Here's one for the annals of FRK....
Jan. 7th, 2010 12:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=130287&catid=339
This kid was running around the living room and, in a freak accident that nobody could've possibly predicted, shocked herself on (possibly) a USB cord.
If there have been other such cases in the past, nobody can find them with Google. Although the reporter does say "some other articles" state that you should be careful of the shock risk of cords and kids, those articles aren't cited in any sort of detail, making me think that that's because the reporters for those articles did exactly as much research as Channel Nine News - that is, they went to Google because they were out of ideas.
I heard about this through a post imploring us all to "unplug our USB cords". One freak accident and all of a sudden it's "better safe than sorry".
Meanwhile, thousands of children every year are killed in car accidents, and who says better safe than sorry about that? Oh, they say safer. They buy carseats. They drive the speed limit (more or less). But the real solution to this problem is to stop driving. To start - now - restructuring our society so that there is good, efficient, and effective public transportation taking you wherever you want to go, and so that you can walk most places you need to go anyway unless you live all the way out in the boondocks.
This is an actual problem, and as near as I can tell that is the only real solution - all the carseats and seatbelts in the world make you safer, but not as safe as safe, you know?
But no, that's not going to happen. It's too hard to restructure. It's too inconvenient to change. Fair enough - but if we can't change because of something that is provably killing children every day, and leaving more than that orphaned? For sure I don't want to be harangued into unplugging my damn USB cords and taking down my curtains and locking my toilet every time some kid, somewhere, coughs a little funny. (Doctors are "optimistic" about her recovery anyway, so yay for her.) We're never going to get rid of these little accidents. It's just not gonna happen.
On a similar note, I want my shoes back. It is profoundly stupid the way the TSA manages security, and everybody knows it, so why do we all still do it? Clearly, we can't stop everybody, and it's folly to even try. There will always be somebody clever enough or desperate enough or determined enough to find that one way through that nobody has thought of yet, so why not cover all the obvious reasons and focus our energies on making people not want to blow us up for the lulz? Or would that make too much sense? (Planes: Much like USB cords, they're safer than cars. And, like USB cords, that has nothing to do with the Terminally Stupid Annoyances.)
This kid was running around the living room and, in a freak accident that nobody could've possibly predicted, shocked herself on (possibly) a USB cord.
If there have been other such cases in the past, nobody can find them with Google. Although the reporter does say "some other articles" state that you should be careful of the shock risk of cords and kids, those articles aren't cited in any sort of detail, making me think that that's because the reporters for those articles did exactly as much research as Channel Nine News - that is, they went to Google because they were out of ideas.
I heard about this through a post imploring us all to "unplug our USB cords". One freak accident and all of a sudden it's "better safe than sorry".
Meanwhile, thousands of children every year are killed in car accidents, and who says better safe than sorry about that? Oh, they say safer. They buy carseats. They drive the speed limit (more or less). But the real solution to this problem is to stop driving. To start - now - restructuring our society so that there is good, efficient, and effective public transportation taking you wherever you want to go, and so that you can walk most places you need to go anyway unless you live all the way out in the boondocks.
This is an actual problem, and as near as I can tell that is the only real solution - all the carseats and seatbelts in the world make you safer, but not as safe as safe, you know?
But no, that's not going to happen. It's too hard to restructure. It's too inconvenient to change. Fair enough - but if we can't change because of something that is provably killing children every day, and leaving more than that orphaned? For sure I don't want to be harangued into unplugging my damn USB cords and taking down my curtains and locking my toilet every time some kid, somewhere, coughs a little funny. (Doctors are "optimistic" about her recovery anyway, so yay for her.) We're never going to get rid of these little accidents. It's just not gonna happen.
On a similar note, I want my shoes back. It is profoundly stupid the way the TSA manages security, and everybody knows it, so why do we all still do it? Clearly, we can't stop everybody, and it's folly to even try. There will always be somebody clever enough or desperate enough or determined enough to find that one way through that nobody has thought of yet, so why not cover all the obvious reasons and focus our energies on making people not want to blow us up for the lulz? Or would that make too much sense? (Planes: Much like USB cords, they're safer than cars. And, like USB cords, that has nothing to do with the Terminally Stupid Annoyances.)
