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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

>I would agree with you if we were talking about a defective product. But neodymium spheres are not defective, they're just dangerous.

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 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".

You play with them, and they have no other purpose than entertainmenr. Of course they are toys. Just not suitable for children.

So are dildos, but that doesn't mean they need to be made safe for children. These toys were clearly advertised as being for adults only.

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.

I suggest you take your toy and go home.

You're right that personal attacks are not OK here, but we also have the responsibility not to respond in kind.

> 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.

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.

> You make it sound like regulation exists for no reason or has no upside

What exactly did I say that made it sound like that?

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