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Comment by rwmurrayVT | Hacker News Reader

I am just waiting for the day I can get my name painted on my hardhat at the shipyard. It certainly is a status symbol here. It's a telltale sign that someone isn't experienced when they're walking around with an undamaged hard hat. It's a telltale sign they might be too risky when they walk around looking like they went through a tornado!

Edit: Also every one always complains about the NYT paywall, but it's $5 a month for a digital only subscription. I can't help but think I read more than enough content to get value.

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The lowest price it gives me, on the basic plan, works out to be $96/year on a "special" price ($2/week special billed at $8/month) with a suggestion that it'd be $180 normally outside of the special.

Aren't you supposed to replace a hardhat after any damage?

Sure, but no one is replacing their hard hat after having bonked their head lightly on a door frame. Scuffs and light marking shouldn't affect the functioning of the hard hat but still be a rough indicator of job-site experience -- until it gets replaced in a more serious and you start over of course, but thats not really a bad thing either in my opinion.

Yes, but doesn't their post make it clear why they don't? The hard hat is a piece of safety equipment and it is also a piece of fashion used to signal status socially. Guess what happens when you walk onto a job site with clean, freshly purchased gloves.

When I was labouring on building sites as a student (1990 or so), the "cool" thing to do was to take the silver tape used for edging computer flooring tiles, and cover your hard hat in it. I should imagine the tape adhesive didn't much enhance the strength of the underlying plastic, but least you had a cool, shiny silver hat.

When I was a conscript in the Swedish army in the early 90:s, this involved some work around masts and telecomms towers (I was in a signals unit) and, under peacetime labour protection rules, that meant wearing an approved hard hat. The army's steel helmet (m/37, i.e, 1937 pattern!) wasn't approved, so we wore standard, bright orange, hard hats, which looked rather funny with our camouflage uniforms. Someone asked whether we could spray paint them dark green, but the answer was a blank no; they must not be modified in any way or the approval would no longer be valid, and our superiors would be in violation of all sorts of laws for allowing us to use them.

-I was given a visitor's hard hat when visiting $YARD on the Gulf coast - gate security didn't quite know what to make of the "Use your head, not your helmet" sticker affixed to the helmet I had brought - and eventually decided it could be interpreted to suggest that you didn't need PPE if you kept your wits about you.

Sigh.

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