In 70 years we will look back at today's kid's toys and wonder how we could ever allow them.
From mobile games casino-style monetization to depression-inducing social networks, passing by Roblox (that takes the usual predatory monetization schema and brings it's own creative touch by using kids to develop their games).
Or probably we won't, because it will be even worse by then.
To be fair, advertisers were psychologically manipulating children for decades before mobile games and loot boxes. maybe they are more brazen about it now, but people are also much more aware of it now.
There is something into it. Remember arcades fondly referenced on HN with some regularity? You had to throw in a coin to play for 2 minutes. Or collectible card games, again, always referenced fondly in here. But those can eat ridiculous amount of money.
I don't understand the Roblox hate I see here all the time.
As a self-taught programmer who learnt via private game servers, I see the importance of making programming fun for kids.
Roblox also needs to be able to sustain itself financially to continue developing the framework and maintaining server resources.
It seems like a lot of the hate is from people who haven't even checked out this community, they just parrot the same talking point and hate that previous people have said.
Same. Roblox is terrible for earning money, and their pricing is truly exploitative indeed, but it’s a great way to learn to code and design games (and random super weird shit) and show it to your friends. Just don’t try to earn (or spend!!) real money on there and you’re all set.
Wow! That is one of the worst articles I've seen posted here in a while. I was reading and reading and kept waiting for the claims to be at least SOMEHOW addressed, but nope. Nothing. It's dangerous because Uranium ore. Ooooo. Scaaaryyy. Who upvotes this garbage?
I had a race car track like that, I think they were my father's, so dating from the 70's. It was great and I only got shocked a couple of times, you quickly learn to be careful.
Yup. Can anyone point to even any injuries caused by this kit? Meanwhile, kids were actually killed by lawn darts, and plenty of kids have died on bicycles (though the ultimate fault there typically lies with cars).
The radiation is not the part I'd be worried about, but uranium is about as toxic as lead.
And a chemistry set that contains brittle lead ores/alloys that "tend to flake and crumble" is not something I'd want a 12 year old using unsupervised. Nor would I trust the vast majority of adults for that matter...
"Banana equivalent dose" is a misleading concept, because the body actively regulates potassium levels. It's very unlikely that somebody with healthy kidneys could give themselves hyperkalemia by eating bananas, and if they somehow did, the radiation would be the least of their concerns.
You would probably hit other problems with eating that many bananas before you got close to problematic levels.
It's more useful for things like "living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant for a year (0.3 µSv) is the equivalent of eating 3 bananas (0.1 µSv each)."
They're a foot long, and the metal tip is 1/4 inch thick.
Also, I think you're supposed to play with everyone standing on the same side and throw the darts at a circle on the ground. However when I was a kid, everyone I knew played by standing on opposite sides of each other and dodged the darts as they fell from the sky...
They're a toy that my parents somehow managed, probably quite deliberately, to not buy us as kids.
It's a textbook example of something that is perfectly safe if used as directed but which practically calls out for kids (and drunk adults) to not use safely.
To give normal darts the damage potential lawn darts have you have to:
1: cut off part of the plastic tail so that the whole dart fits in a ~1m piece of PVC electrical conduit
2: wrap electricians tape around the brass front so it fits snugly but not too tight in the same piece of pipe
3: put the dart, point forward, into the pipe
4: connect the back (or "breach") part of the pipe to a large foot-operated bellows as used to blow up dinghies.
5: aim the pipe at a brick wall
6: jump, or have you accomplice jump on the bellows
7: walk towards the wall and extract the dart from a brick into which it has embedded itself about 1.5 cm.
Source: personal experience. We did not have lawn darts. We did not need them. Even at that age we were smart enough not to aim the pipe upwards to see how high the dart would go in the knowledge that it would eventually come back to ground level.
I'm not sure traditional metal-tipped pub darts are a particularly great example of an ideal kid's toy either.
Safety concerns can sometimes seem over the top but, if you look at "dangerous toys" lists with a modern eye, they mostly do seem like things it makes sense to pass on.
I would expect most of the injuries from the forbidden sharp lawn darts to have been to the head and/or shoulders? To 'poke a heart out' you'd need the victim to be laying down on the ground, which kids do obviously do, but presumably a little less when they see things raining down from the sky.
With normal darts you kinda need to try to intentionally harm someone. Not that kids won't do that. But still the sector of risk is smaller. Big much less controllable darts on other hand might land in general area near someone.
Is it actually that dangerous? I thought beta and alpha emitters were pretty safe as long as you don't get them inside your body. If you opened a vial of one of these and dumped it out on the workbench and stood there for an hour, how bad would that be?
I've got two friends who are doctors and who don't know each other (different countries): most common cause of "toy" bringing kids to emergencies... Trampoline. But: it's nearly always when there are two kids simultaneously on the trampoline. A trampoline with a strict rule: "only one kid at a time or I sell the trampoline" does help a lot (it's what I did).
> only one kid at a time or I sell the trampoline" does help a lot (it's what I did).
As a kid who grew up with a trampoline in the backyard (and who had 4 other friends w trampolines as well), I never would have used it if that was the rule. 90% of the fun was jumping w other kids, whether it was playing basketball, tag, or just double jumping. Did kids get a little hurt sometimes, sure. But it all in the vein of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” one kid did crack a front tooth once but that was the worst of it.
Doesn't seem significantly more dangerous than any other firearm that can be easily handled by a child. I would venture to guess that most accidental firearm deaths and injuries caused by children are caused by pistols.
Let's also be clear that a firearm is not a toy and this is not advertised as one. if it were, then yes, it would be a very different situation.
* a weapon for defense of self and other, if no other viable alternative exists
In other words - they’re a dangerous item that requires responsibility to possess safely. Just like the Jerry can of gasoline sitting in the shed. They use that too, to fuel their ATVs and such.
This toy was perfectly safe, no injuries were reported, and nuclear scare in general prevented a lot of good things to happen. Like, cheap and CO2-free electricity.
It's easy to look back and tut tut over how stupid everyone was, but think about it. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were caused by a mix of lax maintenance and operator error. Normally, that only kills a few (or a few dozen) people at once in a small area. But occasionally we see widespread negative effect at things like chemical plants and oil tankers/rigs. The human factors are always the same, because humans are more or less the same across time in space. Why should nuclear be any different? It's entirely possible that there is some technology so dangerous that we simply can't be trusted to manage it correctly, i.e. the expected loss is very large even if the probability of loss is very low.
To be clear, I am not arguing that this is so. But I would encourage some level of empathy for people who are opposed to nuclear on these grounds.
I have loads of empathy for the millions killed by emissions that nuclear could have avoided. Is my empathy for the innocent not more important than empathy for people who caused the innocent to die?
I never had one of these, but one of the earliest gifts I remember from my grandfather was a chemistry set which came with all the necessary chemicals to easily create a wide variety of poisonous and otherwise dangerous (explosive / flammable for example) substances. The book that came with it was very explicit about those dangers and explained clearly what one should do to be as "safe" as possible about working with those chemicals. Fun times. Truly educational toys are just the best.
In the 1970s I had an Edmund Scientific cloud chamber kit that included uranium ore and radium paint samples. It also needed dry ice to work. I recall getting some from a place that supplied ice cream trucks. I set it up for a school science fair. No one seemed bothered about it.
I read that article looking for the glaringly dangerous part and while it seems you could get hurt if you used it the wrong way it didn't seem worse than misusing lawn darts.
The lead sample is way more dangerous to kids than any of the others; the radioemitters are not that dangerous as radioemitters. Lead is extremely dangerous to children in extremely tiny quantities.
From mobile games casino-style monetization to depression-inducing social networks, passing by Roblox (that takes the usual predatory monetization schema and brings it's own creative touch by using kids to develop their games).
Or probably we won't, because it will be even worse by then.