Oscars? I usually reach for the remote when they come on.
Sailboats too large to be kept trailered are an expensive hobby for certain. And if yours were wood, well, you wouldn’t be here because you’d be too busy doing maintenance.
As regards the brake pads, I’m sure this new indicator is helping some out-of-touch regulator feel good about him/herself, but I seriously doubt if the markings are doing any good whatsoever for anything whatsoever. I file it under the category of “more BS”.
Well, it’s nice that we are conscious of the copper in the brake linings of our overly large and needlessly powerful cars that we race towards the next red light.
The markings are there to show compliance with regulations and are required in order to be sold. I think it is more ridiculous to continue to harp on the fact that no end consumer cares about them. OF COURSE THEY DON’T. They also don’t care about catalytic converters, oil/battery recycling or any other measure that has been undertaken to improve the environment everyone lives in. They are out of touch with the reality of the totality/scope of the problem (as apparently are a number of responders here). It’s far easier to stick one’s head in the sand and deny there may be a problem. Maybe if you care to educate yourself, look up the rationale for WEEE and REACH sometime and where exactly they originated…nah, much easier to just proclaim it’s BS…
But STILL…?
What good is the sticker ?
If it were to produce a difference in the market supply and demand…by allowing the purchasing public to actively choose one over the other…
Why is it so ambiguous…un-explained…un-marked…and un-publicized ?
Problem is for a hundred bucks I could print up a lifetime supply of those stickers. So maybe we need EPA inspectors in the plants like the ag de tpt.
Isn’t that the problem with any new regulation? You can enact the law but then you need to spend time and resources ensuring that the public is complying with the law.
Washington outlawed lead wheel weights a few years ago but I have yet to have any state enforcement agent come by and inspect my wheel weight inventory.
I think they outlaw things like lead weights or lead shot in guns, and figure the supply will be used up over time. No one’s going to go around to every shop and test every weight in stock. Although there is a risk that, 5 years from now, some idiot that let his kid put old lead weights in his mouth will sue you for poisoning the child of a jerk.
I think I am happy that the pads don’t have Asbestos in them any more, so I might be in favor of some regulation.
“I think they outlaw things like lead weights or lead shot in guns, and figure the supply will be used up over time.”
Yeah, that’s the beauty of it! They are “supply-side” regs–prevent the sale, and existing stock eventually gets used up. Of course, they don’t count on resourceful folks like me who know how to salvage, scrounge, and cobble together parts for yesterday’s (frequently superior) tech indefinitely. I’ve got a 6.5 HP Lawnboy 2-Stroke that is the only push mower I can count on not to bog down when cutting a swath through knee-high Bermuda grass. I use it on hills so steep, I have to wear baseball cleats not to slide off!
It’s just a shame that “American ingenuity” has gone from a laudable attribute to a quasi-outlaw behavior 
Non toxic shot is only federally mandated for migratory waterfowl hunting. You can still shoot rabbits, doves, and clay pigeons with lead shot except maybe in California.
It’s not really auto related except on general principles related to recycling but the local news here this evening provided a story about copper theft and unfortunately, leaves another black eye for OK.
He paid the 3 inmates 120 dollars to gut the sirens and sold the copper for 160 dollars. Fits right in with other politicians; the only difference is the scale.
I see now why ostriches stick their heads in a hole in the ground; they’re ashamed of some of their own species…
The pipes, who has a house with lead pipes?
WHAT??? We go from stickers on brake pads 5 months ago then jump to petty organized crime…
Somewhere back there copper was being discussed and it occurred to me that copper napthenate is the wood preservative used in treated lumber these days and there are several copper napthenate products available to the public for various uses. Creosote was the most common wood treatment for many years but it’s now restricted as copper will soon be I guess.
I am much more concerned for the long term ill effects of GMO than copper in brake pads or fence posts.
There are a large number of scientific studies that show GMO foods are biologically equivalent to non-GMO foods – i.e, they’re not going to hurt you. Just to use corn as an example, it’s all GMO. Some was modified in a lab, and the rest was modified by generational selective breeding over hundreds of years by people who wanted larger, more nutritious kernels from their teosinte.
By contrast, there are also a large number of scientific studies that demonstrate the harm caused by heavy metals and other environmental hazards.
Based on the science, I’m gonna be a lot more worried about what they’re putting in my brake pads than I am about whether the corn I’m eating was genetically modified through generational selective breeding or direct gene insertion.
There are a large number of scientific studies that show GMO foods are biologically equivalent to non-GMO foods -- i.e, they're not going to hurt you. Just to use corn as an example, it's all GMO
There were several scientific studies showing that feeding cows the remains of dead cows was not harming the cow or the people that consumed the cow’s meat. We all now know that the scientific study was WRONG…thousands of cows and a few hundred people affected with mad-cow disease.
The vast majority of GMO foods is for herbicide tolerance. Companies who produced GMO’s were warned years before the first GMO plant was ever planted…that most plants will cross-pollinate. There are now super weeds in nature that weren’t there before GMO’s.
The long term impact of GMO’s is unknown. Unfortunately it’s almost impossible to stay away.
Actually a lot of GMO products these days are also to reduce the need for herbicide. Bt corn is a good example. It’s engineered to produce a protein that destroys insect digestive systems (but is harmless to non-insects because their digestive systems work differently). You don’t have to use as much pesticide to keep the bugs away. This is a good thing.
I’d be interested in seeing a scientific paper discussing the super weeds and the link to GMO cross polination. Especially since most of the sources I find discussing them are from envrio-scare websites that are on the order of the anti-vax movement.
I would suspect these “super weeds” are more likely evolving a resistance to the pesticides we’re spraying on them because that’s how evolution works. Organisms which resist dying from a new harmful environmental factor tend to breed more organisms which resist dying from that environmental factor. This is also the mechanism behind “super bugs” which are antibiotic resistant.
I'd be interested in seeing a scientific paper discussing the super weeds and the link to GMO cross polination.
OK - Here’s one.
Many local farmers are now shying away from GMO seeds…and starting to use the time honored method of crop rotation. They are actually saving money and less run-off into out water supply.
From that paper:
Why have GR weeds become such a serious problem? Heavy reliance on a single herbicide – glyphosate (Roundup) -- has placed weed populations under progressively intense, and indeed unprecedented, selection pressure
Yes, so as I said, it’s not the GM crop cross pollinating, it’s the farmers using the same pesticide over and over again year after year, and weeds are evolving a resistance to it. This is the same thing that is happening in disease, because doctors over-prescribe antibiotics, and bacteria strains evolve antibiotic resistance via natural selection.
You will get no argument from me that farms in general are environmental disasters (which is just one of the many reasons I’m so vehemently opposed to corn-based ethanol fuels for vehicles). Especially in large/factory farms, farmers do what’s best for crop yields and therefore profits, and don’t think too much about what today’s practices will lead to down the road.
Heck, with the Bt corn I talked about, farmers were told that they had to use a certain amount of pesticide or the corn would lose effectiveness because insects would evolve a resistance to Bt corn if the ones who managed to survive it weren’t killed off. The farmers didn’t because it was cheaper not to and so few insects survived it that they still got great yields. And now, guess what? Those few survivors had lots of babies, and now insects have a resistance to gen-1 Bt corn.
What I’m getting at is that GMO technology is not inherently bad. I’ll readily agree that farmer misuse of the technology can lead to bad things, but farmer misuse of technology has been leading to bad things since farms were invented, from slash-and-burn to DDT to helping insects and weeds evolve resistance to our control methods.