Zen Magnets: 6 Years of Battle End in Victory
zenmagnets.com
zenmagnets.com
It's also dangerous, and not in obvious ways. It's like the opposite of a cauldron of 400f peanut oil --- if that oil could also quickly asphyxiate you. And your intuition for how to mitigate the risk is bad; for instance: gloves would be a mistake. And that's just for handling it; freeze something the wrong way and give it to a friend to ingest and you could perforate their alimentary canal.
Should people be able to play with LN? Absolutely.
Should someone start a company and sell super-fun mini-dewars to people as a novelty item, like the Soda Stream of chilling? If they did, a lot of people would get hurt.
I am fine with it being a little bit of a hassle to get LN, and I am fine with it being a little bit of a hassle to buy a pretty boring desk toy. The CPSC appeared to have been fine with that too; its problem wasn't with you owning little magnets, but with companies selling them as novelty stress relieving desk devices to rekindle your sense of childlike wonder and also make excellent refrigerator art (all things on Zen Magnets current page).
I don't think HN's take on magnets and the CPSC is very sophisticated or interesting or really even all that well informed.
An adult could quite easily harm themselves or others when playing with LN2, in a lot of ways that aren't inherently intuitive, or just because they are a bit lax with precautions.
An adult is very unlikely to just swallow a magnet for no reason, much less multiple.
> The CPSC appeared to have been fine with that too; its problem wasn't with you owning little magnets
This isn't true. https://www.cpsc.gov/Regulations-Laws--Standards/Rulemaking/...
"objects that are marketed or commonly used as a manipulative or construction item for entertainment, such as puzzle working, sculpture building, mental stimulation, or stress relief."
Even if they were not marketed as such in any way, any magnet set that was commonly used for this would have to have flux index of 50 kG2 mm2 or less.
The CPSC's ruling basically banned the sale of spherical strong magnets to consumers.
That specifically is an or statement, not and.
In other words: it'd be OK if they were sold if you specifically had to know what you were looking for to get them, just like with LN.
(Obviously this is all a moot point now.)
I know a few people of various professions, trades, students, and I've never known anyone to have a use for spherical strong magnets that wasn't manipulative or construction item for entertainment.
I suppose the end goal is still entertainment, but they are a utility piece in this example, and you could use them similarly for anything you are building where you want a small magnet.
You seem to have posited that no use case could exist, and as each person mentions a use, you respond to ask ~"but really?"
I've never handled liquid nitrogen, but everytime I've seen someone handle it they wore gloves like these:
Gloves are not a perfect insulator, therefore they absorb heat and cold. It takes time for the cold to permeate the gloves - i.e. you observe significant temperature gradient over thickness of the glove. By the time your hand feels the cold, the whole width of the glove is bloody cold. In order to remove the cold from the glove you need to heat it. The only heat source is your hand inside of the glove, therefore the heat is taken from your hand. You need as much heat from your hand as much cold you have taken from LN to bring the gloves to 0. Unless you remove the gloves when the cold starts to permeate - hello frostbite.
While Leidenfrost effect allows one to splash LN on their hands without any or at least significant damage, gloves simply allow more splashes, not full immersion. Handling LN with gloves is a delaying technique, gloves do not magically protect from cold.
The problem is most gloves are designed for vastly warmer temperatures and you don't notice frostbite if your hand cools down slowly.
I don't think so. The only way you could make an object like a glove for continuous LN2 exposure, and not have it be 2 feet thick, is multilayer vacuum insulation (like LN2 dewars use). But that would not let you move your hands or fingers at all.
Though I suspect mittens are probably far easier to manufacture as that's what current designs for -60c use. Either way you are not going to have much flexibility, but could grab something.
If the gloves slow down the process enough so that when you feel cold you have time to put down the container and remove the gloves (less than five seconds?). I mean, to me I'd imagine that is the sole purpose to wear them in the first place?
It would, I imagine, also help from panic. If you notice that you got LN on your gloves there is less panic than getting it on your skin - less chance of a reflex reaction that just makes things worse.
For example if you are arc welding and some nasty blob of molten metal drops on your hand, gloves will provide "heat through" time cushion to remove the gloves more or less safely (easily removable layer also helps avoid hot/cold blob sticking to your body), but keeping the gloves on will most likely still result in a burn. There is a hidden danger with cold that cold does not radiate like heat and we have much less intuitive understanding of how cold affects the skin. Sometimes people get frostbitten during winter activities without them noticing that something was too cold for too long.
Maythe the LN would "stick" to the gloves, freeze them, and then freeze the skin?
One could sum up your use of liquid nitrogen similarly. What something is ultimately used for (play, in both cases), is orthogonal with how hard it is to get. In fact, relying on something being a bit of a hassle to get is probably the wrong idea, as that setup is easily invalidated by someone going through the hassle and then eg giving away the proceeds as party favors.
What we really need is a clear label that points out warning, you're now straying from the herd immunity and now dealing with a novel type of danger. But the problem is we're already drowning in warning labels, as there's no downside on spuriously including them - eg how many times do I have to skim over an admonishment to not use an electrical appliance in the rain? Heck, I've seen a bunch of products lately that don't even come with an instructive manual, just pages and pages of common sense and cya-to-be-ignored warnings. So this hypothetical label would have to be distinctive to stand above the useless chaff and also restricted to only referencing novel dangers, not reiterating basic sense that one should have learned by elementary school.
Unfortunately, under our entrepreneurial form of government the CPSC won't just come up with such an "opt out of us" label standard on their own, as it would diminish their own scope. So a private company has to spend a fortune working to legally define a narrow exception from an adversarial regulator rather than just both working together to solve the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLwR81UyceE
In particular, the basis of their "thousands" claim is an overbroad stat whose magnitude actually declined following the commercial introduction of these entertainment magnets in 2009. So the CPSC is either measuring mostly something other than these toy magnets, or miraculously these toy magnets displaced other more dangerous magnet-play, or both.
Of course there will be tricky borderline cases, and arguably nonsensical outcomes. That’s true of pretty much every law. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad law.
Lawn darts were banned on a mere 750 ED visits annually.[2] The fact is, we live in a society and (as with fireworks and other dangerous toys that could be labelled 'adults only') the cost of being able to have these magnets on your desk is probably dozens or hundreds of kids getting very sick.
[1]https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/29135818 [2]http://mentalfloss.com/article/31176/how-one-dad-got-lawn-da...
Several points:
1. Suspected magnet ingestion =/= magnet ingestion. I believe we should stop here, however:
2. Of course a total ban on sales (which was in effect for some time) would decrease this number, but
3. So would improved packaging and public education campaigns on the potential dangers of the product, which were happening at the same time, and
4. If you actually read the paper, they observe that the reduction in the suspected ingestion cases was not that large: from 8,326 to 6,260. Perhaps you should include that in your cost function.
5. Also from the paper: 86% of the kids were "treated and released from the ED or examined and released without treatment"
To put the nail in the suspected coffin, one should go and read the article you referenced: [SciHub link][1]:
>Subjects from 0-17 years old were included using a primary search term for diagnosis of “ingested object” from the time period of 2002-2015. Cases of ingested objects were classified as “suspected magnet ingestion” (SMI) if the term “magnet” appeared anywhere in the narrative section of the database.
Meanwhile, a million kids ended up in emergency rooms from trampoline-related injuries over a decade[2], and no one bats an eye.
[1]http://sci-hub.nu/10.1097/MPG.0000000000001830
[2]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-terrifying-statistics-tramp...
So would limiting sale to industrial supply houses like McMaster-Carr rather than "Happy Fun Magnet Toy Yum Yum Company"
No, that's the cost of everyone being able to have these magnets on their desk. The pro rata cost of me being able to have them is quite small.
However, this argument is exactly wrong -- it would create another commons problem, where your individual interest is against the interest of the group, and so everyone acting in their individual interest creates a big problem.
(fortunately, with education and careful use, we can avoid the common problem)
That also factors into your point about other household items. Most of the household items that are dangerous to children are very clearly dangerous. It is much easier for a parent to overlook the danger of these magnets compared with stuff like potentially poisonous household cleaners.
> " My point was that most people don't understand how dangerous tiny magnets might be for toddlers."
And yet, far from "most people" giving magnets to toddlers, very few people seem to.
Almost everyone lets toddlers play with toys that say "Choking hazard: Ages 3+", because that warning comes on basically all toys, including stuff like Jenga blocks, sidewalk chalk, ....
Any parent who disallows their child from playing with any “age 3+” labeled toys/objects before age 3 is going to be significantly delaying their child’s development of basic fine motor skills.
Some parents might become desensitized to the labels since the warning is used over-broadly, and might not realize that tiny magnets are something you have to be extra careful about, because the effects of swallowing magnets are generally worse than the effects of swallowing some little piece of plastic.
You don't need to read a warning label, or even know of the special medical threat of swallowed magnets to think this 'toy' was a bad idea for a small child. Would you give a toddler a box of completely inert culinary grade stainless steel BBs to play with? Of course you wouldn't. Your kid could eat them and shit them out to his hearts content, but he still might chip a tooth trying to bite them and even if he were toothless why would you give a kid even harmless metal balls? They're just going to wind up stuck in his nose or something. Nobody gives inert glass marbles this small to young kids. It's a bad idea all around even discounting the unique threat magnets pose. Which is probably why there are very few confirmed cases of kids actually eating these magnets.
If you did, it wouldn’t really be a big deal. Toddlers daily encounter playgrounds full of tiny rocks, wood chips, etc. which are more dangerous than the BBs. Swallowing BBs is comparable to swallowing cherry pits. It’s very unlikely to be life threatening. Typically there is no noticeable effect, or there might be some minor discomfort as it works through the digestive system.
I would be entirely comfortable letting my under 2 year old play with BB-sized steel or glass balls, under loose adult supervision, from a safety perspective (from a that’s-going-to-be-a-mess perspective I can well imagine avoiding giving kids BBs). More realistically, I can imagine letting an older child play with a box of BBs without worrying that a toddler would eat a few and die. Larger marbles are more of a choking hazard, and require closer adult supervision.
But swallowing magnets is much more dangerous.
You'll be spending time in ED having them removed from the nose or ear.
Similarly children often swallow batteries and no one thinks it that’s a good thing but many people do not realize that the child can die from it and it should be treated as an emergency.
That does not follow logically at all. Just because someone doesn't heed the warning doesn't mean they will fall victim to what they are being warned about. Think of it like jaywalking. "Almost no one" heeds the warnings about the dangers of jaywalking. That does not mean that "almost everyone" would be hit by a car. Someone being mindless of the dangers of an activity does not mean they will automatically succumb to those dangers, but that also doesn't mean that the dangers were not real, serious, and worth protecting against.
I never said it follows in a strict mathematical sense, I said it was implied, and implied that it was implied in an informal sense. And I stand by that. By saying that most people don't read warning labels you absolutely meant to suggest that that a very large portion of the population would have trouble with products which require warning labels.
My magnets wont get eaten by anyone and suprise neither will my cleaning supplies. There is also no one touching my knifes and no one is putting flatware in my toaster or wall socket. There is also no one drowning in my make belief pool.
If you really belief, that protecting children from their parents miss judgment, than banning people with children in their household from buying and owning every last of those items. Which obviously would be extremely discriminating towards adult humans with offsprings.
This has got to have an obscenely high false positive rate.
When the ban was being proposed the CPSC's claim was "at least a dozen" from 2009-2012.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/08/07/feds-sue-to-take-zen-ma...
This whole thing is insulting.
Ever Google "pierre paul finger"?
Of course everyone has different opinions of what an acceptable level of risk is.
My favorite manuals of all time were the original printed Inside Macintosh volumes. They were amazing compared to, say, the documentation for the Amiga OS.
Lawn darts are a toy, a toy for children an adults to play alike.
Ball magnets aren't sold as a toy. We don't restrict the sale of sharp knives because children might injure themselves, no we rely on parents to not let their children play with them.
They were when this controversy began.
And from CPSC's perspective, it doesn't matter, because they were sticking to the point that no amount of warnings and restrictions can make magnets safe enough to be sold. (Unlike, say, an M-16 rifle).
The intended use and operation of the Subject Products require the magnets to be separated and reattached to create and reshape the magnets into a variety of figures, sculptures, structures, jewelry, and art. See, e.g., Exs. R-55 (product guide with examples of structures that can be created with the Subject Products); R-139 (“Never Let Go of Childhood Wonder” demonstration video
Two obvious observations:
- "Childlike wonder"? Really?
- If there's any use for these things that is more dangerous than desk toys, it's jewelry.
Some places do, actually.
In Australia most states have laws restricting knife sales to young people, in my state it's 18.
I don't think many people would be against a law preventing sale of these magnets to children,.
Just another example of the FUD spread by CPSC which people ended up eating wholesale.
>Inclusion Criteria and Variable Classification:
>Subjects from 0-17 years old were included using a primary search term for diagnosis of “ingested object” from the time period of 2002-2015. Cases of ingested objects were classified as “suspected magnet ingestion” (SMI) if the term “magnet” appeared anywhere in the narrative section of the database.
Where's the screening part you mention? I didn't find anywhere that the inclusion criteria implied that magnets have actually been ingested - or that the results were filtered in any way other than a keyword search.
E.g.: "Child ingested a marble, parent worries that it could have been a magnet" would pass this inclusion criterion.
But i should hope that medical specialists use the abbreviated mri.
Well that's one way to get the magnet out...
[1]http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1562978...
When I was in college my freshman year, the dorms had bunk beds, and I worried about falling from the top, but never did.
My parents were not especially concerned about the dangers of beds, bicycles, cars, drugs, alcohol, chainsaws, or lawnmowers when I was growing up. On the other hand they drew the line at motorcycles and guns. The only time I was seriously injured (concussion), it was bicycle related, FWIW.
I don't know how you do a cost-benefit analysis for society when nobody particularly agrees on the benefits of something.
If you ban stuff at some point someone has to at least implicitly weight utility against risk. That's ultimately going to be fairly subjective. I'd say cars are overall still a good thing, guns I'm not sure about (but in the U.S. the constitution trumps the death statistics), magnets...I have a hard time quantifying the utility but there's probably a decent economic argument for them overall.
It's obviously easy to say "protection of innocent children" but that doesn't mean it's all there is to it.
I'd like to live in a society willing to pay that price.
I could be misreading you, but it sounds like you're stipulating that kids are getting hurt, and saying you'd be happier if we could hurt some reasonable amount of kids to get new desk toys. That is a different and more disturbing argument from the one that says that we should be able to have the desk toys and avoid the harm, too.
All of them kill astronomically more children than any toy, even taking into account their generally more practical uses. There are substitutes.
Society makes these decisions every day. We accept a large number of injuries and deaths due to cars because we feel they are still a net benefit (which may be debatable when public transportation might be a better option to reduce the numbers). We make these decisions around gun ownership - and obviously there is a large amount of controversy there - at least in the US.
Most importantly, accepting that some children will be injured or killed by a product doesn't mean that the person doesn't care, and won't take steps to use and store the product responsibly so as to prevent injury or death.
Don't you think asking such a question is not a terribly subtle way of calling somebody an asshole?
Very different both in tone and implication from "You're an asshole for saying that".
Well, you're lucky because Trump's making it happen.
The article says zen magnets was the first company whose sales were blocked after zero confirmed incidents, so it sounds like all those incidents were from other products.
ZenMagnets also petitioned the CPSC to establish labeling requirements that all small magnet vendors would have to comply with. Instead of going along with this eminently reasonable suggestion, they continued to try to get the product off the market.
Full disclosure: happy ZenMagnets customer.
I'll have to dig up my old set of magnets but I don't believe their early warnings would clue you in to exactly how dangerous the magnets are when ingested. The newer warnings are considerably more effective, I suspect, if what is on the website ("MAY CAUSE FATAL INTESTINAL PINCHING") is representative of what's on the package.
edit: I hope this stupid warning is not a real thing today: https://images1.westword.com/imager/one-of-the-warning-label...
If a product causes injuries when used as intended then CPSC action seems warranted to me. This is not such a case. I also suspect the lawn dart ban might not have held up in court had manufacturers then pressed as hard as Qu has been pressing today, so I don't think that ban does anything to legitimize CPSC action now. Fireworks bans in the United States have (to my knowledge) originated from legislative bodies.
By the way, the way CPSC reached their conclusion that these magnetic balls were a net negative was based off their own calculation that injuries to children cost more to treat than profits made by the magnetic ball companies. This seems like an absurd way to calculate whether or not something is a net negative to society.
They are not toys.
Am I misunderstanding? It's been awhile since I read any of the primary source documentation on this stuff.
Hint: advertising magnets that are "fun to play with" is advertising them as toys.
There's still a lot of judgement involved, and I'm right there with you on children being overprotected in general. But they need to be kept from the unrecoverable mistakes.
One of the interesting things about child proofing your home, if you are of an introspective mindset, is the cataloging of how much danger you causally live with. Or at least, danger from a certain point of view.
[1]: Not 100% perfectly, of course. But there's a qualitative difference between our natural instinct's ability to deal with fall damage, and eating rare earth magnets.
Unless those mistakes involve trampolines[1], because wheeee! Those are cool.
What I'm saying is that there are a lot of dangerous things, but we don't necessarily ban all of them.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-terrifying-statistics-tramp...
One thing about trampolines is that AIUI, the vast majority of the danger comes from having multiple people on one at a time. Most of the remaining risk is manageable, more in the normal range of risk, especially with supervision. As evidence, I cite that in lawsuit-crazy USA, there are businesses like Sky Zone that provide trampoline play commercially. That kinda bounds the upper level of risk...
I have some additional considerations that require that for other reasons, but I think I'd still feel the same way even without them.
Great! The whole point is that you are capable to do that, and that the total ban is unreasonable. Nobody is arguing that having small magnets around little kids who don't know better is a good idea.
In the past few weeks I've seen a couple articles about people breaking their spine doing flips into foam pits. I would avoid that particular activity, at least.
I had a trampoline as a kid. It resulted in a few very painful injuries, but it was a lot of fun. My brother broke his arm rolling off of it (nobody was even jumping). You can't fall off the edge at those businesses because the trampolines are built into raised floor areas. That removes one of the larger dangers from the equation.
I think you're kind of appealing to nature in a fallacious way. Hundreds of years ago, these magnets wouldn't exist. So, yes, there's always ways for bad things to happen, but even if that's "natural" and therefore necessary, that's not a reason to retain a particular hazard that has existed for a short period of time historically.
That's a good point. I hope they keep these magnets out of kids' hands. The article ends on a promising note in that regard:
> We remain willing to work with the CPSC to develop the magnet safety standards for which we’ve already petitioned, and which will be more effective and reasonable than the all-ages, nationwide ban we succeeded in vacating in the Tenth Circuit. As we’ve already been doing, Zen Magnets looks forward to providing not just the highest quality magnet spheres on the market, but also the safest in terms of sales methods and warnings. Now that the war on magnets is over, hopefully we can all focus towards the war on magnet misuse.
That said, I do understand they can cause great harm. But what do we lose when we choose to isolate our kids from reality?
That said, I wouldn't ban magnets myself, though I'm against selling then directly to young children.
People have been doing it for generations, so consider it something you'll want to think about for yourself before having children.
Another example is alcohol. Annually it kills 88,000 in the US and 2.4 Million world wide. Yet weed, a drug that kills 0 people, and is an effective tool for managing pain and misc. disorders, has been illegal for a century or more.
The banning of the magnets is a convenience for people who don't want to be required to behave responsibly. If enough people wanted the magnets, they would never have been banned.
I bought an extra set because of their legal battle a couple of years ago. They're sitting on my desk right now. I'm glad they've won, it's a poke in the eyes against ineffective prohibition, and a win for personal responsibility.
I'd prefer that there was a regulation on these such that they were only available to adults, however. They can cause terrible injuries that require surgery in uninformed and impulsive children.
I agree. There seems to be a category of products that are definitely safe in the right hands, but they do look particularly "overly innocuous" and, while I don't think they should be banned, they should at least require some sort of "We're not kidding around, these can actually kill you" warning in big, bold letters.
A couple years ago I read about a teenager who died after ODing on caffeine powder he bought on Amazon. While there were lots of tasteless "Darwin award" comments when this happened, it's not hard to think that someone would think a spoonful of caffeine powder would be like a couple of NoDoz, instead of actually being like 30 cups of coffee.
Seems like there is a middle ground between outright banning these products and completely unregulated sales of potentially dangerous items like this.
I understand the problem with loose powder is it makes it more difficult to get a precise dosage, but easy dosage pills won't help much if you're a dumbass who doesn't respect caffeine. Ultimately personal responsibility needs to be emphasized.
Replace all that with the six words "DO NOT EAT, YOU WILL DIE", and it would be brutally effective
You know the limited offers that make you buy useless stuff just because you didn't want to miss the opportunity. Same idea. We instinctively place higher value on stuff that is perceived as scarce. It means that your roommate viewed that soon-to-be-banned caffeine powder as more valuable than it really is.
Needless to say, that effect is a marketing classic.
Those are usually just called 'children'.
A worse asymmetry: If a person spends years and his own money battling a regulation, and something good happens for the entire economy, the person doesn't get rewarded. In fact, the person might suffer when competitors who were just sitting around with no skin in the game can now freely enter the market against the person who fought so hard to open up the marketplace.
Another good example is the Carterfone decision[1], a landmark FCC decision that allowed devices to connect directly to the telephone system. Prior to Thomas Carter's years-long fight, AT&T considered it illegal to connect anything to your telephone. The ruling paved the way for answering machines, fax machines, and modems.
>Jackson's order doesn't mean the agency can no longer seek to shut down the magnet trade; it simply sends the case back for further review before a possibly less biased panel.
Is this really a victory?
Given the overwhelming amount of data that is out there that one shouldn't restrict magnets more than military weapons, I have high hopes that an less biased commission would not advocate for a total and absolute ban.
If you win, can you sue for damages and defense costs? If so, will the government even give you a fair amount of compensation?
A single magnet ought to pass through easily and be pretty benign, right?
Contrast to button-cell / "coin" batteries which are incredibly dangerous if ingested, and where swallowing a single one can cause severe internal burns or even death. Yet we don't see many calls to ban these, despite being very common in all kinds of household devices...
> Yet we don't see many calls to ban these, despite being very common in all kinds of household devices...
Battery compartments now come screwed shut, where they didn't in the past. This is because of the danger of button batteries. We can't ban the batteries because they have widespread legitimate use. Toy magnets don't.
I assume that the loose little balls aren't enough small to end fitting inside a USB connector or something like that. If not, what could happen hypothetically?
But people have similar stories (or worse) about their children being harmed by other household objects, from bleach to electric outlets to plenty of other things.
It isn't evil - much less pure evil. It isn't a disgrace. And they aren't worse than substances which people spend time in prison for. It's a product that should have had a better warning label on it that properly explained the dangers.
Just because something can be dangerous doesn't mean it should be banned. We'd have to ban a billion things in modern living.
> I bought a pair of bucky balls; it was fun but once you start loosing them and if you have pets... best not to buy them
small enough that it's easy to loose
Characterizing them as "magnetic balls of death" is very unfair considering that not many people have actually been killed or maimed by them. Driving your kids around town in a convertible is probably more dangerous than owning these magnets. Owning a swimming pool certainly is.