In article . com,
"rigger" wrote:

Joseph Gwinn pointed out:


In other words, the adult entire population is being treated like
children because one in ten million is childish.

So then you would agree with the Ford Motor Company in their original
accessment of the Pinto "situation" right? No need to improve safety
as long as the people (and families) being burned up were a "small"
number and it wouldn't have a big negative affect on finances. No need
to actually "WARN" anyone their car (whether full of children?) had
defects. The wonderful executives at Ford wouldn't want anyone to feel
they were being "childish", right?

All accidents that hurt or kill people are horrible, even if the person
happens to be line for a Darwin Award.

You wouldn't happen to have an authoritative source for the relative
incidence? This is the key - there is only so much time and money in
the world, and we should look for the biggest pile of bodies and start
there, not with trivial risks. Why? Because if we spend the time and
energy on trivia, we won't ever quite get around to real risks, and the
total number of significant accidents will be far higher than need be.


By the same token, no civilian should be permitted to possess or use
metalworking equipment -- after all, people have been maimed or even
killed by such equipment, and the incidence is orders of magnitude
higher than one in ten million metalworkers.

Do you *really* think this is the same as putting the average citizen
(man, woman, child, handicapped, etc.) in harms way?

Sure. Any damn fool can buy machine tools. All it takes is money, and
nobody makes them prove that they have taken a bunch of safety courses
and passed some license tests and gotten a pretty bit of parchment.
Unlike Stationary Engineers (steam plants) and Professional and/or Civil
Engineers (construction). Etc.

If someone buys more machine than they can handle and manages to hurt
themself, they are likely to sue alleging that the tool is unreasonably
dangerous, and/or that in all those the pages of warnings in the manual,
there was nothing that *exactly* fit the specifics.

Jurys tend to feel sorry for the poor slob, and often find for the
plaintiff because the defendent is seen as a big rich company that can
clearly spare the money, even if the plaintiff is clearly an idiot.

If this happened only rarely, it wouldn't have much of a general effect.
But what's happening is that companies across the board are stopping
making things deemed too dangerous for the average citizen, or selling
only to industry, because a sympathetic jury doesn't really care about
the facts or the law.

At my company, we have precisely such a training and exam system,
because too many factory people were getting themselves chopped up, and
these are mostly full time employees with experience. Suits weren't the
issue, because Workman's Compensation applies, but still the injury rate
was too high, so everybody in the company was sent in for mandatory
safety training.

Joe Gwinn