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[Wag the dog parenting] - Or, why Buckyballs are not a snack food.
Posts
If your kid dies, he dies.
Wellllllll...I get what you're saying, but there are as dangerous if not more dangerous things sold as 'novelty items'.
Shit, there's a lot of things that will get your kid killed. The description 'easily swallowed' should not mean 'illegal to sell'.
Kids eat everything. A lot of those things are dangerous. No one expects parents to be perfect, but banning small magnets is extreme. Because, really, unless this is a vendetta against buckyballs specifically, the only legislation that makes sense is to ban any magnet that is small enough to be swallowed.
Otherwise, this is about the company and not the magnet.
For some reason my brain processed that as an anti-drug statement.
And yet we have products out that kill far more children through misuse by adults.
better stop selling headphones to kids because if they pry them open and harvest the magnets they could die.
Wow...a whole dozen. More kids are hurt or killed by drowning in swimming pools each year. Why don't they go try and ban swimming pools first.
Edit:
In fact, there was an average of 3,533 child drownings per year between 2005 and 2009. Who will stop these vicious child eating pools?
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
I'm now imagining headphones with magnets so strong they burrow into the ears and meet in the middle of the skull.
On an individual level, sure, it's asinine to blame the company because your little timmy ate your magnets. You were, in fact, fairly warned of their dangers and it's your job to protect him. (Like I don't think anyone should be able to sue the co. for damages, even if the magnets do get outlawed.)
But if you're the government regulator you gotta look at how the whole thing effects your people. If your populace is full of stupid people who will eat magnets, and you can prevent some deaths by outlawing strong magnets marketed as toys, then maybe you should.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we got booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
The hazards of headsets for children, right here:
Also on PSN: twobadcats
Well it's technically "at least" a dozen.
But I agree generally. I don't think it is the responsibility of these companies to do more than make the public aware that ingesting their product may be hazardous to your health. They aren't marketing these things to kids, and parents should make an effort to keep such things away form their kids or inform them of the dangers of them. It is absolutely tragic when something like this happens, but they are fairly isolated incidents and as someone else has pointed out, they make up a very small percentage of the units sold.
I am not a parent, so feel free to ignore these statements as I do not have any experience regarding small children outside of being the eldest child and dealing with two younger siblings. We did all sorts of stupid things (highlight was my brother skateboarding off the roof and breaking his arm) and while we were certainly idiots, our parents also took responsibility for a lot of the stuff we did and at no point did they ever consider suing large corporations for the stupid things we did.
There is a huge leap towards a lack of personal responsibility these days, not just in parenting, but in society as a whole and stuff like this is the result of that mentality.
Delphin Twitch Stream:
If harm reduction really is the motive then why would you go after something so mildly menacing and rare instead of swimming pools? It's like Bizarro Kennedy - We do things not because they are hard but because they are easy and we can look like we care about public safety.
It's not just "easily swallowed" it's "easily swallowed toy items that can perforate your intestines and cause massive amounts of internal damage"
And yes, kids eat everything. That's why selling very powerful rare earth magnets in the form of a small, round, candy-like, easily swallowed toy is a pretty bad idea.
Also, they're not talking about banning "small magnets", they're talking about banning the sale of small, easily swallowed rare earth magnets, which are much more powerful (and thus much more hazardous to swallow) than other magnets.
Well, yeah. That's pretty much it. Doesn't mean it's a bad decision to outlaw the magnets.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we got booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Because banning the sale of small rare earth magnets as toys is much easier and the balance between "kids being killed" and "nerds wanting a cool novelty toy" is much clearer than the risk/benefit balance involved in swimming pools.
I'm also not really keen on the issue of children drowning in swimming pools being used as a bludgeon to allow companies to continue to sell unsafe toys. It's not a "one or the other" issue, in the slightest.
Oh man, this is going to really put a damper on my old physics professor's magnetism presentations since he used small, swallowable rare earth magnets all the time.
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
Come on man this is silly, little kids think Antifreeze is juice and far, far more than a dozen kids have died from that and nobody's talking about banning antifreeze
You can't babyproof the world. There's a warning label on them that swallowing them is harmful.
They are trying to get it across. But yeah, it's not working so maybe they should just be recalled. Or at least regulated more.
Antifreeze isn't sold as a toy.
Well, I bet if they were outlawed as toys, you could still get them through other channels. Like, in this instance, through some sort of education/laboratory/industrial supply company.
I could still legally get my hands on sharpened aluminum spikes even though lawn darts are illegal.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we got booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Neither is Buckyballs.
Not as a children's toy. But still as a toy.
Nintendo Network ID - PirateLuigi
Many people see guns as toys, and I've also seen them marketed as toys for adults. Maybe we should ban them too.
I wonder which kills more kids a year, guns or Buckeyballs....
Why so butt hurt? Is it really so outrageous that people might not have a small fidget toy but a bunch of children* will not be killed or require extensive risky and expensive surgery? Kids swallow shit. This particular product, which serves no real utility except as a novelty toy, poses a high risk of being swallowed and a much higher health risk if swallowed than most things. When warnings didn't work and the company refused to do a recall, the government is now moving to block selling the product.
They're not even blocking selling "rare earth magnets" they're trying to block selling these particular, very small and candy-looking magnets because they pose a particular risk.
I mean god damn, is anyone really that invested in a particular fucking desk toy?
*Again, its not "12" its "12 there were news reports about in the last 2 years." My wife has cared for that many in a post-surgery capacity in the last 4 years and its not a simple surgery or a routine recovery.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
I mean they sell band saws to adults for the purpose of crafting and hobby time, why are buckyballs the exception here? If anything the parents are liable for their own buying habits and leaving shit like that laying around, in an unsupervised way.
It's no more different than keeping draino below a sink and your kid drinks that shit because you didn't secure the cabinets.
Not only can these things kill you, they can help you thwart bluray anti-theft devices.
2 evils, one (magnetic) stone. Boom.
True, there's no way children will ever encounter buckyballs if their parents don't buy them.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
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Because that's what happened all the previous times unsafe toys were banned.
It's not this particular product I'm concerned about. This type of thinking is a slippery slope.
In the U.S. at least fifty children are being backed over by vehicles every week. Forty-eight are treated in hospital emergency rooms and at least two children are fatally injured every week. Ban cars I say.
The likelihood is amazingly tiny.
How often do you see kids at another person's house unattended? Honestly, though, it is no more dangerous than antifreeze, and hey that tastes a bit sweet, just like juice!
Let's over legalize stupid nonsense like this and waste our time more.
What can't inflict grissly damage on people if you completely ignore the labels?
So, why didn't the ban on Lawn Darts lead to things like guns, swimming pools, household cleaning products, tools, and so on being banned?
It's not a slippery slope. I'm not fretting over possible outcomes of this or concern trolling. I don't think this will lead to big things being banned. This is merely another brick in the wall of protecting children from things in a hamfisted manner.
I think I stated why stupid shit like magnets gets attention despite the minuscule harm it causes while other things that cause much more harm get a free pass. We're a nation of wussies who tackle easy things despite their near irrelevancy to the daily life of humans. We would rather ban something piddly like magnets than just tell parents to use better judgement when purchasing items because we fundamentally don't trust people to exercise judgement and risk the possibility of catastrophe. And that is really the depressing part.
Thank you for adding a bit of a laugh to my afternoon.