On Wed, 06 Jun 2007 16:43:42 -0500, dpb wrote:

At least one of the woodworking magazines has added that mantra to their
inside cover page, apparently in response to the legal beagles and in
the interest of political correctness. I tend to disagree not in
principle but in level of it being an "ordinary" level of danger
associated w/ the activity and not worthy of mention per se.

Unfortunately, we live in a very sue-happy society where not only do
you have to tell people to be safe, you have to do it in such a way
that a brain-dead chihuahua could understand it.

the list of accidents, other than the splinter, I can't recall the
last time one of the others has happened to me. Not that I'm somehow
magic, but I do tend to be careful. Having hit myself w/ hammers in the
past has taught me not to do that any longer.. I have a very strong
aversion to _ever_ cutting myself again severely, and for that reason
have very serious evaluations of how I try to carve/cut on stuff...I'm
not a professional carver, though...

I've never managed to cut anything off my body I didn't intend to,
neither did my father in a lifetime of woodworking, neither did my
uncle in a lifetime of woodworking. Why? Because we all learned that
whirling metal blades of death meeting flesh is a bad thing. We
learned how to work safely, we learned that if you do something that
feels dangerous, chances are that doing it at all is wrong. You know
something? That's what kept us all safe. Not having nanny-equipment
that doesn't let us be stupid, but learning not to be stupid in the
first place. That's really where I object to all this anti-stupidity
equipment that has come along. It doesn't teach people to be safer,
it teaches them that they can be idiots, the equipment will keep them
from having any consequences to their stupidity.

Honestly, I think people need to suffer the consequences of their
idiocy, otherwise how do you learn not to be an idiot?