It seems to me there has been a significant shift to thinking about problems sociologically rather than individually - perhaps combined with only doing the easy half of the sociology.
Individually, it's pretty reasonable to include something like "The chemistry set is recommended for ages 12 and over; chemicals A, B, and C are poisonous if ingested; chemicals D and E are flammable" with the chemistry set. Some of the warnings should probably go on the outer packaging so parents can make informed decisions about buying it. In general, 12 "is old enough to know better" when it comes to tasting the poison and playing with fire.
Sociologically, we know that some 12 year olds will taste the poison and set their houses on fire. It's usually not hard to count roughly how many. We have decided the question is something like "how many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?" and concluded the answer is few to none. Of course, as the article alludes to, there's a lot more benefit to experimenting with a chemistry set than mere entertainment. It's hard to measure though, and saying that there's an acceptable number of poisoned kids is not a winning move for politicians.
> In general, 12 "is old enough to know better" when it comes to tasting the poison and playing with fire.
Funny thing is, i got a German chemistry kit as a kid in the 90s and i remember one of the instructions was to taste one of the synthesis products (I believe it was ammonium chloride or nitrate)
Looking at the modern version of that particular kit (Kosmos C2000) it doesn’t seem to have changed all that much since then either.
Indeed, although when I was a kid parks had play structures that were fun, a challenge, and hint of danger. Getting to the top of a play structure lent a sense of accomplishment. Generally the fear/danger was perceived more than real, but pretty fun/popular up till age 10 or so.
In the last 25 years I've seen play structures replaced by the parks I visit were neutered so that even a 2 year old could fully explore, and for that reason only occasionally would there be a 2 year old on them and they were avoided by anyone older.
Had the person tried to demonstrate magnetism with some Zen Magnets, they'd have seen the availability determined by CPSC fiat. Which supports their argument.
What might've changed chemistry set suppliers' attitude towards risk? Plaintiff's attorneys are not, strictly speaking, "regulators".
The author doesn't mention the country he's talking about, but if it's the US then chemistry kits manufactured overseas don't really count do they?
eg they're not US manufacturers, so they wouldn't accept liability
That some places in the US are selling chemistry kits overseas... might be a bit risky for the place selling them though. Sounds like they'd be copping the liability instead.
Back when I was in the approximate equivalent of junior high school, one of the classic experiments done in chemistry was making ammonium chloride, which is used as flavouring in sweets [1] here.
It was tasted.
As the teachers were responsible and I'm sure they didn't want to take safety risks, I'm inclined to believe it was safe to do. (I can't remember how it was made but I suppose the only risks would be from unclean glassware or contamination by some other substance.)
Cause that one is safe. And of course, other chemicals are not safe to lick. This set in particular is teaching the 12 years old to lick the weird thing.
Nothing wrong with that, but then it is reasonable to expect that the same set does not contain similarly looking/smelling poison.
> We have decided the question is something like "how many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?" and concluded the answer is few to none.
Yet, new versions of Tesla Autopilot hit the road every week, and the public is used as beta-testers.
I guess "we" have decided that driving, and self-driving, is worth a number of deaths.
And to be honest, I agree. It's a tough balance to consider, and the death of any individual is going to be weighed much more heavily by their nearest and dearest than it will be for a dispassionate observer, but I'm inclined to say that advancement of humanity is a big enough reward that some risk is justified.
> I guess "we" have decided that driving, and self-driving, is worth a number of deaths.
Yes, although it has been that way all along, and not just with self-driving cars. Driving is implicitly seen as either an inevitability or worth the risks, although few people want to explicitly say deaths are an acceptable tradeoff for, well, anything. Implicitly accepting a (usually small) number of deaths, or a statistical risk of death, for almost any activity is a part of life.
Eliminating accidental deaths entirely would generally make us pay through the nose in some other way, economical or otherwise, so almost nobody actually even wants what it would entail. It's socially and emotionally hard to say that, so it's easier to just consider it inevitable. (Frankly, that's just kind of a different way of saying the same thing, and understandable.)
Self-driving cars just turn it from an inevitable human error into something with a target on it. It's no longer an inevitable human error because there's a technology that caused the accident to happen.
Self-driving cars are supposed to reduce the total risks in the end, though, so if that happens, the more interesting question will be in whether people will be allowed to drive at some point in the future at all.
Honestly, it doesn't seem like society has decided any such thing w/r/t self-driving! The couple of deaths from self-driving have attracted enormous negative media attention, and I suspect that if 100 people had been killed by self-driving cars, there would have been immense public pressure to shut down the programs. The public is not running cost-benefit analysis on this.
I'll go further. Tesla has decided (correctly?) that there is enough money in it for them to push that line. The chemistry set manufacturers decided that there isn't enough money.
Bingo, if the set manufacturers were convinced they could make hundreds of billions, somehow, I would bet they would have continued selling them down to this day.
If "we" haven't decided it's worth it, it's likely "we" are wrong. Trillions of dollars and an untold number of of lives have been lost to inefficient human driven transport. See also: Every preventable driving accident ever, and every dollar ever spent on transport for further details.
Are you implying that automating it might somehow NOT be the most important innovation since the invention of penicillin, or are you implying that it can't be automated? Sorry, it may be that I'm dense, but I'm actually not clear what your argument here is.
Self driving overall is definitely worth it. What Tesla is currently doing, however, is selling beta software as FSD and testing it on public roads. That's very different.
> Are you implying that automating it might somehow NOT be the most important innovation since the invention of penicillin
Do people really think self-driving cars are anywhere near the same class of benefit as penicillin, let alone the most important invention since then? Hell, if self-driving cars came out tomorrow, they wouldn't even be the most important innovation in the last two years (that would be the COVID vaccines).
> I guess "we" have decided that driving, and self-driving, is worth a number of deaths.
I don't think anyone has decided anything of the sort. If I shoplift from a store and I'm not stopped, that doesn't mean that "we" have decided that my theft is okay. It just means that I haven't got caught, or that the system isn't sufficient to hold me accountable, or that there isn't enough evidence to present a damning case against me just yet.
> but I'm inclined to say that advancement of humanity is a big enough reward that some risk is justified.
There's absolutely no evidence that Tesla's rushed and untested beta product is helping the "advancement of humanity" versus better designed and controlled research by organizations like Waymo.
The only evidence of FSD's "advancement" I see is the advancement of Tesla's profits. FSD serves as a vehicle for interest-free loans to Tesla directly from their customers.
> > I guess "we" have decided that driving, and self-driving, is worth a number of deaths.
> If I shoplift from a store and I'm not stopped, that doesn't mean that "we" have decided that my theft is okay.
Those aren't equivalent, though. Stores _have_ decided that _some_ theft is okay in the grand scheme of running a store.
Conversely, I think most of us agree e.g. that the incident where a woman was killed by an Uber self-driving Volvo[1] was _not_ okay, and that multiple negligent factors were at play that contributed to her death.
This doesn't mean that society thinks self-driving cars are _all_ not okay.
Similarly, the royal/societal "we" _absolutely_ have decided that collective driving is worth some quantity of deaths. We seek to minimize them, but there are extremely few people seriously advocating for the abolition of cars today, and they've been around for over a hundred years at this point.
> The advent of automobile use in the early 20th century brought about a measurable rise in total numbers of highway deaths and injuries. However, the automobile's toll on human life and limb was probably not extravagantly greater than the toll exacted by the combination of steam- and horse-driven travel methods it displaced
From skimming the article, it seems like motor vehicle fatalities in NYC in the 1990s were similar to total traffic fatalities in the early 1900s, even though the population almost doubled.
I'm assuming motor vehicle fatalities includes pedestrians hit by motor vehicles. There could still be additional deaths today from things like streetcars, horses, or ox carts, but I feel like those would be low.
The issue is not always children or safety. When an elderly customer of McDonald’s sues — and wins damages — for being burned by coffee that is too hot, what do you think will happen to prevent it in the future? (Besides cooler coffee) hint: special warnings on the cup, redesigned cups, and the basic infantilization of adults.
I suggest you go and read the details of that case. The store was knowingly serving coffee at temperatures too hot for human consumption, and had received prior complaints of injuries. The cups they served coffee in at the time were also known to be extremely flimsy and easy to accidentally collapse. The woman in question had third degree burns and required skin grafts.
As someone that lived there, and drank their coffee, everyone knew it was hot. It was served that way because of the huge number of university students that grabbed a cup before class and it was still warm after walking across campus. The exit of that parking lot is also a known issue. It has/had a steep dip out of the lot and onto the road because that's how the roads were built down there rather than putting in sewers. Finally, there is a traffic light right next to that McDonalds. A LOT of people hit that dip hard trying to get onto the road before that light changes.
All of these things contributed to the issue. Sticking a hot cup of coffee between your legs while someone is driving is stupid, especially in that parking lot. Serving coffee so hot that it stays warm while you walk to class is also pretty stupid. The way McDonalds handled the issue is what made them the bad guys here. They could have easily helped this woman with her medical bills and it would have cost them far less money than the amount they spent on the their PR campaign and lawyers.
For what it’s worth, they were parked when the spill happened. But agreed re:McDonald’s behaviour. I believe the jury was also deeply unimpressed, which is why the punitive damages were so high at first.
What happened to Stella Liebeck was terrible, but her coffee was not excessively hot by modern standards.
Stella's coffee was served within the temperature range that was, and still is, recommended by professional coffee associations like SCAA and NCA [1]. The NCA recommends that coffee be held and served at around 180-185 deg F (~80-85 deg C), which is likely near the temperature at which Stella was burned. This is a perfectly reasonable service temperature, widely used by coffee shops, restaurants, and home brewing machines to this day.
Stella Liebeck took her cup of coffee and squeezed it between her legs in order to fiddle with the lid. The result was tragic, but completely expected. If I spill a fresh cup of Starbucks coffee on my crotch today, I fully expect to sustain third-degree burns. So I take a little extra care with it until it has cooled to drinking temperature, which happens pretty quickly.
Tea is generally even hotter. Any good tea shop will serve a pot of freshly boiled water, at least twenty degrees hotter than hot coffee. Spilling that on yourself is guaranteed to melt your skin. Great care is warranted.
Again, what happened to Stella was terrible. She didn't deserve it, and she didn't deserve the hate she got afterward. But she did something really stupid. I sympathize, because I do stupid stuff all the time, and I have the scars to remind me.
We're surrounded by extremely dangerous things that require great care to use properly. It's useful for coffee to be held and served hot, just as it's useful for knives to be sharp and cars to be able to reach highway speeds. There will inevitably be accidents, but making the world completely safe for people who use these things carelessly would mean depriving everyone of their proper use.
Saying that "tea temperatures are supposed to be x" is like saying that "food should be cooked at x". But regardless, if you go to a good tea shop you are likely to have a pot of freshly boiled water placed in front of you, which some folks in this thread consider an unnacceptable hazard worthy of a lawsuit.
Technically, it depends entirely on the tea. Black teas are universally recognized to require the highest steeping temperatures, to the point that high-altitude brewing is a problem because the boiling point of water is too low. Sweet, amino-heavy teas like a good gyokuro are definitely better done at lower temperatures. But most green teas are quite forgiving, and are commonly brewed at near boiling temperatures. Freshly boiled hot water is also often necessary for herbals, especially short-steeping acidic herbals like hibiscus.
And none of this has anything to do with catechins, which are not significantly more stable at 170 deg F than they are at 200. Theaflavins on the other hand are quite unstable, but they start degrading at temperatures lower than any accepted steeping temperatures, so losing them is unavoidable.
> In essence, the researchers found that in solution, both green tea catechins and black tea theaflavins are unstable and have a tendency for rapid degradation, especially at high temperature or basic pH.
> The thermal stability of catechins is better than that of theaflavins. For example, after a 3 hour open-air storage in a water solution, the amount of catechins and theaflavins was not found to have decreased at 24 °C, whereas catechins had a 25% reduction at 70 °C and a 29% decrease at 100 °C; theaflavins on the other hand had a 56% decrease at 70 °C and amounts were undetectable at 100 °C after 3 hours. The discrepancy in the aqueous stabilities of catechins and theaflavins can be postulated to be due to the large difference in chemical reactivity between the two groups of compounds: relative inertness and less steric hindrance of catechins vs. higher reactivity, especially anti-oxidant activity because of the ring-fusing, increased number of hydroxyl groups and steric hindrance surrounding the benzotropolone core.
She originally only sued for her medical bills but the jury awarded her punitive damages after it was revealed that McDonald’s had been sued several times and never lowered the temperature to levels standard in the industry
No, Stella's coffee was served at a temperature that was and still is an industry standard. From the wikipedia article:
> "Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C),[37] relying on more sternly worded warnings on cups made of rigid foam to avoid future liability, though it continues to face lawsuits over hot coffee.[37][38] The Specialty Coffee Association of America supports improved packaging methods rather than lowering the temperature at which coffee is served. The association has successfully aided the defense of subsequent coffee burn cases.[38] Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C)."
Contrary to popular belief, the “sue because coffee is too hot, what an infantile concept” is actually a highly successful PR campaign by McDonald’s. The coffee was hot enough to melt flesh and in fact, when spilled onto a lap, was hot enough to melt the genitals shut. I would sue too!
Would you also sue a tee shop or cafe if you spilled the freshly boiled pot of water that any good tea shop brings to your table?
More specifically, if you put a cup of 180 degree+ tea between your legs and squeezed it, like Stella did, would you blame the tea shop when it predictably spills in your lap?
I would blame a tea shop for serving me a beverage so hot that it was undrinkable to the point of severely injuring me, yeah. If I spilled a cup of coffee on myself I would expect a light scalding, maybe a bit of redness, and laugh it off. I wouldn’t expect to need skin grafts.
It sounds like you're exactly the sort of delicate person TFA is talking about :)
In that case, in order to keep you safe, you'll want to avoid all beverage shops and restaurants, since they all generally follow the the NCA recommendations that coffee be held and served at around 180-185 deg F (~80-85 deg C), which is around the temperature at which Stella was burned. This would be very dangerous for someone like you!
And I hate to tell you this... but it's not just beverage shops and restaurants. Domestic coffee makers also follow the NCA guidelines. Your Mr. Coffee machine holds coffee at around 185 deg F, which will melt your skin just like it did to Stella. And definitely don't attempt to make tea, because the first step is usually involves putting on a kettle to boil.
You'll probably need to stay out of the kitchen altogether. Steaming vegetables is where I've gotten the most burns for some reason. You won't want to try to make pasta, which always involves large quantities of boiling water. And don't even think about using a stove or oven, where temperatures are easily double or triple that of boiling water. That's just a lawsuit waiting to happen!
This is just the temperature hazards. I imagine you don't use knives, which can be quite sharp, although I suppose you could always try suing the knifemaker if a kinfe turns to be unexpectedly sharp. And obviously you'll want to stay far away from the mother of all hazards: cars. Unfortunately, even though cars kill more people than any other machine in history, people like you have been largely unsuccessful in suing carmakers for defects such as excessive speed or ability to drive into objects.
Overall, my recommendation is that you hire someone for anything more complicated than watching TV.
Your response is extremely condescending and expresses more that you were interested in making me feel bad about myself than you engaging with me in good faith.
No, I'm trying to point out that you have very unrealistic expectations of the world you live in. This is very simple: beverages such as tea and coffee are brewed, held, and served at temperatures that make them extrememly dangerous if you spill them on yourself. This isn't my opinion. At the risk of repeating myself: when Stella was injured, McDonalds' corporate policy required coffee to be held at 180-190 deg F. This is nearly identical to the range recommended by professional coffee associations like the NCA, who TODAY recommend that coffee be held and served at around 180-185 deg F (~80-85 deg C) [1]. This temperature range was, and still is, used by nearly every coffee shop, restaurant, and domestic coffee machine.
So if you personally can't handle the risk of dangerously hot beverages, then you'll want to be sure to specifically ask, everywhere you go, for warm coffee. Starbucks has a procedure to accommodate people like you, which I believe involves simply setting the cup aside for a while to cool before they give it to you. (EDIT: I hear Starbucks actually has a more flexible process and equipment settings which can "officially" accomodate a range of service preferences, so that might really be the place you want to go).
If you want to make coffee for yourself, you'll need to come up with a procedure that's safe for you. Don't use a coffee maker; like I said, my Mr. Coffee machine holds coffee at around 185 deg F. So does yours. Look it up. Remember that this is right around the temperature that melted Stella's flesh.
I and most other people prefer coffee that has been brewed, held, and served at the proper temperature, which is why those standards exist and are almost universally used. And I'm extremely grateful that Stella's hot coffee lawsuit didn't ruin it for everybody; I felt really bad for her, and I don't begrudge her medical bills being paid, but I'm very glad her lawsuit had no lasting effect beyond sterner warnings on coffee cups.
Folks like yourself who for whatever reason don't want to be exposed to that danger are in a difficult position, and you need to take responsibility for your special needs, as it were. You will not be successful in suing for "excessively" hot coffee; Stella's lawsuit was pretty much a one-off, and personal injury lawyers have mostly moved on to suing over defective lids instead of excessive temperatures [2].
My comparison with knives and other common hazards is not merely academic. I've come very close to losing fingers and my eyesight to knives and other cutting tools. And you will not be successful in suing the maker or seller of knife that turns out to be "excessively" sharp. Just an example.
Typically it is boiling water in cup with leaves. Normal office setup. You don't hotter then boiling. And when spilled and you don't remove it asap, it does that damage.
You talk about that coffee as if it was magically hotter then water. It was not.
Flesh doesn't melt. The coffee was hot enough to cause third-degree burns. Specifically, it was 82–88 °C [1].
I couldn't find a definitive "correct" temperature at which to serve coffee. It seems that people typically want it at 60 °C when they drink it [2], but since not everyone wants to drink it straight away, often coffee shops serve it hotter than that.
When someone says "He got his head blown off" in reference to a cranial gunshot wound, do you also pull this "WELL AKSHUALLY..." routine on them, by pointing out that the victim's head is still attached to their body?
The characterization of "melt the genitals shut" is not a precise medical, physical, scientifix statement. It's a colloquial, even poetic phrasing, and it does a FANTASTIC job of describing the impact of this woman's injuries.
It seems fairly clear to me that it was not intended to be read as a colloquial phrasing. It's stated twice, in italics. There's nothing wrong with pointing out this idea is just false.
The responder isn't telling the whole story though. The reason the coffee was so hot was because they wanted to limit the practical ability of customers to make use of endless refills on coffee. Not consideration for the average customer's wants.
I thought it was pretty clear that it is colloquial language, and that the italics are for emphasis... For example, "They blew his head off.
In the future, maybe you'd be better served to trying asking the other person how they meant it, rather than jumping to correct them.
Unless your actual purpose is mainly to aggrandize yourself by dunking on someone else by correcting them... In which case you should just carry on, as you have been doing.
And yet here you are making two posts trying to correct someone on whether the factual correction was necessary. I assure you, that is far more uninteresting than the issue you're trying to address.
I'm not trying to correct you by calling you out... I assume you're a lost cause, already. But hopefully other people reading this will think twice before they act the fool.
You have been and taken in by propaganda. Please take the time to read the wikipedia article that the other commenter linked, and learn the truth about this incident. You deserve better than to continue having the wool pulled over your eyes.
Pay special attention to the "Coffee Temperature" section:
> "Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C),[37] relying on more sternly worded warnings on cups made of rigid foam to avoid future liability"
In other words, Stella's lawsuit was sort of a one-off success for aspiring hot-coffee lawyers, and the only effect it had in the long run was maybe a few more warning labels on paper cups.
So you actually quoted the part where it mentions improving their cups... And then you seem to have completely ignored it in your own commentary. Redesigning the cups with more rigid foam (and the plastic lid lip IIRC) was a pretty big deal at the time, and it made a significant impact on the possibility of spilling.
But the bigger problem is that you're still ignoring that your mind has been captured by the propaganda that demonized this woman as a greedy opportunist, and cast our tort system as a lottery for lazy, evil people to enrich themselves at the expense of honest hard-working businesses.
The woman asked that McDonald's pay her medical damages, only... And those damages were extensive... Can you even imagine how much surgery is required to treat 3rd degree burns to the genitals? Major skin grafts, permanent horrific scarring. You'd never regain full sensation again, and it's likely you'd never fully function sexually afterwards.
The jury decided to award massive punitive damages, in large part because they felt that McDonald's conduct after the injury was so shocking that they felt compelled to send an equally attention-getting message to the corporate executives who had treated this woman with such callous inhumanity.
And the punitive damages were reduced on appeal, anyway, which shows that the tort system does work. McDonald's paid their lawyers more than they paid the defendant... And they would have only paid a tiny fraction of that amount, if only they had evolved a bit of conscience at the beginning.
No, the changes that McDonalds implemented in their cups were not really a big deal. Rigid styrofoam and cups were already in widespread use at large establishments at the time. McDonalds' "redesigned" cups were and continue to be quite pedestrian. Don't take my word for it. Go order a cup of McDonalds coffee, which will likely be served to you at the same dangerously hot, NCA-approved temperature that burned Stella, put the cup between your legs and squeeze it like Stella did, and tell me how safe you feel.
> But the bigger problem is that you're still ignoring that your mind has been captured by the propaganda that demonized this woman as a greedy opportunist
No, in my comments I have explicitly stated that I empathized with Stella and that I'm glad she got her medical bills paid. She didn't deserve what happened to her, and she definitely didn't deserve the hateful publicity she received.
I furthermore freely admit that I'm fully capable of doing the same idiotic things that Stella did. Putting hot coffee between my legs and squeezing it to fiddle with the lid is exactly something I would do, and I'd probably be on the fucking phone or driving while I did it. I recognize that Stella probably didn't understand just how dangerous this is, and I accept that McDonalds may have been negligent in the nature of the warnings it provided.
> Can you even imagine how much surgery is required to treat 3rd degree burns to the genitals?
This is an appeal to emotion. Yes, I've seen some horrific injuries in my time. I'm also a vegetarian with a deep abiding hatred of McDonalds and their ilk. McDonalds makes, markets, and sells shit food that is poisoning generations. But the magnitude of Stella's injury is orthogonal to the issue of McDonalds culpability for it. Clearly the judicial system has settled into some recognition of liability for merchants of hot coffee, but excessive service temperature is not part of that consideration. And it's a damn good thing, because coffee needs to be hot.
Here's a simple question for you, based on an actual experience I had years ago. If I accidentally stab myself in the eye with a paring knife (yes, long story), will you support me if I sue the knife maker or the merchant for selling me a knife that was excessively or unexpectedly sharp and pointy?
You don't seem to know very much about the redesigned lids. Disposable coffee lids in the US changed drastically following this lawsuit. It took a few years, but the quality of disposable cups/libs used to serve hot beverages to-go is vastly higher than it used to be. I'm surprised that you don't know that... There's a lot of legal scholarship on this topic that specifically discusses that shift, and analyzes the impact of this lawsuit vs other causes.
But then, you also don't seem to know very much about product liability in US law. Manufacturers are held to surprisingly high standards in the US, and McDonald's conduct before & during this trial actually shocked the legal community. Their position was seen as surprisingly risky, given the fact pattern.
Your knife example is pretty silly, and I'm not sure why you expected it to prove anything. Legal hypotheticals are sometimes useful analytical tools, but you have to actually construct the hypo case to distinguish a relevant legal principle or fact pattern... Your example does none of that. It's just an obvious tautology, and there's not really any argument contained in it.
Again, I would encourage you to educate yourself, instead of just making a lot of assumptions that are emotionally convenient to your preconceived notions.
> You don't seem to know very much about the redesigned lids. ... There's a lot of legal scholarship on this topic that specifically discusses that shift, and analyzes the impact of this lawsuit vs other causes.
Go ahead and cite some of that scholarship. I would genuinely love to see it. Explain how the current designs, which are still subject to coffee spill lawsuits, differ from those before Stella's lawsuit. Then explain why, if the lid was inadequate for its purpose, Stella's lawyers specifically cited her difficulty in prying off the lid as the proximate cause of the accident.
Otherwise, your detour into lids and cups is a bit of a distraction. The primary allegation, and the one most parroted by sympathetic media and trial lawyers to this day, was that McDonalds' coffee was a defective product due to outrageously excessive temperature, far beyond industry standards or best practices. Nowadays the trial lawyers like to claim that the lawsuit forced McDonalds to drastically lower the temperature of their coffee. I don't know whether you also believe these easily debunked claims, but you sure seem eager to redirect the debate in a direction where you know I don't disagree as strongly. It's kinda weird.
> But then, you also don't seem to know very much about product liability in US law.
Guilty as charged!
> McDonald's conduct before & during this trial actually shocked the legal community. Their position was seen as surprisingly risky, given the fact pattern.
Right, I definitely remember personal injury lawyers and opponents of tort reform acting "shocked". They still do. No surprise there. And almost every single one of them lies about the temperature issue.
> Your knife example is pretty silly, and I'm not sure why you expected it to prove anything.
I don't expect it to prove anything. I'm simply curious how you feel about strict liability as applied to other dangerous but common products, where the the issue of whether the product is safe for its intended or anticipated use is in dispute. It's a simple if unimportant question, which you appear unable to answer.
> Again, I would encourage you to educate yourself, instead of just making a lot of assumptions that are emotionally convenient to your preconceived notions.
Hmmm, I sure don't feel very emotional about this. My strongest emotion is, like I said, contempt for McDonalds' influence on peoples' health. And again, I was happy that Stella bill's were paid.
EDIT:
Seriously though, please cite that "scholarship" on lids and cups you mentioned. I'm skeptical, and it's somewhat tangential to the more sensationalized allegations made by Stella's lawyers, but I'm also genuinely curious.
Also corporations will gladly poison children if it will enrich some stock-holding heir without consequence. I am not mustering up a lot of sympathy for corporations manufacturing hazardous materials for children that then get sued.
The major removal of agency for working people is by corporations and their aristocratic heir majority owners. Lawyers suing corporations for harming children are one of the things working people have to regain agency, as are laws to protect us. There is too little of it, not too much of that.
These are chemistry sets. They are, when used inappropriately, just as likely to cause harm as a sawzall, a hammer, or a cuisinart.
I assure you, the "aristocratic heir majority owners" are also interested in letting their kids have access to experimental chemistry; and lawyers depriving any child of the opportunity to experience such (or to learn how to use a hammer, a sawzall, or a cuisinart for that matter) does no one any good, least of all working people.
I feel like you've actually kind of proven the reasonability of what actually happened to chemistry sets with this comparison.
Fully-functional sawzalls, hammers, and Cuisinarts don't get actively marketed to children. You can buy them and let children use them, just as you can with (non-children-marketed) chemistry supplies, and in the same way that comes with the societal understanding that, by letting a child use something not marketed for use by children, you'll be providing suitable safety instruction and oversight yourself.
Yeah, this is a pretty good explanation, chemistry sets may be nerfed because the risk of giving poisons and invisible flames to children as toys far outweighs the benefits which accrue to a small minority who would gain from this. And the children who would gain from it have other ways to access bomb-making or nuclear-reactor making materials if they really want to: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/150726-nu...
That all seems to be corroborated by the fact there doesn't seem to be any shortage of scientifically gifted young adults. If anything we're on a golden age of scientific discovery. Teenagers fairly regularly make contributions to science, and chemistry in particular. It doesn't look as though there is some broad over-protective social force holding children back from developing adult skills and that this whole thing is much more likely to be a subjective impression of the author.
Of course, there are still the old-fashioned forces of parental and social neglect, and the fact that opportunities and neglect are not evenly distributed throughout the society (being much more dispersed/concentrated, respectively in poor households). But the author does not seem interested in that. One can only speculate as to why.
> "how many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?"
I think it's an important point to note that the vocally asking of that question of course signals the end of the activity. It's basically a rhetorical tool when one side of a trade-off decision is easily measurable and photographable and the other is a lost opportunity (generations of chemists).
You can't photograph a lost opportunity.
I'd argue the school mask debate is a similar one. It's easy to interview the teacher who almost died from Covid or grandma with little ones in school who is scared. It's impossible to photograph a generation of kids' developmental gaps.
The shift in the 60s and 70s wasn't so much a shift to societal thinking, it was a shift to media-driven public opinion.
> We have decided the question is something like "how many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?" and concluded the answer is few to none.
A perfect example of how choosing the right question matters just as much as choosing the right answer.
"How many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?" is the same kind of fallacious question as "Do you think all vaccinations should be voluntary or are you in favor of authoritarianism?"
In short, it's a false dichotomy presented as a question, with the purpose of distorting the narrative and forcibly ending discussion.
EDIT: Since it might not be clear, I want to clarify that I'm not saying the parent chose that question to shut down the discussion. I agree with the parent's assessment that insisting on asking the right questions wasn't "a winning move for politicians".
While the question isn't phrased as a false dichotomy, it imposes one within the context. The idea that we either hold the chemistry set manufacturer accountable or we're letting children die is a false dichotomy.
We had snakes going through our yard, every day, that would make you brownulate your jodhpurs. We had bugs that, when they bit you, hurt for a month.
My favorite toys were these painted sheet-metal cars and spaceships, with flints and sanding wheels. They would spit out showers of sparks.
I survived.
But ask any parent that has lost a child. It's absolutely devastating. I know a number of them. I never, ever want to tell them that their child's life is worth less than my freedom from inconvenience.
It's really not a black/white issue, and I have no answers.
>But ask any parent that has lost a child. It's absolutely devastating. I know a number of them. I never, ever want to tell them that their child's life is worth less than my freedom from inconvenience.
Sure, but when safety is the primary concern then nothing gets done. Too many car accidents? Just ban cars. You can't have a car accident if there are no cars. If safety is your primary goal, then surely something small like "getting from A to B faster" is a small price to pay for the life of a child!
But this isn't feasible. You can't run a society based on this concern. Everything we do carries risks. Some are more hidden, others are more accepted and for some reason we single out specific risks and become unreasonable about them. We selectively pick and choose what we're outraged about in the name of safety.
> Sure, but when safety is the primary concern then nothing gets done. Too many car accidents? Just ban cars. You can't have a car accident if there are no cars.
I think you’re missing the part of these debates that is an honest conversation about utility and how to balance the needs of the group vs. the needs of the individual.
That’s why we both care about car safety and don’t ban cars. It doesn’t have to be as extreme as either A) No safety rules, maximum freedom. Or B) Maximum safety, no freedom. The middle option is what you see a lot: some safety, some freedom.
That’s why you have cars with airbags and kid’s chemistry sets without hazardous materials. Some safety, some freedom.
You can debate about the utility, but I doubt anyone in the pro-50s chemistry kit camp would be OK with including radioactive isotopes or deadly viruses. At some point the learning experience isn’t worth the risk at which point you’ve gone through the exact same thought process: how much safety do I want vs. how much freedom?
So I think we all agree there needs to be some safety concerns, the question is where and that will always be a grey area with no right or wrong answer. Everyone’s utility will be slightly different. But just questioning safety as a goal itself doesn’t make much sense IMO. We all want safety and we all want freedom, just different amounts of each.
But are we not then taking the slippery slope of an infantilisation of society? surely we need to round the sharp edges, but eliminating danger, you do away with adaptability, reaction time, self responsibility, fun.... I rollerblade on the road, some people drive dangerously just because they don't like I'm not following the rules...
Also was just in Egypt, I highly enjoyed jaywalking there, less so being a car/minibus passenger , saw what looked like 6 year olds on motorcycles with their friends, kids driving cars, preteens at the helms of trucks...were there more accidents? maybe not, dunno, maybe the lack of alcohol is a reason... but ultimately I agree huge zones with no cars in cities, more space, cleaner air, less danger...
1.) People who drive dangerously are danger to others.
2.) Cities that don't require cars to move in are raising freedom of both kids and adults living in them. It means kids go by themselves to places sooner. It means old people are not so locked. It means parents don't have to be taxi drivers every time kid wants to try a hobby.
The corporate headquarters that I traveled to, on a train, had a girls’ school, next to it.
I would often be on the train, packed with commuters, and see these tiny little girls, in their school uniforms, maybe seven or eight years old, alone, on the train.
One of the big reasons that this was possible, is because of the civil and social infrastructure of Japanese society.
This structure is one that many Americans would find stifling —for good reason, but it also means that elementary school girls can take the train, alone, to school, everyday.
You don't even have to go to Japan. In Germany, first graders go to school alone too. Same in Switzerland - sometimes even younger kids. I think that United States with the 11-12 years old is considered too young to go to school alone is the outlier.
Death rate per 100k inhabitants is roughly 4 times higher in Egypt compared to the US (44 vs 11) which is still quite high compared to eg Germany (4/100k)
> Sure, but when safety is the primary concern then nothing gets done.
Incidentally, this is part of the reason why it is cheaper, faster, and easier to build large infrastructure projects outside the West, and why the rate of innovation slows as societies go from developing to developed. Basically, there's some (possibly defined?) sociological cut-off point where societies become more concerned for safety vs possible benefits of the risks they take and eliminate the risk-taking possibility altogether. Before that cut-off point, "life is cheap", and that has all sorts of benefits and detriments for society, after that cut-off point "life is priceless", and that has all sorts of benefits and detriments to society.
Like anything, it seems it's a trade-off without a clear "best" way to do things.
> I never, ever want to tell them that their child's life is worth less than my freedom from inconvenience.
This is why a healthy society needs social institutions which insulate people from having to constantly defend freedoms and other pro-social behaviors from emotional appeals. The fact that we are so vulnerable to such appeals causes scaling problems in societies as large as ours today.
It's not a black/white issue and I don't think it has to be handled like one.
It's possible to that allow serious exploration without exposing children to toxic chemicals. I think you can let children walk by themselves and play by themselves without discarding any worry about child safety. Etc.
The OP is what my younger friends would call a "boomer rant". And despite being a "boomer" myself I no sympathy for a "the problem today is people are too worried about safety" viewpoint. Today's world is complex combination of good trends and bad trends, not merely a matter of "now lawyers run everything".
It doesn't have to be the problem to be a problem.
As for the labels, I'm late genX / early millennial, but I broadly agree with the premise that safety concerns are excessive in modern society, and that causes adverse social effects that are often unaccounted for.
I will not have my children deprived of their right to grow into adulthood
If you don't shield them from simple dangers they cannot understand, then that is exactly what you may deprive them of. A two year old is not ready to contend with rattlesnakes, mountain lions, electrical sockets, etc.
Invariably, any criticism of safety obsession is met with something along the lines of "so you're saying we should fill playgrounds with active landmines and light machine guns?"
Danger needs to scale with a child's ability to handle it, and which is likely higher than the average American parents' tolerance.
A two-year-old isn't ready to contend with rattlesnakes. A sixteen-year-old absolutely is. Somewhere in that timeline, there's a stair-step in the danger function, and that's just part of life.
Safety-obsessed Americans would ensure that the rattlesnake stays behind glass forver.
What is gained by selling rattlesnakes to children in stores? The harms outweigh the benefits. People who need to study rattlesnakes have ample opportunity. Similarly, chemicals that are extremely risky to handle should not be sold to children but introduced in a classroom. (OP's example is different because the chemistry sets he complains about not being available actually are available to children today.) It's not like there isn't plenty of other chemistry to learn about, and this setup makes it more likely that more children will survive as chemists to make important discoveries. (See the David Hahn story.)
I'm not too bothered by the reaction, but I don't know if it's actually useful.
My childhood gave me great things. I have a worldview that is highly unusual in my peer group, and was directly useful in my career, as I'm a xenophile. I'm not sorry I went through what I went through, but I had to add some loc-tite, later in life, to tighten a few loose screws, from my childhood experiences.
But I am serious. Because of the extracurricular work I do, I am in daily contact with many parents of deceased children (and relatives of other deceased people). Many of the deceased got there through misadventure, suicide, or even murder.
It's really hard to encounter these folks, and not understand that there are depths of feeling, that we can't understand. I would submit that dismissing these feelings that others experience; simply because they don't fit our own worldview, makes our own lives (and the lives around us) darker. It certainly doesn't help us to become better people.
> I think that if your manner of speech makes you sound like a B-movie villain
I imagined the poster above you having his five-year-old child come home from school with a fresh painting of Mommy and Daddy and the poster snatching it out of their hands, "PATHETIC!" rips up painting
No, you save that for the essays they write throughout high school.
Joking aside, children are not tiny adults, and how you deal with them changes over time.
A five-year-old gets rewarded for just doing work, because that's the baseline. A fifteen-year-old must demonstrate some degree of competence. They are not developmentally identical.
A grown adult obsessed with safety over all other concerns is childish, pathetic, and ironically, dangerous as all hell to others.
Those that prioritize safety above other concerns are the first to use violence against any and all perceived threats to that "safety".
> This is a world that has nearly ended the manufacture of private aircraft that any individual with a private pilot's license and enough money can purchase.
Did this happen due to legislation or market forces? I honestly don't know, but that sounds like it could be that the author got priced out of the market. Where's the legislative or legal connection here?
> This is a world that feels compelled to pass laws requiring the use of seat belts and motorcycle helmets in the hope of protecting people who are too stupid to wear them otherwise.
People dying in auto accidents costs the government money in lost economic activity as well as things like medical care. I have a really hard time seeing how a helmet law, which if violated would result in what, a citation?, can be construed as overwhelmingly oppressive. This is pretty weak.
> You are too stupid to speak in public or post on the Internet on any topic you judge to be important. We will tell you what you can and what you cannot say.
Care to provide specific examples of what you have tried and been unable to say because the government explicitly tells you not to? A lot of that has to do with the commercial mechanisms that keep the internet free for users too, it's not like banning all regulation around the internet would magically make it a better place.
I still think American ISPs are doing a lot more to stifle innovation than legislation that keeps certain chemicals out of kids chemistry sets.
> People dying in auto accidents costs the government money in lost economic activity as well as things like medical care.
I'm astounded to read this. Do you believe we are the property of the government? That we live for the benefit of the government? That we are kept alive to serve the government?
> I have a really hard time seeing how a helmet law, which if violated would result in what, a citation?, can be construed as overwhelmingly oppressive. This is pretty weak.
Washington State just repealed the bicycle helmet law, on the grounds that it was racist.
In this sense we are the government. The people that are getting hurt in auto accidents are us, and in a large number of cases not just the person behind the wheel of bad driving.
If you crash into someone and you die but they dont, they are still left as a burden on society to take care of.
I’m not sure the right people feel the same way about this. I recall that after the 2008ish bailouts many politicians felt they were entitled to own banks, even the ones who did not ask for and had repaid the money.
Seeing as there's no chance of voting for "no taxes" because that's not how effective governments in the real world work (although I wish the Seasteaders, Cryptoland[0], and the LPD[1] the best of luck), your point is rather moot.
A quick synopsis of my wall of words below - stop calling mutual obligation "ownership", I feel that's a bit of a silly framing.
No matter how high or low our tax rates, you live in a society. Societies were evolved by our ancestors because they kept clever apes (with no natural weapons and infants that have the animal world's longest periods of helplessness due to the compromises involved in big brains and pelvises) alive better than not having them.
But a society comes with a) rights and b) responsibilities. The two are not an OR, nor XOR, but very much AND.
The government mandating you wear a helmet on a motorcycle is because far too many people focus on their rights only, and consider their responsibilities an onerous imposition - and then impose the consequences of their choices on the rest of society.
If you feel you have no obligations to the rest of society, you're wrong in my opinion, but you are always free, of course, to opt out entirely, go and build a hut in the boreal forests (tropical is also an option, but might be too many societies living in them for your tastes), and live fully free.
And because Terry Pratchett is eminently quotable in these areas: "Freedom may be mankind's natural state, but so is sitting in a tree eating your dinner while it is still wriggling."
Perhaps I can give you an example not involving brains being hosed off roadways.
As our society is a big fan of property rights, a mutual obligation of "don't steal my stuff, and I won't steal yours" is core to it. Even the USSR, despite it's views on private property, weren't fans of stealing from other members of your society.
It's a very old value in human societies, I mean, it's in the top ten Commandments from YHWH, and we're going back a few thousand years there.
Previously it was enforced by people of the tribe throwing stones while the priests watched, these days it's enforced by the government, a collective figment we formed to represent our society's collective desires and values as best we can (very imperfectly, but as the old saying goes, democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others we've tried).
If I choose to steal your stuff, agents of the government (paid for by the taxes of yourself and other members of society) will try to apprehend me, return your stuff, and punish me for violating a mutual obligation inherent to our society.
But, to go full reductio ad absurdum here, why should the fact of your paying taxes constrain my choice to steal your stuff? Why should my choices be constrained when they impact you? Do you think you own me?
If not, please send me location details, times of day you're not at home, alarm codes, the favourite foods of any pets which might be defensive when I come calling unexpectedly so I can make friends before trying to carry your TV out, and which valuables have the highest market value, just so I can reaffirm that you and I claim no ownership of each other or our respective actions.
TL;DR - it's not ownership, it's mutual obligation. It's central to being a social animal, and we're social animals because that's how we evolved.
PS - I was trying to be understanding of your POV, as I had assumed you'd lived in the USSR based on your repeated comparisons to it. Then I found out that you're Apple Pie American, so now I'm just a bit sad that you're resorting to Soviet Russia for the sake of argument.
Societies that we actually have today did not evolve around "mutual obligations". They evolved as a tool of control of production by the elites, to enable exploitation of laborers. You may argue that social democracies are different, but they retain the hierarchical power structures from those older times. So even in a democracy, to conflate a government policy with social obligation is misleading at best.
Citation needed on that one :) How do you think elites took control, other than through mutual obligation?
E.g., if you farmers grow the grain and give us some, us warriors will protect you from the other tribe who would burn your homes, enslave your children, and steal your food. Or, us priests will resolve your disputes according to our tribe's values, and intercede with the gods to ensure the rains come.
Originally, mostly by direct violence or threat thereof. The thing about extracting profits from other people is that you can invest them into more warriors, which can be used to subjugate and then control more people to extract profits from them etc. That's how most modern countries originated.
On the violence imposed by nobility, I agree, the threat of violence, indeed, claiming the sole right to use violence, has been inherent to, well, being a noble, or being a government.
That said, the nobility weren't monolithic, so Lord X being an asshole could find himself replaced, with the people's blessing, by Lord Y.
Or, as seems to have happened several times in ancient history, people walked away from a complex society they found uncompelling. Societies splintered, sometimes just people gave up on it altogether and reverted to older patterns of life that involved less warring princes throwing your children into cenotes.
And likewise, there was a limit to how much violence you could use sustainably - killing all your farmers was a bad move.
Obviously, the people holding the monopoly on power gradually developed ideas to prevent this mobility, serfdom was a favourite during feudalism.
But, mutual obligation still existed between commoner and noble. A noble who didn't defend his peasants when they were attacked was violating an ancient contract. Likewise, it wasn't commoners that were thrice-killed in PIE derived cultures - when you really needed to get the attention of the gods, you had to send someone of noble birth.
And lastly, there were a bunch of peasant revolts. A few of them even succeeded. (Far too few, IMO, but bless them for trying). And they generally arose when the commoners felt that the nobles hadn't held up their end of the bargain.
It's a very complicated thing to try to generalise over, but am I seriously wrong to state that from tribal society upwards, that everyone in that society is expected to fulfill their obligations to others in that society?
That was pretty much my main thesis :)
Interesting side tangent on this - in areas where different societies (typically, but not always) sharing a culture fiercely fought each other, the concept of hospitality-as-an-unbreakable-law often developed.
While it imposed mutual obligation on host and guest, it was also a mutual obligation between the societies - why would I extend hospitality to people from tribe X, if they never extend it to us?
It's a very fascinating subject all round, and I think that trying to frame it all as exploiter and exploitee sacrifices a lot of nuance.
As for "that's how countries developed", I rather disagree. The concept of a nation is very new in human history. Germany and Italy as countries were, well, I guess the prototype for the joke that a nation is a language with a navy.
I don't have a problem with the notion of social obligations in general, in a society where there's actually a working mechanism by which these can be determined by consensus. But none of our existing societies are like that.
The elites are not monolithic, yes, and there's violence between them, too. But that violence is used to settle the question of who gets to exploit the rest of the population. Ditto wars.
Now, the elites did adopt the "mutual obligation" language (among others - "divine right", for example) to claim legitimacy. However, when one looks at the actual obligations involved, and especially at the history of them being fulfilled or ignored, and the consequences of ignoring them for either side, it's fairly obvious that the "contract" is very skewed and ultimately based on coercion.
The concept of a nation is different from the concept of a country, or a state. Nations are indeed relatively recent - unlike states. It's an artificial abstraction that allows the elites to channel popular discontent away from themselves and against "foreign enemies", which is why nationalism and populism go hand in hand so often. Whenever politicians start to talk about "national interests", it means that either someone is trying to rob them, or they're trying to rob their subjects.
Assuming for a second I would support your idea of "responsibilities", the question is where to draw the line.
If that line is drawn where you believe it is, any undue burden monetarily on society, then you would you agree you reject the concept of limited government and individual rights? If your position is taken to the logical conclusion, that because a person that is injured by not wearing a helmet posses an undue burden on society due to medical costs, there is literally no law or regulation that would be outside the bounds of government control. You are proposing a literal totalitarian regime.
For me I draw that line at a very different spot, you point to the idea that not stealing someone else's property has a social responsibility. I agree that people should not steal other peoples property, and that government should enforce said property rights. Theft is a direct harm, one individual harming another individual. That is clear delineation where government can be an arbitrator.
However the example here of a non-helmet wearer harming "society" at large is less direct, first not every person that does not where a helmet will get into an accident, then not every accident will result in medical care, then not every accident that results in medical care would go to the point to be an imposition on society. So now instead of a clear 1:1 direct harm you are now wanting government to use threat of violence (and to be clear all government laws are back by such a threat) to reduce a "harm" that is spread out over all of society, and is also a fraction of a fraction of percent probability that the burden will even present itself. To me that is unjustifiable and draconian, it does not rise to the level of requiring government intervention in the same way theft does.
Each of us has a natural right to defend their person, their liberty, and their property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. Society then has the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. We call this Government. The principle of collective right its reason for existing, its lawfulness is based on individual rights. As such the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force for the same reason cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.
That is the foundation for which I look at government policy. So my question on this helmet issue is.. Can I as an individual impose my desire to another person to wear a helmet upon them forcibly? I can as an individual prevent them from stealing my property, but I do not believe I can forcibly make another person wear a helmet, since I can not do that as an individual, I do not believe the government should have that authority either.
No, but your choices impose a cost on me. And the rest of society. Society collectively saying "we're not going to put up with that particular set of costs generated by that particular choice" is not an assertion of "ownership", rather a collective agreement.
You don't need to be the government's property for the government to optimize laws in order to reduce loss of life and medical expenses (the latter is important because in practice if someone badly wounded shows up in the ER, they get treated and someone has to pay for it, and that might not be the injured person or an insurance company)
Yeah, you do. It goes hand in hand with being the property of the government. For an example, the Soviet Union believed that if they funded your education, you owe the government a lifetime of service for it.
I agree. But no one except you is suggesting that it does! No one except you has said anything about anyone being the governments property. You've invented a line of argument to be concerned about.
As another user said, your line of reasoning doesn't at all follow. I've tried to point that out twice now and I guess you don't want to acknowledge that.
> You don't need to be the government's property for the government to optimize
Right, so like I said. I mean you even quoted this part and then proceeded to not explain why perhaps you believe this is inevitable, but simply restate it. You're assuming you're correct but not justifying it.
Or perhaps you mean the prior comment where someone said "People dying in auto accidents costs the government money in lost economic activity as well as things like medical care." which you took umbrage with. But there's again, nothing that implies property here. I don't think that the businesses on my street are my property, but I can still support policies that benefit them, because a robust local economy still benefits me. Nor do I think I hold any sort of right of ownership over an average schoolchild, and yet I benefit from a well educated citizenry and so support robust public education.
Direct property ownership is not the only method by which people can benefit from things, and regulation is not necessarily done out of a sense of "entitlement". Some regulations are actually just good and improve the world.
So just to clarify here, does my boss or employer own me? Because he both is generally entitled to the work I do, and as such can control my behavior?
But more generally, I don't agree that exerting some amount of influence over behavior that affects me is ownership, as long as it is limited to the behavior that affects me. And as that user mentioned, there are costs society bears beyond the potential lost productivity (healthcare/rehabilitation costs as an example) so you can completely ignore this line of reasoning and their point still stands.
Nope. Because you and your boss work based on a voluntary freely consented agreement, not a forcible one. Slave contracts are illegal. You can quit anytime.
Taxation is not a free consent thing. I vote against lots of taxes, but they pass anyway and I'm forced to pay them. A vote is not consent and is not a contract.
> I don't agree that exerting some amount of influence over behavior that affects me is ownership
Forcibly controlling other people's behavior is ownership.
I wore seatbelts years before the law forced me to. I resent such laws in a free society, despite my seatbelt saving my life at one point. I will continue to wear a bike helmet even though I'm pleased the helmet law was repealed. I encourage you to wear one, too, but if you don't want to, it's your choice and your cranium.
I know. But I am asserting that is wrong. The US government was not set up to own people. (Yes, I know that it allowed individuals to own other individuals, but that got fixed.)
Some do it far more than others. The US was the first to have a Bill of Rights. It's a big deal. Although the BoR is constantly under attack. I'm amazed at the people who want to throw it away.
I know people who would happily replace it with the 10 Commandments, for example.
The Bill of Rights was literally inspired by various English Bills of Rights. To view the early U.S. as some sort of magical utopian exceptional polity that grew out of the head of Zeus is using incredibly rose-colored glasses; George Washington literally put down a tax rebellion with force, John Adams did as well, and Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Just ask Daniel Shays how much the Bill of Rights helped him.
From the beginning the United States was as flawed and as human as every single other government in the history of the world, and to pretend there is some sort of magical exceptionalism to it is both hopelessly utopian and impractical for useful discourse.
Employment is at-will on both sides. In the case of the state, you could also renounce your citizenship and try to get one with a more suitable country: so far as there's a wide range of choices and it's realistic to do that, you're not owned.
One of these cases is dramatically more realistic than the other.
Cost/benefit thinking has value. But realize you're taking one form of coercion (a state forcing others to pay for my medical costs whether or not I would choose to insure myself) to justify another (forbidding you to do something a bit risky to yourself). You might conclude the ownership is worth it, but it doesn't negate WalterBright's point. There's a cost in individual freedom.
> Ownership is the power to coerce someone to do your bidding
I could maybe agree with this. But I find the gap between "helmet laws" and "you're forced to do the government's bidding" rather wide. Like as far as I can tell this reduces to "any reduction in rights is ownership", so the government limiting your right to murder people means that the government owns you already.
> so the government limiting your right to murder people means that the government owns you already.
You have no right to hurt other people. Having the government prevent you from murdering people is not owning you and is not infringing on your rights. Actually, the government should not be preventing you from murdering others - it is there to mete out justice if you do.
> Having the government prevent you from murdering people is not owning you and is not infringing on your rights.
Of course it is! You just don't believe my exercise of those rights is legitimate, but there's no intrinsically different about the act of shooting someone and the act of riding a bike without a helmet, from a Hobbesian point of view. You can argue that the government/society has a more legitimate interest in limiting exercise of one of those rights, and I'd agree. But when we're talking about what rights should be, you can't use a legal definition of rights. That's circular.
> Actually, the government should not be preventing you from murdering others - it is there to mete out justice if you do.
And see, this is I think an interesting argument. But it leads to a really perverse system. You can't engage in any form of harm reduction policy, which means the only lever you have to reduce criminal/harmful activity is to have really cruel punishments for the few directly harmful acts.
Like take speeding or drinking and driving as obvious examples. Under the "only mete justice if you harm others" approach, you can't criminalize drunk driving or speeding, only vehicular manslaughter, so you either live with more death due to dangerous driving, or you have to like make the punishment for drunk/dangerous driving so terrible that it dissuades people from even engaging in the risky behavior. But in practice, avoiding the circumstances that lead to harm is better for everyone (the victim, the potential perpetrator, society at large) than punishing people after the fact, and there are lots of situations where punishments simply don't work.
Given that the argument being made here is that some laws formed by legitimate democratic institutions impose ownership (and are therefore unjust) no, you can't draw a distinction between laws and power here.
The Athenian assembly voted to massacre all the men on Melos, and sell the women and children into slavery. If you believe democracy is the source of all legitimacy, you need to debug your beliefs.
Edit: it's unclear whether that atrocity came to a vote, though it certainly happened. To pick a clear case of unjust and unlawful democratic legislation in the same war, there was the time they voted to execute six of eight generals, rather than subject each to a trial.
I know the post you're responding to probably got a, "wait, that doesn't follow at all..." out of a bunch of folks, but I'd recommend letting it be to speak for itself—most everyone else can see the same thing you do. You're not going anywhere useful by engaging.
Also, helmet laws reduce organs available for transplant. Instead of requiring helmets we should default all motorcycle riders in as organ donors. In fact I’d be in favor of changing the law to opt out rather than opt in.
The government arranges for most people to live in environments where driving or otherwise being around cars is necessary. Compensating controls are the least it can do.
Yeah, they didn't repeal it because it was racist. They repealed it because the enforcement of it was biased. That's an important difference and omitting it can lead to misinterpretation.
As it turns out, their data showed that the vast majority of people already used helmets. Those who don't are mostly those who can't afford it, and fining them won't make cycling safer for anyone.
The bias in the enforcement was substantial: black cyclists got 4 times as many tickets as white, and nearly half of the tickets were issued to homeless people.
Missing in the bias statistics was the rate at which various groups wore helmets. Enforcement bias cannot be inferred without these figures, which were missing from every article I read about it.
What they're saying is that there are biases in the sample of the people who got fined. What you're asking is what caused that bias. While that's certainly an interesting question that should be answered for a variety of reasons, answering it is not necessary to conclude that the law isn't doing its intended job.
By this logic, we should immediately repeal all laws. All of them.
You don't repeal laws because someone feels the law is being applied unequally. You fix the problem which causes that inequal problem, thus, resolving the problem for all laws.
Anything else is just people using race to get rid of specific laws they don't like.
Sure, if we apply the same logic out of the context where it was applied in this case, then you're completely right.
However, context matters. The statistics they quoted showed that the helmet use was at 91% in Seattle.
So if you have a law that is punishing up to 9% of the population and you note some pretty ugly biases in the sample of those who get fined, then it doesn't sound unreasonable to conclude that maybe we don't need to be doing that right now.
Do you really want to go down the rabbit hole of discussing just how many fallacies you stuffed in a one-liner? Is that what passes for discourse on HN nowadays?
The claim was, most people were obeying the law, so rather than fix the supposed problem (misuse of the law to target specific categories of people unfairly), just get rid of the law.
Murder has more people obeying that law, therefore, it should be looked at more eagerly with the same optics.
Looking at how only 91% of people are obeying a law, is an absurd and ridiculous method to determine if the law should exist.
You speak of logistical fallacies, but this entire premise is a fallacy.
Fix the problem, fix what leads to inequal application of the law.
Removing this law, will not prevent every other law, even the charging of people of colour with murder, which happens excessively as well, when they are innocent.
It is blasphemous these days to even entertain the thought that there might be behavioural differences between races, so gathering these statistics is like picking the forbidden fruit.
Not only is it not blasphemous, GP literally entertained the thought and stated it as fact.
If you cannot afford a helmet, you are less likely to wear one, and if you get fined for not wearing on, it isn't going to incentivize you to buy one - it's going to render you less able to buy one.
Or perhaps you are suggesting that black people are poorer because their ancestors adaptations to sunlight light have altered the way they handle their finances or respond to those incentives?
In which case, you shouldn't feel like a blasphemer and should just expound on those theories here. Please, don't leave them unsaid because we are just going to have to assume what you think. And we might make the error of assuming that you are just a racist.
Yup, just as expected - four paragraphs accusing me of not being orthodox enough, finishing up with calling me a heretic.
Look up how black people go camping less, how they are better at sprinting than other races, etc.
Do you think a certain race simply not biking that much is so dangerous of a thought, it should be illegal to even think about it and should result in one being called epithets, as you just did?
It may not even be that. If, for example, one group rides bikes more often than another group, they may be cited for lack of helmet use more even if the percentage of helmet use was exactly the same and the enforcement was perfectly unbiased.
They repealed the law because they wanted to for a bunch of fairly legitimate reasons. Due to the political climate at the time they couldn't say they did it because "what people do with their craniums is none of the government's business" so they picked a reason that they could use.
>>Care to provide specific examples of what you have tried and been unable to say because the government explicitly tells you not to?
Looked at Canadian news lately? I am not even talking about those blocking a major bridge or anything like that. They are seizing bank accounts of people they politically disagree with, or supported "indirectly" those they politically disagree with.
"Without the freedom to transact, you have no other constitutional rights"
>>People dying in auto accidents costs the government money in lost economic activity as well as things like medical care.
WOW... you understand you are providing an authoritarian justification for literally controlling everything about a persons life. These type of justification for the imposition of state authority into peoples life is one of the main reason I continue to oppose single payer healthcare for the US.
This idea because it would cost the government money in medical expenses is all the justification the government needs infringe on my personal autonomy / liberty is frankly terrifying, but less those then the idea of "less economic activity" being justification. That is freaking dystopian right there, am at a loss that anyone could think that is a valid justification for state power / authority
> Looked at Canadian news lately? I am not even talking about those blocking a major bridge or anything like that. They are ceasing bank accounts of people they politically disagree with, or supported "indirectly" those they politically disagree with.
Yes I have. You're ignoring the relationship between these two things. A group of protestors has occupied a city and created a massive public disturbance in the process for those that live and work there. People have a right to live in peace, undisturbed by others, do they not?
What's even more bizarre about this situation is that now, the leader of the movement has been arrested and now wants out of the entire thing because he didn't think the authorities would actually take action.
When you look back at history, you see leaders of real movements like MLK getting arrested because they lived under actual tyranny, and they weren't afraid of it because they spent their entire lives under oppression.
MLK was arrested multiple times throughout his life, and anyone who's serious about participating in civil disobedience knows that arrest is always on the table, and has been since the founding of the country.
The leader of the truckers buckled after a day in custody, what conviction he has in his rights.
>> A group of protestors has occupied a city and created a massive public disturbance in the process for those that live and work there.
Yes, that is the point of protesting. Which is a fundamental right in free society. As long as they are not rioting, destroying property, or using violence they should be free to protest.
Protesting is not standing to the side quietly holding a sign not getting in the way of anyone, relegated to a "free speech zone"
>>When you look back at history, you see leaders of real movements like MLK getting arrested because they lived under actual tyranny, and they weren't afraid of it.
He also "created a massive public disturbance" and was justified in doing so. The fact that some or even all of the "organizers" of this protest did not have the same moral conviction does not change anything.
That is a very very weak argument, it is also a weak argument that because racial discrimination was an objective moral wrong that we both agree with, so we both support those protests, but since you view body autonomy to be lessor, and violation of body autonomy to be less of a moral wrong then those people lose their right to protest.
That is a very dangerous position to hold, and one that highly doubt you would like to be used for something you think is very important, but maybe I don't. The difference is I would still defend your right to protest and assemble even if I disagree with your cause. Remember in politics, you must always, always, always invert.
You really shouldn't be surprised about Canada, of all places, doing stuff like that. I mean, we're talking about a country which, when it wrote its equivalent of the Bill of Rights, had to add a clause to it that basically allows state governments to nullify it pretty much whenever they wish, so long as they explicitly say that they do so:
And if you look further back, one could argue that the Canadian equivalent of "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" is "peace, order, and good government":
"Care to provide specific examples of what you have tried and been unable to say because the government explicitly tells you not to? " I would love to, despite your setting up a straw-man argument. I posted a link to this article: http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/no-vote.html on Hacker News. It received about 2000 page views in less than 30 minutes before it was pulled from the feed.
Wait, are you saying that Hacker News is the government? What does having a post getting removed from Hacker News have to do with what the government tells us to say? I'm sorry but I don't follow this line of argument at all.
The article doesn't say the government is the reason children could not have decent chemistry sets in the 1970's and '80's. That's the straw-man argument. However, I can't prove that fear of the government, due to what could be seen as an anti-government article, is the reason Hacker News pulled the post from the feed. I really don't know.
Given the topics quite routinely discussed here, I very much doubt that. But the article in question is a really short piece, and, so far as I can see, it's strictly politics - what makes it HN front page material? (popularity by itself is not a valid metric here)
> If your car runs out of gasoline and you manage to walk to a gas station, you cannot buy gasoline in anything other than an government approved container.
Approved gas cans are easy to come by and not particularly expensive. And keep in mind that gasoline is very flammable, turns into a moderately nasty pollutant when evaporated, is a moderately nasty pollutant when spilled, and can dissolve an inappropriate container. Additionally, the government has a very compelling interest in keeping roads open, and preventing transportation related fires seems entirely sensible.
No one has stopped you from buying gasoline, and, sadly, no one stops you from burning it in highly polluting devices in populated areas.
Approved gas cans are terrible. They leak, they don’t flow, they’re expensive, they’re complicated and god help you if you need to figure out how to use one in the dark. they end up doing exactly what they’re designed to prevent (leaking gas all over your hands, the ground, your car). There’s a great, simple sealing metal Jerry can that you can’t get anymore because… reasons.
I’m all for making things better and safer, but we go too far quite often.
I bought one of those government approved containers. It's impossible to fill it without spilling gas, and I absolutely hate spilling gas. (The nozzle is spring loaded, such that it takes a fair amount of force to open it. Then, when the container is full, it squirts out the top faster than I can react.)
Those are actually the easy ones to "fix". Either disassemble and pull the spring out, or if it's the push then twist version, just force/ twist the spout past the plastic nub that's supposed to limit how far it twists.
Either will allow you to hold the valve open without force.
Of course a properly sized/ shaped funnel without any spout at all is even easier. Which is basically how the metal safety cans work.
Also helps to drill a vent hole on the handle, and use a sheet metal screw as a plug.
which is great and actually works if you're in a rich area. What happens if you're not, and the gas station is out, or it's one of the ones without an attached little convenience store? If you've run out of gas and need a gas can, going to the next station over may be miles to walk!
If the alternative is putting gas in a bucket, which a) will be evaporating into your face while you walk back; b) will be dissolving the bucket while you walk back; c) you won't be able to use the get the gas into the tank anyway, even if it hasn't completely dissolved the bucket, then yes you walk. That's what happens when you run out of gas and you don't have a container in your car. You walk.
it has been my experience, even in the poorer parts of inner cities, most gas stations (the ones with convenience stores attached) sell gas cans for ~$5.
AAA will deliver you 5 gallons of gas, for members, though it counts towards a call for service (and you have to pay for gas).
I keep an empty gas can in my car trunk after learning the hard way.
I fully approve of the underlying idea that education is a good and valuable thing and that encouraging people / children to seek knowledge themselves is the only sensible way.
But come on. We do not run chemistry undergraduate courses by letting the students in the building and just leaving them there. A chemistry set is not enough. Teachers, mentors, peers and all the rest are part of both shaping and accelerating learning.
A child given chemicals who then "stupidly" poisons themselves is not solely to blame. They are expected to be supervised. If we as a society cannot afford enough teachers we should not say "let's hand out chemistry sets - we will get a few industrial chemists at the cost of a few poisonings". That is not trade off to be discussed - we should talk about why is chemistry not taught better at every primary and secondary school?
Oh phooey. I got a chemistry set at age 10 complete with bunsen burners and acids. Had a great time with it. The notion of sticking any of it in my mouth never occurred to me. The quantities of the chemicals weren't much, so there wasn't a whole lot of damage to be done with it.
A bunsen burner is much less dangerous than a candle.
I didn't learn a whole lot about chemistry with it, but later when I took chemistry classes I had some experience to flesh out the abstract instruction.
BTW, at Caltech, I noticed that quite a high percentage of students had played around with things that explode while kids. One told me his explosive hydrogen balloon had burned a 3' diameter hole in his home's roof. I asked him how he hid that from his parents. He said he patched it with a tarp, and when his parents weren't home he repaired it. They never found out, and he learned to be much more careful.
Also, the reason Caltech's JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) exists is because some rocket experimenters on campus had had some terrific explosions. The residential neighborhood got nervous about that and forced them outside the (then) city limits. It was called the Jet lab instead of the Rocket lab to allay the locals' fears about it.
You might also enjoy Homer Hickham's biography "October Sky" about how playing with rockets as a kid led directly to his career at NASA.
P.S. My dad refused to let me buy those Estes rockets. He didn't trust me :-) he was probably right. I did make my own rocket fuel on a couple occasions. I also built a flame thrower. No, I'm not going to describe it, so don't ask.
All that went away when I discovered cars. Gasoline, oil, and V8 engines. That thrill has never ever abated in me. My ancient heavily modified dodge makes me very happy.
If I was starting my career over today, I'd probably camp on SpaceX's doorstep until they relented and allowed me to work on those Raptor engines. I'd do it for minimum wage.
I didn't try that with matches, as I knew that packed matches are very unstable and likely to blow up in your face.
I did spend a lot of time trying to engineer a multi-stage bottle rocket. I finally got one to work, it was awesome! The cluster engine bottle rockets never did work. Happy times.
One of the things a person ought to learn is how to learn outside of an institutional setting. Completely alone if need be. That includes risk assessment, by the way.
This does not mean that kids' chemistry sets should include low-dose deadly poisons, but teachers are not a substitute for being able to learn things on your own. A person who can only function in a social setting is just as incomplete as a person who cannot function in a social setting. Maybe more so.
This article reminds me of a documentary that came out a couple years back on HBO Max called Class Action Park. It was about a notoriously dangerous water park in New Jersey in which several kids died or were maimed. Most of the documentary was toned with nostalgia. They interviewed many former employees and people who went there as kids. Many of the interviewees were comedians that told funny stories about the antics that went on there. Most of them viewed the experience through rose-colored glasses. This was a place were a kid could be a kid in an era when parents still allowed that to happen.
Then there would be an interview with a mom whose child died in the park describing how she was so grief-stricken that she walked into traffic trying to kill herself and was pulled back at the last second by her husband. You hear one story like that from a parent who lost a kid and suddenly dangerous waterslides and chemistry kits don't seem that important to a good childhood.
To me there's a big difference between a water park slide and a chemistry set. The water park is a business that is providing you an experience on their property. In this case, isn't there the assumption that they hired good engineers to build the slide, so they could make money off me and I won't die using their slide? In the case of the chemistry set, I'm buying something I know can hurt me if I use it wrong. It has warnings all over it. Actually, I had a chemistry set when I was young, but really don't remember anything about it, unfortunately.
The reputation of the park being dangerous wasn't retroactive. According to Wikipedia, at least 6 people died in the park. That "assumption" that the park was safe should have been gone after the 1st death and was certainly gone after the 5th. People knew that it was dangerous at the time and that was part of the fun. Does that mean the 6th person to die is solely responsible for their own death? To paraphrase you "they were doing something they knew could hurt them". Does that excuse the park's horrendous safety record? Should the park be allowed to operate if customers knew death was a very real possibility?
> In the case of the chemistry set, I'm buying something I know can hurt me if I use it wrong.
Chemistry is not a commonly known subject though. For example, I took AP Chemistry in HS and this article is the first time I’ve ever heard of “cobalt chloride”.
We have a social contract that parents teach their kids about common household safety like don’t touch hot things, how to use a knife and don’t shoot your brother with a BB gun. Those things we all know can harm us.
Chemistry just isn’t in that category. Parents aren’t warning their kids from a young age about “cobalt chloride” and to make sure you never ingest it.
Stories such as the one you mention about the woman who lost her son are very moving - but this is exactly the problem. It’s not wise to base decisions on individual anecdotes, or to reason from emotion.
Emotions are real and in some ways the most important consideration, but not one persons emotion, not a few tragic cases.
We have to do our best to check our human tendency to overweight these emotional stories and reason about the overall impact to everybody.
When we feel ourselves reacting emotionally to a story, that’s when we should least trust our own judgement.
My argument is no more emotional or anecdotal than the one in the article. They didn't share any statistics about how chemistry kits resulted in smart kids or how accidents with the kits were so rare as to be worth ignoring. Their argument was one based purely on nostalgia and ideology. If you think their argument is reasoned, odds are it is because you have that same nostalgia or share that same ideology.
The "it was so múch fun" is as emotional as it gets. There is literally document all about emotions and you object to one of them and approve the others.
I was curious and looked this up,and "several kids died" actually understates how dangerous it was. Only one of the victims was a minor (a 15-year-old who drowned) - the rest were all adults. An 18 and a 20-year-old by drowning, a 19-year-old by a ride car jumping a track, and a 27-year-old by electrocution.
Action Park didn't banish gs from the American childhood experience. We know perfectly well how to make thrilling amusement park rides under serious safety engineering discipline, and that's what happens.
The rate of child deaths due to unintentional injury has fallen by over half from 1970 to 2007 for children 1-14.[1] With the current population of US children, this means about 100-200 fewer child deaths per year.
Consumer protection lawsuits have done a lot to keep people safe.
That said, there needs to be balance. Keeping kids indoors for fear of kidnapping is ridiculous. Keeping kids away from real science is also probably a bad idea. But modern playground equipment safety regulations, as an example, are really good, even if they do mean no more spiny things.
Playgrounds are also supposed to be a place where kids learn to take risks and find their boundaries. Many of todays playgrounds are so safe that kids aren’t learning to take risks.
There’s a great book called The Coddling of the American Mind. It talks about play grounds safety, cancel culture, and many of the topics covered in this thread. I recommend it for everyone, but especially parents.
As adults we might overestimate what it takes for a kid to feel like they are taking a risk. My preschooler was quaking with fear & on the verge of tears (but determined) the first, second, and third time he climbed 6ft up a funky metal trellis. Then it was just as terrifying when he climbed a rope ladder.
I mean, historically they were not build for risk taking. That was not motivation behind playgrounds at all. I agree that American culture is often overly on the safe side. But that does not make the above argument true.
Plus, what would actually helped would be to stop framing non risky activities as risk taking.
This is one aspect of American culture that absolutely mystifies me. The need to "idiotproof" every potential angle of harm in society leads to a predictable outcome: a bunch of idiots that have never learned anything the hard way. It creates a feedback loop that creates a need for more stringent nannying by the government until personal agency is completely eroded.
Yeah, all those kids that haven't poisoned themselves are a real drain on our society.
I just don't buy that warning labels somehow create a dumber populace. Are we saying that self-electrocution is a required ingredient for critical thinking?
Warning labels, perhaps not. But in Australia I cannot run Cat6 for "safety". I might electrocute someone with the 12V and must get a licensed professional to do the work for me.
A label warning that high voltage is inside is fine, a required label is quite ok, a fine because you didn't put the label on (even though it wasn't explicitly required) is a little bit of a stretch, banning modification is clearly an overreach (in my book).
There is a line somewhere, and drawing it too close to either end is harmful. So now we're arguing degrees, and not absolutes.
The way this usually works in the USA is a “homeowner’s exemption” - you can run cat6 in your house all you want but you can’t charge others to do it for them without certification/licensing.
Which can lead to all sorts of fun homeowner specials when you buy an older property.
You can also have fun times if they used "professionals". Electricians, and especially plumbers, are like termites. In the course of following their own imperatives, they often do serious damage to the building structure. Sometimes they also screw up their own trades, but more often they screw up something else.
Yeah, even if you're having a custom home built, you either need a really diligent prime contractor, or you need to visit it every day, because nobody cares about anyone else on the job site, and very few companies have all the trades in-house.
Definitely have an independent home inspector do an inspection before the sheetrock goes up. Issues are cheap or free to fix before that step.
No. It’s very nice, but for things like actual electrical and gas work, a permit is required.
Many people don’t pull permits however - it’s something to be aware of when buying older homes. The advent of arc breakers and GFCI have reduced the chance of serious harm in these areas.
And I’ve also seen (and done) work that was significantly above the base line contractor level (that nobody would pay for usually) just because it was the homeowner bothering to do things very right.
Are you talking about running it in your own house?
Because if you're talking about a commercial building you are talking about a non zero chance of setting up a situation that can harm others. It's not about the 12v. It's about you getting it hooked in with 110/220 and killing someone else. People that do it professionally tend to have liability insurance you pay your survivors something.
I do wonder if too many warning labels leads to warning fatigue. I remember the first time I saw a Proposition 65 warning it gave me serious pause wondering if the product (a set of Christmas lights) was even safe to handle with bare hands. The 10,000th time I didn't notice at all. "Yeah everything causes cancer nowadays whatever who cares". Meaning there is now a chance I will end up ignoring the warning on something that is actually really carcinogenic because everything I buy says it can cause cancer and reproductive harm.
I don't think it's any one thing making society dumber, but there is a clearly a combination of things at work making society dumber. I'd be interested to know which of those things show the highest correlation, but something is inf act making people dumber.
Idiocracy is only 15 years old, how did we get to where we are this fast?
I think warning labels produce a number populace and produce nothing of value. And that's by design. If you put lengthy labels on everything the effect is the same as no labels at all. Nobody reads them and you just use the item as best as you can figure out. In CA they put cancer warning stickers on almost everything. Either you stop buying anything or you ignore them.
I agree about the warning labels being too… eager… but I was shopping in the past and was about to buy a bottle of olive oil, except that there was a big cancer warning on the shelf for that specific bottle. So I bought a different bottle of olive oil that didn’t have the cancer warning. So in that case it was quite effective
So it's not really idiot-proofing, it stems from this:
You have two innocent people. One harms the other, unintentionally. Who pays for the damage?
ex. I throw a rock, it hits your windshield. Total accident. Should I pay?
ex. I manufacture an atv - it's really fun to ride, but it tends to flip over, killing the rider. I obviously don't intend for this to happen, but it does, several times. Should I pay for this? Should the government regulate it?
My personal pet theory for this has always been that the United States was founded by lawyers. Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton were all attorneys.
Of course this doesn’t speak to the rise of lawsuits as an industry in the 70’s and 80’s. I’m not sure of the reasons for that, but as the author notes it had a huge upswing at that time.
The rise of lawsuits is because that's how the system "works". For better or worse. The US doesn't have the same sort of oversight watchdog groups with actual power like in the EU, so lawsuits with threat of monetary damages is how coffee is no longer flesh-burning scaldingly hot.
No, the famous hot-coffee lawsuit did not result in lower service temperatures. Coffee is still widely served at the same flesh-burning scaldingly hot temperatures:
> "Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C),[37] relying on more sternly worded warnings on cups made of rigid foam to avoid future liability, though it continues to face lawsuits over hot coffee.[37][38] The Specialty Coffee Association of America supports improved packaging methods rather than lowering the temperature at which coffee is served. The association has successfully aided the defense of subsequent coffee burn cases.[38] Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C)."
That's a shame. And also on appeal, the judgement was tamped down. What is the system working here is that the woman got her medical bills paid for, and in a country where medical bankruptcy is a routine thing, that's really important.
There are good reasons for the industry standard high holding and service temperatures. I can tell when coffee has been sitting at temperatures that are too low.
I'm glad Stella got her bills paid, but no, that's not how the system is working. Successful hot coffee lawsuits are extremely rare. I'm aware of only a couple successful payouts in case alleging only excessive temperature. The only two "hot-coffee" lawsuits I know of in the past couple of years both involve defective lids and insufficient warnings.
I personally theorize that many of these considerations are practical, as education quality and quantity have both dropped considerably in the USA over the last generation or so, and precipitously so over two or three generations.
The median person has a lot less knowledge, education, and experience today than in the past, and I hope and believe that the current circumstance is a general response to that as opposed to simply a legal system run amok with assignment of liability.
I can't speak to the quality but quantity has definitively not dropped[0]. More people are more educated now than ever before, and that's only increasing.
I'm talking about the number of things learned, not the number of hours spent under the broad category heading of "education".
Showing that more people graduate high school or university without compensating for the reduced level of education those milestones represent is a somewhat meaningless graph, which predictably goes up and to the right.
The Flynn Effect is about how general intelligence is generally trending upward. In the good old days, people were significantly dumber than they are now.
This holds up in all quantiles. The smartest kids today are much smarter than the smartest kids a few decades ago, and this is apparent in the difficulty level of academic competitions.
"Some research suggests that there may be an ongoing reversed Flynn effect (i.e., a decline in IQ scores) in Norway, Denmark, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, and German-speaking countries,[4] a development which appears to have started in the 1990s.[5][6][7][8] In certain cases, this apparent reversal may be due to cultural changes which render parts of intelligence tests obsolete.[9] Meta-analyses indicate that, overall, the Flynn effect continues, either at the same rate[10] or at a slower rate in developed countries.[11][12]"
I'd contest that idea. Although they may have more knowledge or be intellectual I'd argue people two or three generations back were far more capable than our current population.
They'd be able to fix their own cars, frame their own houses,etc. Most people these days struggle to change their own oil.
These people are also unable to program a VCR. When cars were unreliable, it was beneficial to understand how they worked. When computing devices were unreliable, it was beneficial to understand how they worked. The field-specific skills are different, but the basic reasoning skills were poorer among those older generations.
Have you instead tried thinking that instead of people getting dumber that life is getting more complicated and that we have little tolerance for injury?
Jump back 50 years and the number of people with crippling injuries really skyrockets. Many more people had missing fingers, legs, or arms back then.
>a bunch of idiots that have never learned anything the hard way
Why do people need to learn the hard way? Now that we have YouTube there's less of a need for so many people to repeat the same thing to learn something as opposed to watching a video on it.
When you are watching a video everything seems easy. When you try to repeat what was shown in the video yourself everything becomes impossibly hard. The learning experience is really not comparable.
> Now that we have YouTube there's less of a need for so many people to repeat the same thing to learn something
maybe you can watch a video about: having a girlfriend/boyfriend, going to the beach and surfing, having friends and going on adventure trips with them... all these things were done before, so why do you need to do them when you can just check YT out...? I hope you sense the absurdity of what you're suggesting.
>so why do you need to do them when you can just check YT out...?
That's kind of different as I'm talking about their not being much of a difference watching a chemical in a video and watching it in real life in terms of gaining knowledge.
I don't see anything wrong with watching videos about people exploring or going to the beach. You might even have more fun than doing those things yourself and you don't even need to leave the comfort of your house.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
> The courts had decided that if a twelve-year-old wondered what cobalt chloride tasted like, was stupid enough to find out, and poison himself in the process, the manufacturer of the Chemistry set was at fault.
There are ways to ingest something without being “stupid”, like a spill accidentally contaminating a food surface like a kitchen table or counter.
Also, how many kids jokingly made their siblings eat sand or some other thing they weren’t supposed to eat? As a parent, I appreciate things being marketed to kids to be as non-lethal as possible.
This is a classic fallacy: “nothing bad happened to me, so if someone else gets hurt they must be stupid”.
This reminds me of memes decrying modern safety rules showing kids in the 50s riding in the front seats of cars without seatbelts.
It’s not always about the chances of an accident happening, it’s about the minor chance of an accident causing catastrophic results.
Re-read the part about accidents. Accidents aren’t Darwin awards. Accidents happen in Level 4 Bio facilities by some of the most highly trained individuals in the world. I’m guessing the accident rate for kids would be much higher than 1 in a million.
And you can still buy an adult chemistry set for your kid and supervise them to the extent you feel is appropriate.
Maybe you personally have never had an accident but to err is human and kid’s products do need to be designed for the masses and accounting for the fact that their bodies, moral compass and decision making is still in flux.
Adult chemistry supplies never went away. You can, in fact, go buy all sorts of chemicals and college-level chemistry lab kits from suppliers right now. The only thing that actually changed is that the immediately dangerous stuff couldn't go in products actively advertised for children.
Ah yes, the world of USA. I know it's a hard concept for Americans to understand, but there do exist countries on this planet where litigation culture hasn't degenerated to the point of complete utter madness. Perhaps for once it would be a good idea to take notes instead of forcing idiotic ideas onto the rest of the civilized world.
Not only that, one could easily argue that it hasn't even happened in the USA :)
Although a massive PR campaign has been waged to suit the legislative agenda of tort reform, because in order do massively limit the liability of huge corporations to effective legal redress for their victims, there has to be a public perception of a masses of frivolous law suits.
One of the most important things I keep in mind is that Americans account for fewer than 1/20th of human beings. Whatever attributes, good or bad, ascribed to the people in that place at that time, if they are somehow unique, are not generally applicable to human beings or human nature or those traits would not likely be unique to 3.x% of people.
As the US is comprised of hundreds of millions of people, it is likely whatever special unique circumstances have arisen there are circumstantial; that is, nurture and not nature. It's probably the result of some (written or unwritten) policy or tradition that is, by definition, local or temporary.
>> The Federal Hazardous Substances Labeling Act of 1960 required labels for toxic and dangerous substances, and chemistry set makers removed the alcohol lamps and acids from their kits. The Toy Safety Act of 1969 removed lead paint from toys but also took its toll on the sets. The creation of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1972 and the passing of the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976 resulted in further limits on the contents of the kits. <<
What word do you think is appropriate when someone prohibits people from doing what they want in a way that doesn't threaten (or even inconvenience) anyone else?
Also, it seems like it might be a struggle to raise great chemists when access to chemicals becomes restricted for young people. Hopefully we've discovered all of chemistry and there is nothing important left to find in that field, otherwise this might be doing net harm to the next generation.
I mean, yeah? There isn't any contention over the facts here. Interesting chemicals are not safe to ingest. What word do you think covers the action of swooping in and making other people's personal decisions for them, on the sole basis that you would make different decisions?
I probably don't agree with your spending decisions. What do you want to call if I were empowered to make better ones on your behalf? Tyranny is a good word for it.
I've got a lot of concerns about your use of language here, because:
1) Tyranny is different to cruelty. Tyrants don't have to be cruel.
2) How is this not oppression? Someone wants to buy their son a chemistry kit, the son is probably all excited about it because there is something dangerous and exciting to learn about and then some random enforcer is coming in and stopping that from happening because they disagree with that family's value judgements. If that isn't oppression in the small, oppression may not exist. Oppressors can all say that they're worried about the safety of the people they oppress - that is a common argument oppressors make if they feel like justifying themselves. Imagine that line coming out of the mouth of a Communist Party spokesperson over in China, they aren't implementing their policies out of a sense of malice - they think they are good for China.
Curiously, Webster's [0] doesn't include the word cruel. Possibly the Americans and the British use the word differently. I suspect the British are working around the fact that they have a monarch; the US definition is closer to my understanding of the original Greek tyrants.
I'm disappointed that this comment is being downvoted silently. You're correct, it's the same basic mindset. If nothing else, consider the "Pascal's Wager" of poverty: somebody who is poor should assume he can, by his sole effort, "pull himself up by his bootstraps" to a better life. This will help him get the best chance at doing so. If not, it doesn't matter anyway. So yes, we should "push" a positive mindset on those in poverty.
And anecdotally, it worked for me and a lot of other people I know, and I think most of the people who claim otherwise do so to justify their political goal of an enlarged socdem welfare state that provides "benefits" to everybody instead of just "the needy".
The ones I give my opinion on agency on are ones where people do have agency.
> At some point during the day you will inevitably trust someone else to prepare food for you, give you advice, collect information, enforce rules, etc.
Trusting someone is something entirely different from having agency.
> It's also been extended to the notion that if one fails, it is always someone else's fault.
Sometimes it is someone else’s fault. But no one is saying it’s always someone else’s fault.
And what I meant by trust is that you have the illusion of agency in many situations. People think they have full agency over their health: they get to choose what to eat, where and how to exercise, what medicine to take, etc.
Except we are restricted by our economic situation, local availability, local knowledge, social influences, etc. such that no two people have the exact same agency.
I’m an extreme example, people are shunned or banned from communities for making certain decisions with their lives. In those scenarios, it isn’t a free market scenario where two choices can be evaluated and the best one picked. The deck is heavily stacked and your agency is impacted to some degree, such that saying that “people have agency over their lives” is too simplistic IMO.
Having an agency is a book length topic. Of course a HN message is going to be short & simple. After all, people don't read long postings. <= yes, that's another generalization, but it's reasonably accurate.
> People think they have full agency over their health
I've seen estimates that 70-80% of health problems are the result of lifestyle choices.
When removing mental illness from the study, many service members who had addiction in Vietnam had no addiction or relapse when they returned to the US, even without any treatment. The leading theories were reduced stress, better social support and less access to opioids.
So, if you’re growing up in a city and/or family unit with high stress (high crime, low opportunity), poor social influences / support structures and high access to dangerous or illegal activities, you’re far more likely to fall into addiction or poor decision making through no extra fault of your own.
If you grow up with low stress, great influences and little temptation, you’re more likely to make good decisions with no bonus points for you.
So yeah, decision making is a huge part of your health, but for this study of service men in the 50s the deck was stacked against them in Vietnam and stacked in their favor in the US. It’s interesting to see the same exact person experiencing two wildly different outcomes with their environment being the largest differing factor, rather than education, treatment, etc.
It suggests that it’s hard to educate someone into making better decisions, but easier to help them make better decisions by helping them find a healthier environment.
This line up with research about self control fatigue that each decision proves and act of self restraint is fatiguing (https://www.nutritionaction.com/daily/what-not-to-eat/decisi...). Which is akin to the salesman’s trick of the trade: “persistence wears down resistance”.
The more you’re tempted the more likely you are to succumb.
So pick your guilty pleasure and now imagine it in your house, on the way to work, enjoyed by your friends and loved ones, everywhere all the time. It’s much harder to resist than if you don’t have access to it or have a healthy mix of people in your life who don’t indulge.
I guess I see it more like 70-80% of decisions are influenced by your environment and we’re not as virtuous or evil as our actions alone might seem.
In economics we distinguish between naive and sophisticated agents. The naive agent assumes he can continue to maintain self control. However, we want our future selves to make a different set of choices than our future selves often want to make.
So, the sophisticated agent recognizes brute self control does not always work and finds ways to commit himself. Most of us are familiar with ways of doing this:
- Plan food for the week and don't keep unhealthy things in the house
- Get a gym partner to avoid excuses for skipping workouts
- Make a budget to place artificial limits on impulse spending
If I were a serviceman and knew I was going to places with lots of drugs, and that I had a weakness, I would maybe ask my CO to test me every x days while there. Commit in advance to a course of action that maybe in the future I would not like, but the choice is already made and so I am better off. This is only one possible idea, of course there are others, the point is there are ways to mitigate these problems.
There are ways we can work against our future selves to make better choices and doing this is an important part of being an adult. The fact that everybody is not perfect at it does not mean people don't have agency. And an idea of "self control fatigue" does not excuse people from responsibility for the consequences of their actions or failure to succeed.
> If I were a serviceman and knew I was going to places with lots of drugs, and that I had a weakness, I would maybe ask my CO to test me every x days while there.
Try this scenario again but without knowledge of the impact your decision will have and without a benevolent and cooperative support structure and I think it will more accurately describe what many people go through.
Your scenario is from an ideal perspective: full information, full awareness and unlimited help from the community. Not everyone has all of those benefits.
FYI, I don’t think the servicemen had an addiction to opioids prior to Vietnam.
Drugs (and most “poor” decisions) aren’t usually offered up with a fair and balanced perspective, it’s more of a “hey, try this” and you’re already in a hole before you knew it was a hole. Same with healthy eating, financial literacy, etc.
If you were raised in a poor, high-crime community by parents who made poor life choices and still found the time to learn about healthy meal prep, workout buddies and proper budgeting, then that’s amazing and kudos to you for overcoming a deck stacked against you.
For example, if your family and entire social circle is built around a religion you could say that your religion is still a choice, but if leaving a religion means leaving every important social bond you have, the choice is not as simple and free of consequences as choosing a BBQ sauce at the supermarket.
Similarly, if you were never taught stress coping mechanisms, or were conditioned by your parents to seek approval from others, or have been taught to live fast and enjoy your youth, etc. it’s probably a lot easier to decide to try opioids. Even to the point where not trying them feels like going against everything you’ve ever been taught and everything that’s kept you safe and alive up to that point.
It’s a nature vs. nurture argument and you’re ignoring the influence nurture has.
We could do this all day, but it’s really not hard to think of a scenario where a bad decision to you is the rational decision to someone else. There are more variables at play than try opioids or not. Your entire life up until that point plays a decision and no two lives and value systems are the same.
Like if you fail to win an election (or even if you win 4 years earlier, but fail to secure the popular vote), for example, or if your inauguration didn't have the highest attendence ever, one could go on and on with examples :)
I don't know much about Hillary but I remember the WBAI interview Bill Clinton did with Amy Goodman for Hillary's gubernatorial election and where he ended up ranting and raving about "hostile questions" he sounded almost exactly like Trump. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if Hillary was another narcissist incapable of accepting responsibility for anything.
> This is a world in which we have lost sight of the fact that constraining ourselves with ridiculous laws to protect us from anything that might conceivable harm us relegates us to the role of toddlers who don't know enough not to touch something hot.
Is there any evidence for this? Sure, it feels good to say "oh, everyone these days has gone soft unlike me who is hard" but how does this actually play out? "don't know enough not to touch something hot" is hyperbole, but what's the concrete version of it? I'm struggling to think of anything.
I've noticed a lot of turns at traffic lights are getting explicit red arrows. A solid green light without an arrow means that you need to give way to pedestrians and other vehicles if turning. It feels to me no one is looking any more, they just think green means go. I think it's because we've trained them out of thinking with too many constraints.
I see them in my area, too, but only at intersections with any or all of extremely heavy traffic, poor sightlines, or multiple left turn lanes, that would make a left turn on plain green dicey at best.
Sometimes there will be red, yellow, flashing yellow, and green arrows, with flashing yellow being the yield option, used at times of day when it's appropriate.
My guess is that it's more a matter of cost. With LEDs, it's cheap to have a red arrow and a red circle. With incandescent lights, you cannot just illuminate part of the red bulb to get an arrow.
Except that none of the traffic lights that I’ve seen have ever used the same light for an arrow and circle — even with LEDs, it’s always two separate lights
None of the examples are particularly convincing. I'm not seeing any evidence of our eventual slip into toddlerdom.
> This is a world that feels compelled to pass laws requiring the use of seat belts and motorcycle helmets in the hope of protecting people who are too stupid to wear them otherwise.
Does anyone really have a problem with mandating basic safety? Can you say this is actually causing harm without extrapolating and theorizing?
> If your car runs out of gasoline and you manage to walk to a gas station, you cannot buy gasoline in anything other than an government approved container. The fact that you are stranded makes no difference.
This one's valid, but I also don't see the practical problem here. Gas stations can just stock jerry cans as needed, it's not that big of a deal. Maybe this one can be done away with.
> If someone falls off a ladder while painting your house, they can sue you and take your house.
This is a matter of liability, a concept I'm sure we all can say is something we should keep around to avoid acting like toddlers. There are situations where they deserve to be compensated for their injury, and there are situations where they don't, and most court systems will attempt to distinguish the two. Now, if your court system sucks, it may not make a great decision but that's neither here nor there.
> This is a world that no longer allows you to purchase hydrogen peroxide above a certain concentration for fear you will use it to make a bomb.
"Due to product restrictions, we cannot sell this product online.
Please call Customer Service at 1-800-234-7437 or send an email to help@thermofisher.com for assistance."
My guess is there will be some ID check, or maybe they only sell to people with "legitimate need" or whatever because the feds get on their ass otherwise.
Any government that puts people on a blacklist for buying over n pounds of fertilizer, peroxide, whatever is a bad government.
> Does anyone really have a problem with mandating basic safety?
Yes. That is why he included the example.
It is totally ridiculous that if I do something that puts myself at a minor risk then I get funnelled into a system where the options are compliance or imprisonment.
The situation is complicated somewhat by the fact that as far as we call tell a rational person should agree with what the system is demanding, and it isn't important enough to fight about. But nevertheless, imprisonment should not be a theoretical outcome for someone wilfully choosing not to wear a seatbelt.
I don't know, I'm not a domain expert. Maybe they don't imprison people for that and just bankrupt them. Still wildly disproportionate and an idiotic formal response to a minor bad decision.
> imprisonment should not be a theoretical outcome for someone wilfully choosing not to wear a seatbelt.
It isn't. You might get cited for not wearing a seatbelt and then through your own stupidity get thrown in jail but the seatbelt citation alone won't do it.
The point about seatbelts is particularly asinine because someone not wearing a seatbelt is not just endangering themselves.
In a car it is pretty easy for a person without a seatbelt to become a hundred plus pound projectile. For instance a belted driver sees something in the road and swerves to avoid it; an unbelted person in the front passenger seat unaware of the maneuver will bounce around likely interfering with the driver's control of the car. If the passenger hits their head and is knocked unconscious they're going to rag doll around the inside of the car.
A lot of people only think of head on collisions with regard to seatbelts. They don't consider (like the author) all of the non-impact events that can happen in a car and cause people to fly around the passenger compartment. Just slamming on the brakes can throw someone through a window or into the front console.
> It isn't. You might get cited for not wearing a seatbelt and then through your own stupidity get thrown in jail but the seatbelt citation alone won't do it.
Yeah, but you're classing "not wearing a seatbelt" as "your own stupidity" in that line of reasoning. If someone persistently and willfuly attempts to drive without wearing a seatbelt (and, obviously, the legal system is aware of it) then the outcome is going to be imprisonment sooner or later.
The fact that nobody is stupid enough to throw away their lives over seatbelts doesn't change the logical progression of what would happen to someone if they tried.
A former coworker of mine always refused to wear a seatbelt, and to my knowledge still does. He was in a car accident and had major damage to his legs, hips, and back. Traction, several surgeries, you get the idea. Because he's too stupid to wear a seatbelt he incurred a lot of costs, both financial and psychological, for a lot of people.
> Still wildly disproportionate and an idiotic formal response to a minor bad decision.
Any interaction with the justice system has to have imprisonment at the end of the line. Not because that's the right way to do it, but because it just doesn't work otherwise. Let's imagine a scenario where a law is passed saying you cannot be imprisoned for a speeding ticket under any circumstances. As long as you don't get in an accident, you can go 150mph down the highway and you won't go to jail.
Okay so you get a ticket for an obscene amount of money. But you can't pay it, or you just don't. Do we just throw our hands up and say "shucks, you got us on that one?" Even if you have wages to garnish or property to forfeit, you'd have to take those costs into account and now for a $500 ticket you're having your car repo'd or your wages garnished by 10% for months. It doesn't seem like an oppressive socialist hellscape to me to just say "you know what, you either pay your ticket or you go to jail, and if you're going fast enough, just go straight to jail."
I'm not certain that a 3rd party would read that as something I agree with, so I'll just note:
1st paragraph - that looks like someone bearing the costs for their bad decision personally to me. Which is why they should be the one making the decision.
2nd & 3rd - yep. That comes close to the extended argument for why it is stupid to legally mandate wearing seatbelts. The level of threat required to enforce a minor requirement is absurd. People shouldn't be subjected to that sort of legal hazard without a high bar of justification.
Yes, it's true that there are lonely people who nobody cares about, who don't have loved ones who are effectively blackmailed in to becoming nurses and carers for them after they self-harm. Some of those people are also contributing enough to cover their medical expenses and maybe they exist in a society where somehow they aren't taking medical resources away from equally or more deserving others.
On the other hand, however, a lot of people exist as parts of families and communities. They don't need to be mandated not to harm themselves in acts of sheer stupidity because they think about the consequences of their own actions and would be mortified to imagine themselves in a situation where medical resources are being expended on them for no other reason than their own narcissism.
But more to the point, at times the task of a democracy boils down to deciding which of these two sorts of personality the society should be geared towards supporting or whether it makes sense to limit the amount of damage that lunatics and sociopths and can do to themselves or to the rest of us for that matter.
> Now, if your court system sucks, it may not make a great decision but that's neither here nor there.
But "good decision" is not just a technical judgement. The OP claimed the U.S. courts changed their doctrine about this kind of case, at least regarding chemistry sets, around the 70s or not long before. I don't know if this is right, but it comports with other claims I've read about strict liability taking over then -- that previously, liability was a balance where adults could assume responsibility for themselves, and it was possible to sell them dangerous items if it was clear enough what they were getting, without extreme fear of lawsuits; and afterwards, not.
Maybe this claim is wrong, I don't know, but it's certainly not "neither here nor there" in this argument.
It actually is, because I'm focused on the slipping into toddlerdom part. Toddlers don't care about liability, but we do. Some mildly overprotective liability doctrine (won't someone think of the children?!) isn't enough to form the slippery slope that is being implied here.
A lot of people here are saying they resent that they're being treated like toddlers. It's not a prospective slippery slope, it's one we've already slid down.
In considering whether it's overprotective, you need to account for the products and industries that never came to exist, and not just the ones that were destroyed, like https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/02/av... (first paragraph).
Aside from the restriction to non-online sales pointed out by another commenter, no, 50% peroxide is not high enough for rocket fuel. Armadillo Aerospace failed in large part because they couldn't get peroxide.
Can you even ship highly concenterated (>50%) hydrogen peroxide? I'd imagine what you get in the mail will be less than what you ordered due to natural decomposition. In any case, it's not a good example, highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide needs to be treated with respect and restricting/tracking its sales isn't going to make us into toddlers.
You can, yes, but not in the mail. (That's a terrifying thought!)
I agree that it needs to be treated with respect. Not allowing the public to access things that need to be treated with respect is indeed treating them like toddlers.
>> This is a world that has nearly ended the manufacture of private aircraft that any individual with a private pilot's license and enough money can purchase.
Fortunately home building aircraft is alive and well. Check out your local EAA for more info.
On the other hand, Burt Rutan quit selling plans for planes after someone did utterly stupid things and the family tried to sue him. Many home builders are reluctant to sell a plane they built for similar reasons.
This attitude has unfortunately also spread into the computing industry, and although some may attribute that to chasing profits, even a lot of FOSS has started to adopt the "you are too stupid to make your own decisions" position.
Consumer Reporter: So, you don’t feel that this product is dangerous?
Irwin Mainway: No! Look, we put a label on every bag that says, “Kid! Be careful – broken glass!” I mean, we sell a lot of products in the “Bag O'” line.. like Bag O’ Glass, Bag O’ Nails, Bag O’ Bugs, Bag O’ Vipers, Bag O’ Sulfuric Acid. They’re decent toys, you know what I mean? [0][1]
Maybe the makers of chemistry sets are following consumer demand. The only backlash I've heard about modern chemistry sets are from those who are reminiscing about their childhood, or using it as an allegory about a perceived social crisis. But maybe the people who actually buy chemistry sets want them to be more benign. Can we hear from some parents who understand the chemistry involved and what their own preferences are?
Disagree. This is a terrible worldview to take: he's just smarmy because he's familiar with the Chemistry topic, but would he still be alive today if not for the many electrical standards and regulations that meant he can charge his iPhone without electrocuting himself?
All sorts of technology is at the forefronts of our worlds and this can only be done _because_ people don't have to be an expert in every subject to interact with these things safely. Ex ABS brakes mean I don't need to have racecar driver skills.
And at the end of the day there's nothing stopping modern parents from being responsible parents and buying their kids a proper adult chemistry set and supervising the use of it, teaching the child to respect it in the same way that my Father taught me to respect mains electricity when mucking about with electronics stuff (by hooking me up to a line tester and giving me a shock "it will be 1000x worse than this) and that lesson sticks with me to this day, mains is scary.
>> If someone falls off a ladder while painting your house, they can sue you and take your house.
This rings true to me. Where I live, on one side of the street half the houses have been taken over by house painters who sued the former owners. The other half of the street the houses go unpainted because people fear the laborers will take advantage of them.
I wish we could go back to a world where property owners had power and political influence.
Har har. It's not common, sure, but it does really happen, and it's devastating and life-destroying to the owners and their entire families when it does.
The same can be said for being struck by lightning. Yet people don’t say the problem of the world is that you can be struck lightning. It’s obvious propaganda.
I don't think there are many protections in either case. I don't know what your experience is, but when people show up to work on my house they don't seem to do so without a lot of protections or regulations and I don't feel very worried about it. If your experience is different, please elaborate.
Larger point: The original post is by an old guy talking about how great things were in the old days. Even Adam Smith made fun of how it is human nature for people to think things are going to hell.
Economists do think over-regulation is a problem. But what they think is a problem is regulation that protect incumbents large and small (farm subsidies, accreditation). Getting sued by your house painter is silly.
Every idea or principle is seen through the lens of current events. There is no nuance or context applied. Everything is seen as either "don't tread on me" type of thinking or "please think of the children!". Maybe it's because the loudest voices or those riding a wave of sensationalism simply drown out everything in the wake. Personal freedoms should absolutely take a back-seat to general welfare and safety of society, within limits and depending on the nature of potential dangers. An airborne virus, for example, necessitates curtailing personal freedoms for the greater good.
Generally, however, once you switch from common sense to thinking in terms of law culturally, it's a slow path toward a police state. I realize that's a loaded phrase; so, maybe read this with a grain of salt, rather than immediately attributing some ulterior motive or agenda.
Once common sense gets twisted for political gain, generally a quicker progression toward anarchy or police state.
This is a society espousing individual freedom, yet hysterical over crime. Punishing a child's actions the same as an adult's shows the micromanaging of those freedoms; especially when police are called to schools for fights or even "misdemeanor" acts. Jails are used to house and treat more people with mental health issues than hospitals.
As we're conditioned to give up our free will and even certain personal freedoms over time and daily (i.e. more personal debt, more things to own, more time spent working, more money spent on things/services to alleviate the stress... cycle), we usually end up either overreacting to "hot-button issues" or lash out at things that have no direct impact on our daily life and on the welfare and prosperity of our families or communities (e.g. abortion, gay marriage). That's not to say that those are not important issues. But they should not take precedence over the level of crime in your neighborhood; your paycheck; your healthcare; education, among other things.
It seems that, especially more recently, no one can/will think for themselves. Even as they proclaim to be "anti-establishment" or some other buzzword, it just becomes more clear there's no original thought in sight. Everyone wants to offer their commentary, yet it usually ends up being nothing but talking points and buzzwords; a self-inflating pedestal of hollow ideas and shallow principles.
Give it time. The world is changing very fast, and a lot of people get confused and lost when everything changes - particularly this fast. Globalization, internet, and increasing complexity.
I believe this is partially a result of a societal shift away from personal responsibility for individuals towards "social" responsibility of the collective.
This shift has its benefits (I, for one, am glad that it is "hard" to unintentionally starve to death in the developed world, regardless of how poorly you planned for winter). But I do think it is important to remember that this does not mean the trend is universally beneficial.
IMHO it is better for individual responsibility to be the default and for society to take responsibility only for specific, carefully defined, aspects of life.
Seat belt laws are a good example. Perhaps regulations involving children and vulnerable adults makes sense, but I am a long way from being convinced that our society is improved by forcing all adults to wear seat belts. (Even though I think it is pretty foolish to ever drive without wearing one...)
If you don't wear a seatbelt, it could kill me when your body is launched out through the windshield and enters my car. On top of that, my taxes would have to bear the direct and indirect societal costs of the deaths prevented by seatbelts (roughly 15,000 per year). Mandating an extra four seconds per person per drive to fasten and unfasten seatbelts seems extremely reasonable, if not morally imperative, to me given those factors.
Certainly, there's a libertarian argument made against requiring seat belt use, including mathematical economics models that can prove it... provided a few unstated assumptions are met--like rational agents, complete information, perfect competition, etc... Of course, the problem is that those assumptions aren't met.
If someone is more seriously injured in a car crash because they weren't wearing a seat belt, the cost of that is going to be borne by society at large in a variety of ways. A more serious accident is going to consume more Police and EMS resources. The increased hospital and resulting medical costs will be shared by millions of people through (even private) insurance companies. If the person dies, the investment the public made in the person's education is lost, etc...
The response to these points from libertarians is typically to propose a system where someone can chose not to be bound by this rule, and pay the price in increased health care/disability premiums or something. But these systems ignore significant information and transaction cost problems. The person makes a statement about whether or not they want to be bound by a seat belt rule, but how is that information verified? (People lie...) If it's just a contract term, not a law, if someone is pulled over for speeding and wasn't wearing a seat belt, do the police ticket the driver for violating the contract? If someone who says they want to follow the seat belt rule is unlucky enough to just forget it the day they got into an accident, do we just let them die? If a crash victim comes into the hospital unconscious, do they verify seat belt contract compliance with the insurance company before spending money on life-saving treatment? Or do they treat the person only if they'll be able to pay out of pocket? The whole system is full of costs, complexities, and moral hazard--it's a mess.
It's SO much simpler and less costly just to have a seat belt law that applies to everyone. Sure, a few people will find it a little paternalistic and annoying, but the other way is a lot worse. We might be willing to deal with a more complex and expensive system if the rule is very intrusive or highly restrictive of personal liberty. Being able to drive without seat belts isn't worth it.
I always like to "follow the money" and the cynic in me wonders how much influence the health care lobby has on seat belt legislation. I don't have any stats on this, but seems like there is a lot more to bill for when car accident victims are not declared dead at the scene...
this is describing a tendency to shift the burden of trust from those immediately connected to you (e.g. your parents) to those more distanced from you (govt authorities). there’s economic efficiency arguments for this sort of thing: parents can’t keep up with state-of-the-art knowledge in every field, whereas specialization can allow for a system that does. but it creates more fragility (individual mistakes have widespread costs: see prescription opioids leading to mass addiction) and ossification (long after illicit/underground culture has learned something valuable it’s hard to take that mainstream: see the impact of psychedelics on PTSD or depression. or for a case to show that we haven’t reached complete ossification but just slower dissemination, ketamine for depression (which has achieved recent approvals after significant efforts)).
> this is describing a tendency to shift the burden of trust from those immediately connected to you (e.g. your parents) to those more distanced from you (govt authorities)
We still have both. Now we have a government saying your kid’s chemistry kit won’t include lethal substances. And you (or your parents) can buy a chemistry book and do whatever experiments you feel are safe.
We now have two layers of trust instead of one and you can choose which layer works best for you.
I think that Hacker News is filled by the likes of this article.
someone who had a profound experience and now wants to give the advice that this experience gave him insight of exaggerated importance and as such writes an article overstating the experience and some more or less arbitrary wisdoms extracted from it.
I was lucky enough to have a friend with that Gilbert chemistry set ... Unfortunately it didn't help my chemistry education very much but I can see how it would have for someone that took it far more seriously (we mostly learned what color flames we could expect from burning chemicals.)
I was thinking about this today when I was interrupted mid-conversation by an emergency weather alert on my phone. The cause? A snow flurry that was expected to last about an hour. It ended up lasting for about half that.
Now, it's New England. These kind of things happen and I am prepared for them by virtue of living here. When I resumed my conversation the topic turned to why they felt the need to send out an emergency alert for something so mundane. The only reason we could come up with was that if they didn't and someone got in an accident they could probably sue. Reading this article really makes me feel like that's the case.
Realistically the reason for "excessive" alerts is probably just scope creep. The system almost definitely began as a mechanism to send alerts for really serious weather, but over time that definition's shifted, or they decided that sending more alerts was a good way to justify a bigger budget, or something similar.
There's been a number of lawsuits stemming around the Amber Alert system [1][2][3]. It's very plausible that they could find someone to sue for failing to issue an emergency alert. Not sure if they would win but it could encourage the NWS and local agencies to err on the side of caution.
This reminds me of the first year I lived in New Mexico, I had moved there from Wisconsin and one night the TV warns us of an “Emergency Weather Alert”, so I look to my wife and, fearing the worst, I say “maybe we should go stock up on some groceries.” A few minutes later we learn that they are expecting up to an inch of snowfall in the next five hours. We almost died laughing about it.
I think there's a difference between civilized and domesticated. Civilized is writing laws that protect other people from your assholery. Domesticated is writing laws that protect you from own assholery at the expense of basic freedoms.
I don't think domesticated is a good state for humans. I think it evolutionarily leads to people becoming Eloi -- aka sheeple.
Fun fact: there was an insect collection set sold in Japan for kids, in the 70s/80s. It contained two bottles: one containing an insecticide, and another containing a preservative, and both accompanied with a warning not to drink them. It turns out both bottles contained plain water with a colorant.
I wonder if the author sees the contradiction between this and an earlier post about doctors not caring if they kill you - wherein the author was appalled, while seeking vaccination against Covid, that no-one was wearing masks properly in a densely packed waiting room.
Because Government mandating that masks be worn, and that businesses have a right to refuse you entry if you don't comply, and likewise mandating social distancing for restaurants/waiting rooms/buses, achieves what the author wants.
Just a thought, maybe this is a general phenomenon:
"I knew myself well enough to realize that working in industry as a ______ would have brought only endless frustration and ultimately kill my love for a subject that I could not bear to devalue in that way."
> If someone falls off a ladder while painting your house, they can sue you and take your house.
I just checked some online references and this is well within the realm of possibility. New thing learned today: contractor insurance certificates must be inspected thoroughly.
Apparently it is under “premises liability” and I don’t know how the so-called “warn the contractor” system gets to be anything beyond but he said she said in a real hearing…
> If someone falls off a ladder while painting your house, they can sue you and take your house.
This doesn’t address the claim that people are losing their houses due to painters falling off of ladders.
There is a very low bar in the US for filing a lawsuit and it’s unsurprising to find a lawyer’s website encouraging you to do so as they typically still get paid even if you lose, or they hope to scare someone into a settlement because they’d never win at trial.
Winning a case like this in front of a jury, and for the value of the house (and collecting it) as OP mentioned sounds unrealistic to me, but happy to see links to any stories where this actually happened in case I’m wrong.
I just can’t imagine a jury awarding such high damages unless there was obvious negligence on the homeowner’s part. I have trouble believing that an accident alone (through no fault of the homeowner) could cost you your home.
I see… okay, thank you for educating me a bit further. The claim in TFA indeed sounded hyperbolic, and the plethora of law sites encouraging people to sue, only increased the fear factor.
My takeaway will still remain that ensuring comprehensive insurance should be a key factor in these engagements. But, good to know it’s not that simple for someone to steal your home over liability!
Burt wanted to go outside and take a walk. Weather permitting, we tried to walk every evening. We left the cafeteria and departed through the main door along with a stream of other people.
The building we exited was another one of the terrafoam projects. Terrafoam was a super-low-cost building material, and all of the welfare dorms were made out of it. They took a clay-like mud, aerated it into a thick foam, formed it into large panels and fired it like a brick with a mobile furnace. It was cheap and it allowed them to erect large buildings quickly. The robots had put up the building next to ours in a week.
The government had finally figured out that giving choices to people on welfare was not such a great idea, and it was also expensive. Instead of giving people a welfare check, they started putting welfare recipients directly into government housing and serving them meals in a cafeteria. If the government could drive the cost of that housing and food down, it minimized the amount of money they had to spend per welfare recipient.
8< -------
Ultimately, you would expect that there would be riots across America. But the people could not riot. The terrorist scares at the beginning of the century had caused a number of important changes. Eventually, there were video security cameras and microphones covering and recording nearly every square inch of public space in America. There were taps on all phone conversations and Internet messages sniffing for terrorist clues. If anyone thought about starting a protest rally or a riot, or discussed any form of civil disobedience with anyone else, he was branded a terrorist and preemptively put in jail. Combine that with robotic security forces, and riots are impossible.
The only solution for most people, as they became unemployed, was government handouts. Terrafoam housing was what the government handed out.
8< -------
Was it prison? Yes. But there were no walls. The food was good. The robots were as nice and respectful as they could be. You could walk outside wherever and whenever you wanted to. But there was an invisible edge. When you walked too far away from your building and approached that edge, two robots would approach you. I had tried it many times.
“Time to turn around Jacob Lewis105. There is construction in the next zone and, for your safety, we cannot allow you to proceed.” There were a hundred reasons the robots gave for making you turn around. Construction, blasting, contamination, flash flooding, train derailments, possible thunder storms, animal migrations and so on. They could be quite creative in their reasons. It was all part of their politeness. If you turned around you were fine. If you made any move in any direction other than the one suggested, you were immediately injected and woke up back in your room. I had only tried it twice.
Thinking your child is too smart to ingest toxic materials or start a fire is naive. Of all the weird things liberals believe, being against safety regulations for consumer products never ceases to amaze me.
> Your (sic) are too stupid to make your own decisions
The author gives a lot of examples where this is a bit ridiculous... But I do think sometimes it is true that people are just too dumb to make their own informed decisions:
- consumption of tobacco products (people just need a tax nudge)
- consumption of junk food (people just need a tax nudge)
- seatbelt laws (I disagree with the author here)
- vaccination (I know I won't be making any friends here, but empirically, layfolks just don't have the capacity to make an informed decision)
Saying that someone is "too dumb to make their own informed decisions" sounds to me like saying "you are too dumb to live your own life", which I find repugnant.
Perhaps it's a distasteful thing to say, but humans (all of us, myself included) are not particularly good at certain types of decisions, for at least a few reasons:
1) we suck at making decisions when the optimal decision requires delaying gratification.
2) some decisions are just so terribly complex (eg.: the pros and cons of vaccinations) that if you don't follow expert advice and try and build up your understanding from scratch, you're extremely unlikely to arrive at a sensible conclusion.
The irony is, the lawyers dont even give everyone a TLDR of law at school or periodic updates when new legislation comes into force, so are they really protecting us or is this a stealth take over or dominance over society and the individual, some sort of revenue generating exercise or a bit of everything?
So I learned a few years ago, when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK, at the time one of the philosophy's of law in which to back up the legal system was the existence of the concept of society, another was law follows the elected leader of society which would have been Margaret Thatcher, so when she declared there is no such thing as society, she basically gave every prisoner in the UK a free exit from prison but to my knowledge no prisoner ever took this up or tried!
Proposed title: "Hobbyist chemist awakens the force of reaction"
In my day... society didn't change for the better. But even if it did, which it didn't, every unique snowflake became a highly offended victim of the change and complained loudly about it as if to signal their virtues. Even if that change was mostly imagined and you had to come up with highly contrived and distorted examples to convince people that the thing you were massively offended about actually exists and is a problem, it would pose no threat to the prelapsarian and rosy hued fantasy of the past that you had donned your suite of armour to defend.
Individually, it's pretty reasonable to include something like "The chemistry set is recommended for ages 12 and over; chemicals A, B, and C are poisonous if ingested; chemicals D and E are flammable" with the chemistry set. Some of the warnings should probably go on the outer packaging so parents can make informed decisions about buying it. In general, 12 "is old enough to know better" when it comes to tasting the poison and playing with fire.
Sociologically, we know that some 12 year olds will taste the poison and set their houses on fire. It's usually not hard to count roughly how many. We have decided the question is something like "how many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?" and concluded the answer is few to none. Of course, as the article alludes to, there's a lot more benefit to experimenting with a chemistry set than mere entertainment. It's hard to measure though, and saying that there's an acceptable number of poisoned kids is not a winning move for politicians.