TIL miniblinds with pull cords to raise and lower them are now illegal to sell in the United States
TIL miniblinds with pull cords to raise and lower them are now illegal to sell in the United States
Replacing a broken set of blinds in my house and apparently no one sells the old standard kind where you pull the cord to raise them, I guess because kids and/or pets could tangle in the cord? Bit of an education in miniblinds today.
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Anything is lethal when you give it to a million people. This is the main reason I take issue with pointing out individual examples of for example autonomous vehicle crashes and treating that as an evidence for why they're inherently dangerous. Almost nothing is 100% safe. I bet there are dozens of people suffocating to their pillows each year.
Are you saying we should not have safety regulations just because we can't make everything 100% safe?
Remember, if something can't be 100% improved, all improvement is worthless!
Nothing is ever 100% safe. Risk assessment is a big part of federal regulations. (See refs at JSTOR and NCBI) One of the key questions is what is the cost/benefit balance for a product. Kitchen knives are hazardous, but it's very hard to cook without them, so they balance heavier on the benefit side despite the risks. Radithor is all risk and no benefit, so it was an easy decision to ban it.
The point ContrarianTrail was making is that there is some risk in nearly everything. People have died as a result of garden tools, cars, house pets, shaving, buckets, toothpicks, baseball, etc. Here's a list. The part he left out is the cost/benefit analysis. I prefer pull cords on my blinds, and I find the new regulations annoying. But I guess some federal agency decided they aren't so useful that it's worth the risk to children. And it would be selfish to be all upset about it if it saves some child's life.
I was giving them the chance to clarify their point, because they didn't say anything beyond "nothing is safe" as a justification for poo-pooing an attempt to improve safety. Hence the question, which they have so far declined to answer themselves.
The point ContrarianTrail was making is that there is some risk in nearly everything. People have died as a result of garden tools, cars, house pets, shaving, buckets, toothpicks, baseball, etc. Here’s a list.
Yes, we all know "nothing is safe". it's a trivial point to make, and if that's the only part of the situation you mention (as the person above did) you're either not thinking very hard or are being deliberately misleading.
I prefer pull cords on my blinds, and I find the new regulations annoying. But I guess some federal agency decided they aren’t so useful that it’s worth the risk to children. And it would be selfish to be all upset about it if it saves some child’s life.
Exactly, it's not that hard to understand. Pull-cord blinds cause deaths, and other reasonable alternatives do not. Framing the discussion to "100%" and dismissing accidents/deaths as anecdotes, to me, seems deliberately misleading. Yet you accuse me of being inflammatory by asking a follow up question. okay.
So by your logic if a collision from bicycle or even from people running isn't 100% safe, then it's as dangerous as car?
More like if you contextualize the incidents of bicycles and pedestrians with cars, you might realize they're safer than you think. This is absolutely false for cars and pedestrians though in America at least.
contextualize how?
Well, nothing is 100% safe, and we allow plenty of things that are demonstrably unsafe to continue. So if you compare bike-car collisions against say, firearm suicides in the US, you'll see that bike-car collisions aren't that bad.
The fundamental argument is that nothing is totally safe, but some things are safer than others.
so by your logic since nothing is as bad as [choose any cause of death], we should just... give up on improving safety?
Does no threshold for the rate of any cause of death justify improving safety?
I legitimately don't understand your question. If you're asking if the cost to improve safety may be too great in some cases, yes that is true in some cases. But you haven't made that case in this specific instance yet.
Well, you asked if I was arguing against improving safety when compared to fatality rates for any activity.
But for me to have made that argument, I'd have to have said that there is no rate of fatality that would justify improving safety. So, I was asking if you think that's true:
Does no threshold for the rate of any cause of death justify improving safety?
But I sucked at wording it clearly. That's on me.
In short, no, I'm not arguing that. Really, I was just clarifying what the person you responded to was saying. I'm not making an argument either way.
Nope.
Username checks out. If they weren't so awful, maybe people would care about defending them, but there's just all-around awful. They're uglier, harder to use, and seem to frequently get damaged (probably mostly from people trying to fight with them or just bending them out of the way because damaging them is worth it to avoid dealing with them...
There's always roller blinds for the ones among us to whom mini blinds are too difficult to use.
Is it that they're "too difficult to use" or is it just that they're a pain in the ass? Because it's the latter in my experience.
In my experience, one begets the other.
It's a pain in the ass because its difficult to use. Or, at least more difficult than it needs to be.
Yeah, but they also break really easily, and then you have the fun of either trying to get the string fixed or back on the track or whatever or just replacing the whole thing.