Peak absurdity of CA gov

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172andyou said:
Gotta love this thread. The reaction to stickers being everywhere is "get rid of the stickers" instead of "WTF are we still putting people in contact with harmful substances so constantly"
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No, I don't think that's it.
 
172andyou said:
Gotta love this thread. The reaction to stickers being everywhere is "get rid of the stickers" instead of "WTF are we still putting people in contact with harmful substances so constantly"
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We aren't. California is absurd in the amount of things they deem harmful and the level at which one must be exposed to it for it to be harmful. I'm recalling from memory, but one of the things they deemed harmful and required a Prop 65 required the person to ingest like 70 gallons a day before they would reach the level that it may cause cancer. But, sticker required, because California.

In my previous example, a person would have to eat over a pound of an alloy to reach the level determined by Prop 65. You know anyone that's going to sit down and eat a pound of metal alloy?

874 items on the list. A lot of them nonsense.
 
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billsgs126 said:
Who is we?
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The nation that allows so many harmful things to be commonly used and then gets offended when people are informed of the harmful things.

billsgs126 said:
If warning stickers say everything is dangerous, what is a logical way to deal with that problem?
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They don't. The universality of the stickers is greatly exaggerated on this thread. So system is perfect, and I'm sure there are some products that have stickers that provide no value. I'm even more sure that letting people know about harmful substances is a net positive.
 
172andyou said:
Gotta love this thread. The reaction to stickers being everywhere is "get rid of the stickers" instead of "WTF are we still putting people in contact with harmful substances so constantly"
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172andyou said:
The nation that allows so many harmful things to be commonly used and then gets offended when people are informed of the harmful things.
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Absolutely correct. We should stop putting people in contact with, and commonly using, harmful substances, like . . . . food.

 
172andyou said:
Gotta love this thread. The reaction to stickers being everywhere is "get rid of the stickers" instead of "WTF are we still putting people in contact with harmful substances so constantly"
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DHMO is required to sustain a human’s life, but has multiple ways to kill you if not treated with respect. Diverging from a goldilocks state is but one way; inhaling it is among numerous others.

The State of California does not require the substance to be labelled.
 
TCABM said:
DHMO is required to sustain a human’s life, but has multiple ways to kill you if not treated with respect. Diverging from a goldilocks state is but one way; inhaling it is among numerous others.

The State of California does not require the substance to be labelled.
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Drinking water, pure water with no additives, will kill you if you drink enough that it upsets the electrolyte balance in your body. As mentioned, sunlight causes forms of cancer that can kill you. Oxygen toxicity is a real thing. And of course if you get too much Nitrogen and other gasses (instead of Oxygen) that will kill you too. Trying to avoid dairy? Don't drink too much Almond Milk . . . that can kill you.

Without fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) you die. Guess what happens if you get too much . . . yup. Too much C just makes you wish you were dead.
 
172andyou said:
Gotta love this thread. The reaction to stickers being everywhere is "get rid of the stickers" instead of "WTF are we still putting people in contact with harmful substances so constantly"
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No, the reaction is an acknowledgement that poor policy implementation has made the warning labels useless because of an overly broad application of what constitutes a harmful substance.

If you care about reducing harmful substances, that should bother you. If labels were more judiciously used, then carrying a label would negatively impact sales and businesses would make efforts to develop alternative products.

The brass screwdriver is an excellent example. Ok, it may have lead in it. But what level of activity would be required to expose a human to actual harmful levels of lead from that screwdriver? If you must boil it in a gallon of water and chug the water every day for 20 years, then that screwdriver is not a harmful substance. If that is the case, the presence of a label on that screwdriver works against your goal by undermining the credibility of warning labels.
 
As I look at all the warnings for virtually every piece of anything one gets these days (with the incredibly useful advice not to take my toaster oven into the shower, etc.), the "outrage" at this one subcategory of that stuff is entertaining. And again (and again and again), I agree the Prop 65 labels are so over-applied that they're functionally of little value. Same for countless other warnings.

There are online ads by a cardiologist telling me not to eat blueberries because they're bad for me. There are people who really think cell towers pose a greater EM risk than the EM transmitter they hold to their ear. There are people who think gluten is bad for them even though they have no indication of gluten sensitivity. There are people who think chemtrails are a thing that need to be outlawed. The point: people have a surprising number of seemingly inexplicable "concerns". Cancer-causing substances in everyday stuff is on some peoples' list, I'm sure - and not necessarily unreasonable.

Aside from the fact that the Prop 65 warnings don't really affect anyone but Californians (except maybe to trigger comments and add unnecessary labels), it seems to me the REAL shortcoming of the legislation is that labelers aren't actually required to tell you what the potential carcinogen is. If we guess/are told the label is on the brass screwdriver because of lead in the alloy, we can decide for ourselves whether or not that's a risk for our situation (and can laugh at the apparent absurdity -to us but not to the Mom who's worried her toddler putting it in their mouth may cause problems). But if we're mistaken and the real reason it's on there is because of the low level of radioactive Uranium that's mixed in the alloy from the lead processing, that's a different risk assessment. The labels don't tell us.
 
172andyou said:
Gotta love this thread. The reaction to stickers being everywhere is "get rid of the stickers" instead of "WTF are we still putting people in contact with harmful substances so constantly"
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No, the reaction to stickers being everywhere is they are ignored.

Putting people in contact with harmful substances? Well, almost everything can be harmful depending on how you are exposed. Drowning in water is the most common form of drowning. Should we label everything with water as a hazard? Oxygen is toxic at high levels. Label oxygen? (We do for flammability as we should.) And every chemist, pharmacist, doctor and nurse would probably agree that poison is in the dosage.

So we should actually have reasonable, evidence backed levels that require labeling. Then we might pay attention to the labels. As has been noted many times above, labeling everything is the equivalent to labeling nothing.
 
jsstevens said:
And every chemist, pharmacist, doctor and nurse would probably agree that poison is in the dosage.
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Calcium, potassium, sodium, magnesium, iron, zinc, copper, and manganese are all required for human life. And each has a toxic level . . .

Gee, it's sorta almost like that PRES Gauge with two Red Radials.
 
Llewtrah381 said:
Aside from the fact that the Prop 65 warnings don't really affect anyone but Californians (except maybe to trigger comments and add unnecessary labels),
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And the non-California companies that have to label the crap lest they be fined/sued if it makes its way to California. So you gotta pay someone to make sure that none of the almost 900 chemicals are or aren't in your product and or at a level that requires it.
 
If all of that stuff really was so harmful for reproductive health, I’m surprised we don’t see more two headed, one armed babies with rat ears.
 
Llewtrah381 said:
Aside from the fact that the Prop 65 warnings don't really affect anyone but Californians (except maybe to trigger comments and add unnecessary labels), it seems to me the REAL shortcoming of the legislation is that labelers aren't actually required to tell you what the potential carcinogen is.
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The real shortcoming of the legislation is that it's dumb. But to address your point, the labelers don't even know what the potential carcinogen is until someone makes up some stupid crap and sues them. See my link above.
 
Perhaps including a practical example on the label of how it could be harmful would be helpful.

Like for a canister of methyl fluorosulfanate, it can say: "merely touching or inhaling this will almost certainly kill you"
Whereas for the brass screwdriver it can say, "if you melt this screwdriver down and pour the slag into your developing child's oatmeal and let them eat it, it will likely inflict brain damage"

Kind of lets people know whereabouts they're at on the FAFO curve when using the product.
 
Should we also remove these labels?
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Remember, the state of Ca isn't able to control the amount of time your child will suck on that screwdriver handle, or how many hours he will spend licking paint off the walls of your 1970s house.
Thus, they can only warn you that doing so increases the risk.
Some things might be obvious to people on PoA, but they're not to the average public. And the problem isn't just one item and the dose you might get it from it, it's the combination of that and the other 999 items in the average household.
If anything, the Prop 65 label should be a very simplified version of the MSDS label, explaining the potentially troublesome contents and the LD50.
 
The good old Slippery Slope fallacy. If we fix this label, we'd wind up getting rid of ALL the labels.
 
AV8R_87 said:
Should we also remove these labels?
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Remember, the state of Ca isn't able to control the amount of time your child will suck on that screwdriver handle, or how many hours he will spend licking paint off the walls of your 1970s house.
Thus, they can only warn you that doing so increases the risk.
Some things might be obvious to people on PoA, but they're not to the average public. And the problem isn't just one item and the dose you might get it from it, it's the combination of that and the other 999 items in the average household.
If anything, the Prop 65 label should be a very simplified version of the MSDS label, explaining the potentially troublesome contents and the LD50.
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That provides more detail than the Prop 65 label. Try again.
 
EdFred said:
That provides more detail than the Prop 65 label. Try again.
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And it has entirely different incentives and enforcement. The list of substances that require a Prop 65 label is on the state's website. The list itself is absurd.
 
Lindberg said:
And it has entirely different incentives and enforcement. The list of substances that require a Prop 65 label is on the state's website. The list itself is absurd.
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Yeah, and if you go on the CA website for many of the items listed they don't even say what the acceptable levels are, or whether it's ingestion/contact/inhalation/etc. Just that _______ is bad.
 
AV8R_87 said:
isn't able to control the amount of time your child will suck on that screwdriver handle, or how many hours he will spend licking paint off the walls of your 1970s house.
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Far before a child learns to read an MSDS label they'll learn not to lick walls or suck on screwdrivers :) . To them the MSDS label will just be a colorful piece of paper that looks like Uno cards.

The labels for MSDS make sense. They serve a purpose. People who handle those materials (adults) can parse the necessary information and make more informed decisions about the correct handling of it; especially since the people actually digesting that information are usually professionals who handle hazardous stuff all day.

No such parsing of information is ever going to be taken seriously or retained for a screwdriver, unless the screwdriver is made out of lead with two coats of mercury as its finish and has a big skull-and-crossbones on the label.
 
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I am so glad this thread taught me to be ****ed off about labels that i never knew existed and will likely never impact me but, now I’m ticked off to no end!
 
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NoBShere said:
I am so glad this thread taught me to be ****ed off about labels that i never knew existed.
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I have to deal with them, and I'm not even in CA. Customers calling and asking "this is supposed to be lead free why does it have a prop 65 sticker on it?"
I've told at least one customer, "because California thinks their citizens dumb enough to eat this."
 
Probably already been said, but it boils down to the penalty for not having a sticker on something that should have one FAR outweighs the cost of putting stickers on EVERYTHING.

reasonTV did a good, short video on it.

 
The Delaney Clause to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics act had become a huge problem by the 1980's. It prohibits any detectable level of any introduced carcinogen in the food supply (or in drugs, or in cosmetics). The rather large array of naturally-occurring carcinogens in food are, of necessity, exempt.

Zero tolerance sounded good in 1958, when the detection level for these chemicals was in the parts-per-thousand range, or a little better. Not so much decades later when most could be detected at the parts-per-million level, or even the parts-per-billion level. Suddenly, everything violated the Delaney Clause. The clause is still in effect, but a couple of reasonable workarounds were eventually implemented: The GRAS (generally recognized as safe) ingredient list, though it appears industry has been playing a bit fast-and-loose with this recently, and a de minimus exemption, which recognizes that 'detectable' doesn't necessarily mean 'dangerous'
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
Far before a child learns to read an MSDS label they'll learn not to lick walls or suck on screwdrivers :) . To them the MSDS label will just be a colorful piece of paper that looks like Uno cards.
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Being as we are picking nits ... they now refer to the older MSDS sheets as SDS. I know, I know ... :dunno:

From MSDS to SDS: A Shift in Chemical Safety

Learn about the transition from MSDS to SDS, a shift enhancing global chemical safety with standardized, detailed information for safer workplaces.
safetyfirstwork.com safetyfirstwork.com
 
The perfect 21st century product.

No item, just a label that says the label itself is hazardous.
 
Bob Noel said:
fake! no farmer has that much time on his hands during daylight hours.
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You’re right. The farmer isn’t sitting in a chair drinking beer. He’s in his truck running around keeping the operation on the rails but he’s still watching that ag pilot. Way to much on the line not to do a little QA when the opportunity is presented.

Kinda miss that job… sometimes.
 
Tarheelpilot said:
You’re right. The farmer isn’t sitting in a chair drinking beer. He’s in his truck running around keeping the operation on the rails but he’s still watching that ag pilot. Way to much on the line not to do a little QA when the opportunity is presented.

Kinda miss that job… sometimes.
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Modern “agribusinesses” forget what farming is. Once big investment capital comes in they think it can be managed like an industry production facility. It can not.
 
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