10 Jul
2001
10 Jul
'01
11:49 p.m.
On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, Tony Duell wrote:
Let's not have a smoking/anti-smoking rant, please. I think it's fairly
well accepted now that smoking (tobacco) does harm your health. I also
believe that's _your_ business. Not mine, and not the government's.
I don't smoke. I do risk my life in other ways, like working on high
voltage equipment. Again, that should be _my_ choice, and not anybody
else's.
One day, even though I work carefully, (I think) I know how to work
safely on HV stuff, I never work alone, and so on, I might end up getting
a fatal shock. In which case, all I can say (in advance) is that I was
working on the unit because that's what I enjoy doing. The fact I had an
accident was bad luck, but I started out knowing what I was letting
myself in for, I made a mistake, and I paid the price. I don't want this
to happen, of course, but I'd rather die that way than die of old age and
boredom having never worked on anything electronic.
Huzzah! I'm with you all the way, Tony. The only thing that bothers me
is that looking at all of the laws/programs in the UK now, it is
difficult to believe that these are the same folk who defeated the
Luftwaffe!
- don
More to the point, my tax dollars go to pay the unpaid
medical bills
of the stupid, and when too many stupid people get head injuries my car
and health insurance rates go up.
Hell, that applies to anything you can name; car crash victums, skate
boarding accidents, people tripping on the side walks, etc etc etc. The
list is endless. Should you let the "hospital costs" rational be used to
govern
everything we do? I don't think so. What if the next law is that
no one will be allowed to work on their own computers since they could be
injured and the public would have to pay the cost of their
hospitalization? Rediculous? Not really. That's the exact rational that
was used to pass the helmets laws to begin with and from what Tony says the
UK isn't far from enacting such non-sensical regulations.
There's been talk on-and-off for the last <n> years in the UK about only
letting qualified [1] people act as service engineers to fix TVs, etc. I
don't think this will apply to people who fix their own stuff (no other
such laws apply in that way in the UK), but it probably would cut off one
of my passtimes -- namely fixing HP calculators for other HPCC members.
The more serious result of such a law, though, would be that it would be
a lot harder to get service manuals and official spare parts. Which would
then probably cause more dangerous repairs. After all, if you don't know
a particular resistor is 'fusible', and you can't get the right
manufacturer's part anyway, you'd probably stick in a normal resistor.
Which could prove dangerous under fault conditions. Time and again I've
been told I can't have a service manual because of liability reasons. No
amount of pointing out that I am more likely to miss some safety related
point _without_ the service manual has ever worked :-(
[1] Whatever the necessary qualifications are, a Ph.D. in particle
physics will not be included...
-tony