helmet laws was : 4th of July Hypocricy (was: OT Celebration)

From: Don Maslin <donm_at_cts.com>
Date: Tue Jul 10 23:49:05 2001

On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, Tony Duell wrote:

> > >More to the point, my tax dollars go to pay the unpaid medical bills
> > >of the stupid, and when too many stupid people get head injuries my car
> > >and health insurance rates go up.
> >
> > Hell, that applies to anything you can name; car crash victums, skate
> > boarding accidents, people tripping on the side walks, etc etc etc. The
> > list is endless. Should you let the "hospital costs" rational be used to
>
> Let's not have a smoking/anti-smoking rant, please. I think it's fairly
> well accepted now that smoking (tobacco) does harm your health. I also
> believe that's _your_ business. Not mine, and not the government's.
>
> I don't smoke. I do risk my life in other ways, like working on high
> voltage equipment. Again, that should be _my_ choice, and not anybody
> else's.
>
> One day, even though I work carefully, (I think) I know how to work
> safely on HV stuff, I never work alone, and so on, I might end up getting
> a fatal shock. In which case, all I can say (in advance) is that I was
> working on the unit because that's what I enjoy doing. The fact I had an
> accident was bad luck, but I started out knowing what I was letting
> myself in for, I made a mistake, and I paid the price. I don't want this
> to happen, of course, but I'd rather die that way than die of old age and
> boredom having never worked on anything electronic.

Huzzah! I'm with you all the way, Tony. The only thing that bothers me
is that looking at all of the laws/programs in the UK now, it is
difficult to believe that these are the same folk who defeated the
Luftwaffe!
                                                 - don

> > govern everything we do? I don't think so. What if the next law is that
> > no one will be allowed to work on their own computers since they could be
> > injured and the public would have to pay the cost of their
> > hospitalization? Rediculous? Not really. That's the exact rational that
> > was used to pass the helmets laws to begin with and from what Tony says the
> > UK isn't far from enacting such non-sensical regulations.
>
> There's been talk on-and-off for the last <n> years in the UK about only
> letting qualified [1] people act as service engineers to fix TVs, etc. I
> don't think this will apply to people who fix their own stuff (no other
> such laws apply in that way in the UK), but it probably would cut off one
> of my passtimes -- namely fixing HP calculators for other HPCC members.
>
> The more serious result of such a law, though, would be that it would be
> a lot harder to get service manuals and official spare parts. Which would
> then probably cause more dangerous repairs. After all, if you don't know
> a particular resistor is 'fusible', and you can't get the right
> manufacturer's part anyway, you'd probably stick in a normal resistor.
> Which could prove dangerous under fault conditions. Time and again I've
> been told I can't have a service manual because of liability reasons. No
> amount of pointing out that I am more likely to miss some safety related
> point _without_ the service manual has ever worked :-(
>
> [1] Whatever the necessary qualifications are, a Ph.D. in particle
> physics will not be included...
>
> -tony
>
>
Received on Tue Jul 10 2001 - 23:49:05 BST