Agreed, but BuckyBalls look very harmless to most adults and kids (they're basically beads), so most people don't put much care into hiding them from young kids.
I will accept that the hazards may have been insufficiently obvious prior to the warning label that states exactly what might happen to a person who eats Buckyballs. I believe the warning labels on the packaging are sufficient to entirely shift responsibility for safe use of the product to the purchaser.
The general principle I'm advocating here is that product manufacturers should not be liable for injuries when the potential hazards are either self-evident to a reasonable adult[0] or clearly marked on the packaging. This might get a bit murky when a product is marketed to young children, but as far as I can tell, Buckyballs were definitely not marketed to age groups who were likely to eat them.
Yeah, it's so obvious that Buckyballs are dangerous compared to other small items that can be swallowed, that there are people in every HN or Slashdot discussion who fail to grasp it, including this one:
"A quick search of: kid swallow lego Returns about 1.9 million results on google, I'm guessing more kids swallow legos, where is the recall order there?"
"Unless you have a gastric bypass they should be attracted to each-other in the stomach, before going anywhere where you can squeeze stuff, well assuming they where eaten during the same time."
Edit - same in the Wall Street Journal comments section:
"Anyway, what's wrong with kids eating magnets? Wouldn't they be the same as eating BB's or ball bearings? If we banned everything that kids eat, we'd have to ban dirt because kids eat a lot of that too. "
"So any toy or object smaller than a human mouth must be banned because it might be ingested by a child? How about Legos? How about marbles? Do we get rid of coins?"
Dan you're being wildly untruthful here. Buckyballs were sold with very clear warnings and it is not their fault if people ignore those warnings.
Are you really trying to argue that a 14 year old is so overcome by the overwhelming desire to experience magnetic forces that s/he is unable to read a warning label, and the only sensible course of action is to halt all sales of the product? Come off it.
How do you feel about a product like balloons? Balloons are responsible for the deaths of dozens of children every year. They are marketed directly to children, used primarily by children, and incredibly dangerous if swallowed.
Your argument is that Buckyballs do not appear as dangerous as they are. However, there are so many products that, if used incorrectly, are dangerous. They may seem harmless but once you swallow them or put them over your head, they turn deadly.
Where do we draw the line? Can the CPSC really hope to judge every product and determine whether it is safe for the general public to consume? Do you truly not see this as a case of selective enforcement?
I will admit I am biased. I am the developer who built and maintains the buckyballs website. This is going to hurt me directly, as I am losing one of my biggest clients. They are going to be laying off a number of other staff as well.
I'm all for throwing the book at people who knowingly market things that appear to be safe in a particular sense but are not.
Buckyballs are obviously strong magnets that are small enough to swallow. Seeing the product or hearing a two sentence description is enough information for a parent to understand that it is not suitable for children who still regularly place toys and random objects in their mouths. Young children should also not be allowed to play with knives, household/automotive chemicals, cooking appliances and sources of electricity.
Craig Zucker created a product that harmed upwards of 80 children. He created the mess, not the Commission. They were doing their job, which is to make sure that products sold in the US are safe for use.
Buckyballs were most definitely not safe, and should never have been marketed as toys for children.
Swallowing one is no problem. But if you swallow two of them separately then they can attract each other while traveling through your intestines. The magnetic force is strong enough to perforate your intestines, requiring surgery. Without treatment they can lead to sepsis and death. I'm all for keeping them legal (I have several sets of Buckyballs) but they can be seriously dangerous. That combined with the fact that they look perfectly innocent is the real problem.
The way that Bucky Balls was abused was insane. They voluntarily went above and beyond to ensure that their vendors knew how dangerous they were for small children. They required a signature on a super non-standard document agreeing to indicate that they are not a toy for small children.
(I had to sign one to order them wholesale for my last company.)
I own several sets of buckyballs and did quite a bit of research on the issue when it was being litigated. I have no opinions on the CPUC's later personal litigations but I would like to note that the Buckyball corporation did a wonderful job fanning unfair populist outrage against the CPUC and that the story is significantly more complicated.
I have no dog in this fight but in the interest of fairness, here are points presented from the other side:
* The risk from buckyballs is highly non-obvious and hard to intuit. I, personally, did not perceive the risk until I read about it. Most items should not be swallowed because they're a choking hazard, they have sharp edges or they contain toxic chemicals. Buckballs are small spheres of stainless steel which present none of those risks. Instead, the risk is if two balls attract each other through layers of your intestine, eventually causing gangrene and sepsis. That's not something I had ever thought about when playing with them.
* The severity of harm was far greater than other swallowing hazards. Treatment for people who improperly swallowed buckyballs involved major surgery and the removal of sections of their intestines. This is orders of magnitudes more severe than most swallowing related injuries, something which also does not fit most people's naive threat models.
* Injury happens days after the event, making cause and effect hard to pin down. The usual response to a child swallowing something improper is to monitor closely for 6 - 24 hours and only seek medical attention if something untoward is happening. Because buckyball injuries occur days after the event, it's hard to pin a stomachache problem on Thursday with swallowing on Monday and treat it with the severity it deserves.
* The design of the toy makes it intrinsically impossible to keep the warnings intact with use. It doesn't matter how dire the warnings may be on an attached sheet of paper because the toy could be sold, given away or played with second hand and there was no way to guarantee transmission that information to the 2nd party. With larger toys, the CPUC could have mandated that warnings be injection moulded into the plastic for example but there was no such recourse with buckyballs.
* There's a finite number of compelling uses of buckyballs and one of them was to make fake studs by attaching them together through a thin fold of skin. On the face, there are only 4 places where this is possible: The earlobe, the nasal cavity, the lip fold and the tongue. 3 of the 4 places allow for a swallowing hazard and magnets are very easy to make fall apart with just the wrong nudge. This greatly increased the likelihood that this toy would be swallowed compared to similar toys.
* Swallowing a single buckyball is harmless, potentially giving people a false sense of security after accidentally swallowing one and having nothing bad happen. This would make them subsequently less careful in the future.
I'm pretty libertarian but I can certainly see the CPUC's rationale in banning these things. Yes, they're incredibly fun to play with and I still tinker with them to this day but the safety risks shouldn't be trivialized either.
Mockery is needlessly cruel, but there's a valid underlying point: the ball magnets are an item intended for adults and teenagers, not young children. When I searched on Ebay for "colored ball magnets", I found what looks to be the same item, and it says "adult" in the title twice.
One could argue that hazardous items should be forbidden from having an appearance attractive to young children, but that's hard to implement in practice. I'm inclined to think a warning on the package that they're not for kids and swallowing can be deadly is an appropriate solution for a product like that. DigitDots brand magnetic balls do have such a warning, but I'm not sure if that's true for the white label version I found on Ebay.
On investigation, and somewhat surprisingly to me, it seems that medical experts legitimately believe that swallowing these particular small metal objects are worse than swallowing garden-variety small metal objects because if you swallow e.g. 5 BB pellets then you'll pass 5 BB pellets but if you swallow 5 high-powered magnets you now have one single clump o' metal which is large/heavy/sharp enough to damage your intestinal tract.
I probably still wouldn't ban them but, hey, worth noting.
I'd wager that a small but significant fraction of people will play with these things in their mouth (sticking them on either side of their tongue, for example) and accidentally swallowing them at that point is not hard to accomplish.
And no, people shouldn't be doing this, but these things look completely harmless. They're not poisonous and they're small enough to pass without harm, so what's the big deal?
I think that's what it comes down to. The danger these things pose isn't terribly large, but it's far larger than what a typical reasonable person would perceive as the danger.
Most of us trust that toys for kids will be essentially harmless.
Speak for yourself - you don't speak for everyone else and I see no reason to use your standard as the default.
I have no such trust because I have always looked at safety warnings and taken them at face value. I always loved playing with Lego, but I was also aware that Lego bricks have sharp edges and are a choking hazard for small children. I knew this when I was a kid too.
Finally, I see no reason for you to lump these magnets in with all other 'toys for kids'. The buckyball magnets came with a very clear warning that they were for people 13 and over, and that you could get injured or even die by swallowing the magnets. When an item comes with a clear and unambiguous written warning of specific dangers and your idea of 'living in a trusting society' is to ignore such explicit warnings then yes it does make you guilty of something - negligence.
It's simply not fair to demand that other people accept liability for your actions when you are literally refusing to read clearly written warnings
This is such a subtle risk, its arguable that a printed warning on a paper container is insufficient. What happens when the packaging is discarded? Another kid enters the house? Your kid gives the toy away?
It's not subtle at all, it's easy to observe the risk from playing with the magnets for a couple of minutes and seeing how powerful they are. When the physical forces involved are self-evident then at some point you have take responsibility for paying attention to what your own senses are telling you. You're literally complaining that this is somehow too hard to think about it for ordinary people, and if you think that then you should be up in arms about the accessibility of gas stations, things make out of glass, and all sorts of other 'subtle' hazards that people navigate on a daily basis.
What happens when the packaging is discarded? The person doing the discarding takes responsibility for leaving the magnets in a safe place where they can not be got at by unsupervised children. I have clusters of neodymium magnets in several places around my house, out of the packaging. I know where they are, I know that I may need to move them if my friends who have kids come to visit (just like I need to move some other things I don't want them getting into), and I know that if I show them off or anyone expresses an interest in them that I have an obligation to point out that they are powerful and dangerous. And just in case, my home insurance policy covers me against financial liability if someone does suffer an injury while visiting my home.
Stop telling me it's a 'subtle risk.' That's complete BS when I can see and feel for myself that the things are really powerful. A subtle risk would be a lump of attractive-looking material whose radioactive nature isn't apparent without some kind of special measuring apparatus. I cannot understand why you are arguing that people should literally disregard the evidence of their senses rather than accept even a modicum of legal liability.
I am not sure where you got those numbers from, but "more than 500 kids treated in the emergency room for ingesting small rare earth magnets" is just not accurate.
I need to do some digging, but the last time I saw the statistics, balloons were responsible for exponentially higher numbers of hospital visits and deaths than magnets. Buckyballs have never resulted in a death, whereas balloons cause numerous deaths every year.
Do you think that balloons should be outlawed as well?
Even if they aren't given to children I don't think they set off the "hey this is really dangerous" alarm for a lot of people. Ideally an adult would play with these then count them all to make sure none are missing and store them out of reach of a child -- every single time with no mistakes or exceptions. Requiring that level of care kind of moves these out of the "toy" category in my mind.
The health risk of swallowing Buckyballs is more serious than just swallowing a marble. If you swallow two or more magnets, they can get stuck together as they wind their way through your intestines and pinch holes through your intestinal wall.
Let's be honest, virtually no teenager in the world could be trusted to ensure that no 2 out of the 216 tiny rolling metal balls that come in one of these sets ever got lost in their house. Meanwhile, yes, putting shiny metal things into their mouths is essentially the full time job of a toddler.
The problem isn't that magnets are inherently unsafe, or even that tiny round magnets are unsafe. It's that this particular packaging of tiny round magnets is unsafe.
There's a lot of really fun things a conscientious person can do with fire, electricity, strong acid, or liquid nitrogen. But nobody's been dumb enough to put them in colorful packages with "Not For Children Under 14" on the label.
Also the Reuters story mentions one kid thought they were chocolates: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/25/us-usa-buckyballs-...
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