No, they don't, they "protect" the irresponsible at the expense of everyone else.

> Your inconvenience is someone else surviving.

That's the wrong way to describe the situation. First, it might be more than an inconvenience to me: the CO detector or automatic shutoff might break when my power is out, and now my generator, which would have worked perfectly fine without this stupid regulation, is gone in the middle of an outage when I was depending on it working. And that can have serious consequences.

Second, you don't know for sure that the irresponsible will survive even with this regulation. As someone else upthread pointed out, someone irresponsible enough to run their generator indoors will still do it even with these protective devices (in fact they'll be more likely to because they are stupid enough to think that the devices make it safe, which it isn't), and that could still kill them.

> So it goes.

Indeed, that's how it's been going for decades in the US. And as a result our society is a mess. When people no longer have an incentive to not be stupid, you will get more and more stupid people. Not a good recipe for a functioning society.

You bought a toy for your kid that happened to include lead. Too bad. You were IRRESPONSIBLE! You should have read all the fine print before buying it.

Your local baker’s muffin has arsenic in it and you ate it and died? IRRESPONSIBLE. You should have known that the presence of arsenic is a possibility. You should have checked with the baker if they added it.

That’s a ridiculous approach.

Also, this isn’t new fangled technology. It exists and is widely deployed and there’s no evidence it increases failure by any meaningful amount.

No, it's only their responsibility to read and follow the manufacturer's instructions. That's very different from having to independently research and identify hidden or unknown dangers.

When they are explicitly stated in the user manual? Yes. That's part of being a responsible adult.

Your examples are of cases where the seller is not telling you material facts about the product. (Unless you think that toy makers who put lead in their toys or bakers who put arsenic in their muffins actually do state that explicitly somewhere in their "fine print". Which of course they don't.) That's a completely different situation, which we already have a name for: fraud.

> That’s a ridiculous approach.

No, what is ridiculous is to make a completely invalid comparison as though it were a valid argument.

> there’s no evidence it increases failure by any meaningful amount

A number of other posters in the thread have posted evidence to the contrary. Your naive confidence in the power and goodness of regulations is sadly misplaced.

Your entire strawman argument against laws helping "irresponsible" users is premised around...you being an irresponsible user.

Generally, for safety systems such as these, the device will give a replacement warning long before the component in question needs to be replaced. (Smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors usually start chirping when the battery still has 10-15% left, or in other words, several weeks to months of useful life.)

That doesn't even seem to register compared to that other deadly consumer product, the personal automobile.

Yeah, and then during a disaster there's a fault with these new components that render the generator unusable during a critical time that results in someone dying.

>Notice how much safer cars are versus decades ago.

Cars tend to work even if the modern features are broken. Imagine if the car would stop its engine if it couldn't detect that your seatbelt was on. Eg during a drive the detector malfunctions and suddenly your car loses power in the highway.

A generator working can be very important at a time when other stuff tends to break. Making it less likely to work is going to cause problems.

Having models with these protections is splendid. Making it mandatory on all of them is not.