"Nothing is allowed unless its completely perfect" is a dangerous attitude. Its made a lot of people homeless, closed a ton of the soup kitchens and shelters those homeless might have sought refuge in and IMHO prevented a great deal of innovation from seeing the light of day.

Its possible that this pervasive bit of anal retentiveness has made some(1) individuals marginally safer, but its super dangerous to societies.

(1) Except for the aforementioned homeless. They're not safer.

Would you:

* sleep on a heavily soiled mattress made of highly flammable material

* dress your baby in highly flammable second-hand sleepwear

* consume unsanitary meat that has been sitting out in the heat for too long

* feed your family a diet of donated junk food including chocolate, biscuits, chips and frozen pizzas

* give your teenage daughter a second hand hair dryer with a frayed electrical lead exposing live wires

* wear bright fluorescent green clown-like clothing that has been collecting dust in someone's attic for 20 years

* allow your children to play with lead-painted toys that pose a choke/suffocation hazard

What makes it acceptable to purchase a brand new electrical appliance and dispose of the old, worn and unsafe one to the less fortunate? What message does it send?

Charities are forced at great expense to dispose of huge amounts of junk similar to the items listed above. It's not just a case of charities looking out for everyone's safety and well-being. To a large extent it's also a desire not to insult those in need by offering junk that the rest of the world wouldn't want to purchase and use.

The rule of thumb that charities use is: donate items that you would purchase yourself or gift to your friends and family.

I eat junk food, cook food that's past the expiration date as long as it doesn't look/smell fishy, and I wear old clothes. My clothing probably isn't too fashionable either and my mattress isn't spotless.

No, I probably wouldn't dress a baby in “highly flammable second-hand sleepwear” but the critical part of that phrase is “highly flammable”, not “second-hand”. It's ridiculous to suggest that because clothing isn't good-as-new to automatically assume it's a “highly flammable” health hazard.

> What makes it acceptable to purchase a brand new electrical appliance and dispose of the old, worn and unsafe one to the less fortunate? What message does it send?

I use old appliances all the time. Sometimes I do replace them. But just the act of buying something new does not make the old any less usable. What message does it send that those old appliances are good enough for me, but they are below the standards of people who can't afford to buy their own?

You missed the point of my comment — donors contemning the less fortunate by throwing them scraps.

It was not an argument about the minimum technical specifications of donated goods. Nor was it an argument about donated goods needing to be brand new.

This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when the homeless rise up and reject Elaine's castoff "muffin stumps". This is not food! We are too dignified to eat the stumps left by the customers of your Muffin Top Cafe!

That "Only donate what you would buy" dictum is just as misguided.

I did buy it once. I just don't need it anymore. Maybe someone else can find some use for it.

―The food bank sometimes receives items with virtually no nutritional value -- "candy and crap" says Aason, which are sometimes tossed, and sometimes used as "filler items." It's not stuff that they want, but the junk food is part and parcel with reclamation.[1]

―"There are things that are not even usable. We can't sell it in the store."[2]

―"We want saleable donations only," a Red Cross spokeswoman said[3]

―"What people take out of our store, we would actually wear ourself."[4]

―“Every Monday, we waste time sorting other people’s rubbish instead of preparing clothing and furniture for sale for people in need,” Mrs Barrett said.[5]

―"A good donation is something which is unbroken, complete, clean and sellable."[6]

―“If people are trying to get rid of stuff, use the tip; we only take items that are in good condition and that people can use.”[7]

―Barbara Cunningham, Sails Outlet's volunteer manager, said people dump unusable items at the thrift store two to three times a week. Recently, they found a queen-size mattress tossed outside the door.[8]

―McLellan suggests donors ask themselves, “would I buy this?”[9]

―“They wouldn’t buy it themselves, but they think other people will.”[9]

―“The appliances and that kind of thing, we want them working. We don’t them to come in without a cord, or a broken anything. There are standards — you can’t sell things that aren’t in good order.”[9]

―“These are things that should be taken to the dump,” said Thrift Store Manager Sheila Combs. “Who wants half a pool table — and a broken one to boot?”[10]

―“We couldn’t get rid of the TVs if we slapped a $2 sticker on them,” Combs said Wednesday. “As for these computer things… we don’t even have a computer so we don’t know if they work.”[10]

[1] http://thetyee.ca/News/2012/04/26/Greater-Vancouver-Food-Ban...

[2] http://www.sunjournal.com/node/100881

[3] http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/charities-report-incre...

[4] http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2011/05/11/18135666.html

[5] http://www.portnews.com.au/news/local/news/general/tip-fees-...

[6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2005/sep/06/charities.volu...

[7] http://www.westernadvocate.com.au/news/local/news/general/tr...

[8] http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2011/09/22/1650943/tri-city-th...

[9] http://www.rosslandnews.com/news/121669949.html

[10] http://www.revelstokecurrent.com/2011/05/25/thoughtless-peop...

I feel like you're cherry picking examples to prove a somewhat dubious point.

I would like clarification: Are you advocating we shouldn't donate used items to charity, or that we shouldn't donate unusable items to charity?

If the former, then how do you propose those less fortunate purchase items outside of their budget? I've gone to thrift and goodwill stores; many of the electronics and clothing there are perfectly usable.

If the latter, I completely agree, though am not sure why this is pertinent to the discussion. Broken junk isn't generally sellable except as scrap.

That has always been a funny scene for me: somebody feels guiltily about throwing away there junk, so they "donate" it to charity.

Give me a break, nobody can use that junk!

Pass me that junk, I want the stepper motors.

That sounds a whole lot like everyday life in the "third world".

Would you dress your child in last years baby clothes now that the regulations have changed?

We had this panic here - everybody had to throw out their Nalgene water bottles because they contain PBA and it MIGHT leach out AND it might be a health hazard - although we had been using them for 20years

The BPA problem (and hence the Nalgene problem) was discovered because it was interrupting people's research on other things due to BPA leeching out of polycarbonate lab ware, causing differences between cell cultures grown in the plastic and those grown in traditional glass petri dishes when they were supposed to be behaving in an identical manner. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/132/the-real-story-on-bp... http://suss.stanford.edu/blog/?p=4119 That's Real Science.

If you'd like to dig it out for yourself, the search terms are: Stanford cancer bpa

(Yes, I'm well-aware that studies sponsored by chemical companies find no problem whatsoever. Quelle surprise.)

It's a long way from the cell culture to the human being when it comes to pharmaceutical effects. That is one of the main reasons it costs so much to develop new drugs--most compounds that produce promising effects in vitro are indistinguishable from placebo during human trials (if they even get that far).

The pharmaceutical industry actually tested BPA as an estrogen replacement decades ago, and did not adopt it because BPA did not produce measurable results. Today most of the BPA warnings are based on extrapolations from cell cultures. But based on the history of drug development such extrapolations are rarely valid. This is why U.S. regulatory agencies have not banned BPA; there just hasn't any solid evidence yet that BPA harms humans at the incidental levels of exposure most people experience.

I don't see how the length of use has any bearing on the appropriate response to something (potentially) being a health hazard.

> "Nothing is allowed unless its completely perfect" is a dangerous attitude.

But you can see that there is a big difference between "not completely perfect" and "likely to cause death or serious injury"?

"likely to cause death or serious injury"

No

You don't know what parts they were, but I'm sure the repairer evaluated the situation.

This is an extreme sheltering mentality

An old product certainly does not conform to modern standarts, but it's reasonably safe (given you don't do anything stupid to it)

"frayed cord" == risk of fire or death. That's not sheltering, it's true.

I don't think that is a necessarily true statement. I would need to see the cord.

Given how horrible reporters are at getting tech and science right, I don't assume "frayed cord" in the article translates to the technical meaning of the term.

That being said, this argument seems to largely consist of 1) some people who assume the repair-man is incompetent and possibly has a psycopathic desire to kill people via shoddy repairs, and at the same time assuming the technical descriptions are 100% accurate, and 2) some people who assume the reporter was being a reporter and willfully being incompetent in reporting, while the humble repairman (basically a hacker working on items) is good enough to know what he is doing with extremely reasonable margins of safety.

Neither of these sets of assumptions particularly valid and they appear to stem from deeper assumptions: what is an acceptable margin of risk, what value various safety rules have on actual safety and so on. IMHO, discussions on these would be far more interesting than wrangling about a passage from a single report without any other evidence of what was (not) done.

I am amazed that anyone thinks this is some kind of over-protective nannying, or expensive over-engineering.

When you have a 2000 watt device operating on 220 v ac mains you can't afford to bodge safety critical components.

Irons are not double insulated (they have a huge chunk of metal on the base) and thus you need to be really careful with earthing and mains cords. This is especially true in a device that needs water to operate.

Since 1.5 metres of good quality mains flex costs hardly anything, and they have have the iron open anyway, there's little reason not to replace the flex. You replace the mains plug at the same time, thus avoiding another common source of risk.

You mention the potential for safety standards to be over-protective and over engineered. I gently agree, some of them do seem a bit much. But then I remember when TV adverts warned people about mains-socket safety - about shoving the wires into the socket by using matches. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYwmrBXHFO4)

All electrical appliances need to come with a pre-fitted plug in the UK. Perhaps the wiring coming from mass producing Chinese factories is scary, but so is the wiring I've seen many friends do (skimpy short earth leads and big loops of live leads) with over-tightened or loose screws - I've seen many nasty errors.

Well, if the issue is a frayed cord, I agree, substitution, as you said, is cheap.

But of course you could describe a cord as "frayed" but only because it's a little dirty, but the isolation is still in good shape

I like that the PSA ends with "fix things properly", which is sensible, as opposed to "don't fix electronic appliances"

It can go a bit too much the other way. A lab full of PhD physicists and engineers designing and building an advanced radar sat and we can't get an extension cord. Instead we get the extension block and a separate plug and wire.

We then need an maintenance 'engineer' who has been on the half day PAT course to come and fit the cable for us.

This attitude has killed many in aviation. The aviation industry is so conservative they've resisted electronic fuel injection for decades. Sticking instead with carburetors which can ice up. and many many people have in fact died from carb icing.

My flight instructor said it best: "At least then we know what killed them". In aviation it seems like its way better to have lots of know risks vs fewer unknown ones. People are desperate for something (or someone) concrete to blame in air mishaps.

But hasn't there been fuel injected engines since the 1960s at least? There are planes like the Beechcraft Musketeer Super III that had a fuel injected Lycoming IO-360 engine for example. I don't know much about motors or aviation to know what the difference would be although.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Musketeer

When you sell products for a customer, you have to be really careful to make them not-dangerous if used by an idiot. If you fix/build stuff yourself, you get to know the ins and outs of the thing you're working with. So it doesn't matter that much if something may be a little dangerous if misused, you should know what to do with it.

One or two screws missing, it's a whole lot better than buying a new one and wasting raw materials and energy and creating waste.

Two scenarios:

1. Performing dodgy repair jobs on your own equipment for your own personal use.

2. Performing dodgy repair jobs for unsuspecting people that don't know the difference between a resistor and capacitor and are trusting your skill and judgement.

In instance [1] you're performing your own risk assessment and will bear any consequences. In [2] you're performing a risk assessment that will directly impact upon someone else's safety. Their level of risk acceptance may be far more conservative than your own.

...and if your bad repair sets a house on fire you risk the lives of the people who come to rescue you, and the lives of anyone else in the building, etc.

3. you throw out the kettle and buy another made in china one for 5quid.

After the fire you discover that the CE mark on the side doesn't mean it has passed all the european safety checks just that it is "china export"

Just note that everyone has a bad day. This may the day you "forget" all the things you normally know and then accidents happen. I don't want to say that you should never use such things, but it is a good practice - even if you just build them for yourself - to improve them in the long-run to decrease the chance of accidents.

If the producer would share the design of the iron with the world, the risk would be reduced significantly. The leftover parts could be identified by crowdsourced databases as nonimportant, or as risky to leave out.

> The leftover parts could be identified by crowdsourced databases as nonimportant

In a low-margin business such as home appliances, I'm willing to bet every single part's cost/benefit ratio is carefully examined by experts before being added.

There's always going to be some parts that are just the difference between good and better (or perhaps bad and less bad) rather than working and non-working. For example in an iron that can spray water there could be a piece that breaks up the water into a wider spray rather than a solid squirt.