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Comment by atahanacar | Hacker News Reader

Let's ban ropes because people might use it to hang themselves.

A closer metaphor might be banning those magnetic bead sculptures because a child might swallow the beads. They were banned for anyone to buy not just children.

https://gizmodo.com/buckyballs-magnets-have-been-banned-by-t...

You can still buy spherical neodynium magnets if you want to. They are just not sold as toys.

Also even the ban on the toy has been overturned: https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a24110/buckyballs-l...

I disagree. That's a toy that kids might choke on. Kids aren't going to randomly buy sodium nitrate and accidentally eat it.

You can probably get basically the same thing from McMaster-Carr: https://www.mcmaster.com/magnet-ball/shape~ball/neodymium-ma...

Or more to the point, ropes are fine, books on tying knots are fine, but if you recommend them both together it is a "suicide kit."

Sure except the book is actually how to hang yourself.

And the ripe is pre-tied (this concentration isn't used for food preservation)

High concentration products are nice because you can dilute them as needed without having to keep a ton on hand.

They also are high concentration hydrogen peroxide that will eat ones arm off. We intentionally don't sell it to the general public at that concentration for safety reasons. It seems that the benefits outweigh the costs in my example and with thebtopic at hand. A bit more convenience for some is not worth the preventable death of others.

> We intentionally don't sell it to the general public at that concentration for safety reasons

We don’t?

Then please explain how I have a bottle of 30% H2O2 sitting on my paints & solvents shelf in the garage. I bought it at my local farm & feed shop. No ID, licence, or even proof of farm ownership required.

Shit is scary af, but I gotta say it does on hell of a job at cleaning mold and mildew out of my window frames.

Exactly my point. Your local farm and feed ship is not a local pharmacy or grocery store. It's a specialty store.

It’s a store that is open to the general public. You claimed that stores don’t sell it to the general public. Obviously they do, because I walked in off the street and bought it.

I'm kinda torn should Amazon be selling high-purity dangerous chemicals or not. On other hand it makes life easy, but on other maybe somethings should have some control in place. That being specialist store who might look at order and give some customer support.

> A bit more convenience for some is not worth the preventable death of others.

Why not?

Why should I be inconvenienced because a rounding-error’s worth of people made the choice, of their own free will, to misuse a product to harm themselves?

This didn’t happen accidentally. It’s not some kind of attractive nuisance.

> Why should I be inconvenienced because a rounding-error’s worth of people made the choice, of their own free will, to misuse a product to harm themselves?

I guess I’m not surprised that if self-obsessed people lacking nuance and empathy grow in number everywhere that they are also present on HN. Just look at the wording. I’ve noticed them more frequently as of late, in threads regarding war, death and suffering.

Furthermore, to claim a severely depressed teenager is a fully-formed person doing something “of their own free will” betrays fundamental ignorance regarding what depression is, as well as how teenagers function.

> Insert Benjamin Franklin quote about sacrificing liberty for safety here.

So providing an effective means of protecting depressed non-adults from the frictionless purchase of above-laboratory strength chemicals to potentially kill themselves by as trivial a measure as verifying age on delivery is somehow infringing on your liberty. Got it.

Yes, it very clearly is, and the fact that you think age verification on delivery is “trivial” is alarming and depressing.

Trivial as compared to taking away the freedom of being able to purchase stuff like that at all via mail order – which I do not necessarily consider to be a reasonable request, nor do I agree with the lawsuit as is. There are already established mechanisms to verify age and identity in place to do that, package delivery companies do it all the time. It’s simply more expensive to do that. But Amazon clearly did not respond to reasonable discourse. I fail to see what you consider radical or restricting about my position.

There was also a quickly deleted response accusing me of ”pathological empathy that would abandon any principled position if it offered an immediate salve” to my “emotional panic”.

I believe this reveals more about the character and expectations of the commenter than anything else. To their credit, they deleted it.

Rational discourse about touchy subjects appears to be largely impossible. I expected better from HN. It doesn‘t follow that because you apparently hold an absolutist stance regarding what you consider freedom to be, that I am on the opposite end of this absolutism.

> I fail to see what you consider radical or restricting about my position.

Society should not bear the cost or responsibility for parenting other people’s children and preventing all possible accidents, much less willful self-harm.

The possibility of bad things happening is the cost of having a healthy, responsible, capable society of well-adjusted adults.

It's simple. They do it every time I order wine or booze online, they do it every time someone orders pot, it'd simple and easy. Even Amazon does it in their whole foods branch when they deliver wine, safeway does it when they deliver me beer. It is simple and trivial.

Those are already intrusions — a slow creep of adding more is not a trivial outcome.

Next you’ll be advocating for age checks on kitchen knife purchases out of an irrational fear of “knife crime”: https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives

Don’t worry, though, Scotland is a little more relaxed: “In Scotland, you’re allowed to sell 16 and 17 year olds cutlery and kitchen knives.”

I moved out at sixteen and bought my first kitchen knife set. That’d be illegal now in the UK.

That’s where your emotionally-driven policies lead. No thanks.

I have ordered booze a number of times online and the majority of times have not been carded on delivery.

I bought a kilogram of pure NaOH from Amazon to make soap with no questions asked. That will also eat my arm off. We don't sell peroxides because they can be used to make explosives.

Can't soap making supplies also be used to make explosives? I learned that in Fight Club.

Which "how to kill yourself with Sodium Nitrate" book is Amazon selling?

Per the complaint[1], it's "The Peaceful Pill" by Dr. Philip Nitschke

[1] 85, https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/McCar...

That particular combination seems likely to be a sex thing.

And then they'd sue Amazon for "promoting sex kits to children."

This type of lawsuit/logic/reporting is an absolute field day, you just have to come up with the clickbait "[frequently purchased together items] kit promoted TO CHILDREN."

I'm very sick and tired of the "What about the children?" mentality. The same excuse is used worldwide for censorship of movies and games, banning "dangerous" products, making anti-LGBT laws because "gay propaganda is making our kids gay", attacking couples because they kissed in public...

A child is their parents'/caretakers' responsibility. I shouldn't have to give away my freedoms just because of some negligent parents.

Or lawn darts, or those old time open fans that you can stick your hands in (or more often kids), or x-ray radiation based shoe sizing machines, or asbestos tiles.

As stated in other comments, this is a concentration that's not used for anything else. The food preservative is a different concentration.

A better analogy would be to ban ropes that are pre-tied into noises and cannot be untied, so they can only be used for hanging. Yep, I agree, those should be banned too.

I assume you realize that a highly pure salt can be effectively diluted for uses where less is needed.

Yes, but similar to high concentration hydrogen peroxide, when the higher concentration product is causing preventable harm and death they make only the more diluted version readily available to the public and keeps the higher concentration stuff just for the folks that truly need it (industry).

An alternative explanation is that 3%, 6%, and 12% are more commonly useful and so the market meets the need. 34% H2O2 is readily available (it’s hardly “kept for industry”, but rather industry/food prep is the most common purchaser of it, just like I can buy urea or ammonium nitrate even though commercial farms are a more common user of it.)

Yes but sodium nitrite isn't that dangerous to handle.

Not to handle, but it's clearly dangerous in the way noted in this article.

You can go to Sigma Aldrich website and buy tens of thousands of other chemicals as deadly or deadlier.

Also I disagree that the concentration is not used for anything else.

Yes, but that's not amazon, it's not a general store, it's a chemical supplier.

The issue here is ease of access and direction (the instructions on how to do it), not the fact that these things exist.

It's like hydrogen peroxide. You can go to a chemical supplier and buy high concentration stuff that will eat your arm off. They don't sell that at the grocery store, because it'd be dangerous. The high concentration stuff is still available to those who need it, but it's not so easy to get and readily available that it causes preventable deaths.

They sell bleach and ammonia-based cleaning products at the grocery store, and those will eat your lungs out if you mix them.

They sell dry ice, and that’ll give you frostbite in seconds if you’re stupid.

They sell extra-strength Tylenol, and that’ll destroy your liver if you just take 10-20 of them.

They don’t sell concentrated hydrogen peroxide at the grocery store because nobody is asking and there’s not a market for it — not because it’s dangerous.

Bleach and ammonia at the grocery store are also very diluted solutions. Most household bleach is 5-9%. Imagine if they sold 100% bleach in stores!

Mixing 5-9% solutions will still produce chlorine/chloramine gas and can cause significant lung damage.

The maximum commercially available (sodium hypochlorite) bleach concentration is about 15%, and that’s due to its non-linear rate of decomposition and extremely short shelf-life at higher concentrations.

A 15% solution must be used very soon after manufacture and does not have significant non-industrial uses — that’s why it’s not stocked in grocery stores. It has nothing to do with its safety at that concentration.

100% bleach would be anhydrous sodium hypochlorite, which is highly unstable and can decompose explosively.

Nobody stocks that.

Seriously... I understand the concerns here but I'm so disturbed by some of the comments, like the idea that "teenagers would almost certainly not be interested in learning how to cure meats." Statements like that make a lot of prejudicial assumptions.

I'm so tired of kneejerk reactions that X is involved in some tragic events so we should ban them, as opposed to looking deeper into the real reasons things are happening. It's much easier to blame Amazon (who I do not have positive feelings about) for selling sodium nitrate than it is to deal with the socioeconomic and environmental circumstances leading to someone wanting to kill themselves. Pills and purchasing restrictions have become the "let them eat cake" of the 21st century.

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