CEO Craig Zucker on the Demise of Buckyballs
wired.com
wired.com
You'd wonder, reading this article, what problem CPSC had with a simple magnetic toy set. After all, nowhere in this article do the words "surgery" or "intestinal perforation" occur. The problem is simple. A child can swallow a penny, or even a nail(!), and the ER doctors will send them home to wait for it to pass. But if you happen to swallow two tiny rare earth magnets, what can happen is that they latch together on opposing sides of loops of small intestine, gradually digging their way through the tissue and spilling gut bacteria into the abdominal cavity, which results in sepsis.
"[W]hen these high-‐powered magnets are swallowed, endoscopic or surgical intervention is required in nearly all cases to prevent bowel damage." - Nerissa S. Bauer, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine
Skateboarding is probably statistically more dangerous than tiny rare earth magnets. But parents know how to mitigate the risks of skateboarding. My guess is that 80% of the parents on Hacker News don't even know that swallowing a tiny smooth round magnet is more dangerous to a toddler than swallowing a nail. Certainly teenagers don't understand this, because they were using Buckyball magnets to hold fake lip piercing studs.
Zucker's firm attempted to address the problem with warning labels. But how do you put warning labels on a set of 100 tiny metal balls? Even if the label read "DO NOT EVER LEAVE THESE OUT OF THE BOX", which they don't and can't because keeping them out of the box is a big part of the point of the toy, what good is that going to do when a teenager buys a set and leaves it on his desk in the house he shares with a 4 year old? Because that is not an uncommon scenario.
In the end, the issue here is not that the government thinks it should be unlawful to sell small rare earth magnets. It's that the government thinks companies shouldn't be able to profit from selling them as direct-to-consumer toys and novelty items. If CSPC is seeing marked increases in injuries due to magnets now, when the products are in their early-adopter infancy (there are, according to Zen Magnets, only two companies selling sets like this as consumer products), the CPSC can reasonably assume that the damage would be much worse as the products mainstreamed.
Buy the magnets online, or from a lab supply store, and give them the respect they deserve.
Except the ban includes online stores, does it not?
Here's the specific proposed language:
any aggregation of separable, permanent magnetic objects that is a consumer product intended or marketed by the manufacturer primarily as a manipulative or construction desk toy for general entertainment, such as puzzle working, sculpture, mental stimulation, or stress relief
It's pretty much as simple as "you can't market magnets like this as novelty items", and that's it. That seems reasonable to me.
You could probably set up a business selling them as a lab supply to nerds knowing full well that 99.999% of your sales were to people using them as desk toys; as long as you aren't inducing the public into using easily ingestible rare earth magnets as desk toys, you're probably fine.
Stats old car accidents and kids: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pubs/811641.pdf
All these things may seem ridiculous, but doing so would have greater impact for child safety than banning rare earth metal balls. Children lives would actually be saved.
The government isn't banning magnets, just like they didn't ban darts. You can own magnets. You can own small round magnets. You can own them in sets of 200. You can even sell them! You just can't set up a business marketing as a toy something the CPSC believes will needlessly endanger children.
Besides the fact, this regulation seems almost pointless. If you can still sell these small round magnets, just not as novelty and toy items, then they will still get into the hands of consumers. As the article mentioned, even with severe restrictions on where they were placed in stores and even with them being absent in physical stores at all sales still held steady, clearly signifying a demand for this product.
At best this ruling is ineffectual and will end up in a cat and mouse game between manufacturers and the CPSC which could potentially end up in heavily overreaching legislation. At worst it's a dangerous precedent set to control the kind of things we give to our children.
I don't need the mayor of New York telling me how much to drink, and I don't need the government telling me what to buy.
Food for thought: The CPSC seems to be fine with the warning labels on cigarettes.
As for "ineffectual": you can't have it both ways; either the ruling is devastating to companies like Zucker's (his claim), or it does little to keep the toys out of the hands of children.
This ruling may be devastating on companies like Zucker's, however that is what happens when your business relies upon a product that is then regulated away by the government. Zucker should have known the risks when he got into the industry, and at least should have known the risks when doing business within the United States.
I see this ruling more as an attack on what I can purchase as a consumer. Why is the government telling me what I cannot buy, or even what I cannot give to my children? If you really want to get into it, I'd be more than happy to tell you why I think the CPSC itself is a threatening institution to my civil liberties, but that seems rather out of scope. What makes this ruling more egregious than any other that comes to mind is that it seems to have been made selectively and without good reason. Warning labels were not sufficient, yet the warning label on a box of cigarrettes is just gravy? If you work out the percentages, regardless of the potential to do harm, not that much comparative harm was really done.
So why was this done? It doesn't take the harmful objects out of the market, so why set this precedent? It makes me wonder what they could do to, say, maybe a politically charged children's book?
The regulation proposed on magnets is effectively identical in principle to the regulation against lawn darts back in 1988. Any idiot can look at a lawn dart --- a large, bottom-heavy weighted metal dart meant for throwing --- and intuit that the pointy end needs to be kept away from kids heads. And yet kids were routinely showing up in the emergency room with darts in embedded in their skulls. In fact, they still were in 1997!
These kinds of determinations are literally the whole reason we have a CPSC. The CPSC is only suddenly a threat to our civil liberties because they pushed back on a nerd toy. I'm sure the manufacturers of lawn darts were plenty pissed too, but we didn't have the message boards back then to hear about it.
Nobody, including the CPSC, is saying that rare earth magents are intrinsically evil, or that you shouldn't be allowed to have them. And so you'll be able to keep buying them even after this rule is put in place. The CPSC is simply saying that tiny magnets make a bad toy, just like weighted darts did.
And note that it isn't the evil, capricious CPSC that's behind this; the movement to suppress this particular bad toy was spearheaded by the American Pediatric Association.
Furthermore, as I stated in my previous comment, I believe the mere existence of the CPSC is a threat against my civil liberties. Thus, I also believe the ban against lawn darts was incorrect. The only reason you're probably hearing about it now is because we are now only having the opportunity to discuss it, not because they pushed back on a "nerd toy"[1].
I understand what the CPSC is trying to do, and I'm not decrying the goal of trying to protect children. I'm also not trying to tie some conspiracy together here, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This seems like needless, overarching legislation that opens the door for abuse, and when couched in the "Save The Children" argument it sends off a lot of warning bells in my head that I don't think deserve to be ignored.
[1] Really? "Nerd toy"? You do realize your audience here... correct?
1. Things painted with lead-based paint 2. Dangerous bacteria 3. Heavily radioactive materials 4. Chips of wood carved and painted to look like hazelnuts 5. Laetril, a completely ineffective pharmaceutical sold as a miracle cure for cancer.
If being unable to buy buckyballs is the cost of having a government agency preventing fraudulent or outright harmful products like the above out of my unwitting hands, or the hands of people who would cause a lot of damage around them, then I'm okay with that. I don't expect the government to be perfect, so I don't consider a failure to be perfect to be a fatal flaw.
Seriously? You undermine your own argument with that comment.
If the CPSC is doing its job well it will react towards gadgets that are within its domain and statistically shown to be dangerous. Regardless of how you feel about this agency's actual mission, that is a good design to keep them from eventually trying to keep you from reading Mein Kampf or Lady Chatterley's Lover or something. (if you're in the United States you also benefit from the first amendment...)
> It doesn't take the harmful objects out of the market, so why set this precedent?
This also strikes me as a really myopic thing to say. Do you really think that eliminating an item from the toy store shelves and relegating it to scientific supply shops is not going to effectively remove it from kids grasp? The obvious counterexample is the chemistry sets of yesteryear.
(it's worse than that: those shops won't finish the magnets in the user-friendly way that these guys did. that was their innovation.)
> What makes this ruling more egregious than any other that comes to mind is that it seems to have been made selectively and without good reason.
Again, very disingenuous. Kids were getting hurt, it's not like the CPSC was making that up. "Good reason" is obviously subjective but the important thing is that it wasn't arbitrary: accidents involving children requiring abdominal surgery are something approximately 100% of us can agree shouldn't happen, regardless of the cause.
You also seem to misunderstand the argument here. If you had read the article, you would know that even when taken out of physical stores the CPSC continued to push for a banning of the Buckyballs. So clearly this legislation isn't about eliminating it from toy stores, as that already happened and wasn't sufficient for the CPSC.
I'm very much not trying to be disingenuous, I realize children were harmed. However, if that is the simple criteria we are using to determine businesses to legislate away then the selective enforcement is even more worrying.
It's plausible that they might become overzealous, sloppy, subject to some unforeseen corruption, etc. Your previous assertion that they might begin censoring speech strikes me as rather over the top.
We all know that people have a hard time identifying and reasoning about high-cost, low-probability risks. The government, because it's aggregating numbers over practically all the hospitals in the country, can identify these oddball cases -- these cases are hard for individuals to discern.
So, they found one -- a service in itself. But, what to do? I don't want to have to keep track of all these oddball risks (un-obvious, and with no significant upside). So, as in the case of various bassinet, bicycle, handrail, and staircase design errors, they are made off limits.
Easier for everyone. Next problem.
I'm all for the government continuing to act as a consumer's advocate, as they should be. However I do not feel comfortable when the government makes these decisions for me.
The CPSC ruling is only devastating to Buckyballs because they are primarily marketed and sold as toys, and when they stop being able to do that, far fewer people will buy them.
I still fail to see your logic that this legislation will prevent these magnets from being sold to people who want them as a novelty. When taken completely out of physical stores sales held steady. The market has clearly communicated a demand, and they will buy them whether they are marketed as novelty toys are not.
If the CPSC's main goal is to prevent Buckyballs from coming into contact with toddlers this band aid legislation seems like a laughable effort.
And, if you're a complete freaking moron and buy magnets and stuff them into the mouths of your children, well, not to sound too callous, but the CPSC isn't going to care so much about those magnets.
They'll probably care more about the quantity of lead paint you must have somehow ingested to make such a dumb decision.
The issue is that I think that said ban will affect the structure of the market for such products, which (if I am correct in thinking this) will affect me by raising the cost of said products and reducing the quality of said products and related accessories/packaging.
Given that I regard the CPSC's process of making decision based on the existing statistics as misinformed, it seems entirely reasonable to me to regard this as a problem. Where exactly am I going wrong here?
Because . . . ?
> . . . but so what?
Well, I obviously care somewhat about your opinion. Otherwise I wouldn't have posted all this stuff. And you obviously care somewhat about the existence of this marketing campaign (that being essentially what this piece of news is). Otherwise you wouldn't have posted all this stuff.
Do you agree the issue is deciding where the government chooses to intervene with a "shall not" directive, or do you reject such directives entirely?
Your argument is that Buckyballs do not appear as dangerous as they are. However, there are so many products that, if used incorrectly, are dangerous. They may seem harmless but once you swallow them or put them over your head, they turn deadly.
Where do we draw the line? Can the CPSC really hope to judge every product and determine whether it is safe for the general public to consume? Do you truly not see this as a case of selective enforcement?
I will admit I am biased. I am the developer who built and maintains the buckyballs website. This is going to hurt me directly, as I am losing one of my biggest clients. They are going to be laying off a number of other staff as well.
Balloons require warning labels, and some balloon applications that previously used latex balloons now use mylar for safety reasons. Balloon casualties are as a result declining. Despite increased safety labeling, reported harm from tiny magnets was steadily increasing.
When the CPSC banned lawn darts, the companies that manufactured that toy also had to lay off staff.
I need to do some digging, but the last time I saw the statistics, balloons were responsible for exponentially higher numbers of hospital visits and deaths than magnets. Buckyballs have never resulted in a death, whereas balloons cause numerous deaths every year.
Do you think that balloons should be outlawed as well?
Edit: This is where I am getting my stats from:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eliyahu-federman/banning-bucky...
> CPSC indicates that approximately 22 children were injured from Buckyball magnets since their release in 2009. Not a single fatality was reported.
Your data comes from The Huffington Post attempting to recap a CBS News report. Mine comes directly from the CPSC Proposed Rule, which includes methodological information. What's happening, it appears is that CBS is reporting a single sample set number, and not an epidemiological conclusion. Which is another reason I'm happy that CPSC does this work and not, say, HuffPo.
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml12/12037.html
>Reports of incidents involving these high-powered ball-bearing magnets have increased since 2009. Specifically, CPSC received one incident report in 2009, seven in 2010 and 14 through October 2011. These 22 incidents have involved children ranging in age from 18 months to 15 years old. Of the reported incidents, 17 involved magnet ingestion and 11 required surgical removal of the magnets. When a magnet has to be removed surgically, it often requires the repair of the child's damaged stomach and intestines.
Hardly 1700 emergency room visits.
Edit:
I think this focus on the numbers is silly. One incident is too many, and even if no children had ever been harmed it would still be important to properly educate the people about the dangers of the product. But I do believe that a wholesale ban is using a shotgun as a flyswatter. It doesn't solve the root problem (uneducated parents or inattentive parenting). Why not focus on making sure the public informed about the dangers of all kinds of products that could potentially harm their children, rather than trying to ban them one by one? It just seems like the wrong way to go about this.
> Reported incidents involving children continued to increase unabated from 8 cases in 2010, 17 cases in 2011, and 25 cases in 2012 (as of July 8, 2012). Twenty two incidents were reported before the PSA; 28 more followed during the eight months after it. A high percentage of the injuries resulted in surgeries or other invasive procedures. Of the 50 reports known to staff, 22 required surgery, and 10 required either invasive procedures such as endoscopies or colonoscopies. In 2011, and into spring 2012, staff continued to identify additional firms offering this product on the Internet with labeling and marketing violations.
It seems that 1,700 number consists mostly of cases where children visited the emergency room, were treated, and sent home, with no surgery required. This means your earlier statement:
>In the same year, more than 500 kids were treated in the emergency room for ingesting small rare earth magnets; according to the APA, "almost every one" of those cases required endoscopic surgery
Is incorrect. The number of incidents that required surgery is very low--in the double digits.
I think this argument has reached a stalemate. I'm obviously not going to change your point of view, and I concede that you are entitled to your own opinion and I can't fault you for it. However, I am glad I am able to make my own case and go on the record that I feel this is a case of selective enforcement that will achieve very little when it comes to children's safety.
You still have not responded to my question about balloons. Do you feel they should receive a similar ban? By your logic it seems like they should. They seem to be, at the very least, somewhat dangerous for children (and certainly more dangerous than they appear).
I would never want to earn a living at the expense of children's lives. We are not bad people. But I honestly do not believe that Buckyballs are as dangerous as they are being made out to be. In addition, I see no reason why a product such as Buckyballs should be uniformly banned when there are millions of responsible adults who enjoy them safely and appropriately. There are no children in my household, and if a child is going to come visit, I make sure there is nothing around that could possibly harm them. I would put alway bottles of liquor, cover power outlets, make sure there are no lighters on the coffee table, and ensure that no buckyballs are within reach. I believe that responsible adults, with appropriate warnings and instructions, should be able to enjoy adult-only products within their home. If I had a toddler running around I would absolutely not have buckyballs in my home.
There is no substitute for proper and attentive parenting. All the bans in the world are not going to save a child who is left to roam around swallowing anything they come across.
No, I don't think we should ban balloons.
I think you're wrong about how dangerous super-strong toy magnets are, but I don't see anyone involved in Buckyballs as trying to "earn a living at the expense of children's lives". We can definitely disagree about this without moralizing.
I think the CPSC is making a sound policy decision here --- and, more importantly to me, is being more carefully empirical than Buckyball's Internet advocates are being.
"No parents can watch all of their kids 100% of the time. The best way to protect kids is to design these risks out of existence." -- Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-02-22-1Achok...
I feel that this is a sad state of affairs.
We have designed many of the risks out of cars too, and I for one appreciate that.
More broadly, and more importantly, designing risk out of our environment gives us less fodder for the development of our own faculties for risk judgment, and therefore makes us more dependent on external articles and less so on intelligence and caution for our safety, and this ironically makes is more risky for us to explore aspects of the world which haven't been already made artificially safe, and more subject to danger if the external sources of risk should shift.
In other words, maintaining risk-free environments ultimately makes us less adaptable, makes the prospect of change riskier, and therefore reduces our evolutionary fitness.
(http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/7393684/Fake-piercing...)
I'm not saying this is a valid reason to ban the sale of these items. (Sell anything, so long as you make clear warnings about non-obvious risks. Thus, a chainsaw doesn't need much warnings, because it's a chainsaw. But little magnetic balls which are very appealing to children but also dangerous - yep, give them some clear warnings.)
I think it's much less likely that you actually mean this, and more likely that you haven't read much about the CPSC's side of this story.
Anyway, I was referring to tptacek's apparent failure to consider that someone might think some finite number of deaths acceptable.
The only ways out (that I can see) are to either talk about the disagreement itself or ignore each other and go back to lobbyist fights.
I kind of agree. That's why I mentioned chainsaws. This instruction manuel for a Stihl chainsaw is, I think, good. There are many pages of warnings. Most of them are informative and address real problems - page 4 talks about why this chainsaw is a special use saw. There are no "Don't hold the wrong end" warnings here.
(http://www.stihlusa.com/WebContent/CMSFileLibrary/instructio...)
Some things are dangerous. Everyone can reasonably know they're dangerous, and we don't need to withdraw those items from sale. Other items are dangerous, but those dangers are not obvious, and even though we put warnings on the objects we still find people being harmed.
Again, I'm not sure that harm is enough to force some items off the market. Maybe just bigger, better, warnings.
The problem isn't that magnets are inherently unsafe, or even that tiny round magnets are unsafe. It's that this particular packaging of tiny round magnets is unsafe.
There's a lot of really fun things a conscientious person can do with fire, electricity, strong acid, or liquid nitrogen. But nobody's been dumb enough to put them in colorful packages with "Not For Children Under 14" on the label.
Nobody cares, because everybody is used to these things. We are satisfied when manufactures put nasty labels on the bottles.
There is a gap between how dangerous magnets technically can be when ingested, and the actual harm they are causing. Yeah, if you swallow them you are pretty much due for an ER visit... but in reality this is an edge case that we should not be wasting our time worrying about.
^ http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/Poisoning/poiso...
Parents give their children tick-tacks (because it's just candy, so why not?) and children see their parents getting "candy" out of medicine bottles. When some of them inevitably come across dangerous medication (which happen to be small and easy to lose...), some of them will pop it in their mouth with the fairly reasonable expectation that it will taste good.
How parents perceive the danger of any of these things is not particularly relevant, particularly in the case of medication. The question we should be asking is how much harm are they actually causing.
Cleaning supply marketing and children vitamins cause far more deaths than magnets could ever dream of causing.
Incidentally: I just looked it up, and it looks like children's vitamins? Also less dangerous, epidemiologically, than rare earth magnets. I find that surprising; maybe you can find a better study that shows how often they kill kids.
The damage done by children vitamins, primarily the ones that are dressed up to look like candy, is actually dealt out by the prescription medication that children swallow and die. The danger children vitamins pose would still be present if they were nothing but sugar pills (and sugar pills that look exactly like medication are dangerous as well).
How many parents of poisoned children have heard "I thought it was candy!"?
That you and the other parents you know are reasonably paranoid about the danger of vitamins and other medications is commendable, but thousands of kids are still being lethally poisoned. If the injuries to children from magnets are enough to concern us, then the poisonings should concern us even more so.
Again: I perceive your argument to be that if the government is going to regulate products, it should sort products by the number of injuries or fatalities they cause and proceed from the top of the list downwards.
My argument is that this isn't the government's M.O.; they don't see it as their mission to eliminate all risk, or even the risk of bad parenting. Instead, their issue is with products that appear to be much much safer than they are. Their concern is literally constrained to marketing, and nothing else. I do not see how you get around the fact that tiny round rare earth magnets sold in sets of 200 are, in actual fact, way the hell more dangerous than their colorful fun packaging makes them seem. Zen Magnets appears to suggest wearing them!
I think I have done all that reasonably I can to make my point of view clear, short of writing an essay, but it is still not understood. I'm not continuing this.
This is not a concern I have invented: http://www.ncpoisoncenter.org/body.cfm?id=115 http://voices.yahoo.com/separating-candy-medicine-prevent-me...
They specifically call out parents calling medication "candy". This is apparently something that parents do with enough frequency to warrant calling out. As far as I am concerned, candy-like vitamin supplements are no better.
I would suggest that prescription medication manufactures stop making medicine in bright colors and fun shapes, however I suspect the harm done by such a suggestion in the form of accidental adult poisonings would outweigh the benefits.
I would therefore argue, were I inclined to, that candy and vitamin companies should modify their products. I would not advocate prescription medication companies altering anything.
So my thesis: confusion between medication and candy kills thousands of children every year. There are trivial things we can go after in an attempt to curb this phenomenon (to repeat: tell vitamin and candy companies to knock it off). Nobody is calling for these trivial measures, even though they seem greatly concerned about a problem with much smaller magnitude. The reason for this incongruity is that candies and vitamins are familiar, while magnet toys are new and striking.
I feel like this kind of makes my case for me: Buckyballs was marketing a desk toy that turns out epidemiologically to be more dangerous to children than leaving a chemistry set unattended on a desk.
I'll also make the further point that chemistry sets aren't actually that dangerous (and never were). 'More dangerous than chemistry sets' is a largely meaningless statistic.
As an aside, I don't see much effective difference between a legal crackdown and one caused by fixing the social context.
'Some degree of danger reduction' just doesn't qualify as a catch-all justification for regulatory action. At least not with me.
And in the magnet case, larger magnets are plenty fun while still being much safer.
And no, people shouldn't be doing this, but these things look completely harmless. They're not poisonous and they're small enough to pass without harm, so what's the big deal?
I think that's what it comes down to. The danger these things pose isn't terribly large, but it's far larger than what a typical reasonable person would perceive as the danger.
One major issue is consistency- the sizes between colors or even individual balls in the same set varies quite a bit. If you create a flat plane (one height, whatever length and width) or magnets with both the Zenmagnets and the Buckyballs, the Zenmagnets will be level all around while the Buckyballs have different sized. This causes some to bulge out, making that level plane actually quiet bumpy looking.
The other problem is that the coating they use over the actual neodymium is very cheap. The longer you own the Buckyballs the more of it breaks off. The Zenmagnets are going to last quite a bit longer, and not break down in your hands just because you let them snap together too hard.
How is the CPSC planning to implement this ban? Prohibit this exact combination? Or ban everybody that sells them in a package that looks vaguely toy-like? Are they ok if the packaging looks boring and industrial? Where do they draw the line? The CPSC is going to have a lot of explaining to do.
Contrary to knee-jerk Internet opinion, the CPSC is not out to rid the country of small round magnets.