Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

1y ago

What is an extremely dangerous thing that we use daily?

185 comments

cars
- This is the only correct answer. Cars kill so many people it's absurd.
  
  The car doesnt kill anybody. Its the driver on their phone, checking their nails, eating McDonald's, etc that kill people.
- Almost got hit today by two separate dipshits not paying attention and/or having zero awareness about the size of the dumbass large trucks they were driving.
  Edit: forgot a word.

Cars.
- Firearm injury 2nd: how to know this is US data without it being labeled as US data.
  
  That third one is just fancy talk for cancer
- Cars are very dangerous.

Your car.
https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/jN7mSXMruEo
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- Also garage doors for that matter. That spring can be lethal when it breaks.
- Surprised I had to scroll this far down to see this!

Cars
- Statistically speaking, you will either die by cancer, or you will die in an automotive accident.
  
  Don't you mean: Statistically speaking, you will die.
  
  Heart disease is #1 IIRC.

Two way roads.
If they didn't exist today and someone came up with the brilliant idea of having people in control of machines (cars or bikes) moving in opposite directions at 50mph, separated by a few feet and a painted line, it would be dismissed immediately.
- I drive on a lot of rural roads in the UK, mainly Wales, most of the time I'm just happy when the road has space for two cars to squeeze through and some visibility for what's coming around the corner of that rural lane. Actual physical lines separating the lanes? Oh boy it's my birthday. Yet with all that, we have a death rate per 100 million miles of just over a third of somewhere like the US, so I'd imagine the size of cars and inadequate licence requirements are probably bigger issues for road safety
  
  I can't remember which episode it was but in the Cautionary Tales podcast by Tim Harford a guest once explained that cars are too safe. Through the years we blamed cars for not being safe when people get hurt but few alterations were made to our behaviour if you campagne it to the advances they've made in car safety. If imminent death would follow everytime we made a mistake people would be more careful. That's how I feel about the roads in Wales. The lack of oversight made me be more cautious. That and the fact that I normally drive at the other side of the road.
  
  Rural Scotland has a lot of single-track roads. One lane for two directions, 50mph speed limit, with pull-offs every few hundred feet so cars can stop and let others pass. FUN™.
- Ok, this is a weird hypothetical, but if the world had been overcast for the last thousand years, and then suddenly there was sometimes just a completely blinding light in the sky that you sometimes have to drive straight toward, it would be chaos.
  Before COVID I imagined that the death toll would be so high that most roads would be shut down until technology had been developed and distributed so that you could never be blinded by the sun while driving. (Not just a flip down sun visor, but something like an LCD screen front windshield with head tracking that automatically blocks just the sun from your view).
  Now I know how quickly and easily people become acquainted with mass death.
  Now I imagine there wouldn't even be a new driver's test required that requires you to demonstrate that you can safely drive into the sunset.
  Just "We recommend, but don't require, that you have a sun visor in your car when using public roads."
- Motorcycles, for the same reason

Your car. Just think about the forces and mechanisms invovled for this to happen. Every single day we travel at 100km/h in our 2ton at least metal box surrounded by hundreds of other people in their equally large and heavy and fast machines in a space barely wide enough to react in case of an emergency(not even considering if most are actually ready to act in such a case. All of this with realistically little training. Not to mention most people don't really pay attention while driving and certainly don't consider the life of others while doing so. It's so impersonal and dangerous. If it was a never heard of concept, individual cars driven by any normal person would be considered laughably stupid at the very best.

The top three causes of preventable fatal injury in the US are:
poisoning (including drug overdoses)
motor vehicles
falls
We might generalize these to:
chemistry
engineering
physics
- im pretty sure the engineering is not at fault for most car accidents.
  
  thats true, but we got to agree N°3 is solely Isaac Newton's fault, for inventing gravity
  
  Sure, but neither is the chemist at fault when someone drinks bleach.
  
  We could use engineering controls to limit the speed of consumer vehicles to 10 mph, still faster than a human can walk, but slow enough that most deadly accidents could be avoided.
  Then establish administrative controls to have public transportation or other professional drivers (taxi operators) have "unlocked" vehicles. They would be required to have routine training and testing to keep their unlocked license.
- The third is more gravity than physics, or perhaps you should consider it the absence of gravity.
  What I'm trying to say is: stop following geodesics.

Ladders. Most serious workplace accidents in a lot of trades can be linked back to falling from a hight. Don't be cocky when up a ladder, even little ones.
- Ladders are legitimately one of the leading causes of death and serious injury among otherwise healthy middle aged adults. A basic fall protection system with some flex rope and a climbing harness can be had for around $100. I don't care if my neighbors think I'm a dweeb, I'm not dying for clean gutters.
- Can confirm - fell from one this week. ;(
  
  RIP to this man
  
  What happened? Was this at work or home?
- A friend of mine's father died falling from a ladder on her birthday while decorating for her party.
  
  That is horrifying, I hope she's managed to recover at least a bit from that

Dihydrogen monoxide. That stuff'll kill you.
- Psh, I drink it everyday and I'm FINE
  
  But everyone who drinks it will die..
  
  But it's the stuff which is used in nuclear power plants to store the used rods.
  
  Hitler also drank it every day and he also thought he was fine...
- Too much dihydrogen monoxide? Death.
  Not enough dihydrogen monoxide? Also death
  
  Just enough dihydrogen monoxide? Believe it or not, also death
- Careful! It's found in 100% of all malignant tumors!

At least here in a very anti-public transit US city: Automobiles
- Short of war zones, they are the most common cause of unnatural death almost everywhere.

Capitalism. Most of the other (daily, specific) dangers out there are dangerous because someone's making money off putting other people in danger. I'm including the military industrial complex, but also regular industries and the exploitation of vulnerable populations.
- Idk if we use capitalism so much as we get used...
- What would you call the military industrial complex of CCCP?
  Edit: I love that one reply is claiming it's self defense, the other is claiming they're capitalist
  
  Necessary to prevent invasions by imperialists and capitalists who feel threatened by successful socialist models or who are looking to exploit other countries.
  Imagine how much more they could have accomplished if they didn't have to fear the very real threat of foreign invasion. Remember, they were invaded by foreign powers shortly after the revolution in 1918.
  
  ....they're capitalist. Tell me you've never lived there without telling me

Fossil Fuels

Fossil fuel pollution.

Electricity?

Swimming pools, with kids in the house. More dangerous than owning a gun:
https://www.kpbs.org/news/living/2023/07/25/more-young-children-die-from-drowning-than-any-other-cause-of-death
- Pools are more dangerous than owning a gun in the same way that vending machines kill more people than sharks.
  People are near vending machines way more often than they are near sharks, and people let their kids play in the pool more often than they let them play with firearms
  
  Nope. Under 10% of households have a swimming pool, but over 40% of households have a gun in the USA. When we're talking about owning one as opposed to actively using one, the pool is more dangerous than the gun.
  Now, if you just left your loaded gun out in your backyard 24/7, it may be a different story.

Sugar.
- You could make the same claim for salt, saturated fats or even water if you wanted to. Everything is a poison.. it just depends on the dose.
  Our bodies actually need a certain amount of sugar . It's why evolution built into us the craving for sweet things .. sugar is instant energy and in the distant past that often meant the difference between life and death.
  I eat a lot of sugar, but I also run 70 miles a week and swim 5 so all that energy is not only consumed but required. If you like sugar maybe the answer is to increase your excercise rather than reduce your intake.
  
  No we don't need extra sugar. We can make our own sugar from carbs, protein, and fat.
  I think sugar is the only macronutrient we don't actually need any of to survive.
  Most people don't put in 1.5 to 2 hours of excersise a day, I'd be surprised if the average person does 1.5 to 2 hours a week. That is a big ask for the average person. I'd personally would rather just cut out my snacking and go to the gym 3 times a week.
  
  True, but there's a difference between natural sugars, like from a strawberry, and the processed sugars (or worse HFCS) you find in almost every item on the market these days.
  Exercise is helpful, but it's hard to keep up when you don't have time for it or the time to prepare your own meals all the time with fresh ingredients.

Gas stoves. Disasters waiting to happen with people sometimes forgetting to turn them off.
- You know, it boggles my mind why stoves in some countries don't come with thermoswitch. The decades old ones here come with it here. Either fire keeps the valve open via this thermoswitch or if fire goes out gas valve is shut off. Danger gone.

Garage door. Then springs will kill you.
- ^This. Leave this to the professionals. When you’ve seen one let go, it is impressive.
- Why are there springs in your garage doors? Over here they are manual rollers or automatic rollers
  
  They balance the door so it takes very little effort/ pressure to open and close the door.
  
  You wouldn’t be able to lift the door without the spring acting as a counterweight. It’s usually a big roller just above the doorway on the inside (right near where the track curves in) with cables that run down to the bottom door panel.
  So yeah, huge spring under constant tension.

I'd say electricity. Even with all the safety precautions we have when using our electrical devices, there's still so much that can go wrong
- definitely, this and even gas. Being directly connected to the grid is a bit insane, when you think about it.
- Here's the thing with electricity: it's invisible.
  If you're using a power saw, you can see the blade. You can see other cars (obviously there's blind spots). You can see a burning flame on your stove, or maybe hear/smell the gas.
  You may have a box and know that there's electricity inside, but you have no idea if it's wired correctly. You have no idea if the breaker is shut, or if there's batteries inside. We've engineered a lot of controls to keep things safe like LEDs to show it's on and ground wires on all the metal bits (thank you underwriter laboratories). But all of those can fail and you can still get shocked because electricity is essentially invisible and requires tools (multimeter) to inform you that it's dead.
  None of your senses will let you know if something with electricity is safe. It's a gamble every single time you touch something electrical. You can be seriously hurt with voltages as low as 30v, assuming worst case conditions like you just finished swimming in the ocean.
  Using electrical equipment is like walking through a construction site blindfolded while someone yells directions at you from afar.

Plastics
- One word... Plastics.
  
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  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

Electricity
- I think from stuff thats powers our homes gas is far more dangerous. I am genuanly scared of gas stove in my place since the incident from few years ago when whole apartman building exploded in nereby city because of faulty gas pipe

Religion
- Especially the one called "Capitalism", which has now more followers than any other religion in the world!

Time. Getting old sucks.

Social media

Lithium batteries

Fire

Cars
Stairs
Bathtubs
Ladders and alcohol hold big honorary mentions too.

The internet as a whole.
- Knowledge is power.
  
  Many good things are double edged

Facebook
- Google

Corn Syrup.

Cars Lithium ion batteries

Knives

Oxygen is highly flammable
- Pure oxygen does not burn on its own. It needs a fuel.
  
  +Humans
  There you go
  
  People can spontaneously combust, its happen before.

Teflon/pfas and deodorant with aluminum.
- Good answer

I wouldn't call compressed air extremely dangerous, but more than you'd think.
It can hurt you in a lot of ways and it's often played with like a toy. Like blowing air in somebody's face, don't do that, think of it like coming at them with a handheld drill. Treat an air compressor like any kind of power tool, not exactly dangerous but can hurt you.
- I respect air compressors after watching No country for old men
- I’m always scared they will explode in my hand when the cans get ice cold, dunno if that is a legitimate fear of mine though.
- That video of the guy that jokingly poked his friend in the ass with one and then the friend died from it will haunt me for the rest of my days. What a way to go...
- High pressure injection injury are no joke.

Money
- Get away

Hm, interesting question. Dangerous in which sense?
A kitchen knife can easily kill a person. A match might burn down a house. Everything that produces CO2 or other greenhouse gases is extremely dangerous for the whole world in the long term.