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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me there has been a significant shift to thinking about problems sociologically rather than individually - perhaps combined with only doing the easy half of the sociology.

Individually, it's pretty reasonable to include something like "The chemistry set is recommended for ages 12 and over; chemicals A, B, and C are poisonous if ingested; chemicals D and E are flammable" with the chemistry set. Some of the warnings should probably go on the outer packaging so parents can make informed decisions about buying it. In general, 12 "is old enough to know better" when it comes to tasting the poison and playing with fire.

Sociologically, we know that some 12 year olds will taste the poison and set their houses on fire. It's usually not hard to count roughly how many. We have decided the question is something like "how many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?" and concluded the answer is few to none. Of course, as the article alludes to, there's a lot more benefit to experimenting with a chemistry set than mere entertainment. It's hard to measure though, and saying that there's an acceptable number of poisoned kids is not a winning move for politicians.

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> In general, 12 "is old enough to know better" when it comes to tasting the poison and playing with fire.

Funny thing is, i got a German chemistry kit as a kid in the 90s and i remember one of the instructions was to taste one of the synthesis products (I believe it was ammonium chloride or nitrate) Looking at the modern version of that particular kit (Kosmos C2000) it doesn’t seem to have changed all that much since then either.

The fact that those Kosmos sets are on sale today largely pulls the rug out from under the author's argument.

https://www.homesciencetools.com/product/thames-kosmos-chem-...

https://www.brightminds.co.uk/products/chem-lab-c3000-chemis...

There is something interesting here, but i think it's far more about parents' and shops' changing attitudes towards risk than regulators'.

Had the person tried to demonstrate magnetism with some Zen Magnets, they'd have seen the availability determined by CPSC fiat. Which supports their argument.

What might've changed chemistry set suppliers' attitude towards risk? Plaintiff's attorneys are not, strictly speaking, "regulators".

The author doesn't mention the country he's talking about, but if it's the US then chemistry kits manufactured overseas don't really count do they?

eg they're not US manufacturers, so they wouldn't accept liability

That some places in the US are selling chemistry kits overseas... might be a bit risky for the place selling them though. Sounds like they'd be copping the liability instead.

Indeed, although when I was a kid parks had play structures that were fun, a challenge, and hint of danger. Getting to the top of a play structure lent a sense of accomplishment. Generally the fear/danger was perceived more than real, but pretty fun/popular up till age 10 or so.

In the last 25 years I've seen play structures replaced by the parks I visit were neutered so that even a 2 year old could fully explore, and for that reason only occasionally would there be a 2 year old on them and they were avoided by anyone older.

Back when I was in the approximate equivalent of junior high school, one of the classic experiments done in chemistry was making ammonium chloride, which is used as flavouring in sweets [1] here.

It was tasted.

As the teachers were responsible and I'm sure they didn't want to take safety risks, I'm inclined to believe it was safe to do. (I can't remember how it was made but I suppose the only risks would be from unclean glassware or contamination by some other substance.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice

Cause that one is safe. And of course, other chemicals are not safe to lick. This set in particular is teaching the 12 years old to lick the weird thing.

Nothing wrong with that, but then it is reasonable to expect that the same set does not contain similarly looking/smelling poison.

> We have decided the question is something like "how many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?" and concluded the answer is few to none.

Yet, new versions of Tesla Autopilot hit the road every week, and the public is used as beta-testers.

The issue is not always children or safety. When an elderly customer of McDonald’s sues — and wins damages — for being burned by coffee that is too hot, what do you think will happen to prevent it in the future? (Besides cooler coffee) hint: special warnings on the cup, redesigned cups, and the basic infantilization of adults.

I suggest you go and read the details of that case. The store was knowingly serving coffee at temperatures too hot for human consumption, and had received prior complaints of injuries. The cups they served coffee in at the time were also known to be extremely flimsy and easy to accidentally collapse. The woman in question had third degree burns and required skin grafts.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Rest...

If you go looking you can find images of the burns on her groin. They’re pretty grisly.

As someone that lived there, and drank their coffee, everyone knew it was hot. It was served that way because of the huge number of university students that grabbed a cup before class and it was still warm after walking across campus. The exit of that parking lot is also a known issue. It has/had a steep dip out of the lot and onto the road because that's how the roads were built down there rather than putting in sewers. Finally, there is a traffic light right next to that McDonalds. A LOT of people hit that dip hard trying to get onto the road before that light changes.

All of these things contributed to the issue. Sticking a hot cup of coffee between your legs while someone is driving is stupid, especially in that parking lot. Serving coffee so hot that it stays warm while you walk to class is also pretty stupid. The way McDonalds handled the issue is what made them the bad guys here. They could have easily helped this woman with her medical bills and it would have cost them far less money than the amount they spent on the their PR campaign and lawyers.

For what it’s worth, they were parked when the spill happened. But agreed re:McDonald’s behaviour. I believe the jury was also deeply unimpressed, which is why the punitive damages were so high at first.

I think they should have made better cups to retain the heat longer.

This. Punitive damages were punitive for a reason. They had every opportunity to fix it and they didn't so they got smacked with a big number.

She originally only sued for her medical bills but the jury awarded her punitive damages after it was revealed that McDonald’s had been sued several times and never lowered the temperature to levels standard in the industry

No, Stella's coffee was served at a temperature that was and still is an industry standard. From the wikipedia article:

> "Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C),[37] relying on more sternly worded warnings on cups made of rigid foam to avoid future liability, though it continues to face lawsuits over hot coffee.[37][38] The Specialty Coffee Association of America supports improved packaging methods rather than lowering the temperature at which coffee is served. The association has successfully aided the defense of subsequent coffee burn cases.[38] Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C)."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald

So why have they still not fixed it?

What happened to Stella Liebeck was terrible, but her coffee was not excessively hot by modern standards.

Stella's coffee was served within the temperature range that was, and still is, recommended by professional coffee associations like SCAA and NCA [1]. The NCA recommends that coffee be held and served at around 180-185 deg F (~80-85 deg C), which is likely near the temperature at which Stella was burned. This is a perfectly reasonable service temperature, widely used by coffee shops, restaurants, and home brewing machines to this day.

Stella Liebeck took her cup of coffee and squeezed it between her legs in order to fiddle with the lid. The result was tragic, but completely expected. If I spill a fresh cup of Starbucks coffee on my crotch today, I fully expect to sustain third-degree burns. So I take a little extra care with it until it has cooled to drinking temperature, which happens pretty quickly.

Tea is generally even hotter. Any good tea shop will serve a pot of freshly boiled water, at least twenty degrees hotter than hot coffee. Spilling that on yourself is guaranteed to melt your skin. Great care is warranted.

Again, what happened to Stella was terrible. She didn't deserve it, and she didn't deserve the hate she got afterward. But she did something really stupid. I sympathize, because I do stupid stuff all the time, and I have the scars to remind me.

We're surrounded by extremely dangerous things that require great care to use properly. It's useful for coffee to be held and served hot, just as it's useful for knives to be sharp and cars to be able to reach highway speeds. There will inevitably be accidents, but making the world completely safe for people who use these things carelessly would mean depriving everyone of their proper use.

1 - https://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/How-to-Brew-Coffee

Tea temperatures are supposed to be 170 degrees Fahrenheit, definitely not boiling temperature. Higher temps destroy catechins.

Saying that "tea temperatures are supposed to be x" is like saying that "food should be cooked at x". But regardless, if you go to a good tea shop you are likely to have a pot of freshly boiled water placed in front of you, which some folks in this thread consider an unnacceptable hazard worthy of a lawsuit.

Technically, it depends entirely on the tea. Black teas are universally recognized to require the highest steeping temperatures, to the point that high-altitude brewing is a problem because the boiling point of water is too low. Sweet, amino-heavy teas like a good gyokuro are definitely better done at lower temperatures. But most green teas are quite forgiving, and are commonly brewed at near boiling temperatures. Freshly boiled hot water is also often necessary for herbals, especially short-steeping acidic herbals like hibiscus.

And none of this has anything to do with catechins, which are not significantly more stable at 170 deg F than they are at 200. Theaflavins on the other hand are quite unstable, but they start degrading at temperatures lower than any accepted steeping temperatures, so losing them is unavoidable.

From https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2013/fo/c2fo3009...:

> In essence, the researchers found that in solution, both green tea catechins and black tea theaflavins are unstable and have a tendency for rapid degradation, especially at high temperature or basic pH.

> The thermal stability of catechins is better than that of theaflavins. For example, after a 3 hour open-air storage in a water solution, the amount of catechins and theaflavins was not found to have decreased at 24 °C, whereas catechins had a 25% reduction at 70 °C and a 29% decrease at 100 °C; theaflavins on the other hand had a 56% decrease at 70 °C and amounts were undetectable at 100 °C after 3 hours. The discrepancy in the aqueous stabilities of catechins and theaflavins can be postulated to be due to the large difference in chemical reactivity between the two groups of compounds: relative inertness and less steric hindrance of catechins vs. higher reactivity, especially anti-oxidant activity because of the ring-fusing, increased number of hydroxyl groups and steric hindrance surrounding the benzotropolone core.

That coffee was not too hot by independent measuremtns.

There was a lot of BS said about that case by all sides. But, the claim that hot coffee was too hot is one of them.

Contrary to popular belief, the “sue because coffee is too hot, what an infantile concept” is actually a highly successful PR campaign by McDonald’s. The coffee was hot enough to melt flesh and in fact, when spilled onto a lap, was hot enough to melt the genitals shut. I would sue too!

Just thinking of the horrible scream that poor person must have let out...

Flesh doesn't melt. The coffee was hot enough to cause third-degree burns. Specifically, it was 82–88 °C [1].

I couldn't find a definitive "correct" temperature at which to serve coffee. It seems that people typically want it at 60 °C when they drink it [2], but since not everyone wants to drink it straight away, often coffee shops serve it hotter than that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230106152_At_What_T...

When someone says "He got his head blown off" in reference to a cranial gunshot wound, do you also pull this "WELL AKSHUALLY..." routine on them, by pointing out that the victim's head is still attached to their body?

The characterization of "melt the genitals shut" is not a precise medical, physical, scientifix statement. It's a colloquial, even poetic phrasing, and it does a FANTASTIC job of describing the impact of this woman's injuries.

It seems fairly clear to me that it was not intended to be read as a colloquial phrasing. It's stated twice, in italics. There's nothing wrong with pointing out this idea is just false.

The responder isn't telling the whole story though. The reason the coffee was so hot was because they wanted to limit the practical ability of customers to make use of endless refills on coffee. Not consideration for the average customer's wants.

I thought it was pretty clear that it is colloquial language, and that the italics are for emphasis... For example, "They blew his head off.

In the future, maybe you'd be better served to trying asking the other person how they meant it, rather than jumping to correct them.

Unless your actual purpose is mainly to aggrandize yourself by dunking on someone else by correcting them... In which case you should just carry on, as you have been doing.

And yet here you are making two posts trying to correct someone on whether the factual correction was necessary. I assure you, that is far more uninteresting than the issue you're trying to address.

I'm not trying to correct you by calling you out... I assume you're a lost cause, already. But hopefully other people reading this will think twice before they act the fool.

Would you also sue a tee shop or cafe if you spilled the freshly boiled pot of water that any good tea shop brings to your table?

More specifically, if you put a cup of 180 degree+ tea between your legs and squeezed it, like Stella did, would you blame the tea shop when it predictably spills in your lap?

I would blame a tea shop for serving me a beverage so hot that it was undrinkable to the point of severely injuring me, yeah. If I spilled a cup of coffee on myself I would expect a light scalding, maybe a bit of redness, and laugh it off. I wouldn’t expect to need skin grafts.

It sounds like you're exactly the sort of delicate person TFA is talking about :)

In that case, in order to keep you safe, you'll want to avoid all beverage shops and restaurants, since they all generally follow the the NCA recommendations that coffee be held and served at around 180-185 deg F (~80-85 deg C), which is around the temperature at which Stella was burned. This would be very dangerous for someone like you!

And I hate to tell you this... but it's not just beverage shops and restaurants. Domestic coffee makers also follow the NCA guidelines. Your Mr. Coffee machine holds coffee at around 185 deg F, which will melt your skin just like it did to Stella. And definitely don't attempt to make tea, because the first step is usually involves putting on a kettle to boil.

You'll probably need to stay out of the kitchen altogether. Steaming vegetables is where I've gotten the most burns for some reason. You won't want to try to make pasta, which always involves large quantities of boiling water. And don't even think about using a stove or oven, where temperatures are easily double or triple that of boiling water. That's just a lawsuit waiting to happen!

This is just the temperature hazards. I imagine you don't use knives, which can be quite sharp, although I suppose you could always try suing the knifemaker if a kinfe turns to be unexpectedly sharp. And obviously you'll want to stay far away from the mother of all hazards: cars. Unfortunately, even though cars kill more people than any other machine in history, people like you have been largely unsuccessful in suing carmakers for defects such as excessive speed or ability to drive into objects.

Overall, my recommendation is that you hire someone for anything more complicated than watching TV.

Your response is extremely condescending and expresses more that you were interested in making me feel bad about myself than you engaging with me in good faith.

No, I'm trying to point out that you have very unrealistic expectations of the world you live in. This is very simple: beverages such as tea and coffee are brewed, held, and served at temperatures that make them extrememly dangerous if you spill them on yourself. This isn't my opinion. At the risk of repeating myself: when Stella was injured, McDonalds' corporate policy required coffee to be held at 180-190 deg F. This is nearly identical to the range recommended by professional coffee associations like the NCA, who TODAY recommend that coffee be held and served at around 180-185 deg F (~80-85 deg C) [1]. This temperature range was, and still is, used by nearly every coffee shop, restaurant, and domestic coffee machine.

So if you personally can't handle the risk of dangerously hot beverages, then you'll want to be sure to specifically ask, everywhere you go, for warm coffee. Starbucks has a procedure to accommodate people like you, which I believe involves simply setting the cup aside for a while to cool before they give it to you. (EDIT: I hear Starbucks actually has a more flexible process and equipment settings which can "officially" accomodate a range of service preferences, so that might really be the place you want to go).

If you want to make coffee for yourself, you'll need to come up with a procedure that's safe for you. Don't use a coffee maker; like I said, my Mr. Coffee machine holds coffee at around 185 deg F. So does yours. Look it up. Remember that this is right around the temperature that melted Stella's flesh.

I and most other people prefer coffee that has been brewed, held, and served at the proper temperature, which is why those standards exist and are almost universally used. And I'm extremely grateful that Stella's hot coffee lawsuit didn't ruin it for everybody; I felt really bad for her, and I don't begrudge her medical bills being paid, but I'm very glad her lawsuit had no lasting effect beyond sterner warnings on coffee cups.

Folks like yourself who for whatever reason don't want to be exposed to that danger are in a difficult position, and you need to take responsibility for your special needs, as it were. You will not be successful in suing for "excessively" hot coffee; Stella's lawsuit was pretty much a one-off, and personal injury lawyers have mostly moved on to suing over defective lids instead of excessive temperatures [2].

My comparison with knives and other common hazards is not merely academic. I've come very close to losing fingers and my eyesight to knives and other cutting tools. And you will not be successful in suing the maker or seller of knife that turns out to be "excessively" sharp. Just an example.

1 - https://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/How-to-Brew-Coffee

2 - https://www.eater.com/2017/5/19/15662790/starbucks-hot-coffe...

If you make tee for yourself it will do the same thing.

I guarantee you that I don’t serve myself tea so hot that I would need skin grafts if it spilled on me.

Typically it is boiling water in cup with leaves. Normal office setup. You don't hotter then boiling. And when spilled and you don't remove it asap, it does that damage.

You talk about that coffee as if it was magically hotter then water. It was not.

You have been and taken in by propaganda. Please take the time to read the wikipedia article that the other commenter linked, and learn the truth about this incident. You deserve better than to continue having the wool pulled over your eyes.

Pay special attention to the "Coffee Temperature" section:

In other words, Stella's lawsuit was sort of a one-off success for aspiring hot-coffee lawyers, and the only effect it had in the long run was maybe a few more warning labels on paper cups.

So you actually quoted the part where it mentions improving their cups... And then you seem to have completely ignored it in your own commentary. Redesigning the cups with more rigid foam (and the plastic lid lip IIRC) was a pretty big deal at the time, and it made a significant impact on the possibility of spilling.

But the bigger problem is that you're still ignoring that your mind has been captured by the propaganda that demonized this woman as a greedy opportunist, and cast our tort system as a lottery for lazy, evil people to enrich themselves at the expense of honest hard-working businesses.

The woman asked that McDonald's pay her medical damages, only... And those damages were extensive... Can you even imagine how much surgery is required to treat 3rd degree burns to the genitals? Major skin grafts, permanent horrific scarring. You'd never regain full sensation again, and it's likely you'd never fully function sexually afterwards.

The jury decided to award massive punitive damages, in large part because they felt that McDonald's conduct after the injury was so shocking that they felt compelled to send an equally attention-getting message to the corporate executives who had treated this woman with such callous inhumanity.

And the punitive damages were reduced on appeal, anyway, which shows that the tort system does work. McDonald's paid their lawyers more than they paid the defendant... And they would have only paid a tiny fraction of that amount, if only they had evolved a bit of conscience at the beginning.

No, the changes that McDonalds implemented in their cups were not really a big deal. Rigid styrofoam and cups were already in widespread use at large establishments at the time. McDonalds' "redesigned" cups were and continue to be quite pedestrian. Don't take my word for it. Go order a cup of McDonalds coffee, which will likely be served to you at the same dangerously hot, NCA-approved temperature that burned Stella, put the cup between your legs and squeeze it like Stella did, and tell me how safe you feel.

> But the bigger problem is that you're still ignoring that your mind has been captured by the propaganda that demonized this woman as a greedy opportunist

No, in my comments I have explicitly stated that I empathized with Stella and that I'm glad she got her medical bills paid. She didn't deserve what happened to her, and she definitely didn't deserve the hateful publicity she received.

I furthermore freely admit that I'm fully capable of doing the same idiotic things that Stella did. Putting hot coffee between my legs and squeezing it to fiddle with the lid is exactly something I would do, and I'd probably be on the fucking phone or driving while I did it. I recognize that Stella probably didn't understand just how dangerous this is, and I accept that McDonalds may have been negligent in the nature of the warnings it provided.

> Can you even imagine how much surgery is required to treat 3rd degree burns to the genitals?

This is an appeal to emotion. Yes, I've seen some horrific injuries in my time. I'm also a vegetarian with a deep abiding hatred of McDonalds and their ilk. McDonalds makes, markets, and sells shit food that is poisoning generations. But the magnitude of Stella's injury is orthogonal to the issue of McDonalds culpability for it. Clearly the judicial system has settled into some recognition of liability for merchants of hot coffee, but excessive service temperature is not part of that consideration. And it's a damn good thing, because coffee needs to be hot.

Here's a simple question for you, based on an actual experience I had years ago. If I accidentally stab myself in the eye with a paring knife (yes, long story), will you support me if I sue the knife maker or the merchant for selling me a knife that was excessively or unexpectedly sharp and pointy?

You don't seem to know very much about the redesigned lids. Disposable coffee lids in the US changed drastically following this lawsuit. It took a few years, but the quality of disposable cups/libs used to serve hot beverages to-go is vastly higher than it used to be. I'm surprised that you don't know that... There's a lot of legal scholarship on this topic that specifically discusses that shift, and analyzes the impact of this lawsuit vs other causes.

But then, you also don't seem to know very much about product liability in US law. Manufacturers are held to surprisingly high standards in the US, and McDonald's conduct before & during this trial actually shocked the legal community. Their position was seen as surprisingly risky, given the fact pattern.

Your knife example is pretty silly, and I'm not sure why you expected it to prove anything. Legal hypotheticals are sometimes useful analytical tools, but you have to actually construct the hypo case to distinguish a relevant legal principle or fact pattern... Your example does none of that. It's just an obvious tautology, and there's not really any argument contained in it.

Again, I would encourage you to educate yourself, instead of just making a lot of assumptions that are emotionally convenient to your preconceived notions.

> You don't seem to know very much about the redesigned lids. ... There's a lot of legal scholarship on this topic that specifically discusses that shift, and analyzes the impact of this lawsuit vs other causes.

Go ahead and cite some of that scholarship. I would genuinely love to see it. Explain how the current designs, which are still subject to coffee spill lawsuits, differ from those before Stella's lawsuit. Then explain why, if the lid was inadequate for its purpose, Stella's lawyers specifically cited her difficulty in prying off the lid as the proximate cause of the accident.

Otherwise, your detour into lids and cups is a bit of a distraction. The primary allegation, and the one most parroted by sympathetic media and trial lawyers to this day, was that McDonalds' coffee was a defective product due to outrageously excessive temperature, far beyond industry standards or best practices. Nowadays the trial lawyers like to claim that the lawsuit forced McDonalds to drastically lower the temperature of their coffee. I don't know whether you also believe these easily debunked claims, but you sure seem eager to redirect the debate in a direction where you know I don't disagree as strongly. It's kinda weird.

> But then, you also don't seem to know very much about product liability in US law.

Guilty as charged!

> McDonald's conduct before & during this trial actually shocked the legal community. Their position was seen as surprisingly risky, given the fact pattern.

Right, I definitely remember personal injury lawyers and opponents of tort reform acting "shocked". They still do. No surprise there. And almost every single one of them lies about the temperature issue.

> Your knife example is pretty silly, and I'm not sure why you expected it to prove anything.

I don't expect it to prove anything. I'm simply curious how you feel about strict liability as applied to other dangerous but common products, where the the issue of whether the product is safe for its intended or anticipated use is in dispute. It's a simple if unimportant question, which you appear unable to answer.

> Again, I would encourage you to educate yourself, instead of just making a lot of assumptions that are emotionally convenient to your preconceived notions.

Hmmm, I sure don't feel very emotional about this. My strongest emotion is, like I said, contempt for McDonalds' influence on peoples' health. And again, I was happy that Stella bill's were paid.

EDIT:

Seriously though, please cite that "scholarship" on lids and cups you mentioned. I'm skeptical, and it's somewhat tangential to the more sensationalized allegations made by Stella's lawyers, but I'm also genuinely curious.

Yes, but I think it simply means the answer changes to "an unknown quantitity" when it comes to sweet sweet quarterly returns.

I guess "we" have decided that driving, and self-driving, is worth a number of deaths.

And to be honest, I agree. It's a tough balance to consider, and the death of any individual is going to be weighed much more heavily by their nearest and dearest than it will be for a dispassionate observer, but I'm inclined to say that advancement of humanity is a big enough reward that some risk is justified.

The number hovers around 35,000 annually in the US.

Also, we don't let 12-year olds drive.

Advancement of humanity would be liberation from the dependency on enormous, spatially wasteful vehicles like cars.

Waymo and their hundreds of miles without needing correction, yes. Tesla and their fractions of one mile without correction, no.

> I guess "we" have decided that driving, and self-driving, is worth a number of deaths.

I don't think anyone has decided anything of the sort. If I shoplift from a store and I'm not stopped, that doesn't mean that "we" have decided that my theft is okay. It just means that I haven't got caught, or that the system isn't sufficient to hold me accountable, or that there isn't enough evidence to present a damning case against me just yet.

> but I'm inclined to say that advancement of humanity is a big enough reward that some risk is justified.

There's absolutely no evidence that Tesla's rushed and untested beta product is helping the "advancement of humanity" versus better designed and controlled research by organizations like Waymo.

The only evidence of FSD's "advancement" I see is the advancement of Tesla's profits. FSD serves as a vehicle for interest-free loans to Tesla directly from their customers.

> > I guess "we" have decided that driving, and self-driving, is worth a number of deaths.

> If I shoplift from a store and I'm not stopped, that doesn't mean that "we" have decided that my theft is okay.

Those aren't equivalent, though. Stores _have_ decided that _some_ theft is okay in the grand scheme of running a store.

Conversely, I think most of us agree e.g. that the incident where a woman was killed by an Uber self-driving Volvo[1] was _not_ okay, and that multiple negligent factors were at play that contributed to her death.

This doesn't mean that society thinks self-driving cars are _all_ not okay.

Similarly, the royal/societal "we" _absolutely_ have decided that collective driving is worth some quantity of deaths. We seek to minimize them, but there are extremely few people seriously advocating for the abolition of cars today, and they've been around for over a hundred years at this point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg

I feel less like "we" have decided that self driving is worth it and more that Tesla is pushing it on everyone and no one has stopped them yet.

I'll go further. Tesla has decided (correctly?) that there is enough money in it for them to push that line. The chemistry set manufacturers decided that there isn't enough money.

Bingo, if the set manufacturers were convinced they could make hundreds of billions, somehow, I would bet they would have continued selling them down to this day.

If "we" haven't decided it's worth it, it's likely "we" are wrong. Trillions of dollars and an untold number of of lives have been lost to inefficient human driven transport. See also: Every preventable driving accident ever, and every dollar ever spent on transport for further details.

Are you implying that automating it might somehow NOT be the most important innovation since the invention of penicillin, or are you implying that it can't be automated? Sorry, it may be that I'm dense, but I'm actually not clear what your argument here is.

Self driving overall is definitely worth it. What Tesla is currently doing, however, is selling beta software as FSD and testing it on public roads. That's very different.

> Are you implying that automating it might somehow NOT be the most important innovation since the invention of penicillin

Do people really think self-driving cars are anywhere near the same class of benefit as penicillin, let alone the most important invention since then? Hell, if self-driving cars came out tomorrow, they wouldn't even be the most important innovation in the last two years (that would be the COVID vaccines).

> I guess "we" have decided that driving, and self-driving, is worth a number of deaths.

Yes, although it has been that way all along, and not just with self-driving cars. Driving is implicitly seen as either an inevitability or worth the risks, although few people want to explicitly say deaths are an acceptable tradeoff for, well, anything. Implicitly accepting a (usually small) number of deaths, or a statistical risk of death, for almost any activity is a part of life.

Eliminating accidental deaths entirely would generally make us pay through the nose in some other way, economical or otherwise, so almost nobody actually even wants what it would entail. It's socially and emotionally hard to say that, so it's easier to just consider it inevitable. (Frankly, that's just kind of a different way of saying the same thing, and understandable.)

Self-driving cars just turn it from an inevitable human error into something with a target on it. It's no longer an inevitable human error because there's a technology that caused the accident to happen.

Self-driving cars are supposed to reduce the total risks in the end, though, so if that happens, the more interesting question will be in whether people will be allowed to drive at some point in the future at all.

Honestly, it doesn't seem like society has decided any such thing w/r/t self-driving! The couple of deaths from self-driving have attracted enormous negative media attention, and I suspect that if 100 people had been killed by self-driving cars, there would have been immense public pressure to shut down the programs. The public is not running cost-benefit analysis on this.

I forget who, but somebody pointed out recently that if cars were invented today, there is no way we would ever let anybody drive one.

Considering all the other reasons cars are bad (energy and space wasted on them), it would’ve been better if they hadn’t been.

True for a lot of inventions that were a huge improvements forhumanity.

If alcohol were invented today, there is no way we'd let anyone market and sell it.

Why aren’t cars much safer than horses? My car doesn’t just decide to run a red light because it’s scared.

I found your question interesting and found this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27739679

> The advent of automobile use in the early 20th century brought about a measurable rise in total numbers of highway deaths and injuries. However, the automobile's toll on human life and limb was probably not extravagantly greater than the toll exacted by the combination of steam- and horse-driven travel methods it displaced

From skimming the article, it seems like motor vehicle fatalities in NYC in the 1990s were similar to total traffic fatalities in the early 1900s, even though the population almost doubled.

I'm assuming motor vehicle fatalities includes pedestrians hit by motor vehicles. There could still be additional deaths today from things like streetcars, horses, or ox carts, but I feel like those would be low.

Tesla Autopilot will allow to remove one more "privilege": Driving cars.

Government will like it that no one can drive a car. Works well with the expected IQ and competency of the future generations.

Also corporations will gladly poison children if it will enrich some stock-holding heir without consequence. I am not mustering up a lot of sympathy for corporations manufacturing hazardous materials for children that then get sued.

The major removal of agency for working people is by corporations and their aristocratic heir majority owners. Lawyers suing corporations for harming children are one of the things working people have to regain agency, as are laws to protect us. There is too little of it, not too much of that.

These are chemistry sets. They are, when used inappropriately, just as likely to cause harm as a sawzall, a hammer, or a cuisinart.

I assure you, the "aristocratic heir majority owners" are also interested in letting their kids have access to experimental chemistry; and lawyers depriving any child of the opportunity to experience such (or to learn how to use a hammer, a sawzall, or a cuisinart for that matter) does no one any good, least of all working people.

I feel like you've actually kind of proven the reasonability of what actually happened to chemistry sets with this comparison.

Fully-functional sawzalls, hammers, and Cuisinarts don't get actively marketed to children. You can buy them and let children use them, just as you can with (non-children-marketed) chemistry supplies, and in the same way that comes with the societal understanding that, by letting a child use something not marketed for use by children, you'll be providing suitable safety instruction and oversight yourself.

Yeah, this is a pretty good explanation, chemistry sets may be nerfed because the risk of giving poisons and invisible flames to children as toys far outweighs the benefits which accrue to a small minority who would gain from this. And the children who would gain from it have other ways to access bomb-making or nuclear-reactor making materials if they really want to: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/150726-nu...

That all seems to be corroborated by the fact there doesn't seem to be any shortage of scientifically gifted young adults. If anything we're on a golden age of scientific discovery. Teenagers fairly regularly make contributions to science, and chemistry in particular. It doesn't look as though there is some broad over-protective social force holding children back from developing adult skills and that this whole thing is much more likely to be a subjective impression of the author.

From a quick google: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/teen-genius-5-... https://brightside.me/wonder-curiosities/6-sensational-disco...

Of course, there are still the old-fashioned forces of parental and social neglect, and the fact that opportunities and neglect are not evenly distributed throughout the society (being much more dispersed/concentrated, respectively in poor households). But the author does not seem interested in that. One can only speculate as to why.

> In general, 12 "is old enough to know better" when it comes to tasting the poison and playing with fire.

It was older than 12 when myself, my brothers, and our friends really started playing with fire ;-)

> "how many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?"

I think it's an important point to note that the vocally asking of that question of course signals the end of the activity. It's basically a rhetorical tool when one side of a trade-off decision is easily measurable and photographable and the other is a lost opportunity (generations of chemists).

You can't photograph a lost opportunity.

I'd argue the school mask debate is a similar one. It's easy to interview the teacher who almost died from Covid or grandma with little ones in school who is scared. It's impossible to photograph a generation of kids' developmental gaps.

The shift in the 60s and 70s wasn't so much a shift to societal thinking, it was a shift to media-driven public opinion.

> We have decided the question is something like "how many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?" and concluded the answer is few to none.

A perfect example of how choosing the right question matters just as much as choosing the right answer.

"How many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?" is the same kind of fallacious question as "Do you think all vaccinations should be voluntary or are you in favor of authoritarianism?"

In short, it's a false dichotomy presented as a question, with the purpose of distorting the narrative and forcibly ending discussion.

EDIT: Since it might not be clear, I want to clarify that I'm not saying the parent chose that question to shut down the discussion. I agree with the parent's assessment that insisting on asking the right questions wasn't "a winning move for politicians".

> it's a false dichotomy

How is it false?

While the question isn't phrased as a false dichotomy, it imposes one within the context. The idea that we either hold the chemistry set manufacturer accountable or we're letting children die is a false dichotomy.

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