toxic because of chemicals and toxic because of the release of untreated sewage (bacteria) are sufficiently different that I thought I'd point out that you kind of mix them here. Also, toxic because of high concentrations (e.g. pH) that will dilute vs toxic cumulative forever chemicals are different orders of magnitude altogether.

This incident you describe seems like a one-off and fairly benign compared to long term patterns that lead to superfund sites. Till this company dumped that batch, they weren't dumping batches, i.e. the system was working.

I'm not up on the latest, not a civil engineer or public health authority, but it is generally recommended in many seaside places not to swim at the beach after rainstorms. the influx of large volumes of water into the sewage treatment systems means that they overflow and raw sewage is released. These systems are being improved all the time, but it's a known problem and civilization hasn't collapsed. Some natural creatures like sewage outflow. When Boston moved their outflow pipe from the inner harbor to deeper water in Cape Cod bay, the lobster population collapsed. Maybe we should have called it the lobster poopulation.

*This is not a post in support of death penalty, just how CA politicians have figured out ways to legally get what they want even if it directly contradicts the will of the people.

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.

Why mince words?

> 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...

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 Freeform, doing metal 3D printing at scale, are in California. This article is wrong.

Wastewater plants have other ponds and tanks which are part of the process, and they're usually full, with liquid moving in and out, accompanied by stirring, air, and chemical injection. A big empty one is a backup system.

Real engineering.[1]

[1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-09/documents/la...

This is enough to earn chemical plants a spot on a future "BANNED in California 2" article, because it's "clearly" overregulation.

I think he wants them not to dump the chemicals straight down the sewer?

Given the labor challenges in California due to high housing costs, which selectively pushes out those willing to work for lower wages, I am always surprised when manufacturers choose the state at all. Throwing additional challenges doesn't make it any easier.

Neither defend nor refute, and by "presume false" I don't actually mean to come way actively and newly believing the opposite of the claims, but just disregard entirely.

Argue over some other article that actually backs it's assertions with citations and reasoning.

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.

Hawaii has other problems. When I lived there, I went through a lot of Neosporin because every scrape you get from a reef pushes in bacteria that got into the ocean from the leaking sewer pipes.

It’s an appeal to absurdity that falls flat because nuclear plants and oil refineries have been built near population centers in the US (including in California) without problem.

California had had more issues from under investment in industry (see it’s ancient electrical infra that lit the state on fire) than from collocation of industry and people.

Both of the largest ports are right in SoCal and that’s going pretty well. Building another one would never make it past the permitting stage in today’s California.

We should, it would replace significant amounts of natural gas usage for space heating. Not doing so is literally cooking the planet.

Maybe by then we'll have returned to building products which last (although I'm not holding my breath).

Maybe Texas is far enough? The [l]one-star state has laissez-faire regulations, and may be more to author's speed.

That's almost exactly how my dad and many of his siblings got permanently disabling muscular dystonia. The old times were fucking bad and we don't want them back.

> So, if the US wants production industry again

It should be noted that the VALUE of US industrial output is many times higher than it was 20 years ago, even if the VOLUME is lower.

If there's a specific regulation on one aspect of a factory, as you describe, then "unbanning" the factory isn't going to help either, one must specifically unban that which was banned.

Mincing words would be saying "Factories doing X are banned" when in fact an existing Factory doing X with negative externality Y had negative externality Y priced or regulated.

That's exactly what we shouldn't be mincing, if we want to address the problems and make better decisions.

Using this I see that within 10 miles of me are

- a microprocessor testing facility that contaminated soil and groundwater with 1,1,1-trichloroethane, trichloroethylene, Freon 113, 1,1-dichloroethane, and tetrachloroethane which affects 300k nearby residents

- a semiconductor manufacturer that led to "trichloroethylene, 1,1,1-trichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, trichlorofluoroethane, and 1,1-dichloroethylene, in soils on the site and in ground water on and off the site."

- a 5-acre drum recycling plant that contaminated wells within 3 miles with trichloroethane, trichloroethylene, 1,1-dichloroethylene, and tetrachloroethylene. Affecting the drinking water of 250k residents.

- about 10-15 other sites I'm not gonna cover in detail but the contaminants include asbestos-laden dust, PCBs, dichlorobenzene, trichloroethylene, trichloroethane, chloroform, vinyl chloride, xylene, and many many more

This didn't occur in a vacuum. Business interests and their aligned politicians fought successfully for a century for their freedom to destroy human health and life in pursuit of profit. Many died, many were injured and countless more had their lifespans cut short. There's obviously legitimate concerns about over-regulation, but concerns about corporate abuse of power are just as legitimate if not more so based on the history. And it's not unopposed either, but most of the backlash in California has centered on housing construction and occupational licensing - not the rights of investors to build new industrial facilities in a post-industrial state.

The difference is that successful businesses in California just do. They don't whine about problems caused by their own incompetence.

Funny enough, I've known some people over the years who have explicitly viewed litigation as a reasonable alternative to regulation. Their logic was that we should just let people and companies do whatever they want. Then, if it turns out a company is dumping mercury in the river or whatever, you litigate based on the damages. Better than regulation, they assured me.

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 water cleaner.

Why would you expect it to be impossible?

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 places where rampant pollution is allowed.

It's a real problem without an obvious long term solution that I am aware of.

This is the biggest lie we are told, and the most heinous. The only thing that will fix it is when people like you (and me!) stop purchasing things which were made in those regulatory environments. If you continue to purchase them under the premise that "I have no choice, I have to participate in this fallen world," so does the state of California. Banning these activities when there are alternative regulatory environments just pushes the problem to someone else.

A great example of this is the Obama-era fuel efficiency laws. No one actually wanted a more efficient truck, so to get around the laws, the manufacturers just made larger trucks, which caused more problems than they solved.

Outlawing something, then doing nothing to stop demand for that thing, that's just irresponsible.

We need to push these people out of California.

See also https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/112668309100333232 (Ashley M. Gjøvik , 2024)

Of course a world where everyone has an equal quality of life is almost a dream but I’d say humanity has been very slowly, very slowly getting there.

What we do now is that “1st world countries” focus on high value manufacturing and growing countries unfortunately take up the dangerous and polluting manufacturing — but bear in mind, the US and other industrial countries also had the same phase.

What fucks up this is when trust breaks down between countries. Now suddenly you need to bring lower value manufacturing in house for national security even if it doesn’t make economic sense. It’s inefficient, puts the world back at square one, causes everyone to fight for survival instead of progress, and frankly leads us away from that “Star Trek” future.

This is also why we’re having to worry about asking these questions now when we didn’t so much have to 20 years ago. We’re living in a mildly cooked part of humanity’s timeline where trust seems to be fleeting.

They are all using voc compliant paints these days, even outside California.

I have no idea how hard permitting is mind you, but the claimed thing here is that they can't be voc compliant and that's just totally wrong.

So, the restrictions on incredibly stinky processes like spray painting cars that emit lots of VOCs and dust are somewhat reasonable?

Or to put it more crudely, isn't it a bit like putting up a big "NO FARTING" sign in a crowded room where the windows don't open, and then simply expecting people to understand that this is a place where they should not fart?

One can hope that most Californians switch to BEVs from ICE vehicles before this becomes more of a constraint.

Gasoline usage externalities are poorly priced-in so the resulting increase in cost of gasoline here is probably overall a good thing. If we had appropriate carbon/sulphur/etc pricing on the outputs, I think it would be less justifiable since then the externalities would be priced in.

0: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65184

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 about the people and environment? Put high tariffs on dangerous process products, reduce regulation (permits, etc), increase standardization and final safety measurements. Then the products we use, we make, safely.

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.

But, locals don't love that because of the environmental concerns.

https://mashable.com/article/naacp-data-centers

I, for one, would not want to live within 100 miles of these data centers. But, people that live there already are not being given the choice.

And, I imagine not many of the people that live there are being offered one of those 3000 jobs.

It's mostly a question of when, not if.

Less stuff and less pollution everywhere.

One thing is to regulate the industrial sector to be cleaner if waaaay more expensive and another is to just forbid stuff that can be reasonably be done cleanly (but again, waaaay more expensive than in asia, for example)

This statement makes me smile. Although I see where this comes from...

Companies that are complaining are complaining that they can't treat the environment as an economic externality anymore in California. Therefore the price of all of these goods are being subsidized with our health and our ecosystems' health.

I hope more of the world follows California's lead and we eventually have a price of these goods that represents what it actually takes to manufacture them in a fair way

Texas got so sick of Texans trying to protect themselves by creating regulations that they created the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act. It took away the ability of local communities to protect themselves and instead protected the profits of some the state's biggest industry buddies.

The good old coal? Have a look at the life expectancy of a coal worker, and maybe a ct scan of a coal workers lung.

Good old nuclear? Will you accept the nuclear waste getting store in your neighborhood? No? What about your neighbors neighbor? No? Keep asking until you get a yes. See you again after having asked 341.8 Million people.

There are reasons we moved on from this and de-industrialized. Because the industries we got rid of simply weren't actually that great. Go visit a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen/China. I have done it a couple of times. The part of electronics production that is not done by machines is painful and exhausting work. Your back will hurt. Your eyes will hurt.

I really wonder what people are thinking how these jobs look like. Nobody would want them. The only ones in the US who would accept those jobs would be immigrants who have seen far worse and therefore view these jobs as an upgrade. But the US doesn't want those immigrants. So why try to build industries creating jobs only the kind of people would accept that you do not want in the country?

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.

And not far down the rabbit whole one finds: The author of the study often cited by oil companies for above narrative, felt impelled to publish a clarifying statement: https://luyendyk.faculty.geol.ucsb.edu/Seeps%20pubs/Luyendyk...

Maybe stricter guidelines against operational "routine" spills led to a reduction of the sticky spots, plausible?

/s

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)

Personally I hope that the two Republican candidates in California both win the jungle primary - maybe that will lead to some soul searching on how bad the Democratic politicians have become in the state.

This is kind of disingenuous.

I mean, not everything used in California, needs to be manufactured in California. Why not manufacture it in New Mexico? Or Arkansas for that matter?

What you're implying, is that Wisconsin, Nebraska, Maine, Florida, etc, etc, etc, should all build out the manufacturing base to manufacture things that are used in those states. That's not really how a healthy economy should work.

I guess what I'm pointing out is that, we don't need to manufacture smartphones in South Dakota. It's perfectly acceptable to manufacture them in, say, New Jersey, and then ship them to South Dakota. Similarly, we don't need to manufacture everything in California.

I would like far less of all of these to exist than we currently produce (I use a 5 year old phone, an 11 year old car, and think the US Navy could function just fine with a lot less budget and warships).

Like where?

If somebody else values their health less - let them have pollution in their own back yard. If enough communities worldwide care about their health, then polluters will have to clean up their processes. But it's not for the residents of California to decide what happens in other jurisdictions.

His point was that they were grandfathered in for making cars in general. But he flat out lies about making batteries being something grandfathered in. That wasn't a battery manufacturing plant to begin with.

And he further lies to say they had to build elsewhere because cell manufacturing was "effectively impossible" because they expanded the factory for cell manufacturing in 2023. [1]

[1] https://electrek.co/2023/06/09/tesla-snaps-new-location-frem...

Plants which do chemistry on an industrial scale tend to need their own waste processing, which gets the waste products down to a reasonably neutral form. Regulation is needed to prevent dumping it unprocessed. That's what the EPA really does.

And OK, sure, there's a lot of industry that ought to happen somewhere. Someone has to build ships and electronics and whatever, and if California's code is too strict then it just becomes NIMBYism. But if some company moves their gigafactory to Reno for easier permitting, I don't whether (or more likely by how much) CA is too strict, or NV is too lax. And I know that CA has NIMBYish and overregulatory tendencies, but given the clear bullshit on this website, I'm not inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt either.

I'm especially doubtful when it says "THE classic example of what you can't do in CA" is auto paint shops ("Impossible"!) ... but then the detail it gives is that they're "effectively impossible" to permit in the Bay Area AQMD, that being only one of the state's 35 AQMDs (albeit one of the larger ones).

Posting a list of them as a justification for red tape that blocks industries does not make sense.

The problem for me is that when you go out in the rest of the country the dislike bordering on hate for California is really common. It is insane to me that you can send Marines to Los Angeles and almost no one cares. California is a such a huge chunk of the US economy, not just tech but agriculture, trade and yes even manufacturing.

The partisanship is poison for everyone and it holds back reform in California. We're all the same country.

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.

I doubt it is though, in these cases. Was probably just to make the measures more popular, as in not destroying existing investments / jobs.

What part am I misreading? How is it that tesla expanded their cell manufacturing in 2023 in California when it was "effectively impossible"?

His point is that it's impossible to manufacture much of anything in California if you aren't grandfathered in. Seems pretty important for economic and security issues.

The electric induction cooktop he and his team has made is pretty cool! I'd check it out.

This list isn't things you "cant do in california" but "polluting things you can't do in highly populated cities".

I'm not sure what the conclusion here is other than health is not important.

Everyone has an agenda. Is anything on this site false? Is it incorrect information?

I think it's just informative. I found it interesting at least. I formed my own conclusions from it.

Also: I suggest rethinking your opening line. It's not very endearing.

For a long time, it was jobs and the promise of a better future for your family. By killing that all we have is weather.

I don't, because I care about security updates, and I don't want to have to choose between a highly degraded battery and giving up waterproofing.

> an 11 year old car

Crash safety has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. I suspect you're more likely to be killed in a car accident that you wouldn't be in a new car, than to be killed by one of the industries that California bans.

> think the US Navy could function just fine with a lot less budget and warships

If a powerful adversary goes to war with us, then we'd want a lot more, and only increasing then would be too late, because we'd lose the war first.

Just because houses cost more and there's a state tax, doesn't mean it's _bad_.

They want to duplicate this success and displace the West, similar to how the USA displaced Europe during and after World War 2.

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

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

that is literally nonsense .. lazy nonsense, ill-willed nonsense.. Ignorant nonsense.

literally four seconds to search " history of us environmental law"

There is a large opportunity to simplify and rationalize the regulations. This would dramatically reduce the cost of both bureaucracy and compliance. In addition to massively reduced cost, it would enable people in CA to do more cool stuff faster!

But simplification, rationalization, and acceleration is not in the interest of the bureaucracy or the incumbents... so we are very unlikely to see change until there is an existential crisis.

... what?

Not the parent but nobody is implying that. Just that most Californians consume or want these things and thus expect other states to build them.

1. Louisiana 10.11%

2. Tennessee 9.61%

3. Washington 9.51%

4. Arkansas 9.46%

5. Alabama 9.46%

Crazy how we never hear pithy drops about sales tax in Louisiana. I wonder why that is literally never a talking point in these discussions? Probably a very similarly motivated reason as to why people rant about murder in Chicago but never Memphis.

Not trying to sound like a jerk but there’s plenty of places in the US where people welcome stuff like coal mines and polluting factories.

If the factories have to be somewhere and they consent, then why not there?

1. Keep the item as is and don't sell it in California.

2. Make a California version that meets regulations. Sell that only in California. Keep making the original version and sell it elsewhere.

3. Same as #2 except sell the California version along with the original version outside of California.

4. Make a California version that meets regulations. Stop making the original version and sell the California version everywhere.

California is a big enough market that many makers cross off #1. Once they are making a California version it often turns out they selling that everywhere is more efficient for them than keeping the original version around.

States have a lot of power to regulate commerce, interstate commerce and the products their citizens have access too.

If indeed they can't, then perhaps its one subject dems and r's could get together on. Instead of blanket tarrifs, tarriffs on products made with slave labor or without strong consideration for environment impact.

Do you think the ship breakers in Bangladesh do it for fun?

This outsourcing of misery is the absolute worst feature of Western neoliberalism. You get a two for one, dumping misery on other countries because it’s cheaper, while outsourcing strategic concerns because they are “too dirty.” It’s NIMBYism taken to its logical conclusion.

It’s not a great example. I’d be more convinced if you picked a decommissioned shipyard with more conventional problems, like marinship.

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.

China's system is authoritarian state-capitalism. It is precisely the bureaucracy that steered it's industries toward this outcome.

These banned industrial processes sum to making almost every physical object. The net effect is that it’s nearly illegal to make anything physical. Do you think that the state or country will do well in the long term if it’s basically illegal to actually make things?

Also funny that the you Musk derangement people will never actually engage with the content of the quote’s message, preferring to dismiss it based on your political disagreement with the person who said it.

~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.

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 Harvey. Our PISA scores were consistently horrible when we were ranked internationally.

Though, curiously enough, we were not "horrible" if you only compared us to the same test results in other US states. We were nowhere near Massachusetts. But we weren't Alabama/Florida/Mississippi either. Which means education in general in the US is pretty bad outside maybe the top 3 to 5 states by performance on the PISA exams.

I keep hearing this, but it never happens. Despite attempts to get jurisdictions to race to the bottom, businesses simply follow the money/markets: I can bet you a hefty sum that Alameda will never go without electrical contractors.

They finding out it's basically impossible, aren't they?

No, California can't do that. States cannot impose tariffs per the Constitution: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S10-C2-1...

They could push for more regulations at the federal level (and indeed, Californians do this quite often!)

And that choice is basically the exact opposite of what western civilization is heading for, and thanks to the AI boom, it has never been worse at any time in human history, I guess. Which means you are likely surrounded by people who want the opposite of what you want. That will be problematic.

However, this really only would be the proper answer if given by a majority as a community. In a crowd of people who want more, more, more more MORE, you will just drown and die.

But in principle you are right:

No, you do not really need to re-industrialize your country. Instead think about how endless growth in a reality of finite resources is going to play out. California is just fine as it is. Let's think about where Californians will get drinking water from in the near future, instead of thinking about building water-consuming factories.

- I don't need a car, I'll use public transport. - I will only buy and eat the amount of calories I actually burn. - This 10 year old phone actually works pretty well. I don't need a new one.

etc

You need new factories because you want more stuff. If you stop wanting more stuff, you don't need more factories, and therefore nobody needs to cry about his industry being "banned".

I have visited the US a hell lot of times. I swear, I never ever in all these visits in any part of the US had the following thought in my head: "Boy, these people really need more car factories!".

A hell lot of industries, including most the original author is mentioning, simply would not work in California. California is running out of drinking water for humans. You can de-regulate all that you want, even cancel all environmental laws, but that will not change the reality: You don't have water. Want to build a water-consuming factory? Great, but please go to somewhere where water is available.

Yes, bureaucracy can be annoying, and of course California has a hell lot of "let's not fix the actual problem, but make it mandatory to put up a sign about it" regulations that for someone from the outside (like me) look silly. If the state of California knows this substance REALLY is harmful, why... is it here?! Either it's not really harmful, but if it is... what? A sign is the solution?! ;)

So I understand people complaining about environmental regulations in California. We had the same in Europe for decades. Everybody was complaining and making fun about all the EU regulations. Then the UK left via Brexit. And learned a lesson. And today nobody is joking about EU regulations anymore.

Anyway: One may call it "banned", or "expensive" or whatever. But it really is "does it really make sense to put this here?".

Then author just wanted to be over dramatic about how it’s not cost competitive to build in the Bay Area vs places like Reno where the land is cheaper and labor is less. Their scape goat or whipping boy is regulations but that’s highly myopic at best.

In part that's simply because while looking different, the general environment is fostering respecting nature, giving room for arts and creative and having an open mind.

(This example of course is coming from a past world where you could safely travel to/from the US, say, 10 years ago:)

Travelling from say Portugal to Miami ) would give you a massive culture shock. Portugal to San Diego? Not so much.

) Yes, Portugal to Key West would have worked.

There are a ton of CNC machining (AL and otherwise) and anodizing shops in the Bay Area.

I'm actually quite surprised by the number of people who have fallen for this. There aren't even any concrete claims here – just the vague assertion that some things are "impossible".

Practically, ‘in theory’ might actually be doable - if there was a single, overarching regulatory environment. That was enforced.

Chances are, that would defacto make a bunch of people starve in poorer countries, and blow a lot of stuff up, so would also likely be worse than ‘the disease’. At least right now.

But maybe I’m just being a cynical bastard.

The word "generated" is used to make it sound like the project opened up 3000 new permanent jobs for people. Those contractors were employed before the contract and will be employed on another contract at some later point. There's no net gain of jobs in the long run. The contractors won't even necessarily be local. The builder isn't going to call up Bob's AC repair from Collierville to do the specialized datacenter HVAC. They'll fly in a company specialized in that task who will fly home at the end of the contract.

The companies scrambling to build datacenters take advantage of that linguistic ambiguity and then the local politicians end up doing the same. They give these companies sweetheart tax/zoning incentives, proclaim contractors as "generated jobs", and then leave the locals with all of the negative externalities and none of the revenue.

Something to bear in mind when you are being told environmental damage is being caused by the poor or some foreign country.

America barely cares about the domestic poor[1] - do you think its captains of industry will care about the poor abroad? Charity begins at home.

1. See locations of Superfund sites. Or for a modern example, where they are choosing to build AI datacenters powered by on-site diesel generators or gas turbines.

Food is slightly different, judging by the rates of obesity people can afford more than they need.

They probably do if it's near their backyard

They didn't, they built it in Reno.

This was back in the 80s.

You are very much Not Allowed To Do That Now.

For most things it says that they are “impossible” or “near-impossible” with no explanation or just "getting a permit is hard" with no futher detail.

It does give some cherry-picked metrics : - 0 Semiconductor fabs built in CA in the last decade => as there been ANY semi fabs built outside of taiwan and china in the last decade ? Not exactly surprising. - 1 West Coast shipyard that can build destroyers, 0 New automotive paint shops permitted in CA, 0 New oil refineries permitted in CA since 1969 => We don't build those for shits and giggles, is there any demand that would justify new factories for thoses ?

Basically, the website doesn't say anything. It just gives some context-less data and one guys opinion on what he perceives as not possible.

Not that I care, I am not from the US or live there, but let's not try to pass some dude rambling as a source of actual information.

Unless you believe there needs to be a plan for CA to secede in the future and thus it needs to be self-sufficient, why does manufacturing need to be in CA? As you stated, the Impulse stove makes heavy use of outsourced manufacturing to other parties; as long as those parties are within the US (which I'm not claiming they are, but there are states like TX that are far less concerned about environmental impact than CA is and thus could pick up any such slack), why is there a security concern here?

As for the economic concern, it seems like this is backwards: I'd argue it's the HCOL that drives industry with the need for low-wage labor away to non-CA locations. There's nothing stopping non-polluting corporations from working and hiring large numbers of people in CA.

I realize it isn't completed yet but I don't think anyone is buying sites for something that's impossible to build.

Here's another one: https://www.bosch-semiconductors.com/roseville/

It's an interesting conundrum though, because in many cases, the cities could not exist without the things that are being banned in the cities. It's a curious goal of populations to centralize, then ostracize all the things that enabled that centralization

> so obviously his point can’t be true > so obviously he’s biased and we can’t do the mental work of sifting > so obviously I can dismiss this as teleologically false.

Please don’t be so lazy you guys. There is something to be gained here.

Context matters a lot. We haven’t built a lot of mercury based hat felting shops lately in California. What conclusion do you draw from that?

But lumping that in with semiconductor fabs, which are extremely toxic, makes me wonder how many of these banned industries I don't want in my state. I think if we want to build them in the US maybe don't build them in the most agriculturally productive and highest population state. Or first figure out how to do it without turning the US into China with its "cancer villages" from poisoned river water.

I'm not defending the dysfunctional CA bureaucracy, but the site should probably focus on specific cases of government-produced insanity than a general complaint that certain industries are banned from operation.

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 non-competitive.

>>> This is why you outsource to other countries and let them do it, because you simply do not care about them living in a polluted environment. Poison Outsourcing.

This is 100% about globalization: if some countries let their rivers catch on fire, the externality lets them out-compete anyone who tries to do the process cleanly. So if you let their externality-fueled products into your country, you just can't build similar things, because they wouldn't be price-competitive.

If labor and environmental standards were strong and global, or countries with high standards refused to trade with countries with low standards, we wouldn't have this situation. There would be an economic motivation to develop and implement cleaner processes.

The “snowball fallacy” is a fallacy because there is no reason California s can’t swing the regulatory pendulum back the other direction if there is too much economy / freedom impacted.

But sure, there are other shipyards they cleaned up in less than three decades.

And the other limiting factor is knowledge/education. Your region has been known for 100 years to be highly skilled at building $THING? That knowledge is still there and has not fully retired? That's also a resource.

"High labor cost" is a smoke screen. We are not talking about acquiring from a pool of lazy dancing monkeys. The labor you need are for tasks that machines can not yet do. Those jobs are either really shitty, or need a lot of qualification.

Due to this: If you want to build a factory in an area where there aren't already similar factories, you first need to build a University and come back 25 years later.

The articles author should next try to build a business based on offering camel riding in Greenland. Camel riding? Banned in Greenland!!!1

Maybe those that own the wealth should pony up more in taxes or give away their factories to the workers so they can run it themselves (something tells me they'll do a better job than greedy owners that just care about money rather than building a community).

We can afford to do it right. It will cost more and we'll have to make more prudent, effective, efficient, etc... decisions about producing and allocating goods and services and would need to give up many of the net negative/zero economic activities we like.

We've also likely enriched ourselves by externalizing the negative externalities of some of our goods and services to other countries. That's our choice, and I don't think it's a great one.

> We cannot.

Apple can afford to do test fabrication while abiding by the rules, but chooses not to. https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/apple-fine-over-bay-area...

> These banned industrial processes sum to making almost every physical object

The processes are obviously not banned, only an idiot would think that. You just can't do the process and dump all the pollutants into the nearby river.

I see no reason to engage in any way with the mental flatulations of this virulently racist Epstein fanboy. The quicker his empire can be dismantled and the sooner he gets utterly shunned from polite society, the better off we’ll all be. To a lesser degree, the same goes for his eager and willing co-conspirators.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...

As for California, as a resident, I’ll take environment over industry, thanks. Half my home neighborhood is already a Superfund site. Go fuck up Texas if you like.

Half my house was built less-than-safely by the previous owner because getting the permits for the structures would be too expensive, time-consuming, and maybe not even possible.

The increased costs (time and money) of permits really changes the risk-reward.

But cash strapped councils take what they can get.

After all most of us work hard so that we can buy things.

Then in 1995, congress "chose not to renew" that provision.

Now you and I literally and directly pay for the cleanup of hazardous waste. Companies don't really. Yet somehow they "Can't make factories" here

  > they are forced to allow pollution because the alternative is grinding poverty and eventual starvation

If I, as a voter, voted for a politician who promised to ban dumping mercury in the local river, I don't expect them to say "Oh, but any company already dumping mercury in the river can keep doing so, because we don't want to hurt people's livelihood." That's not what I voted for.

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 out competed by jurisdiction which have many fewer labor laws and much more lax environmental monitoring. If we are out-competed on product, then we deserve to loose, which is where libertarians and free-trade have a point. But if we are out-competed on keeping people and the environment reasonably safe? That's when we enact trade barriers.

That is how you actually keep the environment and people safe.

You may want to ask your LLM to do very detailed research.

The difference between the USA and, for example, China, in manufacturing is the difficulty of getting a new factory built.

If you have a product designed and ready for production, it will take you years to build a factory in the USA. All the while you'll be losing money managing the build, paying your employees and, most importantly, letting your competitors get a head start.

Likewise, if you build that factory in China, it'll be up and running in less than a year and you can start making your R&D money back, get to market before your competitors and not bleed money keeping your companies doors open.

The labor costs are easily offset by removing the logistics of moving the product.

Tesla Gigafactories are a pretty good example of this. The first two took ~3 years to build in Nevada and New York. The third, in Shanghai, took 10 months.

Texas, California, and Florida are all fairly similar, with California doing somewhat worse than Texas and Florida. Unfortunately, the dedication of California to effective education is going down over time, while even the Deep South, which has consistently been at the bottom, is going up.

You *really* don't understand the issue then because no one is saying that there will be 0 electrical contractors.

Electrical contractors will continue to exist because demand will continue to exist, but the wait time to get the work done will increase due to not enough electrical contractors.

Or the work will be left undone because the owner doesn't have enough money to pay the few electrical contractors that remain.

Or the work will occur but will avoid all regulations because the cost of complying relative to the odds of being caught don't justify paying it.

https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2024-Democr...

This is the current DNC platform. There are zero mentions of a universal / single payer / socialized healthcare system.

There are four mentions of "healthcare" it refers to maintaining the ACA (which is a bad law), making a more integrated health care system in the US territories (Guam, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, etc.), climate law which will improve health care nebulously, and a vague statement about the supreme court hurting healthcare decisions (which is just a statement about them supporting the murder of babies).

It's difficult to transport petroleum over the rocky mountains, and California requires its own blend of gasoline for use in vehicles, so there is significant demand for oil refineries in the state. Fuel imports have increased significantly due to refinery closures.[3] Some companies are trying to build pipelines to connect the west coast to refineries in Texas, but it's unclear when or if that will happen.[4]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC_Arizona

3. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65704

4. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/california-refinery-...

The Copper stove is made in Berkeley, California, by the way.

This is to show that there is more geopolitically than meets the eye.

First, manufacturers don't really make non voc compliant auto paints. The market is too small. They may make 550 and 275 variants but most don't.

Second, even like Texas has voc regulations on paints and also requires filtering and enclosed spray booths and gun cleaners and ....

And like I said, nobody is selling non compliant coatings because the market is zero.

I go by a paint shop every now and then. It’s not nearly as smelly as a quite of a few of the nearby restaurants.

There are. They just cost more and take more time.

> But lumping that in with semiconductor fabs, which are extremely toxic

People say this all the time, but semiconductor fabs simply aren't very toxic compared to just about every other industrial manufacturing process. Mostly this is because everything is sealed and sealed and sealed some more.

Yes, they handle stuff like arsenic gas (arsine AsH3), but they really try to reclaim it all. The semiconductor waste stream is often purer than most industrial inputs. Yeah, old plants would just dump crap into the environment. However, for modern semiconductor facilities, it is generally more economic to reprocess your waste than try to purify from primary sources.

Now, PCB manufacturing, on the other hand, is quite terrible or at least it used to be. I don't know if people have sealed and automated that yet.

https://lwvtexas.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=979482&i...

But what will be the result? The product now has equal cost to be produced, but the market is gone.

People consume cheap stuff because it is cheap. If it is no longer cheap, they will not consume.

US americans just need to make up their minds. Do they want keep getting more and more and more cheap stuff? Fine. Then go on exploiting other regions of the planet. Or do you have enough cheap stuff now? Ok, then nobody needs another factory.

Many on HN are living in a society where it is normal to use a TELEPHONE for only two years before throwing it away.

What would happen if you instead used it for 5 years? No more factories needed. Problem solved. You don't have to compete, as there is no competition.

The result of charging the true cost of T-Shirt to the consumer is not that everybody now has 100 Fair-Traded-Ecofriendly T-Shirts at home that they don't wear. They will notice that 10 T-Shirts are more than enough if you wash your clothes once per week.

What I am trying to say is: The demand is only there due to the option of exploitation. Take away the part of ruining other peoples lives to get cheap stuff, then it's no longer interesting and will just stop.

So of course you can take the detour, try to re-industrialize, and then find out that your people do not actually like this kind of work, and that they for sure also aren't willing to buy your stuff at the price you are asking.

There is a reason nobody would be so stupid to produce "Make America Great Again" merch in America. Your target audience would not buy it if it was made in America.

It is pragmatic to simply skip this step and end up with the same result: You'll just consume less.

You either make it doable or you don't.

To your last point, I am somewhat doubtful that this website is being honest about automotive paint shops being banned in California. Am I to believe that the 3,000 auto body shops in Southern California sit on their hands all day? Was West Coast Customs just a fake TV show filmed in Texas?

https://www.autobodynews.com/news/new-paint-voc-regulations-...

If this website’s author is correct I’m supposed to believe that no paint gets applied to cars in Canada.

As another nitpick, let’s also not forget that nobody else is building oil refineries in the US. The newest one in the entire country was built in 1976. Oil demand in the US is relatively flat since decades ago; there isn’t a pressing need for new refineries.

I also think that readers in this thread should remember that California has strict air quality regulations because its geography especially in Southern California lends itself to bad air quality. These regulations are very much written in blood. Globally, almost 7 million people die prematurely every year due to air pollution.

With aligned talent you can make the process neutral. I’m assuming lots of ‘eco conscious’ engineers would love to implement better practices and get paid for it.

If oil refineries are bad in California, they're bad everywhere, and if they're bad everywhere, we ought to stop using them altogether, which will make for some unwelcome lifestyle changes.

This guy, with an obvious bias, created a website that misrepresents the situation in California (by implying things are banned or "nearly impossible" when in actuality they just take time/effort), while also failing to show the specific regulations or requirements for any of it. Without supplying that kind of information this website is little better than "It's banned. trust me bro". It's not our responsibility to try to dig up evidence to support or verify this guys claims just because he can't be bothered to do it.

His motivations, his framing of the problem, and his failure to back up his own statements makes the site pretty damn easy to dismiss and I don't even doubt that there might be instances where bad regulation exists, especially regulation that protects the profits of established players in certain industries by keeping out competition. I'm entirely sympathetic to the idea that it might be happening, but if there is something to be gained you aren't going to find it on this guys website. Serious coverage on this topic would include actionable information we can use to identify and solve specific problems. This is just anti-regulation propaganda.

So the right thing is to outsource the dirty jobs to countries that can’t afford to be picky?

Wouldn’t it be better for the world if we used our wealth to develop methods of safe semiconductor manufacturing with low environmental impact, and proudly built those facilities in California?

Wait, hold on - I watched all the seasons of "Rust To Riches" on Netflix, about a small shop that flips cars.

They routinely painted cars.

They'd paint in this sealed-up room/garage thingee, the guy would wear and industrial-grade mask, and the camera would slide past as he expertly painted the car. The 30 second montages looked awesome!

That show took place in Temecula, California. So there's no way that site is accurate.

And, more to the point, if they want to show that they are accurate they should be linking to the rules & regulations that actually prohibit these things instead of just making a claim & calling it a day.

We are never going to catch up.

TFA appears to be arguing just that. It lists a prohibition on spewing cancer-causing chemicals into the air, as a ban which needs to be lifted.

Since D's control California, no need to work with R's there.

I also think they could get creative. Eg., without an attestation validated by <agency> products can't be sold.

For example, this is already done with controlled substances and food.

The mechanisms by which this can be accomplished are antitrust and careful application of trade barriers. The obsession with “free trade” has done damage to countries all across the world in order to benefit a small class connected to multinational industry. The short lived benefits came at a huge cost and countries are only just now seeing this.

Free trade/open borders libertarians have lost influence to nationalists because the former position is antithetical to maintaining a functional society. It’s possible to build “libertarianism in one country,” and the sooner that people wake up to that, the better. The alternative is some form of left or right despotism.

Trade barriers however are bullshit and don't work. And they are a lie. You are not building IPhones in the US because building an IPhone in the US would cost three times as much as it would doing in Shenzhen. And people would not be willing to pay that. And that's why they get an exception from the trade barriers. And that list of exceptions basically goes on and on and on...

Anyway, what works, works. This is especially true if that industry had been in the area for long, and therefore has access to a lot of skilled and experienced workers.

But it does not make sense to cry and complain that building such a thing from scratch is "banned". No, it is not banned. It's just a stupid idea, and there are laws against stupid ideas using limited natural resources.

There are also network effects. Your plant that is energy intensive is closing? Now other manufactures must increase their cost as transportation is increased and local contracts harder to get. Your chemical plant, which has operated within good bounds for a decade can't get a permit to expand, or is protested? Your intake products now either go up in price or become unable to attain them at all.

Right, and if the US congress[0] properly cared about the environment, the regulation would require both A) requirements to keep the manufacturing clean if done here, and B) tariffs for goods produced with polluting processes over there, scaled so the costs are somewhat higher if produced dirty.

They can produce cleanly here or there without extra tariffs and without losing market share because some other competitor externalizes the pollution costs.

[0] Tariffs are proper the domain of Congress, not any other branch. OFC, because of this, it isn't really an option for California, since states cannot levy tariffs externally or vs other states.

If you’re worried about people evading the tax, you can make a border adjustment for imports across national borders. Note California is simply forcing things to be done elsewhere.

Current democratic party is currently a pro-corporate pro-deregulation party, basically Reaganites from 80s.

What do you want? If there were more Democrats in office in 2010 we would have already had socialized healthcare.

People keep getting pissed that the party without power can't do things. If you want a politician to change something, you have to vote for them first

Even the people who vote for Trump understand that, but so many people who think they are smart can't understand that about voting for democrats. They continue to get pissed that the democrats secure the presidency and nothing else and can get nothing done as is intentionally the design of the american system

FDR's New Deal was possible because the Democrat party held about 80% control of both houses of congress and the presidency. Their threat to pack the supreme court to bypass them worked because it was trivially doable for them. You want a New New Deal? You have to vote for more Democrats.

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.

So they may be doing simpler portions of manufacturing. The article didn't claim you couldn't build any part of a battery without grandfathering.

Plus scaling industrial production is one thing, but if proletarians are unable to afford them because wealth distribution is exponentially concentrated, what is the point?

(China's predicament is not much better, with the added wrinkle that there's absolutely nothing whatsoever they can do about bad demographics due to their size, whereas Central/Eastern Europe can import people once we collectively get over ourselves and let go of uppity xenophobia).

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?

The outcome is the same as long as only California does it, but the ethics of it and the outcome if every state acted like that is vastly different

From the page itself, "A modern auto paint shop emits volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during primer, base coat, and clear coat application. The Bay Area AQMD makes permitting a new paint shop nearly impossible. This is THE classic example of what you can't do in CA." This point is trotted out and reframed multiple times on the page but it's literally self contradictory. It's not something you can't do in California, it's something you can't do without approval in the Bay Area Air District.

It's not a good place to be doing such an activity, as the area already can't successfully keep the air healthy enough to stay within federal limits due to environmental factors that trap particulate low to the ground. If you're at all familiar with the area you know concerns about air quality are not overblown and. Go further away from people or meet strict VOC regulations if you absolutely need to be doing that kind of work in the area, seems completely reasonable to me.

https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2024/08/28/18869003.php

I cannot to move to California once all the billionaires move to Texas and Florida.

Your downvotes are invalid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...

https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-y...

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

IMO this is all cyclical.

* This is metaphorical. Obviously there were also textbooks and research papers and technical manuals and everything else. The point is much of it came from abroad and they learned it all to the point that they're the experts today.

No, why would you say that? When America and Europe built their wealth, they were mainly (though not exclusively) producing and selling manufactured goods for themselves. This whole idea of a poor country developing by building polluting factories to make items for rich countries is a more recent and different thing.

Europe and America insisting on certain labor and environmental standards as a condition of trade wouldn't mean poor countries can't build factories for themselves. At worst, you just split the current one big market into two smaller markets: an expensive and clean one, and a dirty and cheap one.

Obviously, California is not composed exclusively of heavily populated cities. But it does contain a lot of them! So it is not completely insane that the regulation is skewed in favour of this.

Of course, for things that are equally polluting no matter where you do them (like burning fossil fuels), moving production outside of the location but still buying produced materials is simply passing the buck. But it's not totally clear to me that's what's happening here.

This statement doesn't acknowledge why NIMBYism is odious. The reason is that we all need housing, but new housing may devalue current housing. While some may wish to protect their housing values/community feel/etc, others wish and may rightly deserve, access to housing at the same levels of access as earlier generations.

The analogy to manufacturing does not exist—to suggest it does ignores the real negative externalities to people who live next to polluting facilities, especially those where the pollutant was not recognized during use.

Existing shops get grandfathered.

Their website says

> We’re designing and manufacturing the stovetop, battery pack, and key internal components to comply with all relevant UL standards and other applicable compliance requirements.

but this device appears to be for sale, right now. Either it is designed for safety already or it isn’t. WHICH UL safety standards? Is there an emergency shutoff? A regular old fire extinguisher probably is not going to cut it.

I think to be eco neutral, you would be cost prohibitive. Which would be an issue in car manufacturing and phone manufacturing.

Also, the website lumps adjacent tech together and says they're all banned, but they are not. Lumping sheet metal stamping in with gigs casting is plain wrong, and you could make the argument that that's an agenda driven aspect of this website. They're casting a wider net than exists.

Point stands, though. California's policy is "go fuck up some other states environment". This policy might not work forever, but that's their stance.

That doesn't follow. It only follows that they are bad everywhere with circumstances similar to California. A place differing in distribution of population, distribution of agricultural land, weather patterns, and/or water flows might be able to have refineries without causing the harms that makes them difficult to place in California.

The Infinera one is described as a "new fab" though (https://www.nist.gov/chips/infinera-california-san-jose) and the Bosch one is adding a new type of fabrication to an existing site. If you can do all that without getting new permits then that makes California sound like a pretty lenient place to do business. I'm assuming they did have to get new permits though.

- the cost of mitigating the human health risk is too high - competitors in low-environmental regulation places don't pay for those costs - ongoing verification is expensive

I mean, let's face it, "self-regulation" of industries isn't really working that great. And for things that are health hazards that are basically borne by someone else, why should a local government make it easy to cheat and lie about this stuff?

The people arguing against this seem to assume that their right to have a business, make a profit, whatever, is a self-evident Good Thing, and rarely provide any additional arguments beyond "but the jobs". If they were at the VERY LEAST saying "we can make X safe" then maybe it'd be interesting. But as it is, the argument is basically asking us to mortgage the health and safety.

okay what’s different in Reno hmmm I could be like the website and try to imply it’s only environmental regulations… or I could acknowledge that land price and availability is drastically different and also labor costs…. But then that wouldn’t help my contrived argument that it’s all the pesky regulations.

Again, without apples to apples comparisons to other areas, wha are you actually able to conclude from the website other than stoking confirmation bias?

It's not like the laws are simply "you can't make semiconductors here". The laws ban the harmful externalities of the process. The companies that want to make semiconductors don't want to find a way to make the processes less harmful: it's cheaper and easier to just go somewhere where they can pollute instead.

3 to 4 decades ago anything from China was poor quality and US manufacturing was tight tolerance.

When we outsourced, we did the training to get them where they are today and stopped investing in our skills at home.

There are still skilled people here who can train and the knowledge is not some sort of eldritch incantation.

The main issues with learning is lack of jobs and lack of opportunity to apply skills if you have them.

California has the highest manufacturing employment and most manufacturing companies of any state, the second highest (behind only Texas) dollar value of manufacturing output.

It is just below the national average in manufacturing as a share of GDP, but its also the fifth highest state in GDP/capita; leaving it still above average in manufacturing GDP/capita.

No but they are significantly cheaper than an employee, A robot can pick up something and move it from A to B for upwards of 10 years. The programming and setup are a fraction of the time a robot can operate reliably

I cannot stress to you how reliable and little maintenance is required for a $60,000 fanuc robot.

There IS labour over abundance. Unemployment in most EU countries is at record highs. And it shows no sign of slowing down.

The problem is it's mostly white collar labor overabundance. And those college educated people aren't gonna want to make sneakers in sweatshops.

Texas beats California in total value of manufacturing shipments only because because of its petroleum and coal products manufacturing. And California beats Texas in manufacturing employment.

Which just shows that other places are allowing those costs to be externalized to society in general which is classic "privatize profits, socialize costs" that businesses have relied on.

The state is large, diverse and already contains vast chunks of unpopulated land. Almost everywhere that isn't near the poles is similar to some part of California.

The article contains no citations, and so may be presumed 100% false by default.

"may be presumed", as in, sure it might actually contain some other mix of true and false, but it doesn't matter what that mix actually is. That only matters in some other article written by someone else that citates any of it's assertions.

This piece is the same as if monkeys typed stuff at random and some of it could possibly happen to be the same as something true. It doesn't mean the monkeys made a valid point, and no one should spend one second either defending or refuting it.

Secondly, it says you can't permit a new auto paint shop in CA, but it specifically mentions the Bay Area AQMD as the reason. But, as its name implies, the Bay Area AQMD only regulates within the San Francisco Bay Area. It is only one of 35 air districts in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_air_distric...

So, it is impossible to permit a new auto paint shop in all of these districts, or just the bay area? Because those are very different. It also labels starting a new paint shop as "impossible", but then says it's "nearly impossible". So is it actually impossible, or just nearly impossible?

> There are still skilled people here who can train

If you don't acknowledge you're losing the race, you will never catch up.

> Charged with regulating stationary sources of air pollution emissions, the Air District drafted its first two regulations in the 1950s: Regulation 1, which banned open burning at dumps and wrecking yards, and Regulation 2, which established controls on dust, droplets, and combustion gases from certain industrial sources.

> Much research and discussion went into the shaping of Regulation 2, but there was no doubt about the need for it. During a fact-finding visit to one particular facility, Air District engineers discovered that filters were used over air in-take vents to protect the plant's machinery from its own corrosive emissions! This much-debated regulation was finally adopted in 1960.

https://www.baaqmd.gov/en/about-the-air-district/history-of-...

CO2 might be a long term problem, but it isn't the core health concern of living near combustion facilities - moving those away from residential areas isn't passing the buck, it's just good sense.

It's an induction stovetop. It doesn't itself get hot, other than whatever heat gets transferred to the top of the stove because it is in contact with the hot pot or pan sitting on top. I don't know about this one specifically but with most induction stovetops that just makes it warm to the touch in the area right under the pot or pan.

That's not going to be hot enough to be a problem for the battery even if for some reason they mounted it in contact with the bottom of the top surface, which I doubt they did.

Pointing out that such costs have been externalised for decades should be the starting point to internalise them.

So, no combustion-based private or public transportation, no detergents, no aspirin, paracetamol or ibuprofen.

It would still be possible to drive an EV, though. You could keep it lubricated with whale oil.

This might be a refutation but it's not super clear. It's definitely not a commercial semiconductor fab but it might do all of or some subset of what a commercial fab does at R&D scale. Hard to know for sure how this jives with the claim in the main website.

> If you can do all that without getting new permits then that makes California sound like a pretty lenient place to do business.

Being able to retool under original zoning/permitting is specifically lenient? That's extremely basic. If you're a co-Californian with me, though, it does help to understand that many people think that anyone doing anything without a permit is "lenient".

> I'm assuming they did have to get new permits though.

Well, that makes it really easy to be "right". I should try this more.

Hint: It doesn't stand for "there forever"

Nobody here wants to just let big business do whatever and turn the rivers weird colors again or go back to smog but it's very clear that the current regulatory system is not suitable and is hurting us.

It boggles the mind that someone could honestly (by which I mean dishonestly and malice are far simpler explanations) step into this conversation and be like "no, this is all fine and well, god forbid someone start spraying cars in a shop in the desert without jumping through all most of the same expensive hoops that make it not worth it down town (and would make it doubly not worth it out in the desert).

And it's not just autobody work. There's all manner of necessary economic activity that's being kept out or made artificially expensive in this manner.

There's not going to be any point even having sweatshops or factories in this region soon. Why bother? If it's anything low or medium-skill and low or medium-capital intense, just open up shop in... Well, why not Uzbekistan? And if double-landlocked isn't your thing, there's dozens of other options.

Gigafactory Berlin is a different beast and produces a different product mix.

Gigafactory New York produces photovoltaic cells and Tesla Supercharger assemblies but does not produce batteries or vehicles yet another product mix.

Giga Shanghai just does final vehicle assembly (basically the easiest kind of factory and most minimally regulated) and is a million square feet smaller than the other factories and with no joint partnership/co buildout.

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?

The tension you may be blind to, is that society wants to maximize safety in an area - and any work done should be in service to that goal, and not an end unto itself. We shouldn't blindly maximize for work done in an area, we have to make sure the result is safe: this introduces rules and regulations, and the time and monetary costs tag along.

No two people will agree where the balance is, but generally there's regional culture. Hell, Texas allows home-owners to do their own electrical work - does that "drive business away" since some people won't pay for small DIY fixes in TX? I can't say I've ever heard that argued, but I hear it deployed a lot in response to regulations.

My point is that’s what safety standards are for. Do they do safe things or not? You might be surprised to hear how many manufacturers do dumb things for one reason or another. If they really do comply with safety standards then they should be able to say which ones. Why don’t they say?

I've grown rather weary of performative complaining about trash which has a waste lifecycle which ends at "stabilized landfill".

Because that's one of our best waste lifecycle processes: what's a disaster is greenhouse gas emissions, it waste which is reliably ending up in the oceans and doesn't biodegrade.

I absolutely agree. 100%. The issue is single companies can't do that. They will not be competitive against companies that aren't doing it. You need an even playing field for this to work, i.e. you need legislation and uniform environmental standards across all states, whatever those standards may be. Probably even need similar pacts across countries, within reason.

Right now, the US is moving in the opposite direction to this statement.

See also the counterproductive legacy of the anti-nuclear movement.

As others have pointed out, the article itself fails to provide any direct citations of the regulations either. This is classic Russell's teapot territory; the one making the initial claim shouldn't have a lower burden of evidence than the one refuting it.

Out of context, incomplete single data points that feels like one’s already held view is how confirmation bias works.

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. PR teams are designed to mitigate negative feedback when this happens.

Smart politicians know this and will not concede to tax breaks for big companies, like Amazon.

Some guy’s website claims with big red scary graphics that this stuff is banned and these poor downtrodden business owners can’t operate.

I can’t imagine that nobody has opened an auto body shop in California in the last decade or two.

When it comes to businesses like large factories opening up that’s more of something that often gets approved on a case by case basis.

E.g., we can’t just say that the Chicago Bears are banned from building a new stadium in Chicago just because they aren’t willing to pay the costs required to do so and aren’t willing to meet the city’s requirements to get the approval vote they need.

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?

The site isn't claiming regulations are the only factor, just that they're sufficient to make things impossible regardless of other factors.

Oh so Lies of omission don’t exist? Deception researchers will be very keen to hear how that works.

So if someone Mormon bubbles a photo of you that also has a kid in it, you’re fine being arrested for indecency and registering as a sex offender? After all, that’s just omitting a few pixels, not a lie or deception in your book.

I think I'm done with this conversation now you're comparing a website about manufacturing to child porn. That's in bad taste.

There's a large middle ground between "Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone" and letting blatant polluters turn your neighborhood into a Superfund site. California solved the latter problem by going too far in the other direction.