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> What are the practical, non-entertainment benefits of magnet balls? If there aren't any -- if they're a toy, a novelty -- it seems completely fair to hold them to a higher standard.

By the same token, we could argue that movies should be banned because the images can trigger PTSD and epileptic seizures, and movies have no practical, non-entertainment benefits.

It's one thing to say that a product should be re-designed to provide the same utility in a safer manner if that's an option. But it is not the government's place to make wholesale subjective decisions about utility to begin with. That is, it's one thing to require that Ford fix the design flaw in the Pinto that made it conducive to explosions because no one really wants an exploding car. It's another to ban cars altogether because public transit provides a safer alternative to personal automobiles.

What is the practical benefit of a back yard pool (drowning apparatus), beer stein (poisoning apparatus), or a sports car (trauma apparatus)?

[I assume this must be a troll, since if this were taken to its logical conclusion, it advocates a Soviet style command and control society. No laughing, smiling, or running with scissors allowed.]

Your slippery-slope approach is fatuous. It is a completely nihilistic approach to any sort of legal system that involves regulations and penalties for breaking them.

It is a completely fair point to ask where on the realm of regulated toys buckyball-style magnets fall. Someone doesn't have to be a troll just because they disagree with you.

Also, what is with your last sentence? Are you suggesting that not allowing running with scissors is indicative of creeping authoritarianism? You would have been disappointed with every teacher I had, then.

edit: thanks for the downvotes. A useful reminder to me to never discuss anything with libertarians.

> Also, what is with your last sentence?

Do you have issues with hyperbole? You seem to have taken it literally.

>>> What are the practical, non-entertainment benefits of magnet balls?

Who cares? In a free country, any benefit that I see for myself would be enough to allow me to purchase the item, without explaining it to you or anybody else. How is it that you decided you have the right to define what is and is not beneficial for me? What gave you that right? How is it fair for you to tell me "I think you're not smart enough to handle a couple of metal balls without killing yourself" and feel all smug and righteous as if you've saved my life, instead as a petty busybody who just made my life (and a life of thousands other people) a little worse for no reason at all, while shuttering perfectly good company, and causing a lot of loss and waste of money and effort? What exactly allows you to feel you're being anything even in the general direction of "fair" when you take on yourself to decide my needs for me? Do you enjoy other people telling you what is and is not of benefit for you?

You can buy water and cars too. A set of zenmagnets is no more a suicide via intestinal pinching kit than a gallon of water is a drowning kit.

There are millions of things on the market that you can kill yourself with; when would you say that personal responsibility should come into play?

Also, magnet sets are educational as well as entertaining.

If you leave a gallon of water on a table unattended it is very unlikely any passing child will use that gallon of water to drown themselves.

All this pretending that the practical differences between this product and all these other things is trivial drives me a little crazy.

If I leave a handful of magnets sitting on a table unattended in my apartment, the odds that a child will eat them are absolutely zero, since neither I nor anyone I know has kids. If they did, I probably wouldn't let the kids in my apartment if they're still at the putting-random-things-in-their-mouth stage and their parents can't keep them from eating other people's things.

What kind of a shitty parent leaves small objects unattended around small children? Only a complete moron would do that.

What about scissors? Pencils? Knives? Everyone has these things in their homes, and you could just as easily leave them on the table as you could a set of magnets.

What drives me crazy are people who want the federal government to micromanage every aspect of their lives, even as it repeatedly proves to us that it is too corrupt/incompetent to do pretty much anything right.

There's plenty of shitty parents around, but the type of parent who is interested in magnetic spheres is not likely to be a shitty parent.

Scissors, pencils, knives: All things safer than these magnets. Empirically true.

The bad parent argument is garbage. If I visit someone's house or bring one of my little ones with me to my accountants or lawyer's office I don't expect to need to be ultra-vigilant, it should be a generally safe environment. I want to live in a society where that is true.

> Empirically true.

Can you cite stats for that claim?

Add up all the rare earth magnet toy sets in America.

Add up all the scissors, pencils, and knives in America.

Look up the injuries/fatalities to children caused by each.

Viola!

Yes, those are the stats I asked you to cite to back your claim.

If you're going to claim your opinion as fact, it's just rude to be a dick when you're called on it. At least admit that it's not 'empirically true' - or, perhaps more to the point, that you don't actually know.

I am not being a dick. That what I said is true is so obvious I am not going to bother digging up a bunch of stats to justify it. It is a waste of time.

This comment ended up doing the work for me, and demonstrates my point. But then based on the numbers somehow concludes that it demonstrates the opposite.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138774

How many houses in the world have pencils in them? Pretty close to every single one, how someone concludes from the injury rate cited that they are more dangerous than these magnetic toys is beyond my understanding.

That comment goes so far as to note that over 40% of the incidents reported in the last 10 years occurred in 2013, how that does not make one think that maybe the recent prevalence of these powerful magnets could be related is also puzzling to me.

So I did a quick search for actual statistics here at CPSC website where they collect data on this sort of thing[1]. Here are the results:

http://imgur.com/a/E35py

Essentially, for 2013, there were 559 injuries sampled from pens and pencils among people aged 1 month to 15 years old. There were 297 from scissors - although I might have missed a few classification product codes for scissors, there were quite a few. There were 219 sampled injuries from building sets, of which magnetic balls are included.

However, these are the sample counts. The Historical Estimate I believe is the total injuries over the time period selected. Building sets is by far the least, 2500 less than scissors and almost 10000 less than pens and pencils.

I then read through those cases. In the 219 cases, magnet is mentioned 13 times. Swallow is mentioned 58 times, but I assume this includes other building sets such as Legos, Knex etc.

13/219*6800 = 403 magnetic swallowing injuries over 2013.

This [2] report from the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition mentions 480 magnet ingestions over the past 10 years, roughly 204 occurring over 2013.

There is an argument to be made over severity of injury I believe, but via the numbers, these balls are not as dangerous as scissors or pencils and pens. I frankly find this attempt at a ban ridiculous. What if a child swallows staples? Thumbtacks? These all are things that can be left on a desk that would cause significant injury.

Please correct me if I’m wrong with my interpretation of the data.

[1] http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Research--Statistics/NEISS-Injury-Dat...

[2] http://www.consumerreports.org/content/dam/cro/news_articles...

I believe your interpretation of this data is incorrect. Given the relatively infrequent contact children would have with magnets strong enough to be dangerous as compared to all of these items that are found in every home in America and most certainly in every home with children in America the rates indicate the opposite.

Think of all the confounding factors here such as ages 1 month to 15 years - older children are far more likely to be injuring themselves with knives, the population at risk from these magnets is generally under 10 years old. Think of just how rarely a child in America makes contact with one of these magnets as opposed to the other objects. All children in the school age range are practically forced to be in contact with a pencil for hours a day every weekday for ten months.

PS: I do really appreciate that you looked these numbers up though.

A gallon of water? You can—and lots of people do—buy a pool. And that poses a far greater risk to children than some magnets!

Pools are basically children-magnets, anyway.

If they swallow two of them, it risks puncturing their intestines.

Upvoted even though I disagree because I think you make the best argument for regulation.

The problem is, it isn't safe to have non-elected bureaucrats making law, either. But that is not something I can get around by being cautions or well-informed.

Of course, it also isn't safe to have elected representatives pass massive bills that they haven't read. So I'm not saying that being elected magically makes everything OK.

> only one -- poison -- is an example of an actual product you can buy (nobody's selling home drowning kits)

They're also not selling magnet ingestion kits

>What are the practical, non-entertainment benefits of magnet balls?

Keep your laws off my balls, nanny-stater.

I guess humor should be banned too.