California's "Wireless-Free" Zone

pangur writes: "In Wired, there's the story about how Arthur Firstenberg changed Mendocino, CA into a 'wireless-free zone' as a safehaven for those deemed 'electrically sensitive'. His critics claim that he is driving away any chance of a significant economy."

Comments

News flash!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sensitive, luddite granola types spotted in California! Nose cut to spite face! News at 11:00!

don't dismiss this so easily

[dewdrops]

It looks like the /. community immediately assumed this guy is looney.

I don't know if all of his symptoms are real or imagined, but I will say that using a cell phone or coming close to a wireless ethernet card gives me a migraine every time, and this has been verified in a blind test (friend plugged in card, brought me into the room without telling me it's state; migraine. next day unplugged in card, brought me into the room; no migraine).

Maybe these kinds of radiation aren't harmful to most people, but let's not immediately dismiss this; I think, if nothing else, this issue should be studied by public researchers because Sprint, AT&T, etc. certaintly aren't going to do anything that would in anyway hurt their profits (cf.tabacco companies and the harmful effects of tabacco).

so let's not dismiss this out of hand; it's a reasonable question.

Drew

A Brief Compassion Break

[drooling-dog]

I agree that the symptoms these people are experiencing are almost certainly not caused by what they think they are, but on the other hand I think the ridicule they're getting here is unnecessary and mean-spirited. The possibility that the symptoms are "psychosomatic" - e.g., stress-related or whatever - does not make them any less real, and we're fools if we think that we're guaranteed never to have to go through something similar.

That said, though, it's also true that we can't impose the burden of remediation on everyone else unless we're reasonably confident that the "true" cause has been identified, and that can only be done with the kind of controlled studies that several others have suggested here.

But give these people a break; their suffering is real even if they're grasping for bogus explanations...

He probably calls himself a "progressive"

[GCP]

Nobody hates progress more. Welcome to my world: Northern California.

The voters in places like Mendocino, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Oakland... tend to consider the scientific method to be part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy". Their politics reflect how far beyond scientific reasoning they've "evolved".