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City-Provided Wi-Fi Rejected Over "Health Concerns"
exphose writes "A small, hippie-friendly town in northern California, Sebastopol, had made an agreement with Sonic.net to provide free Wi-Fi across the downtown area. However, not everyone in town was pleased with the arrangement. According to Sebastopol Mayor Craig Litwin, citizens had voiced concerns that 'create enough suspicion that there may be a health hazard' and so they canceled their contract with Sonic.net. Some more details are at the blog of Sonic.net's CEO."
How many of these concerned citizens happen to smoke, I wonder...
.: Max Romantschuk
Could it be that someone there is worried about their own FINANCIAL "health" instead?
Does someone there have a vested intere$t in making sure this deal fell through?
As with anything else... follow the money.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
My bet is on "paid by a telecom". They hate the idea of there being more than one supplier for any given house.
You say that there are links between cellphone use and brain tumors but it seems that for every study claiming that, there is a study claiming there is no link.
Turns out that any connection between power lines and increased cancer rates was always a false positive. In all cases, it was mitigated by some other cause, such as the community was getting it's water from an aquifer downstream from an old chemical dump. The initial research which made the connection, was falsified, and the scientist, well, he's not doing research any more.
EM radiation of various forms has been a boogieman for a long time, and I'm sure it won't change. Hell we saw this at work. The campus is rolling out a new WiFi system with complete coverage. When I say that, I mean it. They are making sure you get a signal everywhere. This necessitates a truly amazing number of access points. There's somewhere in the range of 50-100 in our 5 story building. The placement of these is dictated by where they do the best for signal coverage, not by convenience (like hallways or electrical closets and so on). This means some are in offices.
Well, people bitched, and thus the APs has to be moved in the offices. They didn't like having them directly overhead, so they'd get moved to the side and such.
Now, you want the really silly part? I work for the electrical and computer engineering department. Yes, that's right, people with PhDs in engineering, who have all taken classes on this kind of stuff, are afraid of the radiation boogieman.
If people with extensive educations in related fields are going to bitch and ignore the facts, you can damn well believe that regular people with no understanding will do so.
I think maybe I should just get in to the market of selling whole-house faraday cages.
There have been som studies funded by the UK Department of Health which showed no convincing results from cellphones. Now, they migh, of course, be in the pocket of the cellphome manufacturers, like they might be in the pocket of the drug manufacturers. But with a socialised health service, they are the people who are going to end up payiong the first level, purely medical, costs of any ill effects that there may be. Whcih suggests to me that, if they were going to err, they would be likely to err in the direction of overcaution rather than recklessness.
All the accusations against cellphones have been generally anecdotal i.e. a number of people have been found who were both heavy cellphone users and got brain tumours. But when large scale statistical studues are done, these "clusters" disappear. If you ask averybody with a tumour whether they were a heavy cellphone user, some will say yes. Probably more than really are, becasue moderate users will tend to judge themselves heavier in order to have something to blame for their tragedy - randomness seems much more frightening that a technological accident.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
You're aware that microwave ovens work in the 2.4-3 GHz range right? If that doesn't "affect us" I'm not sure how you define affect. That's far less than "one million times higher in frequency than cellphones and wifi". It's barely twice the frequency, than the lowest cell phone band and not even twice the frequency of the highest cell phone band, and the same as . Is it likely to cause major damage at the power levels generated for wifi or cellphone use? Not likely, but that doesn't mean it won't have any affect.
I dare say you do see "EM-sensitive people complain about the sun" every time you go to the beach, pool, or just out doing yard work. People all over the world are wearing more sunscreen now than ever before.
I'm sure you did it deliberately but, just in case you didn't, I'll be a dick and point out that nuclear is the correct spelling even if a lot of people mispronounce the word.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Having lived in Sebastopol for 15 years, and in Silicon Valley for 20 years before that, I feel compelled to make a few observations about the context of this decision by the city council (with which I disagree).
.)
... (wait for it) ... Sebastopol. It was founded by people from, and had its meetings at, O'Reilly.
1. "Hippie friendly" does little to convey the truly eclectic mix of people who live here. You name it, we got it: 5th generation farming families, refugees from Berkeley and the Valley, 200 acre commercial winemaking operations next door to the 2 acre "wine estates" of retired attorneys, a surprising number of geezer geeks (including me), a large gay/lesbian community, and, yes, a certain number of people wearing tie-dyed clothing and reeking of patchouli oil. About the only group in short supply here is neo-cons. (Thank
2. Speaking of geeks, some of you may have heard of a project call nocat.net. It uses off-the-shelf WiFi hardware to deliver broadband to places miles (and hills) away from the nearest cable/DSL connection. It was started by a group of people in
3. This area has higher-than-average levels of education and of political activism. I think these are good things. However, having a college degree and being willing to make yourself heard does not necessarily translate into knowing what the hell you are talking about. This is a universal truth.
4. People in general do not understand the technologies they use, and Sebastopol is no exception. I would bet good money that at least some of the people who are so vocal (here and elsewhere) about the dangers of WiFi are actually using a laptop that has--you guessed it--WiFi. Some of them may have actually decided not to have a WiFi router in their home "because of the radiation," but it's almost a certainty that they forgot to turn off the radio in their laptop. I'm not a radio engineer, but I seem to remember something about radiated energy falling off as the inverse square of the distance. Which means that, whatever the perceived dangers from the router, they are actually much more exposed to radiation from their own laptop. (Not to mention that little radio transmitter they nestle against their brain, AKA their cellphone.)
What does all of that mean? Hell, I don't know. I guess I was irked by the simplistic labeling from the original story.
People who complain of RF sensitivity are in the same category as people who complain of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. They really do suffer from a disease that causes real symptoms. However the disease they have is a form of panic attack - which can in the case of MCS especially progress to something akin to agoraphobia. When you test people who are labeled as having MCS in a blinded fashion to things they are sensitive to, they don't get triggered any more often than placebo. (Expose them to placebo puffs of air and expose them to the chemical they are sensitive to but don't tell them which is which, and they can label them correctly no more better than would be expected from chance.)
However, the problem is that people with these really are tortured - they are truly convinced of this sensitivity and sometimes end up housebound and with ruined lives because of profound avoidance of perceived triggers.
The question is though, how do you address this in a patient and from a societal perspective. Say I have a person with RFS or MCS as a patient. If you say: 'Look, hon. You are a total whackadoodle. You need to just get over it and stop having panic attacks, K?' that may fix the problem in that they will not haunt your practice, but they will go to another provider who will further validate their phobias and be worse off. If however, you can engage the person in care, even perhaps give them medicines in what may be a placebo effect (and maybe in a manner that helps the basic panic attack), and help them gradually get over the symptoms and regain their life, you are doing a better thing. But that requires controlled validation of their experience, and it ain't something you are doing in a few months. This is a long haul thing... and its a lot of energy. I limit myself to only a few people who require this at any given time in my practice.
From a societal perspective, its the same issue: if a person with RFS or MCS says 'I can't access X public venue without Y accommodation' what do you do? Even knowing that its a form of panic disorder, that doesn't obviate the need for accommodations. We let people with mental health problems have a lot of accommodations not aimed at 'toughening them up' but aimed at making them able to fully participate in society. And like all accommodations, we have to balance the reasonableness of the request against the rest of societies needs. Expecting a wheelchair ramp on public buildings is very reasonable. Expecting that all buildings have lights turned off at 6pm is not. If a person with MCS needs a 'scent free space' in order to be able to go to college, that's reasonable... until a person with psoriasis is told she can't use her medications that control her disease. They can reasonably expect me to limit cologne use, but not things that are required to treat a serious health problem.
In this case, I actually think the reasonableness of the request doesn't balance out. Though there are other ways that it could be addressed. Talk to local businesses who already offer wifi, request that they take down their wifi if the city guarantees free and consistent access for their customers.
There are many, many, many abuses of the American legal system. This is not one of them.
Also, to respond to one of the other posters, I'd doubt that Sonic.net would be asked to prove that Wi-Fi is 100% safe, unless the judge is an absolute loony (in which case, they'd likely be able to appeal). The FCC has very explicit guidelines for "safe" levels of RF exposure, and Sebastopol would need to take on the FCC directly in order to challenge this.
They'd probably be able to get away with simply demonstrating that public access points don't significantly increase public exposure to 2.4GHz RF given the number of private transmitters around. Similarly, the town will have a very difficult time defending themselves, considering that they have not banned the use of private access points. (Nor do they have the ability to do so, as that lies under the jurisdiction of the FCC)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Ironically, asbestos is quite safe, as long as you leave it in the wall where it belongs. About the worst thing you can do is remove it from an existing installation where the building is not scheduled to be demolished (since you spread its dust around by removing it).
Living and working in buildings with asbestos isn't a big deal. You don't really get any increase in lung cancer risk, but you get the benefit if a much lower death from fire risk. working with asbestos was always the problem. So the solution? Marathon of extra work with asbestos for all the people removing it in a panic. Brilliant.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Saccharine, of course, causes cancer only in huge quantities and aspartame doesn't cause cancer at all-- although it does cause headaches in some people and can break down into toxic compounds in extreme heat. But thanks for continuing to spread the 1970s-era hysterics of the ignorant.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
get your facts straight.
from : http://www.ethicalinvesting.com/monsanto/aspartame.shtml
"Primarily, the only research that claims aspartame is safe is that which has been funded and/or controlled by the manufacturer (e.g., Monsanto). They put together convincing-sounding summaries of poorly-designed research in order to present to the public. When the research is examined closely it is found that the testing was often done improperly, the results were often reported inaccurately or in a biased way, and the equivalent of extremely low doses of aspartame was often used even though the summaries reported the use of high doses."
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?