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Banned in California

bannedincalifornia.org

681–690 of 749 posts

Re: Banned in California

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, everyone wants faster bureaucracy until they see the cost estimate for proper staffing, then just pretending there wasn't any harm to regulate in the first place becomes the preferred option.

Every bureaucracy I've ever experienced is constantly complaining about being under-staffed, but when they get more funding, the service level rarely improves. It seems like complaining about 'over-work' is just an easy excuse for doing a bad job, which makes sense given how many friends I have in government who are constantly complaining about their lazy and inept colleagues.

Re: Banned in California

#682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How did the wildlife adapt to that? There must be some cool species there

I don't know much about it but I have read that the local ecosystem is well-adapted to the oil seep environment.

That area has been like that for something like 100,000 years, which is a considerable amount of time in evolutionary terms.

Re: Banned in California

#683
post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, we are now a threat, but let’s not ignore Russia or China. Neither of them are breaking news and Russia is the immediate threat for most of the West, and until recently for you guys as well

I never heard Russia or China openly say they want to annex-invade Canada. However, I did hear the USA president say that openly, recently and multiple times. So pardon me for entirely rejecting your 'Russia+China = BAD, USA = GOOD' narrative. I would even go as far as saying that today, the most immediate danger to World stability is Donald Trump and his USA, which are not friends to anyone anymore. Let us hope we c…

My original point stands. Your country was able to invest in healthcare because it didn’t spend enough on defense. It doesn’t matter who the aggressor is.

Re: Banned in California

#684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Gigafactory is less than 20 miles from a drinking water reservoir (and recreation area) in one direction, and the city of Reno in the other. ~30 miles to Lake Tahoe. And according to https://www.reno.gov/home/showpublishedimage/4088/6351980817... , it's about two miles from the watershed that feeds it.

20 miles is a very long way away

Surely you must know what a watershed is.

Re: Banned in California

#685
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for confirming my suspicion! When I read phrases like "Battery cells require electrode coating with toxic solvents (NMP), electrolyte handling, and formation cycling. This is exactly why Tesla's Gigafactory went to Reno." I (as someone not very familiar with the subject) thought it's strange that California should regulate what kind of chemicals can be used in an industrial process. Of course, they don't - but…

That's certainly one interpretation. Most of the workers there keep doing what they do to protect the environment though, so it's entirely plausible that they are taking precautions to save the environment, but find the method in which the regulations are implemented to be slow or arcane. If it's anything like cybersecurity in the government, the laborious process of filling out irrelevant paperwork is orthogonal to…

>laborious process of filling out irrelevant paperwork is orthogonal to actually accomplishing the initial goals.

Well yes, it's designed so that a handful of teenagers can't just clone the IRS database, for example.

Re: Banned in California

#686

Listen y’all, it’s not just that we aren't letting companies spew chemicals into the air. The permitting and regulatory process is so extremely hostile that even when you want to and are able to do so safely and without emissions, it’s impossible. Instead you have to ship things from out of state and other countries, which generates emissions and pollution itself that might actually be more than local production. Its…

There is a lot of manufacturing in California. There are a lot of new factories in California. California manufactures almost as much as most of the Southeast combined. (Note that CA manufacturing is spread across dozens of industries.) The difference is that successful businesses in California just do. They don't whine about problems caused by their own incompetence.

Trust me I know. If you've ever talked to any of them they absolutely whine about California if you let them.

Re: Banned in California

#687
post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power plants have secondary and tertiary overflow reservoirs, intended to capture any uncontrolled dangerous outflow if things go wrong. I wonder if chemical plants have something similar, a way to contain an uncontrolled outflow of toxic stuff if the normal flow of neutralization fails. BTW this likely means quite a bit of land used up by such a reservoir which is ideally never needed, but must be present.

Yes. In Silicon Valley, if you go to Bedwell Bayfront Park, which is behind Meta/Facebook HQ, there is, on the bay side, a small sewerage treatment plant. There's a fenced concrete-lined pond, usually empty. That is a sewerage overflow containment pond. It's next to a hiking trail, so it's easily visible to the public. That whole park, by the way, is a recycled garbage dump. So is the bay side park behind Google HQ.…

Does the area smell, or is that all captured somehow? I've been to the plant in my city many years ago and it only smelled in certain buildings.

Re: Banned in California

#689

The Grandfatherd-in section is incredibly misleading. Look at the Semiconductor Fabrication section, for example. The implication is that these are the only fabs in the state, they wouldn't be able to get new permits today, and the red dots indicate that it would be "effectively impossible" to open any other ones. In fact (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... ) there are at lea…

Without sources all of this is…suspicious at best.

They list playing and Cnc machining as banned and then only describe the chemicals used in playing.

There is a huge defense production industry in CA and an even larger machining industry that would be really surprised to hear that.

The largest manufacturer of machine tools in the US (Haas) is based in California.

Re: Banned in California

#690

These explanations have no citations, and even the explanations frequently conflict with the category labels. It seems much more like an elaborate propaganda infographic than a useful source of information.

"Hey AI, tell me what manufactured phone components require permitting in California." ... Copy paste copy paste copy paste I can think of multiple manufacturers that do all engineering and have recently built manufacturing facilities in California and would manufacture there at scale too except other states gave them massive tax incentives. Tesla and Rivian both do initial manufacturing in California. Startups like…

I confuses “it’s hard” with “it’s banned”

It’s…not even wrong it is detached from any effort at truth.

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