alt Hacker NewsBanned in California
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The Grandfatherd-in section is incredibly misleading. Look at the Semiconductor Fabrication section, for example. The implication is that these are the only fabs in the state, they wouldn't be able to get new permits today, and the red dots indicate that it would be "effectively impossible" to open any other ones. In fact (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...) there are at least 18 fabs in California, and these are just two random examples of particularly old ones. Obviously they couldn't reopen under the same permits they got in the 60s, why would anyone expect that to be the case?
Listen y’all, it’s not just that we aren't letting companies spew chemicals into the air. The permitting and regulatory process is so extremely hostile that even when you want to and are able to do so safely and without emissions, it’s impossible.
Instead you have to ship things from out of state and other countries, which generates emissions and pollution itself that might actually be more than local production.
Its the same issue as housing. Endless rules and regulations, many of which make no attempt at doing anything but block, cause the wealth of socirty to be siphoned away. An apartment project in LA with permits complete is worth twice as much as one without. How do we see this and expect our economy to do anything except drown in bureaucracy?
My advice is dont ever manufacturing anything in CA. They will try and kill your business for simply existing no matter how perfect you are.
Oh I didn’t realize pineapple farms were banned in California and Alaska.
I thought they hadn’t been built for other reasons over the last decade. But according to this, not being built means banned. TIL!
Started reading this site but the massive gaps in logic and reasoning are like nails on a chalkboard.
No new fabs being built in CA means fabs are banned?!
Okay well fabs are banned in pretty much the whole country then, so why call out California?
Just because something isn’t done doesn’t mean it’s banned. Neither is it necessarily bad. There’s a lot of reasons why not to build certain things certain areas - labor cost, earthquake risk, land is more desired leading to higher cost, blah blah blah
That doesn’t mean something is banned. Maybe we should look at making some things easier but this website is just a hit piece and has a clear motivation rather than being a trustworthy evaluation.
It’s like those cringy billboards on highway 5 about Gavin newsom and water.
Edit —— Complaining that large factories can’t easily be built in dense population centers like the Bay Area means things are banned is weird - who in the right mind thinks a sprawling factory with emissions should go smack dab in the middle of population centers? Why can’t we build a new nuclear plant in Manhattan or maybe an oil refinery on wall street!? Waah waah so outrageous! None were built in the last decade so it’s the outrageous regulations fault! I want my lead battery smelter in downtown Portland but Oregon banned it! Waah waah!
Aside that, this site is mostly blaming California regulations for the nationwide manufacturing issues driven heavily by free trade
They are playing a bit fast and loose with the word "banned".
> Your smartphone contains materials processed through semiconductor fabrication, chemical etching, metal anodizing, glass tempering, and electroplating — none of which you could start a new facility for in California without years of litigation.
I agree that we should make it easier to do things, specifically by decreasing the amount of litigation involved in doing stuff. But the risk of a bunch of litigation isn't a ban, right? I get that it's trying to be attention-grabbing, but calling it a ban when it's not just sort of confuses the issue.
As a resident who likes to breathe clean air and drink clean water, none of that seems all that bad.
I guess there should be an ability to do this farther from the population centers though.
It's interesting, but is there some conflation of regional restrictions with the state of California?
Example: cites automotive paint shop restrictions as the quintessential example of what you can't do in CA, and qualifies it with a specific Bay Area regulation.
Let's be honest: People have no problem polluting elsewhere as long as they can consume the final product without suffering the consequences. TFA isn't important to the people of California.
Interesting website.
"Semiconductor Fabrication (7nm/5nm)
The main processor requires ultra-clean rooms, toxic gases (arsine, phosphine), and chemical etching. No new fabs have been built in CA in over a decade. Intel, TSMC, and Samsung all build elsewhere."
Phosphine is pretty nasty stuff. California was full of EPA Superfund sites when the government got stuck with cleaning up all the toxic waste. Politicians and voters went, "Eff that!" after manufacturers left the state, but left their barrels of shit behind.
They lost me at "vacuum deposition - impossible" without justification. As far as processes go it's one of the safest (everything happens in a sealed vacuum chamber). Maybe the solvents used to clean prior to coating?
I wonder if there's a law+econ analysis of comparing the current framework (regulations and upfront permitting) vs having the regulations but then enforcement via combination of randomized gov't inspections and private lawsuits. The motivation would be to allow things to move faster while also requiring the same degree of compliance, but without the massive red tape upfront with administrators having no real incentive to approve projects or move fast. One obvious downside is that it effectively creates an economic incentive to try and skirt the law and/or find loopholes, but that arguably exists to the same degree in the existing system.
So no new car paint shops or oil refineries? I'm okay with that.
The site would be better if it linked to the actual regulation that prohibits each type of business instead of just making the claim “0 new factories of this type have been built”.
Probably helpful to add why, otherwise this is just seems intended to trigger biases
Are other states building all this manufacturing/semiconductor capacity? I think it's an overall USA thing, we just don't do manufacturing anymore because it's cheaper to do it in another country.
Not sure what the point of the website is. To me it looks like a bad faith argument. The secular trend in the US has been to increase margins by moving manufacturing to other countries.
The tariffs are certainly not making it easier to manufacture domestically.
CA is currently importing gas from Bermuda via the Panama Canal:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/02/16/gasoline-starved-cali...
I appreciate some of the arguments here about pushing pollution outside the state, but this is madness.
Half the states in the country are actively deregulating all of this stuff. Why not take your factories there? California is anyways too expensive.
This kinda makes me wanna move to CA. someone should take these list items and make a map of those fabs in the US so we can avoid moving near them.
My favorite banned in CA is the "off roster" handguns that the police can buy and sell to the people of CA at a markup.
A lot of these are stretches or remove nuance. I get the point they are trying to make, but it's a lot weaker than they think and undermined by their own "hero" example: painting cars in California
> A modern auto paint shop emits volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during primer, base coat, and clear coat application. The Bay Area AQMD makes permitting a new paint shop nearly impossible. This is THE classic example of what you can't do in CA.
Ah yes, the Bay Area, famously "all of California". And on top of that, the restrictions are mostly in highly populated areas.
> California has outsourced its industrial base while still consuming the products.
America did that. If it was just California then they could import iPhone parts from Alabama, but they don't do that do they?
How do the new manufacturing startups in the Bay Area and El Segundo deal with these limitations?
I confess I don't know what to make of this. Without seeing the reasons why these are banned, what is the point? Would be like lamenting how you can't use asbestos. Sure, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
The claim that aluminum anodizing is "banned in California" because of the sulfuric acid waste it produces is patently absurd. There are no shortage of labs, factories, and more in California that use sulfuric acid, and they all figure out how to dispose of their waste without going "fuck it, YOLO it into the river".
Is this a lobbying initiative?
Surely the answer is not let's just allow to pillage, pollute and extort again to build a car, ship or phone.
I like clean air, and rivers. They are good for every being.
I don't want to make a mess in my yard but I don't care if your yard is a mess and I'll buy it
Why not invest in ways to make these processes more eco friendly?
What about "Things banned in Texas"? or "Idaho"?
This has 70 upvotes within 30 minutes. This feels like an astroturf.
Lot of things could be added to this list. Good luck getting permission to start a hospital, or permission to mine/refine anything with a slightly messy process (e.g. rare earth metals). You can't build a new port. The California Coastal Commission won't let you open a new hotel anywhere on the water. You can't even keep a bar open late in San Francisco.
But don't you get it? We're moving up the value chain to things only WE can do.
Got a new one. In California—the only place that matters in tech—all operating systems must implement age verification by Jan 1, 2027. Which means this is coming to a computer near you, worldwide.
California can do a lot to private companies, but the supremacy clause allows the federal government to do what it wants. If a business wants to engage in these illegal-in-California practices, they could partner with the federal government.
Edit: Now that I’m doing the research a partnership isn’t even needed, just a contract. Which makes sense, the feds cannot hire a private individual to do what would be illegal for them to do themselves… conversely, a company who is contracted to do federal business also enjoys supremacy by virtue of acting for the feds.
I love that "The Grandfathered In" section. Here's just one sample of a place that presumably this stupid website wants to keep up and running:
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-10-04/chevron...
The guy who made this site is selling a $7k stove? Good luck with that, my dude.
honestly, you couldn't even build your own house.
The newest thing I've seen:
"compostable - except in CA"
Guess we can add free (from age verification) operating systems to that list now as well.
As a Californian:
1) They forgot to list Kid Rock (https://x.com/GovPressOffice/status/1969256868364095868)
2) Good, I'm glad this toxic shit is banned.
3) I wish people that constantly complained about California's regulations/taxes/politics would just quietly see their way out rather than obsessively whine about it. Enjoy Texas/Florida/wherever you go. We'll be ok without you.
Is hosting a website in California banned? /s
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They just really, really want to be European.
Just look at what they've done about rebuilding the Palisades, and the nonsense they've perpetrated, allowing people to live and build in places that are completely impossible to make safe to live because of incredibly stupid bureacratic policy conflicts. And then the staggering mismanagement of water resources, allowing huge tax breaks and claims on water rights to giant corporations, then completely taxing and running out farmers and landowners with legacy rights, making it impossible for them to live there.
At least if they drive everyone productive out of the state, the environment will be pristine.
It's like some insanely scaled up version of gentrification, but in the most aggressively, offensively stupid way possible. California is a tasteless joke.
The creator of the website is the CEO of a battery-powered induction cooktop company. (https://x.com/sdamico)
He clearly has an agenda against what he perceives as onerous environmental regulations: https://x.com/sdamico/status/2026536815902208479 https://x.com/sdamico/status/2026552845294792994