Excepting the conspiracy theories about BG, this is pretty much what I figure will happen. Outsourcing to India/China encompasses far more than software writing, after all.
Don't forget that once fully industrialized, China and India will be looking to outsource as well.
The other major possible population centers for replacing China and India tend to have some rather severe problems, starting with lower population levels, not to mention the civil wars, the lack of even basic infrastructure in many areas.
Not saying that it won't happen even there, but the increased expense will tend to slow outsourcing stuff down such that the majority of production left in the USA will stay here.
While we're arguably in a recession right now. Part of the reason for the slowing of the growth in India is the cost of oil, which is making everything more expensive.
Another part is that expenses in India have hit a point where it's no longer worth the expense to outsource many things there. Without the constant addition of jobs and such from the USA and other countries, growth will slow.
I doubt very much twenty years is enough to bring the median income in India to $30k+.
You'd be surprised, I think. Part of it is that it doesn't have to actually reach median, just reach enough to make outsourcing there uneconomic, on average. You'll always have some back and forth, and that's not a bad thing.
I suspect will return to India with there retirements, spawning industry in India to support their needs.
Putting more demands on the Indian labor pool.
It's creating a self-feeding cycle that I see raising effective wages. The Indian people themselves wanting and consuming more, enjoying a higher style of living, for example.
Besides, it's not just the wages going up in the USA, it's also wage stagnation, deflation happening in the USA.
Then where else, if not China/India? The only other major non-industrialized areas I can think of are Africa. Africa only has a population of ~922 million. India alone has 1.13B, China 1.3B.
In addition, Africa is crippled by internal strife and warfare in ways that the other two aren't. Even if you toss in the Middle east, that's only another 197 million. South America is 371 million. And I wouldn't consider them unindustrialized.
Even if you add those three regions up, we're still around half that of our current outsourcing targets. Don't forget that at that point China and India will be looking to outsource.
There will always be someone at the bottom of the wage food chain, willing to work for relative peanuts.
True, but in the future I don't see it being nearly as regionalized as it is now, resulting in wholesale outsourcing.
In the American justice system, you have no reason to confess if there is not sufficient evidence of your guilt.
You have to remember, in the USA you pay for your own defense unless you're fiscally unable to. For example, the local justice system would likely expect me to pay my own legal bills, up to several hundred thousand. Otherwise you get a public defender, which tends to be bottom of the barrel.
So you'll get a prosecutor's office that'll offer to plea the multiple felonies you're being accused of, with the max sentence of 60+ years to a simple felony with 1 year in prison or just parole or whatever. Most people start thinking in game theory: 'Well, I'm X% likely to get convicted and get even MORE prison sentence vs copping the plea and serving less, on average'. I'm discounting that the overwhelming majority of people in the justice system have been there before.
When the evidence is shaky, they'll be generous with the plea deals. When the evidence is solid, they won't be.
Now, being the type of person I am, I'm never going to plea to a felony*, no matter the expense.
*Would cost me my right to vote, keep&bear arms, etc...
or much better developed, which would ruin this business model as far as I can see.
It's starting to happen. Give it another 20 years and Indian wages will be high enough that this sort of stuff won't happen because Indian wages will be almost as high as a US worker's wages.
China, I think, will take a bit longer, but I think they'll end up using up their own labor that's coming off the farms and such for the most part during the later stages of their industrialization.
Heck US manufacturing goods exports and domestic production have been increasing recently, and that hasn't happened in years.
Mine was to have everybody throw a few cents in whenever they get a spam, creating a sort of bounty system - somebody would go after a proliferate spammer eventually.
I was going to have it set up as a death pool type system. You pay your money and guess a date. If you're right on the date, you split the money among everybody who got the right date.
Obviously the hitman has a leg up in such a scheme...
Yes. The temporary tags are only good for so long, though that's creating some annoyance here because the state is taking longer to issue plates than what the tags are good for.
Just gotta love that. In addition, I've also heard of an automated speed camera sending a fine notice to a farmer for his antique tractor with a max speed of 8 kph - it said he was doing something in the high 80's with it.
The funny one I saw recently sent a ticket to a guy - the picture showed the car was in the process of being towed.
Of course, they're also throwing the ball back at you - you have to prove you're innocent, not the other way around.
Back on the wireless toll roads, my first thought was that 'they even encrypt garage door openers to prevent this today!'. For anything more serious than a simple inventory, encrypted RFID devices should be the rule.
well, you can't listen to sounds or watch movies on an etched nickel disk through a 1000x microscope
Well, you might want to alter the etching method a bit, but look up phonograph and you'll see that we are quite capable of playing etched sounds... There's even a few examples of video recordings being placed on records.
Of course, go even smaller and use a laser and the sky's pretty much the limit. Still, write large and analoge and your recording will most likely last a lot longer and be simpler to access later on.
On problem with recordings though, again, is copyright - even a performance of Beethoven is copyright the orchestra that made it. Somebody else is free to get their own orchestra together and perform it, but the recording of that performance is copyright.
Though yes, this can be worked out with artist/performer/writer permission. Some are asses, some are not.
We don't use lead in solder pipes (banned in 1986) anymore for the reason not that because it causes cancer but that it leads to lead poising which causes neurological damage. Similar to mercury poisoning but works on the body in a different manner.
Ahem: It'll generally lead to heavy metal poisoning long before you have to worry about it giving you cancer
I'm also unlucky, they didn't ban leaded gas until I was a teen(the dangerous years). Heck, my grandfather ran around with an adaptor for a while so he could put leaded gas in his unleaded vehicle(thanks gramps!). I did eventually put a stop to that.
I'm not objecting to the elimination of leaded gasoline. I'm not objecting to the elimination of lead in water systems - if you're drinking water run over it, like in pipes.
I'm objecting to the worrying about it in places like the soldering of various bits of computing equipment and wires in sealed containers, where it's very unlikely to get into somebody's body.
Mercury is a bit more dangerous because it's easier to ingest, depending. Still a heavy metal, and because it's a liquid at room temperature, more likely to get out into the enviroment if the container is compromised, such as by crushing/shattering. Doesn't mean that the few micrograms in a CFL mandates a $10k cleanup if it hits the carpet. I think it's more likely, especially if it was an older house, that something with a LOT more mercury was spilled there at one time. Such as a thermometer.
The major concern with lead is not cancer. Lead is a neurotoxin, shown in numerous studies to affect brain function and development; increasing the risk of cognitive and behavioral problems.
Please, re-read my sentence #2 where I mention heavy metal poisoning. I am very familiar with the toxic effects of lead, to the point that what most people assumed were radiation effects, I identified as heavy metal poisoning(exposure to a depleted uranium fire without masks).
I was making the point that making manufacturers put signs that warn of carcinogenic substances in the product when the 'substance' is lead is fairly silly. Unless you're ingesting it, it's not a problem. It's inert. It'd still make more sense to stick a 'don't eat this, toxic heavy metals' on the device than a cancer warning.
Now, if you're talking about drinking water pipes, children's toys, paint, etc... Darn right I want you to keep the lead out of it.
I think the problem is less with the usage and more with the disposal.
How does making everybody stick a 'this product contains a substance that the state of California has determined to cause cancer' on their stuff change the disposal method? Heck, it's not even changing construction methods for the most part.
Besides, a lot of the non-cancer causing substances are still poisonous.
We need effective ways to dispose of things - preferably by recycling/recovering - that have harmful components.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that recycling/recovering/reusing stuff period is a good thing - not just if it has harmful components. I just think that we need to develop far more effective ways to perform the recovery/recycling than we currently have.
Because once they're in a landfill, they can get into the ecosystem in a big way (lots of little bits adding up...) and they don't just "go away" because you stuck them in a landfill.
Modern landfills are very safe and secure. And no, the waste doesn't go away. Matter of fact, we already have archeologists going through the trash to learn stuff. Still, at some point I figure we'll get our recovery/recycling tech up to the point that we'll start digging up the landfills. After all, depending on the makeup of the landfill, the levels of Iron, Aluminum, Titanium, Tin, etc... are higher than many of the ores we're currently extracting for the metals.
but I think we do need to think about the materials we use.
Oh, agreed. It's just that, even state of the art flourescent lights require mercury. It's an order of magnitude less than the amount in the old tubes(back in the '40s), but it's still there. Relatively speaking, it's a tiny amount of mercury, and that tiny bit of mercury, even if you release it at the end of the bulb's life, prevents even more mercury releases into the atmosphere over the usage of incandescent bulbs - mercury is released into the atmosphere with coal power. It depends a bit, but on average even true as long as your power comes from a mix that includes coal.
The same with LEDs. Sure, it uses a toxic material. But we can't work our way around that, and it's ultimately the cleaner alternative due to the superior characteristics of LED bulbs such as higher efficiency, durability and lifespan.
Now, if Cali, the USA, Europe, etc... Had some sort of recycling/reusability rating, then there might be more pressure on manufacturers to make their stuff easy to recycle - not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it doesn't effect usability.
My dad works for a HVAC company, and noticed that many of the highest efficiency AC systems also had high failure rates - certain components were failing on average within 3 years rather than 10+. The reason? To make them efficient they had to be made thin, and the manufacturers hadn't spent the money to make the thinner structures sturdy enough to last by adjusting the metalurgy.
Is saving, say, 90kwh a year worth it if you have to replace your appliance, costing hundreds, in 5 years rather than 20? Would it really be using less resources? It costs money to recycle, after all.
They're not overused, "Corrosive" means *really* corrosive -- most powerful household cleaners are only "Irritant".
While they're the european version, the US does have equivalents, and they look much the same, though 'hazardous for the environment' isn't on the list for the US ones.
And yes - I think that it's important to keep them from being overused, and households shouldn't, by standard, have those sorts of materials in them.
That was merely a suggestion for those who hate seeing them everywhere.
While, you might make an educated guess, what are the types disposed to hypochondria going to do? Or those without the knowledge base to make an educated guess?
I'm not a fan of putting the signs/warnings everywhere because that DOES lead to people ignoring them.
Thus, to keep people from ignoring the signs, you should put them only where they really need to go.
Federally, we have the same sort of system; It's just that it's reserved for things that are more or less seriously hazardous.
California's problem is that they have the safety standard set so low that EVERYTHING ends up needing their nice, unhelpful label - thus making the label useless because it's marking stuff that's overall very safe and doesn't give you any ability(from the label) to discern whether it has the label because there's a bit of lead in the solder joints(like my LCD panel), or because it's offgassing some gas that'll cause your kids to be born with flippers.
A color coded system might do consumers well. No color==mostly OK. Green==Don't eat a bunch of this, it's not good for you. Yellow==Take care when using this, ventilation is a good idea and long term exposure is probably going to hurt you. Red==For the love of all that is holly, wear a respirator or leave it for the pros. Black==if you are reading this, you're already dead.
Very good idea. Heck, for the red/black we already have a few symbols for(HAZMAT). It'd be nice to know that Paint A is considered 50% more dangerous than Paint B over the current cancer warning on both because of California law.
Anybody stupid enough to _eat_ a playstation pretty much deserves what they get, and a recycle symbol on fluorescent lights might not be bad.
Cans of brake cleaner, motor oil, some paints deserve hazardous material warnings far more than playstations, computers, window cleaner, etc...
I think that this is more or less the point. California has lost sight of 'risk management' in favor of 'risk avoidance'.
The problem? You can't economically avoid all risk. Apple seeds contain a poison/carcinogen. Yet, in order to have a risk of getting cancer from it along the lines of winning the lottery - you'd have to practically eat your body mass in seeds.
Lead is a carcinogen, in fairly massive doses. It'll generally lead to heavy metal poisoning long before you have to worry about it giving you cancer. As a bonus, when contained in a solder you really only have to worry about it if you're drinking water run over it, like in pipes. Sitting in your playstation or DVD player, it's not a concern to anybody but the workers soldering all day, and we have machines for that now.
Yet we spend billions on developing lead free solder techniques that create bonds that are worse than lead ones for these applications*, tending to break more often.
California bans** incandescent light bulbs - then starts screaming and holloring about the relatively tiny amount of mercury in fluorescent bulbs, now the gallium arsenide in LED lights.
When you have those 'contains something california has determined causes cancer' signs on everything, it becomes useless because you can't just chose to use stuff without them, and if you look at the literature the risk is negligible anyways. So it just ends up being a waste of time, effort, and money.
Heck, I'm fairly certain that the gallium in a LED is protected enough that even if a tyke ate a led it'd just come out the other end.
What california should do is set a standard - only the more dangerous cancer causing substances such as cigarettes and asbestos get the warning. Other items with carcinogenic substances have to show how well sealed the substance is/amounts, which is plugged into some sort of equation to see if it requires a sign. Then people will probably pay attention to the signs.
I'm sorry, but this is the sort of stuff that makes people think that the greenies just want to send us back to the stone age.
*You have a point if you're looking at drinking water pipes, but otherwise? **In the future, but play with me
Uh, wasn't that what I said? '#2 pencil bubblesheet variety'
If you have a machine fill them out, that's fine, as long as the paper ballot is the official one, and the individual has a chance to review it before turning it in. Matter of fact, I understand some states do it this way - fudging a ballot box does them no good because all it does is print onto the official ballot, which isn't a vote until it'd deposited into the box.
As for a photo ID requirement, you're right, it's easy to get a photo ID... with any name on it you like.
Not as easy as you might think, in many areas. Part of that is the RealID act, part is states being careful. Different states differ, of course.
The important part is that it requires somebody to get and present a fraudulent ID before submitting a fraudulent vote, which substantially increases the risk of getting caught.
I'll agree that automated fraud is a larger concern, I'll just note that we need to fight voting fraud on all fronts.
This would make it more obvious and easy to vote only for the offices you were interested in voting on. If you don't know the name of the person running for a said office, and have to pick it from a list or worse yet try to figure out if "that one's a democrat" etc, you have no business voting in that office.
Some states have this. No party affiliations on the ballot. If you chose to take in a list of republicans/democrats handily mailed to you before the election, that's your option, just as it's your option to bring in a phone book's worth of notes.
I end up not voting in a number of small elections - like voting for/against a judge I've never heard about.
This is the only WTF I have from reading about the system. I'm sorry, but I believe that an automated scanner is much better, with *random* samples pulled and counted, using an independent system to tally the votes. IE the bulk scanner gives you the results for that pile, it goes into another system for totaling.
Consider that a number of elections have been decided by less than a thousand votes in various states last election.
100 people placing 10 extra votes can throw the election that way.
Yes, I'd say it's an issue.
But your system will prevent many people from voting. Tens of thousands of people don't drive and don't have passsports -- why should you make them jump through lots of (expensive) hoops?
You mean free? About an hour of their time? Most/all people who don't have a driver's license qualify for a free picture ID today. You get it from the same office that issues driver's licenses.
It depends on the area - but I figure that in the worst states, yes, it'd reduce the fraudulent vote more than it denies legitimate voters.
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Excepting the conspiracy theories about BG, this is pretty much what I figure will happen. Outsourcing to India/China encompasses far more than software writing, after all.
Don't forget that once fully industrialized, China and India will be looking to outsource as well.
The other major possible population centers for replacing China and India tend to have some rather severe problems, starting with lower population levels, not to mention the civil wars, the lack of even basic infrastructure in many areas.
Not saying that it won't happen even there, but the increased expense will tend to slow outsourcing stuff down such that the majority of production left in the USA will stay here.
India's economy is nearing recession
While we're arguably in a recession right now. Part of the reason for the slowing of the growth in India is the cost of oil, which is making everything more expensive.
Another part is that expenses in India have hit a point where it's no longer worth the expense to outsource many things there. Without the constant addition of jobs and such from the USA and other countries, growth will slow.
I doubt very much twenty years is enough to bring the median income in India to $30k+.
You'd be surprised, I think. Part of it is that it doesn't have to actually reach median, just reach enough to make outsourcing there uneconomic, on average. You'll always have some back and forth, and that's not a bad thing.
I suspect will return to India with there retirements, spawning industry in India to support their needs.
Putting more demands on the Indian labor pool.
It's creating a self-feeding cycle that I see raising effective wages. The Indian people themselves wanting and consuming more, enjoying a higher style of living, for example.
Besides, it's not just the wages going up in the USA, it's also wage stagnation, deflation happening in the USA.
Then the problem will simply move elsewhere.
Then where else, if not China/India? The only other major non-industrialized areas I can think of are Africa. Africa only has a population of ~922 million. India alone has 1.13B, China 1.3B.
In addition, Africa is crippled by internal strife and warfare in ways that the other two aren't. Even if you toss in the Middle east, that's only another 197 million. South America is 371 million. And I wouldn't consider them unindustrialized.
Even if you add those three regions up, we're still around half that of our current outsourcing targets. Don't forget that at that point China and India will be looking to outsource.
There will always be someone at the bottom of the wage food chain, willing to work for relative peanuts.
True, but in the future I don't see it being nearly as regionalized as it is now, resulting in wholesale outsourcing.
In the American justice system, you have no reason to confess if there is not sufficient evidence of your guilt.
You have to remember, in the USA you pay for your own defense unless you're fiscally unable to. For example, the local justice system would likely expect me to pay my own legal bills, up to several hundred thousand. Otherwise you get a public defender, which tends to be bottom of the barrel.
So you'll get a prosecutor's office that'll offer to plea the multiple felonies you're being accused of, with the max sentence of 60+ years to a simple felony with 1 year in prison or just parole or whatever. Most people start thinking in game theory: 'Well, I'm X% likely to get convicted and get even MORE prison sentence vs copping the plea and serving less, on average'. I'm discounting that the overwhelming majority of people in the justice system have been there before.
When the evidence is shaky, they'll be generous with the plea deals. When the evidence is solid, they won't be.
Now, being the type of person I am, I'm never going to plea to a felony*, no matter the expense.
*Would cost me my right to vote, keep&bear arms, etc...
or much better developed, which would ruin this business model as far as I can see.
It's starting to happen. Give it another 20 years and Indian wages will be high enough that this sort of stuff won't happen because Indian wages will be almost as high as a US worker's wages.
China, I think, will take a bit longer, but I think they'll end up using up their own labor that's coming off the farms and such for the most part during the later stages of their industrialization.
Heck US manufacturing goods exports and domestic production have been increasing recently, and that hasn't happened in years.
Well, not exactly. ;)
Mine was to have everybody throw a few cents in whenever they get a spam, creating a sort of bounty system - somebody would go after a proliferate spammer eventually.
I was going to have it set up as a death pool type system. You pay your money and guess a date. If you're right on the date, you split the money among everybody who got the right date.
Obviously the hitman has a leg up in such a scheme...
Yes. The temporary tags are only good for so long, though that's creating some annoyance here because the state is taking longer to issue plates than what the tags are good for.
Just gotta love that. In addition, I've also heard of an automated speed camera sending a fine notice to a farmer for his antique tractor with a max speed of 8 kph - it said he was doing something in the high 80's with it.
The funny one I saw recently sent a ticket to a guy - the picture showed the car was in the process of being towed.
Of course, they're also throwing the ball back at you - you have to prove you're innocent, not the other way around.
Back on the wireless toll roads, my first thought was that 'they even encrypt garage door openers to prevent this today!'. For anything more serious than a simple inventory, encrypted RFID devices should be the rule.
well, you can't listen to sounds or watch movies on an etched nickel disk through a 1000x microscope
Well, you might want to alter the etching method a bit, but look up phonograph and you'll see that we are quite capable of playing etched sounds... There's even a few examples of video recordings being placed on records.
Of course, go even smaller and use a laser and the sky's pretty much the limit. Still, write large and analoge and your recording will most likely last a lot longer and be simpler to access later on.
On problem with recordings though, again, is copyright - even a performance of Beethoven is copyright the orchestra that made it. Somebody else is free to get their own orchestra together and perform it, but the recording of that performance is copyright.
Though yes, this can be worked out with artist/performer/writer permission. Some are asses, some are not.
We don't use lead in solder pipes (banned in 1986) anymore for the reason not that because it causes cancer but that it leads to lead poising which causes neurological damage. Similar to mercury poisoning but works on the body in a different manner.
Ahem: It'll generally lead to heavy metal poisoning long before you have to worry about it giving you cancer
I'm also unlucky, they didn't ban leaded gas until I was a teen(the dangerous years). Heck, my grandfather ran around with an adaptor for a while so he could put leaded gas in his unleaded vehicle(thanks gramps!). I did eventually put a stop to that.
I'm not objecting to the elimination of leaded gasoline. I'm not objecting to the elimination of lead in water systems - if you're drinking water run over it, like in pipes.
I'm objecting to the worrying about it in places like the soldering of various bits of computing equipment and wires in sealed containers, where it's very unlikely to get into somebody's body.
Mercury is a bit more dangerous because it's easier to ingest, depending. Still a heavy metal, and because it's a liquid at room temperature, more likely to get out into the enviroment if the container is compromised, such as by crushing/shattering. Doesn't mean that the few micrograms in a CFL mandates a $10k cleanup if it hits the carpet. I think it's more likely, especially if it was an older house, that something with a LOT more mercury was spilled there at one time. Such as a thermometer.
The major concern with lead is not cancer. Lead is a neurotoxin, shown in numerous studies to affect brain function and development; increasing the risk of cognitive and behavioral problems.
Please, re-read my sentence #2 where I mention heavy metal poisoning. I am very familiar with the toxic effects of lead, to the point that what most people assumed were radiation effects, I identified as heavy metal poisoning(exposure to a depleted uranium fire without masks).
I was making the point that making manufacturers put signs that warn of carcinogenic substances in the product when the 'substance' is lead is fairly silly. Unless you're ingesting it, it's not a problem. It's inert. It'd still make more sense to stick a 'don't eat this, toxic heavy metals' on the device than a cancer warning.
Now, if you're talking about drinking water pipes, children's toys, paint, etc... Darn right I want you to keep the lead out of it.
I think the problem is less with the usage and more with the disposal.
How does making everybody stick a 'this product contains a substance that the state of California has determined to cause cancer' on their stuff change the disposal method? Heck, it's not even changing construction methods for the most part.
Besides, a lot of the non-cancer causing substances are still poisonous.
We need effective ways to dispose of things - preferably by recycling/recovering - that have harmful components.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that recycling/recovering/reusing stuff period is a good thing - not just if it has harmful components. I just think that we need to develop far more effective ways to perform the recovery/recycling than we currently have.
Because once they're in a landfill, they can get into the ecosystem in a big way (lots of little bits adding up ...) and they don't just "go away" because you stuck them in a landfill.
Modern landfills are very safe and secure. And no, the waste doesn't go away. Matter of fact, we already have archeologists going through the trash to learn stuff. Still, at some point I figure we'll get our recovery/recycling tech up to the point that we'll start digging up the landfills. After all, depending on the makeup of the landfill, the levels of Iron, Aluminum, Titanium, Tin, etc... are higher than many of the ores we're currently extracting for the metals.
but I think we do need to think about the materials we use.
Oh, agreed. It's just that, even state of the art flourescent lights require mercury. It's an order of magnitude less than the amount in the old tubes(back in the '40s), but it's still there. Relatively speaking, it's a tiny amount of mercury, and that tiny bit of mercury, even if you release it at the end of the bulb's life, prevents even more mercury releases into the atmosphere over the usage of incandescent bulbs - mercury is released into the atmosphere with coal power. It depends a bit, but on average even true as long as your power comes from a mix that includes coal.
The same with LEDs. Sure, it uses a toxic material. But we can't work our way around that, and it's ultimately the cleaner alternative due to the superior characteristics of LED bulbs such as higher efficiency, durability and lifespan.
Now, if Cali, the USA, Europe, etc... Had some sort of recycling/reusability rating, then there might be more pressure on manufacturers to make their stuff easy to recycle - not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it doesn't effect usability.
My dad works for a HVAC company, and noticed that many of the highest efficiency AC systems also had high failure rates - certain components were failing on average within 3 years rather than 10+. The reason? To make them efficient they had to be made thin, and the manufacturers hadn't spent the money to make the thinner structures sturdy enough to last by adjusting the metalurgy.
Is saving, say, 90kwh a year worth it if you have to replace your appliance, costing hundreds, in 5 years rather than 20? Would it really be using less resources? It costs money to recycle, after all.
They're not overused, "Corrosive" means *really* corrosive -- most powerful household cleaners are only "Irritant".
While they're the european version, the US does have equivalents, and they look much the same, though 'hazardous for the environment' isn't on the list for the US ones.
And yes - I think that it's important to keep them from being overused, and households shouldn't, by standard, have those sorts of materials in them.
That was merely a suggestion for those who hate seeing them everywhere.
While, you might make an educated guess, what are the types disposed to hypochondria going to do? Or those without the knowledge base to make an educated guess?
I'm not a fan of putting the signs/warnings everywhere because that DOES lead to people ignoring them.
Thus, to keep people from ignoring the signs, you should put them only where they really need to go.
That's what I was arguing for.
Yeah, turns out DDT is more effective and less toxic than the alternatives, and don't affect bird's eggshells when used in moderation. ;)
I was ignoring the AC because he missed my point about putting signs on everything leads to the signs being ineffective.
Federally, we have the same sort of system; It's just that it's reserved for things that are more or less seriously hazardous.
California's problem is that they have the safety standard set so low that EVERYTHING ends up needing their nice, unhelpful label - thus making the label useless because it's marking stuff that's overall very safe and doesn't give you any ability(from the label) to discern whether it has the label because there's a bit of lead in the solder joints(like my LCD panel), or because it's offgassing some gas that'll cause your kids to be born with flippers.
Then you sort out and recycle the electronics stuff.
As for the dump leaching into groundwater - modern dumps are designed to prevent that, and lead doesn't leech that much.
You have to balance this against the tendency for lead free solders to fail sooner - resulting in the WHOLE item in the dump, more often than not.
A color coded system might do consumers well. No color==mostly OK. Green==Don't eat a bunch of this, it's not good for you. Yellow==Take care when using this, ventilation is a good idea and long term exposure is probably going to hurt you. Red==For the love of all that is holly, wear a respirator or leave it for the pros. Black==if you are reading this, you're already dead.
Very good idea. Heck, for the red/black we already have a few symbols for(HAZMAT). It'd be nice to know that Paint A is considered 50% more dangerous than Paint B over the current cancer warning on both because of California law.
Anybody stupid enough to _eat_ a playstation pretty much deserves what they get, and a recycle symbol on fluorescent lights might not be bad.
Cans of brake cleaner, motor oil, some paints deserve hazardous material warnings far more than playstations, computers, window cleaner, etc...
I think that this is more or less the point. California has lost sight of 'risk management' in favor of 'risk avoidance'.
The problem? You can't economically avoid all risk. Apple seeds contain a poison/carcinogen. Yet, in order to have a risk of getting cancer from it along the lines of winning the lottery - you'd have to practically eat your body mass in seeds.
Lead is a carcinogen, in fairly massive doses. It'll generally lead to heavy metal poisoning long before you have to worry about it giving you cancer. As a bonus, when contained in a solder you really only have to worry about it if you're drinking water run over it, like in pipes. Sitting in your playstation or DVD player, it's not a concern to anybody but the workers soldering all day, and we have machines for that now.
Yet we spend billions on developing lead free solder techniques that create bonds that are worse than lead ones for these applications*, tending to break more often.
California bans** incandescent light bulbs - then starts screaming and holloring about the relatively tiny amount of mercury in fluorescent bulbs, now the gallium arsenide in LED lights.
When you have those 'contains something california has determined causes cancer' signs on everything, it becomes useless because you can't just chose to use stuff without them, and if you look at the literature the risk is negligible anyways. So it just ends up being a waste of time, effort, and money.
Heck, I'm fairly certain that the gallium in a LED is protected enough that even if a tyke ate a led it'd just come out the other end.
What california should do is set a standard - only the more dangerous cancer causing substances such as cigarettes and asbestos get the warning. Other items with carcinogenic substances have to show how well sealed the substance is/amounts, which is plugged into some sort of equation to see if it requires a sign. Then people will probably pay attention to the signs.
I'm sorry, but this is the sort of stuff that makes people think that the greenies just want to send us back to the stone age.
*You have a point if you're looking at drinking water pipes, but otherwise?
**In the future, but play with me
Uh, wasn't that what I said? '#2 pencil bubblesheet variety'
If you have a machine fill them out, that's fine, as long as the paper ballot is the official one, and the individual has a chance to review it before turning it in. Matter of fact, I understand some states do it this way - fudging a ballot box does them no good because all it does is print onto the official ballot, which isn't a vote until it'd deposited into the box.
As for a photo ID requirement, you're right, it's easy to get a photo ID... with any name on it you like.
Not as easy as you might think, in many areas. Part of that is the RealID act, part is states being careful. Different states differ, of course.
The important part is that it requires somebody to get and present a fraudulent ID before submitting a fraudulent vote, which substantially increases the risk of getting caught.
I'll agree that automated fraud is a larger concern, I'll just note that we need to fight voting fraud on all fronts.
This would make it more obvious and easy to vote only for the offices you were interested in voting on. If you don't know the name of the person running for a said office, and have to pick it from a list or worse yet try to figure out if "that one's a democrat" etc, you have no business voting in that office.
Some states have this. No party affiliations on the ballot. If you chose to take in a list of republicans/democrats handily mailed to you before the election, that's your option, just as it's your option to bring in a phone book's worth of notes.
I end up not voting in a number of small elections - like voting for/against a judge I've never heard about.
and then wand scanned by hand.
This is the only WTF I have from reading about the system. I'm sorry, but I believe that an automated scanner is much better, with *random* samples pulled and counted, using an independent system to tally the votes. IE the bulk scanner gives you the results for that pile, it goes into another system for totaling.
Consider that a number of elections have been decided by less than a thousand votes in various states last election.
100 people placing 10 extra votes can throw the election that way.
Yes, I'd say it's an issue.
But your system will prevent many people from voting. Tens of thousands of people don't drive and don't have passsports -- why should you make them jump through lots of (expensive) hoops?
You mean free? About an hour of their time? Most/all people who don't have a driver's license qualify for a free picture ID today. You get it from the same office that issues driver's licenses.
It depends on the area - but I figure that in the worst states, yes, it'd reduce the fraudulent vote more than it denies legitimate voters.