws ban the harmful externalities of the process. The companies that want to make semiconductors don't want to find a way to make the processes less harmful: it's cheaper and easier to just go somewhere where they can pollute instead.
There's a large middle ground between "Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone" and letting blatant polluters turn your neighborhood into a Superfund site. California solved the latter problem by going too far in the other direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-y...
There are. They just cost more and take more time.
> But lumping that in with semiconductor fabs, which are extremely toxic
People say this all the time, but semiconductor fabs simply aren't very toxic compared to just about every other industrial manufacturing process. Mostly this is because everything is sealed and sealed and sealed some more.
Yes, they handle stuff like arsenic gas (arsine AsH3), but they really try to reclaim it all. The semiconductor waste stream is often purer than most industrial inputs. Yeah, old plants would just dump crap into the environment. However, for modern semiconductor facilities, it is generally more economic to reprocess your waste than try to purify from primary sources.
Now, PCB manufacturing, on the other hand, is quite terrible or at least it used to be. I don't know if people have sealed and automated that yet.
I realize it isn't completed yet but I don't think anyone is buying sites for something that's impossible to build.
Here's another one: https://www.bosch-semiconductors.com/roseville/
The Infinera one is described as a "new fab" though (https://www.nist.gov/chips/infinera-california-san-jose) and the Bosch one is adding a new type of fabrication to an existing site. If you can do all that without getting new permits then that makes California sound like a pretty lenient place to do business. I'm assuming they did have to get new permits though.
This might be a refutation but it's not super clear. It's definitely not a commercial semiconductor fab but it might do all of or some subset of what a commercial fab does at R&D scale. Hard to know for sure how this jives with the claim in the main website.
> If you can do all that without getting new permits then that makes California sound like a pretty lenient place to do business.
Being able to retool under original zoning/permitting is specifically lenient? That's extremely basic. If you're a co-Californian with me, though, it does help to understand that many people think that anyone doing anything without a permit is "lenient".
> I'm assuming they did have to get new permits though.
Well, that makes it really easy to be "right". I should try this more.
As others have pointed out, the article itself fails to provide any direct citations of the regulations either. This is classic Russell's teapot territory; the one making the initial claim shouldn't have a lower burden of evidence than the one refuting it.
> so obviously his point can’t be true > so obviously he’s biased and we can’t do the mental work of sifting > so obviously I can dismiss this as teleologically false.
Please don’t be so lazy you guys. There is something to be gained here.
This guy, with an obvious bias, created a website that misrepresents the situation in California (by implying things are banned or "nearly impossible" when in actuality they just take time/effort), while also failing to show the specific regulations or requirements for any of it. Without supplying that kind of information this website is little better than "It's banned. trust me bro". It's not our responsibility to try to dig up evidence to support or verify this guys claims just because he can't be bothered to do it.
His motivations, his framing of the problem, and his failure to back up his own statements makes the site pretty damn easy to dismiss and I don't even doubt that there might be instances where bad regulation exists, especially regulation that protects the profits of established players in certain industries by keeping out competition. I'm entirely sympathetic to the idea that it might be happening, but if there is something to be gained you aren't going to find it on this guys website. Serious coverage on this topic would include actionable information we can use to identify and solve specific problems. This is just anti-regulation propaganda.
Your downvotes are invalid.
The article contains no citations, and so may be presumed 100% false by default.
"may be presumed", as in, sure it might actually contain some other mix of true and false, but it doesn't matter what that mix actually is. That only matters in some other article written by someone else that citates any of it's assertions.
This piece is the same as if monkeys typed stuff at random and some of it could possibly happen to be the same as something true. It doesn't mean the monkeys made a valid point, and no one should spend one second either defending or refuting it.
I'm actually quite surprised by the number of people who have fallen for this. There aren't even any concrete claims here – just the vague assertion that some things are "impossible".
There are a ton of CNC machining (AL and otherwise) and anodizing shops in the Bay Area.