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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

No, lithium battery fires are really nasty, and that's why he got a chemical burn.

LiPF6 is a contact irritant, PF5 it decomposes to is a gas, and also a respiratory irritant, and HF PH5 decomposes in the air is a dangerous poisonous acid.

This is what everybody visiting a lithium battery factory is told on safety orientation. In case there is fire in the factory, run, preferably until you are few blocks away.

If enough hot aqueous LF6 in solvent gets on the skin, you will get a chemical burn. In worst case, the same thing as HF poisoning will happen (it pulls electrolytes out of blood, and then death from heart failure.)

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A lithium battery factory has many orders of magnitude more chemicals than a single low-capacity cell. "The dose makes the poison."

It's not even clear if the battery caught fire, or if something else shorted out.

What's clear is that Bose QC-35 II headphones caused bodily damage to the consumer who used it in a completely normal way and in accordance to the instruction manual, without any potential of such damage being indicated on the product that is generally assumed to be safe.

We should stop nitpicking of which part of Bose QC-35 II headphones malfunctioned and caused the product to be deadly dangerous. Instead, we should focus on the following problems:

* How do we incentivize the manufactures to take safety of their products seriously?

* How do we make sure the manufacturers don't skirt the responsibility of selling unsafe products as safe ones?

One doesn't get enter the free market without agreeing to some rules first. The rules are what differentiates a market from a scam.

Actually delivering the product for which the money was paid is one such rule.

Clearly warning about lethal dangers of the stuff you try to sell is another.

Violations of either rule come with a cost - because these violations damage not only the customer, but the entire free market.

I think the two things mentioned are not mutually exclusive, moreover, learning which part had a failure leads to making sure the product will be made safe in the future.

Of course, but we don't have the capacity to do an investigation of this sort - Bose does; and we don't have the authority to force Bose to conduct it - CPSC does, as do the courts.

Hence my suggestions to direct our efforts toward having the responsible government agencies work with Bose on researching and addressing the root issue.

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