9 ms·
When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together, two parts were left over — no matter, he said, they were probably not that important. He plugged the fr
by dhx 14y ago
When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together,
two parts were left over — no matter, he said,
they were probably not that important. He plugged
the frayed cord into a socket. A green light went
on. Rusty water poured out. Finally, it began to
steam.
The risk is significant and far outweighs any benefit gained.
A classic example of poor risk assessment.
- exDM69 14y agoWhen you sell products for a customer, you have to be really careful to make them not-dangerous if used by an idiot. If you fix/build stuff yourself, you get to know the ins and outs of the thing you're working with. So it doesn't matter that much if something may be a little dangerous if misused, you should know what to do with it. One or two screws missing, it's a whole lot better than buying a new one and wasting raw materials and energy and creating waste.
- sgift 14y agoJust note that everyone has a bad day. This may the day you "forget" all the things you normally know and then accidents happen. I don't want to say that you should never use such things, but it is a good practice - even if you just build them for yourself - to improve them in the long-run to decrease the chance of accidents.
- dhx 14y agoTwo scenarios: 1. Performing dodgy repair jobs on your own equipment for your own personal use. 2. Performing dodgy repair jobs for unsuspecting people that don't know the difference between a resistor and capacitor and are trusting your skill and judgement. In instance [1] you're performing your own risk assessment and will bear any consequences. In [2] you're performing a risk assessment that will directly impact upon someone else's safety. Their level of risk acceptance may be far more conservative than your own.
- DanBC 14y ago...and if your bad repair sets a house on fire you risk the lives of the people who come to rescue you, and the lives of anyone else in the building, etc.
- excuse-me 14y ago3. you throw out the kettle and buy another made in china one for 5quid. After the fire you discover that the CE mark on the side doesn't mean it has passed all the european safety checks just that it is "china export"
- noonespecial 14y ago"Nothing is allowed unless its completely perfect" is a dangerous attitude. Its made a lot of people homeless, closed a ton of the soup kitchens and shelters those homeless might have sought refuge in and IMHO prevented a great deal of innovation from seeing the light of day. Its possible that this pervasive bit of anal retentiveness has made some(1) individuals marginally safer, but its super dangerous to societies. (1) Except for the aforementioned homeless. They're not safer.
- DanBC 14y ago> "Nothing is allowed unless its completely perfect" is a dangerous attitude. But you can see that there is a big difference between "not completely perfect" and "likely to cause death or serious injury"?
- raverbashing 14y ago"likely to cause death or serious injury" No You don't know what parts they were, but I'm sure the repairer evaluated the situation. This is an extreme sheltering mentality An old product certainly does not conform to modern standarts, but it's reasonably safe (given you don't do anything stupid to it)
- DanBC 14y ago"frayed cord" == risk of fire or death. That's not sheltering, it's true.
- sophacles 14y agoI don't think that is a necessarily true statement. I would need to see the cord. Given how horrible reporters are at getting tech and science right, I don't assume "frayed cord" in the article translates to the technical meaning of the term. That being said, this argument seems to largely consist of 1) some people who assume the repair-man is incompetent and possibly has a psycopathic desire to kill people via shoddy repairs, and at the same time assuming the technical descriptions are 100% accurate, and 2) some people who assume the reporter was being a reporter and willfully being incompetent in reporting, while the humble repairman (basically a hacker working on items) is good enough to know what he is doing with extremely reasonable margins of safety. Neither of these sets of assumptions particularly valid and they appear to stem from deeper assumptions: what is an acceptable margin of risk, what value various safety rules have on actual safety and so on. IMHO, discussions on these would be far more interesting than wrangling about a passage from a single report without any other evidence of what was (not) done.
- generateui 14y agoIf the producer would share the design of the iron with the world, the risk would be reduced significantly. The leftover parts could be identified by crowdsourced databases as nonimportant, or as risky to leave out.
- namdnay 14y ago> The leftover parts could be identified by crowdsourced databases as nonimportant In a low-margin business such as home appliances, I'm willing to bet every single part's cost/benefit ratio is carefully examined by experts before being added.
- corin_ 14y agoThere's always going to be some parts that are just the difference between good and better (or perhaps bad and less bad) rather than working and non-working. For example in an iron that can spray water there could be a piece that breaks up the water into a wider spray rather than a solid squirt.