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

[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]

Let's not start a flame war here, please. And that starts with not tossing bricks and accusations at people whose motivations you don't know. I can vouch for the fact that jilara is not a "troofer". But, like it or not, it is inarguable fact that the administration's handling of Katrina was a rolling clusterfuck, and the people put in charge of it were utterly and completely incompetent.

It's also true, whether you like it or not, that every infringement upon our liberties put in place since 9/11 was put in place by the Bush administration.

No, the Democrat Party is not our friend. But neither is the Republican Party. Neither one of them is acting on behalf of America as a whole (particularly since the neoconservatives pulled off what amounts to a coup d'etat in the Republican party during the Clinton administration). It's two-valued "your party is bad, my party is good" thinking that's had us stuck in this two-party mess for the past century.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

If we are lucky and avoid World War III until at least 2013, in the meantime a great many current incumbents from both major parties will get thrown out of office and replaced by third-party candidates . . . assuming that the third/fourth/fifth/etc.-party candidates who do get voted in aren't members of modern-day equivalents of the National Socialists, or the Communist party. The one and only good thing about the disaster now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico is that, added to everything else that has happened in the last decade or so, it has people fed to the teeth with government. Period. Cross your fingers -- we may get something we can live with out of this. Maybe. Please. Pretty please with sugar on top.

-- Back in late 2001 I said that no matter what, because of 9/11 we Americans were going to lose at least some of our freedom, the degree of that loss depending on a number of factors which boiled down to whether Americans or non-Americans were the determinators of just which of our freedoms would go. Because, I said, Americans generally have a better feeling for just how far they can go before other Americans start looking around for a rope to do some cleaning out of high office with, hence they probably wouldn't go as far in the direction of destroying our freedoms as non-Americans, i.e., invaders, would. The reason is that effective security measures would take away some of our freedoms, or what many have come to consider to be true freedoms, whether they are or not, in order to secure the nation as effectively as possible from outside attack and/or attack from within. Invaders, on the other hand, would take away the freedoms of American citizens in order to control and use us. (I am including Islamists under the heading of possible "invaders" whether they are in fact non-citizens or actually American citizens.) Frankly, I'd rather lose some freedom to a government comprising Americans than I would to, say, Islamists or others who either aren't Americans or don't consider themselves to be actual Americans or both. So the question is, how much of what we have lost since 9/11 has been lost to the need for tightened security, and how much to the freed and lust for power of some elected officials? And who has been responsible for that? Did we need tightened national security after 9/11? Yes, and we still do. But after 2008 the security measures put in place by the Bush administration began to slip rather rapidly, as witness that damned 13-story Islamic studies center and mosque they're planning to build just yards from Ground Zero in NYC. That terrifies me. What has happened to us?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

So the question is, how much of what we have lost since 9/11 has been lost to the need for tightened security, and how much to the freed and lust for power of some elected officials?

Honestly, 90% of it is misguided, misdirected security-theater. Very, very little of it actually does anything to make us more safe. For instance, air travel? You want to make US air travel immune to hijacking at a single stroke? Expand the FFDO program — armed flight crews — and allow valid CCW permit holders to fly armed. The stupid no-fly list? Scrap it, it's a complete disaster. It's been used as often to retaliate against political dissidents as to keep terrorists off airline flights, and the number of times it's actually caught a terrorist trying to board a flight is exceeded by the number of times it's kept Federal air marshals from boarding the flights they were supposed to guard. The TSA? During the first two years of operation of the FFDO program, over three hundred FFDO sidearms had been stolen BY TSA PERSONNEL.

Honestly? Most of the crap the government has put in place is not part of a solution, it's part of the problem.

I'll agree with you unhesitatingly that a madrassa at Ground Zero, is, AT THE VERY BEST, in execrably poor taste and a slap in the face to everyone who lost a friend, relative or family member on 9/11.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

I agree that the security measures put in place by the Bush administration that were easily seen were not, by and large, worth a damn. Part of that was due to the gun-control lobby and a Congress that did not want to arm pilots, let alone citizens. The rest was window-dressing designed to assure the American public which, by then, was already in the midst of a recession which wouldn't have been made any better if people had stropped traveling abroad. Thre's no such thing as perfect security, of course, but the public saw that something seemed to be happening as far as tighter security went, and were reassured. There was also Gitmo, where captured terrorists went and where they stayed, well away from the American mainland -- which is no longer the case. They never got civilian trials; if anything, they were subject to something like a military tribunal, which ruled that they were too dangerous to let loose. There were other things that weren't obvious, partly because they weren't showy, so why bother showing them, and partly because you really don't want the people you're trying to keep out/fail in their purpose knowing what you're doing to keep them from doing that. That we never had another 9/11 or eve a successful smaller-scale terrorist attack sfter that during Dubya's tenure in office says something sure was going on. I do agree we will have to disagree on this one, though. Dubya's out of office and Obama is in, and Obama has dropped the ball, and not just on security, either. Everything is going to hell, which mostly isn't his fault, though, and I really am expecting the outbreak of a hot, shooting war sometime later this year, one started by somebody other than this country, which may well probably will involve nukes. There world's in a much scarier place than even during the Cold War. We could reason with the Soviets. We can't reason with terrorist states. And we don't have the right to forbid any nation from using nukes on somebody who has just nuked them. Self-defense is always an option and a moral right.

Forgive me; I have lost all hope. I am not depressed; I'm in despair. Between the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico and the current administration's complete lack of interest in protecting the American public (or at least using the bully-pulpit to denounce Congress for its lack of interest in doing so), the mainstream media's shenanigans, and a thousand other things, there's nothing that shows that things could get better. They won't. They may well soon get so bad that nuclear war starts, in which case, we can kiss everything off.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Interesting point. Most of my friends at the USGS are retired, now, but it might be interesting to get their perspective on it. (I liked their response to the disaster film on the Yellowstone supervolcano---they loved it, because it was realistic: "If it happens, we're all going to die.")

Sorry, but I've read about the FEMA messup on Katrina in some detail, and part of the problem was that a lot of the people Dubya appointed to manage it had no prior experience in emergency management. They knew how to deal with security problems, but not much of anything else. So they treated New Orleans like a security problem, which was a completely inappropriate response. And the fallout is still rattling through. No conspiracy, just bad choices.

In terms of 9/11, the immediate Bush response to that was good and totally appropriate. I actually applauded his handling of it, since it was a swift response to a totally unprecedented terrorist action. Would have been nice if a lot of other actions were as good.

So don't be so quick to assume what I think. Maybe you should actually read what I'm writing, rather than leaping to conclusions and lashing out. However, I suspect that you're just doing what I am---screaming in the back of your head over an unprecedented disaster on a global scale, and the fact it's like watching a slow-motion play-by-play of global eco-collapse. I know that I feel physically sick every time I think about it.

Fun to attack public figures? Hmm, like Obama? Or maybe accusing someone in LJ of certain beliefs without any evidence? Sorry, that was uncalled-for. But the bottom line is that we like to have someone in authority to blame for what we perceive as "letting it happen." Which isn't always the appropriate party. Scapegoating becomes popular, too.

The general rule is search for the guilty, punishment of the innocent, and reward of the non-participants. It's human nature at large, or I wouldn't be able to quote that slogan.

As I say, I think we put too much faith in the government, overall.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Interesting point. Most of my friends at the USGS are retired, now, but it might be interesting to get their perspective on it. (I liked their response to the disaster film on the Yellowstone supervolcano---they loved it, because it was realistic: "If it happens, we're all going to die.")

I would love to see their take on the ongoing crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, though it's likely to consist largely of words spelled with four letters (or longer and worse ones). ;-)

Sorry, but I've read about the FEMA messup on Katrina in some detail, and part of the problem was that a lot of the people Dubya appointed to manage it had no prior experience in emergency management. They knew how to deal with security problems, but not much of anything else. So they treated New Orleans like a security problem, which was a completely inappropriate response. And the fallout is still rattling through. No conspiracy, just bad choices. In terms of 9/11, the immediate Bush response to that was good and totally appropriate. I actually applauded his handling of it, since it was a swift response to a totally unprecedented terrorist action. Would have been nice if a lot of other actions were as good.

Okay, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Dubya, for reasons that are not political in nature, and are impossible to describe, so I won't try here or elsewhere. I realize this will probably get me killed by a giant pack of bloggers of all political persuasions, but hey, any day is a good day to die. I've been swimming upstream literally since I was conceived -- see, e.g., http://polaris93.livejournal.com/1714735.html, http://polaris93.livejournal.com/1715175.html, http://polaris93.livejournal.com/1715455.html, http://polaris93.livejournal.com/1715673.html for details. At any rate, this is where I will differ with just about everybody about Dubya, and that isn't going to change, no matter what.

So don't be so quick to assume what I think. Maybe you should actually read what I'm writing, rather than leaping to conclusions and lashing out. However, I suspect that you're just doing what I am---screaming in the back of your head over an unprecedented disaster on a global scale, and the fact it's like watching a slow-motion play-by-play of global eco-collapse. I know that I feel physically sick every time I think about it.

That's true.

Fun to attack public figures? Hmm, like Obama? Or maybe accusing someone in LJ of certain beliefs without any evidence?

I never attack anyone for fun. Human beings are great big nasty animals that can make a real dent in you if they want to, and if you attack them, they'll want to. I took some combat-arts training which ground in that attacking anyone or anything for fun is a bad idea. So when I say something that could be construed as an attack, I mean it, and am saying on the basis of the best information I have at the time.

Sorry, that was uncalled-for. But the bottom line is that we like to have someone in authority to blame for what we perceive as "letting it happen." Which isn't always the appropriate party. Scapegoating becomes popular, too.

I'd be satisfied with someone in charge who has his/her act together and moves on terrible things in an appropriate way. Right now, whoever's in charge doesn't have his act together, and is moving at the rate of cold molasses. And because of it we're all in terrible trouble. Surely the Democrats could have mustered somebody better than that guy to run against Dubya. Why didn't they?

As I say, I think we put too much faith in the government, overall.

Yes, we do. But when it comes to disasters on this kind of scale, ones that come to pass because somebody wasn't paying attention to either to pphysical reality or building codes (or the equivalent), because of the way we've all set things up, the government has to get involved if the problem is to be solved. Or even nibbled away at.