It can be avoided, but as I said elsewhere we make calculated risks all the time. Individually and as a society. 1 in 5 Americans will get skin cancer at some point but we allow tanning salons. Red meat is linked to stomach cancer. Alcohol. Tobacco. Backyard pools. There is none-to-limited legal or medical protection granted to people from a huge range of dangers to ourselves and others and they are broadly accepted as in the realm of “personal freedoms” or in some way necessary to society, like the dangerous jobs of logging or roofing or firefighting.

I’m not saying safety shouldn’t be a goal, I’m saying that risk-free is functionally impossible and people disagree on “acceptable risk.”

I’m gonna defer to this guy John Knox, who has been studying bounce houses for two decades. https://accesswdun.com/article/2022/8/1123579/uga-study-discovers-132-dangerous-bounce-house-related-incidents

Airborn events are dramatic and awful but rare and preventable, and I think gut reaction legislation is bad practice. I would like to see widespread adoption of laws for securing and operating these things but I don’t think they meet “ban outright” danger. Backyard pools are way deadlier and I don’t even think those should go away.

Fuck Petey Potatotown. And unfortunately the GOP isn’t concerned about being hypocritical.

Good thing that, uh, doesn’t happen anyway. At Guantanamo Bay for instance.

Most deaths by gun violence are self-inflicted. And most of the murders are gang-related.

Not owning a gun and not joining a gang are far more effective ways to prolong your life than joining in on some Old West shootout.

That’s one of the weirder ways I’ve seen to say “I don’t enjoy competitive games and everyone who does is stupid.”

Nothing, it just makes them feel special.

Easier to supervise, too.

If the design is inherently unsafe and regular use can result in injury, like the Verrückt water slide, then yes regulation and inspection is necessary. If the product is intended for children too young to understand basic safety precautions then strict design rules are important because we can’t trust companies to be ethical on their own. But if the object in question poses an obvious minor-to-moderate risk, things like trampolines or skateboards or tire swings, it can be reasonably expected that the object not break from normal use but supervision and safety precautions are the responsibility of the consumer.

There’s lots of room for argument about where the lines of acceptable risk are drawn. Personally I’m in favor of helmet and floatation-vest laws for children (and people accompanying children). I think bicycles are an acceptably risky thing for children to ride, but obviously tragic accidents do occur.

It’s hard to find data pertaining to bounce houses specifically as there is no official governing body tracking them. It gets lumped into sports or recreation and without usage stats it’s impossible to determine injury rate. They might not even be as dangerous as traditional playground structures.

I’m fine with requiring them to be anchored, and you’re right that safety laws are pretty strict for toys, but we can’t mandate literally-zero-risk-of-harm. “Rare” and “regular” are terms I generally think of as opposed and there’s always going to be some cold calculation of “acceptable risk” on a personal and a societal scale.

It’s been a while since I’ve done kitchen work but I’ve never had an automatic lifter. We just had someone being paid to cook food and watch the fryer. The issues start piling up in places that make the cashier handle front, drive-thru, fryer, whatever else all at once rather than pay an extra $150 in labor for the day.

One child almost every year is a staggeringly low incidence rate. If that’s enough to get banned then children should also not be allowed near pet dogs, the beach, family members, heavy furniture, inside cars, or outside.

We should only drive 5mph because a kid could run out into any street, theoretically.

The actual answer is that we take calculated risks all the time and trade safety for convenience every day.

“Then we’ll put you in the crooked home we saw on 60 Minutes!”

First, that’s already how many sports are, there’s an “open” league and a women’s league that exists because sexual dimorphism is a hell of a drug.

Second, skill-based classes present a different perverse incentive to intentionally under-perform in order to dominate a lower bracket rather than ascend to the bottom of a higher tier.

There’s not really a perfect solution as long as there are stakes beyond pride and good sportsmanship.

The same people doing that now would have been doing it then also. It’s so easy to put an ashtray in your car, or just an old soda can, and people used to care a lot less about “littering”.

Good news! We made the Torment Nexus from the hit book “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus!”

Do you have a big and important enough network to shut down the economy and/or key infrastructure with a general strike? Because that’s the most effective non-violent way.

That makes no sense.

Beans are a fruit. Kinda. We mostly eat the seeds of the legume fruit. But we also use the seeds of vanilla orchids, coffee cherries, and soy beans. It’s not three bean soup it is bird food.

They shouldn’t pay for it, they should just seize it.