Tempest in a teapot

[unixronin]

The health blog on the New York Times has a column about the deadly danger to small children posed swallowing by various types of button-cell batteries.  This terrible danger happens THOUSANDS OF TIMES PER YEAR!!!  Well ... OK, maybe a few hundred ... no?  Ten to a dozen?

Well, OK, ALMOST ten.  ...Over the past six years.

Three hundred and forty million people, more or less, in the United States.  And in any given year, one or two of them swallow a button-cell battery and die as a result.

So, let's see ... how does that compare to other common risks?  No, wait: let's compare to RARE risks.  Oh, yes, here we go:  You are fifty times more likely to be struck and killed by lightning in any given year than you are to die from swallowing a button-cell battery.

But wait, not everyone who swallows a battery dies.  What about all the children that don't die, but still suffer serious injuries?

Well, the article says that's about a hundred people per year in the US at present, up from about fifteen per year in 1985. Out of three hundred and forty million.  That's, um ... gee. 130 times less than the number of people aged fifteen and under injured on those deadly, death-trap contrivances, bicycles, each year.  (About 13,000 in 2009.)  Hell, it's almost the number of 15-and-unders killed on bicycles in 2009 (93).

Well, we all knew bicycles were dangerous.  How about something nice and safe like the school playground?

ZOMG!!!  About two hundred thousand playground injuries per year among the 14-and-under set, about 90,000 of them severe (fractures, concussions, internal injuries, amputations etc).

Well, OK ... how about food?  Food's nice and safe, isn't it?

Well ... since you mention it ... actually, not so much.  WebMD says between 66 and 77 children under 10 die each year after choking on foods, and 10,000 children under age 15 are treated in emergency departments. Three quarters of those are children under 3 years old.  Even more deaths and choking injuries result from "swallowing balloons and small toys".

But Ms. Parker-Pope thinks we have an imminent crisis that desperately needs attention, because one to two people per year are dying from ingesting button cell batteries and maybe a hundred are being seriously injured.  We need to secure all battery compartments, everywhere, right away.

Or then again, Ms. Parker-Pope, maybe we could all start paying attention again to what our kids are getting into.  And maybe you could find something productive to do with the time on your hands, of which you appear to have rather too much if you have time to get all in a tizzy about a hazard so rare that, frankly, it's lost in the statistical noise.

Sometimes I swear we're actively breeding people for stupidity.

Comments

[ithildae]

Two comments come to mind;

A zealot is someone who can't change their mind, and won't change the subject. -- W. Churchill

and

...
Time after time, we lose sight of the way.
Our causes can't see their effects.

[merlinpendragon]

Well put.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I swear we're actively breeding people for stupidity.

Well, that, and the fact that there are an awful lot of people with entirely too much time on their hands and not nearly enough worth a damn to fill it with. Like the aforementioned Mrs. Parker-Pope. Who is probably a lawyer with a stake in frivolous lawsuits over such things. Or married to such a lawyer. Or is going to get an inheritance from one. Meanwhile, the Gulf of Mexico is dying because of a President and an oil company who weren't paying attention. But Mrs. Parker-Pope doesn't care about that. She's far too busy ferreting out possible causes for litigation.

[mrakg.livejournal.com]

Two issues:

1) I agree with your assessment of Mrs. Parker-Pope. She's obviously hoping to make the Litigation Lottery pay off big.

2) Now for a grumble: OK, aside from putting on some Speedos, taking a deep breath, diving down to the well, and crushing the pipe shut with his mighty bare hands, what was The President supposed to _do_? It's become readily apparent that the White House's biggest error in this was believing BP & Halliburton.

Remember - the US Government has absolutely nothing (aside from the much-discussed nuke) that can deal with this. I despised Bush and Clinton, but wouldn't have been gleefully jumping up and down to blame them, had it happened on their watches.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Dubya would have figured out what kind of team should have been put together to deal with this within a very few days after consulting with the Army Corps of Engineers, the Seabees, geologists, and people from other disciplines having to do with the situation, and then would have sicced them on the situation, to do the jobs they do best. But Obama didn't move on this decisively for weeks, and when he finally did, he was still trailing along behind BP, who themselves had dragged their heels for way too long before tackling this situation the way they should have right at the beginning. Even now, BP has steadfastly refused to employ people who actually have good track-records when it comes to cleaning up great oil spills like this. It has been more concerned with damage-control on its PR image than fixing the damned leak, and as the days have gone by the harm done to the living Gulf of Mexico has gotten greater and greater. This is unconscionable. And all Obama does is spout noises that sound good and mean nothing. Dubya's a businessman, and acts like it. Businessmen are trained to solve problems by identifying who the best ones for the job are and putting them together to do that job. Obama is trained for -- what? The results are as you see.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

And all Obama does is spout noises that sound good and mean nothing.

Frankly, that's his specialty. And even for that, he's dependent on his teleprompter.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

It's pretty bad when your teleprompter is a blithering idiot. ;-)

[mrakg.livejournal.com]

The Seebees have already gone on record to state that they have nothing...yet.

Ditto, ACE. [Who, despite their negative cachet here in Atlanta, are damn good]

As for delay: Yes, there was. It's unconscionable, and a large chunk of it is directly attributable to bad information from BP/Halliburton.

Dubya never impressed me as a businessman, but that's another issue.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Look, the whole thing has become obscenely academic: by the end of this summer, the oil will have drifted out into the Atlantic and maybe also into the Caribbean, wrecking ecosystem after ecosystem, fishery after fishery, as it goes, triggering an ecological disaster on a scale humanity has never seen before. The result of that will impact the global economy so terribly that it could trigger all-out nuclear war as nation after nation tries to grab rapidly dwindling resources to feed their own people, and the hell with everyone else. Next to that, everything pales into insignificance. Yet ditherers like the lady who's all upset over those batteries still clutter up the landscape, doing nothing useful, distracting us all from doing whatever constructive can be done about the things that really do matter.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

The problem is that the government DOESN'T have a crack team of oilwell specialists on tap, unless you count Halliburton, and well, that's enough said, right there.

Of course, one could point to how well Dubya did with Katrina, and the folks he appointed who didn't have the foggiest CLUE as to what they were supposed to do with a disaster of unprecedented scale. And still don't.

I think we're unrealistic in expecting our government to be able to play Johnny-Fix-It, when it doesn't even play international police particularly effectively. The old comedy phrase of "We're from the government, we're here to help," is funny for a reason.

(Why yes, I do belong to a Third Party and don't think much of what the gov's been doing lately, like for the past few decades. The last President who got my retrospective approval rating was Gerald Ford, and that's an interesting statement.)

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

The government does have a crack team of geologists available. It's the office of the US Geological Survey (http://www.usgs.gov/), and they know where to get petrologists and others who are experts in the fields related to this crisis.

Now, as for Dubya, I hope someday you get snowballed by all the things he got snowballed by during his administration. People literally blame him for everything (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_Derangement_Syndrome) from the Big Bang to the Big Rip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip), including the breakup of Al and Tipper Gore's marriage (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/01/al-gore-tipper-gore-separ_n_596199.html), and it's getting very, very old. That man put himself between everyone in this country and Islamist terrorists, trying to keep us all safe, for eight long, hellish years, and all he got was endless shit for it from people who would have screamed their heads off about it if they had been knowingly abandoned to that danger. And of course you will sneer that we were in no danger, it was all just the result of a government conspiracy to murder almost 3,000 Americans on 9/11 in order to etc. etc. blah. Do you really believe that? When you face your Judge on Judgement Day, whenever that may be, how will you answer the question of whether you really believe it? I realize it's fun to join fads, because it's a way to bond socially with others. But some fads are just plain dead wrong, and conspiracy-theory fads and fads for attacking public figures just because everyone else thinks it's fun to do fall right into that category.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I do actually wonder what would happen if Woods Hole were to pull out one of their deep-submersibles like, say, an Alvin, which can operate in water depths FAR exceeding this well, and go manually activate the blowout preventer. Or if it doesn't work, I'm sure it shouldn't take more than a few days for a competent company to build a one-shot explosive-powered device to clamp off even the high-strength deep-well pipe. I want to know why we've heard nothing of any such attempt.

[mrakg.livejournal.com]

Woods Hole is not part of the US Government. It's a private institution.

That being said, the question of why no one has contacted them is a good one.

I'm actually surprised they haven't initiated contact, themselves.

I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[jilara.livejournal.com]

But what, exactly what was the President supposed to be doing, personally supervising all the oil rigs? That thing wasn't even built on his watch. Yeah, he and everyone else lately have been hyping offshore drilling, but this one is all BP's doing. They're the ones who created the problem and have the tech and expertise to stop the damned thing...maybe. Maybe if we had nationalized oil companies, we'd have both the fault and the tech to deal with it inside the government, but we don't. At this point, the Prez is kind of limited to attempting to mitigate damage.

What I object to is the EPA wringing their hands and talking about studies. When the house is on fire, you try to put it out with whatever you've got, and worry about if it was the right thing, later.

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Okay, let's take this from the top. What Obama should have done as soon as it was clear that a crisis was developing in the Gulf of Mexico, and why, was a) call in the Army Corps of Engineers and the Seabees, who have a magnificent track-record for carrying out big huge projects to the finish in good order, b) call in top geologists and petrologists, trained in identifying the salient characterstics of sea-floor geology and what you have to do in order to deal with problems such as this one in areas like this, and c) call in top marine biologists and others concerned with marine life, shore life, and related matters, to identify what needs to be done to heal the Gulf of Mexico's wounds to the extent possible. The geologists and petrologists would lay out what needed to be done to cap the well and clean up the leak, including consulting with people who had done such work successfully in the past and maybe bringing them in on it, and turn that over to the Seabees and Army Corps of Engineers, who would then go to work to cap the leak and clean up the spill, possibly in conjunction with those outside workers who'd done that in the past. The biological scientists would form a second team to start working to save the life of the Gulf. And they'd have started work within a week of the Deep Horizon explosion, ten days at the most, saving precious time needed to get in there and cap the damned thing before it got all out of hand. Instead, this dragged on and on and on until now, even though BP is working on it, it's going to take forever to plug the leak and clean up the spill, certainly beyond the time at which a huge amount of the tar and oil has made its way out into the Atlantic Ocean and up the East Coast, and perhaps even into the Caribbean.

Which is beside the point. What I mean was, metaphorically speaking, Mrs. Parker-whatever is dithering while Rome burns. Doesn't she have anything better to do with her time?

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

BP's not trying to plug the leak. They're looking for ways to capture the oil.

I'm not sure that the Army Corps of Engineers or the Seabees are trained in deep water oil exploration. It's a somewhat specialised area. Amateurs, even enthusiastic ones, are likely to do as much harm as they are good. Wasn't it the Army Corps of Engineers who let the New Orleans levees go? Heck of a job!

What's unconscionable is BP's lying and prevaricating and the Administration's acceptance of that.

What would have been a good idea back when they started drilling would have been a small ($10K or even $100K) fee per rig per year which would have been used to fund a corporation to explore solutions to oil leaks, develop the technology and manpower to deal with them. There are close to 4,000 rigs in the Gulf of Mexico right now. Deepwater Horizon wasn't the furthest out or in the deepest water. We've either been astoundingly lucky, or the oil companies are actually very good at what they do. However $40M or $400M a year would fund a shit-hot cleanup crew (and probably have enough left over to pay insurance to rig workers killed or injured on the job).

Government is mostly comprised of people whose main skills are raising money and getting people to vote for them, along with their cronies. They don't have much in the way of real world skills.

It's not the government's job to fix *everything*.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Same category as security theater. I'm really tired of this whole "we must make little Johnny SAFE!" hype, for these extreme corner cases.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup. Especially since so many of them come down to "Parents weren't paying attention" in the first place.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

And because this is the bread-and-butter of attorneys who thrive because of frivolous bullshit litigation. May all such go extinct. NOW

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the worst tyranny of them all: the tyranny of good intentions.

Whenever someone tells me something is "for your own good" or "for the children", I grab hold of my wallet real tight and run like hell in the opposite direction.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

The real-world application of "good intentions" are, all too often, followed by very unwelcome unintended consequences. The problem is that it's usually everyone but the bozo who wanted to apply those "good intentions" who get steam-rollered by those consequences. Darwin turned inside-out.

The Tempest seems to have become a Gulf Hurricane

[jilara.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of us are just venting frustration, and took this totally off topic.

It's not easy being a green libertarian and watching the mess that's been evolving. And now good old California has a primary initiative for open primaries that my friend Kennita, who's the Libertarian candidate for State Board of Equalisation, has analyzed, and has said will essentially kill 3rd parties in the State of California. Interestingly, it's being hyped as a "send a message to the major party powers running this state and their special-interest backers!" initiative.

Re: The Tempest seems to have become a Gulf Hurricane

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think the message is, "Hey, here you go, we're bent over already, don't bother with the lube, we're used to it."

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

the selective pressure against stupidity has eased off mightily in the past century.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Yeah, except it's actually being billed the other way around: stick it to the man. I think the idea is to get you to do it to yourself.