Comment by rswail
19 hours ago
This is whining from someone that doesn't want to be responsible for the externality of pollution that these manufacturing facilities generate.
The regulations are to stop the pollution, if you can manufacture without polluting, then you'll comply and be able to manufacture.
The problem is that there are other regulatory environments where the people aren't protected from pollution.
What would fix that is enforcing the regulations nation wide, then applying tariffs on imported products that don't enforce the same regulations.
Net result, more expensive phones, better health and improved environment for the public. In the same way as car pollution was cleaned up.
Thanks for confirming my suspicion! When I read phrases like "Battery cells require electrode coating with toxic solvents (NMP), electrolyte handling, and formation cycling. This is exactly why Tesla's Gigafactory went to Reno." I (as someone not very familiar with the subject) thought it's strange that California should regulate what kind of chemicals can be used in an industrial process. Of course, they don't - but they regulate that industry can't release toxic chemicals into the environment. But because Elon thinks it's too expensive to make sure that no NMP gets out of his factory, he goes to his Republican pals in Texas or Nevada who don't worry about pollution...
That's certainly one interpretation. Most of the workers there keep doing what they do to protect the environment though, so it's entirely plausible that they are taking precautions to save the environment, but find the method in which the regulations are implemented to be slow or arcane. If it's anything like cybersecurity in the government, the laborious process of filling out irrelevant paperwork is orthogonal to actually accomplishing the initial goals.
If there's anything I have learned with age it's that regulations have bizarre unintended consequences. The incentives are too numerous and too precariously balanced to muck with without tipping someone's seesaw right into a volcano.
>laborious process of filling out irrelevant paperwork is orthogonal to actually accomplishing the initial goals.
Well yes, it's designed so that a handful of teenagers can't just clone the IRS database, for example.
...because dumping stuff into the middle of what is already a barren wasteland isn't actually a problem.
The Gigafactory is less than 20 miles from a drinking water reservoir (and recreation area) in one direction, and the city of Reno in the other.
~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.
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NMP in particular readily biodegrades in aerobic environments, both in water treatment plants and just in water. Bacteria seem to crack it quickly. It's also not volatile. You have to protect yourself while working with it, but it's not comparable to really nasty stuff, like heavy metals.
I'm not aware of many (non-manmade) barren wastelands on Terra. Even the Empty Quarter has wildlife. About the only place I can think of would be something like the Dead Sea.
It’s not like the health of the public stopped Lonnie from installing a bunch of generators near poorer neighborhoods in Tennessee.
The desert is not a "barren wasteland." It is a valuable, vibrant ecosystem no different than any other.
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The regulatory bureaucracy is a real hurdle. Even if you want to comply with the regulations, navigating the regulatory bureaucracy is a killer. Super slow, super expensive, quite opaque, somewhat arbitrary, and highly punitive.
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.
Yeah I think there are two problems
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.
> It's a collateral damage of all the (even well-intentioned, good) regulation that drives business away.
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.
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> China has more naval vessels than the US
... what?
Yeah, everyone wants faster bureaucracy until they see the cost estimate for proper staffing, then just pretending there wasn't any harm to regulate in the first place becomes the preferred option.
Agreed that staffing the bureaucracy with good people costs a lot.
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.
Every bureaucracy I've ever experienced is constantly complaining about being under-staffed, but when they get more funding, the service level rarely improves. It seems like complaining about 'over-work' is just an easy excuse for doing a bad job, which makes sense given how many friends I have in government who are constantly complaining about their lazy and inept colleagues.
I think that one solution might be making it much easier to sue companies for their externalities and then loosen the regulation. IMHO, all that regulation is necessary primarily because methods of controlling the corpos and the rich have broken down.
China has reduced its pollution massively since the 90s while aggressively expanding its industrial output. And they have done it without excessive bureaucracy and delays in construction. In the US environmental laws are not about the environment at all. They are there to enrich lawyers who profit from multi year permitting processes and lawsuits.
> China has reduced its pollution massively since the 90s while aggressively expanding its industrial output. And they have done it without excessive bureaucracy
China's system is authoritarian state-capitalism. It is precisely the bureaucracy that steered it's industries toward this outcome.
It helps you can buy an electric car in China for 1/4th the price as California. They also massively invested in every sort of energy (not just solar) where it's cheap and affordable to develop industry. Everyone obsesses about labour costs but almost everything is easier and cheaper to build in China because they allow stuff to be built there. Including the workers far lower housing, utilities, fuel, and food prices which lower the cost of living.
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Don't forget Insurance companies! They define and enforce a lot of the requirements too, it's also why all the new parks look the same.
It really helps when the government can just disappear someone when they don't play along with government edicts.
Don't worry, we in the US will get to enjoy that soon enough.
> In the US environmental laws are not about the environment at all.
that is literally nonsense .. lazy nonsense, ill-willed nonsense.. Ignorant nonsense.
literally four seconds to search " history of us environmental law"
The phones might not even be more expensive in the long term, if we’re just in an easier-to-discover local maximum in efficacy x cost x pollution space.
> What would fix that is enforcing the regulations nation wide, then applying tariffs on imported products that don't enforce the same regulations.
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.
I want a more efficient truck!
I don't think that will work. There's simply no viable path towards that much coordination; especially when late stage capitalism ensures that most people are living too hand to mouth to be able to worry about stuff like the environment.
We've kicked the can down the road. Stuff used to cost more; now we make everything out of plastic overseas. Once all of those economies are wealthy enough to start caring about the environment (and I'm convinced we'll get there), pollution will have to be dealt with globally.
Maybe by then we'll have returned to building products which last (although I'm not holding my breath).
And starts out with a Musk quote, to boot. (Assuming it's not made up wholesale; could not verify.)
We need to push these people out of California.
By “these people” do you mean the people who actually make things?
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 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.
I think "these people" referred to the people who write articles like this one.
What’s funny is how much the chuds try to frame revulsion at white supremacy as “political disagreement” and “derangement.” As I was raised, this is actually just deadass “normal.”
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.
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Why is disliking racists political. What do words even mean.
> 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.