Was this the most dangerous children's toy? | Hacker News Reader

Was this the most dangerous children's toy?

keith-mcnulty.medium.com

61 pointssephiroth7372 comments

In 70 years we will look back at today's kid's toys and wonder how we could ever allow them.

From mobile games casino-style monetization to depression-inducing social networks, passing by Roblox (that takes the usual predatory monetization schema and brings it's own creative touch by using kids to develop their games).

Or probably we won't, because it will be even worse by then.

To be fair, advertisers were psychologically manipulating children for decades before mobile games and loot boxes. maybe they are more brazen about it now, but people are also much more aware of it now.

There is something into it. Remember arcades fondly referenced on HN with some regularity? You had to throw in a coin to play for 2 minutes. Or collectible card games, again, always referenced fondly in here. But those can eat ridiculous amount of money.

> maybe they are more brazen about it now,

They are not. In fact, much of the controversy is because of the opposite, that they are stealthier about it now.

Bold prediction we've got 70 more years.

I don't understand the Roblox hate I see here all the time.

As a self-taught programmer who learnt via private game servers, I see the importance of making programming fun for kids.

Roblox also needs to be able to sustain itself financially to continue developing the framework and maintaining server resources.

It seems like a lot of the hate is from people who haven't even checked out this community, they just parrot the same talking point and hate that previous people have said.

Same. Roblox is terrible for earning money, and their pricing is truly exploitative indeed, but it’s a great way to learn to code and design games (and random super weird shit) and show it to your friends. Just don’t try to earn (or spend!!) real money on there and you’re all set.

Wow! That is one of the worst articles I've seen posted here in a while. I was reading and reading and kept waiting for the claims to be at least SOMEHOW addressed, but nope. Nothing. It's dangerous because Uranium ore. Ooooo. Scaaaryyy. Who upvotes this garbage?

Personally, I flagged it. It's an interesting kit, but I think at this point we've discussed it enough times on HN.

A friend once showed me his vintage electric train set that ran on full 240v mains power. You know, for kids.

The control box even had a 40 watt lightbulb on the top to show when the (bare metal) tracks were live.

The trains themselves ran pretty well, except for the sparks shooting out from underneath and a strong smell of ozone.

Apparently so many kids zapped themselves that questions about the set were asked in parliament.

I had a race car track like that, I think they were my father's, so dating from the 70's. It was great and I only got shocked a couple of times, you quickly learn to be careful.

Uranium ore is about as dangerous as a fierce banana habit.

According to this Stack Exchange Physics answer, your assessment seems to be correct: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/608612

Yup. Can anyone point to even any injuries caused by this kit? Meanwhile, kids were actually killed by lawn darts, and plenty of kids have died on bicycles (though the ultimate fault there typically lies with cars).

> Estimates place the number of child trampoline-related injuries in a one-year period to be around 100,000.

A strong contender. Also, backyard pools kill a lot of kids :(

The radiation is not the part I'd be worried about, but uranium is about as toxic as lead.

And a chemistry set that contains brittle lead ores/alloys that "tend to flake and crumble" is not something I'd want a 12 year old using unsupervised. Nor would I trust the vast majority of adults for that matter...

Uranium ore != Uranium.

I thought from headline it would be lawn darts.

"Banana equivalent dose" is a misleading concept, because the body actively regulates potassium levels. It's very unlikely that somebody with healthy kidneys could give themselves hyperkalemia by eating bananas, and if they somehow did, the radiation would be the least of their concerns.

You would probably hit other problems with eating that many bananas before you got close to problematic levels.

It's more useful for things like "living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant for a year (0.3 µSv) is the equivalent of eating 3 bananas (0.1 µSv each)."

Relevant xkcd - https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Note also the "Yearly dose from natural potassium in the body 390 µSv"

Is that yearly number the mean or the median or an upper percentile?

Bananas are a double threat. Not only is there a radiation hazard, but you can slip on the peel.

80s lawn darts seemed pretty bad looking back with sharp metal tips.

that would be in line with my crossbow [7th bday]

WW2 era bolt action 22LR for my 12th, but it was never considered a toy

exactly! of all the things that were random access i had to ask, and explain where and why to use it.

I was going to chime in with the lawn darts as well, we had them when I was growing up but luckily no one was impaled.

Normal darts have sharp metal tips. Why are the lawn darts considered especially unsafe?

They’re substantially larger and heavier

Size and weight. Combined with "thrown haphazardly into the air".

With a normal dart you poke an eye out. With lawn darts you poke a heart out.

Also many darts for kids these days are plastic.

I would expect most of the injuries from the forbidden sharp lawn darts to have been to the head and/or shoulders? To 'poke a heart out' you'd need the victim to be laying down on the ground, which kids do obviously do, but presumably a little less when they see things raining down from the sky.

It all depends on how you throw them — they can come in at a pretty shallow angle.

I'm not sure traditional metal-tipped pub darts are a particularly great example of an ideal kid's toy either.

Safety concerns can sometimes seem over the top but, if you look at "dangerous toys" lists with a modern eye, they mostly do seem like things it makes sense to pass on.

They're a foot long, and the metal tip is 1/4 inch thick.

Also, I think you're supposed to play with everyone standing on the same side and throw the darts at a circle on the ground. However when I was a kid, everyone I knew played by standing on opposite sides of each other and dodged the darts as they fell from the sky...

They're a toy that my parents somehow managed, probably quite deliberately, to not buy us as kids.

It's a textbook example of something that is perfectly safe if used as directed but which practically calls out for kids (and drunk adults) to not use safely.

It’s difficult for a child to throw a normal dart through a friend’s skull. But this has happened with lawn darts.

With normal darts you kinda need to try to intentionally harm someone. Not that kids won't do that. But still the sector of risk is smaller. Big much less controllable darts on other hand might land in general area near someone.

To give normal darts the damage potential lawn darts have you have to:

   1: cut off part of the plastic tail so that the whole dart fits in a ~1m piece of PVC electrical conduit
   2: wrap electricians tape around the brass front so it fits snugly but not too tight in the same piece of pipe
   3: put the dart, point forward, into the pipe
   4: connect the back (or "breach") part of the pipe to a large foot-operated bellows as used to blow up dinghies.
   5: aim the pipe at a brick wall
   6: jump, or have you accomplice jump on the bellows
   7: walk towards the wall and extract the dart from a brick into which it has embedded itself about 1.5 cm.

Source: personal experience. We did not have lawn darts. We did not need them. Even at that age we were smart enough not to aim the pipe upwards to see how high the dart would go in the knowledge that it would eventually come back to ground level.

One drunk family member throwing blindly and we lost such a great toy.

Thankfully I just made my own.

Is it actually that dangerous? I thought beta and alpha emitters were pretty safe as long as you don't get them inside your body. If you opened a vial of one of these and dumped it out on the workbench and stood there for an hour, how bad would that be?

Sounds like you would probably get some inside you if you did that right?

I've got two friends who are doctors and who don't know each other (different countries): most common cause of "toy" bringing kids to emergencies... Trampoline. But: it's nearly always when there are two kids simultaneously on the trampoline. A trampoline with a strict rule: "only one kid at a time or I sell the trampoline" does help a lot (it's what I did).

> only one kid at a time or I sell the trampoline" does help a lot (it's what I did).

As a kid who grew up with a trampoline in the backyard (and who had 4 other friends w trampolines as well), I never would have used it if that was the rule. 90% of the fun was jumping w other kids, whether it was playing basketball, tag, or just double jumping. Did kids get a little hurt sometimes, sure. But it all in the vein of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” one kid did crack a front tooth once but that was the worst of it.

The AR-15 for Kids seems like it could be pretty dangerous

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/wee-1s-jr-15-is-the-...

Doesn't seem significantly more dangerous than any other firearm that can be easily handled by a child. I would venture to guess that most accidental firearm deaths and injuries caused by children are caused by pistols.

Let's also be clear that a firearm is not a toy and this is not advertised as one. if it were, then yes, it would be a very different situation.

if a firearm for children isn't a toy, what the fuck is it?

A tool designed for the needs of the user.

a weapon; like short bows, pellet guns, and cattys

Gotta teach them fear and violence soon. Otherwise they might end up friendly to strangers.

Equipment for athletic competitions.

For my kids, they are:

* athletic equipment, for shooting competition

* a weapon for hunting

* a tool for pest control

* a weapon for defense of self and other, if no other viable alternative exists

In other words - they’re a dangerous item that requires responsibility to possess safely. Just like the Jerry can of gasoline sitting in the shed. They use that too, to fuel their ATVs and such.

lets also mention this is a .22 not a .223

This toy was perfectly safe, no injuries were reported, and nuclear scare in general prevented a lot of good things to happen. Like, cheap and CO2-free electricity.

It's easy to look back and tut tut over how stupid everyone was, but think about it. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were caused by a mix of lax maintenance and operator error. Normally, that only kills a few (or a few dozen) people at once in a small area. But occasionally we see widespread negative effect at things like chemical plants and oil tankers/rigs. The human factors are always the same, because humans are more or less the same across time in space. Why should nuclear be any different? It's entirely possible that there is some technology so dangerous that we simply can't be trusted to manage it correctly, i.e. the expected loss is very large even if the probability of loss is very low.

To be clear, I am not arguing that this is so. But I would encourage some level of empathy for people who are opposed to nuclear on these grounds.

I have loads of empathy for the millions killed by emissions that nuclear could have avoided. Is my empathy for the innocent not more important than empathy for people who caused the innocent to die?

I never had one of these, but one of the earliest gifts I remember from my grandfather was a chemistry set which came with all the necessary chemicals to easily create a wide variety of poisonous and otherwise dangerous (explosive / flammable for example) substances. The book that came with it was very explicit about those dangers and explained clearly what one should do to be as "safe" as possible about working with those chemicals. Fun times. Truly educational toys are just the best.

In the 1970s I had an Edmund Scientific cloud chamber kit that included uranium ore and radium paint samples. It also needed dry ice to work. I recall getting some from a place that supplied ice cream trucks. I set it up for a school science fair. No one seemed bothered about it.

I would have been so stoked as a kid to get one of those

No way man, those gas powered planes on a string were like 1000x times more dangerous than these things

While not a toy, in shoe stores they used to x-ray children's feet to measure them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

https://thebulletin.org/virtual-tour/worlds-most-dangerous-t...

https://kids.kiddle.co/Gilbert_U-238_Atomic_Energy_Laborator...

I suspect early model railroads were quite a bit more dangerous: https://marklinstop.com/2015/07/220-volts-to-the-present-fro...

Ha, not even close to the Cox E-Z Flyer https://whyisthisinteresting.substack.com/p/the-worlds-most-...

I read that article looking for the glaringly dangerous part and while it seems you could get hurt if you used it the wrong way it didn't seem worse than misusing lawn darts.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fkeith-mcnulty.medium.c...

In Spain they were hard causalities in the 80's and early 90's due to chemistry kits for children.

The lead sample is way more dangerous to kids than any of the others; the radioemitters are not that dangerous as radioemitters. Lead is extremely dangerous to children in extremely tiny quantities.

Free market once "it's completely safe and fully certified", free market 70 years later "ups sorry that thing was actually deadly".

Cool story, bro. Except for the part where it wasn't "deadly" in any way.

Alpha emitters are the most sophisticated poison when swallowed.

Paywall.

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