I'm glad these are available for adults but the danger to children and pets is very real.
A kid eats a magnet waits a while then eats another one. The magnets are strong enough to find each other through the intestinal walls. The result is pretty horrifying, so be careful with strong magnetic toys.
No doubt the injuries are horrifying, but so are fireworks-related burns and gunshot wounds. It's hard to imagine a world where neodymium magnets should be more regulated than fireworks and firearms, but that's the world we lived in before the 10th circuit vacated the CPSC's regulatory overreach.
We don't sell fireworks nor guns to children. (At least, in the UK we don't).
The magnet companies sold these items as a toy to children and resisted efforts to put warnings on them and resisted efforts to stop them being sold to children.
On the contrary, Buckyballs was never marketed to children, and had clear warnings all over them. They were still pushed into closure by the CPSC. Even after they were clearly marked "Keep Away From All Children".
If we can't sell things to adults because they're dangerous to children, we might as well close... well, all hardware stores.
My nephews don't think tools or random bits of hardware are uninteresting. I certainly didn't either. If you're of a mind to play, the world is nothing but toys.
Some adults will let their children use power tools. They'll make sure there's the discussion about safety, they'll do a bit of supervision. They'll hopefully include safety glasses. Everyone knows a drill is dangerous. No-one just hands a hammer drill to a six year old and leaves them to it.
The regulator's point about the magnets is that the manufacturers didn't manage to stop them being sold in toy shops to children, and that even with the warnings parents were giving them to children as toys.
And, even compared to random bits of hardware store: if you swallow a nail you're probably going to be ok. If you swallow magnets you're probably going to need medical help.
No, in most cases the child is going to be fine. This is exactly the point - swallowing a nail is a bad idea but is unlikely to cause significant harm. Swallowing a magnet doesn't look as bad as swallowing a nail (the magnets are smooth and shiny, sometimes round, and very small), but the consequences are usually worse.
I'm not sure I believe that. Depending on the size of the nail and how sharp it is, it could pass through, but could also puncture something along the way or get lodged.
If a child swallows anything larger than a dime, the standard recommendation is to seek medical attention.
Most small boys (and some girls) are fascinated by tools, that's why there are play tools in toy stores so kids can pretend to be a construction worker or suchlike. Conversely I enjoy playing with magnets but I also find them useful for visualizing complex problems and as artistic tools for texturing paint.
Maybe you didn't find physical tools interesting as a child but it's fallacious to assume that no other children do when there's abundant evidence to the contrary.
By most conventional definitions, 13+ is a teen. Apparently, in 2010, Congress extended the definition of "child" up to age 14[0], and the CPSC started their complaint on that one year differential. And Buckyballs, for example, changed their notice then to "Keep Away From All Children" and agreed not to sell them at stores like Toys R Us. Two years later from them voluntarily making those changes, the CPSC sued them and sequentially drove them out of business.
The facts fall staunchly in opposition to your comments suggesting that they were resistant to applying warning labels, and actively trying to market them to children. This is why all of your comments stating such are downvoted into the grey. One of your other comments claims all the CPSC wanted was warnings, but the reality is that the CPSC worked to drive these companies out of business after all of the warnings were present.
> The magnet companies sold these items as a toy to children and resisted efforts to put warnings on them and resisted efforts to stop them being sold to children.
No it's not. This submission is about one company resisting the regulatory action created when buckyballs continued to sell the product to 14 year olds, even though they knew teenagers were among the > 1000 children hospitalised by these magnets.
Dan you're being wildly untruthful here. Buckyballs were sold with very clear warnings and it is not their fault if people ignore those warnings.
Are you really trying to argue that a 14 year old is so overcome by the overwhelming desire to experience magnetic forces that s/he is unable to read a warning label, and the only sensible course of action is to halt all sales of the product? Come off it.
This submission is not about buckyballs, but buckyballs and zenmagnets worked hard to resist the efforts of the regulators.
The warnings you talk about on buckyballs did not say "adults only", they said "13+".
It is dishonest to suggest that buckyballs didn't sell to children and to say that buckyballs included warnings about not selling to children when the warnings said 13+.
> Are you really trying to argue that a 14 year old is so overcome by the overwhelming desire to experience magnetic forces that s/he is unable to read a warning label
That's what happened, yes. Children are by definition fucking idiots. That's why we don't let them drive; drink alcohol; vote; run for office; enter into contracts; join the military; live by themselves; get married; have sex; etc.
>, and the only sensible course of action is to halt all sales of the product? Come off it.
I'm saying we tried warning labels. Parents and children and toy stores ignored those warnings, and children ended up hospitalised as a result. The manufacturers resisted attempts to strengthen the warnings; regulators were forced into issuing a ban because soft-touch regulation failed.
The manufacturers brought this upon themselves by not controlling their supply chain properly and by resisting better clearer warnings.
No, children are not fucking idiots. I did some dangerous stuff as a teenager (mostly involving fire) but I knew it was dangerous. Many products can cause injury if swallowed but in most jurisdictions people are recommended to keep them away from children under 3. Past that age it's expected that parents will advise them about what is or isn't edible.
If you are telling me that a 13 year old can't comprehend a clearly written warning then I call bullshit. If parents and children and toy stores ignore the warnings then the responsibility lies with them, not the manufacturers. I am not willing to live in a society where everything has to be dumbed down to the level of safety for a small child.
The manufacturers brought this upon themselves by not controlling their supply chain properly and by resisting better clearer warnings.
What does the supply chain have to do with consumer behavior? Total bullshit. Why don't you think that parents, toy stores and older children are immune from responsibility when they are given clear warnings of the danger? I take responsibility for myself and any kids that are temporarily in my care, so you should you and so should everyone else.
You're literally arguing that adults should be able to have nice things because some people are too fucking stupid to follow directions. No. Once they've been properly informed and still choose to do stupid shit, it's their responsibility, not mine or yours. Why are you arguing so intently for treating everyone like children just because some adults refuse to accept responsibility?
I don't think you know what you're talking about. There was a voluntary recall prior to the CPSC action to improve the language on the warnings. Additionally, Buckyballs were never sold to toy stores, nor were they marketed as toys, nor were they allowed to be sold in the toy section of stores that carried other kinds of products.
I am not sure where you got the idea that the companies were trying to sell these thing to children. They never attempted to do that, and if they had they would be liable for millions in damages. They did everything they could to save their business and cooperated with the CPSC in every possible way.
Disclaimer: I am not directly involved with these companies but I am a freelancer who built and ran the Buckyballs website for almost four years.
I bought some years ago, and had fun playing with them with my children. If you need a warning saying that eating a magnet is dangerous, you're not very clever.
And if your child (Lets say over the age of 3) is still eating random non-food items without checking with you, then you're not doing a great parenting job.
Don't you think the whole "put a warning sticker on everything" is getting a bit ridiculous?
I believe that most people would probably assume that it's similar to eating a coin or other small piece of non-sharp metal -- it's not good, but it's generally not potentially life-threatening.
If you spend a little bit of time thinking about how strong magnets can probably attract each other through internal tissue, the risk makes sense, but it doesn't seem like something that's obvious, at least not to me.
This is one circumstance where awareness/warning labels are really useful, but unfortunately we hear so many frivolous warnings people are not likely to take them seriously. Everyone should know that these contraptions were literally banned at one point for the risk they pose to children, and the disclaimers encountered are not just generic CYA, but representative of a real risk to small children that has a real body count.
Like the GP, I'm glad that these are legal in the United States again, but we should not take the issue of informing parents of the risk involved with these toy-like objects lightly.
A similar issue is being posed by the small watch batteries included in many children's toys and remote controls these days. Children swallow these and they burn holes in their organs that result in serious disabilities. It's important that parents be aware of such non-obvious environmental dangers.
Small watch batteries are an interesting example, I don't recall seeing any warning stickers on these toys or their packaging. Perhaps something is buried in the back of an instruction manual, but that would be obviously ineffective.
The more dangerous case is those watch batteries are included in some greetings cards which play music or a recorded message etc. Very young kids can easily chew on a greetings card which isn't going to hurt them, but they may now swallow a battery as well, which may hurt them.
> If you need a warning saying that eating a magnet is dangerous, you're not very clever.
I don't think non-clever parents ought to be punished via their children. That seems a little Old Testament biblical.
> Don't you think the whole "put a warning sticker on everything" is getting a bit ridiculous?
That's pretty good late 90's standup material, but I'm not sure if it's factually supported. Are there too many stickers? Are they effective or not effective at preventing harm? Do they incur more costs than the harm they prevent?
I would say that when you buy an inflatable pool ring, if more of the area of the pool ring is taken up by warning messages, than isn't, then we've gone too far.
Non-clever parents don't deserve to be punished, but nor do the rest of us deserve to permanently obstructed by rules designed for the least competent members of society.
I argue that there are too many stickers, that they become less effective through profusion, and that in some cases the cost does exceed the benefit. For example, in California a 1986 ballot initiative called Proposition 65 mandates that businesses put up a sign on any building that contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer. Unfortunately this definition is very vague, since many common chemicals can be carcinogenic in sufficient quantities. As a result, virtually every business in California displays a sign warning that the building contains cancer-causing chemicals, completely obviating the utility of warning the public about hazards because it's impossible to distinguish what the actual level of risk is. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of the signage provision actually helping in any way, but it's been a goldmine for signmakers and attorneys who file nuisance lawsuits over the non-display of these useless signs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_65_(198...
Note that I'm not arguing against regulation here, I'm arguing against ineffectual regulation whose discernable costs exceed the discernable benefit.
>And if your child (Lets say over the age of 3) is still eating random non-food items without checking with you, then you're not doing a great parenting job.
That's just plain ridiculous. No amount or quality of parenting will prevent a child from occasionally doing something stupid, any more than it will prevent an adult from the same.
Which we accept as the natural form of evolution, but wholly reject continuing to act without recourse on our species. Unless you also dislike any medicine or safety measures.
OK but where does it end? Every time you strike a match you could start a fatal fire, but it would obviously be absurd to require people to take a safety class every time they strike a match. We settle for putting a generic warning on boxes of matches instead. Likewise you can buy gasoline and propane at the gas station without having to go through any bureaucracy, because it's assumed that responsible individuals know fire is dangerous and that refined fuels are highly-combustible, so as long as there are some warning signs up to remind people of the fact then the public interest is considered to have been served. And sure enough, millions of people buy and consume gasoline every day without injury despite the high risk potential.
Please stop offering false dichotomies like 'status quo (even when it's failing) or no regulation at all.'
as opposed to your slippery-slope "where does it end?" argument?
Unless you think that there should be no regulations at all, you agree that there is some line before which there should be regulations and after it there shouldn't, so "where does it end" is an actual discussion to have, not a non-sequitor to end the conversation like you're using it.
Oh no. you said 'Unless you also dislike any medicine or safety measures.' I asked you where the line of demarcation was for acceptable safety measures, and gave some examples for context, which is a totally legitimate question.
It was not a non-sequitur at all. I want an answer.
The answer is we have that debate as a society. I was asserting that there was a line of demarcation, because you asserted that there wasn't with your claim of "Darwinism".
I did not write the post about Darwinism (that was user jlgaddis) nor did I interpret his/her comment to mean that there was no such line.
Meantime, since we are already having that debate, I am asking you, personally, to go on the record on where you as an individual think that line of demarcation should be. I am all for safety labeling (up to the point where there are so many safety warnings that their effectiveness drops) but I am also all for people being able to buy potentially dangerous products that can be used safely by following instructions and the use of the senses by a person of ordinary adult competence.
In other words, if a supermajority of adults selected via a statistically valid sampling method were to examine a commercial product and correctly infer what degree of danger it might present (based on the packaging, direct observation of the product, and general knowledge) then that's Good Enough.
I don't think that we need to build all our theories of product safety and liability around the least competent people in our society. That imposes a large opportunity cost on people who do take their responsibilities seriously but whose liberty is curtailed in the name of safeguarding people who can't or won't take responsibility.
>How many kids are hospitalized/die from swallowing batteries?
For button batteries:
poison.org[1] lists 54 fatalities since 1977; the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has a page [2] that mentions "Fifteen children have died — 11 of them within the last six years" but it isn't clear when exactly that page was published.
http://www.hassandlass.org.uk/ shows for 2002 that there were ~320 cases of magnet injuries (nature unspecified) in home/leisure scenarios vs. ~12000 coin injuries.
However that doesn't help us much. Strong magnets are far more prevalent now and the specific toys that caused most injuries weren't around in the UK, I think (?), back then.
Moreover, that probably makes magnet injuries per item in the home massively outweigh coin injuries.
I looked for EU IDB stats too but didn't get anywhere, my starting source was http://www.rospa.com/resources/statistics/ which lists some other potential data sources at the bottom.
> If you need a warning saying that eating a magnet is dangerous, you're not very clever.
Of course you can't prevent every idiot from doing something stupid. But some things are dangerous in an non-obvious way. It's pretty obvious you can choke on small objects. It's not obvious that eating one small magnet is fine, but eating a second one after a while can kill you.
Nobody disputes that, but a) once it has been explained via a warning, why should responsibility remain with the manufacturer, and b) once someone of ordinary intelligence plays with the magnets and sees how strong they are then it is obvious. Neodymium magnets will pinch your fingertip painfully if you're not careful. If it can hurt your finger it could hurt other parts of your body.
I agree. I don't know why some people act as if it's astounding and something you would never think of - that swallowing magnets can be pretty dangerous.
Stickers or labeling on packaging sounds pretty inexpensive and straightforward. For sure, too many stickers and labels turns into noise but I would argue that we aren't there yet, most of the toys I purchase for my children are relatively bereft of warnings.
> On the contrary it can put all their business at total risk.
...mostly by regulation, right?
I mean – we can all hope that all parent read about all accidents that kill people and then independently come to the smart conclusion, including a level-headed appreciation of the risk, normalized within the background context and the market penetration of ultra-strong magnets...
or – better idea – let's put some smart people in a room and let them make a recommendation.
There's even a staunchly capitalistic argument for regulation: it's the only reason we trust food from a supermarket we've never visited before, or a new toy, or an online bank, or a really fast looking electric car from California made by this guy who mostly deals in explosions controlled by 400,000 mechanical parts all supplied by the lowest bidder.
In other words: Regulation creates the trust that's essential for any economic activity.
While everyone thinks that it was an evil pharma that should have stopped by regulators it appears that the pharma company lost billions but saved by regulators instead.
>we can all hope that all parent read about all accidents that kill people and then independently come to the smart conclusion
Neither parent not bureaucrats can do that 100% correctly. Parents can do it infinitely better that the people in washington. Babies will die no matter what.
> let's put some smart people in a room and let them make a recommendation.
Like smart people deciding on housing loans, student loans, cheaper healthcare, invasion of Iraq ? It eventually snowballs into a giant problem that makes the original problem far less worse.
Smart people do not possess the intelligence or information to make decisions for others.
You're really bringing Thalidomide, of all examples?
To quite the Wikipedia article you linked:
For correctly denying the application despite the
pressure from Richardson-Merrell, Kelsey eventually
received the President's Award for Distinguished
Federal Civilian Service at a 1962 ceremony with
President John F. Kennedy. In September 2010, the
FDA honored Kelsey with the first Kelsey award.
The award, given annually to an FDA staff member,
came 50 years after Kelsey, then a new medical
officer at the agency, first reviewed the application
from the William S. Merrell Company of Cincinnati.[109]
Cardiologist Helen B. Taussig learned of the damaging
effects of the drug thalidomide on newborns and in 1967,
testified before Congress on this matter after a trip to
Germany where she worked with infants with
phocomelia (severe limb deformities).
As a result of her efforts, thalidomide was banned
in the United States and Europe.
I mean, it did take a while, but they didn't just give her an award – they _named_ the thing after her when they finally got around to recognize her.
Meanwhile, in places where the market was regulating itself:
Throughout the world, about 10,000 cases were
reported of infants with phocomelia due to
thalidomide; only 50% of the 10,000 survived.
FDA saved people from Thalidomide ? What about over 100K people who lost their life because FDA delayed approval of Provenge and many other life saving drugs ? What about the near monopoly that FDA has granted to EpiPens ? What about millions of Americans who can afford basic healthcare because of FDA's compliance costs and die as a result ?
FDA or market based regulation totally depends on the outcomes and at least for me it is very apparent that market is extremely good at figuring out what works and what not than FDA. Also at significantly lower costs.
>Throughout the world, about 10,000 cases were
reported of infants with phocomelia due to
thalidomide; only 50% of the 10,000 survived.
It is actually a very good example of how quickly market can detect signals and respond to it. FDA in this case is purely awarded for being slow. FDA has a very poor history of preventing harmful drugs one has to only look at the list of lawsuites after which the drugs ere taken back from market.
Thalidomide is not a good poster boy for regulation as it was not regulation, but sloth that stopped the approval of thalidomide in the USA. If the company involved had decided to hold off selling it in other countries first the FDA would have approved it.
> Regulation creates the trust that's essential for any economic activity.
At the moment that seems completely false to me. I don't remember a single time I took any government regulation seriously. For example I take my mechanic's advice about car safety far more seriously than government reports and ratings.
I trust Yelp lot more to chose a doctor for my kid than any government report. Honestly, I dont even care if the doctor actually had a medical degree or not if the yelp reviews and my peer's reviews about that doctor are good enough.
Regulator's role in deceiving public on important issues on the contrary makes me fare more skeptical. Regulator's stand on marijuana, vaping, sugar, fat, mother's milk, ethanol in gas and many others things is often false.
> For example I take my mechanic's advice about car safety far more seriously than government reports and ratings.
Why? Your mechanic might have useful insight into the reliability of cars but would have little more visibility into the safety of cars than the average person.
> Honestly, I dont even care if the doctor actually had a medical degree or not if the yelp reviews and my peer's reviews about that doctor are good enough.
I hope your kid is a rhetorical device and not an actual child.
> Your mechanic might have useful insight into the reliability of cars but would have little more visibility into the safety of cars than the average person.
On the contrary he knows more people in real accidents unlike the regulators and sees on regular basis which car did better and worse. He has a clear skin in the game to offer me reliable advice.
> I hope your kid is a rhetorical device and not an actual child.
It is a rhetorical device but I hardly doubt people demand to see their pediatrician's degree certificate.
Your mechanic definitely doesn't have sufficient data to make meaningful statements about which cars are safer. Your mechanic might have opinions about which models look better or worse after certain types of accidents but that says nothing about safety. Safety data is gathered by either recording accident outcomes or by simulating accidents. Your mechanic is doing neither of those. In fact the most important outcome is whether a passenger or driver dies, and your mechanic probably never sees those because the cars are generally totaled.
Most people don't demand to see the pediatrician's degree and certifications because the government regulates the industry.
You are right. He does not have sufficient data to make meaningful statement about all cars and his knowledge is probably incomplete even about specific cars. But yet what he sees is a real world data far more accurate than what is collected by some agency or simulations performed in the lab. He is a guy with some real skin in the game. I might not ask him if car X is good or bad but most certainly pay heed to him when he says car Y sees a lot of problems.
> Most people don't demand to see the pediatrician's degree and certifications because the government regulates the industry.
People refer to yelp, friends and other known patients before visiting a doctor. Or they rely on a reputable brand of the hospital which has all the incentive to employ good doctors. Government regulation or not people do not rely on mere certificate the doctor has and instead rely on other much more collaborative system to figure out who is a good doctor.
In the absence of government's heavy handed approach of medical regulation the market can perhaps develop a FICO like score for doctors.
This is just insane... You're basically living about 300 years in the past, completely rejection of the scientific method.
Daily life must be fascinating. All these miracles – wireless phones, glowing globes, flying(like off the ground!). Experts are completely useless, so these things must be spiritual creatures, created for the pleasure of "street-smart" people.
I wish there were a way for such people to actually opt out the system they reject.
Experts are useless when they don't have skin in the game. A educational expert advising president about education is mostly as ass-hole where as a teacher, principle or private tutor might be far more trust-worthy.
Not one of that invention you list is made by experts working to help people. On the contrary they are a result of spontaneous order created by people pursuing self interest.
The "asshole" advising the president on education is generally a teacher. People don't magically become terrible just because they work for the government.
It's healthy to be skeptical of the government. It's not healthy to always assume malice, because it makes you so biased that you do things like assume your mechanic knows more about the safety of cars than the people whose only job is to determine the safety of cars.
Your mechanic has zero skin in the car safety game. He has nothing to gain or lose from giving accurate safety advice. This means he's not financially incentivized to push certain cars but also means he's not incentivized to gather or provide accurate or useful data.
I'm amazed that you're so distrustful of the government that you prefer tarot reading from your mechanic over the recommendations from the agency that literally crashes thousands of cars to gather data on how safe they are. This isn't healthy skepticism. This is blind hate.
> People refer to yelp, friends and other known patients before visiting a doctor.
People generally have no way of knowing the quality of a doctor. They recommend primarily based on whether they like the doctor on a personal level. Which is fine because the medical industry is structured to largely keep incompetent doctors out.
> In the absence of government's heavy handed approach of medical regulation the market can perhaps develop a FICO like score for doctors.
I'm just kind of at a loss here. FICO was such a screwed up system that the government had to step in and regulate it because people were unable to get loans because of bad data and they had no way to find out or fix it. This is hardly a good model for controlling quality in general.
When industries form bodies to self-regulate in the absence of government involvement, it generally doesn't help consumers. It helps the industry. It's also typically called collusion because it's such a harmful practice.
I don't remember a single time I took any government regulation seriously.
Well then you're just a foolish person. The absurdity of some regulations doesn't mean that all regulations are absurd - that's a simple fallacy of composition.
I dont even care if the doctor actually had a medical degree or not if the yelp reviews and my peer's reviews about that doctor are good enough.
Yeah sure buddy. Come over next time you have a bad pain and I'll operate for cheap. I have a really high karma score so you know I'm legit.
I'm absolutely pro regulation (I'm from europe) but the notion that all regulation is good is just as flawed as the proposition that no regulation would be better. I also agree about the capitalistic basis for regulation, but it really seems to me as if people are substituting the economic asymmetry of the median consumer vs a manufacturer for the liability distribution. That is to say, because the manufacturer has deeper pockets than the consumer (by selling a somewhat dangerous product at a profit) then the manufacturer should bear the bulk of the liability solely because of a greater ability to pay, and regardless of whether the consumer was adequately informed.
Profitability does not automatically imply liability...unless you want all manufacturers to carry total liability insurance for every product they sell and for every product to become significantly more expensive as a result.
The magnet companies sold these items as a toy to children and resisted efforts to put warnings on them and resisted efforts to stop them being sold to children.
This is just not true. I bought a lot of Buckyballs (a brand of magnet) before they were taken off sale and they had very clear and prominent warnings on them which I read and took seriously because I am an adult. Neither I nor the manufacturer are responsible for people who won't do that.
Now maybe you can cite a manufacturer in the UK who showed disregard for such regulation, but we're talking about a regulatory body in the US which insisted on taking products off sale even though the manufacturers were fully compliant with the regulatory demands. Please stick within the factual context.
Those examples are obviously dangerous while magnets are not. A parent is going to leave their 2 year old playing with a loaded gun, but they might leave them to play with a bunch of magnets without realizing the danger.
That's what warning labels are for. A policy of banning any product for which the general public isn't fully informed of the dangers is a policy which prevents the public from becoming aware of dangers and mitigating them. ("A week ago there was no acceptable warning, no acceptable age, no sales restriction nor waiver that allowed production of magnets like Zen Magnets, Buckyballs, Neoballs, Magnicube or Neocubes.")
Also, there are no warning labels on balloons, much less are they banned, but, as the OP points out, balloons are the #1 cause of child suffocation. It's clear here that these rules aren't being made based on any sensible cost-benefit regulatory consideration, they are just putting unnecessary burdens on new products and grandfathering in the old ones because this is the path of least blame/resistance.
I can least a zillion things on earth that can kill little children but parents might leave those things around. When I was a child I put a hairpin inside power socket and had caught a poisonous snake in the backyard.
I don't think it is sensible for government machinery to waste taxpayer money on inventing new ways of saving babies and instead let parents make those decisions. Parents care for their babies infinitely more than government and those parents who might be irresponsible might put children in harms way despite all regulations.
A good clear label indicating the harm is good enough.
The irony here is that the reason Zen Magnets had such a fight on their hands is that there isn't a comparable amount of regulation for guns & fireworks.
Every box of neodymium magnets I've ever bought has a big warning on it saying 'DANGER - do not swallow' with an explanation of why. It's not the manufacturer's fault if some people refuse to pay attention to clearly stated warnings. It's those parents which are putting their children at risk, not the manufacturers.
Those examples are obviously dangerous while magnets are not. A parent is [not] going to leave their 2 year old playing with a loaded gun [...]
I amended your quote as you seem to have omitted a word by mistake. However, I have to disagree - lots of small children die or shoot others every year because the parents do allow them to play with a loaded gun. Sure they don't hand them a gun and say 'have fun Timmy,' but it's quite common for people to leave the gun accessible to children who then play with it. I don't recall how many kids die this way each year but it's far from zero. Given the wide popularity of guns, I'd think a lot more 2 year olds get shot than die or suffer injury from eating magnets.
> I've ever bought has a big warning on it saying 'DANGER - do not swallow' with an explanation of why
I've seen the "do not swallow warnings" but I don't recall ever getting much of an explanation.
I think explanations of warnings are severely under rated. It's the difference between a warning someone might actually heed and one someone might easily dismiss as nannying.
Well I first learned about the risks from reading the warning leaflet supplied with the fancy magnets I bought which explained exactly what could go wrong.
You are right I omitted a word there, but it is too late to edit my post.
>they don't hand them a gun and say 'have fun Timmy,'
That is the distinction. These things are marketed as toys. The expectation is that they will be played with and probably by kids.
Regarding the warnings, almost every kids toy has these type of warnings. It is easy to get desensitized to them. A parent should still be aware of them, but it also means that in practice these type of warnings might not be enough to stop potential problems.
And for the record, I'm not saying these should be outlawed or anything. Just that the comparison to guns and fireworks or using those as a justification for a lack of regulation is silly due to the marketing and perceived danger of all three products.
almost every kids toy has these type of warnings. It is easy to get desensitized to them
I agree and think it's a mistake to put on so many warnings that tired parents, or stupid parents, or parents who can't read English well, or whoever, become so overwhelmed by the warning information that they just ignore it. But it's also a mistake to say 'well people don't pay attention to warnings so we'd better just take the product off the market.' That's just an absurd over-reaction.
'You can have fun with this' =/= 'Safe for kids to use unsupervised.' Or more bluntly 'fun' =/= 'carefree.' Lots of enjoyable things are also dangerous. At some point liability accrues to the person who willingly engages in the dangerous activity; manufacturers should clearly inform consumers about the existence of risk but should not be expected to actively insulate them from it under every circumstance.
And for the record, I'm not saying these should be outlawed or anything. Just that the comparison to guns and fireworks or using those as a justification for a lack of regulation is silly due to the marketing and perceived danger of all three products.
I don't think so. Guns and fireworks are often marketed irresponsibly from what I've seen, and while responsibility is a matter of opinion it's easy to find advertising materials suggesting that guns and fireworks can be employed for fun, so I hope you'd agree that that's a fact. It's definitely a fact that while in pursuit of said fun, people do stupid shit with guns and fireworks on a regular basis - every year a few people kill them,selves on the 4th of July doing some idiotic firework stunt, and the toll from gun accidents is higher again.
So look, while I agree that magnets are not as obviously dangerous as guns or fireworks in that they don't involve explosions, they're still dangerous and anyone over the age of about 12 who doesn't appreciate this is rather ignorant. When the magnets are sold with a large warning saying 'this is dangerous because you could die' and people choose to ignore than, then they're being willfully ignorant.
I don't understand the compulsion to make excuses for willful ignorance. Most households have several dangerous chemicals in a cupboard under the kitchen sink and it's well understood that you shouldn't let kids drink drain cleaner etc. etc. Why are parents expected to exercise reasonable judgement where firearms, incendiaries, chemicals and so on are concerned but the same level of warning isn't considered sufficient for some other products? It's a self-defeating position.
In America, you're not expected or even allowed to be completely responsible for your child's safety. You're told what to do and what not to do (no matter your own educated experience)... the state knows best, don't you know?
I don't think these kind of simplistic characterizations are the least bit helpful. This particular regulatory outcome is atypical, and furthermore you're ignoring the rather significant body of tort law and its impact on theories of legal liability, even though the state is rarely a party to product liability lawsuits.
More and more, every time I hear the word 'simple' it's followed by some irrational bullshit. It's becoming my least favorite word.
That link includes kids killed during murder-suicides, gang violence, and so on -- which is a pretty far cry from negligent parents -- and it is criminal negligence to leave a weapon unsecured, whether children are present or not.
The most accurate number I've found (compiled by the Associated Press) gives around 100 deaths per year from firearm negligence involving children.
That's 100 too many, but to put it in perspective, 70 children per year choke to death on small objects (like balloons or dice), and right around 700 per year drown in swimming pools.
The most important part to solving this problem is education.
There are far too many children that don't know that guns aren't toys, and that grow up never learning anything about gun safety, which isn't exactly the best way to encourage a culture of responsibility as adults.
We know that teaching teenagers about safe sex drastically lowers STD and unplanned pregnancy rates, and we should be doing the same thing with gun safety education.
You dont see the wound. Your kid has tummy ache. Then a slight fever. Then a strong fever. Then a whole body inflammation and exitus-experience.
Parents can be quite ignorant of this. I had a broken appendix as kid, and was already drifting out of the world, when my parents finally decided to get a doctor.
Interior wounds are not visible until it is over.
They should definitely be labeled clearly because they present real danger. However, there are far stronger magnets that pose an equal or worse danger that are for sale home stores, craft stores, and grocery stores across the country. There's nothing about these little magnets that make them worse than button magnets except for negligent adults.
You mean like silly putty or the thousands of other toys that present choking hazards to children?
All toys are not appropriate for all children. I wouldn't give my daughter magnets to play with. I also wouldn't give her silly putty or dice or a chemistry set. She's too young. Eventually she can have all these things and a gallon of bleach under her bathroom sink. But not for quite a while.
But eating small amounts of silly putty isn't going to kill me, and there's no reason to eat silly putty, and it's quite unpleasant tasting.
These magnet companies knew that teenagers were using the magnets for fake piercing jewellery. They knew there was a risk that young people were eating the jewellery, and they resisted putting warnings on the packs and resisted moving the product off toy shelves.
> But eating small amounts of silly putty isn't going to kill me
But choking on a wad of silly putty definitely can. Hence the fact that it's labeled as a choking hazard and not for young children.
I don't think the bar for "should be banned" is "small amounts are dangerous". A "small amount" of Scrabble can kill your kid, despite there being "no reason" to eat Scrabble tiles, but we don't ban it. Toy stores sell balloons and jacks and dice and all kinds of things that pose real dangers to kids.
> These magnet companies knew that teenagers were using the magnets for fake piercing jewellery.
Shrug? Car manufacturers know teens are racing cars and snowboard manufacturers know teens are riding down black diamonds with little skill and no helmets. Teens do stupid things and we don't ban entire categories of product to attempt to protect them from minor dangers.
> * they resisted putting warnings on the packs and resisted moving the product off toy shelves.*
Did they actually resist labeling them or just resist the ban? If they resisted labeling, that's pointless and dumb and it's perfectly reasonable that they be required to label clearly and appropriately.
Did quite a lot of people ignore the warnings? Yes? Is that the manufacturer's fault? No, it's the fault of the people who saw a warning and didn't bother to read it or take it seriously. No doubt they are some very unhappy people because their kids ended up in hospital, but their opinions are worthless because they had the safety information and put their children at risk because they chose to ignore it.
Its about risk/reward. The fun to be had is perhaps small compared to the large risk (hospitalization).
Most of us trust that toys for kids will be essentially harmless. We choose to live in a trusting society, yes. That doesn't make us guilty of anything.
This is such a subtle risk, its arguable that a printed warning on a paper container is insufficient. What happens when the packaging is discarded? Another kid enters the house? Your kid gives the toy away?
Most of us trust that toys for kids will be essentially harmless.
Speak for yourself - you don't speak for everyone else and I see no reason to use your standard as the default.
I have no such trust because I have always looked at safety warnings and taken them at face value. I always loved playing with Lego, but I was also aware that Lego bricks have sharp edges and are a choking hazard for small children. I knew this when I was a kid too.
Finally, I see no reason for you to lump these magnets in with all other 'toys for kids'. The buckyball magnets came with a very clear warning that they were for people 13 and over, and that you could get injured or even die by swallowing the magnets. When an item comes with a clear and unambiguous written warning of specific dangers and your idea of 'living in a trusting society' is to ignore such explicit warnings then yes it does make you guilty of something - negligence.
It's simply not fair to demand that other people accept liability for your actions when you are literally refusing to read clearly written warnings
This is such a subtle risk, its arguable that a printed warning on a paper container is insufficient. What happens when the packaging is discarded? Another kid enters the house? Your kid gives the toy away?
It's not subtle at all, it's easy to observe the risk from playing with the magnets for a couple of minutes and seeing how powerful they are. When the physical forces involved are self-evident then at some point you have take responsibility for paying attention to what your own senses are telling you. You're literally complaining that this is somehow too hard to think about it for ordinary people, and if you think that then you should be up in arms about the accessibility of gas stations, things make out of glass, and all sorts of other 'subtle' hazards that people navigate on a daily basis.
What happens when the packaging is discarded? The person doing the discarding takes responsibility for leaving the magnets in a safe place where they can not be got at by unsupervised children. I have clusters of neodymium magnets in several places around my house, out of the packaging. I know where they are, I know that I may need to move them if my friends who have kids come to visit (just like I need to move some other things I don't want them getting into), and I know that if I show them off or anyone expresses an interest in them that I have an obligation to point out that they are powerful and dangerous. And just in case, my home insurance policy covers me against financial liability if someone does suffer an injury while visiting my home.
Stop telling me it's a 'subtle risk.' That's complete BS when I can see and feel for myself that the things are really powerful. A subtle risk would be a lump of attractive-looking material whose radioactive nature isn't apparent without some kind of special measuring apparatus. I cannot understand why you are arguing that people should literally disregard the evidence of their senses rather than accept even a modicum of legal liability.
It's actually not. It's panic about perceived risk. Balloons kill about 8 kids a year, which is 16 times as much as magnet sets (1 death in 2 years). We don't ban balloons, and few people would consider such a ban reasonable despite a clearly worse risk/reward tradeoff. Balloons are definitely not 16x more fun than magnet toys.
> Most of us trust that toys for kids will be essentially harmless. We choose to live in a trusting society, yes. That doesn't make us guilty of anything.
I don't agree with this at all. There are many toys I still won't give my 2-year-old, and even more that I'll only let her have under supervision. And she's actually an easy kid who doesn't tend to stick random stuff in her mouth.
> This is such a subtle risk, its arguable that a printed warning on a paper container is insufficient. What happens when the packaging is discarded? Another kid enters the house? Your kid gives the toy away?
I actually agree that the risk isn't obvious, unlike some people in this thread. The solution is labeling and education, though, not a ban. Kids die from random toys at a much higher rate that 1 every two years but we don't ban everything (just Kinder eggs, inexplicably).
How about teenagers who play with fireworks and die? Do we need to ban fireworks? Or do we just need parents to educate their children that fireworks are dangerous.
No; but if they do, it's the parents who should be held liable for disregarding important safety information.
This whole debate is symptomatic of some bigger cultural problem. It reminds me of when some kid shoots themselves with a gun and then the community is all 'too bad, so sad' and no charges are brought against the parent because they've been through the 'tragedy' of losing a child. Well that's tragic for them but it was fatal for the child, and dead children are not getting any justice when their negligent parents are let off the hook for causing the death of another person.
I mean, if I as an adult was hanging out with you and then I died because you handed me something that looked like a can of coke but was actually a hand grenade, then you'd be charged with manslaughter for failing to apprise me of the risk. But when small children get hold of guns and kill themselves (or worse, kill another kid) that's frequently just treated as 'the cost of our 2nd amendment freedom' or some bullshit. there are a lot of cases where parents get off with no legal penalty because the death of a child is so painful, even though they're clearly responsible. That does not make it OK to push the liability onto some third party who wasn't present and who supplied a a dangerous product with a detailed warning about the risks involved in it suse which people chose to ignore.
Out of curiosity, did you read those case studies? In the two listed, the children swallowed a single magnet, which is actually not particularly dangerous. More problematic were the button batteries these children also swallowed. Do we ban button batteries also?
Also, is there much evidence of teens actually doing this and accidentally swallowing them? I have no doubt that teens are playing with the magnets in stupid ways, but how many teens have swallowed magnets this way and had complications? The CPSC claims its happening but provides no breakout stats for this.
Also also, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of the claims the CPSC is making. On the page I linked, they clam "22 reports of magnet incidents involving children between the ages of 18 months and 15 years old since June 2009" through Nov 2011 and provide a yearly breakout of all those reports. In the press release poison.org cites, they claim "CPSC staff estimates that small, high powered magnet sets were associated with 1,700 emergency room-treated injuries between 2009 and 2011." So they estimate two orders of magnitude higher than they actually have reports for?
I was referring specifically to the case studies listed on that page's sidebar.
Where did that 1300 number come from? I'm seeing so many random numbers for how often kids are swallowing magnets that I'm doubting the good faith of the CPSC now.
Sure there are, many of them look like candy (for instance, in reference to zenmagnets, the neoballs). I've not seen magnets sold in grocery stores or home stores that share that property. Additionally, the size and shape make them quite easy for a child to swallow.
What magnet have you seen in a grocery store or Home Depot that is the size and shape of a small gumball? Link?
Have you spent much time with small children? They'll happily stick buttons (and button magnets) in their mouths if they find them on the floor. Kids who don't even know what candy is will still put small objects into their mouths because it's what they do. Buttons are about as easy to swallow as small balls. We literally package medicine in button shape because it's easy to swallow.
I vividly remember kids in late elementary school playing with pencil grips and cola can tabs in their mouths. I was always terrified someone was going to choke to death on one. (They didn't.) These were kids old enough to know that they weren't candy and they still put them in their mouths because kids are just kind of dumb. There are also stories of teens using ball magnets for tongue "piercings" and accidentally swallowing them.
Magnets absolutely don't have to look like candy to be dangerous.
Most ball magnets are also not colorful. Even if the colorful ones were somehow especially dangerous, that wouldn't make all ball magnets especially dangerous.
There's no but here. Grandpa was negligent and put a small child's safety at risk because he ignored the risk warnings on the product in favor of an assumption that 'anything sold in a gift shop must be safe.' I don't want to be rude about your parent but the liability is squarely on him (and you, insofar as you left your child in his risk-indifferent custody).
I don't mean to attack you personally in any way, but if you have an awareness that such things as small powerful magnets exist and can imagine what the risks would be, how is it not your job as a parent to be on the lookout for that? You manage to be on the lookout for all sorts of other risks that exist in your household - drowning, fire, chemicals, sharp objects, and so on.
I do not believe that adding an awareness of magnets (which are generally pretty easy to identify because of their magnetic properties causing them to stick to metallic surfaces or each other) causes some unacceptably large burden. You've known what magnets are since you were a small child. You are almost certainly easily able to distinguish between a bunch of magnetic balls and a bunch of non-magnetic ball bearings by simply looking at them. How is it not your responsibility to use that knowledge?
I find that hard to believe without a photograph, and even if it were true the intense nature of the magnetic force is self-evident. Common sense mitigates against giving any small non-food objects to a 2-year old.
I never claimed to be a perfect parent (nice attempt at misdirection there). But I don't try to hold other people responsible for the decisions I make. When people with kids visit me or leave their kids in my care then their safety is my primary responsibility and I'm willing to accept that.
It seems like an easy way to prevent that is clearly marking the packaging (which they did), and to package them in a good case so that the user can easily tell if any of the magnets are missing when they are put away.
Any links or further explanation? Tried searching myself, but not enough to really go on. Couldn't think (specifically) how wearing them as jewelry could go wrong.
I remember this from when they were first banned. But I just fail to see how it's the manufacturer's fault when they say 'don't do this, it's a really bad idea' and people just do it anyway.
I know teenagers do stupid things, and that they're more likely to do stupid things in the name of fashion. I'm old enough to recall the 1980s when body art first took off and it became cool for guys to wear earrings without being a pirate or a gypsy. I pierced my own ears around this time, despite being warned about everything from the risk of infection to the possibility of illness by hitting an acupuncture point (a risk what was inexplicably not assumed to be true for girls).
Well not only did I end up with holes in my ears but over a the years they did get infected on a few occasions when I didn't clean my earrings properly, and I had to clean out a small but painful and gross cyst. None of this is the fault of the people who manufacture earrings. No results yet on the acupuncture danger but after 30 years I'm beginning to think that warning may have been misplaced.
I'm pretty ambivalent about this whole issue, but would like to point out that the ban was not on "magnets", but on these particular magnets when packaged and marketed as toys.
There's a reason the CPSC banned lawn darts but not blowtorches or medical sharps or the safety pin you probably used to pierce your ear. There's not much ambiguity about the dangerous things the CPSC doesn't care about. But you can't say that about the magnets, which cause truly horrible medical calamities that most ordinary people do not expect.
Also, not sure if we were just hiding on different ends of HN or whatever, but it's good to bump into you again!
You should be thankful that you were fortunate enough to have children bright enough to learn that lesson early in life, and who are capable of abstraction without direct experience. Other people's children don't pick up those skills until quite a lot later. The implication of what you're saying is that you think the children of parents who don't teach them this important lesson early enough should be allowed to die. That's an incredibly harsh outlook.
Unless and until we limit childbearing to people of proven competence - hardly a desirable goal - then that's the outcome we have to accept. I'm not willing to live in kindergarten conditions just because some other people are terrible parents.
I'm not willing to live in kindergarten conditions just because some other people are terrible parents.
This isn't about you. This is about people who don't know what you know. In this case you understand the danger so you think the warnings are an unnecessary insult to your intelligence because you find them obvious. You're ignoring the people out there who don't understand the danger. Imagine a situation where your child came in to contact with something you know nothing about - you'd want information right there in front of you printed on the side, even if someone else who has experience and knowledge about the thing thought that warning was ridiculous.
The suggestion that we should let parents bring dangerous things in to their houses without warnings because they ought to understand the dangers already is utterly ridiculous. The 'kindergarten conditions' you're talking about is having sensible warnings on things. Why would it be better to have empty space, or a marketing message, or a pretty picture where that warning is if the warning could save someones life? It simply isn't, and if you believe it is then you are wrong.
Thanks for pointing out the threat. It was not immediately clear to me why anyone would ban magnets. I hope people who make toys out of those come up with clever ways to educate parents about their danger.
Yes, but the switch on my saw looks just like a fun red pushable button, and my bleach looks like a milk bottle.
It isn't a straw man. The question is how ultra-safe you'd like your society to be. My argument is that we have dangers all around, and some acceptable and reasonable risk must be associated with living. And it's unavoidable to boot. The society that believes that cushioning every corner eliminates daily risks is living a lie.
The trouble is that if you say that banning magnets is reasonable, nobody listens to you when you tell them that banning the sale of automatic weapons should also be. You're crying wolf with the damn magnets. There are bigger fish to fry!
It's not subtle at all. Why are we protecting candy manufacturers who make candy that resembles ball bearings? Most likely for no other reason than that we have been used to such novelty candy since we were kids ourselves, and somehow learned to distinguish between candy and actual ball bearings so as not to eat the latter.
Why are we expected to believe that adults can't tell the difference between candy and powerful magnets just because they're both shiny and metallic-looking? Why are the very clear warnings supplied with the product somehow unreadable in the face of their shiny roundness?
Sure thing, but everything is dangerous if you let kids eat them. Imagine your kids drinking bleach because it looks like lemonade. Or sitting on the stove because it's nice and warm. Or eating bees because they are nice and fuzzy. Or eating batteries because they ace small and shiny. Or eating the buttons off of their shirts, which then may be brittle, break inside their bodies and puncture something. Or what about sitting behind a door and someone then opening that door, hitting them just the wrong way causing permanent blindness...
It's just strange that people seem to want to point at super specific things and say: "those are inherently dangerous!"
We could agree that oxygen is dangerous because it reacts with almost anything. Does that mean we're going to have oxygen banned? :p
Apply the standard risk management quadrants -- magnets are small and easy to swallow, so the likelihood of an incident is high if magnets exist in toys. The consequence is emergency medical interventions, which is also high. So it falls into the worst quadrant. Many of the other things you mentioned have either a lower likelihood, or lower consequence, so they are not as serious.
Nice in theory but you can say the same thing about coins and many other things, such as paperclips. That's why you have to constantly watch kids up to the age of 3, because they just put everything in their mouths. After that age, though, they're expected to pay some attention to parents who tell them 'don't eat that.'
If I can teach my dogs not to eat certain things and to stop eating anything when I tell them, other people can certainly teach that to their kids. Risk management is great but what you're describing is risk phobia, which irrationally demands the whole world should be as safe as a kindergarten and that people should have to get special permission to undertake any risk whatsoever.
I thought that Buckyballs were a cool novelty when I received them as a gift a few years ago (and it seems like Zen Magnets makes pretty much the same thing). Once I opened and played with them once, they just weren't that interesting anymore, where I thought they'd feel more like Legos. Kudos to them for winning, but I probably won't buy another new set.
My 4 year old loves her magformers sets, she's still at that age where she needs a lot of assistance with them, but she likes building "houses" and other structures to use with her small figurines.
It costs money to fight it, but Zen Magnets will probably make a killing because of this. Maybe the Kinder surprise company will be more interested in fighting the ban now.
I think the Kinder-surprise company[0] has a lot more money than the magnet-surprise company, and my first guess would be that they don't think the liability risk is worth the effort.
The idea that the agency banning the magnet balls is ignoring much more dangerous issues such as pools or balloons is interesting - I can think of many examples of disproportionate government enforcement. For example, huge sentencing for computer crimes that under the right circumstances can be more punitive than what a child molester or violent assaulter could expect, or the entirety of the insane war on drugs. I'd be curious to see what kind of "balancing" could be done on the legal system.
They're not ignoring pools nor balloons. The agency going after the ban only wanted suitable warnings to be included with the magnets, and for the company to stop selling them to children as toys.
I'm in no way supporting the complete ban by the CSPC, but I also think it's unfair to compare a toy that was on the market for a relatively short period of time with relatively small market penetration to a balloon which you can find in most American homes (with children) at some point during a given year. That's like comparing the number of railgun deaths per year to the number of handgun deaths. You can't be killed by something you never had access to in the first place.
Wow, they claimed that they reduced their prices by 10%. What I'm seeing on the website is a 100% price increase. Talk about price gouging, and what a way to be reintroduced to the general market!
2015 Zen Booster Set: 216 Zen Magnets. 6 Spares, .5mm PVC Card and Velvet Sack.
Those are the prices from when they were selling the NOS and buybacks. This is how they stayed in business through the court rulings. They couldn't import new stock so they were selling what they had warehoused pre-ban and what they could buyback from previous customers.
The 2017 prices are published (I'm guessing the ban doesn't end immediately) and they are indeed 10% cheaper.
[edit] I'm not affiliated with zen magnets in any way, but I bought their largest set available pre-ban and have been following their progress on this ever since. They are an extremely reputable company and I highly recommend them.
This was an amazingly stupid action on the CPSC's part to begin with. Are magnets often considered a "toy"? Yes. Can magnets actually cause harm? Yes. But this is true of almost anything in our world.
There are a lot more dangerous things that are a lot less regulated than a wholesale ban. The CPSC needs, apparently, a much strong leash put on it. We need a government, not a nanny state.
Much like how Kinder Eggs are banned in the US but not Canada (and many other countries). Besides firearms, the US is in many ways as regulation and control obsessed as many state-heavy European countries - probably much more so given the size and capitalization of the various governments and agencies, plus the breadth of industry there - despite having the image of being a place of liberty and freedom.
One of the problems is the hysteria of the press whenever anything close to bad happens. It's created a culture of hyper critical control systems over defaulting to trusting the common sense of individuals, the ability of information to disseminate to educate peoplel (warning labels, stories of people getting hurt educating people on what not to do, etc), and the ability of parents.
I read through the archives of some Russian world traveller's extensive photo blog a couple years back, and I remember him commenting more than once that one of the most striking things about the US is how many posted regulations and notices there are compared to other countries. None but a couple other countries (I think Australia was one) were similar to the US in that regard.
You can argue the correctness of the ban, but saying that because there is worse problem X we shouldn't try and solve less-bad problem Y doesn't make any sense.
To use your terminology, he is saying worse problem X was solved with less costly means that are considered effective and pointing out problem Y could have been solved with equal or lesser cost but was instead treated as if it was worse than problem X and solved at greater cost.
Sorry, I don't see anywhere in their comment where they talk about the cost or efficacy of solving any problems. They mention other problems that have regulations, but not whether they are effective or cost-efficient.
It seems implied to me that he considers the regulation effective. His argument requires it. The cost is also implied: a wholesale ban has a steeper cost than the other, less onerous methods of regulation.
My comment was merely meant as an explication of his comment since your interpretation of his comment seems unsupported and bizarre. He stated clearly "We need government," but feels a wholesale ban is overkill in this case because for more dangerous things, we don't ban them outright.
Note: you're making a mistake if you read this story and think "well, at least the system basically works, and the right decision was finally made". The maker of ZenMagnets was tirelessly and bizarrely passionate about overturning this ruling. For every entrepreneur that struggles through a hurdle like this, a dozen more wisely choose to silently forgo developing a similar a product.
It seems normal to pursue something that could result in economic benefit, if you have the means to do so. And if there's a larger principle at stake, all the more reason.
The CPSC successfully drove every other company in this product category out of business. For any CEO in this position, it honestly bears question whether fighting a seemingly unwinnable battle (they claim they're the first to win such a battle in over 20 years) is going to end up eventually allowing you to turn a profit, or if your best bet is to close up shop and enter a different business entirely.
I used "bizarre" based on the tone of the guys writing. Read some of the older stuff he's written about it; it's been going on for years. He cares about this a lot more than most people who suffer from these sorts of regulation. It's not clear to me that he actually ended up with an economic benefit to justify the time he spent on it.
A frequent narrative I hear on HN is that going to court is ruinously expensive, emotionally taxing, wildly uncertain even if you're completely in the right, and so slow any victory is almost certain to be Pyrrhic.
Someone who believes that narrative would have expected this guy to lose, pay six figures in legal fees, have a mental breakdown, and the judgement to only come in five years after his magnet company closed down because they couldn't sell their only product.
Personally I don't have enough experience to know whether the US legal system really works that way.
It's bizarre in that he went to great lengths to prove a point when there were much easier ways to make more money in the same period. Most people would not be willing to spend as much money on proving the point but would rather use it to produce something less controversial.
If, however, you think "too bad there are dozens of entrepreneurs that fail at hurdles like these", make sure to remember: for every entrepreneur that encounters such Kafkaesque situations, there are thousands that never run into any problems with bureaucracy that can't be solved with a phone call or a two-page form.
The large, economy-wide negative impact of regulation are well established by academics. You can think the benefits are worth the cost, but you can't think the costs are small.
"Regulations are very costly (in a large, economy-wide way)," to me, sounded like an almost-self-evident, incredibly easy to back up claim. 15 seconds with Google confirmed that initial assessment.
"The Costs and Benefits of Regulation: Review and
Synthesis" RW Hahn, Yale Journal of Regulation, Volume 8, Issue 1, Article 9, 1991
The above link was the first Google result for (economy-wide costs of regulations journal) for me, and Google notes that it is cited by hundreds of other articles. The first 10 results all seemed to similarly explain that regulations are costly.
Why did you feel the need to reply with this sentence? How does it advance our conversation whatsoever? You replied saying
>Having a cost and having a "large, economy-wide negative impact" are very different things.
Is a large cost not a large negative impact? Are regulations by the federal government not economy-wide? Are you making any discernible point that couldn't have been expressed by "NUH UH, I'M STILL RIGHT LALALALA!"?
To pick a random example: The article doesn't say it costs shoppers in Des Moines $4,029 per year due to milk-market regulations. It costs US citizens somewhere between $500 million and $2.1 billion per year - in 1991.
The journal article I linked is literally about the large, economy-wide costs of regulations. Your response is a non-sequitor.
You have not demonstrated a net negative cost. In fact, I wonder if you even read the abstract, which states in pertinent part: [Authors] find that previous estimates of the costs of economic regulation probably overstated the true costs by failing to distinguish between transfer payments and net changes in economic efficiency [...] Overall, they find that the efficiency cost due to economic regulation is large and that the benefit from social regulation is positive but small. Their study also finds a huge variation in estimates of the costs and benefits ofparticular regulatory policies, particularly in the transportation sector and in environmental protection. This variation indicates that most estimates may be merely "guesstimates."
Going with your random example plucked from the article...
[Milk market regulations] cost US citizens somewhere between $500 million and $2.1 billion per year - in 1991.
Besides the wild variation, so what? That number is meaningless without the context of the size of the milk market as a whole which would allow us to assess the scope of the burden, not to mention some estimate of the likely economic cost of an unregulated milk marketplace (eg economic losses due to illness from disease).
Why do you think it's impressive to pull out a big number like this without any context? It's ridiculous. If we're going to go with cherry-picking argument of this type, I can't help noticing that Americans love milk and almost every American refrigerator I'e ever seen has an open container of milk. So since we're talking about the US as a whole in your example, and there were ~250m Americans in 1991, it seems like these regulations imposed a cost of between $2 and $8 that year on every American...which doesn't sound like all that much to pay for a year of knowing the milk you enjoy is safe to consume. MY household spends about $7-800 a year on dairy products, so back in 1991, and adjusting very generously for inflation, we might have spent $200 to consume the same amount of milk. Using the worst-case number from your paper, positing an upper regulatory burden for every American of $8 and doubling it to represent the two people in my household, maybe $16 of that $200 consisted of regulatory costs. So the worst-case scenario is that regulation drove up the cost of milk by 8%, which doesn't sound like that bad of a trade.
Since I've done all the work here so far perhaps you'd like to estimate the benefits of reliably safe milk in terms of avoided medical costs from dairy-borne pathogens.
Geez, at least give me a chance before you decide what I can't do.
The difference is pretty basic: Having a "negative impact" requires value-judgement, having a cost does not. In terms of economics it requires a broad view of the entire economy, whereas a cost can be directly assigned to a single event or series of events.
Saying that a regulation has a cost is saying that it requires some expenditure to implement/maintain. Saying it has a negative impact is saying that the expenditure to implement/maintain that regulation outweighs the as-yet-in-this-discussion undefined benefits of the regulation in question.
>regulations are obviously costly, benefits are obviously great. the important hard question is the net.
Well of course, but the comment I responded to questioned the assertion that there is a large, economy-wide cost.
Is the benefit of (cleaner air/safer highways/magnet-free-toys) worth the cost? That's what the debate ought to be about. But first we all have to agree that there is a cost being paid.
Finding a citation isn't the same as forming an argument. A 25 year old article is also not a very impressive comeback considering that there has been a lot of new research in economics and in computational analytics over that period. Try harder.
That paper actually points out that costs have been widely overestimated. It also points out that estimating the costs is very difficult and a lot of estimates out there are pretty hand wavy and/or just made up.
It also says "Overall,
they find that the efficiency cost due to economic regulation is large and that
the benefit from social regulation is positive but small."
The costs lie on a distribution and most of the time they are small when broken out. It's dishonest to cite huge numbers from aggregated costs or cherry-pick costs from highly-regulated industries like pharma or chemistry where the regulatory burden is high due to substantially elevated risk.
An "some form" means some faceless bureaucrat fuckhead, who's having a lousy day (after reading my comment!) rubber-stamps "NOPE".... or is just lost.
These are barriers to trade. And we got to this place with death by a thousand regulation cuts. Can't do this. Can't do that. Cant do this on that day while doing that instead of this, without willing out volumes of forms. And you wonder why compliance costs are stupid high?
(Don't get me wrong, I hold to a mixture of communism and capitalism - I think something like GNU can be done for nearly everything, but there's room for making money as well. I just categorically disagree with the volume of regulations. It makes people criminals via incapability of understanding the law.)
OTOH too little regulation can easily mean no-one trusting a brand they don't recognize as large and well-established to even reach the standard of not killing them, let alone being any good.
Personally I'm already there with lots of stuff. I'm aware that it's letting certain companies collect rents, but it's generally not worth my time and the extra risk to track down another brand that might be acceptably reliable and safe, assuming they haven't decided to burn whatever little reputation they've built up for some short-term profit by swapping their once-decent product for crap while keeping the price and model info the same after all the reviews I read were written.
That's also a barrier to entry. Economies are tricky things :-/
Well, considering your username, I'm sure you may end up in those Kafkaesque situations more than usual...
But, seriously: This nightmare is one of the stories we tell each other. But, for most companies, it's just not true.
I've started four or five companies. Mostly software, one that sells actual (government-certified organic) food, one that mostly worked for governments (including the defense sector). In all that time, I've never felt like regulation prevented me from doing anything. Once or twice, I had to submit some form that I thought was overkill. But in fact I doubt there was ever a year where I spend more than two or three days net on government bureaucracy.
I know that the situation may be different for construction or airplane startups (at least I hope it is). But this sort of hyperbole is just a lie that doesn't improve by repetition.
If anything, I've been surprised by how little regulation there sometimes is. Look at AirBnB or Uber or drones: Who would've though that you could (for a time) fly a model airplane in Heathrow's final approach corridor and only get a "we're looking into it and engaging in a dialog with all interested parties" as a reply?
For every entrepreneur that struggles through a hurdle like this, how many personal injuries and environmental harms are avoided? You make it sound like regulation exists for no reason or has no upside, but that's a very money-centric POV. From a human POV it's often just as well that some of those startups didn't get off the ground. How many cases of food poisoning or malnutrition were avoided because a dozen Soylent-alikes were - rightly! - told their products were unfit for human consumption?
You're committing a critical fallacy here, you're making it sound like this has to be a "virtually non-existent regulation" situation or a circumstance like Zen Magnets went through.
The CPSC and related regulators CAN regulate dangerous stuff without making idiotic wars on toy magnets that undermine their entire existence. Seriously. They can fulfill their entire function, standards of error for mistakes included, without EVER committing such heinously overregulatory acts as this - in fact, it's important to their continued existence that they DO NOT overregulate this badly (because when they do, their opponents gain substantial ammunition to eventually disband/defang them).
They aren't toy magnets, which is part of the problem: people have internalized that these are toys, which leads to hazardous situations. An educational campaign is surely something that needs to happen.
Yes, many regulations exist for good reason and have significant upsides.
However, it's false to say that EVERY individual regulation meets these criteria. As TFA pointed out, these objects are far less hazardous than firearms, fireworks, automobiles, and even balloons (the leading cause of child suffocation, and for whic labeling is required), but because they are novel the CPSC decided to slap them with an absolute ban, which is stronger regulation than any of the other products listed above and thousands of others.
This was a very badly considered and executed regulation, and the judge acted rightly. FWIW, I don't think anyone is saying what you imply, that all regulations are baseless and bad.
I would agree with you if we were talking about a defective product. But neodymium spheres are not defective, they're just dangerous. I have been interested i this for several years as I own a whole lot of Buckyballs, a previously popular brand of strong magnet sold to the public, which were taken off sale after repeated CPSC objections.
Yes, they're dangerous is you don't follow safety precautions and I would never allow children to play with them. When children visit we make sure the magnets are not accessible - it's our responsibility to think about others' safety. But it's not the responsibility of the magnet manufacturers, as long as they make it clear that their product can be dangerous (and the vendors I've bought from certainly do). The mere fact that something is dangerous is not grounds for taking it off sale, otherwise we should shut down every gas station and hardware store right now.
Why make a distinction between things that are dangerous on accident (defective) vs things that are dangerous by design?
Because many dangerous things have significant utility. Fire is useful for warming your home and cooking food but can also injure or even kill. Water is essential life but you could suffer from hypothermia or drown. These are things that should be obvious to all adults and most children. If you need to have it spelled out to you then your opinions on the economics of safety are not worth very much.
Every law or regulation needs to balance the risk to society against the benefit to society. This is a toy.
It's not a toy just because you say it is, nor are all toys required to be equally safe or not admit any possibility of injury. Really, it's sad that you think such an assertion constitutes a valid argument.
Maybe you think it's 'just a toy' because you can't conceive of any use for it other than mere amusement. That's your problem, not mine.
This has gotten out of hand, principally because of this commenter insulting folks out of hand.
Its reasonable to observe social norms, comment on risk vs reward, and suggest different views. Others should not be subject to ridicule and hostile comments for this.
> Because many dangerous things have significant utility
Yes, it certainly makes sense to distinguish based on utility, which was the whole point of the second part of my comment, and is why a comparison to gas stations and hardware stores is invalid. Utility is completely orthogonal to "defect vs design".
> It's not a toy just because you say it is
It's a toy because it fits the definition of the word, regardless of how they market it. If it has some purpose other than entertainment, I would love to understand what it is. From my viewpoint, the utility, and therefore the harm caused to society by it being banned, is low. Note how this is different for gasoline and power tools.
I honestly had no idea this was even an issue. I purchased some outrageously strong magnets from Lee Valley for some wood working projects.
You don't want to get them stuck between your fingers, but besides keeping them away from visa cards and rotating hard drives, I didn't think much more about the potential dangers. Thank goodness the negligence of my government didn't cause me all manner of danger (kidding).
Strong magnets are incredibly dangerous; about as dangerous as a table saw I'd say. You can know what you're doing but still get hurt. All it takes is one stray nail under the table to put a damper on your ability to grab a cup in the future.
I bought tiny neodymiums at a store once. They're about 3/4 the size of a dime. You have to pry them off the fridge, they can hang pictures on the wall if a nail is hiding behind, and I _have_ hurt myself with them before. It's easy, and happens before you can blink.
Simply claiming a fallacy is not a discussion or a rebuttal. Also, there is no "but think of the children" fallacy. You may be thinking of the Emotional Appeal fallacy, but even then it isn't always a fallacy to point out potential dangers to children.
If we were discussing whether pavel_lishin was a good person, would ad hominem be off limits to you? It doesn't make sense to call out a "think of the children" when we're actually discussing dangers to children.
Alright, both of you folks are absolutely correct - 'think of the children', in the context of 'is X safe for children?' is an appropriate use of same. Snark retracted :-)
Posts about him fighting on tirelessly. I look to them like the NewEgg of Patent trolls. He stood up and fought back a group that seldom has cases turn on them.
223 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadA kid eats a magnet waits a while then eats another one. The magnets are strong enough to find each other through the intestinal walls. The result is pretty horrifying, so be careful with strong magnetic toys.
The magnet companies sold these items as a toy to children and resisted efforts to put warnings on them and resisted efforts to stop them being sold to children.
If we can't sell things to adults because they're dangerous to children, we might as well close... well, all hardware stores.
My nephews don't think tools or random bits of hardware are uninteresting. I certainly didn't either. If you're of a mind to play, the world is nothing but toys.
The regulator's point about the magnets is that the manufacturers didn't manage to stop them being sold in toy shops to children, and that even with the warnings parents were giving them to children as toys.
And, even compared to random bits of hardware store: if you swallow a nail you're probably going to be ok. If you swallow magnets you're probably going to need medical help.
As long as you're okay with sepsis from a perforated intestine, then sure.
If a child swallows anything larger than a dime, the standard recommendation is to seek medical attention.
Most small boys (and some girls) are fascinated by tools, that's why there are play tools in toy stores so kids can pretend to be a construction worker or suchlike. Conversely I enjoy playing with magnets but I also find them useful for visualizing complex problems and as artistic tools for texturing paint.
Maybe you didn't find physical tools interesting as a child but it's fallacious to assume that no other children do when there's abundant evidence to the contrary.
The first warning label on Buckyballs said 13+. Anyone under 18 is a child.
The facts fall staunchly in opposition to your comments suggesting that they were resistant to applying warning labels, and actively trying to market them to children. This is why all of your comments stating such are downvoted into the grey. One of your other comments claims all the CPSC wanted was warnings, but the reality is that the CPSC worked to drive these companies out of business after all of the warnings were present.
[0] http://gizmodo.com/how-buckyballs-fell-apart-1609183224
That's categorically false.
No it's not. This submission is about one company resisting the regulatory action created when buckyballs continued to sell the product to 14 year olds, even though they knew teenagers were among the > 1000 children hospitalised by these magnets.
Are you really trying to argue that a 14 year old is so overcome by the overwhelming desire to experience magnetic forces that s/he is unable to read a warning label, and the only sensible course of action is to halt all sales of the product? Come off it.
The warnings you talk about on buckyballs did not say "adults only", they said "13+".
It is dishonest to suggest that buckyballs didn't sell to children and to say that buckyballs included warnings about not selling to children when the warnings said 13+.
> Are you really trying to argue that a 14 year old is so overcome by the overwhelming desire to experience magnetic forces that s/he is unable to read a warning label
That's what happened, yes. Children are by definition fucking idiots. That's why we don't let them drive; drink alcohol; vote; run for office; enter into contracts; join the military; live by themselves; get married; have sex; etc.
>, and the only sensible course of action is to halt all sales of the product? Come off it.
I'm saying we tried warning labels. Parents and children and toy stores ignored those warnings, and children ended up hospitalised as a result. The manufacturers resisted attempts to strengthen the warnings; regulators were forced into issuing a ban because soft-touch regulation failed.
The manufacturers brought this upon themselves by not controlling their supply chain properly and by resisting better clearer warnings.
If you are telling me that a 13 year old can't comprehend a clearly written warning then I call bullshit. If parents and children and toy stores ignore the warnings then the responsibility lies with them, not the manufacturers. I am not willing to live in a society where everything has to be dumbed down to the level of safety for a small child.
The manufacturers brought this upon themselves by not controlling their supply chain properly and by resisting better clearer warnings.
What does the supply chain have to do with consumer behavior? Total bullshit. Why don't you think that parents, toy stores and older children are immune from responsibility when they are given clear warnings of the danger? I take responsibility for myself and any kids that are temporarily in my care, so you should you and so should everyone else.
You're literally arguing that adults should be able to have nice things because some people are too fucking stupid to follow directions. No. Once they've been properly informed and still choose to do stupid shit, it's their responsibility, not mine or yours. Why are you arguing so intently for treating everyone like children just because some adults refuse to accept responsibility?
I am not sure where you got the idea that the companies were trying to sell these thing to children. They never attempted to do that, and if they had they would be liable for millions in damages. They did everything they could to save their business and cooperated with the CPSC in every possible way.
Disclaimer: I am not directly involved with these companies but I am a freelancer who built and ran the Buckyballs website for almost four years.
And if your child (Lets say over the age of 3) is still eating random non-food items without checking with you, then you're not doing a great parenting job.
Don't you think the whole "put a warning sticker on everything" is getting a bit ridiculous?
If you spend a little bit of time thinking about how strong magnets can probably attract each other through internal tissue, the risk makes sense, but it doesn't seem like something that's obvious, at least not to me.
This is one circumstance where awareness/warning labels are really useful, but unfortunately we hear so many frivolous warnings people are not likely to take them seriously. Everyone should know that these contraptions were literally banned at one point for the risk they pose to children, and the disclaimers encountered are not just generic CYA, but representative of a real risk to small children that has a real body count.
Like the GP, I'm glad that these are legal in the United States again, but we should not take the issue of informing parents of the risk involved with these toy-like objects lightly.
A similar issue is being posed by the small watch batteries included in many children's toys and remote controls these days. Children swallow these and they burn holes in their organs that result in serious disabilities. It's important that parents be aware of such non-obvious environmental dangers.
I don't think non-clever parents ought to be punished via their children. That seems a little Old Testament biblical.
> Don't you think the whole "put a warning sticker on everything" is getting a bit ridiculous?
That's pretty good late 90's standup material, but I'm not sure if it's factually supported. Are there too many stickers? Are they effective or not effective at preventing harm? Do they incur more costs than the harm they prevent?
So yes, I think we've gone too far.
I argue that there are too many stickers, that they become less effective through profusion, and that in some cases the cost does exceed the benefit. For example, in California a 1986 ballot initiative called Proposition 65 mandates that businesses put up a sign on any building that contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer. Unfortunately this definition is very vague, since many common chemicals can be carcinogenic in sufficient quantities. As a result, virtually every business in California displays a sign warning that the building contains cancer-causing chemicals, completely obviating the utility of warning the public about hazards because it's impossible to distinguish what the actual level of risk is. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of the signage provision actually helping in any way, but it's been a goldmine for signmakers and attorneys who file nuisance lawsuits over the non-display of these useless signs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_65_(198...
Note that I'm not arguing against regulation here, I'm arguing against ineffectual regulation whose discernable costs exceed the discernable benefit.
That's just plain ridiculous. No amount or quality of parenting will prevent a child from occasionally doing something stupid, any more than it will prevent an adult from the same.
Please stop offering false dichotomies like 'status quo (even when it's failing) or no regulation at all.'
as opposed to your slippery-slope "where does it end?" argument?
Unless you think that there should be no regulations at all, you agree that there is some line before which there should be regulations and after it there shouldn't, so "where does it end" is an actual discussion to have, not a non-sequitor to end the conversation like you're using it.
It was not a non-sequitur at all. I want an answer.
Meantime, since we are already having that debate, I am asking you, personally, to go on the record on where you as an individual think that line of demarcation should be. I am all for safety labeling (up to the point where there are so many safety warnings that their effectiveness drops) but I am also all for people being able to buy potentially dangerous products that can be used safely by following instructions and the use of the senses by a person of ordinary adult competence.
In other words, if a supermajority of adults selected via a statistically valid sampling method were to examine a commercial product and correctly infer what degree of danger it might present (based on the packaging, direct observation of the product, and general knowledge) then that's Good Enough.
I don't think that we need to build all our theories of product safety and liability around the least competent people in our society. That imposes a large opportunity cost on people who do take their responsibilities seriously but whose liberty is curtailed in the name of safeguarding people who can't or won't take responsibility.
These magnets hospitalised over a thousand children, and killed at least one.
How many children are hospitalized/die from swallowing coins or lego?
Do we need warning labels on coins?
How many kids are hospitalized/die from swallowing batteries? I'd bet it's a lot more than magnets, and batteries can be pretty lethal.
For button batteries:
poison.org[1] lists 54 fatalities since 1977; the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has a page [2] that mentions "Fifteen children have died — 11 of them within the last six years" but it isn't clear when exactly that page was published.
[1]http://www.poison.org/battery/fatalcases
[2] http://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/kohls-injury-prevention...
However that doesn't help us much. Strong magnets are far more prevalent now and the specific toys that caused most injuries weren't around in the UK, I think (?), back then.
Moreover, that probably makes magnet injuries per item in the home massively outweigh coin injuries.
I looked for EU IDB stats too but didn't get anywhere, my starting source was http://www.rospa.com/resources/statistics/ which lists some other potential data sources at the bottom.
Of course you can't prevent every idiot from doing something stupid. But some things are dangerous in an non-obvious way. It's pretty obvious you can choke on small objects. It's not obvious that eating one small magnet is fine, but eating a second one after a while can kill you.
This was the first court case CPSC took in 13 years to force a recall. That doesn't sound like an out of control regulator.
Regulators & regulations aren't an unmitigated good. They can be better than their lack, or they can be worse.
Magnet companies are more likely to care about their customers than government caring about my child.
> We don't sell fireworks nor guns to children.
UK is not a good example because they dont even sell hardware tools to kids. That is simply wussyfication of the society.
...mostly by regulation, right?
I mean – we can all hope that all parent read about all accidents that kill people and then independently come to the smart conclusion, including a level-headed appreciation of the risk, normalized within the background context and the market penetration of ultra-strong magnets...
or – better idea – let's put some smart people in a room and let them make a recommendation.
There's even a staunchly capitalistic argument for regulation: it's the only reason we trust food from a supermarket we've never visited before, or a new toy, or an online bank, or a really fast looking electric car from California made by this guy who mostly deals in explosions controlled by 400,000 mechanical parts all supplied by the lowest bidder.
In other words: Regulation creates the trust that's essential for any economic activity.
Mostly by bad reviews, lawsuites and bad PR. One good example of this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
While everyone thinks that it was an evil pharma that should have stopped by regulators it appears that the pharma company lost billions but saved by regulators instead.
>we can all hope that all parent read about all accidents that kill people and then independently come to the smart conclusion
Neither parent not bureaucrats can do that 100% correctly. Parents can do it infinitely better that the people in washington. Babies will die no matter what.
> let's put some smart people in a room and let them make a recommendation.
Like smart people deciding on housing loans, student loans, cheaper healthcare, invasion of Iraq ? It eventually snowballs into a giant problem that makes the original problem far less worse.
Smart people do not possess the intelligence or information to make decisions for others.
To quite the Wikipedia article you linked:
I mean, it did take a while, but they didn't just give her an award – they _named_ the thing after her when they finally got around to recognize her.Meanwhile, in places where the market was regulating itself:
FDA saved people from Thalidomide ? What about over 100K people who lost their life because FDA delayed approval of Provenge and many other life saving drugs ? What about the near monopoly that FDA has granted to EpiPens ? What about millions of Americans who can afford basic healthcare because of FDA's compliance costs and die as a result ?
Just for sample check this : http://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2010/11/FDA-Delay-of-O...
FDA or market based regulation totally depends on the outcomes and at least for me it is very apparent that market is extremely good at figuring out what works and what not than FDA. Also at significantly lower costs.
>Throughout the world, about 10,000 cases were reported of infants with phocomelia due to thalidomide; only 50% of the 10,000 survived.
It is actually a very good example of how quickly market can detect signals and respond to it. FDA in this case is purely awarded for being slow. FDA has a very poor history of preventing harmful drugs one has to only look at the list of lawsuites after which the drugs ere taken back from market.
At the moment that seems completely false to me. I don't remember a single time I took any government regulation seriously. For example I take my mechanic's advice about car safety far more seriously than government reports and ratings.
I trust Yelp lot more to chose a doctor for my kid than any government report. Honestly, I dont even care if the doctor actually had a medical degree or not if the yelp reviews and my peer's reviews about that doctor are good enough.
Regulator's role in deceiving public on important issues on the contrary makes me fare more skeptical. Regulator's stand on marijuana, vaping, sugar, fat, mother's milk, ethanol in gas and many others things is often false.
Why? Your mechanic might have useful insight into the reliability of cars but would have little more visibility into the safety of cars than the average person.
> Honestly, I dont even care if the doctor actually had a medical degree or not if the yelp reviews and my peer's reviews about that doctor are good enough.
I hope your kid is a rhetorical device and not an actual child.
On the contrary he knows more people in real accidents unlike the regulators and sees on regular basis which car did better and worse. He has a clear skin in the game to offer me reliable advice.
> I hope your kid is a rhetorical device and not an actual child.
It is a rhetorical device but I hardly doubt people demand to see their pediatrician's degree certificate.
Most people don't demand to see the pediatrician's degree and certifications because the government regulates the industry.
> Most people don't demand to see the pediatrician's degree and certifications because the government regulates the industry.
People refer to yelp, friends and other known patients before visiting a doctor. Or they rely on a reputable brand of the hospital which has all the incentive to employ good doctors. Government regulation or not people do not rely on mere certificate the doctor has and instead rely on other much more collaborative system to figure out who is a good doctor.
In the absence of government's heavy handed approach of medical regulation the market can perhaps develop a FICO like score for doctors.
Daily life must be fascinating. All these miracles – wireless phones, glowing globes, flying(like off the ground!). Experts are completely useless, so these things must be spiritual creatures, created for the pleasure of "street-smart" people.
I wish there were a way for such people to actually opt out the system they reject.
Not one of that invention you list is made by experts working to help people. On the contrary they are a result of spontaneous order created by people pursuing self interest.
It's healthy to be skeptical of the government. It's not healthy to always assume malice, because it makes you so biased that you do things like assume your mechanic knows more about the safety of cars than the people whose only job is to determine the safety of cars.
Your mechanic has zero skin in the car safety game. He has nothing to gain or lose from giving accurate safety advice. This means he's not financially incentivized to push certain cars but also means he's not incentivized to gather or provide accurate or useful data.
I'm amazed that you're so distrustful of the government that you prefer tarot reading from your mechanic over the recommendations from the agency that literally crashes thousands of cars to gather data on how safe they are. This isn't healthy skepticism. This is blind hate.
> People refer to yelp, friends and other known patients before visiting a doctor.
People generally have no way of knowing the quality of a doctor. They recommend primarily based on whether they like the doctor on a personal level. Which is fine because the medical industry is structured to largely keep incompetent doctors out.
> In the absence of government's heavy handed approach of medical regulation the market can perhaps develop a FICO like score for doctors.
I'm just kind of at a loss here. FICO was such a screwed up system that the government had to step in and regulate it because people were unable to get loans because of bad data and they had no way to find out or fix it. This is hardly a good model for controlling quality in general.
When industries form bodies to self-regulate in the absence of government involvement, it generally doesn't help consumers. It helps the industry. It's also typically called collusion because it's such a harmful practice.
Well then you're just a foolish person. The absurdity of some regulations doesn't mean that all regulations are absurd - that's a simple fallacy of composition.
I dont even care if the doctor actually had a medical degree or not if the yelp reviews and my peer's reviews about that doctor are good enough.
Yeah sure buddy. Come over next time you have a bad pain and I'll operate for cheap. I have a really high karma score so you know I'm legit.
Profitability does not automatically imply liability...unless you want all manufacturers to carry total liability insurance for every product they sell and for every product to become significantly more expensive as a result.
This is just not true. I bought a lot of Buckyballs (a brand of magnet) before they were taken off sale and they had very clear and prominent warnings on them which I read and took seriously because I am an adult. Neither I nor the manufacturer are responsible for people who won't do that.
Now maybe you can cite a manufacturer in the UK who showed disregard for such regulation, but we're talking about a regulatory body in the US which insisted on taking products off sale even though the manufacturers were fully compliant with the regulatory demands. Please stick within the factual context.
Also, there are no warning labels on balloons, much less are they banned, but, as the OP points out, balloons are the #1 cause of child suffocation. It's clear here that these rules aren't being made based on any sensible cost-benefit regulatory consideration, they are just putting unnecessary burdens on new products and grandfathering in the old ones because this is the path of least blame/resistance.
For instance, the first result for "balloons" on amazon doesn't show any warning labels on the exterior package or the front of the interior bag.
https://smile.amazon.com/Kings-Deal-10color-Latex-Balloons/d...
(Maybe it's in small type on the back?)
EDIT: Was able to find this PDF, which says that latex balloons must be labeled if they are intended for children under 12. But presumably nothing is required if intended for adults. http://mohawkglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/labeling-...
I don't think it is sensible for government machinery to waste taxpayer money on inventing new ways of saving babies and instead let parents make those decisions. Parents care for their babies infinitely more than government and those parents who might be irresponsible might put children in harms way despite all regulations.
A good clear label indicating the harm is good enough.
http://www.kidzone.ws/lw/snakes/ws8.htm
Perfect accidentally correct typo. You meant "NOT going to", but your intent was wrong:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/01/toddl...
Or, according to the website, "a balloon, the #1 cause of child suffocation, a novelty everyone grew up with and often believe to be harmless."
Those examples are obviously dangerous while magnets are not. A parent is [not] going to leave their 2 year old playing with a loaded gun [...]
I amended your quote as you seem to have omitted a word by mistake. However, I have to disagree - lots of small children die or shoot others every year because the parents do allow them to play with a loaded gun. Sure they don't hand them a gun and say 'have fun Timmy,' but it's quite common for people to leave the gun accessible to children who then play with it. I don't recall how many kids die this way each year but it's far from zero. Given the wide popularity of guns, I'd think a lot more 2 year olds get shot than die or suffer injury from eating magnets.
http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/child-injured-kill... has pretty up-to-date raw data for anyone interested in analyzing this.
I've seen the "do not swallow warnings" but I don't recall ever getting much of an explanation.
I think explanations of warnings are severely under rated. It's the difference between a warning someone might actually heed and one someone might easily dismiss as nannying.
>they don't hand them a gun and say 'have fun Timmy,'
That is the distinction. These things are marketed as toys. The expectation is that they will be played with and probably by kids.
Regarding the warnings, almost every kids toy has these type of warnings. It is easy to get desensitized to them. A parent should still be aware of them, but it also means that in practice these type of warnings might not be enough to stop potential problems.
And for the record, I'm not saying these should be outlawed or anything. Just that the comparison to guns and fireworks or using those as a justification for a lack of regulation is silly due to the marketing and perceived danger of all three products.
I agree and think it's a mistake to put on so many warnings that tired parents, or stupid parents, or parents who can't read English well, or whoever, become so overwhelmed by the warning information that they just ignore it. But it's also a mistake to say 'well people don't pay attention to warnings so we'd better just take the product off the market.' That's just an absurd over-reaction.
'You can have fun with this' =/= 'Safe for kids to use unsupervised.' Or more bluntly 'fun' =/= 'carefree.' Lots of enjoyable things are also dangerous. At some point liability accrues to the person who willingly engages in the dangerous activity; manufacturers should clearly inform consumers about the existence of risk but should not be expected to actively insulate them from it under every circumstance.
And for the record, I'm not saying these should be outlawed or anything. Just that the comparison to guns and fireworks or using those as a justification for a lack of regulation is silly due to the marketing and perceived danger of all three products.
I don't think so. Guns and fireworks are often marketed irresponsibly from what I've seen, and while responsibility is a matter of opinion it's easy to find advertising materials suggesting that guns and fireworks can be employed for fun, so I hope you'd agree that that's a fact. It's definitely a fact that while in pursuit of said fun, people do stupid shit with guns and fireworks on a regular basis - every year a few people kill them,selves on the 4th of July doing some idiotic firework stunt, and the toll from gun accidents is higher again.
So look, while I agree that magnets are not as obviously dangerous as guns or fireworks in that they don't involve explosions, they're still dangerous and anyone over the age of about 12 who doesn't appreciate this is rather ignorant. When the magnets are sold with a large warning saying 'this is dangerous because you could die' and people choose to ignore than, then they're being willfully ignorant.
I don't understand the compulsion to make excuses for willful ignorance. Most households have several dangerous chemicals in a cupboard under the kitchen sink and it's well understood that you shouldn't let kids drink drain cleaner etc. etc. Why are parents expected to exercise reasonable judgement where firearms, incendiaries, chemicals and so on are concerned but the same level of warning isn't considered sufficient for some other products? It's a self-defeating position.
In America, you're not expected or even allowed to be completely responsible for your child's safety. You're told what to do and what not to do (no matter your own educated experience)... the state knows best, don't you know?
More and more, every time I hear the word 'simple' it's followed by some irrational bullshit. It's becoming my least favorite word.
The most accurate number I've found (compiled by the Associated Press) gives around 100 deaths per year from firearm negligence involving children.
That's 100 too many, but to put it in perspective, 70 children per year choke to death on small objects (like balloons or dice), and right around 700 per year drown in swimming pools.
The most important part to solving this problem is education.
There are far too many children that don't know that guns aren't toys, and that grow up never learning anything about gun safety, which isn't exactly the best way to encourage a culture of responsibility as adults.
We know that teaching teenagers about safe sex drastically lowers STD and unplanned pregnancy rates, and we should be doing the same thing with gun safety education.
Parents can be quite ignorant of this. I had a broken appendix as kid, and was already drifting out of the world, when my parents finally decided to get a doctor. Interior wounds are not visible until it is over.
Still magnets are awesome.
But no doctor would order an MRI first, physical examination then one or two X rays first would be standard.
When you buy an item marketed and sold as a toy you have a reasonable expectation that it's not going to cause the death of your child.
All toys are not appropriate for all children. I wouldn't give my daughter magnets to play with. I also wouldn't give her silly putty or dice or a chemistry set. She's too young. Eventually she can have all these things and a gallon of bleach under her bathroom sink. But not for quite a while.
These magnet companies knew that teenagers were using the magnets for fake piercing jewellery. They knew there was a risk that young people were eating the jewellery, and they resisted putting warnings on the packs and resisted moving the product off toy shelves.
But choking on a wad of silly putty definitely can. Hence the fact that it's labeled as a choking hazard and not for young children.
I don't think the bar for "should be banned" is "small amounts are dangerous". A "small amount" of Scrabble can kill your kid, despite there being "no reason" to eat Scrabble tiles, but we don't ban it. Toy stores sell balloons and jacks and dice and all kinds of things that pose real dangers to kids.
> These magnet companies knew that teenagers were using the magnets for fake piercing jewellery.
Shrug? Car manufacturers know teens are racing cars and snowboard manufacturers know teens are riding down black diamonds with little skill and no helmets. Teens do stupid things and we don't ban entire categories of product to attempt to protect them from minor dangers.
> * they resisted putting warnings on the packs and resisted moving the product off toy shelves.*
Did they actually resist labeling them or just resist the ban? If they resisted labeling, that's pointless and dumb and it's perfectly reasonable that they be required to label clearly and appropriately.
Did quite a lot of people ignore the warnings? Yes? Is that the manufacturer's fault? No, it's the fault of the people who saw a warning and didn't bother to read it or take it seriously. No doubt they are some very unhappy people because their kids ended up in hospital, but their opinions are worthless because they had the safety information and put their children at risk because they chose to ignore it.
That's not the manufacturers' fault.
Most of us trust that toys for kids will be essentially harmless. We choose to live in a trusting society, yes. That doesn't make us guilty of anything.
This is such a subtle risk, its arguable that a printed warning on a paper container is insufficient. What happens when the packaging is discarded? Another kid enters the house? Your kid gives the toy away?
Speak for yourself - you don't speak for everyone else and I see no reason to use your standard as the default.
I have no such trust because I have always looked at safety warnings and taken them at face value. I always loved playing with Lego, but I was also aware that Lego bricks have sharp edges and are a choking hazard for small children. I knew this when I was a kid too.
Finally, I see no reason for you to lump these magnets in with all other 'toys for kids'. The buckyball magnets came with a very clear warning that they were for people 13 and over, and that you could get injured or even die by swallowing the magnets. When an item comes with a clear and unambiguous written warning of specific dangers and your idea of 'living in a trusting society' is to ignore such explicit warnings then yes it does make you guilty of something - negligence.
It's simply not fair to demand that other people accept liability for your actions when you are literally refusing to read clearly written warnings
This is such a subtle risk, its arguable that a printed warning on a paper container is insufficient. What happens when the packaging is discarded? Another kid enters the house? Your kid gives the toy away?
It's not subtle at all, it's easy to observe the risk from playing with the magnets for a couple of minutes and seeing how powerful they are. When the physical forces involved are self-evident then at some point you have take responsibility for paying attention to what your own senses are telling you. You're literally complaining that this is somehow too hard to think about it for ordinary people, and if you think that then you should be up in arms about the accessibility of gas stations, things make out of glass, and all sorts of other 'subtle' hazards that people navigate on a daily basis.
What happens when the packaging is discarded? The person doing the discarding takes responsibility for leaving the magnets in a safe place where they can not be got at by unsupervised children. I have clusters of neodymium magnets in several places around my house, out of the packaging. I know where they are, I know that I may need to move them if my friends who have kids come to visit (just like I need to move some other things I don't want them getting into), and I know that if I show them off or anyone expresses an interest in them that I have an obligation to point out that they are powerful and dangerous. And just in case, my home insurance policy covers me against financial liability if someone does suffer an injury while visiting my home.
Stop telling me it's a 'subtle risk.' That's complete BS when I can see and feel for myself that the things are really powerful. A subtle risk would be a lump of attractive-looking material whose radioactive nature isn't apparent without some kind of special measuring apparatus. I cannot understand why you are arguing that people should literally disregard the evidence of their senses rather than accept even a modicum of legal liability.
I don't agree with this. I think the risk isn't obvious to many people and we should therefore demand clear labeling. But not a ban.
It's actually not. It's panic about perceived risk. Balloons kill about 8 kids a year, which is 16 times as much as magnet sets (1 death in 2 years). We don't ban balloons, and few people would consider such a ban reasonable despite a clearly worse risk/reward tradeoff. Balloons are definitely not 16x more fun than magnet toys.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2239860
> Most of us trust that toys for kids will be essentially harmless. We choose to live in a trusting society, yes. That doesn't make us guilty of anything.
I don't agree with this at all. There are many toys I still won't give my 2-year-old, and even more that I'll only let her have under supervision. And she's actually an easy kid who doesn't tend to stick random stuff in her mouth.
> This is such a subtle risk, its arguable that a printed warning on a paper container is insufficient. What happens when the packaging is discarded? Another kid enters the house? Your kid gives the toy away?
I actually agree that the risk isn't obvious, unlike some people in this thread. The solution is labeling and education, though, not a ban. Kids die from random toys at a much higher rate that 1 every two years but we don't ban everything (just Kinder eggs, inexplicably).
http://www.poison.org/articles/2012-oct/toy-magnets-are-dang...
> Avoid the use of magnetic beads as fake body piercings.
How about teenagers who play with fireworks and die? Do we need to ban fireworks? Or do we just need parents to educate their children that fireworks are dangerous.
This whole debate is symptomatic of some bigger cultural problem. It reminds me of when some kid shoots themselves with a gun and then the community is all 'too bad, so sad' and no charges are brought against the parent because they've been through the 'tragedy' of losing a child. Well that's tragic for them but it was fatal for the child, and dead children are not getting any justice when their negligent parents are let off the hook for causing the death of another person.
I mean, if I as an adult was hanging out with you and then I died because you handed me something that looked like a can of coke but was actually a hand grenade, then you'd be charged with manslaughter for failing to apprise me of the risk. But when small children get hold of guns and kill themselves (or worse, kill another kid) that's frequently just treated as 'the cost of our 2nd amendment freedom' or some bullshit. there are a lot of cases where parents get off with no legal penalty because the death of a child is so painful, even though they're clearly responsible. That does not make it OK to push the liability onto some third party who wasn't present and who supplied a a dangerous product with a detailed warning about the risks involved in it suse which people chose to ignore.
Also, is there much evidence of teens actually doing this and accidentally swallowing them? I have no doubt that teens are playing with the magnets in stupid ways, but how many teens have swallowed magnets this way and had complications? The CPSC claims its happening but provides no breakout stats for this.
http://onsafety.cpsc.gov/blog/2011/11/10/magnet-dangers/
Also also, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of the claims the CPSC is making. On the page I linked, they clam "22 reports of magnet incidents involving children between the ages of 18 months and 15 years old since June 2009" through Nov 2011 and provide a yearly breakout of all those reports. In the press release poison.org cites, they claim "CPSC staff estimates that small, high powered magnet sets were associated with 1,700 emergency room-treated injuries between 2009 and 2011." So they estimate two orders of magnitude higher than they actually have reports for?
https://www.cpsc.gov/Newsroom/News-Releases/2012/CPSC-Starts...
No, I have not read the more than 1,300 case studies of children taken to hospital after swallowing these magnets.
> Do we ban button batteries also?
We mandate that button batteries are supplied in toys that cannot be opened, or that can only be opened with a screwdriver.
Where did that 1300 number come from? I'm seeing so many random numbers for how often kids are swallowing magnets that I'm doubting the good faith of the CPSC now.
What magnet have you seen in a grocery store or Home Depot that is the size and shape of a small gumball? Link?
I vividly remember kids in late elementary school playing with pencil grips and cola can tabs in their mouths. I was always terrified someone was going to choke to death on one. (They didn't.) These were kids old enough to know that they weren't candy and they still put them in their mouths because kids are just kind of dumb. There are also stories of teens using ball magnets for tongue "piercings" and accidentally swallowing them.
Magnets absolutely don't have to look like candy to be dangerous.
Most ball magnets are also not colorful. Even if the colorful ones were somehow especially dangerous, that wouldn't make all ball magnets especially dangerous.
So sure, he and I were both being negligent. But it also seems like a dangerous set up.
I don't mean to attack you personally in any way, but if you have an awareness that such things as small powerful magnets exist and can imagine what the risks would be, how is it not your job as a parent to be on the lookout for that? You manage to be on the lookout for all sorts of other risks that exist in your household - drowning, fire, chemicals, sharp objects, and so on.
I do not believe that adding an awareness of magnets (which are generally pretty easy to identify because of their magnetic properties causing them to stick to metallic surfaces or each other) causes some unacceptably large burden. You've known what magnets are since you were a small child. You are almost certainly easily able to distinguish between a bunch of magnetic balls and a bunch of non-magnetic ball bearings by simply looking at them. How is it not your responsibility to use that knowledge?
I am glad you are a perfect parent, it is very lucky for you and your children. Congratulations!
I never claimed to be a perfect parent (nice attempt at misdirection there). But I don't try to hold other people responsible for the decisions I make. When people with kids visit me or leave their kids in my care then their safety is my primary responsibility and I'm willing to accept that.
I know teenagers do stupid things, and that they're more likely to do stupid things in the name of fashion. I'm old enough to recall the 1980s when body art first took off and it became cool for guys to wear earrings without being a pirate or a gypsy. I pierced my own ears around this time, despite being warned about everything from the risk of infection to the possibility of illness by hitting an acupuncture point (a risk what was inexplicably not assumed to be true for girls).
Well not only did I end up with holes in my ears but over a the years they did get infected on a few occasions when I didn't clean my earrings properly, and I had to clean out a small but painful and gross cyst. None of this is the fault of the people who manufacture earrings. No results yet on the acupuncture danger but after 30 years I'm beginning to think that warning may have been misplaced.
There's a reason the CPSC banned lawn darts but not blowtorches or medical sharps or the safety pin you probably used to pierce your ear. There's not much ambiguity about the dangerous things the CPSC doesn't care about. But you can't say that about the magnets, which cause truly horrible medical calamities that most ordinary people do not expect.
Also, not sure if we were just hiding on different ends of HN or whatever, but it's good to bump into you again!
1). Prevent this business from existing.
2). Allow toy magnets to exist, thereby allowing X children to die from swallowing toy magnets.
I don't think this is ZenMagnet's fault. But I think placing a restriction on toy magnets is probably a net positive.
This isn't about you. This is about people who don't know what you know. In this case you understand the danger so you think the warnings are an unnecessary insult to your intelligence because you find them obvious. You're ignoring the people out there who don't understand the danger. Imagine a situation where your child came in to contact with something you know nothing about - you'd want information right there in front of you printed on the side, even if someone else who has experience and knowledge about the thing thought that warning was ridiculous.
The suggestion that we should let parents bring dangerous things in to their houses without warnings because they ought to understand the dangers already is utterly ridiculous. The 'kindergarten conditions' you're talking about is having sensible warnings on things. Why would it be better to have empty space, or a marketing message, or a pretty picture where that warning is if the warning could save someones life? It simply isn't, and if you believe it is then you are wrong.
If parents themselves are generally too ignorant, then there's a much bigger problem.
(Odd that someone used a downvote on this.)
This is fairly subtle issue, and strawman analogies add nothing of value to the conversation.
It isn't a straw man. The question is how ultra-safe you'd like your society to be. My argument is that we have dangers all around, and some acceptable and reasonable risk must be associated with living. And it's unavoidable to boot. The society that believes that cushioning every corner eliminates daily risks is living a lie.
The trouble is that if you say that banning magnets is reasonable, nobody listens to you when you tell them that banning the sale of automatic weapons should also be. You're crying wolf with the damn magnets. There are bigger fish to fry!
Why are we expected to believe that adults can't tell the difference between candy and powerful magnets just because they're both shiny and metallic-looking? Why are the very clear warnings supplied with the product somehow unreadable in the face of their shiny roundness?
It's just strange that people seem to want to point at super specific things and say: "those are inherently dangerous!"
We could agree that oxygen is dangerous because it reacts with almost anything. Does that mean we're going to have oxygen banned? :p
If I can teach my dogs not to eat certain things and to stop eating anything when I tell them, other people can certainly teach that to their kids. Risk management is great but what you're describing is risk phobia, which irrationally demands the whole world should be as safe as a kindergarten and that people should have to get special permission to undertake any risk whatsoever.
I think magformers are the best toy we own.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrero_SpA
If you want to check the balance of the legal system, you have to compare actual time served.
The Nanny State Didn't Show Up, You Hired It http://web.archive.org/web/20150315003211/http://thelastpsyc...
2015 Zen Booster Set: 216 Zen Magnets. 6 Spares, .5mm PVC Card and Velvet Sack.
Was: $32.98
Now: $65.96
The 2017 prices are published (I'm guessing the ban doesn't end immediately) and they are indeed 10% cheaper.
[edit] I'm not affiliated with zen magnets in any way, but I bought their largest set available pre-ban and have been following their progress on this ever since. They are an extremely reputable company and I highly recommend them.
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=sphere+magne...
There are a lot more dangerous things that are a lot less regulated than a wholesale ban. The CPSC needs, apparently, a much strong leash put on it. We need a government, not a nanny state.
One of the problems is the hysteria of the press whenever anything close to bad happens. It's created a culture of hyper critical control systems over defaulting to trusting the common sense of individuals, the ability of information to disseminate to educate peoplel (warning labels, stories of people getting hurt educating people on what not to do, etc), and the ability of parents.
My comment was merely meant as an explication of his comment since your interpretation of his comment seems unsupported and bizarre. He stated clearly "We need government," but feels a wholesale ban is overkill in this case because for more dangerous things, we don't ban them outright.
It seems normal to pursue something that could result in economic benefit, if you have the means to do so. And if there's a larger principle at stake, all the more reason.
Someone who believes that narrative would have expected this guy to lose, pay six figures in legal fees, have a mental breakdown, and the judgement to only come in five years after his magnet company closed down because they couldn't sell their only product.
Personally I don't have enough experience to know whether the US legal system really works that way.
That sounds like an easily made, hard to back up claim.
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
"The Costs and Benefits of Regulation: Review and Synthesis" RW Hahn, Yale Journal of Regulation, Volume 8, Issue 1, Article 9, 1991
The above link was the first Google result for (economy-wide costs of regulations journal) for me, and Google notes that it is cited by hundreds of other articles. The first 10 results all seemed to similarly explain that regulations are costly.
>Having a cost and having a "large, economy-wide negative impact" are very different things.
Is a large cost not a large negative impact? Are regulations by the federal government not economy-wide? Are you making any discernible point that couldn't have been expressed by "NUH UH, I'M STILL RIGHT LALALALA!"?
To pick a random example: The article doesn't say it costs shoppers in Des Moines $4,029 per year due to milk-market regulations. It costs US citizens somewhere between $500 million and $2.1 billion per year - in 1991.
The journal article I linked is literally about the large, economy-wide costs of regulations. Your response is a non-sequitor.
Going with your random example plucked from the article... [Milk market regulations] cost US citizens somewhere between $500 million and $2.1 billion per year - in 1991.
Besides the wild variation, so what? That number is meaningless without the context of the size of the milk market as a whole which would allow us to assess the scope of the burden, not to mention some estimate of the likely economic cost of an unregulated milk marketplace (eg economic losses due to illness from disease).
Why do you think it's impressive to pull out a big number like this without any context? It's ridiculous. If we're going to go with cherry-picking argument of this type, I can't help noticing that Americans love milk and almost every American refrigerator I'e ever seen has an open container of milk. So since we're talking about the US as a whole in your example, and there were ~250m Americans in 1991, it seems like these regulations imposed a cost of between $2 and $8 that year on every American...which doesn't sound like all that much to pay for a year of knowing the milk you enjoy is safe to consume. MY household spends about $7-800 a year on dairy products, so back in 1991, and adjusting very generously for inflation, we might have spent $200 to consume the same amount of milk. Using the worst-case number from your paper, positing an upper regulatory burden for every American of $8 and doubling it to represent the two people in my household, maybe $16 of that $200 consisted of regulatory costs. So the worst-case scenario is that regulation drove up the cost of milk by 8%, which doesn't sound like that bad of a trade.
Since I've done all the work here so far perhaps you'd like to estimate the benefits of reliably safe milk in terms of avoided medical costs from dairy-borne pathogens.
Because you replied with a link to something that did not further the point under discussion.
>Is a large cost not a large negative impact?
No, it is not.
>The journal article I linked is literally about the large, economy-wide costs of regulations.
And it appears to mostly disagree with the point you are trying to make.
The difference is pretty basic: Having a "negative impact" requires value-judgement, having a cost does not. In terms of economics it requires a broad view of the entire economy, whereas a cost can be directly assigned to a single event or series of events.
Saying that a regulation has a cost is saying that it requires some expenditure to implement/maintain. Saying it has a negative impact is saying that the expenditure to implement/maintain that regulation outweighs the as-yet-in-this-discussion undefined benefits of the regulation in question.
Well of course, but the comment I responded to questioned the assertion that there is a large, economy-wide cost.
Is the benefit of (cleaner air/safer highways/magnet-free-toys) worth the cost? That's what the debate ought to be about. But first we all have to agree that there is a cost being paid.
No, I did not. The comment I replied to implied a net-negative cost.
When regulation is used to protect people from being taken advantage of, then the benefits are well worth the cost.
These are barriers to trade. And we got to this place with death by a thousand regulation cuts. Can't do this. Can't do that. Cant do this on that day while doing that instead of this, without willing out volumes of forms. And you wonder why compliance costs are stupid high?
(Don't get me wrong, I hold to a mixture of communism and capitalism - I think something like GNU can be done for nearly everything, but there's room for making money as well. I just categorically disagree with the volume of regulations. It makes people criminals via incapability of understanding the law.)
Personally I'm already there with lots of stuff. I'm aware that it's letting certain companies collect rents, but it's generally not worth my time and the extra risk to track down another brand that might be acceptably reliable and safe, assuming they haven't decided to burn whatever little reputation they've built up for some short-term profit by swapping their once-decent product for crap while keeping the price and model info the same after all the reviews I read were written.
That's also a barrier to entry. Economies are tricky things :-/
But, seriously: This nightmare is one of the stories we tell each other. But, for most companies, it's just not true.
I've started four or five companies. Mostly software, one that sells actual (government-certified organic) food, one that mostly worked for governments (including the defense sector). In all that time, I've never felt like regulation prevented me from doing anything. Once or twice, I had to submit some form that I thought was overkill. But in fact I doubt there was ever a year where I spend more than two or three days net on government bureaucracy.
I know that the situation may be different for construction or airplane startups (at least I hope it is). But this sort of hyperbole is just a lie that doesn't improve by repetition.
If anything, I've been surprised by how little regulation there sometimes is. Look at AirBnB or Uber or drones: Who would've though that you could (for a time) fly a model airplane in Heathrow's final approach corridor and only get a "we're looking into it and engaging in a dialog with all interested parties" as a reply?
The CPSC and related regulators CAN regulate dangerous stuff without making idiotic wars on toy magnets that undermine their entire existence. Seriously. They can fulfill their entire function, standards of error for mistakes included, without EVER committing such heinously overregulatory acts as this - in fact, it's important to their continued existence that they DO NOT overregulate this badly (because when they do, their opponents gain substantial ammunition to eventually disband/defang them).
However, it's false to say that EVERY individual regulation meets these criteria. As TFA pointed out, these objects are far less hazardous than firearms, fireworks, automobiles, and even balloons (the leading cause of child suffocation, and for whic labeling is required), but because they are novel the CPSC decided to slap them with an absolute ban, which is stronger regulation than any of the other products listed above and thousands of others.
This was a very badly considered and executed regulation, and the judge acted rightly. FWIW, I don't think anyone is saying what you imply, that all regulations are baseless and bad.
Yes, they're dangerous is you don't follow safety precautions and I would never allow children to play with them. When children visit we make sure the magnets are not accessible - it's our responsibility to think about others' safety. But it's not the responsibility of the magnet manufacturers, as long as they make it clear that their product can be dangerous (and the vendors I've bought from certainly do). The mere fact that something is dangerous is not grounds for taking it off sale, otherwise we should shut down every gas station and hardware store right now.
Why make a distinction between things that are dangerous on accident (defective) vs things that are dangerous by design?
>otherwise we should shut down every gas station and hardware store right now.
Every law or regulation needs to balance the risk to society against the benefit to society. This is a toy.
This comment is one example of how hard the labelling failed. Buckyballs came with a big label saying "BUCKYBALLS ARE NOT TOYS".
Because many dangerous things have significant utility. Fire is useful for warming your home and cooking food but can also injure or even kill. Water is essential life but you could suffer from hypothermia or drown. These are things that should be obvious to all adults and most children. If you need to have it spelled out to you then your opinions on the economics of safety are not worth very much.
Every law or regulation needs to balance the risk to society against the benefit to society. This is a toy.
It's not a toy just because you say it is, nor are all toys required to be equally safe or not admit any possibility of injury. Really, it's sad that you think such an assertion constitutes a valid argument.
Maybe you think it's 'just a toy' because you can't conceive of any use for it other than mere amusement. That's your problem, not mine.
Its reasonable to observe social norms, comment on risk vs reward, and suggest different views. Others should not be subject to ridicule and hostile comments for this.
I suggest you take your toy and go home.
Yes, it certainly makes sense to distinguish based on utility, which was the whole point of the second part of my comment, and is why a comparison to gas stations and hardware stores is invalid. Utility is completely orthogonal to "defect vs design".
> It's not a toy just because you say it is
It's a toy because it fits the definition of the word, regardless of how they market it. If it has some purpose other than entertainment, I would love to understand what it is. From my viewpoint, the utility, and therefore the harm caused to society by it being banned, is low. Note how this is different for gasoline and power tools.
What exactly did I say that made it sound like that?
You don't want to get them stuck between your fingers, but besides keeping them away from visa cards and rotating hard drives, I didn't think much more about the potential dangers. Thank goodness the negligence of my government didn't cause me all manner of danger (kidding).
I bought tiny neodymiums at a store once. They're about 3/4 the size of a dime. You have to pry them off the fridge, they can hang pictures on the wall if a nail is hiding behind, and I _have_ hurt myself with them before. It's easy, and happens before you can blink.
That's the problem. Historically, people thought of permanent magnets as "safe". But modern magnets are so powerful that they have new risks.
Good for him!