[time-nuts] OT: RoHS crap

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <45AC324E.9070102 at erols.com>, Chuck Harris writes:

Chuck, you are entitled to your opinions, but some of your
assumptions indicate that you havn't been in Europe for
any amount of time, so I'll just correct those of of your
mistakes that applies to over here:

>Oh darn!   Another toothless regulation.

Calling anything with a 99.9% success rate toothless is stupid.

>Incinerators are a perfect place to scrub these metals out of the
>waste stream.  Perhaps we need to perfect the pollution controls
>on incinerators? ...or better still, eliminate incinerators?

Europe does not have vast tracts of land we can use for landfills,
and we care enough about the oceans to not just dump our shit
unfiltered into them.

>That logic doesn't follow:  The lead in gasoline was by design destined
>to enter the atmosphere.

No.  Originally it was argued that it would deposit inside the
exhaust and be eliminated/recycled along with the car.

Then much later on, independent researches found lots of lead in
city smog and only after they directly proved its heritage did Ethyl
Corp admit that "could be a possibility" and that they never really
researched it in the first place.

>The only reason lead was taken out of gasoline was to
>facilitate catalytic converters, and smog reduction.

No.  The reason lead was taken out of gasoline was to reduce
the amount of lead in childrens blood.

>> Finally I'll cordially remind you gentlemen that there were similar
>> dire predictions when gasoline additives where changed from alcohols
>> to ethyl-lead and again when ethyl-lead was banned.
>
>Of course cars now cost 5 to 10 times as much as they did in 1976 when
>lead was banned from gasoline in the US.  In the US, this fact keeps a
>lot of very old, and marginally safe cars on the road.

And ?  Would it have been better to keep polluting our kids with lead ?

Or are you saying that cars are 5 to 10 times as expensive because
of the catalytic converter ?

Anyway, it's hard to take seriously any complaint about cars from
a country where the most asked for extra feature is the roof mounted
machine-gun for the hummer :-)

>> (Who will use SnPb solder until he runs out, probably 10 years from now.)
>
>I'm sorry Poul, if you use that Sn/Pb solder, knowing what you *know*,
>then you are a hypocrite.

No it isn't.

I bought my current roll of solder four years ago and you can still
barely see that I've used any of it, so the amount of lead we are
talking about is vanishing small (hence the 10 years).  Furthermore
the resulting constructions only leave my lab for certified electronics
recycling.

There is such a thing like personal responsibility, even without
a constitutional right to bear guns :-)

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.