Sorry everyone. I am pretty confident this is not going to get investigated by us any time soon, so I'm resolving ambiguous.

Reopening the market for now, debating whether to resolve N/A or let it continue - my guess is that Balsa will not investigate this any time soon, there's simply too many other things to do, but I want to hear if anyone thinks that's not the way to go here.

Independent of the harms of such chemicals, the value of them has dropped as the rates of smoking have declined and overall quality of electrical work has improved. Residential fires are just a lot less common than they used to be. https://www.nfpa.org/~/media/fd0144a044c84fc5baf90c05c04890b7.ashx

There are a bunch of studies linking flame retardants with health problems, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/flame-retardants-in-consumer-products-are-linked-to-health-and-cognitive-problems/2013/04/15/f5c7b2aa-8b34-11e2-9838-d62f083ba93f_story.html, but there are also studies linking everything with health problems, so without having actually researched the studies, I overall suspect that they are harmful with moderate confidence - my prediction here is about 80%.

I've been told (but have not checked the research myself) that baby clothes for example have requirements for flame resistance that are of extremely dubious protective value, and that the chemical flame retardants typically used to meet these requirements are toxic and best avoided.

Another link: https://e360.yale.edu/features/pbdes_are_flame_retardants_safe_growing_evidence_says_no

The Consumer Product Safety Commission moved to ban some types of flame retardants: https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/avoid-these-flame-retardants-cpsc-warning/. However, the rule changes are still stuck in research and/or bureacracy: https://www.cpsc.gov/Business--Manufacturing/Business-Education/Business-Guidance/flame-retardants.

There's also an ongoing EPA investigation: https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/fact-sheet-assessing-risks-flame-retardants

Featuring and adding a M$250 bounty that Zvi can award to a good commenter! I'm excited by this style of market for crowdsourcing research and surfacing useful information to the market creators, and would love to see more traders weigh in with their thoughts on why they bet one way or another.

Over here in Manifold Land we call Ambiguous resolution N/A :)