California has a lot of quirks that outside people jeer at. There is no defending it, when people ask about California, I simply tell them 'all of the weird things and the good things you hear are true.'
One of the biggest cultural disconnects is that Californians will promote tolerance and diversity and choice by banning everything. This downward spiral did not happen in the 1960s - the hippie movement was mythologized but it was more of a New York thing than a San Francisco one, Frisco just had better public relations.
It really happened in the 1980s. And there is no bigger example of California weirdness that has helped absolutely no one than Proposition 65, which says you have to be notified if a chemical can give you cancer. The problem with that is that the standard for 'causing cancer' was so broad any epidemiological study that says 'X people got cancer and Y people eat cheese, therefore cheese causes cancer' got a warning label. So for newcomers, it is weird to have a giant warning label on everything. You see it in every business, in every coffee shop, even, as Alex Berezow discovered, in a rather open airport gate.
Did he ever discover what was giving him a cancer warning? Who can figure out from dozens of pages of 'carcinogens' what as going to kill him? Something in an airport seat? Whatever they clean the floors with? Paper?
Though Prop 65 has helped no one, it has made a lot of lawyers rich - and it made Californians a little more jaded about warning labels. When the magic soap, homeopathy and organic food companies behind Proposition 37, which would have put warning labels on non-organic items, wanted someone to write the thing up, they hired James Wheaton - who wrote Prop. 65 and got rich suing companies who did not have signs in the correct spots.
But it's not 1986 any more and it failed.
Getting Cancer at San Francisco Airport by Alex B. Berezow, RealClearScience
