[kybishop]

Do you have evidence to back up this claim? I'm aware CA puts many warning stickers on various products... but isn't it possible that profit-seeking corporations are, in fact, using cancer-causing materials simply because they're cheaper?

[jessriedel]

The point isn't that the amount of cancer caused is literally zero. Just by chance, everything will have some (generally infinitesimal) effect on cancer, and often it will be positive. The question is whether "causes cancer" is being applied to products that cause amounts of cancer that are so small that it's not worth warning people about. That consumer products and businesses are covered in these warning and few people take them seriously is prima facie evidence that this is the case, but you'd have to dig into the numbers to be sure.

For instance, Wikipedia:

> The requirements apply to amounts above what would present a 1-in-100,000 risk of cancer assuming lifetime exposure (for carcinogens)

Using the standard ~$5M statistical value of life, this mean that you need to label a product if it is estimated to impose the equivalent of $50 in costs if someone is regularly exposed to the chemical over an entire lifetime. I'm not sure what frequency of exposure is being assumed here, but naively that means that if I use the product once a week, it requires notification of about 2 cents worth of harm per usage.

[imtringued]

You're not going to get more customers by labeling your product with "99% less cancerous than what the standard requires" next to the warning that it causes cancer.

[LorenPechtel]

No--it's based on the risk to someone who uses it a lot. Even if it's a product they're not going to use a lot.

[jessriedel]

I don't think we disagree?

[maxk42]

They're not labeling things that are particularly known to be harmful. CA Prop 65 warnings are on all rice, coffee, and multi-tenant garages. When you begin labeling things that common and benign as "cancer-causing" people learn to tune it out. Pretty sure rice, coffee, and/or multi-tenant garages are found pretty much everywhere.

[rezendi]

https://www.popsci.com/california-coffee-cancer-warning/

[AnthonyMouse]

This article is not very convincing. I mean sure, the thing about coffee was over the top, but they also stopped requiring that one.

Meanwhile the other examples it uses are that you have to be warned when you're being exposed to things like diesel exhaust. Which, um, actually does cause cancer.

[rezendi]

Wood dust on furniture? The prospect of alcohol in hotel rooms? Tiffany lamps? Seriously?

[AnthonyMouse]

Motor oil? Mercury? Cigarettes?

And kids will lick a lampshade.

Regulations always have dumb results. If you put the warning on anything with lead in it, people make fun of the warning on a Tiffany lamp. If you don't, people are shocked that you don't have the label on a child's toy with lead paint.

Regulators are never going to thread the needle that well. They're not capable of it. This is a huge problem when they're banning stuff. When they're labeling stuff, eh. People will figure it out.

[chrisseaton]

People don't seem to change their behaviour due to those warnings. Nobody's going into a coffee shop, seeing that warning sticker and thinking 'ah whoops better get out of here' are they? The warning 'cancer-causing' has no effect.

[ajsnigrutin]

This works, if you have 20 coffee shops, and one of them has "there's asbestos in this building" warning.

If you have warnings literally everywhere, for minor things, that noone really cares about, because the risks are miniscule, people will start ignoring even the dangerous but identical-looking signs. "this item causes cancer" ... are we talking about asbestos, or are we talking about a roasted potato? If the labels are the same, people stop noticing them.

[njarboe]

I agree with your sentiment, but fear of asbestos is also another danger that has been highly exaggerated. Asbestos is only dangerous if it is particularized and inhaled in high quantities over a period of time. Men that changed breaks that had asbestos in them and thus lots of asbestos dust or men who worked on installing asbestos pipes and were cutting them all the time, were the ones who got cancer (or their wives who washed their dusty clothes). The fear of asbestos objects or buildings that have, say asbestos insulation on pipes in the basement, is not reasonable and another example of overblown fear that probably cost the US a hundreds of billions dollars (wild guess) that could have been spent much more productively on something else.

[mindslight]

Ultimately you're describing how asbestos is generally handled, apart from the rare exceptions of subsidies to preemptively replace it. But eventually, maintenance has to be performed on things made out of asbestos, which would then disperse it into the air and surrounding environment. So sure, asbestos is basically inert until it's disturbed, but once some part needs to be disturbed then it makes sense to do a full scale remediation rather than setting up expensive containment and only finishing part of the job.

[throwaway0a5e]

You're not wrong. When there's high dollar figured involved rationality tends to prevail over ideological screeching.

But what he described is exactly how asbestos is handled in discourse in any other context. People absolutely lose their minds over it.

[actually_a_dog]

I was going to suggest that asbestos was a bad example, because, in most cases, as long as it's left undisturbed, it's completely safe. The only risk from asbestos is from breathing it into one's lungs. If it's not in the air, it's not a problem.

But, then I thought: hmm... maybe his is a great example. People are terrible at assessing risks. The word 'asbestos' is likely to cause a greater reaction than is warranted. It's the opposite side of the coin from peoples' reactions to those prop 65 signs.

[LorenPechtel]

But note the very high cancer rates amongst those who were dealing with the twin towers rubble.

[californical]

I almost bought olive oil, then noticed the California warning sticker that it contained lead, and didn’t buy it - I don’t see that on all olive oil. So it does make a difference sometimes

[zbrozek]

My social circle is in CA. None of us pay any attention whatsoever to prop65 labels. They're about as useful as any other type of product or business labeling: there's so much of it that it's just visual noise that's long-ago been brainfiltered out of existence.

[mdp2021]

They are interesting to the interested. Like «any other ... labeling».

[AnthonyMouse]

> The warning 'cancer-causing' has no effect.

Devil's advocate, it has an effect on some minority of people. Then the company loses sales and has the incentive to stop using the carcinogen if possible.

Your lifetime risk of getting cancer from that thing might have been one in a thousand, so you don't really care, but the company has ten million customers and getting them to change prevents 10,000 cancers.

This is a pretty good alternative to banning the thing. Because if there is a reasonable way to stop using the carcinogen, you don't want to be the company that has the cancer warning when your competitors don't. But if there isn't, maybe the risk is low enough that people make an informed choice to take the risk for the benefit of the thing with no better alternative, and that's fine too.

[azinman2]

I absolutely pay attention to Prop 65 when I buy products and will find alternatives. I also try to find out _why_ there's a prop 65 warning and then decide how much I care (e.g. if an SSD has it, I don't care because I know I'm handling it so little and it shouldn't be offgasing anything; where as with food or things I'm always touching, then I care very much).

[csee]

Do you have any evidence for this statement?

I have changed my behavior in response to health info on labels, so this is anecdotal evidence against your assertion.

PR campaigns have been known to work, e.g. alcohol in Russia in the 90s.

[chrisseaton]

> Do you have any evidence for this statement?

The fact that every coffee shop in California is still open, despite people being warned for years that they sell products that cause cancer. The vast majority of people clearly do not care about the warning.

And what do you think is the benefit of putting unsupported warnings on things? Do you think it's actively beneficial? Do you think it's harmless? If it's beneficial or harmless we might as well go ahead and put a warning label on absolutely everything regardless. Then how do we react to this linked article? We'd ignore it.

If you're the one who wants warning labels on things that don't need warning about then you justify that position!

[ziddoap]

It's not clear to me if you're arguing just about warnings on coffee or if you're arguing that all warning labels are useless.

>The fact that every coffee shop in California is still open, despite people being warned for years that they sell products that cause cancer. The vast majority of people clearly do not care about the warning.

Or they care, but have balanced the risks vs. their enjoyment of coffee. But they may see a warning on, for example, olive oil which contains lead, and decide to buy another product.

>putting unsupported warnings on things?

What do you mean by unsupported here? As in, not supported by science? Or by the people? Because I'm pretty sure it's well supported by science that certain products are carcinogenic and that consuming them, unsurprisingly, isn't very good. We can argue about what thresholds constitute a tangible risk, for sure, but either way the fact that some things cause cancer is surely considered "supported".

>that don't need warning about

Same question -- just referring to coffee or all labels on everything? I agree with this if you're just referring to coffee, but there are certainly labels that I do pay attention to and consider a warning useful.

I think there's a happy middle-ground here. If my favorite juice has lead, I want to know. If my favorite coffee shop has a 1 in 10,000,000 of causing cancer, I probably don't need the warning each day.

[zardo]

The problem I see with these labels is they lack specificity. A sticker on the visor in a new car says this vehicle contains chemicals that cause cancer and /or birth defects. I know the paint does, as do all the fluids.

What about the steering wheel and the arm rests?

My pen doesn't have a warning, is that because the manufacturer chooses to consider exposure through skin contact only, but chewing on it is actually a sizeable risk?

[LorenPechtel]

The problem isn't labels in general. It's that Prop 65 went way too far, it was a case of the boy crying wolf for every rodent walking around.

[csee]

I agreed with that, I was talking about labels in the abstract but they can definitely be put to bad use.

[djbusby]

Worked (sorta) for tobacco.

[Tagbert]

CA looks a lot like the boy who cried “wolf”.

When the risk is infinitesimal and the warning placed on so many items, what is the value of that warning?

[azinman2]

What makes you think the risk is infinitesimal?

I think the reality is we have so many terrible chemicals all around us that it feels like an over reaction, when it's actually the exact opposite -- manufacturers have made many a deal with the devil.

[LorenPechtel]

In many cases it's natural risk, not the products at all.

Everything has some amount of lead back from the days when it was used recklessly. Everything has some amount of mercury that's still going up smokestacks. (Now we catch most of it--not all of it!) Plants pick up some arsenic from the soil--for medical reasons I eat a lot of rice and it's enough of an issue I make sure to buy rice grown in low-arsenic areas.