Six Retailers Announce Recall of Buckyballs and Buckycubes 343
thereitis writes "The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), in cooperation with six retailers, is announcing the voluntary recall of all Buckyballs and Buckycubes high-powered magnet sets due to ingestion hazard. CPSC continues to warn that these products contain defects in the design, warnings and instructions, which pose a substantial risk of injury and death to children and teenagers. An administrative complaint has been filed which is rare, as CPSC has filed only four administrative complaints in the past 11 years."
This follows last year's ban on buckyballs.
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does this even need a warning? If you're too stupid not to understand to either A) not ingest these, or B) not give them to someone not old enough to know better, then by all means, swallow them all, then go get an MRI.
Yay, we can stop this pernicious danger! (Score:5, Insightful)
But if it's guns, well, we can't even suggest that background checks should be implemented or the NRA will unleash a titanic fury of political money to get what they want.
ffs (Score:5, Insightful)
Lawyers (Score:1, Insightful)
Why pandering government officials need to die screaming like pigs in Hell [huffingtonpost.com].
This is just ridiculous. Hell, just the infinitesimal decrease in future scientists because some kids won't be mesmerized will slow technological development enough to cause, by lack of invention, deaths to occur that wouldn't otherwise.
Lawyers are indistinguishable from a disease on the body of the populace. A parasite -- an organism that exists drawing resources from the host organism, and causing degradation to the host organism.
Re:Yay, we can stop this pernicious danger! (Score:5, Insightful)
Relax. We're laughing that "think of the children" claimed your toys, too.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
My 5 year old gets to play with my set, but the 3 year old (who doesn't eat toys) has close supervision, especially since these look like dragee, candy he has had before.
The problem is that a proper warning is hard when everything is deadly already. I'm surprised bottled water doesn't come with a DHMO warning label. When everything has a warning on it, adding a real warning to something that looks safe doesn't have proper effect. People don't read warnings when everything comes with 100 warnings.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't read warnings when everything comes with 100 warnings.
Very good point. Or they read them and laugh.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assuming that the reason for the warnings is to save lives...
It's actually purely to get themselves off the hook after lives are lost. Plausible deniability!
Re:A growing problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Smoking is a problem. Motor vehicle accidents are a problem. Guns related deaths (some say it isn't) are a problem.
A product that has sold 2.2million sets resulting in 33 surgical procedures and 1 death since 2010 is NOT a problem.
Re: death to children and teenagers. (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah, ignorant liberals who use words like Murricans - don't understand that the government's job is to take any role granted to it by its citizens and then do it in the most ludicrously inefficient and inept way possible. Big Government doesn't work, not in a country of real scale in terms of population, resources, and economy. It doesn't matter what political flavor that government is.
This really is a basic engineering problem, not a political one. Think scaling servers for a large online service, or scaling human effort on a large coding project like the Linux kernel, if you have no background in the history of world governments (or at least, any real insight into how moderns ones are doing) to draw similar lessons from.
On the small scale, centralized planning and execution can work. 50 people can start a commune, elect one really smart guy as Supreme Leader, let him dictate everything, and if he's benevolent it probably works out pretty well. He can plan what crops they grow and how food is shared, how work responsibilities are doled out, what behaviors are taboo, etc. He's a one-man government. This is basically how most small businesses operate: one or a few at the helm that kinda know what they're doing, centrally controlling a small array of complex bits. Or to jump over to other analogies again: a small but reasonably successful niche open source product, or a small website that has 10 visitors a day and is hoted on some crappy shared webhost service in a single VM.
Consider the other end of the spectrum: A country of the scale of the US, or Russia, or China (or really any of the next tier down in size either...), the Linux kernel project, a behemoth corporation like GE, a website like Wikipedia. Can you imagine what it would be like for one person to centrally plan the minutiae of any of these entities (or in the case of Wikipedia: having one server directly involved in coordinating all traffic and edits in realtime, instead of a distributed and scalable approach).
It can't happen: thing naturally become hierarchical and/or distributed, because anything else is crazy. Hierarchical only scales so far, but makes more intuitive sense to puny humans that are merely a few hundred years past the "Hey, we need to take baths regularly?" stage of societal evolution. So big governments and big corporations tend to be hierarchical. It's better than nothing, but it still doesn't scale that great. It's like moving from linear scaling to n/4 scaling or something.
Wikipedia knows how to scale servers: be distributed to the extent possible, avoid centralized contention points in the architecture. The Linux kernel project knows how to scale human effort in much the same way. GE doesn't really get "distributed human effort", they're still hierarchical. But: they're a hierarchical organization that, amongst a pool of millions of other competitors, *evolved* to be one of the best competitors ever. It's been honed for decades by market forces, and it's probably about as efficient as a behemoth hierarchical corporation can get. The US government (or any other large-scale government, of any political "type")? No real market force action: You get a little of it from geo-politics, but the pool's too small and things move too slow. Even bigger scale. The self-righteous mandate mentality that they are the law. I dare you to find any common task that both the US government and a corporation do, where the government does it more efficiently.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really?! Now that wouldn't be very smart, would it?
Just like swallowing magnets in the first place.
I think he did mean MRI for exactly that reason :)
(My apologies for my sarcasm)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, my boy, you clearly haven't been to an MRI scan before. Just try to go into the chamber with your glasses on, and see the reaction of the operator.
Nope, my boy, you clearly haven't been exposed to sarcasm before. Just try and go on Slashdot without it, and see the reaction of the intertubes.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
CPSC has received 54 reports of children and teens ingesting this product, with 53 of these requiring medical interventions.
Sounds like Darwinism in action. Young children, I can understand, but teens?
Re:ffs (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:A growing problem (Score:4, Insightful)
No. But it's damn well higher than one. As a quick guide think of the things we as a society take for granted and then consider how many people get killed by it each year.
But then it's not a case of absolutes either. The primary purpose of buckyballs is not to be eaten. As such a child related death due to ingestion is simple bad supervision by parents. Accidental deaths are attributed to all manner of products used improperly. A teenager got killed opening a computer powersupply, does that mean we should ban all computers? On the other hand a safety device like a seatbelt pretensioner failing and causing one death over a three year period is cause for alarm as the device failed to perform it's primary purpose.
Re:Incredibly stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
So the kid, who is 12 and should have known better, went into his fathers office, climbed up the shelf, pulled down metal balls and proceeded to eat them.
The kid didn't just ate them for the fun of it, it swallowed them accidentally while pretending to have a pierced tongue. You might still call that stupid, but that's well in the realm of normal child stupidity (I for one prefer to call that creativity).
These are not children's toys
It's looks like a toy, it plays like a toy and is fun like a toy. The very problem with them is that it is not obvious how dangerous those things can be.
Re: Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't appear to be the case. Look, for example at this reference [cdc.gov], where several magnets had stuck together and yet caused problems. These appear to have been larger than buckyballs, but the idea is that they can loop back and pinch the bowel even if they are stuck together.
Even a cursory glance at the literature is a bit scary. The problem is that MOST things that kids swallow are pretty harmless and therefore not brought to anyone's attention. We don't know the numbers of kids that swallow magnets yet have no problems - they certainly exist - so the reporting bias is going to be fairly high.
But I personally would keep kids away from these things. They just don't need to play with them just yet.
Labelling (Score:4, Insightful)
When I was living in the US, I enjoyed showing my German friends labels from water bottles that listed 0% fat, with the comment: "Look, they sell fat-free water in the US, quite unlike all the fatty water that is being sold in Germany!" ;-)
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, the problem is that people are idiots, even smart people. On one of the previous /. discussions there were a surprising number of people who posted comments talking about how they'd swallowed all kinds of metal objects as kids, many of which were sharp, and swallowing something round like Buckyballs is no big deal - it's just the nanny state kicking up a fuss about nothing. They did this in response to an article which described, in fairly graphic detail, exactly why swallowing strong magnets was more dangerous than other small metal objects and the actual injuries that had resulted from it.
Re: Seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)
And yet, a comment about how it would be no big deal if you swallowed them all at once has been voted up to +5, Insightful on a site supposedly full of smart people. Gee, I wonder why the CPSC felt the need to try and recall them, given how good everyone's understanding of the risks resulting from swallowing them is.