All the highly educated and well connected residents, rich and powerful corporations, and even local governments can't do anything about it, because it is grandfathered in by federal law. It doesn't even appear on many lists of top polluters because many people who compile such lists only include power plants, and it is not a power plant.
It's a real world counterexample for people who say we can just turn off the switch of things we don't like (AI being the usual such thing). Well, good luck with that, if there are laws saying you can't... which there will be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanente_Quarry
Which is not owned by Kaiser Permanente?
https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/our-story/our-history/how...
I've left Silicon Valley since I read it. And having read it, I hope to never move back.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/brchannel/Map-The-Chemical-Legacy...
TCE has a distinctive smell - sweet, like cookie dough or donuts. You'll know if you're in an area contaminated by it - I've smelled it at the Google Quad campus and some of the residential areas around it. (The area around Evandale is particularly bad, I've smelled it just driving through some of the residential streets there.) Some of the other chemicals used in semicoductor manufacture are odorless, though.
Most of the contamination is in industrial or office park zones, so I'd be more worried about your workplace than your home, and many of the spills are plain old gasoline (from service stations) which you can have anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafencity https://osm.org/go/0HoGuvP~t--?m=
they inject something into the compacted sand of the former quays/piers which makes you think you are getting high. At least it smells like electrical insulating paint i had to work with a long time ago. Open the drum and hold your breath, or get dizzy.
Was a few weeks ago, in the middle of the night while i was on S/Nightseeing tour. Two large tractors with large liquid trailers which had centipede-like appendages on each side, maybe 10 to 12 "legs" and fully automated. Stop, ram the legs into the ground and loudly squirt a minute or so, move on, repeat. The whole area stank! Never seen or heard of something like this before. Apparently it's called Geo Injection to stabilize the ground, or impregnate against water. Nothing about this in the local media at all.
I'm suspicious. Why in the middle of the night at 2 to 3 AM?
A few days ago i've been on tour again, also during the night, maybe 7km/4.35miles downstream while the Elbe was at low tide. Same intense smell, though no construction site in sight.
I moved to Europe from SF bay area years ago, coinciding with the birth of my son, and this was one of the factors.
And an entertaining rant by a UC Berkeley Health Physicist, on D&D (Decontamination & Demolition): http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2019/05/a-stream-of-consciousne...
Also, if Stanford did this retrofitting, that implies that maybe FB did not do enough when they were there?
The housing disclosures have more info on the contamination and retrofitting: https://universityterrace.stanford.edu/disclosures
Its not a competition. The article is saying SV is badly polluted. Pointing out that China might be worse just means there's another problem; that's redundant information in the context of talking about SV.
No one said it was, and nothing said detracts from SV. I think it's an interesting question I wouldn't have otherwise thought about. Fifty years from now will China be talking about the same environmental issues we're talking about now? Will it be better or worse?
I find it deeply ironic how everybody talks about what the US has to do to stop climate change; while China just goes about its business making the situation exponentially worse without anybody really caring.
As an American, my first thought it when it comes to most issues tends to be "what can we, America, do to make things better." This leads me to vote a certain way, consume a certain way, and live a certain way. I understand that out countries are doing their own things and having their own problems, but there's fewer mechanisms in place for the average person outside that nation to affect change (and depending on the structure of the government, there might not even be that much for people IN the nation to do).
I care that China has bad aspects of how their government works. But the low hanging fruit for me is to try and pressure the people in my neighborhood (either literally or metaphorically) towards better decisions. "Change start at home" and all that.
The problem is that the low hanging fruit in America has been picked 30+ years ago. The things Americans can do to meaningfully impact climate change involve deep systemic changes - eating less meat, use of plastics, use of cars, general consumerism, etc. The impact of changing those would be big, but so is the level of effort involved.
China doesn’t really have superfund sites, in that they don’t have a specific category for expensive cleanup projects.
I'd challenge anyone who thinks we know all of them in the USA.
It doesn't even take the corruption that a big employer in a small town automatically creates to have a 'hidden' superfund site.
It only takes the lack of dedicated professionals testing everything all the time. Tracking sources and types of pollution is _not only_ difficult, highly technical work that requires a lot of infrastructure- but it also _requires its own R&D to keep up with new industrial chemicals_. This means it's fiercely expensive, manpower-limited, and that it takes a long, long time.
What country is going to dedicate that amount of resources to find problems that'll cost even more money to clean up (or possibly can't be cleaned up at all)? Maybe Norway. Maybe.
https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...
Meanwhile, Nature's story about climate change (The hard truths of climate change — by the numbers) got flagged and disappeared quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042101
There is no better way to show what "tech bubble" means.
Plus, "The people's voice matters. We must democratize everything... as long as they only agree with me."
Reality is, silicon valley is not really different from the old titans of industry. One difference, the old assholes were upfront "You need something, I hire people to make it, and I'm in it for the money." The valley, "I'm here for you. You giving me your money is the best way to make the world a better place through [insert disruptive product]. You'll be happy with a lighter wallet. We're going to save the world together."
So if you have a segment of engineers who believe living in SV is "smart" financially... do you really want them to make opinions on government spending? I'm not saying that "people not living in Cali" are instantly money smart. But, you don't quickly take financial advice from a friend that's gone bankrupt twice, is always in crippling debt due to overspending and throws money at ideas largely based on keywords.
I guess my long drawn out rant is just the problem where lots of folks consider SV "smart". Thus they're allowed to have an affecting opinion on things they're truly not "smart" about.
It's much more likely is that everyone's well aware of climate change (I'm sure I've read many hundreds of articles over my lifetime), but this is the first many people have heard of SV pollution (it certainly is for me).
I'm missing something.
What exactly is the agenda?
Maybe front page rank isn’t about how important or pressing the story is?
2) It's generally frowned upon to comment about "why isn't this story getting more upvotes", etc. In other words, it's not adding value to the conversation, so please refrain from doing so and use the upvote/flagging features if you feel outraged something isn't getting the attention it deserves.
3) If you don't like something on the frontpage then don't upvote it. Simple.
4) I don't live in SV, but many people who are "Hackers" do. The article specifically targets tech companies who have offices in SV and are impacting the environment.
If HN runs simply on what people consider politically important, it might as well shut down and just be a redirect to the Huffington Post or something. There is abundant evidence that online communities end up in certain strange attractors [1], and the dominant political narrative of the day is one of the strongest ones.
I didn't flag the particular article in question, but yes, I absolutely flag any article that can be replaced with little or no loss with $POPULAR_POLITICAL_NARRATIVE_IS_TRUE, regardless of which narrative it is, even the ones I more-or-less agree with. I doubt HN is anybody's sole source of news and it doesn't need to join the stampeding horde of other websites who publish that article 20 times a day.
[1]: A math term, not a term of judgment.
I am honestly not sure if I want to continue to participate in this community.
