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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

> So, paradoxically, the risks are both negligible and inevitable, something that every consumer should be prepared for because "everyone knows" batteries explode, but no manufacturer should warn about, mitigate, or account for in the design because who'd buy their product then?

I think this can all be true. ER doctors say avocados are one of the most dangerous fruits because of knife accidents.

Yet avocados don’t come with any warnings or mitigations. And for the general public, you probably don’t know any one who was severely injured slicing an avocado.

Surely avocado farmers should be working on cultivars that have a small or no pit so people don’t get injured preparing these fruits? (I mean that only half sarcastically, I would enjoy a seedless avocado if it tasted the same.)

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Another example might be bagels, which are manufactured products, hence more putative liability.

> “Americans ate an estimated 3 billion bagels at home in 2011, an average of about 11 per person ... in the course of slicing up all those bagels, almost 2,000 people cut their fingers so badly that they ended up in an emergency room.

> By the finger-cut-to-E.R. metric, that makes bagel-cutting the fifth most dangerous activity in the American kitchen.

https://www.newyorkerbagels.com/blogs/bagels/bagel-safety-do...

Why are we discussing this here?

A bagel sitting on a shelf isn't going to cut you up.

Bose QC-35 II headphones, apparently, may catch on fire and cause chemical burns when touched.

Analogies are great for illustrating a point, but if you say "this thing is just like that other one", you need to argue why that's the case first.

Product, in ordinary usage, might be implicated in injury to user.

I don't have an argument here, except that bagels might be a better example than avocados, because bagels are a manufactured product.

In either case, a knife is required for the injury to occur, so I agree that the comparison to spontaneous headphone combustion is not great.

> Bose QC-35 II headphones, apparently, may catch on fire and cause chemical burns when touched.

Not if never charged (IIUC). Of course they probably come with chargers and are never used without them, but does anyone buy uncut bagels and not cut them?

The charger needs not be present for injury.

If you really want to stick to the bagel analogy, it's as if the bagel stabbed you back with a knife after you cut it and set the knife aside.

I hope you would find such backstabbing bagels problematic.

Bagel is a bad example here if fingers were cut by a knife. Most people thought by parents how to use a knife safely, but probably not all. Thought I doubt that anyone would read a manual for a knife and then follow it.

I wouldn't mind a sign over the avocado bin at the supermarket warning consumers about knife injuries and an infographic showing the correct way to cut them. The avocado lobby has enough money to help fund it.

I kind of like the giant seeds. It reminds me that this bizarre fruit is a leftover from megafauna eating and pooping out the giant seeds over long distances (you need a big seed to survive dinosaur digestion)

Maybe, is there any evidence Prop 65 warnings have reduced people buying carcinogenic foods in California supermarkets?

You seem to ask the question in bad faith, as clearly this is not the right place to find out these statistics. Google is your friend. There is evidence that warnings, in general, do work.

There is also evidence that wired headphones, which don't have batteries in them, do not self-combust and therefore will not require such a label. A label that differentiates products is certainly useful.

There is also plenty of evidence that most people are unaware of the potential dangers of lithium batteries.

There is no parallel with Prop 65 warnings here.

The Prop 65 warnings apply to basically everything, so it's difficult to avoid them. That doesn't mean that the warning is bad, just that the threshold is too low.

Giving radiation warnings at the level of a banana would be useless. Does that mean we shouldn't use Geiger counters?

I don't think you need evidence. People who are concerned about cancer would be looking for the cancer warning and avoid those products, just like people concerned about the rainforest will seek out Rainforest Alliance-certified products. People who don't care, don't care, but for people who do, they make their decisions based on the information provided to them.

And I just think it would be cool if we dropped little hints to people about the best way to do common things, like cutting an avocado. Imagine if the world were filled with little tips and tricks everywhere we went. Tiny changes, but added up, might elevate life as a whole.

I feel like the people we're arguing with are going around at night tearing down street signs:

>We have GPS, nobody reads directions anyway. You should know your way around these parts. Getting lost is a part of life, deal with it. Using a sextant is easy, just follow these 25 steps in clear weather, and you know precisely where you are, no need for "you are here" displays. Kids these days expect everything to be spoon-fed to them. Nobody gets lost anyway, why should tax money be wasted on this? etc.

I believe it was giant ground sloths as the seed dispersal fauna.

>I think this can all be true. ER doctors say avocados are one of the most dangerous fruits because of knife accidents.

This analogy doesn't apply. Avocados don't lunge at unsuspecting people with knives while they're not looking.

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