Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Mill Valley joins effort to constrain 5G proliferation
The city of Mill Valley has enacted an urgency ordinance to regulate "small cell" towers amid concerns that cellphone companies want to grow their 5G networks and install new equipment in Marin. "We do intend to do more work and studies to craft a permanent ordinance within the next year," Mill Valley Mayor Stephanie Moulton-Peters said Friday. "The urgency ordinance has standards to limit and prohibit the installations of devices in residential neighborhoods, but there is more that we can do."
The decision came on a unanimous vote by the City Council on Thursday, after residents from across Marin packed the council chambers as part of a campaign urging local officials to block cellphone companies from attempting to build 5G towers in the county. No proposals for 5G towers have been submitted to Mill Valley, staff said.
The issue is that 5G towers, which would allow for faster and higher-capacity video streaming and other transmissions, could exacerbate health symptoms already suspected as a result of exposure to electromagnetic fields, according to the EMF Safety Network, a group advocating to keep communities EMF-free. Those symptoms can include fatigue, headaches, sleep problems, anxiety, heart problems, learning and memory disorders, ringing in the ears and increased cancer risk, according to the EMF Safety Network website.
"What 5G does is it adds another cloud to what we refer to as 'electromagnetic smog' into an environment that is already pretty saturated," said Fairfax resident and activist Valeri Hood. "In Fairfax, what we're doing is asking our council to step up in the way councils have in the past, and just say no to 5G."
Also at HardOCP.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:56PM (7 children)
In order to keep communities EMF-free, you must first have a community not within the range of an EMF (electromagnetic field).
In general, EMFs dissipate according to the inverse square law, but our proximity to the Earth, to the Sun and to each other means that no communities now exist free of EMF.
Thus, it is not possible to keep any communities that way. That's kind of like a committee to keep communities free of heat. Since no community is at absolute zero, no community can be kept at absolute zero.
In fact, since infrared is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, there's a huge overlap between being at absolute zero and being free of EMF.
No group interested in anyone's best interest wants them to freeze literally to (heat) death.
The symptoms believed to proceed from a nonexistent or undefined illness are not limited to those listed by the EMF Safety Network propaganda materials; the human imagination is the only limit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 11 2018, @10:12PM (2 children)
Know what is worse than a real nazi? A grammar nazi!
(Score: 5, Funny) by requerdanos on Tuesday September 11 2018, @10:38PM
It's actually "Nazi" (capital "N").
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Grammar%20Nazi [urbandictionary.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by jmorris on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:47AM
No, they prefer not to be called Nazis anymore. They are the Alt-Write.
Have I said lately how much I HATE the minimum post size limit?
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday September 11 2018, @11:26PM (2 children)
Sounds like Mill Valley needs a better Faraday cage. I can still hear them.
Does anybody know if the EMF Safety Network passes out foil hats? Please educate me. Do they truly think that all EMF is bad, man-made EMF, or EMF above certain frequencies about particular power thresholds emitted a specified distance from a human is bad? Because one is argument is lunacy, one is kooky, and the last I can get behind. I mean, I like LED lights. That is until someone focuses the beam into a laser and fires it at 1000W directly into my retina from half a meter away. I don't like that type of EMF.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday September 12 2018, @12:39AM (1 child)
Your words evoke images of specificity, standards, quantifiable and definable things. Not so with their much more hand-wavy published pamphlet, What Is EMF? [emfsafetynetwork.org] (PDF warning), an excerpt from which appears below.
One might suspect that they're nutty as mixed nuts on a fruitcake, but not to worry, their website confidently asserts that:
There did not appear to be any reference to a particular study that supported these claims, footnoted or otherwise, so maybe their their word with a grain of salt. A big grain of salt. Their apparent attempt to smoothly, casually equate electromagnetic radiation with nuclear radiation is particularly troubling in the hand-wavy department. I wonder whether they even know that cell towers don't emit Iodine-131 as a natural part of their basic operation.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @01:22AM
Way off topic, but:
Our machines leak oil, often enough. Sometimes, that oil leaks above the electrical boxes. Now and then, you'll open an electrical cabinet, and find oil puddled at the bottom. Someone will ask, "How do we get oil in an ELECTRICAL CABINET?" And, my explanation for the past ten or twelve years has gone thus:
"They aren't maintenancing the generators like they used to. Instead of replacing failed bearings, they just lube hell out of them. There's excess oil all over the generators, and it has to go somewhere. So, it leaks into the power lines, and some of it ends up right here!"
You'd be surprised, first, at how many people take my explanation seriously.
You'd be even more surprised at how many people actually believe that explanation!!
Now, about that iodine-131 - where in hell do you expect it to go? :^)
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday September 12 2018, @12:17AM
It's also not a new phenomenon.
When the junior Zombies were small, about 12 years ago (or so), their school decided to fund-raise and buy a bunch of wi-fi access points so that each class could have a decent wireless signal.
This bought a small but very vocal group out of the bushes. You know them, stay-at home Mothers with a "I want to speak to the manager" haircut, and too much time on their hands.
They asserted loudly and repeatedly that wi-fi would give all the children cancer, until another group formed which demanded to see their evidence, as we had spent the money on access points.
As you can imagine, there was unpleasantness for a while, but the kids got their wi-fi.
Curiously, some of the same anti-wireless campaigners also started lobbying for the children to all have programming lessons a few months later, which seems equally stupid to me.