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How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

nytimes.com

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Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#121

Post by michael_h »

Alex3917 wrote: post #104
usefulcat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it seems that smokers (at least in the US) are much more likely to go outside to smoke now, even when at their own home. Sorry, no data just personal recollections from childhood in the '80s.

This seems correct anecdotally. At some point they figured out that smoking is somewhat less bad for you if you smoke outside, so maybe this had some effect.

  At some point they figured out that smoking is somewhat less bad for you if you smoke outside
Smoking is in no way less bad for you if done out of doors. It's because no one, not even a smoker, wants their domicile to smell like an ash tray...and when selling a house, you don't want to cut out that large swath of the population that doesn't smoke from your buyer pool.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#122

Post by GFischer »

pmorici wrote: post #95
tokenadult wrote: post #49

Another top-level comment wrote: between this and the article about brain parasites in california, HN is scaring the crap out of me And I guess that's why my all-time favorite external link to share here on Hacker News is "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html by Peter Norvig, Google's director of research. To resolve the issue of the safety trade-offs of no…

I think the thing that is reflexively offensive about this whole thing is that the government has taken a risk that is reasonably easy for a responsible adult to avoid (setting their couch on fire) and implemented a measure that is harmful and difficult or almost impossible to avoid. It's as if we are all made to pay for the morons who can't resist playing with matches in their couch.

One of my coworkers had his 4 year old child set fire to his couch (he pushed and pushed until it was next to the gas stove - it's easier here in Uruguay due to smaller houses and different gas stoves).

Irresponsible, absolutely, for not supervising the kid, but it is possible.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#124

Post by 001sky »

AJ007 wrote: post #106
rdl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume flame retardants are mainly only needed for couches of smokers (I've never randomly put a flame onto my couch for fun to see if it would burn), so even if fire retardants save 100 people from fires they caused through voluntary negligence while subjecting 1 additional person to cancer or other illness due to chemicals, I'm not sure if it's a fair trade. Saving firefighters might be a reasonable argument, tho…

Its not just firefighters, but people who live in shared buildings -- apartment, condominium, co-op, etc. In which case, it would appear evident to me that the real policy issue is one of allowing smoking indoors. Unfortunately the bureaucratic process tends to lean towards spending enormous amounts of time and resources on issues that could be "hacked" fairly easily. When we add a lot of variables to a problem we en…

Hack: use horse hair, down, and feathers for furniture stuffing.

More comfy. Longer lasting.

Won't spontaneously cumbust! =D

Environmentally friendly, too

That's so 1930's.

_______________

[Used today for this very reason!]

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#125

Post by rdl »

001sky wrote: post #124
AJ007 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not just firefighters, but people who live in shared buildings -- apartment, condominium, co-op, etc. In which case, it would appear evident to me that the real policy issue is one of allowing smoking indoors. Unfortunately the bureaucratic process tends to lean towards spending enormous amounts of time and resources on issues that could be "hacked" fairly easily. When we add a lot of variables to a problem we en…

Hack: use horse hair, down, and feathers for furniture stuffing. More comfy. Longer lasting. Won't spontaneously cumbust! =D Environmentally friendly, too That's so 1930's. _______________ [Used today for this very reason!]

Kind of tangentially, down is one of the few products where the "humane" way to harvest involves killing the animal; the "pluck living geese over and over again" method is apparently quite painful for them.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#126

Post by brendn »

ericdykstra wrote: post #74

Another example of government creating arbitrary policies that just waste time and money, and probably kill us. Since 1975, an obscure California agency called the Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation has mandated that the foam inside upholstered furniture be able to withstand exposure to a small flame, like a candle or cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without igniting. Who decided on 12 seconds? Why th…

It was totally a lobbying effort to get the legislation passed. First by the tobacco industry because of fires started by smokers falling asleep with lit cigarettes, then by the chemical industry (by courting state fire marshals) to boost sales of their flame retardants. The Chicago Tribune has a multi-part series on it here: http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/flames/index.html

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#127

Post by 001sky »

rdl wrote: post #125
001sky wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hack: use horse hair, down, and feathers for furniture stuffing. More comfy. Longer lasting. Won't spontaneously cumbust! =D Environmentally friendly, too That's so 1930's. _______________ [Used today for this very reason!]

Kind of tangentially, down is one of the few products where the "humane" way to harvest involves killing the animal; the "pluck living geese over and over again" method is apparently quite painful for them.

Yes, it is a by-product of food consumption. So there is no waste.

Its very sustainable, in that regards. [1]

Edit: citation added.

________

[1] "Some 70 percent of the world's supply comes from China, typically from birds killed for their meat. Most of the rest comes from Europe and Canada, from birds harvested for meat or pâté.", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_feather#cite_note-24

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#128

Post by gojomo »

It's sad that premature regulation moved this into the sphere of politics and mandated-purchases (from companies with an incentive to lobby). That means any attempt to learn what's really going on, or make any incremental changes, is gummed up by the fog of adversarial, zero-sum politics.

Without the inflexible mandate, the rule could simply be: label whether your product has flame-retardants or not, and have evidence for your claims. Then the industry could diversify, some brands emphasizing flame-resistance and others lack of chemical additives. And, this diversity would mean we would gather more real-world experience about whether the flame-retardant units are really correlated with fewer/slower fires and fewer fatalities, or with more health/IQ/behavior problems in children and pets, or both, or neither.

But because of the uniform monoculture imposed by the premature politicization, we face a data white-out and policy is flying half-blind... with only indirect data on costs and benefits.

Maybe a way out would be to compel a bisection of the industry output: you must make half your units with, and half without, these additives, and clearly mark the units in each category. Five to ten years later, we'd likely have much better data about real effects.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#129

Post by cghfdscv »

lignuist wrote: post #54
greenyoda wrote: post #18

The irony of the whole thing is that the flame retardants don't even make furniture any less flammable: "The problem, [the fire expert] argues, is that the standard is based on applying a small flame to a bare piece of foam - a situation unlikely to happen in real life. ... In real life, before the flame gets to the foam, it has to ignite the fabric. Once the fabric catches fire, it becomes a sheet of flame that can…

This reminds me of the ban on regular light bulbs in the EU. People are basically forced now to install so called energy saving lamps, which contain and emit highly toxic mercury and phenol. Most people even don't know about the risks and would let their children sleep in a room with a broken lamp.

Yes.

Recently mercury-free LED light bulbs are getting more popular.

And you can still buy 100W incandescent light bulbs everywhere. The workaround is that they are marketed as for special use (shock-resistant).

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#130

Post by spqr »

GFischer wrote: post #122
pmorici wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the thing that is reflexively offensive about this whole thing is that the government has taken a risk that is reasonably easy for a responsible adult to avoid (setting their couch on fire) and implemented a measure that is harmful and difficult or almost impossible to avoid. It's as if we are all made to pay for the morons who can't resist playing with matches in their couch.

One of my coworkers had his 4 year old child set fire to his couch (he pushed and pushed until it was next to the gas stove - it's easier here in Uruguay due to smaller houses and different gas stoves). Irresponsible, absolutely, for not supervising the kid, but it is possible.

I have an electric heat pump in my house for heat, nobody smokes or lights candles and the electrical lines are immaculate. Yet I'm forced to have cancer causing chemicals in my couches to give me an extra couple of seconds in the extremely unlikely event of a fire. Makes no sense.
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