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You can buy water and cars too. A set of zenmagnets is no more a suicide via intestinal pinching kit than a gallon of water is a drowning kit. There are millio
by phaus 12y ago
You can buy water and cars too. A set of zenmagnets is no more a suicide via intestinal pinching kit than a gallon of water is a drowning kit.
There are millions of things on the market that you can kill yourself with; when would you say that personal responsibility should come into play?
Also, magnet sets are educational as well as entertaining.
- JamisonM 12y agoIf you leave a gallon of water on a table unattended it is very unlikely any passing child will use that gallon of water to drown themselves. All this pretending that the practical differences between this product and all these other things is trivial drives me a little crazy.
- GeneralMayhem 12y agoIf I leave a handful of magnets sitting on a table unattended in my apartment, the odds that a child will eat them are absolutely zero, since neither I nor anyone I know has kids. If they did, I probably wouldn't let the kids in my apartment if they're still at the putting-random-things-in-their-mouth stage and their parents can't keep them from eating other people's things.
- phaus 12y agoWhat kind of a shitty parent leaves small objects unattended around small children? Only a complete moron would do that. What about scissors? Pencils? Knives? Everyone has these things in their homes, and you could just as easily leave them on the table as you could a set of magnets. What drives me crazy are people who want the federal government to micromanage every aspect of their lives, even as it repeatedly proves to us that it is too corrupt/incompetent to do pretty much anything right.
- pstuart 12y agoThere's plenty of shitty parents around, but the type of parent who is interested in magnetic spheres is not likely to be a shitty parent.
- JamisonM 12y agoScissors, pencils, knives: All things safer than these magnets. Empirically true. The bad parent argument is garbage. If I visit someone's house or bring one of my little ones with me to my accountants or lawyer's office I don't expect to need to be ultra-vigilant, it should be a generally safe environment. I want to live in a society where that is true.
- semanticist 12y ago> Empirically true. Can you cite stats for that claim?
- JamisonM 12y agoAdd up all the rare earth magnet toy sets in America. Add up all the scissors, pencils, and knives in America. Look up the injuries/fatalities to children caused by each. Viola!
- semanticist 12y agoYes, those are the stats I asked you to cite to back your claim. If you're going to claim your opinion as fact, it's just rude to be a dick when you're called on it. At least admit that it's not 'empirically true' - or, perhaps more to the point, that you don't actually know.
- JamisonM 12y agoI am not being a dick. That what I said is true is so obvious I am not going to bother digging up a bunch of stats to justify it. It is a waste of time. This comment ended up doing the work for me, and demonstrates my point. But then based on the numbers somehow concludes that it demonstrates the opposite. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138774 How many houses in the world have pencils in them? Pretty close to every single one, how someone concludes from the injury rate cited that they are more dangerous than these magnetic toys is beyond my understanding. That comment goes so far as to note that over 40% of the incidents reported in the last 10 years occurred in 2013, how that does not make one think that maybe the recent prevalence of these powerful magnets could be related is also puzzling to me.
- tikhonj 12y agoA gallon of water? You can—and lots of people do—buy a pool. And that poses a far greater risk to children than some magnets!
- tripzilch 12y agoPools are basically children-magnets, anyway. If they swallow two of them, it risks puncturing their intestines.