Live data from Hacker News

Banned in California

bannedincalifornia.org

561–570 of 749 posts

Re: Banned in California

#561

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…

> But people don't actually care about the environment. They care about looking like they care about the environment, and sending industrial processes somewhere else. There is a difference.

The idea that people setting pollution rules secretly don't care is silly.

California can't fix the whole world's problems.

Re: Banned in California

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The person you are replying to mentioned their personal experience. Have you seen this work in person? It might help to talk about those facts. The meat of their comment wasn't the personal anecdote, it was actually on government policy: >>> You can sum this up with: Producing stuff without polluting the environment in most cases is impossible. Reducing the pollution costs a lot of money, and can make your product…

Another thing is that the us and European countries build their wealth where they had los standards now other countries want to do the same but would be limited by us and European countries. It's very tricky

Is it actually tricky?

Do we let other countries wage war, pillage, etc. because others gathered wealth that way previously?

Re: Banned in California

#563

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…

Crude oil floating in the ocean used to be a big nuisance in parts of California. It is a natural phenomenon, created by oil deposits on the ocean floor leaking into the environment. Santa Barbara was particularly famous for it. Extraction of that oil via commercial wells greatly reduced the natural seepage, which is why there is so little crude oil floating in that ocean water today. Oil drilling actually made the w…

I remember swimming in Santa Barbara growing up (well closer to the Ventura side really) and having to dodge oil on the sand and water.

Re: Banned in California

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Texas - K12 Uh.. I'd do Massachusetts K-12. Texas is pretty bad. Massachusetts consistently ranks in the top 10 in the world on PISA. An exam which removes all the political "BS"-ability from the results and comparisons. It's just your students taking the same test as all the other students in the world, and the resultant scores being ranked. Texas K-12 is horrible. Lived there from Katrina to a few years past Harv…

Massachusetts is unusually good though, probably because of the high concentration of elite universities in Boston, which is also the capital of the state, which means politicians there take education most seriously - and don't forget the demographic effect of the number of professors and other highly-educated professionals. Texas, California, and Florida are all fairly similar, with California doing somewhat worse t…

>while even the Deep South, which has consistently been at the bottom, is going up

Well their PISA scores haven't been going up. In fact they've been going down. So if their education is getting better, it's not showing up in the ability of their students to answer questions that other students seem to be able to answer.

That's kind of what I meant by PISA removing "BS"-ability from the equation. For some reason, on American standardized tests, all our children do great. Then we take PISA with all the other kids in the world, and the truth comes out.

That's also why I think we should all just take Massachusetts' education curriculum and implement it across the nation. Because you talk about demographics, but even when you control for income and race, kids in Massachusetts just flat out do better than our kids. Even just taking all kids at the bottom of the rankings in Massachusetts, they are still doing better than kids at the median of the rankings of many, many other states. (And think about the demographics of kids at the bottom in Boston, Brockton, or Springfield. Come on, admit it man. I'll try to stay politically correct here and just state that those very likely aren't professors' kids at the bottom of the rankings in Massachusetts.)

Massachusetts is so far ahead of all of us that I think I'd be comfortable just saying that they seem to have gotten it right, and we should simply copy it. Because right now, the gap is just getting wider and wider with every round of PISA testing.

Re: Banned in California

#565
post #248

This is whining from someone that doesn't want to be responsible for the externality of pollution that these manufacturing facilities generate. The regulations are to stop the pollution, if you can manufacture without polluting, then you'll comply and be able to manufacture. The problem is that there are other regulatory environments where the people aren't protected from pollution. What would fix that is enforcing t…

The regulatory bureaucracy is a real hurdle. Even if you want to comply with the regulations, navigating the regulatory bureaucracy is a killer. Super slow, super expensive, quite opaque, somewhat arbitrary, and highly punitive. Even if the bureaucracy didn't exist and everyone voluntarily followed the regulations, you could not run a globally cost competitive business without some sort of subsidy when competing with…

Yeah I think there are two problems

First: we may have gone too far toward anti-pollution. China has more naval vessels than the US. Everything changes when peace isn't a foregone conclusion, as it has been for the past 30? 50? years.

Second: it's not the regulations per se, but the difficulty of dealing with the bureaucracy, particularly (a) long delays and (b) uncertainty.

I run an electrical contractor, so this is not the least bit theoretical to me. The hassle of dealing with local government and PG&E for what should be routine things adds tremendous cost to doing business. Recent concrete example: it cost over $1,000 and two months to process a minor change to an electrical permit set, in Alameda (City). The actual change was moving some panels outside, a small revision to a plan that had already been checked and permitted. This required $1,400 in engineering fees, plus a ~$200 application fee to the City, and then the actual plan check and review charge of $650-700. It was probably one hour of actual work. The worst part was that Alameda outsources its plan check to a third party and I'm pretty sure the plans sat for two weeks on someone's desk at the City, before I asked for status, and then, an hour later, by "complete coincidence", it was sent to the outsourced plan checker.

If we could put a precise price on pollution, it would be a different story. It's a collateral damage of all the (even well-intentioned, good) regulation that drives business away.

Re: Banned in California

#566

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…

Crude oil floating in the ocean used to be a big nuisance in parts of California. It is a natural phenomenon, created by oil deposits on the ocean floor leaking into the environment. Santa Barbara was particularly famous for it. Extraction of that oil via commercial wells greatly reduced the natural seepage, which is why there is so little crude oil floating in that ocean water today. Oil drilling actually made the w…

To this day if you walk on the beach your soles or the soles of your shoes will get sticky tar spots. You need baby oil wipes to clean them up before entering your home.

And some of it, if not most of it is not natural seepage but early environmental catastrophes in the 50s and 60s, particularly around Summerland.

(Source ex-resident)

Re: Banned in California

#567

There's an important distinction here, between "banned" and "has far cheaper alternatives". Things can appear banned even when they aren't merely because there is a new technology that's better and cheaper and it's a big investment so people go with the cheaper option. Nobody is building new coal in the US because it's so expensive, not because there's an outright ban. Now, part of the reason it's more expensive than…

You can just look at examples in the article. For example "Lithium-Ion Cell Manufacturing"

> Cell manufacturing uses NMP solvent for electrode coating, handles flammable electrolytes, and requires formation cycling that generates heat and gases. Tesla chose Reno for the Gigafactory specifically because of California's permitting environment.

EPA tried to heavily restrict these outright in 2024 [1] and California has air/environmental rules that made it nearly impossible to develop large battery factories in California, which is why Tesla chose Reno in 2014. An alternative didn't exist at the time and now a decade later Tesla recently filed a patent this year for Dry electrode processing [2]

So basically California lost a decade of possible lithium factories

[1] https://www.sgs.com/en-ca/news/2024/06/safeguards-9624-us-ep...

[2] https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/26/02/50290319/elon-mu...

Re: Banned in California

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of which answers the question of why we can't manufacture things in other states? Things that California clearly doesn't want to manufacture. Again, what is the reason New Mexico, or Utah, or Nebraska, or Tennessee cannot manufacture these things? And why is it a problem if they do so instead of California?

Big companies already handle manufacturing in other states. Often in states that have the worst education systems and quality of living. It is frequently done to reduce the cost of labor. Manufacturing jobs are also some of the most unstable because big companies will shop around for tax breaks. Once they find a political sucker ... they build a new plant and close the old one which wrecks havoc on the local economy.…

Doesn't that just make California's case for them though?

I mean if these jobs are so bad, isn't it good that California is trying to not have them in its own municipalities? The way you laid it out, shouldn't everyone be trying not to have those jobs?

Re: Banned in California

#569

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…

Crude oil floating in the ocean used to be a big nuisance in parts of California. It is a natural phenomenon, created by oil deposits on the ocean floor leaking into the environment. Santa Barbara was particularly famous for it. Extraction of that oil via commercial wells greatly reduced the natural seepage, which is why there is so little crude oil floating in that ocean water today. Oil drilling actually made the w…

Wtf I love Exxon now.

Re: Banned in California

#570
post #556
post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website is garbage. Bad guy anti manufacturing California put out a grant to build impossible to build lithium battery cell manufacturing capacity in California. https://www.grants.ca.gov/grants/gfo-24-304-california-batte...

That grant is only for nonprofits and only for "pilot manufacturing and testing", not useful mass manufacturing.

It is a battery cell manufacturing line and with the intent to facilitate providing research resources to California battery business. Considering the claim was that you couldn't make lithium batteries in CA, having a new manufacturing line shows that's incorrect. It also shows the state sees it as a need. I haven't seen anyone provide any info showing it isn't possible.
Post reply on HN