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Banned in California

bannedincalifornia.org

421–430 of 749 posts

Re: Banned in California

#421

There is a reason these kind of things are no longer possible in much of the western world and especially Europe-like US states like California: After the deindustrialization people started to enjoy healthy air and clear water. As always when it comes to "the good old times" or "make great again", your brain will remember very selectively. I used to live next to a large river for about 35 years. As a kid, it was forb…

I'd choose to be the powerful and rich industrial country every single time. If I had a button that would wipe out the entire Amazon jungle and replace it with a world class high technology industry, I wouldn't even think twice before pressing it. Clean water to swim in? Build a pool. Frankly, any deindustrialized country is quite simply irrelevant. You need industry to have a middle class. You need middle class for…

> If I had a button that would wipe out the entire Amazon jungle and replace it with a world class high technology industry, I wouldn't even think twice before pressing it.

Wow. Why, because the Amazon is just a bunch of trees or something boring? If "high technology industry" is so much more valuable without even thinking twice about it, you probably don't understand very much of the world.

Re: Banned in California

#422
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> California can't restrict the importation and sale of items manufactured legally in other states if the item itself (after manufacture) is safe. I'm not sure about that, maybe it is based on the definition of "safe". There are tortilla chips made in Chicago that explicitly say they cannot be sold in California on the packaging. This is due to chemicals banned in Prop 65. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/c…

Right, because the "bad" chemical will be in CA, harming CA residents. CA can't say "the factory that made these chips emitted chemical X into the air during manufacturing, but none of it is in the final product", so you can't import it. The Federal Government can, but not an individual state.

Thanks for clarifying. I believe I misunderstood your initial comment.

Re: Banned in California

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA is already effectively priced out of manufacturing due to high labor costs. Doing things with the "correct choices" simply makes the impossible even more so.

I live in Texas, which is still part of the USA, and we manufacture a great deal. I have a friend who works as an environmental engineer at a chem plant. They work hard to keep things safe and clean, and rigorously monitor their output. I'm sure we could do even more if we weren't competing in meany areas against legal jurisdictions which DON'T care about such things. We aren't "priced out". We are regulated out and…

This is what I don't understand?

We do manufacture things. Just not in California.

So why does it even matter if California bans manufacturing dangerous things? Who cares? Just manufacture it in some other state. As a bonus, you don't have to pay those high California taxes.

In what world is this a problem?

Re: Banned in California

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are the incorrect choices. You CAN actually do these processes, and still keep the environment clean. I believe in procedural symmetry: if you ACTUALLY care about people and the environment, then you wouldn't let other poorer do these thing. The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer, not through regulation, but through process. There is a difference. So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared ab…

> But people don't actually care about the environment. They probably do if it's near their backyard

Corporations don't have a backyard, based on their historical behavior. The resource extraction and manufacturing sectors simply move on after they screw up or deplete one area.

Re: Banned in California

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an inconvenient truth that the better off don’t want to face up to. Your environmental impact is going to be correlated to your consumption. More spending == more damage. Something to bear in mind when you are being told environmental damage is being caused by the poor or some foreign country.

There are some scenarios where it’s a coordination problem. People could drive light fuel efficient vehicles if so many other people weren’t driving large, heavy, dangerous ones, for example.

Those large heavy vehicles are incentivized by loopholes in regulations because politicians were afraid of affecting "domestic jobs" as US automakers weren't even trying to compete with JP fuel-efficient imports.

Re: Banned in California

#426
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are the incorrect choices. You CAN actually do these processes, and still keep the environment clean. I believe in procedural symmetry: if you ACTUALLY care about people and the environment, then you wouldn't let other poorer do these thing. The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer, not through regulation, but through process. There is a difference. So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared ab…

You can also use pigouvian taxation to make polluting expensive. Cost savings is generally the motivation for allowing negative externalities like pollution, so a natural way to reverse it in many cases while allowing flexibility when there is no practical alternative.

The problem is you can't enforce your taxation outside your borders without things like tariffs or subsidies.

Re: Banned in California

#427

There is a reason these kind of things are no longer possible in much of the western world and especially Europe-like US states like California: After the deindustrialization people started to enjoy healthy air and clear water. As always when it comes to "the good old times" or "make great again", your brain will remember very selectively. I used to live next to a large river for about 35 years. As a kid, it was forb…

Those are the incorrect choices. You CAN actually do these processes, and still keep the environment clean. I believe in procedural symmetry: if you ACTUALLY care about people and the environment, then you wouldn't let other poorer do these thing. The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer, not through regulation, but through process. There is a difference. So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared ab…

> The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer

We cannot. We are richer because we don't do it. We export it to areas so poor they view the environmental impact as a fair trade-off for being able to eat.

Re: Banned in California

#428

When I was a kid growing up in Texas, our ocean visits were to the Gulf of Mexico, off the Texas coast, and you would grab little alcohol wipes for when you got out of the ocean, to wipe the oil off. Years later, swimming in Hawaii, I found myself looking for wipes. I mentioned it to a snorkel-outfit operator, and she looked at me like I was insane. They didn't even put damaging sunscreen in the water, and there was…

For what it's worth you still need the alcohol wipes (mineral oil works well too) when swimming off the coast of Santa Barbara. It's naturally occurring oil that gets all over your feet in little annoying sticky spots.

Re: Banned in California

#429
post #120
post #53

They are playing a bit fast and loose with the word "banned". > Your smartphone contains materials processed through semiconductor fabrication, chemical etching, metal anodizing, glass tempering, and electroplating — none of which you could start a new facility for in California without years of litigation. I agree that we should make it easier to do things, specifically by decreasing the amount of litigation involve…

Being unable to start a project without doing 5 years of legal wrangling once you put shovel to earth may not be a "ban", but it sure doesn't encourage development.

Just Devil's Advocate..

but why is this a problem?

There are other states without the regulations that these businesses apparently find offensive. Why can't the manufacturing be spun up in those states?

Serious question.

Re: Banned in California

#430

When I was a kid growing up in Texas, our ocean visits were to the Gulf of Mexico, off the Texas coast, and you would grab little alcohol wipes for when you got out of the ocean, to wipe the oil off. Years later, swimming in Hawaii, I found myself looking for wipes. I mentioned it to a snorkel-outfit operator, and she looked at me like I was insane. They didn't even put damaging sunscreen in the water, and there was…

Half-ish (don't get hung up on being exact, they are at least of similar orders of magnitude) of the oil that makes its way into the ocean is natural. That is, leaking out of the ground into the water not at all as a result of human activity. Obviously enormous anthropogenic oil spills make this a very spiky statistic one way or the other.

Oil production and natural oil seepage happen in the gulf of mexico because there's oil there, there's not much oil around Hawaii.

So there's likely both a human and non-human reason for this in Texas.

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