I like to play with liquid nitrogen. We have parties and make cocktails with it and do instant ice cream. In a couple weeks, we're going to do a thing where we make Dippin' Dots with them. Liquid nitrogen is fun stuff.
It's also dangerous, and not in obvious ways. It's like the opposite of a cauldron of 400f peanut oil --- if that oil could also quickly asphyxiate you. And your intuition for how to mitigate the risk is bad; for instance: gloves would be a mistake. And that's just for handling it; freeze something the wrong way and give it to a friend to ingest and you could perforate their alimentary canal.
Should people be able to play with LN? Absolutely.
Should someone start a company and sell super-fun mini-dewars to people as a novelty item, like the Soda Stream of chilling? If they did, a lot of people would get hurt.
I am fine with it being a little bit of a hassle to get LN, and I am fine with it being a little bit of a hassle to buy a pretty boring desk toy. The CPSC appeared to have been fine with that too; its problem wasn't with you owning little magnets, but with companies selling them as novelty stress relieving desk devices to rekindle your sense of childlike wonder and also make excellent refrigerator art (all things on Zen Magnets current page).
I don't think HN's take on magnets and the CPSC is very sophisticated or interesting or really even all that well informed.
I'm not sure I understand how you can draw a comparison between LN2 and small magnets.
An adult could quite easily harm themselves or others when playing with LN2, in a lot of ways that aren't inherently intuitive, or just because they are a bit lax with precautions.
An adult is very unlikely to just swallow a magnet for no reason, much less multiple.
> The CPSC appeared to have been fine with that too; its problem wasn't with you owning little magnets
"objects that are marketed or commonly used as a manipulative or construction item for entertainment, such as puzzle working, sculpture building, mental stimulation, or stress relief."
Even if they were not marketed as such in any way, any magnet set that was commonly used for this would have to have flux index of 50 kG2 mm2 or less.
The CPSC's ruling basically banned the sale of spherical strong magnets to consumers.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're saying. CPSC's Final Rule specifically says the action pertains only to magnets marketed as entertainment devices.
They're commonly used that way because of how they're marketed. The idea is that it's probably fine if you're acquiring these in lots on Alibaba the way you would a bundle of sapphire crystal rods or whatever, but it is not OK to sell them on a site that has a streamlined checkout flow and exists to promote the magnets as entertainment.
In other words: it'd be OK if they were sold if you specifically had to know what you were looking for to get them, just like with LN.
I'm not expert in the field, but what purpose does the average person have for small spherical strong magnets?
I know a few people of various professions, trades, students, and I've never known anyone to have a use for spherical strong magnets that wasn't manipulative or construction item for entertainment.
I use magnets that are stronger in gaming figures. I have a board game that came with a bunch of "Armor Kits" for the plastic figures. If I just used plastic cement to assemble them, they would no longer be customizable. Instead I drill out small holes for magnets on the various pieces, superglue them in there, and then I can swap our pieces as needed.
I suppose the end goal is still entertainment, but they are a utility piece in this example, and you could use them similarly for anything you are building where you want a small magnet.
Gloves are not inherently bad, but the risks they do not protect from are not obvious. For the sake of this comment room temperature is 0 heat, cold is negative heat (offset scale).
Gloves are not a perfect insulator, therefore they absorb heat and cold. It takes time for the cold to permeate the gloves - i.e. you observe significant temperature gradient over thickness of the glove. By the time your hand feels the cold, the whole width of the glove is bloody cold. In order to remove the cold from the glove you need to heat it. The only heat source is your hand inside of the glove, therefore the heat is taken from your hand. You need as much heat from your hand as much cold you have taken from LN to bring the gloves to 0. Unless you remove the gloves when the cold starts to permeate - hello frostbite.
While Leidenfrost effect allows one to splash LN on their hands without any or at least significant damage, gloves simply allow more splashes, not full immersion. Handling LN with gloves is a delaying technique, gloves do not magically protect from cold.
It's sort of similar with very hot things. I'm a blacksmith, and I rarely wear gloves. Steel is a poor conductor of heat, so if you grab it just a few inches away from the red-hot end you're fine. If you hold it too close, you realize it instantly and let go before any serious damage happens. But if you wear cotton gloves for a while, you'll grab the steel closer to the heat without realizing how hot it is, and then the accumulated sweat inside the glove suddenly vaporizes, and you get a nasty steam burn before you can get the glove off.
Similar thing working in a kitchen: always grab things out of the oven with a dry towel. Use a wet towel once and you'll never make that mistake again: the steam exploding against your skin will hurt you a lot more than the metal on your bare skin would have.
Similar with calfskin welding gloves. They'll protect you, but if you grab something really hot, after a moment you end up with a really hot piece of calfskin against your skin. And when you let go of the hot metal object, you still have the hot calfskin against your skin.
This depends on how insulated they are. You could make gloves that allowed you to stick your hand in -200C all day long. It's the same reason winter coats work, slow heat loss below the body's heat protection and you get unlimited duration.
The problem is most gloves are designed for vastly warmer temperatures and you don't notice frostbite if your hand cools down slowly.
> You could make gloves that allow you to put your hands in -200C all day long
I don't think so. The only way you could make an object like a glove for continuous LN2 exposure, and not have it be 2 feet thick, is multilayer vacuum insulation (like LN2 dewars use). But that would not let you move your hands or fingers at all.
Check out polyimide aerogels, it's flexible and has ridiculous insulating properties. On top of that your hands are providing heat which makes a big difference.
Though I suspect mittens are probably far easier to manufacture as that's what current designs for -60c use. Either way you are not going to have much flexibility, but could grab something.
I don't doubt that you are right. But that whole description could, to my inexperienced ears, just as well be an argument as to why you really really should be wearing gloves at all times.
If the gloves slow down the process enough so that when you feel cold you have time to put down the container and remove the gloves (less than five seconds?). I mean, to me I'd imagine that is the sole purpose to wear them in the first place?
It would, I imagine, also help from panic. If you notice that you got LN on your gloves there is less panic than getting it on your skin - less chance of a reflex reaction that just makes things worse.
You are correct, one of the main purposes for wearing gloves when handling really cold/hot materials is to provide that time cushion to handle the thing or contain accident safely. The question was why gloves are not necessarily a good preventative measure.
For example if you are arc welding and some nasty blob of molten metal drops on your hand, gloves will provide "heat through" time cushion to remove the gloves more or less safely (easily removable layer also helps avoid hot/cold blob sticking to your body), but keeping the gloves on will most likely still result in a burn. There is a hidden danger with cold that cold does not radiate like heat and we have much less intuitive understanding of how cold affects the skin. Sometimes people get frostbitten during winter activities without them noticing that something was too cold for too long.
In addition to my sibling comment, the practical risk is that instead of splashes skittering across your skin (probably harmlessly), gloves present an opportunity for LN to get trapped up against your skin, where it will most certainly burn you.
Perhaps because of the Leidenfrost effect? LN would evaporate before, or very briefly during, contact with skin, creating a cushion of air under the droplet, making it just roll away and avoid freezing of the skin.
Maythe the LN would "stick" to the gloves, freeze them, and then freeze the skin?
Proper long cryo gloves are fine. It's what you are supposed to use. The issue you are mitigating with the gloves is mostly that you may inadvertently touch surfaces which are extremely cold, freezing your skin itself or freezing it to the surface. Due to the Leidenfrost effect one is rather safe from touching LN directly unless it is for more than a couple of seconds.
> [the CPSC's] problem wasn't with you owning little magnets, but with companies selling them as novelty stress relieving desk devices to rekindle your sense of childlike wonder and also make excellent refrigerator art (all things on Zen Magnets current page).
One could sum up your use of liquid nitrogen similarly. What something is ultimately used for (play, in both cases), is orthogonal with how hard it is to get. In fact, relying on something being a bit of a hassle to get is probably the wrong idea, as that setup is easily invalidated by someone going through the hassle and then eg giving away the proceeds as party favors.
What we really need is a clear label that points out warning, you're now straying from the herd immunity and now dealing with a novel type of danger. But the problem is we're already drowning in warning labels, as there's no downside on spuriously including them - eg how many times do I have to skim over an admonishment to not use an electrical appliance in the rain? Heck, I've seen a bunch of products lately that don't even come with an instructive manual, just pages and pages of common sense and cya-to-be-ignored warnings. So this hypothetical label would have to be distinctive to stand above the useless chaff and also restricted to only referencing novel dangers, not reiterating basic sense that one should have learned by elementary school.
Unfortunately, under our entrepreneurial form of government the CPSC won't just come up with such an "opt out of us" label standard on their own, as it would diminish their own scope. So a private company has to spend a fortune working to legally define a narrow exception from an adversarial regulator rather than just both working together to solve the problem.
In particular, the basis of their "thousands" claim is an overbroad stat whose magnitude actually declined following the commercial introduction of these entertainment magnets in 2009. So the CPSC is either measuring mostly something other than these toy magnets, or miraculously these toy magnets displaced other more dangerous magnet-play, or both.
I am not sure I got what you're saying but it sounds like you, of course, are adult enough to play with fun but dangerous toys. But other people - they are not up to your level, and can't be trusted with such toys, because surely nobody is adult enough to handle it. Since idiots exist, everybody must be treated like an idiot. With some exceptions of course, like you.
I think they are saying that you, too, should be able to get your hands on liquid nitrogen as long as you know what you’re doing. If you have to jump through a few hoops, well, that’s part of the process that demonstrates that you’re competent.
They're not really even hoops. We bought the dewar on Amazon, and we get it filled at a welding supply store. You just have to know what you're looking for. But I can't, like, go to Bed Bath & Beyond and get LN.
Of yeah? When I was 9 or so, I had access to dewars of LN and eventually ended up peeing in one to see what happens. It was fine. I've got you on the children, easy access and the Bed Bath & Beyond!
Was the question about Bed Bath & Beyond ? I think they were prohibited from selling magnets even on their own site, let alone Amazon or welding supplies store. They were sued to close the sale and recall the product, not to stop selling it to Bed Bath & Beyond. Do you really think the situation is in any way similar?
Wait, so what was your point? You compare LN - seriously more risky, but available to you, and you think it's great - to magnets, much less dangerous, made not available to anyone, and argument it with "LN should not be available in retail", yet you claim your point is not about retail. And you claim LN being dangerous, but available, is the same as magnets being less dangerous, but completely banned. I must admit if there's a point there, beyond "I like this but don't like that, so the law should follow" it's not easily accessible.
"Not available to anyone" is where you're losing me. CPSC didn't ban little magnets; it banned them when sold as part of an entertainment set. So to extend the analogy: I am fine if you have to go on Alibaba and order them directly from the manufacturer.
Wait, so it's not dangerous if the label says "magnets" but is dangerous if nothing changes but the label says "entertaining magnets"? Makes zero sense to me. Then again, people put "do not swallow" warnings on coat hangers now, so maybe that's what we've gotten to.
They are just talking about adding a little bit of friction to the process of buying something that’s useful but potentially dangerous. What is so difficult about that?
Of course there will be tricky borderline cases, and arguably nonsensical outcomes. That’s true of pretty much every law. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad law.
People love to say that they shouldn't be prevented from owning these toys just because some other person's child might get injured, and I sympathise with that point of view. But at their peak, three thousand children a year were visiting emergency departments for suspected magnet ingestion (a number which declined after the CPSC ban).[1]
Lawn darts were banned on a mere 750 ED visits annually.[2] The fact is, we live in a society and (as with fireworks and other dangerous toys that could be labelled 'adults only') the cost of being able to have these magnets on your desk is probably dozens or hundreds of kids getting very sick.
>But at their peak, three thousand children a year were visiting emergency departments for suspected magnet ingestion (a number which declined after the CPSC ban).[1]
Several points:
1. Suspected magnet ingestion =/= magnet ingestion. I believe we should stop here, however:
2. Of course a total ban on sales (which was in effect for some time) would decrease this number, but
3. So would improved packaging and public education campaigns on the potential dangers of the product, which were happening at the same time, and
4. If you actually read the paper, they observe that the reduction in the suspected ingestion cases was not that large: from 8,326 to 6,260. Perhaps you should include that in your cost function.
5. Also from the paper: 86% of the kids were "treated and released from the ED or examined and released without treatment"
To put the nail in the suspected coffin, one should go and read the article you referenced: [SciHub link][1]:
>Subjects from 0-17 years old were included using a primary search term for diagnosis of “ingested object” from the time period of 2002-2015. Cases of ingested
objects were classified as “suspected magnet ingestion” (SMI) if the term “magnet” appeared anywhere in the narrative section of the database.
Meanwhile, a million kids ended up in emergency rooms from trampoline-related injuries over a decade[2], and no one bats an eye.
I'm all for the magnets, and Zen's solution of education (vs the CSPC's banhammer solution).
However, this argument is exactly wrong -- it would create another commons problem, where your individual interest is against the interest of the group, and so everyone acting in their individual interest creates a big problem.
(fortunately, with education and careful use, we can avoid the common problem)
Proper warnings or even age restrictions on sales are the correct solution, not a total ban. The knee-jerk reaction of "children can hurt themselves with it, let's ban it" is completely wrong. There are countless items in any household that could potentially be lethal to a child.
The problem is that almost no one reads those warnings. Most packages for kids toys will have a warning somewhere on them about how they are a swallow or suffocation hazard. People get desensitized to that constant bombardment of warnings. Unless you spend some time really thinking about it, it might not be clear why swallowing a magnet like this might be so much more dangerous than swallowing a something of this size made of different material.
That also factors into your point about other household items. Most of the household items that are dangerous to children are very clearly dangerous. It is much easier for a parent to overlook the danger of these magnets compared with stuff like potentially poisonous household cleaners.
I am confused, I didn't say anything close to "almost everyone gives tiny magnets to toddlers" and that wouldn't even be a relevant factor in this discussion. My point was that most people don't understand how dangerous tiny magnets might be for toddlers.
The inverse of "almost no one" is "almost everyone". When you say that "almost no one" reads warnings, you imply the set "almost everyone" is going to encounter problems.
> " My point was that most people don't understand how dangerous tiny magnets might be for toddlers."
And yet, far from "most people" giving magnets to toddlers, very few people seem to.
Almost everyone lets toddlers play with toys that say "Choking hazard: Ages 3+", because that warning comes on basically all toys, including stuff like Jenga blocks, sidewalk chalk, ....
Any parent who disallows their child from playing with any “age 3+” labeled toys/objects before age 3 is going to be significantly delaying their child’s development of basic fine motor skills.
Some parents might become desensitized to the labels since the warning is used over-broadly, and might not realize that tiny magnets are something you have to be extra careful about, because the effects of swallowing magnets are generally worse than the effects of swallowing some little piece of plastic.
No, you've completely missed the point. Whether or not "almost nobody heeds the warnings" is true or not is irrelevant because regardless of whether or not they're reading the labels their observed behavior is that most of them do not give toys like this to young kids.
You don't need to read a warning label, or even know of the special medical threat of swallowed magnets to think this 'toy' was a bad idea for a small child. Would you give a toddler a box of completely inert culinary grade stainless steel BBs to play with? Of course you wouldn't. Your kid could eat them and shit them out to his hearts content, but he still might chip a tooth trying to bite them and even if he were toothless why would you give a kid even harmless metal balls? They're just going to wind up stuck in his nose or something. Nobody gives inert glass marbles this small to young kids. It's a bad idea all around even discounting the unique threat magnets pose. Which is probably why there are very few confirmed cases of kids actually eating these magnets.
> box of completely inert culinary grade stainless steel BBs to play with?
If you did, it wouldn’t really be a big deal. Toddlers daily encounter playgrounds full of tiny rocks, wood chips, etc. which are more dangerous than the BBs. Swallowing BBs is comparable to swallowing cherry pits. It’s very unlikely to be life threatening. Typically there is no noticeable effect, or there might be some minor discomfort as it works through the digestive system.
I would be entirely comfortable letting my under 2 year old play with BB-sized steel or glass balls, under loose adult supervision, from a safety perspective (from a that’s-going-to-be-a-mess perspective I can well imagine avoiding giving kids BBs). More realistically, I can imagine letting an older child play with a box of BBs without worrying that a toddler would eat a few and die. Larger marbles are more of a choking hazard, and require closer adult supervision.
> I would be entirely comfortable letting my under 2 year old play with BB-sized steel or glass balls, under loose adult supervision, from a safety perspective
You'll be spending time in ED having them removed from the nose or ear.
Fair enough. Thankfully we haven’t yet had any pebbles shoved in nose or ear, and we play with those on a regular basis. I feel like little objects making it into the mouth is significantly more common.
It’s very easy to overlook the risk of these magnets pinching the intestines.
Similarly children often swallow batteries and no one thinks it that’s a good thing but many people do not realize that the child can die from it and it should be treated as an emergency.
Did you miss the part where basically nobody would give their child a box full of non-magnetic BBs anyway? Even if you had no clue magnets were dangerous, if you thought they were the safety equivalent of stainless steel BBs, you wouldn't give a toddler a box of them.
>The inverse of "almost no one" is "almost everyone". When you say that "almost no one" reads warnings, you imply the set "almost everyone" is going to encounter problems.
That does not follow logically at all. Just because someone doesn't heed the warning doesn't mean they will fall victim to what they are being warned about. Think of it like jaywalking. "Almost no one" heeds the warnings about the dangers of jaywalking. That does not mean that "almost everyone" would be hit by a car. Someone being mindless of the dangers of an activity does not mean they will automatically succumb to those dangers, but that also doesn't mean that the dangers were not real, serious, and worth protecting against.
I never said it follows in a strict mathematical sense, I said it was implied, and implied that it was implied in an informal sense. And I stand by that. By saying that most people don't read warning labels you absolutely meant to suggest that that a very large portion of the population would have trouble with products which require warning labels.
You can say I phrased something poorly which implied something I didn't intend. However, you lose all credibility when you get to the point of saying I "absolutely meant to suggest" something. It is frankly insulting that you are pretending to know my intentions better than I do.
To be fair, then the problem here are parents not the adult toys. And if you start banning things for the general population, with which negligent parents could kill their kids, there is an extremely long list to go.
My magnets wont get eaten by anyone and suprise neither will my cleaning supplies. There is also no one touching my knifes and no one is putting flatware in my toaster or wall socket. There is also no one drowning in my make belief pool.
If you really belief, that protecting children from their parents miss judgment, than banning people with children in their household from buying and owning every last of those items. Which obviously would be extremely discriminating towards adult humans with offsprings.
'Subjects from 0-17 years old were included using a primary search term for diagnosis of “ingested object” from the time period of 2002-2015. Cases of ingested
objects were classified as “suspected magnet ingestion” (SMI) if the term “magnet” appeared anywhere in the narrative section of the database. Researchers then identified specific characteristics of ingested magnets for descriptions related to rare-earth metals or small size. Specific inclusionary terms for small, round size/shape included: small, tiny, ≤1cm, battery-like, marble, bead, BB, ball, sphere, round, and circular. Inclusion terms for multiple were: multiple, > 1, or the plural “magnets.” '
This has got to have an obscenely high false positive rate.
When the ban was being proposed the CPSC's claim was "at least a dozen" from 2009-2012.
~100,000 narratives to classify and they couldn't even be bothered to have a couple interns spend a few weeks reviewing suspected narratives? All it would take is to present the suspected narrative to a human with the instances of "magnet" highlighted so the human could quickly determine if the sentence mentioning "magnet" was actually talking about one being eaten. Since when does a dumb database query with next to no diligence even qualify as science? If this is truly a matter of saving the lives of children, then surely the expense could be spared.
I suppose the question is what sort of world do you want to live in? I had a great time with fireworks growing up in a less regulated country (Fiji), most of the time we don't even bother with Guy Fawkes here (NZ) now. Having also spent time in a few other more & less nanny state-ish countries growing up I don't think bubble wrapping children does them many favours in the long run.
My parents thought nothing of my using power equipment growing up, string trimmers, lawnmowers, chainsaws. I was told "read the manual" and assumed to be responsible. But not guns or explosives. Is that "bubble wrapping"? Some people draw the line at things that are too prone to instant death or maiming when you screw up.
Well I have now, and at school in Fiji there were stories of other kids blowing themselves up with homemade kerosene & bamboo fireworks. My personal opinion is that responsibility and risk are related, and if you don't have a gradual increase of both in a relatively safe environment while growing up you are more likely to wrap your sports car around a traffic light (for example) once you finally experience 100% of both at once.
Of course everyone has different opinions of what an acceptable level of risk is.
Yes, it was before the internet was popular; reading books was basically all there was.
My favorite manuals of all time were the original printed Inside Macintosh volumes. They were amazing compared to, say, the documentation for the Amiga OS.
>Lawn darts were banned on a mere 750 ED visits annually
Lawn darts are a toy, a toy for children an adults to play alike.
Ball magnets aren't sold as a toy. We don't restrict the sale of sharp knives because children might injure themselves, no we rely on parents to not let their children play with them.
And from CPSC's perspective, it doesn't matter, because they were sticking to the point that no amount of warnings and restrictions can make magnets safe enough to be sold. (Unlike, say, an M-16 rifle).
What CPSC document are you relying on for that assertion? I just read the 2017 Zen Magnet ALJ decision, and it revolves around the marketed intended use for the products:
The intended use and operation of the Subject Products require the magnets to be
separated and reattached to create and reshape the magnets into a variety of figures, sculptures, structures, jewelry, and art. See, e.g., Exs. R-55 (product guide with examples of structures that can be created with the Subject Products); R-139 (“Never Let Go of Childhood Wonder” demonstration video
Two obvious observations:
- "Childlike wonder"? Really?
- If there's any use for these things that is more dangerous than desk toys, it's jewelry.
The other comment betrays the reason: because the numbers are bogus and are artificially inflated to be high by making a query too broad (it includes marbles, BB balls, batteries, etc).
Just another example of the FUD spread by CPSC which people ended up eating wholesale.
Which query are you referring to? It's important to understand that the first step in a systematic review is to identify all the potentially relevant literature (the "search"), only after which are the studies found screened for inclusion. We're conservative in the direction of over-inclusion during the "search", but in the opposite direction during the "screen".
We - are you one of the authors? Perhaps you can clarify the following paragraph from [1], page 8:
>Inclusion Criteria and Variable Classification:
>Subjects from 0-17 years old were included using a primary search term for diagnosis of “ingested object” from the time period of 2002-2015. Cases of ingested
objects were classified as “suspected magnet ingestion” (SMI) if the term “magnet” appeared anywhere in the narrative section of the database.
Where's the screening part you mention? I didn't find anywhere that the inclusion criteria implied that magnets have actually been ingested - or that the results were filtered in any way other than a keyword search.
E.g.: "Child ingested a marble, parent worries that it could have been a magnet" would pass this inclusion criterion.
It’s not that hard to figure out the simple, non-tinfoil hat answer: the items are hidden deep inside the recesses and folds of soft tissue organs inside the body. It’s not that easy to find them or even verify 100% that they are magnetic, without very specialized equipment. An x-ray machine only gets you part of the way there. Then you have to go by what you hear from the patient, who might be three years old.
Falling out of bed kills 600 Americans a year.[1] Should we regulate beds so that the distance between the mattress and the floor not exceed a few inches?
For some years as a fairly young kid, in between a crib and a real bed, I had a mattress on the floor.
When I was in college my freshman year, the dorms had bunk beds, and I worried about falling from the top, but never did.
My parents were not especially concerned about the dangers of beds, bicycles, cars, drugs, alcohol, chainsaws, or lawnmowers when I was growing up. On the other hand they drew the line at motorcycles and guns. The only time I was seriously injured (concussion), it was bicycle related, FWIW.
I don't know how you do a cost-benefit analysis for society when nobody particularly agrees on the benefits of something.
Well if you want to make these sorts of comparisons why not ban cars (cause lots of death, including children) and firearms (accidental shootings alone probably make magnets look like...well toys).
If you ban stuff at some point someone has to at least implicitly weight utility against risk. That's ultimately going to be fairly subjective. I'd say cars are overall still a good thing, guns I'm not sure about (but in the U.S. the constitution trumps the death statistics), magnets...I have a hard time quantifying the utility but there's probably a decent economic argument for them overall.
It's obviously easy to say "protection of innocent children" but that doesn't mean it's all there is to it.
Respectfully: wouldn't really believing that make you kind of an asshole? The number of children I would need to see hospitalized to give up a desk toy is pretty low.
I could be misreading you, but it sounds like you're stipulating that kids are getting hurt, and saying you'd be happier if we could hurt some reasonable amount of kids to get new desk toys. That is a different and more disturbing argument from the one that says that we should be able to have the desk toys and avoid the harm, too.
No, believing that doesn't make a person an asshole. It's entirely fair to debate what number of injuries or deaths is acceptable, but it's not fair to call a person an asshole just because they come up with a different number than you do.
Society makes these decisions every day. We accept a large number of injuries and deaths due to cars because we feel they are still a net benefit (which may be debatable when public transportation might be a better option to reduce the numbers). We make these decisions around gun ownership - and obviously there is a large amount of controversy there - at least in the US.
Most importantly, accepting that some children will be injured or killed by a product doesn't mean that the person doesn't care, and won't take steps to use and store the product responsibly so as to prevent injury or death.
The emphasis to my eye was on the word "really". tptacek is suggesting that author of the previous post should consider whether they really mean that or if he they have merely taken a stance without thinking it through clearly.
Very different both in tone and implication from "You're an asshole for saying that".
Saying "If you honestly mean that then you're an asshole" is just a round-about way of calling somebody an asshole while providing them with an out; it's a method of insulting people to get them to change their stance. Where I come from, it's considered rude.
In fact, I wrote it the other way first, and but when I read it on the screen, it looked a lot like I was saying they were an asshole, and so ratcheted it back, since that wasn't what I was trying to say.
You were saying they were an asshole, in both versions. Trying to be coy about it doesn't change it. I'm not sure why you bothered to be coy about it since you regularly get away with incivility on this site.
I heard the vast majority of those cases were from other products with poorly secured magnets in them.
The article says zen magnets was the first company whose sales were blocked after zero confirmed incidents, so it sounds like all those incidents were from other products.
Yes. ZenMagnets has always put warnings on their products, and there are no confirmed incidents of ingestion involving their magnets. To me, this constitutes empirical evidence that warning labels can work.
ZenMagnets also petitioned the CPSC to establish labeling requirements that all small magnet vendors would have to comply with. Instead of going along with this eminently reasonable suggestion, they continued to try to get the product off the market.
> ZenMagnets has always put warnings on their products
I'll have to dig up my old set of magnets but I don't believe their early warnings would clue you in to exactly how dangerous the magnets are when ingested. The newer warnings are considerably more effective, I suspect, if what is on the website ("MAY CAUSE FATAL INTESTINAL PINCHING") is representative of what's on the package.
I feel like these are frivolous toys that are a net negative to society, but the product has legitimate uses (however silly) and does not cause injury when used appropriately. There are many products in our everyday lives with legitimate uses that can and do regularly injure children but are not banned because we have (at least implicitly) decided that the benefits outweigh the costs. Ultimately this kind of ban is based off a value judgment and it doesn't feel like it is something appropriate for an un-elected regulatory body to decide. The ban should come from Congress.
If a product causes injuries when used as intended then CPSC action seems warranted to me. This is not such a case. I also suspect the lawn dart ban might not have held up in court had manufacturers then pressed as hard as Qu has been pressing today, so I don't think that ban does anything to legitimize CPSC action now. Fireworks bans in the United States have (to my knowledge) originated from legislative bodies.
By the way, the way CPSC reached their conclusion that these magnetic balls were a net negative was based off their own calculation that injuries to children cost more to treat than profits made by the magnetic ball companies. This seems like an absurd way to calculate whether or not something is a net negative to society.
As I understand it, the CPSC restriction is on the packaging and marketing of the magnets as toys and entertainment devices. You weren't prohibited from owning small magnets.
Am I misunderstanding? It's been awhile since I read any of the primary source documentation on this stuff.
What are they then? Seriously. What is it, if it is not a toy? Sure it’s has this patina of being for adults, but that doesn’t make it a toy. In fact, aren’t these and other little magnetic sculptures marketed as “desk toys”?
Small magnets that are not toys are bought through industrial supply houses and such, not websites advertising them with bullshit copy like "Zen Magnets are fun to play with, deeply addictive, and go well with deep breaths. "
Hint: advertising magnets that are "fun to play with" is advertising them as toys.
I don't know, I'm pretty sure this leads to putting kids in bubbles - and for full disclosure, I'm a proponent of right to roam laws. How do you balance letting kids learn to manage risk in unstructured environments with banning objects and activities that might be dangerous?
Children need to be able to hurt themselves. That may bother some people to hear, but I'd suggest googling "congenital analgesia" for them. Children need to not be able to kill themselves via hazards their genetic heritage provides them no way to realize is dangerous. That is, children quickly learn not to fall too far [1], but they've got no inherent defense against eating two magnets slightly spaced apart in time. Or antifreeze. Or electricity. Etc.
There's still a lot of judgement involved, and I'm right there with you on children being overprotected in general. But they need to be kept from the unrecoverable mistakes.
One of the interesting things about child proofing your home, if you are of an introspective mindset, is the cataloging of how much danger you causally live with. Or at least, danger from a certain point of view.
[1]: Not 100% perfectly, of course. But there's a qualitative difference between our natural instinct's ability to deal with fall damage, and eating rare earth magnets.
Well, I wasn't explaining the logic of the law, but the logic I use. I'm consistent; we have rejected requests for a trampoline, and the usage my kids have had has been heavily supervised.
One thing about trampolines is that AIUI, the vast majority of the danger comes from having multiple people on one at a time. Most of the remaining risk is manageable, more in the normal range of risk, especially with supervision. As evidence, I cite that in lawsuit-crazy USA, there are businesses like Sky Zone that provide trampoline play commercially. That kinda bounds the upper level of risk...
I have some additional considerations that require that for other reasons, but I think I'd still feel the same way even without them.
>Well, I wasn't explaining the logic of the law, but the logic I use.
Great! The whole point is that you are capable to do that, and that the total ban is unreasonable. Nobody is arguing that having small magnets around little kids who don't know better is a good idea.
> there are businesses like Sky Zone that provide trampoline play commercially. That kinda bounds the upper level of risk...
In the past few weeks I've seen a couple articles about people breaking their spine doing flips into foam pits. I would avoid that particular activity, at least.
I had a trampoline as a kid. It resulted in a few very painful injuries, but it was a lot of fun. My brother broke his arm rolling off of it (nobody was even jumping). You can't fall off the edge at those businesses because the trampolines are built into raised floor areas. That removes one of the larger dangers from the equation.
I think you're kind of appealing to nature in a fallacious way. Hundreds of years ago, these magnets wouldn't exist. So, yes, there's always ways for bad things to happen, but even if that's "natural" and therefore necessary, that's not a reason to retain a particular hazard that has existed for a short period of time historically.
> But they need to be kept from the unrecoverable mistakes.
That's a good point. I hope they keep these magnets out of kids' hands. The article ends on a promising note in that regard:
> We remain willing to work with the CPSC to develop the magnet safety standards for which we’ve already petitioned, and which will be more effective and reasonable than the all-ages, nationwide ban we succeeded in vacating in the Tenth Circuit. As we’ve already been doing, Zen Magnets looks forward to providing not just the highest quality magnet spheres on the market, but also the safest in terms of sales methods and warnings. Now that the war on magnets is over, hopefully we can all focus towards the war on magnet misuse.
This is a really different issue from right to roam. Magnet ingestion is something that will happen when curious little hands get hold of these magnets, and is also not something you can obviously know has happened. That's scary given the great potential for severe adverse health consequences.
I don't think it is terribly different. Getting struck by a vehicle is at least as great a danger, if not a much more likely scenario, than ingesting magnets, and is also not immediately apparent for the simple fact that the kids are out of sight. I would put "right to roam" laws as being in opposition to the banning of object like magnets or Kinder Eggs.
That said, I do understand they can cause great harm. But what do we lose when we choose to isolate our kids from reality?
I read your intent and I don't agree with a libertarian implication that ignores how things have worked more or less fine, and which is certainly not banning everything.
2,400 children go to the emergency room every year from sticking things in electrical sockets. Nobody cares to stop the sale and installation of standard electrical outlets, though, because that would be an inconvenience to too many people.
Another example is alcohol. Annually it kills 88,000 in the US and 2.4 Million world wide. Yet weed, a drug that kills 0 people, and is an effective tool for managing pain and misc. disorders, has been illegal for a century or more.
The banning of the magnets is a convenience for people who don't want to be required to behave responsibly. If enough people wanted the magnets, they would never have been banned.
I bought an extra set because of their legal battle a couple of years ago. They're sitting on my desk right now. I'm glad they've won, it's a poke in the eyes against ineffective prohibition, and a win for personal responsibility.
I'd prefer that there was a regulation on these such that they were only available to adults, however. They can cause terrible injuries that require surgery in uninformed and impulsive children.
> I'd prefer that there was a regulation on these such that they were only available to adults, however. They can cause terrible injuries that require surgery in uninformed and impulsive children.
I agree. There seems to be a category of products that are definitely safe in the right hands, but they do look particularly "overly innocuous" and, while I don't think they should be banned, they should at least require some sort of "We're not kidding around, these can actually kill you" warning in big, bold letters.
A couple years ago I read about a teenager who died after ODing on caffeine powder he bought on Amazon. While there were lots of tasteless "Darwin award" comments when this happened, it's not hard to think that someone would think a spoonful of caffeine powder would be like a couple of NoDoz, instead of actually being like 30 cups of coffee.
Seems like there is a middle ground between outright banning these products and completely unregulated sales of potentially dangerous items like this.
The FDA banned pure caffeine powder but as far as I can tell caffeine pills are still legal and widely available. I go easy on the stuff these days, but when I was younger I once took way too many (10 pills equivalent to 20 cups of coffee IIRC) and was sure I was going to die.
I understand the problem with loose powder is it makes it more difficult to get a precise dosage, but easy dosage pills won't help much if you're a dumbass who doesn't respect caffeine. Ultimately personal responsibility needs to be emphasized.
The new Zen mangnets packaging comes with literally 8 different warnings, including multiple inserts, and it’s impossible to open the packaging without seeing at least half of them. Those warnings are big, bold, and scary.
I had a roommate in college who read an article about that and went on Amazon and bought a pound of caffeine powder. Not sure of the thought process on that one...
You know the limited offers that make you buy useless stuff just because you didn't want to miss the opportunity. Same idea. We instinctively place higher value on stuff that is perceived as scarce. It means that your roommate viewed that soon-to-be-banned caffeine powder as more valuable than it really is.
Needless to say, that effect is a marketing classic.
Just that they need to have a visible warning. If you go to Zen Magnet's website there are big warnings telling you that if you eat these you could die and that you definitely don't want to give them to children. I think that's reasonable.
Couldn't agree more. Disappointed to see the innocence of childhood mischaracterised in such a negative light. Children deserve our care and protection, not our scorn.
> If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they can easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don’t even get a reward. So, it’s very asymmetric. – Elon Musk
A worse asymmetry: If a person spends years and his own money battling a regulation, and something good happens for the entire economy, the person doesn't get rewarded. In fact, the person might suffer when competitors who were just sitting around with no skin in the game can now freely enter the market against the person who fought so hard to open up the marketplace.
Another good example is the Carterfone decision[1], a landmark FCC decision that allowed devices to connect directly to the telephone system. Prior to Thomas Carter's years-long fight, AT&T considered it illegal to connect anything to your telephone. The ruling paved the way for answering machines, fax machines, and modems.
>Jackson's order doesn't mean the agency can no longer seek to shut down the magnet trade; it simply sends the case back for further review before a possibly less biased panel.
The victory here is that Zen is not currently in active litigation, which is a huge drain on resources.
Given the overwhelming amount of data that is out there that one shouldn't restrict magnets more than military weapons, I have high hopes that an less biased commission would not advocate for a total and absolute ban.
So they won their legal battle, but in the process their entire company was essentially destroyed, right? If that's true then what is the difference between the government agencies having to simply file a suit versus actually win it?
How much do you think he spent on litigation? Lawyers are pretty expensive. Even if you don't like the company that was effected, what stops the government agency from using the same tactics on one you do like and putting them out of business without having to win a court case?
Yeah, it's completely nuts. I'm a believer in the right to own firearms for various reasons and it's still insane, there's absolutely no consistency to how products are regulated. In fact, it's a frequent gripe of firearm enthusiasts. Full auto is banned, but bump-fire stocks aren't. A rifle with a barrel than 16 inches is subject to special rules, but a handgun with a 2 inch barrel isn't. There's even a joke that goes around: "If OSHA were in charge of the ATF, suppressors would be mandatory".
I'm curious: what exactly makes these magnets so dangerous when swallowed? Is it just the case that if multiple magnets are swallowed, they will clump together and cause obstructions, or is there more to it?
A single magnet ought to pass through easily and be pretty benign, right?
Contrast to button-cell / "coin" batteries which are incredibly dangerous if ingested, and where swallowing a single one can cause severe internal burns or even death. Yet we don't see many calls to ban these, despite being very common in all kinds of household devices...
When you swallow two magnets they can attract each other and perforate the stomach or intestine.
> Yet we don't see many calls to ban these, despite being very common in all kinds of household devices...
Battery compartments now come screwed shut, where they didn't in the past. This is because of the danger of button batteries. We can't ban the batteries because they have widespread legitimate use. Toy magnets don't.
Couldn't a large amount of this stuff in your desktop damage a computer or wipe a SD card?
I assume that the loose little balls aren't enough small to end fitting inside a USB connector or something like that. If not, what could happen hypothetically?
I owned buckeyballs many years ago. I've since lost them, but every now and then I'll find an errant ball attached to a random piece of metal around the house.
This is pure evil. My 3 years old swallowed some of these magnets (there was only a choking hazard warning on the magnets which we got from Amazon and we had no idea about the danger).
The poor boy had to go through an emergency surgery, be in the hospital for a week, and be traumatized.
The over all cost was about $100k.
I don't understand how this shit is legal. It's much worse than some substances for which people spend many years in prison.
What a disgrace!
That's a horrific experience and I am sorry you and your child had to go through it.
But people have similar stories (or worse) about their children being harmed by other household objects, from bleach to electric outlets to plenty of other things.
It isn't evil - much less pure evil. It isn't a disgrace. And they aren't worse than substances which people spend time in prison for. It's a product that should have had a better warning label on it that properly explained the dangers.
Just because something can be dangerous doesn't mean it should be banned. We'd have to ban a billion things in modern living.
So he never swallowed Zen Magnets, then. The distinction between Bucky balls and Zen is outlined many times - Bucky balls being responsible for many injuries like these and Zen balls for zero injuries is the reason Zen won the suit.
The distinction is that Bucky balls were more successful than Zen, so there were more purchased, so injuries were more likely to happen with Bucky balls.
They're not that easy to lose, on account of being incredibly magnetic. Even if you throw a handful across the room, they'll stay stuck to each other. If you pick them off one by one and throw them then you'll lose them, but sweep around the room with a piece of metal or more magnets and you'll find them again pretty quick.
Characterizing them as "magnetic balls of death" is very unfair considering that not many people have actually been killed or maimed by them. Driving your kids around town in a convertible is probably more dangerous than owning these magnets. Owning a swimming pool certainly is.
It's also dangerous, and not in obvious ways. It's like the opposite of a cauldron of 400f peanut oil --- if that oil could also quickly asphyxiate you. And your intuition for how to mitigate the risk is bad; for instance: gloves would be a mistake. And that's just for handling it; freeze something the wrong way and give it to a friend to ingest and you could perforate their alimentary canal.
Should people be able to play with LN? Absolutely.
Should someone start a company and sell super-fun mini-dewars to people as a novelty item, like the Soda Stream of chilling? If they did, a lot of people would get hurt.
I am fine with it being a little bit of a hassle to get LN, and I am fine with it being a little bit of a hassle to buy a pretty boring desk toy. The CPSC appeared to have been fine with that too; its problem wasn't with you owning little magnets, but with companies selling them as novelty stress relieving desk devices to rekindle your sense of childlike wonder and also make excellent refrigerator art (all things on Zen Magnets current page).
I don't think HN's take on magnets and the CPSC is very sophisticated or interesting or really even all that well informed.